H. G. Wells | Page 4

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