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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of H. G. Wells, by J. D. Beresford
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: H. G. Wells
+
+Author: J. D. Beresford
+
+Release Date: March 13, 2005 [EBook #15351]
+[Last updated: November 10, 2011]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK H. G. WELLS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: H.G. WELLS]
+
+
+
+
+H.G. WELLS
+By
+J.D. BERESFORD
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+_First Published in 1915_
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                               PAGE
+
+  I.  INTRODUCTION                9
+ II.  THE ROMANCES               17
+III.  THE NOVELS                 58
+ IV.  SOCIOLOGY                  97
+      BIBLIOGRAPHY              117
+      AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY     121
+      INDEX                     125
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Notes for e-book:
+
+The spelling and punctuation are consistent with the original scans
+with the following exceptions. If you are using this book for research, please
+verify any spelling or punctuation with another source.
+
+I added ["] at end of phrase: "to recover the full-bodied
+self-satisfaction of his early days."
+
+In the following sentence, I changed 'succeded' to 'succeeded': And
+Bensington, the other experimenter, succeeded in separating a food
+that produced regular instead of intermittent growth.]
+
+
+
+
+TO
+R.A.A.B.
+THIS ESSAY IS FRATERNALLY
+DEDICATED
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+THE NORMALITY OF MR WELLS
+
+
+In his Preface to the _Unpleasant Plays_, Mr Shaw boasts his
+possession of "normal sight." The adjective is the oculist's, and the
+application of it is Mr Shaw's, but while the phrase is misleading
+until it is explained to suit a particular purpose, it has a pleasing
+adaptability, and I can find none better as a key to the works of Mr
+H.G. Wells.
+
+We need not bungle over the word "normal," in any attempt to meet the
+academic objection that it implies conformity to type. In this
+connection, the gifted possessor of normal sight is differentiated
+from his million neighbours by the fact that he wears no glasses; and
+if a few happy people still exist here and there who have no need for
+the mere physical assistance, the number of those whose mental outlook
+is undistorted by tradition, prejudice or some form of bias is so
+small that we regard them as inspired or criminal according to the
+inclination of our own beloved predilection. And no spectacles will
+correct the mental astigmatism of the multitude, a fact that is often
+a cause of considerable annoyance to the possessors of normal sight.
+That defect of vision, whether congenital or induced by the
+confinements of early training, persists and increases throughout
+life, like other forms of myopia. The man who sees a ball as slightly
+flattened, like a tangerine orange too tightly packed (an "oblate
+spheroid" would be the physicist's brief description), seeks the
+society of other men who share his illusion; and the company of them
+take arms against the opposing faction, which is confirmed in the
+belief that the ball is egg-shaped, that the bulge, in fact, is not
+"oblate" but "prolate."
+
+I will not elaborate the parable; it is sufficient to indicate that in
+my reading of Mr Wells, I have seen him as regarding all life from a
+reasonable distance. By good fortune he avoided the influences of his
+early training, which was too ineffectual to leave any permanent mark
+upon him. His readers may infer, from certain descriptions in _Kipps_,
+and _The History of Mr Polly_, that Wells himself sincerely regrets
+the inadequacies of that "private school of dingy aspect and still
+dingier pretensions, where there were no object lessons, and the
+studies of book-keeping and French were pursued (but never effectually
+overtaken) under the guidance of an elderly gentleman, who wore a
+nondescript gown and took snuff, wrote copperplate, explained nothing,
+and used a cane with remarkable dexterity and gusto." But, properly
+considered, that inadequate elderly gentleman may be regarded as our
+benefactor. If he had been more apt in his methods, he might have
+influenced the blessed normality of his pupil, and bound upon him the
+spectacles of his own order. Worse still, Mr Wells might have been
+born into the leisured classes, and sent to Eton and Christchurch, and
+if his genius had found any expression after that awful experience, he
+would probably, at the best, have written polite essays or a history
+of Napoleon, during the intervals of his leisured activity as a member
+of the Upper House.
+
+Happily, Fate provided a scheme for preserving his eyesight, and
+pitched him into the care of Mr and Mrs Joseph Wells on the 21st
+September 1866; behind or above a small general shop in Bromley. Mrs
+Wells was the daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst and had been in
+service as a lady's maid before her marriage. Joseph Wells had had a
+more distinguished career. He had been a great Kent bowler in the
+early sixties, and it must have been, I think, only the year before
+the subject of our essay appeared at Bromley that his father took four
+wickets with consecutive balls and created a new record in the annals
+of cricket. The late Sir Francis Galton might have made something out
+of this ancestry; I must confess that it is entirely beyond my powers,
+although I make the reservation that we know little of the abilities
+of H.G. Wells' mother. She has not figured as a recognisable portrait
+in any of his novels.
+
+The Bromley shop, like most of its kind, was a failure. Moderate
+success might have meant a Grammar School for young Wells, and the
+temptations of property, but Fate gave our young radical another twist
+by thrusting him temporarily within sight of an alien and magnificent
+prosperity, where as the son of the housekeeper at Up Park, near
+Petersfield, he might recognise his immense separation from the
+members of the ruling class, as described in _Tono-Bungay_.
+
+After that came "the drapery," first at Windsor and then at Southsea;
+but we have no autobiography of this period, only the details of the
+trade and its circumstances. For neither Hoopdriver, nor Kipps, nor
+Polly could have qualified for the post of assistant at Midhurst
+Grammar School, a position that H.G. Wells obtained at sixteen after
+he had broken his indentures with the Southsea draper.
+
+At this point we come up with Mr Lewisham, and may follow him in his
+experiences after he obtained what was, in fact, a scholarship at the
+Normal School of Science, South Kensington; but we drop that hero
+again before his premature marriage and failure, to follow the
+uncharted course of Wells obtaining his B.Sc. with first-class
+honours; passing to an assistant-mastership at the Henley House
+School, St John's Wood, and so coming by way of tutor, lecturer and
+demonstrator to the beginnings of journalism, to the breaking of a
+blood-vessel and thence, without further diversion, to the trade of
+letters, somewhere in the summer of 1893.
+
+I have taken as my text the normality of Mr Wells, on the
+understanding that I shall define the essential term as I will; and
+this brief outline of his early experiences may help to show, _inter
+alia_, that he viewed life from many angles before he was
+twenty-seven. That he had the capacity so to see life was either a
+lucky accident or due to some untraceable composition of heredity.
+That he kept his power was an effect of his casual education. He was
+fortunate enough to escape training in his observation of the sphere.
+
+Persistent repetition will finally influence the young mind, however
+gifted, and if Mr Wells had been subject to the discipline of what may
+be called an efficient education, he might have seen his sphere at the
+age of twenty-seven as slightly flattened--whether it appeared oblate
+or prolate is no consequence--and I could not have crowned him with
+the designation that heads this Introduction.
+
+He is, in fact, normal just in so far as his gift of vision was
+undistorted by the precepts and dogmas of his parents, teachers and
+early companions.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE ROMANCES
+
+
+Mr Wells' romances have little or nothing in common with those of
+Jules Verne, not even that peculiar quality of romance which revels in
+the impossible. The heroes of Jules Verne were idealised creatures
+making use of some wonderful invention for their own purposes; and the
+future of mankind was of no account in the balance against the lust
+for adventure under new mechanical conditions. Also, Jules Verne's
+imagination was at the same time mathematical and Latin; and he was
+entirely uninfluenced by the writings of Comte.
+
+Mr Wells' experiments with the relatively improbable have become
+increasingly involved with the social problem, and it would be
+possible to trace the growth of his opinions from this evidence alone,
+even if we had not the valuable commentary afforded by his novels and
+his essays in sociology. But his interest in the present and future
+welfare of man would not in the first place have prompted him to the
+writing of romance (unless it had been cast in the severely
+allegorical form of _The Pilgrim's Progress_), and if we are to
+account for that ebullition, we shall be driven--like Darwin with his
+confounding peacock--to take refuge in some theory of exuberance. The
+later works have been so defensive and, in one sense, didactic that
+one is apt to forget that many of the earlier books, and all the short
+stories, must have originated in the effervescence of creative
+imagination.
+
+Mr Wells must, also, have been slightly intoxicated by the first
+effects of reaction. A passage from _The Future in America_ exhibits
+him somewhat gleefully reviving thoughts of the prison-house, and I
+quote it in order to account for his first exercises in prophecy by a
+study of contrasts. "I remember," he writes, "that to me in my boyhood
+speculation about the Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of
+my generation, I was launched into life with millennial assumptions.
+This present sort of thing, I believed, was going on for a time,
+interesting personally, perhaps, but as a whole inconsecutive, and
+then--it might be in my lifetime or a little after it--there would be
+trumpets and shoutings and celestial phenomena, a battle of
+Armageddon, and the Judgment.... To talk about the Man of the year
+Million was, of course, in the face of this great conviction, a
+whimsical play of fancy. The year Million was just as impossible, just
+as gaily nonsensical as fairyland...."
+
+The imprisoning bottle was opened when he became a student of biology,
+under Huxley, and the liquid of his suppressed thought began to
+bubble. He prefaced his romances by a sketch in the old _Pall Mall
+Gazette_, entitled _The Man of the Year Million_, an a priori study
+that made one thankful for one's prematurity. After that physiological
+piece of logic, however, he tried another essay in evolution,
+published in 1895 in book form under the title of _The Time
+Machine_--the first of his romances.
+
+The machine itself is the vaguest of mechanical assumptions; a thing
+of ivory, quartz, nickel and brass that quite illogically carries its
+rider into an existing past or future. We accept the machine as a
+literary device to give an air of probability to the essential thing,
+the experience; and forget the means in the effect. The criterion of
+the prophecy in this case is influenced by the theory of "natural
+selection." Mr Wells' vision of the "Sunset of Mankind" was of men so
+nearly adapted to their environment that the need for struggle, with
+its corollary of the extermination of the unfit, had practically
+ceased. Humanity had become differentiated into two races, both
+recessive; one, the Eloi, a race of childlike, simple, delicate
+creatures living on the surface of a kindly earth; the other, the
+Morlocks, a more active but debased race, of bestial habits, who lived
+underground and preyed cannibalistically on the surface-dwellers whom
+they helped to preserve, as a man may preserve game. The Eloi,
+according to the hypothesis of the Time Traveller, are the descendants
+of the leisured classes; the Morlocks of the workers. "The Eloi, like
+the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They
+still possessed the earth on sufferance; since the Morlocks,
+subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the
+day-lit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I
+inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs perhaps through
+the survival of an old habit of service." All this is in the year
+802,701 A.D.
+
+The prophecy is less convincing than the wonderful sight of the
+declining earth some million years later, sinking slowly into the
+dying fires of the worn-out sun. Man and the vertebrates have
+disappeared, and the highest wonder of animal life is represented by
+giant crustaceans, which in turn give way to a lower form. We have a
+vision of an involution that shall succeed the highest curve of
+development; of life ending where it began in the depths of the sea,
+as the initial energy of the solar system is dissipated and the
+material of it returns to rest at the temperature of the absolute
+zero. And the picture is made more horrible to the imaginative by the
+wonder whether the summit of the evolutionary curve has not already
+been reached--or it may be passed in the days of the Greek
+philosophers.
