A Scientific Prophet

Northern Advocate, 18 February 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

A Scientific Prophet

H, G. Wells was born at Bromley, Kent, as far back as 1866. Only Bernard Shaw rivals him in unabated force of genuis in spite of years. And of the two there are ample signs that Shaw Is a diminishing force. Wells astonishes everyone by an increasing vigour and amazing versatility. A SOCIALIST, UNASHAMED

The number of publications to bis name are legion. His imaginative novels projecting the possibilities of science, followed Jules Verne in the most astonishing anticipations of what might happen to the world and its population. His economic and socialreconstruction books, again, reveal an uncommonly acute power of analysis and practical application. He is, of course, a socialist unashamed. But that says little, for we all differ as to what is socialism. There • is nothing obscure about Wells. You know where he stands and why. But while he “stands,” he also moves, and is one of the supremely progressive men of the age, a standard bearer, always a little in front. So you can choose from “The Time Machine,” “The War in the Air,” “Anticipations,” “A Modern Utopia” or “Men Like Gods,” or among numerous others of his works. “Kipps,” however, and “Tono-Bungay” are conspicuous among his acknowledged masterpieces in storykind. BUSINESS WORLD DISSECTED Of “Tono-Bungay” you can say it is a grimly clever dissection of our business world and the immense power of mass suggestion enlisted under the name of “Advertising.” It is this, and a good story also; but it is far more.

1 It is a veiled perspective of his own. | life. And more again, it, is a mirror 1 of changing conditions in business and ! social life of the new century that was baptised in one war and sent to school ■ in another.

MAN IN STREET MAGNIFIED Professor C. M. Joacl has singled out “Tono-Bungay" as the greatest of the novels by Wells because the strands of all his versatile interests —“in i science, in sociology, and in people as | people, are for the first time woven together into a single fabric. The greatness of some men appears to lie in their superior difference from ordinary people., Dx*. Joad considers j that the greatness of Wells lies “not-; in. difference from, but in his enormous likeness to the man in the street. Wells, in a word, is a glorified edition of ourselves, his history is our history, and the world as he sees it }o-day is the world as we ourselves shall see it to-morrow.” He continues: fluttered minds About the beginning of the twentieth century a great change came over the life of England. An age died and another age was born, while a crust of ideas, customs, and habits, which had moulded men’s minds for nearly a century, crumbled, cracked, and.finally split asunder. A thaw set ill and the Victorian frost broke up. Seme connected this change with the death of the old Queen, herself. As Wells himself puts it somewhere, Queen Victoria was like a great paper weight that for half a century had sat upon men’s minds, and when she was removed their ideas began-to blow about anyhow. A RASH OF PINK VILLAS Be this as it may, of the fact of change there can be no doubt. Morals were growing laxer, the ‘ churches emptier; family life was breaking up: young girls were rushing about in side-cars, smoking cigarettes and going unchaperoned to dances; the countryside came out in a rash of pink, villas, residences of a new Wellsian social class, grown like mushrooms in a night, and the middle aged knew even less and wondered even more than usual what the world was coming to. “Of this change, Shaw, Bennett and Wells were the contemporary recorders. But while Shaw and Bennett witnessed it as competent observers from the outside and recoi'ded what they saw, Wells had merely to give an impressionistic account of his own life. Within the little world of his experience. A RESTLESS THINKER The record of his changing ideas and thought is the record of the changing ideas and thought of the age.” This wide survey, this story of one age passing and a new one coming, seen and described through the peisonal experience of an acute observer and restless thinker, gives distinction to “Tono-Bungay,” and it is an informing introduction to Wells himself and all his works.