Mr Wells' romances have little or nothing in common with those of
Jules Verne, not even that peculiar quality of romance which revels in
the impossible. The heroes of Jules Verne were idealised creatures
making use of some wonderful invention for their own purposes; and the
future of mankind was of no account in the balance against the lust
for adventure under new mechanical conditions. Also, Jules Verne's
imagination was at the same time mathematical and Latin; and he was
entirely uninfluenced by the writings of Comte.
Mr Wells' experiments with the relatively improbable have become
increasingly involved with the social problem, and it would be
possible to trace the growth of his opinions from this evidence alone,
even if we had not the valuable commentary afforded by his novels and
his essays in sociology. But his interest in the present and future
welfare of man would not in the first place have prompted him to the
writing of romance (unless it had been cast in the severely
allegorical form of _The Pilgrim's Progress_), and if we are to
account for that ebullition, we shall be driven--like Darwin with his
confounding peacock--to take refuge in some theory of exuberance. The
later works have been so defensive and, in one sense, didactic that
one is apt to forget that many of the earlier books, and all the short
stories, must have originated in the effervescence of creative
imagination.
Mr Wells must, also, have been slightly intoxicated by the first
effects of reaction. A passage from _The Future in America_ exhibits
him somewhat gleefully reviving thoughts of the prison-house, and I
quote it in order to account for his first exercises in prophecy by a
study of contrasts. "I remember," he writes, "that to me in my boyhood
speculation about the Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of
my generation, I was launched into life with millennial assumptions.
This present sort of thing, I believed, was going on for a time,
interesting personally, perhaps, but as a whole inconsecutive, and
then--it might be in my lifetime or a little after it--there would be
trumpets and shoutings and celestial phenomena, a battle of
Armageddon, and the Judgment.... To talk about the Man of the year
Million was, of course, in the face of this great conviction, a
whimsical play of fancy. The year Million was just as impossible, just
as gaily nonsensical as fairyland...."
The imprisoning bottle was opened when he became a student of biology,
under Huxley, and the liquid of his suppressed thought began to
bubble. He prefaced his romances by a sketch in the old _Pall Mall
Gazette_, entitled _The Man of the Year Million_, an a priori study
that made one thankful for one's prematurity. After that physiological
piece of logic, however, he tried another essay in evolution,
published in 1895 in book form under the title of _The Time
Machine_--the first of his romances.
The machine itself is the vaguest of mechanical assumptions; a thing
of ivory, quartz, nickel and brass that quite illogically carries its
rider into an existing past or future. We accept the machine as a
literary device to give an air of probability to the essential thing,
the experience; and forget the means in the effect. The criterion of
the prophecy in this case is influenced by the theory of "natural
selection." Mr Wells' vision of the "Sunset of Mankind" was of men so
nearly adapted to their environment that the need for struggle, with
its corollary of the extermination of the unfit, had practically
ceased. Humanity had become differentiated into two races, both
recessive; one, the Eloi, a race of childlike, simple, delicate
creatures living on the surface of a kindly earth; the other, the
Morlocks, a more active but debased race, of bestial habits, who lived
underground and preyed cannibalistically on the surface-dwellers whom
they helped to preserve, as a man may preserve game. The Eloi,
according to the hypothesis of the Time Traveller, are the descendants
of the leisured classes; the Morlocks of the workers. "The Eloi, like
the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They
still possessed the earth on sufferance; since the Morlocks,
subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the
day-lit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I
inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs perhaps through
the survival of an old habit of service." All this is in the year
802,701 A.D.
The prophecy is less convincing than the wonderful sight of the
declining earth some million years later, sinking slowly into the
dying fires of the worn-out sun. Man and the vertebrates have
disappeared, and the highest wonder of animal life is represented by
giant crustaceans, which in turn give way to a lower form. We have a
vision of an involution that shall succeed the highest curve of
development; of life ending where it began in the depths of the sea,
as the initial energy of the solar system is dissipated and the
material of it returns to rest at the temperature of the absolute
zero. And the picture is made more horrible to the imaginative by the
wonder whether the summit of the evolutionary curve has not already
been reached--or it may be passed in the days of the Greek
philosophers.
