H. G. Wells | Page 8

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