In his youth became acquainted with the Keats brothers, and with R. H. Horne. In 1822 he published, anonymously, “Stories after Nature,” and in 1824, “Joseph and His Brethren, a Scriptural Drama: in Two Acts,” using the pseudonym “H. L. Howard.” This was revived in 1876, with an introduction by Mr. Swinburne. Practised law early in life, and at one time held a professorship at Quimper. His closing years were passed at Marseilles.

Personal

  Anybody could see that Wells was fond of field sports and all out-of-door exercises. He was a fair horseman, a pretty good shot; and he liked to talk about fishing, though I seldom heard of his taking anything, at any rate before he left England. He understood floriculture, and would have been a really good gardener but for his impatient habit of now and then pulling up plants to see how the roots were getting on, carefully putting them back again. He would do this early in the morning, before anybody else was up, Mrs. Wells told me.

  It was somewhere between 1845 and 1847…. A healthy, ruddy-faced, weather-hardened, fleshless man, bright and cheery, foxy-looking (if it may be said without prejudice), the very type of a wiry sporting squire, who looked as if he lived always out-of-doors, and had too keen a relish for fresh air and following the hounds to have ever dreamed upon the side of Parnassus. His talk even was not of poetry, but, as chiefly recurs to me, of Brittany and (he had become a Catholic) of the good Breton curé: a character which I suppose neither Scott nor myself had much cared to discuss, but in which he greatly interested us.

General

  “Joseph” is, perhaps, the solitary instance, within our period, of poetry of the very first class falling quite unrecognised and continuing so for a long space of years. Its time, however, will most assuredly still come. It is impossible here to make any but a passing allusion to it, as affording, in its command of various character, including even the strongest and most earthly passion, but all working within a circle of spiritual influence,—a perfect parallel with the productions of Blake’s genius, though rather, perhaps, with its more complete development in painting, than its always somewhat fragmentary written expression.

  In whatever degree the undeniable presence of minor faults and mere stains of carelessness may excuse the neglect of Mr. Wells’s prose stories, no such plea of passing defect can extenuate the scandal of the fact that to this day his great dramatic poem remains known perhaps on the whole to about half a dozen students of English art…. Only once before had such a character been given with supreme success, and only by him who has given all things rightly, in whom there was no shadow of imperfection or shadow of failure. In the Cleopatra of Shakespeare and in the heroine of the present play there is the same imperious conscience of power by right of supreme beauty and supreme strength of will; the same subtle sweetness of speech; the same delicately rendered effect of perfection in word and gesture, never violated or made harsh even by extreme passion; the same evidence of luxurious and patient pleasure found in all things sensually pleasant; the same capacity of bitter shame and wrath, dormant until the insult of resistance or rebellion has been offered; the same contemptuous incapacity to understand a narrower passion or a more external morality than their own; the same rapid and supple power of practical action. All women in literature after these two seem coarse or trivial when they touch on anything sensual; but in their passion there is nothing common or unclean; nothing paltry, no taint of vulgar sin or more vulgar repentance, can touch these two. And this the later poet, at least, has made out of the slightest and thinnest material possible; his original being not only insufficient—the very bare bones of conjecture, the suggestion of a skeleton character—but actually, as far as it was anything at all, so associated with ideas simply ludicrous and base that the very name of “Potiphar’s wife” has the sound of a coarse by-word.

  After making all allowance for the exceeding fertility of literature, which in this century has resembled a tropical forest where bird of rarest plumage or plant of strangest hue may lurk unnoticed mid the prodigality of fair things around it, the neglect of the poem is still inexplicable. If it be great work in the true sense of that term, as I for one think it is, then it is as great as dramatic work—not, indeed, as a drama to be acted, for no one who has read it will conceive that it could be brought successfully upon the stage, but as a poem distinguished by dramatic situations, by dramatic imagery, by the dramatic marking and sustaining of character.