_The Time Machine_, despite certain obvious faults of imagination and
style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of
the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and
finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven
or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of
conventional thought, and is prepared to examine, and to present life
from the detached standpoint of one who views it all from a
respectable distance; but who is able, nevertheless--an essential
qualification--to enter life with all the passion and generosity of
his own humanity.
And in _The Wonderful Visit_--published in the same year as _The Time
Machine_--he comes closer to earth. That ardent ornithologist, the
Rev. K. Hilyer, Vicar of Siddermouth, who brought down an angel with a
shot-gun, is tenderly imagined; a man of gentle mind, for all the
limitations of his training. The mortalised angel, on the other hand,
is rather a tentative and simple creature. He may represent, perhaps,
the rather blank mind of one who sees country society without having
had the inestimable privilege of learning how it came about. His
temperament was something too childlike--without the child's
brutality--to investigate the enormous complexities of adjustment that
had brought about the conditions into which he was all too suddenly
plunged by a charge of duck-shot. He came and was filled with an
inalterable perplexity, but some of his questions were too ingenuous;
and while we may sympathise with the awful inertia of Hilyer before
the impossible task of explaining the inexplicable differences between
mortal precept and mortal practice, we feel that we might, in some
cases at least, have made a more determined effort. We might have
found some justification for chairs, by way of instance, and
certainly an excuse for raising beds above the floor. But the wounded
angel, like the metal machine, is only a device whereby the searching
examination of our author may be displayed in an engrossing and
intimate form. And in _The Wonderful Visit_, that exuberance we
postulated, that absorption in the development of idea, is more
marked; in the unfolding of the story we can trace the method of the
novelist.
Indeed, the three romances that follow discover hardly a trace of the
social investigator. _The Island of Dr Moreau_, _The Invisible Man_
and _The War of the Worlds_ are essays in pure fantasy, and although
the first of the three is influenced by biology I class it
unhesitatingly among the works of sheer exuberance. Each of these
books is, in effect, an answer to some rather whimsical question, and
the problem that Dr Moreau attempted to solve was: "Can we, by
surgery, so accelerate the evolutionary process as to make man out of
a beast in a few days or weeks?" And within limits he found that the
answer was: "Yes."
In the seclusion of his island, and with the poor assistance of the
outlawed medical student, Montgomery, Dr Moreau succeeded in producing
some creditable parodies of humanity by his operations on pigs, bulls,
dogs and other animals. These cut and remoulded creatures had
something the appearance and intelligence of Homo Sapiens, and could
be maintained at that level by the exercise of discipline and the
constant recital of "the Law"; left to themselves they gradually
reverted to the habits and manners of the individual beasts out of
which they had been carved. We may infer that some subtle organic
chemistry worked its determination upon their uncontrolled wills, but
Mr Wells offers no explanation, psychic, chemical or biological, and
I do not think that he intended any particular fable beyond the
evident one that, physically, one species is as like to the next as
makes no matter. What Moreau did well another man might have done
better. It is a good story, and the adventures of the marooned
Prendick, alone, are sufficient justification for the original
conception. (I feel bound to note, however, the absurd comments of
some early reviewers who seemed to imagine that the story was a
defence of vivisection.)
The next romance (1897) seeks to answer the question: "What could a
man do if he were invisible?" Various attempts to answer that question
had been made by other writers, but none of them had come to it with
Mr Wells' practical grasp of the real problem; the earlier romantics
had not grappled with the necessity for clothes and the various ways
in which a material man, however indistinguishable his body by our
sense of sight, must leave traces of his passage. The study from
beginning to end is finely realistic; and even the theory of the
albino, Griffin, and in a lesser degree his method of winning the
useless gift of invisibility, are convincing enough to make us wonder
whether the thing is not scientifically possible. As a pure romance
set in perfectly natural surroundings, _The Invisible Man_ is possibly
the high-water mark of Mr Wells' achievement in this kind. He has
perfected his technique, and the interest in the development of the
story works up steadily to the splendid climax, when the form of the
berserker Griffin returns to visibility, his hands clenched, his eyes
wide open, and on his face an expression of "anger and dismay," the
elements--as I choose to think--of man's revolt against imprisonment
in the flesh. It is worth while to note that by another statement, the
same problem is posed and solved in the short story called _The
Country of the Blind_.
