FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41  
42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   >>  
ly obvious world. We come, finally, without any suggestion of climax, to _The Food of the Gods_ (1904). The food was produced, casually in the first instance, by two experimenters who served no cause but that of their own inquisitive science. One of them, Redwood, had become intrigued by the fact that the growth of all living things proceeded with bursts and intermissions; it was as if they had "to accumulate force to grow, grew with vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space before they could go on growing again." And Bensington, the other experimenter, succeeded in separating a food that produced regular instead of intermittent growth. It was universal in its effects, influencing vegetable as well as animal life; and in the course of twenty years it produced human giants, forty feet high. This is a theme for Mr Wells to revel in, and he does, treating the detail of the first two-thirds of the book with a fine realism. Like Bensington, he saw, "behind the grotesque shapes and accidents of the present, the coming world of giants and all the mighty things the future has in store--vague and splendid, like some glittering palace seen suddenly in the passing of a sunbeam far away." The parable is plain enough, but the application of it weakens when we realise that so far as the merely physical development goes, the food of the gods is only bringing about a change of scale. If we grant that this "insurgent bigness" must conquer the world, the final result is only humanity in the same relation to life that it now occupies, and we are left to reflect with Bensington, after the vision had faded, on "sinister shadows, vast declivities and darknesses, inhospitable immensities, cold, wild and terrible things." The change of scale, however, so long as it was changing, presents in another metaphor the old contrasts. The young giants, the Cossars and Redwood, looking down on common humanity from a vantage-point some thirty to forty feet higher than the "little people," are critical by force of circumstances; and they are at the same time handicapped by an inability to comprehend the thing criticised. They are too differentiated; and for the purpose of the fable none of them is gifted with the power to study these insects with the sympathy of a Henri Fabre. We may find some quality of blundering stupidity in the Cossars and in young Redwood, they were too prejudiced by their physical scale; but the simple Caddles, bo
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41  
42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   >>  



Top keywords:
Bensington
 

giants

 

things

 

produced

 

Redwood

 
growth
 
humanity
 

physical

 
change
 

Cossars


reflect

 

inhospitable

 
immensities
 

shadows

 
sinister
 

vision

 
darknesses
 
declivities
 

bringing

 

development


application

 

weakens

 

realise

 

result

 

relation

 

occupies

 

conquer

 

insurgent

 

bigness

 

thirty


gifted

 
insects
 

criticised

 

differentiated

 

purpose

 
sympathy
 

prejudiced

 
simple
 

Caddles

 
stupidity

blundering
 

quality

 
comprehend
 
inability
 

contrasts

 

common

 
metaphor
 

changing

 
presents
 

vantage