H. G. Wells | Page 8

just considered.
And in this thing I claim that the conscious purpose of the artist is of
comparatively small account. I may be doing Mr Wells an injustice,
either by robbing him of the credit of a clearly conceived intention, or
by reading into his books a deliberation which he might wish to
disclaim. But my business is 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