The War in the Air definitely disclosed a change of method that was adumbrated in its predecessor. The agent of experience is still retained in the person of Bert Smallways, but the restrictions imposed by the report of an eye-witness have become too limiting, and, like Hardy in The Dynasts, Mr Wells alternates between a near and a distant vision. The Welt-Politik could not be explained through the intelligence of a "little Cockney cad," even though he was "by no means a stupid person and up to a certain limit not badly educated"; and the general development of the world-war, the account of the collapse of the credit system and all such large and general effects necessitated the broad treatment of the historian. So the intimate, personal narrative of Smallways' adventures is occasionally dropped for a few pages; Mr Wells shuts off his magic-lantern and fills the interval with an analysis of larger issues.

And the issues are so vital, the dénouement so increasingly probable, that, despite all the exaggerations necessary in a fiction of this kind, the warning contained in this account of a world-war is one that must remain in the minds of any thoughtful reader. Smallways' pert reflection on the causes of the immense downfall represents the wisdom that comes of bitter experience, and the application of it is very pertinent to present conditions. "There was us in Europe all at sixes and sevens with our silly flags and our silly newspapers raggin' us up against each other and keepin' us apart," says Smallways, and for the briefest analysis of causes that continually threaten us with all the useless horrors of war, the summary could scarcely be bettered.

Indeed, I think that The War in the Air is the greatest of Mr Wells' achievements in fantasy that has a deeper purpose than mere amusement. The story is absorbing and Smallways a perfectly conceived character, recommendations that serve to popularise the book as a romance; but all the art of the construction is relevant to the theme, and to the logical issue which is faced unflinchingly. In the many wild prophecies that have been incorporated in various stories of a great European war, there has been discoverable now and again some hint of insight into the real dangers that await mankind. But such stories as these degenerate into some accidental, but inferentially glorious, victory of British arms, and any value in the earlier comments is swamped in the sentimentality of the fortuitous, and designedly popular, sequel. In the book now under consideration the conception is too wide for any such lapses into the maudlin. British interests play an insignificant part in the drama. We have to consider war not as an incident in the history of a nation, but as a horrible disgrace in the history of humanity.

And war is the theme also of The World Set Free (1914), but it leads here to a theory of reconstruction of which we have no sight in the earlier work. The opening chapters describe the inception of the means, the discovery of the new source of energy—a perfectly reasonable conception—that led to the invention of the "atomic bomb," a thing so terribly powerful and continuous in its action that after the first free use of it in a European outbreak, war became impossible. As a romance, the book fails. The interest is not centred in a single character, and we are given somewhat disconnected glimpses of various phases in the discovery of the new energy, in its application, and of the catastrophes that follow its use as an instrument of destruction. The essay form has almost dominated the method of the novelist, and consequently the essential parable has not the same force as in The War in the Air. Nevertheless, the vision is there, obscured by reason of its more personal expression; and before I return to consider the three less pertinent romances interposed between those that have a more recognisable critical tendency, I wish to sum up the distinctive attitude of the four just considered.

And in this thing I claim that the conscious purpose of the artist is of comparatively small account. I may be doing Mr Wells an injustice, either by robbing him of the credit of a clearly conceived intention, or by reading into his books a deliberation which he might wish to disclaim. But my business is not justice to the author in this sense, but an interpretation—necessarily personal—of the message his books have conveyed to a particular reader. And the plain message that all these romances—including those that follow—have conveyed to me is the necessity for ridding the mind of traditions of the hypnotic suggestions of parents and early teachers, of the parochial influences of immediate surroundings, of the prejudices and self-interested dogmatisms and hyperboles of common literature, especially of the daily and weekly press; in order that we may, if only for an exercise in simple reason, dissociate ourselves for a moment from all those intimate forces, and regard life with the calmness of one detached from personal interests and desires. No human being who has not thus stood apart from life can claim to have realised himself; and in so far as he is unable thus to separate himself temporarily from his circumstances he confesses that he is less a personality than a bundle of reactions to familiar stimuli. But given that power of detachment, the reader may find in these four books matter for the reconsideration of the whole social problem. Whether he accept such tentative reconstructions as those suggested in The World Set Free or In the Days of the Comet is relatively unimportant, the essential thing is that he should view life with momentarily undistracted eyes; and see both the failures of our civilisation and its potentialities for a finer and more gracious existence....

The First Men in the Moon (1901) is little more than a piece of sheer exuberance. The theory of the means to the adventure and the experience itself are both plausible. There are a few minor discrepancies, but when the chief assumption is granted the deductions will all stand examination. The invention of cavorite, the substance that is impervious to the force—whatever it may be—of gravitation, as other substances are impervious to light, heat, sound or electricity, is not a priori impossible, nor is the theory that the moon is hollow, that the "Selenites" live below the surface, or that evolution has produced on our satellite an intelligent form which, anatomically, is more nearly allied to the insect than to the vertebrate type as we know it. The exposition of lunar social conditions cannot be taken very seriously. Specialisation is the key-note; the production by education and training, of minds, and, as far as possible, bodies, adapted to a particular end, and incapable of performing other technical functions. The picture of this highly developed state, however, is not such as would tempt us to emulation. As a machine it works; as an ideal it lacks any presentation of the thing we call beauty. The apotheosis of intelligence in the concrete example leaves us unambitious in that direction.

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