+
+_The Time Machine_, despite certain obvious faults of imagination and
+style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of
+the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and
+finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven
+or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of
+conventional thought, and is prepared to examine, and to present life
+from the detached standpoint of one who views it all from a
+respectable distance; but who is able, nevertheless--an essential
+qualification--to enter life with all the passion and generosity of
+his own humanity.
+
+And in _The Wonderful Visit_--published in the same year as _The Time
+Machine_--he comes closer to earth. That ardent ornithologist, the
+Rev. K. Hilyer, Vicar of Siddermouth, who brought down an angel with a
+shot-gun, is tenderly imagined; a man of gentle mind, for all the
+limitations of his training. The mortalised angel, on the other hand,
+is rather a tentative and simple creature. He may represent, perhaps,
+the rather blank mind of one who sees country society without having
+had the inestimable privilege of learning how it came about. His
+temperament was something too childlike--without the child's
+brutality--to investigate the enormous complexities of adjustment that
+had brought about the conditions into which he was all too suddenly
+plunged by a charge of duck-shot. He came and was filled with an
+inalterable perplexity, but some of his questions were too ingenuous;
+and while we may sympathise with the awful inertia of Hilyer before
+the impossible task of explaining the inexplicable differences between
+mortal precept and mortal practice, we feel that we might, in some
+cases at least, have made a more determined effort. We might have
+found some justification for chairs, by way of instance, and
+certainly an excuse for raising beds above the floor. But the wounded
+angel, like the metal machine, is only a device whereby the searching
+examination of our author may be displayed in an engrossing and
+intimate form. And in _The Wonderful Visit_, that exuberance we
+postulated, that absorption in the development of idea, is more
+marked; in the unfolding of the story we can trace the method of the
+novelist.
+
+Indeed, the three romances that follow discover hardly a trace of the
+social investigator. _The Island of Dr Moreau_, _The Invisible Man_
+and _The War of the Worlds_ are essays in pure fantasy, and although
+the first of the three is influenced by biology I class it
+unhesitatingly among the works of sheer exuberance. Each of these
+books is, in effect, an answer to some rather whimsical question, and
+the problem that Dr Moreau attempted to solve was: "Can we, by
+surgery, so accelerate the evolutionary process as to make man out of
+a beast in a few days or weeks?" And within limits he found that the
+answer was: "Yes."
+
+In the seclusion of his island, and with the poor assistance of the
+outlawed medical student, Montgomery, Dr Moreau succeeded in producing
+some creditable parodies of humanity by his operations on pigs, bulls,
+dogs and other animals. These cut and remoulded creatures had
+something the appearance and intelligence of Homo Sapiens, and could
+be maintained at that level by the exercise of discipline and the
+constant recital of "the Law"; left to themselves they gradually
+reverted to the habits and manners of the individual beasts out of
+which they had been carved. We may infer that some subtle organic
+chemistry worked its determination upon their uncontrolled wills, but
+Mr Wells offers no explanation, psychic, chemical or biological, and
+I do not think that he intended any particular fable beyond the
+evident one that, physically, one species is as like to the next as
+makes no matter. What Moreau did well another man might have done
+better. It is a good story, and the adventures of the marooned
+Prendick, alone, are sufficient justification for the original
+conception. (I feel bound to note, however, the absurd comments of
+some early reviewers who seemed to imagine that the story was a
+defence of vivisection.)
+
+The next romance (1897) seeks to answer the question: "What could a
+man do if he were invisible?" Various attempts to answer that question
+had been made by other writers, but none of them had come to it with
+Mr Wells' practical grasp of the real problem; the earlier romantics
+had not grappled with the necessity for clothes and the various ways
+in which a material man, however indistinguishable his body by our
+sense of sight, must leave traces of his passage. The study from
+beginning to end is finely realistic; and even the theory of the
+albino, Griffin, and in a lesser degree his method of winning the
+useless gift of invisibility, are convincing enough to make us wonder
+whether the thing is not scientifically possible. As a pure romance
+set in perfectly natural surroundings, _The Invisible Man_ is possibly
+the high-water mark of Mr Wells' achievement in this kind. He has
+perfected his technique, and the interest in the development of the
+story works up steadily to the splendid climax, when the form of the
+berserker Griffin returns to visibility, his hands clenched, his eyes
+wide open, and on his face an expression of "anger and dismay," the
+elements--as I choose to think--of man's revolt against imprisonment
+in the flesh. It is worth while to note that by another statement, the
+same problem is posed and solved in the short story called _The
+Country of the Blind_.
+
+_The War of the Worlds_ (1898), although written in the first person,
+is in some ways the most detached of all these fantasies; and it is in
+this book that Mr Wells frankly confesses his own occasional sense of
+separation. "At times," says the narrator of the history, "I suffer
+from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about
+me, I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere
+inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and
+tragedy of it all." That sense must have remained with him as he wrote
+the account of the invading Martians, so little passion does the book
+contain. The vision, however, is clear enough and there is more
+invention than in many of the other romances. The picture of the
+Martians themselves develops in one direction the theory of human
+evolution expressed in _The Man of the Year Million_. The expansion
+of the brain case, and the apotheosis of pure intellect, devoid, so
+far as we can judge, of any emotional expression, are the steadily
+biological deductions that we should expect from the Wells of this
+period. The fighting machines of these incomprehensible entities, the
+heat ray and the black smoke, are all excellent conceptions; and the
+narrative is splendidly graphic. But only in the scenes with the
+curate, when the narrator is stirred to passionate anger, and in his
+later passages with the sapper, do we catch any glimpses of the
+novelist intrigued with the intimate affairs of humanity. Even the
+narrator's brother, in his account of the escape with two women in a
+pony-carriage, has become infected with that sense of detachment. The
+two women are strongly differentiated but leave little impression of
+personality.
+
+The fact that I have made this comment on lack of passion in
+describing one of these earlier romances is indicative of a particular
+difference between Mr Wells' method in this sort and the method of the
+lesser writer of fantasias. The latter, whatever his idea, and it may
+be a brilliant idea, is always intent on elaborating the wonder of his
+theme by direct description. Mr Wells is far more subtle and more
+effective. He takes an average individual, identifies him with the
+world as we know it, and then proceeds gradually to bring his marvel
+within the range of this individual's apprehension. We see the
+improbable, not too definitely, through the eyes of one who is
+prepared with the same incredulity as the reader of the story, and as
+a result the strange phenomenon, whether fallen angel, invisible man,
+converted beast or invading Martian, takes all the shape of reality.
+That this shape is convincing is due to the brilliance of Mr Wells'
+imagination and his power of graphic expression; the lesser writer
+might adopt the method and fail utterly to attain the effect; but it
+is this conception of the means to reach the intelligence and senses
+of the average reader that chiefly distinguishes these romances from
+those of such writers as Jules Verne. Our approach to the wonderful is
+so gradual and so natural that when we are finally confronted with it
+the incredible thing has become inevitable and expected. Finally, it
+has become so identified with human surprise, anger or dismay that any
+failure of humanity in the chief person of the story reacts upon our
+conception of the wonderful intrusion among familiar phenomena.
+
+Now, this power of creating the semblance of fact out of an ideal was
+too valuable a thing to be wasted on the making of stories that had no
+purpose beyond that of interesting or exciting the reader with such
+imaginations as the Martians, whose only use was to threaten humanity
+with extinction. Mr Wells' own sight of our blindness, our complacent
+acceptance of the sphere as an oblate or prolate spheroid, might be,
+he hoped, another of the marvels which we should come to accept
+through the medium of romance. So he began tentatively at first to
+introduce a vivid criticism of the futility of present-day society
+into his fantasies, and the first and the least of these books was
+that published in 1899 as _When the Sleeper Wakes_, a title afterwards
+changed to _The Sleeper Awakes_.
+
+In the two opening chapters we find the same delightfully realistic
+treatment of the unprecedented slowly mingling with the commonplace.
+The first appearance of Graham the Sleeper, tormented then by the
+spectres and doubts that accompany insomnia, is made so credible that
+we accept his symptoms without the least demur; his condition is
+merely unusual enough to excite a trembling interest. Even the
+passing of his early years of trance does not arouse scepticism. But
+then we fall with one terrific plunge into the world of A.D. 2100,
+and, like Graham, we cannot realise it. Moreover this changed,
+developed world has a slightly mechanical air. The immense enclosed
+London, imagined by Mr Wells, is no Utopia, yet, like the dream of
+earlier prophets, it is too logical to entice us into any
+hallucination; and we come, fatally, to a criticism of the syllogism.
+
+Mr Wells himself has confessed, in a new Preface, that this is "one of
+the most ambitious and least satisfactory" of his books; and explains
+that it was written against time, when he was on the verge of a
+serious illness. It is superfluous, therefore, to criticise it in
+detail, but one or two points in relation to the sociological idea
+must be emphasised.
+
+The main theme is the growing division between Capital and Labour.
+The Giant Trust--managing the funds accumulated in Graham's name, a
+trust that has obtained possession of so immense a capital that it
+controls the chief activities of the world--is figured in the command
+of a certain Ostrog, who, with all the dependents that profit by the
+use of his wealth and such mercenaries as he can hold to himself,
+represents one party in opposition to the actual workers and
+producers, generically the People. The picture is the struggle of our
+own day in more acute form; the result, in the amended edition, is
+left open. "Who will win--Ostrog or the People?" Mr Wells writes in
+the Preface referred to above, and answers: "A thousand years hence
+that will still be just the open question we leave to-day."
+
+I am not concerned in this place to question the validity of that
+answer, nor to suggest that the Wells of 1914 would not necessarily
+give the same account of his beliefs as the Wells of 1909, but I must
+draw attention to the attitude displayed in the book under
+consideration in order to point the change of feeling recognisable in
+later books. In _The Sleeper Awakes_, even in the revised version, the
+sociological theory is still mechanical, the prophecy at once too
+logical, and at the same time deduced from premises altogether too
+restricted. The world of A.D. 2100 is the world of to-day, with its
+more glaring contrasts still more glaringly emphasised; with its
+social incongruities and blindness raised to a higher power. And all
+that it lacked has been put into a romance called _In the Days of the
+Comet_ (1906), a book to which I shall now leap, returning later to
+consider the comparatively irrelevant theses of three other romances
+that chronologically intervened.
