III. Socialism "True and False"
IV. The Philosophy of the New Republican
A natural pause appears to have come in the career of Mr. H.G. Wells.After so many years of travelling up and down through time and space,familiarizing himself with all the various parts of the solar system andpresenting himself imaginatively at all the various geological epochs,from the Stone Age to the end of the world, he has for good and alldomesticated himself in his own planet and point of time. This gradualprocess of slowing down, so to speak, had been evident from the momentof his first appearance. The most obvious fact about his romances ofscience, considered as a series, is that each one more nearly approachedthe epoch in which we live, and the realities of this epoch. From theyear A.D. 802, 701, witnessed in his first romance by the TimeTraveller, we found ourselves at last in the presence of a decade onlyso remote as that[Pg 10] of the war which has now befallen Europe. A similartendency in his novels has been equally marked. The possibilities ofscience and socialism have received a diminishing attention relativelybeside the possibilities of human reaction to science and socialism. Itis individual men and women, and the motives and personalities ofindividual men and women, which now concern him. Still retaining theentire planet as the playground of his ideas, still upholding scienceand socialism as his essential heroes, he has been driven by experienceto approach these things through human nature as it is. In a recentessay he has told us not to expect any more dramatic novelties: for thepresent at any rate our business must be to make science and socialismfeel at home. Whether or not this may stand as a general diagnosis ofour epoch, it is a remarkable confession with regard to his own place init. For it signifies nothing less than that he has reached the limit ofhis own circle of ideas and finished his own pioneering, and that hiswork for the future will be to relate the discoveries of his youth withhuman experience. He is no[Pg 11] longer a "new voice"; his work belongs, forgood or ill, to history and literature, and he presents himself fromthis time forward as a humanist.
In this new posture Wells does not stand alone. He is typical of anentire generation of Englishmen that knows not Oxford, a generationwhich has been busy with all manner of significant movements anddiscoveries, too busy indeed to relate them to the common reason ofhumankind. During these years the word "academic" has been outlawed;naturally so, for the academic mind is to the creative mind what thedigestive system is to the human body: a period of en