a flat one. Cyrano de Bergerac or Baron Munchausen, or other
typical men of science, had treated the moon as a mere flat silver
mirror in which Man saw his own image--the Man in the Moon. Wells
treated the moon as a globe, like our own; bringing forth monsters as
moonish as we are earthy. The exquisitely penetrating political and
social satire he afterwards wrote belongs to an age later than the
Victorian. But because, even from the beginning, his whole trend was
Socialist, it is right to place him here.

While the old Victorian ideas were being disturbed by an increasing
torture at home, they were also intoxicated by a new romance from
abroad. It did not come from Italy with Rossetti and Browning, or from
Persia with Fitzgerald: but it came from countries as remote, countries
which were (as the simple phrase of that period ran) "painted red" on
the map. It was an attempt to reform England through the newer nations;
by the criticism of the forgotten colonies, rather than of the forgotten
classes. Both Socialism and Imperialism were utterly alien to the
Victorian idea. From the point of view of a Victorian aristocrat like
Palmerston, Socialism would be the cheek of gutter snipes; Imperialism
would be the intrusion of cads. But cads are not alone concerned.

Broadly, the phase in which the Victorian epoch closed was what can only
be called the Imperialist phase. Between that and us stands a very
individual artist who must nevertheless be connected with that phase. As
I said at the beginning, Macaulay (or, rather, the mind Macaulay shared
with most of his powerful middle class) remains as a sort of pavement or
flat foundation under all the Victorians. They discussed the dogmas
rather than denied them. Now one of the dogmas of Macaulay was the dogma
of progress. A fair statement of the truth in it is not really so hard.
Investigation of anything naturally takes some little time. It takes
some time to sort letters so as to find a letter: it takes some time to
test a gas-bracket so as to find the leak; it takes some time to sift
evidence so as to find the truth. Now the curse that fell on the later
Victorians was this: that they began to value the time more than the
truth. One felt so secretarial when sorting letters that one never found
the letter; one felt so scientific in explaining gas that one never
found the leak; and one felt so judicial, so impartial, in weighing
evidence that one had to be bribed to come to any concl