CHAPTER II

H. G. WELLS

Scientific Futurist

We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity

has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making

incident--but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak.

At no point can we say, "Here it commences, now; last minute

was night and this is morning." But insensibly we are in the

day. If we care to look, we can foresee growing knowledge,

growing order, and presently a deliberate improvement of

the blood and character of the race. And what we can see

and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what

surpasses the imagination.

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the

beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been

is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe

that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but

the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, there is

no need for us to see, what this world will be like when

the day has fully come. We are creatures of the twilight.

But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will

spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to

know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach

forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats

our eyes. All this world is heavy with the promise of

greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending

succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent

in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon

this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh

and reach out their hands amid the stars.--"The Discovery of

the Future" (1902).

Is Wells also among the prophets? Surely, and none with better right,

even though we use the word "prophet" in its narrowest and most

ordinary sense as one who foretells the future. He has foretold many

futures for us, some utterly abhorrent, others more or less attractive.

If we shudder at the thought of humanity on a freezing world fighting

a losing battle with gigantic crustaceans as in "The Time Machine",

or being suffocated on a blazing world as in "The Star", or being

crushed under the tyranny of an omnipotent trust as in "When the

Sleeper Wakes"--if none of these please us, then we have the option

of a businesslike and efficient organization of society under the

domination of the engineer as in "Anticipations", or a socialistic

state under the beneficent sway of the Samurai as in "A Modern Utopia,"

or an instantaneous amelioration of human nature as "In the Days of the

Comet." In thus presenting various solutions to the world problem Wells

is not inconsistent. Every complicated equation has several roots,

some of them imaginary. In solving a physical problem the scientist

begins by disentangling the forces involved and then, taking them one

at a time, calculates what would be the effect if the other forces did

not act. So Wells is applying the scientific method to sociology when

he attempts to isolate social forces and deal with them singly. If

nothing intervenes to divert it, says the hydraulic engineer, the water

of this mountain stream will develop such a momentum on reaching the

valley. If no limitations are placed upon the consolidation of capital,

says Mr. Wells, we may have a handful of directors ruling the world, as

depicted in "When the Sleeper Wakes."

In its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation

and justification. By this alone it tests its conclusions and

demonstrates its usefulness. In fact, the sole object of science

is prophecy, as Ostwald and Poincaré make plain. The mind of the

scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except

as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project

into the future. It is, therefore, not a chance direction of his

fancy that so many of Wells's books, both romances and studies, deal

with the future. It is the natural result of his scientific training,

which not only led him to a rich unworked field of fictional

motives, but made him consider the problems of life from a novel and

very illuminative point of view. He gave definite expression to this

philosophy in a remarkable address on "The Discovery of the Future",

delivered at the Royal Institution of London, January 24, 1902. Here

he shows that there is a growing tendency in modern times to shift the

center of gravity from the past to the future and to determine the

moral value of an act by its consequences rather than by its relation

to some precedent. The justification of a war, for instance, may either

be by reference to the past or to the future; that is, it may be based

either upon some supposititious claim and violated treaty, or upon the

assumed advantage to one or both parties. This idea, that in the moral

evaluation of an act its results should be taken into consideration,

has been popularly ascribed to the Jesuits, but since they have

repeatedly and indignantly denied that it ever formed part of their

teaching, it is questionable whether they could claim it now when it

is becoming fashionable. At any rate, it is interesting to note that

Wells gave very clear expression to this pragmatic principle five years

before the publication of "Pragmatism" by James.

I hope that Mr. Wells will work out in detail his theory of prevision

as a motive for morality. We cannot have too many such motives, and it

is quite possible that this factor has not been fully recognized in

our ethical systems, though I have no doubt that, as is usually the

case with discoveries, especially in ethics, the theory is not quite so

novel as it seems to him. In the meantime, I would call his attention

to two weak points in argument, as he has sketched it in this lecture.

He gives as an example of the two ways of looking at a problem the old

question of whether a bad promise is better broken or kept. The "legal

mind" would regard the promise as inviolable; the "creative mind" would

say that in view of future consequences it should be disregarded. But

I would suggest that, if morality is, as he defines it, "an overriding

of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to something to

be attained in the future", the one who viewed the act most clearly

in the light of the future would keep the promise even at the cost of

some suffering to himself and others rather than bring the lack of

confidence which results from a violated oath.

I would also point out that the followers of dogma are not to be

classed so positively with those who look only on the past.

Certainly those whose morality is based on the hope of heaven and the

fear of hell--and this is too numerous a class to be ignored--are as

truly guided by their ideas of the future as are those who are working

for the prosperity of the "Beyond-Man" some thousand years hence.

Jonathan Edwards's first resolution was typical. It reads:

I. Resolved, That _I will do whatsoever_ I think to be most

to God's glory and my own good, profit and pleasure, on THE

WHOLE; without any consideration of the time, whether now,

or never so many myriads of ages hence; to do whatever I

think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of

mankind in general--whatever _difficulties_ I meet with, how

many and how great soever.

The highest morality is attained, in my opinion, by the class which Mr.

Wells despises--namely, those who disregard neither causes nor effects,

but consider every act in the light of both the past and the future.

For this reason we are grateful to Mr. Wells for the light he is giving

us on the future by his efforts in scientific prophecy.

Wells defines two divergent types of mind by the relative importance

they attach to things past or things to come. The former type he calls

the legal or submissive mind, "because the business, the practice

and the training of a lawyer dispose him toward it; he of all men

must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established,

the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing

that is only seeking to establish itself." In opposition to this is

"the legislative, creative, organizing, masterful type", which is

perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things; it

is constructive and "interprets the present and gives value to this or

that entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen." The use of

the term "legislative" for this latter type is confusing, at least to

an American, because unfortunately most of our legislators are lawyers

and have minds of the legal or conventional type. "Scientific" would be

a better term than "legislative", because most of our real revolutions

in thought and industry originate in the laboratory.

In his "Modern Utopia" Wells introduces a more complete classification

of mankind into (1) the Poietic, that is, the creative and original

genius, often erratic or abnormal; (2) the Kinetic, that is, the

efficient, energetic, "business man" type; (3) the Dull, "the people

who never seem to learn thoroughly or hear distinctly or think

clearly", and (4) the Base, those deficient in moral sense.

The first two categories of Wells, the Poietic and Kinetic,

correspond roughly to Ostwald's Romanticist and Classicist types of

scientific men.[1] I have laid stress upon Wells's point of view and

classification of temperaments because it seems to me that it gives the

clue to his literary work. This is voluminous and remarkably varied,

yet through all its forms can be traced certain simple leading motives.

Indeed I am unable to resist the temptation to formulate his favorite

theme as: _The reaction of society against a disturbing force._

This certainly is the basic idea of much of his work and most of the

best of it. He hit upon it early and he has repeated it in endless

variations since. The disturbing force may be an individual of the

creative or poietic type, an overpowering passion, a new idea, a social

organization or a material change in the conditions of life. Whatever

it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the

foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual,

or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible.

Usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder

or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is advantageous,

even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and

the retardation of progress. Certainly no one is good enough or wise

enough to be trusted with irresponsible power.

This is the lesson of "The Invisible Man." We all have been struck,

probably, by a thought of the advantages which personal invisibility

would confer. It is one of the most valued of fairy gifts. But perhaps

only Wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how

demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how

powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. Assuming

that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the

refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in

water, in what situation would he be? He would be naked, of course,

and he could not carry anything in his hands or eat in public. If it

were winter he would leave tracks and would catch cold and sneeze. So

the invisible man who starts to rob and murder at his own sweet will

is soon run down by boys, dogs, and villagers as ignominiously as any

common thief.

A more artistic expression to the same theme is given in "The Country

of the Blind." A young man tumbled into an isolated valley of the

Andes where lived a community which had through some hereditary

disease lost many generations ago the power of sight. The stranger

first thought of the proverb, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed

man is king", but when he tried to demonstrate his superiority he found

it impossible. His talk about "seeing" the natives held to be the

ravings of a madman and his clumsiness in their dark houses as proof

of defective senses. He was as much at a disadvantage in a community

where everything is adapted to the sightless as a blind man is in ours.

He falls in love with a girl, but before he is allowed to marry her he

must be cured of his hallucinations; a simple surgical operation, the

removal of the two irritable bodies protuberant from his brain, will

restore him to normality, say the blind surgeons, and make a sane and

useful citizen of him. The entreaties of his lady love are added to the

coercion of public opinion to induce him to consent. The exceptional

man is beaten, he must either conform to the community or leave it.

No matter how the story ends. The true novelist and dramatist, like

the true mathematician, finds his satisfaction in correctly stating a

problem, not in working it out.

The theme of these parables, the comparative powerlessness of the

individual, however exceptionally endowed, against the coercive force

of environment, Wells has developed at length in his novels; in "The

New Machiavelli", for instance, where a statesman at the height of his

public usefulness is overthrown and banished because he had succumbed

to selfish passion and violated the moral code. Parnell is popularly

supposed to be the model for this character rather more than the

original Machiavelli, but it is, unfortunately, a type not rare either

in history or fiction. Indeed this may be called the common plot of

tragedy from the time when it began to be written, the vulnerable

heel of Achilles, the little defect of character or ability that

precipitates the catastrophe.

