II

THE ROMANCES


Mr Wells' romances have little or nothing in common with those of
Jules Verne, not even that peculiar quality of romance which revels in
the impossible. The heroes of Jules Verne were idealised creatures
making use of some wonderful invention for their own purposes; and the
future of mankind was of no account in the balance against the lust
for adventure under new mechanical conditions. Also, Jules Verne's
imagination was at the same time mathematical and Latin; and he was
entirely uninfluenced by the writings of Comte.

Mr Wells' experiments with the relatively improbable have become
increasingly involved with the social problem, and it would be
possible to trace the growth of his opinions from this evidence alone,
even if we had not the valuable commentary afforded by his novels and
his essays in sociology. But his interest in the present and future
welfare of man would not in the first place have prompted him to the
writing of romance (unless it had been cast in the severely
allegorical form of _The Pilgrim's Progress_), and if we are to
account for that ebullition, we shall be driven--like Darwin with his
confounding peacock--to take refuge in some theory of exuberance. The
later works have been so defensive and, in one sense, didactic that
one is apt to forget that many of the earlier books, and all the short
stories, must have originated in the effervescence of creative