es
really take himself and his message seriously, and from first to last
conceives himself as the apostle of a tremendous creed. Among many other
things which they have in common, these writers have manifested the
tendency to regard all who ever went before them as, in a certain sense,
thieves and robbers; at least they give one the impression that the
present has little need for long lingering over the past. Mr. Wells, for
instance, cannot find words strong enough to describe the emancipation
of the modern young man from Mr. Kipling with his old-fashioned
injunction, "Keep ye the law." There are certain laws which Mr. Wells
proclaims on the housetops that he sees no necessity for keeping, and so
Mr. Kipling is buried under piles of opprobrium--"the tumult and the
bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and the
inconsistency," and so on. As for Mr. Bernard Shaw, we all know his own
view of the relation in which he stands to William Shakespeare.

Mr. Wells has written many interesting books, and much could be said of
him from the point of view of science, or of style, or of social theory.
That, however, is not our present concern, either with him or with Mr.
Shaw. It is as idealist or pagan influences that we are discussing them
and the others. Mr. Wells boasts a new morality in his books, and Mr.
Shaw in his plays. One feels the same startling sense of a _volte face_
in morality as a young recruit is said to do when he finds all the
precepts of his childhood reversed by the ethics of his first
battlefield. Each in his own way falls back upon crude and primitive
instincts and justifies them.[5]

Mr. Wells takes the change with zest, and seems to treat the adoption of
a new morality in the same light-hearted spirit as he might consider the
buying of a new hat. From the first he has a terrifying way of dealing
familiarly with vast things. Somehow he reminds one of those jugglers
who, for a time, toss heavy balls about, and then suddenly astonish the
audience by introducing a handkerchief, which flies lightly among its
ponderous companions. So Mr. Wells began to juggle with worlds. He has
latterly introduced that delicate thing, the human soul and conscience,
into the play, and you see it precariously fluttering among the
immensities of leaping planets. He persuades himself that the common
morality has not gripped people, and that they really don't believe in
it at all. He aims at a way of thinking which