+
+The great change wrought by the coming of the Comet might be
+sentimentally described as a change of heart; I prefer to call it a
+change of reason. All the earlier part of the work, which is again
+told in the first person, presents the life of a Midland industrial
+area as seen by one who has suffered it. The Capital-Labour problem
+bulks in the foreground, and is adequately supported by a passionate
+exposition of the narrowness and misery of lower-middle-class life in
+the jumble of limitations, barriers and injustices that arise from the
+absolute ownership of property. Also, into this romance--the only one,
+by the way--comes some examination of the relations of the sexes. And
+all this jumble is due, if we are to believe the remedy, to human
+misunderstanding. The influence of the Comet passed over the earth,
+and men, after a few hours of trance, awoke to a new realisation. We
+come to a first knowledge of the change in one of the most beautiful
+passages that Mr Wells has written; and although I dislike to spoil a
+passage by setting it out unclothed by the idea and expectations which
+have led to its expression, given it form, and fitted it to a just
+place in the whole composition, I will make an exception in this case
+in order to justify my metaphor of "normal sight." The supposed writer
+of the description had just awakened from the trance induced by the
+passing of the Comet. He says:
+
+    "I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of those drugged,
+    feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a
+    very glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and
+    interlaced like splendid music. It was rich with lupin,
+    honeysuckle, campions and ragged robin; bed straw, hops and wild
+    clematis twined and hung among its branches, and all along its
+    ditch border the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces and
+    chorused in lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of
+    note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly, in its
+    depths, I heard a chirrup and the whir of startled wings.
+
+    "Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I
+    stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the
+    intricate delicacy before me and marvelling how richly God has
+    made his worlds...."
+
+And not only the writer but also every other person on the earth had
+been miraculously cured of their myopia and astigmatism. They saw
+beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they
+had but to believe and the old miseries vanished. In the old days men
+preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an
+asceticism such as that of St Simon Stylites. The lesson--I cannot
+deny that the book is didactic--of the change wrought by the comet is
+that man should find the full expression of his personality in
+sympathy and understanding. The egotism remains, but it works to a
+collective end....
+
+War is necessarily touched upon in this book as an inevitable
+corollary to the problems of personal and a fortiori of national
+property; but the real counterblast against wholesale fratricide was
+reserved for the following romance, published in 1908.
+
+_The War in the Air_ definitely disclosed a change of method that was
+adumbrated in its predecessor. The agent of experience is still
+retained in the person of Bert Smallways, but the restrictions imposed
+by the report of an eye-witness have become too limiting, and, like
+Hardy in _The Dynasts_, Mr Wells alternates between a near and a
+distant vision. The Welt-Politik could not be explained through the
+intelligence of a "little Cockney cad," even though he was "by no
+means a stupid person and up to a certain limit not badly educated";
+and the general development of the world-war, the account of the
+collapse of the credit system and all such large and general effects
+necessitated the broad treatment of the historian. So the intimate,
+personal narrative of Smallways' adventures is occasionally dropped
+for a few pages; Mr Wells shuts off his magic-lantern and fills the
+interval with an analysis of larger issues.
+
+And the issues are so vital, the _denouement_ so increasingly
+probable, that, despite all the exaggerations necessary in a fiction
+of this kind, the warning contained in this account of a world-war is
+one that must remain in the minds of any thoughtful reader. Smallways'
+pert reflection on the causes of the immense downfall represents the
+wisdom that comes of bitter experience, and the application of it is
+very pertinent to present conditions. "There was us in Europe all at
+sixes and sevens with our silly flags and our silly newspapers raggin'
+us up against each other and keepin' us apart," says Smallways, and
+for the briefest analysis of causes that continually threaten us with
+all the useless horrors of war, the summary could scarcely be
+bettered.
+
+Indeed, I think that _The War in the Air_ is the greatest of Mr Wells'
+achievements in fantasy that has a deeper purpose than mere amusement.
+The story is absorbing and Smallways a perfectly conceived character,
+recommendations that serve to popularise the book as a romance; but
+all the art of the construction is relevant to the theme, and to the
+logical issue which is faced unflinchingly. In the many wild
+prophecies that have been incorporated in various stories of a great
+European war, there has been discoverable now and again some hint of
+insight into the real dangers that await mankind. But such stories as
+these degenerate into some accidental, but inferentially glorious,
+victory of British arms, and any value in the earlier comments is
+swamped in the sentimentality of the fortuitous, and designedly
+popular, sequel. In the book now under consideration the conception is
+too wide for any such lapses into the maudlin. British interests play
+an insignificant part in the drama. We have to consider war not as an
+incident in the history of a nation, but as a horrible disgrace in the
+history of humanity.
+
+And war is the theme also of _The World Set Free_ (1914), but it leads
+here to a theory of reconstruction of which we have no sight in the
+earlier work. The opening chapters describe the inception of the
+means, the discovery of the new source of energy--a perfectly
+reasonable conception--that led to the invention of the "atomic bomb,"
+a thing so terribly powerful and continuous in its action that after
+the first free use of it in a European outbreak, war became
+impossible. As a romance, the book fails. The interest is not centred
+in a single character, and we are given somewhat disconnected glimpses
+of various phases in the discovery of the new energy, in its
+application, and of the catastrophes that follow its use as an
+instrument of destruction. The essay form has almost dominated the
+method of the novelist, and consequently the essential parable has not
+the same force as in _The War in the Air_. Nevertheless, the vision is
+there, obscured by reason of its more personal expression; and before
+I return to consider the three less pertinent romances interposed
+between those that have a more recognisable critical tendency, I wish
+to sum up the distinctive attitude of the four just considered.
+
+And in this thing I claim that the conscious purpose of the artist is
+of comparatively small account. I may be doing Mr Wells an injustice,
+either by robbing him of the credit of a clearly conceived intention,
+or by reading into his books a deliberation which he might wish to
+disclaim. But my business is not justice to the author in this sense,
+but an interpretation--necessarily personal--of the message his books
+have conveyed to a particular reader. And the plain message that all
+these romances--including those that follow--have conveyed to me is
+the necessity for ridding the mind of traditions of the hypnotic
+suggestions of parents and early teachers, of the parochial influences
+of immediate surroundings, of the prejudices and self-interested
+dogmatisms and hyperboles of common literature, especially of the
+daily and weekly press; in order that we may, if only for an exercise
+in simple reason, dissociate ourselves for a moment from all those
+intimate forces, and regard life with the calmness of one detached
+from personal interests and desires. No human being who has not thus
+stood apart from life can claim to have realised himself; and in so
+far as he is unable thus to separate himself temporarily from his
+circumstances he confesses that he is less a personality than a bundle
+of reactions to familiar stimuli. But given that power of detachment,
+the reader may find in these four books matter for the reconsideration
+of the whole social problem. Whether he accept such tentative
+reconstructions as those suggested in _The World Set Free_ or _In the
+Days of the Comet_ is relatively unimportant, the essential thing is
+that he should view life with momentarily undistracted eyes; and see
+both the failures of our civilisation and its potentialities for a
+finer and more gracious existence....
+
+_The First Men in the Moon_ (1901) is little more than a piece of
+sheer exuberance. The theory of the means to the adventure and the
+experience itself are both plausible. There are a few minor
+discrepancies, but when the chief assumption is granted the
+deductions will all stand examination. The invention of cavorite, the
+substance that is impervious to the force--whatever it may be--of
+gravitation, as other substances are impervious to light, heat, sound
+or electricity, is not a priori impossible, nor is the theory that the
+moon is hollow, that the "Selenites" live below the surface, or that
+evolution has produced on our satellite an intelligent form which,
+anatomically, is more nearly allied to the insect than to the
+vertebrate type as we know it. The exposition of lunar social
+conditions cannot be taken very seriously. Specialisation is the
+key-note; the production by education and training, of minds, and, as
+far as possible, bodies, adapted to a particular end, and incapable of
+performing other technical functions. The picture of this highly
+developed state, however, is not such as would tempt us to emulation.
+As a machine it works; as an ideal it lacks any presentation of the
+thing we call beauty. The apotheosis of intelligence in the concrete
+example leaves us unambitious in that direction.
+
+One chapter, however, stands apart and elaborates once more that
+detachment for space and time which I have so particularly emphasised
+as the more important feature of these particular books. Mr Bedford,
+alone in his Cavorite sphere between the Earth and the Moon,
+experiences this sensation of aloofness. "I became, if I may go
+express it, dissociate from Bedford," he writes. "I looked down on
+Bedford as a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be
+connected," Bedford, unfortunately for my moral, was a poor creature
+who got no benefit from his privilege, who flouted it indeed and
+regretted his inability "to recover the full-bodied self-satisfaction
+of his early days." Possibly the fact that in his case the knowledge
+was thrust upon him may account for his failure. It is only the
+knowledge we seek that has any influence upon us.
+
+_The Sea Lady_ (1902) stands alone among Mr Wells' romances. The
+realistic method remains, but the conception is touched with a poetic
+fancy of a kind that I have not found elsewhere in these books. The
+Venus Annodomini who came out of the sea at Folkestone in the form of
+an authentic mermaid was something more than a mere critic of our
+civilised conventions. She was that, too; she asked why people walked
+on the Leas "with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and
+bound not to do all sorts of natural things, and bound to do all sorts
+of preposterous things." But she was also the personification of
+"other dreams." She had "the quality of the open sky, of deep tangled
+places, of the flight of birds ... of the high sea." She represented
+to one man, at least, "the Great Outside." And, if we still find a
+repetition of the old statement in that last description, it is,
+nevertheless, surrounded with a glamour that is not revealed in such
+books as _In the Days of the Comet_. The ideal that is faintly
+shadowed in _The Sea Lady_ is more ethereal, less practical; the
+story, despite the naturalistic, half-cynical manner of its recountal,
+has the elements of romance. The closing scene describes the
+perplexity of a practical Kentish policeman "who in the small hours
+before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady had been wearing, just as
+the tide overtook it," He stands there on the foreshore with a foolish
+bewilderment, wondering chiefly "what people are up to." He is the
+"simple citizen of a plain and obvious world." And Mr Wells concludes:
+"I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little
+way, a stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast serenity
+of the night." And I make an application of the parable for my own
+purposes, and wonder how far the curiosity of Mr Wells' readers will
+carry them into the great mystery that lies behind the illusion of
+this apparently obvious world.
+
+We come, finally, without any suggestion of climax, to _The Food of
+the Gods_ (1904). The food was produced, casually in the first
+instance, by two experimenters who served no cause but that of their
+own inquisitive science. One of them, Redwood, had become intrigued by
+the fact that the growth of all living things proceeded with bursts
+and intermissions; it was as if they had "to accumulate force to grow,
+grew with vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space
+before they could go on growing again." And Bensington, the other
+experimenter, succeeded in separating a food that produced regular
+instead of intermittent growth. It was universal in its effects,
+influencing vegetable as well as animal life; and in the course of
+twenty years it produced human giants, forty feet high. This is a
+theme for Mr Wells to revel in, and he does, treating the detail of
+the first two-thirds of the book with a fine realism. Like Bensington,
+he saw, "behind the grotesque shapes and accidents of the present, the
+coming world of giants and all the mighty things the future has in
+store--vague and splendid, like some glittering palace seen suddenly
+in the passing of a sunbeam far away." The parable is plain enough,
+but the application of it weakens when we realise that so far as the
+merely physical development goes, the food of the gods is only
+bringing about a change of scale. If we grant that this "insurgent
+bigness" must conquer the world, the final result is only humanity in
+the same relation to life that it now occupies, and we are left to
+reflect with Bensington, after the vision had faded, on "sinister
+shadows, vast declivities and darknesses, inhospitable immensities,
+cold, wild and terrible things."