In Wells's hands this motive takes most fantastic forms. There was,

for example, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"; "his name was George

McWhirter Fotheringay--not the sort of name by any means to lead to

any expectation of miracles--and he was clerk at Gomshott's"; "he

was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair,

a mustache with ends he twisted up, and freckles." This unpromising

looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly

possessed of the power to make anything happen that he wills, but

he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage.

It brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his

renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. Mr. Fotheringay

lived in Church Row, and since Mr. Wells lives in the same street he

perhaps knew him personally.

In "The War of Worlds" the earth is invaded by Martians, who are not

in the least like those of Du Maurier or Professor Flournoy, but

octopus-like creatures as far above mankind in intellect and command

of machinery as we are above the animals, supermen surpassing the

imagination of Nietzsche. They stride over the earth in machines of

impregnable armor and devastate town and country with searchlights

projecting rays more destructive than those of radium and much like

Bulwer-Lytton's "vril." They feed on human blood and, if humanity is

not to perish or become as sheep to these invaders, men and women must

take to sewers and such like hiding places and wage incessant warfare

against overwhelming odds.

In a passage that is to me the most gripping of anything Wells has

written, a few unconquerable spirits plan the life that mankind must

lead under these terrible conditions, but they are relieved from

the necessity of putting it into execution by the interposition of

an unexpected ally in the form of the most minute of creatures, the

microbe. The men from Mars, not being immune to terrestrial diseases,

are annihilated by one of them.

The formula remains the same although conditions are reversed in "The

First Men in the Moon", for men, being naturally larger than the lunar

people, might be supposed to dominate them, but, on the contrary, the

ant-like inhabitants of the moon conquer the earthly invaders.

In "The Wonderful Visit" a curate goes out hunting for rare birds and

shoots an angel on the wing. But the heavenly visitant does not play

the rôle of the angel in Jerome's "The Passing of the Third Floor Back"

and transform the character of all he meets. Wells's angel does not fit

into the parish life, and everybody is relieved when he disappears. The

same idea, the reaction of conventional society toward the unusual,

is illustrated by "The Sea-Lady", where, instead of an angel from the

sky, we have a mermaid from the ocean brought into the circle of a

summer resort. Mr. Wells has said that by the sea-lady he meant to

symbolize "love as a disturbing passion", the same theme as "The New

Machiavelli." It may be taken to mean that, of course, or half a

dozen other things as well. We are at liberty to disregard Mr. Wells's

interpretation if we like. It is not an author's business to explain

what his works mean. In fact it seems a bit officious and impertinent

for him to attempt it. How little would there be left of the great

literature of the world if it were reduced to what the author literally

and consciously had in mind when he wrote. The value of any work of art

depends upon what may be got out of it, not what was put into it.

"The Food of the Gods" is a case in point. These children who are

fed on "boom-food" (presumably an extract from the pituitary body of

the brain) and grow to gianthood may be taken to represent any new

transforming force. If the story was conceived in Wells's earlier

days he may have meant by it the power of science. If in the days of

"Anticipations" he more likely had in mind efficiency or "scientific

management." If when he was a member of the Fabian Society it doubtless

stood for Socialism. Such questions may well be left to the future

biographer who will take an interest in tracing out the genesis of

his thought. Really it makes no difference to the reader, for the

essential thing is to note that the reaction of society toward any

unprecedented factor is the same. That in various parts of the country

a new and gigantic race was growing up aroused at first a certain

sensational interest, but this soon died down. People became accustomed

to seeing the giant boys and girls and even set them at work. Later as

it was realized that the giants could not be adapted to the existing

social structure, but meant its overthrow, the government attempted

to segregate and limit them, and at length, finding no compromise

possible, determined to exterminate them. This brings about a duel to

the death between the little race and the big, and there could be no

doubt as to the issue.

Chesterton says[2]:

"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack the

Giant-Killer" told from the point of view of the giant. This

has not, I think, been done before in literature; but I have

little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed

in fact. I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack killed

did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely enough that

he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished

to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force.

If (as not infrequently was the case) he happened to have

two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which

declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the

subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant

to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct

himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the

enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one

head, and one man one conscience, of the single head and the

single heart and the single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed

by the question of whether the giant was a particularly

gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whether he was a

good giant--that is, a giant who was any good to us. What

were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics

and the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children--or

fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense? To use a

fine phrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right

place? Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in

order to find out.

Nothing could better illustrate the difference in standpoint between

Chesterton and Wells than this. The sympathies of Wells are undoubtedly

with the giants, with the new forces that aim to transform the world,

though he is not always confident of their ultimate triumph. Being a

man of scientific training, he is a determinist but not a fatalist.

All his prophecies are conditional. If the gulf between industrial

and parasitic classes keeps on widening there will eventually be two

races, and the former will be master; this is the lesson of "The Time

Machine." If the engineer and business manager get control we shall

have the well ordered prosperity of "Anticipations." If Socialism

prevails we shall have the Great State. His stories of the future are

about equally divided between optimistic and pessimistic prophecy,

between allurements and warnings.

"In the Days of the Comet"[3] he uses again the mechanism of the most

artistic of his earlier short stories, "The Star", which is a little

gem in its way without a superfluous word or a false tone. But those

were the days when Mr. Wells was writing for pleasure; now he writes

for a purpose, so the two stories resemble each other only in their

common theme, the swishing across the earth of a comet's tail. In

the former tale the event was viewed by a man in Mars who reported

to his fellow scientists that the earth was little damaged, for the

destruction of all life on it was too insignificant an event to be

noticed at that distance. In the present book the earth was decidedly

benefited, and the history is told by a man more foreign to us than

the Martian, for he is a citizen of the new civilization that followed

the "Great Change." A wonderful transformation had been effected in

our atmosphere by its mingling with the cometary gases. The inert

nitrogen of the air had been changed to some life-giving, clarifying,

and stimulating gas; it would be unfair to the author to infer that

this was nitrous oxid, more familiarly known as "laughing gas." Under

its influence the inhabitants of the earth perceive the evils of our

present régime and realize that they are mostly avoidable if everybody

had good intentions and good sense. As an argument for Socialism it

is a very weak one, for it gives away the case by conceding, at the

outset, the main objection of the conservative, that you will have

to change human nature before Socialism becomes possible. Of course,

if all men were well-meaning and wise Socialism would be practical.

It would also be unnecessary, because any social machinery, or,

indeed, none at all, would work well enough under these conditions.

The difficulty is to devise any changes that will make it work better

with people as they are. That better people than we would be able

to make for themselves better ways of living, nobody denies. That

social, institutions influence the character of individuals, and that

individuals influence the character of institutions, are correlative

truths, but it is difficult for most people to keep them both in

mind. Mr. Wells's collectivist conversion by a "green gas" is much

the same thing as individualist conversion by religious influence,

but we know of instances of the latter, while the former is purely

hypothetical.

But, of course, the object of the book is not to show how Socialism can

come about, but to assist in making it come about by acting on readers

as a dose of the "green gas" and opening our eyes to the vulgarity,

silliness, squalor, and wastefulness of our daily life. Mr. Wells is

an artist by nature and a scientist by training, and ugliness and

stupidity worry him more than wickedness and injustice. In fact, he

would probably class all the evils of civilization under stupidity.

But long ago it was said that against stupidity even the gods fight in

vain, and it remains to be seen whether Socialists will succeed better.

The most attractive pages of the book to me are those that describe

"the festival of the rubbish burnings", though Wells does not improve

upon Washington Irving's treatment of the same theme. There are several

things owned by our neighbors, even by relatives, which we should like

to cast upon the flames. But we are afraid to light the bonfire lest

the neighbors should burn up some of our treasures. That war is also

an example of human stupidity, we agree, but just how to prevent

it altogether until the rest of the world comes to our opinion, we do

not understand. It takes two to stop a quarrel. The fleets of England

and Germany were engaged in bombarding each other when the renovating

comet struck the earth, but as soon as the eyes of the combatants and

the "statesmen" who had instigated it were opened, and their anger

quenched, it seemed incredible to them that they should have sought

to kill each other for such trivial and remote causes. Jules Verne

has a similar scene in "Dr. Ox's Experiment", but in that case the

gas acts in the opposite way to excite the sluggish inhabitants of a

peaceful Flemish village to make war against the neighboring village,

and as soon as they are out of the contaminated atmosphere they look in

bewilderment at the deadly weapons in their hands. Eight years later

Wells's worst forebodings came to pass, but no "green gas" came to

clear the air of hate.

But the particular passion that Wells would sweep away by the breath

of his comet is one which, in the opinion of most people, is necessary

to the maintenance of morality, that is, jealousy. The young English

workingman who tells the story is infuriated against the young

aristocrat who had seduced his sweetheart and is pursuing them

with a revolver when the "Great Change" comes. Then he is content

to share her affections with his former rival, and they all lived

together happily ever after. In his works on Socialism Wells gives

his reasons for thinking that, whether we wish it or not, the family

is disintegrating, and that only under Socialism, which will insure a

support sufficient for independence to both men and women, can better

relations be established.