_The War of the Worlds_ (1898), although written in the first person,
is in some ways the most detached of all these fantasies; and it is in
this book that Mr Wells frankly confesses his own occasional sense of
separation. "At times," says the narrator of the history, "I suffer
from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about
me, I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere
inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and
tragedy of it all." That sense must have remained with him as he wrote
the account of the invading Martians, so little passion does the book
contain. The vision, however, is clear enough and there is more
invention than in many of the other romances. The picture of the
Martians themselves develops in one direction the theory of human
evolution expressed in _The Man of the Year Million_. The expansion
of the brain case, and the apotheosis of pure intellect, devoid, so
far as we can judge, of any emotional expression, are the steadily
biological deductions that we should expect from the Wells of this
period. The fighting machines of these incomprehensible entities, the
heat ray and the black smoke, are all excellent conceptions; and the
narrative is splendidly graphic. But only in the scenes with the
curate, when the narrator is stirred to passionate anger, and in his
later passages with the sapper, do we catch any glimpses of the
novelist intrigued with the intimate affairs of humanity. Even the
narrator's brother, in his account of the escape with two women in a
pony-carriage, has become infected with that sense of detachment. The
two women are strongly differentiated but leave little impression of
personality.
The fact that I have made this comment on lack of passion in
describing one of these earlier romances is indicative of a particular
difference between Mr Wells' method in this sort and the method of the
lesser writer of fantasias. The latter, whatever his idea, and it may
be a brilliant idea, is always intent on elaborating the wonder of his
theme by direct description. Mr Wells is far more subtle and more
effective. He takes an average individual, identifies him with the
world as we know it, and then proceeds gradually to bring his marvel
within the range of this individual's apprehension. We see the
improbable, not too definitely, through the eyes of one who is
prepared with the same incredulity as the reader of the story, and as
a result the strange phenomenon, whether fallen angel, invisible man,
converted beast or invading Martian, takes all the shape of reality.
That this shape is convincing is due to the brilliance of Mr Wells'
imagination and his power of graphic expression; the lesser writer
might adopt the method and fail utterly to attain the effect; but it
is this conception of the means to reach the intelligence and senses
of the average reader that chiefly distinguishes these romances from
those of such writers as Jules Verne. Our approach to the wonderful is
so gradual and so natural that when we are finally confronted with it
the incredible thing has become inevitable and expected. Finally, it
has become so identified with human surprise, anger or dismay that any
failure of humanity in the chief person of the story reacts upon our
conception of the wonderful intrusion among familiar phenomena.
Now, this power of creating the semblance of fact out of an ideal was
too valuable a thing to be wasted on the making of stories that had no
purpose beyond that of interesting or exciting the reader with such
imaginations as the Martians, whose only use was to threaten humanity
with extinction. Mr Wells' own sight of our blindness, our complacent
acceptance of the sphere as an oblate or prolate spheroid, might be,
he hoped, another of the marvels which we should come to accept
through the medium of romance. So he began tentatively at first to
introduce a vivid criticism of the futility of present-day society
into his fantasies, and the first and the least of these books was
that published in 1899 as _When the Sleeper Wakes_, a title afterwards
changed to _The Sleeper Awakes_.
In the two opening chapters we find the same delightfully realistic
treatment of the unprecedented slowly mingling with the commonplace.
The first appearance of Graham the Sleeper, tormented then by the
spectres and doubts that accompany insomnia, is made so credible that
we accept his symptoms without the least demur; his condition is
merely unusual enough to excite a trembling interest. Even the
passing of his early years of trance does not arouse scepticism. But
then we fall with one terrific plunge into the world of A.D. 2100,
and, like Graham, we cannot realise it. Moreover this changed,
developed world has a slightly mechanical air. The immense enclosed
London, imagined by Mr Wells, is no Utopia, yet, like the dream of
earlier prophets, it is too logical to entice us into any
hallucination; and we come, fatally, to a criticism of the syllogism.