+
+The change of scale, however, so long as it was changing, presents in
+another metaphor the old contrasts. The young giants, the Cossars and
+Redwood, looking down on common humanity from a vantage-point some
+thirty to forty feet higher than the "little people," are critical by
+force of circumstances; and they are at the same time handicapped by
+an inability to comprehend the thing criticised. They are too
+differentiated; and for the purpose of the fable none of them is
+gifted with the power to study these insects with the sympathy of a
+Henri Fabre. We may find some quality of blundering stupidity in the
+Cossars and in young Redwood, they were too prejudiced by their
+physical scale; but the simple Caddles, born of peasant parents,
+uneducated and set to work in a chalk quarry, is the true enquirer. He
+walked up to London to solve his problem, and his fundamental
+question: "What's it all _for_?" remained unanswered. The "little
+people" could not exchange ideas with him, and he never met his
+brother giants. It is, however, exceedingly doubtful whether they
+could have offered him any satisfactory explanation of the purpose of
+the universe. Their only ambition seemed to be reconstruction on a
+larger scale.
+
+I think the partial failure of _The Food of the Gods_ to furnish any
+ethical satisfaction is due to the fact that in this romance Mr Wells
+has identified himself too closely with the giants; a fault that
+indicates a slight departure from normality. The inevitable contrast
+between great and little lacks a sympathy and appreciation we find
+elsewhere. "Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is
+that. Great and little cannot understand one another" is the true text
+of the book; and it implies a weakness in the great not less than in
+the little; a weakness that is hardly exonerated by the closing
+sentence: "But in every child born of man lurks some seed of
+greatness--waiting for the food." I find a quality of reasonableness
+in the little people's antagonism to the blundering superiority of
+those giants.
+
+To the tail of these romances I may pin the majority of Mr Wells'
+short stories. The best of them are all included in the collection
+published under the title of _The Country of the Blind_. In this form
+Mr Wells displays nothing but the exuberance of his invention. In the
+Preface to the collection he defines his conception of short-story
+writing as "the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;
+it may be horrible or pathetic or funny, or beautiful, or profoundly
+illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from
+fifteen to twenty minutes to read aloud." I can add nothing to that
+description, and would only take away from it so much as is implied by
+the statement that I cannot call to mind any one of these stories
+which is "profoundly illuminating" in the same sense that I would
+certainly apply the phrase to some of the romances. Jolly and bright
+they undoubtedly are, but when they are moving, they provide food for
+wonder rather than for enlightenment....
+
+I cannot leave these romances without a comment on Mr Wells'
+justification as preacher and prophet. Writing in the midst of the
+turmoil of war, I am vividly conscious of having had my mind prepared
+for it by the material I have here so inadequately described. All the
+misunderstandings, the weaknesses, the noisy, meaningless ambitions,
+the tepid acceptance of traditional standards, have been exposed by Mr
+Wells in these fantasies of his. And in _The War in the Air_, with
+just such exaggerations as are necessary for a fiction of this kind,
+he has forecast the conditions which have now overtaken us. We
+know--or we might know if we had the capacity for any sort of
+consequent consideration of our conditions--that in a reasonably
+conducted civilisation no such awful catastrophe as this senseless
+conflagration could have been possible. No doubt we shall profit by
+the lesson, but it is one that any individual might have learned for
+himself from these romances, without paying the fearful price that is
+now necessary. And because humanity is apt to forget its most drastic
+punishments, to revert to its original inertia as soon as the smart is
+healed, I feel that when the worst is over, these books will have a
+greater value than ever before. I believe that in them may be found
+just those essentials of detachment and broad vision which might serve
+to promote a higher and more stable civilisation.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE NOVELS
+
+
+I am willing to maintain that H.G. Wells is second to none as a writer
+of romances of the type I have just examined. I am less certain of his
+position as a novelist. He brings to his fiction the open-eyed
+recognition of realities, the fine analysis of modern conditions, the
+lucid consequent thought and the clean, graphic style that mark the
+qualities of his other method; he has that "poetic gift, the gift of
+the creative and illuminating phrase," which, he has said, "alone
+justifies writing"; but he has not the power of creating characters
+that stand for some essential type of humanity. On the one hand he is
+inclined to idealise the engineer and the scientific researcher, on
+the other to satirise and, in effect, to group into one
+sloppy-thinking mass every other kind of Englishman, not excepting
+philosophers, politicians and social reformers. This broad
+generalisation omits any consideration of the merely uneducated, such
+as Hoopdriver or Kipps, and the many women he has drawn. But the
+former, however sympathetically treated, are certainly not idealised;
+and among the latter, the only real creation, in my opinion, is Susan
+Ponderevo in _Tono-Bungay_; although there is a possible composite of
+various women in the later books that may represent the general
+insurgent character of recent young womanhood. But now that I have
+made this too definite statement I want to go back over it, touch it
+up and smooth it out. For if I have found Mr Wells' character types
+too few and too specialised; and as if, with regard to his more or
+less idealised males--such as Capes, George Ponderevo, Remington,
+Trafford, Stafford--he had modelled and re-modelled them in the effort
+to build up one finally estimable figure of masculine ability; there
+still remains an enormous gallery of subsidiary portraits, for the
+most part faintly caricatured, of men and women who do stand for
+something in modern life; portraits that are valuable, interesting and
+memorable. Nevertheless, I submit that Mr Wells' novels will not live
+by reason of their characterisation.
+
+The desire to write essays in this class of fiction does not seem to
+have overcome Wells until the last few years. Before 1909, he had
+written all his sociology and all his romances, with the exception of
+_The World Set Free_, but only three novels--namely, _The Wheels of
+Chance_, _Love and Mr Lewisham_ and _Kipps_; and none of them gives
+any indication of the characteristic method of the later work.
+
+The first of the three, published in 1896, is in one respect a
+splendid answer to the objection against what has been called the
+episodical novel. The story deals only with ten glorious days in the
+life of Hoopdriver, a callow assistant in a draper's "emporium" at
+Putney. He learnt to ride a bicycle, set out to tour the south coast
+for his short summer holiday and rode into romance. One section of the
+book is a trifle too hilarious, coming perilously near to farce, but
+underlying the steady humour of it all is a perfectly consistent, even
+saddening, criticism of the Hoopdriver type. He has imagination
+without ability; life is made bearable for him chiefly by the means of
+his poor little dreams and poses; he sees himself momentarily in the
+part of a detective, a journalist, a South African millionaire, any
+assumption to disguise the horrible reality of the draper's assistant;
+and yet there is fine stuff in him. (Perhaps the suggested antithesis
+is hardly justified!) We leave him at the door of the Putney shop full
+of resolution to read, to undertake his own education, in some way, no
+doubt, to better himself, as he might have phrased it. But we doubt
+the quality of his determination and of the lasting influence of the
+"more wonderful desires and ambitions replacing those discrepant
+dreams." We have only followed Hoopdriver through a ten-day episode,
+but all his story has been told.
+
+We are in quite a different position with regard to Lewisham. The
+history of his encounter with love and the world, published in 1900,
+covers a period of four or five years, but while we leave him
+down-at-heel, with a wife and a mother-in-law dependent upon him, and
+the prospect of fatherhood adding to his responsibilities, we are
+uncertain whither his career will take him. Lewisham is the first
+sketch for the type that was to be elaborated in five subsequent
+books. The allurements of his love for Ethel Henderson spoilt his
+chances at the science school, but he has the quality that is so
+conspicuously lacking in the Hoopdriver-Kipps-Polly succession.
+Lewisham had some resolution, undoubted energy, and the beginnings of
+that larger vision which was the gift of the later protagonists. But
+he is not idealised; he comes nearer to the average of humanity than
+the later pictures of his like; although they share with him that
+tendency to sudden irascibility, to outbursts of a somewhat petty
+temper against the obvious limitations of life--a common tendency
+observable in nearly all Mr Wells' dominant male characters. Those few
+years of Lewisham's life were so well done, so consistently developed,
+that I have regretted the absence of a sequel. Indeed, I still regret
+it, although I realise very well that Mr Wells' steady progress in the
+conception of his own purpose as a writer has absolutely precluded
+any return to an older method. Lewisham was not quite strong enough
+to portray the further development of the dominant idea, not a
+sufficiently tempered tool for the dissection of the modern world.
+
+I have said little about the story of this fragment of Lewisham's
+career; I have not even mentioned that deliciously plausible and able
+rogue, Chaffery, the fraudulent medium; but in this essay I am more
+concerned to trace the meaning of Mr Wells' books than to criticise or
+praise the detail. With regard to the latter, the reader may always
+feel so perfectly safe. He need have no doubt that description of
+action, of mood, or of place will be vivid and convincing, true to
+life and essential to the story. I do not pass this detail by because
+I have found it better done in other contemporary writers; I have not;
+but because I find a pregnancy and a growing force behind these
+minutiae that is strangely lacking from any other works of fiction in
+which I can find any comparison.
+
+There are, however, still two more novels to be disposed of before I
+can examine the full expression of Mr Wells' purpose as I find it in
+his later books. One of these novels, _Kipps_ (1905), is the next in
+chronological order; the other, _The History of Mr Polly_, was
+published in 1910, interpolated between _Ann Veronica_ and _The New
+Machiavelli_. Both Kipps and Polly began active life in a draper's
+shop. The former is explicitly labelled "a simple soul." He is at once
+sillier and sharper than Hoopdriver, but, like that "dear fool" (the
+phrase is Mr Wells'), Kipps has some very sterling qualities. He had
+the good fortune to come into money--I cannot but count it good
+fortune in his case--and was just wise enough to avoid a marriage with
+Helen Walshingham--"County family. Related to the Earl of
+Beaupres"--and if he shirked that match rather from sheer funk than
+from any clear realisation of the futility of what he was avoiding, he
+did, at least, run away with and marry that very charming little
+housemaid, Ann Pornick, whom he had loved in his early boyhood. After
+his marriage he lost the greater part of his money, and later
+recovered it again; but all these shocks of fortune left him the same
+simple soul, untroubled by any urgent problems outside the range of
+his personal experience. His brief contact with the dreamer,
+Masterman, and his friendship with the capable young
+engineer-socialist, Sid Pornick, Ann's brother, only roused Kipps to a
+momentary wonder, and his final enunciation of the great question was
+representative. "I was thinking just what a Rum Go everything is," he
+says. That question, to quote Mr Wells, "never reached the surface of
+his mind, it never took to itself substance or form; it looked up
+merely as the phantom of a face might look, out of deep waters, and
+sank again into nothingness."