We might have known that as soon as science discovered the new world

inside the atom the story-writer would follow close behind. We might

also have known that H. G. Wells would be the first to exploit this new

territory annexed to human knowledge, for he has always kept an eye on

scientific progress even while seemingly engrossed in British politics

and marriage problems. So he wrote a romance of the atom, "The World

Set Free", describing the Great War months before it happened.

Our sleepy earth has been caught napping by every great change that

has thus far reached humanity, and probably Mr. Wells is quite right

in supposing that a sudden release of the vast stores of energy hidden

in the atom would find civilization as unprepared for the social,

economic, political, and intellectual results of the new energies in

industry as it was for the effects of the great industrial revolution

which followed the introduction of steam power not much more than a

century ago.

But Mr. Wells has the alertest literary imagination of any modern

writer; the significance of the new physics has not escaped him as it

has the common run of novelists intently searching for good plots and

neglecting entirely the rich ore awaiting any writer who happened to

have an elementary knowledge of modern science. Many short stories and

one or two novels have introduced more or less accurate accounts of

radium as a side-show to a love story or an incident in a detective

tale. But it required the boldness of Mr. Wells to throw overboard

entirely the conventional novel plot and make a hero of the cosmic

energies. "The World Set Free" resembles "The War in the Air" in its

vivid account of world-wide war, nations armed with novel weapons and

forces, appalling power for destruction and attack in the hands of

every nation, together with complete incapacity for defense by any

nation, the resulting collapse of credit, panic, starvation, anarchy

and a general social _débâcle_. But while the "war in the air" meant

the end of civilization, the war with "atomic bombs" in the present

book results in a general treaty of peace, the foundation of a world

state under a provisional government, and a successful reorganization

of society in which the forces which had been used by nations and

empires to conquer each other are directed to the task of subduing

nature to human aims.

Like the reconstructed world of "In the Days of the Comet" the future

state is very faintly depicted, hinted at rather than described, in

"The World Set Free." It differs from the numerous other Utopias of

Mr. Wells in that, whereas the world states of "Anticipations", "A

Modern Utopia", "In the Days of the Comet", etc., could be brought

about by nothing more than taking the author's advice on politics,

law, economics, and social customs, "The World Set Free" depends

upon scientific discovery. A new hypothesis, in short, has given the

inhabitants of this Utopia an advantage over all previous Utopias. They

have energy at their command almost as freely accessible as water or

air, and so the labor question is annihilated, the whole world becomes

a leisure class, and everybody is free to devote his life to gardening,

artistic decoration, and scientific research. Country life becomes a

constant delight. The agriculturist shrinks to less than one per cent

of the population. The lawyer follows the warrior into extinction.

"Contentious professions cease to be an honorable employment for men."

The Parliament of the World, which came into existence after the atomic

explosions of 1950, was simple and sensible; fifty new representatives

elected every five years; proportional representation; every man and

woman with an equal vote; election for life subject to recall; each

voter putting on his ballot the names of those he wishes elected and

those he wishes recalled; a representative recallable by as many votes

as the quota that elected him. But political machinery does not count

for much in this most modern of Utopias. A scrap of the conversation

between the President of the United States and King Egbert, "the young

king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe", will illustrate the

point of view:

"Science," the King cried presently, "is the new king of the

world."

"Our view," said the President, "is that sovereignty resides

with the people."

"No," said the King, "the sovereign is a being more subtle

than that, and less arithmetical; neither my family nor your

emancipated people. It is something that floats about us

and above us and through us. It is that common impersonal

will and sense of necessity of which science is the best

understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the

race. It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed

us all to its demands."

The agency which effects this transformation is the discovery of how

to release the internal energy of the atom, which we now know exists,

although we do not know how to get at it. Since wealth is essentially

nothing but energy this means that we have within reach enough to

make multi-millionaires of all of us; a tantalizing thought. The new

disintegrating element, according to Mr. Wells, is carolinum, an

element that Professor Baskerville also discovered on paper a few years

ago. This exhaustless supply of energy being utilized in machinery sets

free the laborer and swells the army of the unemployed; and since,

incidentally, one of the by-products of its decomposition is gold, the

financial systems of the world go to smash. But naturally carolinum

finds speedy employment in war. A bomb of it buried in the soil becomes

a perpetual volcano, half of it exploding every seventeen days. A few

bombs of this radioactive element dropped from aeroplanes demolish

Paris and Berlin and throw the world into a chaos of confusion,

which Wells's characteristic style, with its flashlight visions, its

tumultuous phrases, and its shifting points of view, its alternations

of generalization and detail, is particularly adapted to depict.

The value of this romance, aside from its interest, lies in the

emphatic way in which it teaches the lesson that civilization is

primarily a matter of the utilization of natural energy and is

measurable in horse power. Unfortunately we have to depend upon the

sunshine, either that of the present or of the carboniferous era; we

have no key to the treasure-house of the atom. Radium gives out its

energy without haste or rest, just as fast at the temperature of liquid

air as at the temperature of liquid iron, always keeping itself a

little hotter than its surroundings, however hot these may be. If only

we could get at this source of exhaustless energy--but let Wells say

what that would mean:

Not only should we have a source of power so potent that a

man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for

a year, fight a fleet of battleships or drive one of our

giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have

a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process

of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay

is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements.

Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an

available reservoir of concentrated force.

It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only

compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery

that lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day toward

radio-activity exactly as our ancestor stood toward fire

before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a

strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the

crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through

the forest. So it is that we know radio-activity to-day.

This--this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At

the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in

the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just

when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs

cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of

energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely

new civilization. The energy we need for our very existence,

and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in

reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us.

We cannot pick that lock at present, but....

Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual

struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies

will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the

pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the

next.[4]

Wells is a futurist in the true sense of the word, appraising all

things by what shall come out of them. This led him to a realization of

the importance of eugenics long before the fad came in. In "Mankind

in the Making" he formulated his test of civilization in these words:

Any collective human enterprise, institution, party, or

state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it

conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births and

according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to

its influence toward a higher and ampler standard of life.

But when it comes to practical measures for securing these advantages,

Wells shows a characteristic timidity. He condemns certain obvious

dysgenic measures, such as the action of school boards in imposing

celibacy upon women teachers, but in several respects legislation

in America has already gone beyond what he ten years ago considered

possible. So, too, in his "Anticipations" he suggested as future

possibilities inventions and practices that were then familiar to us

in this country. It is hard for a man nowadays to be a prophet. If he

doesn't look sharp he will find himself an historian instead.

When H. G. Wells in 1902 essayed the rôle of prophet and in his volume

entitled "Anticipations" tried to forecast the future of the world

on scientific principles, he excited the same popular interest that

any guess at coming events arouses, but there were few who took

him seriously. Now, however, "Anticipations" makes very interesting

reading. Much of it has already come to pass, and we see that Wells's

chief mistake lay in putting his forecast too far ahead; for instance,

when he says that he is "inclined to believe.... that very probably

before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe

and sound."

The chapter on war in "Anticipations" shows astonishing power of

prescience in what he says of the use of the submarine and armored

automobile, the development of trench warfare, the substitution of the

machine gun for the rifle, and the abolition of the distinction between

military and civilian parts of a nation. His discussion of the new

forms of warfare and the inadequacy of the old methods of management

and training is full of warnings which it were well for his country to

have heeded. This is shown if we compare that feeling passage in which

he describes a future British army setting out to meet a scientifically

organized foe with an actual battle on the Artois field as seen from

the German side. The first column is quoted from "Anticipations",

published fifteen years ago. The second column is taken from

Kellermann's picture of the battle of Loos, September 22, 1915,

published in the _Continental Times_ of Berlin. Bernard Kellermann, one

of the most brilliant of the younger writers of Germany, is well known

in America through his novel, "The Tunnel", dealing with a submarine

passage to Europe.

THE PROPHECY, 1902

I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the gray old

general--the general who learned his art of war away in the

vanished nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly

general with his epaulettes and decorations, his uniform

that has still its historical value, his spurs and his

sword--riding along on his obsolete horse, by the side of

his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. And

the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys'

faces, and the boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he

has won battles in the old time. They will believe in him

to the end. They have been brought up in their schools to

believe in him and his class, their mothers have mingled

respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of

their faith, their first lesson on entering the army was

the salute. The "smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such

unqualified person, chose for them lie hotly on their young

brows, and over their shoulders slope their obsolete,

carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing

what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything

they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful,

marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death.

They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of

what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and

the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality

of the best club in the world have kept their souls and

minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered

with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp,

tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing

patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth,

badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in

some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an

absolute stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of

speech and thought, and at any rate to be shot with them

fairly and squarely, marches the sub­altern--the son of the

school-burking, share-holding class--a slightly taller sort

of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the

realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get

water, how to keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of

his practical equality with the men beside him, carefully

trained under a clerical head­master to use a crib, play

cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens,

believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."

