H. G. WELLS

"Three Plays by Brieux", (Brentano's, 1911; contain "Damaged Goods" and other plays in which the French playwright attacks social evils as vigorously and outspokenly though not so wittily as Shaw. They are translated by Mrs. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Shaw provides a preface).

Two farcical plays of the war, "The Inca of Perusalem" and "Augustus does his Bit", produced by the London Stage Society and the former also in New York, are ascribed to Shaw though unacknowledged by him.

Of Shaw's critical work we have in book form "The Perfect Wagnerite", 1895, and "The Quintessence of Ibsen", 1890, which championed two unpopular causes; "The Sanity of Art", 1908, attacking Nordau's theory of the degeneracy of artists; and two volumes of "Dramatic Opinions and Essays", which, although reviews of current plays of the nineties, retain a permanent value. Shaw's four early novels "Cashel Byron's Profession", "An Unsocial Socialist", "Love Among the Artists", and "The Irrational Knot" are of less interest than his plays.

His socialism has found expression in "The Common Sense of Municipal Trading" and "Fabian Essays in Socialism", and numerous other tracts and articles as well as most of his plays and prefaces.

Shaw's fugitive contributions to journalism are too numerous and scattered to be cited here, but I will mention a few of them that are of special interest: "The Case Against Chesterton" (Metropolitan, 1916); "The Case for Equality" (Metropolitan, 1913); "The German Case Against Germany" (New York Times, April 16, 1916).

More has been written about Shaw's personality than about all the rest of my "Twelve Major Prophets" put together. The chief and authorized biography is "George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Work" by Professor Archibald Henderson of the University of North Carolina. (Cincinnati: Stewart and Kidd, 1911.) It contains a full bibliography up to its date and some twenty portraits as well as much inaccessible and unpublished material. Besides this we have:

"George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Joseph McCabe (London: Paul, French, Trubner, 1914); "Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Percival P. Howe (Dodd, Mead, 1915); "George Bernard Shaw" by G. K. Chesterton (John Lane, 1909); "Bernard Shaw as Artist-Philosopher", an exposition of Shavianism, by Renée M. Deacon (John Lane, 1910); "George Bernard Shaw: His Plays" by H. L. Mencken (Luce, 1909); "Bernard Shaw" by Holbrook Jackson (Jacobs, 1907); and "The Innocence of Bernard Shaw" by D. Scott (Doran, 1914).

Latest of all is "Bernard Shaw: The Man and the Mask" by Richard Burton, a study of his plays in chronological order by the ex-president of the Drama League of America (Henry Holt, November, 1916).

"Bernard Shaw: An Epitaph" by John Palmer (London: Richards, 1915), "Harlequin or Patriot" (Century). Mr. Palmer comes to bury Shaw, not to praise him, yet gives him more credit than many of his admirers.

Biographical data and criticism are also to be found in Archibald Henderson's "European Dramatists" (Stewart and Kidd) and his "Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit" (Kennerley); Ford Madox Hueffer's "Memories and Impressions"; R. A. Scott-James's "Personality in Literature" which also contains sketches of Wells and Chesterton (London: Seeker, 1913); E. E. Hale's "Dramatists of To-day" (Holt, 1911); J. G. Huneker's "Iconoclasts" (Scribner, 1905); Cyril Maude's "The Haymarket Theater"; Edward Pease's "History of the Fabian Society" (London, 1916); Herman Bernstein's "With Master Minds" (Universal Series Co., New York, 1913); and "Bernard Shaw et son oeuvre" by Professor Cestre of the University of Bordeaux (Mercure de France, 1912).

Augustine F. Hamon, who has translated many of Shaw's plays into French, has published the lectures he gave on them at the Sorbonne in the volume "Le Molière du XXe siècle" (Paris: Figuière, 1913) which has been translated "The Twentieth Century Molière" (Stokes, 1915), and a separate chapter of it as "The Technique of Bernard Shaw's Plays" (London: Daniel, 1912).

The following articles on Shaw are noteworthy for one reason or another:

"Shaw Contra Mundum" by C. B. Chilton inThe Independent, March 8, 1906, with a sharp retort by Shaw; Personal reminiscences by Frank Harris inPearson's, 1916; Controversies of Shaw with Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton inThe New Witness, 1916; "Bernard Shaw, Musician" by Florence Boylston Pelo inThe Bookman, March, 1916; "Shaw in Portrait and Caricature" by H. Jackson inThe Idler, 1908; "Shavian Religion" by the Rev. P. Gavan Duffy inThe Century, vol. 87, p. 908; "Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy" by A. K. Rogers inHibbert Journal, 1910; "George Bernard Shaw" by D. A. Lord inCatholic World, March and April, 1916; "Bernard Shaw et la guerre" by Christabel Pankhurst inLa Revue, 1915; "The Philosophy of Shaw" by Archibald Henderson inAtlantic, vol. 103, p. 227; "Die Quintessenz des Shawismus" by Helene Richter (Leipzig, 1913); "Bernard Shaw" by Julius Bab (Berlin: Fischer).

The ingenious Allen Upward has written a futuristic satire on Shaw in the form of a play: "Paradise Found or the Superman Found Out" (Houghton Mifflin, 1915). In Act I The Sleeper Wakes, à la Wells, two hundred years hence, finding himself in the Shaw Memorial Hall in the custody of the Most Noble Order of Hereditary Fabians, chief of whom are the Lady Wells and the Lord Keir-Hardie. The second act is set in the Headquarters of the Anti-Shavian League, which the awakened and disillusionized Shaw joins. The third act is in the Cabinet of H. V. M. Maharajah Sri Singh Bahadar, for of course India outvoted England as soon as universal suffrage was introduced into the British Empire.

[1]Published by Brentano's, 1904.

[2]Published by Brentano's, 1909.

[3]Mr. McCabe, in his life of Shaw, gives an interesting account of one of these addresses, that on "Christian Economics" at the City Temple in 1913. But Shaw is too much of a Christian still to suit McCabe.

[4]See for instance Shaw's book on "The Common Sense of Municipal Trading", based upon his experience as Vestryman and Borough Councillor.

[5]Pease, in his "History of the Fabian Society", gives an interesting account of these diverse movements which in their inception were closely allied. See also Knight's "Memorials of Thomas Davidson: the Wandering Scholar" and James' delightful sketch, "The Knight-Errant of the Intellectual Life", in his posthumous volume of "Memories and Studies."

[6]Printed in The Independent, July 28, 1910.

[7]For Shaw's opinions on phonetics see "Pygmalion", "Captain Brassbound's Conversion", and Henderson's biography, p. 326.

[8]Von unmusikalischen England und seiner musikalischen Heilsarmee. Deutscher Wille, February, 1916.

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).

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, ThatI will do whatsoeverI think to be most to God's glory and my own good, profit and pleasure, onTHE 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—whateverdifficultiesI 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 socialdébâcle. 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."

"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]

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 theContinental Timesof 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, 1902I 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, 1915They 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]

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 fromHarper'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 theSaturday 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.

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