+
+Mr Polly is a third variant of the Hoopdriver-Kipps genus. He had more
+initiative, although he still presents a problem in inertia, and he is
+the only one of the three who had a feeling for literature, and read
+persistently, if vagariously. And Mr Polly did at last take his fate
+into his own hands, commit arson, desert his wife and wander off, an
+"exploratious adventurer," as he might have put it, to discover some
+joy and poetry in life after a heroic battle that he funked most
+horribly and might have avoided. This may sound rather a criminal
+record, and even so I have taken no account of his fraud on the Life
+Assurance Company, but no one could ever condemn Mr Polly--or wish him
+a happier employment than that he finally achieved partly by luck and
+partly by his own effort. He was the sport of the forces that break
+out so ungovernably in this haphazard world. As the "high-browed
+gentleman living at Highbury" explains: "Nothing can better
+demonstrate the collective dullness of our community, the crying need
+for a strenuous, intellectual renewal, than the consideration of that
+vast mass of useless, uncomfortable, under-educated, under-trained,
+and altogether pitiable people we contemplate when we use that
+inaccurate and misleading term, the Lower Middle Class. A great
+proportion of the lower middle class should properly be assigned to
+the unemployed and the unemployable." And that is the moral we may lay
+to heart from the presentation of these three quite lovable and quite
+futile draper's assistants. Their stories are told without
+didacticism; the method displays at its brightest Mr Wells' intimate
+knowledge and understanding of the life and speech of the class
+portrayed; the developments are natural and absorbing enough to hold
+the interest of the most idle reader; and here and there, perhaps, an
+intelligent man or woman may be stirred to realise that he or she is
+in part responsible for the futility of a Hoopdriver or a Kipps, or
+for the jovial crimes of Mr Polly....
+
+I come now to the six novels which represent most truly the striving,
+persistent idealism of the mature Wells. In these books he has come to
+the mastery of his own technique--so far as a man may ever master it.
+He admits that there remain inexpressible visions, he is apt at times
+to be overtaken by his own mannerisms (a fault that in no way affects
+the enjoyment or enlightenment of the average reader), but he has
+wrought and perfected a delicate instrument of style that is finely
+adapted to his purpose. I cannot avoid speaking of "purpose" in
+relation to these five books, and yet the word is misleading. I do not
+mean by it that Mr Wells has ever sat down to write a novel with the
+deliberate intention of converting an honest reader or so. But I do
+mean that he has tried very deliberately to express his own attitude
+in these books, and that whether or not he was intentionally a
+propagandist, he has done his utmost to explain and to glorify that
+attitude of his. Perhaps I shrink from that word "purpose" too
+sensitively, because it is so naturally associated in the mind with
+all that is clumsy and didactic in fiction. The "novel with a
+purpose," as the dreadful phrase has it, is a horrible thing, and none
+of this five could be so misdescribed. Nevertheless it is very plain
+that Mr Wells has deliberately selected his stories and his characters
+to illustrate certain points of view. The characters are consistent,
+and the story growing out of their influences and reactions is never
+distorted in order to score a point for the maintainer of a theory.
+But the preliminary selection cannot be overlooked. It has, without
+question, been made in each case to illustrate a thesis.
+
+_Ann Veronica_ (1909) opens an aspect of the sex question that has
+been amplified in later novels. The chief person in the story
+illustrates for us the revolt of young women against the limitations
+of a certain, the most representative, type of home discipline. Ann
+Veronica was a well-educated young woman with that leaning towards
+biological science which seems an almost necessary element in the
+make-up of Mr Wells' exemplars of the open mind. She came to an open
+quarrel with her father on the question of attending a somewhat
+Bohemian fancy-dress ball, and she had the courage and determination
+to uphold her declaration of independence. She ran away, came up to
+London from her father's suburb, took lodgings and essayed quite
+unsuccessfully to make her own living. She failed in this endeavour
+because she had not been educated or trained for any of those few and
+specialised occupations that women may attempt in modern conditions.
+She learned by experience various essentials that had been omitted
+from any teaching she had received at home, and ended that phase of
+her life by falling in love with Capes, demonstrator at the
+Westminster Imperial College, a man who was living apart from his
+wife. Ann Veronica's story is the first serious essay in feminism--a
+term that takes a much wider meaning in Mr Wells' definition than is
+commonly attributed to it. The novel presents the claim of the woman
+to free herself from the restrictions that once almost necessarily
+limited her sphere of action, restrictions that are ever becoming more
+meaningless in a civilisation that has enforced new economic
+conditions. But Mr Wells goes far beyond that elementary proposition.
+He has tried in _Ann Veronica_--and again with a more delicate probe
+in _Marriage_ and _The Passionate Friends_--to touch the hidden thing
+that is causing all this surface inflammation. He has analysed and
+diagnosed the exposed evil, always it seems with a certain
+tentativeness, and we are left to carry on his line of research; many
+of the difficulties of the problem are indicated, but no sovereign
+specific for the malady.
+
+_Tono-Bungay_ (1909) touches only casually on the sex question. The
+involved love affairs of George Ponderevo are less essential than the
+career of his uncle, the inventor of the patent medicine that gives a
+title to the book. In many ways _Tono-Bungay_ is the best novel that
+Mr Wells has given us. It is written in the first person, a narrative
+form that afterwards served to convey Mr Wells' interpolated
+criticisms of the bodies social and politic in something nearly
+approaching the shape of an essay, but in _Tono-Bungay_ there are no
+important divagations from the development of the story. The framework
+of the book is provided by the life history of the narrator from early
+boyhood to middle age, matter interesting enough in itself even if it
+had not provided the means for revealing the inwardness of Edward
+Ponderevo's character and career. He was not a bad little man, this
+plump little chemist; a Lombroso or a Ferri would have found
+difficulty in classifying him as a "criminal type," however eager
+those investigators might have been to confirm their pet theories.
+Ponderevo's wife--the inimitable Aunt Susan--called him "Teddy" and
+his nephew endorses the appropriateness of that diminutive; he affirms
+that there was a characteristic "teddiness" about Uncle Ponderevo. He
+failed as a retail chemist in Wimblehurst. He was not naturally
+dishonest, but he had windy ideas about finance, and he was careless
+in the matter of certain trust monies. He was "imaginative, erratic,
+inconsistent, recklessly inexact," and his imagination led him by way
+of a patent medicine to company promoting on the Hooley scale. "Do you
+realise the madness of the world that sanctions such a thing?" asks Mr
+Wells in the person of the supposed narrator and points that question
+on a later page as follows:--"At the climax of his Boom, my uncle at
+the most sparing estimate must have possessed in substance and credit
+about two million pounds' worth of property to set off against his
+vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a
+controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions. This
+irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid
+him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it
+lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised
+nothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we
+organised added any real value to human life at all."
+
+The enormous success and rapid failure of this futile, ambitious
+little chemist--a success that is, unhappily, only too conceivable and
+probable--are seen against the background of his nephew's life, Mr
+Wells has given a greater value and credulity to the legal
+criminalities of Ponderevo, by coming at him, as it were, through a
+wider angle; just as he achieves all the circumstances of reality in
+his romances by his postulation of an average eye-witness. But there
+are many threads in George Ponderevo's life that were not immediately
+intertwined with the _Tono-Bungay_ career, and his love for Beatrice
+Normanby touches in quite another manner on the sex problem opened in
+_Ann Veronica_. In both these books the story is the essential thing,
+and the attack upon social conditions is relatively indirect. The
+general criticism is at times quite explicit, but it is subordinated.
+
+In _The New Machiavelli_ (1910) these relations are nearly reversed.
+The detailed exposure of the moving forces that stimulate our
+political energies, occupies long sections into which the human
+relations of Remington (the form is again that of an autobiography)
+hardly enter, except in an occasional conversation to sharpen up a
+criticism. This comment on politics (regarded in his own constituency,
+Remington says, not as a "great constructive process" but as a "kind
+of dog-fight") is the chief theme; subsidiary to it is the comment on
+a society that could waste so valuable a life as Remington's for the
+sake of a moral convention. Both comments point Mr Wells' expression
+of what he calls in this book "the essential antagonism ... in all
+human affairs ... between ideas and the established method--that is to
+say, between ideas and the rule of thumb." And he adds: "The world I
+hate is the rule-of-thumb world; the thing I and my kind exist for
+primarily is battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct
+it." This confession is so lucid and characteristic that I cannot
+improve upon it, and yet I see that it is a statement likely to arouse
+considerable resentment, "Of course we are detestable," Remington
+admits in this connection; and in these later, more urgently critical
+novels, we recognise a little too clearly that note of protest, almost
+of defensive proclamation. And in none of them do we see it more
+definitely than in the book now under consideration. In many ways _The
+New Machiavelli_ stands apart from the other novels. I find it a
+little bitter in places, because the thing condemned appears too small
+for such unequivocal condemnation. The following superlative summary
+is put into the mouth of a minor character, but I think it is fairly
+representative of Remington's later attitude. "But of all the damned
+things that ever were damned," says the plain-spoken Britten, "your
+damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied,
+respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the
+utterly damnedest." As a commentary, I find this exaggerated; and
+although it is in the mouth of one who is not presented as a spokesman
+for Mr Wells' own opinions, I feel that it comes very near to being a
+text for a considerable section of the political criticism; and that
+it indicates bias, a departure from normality.
+
+And yet, despite this occasional exhibition of temper, _The New
+Machiavelli_ is a most illuminating book. It reveals with
+extraordinary clearness the Wells of that period; but it also gives us
+a sight of the spirit in him that does not change. All his books,
+romances, novels and essays indicate a gradual process of growth; if
+we were to apply any label to him, we should inevitably land ourselves
+in confusion. He is nothing "in the first place" but a man with an
+intense desire to understand life. As he says in this book: "A human
+being who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first
+place, or a statesman in the first place, is thereby and
+inevitably--though he bring God-like gifts to the pretence--a quack."
+But while he may dissociate himself from any clique, and disclaim any
+fixed opinion that might earn for him the offensive and fiercely
+rejected label, he nevertheless presents to us one unchanging attitude
+in these very refusals. "I'm going to get experience for humanity out
+of all my talents--and bury nothing," says Remington; and that purpose
+is implicit in every book that Wells has written. He is an empiric,
+using first this test and then that to try the phenomena of life;
+publishing the detail of his experiment and noting certain
+deductions. But while he may offer a prescription for certain
+symptoms, he gives us to understand that he is only diagnosing a phase
+in human development; that he is seeking an ultimate which he never
+hopes to find, and that the deductions he draws to-day may be rejected
+to-morrow without a shadow of regret. He would be constant, I think,
+only in his inconstancy to any criterion of present conditions as
+applicable or likely to be applicable to the future; he sees life as a
+dynamic thing in process of change and growth. "All the history of
+mankind," he writes, "all the history of life has been and will be the
+story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss,
+struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual
+lives--an effect of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible
+appeal." And it is for this reason that he is so eager to battle with,
+annoy, disarrange and reconstruct that rule-of-thumb world he
+censures so steadily; he is fighting the assumption of a static
+condition which he knows to be impossible.
+
+And for a moment in _The New Machiavelli_, and again in his next book,
+_Marriage_, he has a passing vision of some greater movement of which
+we are but the imperfect instruments. He develops and then drops the
+idea of a "hinterland," not only to the individual mind but to the
+general consciousness. The "permanent reality," he calls it, "which is
+never really immediate, which draws continually upon human experience
+and influences human action more and more, but which is itself never
+the actual player upon the stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never
+takes a call." And in another place he writes in the same connection:
+" ... the ideas go on--as though we are all no more than little cells
+and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding."
+
+We come again to a hint of that explanation at the end of _Marriage_,
+published in 1912. The story, reduced to the barest outline, is that
+of the relations of Trafford to his wife. It is not complicated by any
+sexual temptations or jealousies, but it gradually evolves the
+integral problem of the meaning of life.
