Herbert wells (1866-1946)

G. Wells is an outstanding representative of the late English critical realism at the turn of the century. The War of the Worlds is a scientific-sociological novel which, together with The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man {1897), The First Men in the Moon (1901) and several other novels, belongs to the first and best period of his work. These novels clothe the writer's scientific and sociological speculations in the form of entertaining fiction. Critical analysis of what capitalist civilization is, combines with the study of what civilization ought or might be.

Whilst still a schoolboy at Bromley Wells was engaged in vigorous literary activity, and the manuscript of a story that he wrote and illustrated at the age of twelve has been published in facsimile in America. During the years of apprenticeship and hard struggle in his teens he continued to write whenever he had an opportunity; at seventeen Wells wrote two stories; one was called Potted Onions and the other described the adventures of Otto Noxious, "explorer and Munchausen".

But Wells' main stimulus to literary creation came dur­ing his years as a student at the Royal College of Science. He helped to found the students' magazine, the Science School Journal, and was editor of the first few issues.

Behind the biting satire of which even in those early days Wells was a master, there were a real kindliness and a very evident sympathy towards his pupils, many of whom were struggling to obtain a university degree, an achievement not so easy and straightforward as it is today. But although Huxley remained his god, and conditioned his thinking for years to come, science and teaching were not much more than very uncertain stepping stones which led Wells in a di­rection quite opposite from the Normal School of Science.

The novel The War of the Worlds suggests that the devel­opment of science benefits society only on condition that the latter is built up on just and humane principles, other­wise progress is basically dangerous. The Martians coming from their planet to the Earth in order to enslave it, person­ify the cruel forces of capitalism. They possess engineering knowledge far superior to that of terrestrial men, their intel­lects are cool and unsympathetic. Human feelings of love, hatred, sorrow or happiness are completely foreign to them.

In The War of the Worlds the idea of a Martian invasion is developed. The Martians are creatures with hypertrophied intellect, unhuman and therefore unmerciful. They are, in this war, a breed of super-Robots.

The War of the Worlds is one of several books partially inspired by the impact of Darwin, but the most complete account of the possible development of man into something both "inhuman" and "ultra human" is to be found in The Time Machine.

Wells was conscious that The Time Machine was his most ambitious work so far and he wrote in December 1894: "It's my trump card and if it does not come off very much I shall know my place for the rest of my career."

Wells is a writer of symbolic fiction or a myth-maker.

The hero of The Time Machine is not a solitary eccentric, but an amiable and gregarious bourgeois. Like Wells himself, he appears to be informed and interested in the dominant in­tellectual movements of his age Darwinism.

Time Machine is not only a myth, but like many other considerable works of mod And despite the complexity of its thematic elements, Wells' art is such that the story is a skilfully wrought imaginative whole, a single image. The opposition of Eloi and Morlocks can be interpreted in terms of the late nineteenth-century class struggle, but it also reflects an opposition between aestheticism and utilitarianism, pastoralism and technology, contemplation and action, and ultimately, and least specifically, between beauty and ugliness, and light and darkness.

The Time Machine was very popular. V. S. Pritchett, one of the best of Wells' modern critics has said of it: “Without question The Time Machine is the best piece of writing. It will take its place among the great stories of our language.” Pritchett has in fact referred to The Time Machine as a poetic social allegory. But this “allegory” or “myth” does operate in social terms, its further significance is biological or even cosmological. But in any event, the work's mythical implications are only possible because of the primary of its structural and narrative qualities.

Wells brought to the so-called "scientific romances" tenderness in humour, and as a born master of character he could always adorn his picture of a merciless mechanical progress with a rare bloom of human comedy.

The First Man in the Moon shows one side of Wells's imagination at its highest point—his gift of being able to picture, almost to create, strange fancies, but which instead of being vague and dreamlike are oddly real and solid. It is essentially a poetic gift. He is taking a score of botanical memories, combining them, inverting them, varying them, and building them up into a shining visual beauty.

It was Wells' great gift to be able to take the romantic myth out of its literary setting and bring it into everyday life, thereby making it real.

Jules Verne had wondered whether his adventurers would find air to breathe on the moon, but Wells had no worries of that sort. No air—no story; so there was sure to be air. We soon find it—great masses like snow, frozen in the lunar night. Cavor and his companions look through the windows of the sphere at a sunrise on the moon. At last, with great excitement, they see the first signs of life.

Critics drew many comparisons with Jules Verne and if the ties were there, they were not very close. Wells used sci­entific ideas as a pure literary vehicle, an exercise in fantasy, the most attractive and original way of saying what he want­ed to say.

The contrast between Verne and Wells may be seen best by comparing in some detail their treatment of the same theme—the exploration of space.

Wells has none of Verne's caution and scruples. He takes a brilliant and daring short-cut and invents Cavorite—a ma­terial that is opaque to the force of gravity as wood is opaque to light.

How Wells worked in those early years! Between 1896 and 1897 The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man were completed, When the Sleeper Wakes begun, with Love and Mr. Lewisham in preparation, and at least four short stories including The Crystal Egg, A Story of the Stone Age, and that brilliant piece of imaginative projection The Star fin­ished.

The Island of Dr. Moreau was published in 1896. The critical reception of the book was far less favourable than that given to Wells's previous books. Some reviewers were so horrified by what they considered the blatant sensational­ism of the novel that they were quite unable to consider its literary merits.

Wells was irritated and perhaps surprised by these criti­cisms. In a magazine interview printed the following year he is reported as saying:

"I should say that The Island of Dr. Moreau, although it was written in a great hurry and is marred by many faults» is the best work I have done."

By the close of the first decade of the twentieth century Wells was more than an accepted man of letters in London and a keenly followed explorer in the avenues of social theory.

During the last year of the war Wells published Joan and Peter. It is a very long novel. It is partly a further record of Britain during the war, and partly a critical essay on mod­ern education. As an interpretation of the national temper during that terrific national strain it is intermittently pro­found. Both the war-critical and educational-constructional sides of this book may be harmonized if we regard it as a discourse on the British mind, its inertia in peace and its failure in war.

Wells published The Outline of History in 1920. It carries the stamp of his personality all over it, and is accordingly the most vivid history-book in the English language.

Wells did not content himself with preaching his doctrine of salvation through knowledge.

No living Englishman save Wells could have made this book (The Outline of History). Where else would be found such terrific energy, such fertility of mind, such an easy flow of luminous, descriptive prose?

There had been essays in "history as a whole" before, but never of this range and vision, never giving such quality of expression to such carefully garnered stores of information; of course some of the individual historical judgments are questioned. That was inevitable. The point is that for aver­age man who wants to discover how man lived, fought, thought, this is an answer.

In 1920 Wells published the Outline and Russia in the Shadow, the result of a personal investigation. Wells was attracted by the "realism" of the Russians displayed in their resolute pursuit of discipline; "the Bolsheviks found a coun­try in anarchic ruin and employed stern methods to fashion a proper order; their policy had the merits of zeal."

H. G. Wells died in 1946 at the age of eighty. He was so much a man of the twentieth century that it is hard to believe that he started his literary career in the middle of the eighteen-nineties.

Questions and tasks

1. What are the main works by Wells?

2. Speak about one of the novels by Herbert Wells.

3. Speak on fantastic novels by Wells describing space travelling.

4. Comment on the contents of “The Time Machine” and “The Invisible Man”.

5. Translate into Russian:

"I have already made it clear, that the Selenites I saw resembled man in maintaining the erect attitude, and in having four limbs, and I have compared the general appear­ance of their heads and the jointing of their limbs to that of insects."

(The First Men in the Moon, H. G. Wells).