So the gentlemanly old general--the polished drover to the

shambles--rides, and his doomed column march by, in this

vision that haunts my mind.

I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do

against modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless

and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads,

who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all

the European armies of to-day, whenever they come against a

sanely organized army. There is nowhere they can come in;

there is nothing they can do.

The scattered, invisible marks­men with their supporting

guns will shatter their masses, pick them off individually,

cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale

surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual

fighting. Yet the bitterest and crudest things will have to

happen, thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed

in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every

conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful disease

before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for

half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form

boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive

demand upon very carefully educated adults for the most

strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical

recognition.[5]

THE FULFILLMENT, 1915

They made the essay with absolutely new, absolutely

antiquated tactics--tactics which are no longer recognized

in this war. It was something really un­heard of! Our staff

officers stood and regarded it--their mouths open in

astonishment. It was observed, shortly before noon, that

the English were advancing toward our positions in dense

masses, eight lines deep in echelon--from Loos. A hail of

shells that churned up the ground was supposed to smooth

the way for the storming columns. At the same time, to the

east of Loos (there is a bit of rising ground there scarcely

noticeable as you drive over it in a wagon, called Hill 70),

we saw English artillery come riding up--quite open--in the

broad of day--under the naked heavens! These batteries

carried bridge materials with them for the crossing of

trenches and natural obstacles. The English general we

caught describes this action as one that was especially

"sporting." There can be no doubt about its dashing

quality. But there was more to come. In the distance, on

the level plain, one or two English cavalry regiments

were visible--Dragoons of the Guard. Eight lines of

infantry? Artillery driving across the open? Cavalry in the

background? It was really unbelievable! It was the plan of a

veritable pitched battle from a forgotten age, the masterly

idea of a senile brain, which had come limping along fifty

years behind the times! Generals in our day grow obsolete as

rapidly as inventions and sciences. The war has taught us

that the blood of nations, the incalculably precious blood,

is to be entrusted only to the freshest, the most elastic,

the most gifted of military spirits, the very cream of the

crop. Those old celebrities of theirs, staggering under

their orders, should have been consigned to relay stations

by the English. The English troops carried out their attack

with a splendid gesture, with admirable bravoure. They

were young and they bore no orders on their uniforms. They

carried out the commands of their celebrated and senile

authorities, carried them out with a blind courage--in this

day of mortars, telephones and machine-guns. As magnificent

as was their bearing, even so pitiful was the collapse of

their onslaught. Before the eightfold storming columns had

been able to make ten steps, they came under our combined

fire-rifles, machine-guns, cannon. The batteries were lying

in wait and they obeyed the telephone. The English knights

and baronets had not reckoned with this. Fresh reserves

came running up and were mown down in the cross-fire of our

machine-guns. Those riding batteries came to a miserable

end. They too came within the zone of the machine-guns,

and our heavy mortars, notified by telephone, got hold of

them so swiftly and so thoroughly, that they were not even

given time to unlimber. The regiments of cavalry that were

waiting in the background, ready to come dashing through,

got salvoes of the heaviest shells full in their faces, and

drew back without having drawn a blade from the scabbard.

That finished the pitched battle. And the attack broke to

pieces in front of our wire entanglements. A prodigious

number of their dead lay before our trenches. We had made

800 prisoners, among them a colonel, four majors, and

fifteen officers. At a conservative estimate, the losses

of the English in this single section of the division, may

be fixed in dead and wounded as at least 20,000. It was

clear that, apart from a small local success, it had been a

disastrous job for the Britishers. Never before has it been

so clearly proved that war is not a sport for a dozen or two

of privileged dilettantes.[6]

Wells made his first hit with "The Time Machine", written under high

pressure of the idea within a fortnight by keeping at his desk almost

continuously from nine in the morning to eleven at night. It is based

upon the theory that time is a fourth dimension of space,[7] and by

a suitable invention one may travel back and forth along that

line. Having once got his seat in his time-machine Wells has never

abandoned it. He uses it still in his novels, in "Tono-Bungay," "The

New Machiavelli", and "The Passionate Friends", telling the story

partly in retrospect, partly in prospect, flying back and forth in the

most mystifying manner, producing thereby a remarkable effect of the

perpetual contemporaneity of existence, though some readers are dizzied

by it.

The charm of a masked ball is that it enables people to do and say what

they please, in short to reveal themselves because their faces are

concealed. Anonymity has the same effect, as many a name from "Currer

Bell" to "Fiona McLeod" attests. So it is not surprising that the

book[8] which purports to have been written by one "George Boon" and

compiled by one "Reginald Bliss" shows Wellsian characteristics more

pronounced than any of the volumes of which H. G. Wells owns authorship.

For one thing Wells obviously likes to start things better than to

finish them. He is apt to run out of breath before he comes to the end

of a novel, and if he gets his second wind it is likely to be some

other kind of wind. In most of his books except the short stories the

reader feels that the author is saying to himself, "I wish I had this

thing off my hands so I could get at that new idea of mine."

Then, too, Wells is fond of putting a story inside of a story, like the

Arabian Nights, and it often happens that the "flash-backs", to borrow

a cinema phrase, are confusing. The framework of "The Modern Utopia" is

an instance of this. It is sometimes hard to tell in this where we are

or who is speaking.

Wells is inimitable in his ability to sketch a character in a few swift

strokes, but he does not care much for the character afterward. He

delights in taking such snapshots, but he hates to develop them. His

mind is quick to change. He is liable to be disconcerted by a sudden

vision of an opposing view. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he

will be seized with a doubt of what he is saying, and being an

honest man, he leaves it in air rather than finish it after he has lost

confidence. He may double on his track like a hunted fox within the

compass of a single volume.

Finally, Wells is fond of satirizing his contemporaries, including his

best friends and his former selves. He is given to mixing realistic

description with recondite symbolism, desultory argumentation with

extraneous personalities, and other incongruous combinations of style

and thought.

Now all these peculiarities, call them faults or merits as you like,

are to be found intensified in "Boon" _Etc._ First Mr. Wells introduces

Mr. Bliss, who then introduces Mr. Boon, a famous author deceased, and

tells how they together invented Mr. Hallery, who introduces a host

of living writers, big and little, known and unknown, at the World

Conference on the Mind of the Race. He has given me the honor of a

seat on a special committee of Section S, devoted to Poiometry, the

scientific measurement of literary greatness.

The volume is illustrated by the author--whoever he may be--but the

best caricatures are not the graphic but the verbal ones with their

amusing parodies of style. Perhaps the best of these is an imaginary

conversation between Henry James and George Moore, in which both

gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought.

Here's the sketch of "Dodd." We recognize him, although we do not know

who Dodd is:

Dodd is a leading member of the Rationalist Press

Association, a militant agnostic, and a dear compact

man, one of those Middle Victorians who go about with a

preoccupied, caulking air, as though, having been at great

cost and pains to banish God from the Universe, they were

resolved not to permit Him back on any terms whatever. He

has constituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a

materialistic age, saying suspiciously: "Here, now, what's

this rapping under the table here?" and examining every

proposition to see that the Creator wasn't being smuggled

back under some specious new generalization. Boon used to

declare that every night Dodd looked under his bed for the

Deity, and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for

fear of a revelation.

One advantage of anonymity is that Wells can contradict himself with

even more freedom than usual. For instance, he expresses great contempt

for Bergson and his "Pragmatism for Ladies." But not long ago, in

"Marriage", he was contemptuous of "Doctor Quiller [Schiller] of

Oxford," for "ignoring Bergson and fulminating a preposterous insular

Pragmatism."

Much of the volume was manifestly written in the calm days before

the war, but the fragment entitled "The Wild Asses of the Devil"

expresses in fantastic guise his--and the world's--confusion and

despair at the catastrophe which has overwhelmed the human race. "It is

like a dying man strangling a robber in his death grip. We shall beat

them, but we shall be dead beat in doing it," says Boon, and he rejects

all suggestions that it may be a good thing in the end:

No! War is just the killing of things and the smashing of

things. And when it is all over, then civilization will have

to begin all over again. They will have to begin lower down

and against a heavier load and the days of our jesting are

done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose and there is no

restraining them. What is the good of pretending that the

Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence kicking better

than we know? It is all evil. Evil.

There are many different Wellses. Probably nobody likes all of them.

He does not like all of himselves. In writing a preface or otherwise

referring to an earlier work he is, after the manner of Maeterlinck,

almost apologetic, and looks back upon the author with a curious wonder

as to how he came to hold such opinions and express them in such a

way. Those of us who have grown up with him, so to speak, and followed

his mind through all its metamorphoses in their natural order can

understand him better, I believe, than those of the younger generation

who begin with the current serial and read his works backward. Mr.