+
+Trafford, before his engagement to Marjorie Pope, and for a year or
+two after his marriage, was engaged in research work. His speciality
+was molecular physics and he was a particularly brilliant
+investigator. That research, with all the possibilities that it held
+of some immense discovery of the laws that govern the constitution of
+inorganic and progressively, perhaps, of organic, matter, was
+sufficient to engross his mental energies, to give him a sense of
+satisfaction in life; but his six hundred pounds a year proved
+insufficient to satisfy the demands of Marjorie's claim to enjoyment.
+She was not a mere type of the worldly-minded woman. She represents,
+indeed, the claim of modern women for a distinctive interest and
+employment not less urgent and necessary than the interests and
+employments of men. And when she failed, as she plainly must have
+failed, to find any such occupation, her sense of beauty and her
+justifiable demand for life found an outlet largely in shopping, in
+entertaining, in all such ephemeral attractions and amusements as
+women in her class may seek and reject. That way of escape, however,
+soon raised financial obstructions to Trafford's work. He had to find
+a means for increasing his income, and came at last and inevitably to
+the necessity for making more money and continually still more. The
+road to wealth was opened for him and he took it by sacrificing his
+research work, but when the economic problem had been triumphantly
+solved, he could not return to his first absorption in the problems
+of molecular physics. Life pressed upon him at every moment of the
+day, he had been inveigled into a net.
+
+The manner of Trafford's escape from the thing that intrigued him has
+been severely criticised. After I had first read the book I too was
+inclined to deprecate the device of taking Trafford and Marjorie into
+the loneliness of a Labrador winter, in order to set them right with
+themselves and give them a clearer vision of life. But I have read
+_Marriage_ twice since I formed that premature judgment, and each time
+I have found a growing justification for what at first may seem a
+somewhat whimsical solution to the difficulties of an essentially
+social problem.
+
+But in effect this is the same specific that I upheld in my comment on
+the romances; it illustrates the need felt by a certain class of mind
+for temporary withdrawal from all the immediate urgencies and calls
+of social life; the overwhelming desire to see the movements and
+intricacies of human initiative and reactions, from a momentarily
+detached standpoint. And Mr Wells has offered us a further commentary
+on the difficulties of this abstraction, by withholding any vision
+from Trafford until he was finally isolated from Marjorie, and even
+from any physical contact with the movement of what we call reality,
+by illness and fever. Only then, indeed, did he touch the vital
+issues. I find the statement of this ultimate thing, vaguely phrased
+in Trafford's semi-delirium, presenting another expression of the
+thought quoted from _The New Machiavelli_; the conception of humanity
+as an instrument. "Something trying to exist," he says, something
+"which isn't substance, doesn't belong to space or time, something
+stifled and enclosed, struggling to get through." And later he
+repeats: "It struggles to exist, becomes conscious, becomes now
+conscious of itself. That is where I come in as a part of it. Above
+the beast in me is that--the desire to know better, to
+know--beautifully, and to transmit my knowledge. That's all there is
+in life for me beyond food and shelter and tidying up. This
+Being--opening its eyes, listening, trying to comprehend. Every good
+thing in man is that--looking and making pictures, listening and
+making songs.... We began with bone-scratching. We're still--near it.
+I'm just a part of this beginning--mixed with other things. Every
+book, every art, every religion is that, the attempt to understand and
+express--mixed with other things."
+
+I have reached something like a climax with this passage; a climax
+that I would willingly maintain if it were possible, inasmuch as it
+holds a representation of that unchanging influence which I find as an
+inspiration and a force behind all H.G. Wells' books. Necessarily
+this vital inspiration is, as he says, "mixed with other things"; he
+has had to find a means to express it, and our means of expression is
+limited not only by our own powers but in a large degree by the
+limitations of the audience addressed. Moreover H.G. Wells' art
+represents him in that it is a practical art. He is, in an
+unspecialised sense, a pragmatist. He comes back from his isolations
+to find in this world all the substance and potentialities of beauty
+both in outward appearance and in conduct. And he is not content to
+vapour of ideals. He recognises that the stuff of admiration and
+desire that animates his own being is present throughout humanity.
+Only the sight of it is obscured by all those stupidities and
+condescensions to rule-of-thumb that he attacks so furiously. Those
+are the impediments that he would clear away, and he acknowledges that
+they stand between him and his own sight of beauty. He is compelled
+always to struggle--and we can see the signs of it in all he
+writes--with his own weakness and limitations; criticising himself as
+he satirises the thing condemned, but striving without ceasing to
+serve the purpose of that which he knows is "struggling to exist."
+This, to me, is the spirit of H.G. Wells, and I find it a spirit that
+is as admirable as it is human....
+
+_The Passionate Friends_ (1913) is another experiment in exposition.
+The very real and fine love of Stafford (the autobiographer in this
+case) and Lady Mary Christian is spoiled, made to appear insignificant
+and debased, by all the conventions and petty, unoriginal judgments
+that go to the making of the rule of our society. The woman had to
+make her choice between love in an undignified poverty for which all
+her training had unfitted her, and a sterile ease and magnificence
+that gave her those opportunities which her temperament and education
+demanded. She chose for dignity and opportunity, was tempted to grasp
+at love, and thus finally came into a blind alley from which death was
+the only escape. It is another picture of the old conflict illustrated
+in the persons of Ann Veronica and Marjorie Trafford; the constant
+inability that our conditions impose on the desire to love
+beautifully. The implicit demand is that for greater freedom for
+women, socially and economically. Incidentally we see that the man,
+Stafford, does not suffer in the same degree. His splendid love for
+Lady Mary is thwarted, but he finds an outlet. It is a new aspect of
+escape, by the way, for Stafford's illuminating business of spreading
+and collating knowledge is a relief from the scientific research which
+was in some form or another the specific of the earlier novels--if we
+exclude Remington's political propaganda in _The New Machiavelli_, a
+suggested solution that was, at the best, something half-hearted. And
+Stafford's escape, and his version of going to the mountain apart--by
+way of a sight of the East and of America--bring us back to that
+integral theme which I have so insisted upon, even at the risk of
+tedious repetition. "I was already beginning to see the great problem
+of mankind," writes Stafford, "as indeed nothing other than a
+magnification of the little problem of myself, as a problem in escape
+from grooves, from preoccupations and suspicions, precautions and
+ancient angers.... For all of us, as for each of us, salvation is
+that. We have to get away from ourselves to a greater thing, to a
+giant's desire and an unending life, ours and yet not our own."
+
+The last novel published at the time I write is _The Wife of Sir Isaac
+Harman_ (1914). The same theme is presented, but in other
+circumstances. Ellen Sawbridge, when she married, at eighteen, the
+founder and proprietor of "The International Bread Shops," was an
+ingenuous schoolgirl; and for more than seven years the change from a
+relatively independent poverty to the luxuries she could enjoy as the
+wife of a man who had not outgrown the Eastern theory with regard to
+the position of women, sufficed to keep her reasonably content. Mr
+Brumley was the instrument of Fate that seriously disturbed her
+satisfaction; but she must have come to much the same crisis, if Mr
+Brumley had never existed. Brumley was a writer, but he was not one of
+"the really imaginative people, the people with vision, the people who
+let themselves go"--I quote the expression of George Wilkins, the
+novelist--and Lady Harman never fell very deeply in love with him.
+Nevertheless it was through Brumley's interference with her life that
+she faced the crux of her position as the closely restricted occupant
+of "a harem of one." She never broke out of that cage. One desperate
+effort led her, by way of a suffragist demonstration on a post office
+window, to a month's freedom in prison; but Sir Isaac and society were
+too clever and too strong for her. When she was enlarged from the
+solitude of confinement in a cell, she was tricked and bullied into
+the resumption of her marital engagements. And presumably she must
+have continued to act as the nurse of her now invalid husband for the
+rest of her life, suffering the indignities of his abuse and the
+restrictions of liberty that the paid attendant may escape by a change
+of situation, if release had not come through Sir Isaac's death. By
+that time Lady Harman had learnt her lesson. I am distinctly sorry for
+Mr Brumley, but I should have been seriously disappointed in Ellen
+Harman if she had consented to marry him.
+
+Thus far I have only traced an imperfect outline of what I take to be
+the more important motive of the book. But there is a second pattern
+hardly less essential--namely, the criticism of the management and, _a
+fortiori_, of the conception of principle, in relation to the
+International Bread Shops. Arising out of this interwoven theme we
+come to some examination of the status of the female employee in
+general, and particularly in connection with the question of their
+board and lodging outside business hours. But in _The Wife of Sir
+Isaac Harman_ the essay manner has been abandoned. Any diversion from
+the development of the story is carried out by the expressed opinions
+of the characters themselves; and, as a consequence, the two essential
+problems are not unduly intruded upon the reader, although for that
+very reason they may remain longer in his thoughts. One more comment
+should be added, which is that this is the wittiest book that Mr
+Wells has yet given us. However serious the motives that give it life,
+it must be classed as a comedy....
+
+In concluding this brief review of Mr Wells' novels, I feel that I
+must hark back to a passage in _The Passionate Friends_ in order to
+indicate a spirit which, if it is not so definitely phrased in this
+last book of his, is certainly upheld in the matter of the story. For
+it is that spirit which seems to me the thing that should live and be
+remembered. Here is one of its more characteristic expressions in the
+mouth of Stafford, who writes:
+
+"I know that a growing multitude of men and women outwear the ancient
+ways. The bloodstained organised jealousies of religious intolerance,
+the delusions of nationality and cult and race, that black hatred
+which simple people, and young people and common people cherish
+against all that is not in the likeness of themselves cease to be the
+undisputed ruling forces of our collective life. We want to emancipate
+our lives from this slavery and these stupidities, from dull hatreds
+and suspicions.... A spirit ... arises and increases in human affairs,
+a spirit that demands freedom and gracious living as our inheritance
+too long deferred...."
+
+And surely H.G. Wells has striven to give a freer and more vital
+expression to that spirit, working through his own life, than any
+other novelist of our day. Indeed I would go further and claim that no
+such single and definite inspiration can be found in the works of any
+other secular writer. Wells has given to the novel a new criticism
+and, to a certain degree, a new form.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+SOCIOLOGY
+
+
+Mr Wells' essays in sociology are not dry treatises, based on Blue
+books and the gathering together of information and statistics from a
+formless and largely worthless collection of earlier sources. He has
+approached this question of man in relation to the State in the same
+generous spirit displayed in his works of fiction; and it is only by
+using the word "sociology" in its fuller sense as conceived by Comte,
+rather than in the restricted sense of "social science" with its
+implication of economics, as narrowed by Herbert Spencer, that I dare
+to head this last chapter with so dangerously technicalised a term.
