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Title: H. G. Wells

Author: J. D. Beresford

Release date: March 13, 2005 [eBook #15351]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK H. G. WELLS
***

H.G. WELLS

By

J.D. BERESFORD

H.G. WELLS
By

J.D. BERESFORD

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

First Published in 1915

CONTENTS
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 dénouement 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
minutiæ 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
Beauprés"—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, à 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

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