et passed over the earth,
and men, after a few hours of trance, awoke to a new realisation. We
come to a first knowledge of the change in one of the most beautiful
passages that Mr Wells has written; and although I dislike to spoil a
passage by setting it out unclothed by the idea and expectations which
have led to its expression, given it form, and fitted it to a just
place in the whole composition, I will make an exception in this case
in order to justify my metaphor of "normal sight." The supposed writer
of the description had just awakened from the trance induced by the
passing of the Comet. He says:

"I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of those drugged,
feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge. It was a
very glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes. It flowed along and
interlaced like splendid music. It was rich with lupin,
honeysuckle, campions and ragged robin; bed straw, hops and wild
clematis twined and hung among its branches, and all along its
ditch border the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces and
chorused in lines and masses. Never had I seen such a symphony of
note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves. And suddenly, in its
depths, I heard a chirrup and the whir of startled wings.

"Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty! And I
stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the
intricate delicacy before me and marvelling how richly God has
made his worlds...."

And not only the writer but also every other person on the earth had
been miraculously cured of their myopia and astigmatism. They saw
beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they
had but to believe and the old miseries vanished. In the old days men
preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an
asceticism such as that of St Simon Stylites. The lesson--I cannot
deny that the book is didactic--of the change wrought by the comet is
that man should find the full expression of his personality in
sympathy and understanding. The egotism remains, but it works to a
collective end....

War is necessarily touched upon in this book as an inevitable
corollary to the problems of personal and a fortiori of national
property; but the real counterblast against wholesale fratricide was
reserved for the following romance, published in 1908.

_The War in the Air_ definitely disclosed a change of method that wa