  The adventures of his one known book form an extraordinary page of literary history. “Joseph and his Brethren” came into the world unnoticed, as veritable a still-birth of genius as ever occurred. Hazlitt, it is true, said the book was “more than original, aboriginal, and a mere experiment in comparison with the vast things” Wells could do; but Hazlitt forebore to review it, and even constantly dissuaded the young poet from writing. About 1838 another neglected writer, Thomas Wade, author of “Mundi et Cordis Carmina,” spoke out in loud commendation of the pseudonymous and forgotten drama. In 1844 Mr. R. H. Horne, writing his charming “New Spirit of the Age,” made space for a clear and generous statement that “Joseph and his Brethren” was “full of the elements of true poetry—rich in passion, in imagination, and in thoughts resulting from reason, experience, and understanding”—but in vain. At last it happened to fall into the hands of Mr. D. G. Rossetti, and in 1863, while writing of Blake, he paid a princely tribute to Wells. The tide now turned at last; “Joseph and his Brethren” became a kind of Shibboleth—a rite of initiation into the true poetic culture—but still the world at large knew nothing of it. Finally, however, Mr. Swinburne, who is never tired of indulging in the “noble pleasure of praising,” and whose eye is ever open to excellence of any kind, made it a duty to resuscitate the forgotten poet, and the results were his eloquent article in the Fortnightly Review, and the reprint of the drama issued by Messrs. Chatto and Windus in 1876.

  But anything more unchastened than “Joseph and his Brethren” it has been the lot of but few poets to bring to the birth. Although for outpourings of pure poetry, the results of first-hand observation of life and nature, the work challenges the highest comparison, there was no serious attempt to endow its teeming beauties with a compact and fitting form, very little care concerning such details as spelling and punctuation—which seem to have been left to some one, as Wells says, “more ignorant than himself”—and not too much attention to grammar or metrical exactness. Indeed it is said that Wells positively would not see the work through the press, and, once having written it and found a publisher, seemed to regard the whole thing very much as a joke…. Wells’s discrimination of character throughout the work, whether in its first, its second, or its final state, is of the very essence of the dramatic faculty. The earthly scenes between Joseph and his brothers, however little adapted for representation, are masterly both in the individual handling of the several characters, and in the vivid perception of surroundings. The character of Pharaxanor, the wife of Potiphar, is a still higher flight of creation: she is of the great unflinching women of all literature: she lives in that strenuous sense in which Medea, Clytemnestra, Cleopatra, Brynhild, Gudrun, and Hallgerda Long-coat live. The unpublished version depicts her in her fall and degradation, as well as in her power, and leaves her the same complete and consistent character, once known, never to be forgotten. There are few pages of “Joseph and his Brethren” that are not instinct with high criticism of life and vitalized by poetic utterances, in which true thought is recorded with rare felicity of expression.

  Wells’s “Stories after Nature,” published anonymously in 1822 (London, 12mo) are the nearest approach to the Italian novelette that our literature can show. Simple in plot, yet generally founded on some striking idea, impressive in their conciseness, and highly imaginative, they are advantageously distinguished from their models by a larger infusion of the poetical element, but fall short of them in artistic structure and narrative power, and the style is occasionally florid. They would have been highly appreciated in the Elizabethan age, but the great subsequent enrichment and expansion of the novel left little room for them in Wells’s day…. “Stories from Nature” being but a slight though a charming book, Wells’s reputation must rest chiefly upon his dramatic poem. It is truly poetical in diction, and often masterly in the delineation of character; but its especial merit is the fidelity with which the writer reproduces the grand Elizabethan manner with no approach to servility of imitation. He is as much a born Elizabethan as Keats is a born Greek; his style is that of his predecessors, and yet it seems his own. It must have been impossible for him to draw Potiphar’s spouse without having Shakespeare’s Cleopatra continually in his mind, and yet his Paraxanor is an original creation. The entire drama conveys the impression of an emanation from an opulent nature to which production was easy, and which under the stimulus of popular applause, might have gone on producing for an indefinite period. The defect which barred the way to fame for him was rather moral than literary; he had no very exalted standard of art and little disinterested passion for it, and when its reward seemed unjustly withheld, it cost him little to relinquish it.