greatness--waiting for the food." I find a quality of reasonableness
in the little people's antagonism to the blundering superiority of
those giants.

To the tail of these romances I may pin the majority of Mr Wells'
short stories. The best of them are all included in the collection
published under the title of _The Country of the Blind_. In this form
Mr Wells displays nothing but the exuberance of his invention. In the
Preface to the collection he defines his conception of short-story
writing as "the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;
it may be horrible or pathetic or funny, or beautiful, or profoundly
illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from
fifteen to twenty minutes to read aloud." I can add nothing to that
description, and would only take away from it so much as is implied by
the statement that I cannot call to mind any one of these stories
which is "profoundly illuminating" in the same sense that I would
certainly apply the phrase to some of the romances. Jolly and bright
they undoubtedly are, but when they are moving, they provide food for
wonder rather than for enlightenment....

I cannot leave these romances without a comment on Mr Wells'
justification as preacher and prophet. Writing in the midst of the
turmoil of war, I am vividly conscious of having had my mind prepared
for it by the material I have here so inadequately described. All the
misunderstandings, the weaknesses, the noisy, meaningless ambitions,
the tepid acceptance of traditional standards, have been exposed by Mr
Wells in these fantasies of his. And in _The War in the Air_, with
just such exaggerations as are necessary for a fiction of this kind,
he has forecast the conditions which have now overtaken us. We
know--or we might know if we had the capacity for any sort of