Mr Wells himself has confessed, in a new Preface, that this is "one of
the most ambitious and least satisfactory" of his books; and explains
that it was written against time, when he was on the verge of a
serious illness. It is superfluous, therefore, to criticise it in
detail, but one or two points in relation to the sociological idea
must be emphasised.
The main theme is the growing division between Capital and Labour.
The Giant Trust--managing the funds accumulated in Graham's name, a
trust that has obtained possession of so immense a capital that it
controls the chief activities of the world--is figured in the command
of a certain Ostrog, who, with all the dependents that profit by the
use of his wealth and such mercenaries as he can hold to himself,
represents one party in opposition to the actual workers and
producers, generically the People. The picture is the struggle of our
own day in more acute form; the result, in the amended edition, is
left open. "Who will win--Ostrog or the People?" Mr Wells writes in
the Preface referred to above, and answers: "A thousand years hence
that will still be just the open question we leave to-day."
I am not concerned in this place to question the validity of that
answer, nor to suggest that the Wells of 1914 would not necessarily
give the same account of his beliefs as the Wells of 1909, but I must
draw attention to the attitude displayed in the book under
consideration in order to point the change of feeling recognisable in
later books. In _The Sleeper Awakes_, even in the revised version, the
sociological theory is still mechanical, the prophecy at once too
logical, and at the same time deduced from premises altogether too
restricted. The world of A.D. 2100 is the world of to-day, with its
more glaring contrasts still more glaringly emphasised; with its
social incongruities and blindness raised to a higher power. And all
that it lacked has been put into a romance called _In the Days of the
Comet_ (1906), a book to which I shall now leap, returning later to
consider the comparatively irrelevant theses of three other romances
that chronologically intervened.
The great change wrought by the coming of the Comet might be
sentimentally described as a change of heart; I prefer to call it a
change of reason. All the earlier part of the work, which is again
told in the first person, presents the life of a Midland industrial
area as seen by one who has suffered it. The Capital-Labour problem
bulks in the foreground, and is adequately supported by a passionate
exposition of the narrowness and misery of lower-middle-class life in
the jumble of limitations, barriers and injustices that arise from the
absolute ownership of property. Also, into this romance--the only one,
by the way--comes some examination of the relations of the sexes. And
all this jumble is due, if we are to believe the remedy, to human
misunderstanding. The influence of the Comet passed over the earth,
and men, after a few hours of trance, awoke to a new realisation. We
come to a first knowledge of the change in one of the most beautiful
passages that Mr Wells has written; and although I dislike to spoil a
passage by setting it out unclothed by the idea and expectations which
have led to its expression, given it form, and fitted it to a just
place in the whole composition, I will make an exception in this case
in order to justify my metaphor of "normal sight." The supposed writer
of the description had just awakened from the trance induced by the
passing of the Comet. He says:
"I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of those drugged,
feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a
very glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and
interlaced like splendid music. It was rich with lupin,
honeysuckle, campions and ragged robin; bed straw, hops and wild
clematis twined and hung among its branches, and all along its
ditch border the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces and
chorused in lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of
note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly, in its
depths, I heard a chirrup and the whir of startled wings.
"Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I
stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the
intricate delicacy before me and marvelling how richly God has
made his worlds...."
And not only the writer but also every other person on the earth had
been miraculously cured of their myopia and astigmatism. They saw
beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they
had but to believe and the old miseries vanished. In the old days men
preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an
asceticism such as that of St Simon Stylites. The lesson--I cannot
deny that the book is didactic--of the change wrought by the comet is
that man should find the full expression of his personality in
sympathy and understanding. The egotism remains, but it works to a
collective end....
War is necessarily touched upon in this book as an inevitable
corollary to the problems of personal and a fortiori of national
property; but the real counterblast against wholesale fratricide was
reserved for the following romance, published in 1908.
