slowly in a field. . . . Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk together!"

That is the burden of his latest novel. By this touchstone he has come to measure the possibility of that openness of mind, that mutual understanding, that ventilation of life and thought through which alone the Great State can exist.

I

CHAPTER VI

A PERSONAL CHAPTER

DOUBT if there are many living men of

note who, a generation after they are dead, will be so fully and easily "explained" as H. G. Wells. He is a most personal and transparent writer, he is the effect of conditions and forces which have existed for scarcely more than two generations. But for these very reasons it is very difficult to see him in perspective, and to explain him would be to explain the age in which we live. Let me at least give certain facts and reflections about his life written by Wells himself, a few years ago, in the introduction to a Russian translation of his writings:

I was born in that queer indefinite class that we call in England the middle class. I am not a bit aristocratic; I do not know any of my ancestors beyond *September 21, 1866.

my grandparents, and about them I do not know very much, because I am the youngest son of my father and mother and their parents were all dead before I was born. My mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at a place called Midhurst, who supplied post-horses to the coaches before the railways came; my father was the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penshurst Castle, in Kent. They had various changes of fortune and position; for most of his life my father kept a little shop in a suburb of London, and eked out his resources by playing a game called cricket, which is not only a pastime, but a show which people will pay to see, and which, therefore, affords a living to professional players. His shop was unsuccessful, and my mother, who had been a lady's maid, became, when I was twelve years old, housekeeper in a large country house. I too was destined to be a shopkeeper. I left school at thirteen for that purpose. I was apprenticed first to a chemist, and, that proving unsatisfactory, to a draper. But after a year or so it became evident to me that the facilities that were and still are increasing in England offered me better chances in life than a shop and comparative illiteracy could do; and so I struggled for and got various grants and scholarships that enabled me to study and take a degree in science and some mediocre honors in the new and now great and growing University of London. After I had graduated I taught biology for two or three years, and then became a journalist.

I began first to write literary ar

ticles, criticisms, and so forth, and presently short imag

inative stories in which I made use of the teeming suggestions of modern science.

So much for the facts. The reflections are not less illuminating:

The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure. Success with a book-even such a commercially modest success as mine has been-means in the Englishspeaking world not merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost freedom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted out of his narrow circumstances into familiar and unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people. He sees the world; if his work excites interest, he meets philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the great, and he may make such use of them as he can. He finds himself no longer reading in books and papers, but hearing and touching at first hand the big questions that sway men, the initiatives that shape human affairs. To be a literary artist is to want to render one's impressions of the things about one. Life has interested me enormously and filled me with ideas and associations I want to present again. I have liked life and like it more and more. The days in the shop and the servants' hall, the straitened struggles of my early manhood, have stored me with vivid. memories that illuminate and help me to appreciate all the wider vistas of my later social experiences. I have friends and intimates now at almost every social level, from that of a peer to that of a pauper, and I find my

sympathies and curiosities stretching like a thin spider's web from top to bottom of the social tangle. I count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents of my life, and another is that I am of a diffident and ineffectual presence, unpunctual, fitful, and easily bored by other than literary effort; so that I am not tempted to cut a figure in the world and abandon that work of observing and writing which is my proper business in it.

This candid and exact statement enables us to see just how far, in matters of fact, experience and belief, the autobiographical motive has entered his writings. It would be possible to show how inevitably such an ideal as that of the New Republican Samurai arose from such a life; how much that conscious and deliberate insistence on personal efficiency and orderly ways, that repudiation of mental confusion, sluggishness, and sentiment may figure as a kind of stepping-stone from the world of Kipps and Polly to the world of Remington and Trafford; how a self-wrought scientific education would form the basis of an ideal of aristocracy rising from it; and how the motto "There is no Being but Becoming" would express its own constant desertion of levels