H. G. Wells | Page 6

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