_The War in the Air_ definitely disclosed a change of method that was
adumbrated in its predecessor. The agent of experience is still
retained in the person of Bert Smallways, but the restrictions imposed
by the report of an eye-witness have become too limiting, and, like
Hardy in _The Dynasts_, Mr Wells alternates between a near and a
distant vision. The Welt-Politik could not be explained through the
intelligence of a "little Cockney cad," even though he was "by no
means a stupid person and up to a certain limit not badly educated";
and the general development of the world-war, the account of the
collapse of the credit system and all such large and general effects
necessitated the broad treatment of the historian. So the intimate,
personal narrative of Smallways' adventures is occasionally dropped
for a few pages; Mr Wells shuts off his magic-lantern and fills the
interval with an analysis of larger issues.
And the issues are so vital, the _dénouement_ so increasingly
probable, that, despite all the exaggerations necessary in a fiction
of this kind, the warning contained in this account of a world-war is
one that must remain in the minds of any thoughtful reader. Smallways'
pert reflection on the causes of the immense downfall represents the
wisdom that comes of bitter experience, and the application of it is
very pertinent to present conditions. "There was us in Europe all at
sixes and sevens with our silly flags and our silly newspapers raggin'
us up against each other and keepin' us apart," says Smallways, and
for the briefest analysis of causes that continually threaten us with
all the useless horrors of war, the summary could scarcely be
bettered.
Indeed, I think that _The War in the Air_ is the greatest of Mr Wells'
achievements in fantasy that has a deeper purpose than mere amusement.
The story is absorbing and Smallways a perfectly conceived character,
recommendations that serve to popularise the book as a romance; but
all the art of the construction is relevant to the theme, and to the
logical issue which is faced unflinchingly. In the many wild
prophecies that have been incorporated in various stories of a great
European war, there has been discoverable now and again some hint of
insight into the real dangers that await mankind. But such stories as
these degenerate into some accidental, but inferentially glorious,
victory of British arms, and any value in the earlier comments is
swamped in the sentimentality of the fortuitous, and designedly
popular, sequel. In the book now under consideration the conception is
too wide for any such lapses into the maudlin. British interests play
an insignificant part in the drama. We have to consider war not as an
incident in the history of a nation, but as a horrible disgrace in the
history of humanity.
And war is the theme also of _The World Set Free_ (1914), but it leads
here to a theory of reconstruction of which we have no sight in the
earlier work. The opening chapters describe the inception of the
means, the discovery of the new source of energy--a perfectly
reasonable conception--that led to the invention of the "atomic bomb,"
a thing so terribly powerful and continuous in its action that after
the first free use of it in a European outbreak, war became
impossible. As a romance, the book fails. The interest is not centred
in a single character, and we are given somewhat disconnected glimpses
of various phases in the discovery of the new energy, in its
application, and of the catastrophes that follow its use as an
instrument of destruction. The essay form has almost dominated the
method of the novelist, and consequently the essential parable has not
the same force as in _The War in the Air_. Nevertheless, the vision is
there, obscured by reason of its more personal expression; and before
I return to consider the three less pertinent romances interposed
between those that have a more recognisable critical tendency, I wish
to sum up the distinctive attitude of the four just considered.
And in this thing I claim that the conscious purpose of the artist is
of comparatively small account. I may be doing Mr Wells an injustice,
either by robbing him of the credit of a clearly conceived intention,
or by reading into his books a deliberation which he might wish to
disclaim. But my business is not justice to the author in this sense,
but an interpretation--necessarily personal--of the message his books
have conveyed to a particular reader. And the plain message that all
these romances--including those that follow--have conveyed to me is
the necessity for ridding the mind of traditions of the hypnotic
suggestions of parents and early teachers, of the parochial influences
of immediate surroundings, of the prejudices and self-interested
dogmatisms and hyperboles of common literature, especially of the
daily and weekly press; in order that we may, if only for an exercise
in simple reason, dissociate ourselves for a moment from all those
intimate forces, and regard life with the calmness of one detached
from personal interests and desires. No human being who has not thus
stood apart from life can claim to have realised himself; and in so
far as he is unable thus to separate himself temporarily from his
circumstances he confesses that he is less a personality than a bundle
of reactions to familiar stimuli. But given that power of detachment,
the reader may find in these four books matter for the reconsideration
of the whole social problem. Whether he accept such tentative
reconstructions as those suggested in _The World Set Free_ or _In the
Days of the Comet_ is relatively unimportant, the essential thing is
that he should view life with momentarily undistracted eyes; and see
both the failures of our civilisation and its potentialities for a
finer and more gracious existence....
