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