Wells is just about my age. We were in the laboratory together and

breathed the same atmosphere, although five thousand miles apart. When

he began to write I was ready to read and to admire the skill with

which he utilized for literary purposes the wealth of material to be

found in the laboratory. Jules Verne had worked the same rich vein,

clumsily but with great success. Poe had done marvels in the short

story with such scanty science as he had at his command. But Wells,

trained under Huxley in biology at the University of London, had all

this new knowledge to draw upon. He could handle technicalities with

a far defter touch than Verne and almost rivaled Poe in the evocation

of emotions of horror and mystery. Besides this he possessed what

both these authors lacked, a sense of humor, a keen appreciation of

the whimsicalities of human nature. So he was enabled to throw off in

the early nineties a swift succession of short stories astonishingly

varied in style and theme. As he became more experienced in the art of

writing, or rather of marketing manuscripts, he seems to have regretted

this youthful prodigality of bright ideas. Many of them he later

worked over on a more extensive scale as the metallurgist goes back

to a mine and with an improved process extracts more gold from the

tailings and dump than the miner got out of the ore originally.

"The Star" was the first of these I came across, clipping it for my

scrap book from _Harper's Weekly_, I believe. First loves in literature

make an indelible impression, so I will always hold that nothing Wells

has done since can equal it. Certainly it was not improved by expanding

it to "In the Days of the Comet." The germ of that creepy tale of

advanced vivisection, "The Island of Dr. Moreau", appeared first in the

_Saturday Review_, January, 1895, as a brief sketch, "Doctor Moreau

Explains." "The Dream of Armageddon", vivid and swift as a landscape

under a flash of lightning, served in large part for two later volumes,

"When the Sleeper Wakes" and "The New Machiavelli."

It was, as I have said, "The Star" that first attracted me to Wells.

It was "The Sea-Lady" who introduced me to him personally. It was

in the back room of a little Italian restaurant in New York, one of

those sixty-cent table d'hôtes where rich soup and huge haystacks of

spaghetti serve to conceal the meagerness of the other five courses.

Here foregathered for years a group of Socialists, near-Socialists, and

others of less definable types, alike in holding the belief that the

world could be moved and ought to be, but disagreeing agreeably as to

where the fulcrum could be placed and what power should move the lever.

We called ourselves the "X Club", partly because the outcome of such a

combination of diverse factors was highly problematical, partly perhaps

in emulation of the celebrated London X. One evening some ten years

ago, as I came late to the dinner, I noticed that the members were not

all talking at once, as usual, but concentrated their attention upon a

guest, a quiet, unassuming individual, rather short, with a sunbrowned

face, tired eyes, and a pessimistic mustache--a Londoner, I judged

from his accent. Then I was introduced to him as "The man who knows all

your works by heart, Mr. Wells." This disconcerting introduction was

their revenge for my too frequent quotation in debate. The reason, I

suppose, for the old saying, "Beware the man of one book", is because

he is such a bore.

Mr. Wells appeared to take the introduction literally and began to

examine me on the subject. "Did you ever read 'The Sea-Lady'?" I

happily was able to say I had, and was let off from any further

questions, for he said that he had never met but two persons before

who admitted having read the book. I am glad he did not ask me what it

meant, for while I had an opinion on the subject, it might not have

agreed with his.

Then we turned the tables on Mr. Wells and for the rest of the evening

asked him questions and criticized his views; all of which he took

very good-naturedly and was apparently not displeased thereby, since

in the book about his trip, "The Future in America", he expressed

disappointment at not finding in Washington any "such mentally vigorous

discussion centers as the New York X Club."

Five years later I had another glimpse of Mr. Wells, this time a jolly

evening at his home, where he kept his guests, a dozen young men and

women, entertained, first by playing on the pianola, which he bought

at the suggestion of Mr. Shaw; afterward by improvising a drama for

the occasion, the star rôle being taken by his wife, whom I had seen a

few days before marching in the great London suffrage procession. Mr.

Wells's home differs from most London houses in having a view and a

park. The back windows look over all the sea of houses, the shipping

in the Thames, and, smoke permitting, the Surrey hills beyond. On the

other side of the house five minutes' walk uphill brings one to

Hampstead Heath, the largest of London's public places, which serves

Mr. Wells for his long walks.

Mr. Wells perhaps got his love of outdoor life from his father, Joseph

Wells, who was a professional cricketer and the son of the head

gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penhurst Castle, in Kent. His mother was

the daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst. Herbert George Wells was born

in Bromley, Kent, September 21, 1866, and his childhood impressions of

his mother's kitchen and his father's garden and shop he has described

in "First and Last Things" and in "Tono-Bungay." In this novel, the

first, perhaps, to be devoted to that conspicuous feature of modern

life, the patent medicine, he has utilized his brief experience as

a chemist's apprentice, or, as we would say, a drug clerk. Next an

unsuccessful attempt was made to train him as a draper's assistant--a

dry goods clerk, in our language, though we have fortunately nothing

that exactly corresponds. The hardships and humiliations of this

experience seem to have cut deep into his soul, for he recurs to

it again and again, always with bitterness, as in "Mr. Polly",

"Kipps", and "The Wheels of Chance", for example. But to untangle

the autobiographical threads from the purely fictional in Wells's

novels would be to cheat some future candidate for a Ph. D. in English

literature of his thesis.

[Illustration: H. G. Wells]

The interesting point to observe is that temperament and training

have combined to give him on the one hand a hatred of this muddled,

blind, and inefficient state of society in which we live, and on the

other a distrust of the orderly, logical, and perfected civilization

usually suggested as a possible substitute. He detests chaos, but

is skeptical of cosmos. Set between these antipathetic poles, he

vibrates continually like an electrified pith ball. He has a horror

of waste, war, dirt, cruelty, cowardice, incompetency, vagueness of

mind, dissipation of energy, inconvenience of households, and all

friction, mental or physical. But yet his ineradicable realization of

the concrete will not allow him to escape from these disagreeables

by taking refuge in such artificial paradises as Fourier's phalanx

or Morris' idyllic anarchism. Wells is a Socialist, yet he finds

not merely the Marxians, but even the Fabians, too dogmatic and

strait-laced for him. His "Modern Utopia" is, I think, the first to

mar the perfection of its picture by admitting a rebel, a permanently

irreconcilable, antagonistic individuality, a spirit that continually

denies. Yet we know that if a utopia is to come on earth it must

have room for such.

Wells would never make a leader in any popular movement. He has the

zeal of the reformer, but he has his doubts, and, what's worse, he

admits them. In the midst of his most eloquent passages he stops,

shakes his head, runs in a row of dots, and adds a few words, hinting

at another point of view. He has what James defined as the scientific

temperament, an intense desire to prove himself right coupled with an

equally intense fear lest he may be wrong.

Your true party man must be quite color blind. He must see the world

in black and white; must ignore tints and intermediate shades. Wells

as Socialist could not help seeing--and saying--that there were many

likable things about the Liberals. As a Liberal he must admit that the

Tories have the advantage in several respects. He professes to view

religion rationalistically, yet there are outbursts of true mysticism

to be found in his books, passages which prove that he has experienced

the emotion of personal religion more clearly than many a church member.

He has the courage of his convictions, but it does not extend much

beyond putting them into print. I doubt whether, if he were given

autocratic power, he would inaugurate his "Modern Utopia" or any other

of his visions. At least he has hitherto resisted all efforts to induce

him to carry them into effect.

For instance, one of the most original and interesting features of

his "Modern Utopia" was the Samurai, the ruling caste, an order of

voluntary noblemen; submitting to a peculiar discipline; wearing a

distinctive dress; having a bible of their own selected from the

inspiring literature of all ages; spending at least a week of every

year in absolute solitude in the wilderness as a sort of spiritual

retreat and restorative of self-reliance. A curious conception it was,

a combination of Puritanism and Bushido, of Fourier and St. Francis, of

Bacon's Salomon's House, Plato's philosophers ruling the republic, and

Cecil Rhodes's secret order of millionaires ruling the world.

One day a group of ardent young men and women, inspired by this ideal,

came to Wells and announced that they had established the order,

they had become Samurai, and expected him to become their leader,

or at least to give them his blessing; instead of which Wells gave

them a lecture on the sin of priggishness and sent them about their

business. I have no doubt he was right about it, nor does his

disapproval of this premature attempt to incorporate the Samurai in

London prove that there was not something worth while in the idea. But

it shows that Wells knew what his work was in the world and proposed

to stick to it, differing therein from other Utopians: Edward Bellamy,

who because his fantastic romance, "Looking Backward", happened to

strike fire, spent the rest of his life in trying to bring about the

coöperative commonwealth by means of clubs, papers, and parties; Dr.

Hertzka, who wasted his substance in efforts to found a real Freeland

on the steppes of Kilimanjaro, Africa.

Perhaps the matter with Wells is simply that he cannot find his proper

pigeon-hole. Perhaps I can find it. Wells has little sympathy with any

political grouping or ideal regnant to-day. The orthodox Tory is in

his view simply a man without imagination. The orthodox Liberal is a

mere sentimentalist substituting democratic phrases for science and

discipline. The Imperialist, though touching Wells at some points,

repels him by his mania for military expenditure and his ignorant race

prejudice. The Socialist or Labor Party man is appallingly narrow and

totally unimpressed with the need for intelligence to rule the State.

In "The New Machiavelli" the hero hovers distressfully over the

entire field of modern politics, finding as little rest for his soul as

Noah's dove on the first trip from the ark found for its feet. Once and

once only has Wells's ideal found even partial embodiment, and that was

in the best days of the Roman Empire.