_The First Men in the Moon_ (1901) is little more than a piece of
sheer exuberance. The theory of the means to the adventure and the
experience itself are both plausible. There are a few minor
discrepancies, but when the chief assumption is granted the
deductions will all stand examination. The invention of cavorite, the
substance that is impervious to the force--whatever it may be--of
gravitation, as other substances are impervious to light, heat, sound
or electricity, is not a priori impossible, nor is the theory that the
moon is hollow, that the "Selenites" live below the surface, or that
evolution has produced on our satellite an intelligent form which,
anatomically, is more nearly allied to the insect than to the
vertebrate type as we know it. The exposition of lunar social
conditions cannot be taken very seriously. Specialisation is the
key-note; the production by education and training, of minds, and, as
far as possible, bodies, adapted to a particular end, and incapable of
performing other technical functions. The picture of this highly
developed state, however, is not such as would tempt us to emulation.
As a machine it works; as an ideal it lacks any presentation of the
thing we call beauty. The apotheosis of intelligence in the concrete
example leaves us unambitious in that direction.
One chapter, however, stands apart and elaborates once more that
detachment for space and time which I have so particularly emphasised
as the more important feature of these particular books. Mr Bedford,
alone in his Cavorite sphere between the Earth and the Moon,
experiences this sensation of aloofness. "I became, if I may go
express it, dissociate from Bedford," he writes. "I looked down on
Bedford as a trivial, incidental thing with which I chanced to be
connected," Bedford, unfortunately for my moral, was a poor creature
who got no benefit from his privilege, who flouted it indeed and
regretted his inability "to recover the full-bodied self-satisfaction
of his early days." Possibly the fact that in his case the knowledge
was thrust upon him may account for his failure. It is only the
knowledge we seek that has any influence upon us.
_The Sea Lady_ (1902) stands alone among Mr Wells' romances. The
realistic method remains, but the conception is touched with a poetic
fancy of a kind that I have not found elsewhere in these books. The
Venus Annodomini who came out of the sea at Folkestone in the form of
an authentic mermaid was something more than a mere critic of our
civilised conventions. She was that, too; she asked why people walked
on the Leas "with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and
bound not to do all sorts of natural things, and bound to do all sorts
of preposterous things." But she was also the personification of
"other dreams." She had "the quality of the open sky, of deep tangled
places, of the flight of birds ... of the high sea." She represented
to one man, at least, "the Great Outside." And, if we still find a
repetition of the old statement in that last description, it is,
nevertheless, surrounded with a glamour that is not revealed in such
books as _In the Days of the Comet_. The ideal that is faintly
shadowed in _The Sea Lady_ is more ethereal, less practical; the
story, despite the naturalistic, half-cynical manner of its recountal,
has the elements of romance. The closing scene describes the
perplexity of a practical Kentish policeman "who in the small hours
before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady had been wearing, just as
the tide overtook it," He stands there on the foreshore with a foolish
bewilderment, wondering chiefly "what people are up to." He is the
"simple citizen of a plain and obvious world." And Mr Wells concludes:
"I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little
way, a stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast serenity
of the night." And I make an application of the parable for my own
purposes, and wonder how far the curiosity of Mr Wells' readers will
carry them into the great mystery that lies behind the illusion of
this apparently obvious world.
We come, finally, without any suggestion of climax, to _The Food of
the Gods_ (1904). The food was produced, casually in the first
instance, by two experimenters who served no cause but that of their
own inquisitive science. One of them, Redwood, had become intrigued by
the fact that the growth of all living things proceeded with bursts
and intermissions; it was as if they had "to accumulate force to grow,
grew with vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space
before they could go on growing again." And Bensington, the other
experimenter, succeeded in separating a food that produced regular
instead of intermittent growth. It was universal in its effects,
influencing vegetable as well as animal life; and in the course of
twenty years it produced human giants, forty feet high. This is a
theme for Mr Wells to revel in, and he does, treating the detail of
the first two-thirds of the book with a fine realism. Like Bensington,
he saw, "behind the grotesque shapes and accidents of the present, the
coming world of giants and all the mighty things the future has in
store--vague and splendid, like some glittering palace seen suddenly
in the passing of a sunbeam far away." The parable is plain enough,
but the application of it weakens when we realise that so far as the
merely physical development goes, the food of the gods is only
bringing about a change of scale. If we grant that this "insurgent
bigness" must conquer the world, the final result is only humanity in
the same relation to life that it now occupies, and we are left to
reflect with Bensington, after the vision had faded, on "sinister
shadows, vast declivities and darknesses, inhospitable immensities,
cold, wild and terrible things."
