H. G. Wells | Page 3

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.