There was the Great State (in the familiar capital letters); a world

state so far as the world was known and civilized. There was a

universal language, exact and lucid. There was freedom and security

of travel, at least as great as in those same countries to-day. True,

Wells would have disapproved of slavery. But so did the Stoics of the

Empire disapprove of slavery, at least in theory. Their ideal was a

universal citizenship. In the later Empire every freeman in the Roman

Empire was called a citizen. There was tolerance, not only of religion

but of manners, such as the narrow and parochial States of Western

Europe which succeeded its fall have never known till within a hundred

years. Statecraft was a science; devotion to the State a cult. There

were the legions, examples of duty and discipline and scientific

warfare, and yet a few thousands of troops sufficed to police and guard

a whole civilized, wealthy, complex world state.

But most important of all was the Roman Law. Based on logical

principles; divested of superstitious accessories and irrational

taboos; universal and in the main equitable; raised above the Empire

and the muddy immediacies of politics till it seemed the voice of

nature itself; flexible and changing, but by growth rather than whim,

it was the intellectual fabric of the Empire. It so happened that a

despotic Emperor wielded the power of state, but still it was the State

and not the mere person of the Emperor that was really reverenced. It

was certainly not the man or the artist that was divine in Nero, but

the office. Even in its decadent and Byzantine days traces of the old

ideal remained, and it was not "Charles Richard Henry Etcetera, by

the Grace of God King of Anyland, Duke of Somewherelse, Knight of the

Golden Spur, Most Reverend Lord of the Free Cities of Lower Ruritania"

in the silly medieval (and modern) style, but "Senatus Populusque

Romani" and "Res Publica." The medieval Papacy was as universal in

structure, but was obscurantist in basis, and left behind it as a

legacy the memory of the crusades and the monasteries and great

cathedrals as its monuments. The Roman Empire was rationalist in basis,

and left behind it laws, straight roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters,

libraries, and municipal organizations. Chesterton is a romantic and

rather likes than otherwise the whimsical eccentricities of modern

national institutions. But Wells, though he loves to play with science,

takes statecraft as seriously as Marcus Aurelius, and, like him, he is

a citizen of the Great State, the Cosmopolis. The "Modern Utopia" might

have grown out of the actual Roman Empire had the right turnings been

taken from that time to this; no other state or civilization would have

formed its basis.

The significance of Wells's advocacy of Socialism lies in the fact that

it is addressed to the middle classes. He might be called "The Apostle

to the Genteels." He took part for a time in the aggressive socialistic

campaign led by the Fabian Society on lines distinct from but parallel

to the Marxian working class propaganda. The orthodox Marxian has

little use for middle-class people. He expects them to become extinct

so shortly that it is no use trying to convert them. He takes no more

interest in them than missionaries do in the Tasmanians. They will be

ground fine between the upper and nether millstones of the trusts and

the unions. Such individuals who survive will be able to do so only by

becoming retainers of the capitalists, and as such will be engulfed

with them in the revolutionary cataclysm which will end the present era.

With a firm faith in this theory, it is no wonder that he often

manifests annoyance at the slowness of the bourgeoisie in carrying out

the part assigned them in the Marxian program. They do not disappear

fast enough, nor do they show any eagerness to take sides either with

the proletariat or with the capitalists. On the contrary, they view

both with a certain distrust and antipathy, and maintain a curious

confidence in their ability to manage both factions in the future as

they have in the past. In short, they are not a negligible quantity,

but hold the balance of power, at least for the present, and can retard

or accelerate the progress of Socialism to a considerable though an

indefinite extent.

Obviously, if the middle class as a whole is to be converted to

Socialism, it must be by different arguments than those found effective

with the proletariat. The Manifesto does not appeal to them, because

they have more to lose than their "chains." There must be something

more alluring than a universal competency and a steady job to arouse

them to the need of radical changes.

The sight of capitalists excites emulation and ambition rather than

hatred and despair. A man is not inclined to vote millionaires out

of existence so long as he cherishes a secret hope of becoming one.

They do not see the proletarian papers and would be repelled by them if

they did.

Wells's outline of the form that middle-class propaganda should take

presents several novel and interesting points, but the most conspicuous

is his discussion of the effect of Socialism on family relations. His

frankness and honesty in bringing that question into the open is in

commendable contrast with the tendency of most advocates of Socialism

to conceal or minimize the fact that any such profound rearrangement

of economic relations as is involved in Socialism must inevitably

affect the family, because the economic factor in this institution is

undeniably great, although how great is a matter of dispute.

Wells boldly attempts to convert a prejudice into an argument by

appealing to the very classes which, it is generally supposed, would be

repelled by the bare mention of the subject, to save the family from

its impending disintegration by adopting Socialism.

That Wells is right in thinking that the problem of the family is a

serious one at the present time is clearly shown by the statistics

collected by Sidney Webb for the Fabian Society. He proves:

That the decline in the birthrate which is depriving England

and Wales of at least one-fifth of every year's normal crop

of babies is not accounted for by any alteration in the age,

sex or marital condition of the population, by any refusal

or postponement of marriage, or by any of the effects of

"urbanization" or physical deterioration of sections of

the community. The statistical evidence points, in fact,

unmistakably to the existence of a volitional regulation

of the marriage state that is now ubiquitous throughout

England and Wales, among, apparently, a large majority of

the population.

So much other statisticians have deduced, but Mr. Webb went farther and

obtained a direct proof of his conclusion by the circulation of several

hundred question blanks among middle-class families. The results are

startling. Out of a total of one hundred and twenty families reporting

in one category, there were only seven in which the number of children

was not intentionally limited. The average number of children in such

limited families is one and a half, which is only one third what it

was twenty-five years ago. In about sixty per cent of the cases "the

poverty of the parents in relation to their standard of comfort" was a

cause in the limitation of the family.

This shows how important a factor the increased expense of raising

children has become in well-to-do families, and unless the

population of the future is to be recruited very largely by the

improvident, ignorant, and debased, it points toward some form of state

encouragement of the production of well-born children. Wells suggested

a differential income tax. Doctor Galton advocated the endowment of

gifted parents. The war has brought this question out of the realm of

speculative controversy into that of practical necessity. Some of the

remedies proposed now make the measures suggested by Wells ten years

before seem timid and conservative.

His early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology

furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered

upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. He therefore

never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he

saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning

is fallacious, because the world cannot be divided up into distinct

things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package

and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. Here he is extremely

radical, going quite as far as Bergson in his anti-intellectualism

though attacking the subject in a very different way. He denies

the categories, the possibility of number, definition, and

classification.[9] He brings three charges against our Instrument of

Knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality

and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or

that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by

treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort

of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work

at another. No two things are exactly alike, and when we try to define

a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them

exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought

back again to a concrete case. Or, as Wells puts it in his laboratory

language: "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the

truth a little in taking hold of it." "Of everything we need to say

this is true, but it is not quite true."

What the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature,

the scientist has come to believe, and perhaps in time the logicians

will come to see it too. At present, however, they are, as Wells says,

in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two.

This is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by Mr. Jourdain in

which he says:[10]

To these strictures of Mr. Wells on logic we may reply, it

seems to me, that either they are psychological--in which

case they are irrelevant to logic--or they are false. Thus

the principle that "no truth is quite true", implying as it

does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood,

and is therefore false.

This sort of thing might have passed as a good joke in the days of

Epimenides, the Cretan, when logic was a novelty, and people amused

themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with

it. But it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought

out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the

ramparts as Wells's essay and from within as F. C. S. Schiller's big

volume, "Formal Logic."

Wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is

rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "The race flows through us,

the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any

sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "We are

episodes in an experience greater than ourselves." There is a desperate

sincerity about the man that I like. He seems always to be struggling

to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say

neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. I do not

think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as Shaw does.

Wells would rather, I believe, agree with other people than disagree.

He is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. But he insists

always on "painting the thing as he sees it." His later novels have

come under the ban of the British public libraries because, conceiving

sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a

disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical

temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate

temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant

facts obtruded. His sociological works, in which, while insisting on

permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would

show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship,

aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions

in his novels.

All his longer novels are largely concerned with the problem of

marital life but the only one of them that comes near to a solution

is that entitled "Marriage." The couple in this case, the Traffords,

are exceptionally decent people for characters in a modern novel,

and if their marriage is not a success it is not on account of any

interference from a third party, but rather because of the cares and

complications that come from family life and financial prosperity. The

heroine is a charming specimen of the modern young woman, educated at

"Oxbridge", whose chief fault is a constitutional inability to keep her

accounts straight. She spends money with excellent taste, but without

regard to her husband's bank balance. Consequently Trafford has to lay

aside his researches in molecular physics to work out a successful

process for synthetic rubber--easy to a man of his ability.

Mr. Wells apparently adopts the theory formulated by Professor Devine,

of Columbia, as to the normal division of labor between husband and

wife, that men should be experts in the art of getting money and women

experts in the art of spending it. Where both parties fail is in

regarding these duties as ends in themselves, the men getting absorbed

in business and the women buying things that they do not want, that

nobody needs, just for the sake of buying. Apparently Mr. Wells has

hope of curing the men, but none of curing the women.

