H. G. Wells | Page 7

saw
beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they had
but to believe and the old miseries vanished. In the old days men
preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an asceticism
such as that of St Simon Stylites. The lesson--I cannot deny that the
book is didactic--of the change wrought by the comet is that man
should find the full expression of his personality in sympathy and
understanding. The egotism remains, but it works to a collective end....
War is necessarily touched upon in this book as an inevitable corollary
to the problems of personal and a fortiori of national property; but the
real counterblast against wholesale fratricide was reserved for the
following romance, published in 1908.

The War in the Air definitely disclosed a change of method that was
adumbrated in its predecessor. The agent of experience is still retained
in the person of Bert Smallways, but the restrictions imposed by the
report of an eye-witness have become too limiting, and, like Hardy in
The Dynasts, Mr Wells alternates between a near and a distant vision.
The Welt-Politik could not be explained through the intelligence of a
"little Cockney cad," even though he was "by no means a stupid person
and up to a certain limit not badly educated"; and the general
development of the world-war, the account of the collapse of the credit
system and all such large and general effects necessitated the broad
treatment of the historian. So the intimate, personal narrative of
Smallways' adventures is occasionally dropped for a few pages; Mr
Wells shuts off his magic-lantern and fills the interval with an analysis
of larger issues.
And the issues are so vital, the dénouement so increasingly probable,
that, despite all the exaggerations necessary in a fiction of this kind, the
warning contained in this account of a world-war is one that must
remain in the minds of any thoughtful reader. Smallways' pert
reflection on the causes of the immense downfall represents the
wisdom that comes of bitter experience, and the application of it is very
pertinent to present conditions. "There was us in Europe all at sixes and
sevens with our silly flags and our silly newspapers raggin' us up
against each other and keepin' us apart," says Smallways, and for the
briefest analysis of causes that continually threaten us with all the
useless horrors of war, the summary could scarcely be bettered.
Indeed, I think that The War in the Air is the greatest of Mr Wells'
achievements in fantasy that has a deeper purpose than mere
amusement. The story is absorbing and Smallways a perfectly
conceived character, recommendations that serve to popularise the
book as a romance; but all the art of the construction is relevant to the
theme, and to the logical issue which is faced unflinchingly. In the
many wild prophecies that have been incorporated in various stories of
a great European war, there has been discoverable now and again some
hint of insight into the real dangers that await mankind. But such
stories as these degenerate into some accidental, but inferentially

glorious, victory of British arms, and any value in the earlier comments
is swamped in the sentimentality of the fortuitous, and designedly
popular, sequel. In the book now under consideration the conception is
too wide for any such lapses into the maudlin. British interests play an
insignificant part in the drama. We have to consider war not as an
incident in the history of a nation, but as a horrible disgrace in the
history of humanity.
And war is the theme also of The World Set Free (1914), but it leads
here to a theory of reconstruction of which we have no sight in the
earlier work. The opening chapters describe the inception of the means,
the discovery of the new source of energy--a perfectly reasonable
conception--that led to the invention of the "atomic bomb," a thing so
terribly powerful and continuous in its action that after the first free use
of it in a European outbreak, war became impossible. As a romance, the
book fails. The interest is not centred in a single character, and we are
given somewhat disconnected glimpses of various phases in the
discovery of the new energy, in its application, and of the catastrophes
that follow its use as an instrument of destruction. The essay form has
almost dominated the method of the novelist, and consequently the
essential parable has not the same force as in The War in the Air.
Nevertheless, the vision is there, obscured by reason of its more
personal expression; and before I return to consider the three less
pertinent romances interposed between those that have a more
recognisable critical tendency, I wish to sum up the distinctive attitude
of the four