been told that Mr. Wells was never able to put forward a
coherent program, to state an intelligible case--but all that I know
for certain is that it was not intelligible to the Fabians. It is
probable enough that his program, as a program, was defective, for
whilst it is perfectly easy to define a simple, definite, not widely
inclusive policy of action, it is far harder to define that side of
the life of a nation which belongs to temperament and instinct. This
was what Mr. Wells had in mind; but the social reformers to whom he
addressed himself preferred a definite scheme touching the surface of
life to an indefinite scheme which aimed at the centre. So Mr. Wells
ceased to be a Fabian, and became a Tory-Socialist.

I suggest that Mr. Wells' life and activity may be taken as symbolical
of the life of his time. He has told his own story again and again in
his novels; it is his own story that he has been telling when he
unfolds his ideas about the society in which we live. He, more than
any other considerable living writer, seems to have been born to
realise within the microcosm of his own experience the social
evolution which most of us see in the macrocosm of the nation--an
evolution which has been _observed_ by Mr. Bennett with equal
clearness, but in a less personal and subjective way, with more
detachment. All of us know from the study of history in what way
England has changed in the last hundred years--how scientific thought
suddenly gained a new importance when it was applied to industry--how
the shell of feudalism survived its vitality when the great factory
towns began to dominate the country--how all the classes were shuffled
and left unsettled--how the cities spread out in disorderly suburbs
and slums, without plan or direction--how men and women became factory
workers and office workers without knowing why, most of them scantily
educated, housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit, and
flung into the maelstrom of competitive labour. All this we knew in a
certain sense, but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us
aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible
effective way, the imaginative way. It may almost be said that he gave
it to us as an impressionistic account of his own life. He had lived
in all this; the social system, or lack of system, had expressed
itself in him; and finally he became conscious of all those elements
about him and in him which had left their dee