The change of scale, however, so long as it was changing, presents in
another metaphor the old contrasts. The young giants, the Cossars and
Redwood, looking down on common humanity from a vantage-point some
thirty to forty feet higher than the "little people," are critical by
force of circumstances; and they are at the same time handicapped by
an inability to comprehend the thing criticised. They are too
differentiated; and for the purpose of the fable none of them is
gifted with the power to study these insects with the sympathy of a
Henri Fabre. We may find some quality of blundering stupidity in the
Cossars and in young Redwood, they were too prejudiced by their
physical scale; but the simple Caddles, born of peasant parents,
uneducated and set to work in a chalk quarry, is the true enquirer. He
walked up to London to solve his problem, and his fundamental
question: "What's it all _for_?" remained unanswered. The "little
people" could not exchange ideas with him, and he never met his
brother giants. It is, however, exceedingly doubtful whether they
could have offered him any satisfactory explanation of the purpose of
the universe. Their only ambition seemed to be reconstruction on a
larger scale.
I think the partial failure of _The Food of the Gods_ to furnish any
ethical satisfaction is due to the fact that in this romance Mr Wells
has identified himself too closely with the giants; a fault that
indicates a slight departure from normality. The inevitable contrast
between great and little lacks a sympathy and appreciation we find
elsewhere. "Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is
that. Great and little cannot understand one another" is the true text
of the book; and it implies a weakness in the great not less than in
the little; a weakness that is hardly exonerated by the closing
sentence: "But in every child born of man lurks some seed of
greatness--waiting for the food." I find a quality of reasonableness
in the little people's antagonism to the blundering superiority of
those giants.
To the tail of these romances I may pin the majority of Mr Wells'
short stories. The best of them are all included in the collection
published under the title of _The Country of the Blind_. In this form
Mr Wells displays nothing but the exuberance of his invention. In the
Preface to the collection he defines his conception of short-story
writing as "the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;
it may be horrible or pathetic or funny, or beautiful, or profoundly
illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from
fifteen to twenty minutes to read aloud." I can add nothing to that
description, and would only take away from it so much as is implied by
the statement that I cannot call to mind any one of these stories
which is "profoundly illuminating" in the same sense that I would
certainly apply the phrase to some of the romances. Jolly and bright
they undoubtedly are, but when they are moving, they provide food for
wonder rather than for enlightenment....
I cannot leave these romances without a comment on Mr Wells'
justification as preacher and prophet. Writing in the midst of the
turmoil of war, I am vividly conscious of having had my mind prepared
for it by the material I have here so inadequately described. All the
misunderstandings, the weaknesses, the noisy, meaningless ambitions,
the tepid acceptance of traditional standards, have been exposed by Mr
Wells in these fantasies of his. And in _The War in the Air_, with
just such exaggerations as are necessary for a fiction of this kind,
he has forecast the conditions which have now overtaken us. We
know--or we might know if we had the capacity for any sort of
consequent consideration of our conditions--that in a reasonably
conducted civilisation no such awful catastrophe as this senseless
conflagration could have been possible. No doubt we shall profit by
the lesson, but it is one that any individual might have learned for
himself from these romances, without paying the fearful price that is
now necessary. And because humanity is apt to forget its most drastic
punishments, to revert to its original inertia as soon as the smart is
healed, I feel that when the worst is over, these books will have a
greater value than ever before. I believe that in them may be found
just those essentials of detachment and broad vision which might serve
to promote a higher and more stable civilisation.