Premature attempts at realization, the demand for immediate results,

the disregard of purely scientific research, the swamping of life by

restless activity and futile efforts at reform, these are the ailments

of the modern world, according to our author. His satire spares neither

conservatives nor radicals. The following passage would apply to New

York as well as London:

London, of course, is always full of Movements. Essentially

they are absorbents of superfluous feminine energy. They

have a common flavor of progress and revolutionary purpose,

and common features in abundant meetings, officials,

and organization generally. Few are expensive and still

fewer produce any tangible results in the world. They

direct themselves at the most various ends: the poor,

that favorite butt, either as a whole or in such typical

sections as the indigent invalid or the indigent aged, the

young, public health, the woman's cause, the prevention of

animal food, anti-vivisection, the gratuitous advertisement

of Shakespeare (that neglected poet), novel but genteel

modifications of medical or religious practice, dress

reform, the politer aspects of socialism, the encouragement

of aeronautics, universal military service, garden suburbs,

domestic arts, proportional representation, duodecimal

arithmetic, and the liberation of the drama. They range

in size and importance from campaigns on a Plessingtonian

scale to sober little intellectual Beckingham things

that arrange to meet half yearly and die quietly before

the second assembly. If Heaven by some miracle suddenly

gave every Movement in London all it professed to want, our

world would be standing on its head and everything would

be extremely unfamiliar and disconcerting. But, as Mr.

Roosevelt once remarked, the justifying thing about life

is the effort and not the goal, and few Movements involve

any real and impassioned struggle to get to the ostensible

object. They exist as an occupation; they exercise the

intellectual and moral activities without undue disturbance

of the normal routines of life. In the days when everybody

was bicycling an ingenious mechanism called Hacker's home

bicycle used to be advertised. Hacker's home bicycle was a

stand bearing small rubber wheels, upon which one placed

one's bicycle (properly equipped with a cyclometer) in

such a way that it could be mounted and ridden without any

sensible forward movement whatever. In bad weather, or when

the state of the roads made cycling abroad disagreeable,

Hacker's home bicycle could be placed in front of an open

window and ridden furiously for any length of time. Whenever

the rider tired, he could descend--comfortably at home

again--and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had

been. In exactly the same way the ordinary London Movement

gives scope for the restless and progressive impulse in

human nature without the risk of personal entanglements or

any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.[11]

To accomplish a cure, or at least to obtain a diagnosis of the evil,

Mr. Wells resorts to a curious expedient which he suggested first in

his "Modern Utopia", where he laid down as one of the rules of his new

order of Samurai that a man who aspired to be a leader of men should

for a week every year go off into the desert and live absolutely alone,

without books or other distractions to keep him from thinking. But in

"Marriage" Mr. Wells improves upon this plan, for Trafford and his wife

go into the wilds of Labrador together. "How sweet is solitude," as the

Irishman said, "when you have your sweetheart with you." So, indeed,

they found it, and in their fight with cold, starvation, and wild

beasts they learned how to found their love upon mutual comprehension

and respect, and made of their marriage a true union. The change

of heart which Trafford experiences is not altogether unlike what

Christians call conversion. His line of argument, or, more properly

speaking, development of thought, finds expression in fragmentary

sentences muttered in the delirium of fever, a Freudian emergence of

fundamental feelings, as in the following passage:

"Of course," he said, "I said it--or somebody said it--about

this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's

something arising out of life--not the common stuff of life.

An exhalation. ... It's like the little tongues of fire

that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back

to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet....

The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I

saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall

pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself

purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear

in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression

of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I

achieve salvation.... Salvation!...

"I wonder is salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for

one man salvation is research and thought, and for another

expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. Provided

he does it in the spirit. He has to do it in the spirit....

"This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from

purposeless triviality, _isn't_ life. Let me get hold of

that. That's a point. That's a very important point."

This passage from "Marriage" showed that in 1912 Wells's thought was

entering upon a new phase, considerably in advance of that revealed in

his "First and Last Things." He seemed to be working toward some sort

of belief in God, a Bergsonian God, struggling upward in spite of and

by means of inert matter and recalcitrant humanity. It would indeed

be queer to find Wells not only among the prophets, but among the

Christian prophets, and, as he intimates, some of the other Christians

would not like it.

Wells's catholicity of sympathy recognizes no limitations of race.

He has an abhorrence for race prejudice of every kind. The greatest

blot he found upon American civilization was our ill treatment of the

negro.[12]

In his article on "Race Prejudice" he puts it foremost among the evils

of the age but even his "anticipations" could not conceive of such an

insensate revival of racial animosity between civilized nations as the

Great War has, brought about:

Knight errantry is as much a part of a wholesome human being

as falling in love or self-assertion, and therein lies

one's hope for mankind. Nearly every one, I believe--I've

detected the tendency in old cheats even and disreputable

people of all sorts--is ready to put in a little time

and effort in dragon-slaying now and then, and if any one

wants a creditable dragon to write against, talk against,

study against, subscribe against, work against, I am

convinced they can find no better one--that is to say, no

worse one--than Race Prejudice. I am convinced myself that

there is no more evil thing in this present world than

Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately--it is

the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds

together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any

other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs

the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and

persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul.

It is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours

youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and

servitude, and desolates wide regions. It is a monster

begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to

be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own

dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable

share.

The abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the

growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of

education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward

his ideal. And his ideal is that of an evolutionist, the opportunity

for continuous growth. He has exp rest it best, perhaps, in "The

Food of the Gods," in the speech of one of the new race of giants,

of supermen, to his fellows as they are about to give battle to the

community of ordinary people determined to destroy them:

It is not that we would oust the little people from the

world in order that we, who are no more than one step upward

from their littleness, may hold their world forever. It is

the step we fight for and not ourselves.... We are here,

Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose

that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for

ourselves--for we are but the momentary hands and eyes

of the Life of the World. Through us and through the

little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word

and birth and act it must pass--to still greater lives.

This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing

place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little

people's knife, having no greater right to live than they.

And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin.

We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that

goes on forever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth

will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit

forevermore. To grow according to the will of God! To grow

out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and

darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater, he said,

speaking with slow deliberation, greater, my Brothers! And

then--still greater. To grow and again--to grow. To grow at

last into the fellowship and understanding of God.

The Great War has inspired or at least instigated many works of fiction

already, but the best of these, in my opinion, is Wells's "Mr. Britling

Sees It Through." It does not deal much with the fighting at the front.

The author is chiefly concerned with another aspect of the war, its

effect upon the psychology of the Englishman. The book is divided into

two parts; the first half is light, carefree and amusing after the

manner of Wells's earlier romances; the other half is darkened by the

war cloud and is written with more emotional power than he has hitherto

shown.

Knowing Wells's habit of introducing autobiographical details into

his romances, we inevitably surmise that Mr. Britling is himself.

Mr. Britling is a writer whom "lots of people found interesting and

stimulating, and a few found seriously exasperating." "He had ideas

in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and

political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of

India and China and esthetics and America and the education of mankind

in general.... And all that sort of thing."

This certainly reads like Wells's repertory of ideas. And to make

the resemblance closer Mr. Britling writes a pamphlet, "And Now War

Ends", shortly after the war began--just as Mr. Wells wrote "The War

That Will End War." Several of the characters are recognizable as Mr.

Wells' neighbors. At any rate we may be sure that the book reveals the

changing moods not only of the author but of every thinking Englishman

as the enormity, the awfulness, the all-pervasiveness of the war became

slowly realized in the course of many months.

As a contrast to his typical Englishman Mr. Wells brings in an

American, handled with more skill than British writers usually show in

dealing with American psychology. The delight of his Mr. Direck at

the recognition of the scenes and customs he had known from history and

novels is well presented:

The Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too

good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever

seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a

marked accent and accosting some passerby with the question,

"Say! But is this little wet ditch here the Historical River

Thames?" In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke

a very good and careful English indeed, but he now found

the utmost difficulty in controlling his impulse to use a

high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in dry Americanisms and

poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people asked him

questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure", words he would

no more have used in America than he could have used a bowie

knife. But he had a sense of rôle. He wanted to be just

exactly what he supposed an Englishman would expect him to

be.

Every American tourist in England has felt this temptation. He also has

the experience ascribed by Mr. Wells to his American of finding that

England on closer acquaintance is not so antiquated as she looks. When

asked what his impression of England is Mr. Direck answers:

That it looks and feels more like the traditional Old

England than any one could possibly have believed, and

that in reality it is less like the traditional Old England

than any one would ever possibly have imagined. I thought

when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come

to the England of Washington Irving. I find that it is not

even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

To complete this study of national psychology there is also a German

in the family circle at first, a tutor whose hobbies are Ido and

internationalism and a universal index, traits drawn from Professor

Ostwald apparently. He is not caricatured but we suspect that like Mr.

Direck, the American, Herr Heinrich is affected by British expectations

and appears more German than he is.

