type of machine from any that has appeared; but his visualisation of aerial warfare turned out to be strangely correct.

Then after twenty years of looking forward over the history of the world from the moment in which he happened to be writing, he turned back and surveyed it from its beginnings. This wonderful book-which phrase I use without forgetting its defects-is certainly the work of a man whose chief interest lies in the future. Mr. Wells sets about all the past ages with just so much zest as he might find in tidying a cluttered writing-table. It would have been considerably better if in several places he had adopted a different point of view. But, in spite of its defects, it was very much better that The Outline of History should have been written than that it should not; and who else could have done it with so much chance of success and influence? This is among his perishable works, for others, it can hardly be doubted, will follow him and rewrite his history without his peculiar biases. has established the framework, as it has never yet been done, since, under the influence of Ranke, history took on the methods of science, multiplied its material a hundredfold and passed out of the hands of men of letters and imagination.

But he

The radical fault of the Outline is, of course, merely its impatience. One seems to hear Mr. Wells saying: You talk of your Greece and Rome! Poor fools, who had not even enough wit to invent the Penny Post! Mankind has been on the earth some twenty thousand years and even now (for to such details does his Utopia condescend) the practice is not universal of rounding the corners of rooms and the edges of floors and ceilings for convenience in dusting. It is an unfortunate fact

that Mr. Wells often seems to find himself in the position of scold to the entire human race.

66

In an impatient man, a man always in a hurry, we are not surprised to find the allied defect of instability. Some one once said that it was Mr. Wells's habit "to conduct his own education in public": he himself, I believe, invented the expression provisional thinking." One sometimes wishes that he could educate himself a little more privately, that he would keep his provisional thoughts a little longer in his notebook. But he is a man of ideas; and when he has an idea to express he proceeds to express it with all his persuasive powers. A disciple would be hard put

to it to ascertain his final views on the sexproblems he has so often solved. The just men made perfect by an unknown gas in a comet's tail admit a sort of group-marriage as a conceivable solution of some of them. The hero of The New Machiavelli seems to arrive at a comparative chastity by a process of trial and error. George Ponderevo's love-affair with Beatrice is a justificatory study in æsthetic sensuality. Peter's trials and errors with Hettie are severely reprobated. And, one may be allowed to observe, if the propagation of right ideas can do any good then the propagation of wrong ideas must do harm. All the ideas Mr. Wells has put forward on political and social topics cannot be right.

His defence might be that the good done by right ideas is greater than all the harm wrong ideas can ever do. It is perhaps at any rate a tolerable defence that he is a man of many ideas. His impatience, his restlessness, and his haste carry him incessantly round the modern world and nothing that is topical is alien to him: there is

no subject which may not inspire him to demand of the thinking public that it should stop and think about it. Even where he causes repulsion, as his glib and facile assertions often do, that is of itself a stimulus to thought.

In this brief essay I have omitted much I should have liked to include. I have said next to nothing, for example, of his humour, of the rollicking adventures of Kipps and Mr. Polly, or of the malicious but admirably satirical portrait gallery which is contained in The New Machiavelli. I have said nothing of his gift of descriptive phrase, which can illuminate the dreariest argument. But it would be pusillanimous to close a study of so eminent a prophet without some prophecy of his future reputation. This will, I imagine, resemble very closely one of those eighteenth-century reputations which have not many books to show in justification of themselves. Mr. Wells will seem to have been a great figure in the intellectual life of his time; but his books will be ruthlessly winnowed. I should select for possible survival The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Food of the Gods, The Invisible Man and, perhaps, The Time Machine, Tono-Bungay, and Mr. Polly, and possibly all the short stories collected with The Country of the Blind, but certainly that one and The Green Door. I think future readers will pay as much and as little attention to Ann Veronica and the rest of them as we do to the tragedies of Voltaire: students will read them in order to be able to declare that no one else need do so. For the rest-a vigorous and restless thinker who powerfully disturbed the waters of his generation.

Reflections on the Recent History of the English Novel

MR. LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE has remarked, in his study of Mr. Hardy, that the novel is the most recent growth in literature. Mr. Max Beerbohm drives this home by his translation of Dr. Johnson's comparison of eighteenth-century sermon-writers into a comparison of modern novelists. "Yes, sir,' some great pundit may be telling a disciple at this moment, Wells is one of the best, Galsworthy is one of the best, if you except his concern for delicacy of style. Mrs. Ward has a very firm grasp of problems, but is not very creational.Caine's books are very edifying. I should like to read all that Caine has written. Miss Corelli, too, is very edifying. And you may add Upton Sinclair.' We do not, so runs Mr. Beerbohm's moral, read sermons much to-day. Will our descendants in the next century look back on our novels and our painstaking discriminations between this novelist and that as something incomprehensible and slightly amusing? For this latest growth of time has not had the long history it might have had, and it may disappear as it came. Between the Satyricon and Clarissa the form was invented and reinvented often enough; but no generation, until the second half of the eighteenth century, was so deeply impressed by its possibilities as to explore them. Then all the world began to write novels, including the greatest men of the time-Goethe, Rousseau, Scott. Within a hundred years it was the chief medium of literary expression in all Western

countries. Now we are receiving novels from every people on the earth-Hindu novels and Japanese novels and Negro novels.

It must always be remembered that the cascade of prose fiction which flows spring and autumn from the presses is not invariably due to the unaided working of the time-spirit in the minds of authors. The modern public is willing to devour novels: it is not willing to devour much else: it is supplied with novels. The individual drops in the flood are not often created by a quite spontaneous impulse in the writer, even when he is a serious and conscientious artist. It is said that nowadays the author who has written even a very promising first novel will find some difficulty in getting it published. It is certain that the author of any other kind of first book is in a far worse position. Therefore the man with ideas to express, equally with the man who has a career to make, is led to the novel -because the novel is undoubtedly more in demand than any other form of literature.

Moreover, sordid as the thought may seem, it means money. The writer of verses, if he has a reputation and can find a publisher and has a little luck besides, may earn enough by the publication of his biennial volume to keep him in cigarettes for one out of the two years. The number of men under fifty who have earned enough by a collection of poems to buy a cottage could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Some writers (not many) do actually live on the proceeds of their novels. Others, who, if left to themselves, would never attempt the form of prose fiction, are driven to do so in the hope, if not of making their fortunes, then at least of augmenting their incomes. It is, apart from periodical journalism, the most serious and probable