+Indeed, I would not use the word "sociology" now if I could find a
+more inclusive heading. For it must be obvious, I think, to anyone who
+has followed my exposition of the romances and the novels that Mr
+Wells has a way of treating all such subjects as relate to the
+betterment of humanity with a broad outlook, an entire disrespect for
+conventional forms however hallowed by precedent, and a habit of
+trenchant criticism that could hardly be fettered by an analysis of
+sociological literature or continual deference to this or that
+experiment in practice or theory. He approaches his subject with the
+normal mind of one who sees the world, its customs and rules of
+conduct, from what is, after all, the point of view of
+common-sense--another term that has been so grossly misused that the
+possessor of true common-sense is apt to be regarded as a most
+uncommon person. It is, in fact, the least common of qualities.
+
+The first three books under this heading form some sort of a trilogy,
+and have a definite air of consequence. Of these, _Anticipations_ was
+published in 1901, and _Mankind in the Making_ and _A Modern Utopia_
+followed in 1903 and 1905 respectively. The scheme of the first two
+books combines a criticism of present conditions with a growing
+constructiveness that points the way to the ideal of what is called
+"The New Republic." Now, one of the labels that has been most
+frequently and adhesively affixed to Mr Wells is that of "Socialist,"
+and no doubt it would proclaim his purpose admirably enough if we
+could satisfactorily define the word in its relation to him. But,
+personally, I refuse so to label him, because I know that socialism
+means as many things to different people as religion, and is as much a
+term of reproach in the mouth of some self-labelled individualists as
+the designation "Christian" might be in the mouth of the "true
+believers"--as the Mohammedans call themselves. Wherefore I am
+particularly anxious in approaching any description of "The New
+Republic," to make it quite clear that that idealised State is not
+built of the bricks that have been modelled and cast by any
+recognisable group of propagandists, working to permeate, or more
+forcibly to convert, a section of the public under the flags of, say,
+Fabianism or Social Democracy. The essential thing about Mr Wells is
+that he is not a Follower, whether of Marx, or Hyndman, or Shaw, or
+Bebel; he may have learnt from any or all of them, but his theory of
+social reconstruction is pre-eminently and characteristically his own.
+He does not believe in the private ownership of land, for example, but
+I do not remember that he has ever advocated the means of the "Single
+Tax." And in these sociological essays, as in his novels, his method
+is that of picturing the more desirable thing or condition, the
+method of sweet persuasion rather than that of the sectarian who has
+a pet specific. Nevertheless Mr Wells uses his sharpened weapon of
+satire with considerable effect when he contemplates and displays for
+us the world as he sees it to-day. I find no hint of sweetness or
+persuasiveness on that side.
+
+It would be impossible in an exposition of this kind to dissect these
+essays in detail, nor would it be desirable. Many of the suggestions
+with regard to actual practice, suggestions that might be embodied in
+modern legislation, are open to criticism in detail, and I would not
+pin Mr Wells down to the letter of any one of them. He has certainly
+changed his mind on many points since he wrote these essays in
+constructive sociology, and the fact that he has so altered and
+enlarged his opinions is the best possible evidence of his reliability
+and sincerity. He is before all else devoted to the services of
+growth and progress. "To rebel against instinct," he writes, "to rebel
+against limitation, to evade, to trip up, and at last to close with
+and grapple and conquer the forces that dominate him, is the
+fundamental being of man." And no man can hope to dominate those
+forces, if he is content to let his opinions crystallise at the age of
+thirty-five or so. If he would retain his powers of criticism and
+construction he must have the patience and the energy to maintain the
+normal, receptive mind with which he is naturally endowed.
+Unfortunately with that endowment commonly comes another--namely, a
+tendency to avoid the irk or constant struggle by taking the line of
+least resistance; by adopting an opinion and upholding it in the face
+of all reason; and only a man of exceptional patience, courage and
+ability can keep himself free from the prejudices and fixed opinions
+which not only bring him a delusive peace and certainty but also are
+the means to worldly success.
+
+So I would advise the readers of _Anticipations_ and _Mankind in the
+Making_ to be influenced by the spirit rather than by the letter of
+these two books. The spirit is definite enough; it is the spirit of
+humaneness, of a passionate criticism of all the evils, miseries and
+disease that are the outcome of our present haphazard civilisation;
+the spirit for a desire for order, wider prospects and opportunities,
+greater freedom for growth. Men are born unequal, with different
+tendencies, different desires, different potentialities, but there
+should be a place for every one of them in the great economy of "The
+New Republic." Each has to learn the lesson--for discipline is
+essential--that he is not an independent unit as regards his work, but
+a factor, more or less insignificant, in the sum of individuals that
+make up the greater State. The good New Republican "will seek
+perpetually to gauge his quality, he will watch to see himself the
+master of his habits and of his powers; he will take his brain, blood,
+body and lineage as a trust to be administered for the world."
+
+Such, I think, is the spirit, the permanent principle of these two
+books. That remains and increases. The conception of the process by
+which the New Republic shall be built is less constant, and Mr Wells
+will change his opinions concerning it for just so long as he
+continues to grow. Should he ever adopt an inalterable policy,
+subscribe to some "ism," and wear a label, he would brand himself
+truly as inconsistent. Then, indeed, he would have contradicted
+himself. We search for truth never hoping to find it complete and
+whole; and he who is contented with a part denies God....
+
+_A Modern Utopia_ (1905) is an attempt to picture "The New Republic"
+in being; a very different dream of reconstruction from that
+displayed in Edward Bellamy's _Looking Backward_, and _Equality_, but
+having nevertheless certain points of likeness to the former at least,
+and especially in the method of marking contrasts by a form of
+parallelism, by keeping the world as we know it within the circle of
+attention in order to break the paralysing illusion that we are moving
+in romantic and quite impossible surroundings. Mr Wells' machinery is
+slightly complicated. He takes two figures from the beginning of this
+twentieth century. The Owner of the Voice ("you will go with him
+through curious and interesting experience. Yet, ever and again, you
+will find him back at the table, the manuscript in his hand ...") and
+the "botanist," a foil and a stimulator to the other expositor. "The
+image of a cinematograph entertainment is the one to grasp," writes Mr
+Wells in his preliminary explanation. "There will be an effect of
+these two people going to and fro in front of the circle of a rather
+defective lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out of
+focus, but which does occasionally succeed in displaying on a screen a
+momentary moving picture of Utopian conditions."
+
+I think Mr Wells tried very valiantly to avoid the all too obvious
+mistake made by other Utopian builders, both romantic and practical.
+He began, I feel sure, with the admirable intention of depicting the
+people of the early twentieth century in new conditions, changed only
+in so far as they were influenced by the presentation of finer ideals
+and by more beautiful circumstance. He even introduced a contemporary
+critic of Utopian conditions in the shape of the talkative person, "a
+conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit, and in some subtly
+inexplicable way a most consummate ass." But once we begin to
+postulate our Utopian villains, the reader's thought is distracted
+from the contemplation of the heroic which is the cement that binds
+every stone in the visionary city. In order to change conditions it is
+necessary to change much in the present cast of human nature. In a
+fiction of Utopia there is no place for a Napoleon, a Rockefeller, or
+an ambition-swelled Imperialist. So Mr Wells is driven with various
+hesitations and resentments to assume that the interactions of cause
+and effect have indeed tended to produce a sweeter-tempered, more
+generous race of men and women; that the spirit which moves us now to
+seek a larger liberty and a greater tolerance has been encouraged and
+increased by the exercise of its own tendencies and the sight of its
+own triumphs; and that those who set their minds to the building gain
+an added grace in the labour. It is a perfectly fair and consistent
+assumption, but Mr Wells has been warned by his predecessors, from
+Robert Owen back to Plato and forward to Edward Bellamy, that the
+designs for Utopia have always been flawed by an altered conception of
+the humanity that walks within the city; and he has begun by trying to
+avoid a fallacy and ended by begging a question that he might very
+well have convincingly argued.
+
+By many people _A Modern Utopia_ is definitely labelled as the
+"Samurai" book. That conception of a natural aristocracy of spirit and
+ability did indeed return upon its creator in the form of an object
+lesson that filled him with a disgust for what was really a fine
+ideal, only too temptingly displayed. So many of his readers, and
+particularly his younger readers, formed the wish to become "Samurai"
+without more ado, a high office for which none of them, perhaps, had
+the ability or the determination to fill. For Utopias take even longer
+to build than Rome or London. But the plan is there--vague and
+tentative as the original scheme of a Gothic cathedral, a plan to be
+continually modified and changed in its most important features; and
+the building has begun....
+
+The last books that can strictly fall into the present category are
+_The Future of America_ (1906) and _New Worlds for Old_ (1908). The
+former is rather a record of impressions than the attempt at prophecy
+which the title and the first chapter indicate; and the final
+conclusion is too hesitating even to convince us that America has a
+future. "I came to America questioning the certitudes of progress," Mr
+Wells says in his Envoy. "For a time I forgot my questionings, I
+sincerely believed, 'These people can do anything,' and, now I have it
+all in perspective, I have to confess that doubt has taken me again."
+And without question he has changed his opinion with regard to many of
+the observations he made nine years ago. I sincerely hope he has.
+
+_New Worlds for Old_ is quite definitely a book of suggestions with
+regard to certain aspects of socialism. It is the most practical of
+all the sociological books, and makes so strong an appeal to the
+buried common-sense of even prejudiced readers, that a devoted
+Primrose Leaguer to whom I lent my copy was quite seriously disturbed
+in mind for nearly a week after he had read it. Fortunately for his
+own peace, he found an answer that permitted him comfortably to avoid
+the perpetual burden of an active responsibility. He thought that
+"Socialism would be all right in a perfect world," or words to that
+effect; and it was quite evident to him that the effort to make some
+small contribution towards raising the standard of human idealism was
+no part of his duty. In any case he greatly preferred the solid
+assurance of the Primrose League. And, speaking generally, as I have
+tried to do throughout, I find that _New Worlds for Old_ presents a
+clearer indication to the possible path for the idealist than any of
+the other sociological essays. _Mankind in the Making_ dealt very
+largely with education directed to a particular end, but in the book I
+am now considering may be found certain outlets for the expression of
+the less consistently strenuous. Education, whether of individual
+children in the home or regarded as a function of the State, offers
+continual perplexities that only the most resolute can confront day by
+day with renewed zeal; the problems of collective ownership are less
+confused by psychology, and the broad principles may be adopted and
+the energy of the young believer directed towards the accomplishment
+of minor detail. He may, for example, find good reason for the
+nationalising of the milk supply without committing himself to any
+broader theory of expropriation.
