wide open, and on his face an expression of "anger and dismay," the
elements--as I choose to think--of man's revolt against imprisonment
in the flesh. It is worth while to note that by another statement, the
same problem is posed and solved in the short story called _The
Country of the Blind_.

_The War of the Worlds_ (1898), although written in the first person,
is in some ways the most detached of all these fantasies; and it is in
this book that Mr Wells frankly confesses his own occasional sense of
separation. "At times," says the narrator of the history, "I suffer
from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about
me, I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere
inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and
tragedy of it all." That sense must have remained with him as he wrote
the account of the invading Martians, so little passion does the book
contain. The vision, however, is clear enough and there is more
invention than in many of the other romances. The picture of the
Martians themselves develops in one direction the theory of human
evolution expressed in _The Man of the Year Million_. The expansion
of the brain case, and the apotheosis of pure intellect, devoid, so
far as we can judge, of any emotional expression, are the steadily
biological deductions that we should expect from the Wells of this
period. The fighting machines of these incomprehensible entities, the
heat ray and the black smoke, are all excellent conceptions; and the
narrative is splendidly graphic. But only in the scenes with the
curate, when the narrator is stirred to passionate anger, and in his
later passages with the sapper, do we catch any glimpses of the
novelist intrigued with the intimate affairs of humanity. Even the
narrator's brother, in his account of the escape with two women in a
pony-carriage, has become infected with that sense of detachment. The