A Modern Utopia. H. G. Wells

set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself." In opposition to this is "the legislative, creative, organizing, masterful type," which is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things; it is constructive and "interprets the present and gives value to this or that entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen." The use of the term "legislative" for this latter type is confusing, at least to an American, because unfortunately most of our legislators are lawyers and have minds of the legal or conventional type. "Scientific" would be a better term than 'legislative," because most of our real revolutions in thought and industry originate in the laboratory.

      In his Modern Utopia Wells introduces a more complete classification of mankind into (1) the Poetic, that is, the creative and original genius, often erratic or abnormal; (2) the Kinetic, that is, the efficient, energetic, "business man" type; (3) the Dull, "the people who never seem to learn thoroughly or hear distinctly or think clearly," and (4) the Base, those deficient in moral sense. The first two categories of Wells, the Poetic and Kinetic, correspond roughly to Ostwald's Romanticist and Classicist types of scientific men. I have laid stress upon Wells's point of view and classification of temperaments because it seems to me that it gives the clue to his literary work. This is voluminous and remarkably varied, yet thru all its forms can be traced certain simple leading motives. Indeed I am unable to resist the temptation to formulate his favorite theme as: The reaction of society against a disturbing force.

      This certainly is the basic idea of much of his work and most of the best of it. He hit upon it early and he has repeated it in endless variations since. The disturbing force may be an individual of the creative or poetic type, an overpowering passion, a new idea, a social organization or a material change in the conditions of life. Whatever it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual, or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible. Usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is necessary, even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and the retardation of progress. Certainly no one is good enough or wise enough to be trusted with irresponsible power. This is the lesson of The Invisible Man. We all have been struck, probably, by a thought of the advantages which personal invisibility would confer. It is one of the most valued of fairy gifts. But perhaps only Wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. Assuming that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in water, in what situation would he be? He would be naked, of course, and he could not carry anything in his hands or eat in public. If it were winter he would leave tracks and would catch cold and sneeze. So the invisible man who starts to rob and murder at his own sweet will is soon run down by boys, dogs and villagers as ignominiously as any common thief.

      A more artistic expression to the same theme is given in The Country of the Blind. A young man tumbled into an isolated valley of the Andes where lived a community which had thru some hereditary disease lost many generations ago the power of sight. The stranger first thought of the proverb, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king," but when he tried to demonstrate his superiority he found it impossible. His talk about "seeing" the natives held to be the ravings of a madman and his clumsiness in their dark houses as proof of defective senses. He was as much at a disadvantage in a community where everything is adapted to the sightless as a blind man is in ours. He falls in love with a girl, but before he is allowed to marry her he must be cured of his hallucinations; a simple surgical operation, the removal of the two irritable bodies protuberant from his brain, will restore him to normality, say the blind surgeons, and make a sane and useful citizen of him. The entreaties of his lady love are added to the coercion of public opinion to induce him to consent. The exceptional man is beaten, he must either conform to the community or leave it. No matter how the story ends. The true novelist and dramatist, like the true mathematician, finds his satisfaction in correctly stating a problem, not in working it out.

       The theme of these parables, the comparative powerlessness of the individual, however exceptionally endowed, against the coercive force of environment, Wells has developed at length in his novels; The New Machiavelli, for instance, where a statesman at the height of his public usefulness is overthrown and banished because he had succumbed to selfish passion and violated the moral code. Parnell is popularly supposed to be the model for this character rather more than the original Machiavelli, but it is, unfortunately, a type not rare either in history or fiction. Indeed this may be called the common plot of tragedy from the time when it began to be written, the vulnerable heel of Achilles, the little defect of character or ability that precipitates the catastrophe. In Wells's hands this motif takes most fantastic forms. There was, for example, The Man Who Could Work Miracles; "his name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott's"; "he was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a mustache with ends he twisted up and freckles." This unpromising looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly possessed of the power to make anything happen that he willed, but he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage. It brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. Mr. Fotheringay lived in Church Row, and since Mr. Wells lives in the same street he perhaps knew him personally. In The War of Worlds the earth is invaded by Martians, who are not in the least like those of Du Maurier or Professor Flournoy, but octopus like creatures as far above mankind in intellect and command of machinery as we are above the animals, supermen surpassing the imagination of Nietzsche. They stride over the earth in machines of impregnable armor and devastate town and country with searchlights projecting rays more destructive than those of radium and much like Bulwer-Lytton's "vril." They feed on human blood and, if humanity is not to perish or become as sheep to these invaders, men and women must take to sewers and such like hiding places and wage incessant warfare against overwhelming odds.

      In a passage that is to me the most gripping of anything Wells has written a few unconquerable spirits plan the life that mankind must lead under these terrible conditions, but they are relieved from the necessity of putting it into execution by the interposition of an unexpected ally in the form of the most minute of creatures, the microbe. The men from Mars not being immune to terrestrial diseases were annihilated by one of them. The formula remains the same although conditions are reversed in The First Men in the Moon, for men being naturally larger than the lunar people might be supposed to dominate them, but, on the contrary, the ant-like inhabitants of the moon conquer the earthly invaders.

      In The Wonderful Visit a curate goes out hunting for rare birds and shoots an angel on the wing. But the heavenly visitant does not play the role of the angel in Jerome's The Passing of the Third Floor Back and transform the character of all he meets. Wells's angel does not fit into the parish life and everybody is relieved when he disappears. The same idea, the reaction of conventional society toward the unusual, is illustrated by The Sea-Lady, where, instead of an angel from the sky, we have a mermaid from the ocean brought into the circle of a summer resort. Mr. Wells has said that by the sea-lady he meant to symbolize "love as a disturbing passion," the same theme as The New Machiavelli. It may be taken to mean that, of course, or half a dozen other things as well. We are at liberty to disregard Mr. Wells's interpretation if we like. It is not an author's business to explain what his works mean. In fact it seems a bit officious and impertinent for him to attempt it. How little would there be left of the great literature of the world if it were reduced to what the author literally and consciously had in mind when he wrote. The value of any work of art depends upon what may be got out of it, not what was put into it.

      The Food of the Gods is a case in point. These children who are fed on "boom-food" (presumably an extract from the pituitary body of the brain) and grow to gianthood may be taken to represent any new transforming force. If the story was conceived in Wells's earlier days he may have meant by it the power of science. If in the days of Anticipations he more likely had in mind efficiency or "scientific management." If when he was a member of the Fabian Society it doubtless