The book reëchoes all the passions of the war,--love, hatred, courage,

despair, meanness, sacrifice, heroism, selfishness, stoicism and mad

wrath,--but ends upon a clear religious tone such as has been heard

but faintly in any work of Mr. Wells before. What Mr. Britling sees

through is not the war, for nobody can yet see so far as that, but he

sees through the doubt and turmoil of his own mind and finds internal

peace in the midst of warfare. When he sits down to write a letter to

the parents of Heinrich, who like his own son had fallen in France, his

mind is torn by conflicting emotions, but finally these are resolved

into one common chord and he writes:

Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until

a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no

beginning, he works to no end. He may have his friendships,

his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these

things fall into place and life falls into place only with

God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against

Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end,

who is the meaning. He is the only King.... Of course I

must write about Him. I must tell all my world of Him. And

before the coming of the true King, the inevitable King,

the King who is present whenever just men foregather, this

bloodstained rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings

and tawdry emperors, these wily politicians and artful

lawyers, these men who claim and grab and trick and compel,

these war makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and

pass--like paper thrust into a flame. Our sons have shown us

God.

HOW TO READ WELLS

The curious thing about H. G. Wells is his diversity. For a person of

any intellectual consistency it is impossible thoroughly to appreciate

him in certain moods without disliking him in others. He is the stern

moralist of "The Sleeper Awakes", the detached and exquisite artist

of "Thirty Strange Stories" and "Tales of Space and Time", the genial

and conciliatory sociologist of "New Worlds for Old", the intolerant

Imperialist of "Anticipations", the subtle anti-moralist of "The New

Machiavelli" and "Ann Veronica", the sympathetic if somewhat cynical

portrayer of the shop-keeping classes of "Mr. Polly" and "The Wheels

of Chance", the vague philosopher at large of "First and Last Things",

the imaginative rationalist of "A Modern Utopia", the Jules-Vernish

romancer of "The War of Worlds" and "The First Men in the Moon", the

scientific transcendentalist of "The Food of the Gods", and in addition

he seriously chronicles "Floor Games" with his boys and takes interest

in fugitive essays on modern warfare and "The Misery of Boots." Unless

one is alien to everything human (and superhuman), it is impossible to

escape being interested in at least some of these.

Wells's philosophy is, as I have said, expressed symbolically in many

of his stories. It is most fully explained in "First and Last Things:

A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life" (Putnam), and in the two

essays previously referred to, "Scepticism of the Instrument" (in "A

Modern Utopia") and "The Discovery of the Future", first published

in _Nature_, February 6, 1902, and in the "Report of the Smithsonian

Institution", 1902, and later in book form (Huebsch, New York, 1913).

His sociological studies comprise the following volumes:

"Anticipations" (1901, Harper), "Mankind in the Making" (1903,

Scribner), "A Modern Utopia" (1904, Scribner), "The Future in America"

(1906, Harper), "New Worlds for Old" (1908, Macmillan), "Socialism and

the Great State", with the collaboration of fourteen other authors

(1911, Harper), "Social Forces in England and America" (1914, Harper),

published in England under the title "An Englishman Looks at the World"

(Cassell), "The War That Will End War" (1915), "What Is Coming?" (1916,

Macmillan), "Italy, France and Britain at War" (1917, Macmillan),

and "God the Invisible King" (1917, Macmillan).

His short stories have been collected in several different volumes, in

part overlapping: "Thirty Strange Stories" (1898, Harper), "Tales of

Time and Space" (1899, Doubleday), "Twelve Stories and a Dream" (1903,

Scribner), "The Plattner Story and Others" (1897, Macmillan), "The

Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents" (1895, Macmillan).

Eight of the best of his short stories (including "The Star",

"Armageddon" and "The Country of the Blind") are published in a

sumptuous edition with Coburn's photographic illustrations by Mitchell

Kennerley ("The Door in the Wall and Other Stories", 1911).

His romances include: "The Time Machine" (1895, Holt), "The Wonderful

Visit" (1895), "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896, Duffield), "The War

of the Worlds" (1898, Harper), "The Invisible Man" (1897, Harper),

"The Sea-Lady" (1902) "The First Men in the Moon" (1901), "When the

Sleeper Wakes" (1899, Harper), rewritten (1911) as "The Sleeper Awakes"

(Nelson, London), "In the Days of the Comet" (1906, Century), "The Food

of the Gods" (1904, Scribner), "The War in the Air" (1908, Macmillan),

"The World Set Free" (1914, Macmillan).

His novels fall naturally into two classes: first those of a lighter

and humorous character: "The Wheels of Chance" (1896, Macmillan),

"Love and Mr. Lewisham" (1900, Stokes), "Kipps" (1906, Scribner), "The

History of Mr. Polly" (1910, Duffield), "Bealby" (1915, Macmillan),

"Boon" etc. (1915, Doran).

His longer and more serious novels are: "Ann Veronica" (1909,

Harper), "The New Machiavelli" (1910, Duffield), "Tono-Bungay" (1908,

Duffield), "Marriage" (Duffield), "The Passionate Friends" (1913,

Harper), "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon" (1914, Macmillan), "The

Research Magnificent" (1915, Macmillan), "Mr. Britling Sees It Through"

(1916, Macmillan).

To these we must add some early works: a "Textbook on Biology" in two

volumes (1892) and two volumes of essays, "Select Conversations with

an Uncle" (1895, Saalfield) and "Certain Personal Matters" (1897). He

has, like Stevenson, devoted much attention to devising floor games for

children and has published two books upon it: "Floor Games" and "Little

Wars" (Small, Maynard).

Wells still awaits his Boswell, but we have "The World of H. G. Wells"

by Van Wyck-Brooks (1915, Kennerley), a lively and appreciative

critique, and "H. G. Wells, A Biography and a Critical Estimate of

his Work" by J. D. Beresford (1915, Holt), still briefer, equally

interesting, and containing a list of his writings to date. An

autobiographical sketch was written for the Russian edition of his

works (1909) and published in T. P.'s Magazine (1912).

Of magazine articles and critiques the following have for one reason or

another special interest:

"Les Idées de Wells sur l'Humanité future" by Charles Duguet in _Revue

des Idées_, 1908.

"Wells" by Chesterton in _American Magazine_, vol. 71, p. 32 (1910).

"Wells and his Point of View" in _Catholic World_, vol. 91 (four

articles, 1910).

"Wells and Bergson" by P. E. B. Jourdain in _Hibbert Journal_, vol. 10,

p. 835, July, 1912. "H. G. Wells et la Pensée contemporaine" by René

Leguy in _Mercure de France_ (1912).

The contributions of Mr. Wells to current magazines and newspapers

are too numerous to enumerate, but I must not omit the two articles

on Socialism which he contributed to _The Independent_, October 25

and November 3, 1906, and an article on "The Nature of Love" (_The

Independent_, August 13, 1908).

[1] See "Major Prophets of To-day", p. 232.

[2] "Heretics", by G. K. Chesterton, p. 85.

[3] "In the Days of the Comet", by H. G. Wells. New York: The Century

Company.

[4] The World Set Free.

[5] From Wells's "Anticipations."

[6] From Kellermann's account of the Battle of Loos.

[7] It would be interesting to learn where Wells happened to get hold

of the idea that time is the fourth dimension of reality and how much

he knew then of the history of the conception. He could not, at any

rate, for all his prophetic powers, have foreseen the important part

it was to play in scientific thought and metaphysical speculation in

the coming century. Lorentz, Einstein and Minkowski have incorporated

it into their new theory of relativity which threatens to abolish the

ether and to make mass a variable, dependent on velocity. Our ordinary

Euclidean or three dimensional space would thus be a cross-section at

a certain time. (See "The Time-Space Manifold of Relativity", by Edwin

B. Wilson and G. N. Lewis, in _Proceedings of the American Academy of

Arts and Sciences_, November, 1912.) Heinrich Czolbe in 1875 brought

forward the theory (see Müller, _Archiv für systematische Philosophie_,

XVII, p. 106), and Lotze discusses it in his "Microcosmos." Bergson's

philosophy is based upon the distinction he draws between psychological

duration and the physical treatment of time as a kind of space.

Professor Pitkin of Columbia criticizes Wells's time-machine from

the metaphysical standpoint in "Time and Pure Activity" (_Journal

Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, Vol. ii, No. 19).

[8] "Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The

Last Trump. Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George

Boon, Appropriate to the Times. Prepared for Publication by Reginald

Bliss, with an Ambiguous Introduction by H. G. Wells." (Doran, 1915.)

[9] He has given three statements of his views on this point: First,

in an article, "Rediscovery of the Unique", in Fortnightly Review,

July, 1891; second, in a paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society

and published in Mind, XIII, No. 51, and as an appendix to "A Modern

Utopia"; and, third, in Book I of "First and Last Things."

[10] "Logic, M. Bergson and Mr. H. G. Wells", by Philip E. B. Jourdain

in _Hibbert Journal_, X, p. 835.

[11] "Marriage," Duffield and Company, 1912.

[12] See "The Tragedy of Color", chapter xii of "The Future in

America", and his article on "Race Prejudice", in _The Independent_ of

February 14, 1907.