+
+Finally I come to the collection of various papers issued in 1914
+under the title _An Englishman Looks at the World_--a book that I may
+pass with the comment that it exhibits Mr Wells in his more captious
+moods, deliberately more captious in some instances, no doubt,
+inasmuch as the various papers were written for serial
+publication--and that _Confession of Faith and Rule of Life_,
+published in 1907 as _First and Last Things_. The opening is
+unnecessarily complicated by the exposition of a metaphysic that is
+quite uncharacteristic and has little to do with the personal
+exposition that follows; and, indeed, I feel with regard to the whole
+work that it attempts to define the indefinable. I deprecate the note
+of finality implied in the title. "It is as it stands now," I read in
+the Introduction, "the frank confession of what one man of the early
+Twentieth Century has found in life and himself," but that man has
+found much since then, and will continue to find much as he grows
+continually richer in experience. So that while no student of Wells'
+writings can afford to overlook _First and Last Things_, I would warn
+him against the danger of concluding that in that book he will find at
+last the ultimate expression of character and belief, set out in the
+form of a categorical creed. Again I find a spirit and overlook the
+letter. I choose to take as representative such a passage as the
+following, with all its splendid vagueness and lack of dogma, rather
+than a definite expression of belief that Mr Wells does not believe in
+a personal immortality. This passage runs: "It seems to me that the
+whole living creation may be regarded as walking in its sleep, as
+walking in the sleep of individualised illusion, and that now out of
+it all rises man, beginning to perceive his larger self, his universal
+brotherhood, and a collective synthetic purpose to increase Power and
+realise Beauty...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now that I have attempted my interpretation, I look back and
+confess that it is a very personal reading of my subject. I may have
+sought too eagerly for all those passages in which I found a note that
+roused in me the most thrilling response. I may have omitted to
+display vital issues that more truly characterise H.G. Wells than the
+appealing urgencies, idealisms, and fluencies that I have found most
+sympathetic and most admirable. But if I appear to have done him an
+injustice in some particulars, it is rather because I have been
+absorbed by the issue I sought to reveal, than because I deliberately
+weighed and rejected others. This short essay can be no more than an
+introduction to the works it describes. It was never intended to be
+critical. I have had no intention of discussing technique, nor of
+weighing Mr Wells against his contemporaries in any literary scale.
+But I have attempted to interpret the spirit and the message that I
+have found in his books; and I have made the essay in the hope that
+any reader who may consequently be stirred to read or to re-read Wells
+will do so with a mind prepared to look below the surface expression.
+
+I feel no shade of hesitation when I say that H.G. Wells is a great
+writer. His fecundity, his mastery of language, his comprehension of
+character are gifts and abilities that certain of his contemporaries
+have in equal, or in some particulars in larger measure. But he alone
+has used his perfected art for a definite end. He has not been content
+to record his observations of the world as he has seen it, to
+elaborate this or that analysis of human motive, or to relate the
+history of a few selected lives. He has done all this, but he has done
+infinitely more by pointing the possible road of our endeavour.
+Through all his work moves the urgency of one who would create
+something more than a mere work of art to amuse the multitude or
+afford satisfaction to the critic. His chief achievement is that he
+has set up the ideal of a finer civilisation, of a more generous life
+than that in which we live; an ideal that, if it is still too high for
+us of this generation, will be appreciated and followed by the people
+of the future.
+
+
+
+
+A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF H.G. WELLS' PRINCIPAL WRITINGS
+
+Select Conversations with an Uncle (_Lane_). 1895.
+
+The Time Machine--An Invention (_Heinemann_). 1895.
+
+*The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories (_Macmillan_). 1895.
+
+The Wonderful Visit (_Dent_). 1895.
+
+The Island of Dr Moreau (_Heinemann_). 1896.
+
+The Wheels of Chance (_Dent_). 1896.
+
+*The Plattner Story (_Macmillan_). 1897.
+
+The Invisible Man (_MacMillan_). 1897.
+
+The War of the Worlds (_Heinemann_). 1898.
+
+When the Sleeper Wakes (_Nelson_). 1899.
+
+Afterwards published (1911) in a revised and altered
+edition, as "The Sleeper Awakes."
+
+*Tales of Space and Time (_Macmillan_). 1899.
+
+Love and Mr Lewisham (_Macmillan_). 1900.
+
+Certain Personal Matters (_Unwin_). 1901.
+
+Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and
+Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought
+(_Chapman & Hall_). 1901.
+
+The First Men in the Moon (_Macmillan_). 1901.
+
+The Discovery of the Future (A Lecture given at the
+Royal Institute). 1902.
+
+The Sea Lady--A Tissue of Moonshine. 1902.
+
+Mankind in the Making (_Chapman & Hall_). 1903.
+
+*Twelve Stories and a Dream (_Macmillan_). 1903.
+
+The Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth
+(_Macmillan_). 1904.
+
+A Modern Utopia (_Nelson_). 1905.
+
+Kipps--The Story of a Simple Soul (_Macmillan_). 1905.
+
+In the Days of the Comet (_Macmillan_). 1906.
+
+The Future in America--A Search after Realities
+(_Chapman & Hall_). 1906.
+
+First and Last Things--A Confession of Faith and
+Rule of Life (_Constable_). 1907.
+
+The Misery of Boots (Fabian Tract). 1907.
+
+Socialism and Marriage (Fabian Tract). 1908.
+
+New Worlds for Old (_Constable_). 1908.
+
+The War in the Air (_Bell_). 1908.
+
+Tono-Bungay (_Macmillan_). 1909.
+
+Ann Veronica--A Modern Love Story (_Unwin_). 1909.
+
+The History of Mr Polly (_Nelson_). 1910.
+
+The New Machiavelli (_Lane_) 1910.
+
+The Country of the Blind and Other Stories
+(_Nelson_). 1911.
+
+Floor Games (A book about play for children)
+(_Palmer_). 1911.
+
+Socialism and the Great State (A contribution by
+H.G. Wells. The book is written by fifteen
+authors) (_Harper_). 1911.
+
+Marriage (_Macmillan_). 1912.
+
+The Passionate Friends--A Novel (_Macmillan_).
+1913.
+
+Little Wars (A book about play for children)
+(_Palmer_). 1913.
+
+An Englishman Looks at the World (_Cassell_).
+1914.
+
+The World Set Free--A Story of Mankind
+(_Macmillan_). 1914.
+
+The volumes marked * are collections of short
+stories, the best of which were republished in "The
+Country of the Blind," 1911.
+
+NOTE.--Some of these volumes have been published
+under different titles in the U.S.A. (See American
+Bibliography.)
+
+
+
+
+AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+Island of Dr Moreau (_Duffield_). 1896.
+
+Invisible Man (_Harper_). 1898.
+
+Thirty Strange Stories (_Harper_). 1898.
+
+When the Sleeper Wakes [English title, "The Sleeper Awakes."] (_Harper_). 1899.
+
+Anticipations (_Harper_). 1902.
+
+Discovery of the Future (_Smithsonian Institute
+Washington_). 1903.
+
+Discovery of the Future (_Huebsch_). 1913.
+
+Food of the Gods and How it Came to Earth
+(_Scribners_). 1904.
+
+Love and Mr Lewisham (_Stokes_). 1904.
+
+Mankind in the Making (_Scribners_). 1904.
+
+Modern Utopia (_Scribners_). 1905.
+
+Twelve Stories and a Dream (_Scribners_). 1905.
+
+Kipps (_Scribners_). 1905.
+
+Future in America (_Harper_). 1906.
+
+Time Machine--An Invention (_Holt & Company_).
+1906.
+
+In the Days of the Comet (_Century Company_).
+1906.
+
+First and Last Things (_Putnams_). 1908.
+
+New Worlds for Old (_Macmillan Company_).
+1908-13.
+
+Socialism and the Family (_Ball Publishing Company,
+Boston, Massachusetts_). 1908.
+
+This Misery of Boots (_Ball Publishing Company,
+Boston, Massachusetts_). 1908.
+
+War in the Air (_Macmillan Company_). 1908.
+
+War in the Air (_Grosset & Dunlap_). 1910.
+
+Ann Veronica (_Harper_). 1909.
+
+Select Conversations with an Uncle (_Saalfield
+Publishing Company, Akron, Ohio_). 1909.
+
+Tono-Bungay (_Duffield_). 1909.
+
+War of the Worlds (_Harper_). 1909.
+
+History of Mr Polly (_Duffield_). 1910.
+
+History of Mr Polly (_Grosset & Dunlap_). 1912.
+
+New Machiavelli (_Duffield_). 1910.
+
+Door in the Wall and Other Stories (_Mitchell
+Kennerley_). 1911.
+
+Floor Games (_Small, Maynard & Company, Boston,
+Massachusetts_). 1912.
+
+Socialism and the Great State (_Harper_).
+1912. (See page 119.)
+
+Marriage (_Duffield_). 1912.
+
+Little Wars (_Small, Maynard & Company, Boston,
+Massachusetts_). 1913.
+
+Passionate Friends (_Harper_). 1913.
+
+Wheels of Chance--A Bicycling Idyll (_Macmillan
+Company_). 1913. Illustrated by F.A. Symington. [English title, "The Wheels of Chance: A Holiday
+Adventure."]
+
+The Wonderful Visit (_E.P. Dutton & Company_). 1914.
+
+Social Forces in England and America (_Harper_). 1914.
+
+The World Set Free (_E.P. Dutton & Company_). 1914.
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+_Ann Veronica_, 65, 76
+_Anticipations_, 99
+
+Bebel, 100
+Bellamy, Edward, 105
+Bromley, 13
+
+Capital and Labour, 35
+Characterisation, 60
+Common-sense, 98
+Comte, 97
+_Country of the Blind, The_, 29, 55
+
+_Dynasts, The_, 40
+
+Education, 111
+_Englishman Looks at the World, An_, 112
+
+Fabre, Henri, 63
+Fecundity, 115
+Feminism, 72
+_First and Last Things_, 112
+_First Men in the Moon, The_, 46
+Fixed Opinions, 102
+_Food of the Gods, The_, 51, 54
+_Future of America, The_, 109
+
+Henley House, 15
+_History of Mr Polly, The_, 65, 67
+Huxley, 19
+Hyndman, 100
+
+Idealism, 69
+Insurgent Bigness, 52
+_In the Days of the Comet_, 36, 46
+_Invisible Man, The_, 25, 28
+_Island of Dr Moreau, The_, 25
+Isolation, 86
+
+_Kipps_, 60-65
+
+_Love and Mr Lewisham_, 60-64
+
+_Man of the Year Million, The_, 20, 30
+_Mankind in the Making_, 99
+_Marriage_, 73, 82-85
+Marx, 100
+Metaphysics, 112
+Midhurst Grammar School, 14
+_Modern Utopia, A_, 99, 104
+
+_New Machiavelli, The_, 65, 77-79, 82, 86
+New Republic, The, 99, 103, 104
+_New Worlds for Old_, 109
+
+_Passionate Friends, The_, 73, 89, 95
+
+Rule of Thumb, 77, 78, 88
+
+Samurai, 108
+_Sea Lady, The_, 49, 50
+Shaw, 100
+Socialism, 99, 110
+South Kensington School, 14
+Spencer, Herbert, 97
+Spirit of Freedom, 96, 103
+
+_Time Machine, The_, 20, 23
+_Tono-Bungay_, 59, 73
+
+Up Park, 14
+Utopias, 106-108
+
+Verne, Jules, 17
+
+_War in the Air, The_, 40, 42, 44, 56
+_War of the Worlds, The_, 25, 29
+Wells, Mr and Mrs Joseph, 12
+_Wheels of Chance, The_, 60
+_When the Sleeper Wakes (The Sleeper Awakes)_, 33, 36
+_Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, The_, 91, etc.
+Women Employees, 92, 94
+_Wonderful Visit, The_, 23, 25
+_World Set Free, The_, 43, 46
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of H. G. Wells, by J. D. Beresford
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