oil of war, I am vividly conscious of having had my mind prepared
for it by the material I have here so inadequately described. All the
misunderstandings, the weaknesses, the noisy, meaningless ambitions,
the tepid acceptance of traditional standards, have been exposed by Mr
Wells in these fantasies of his. And in _The War in the Air_, with
just such exaggerations as are necessary for a fiction of this kind,
he has forecast the conditions which have now overtaken us. We
know--or we might know if we had the capacity for any sort of
consequent consideration of our conditions--that in a reasonably
conducted civilisation no such awful catastrophe as this senseless
conflagration could have been possible. No doubt we shall profit by
the lesson, but it is one that any individual might have learned for
himself from these romances, without paying the fearful price that is
now necessary. And because humanity is apt to forget its most drastic
punishments, to revert to its original inertia as soon as the smart is
healed, I feel that when the worst is over, these books will have a
greater value than ever before. I believe that in them may be found
just those essentials of detachment and broad vision which might serve
to promote a higher and more stable civilisation.

III

THE NOVELS

I am willing to maintain that H.G. Wells is second to none as a writer
of romances of the type I have just examined. I am less certain of his
position as a novelist. He brings to his fiction the open-eyed
recognition of realities, the fine analysis of modern conditions, the
lucid consequent thought and the clean, graphic style that mark the
qualities of his other method; he has that "poetic gift, the gift of
the creative and illuminating phrase," which, he has said, "alone
justifies writing"; but he has not the power of creating characters
that stand for some essential type of humanity. On the one hand he is
inclined to idealise the engineer and the scientific researcher, on
the other to satirise and, in effect, to group into one
sloppy-thinking mass every other kind of Englishman, not excepting
philosophers, politicians and social reformers. This broad
generalisation omits any consideration of the merely uneducated, such
as Hoopdriver or Kipps, and the many women he has drawn. But the
former, however sympathetically treated, are certainly not idealised;
and among the latter, the only real creation, in my opinion, is Susan
Ponderevo in _Tono