H. G. Wells | Page 5

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 two women are strongly differentiated but leave little
impression of personality.
The fact that I have made this comment on lack of passion in
describing one of these earlier romances is indicative of a particular
difference between Mr Wells' method in this sort and the method of the
lesser writer of fantasias. The latter, whatever his idea, and it may be a
brilliant idea, is always intent on elaborating the wonder of his theme
by direct description. Mr Wells is far more subtle and more effective.
He takes an average individual, identifies him with the world as we
know it, and then proceeds gradually to bring his marvel within the
range of this individual's apprehension. We see the improbable, not too
definitely, through the eyes of one who is prepared with the same
incredulity as the reader of the story, and as a result the strange
phenomenon, whether fallen angel, invisible man, converted beast or
invading Martian, takes all the shape of reality. That this shape is
convincing is due to the brilliance of Mr Wells' imagination and his
power of graphic expression; the lesser writer might adopt the method
and fail utterly to attain the effect; but it is this conception of the means
to reach the intelligence and senses of the average reader that chiefly
distinguishes these romances from those of such writers as Jules Verne.
Our approach to the wonderful is so gradual and so natural that when
we are finally confronted with it the incredible thing has become
inevitable and expected. Finally, it has become so identified with
human surprise, anger or dismay that any failure of humanity in the
chief person of the story reacts upon our conception of the wonderful
intrusion among familiar phenomena.

Now, this power of creating the semblance of fact out of an ideal was
too valuable a thing to be wasted on the making of stories that had no
purpose beyond that of interesting or exciting the reader with such
imaginations as the Martians, whose only use was to threaten humanity
with extinction. Mr Wells' own sight of our blindness, our complacent
acceptance of the sphere as an oblate or prolate spheroid, might be, he
hoped, another of the marvels which we should come to accept through
the medium of romance. So he began tentatively at first to introduce a
vivid criticism of the futility of present-day society into his fantasies,
and the first and the least of these books was that published in 1899 as
When the Sleeper Wakes, a title afterwards changed to The Sleeper
Awakes.
In the two opening chapters we find the same delightfully realistic
treatment of the unprecedented slowly mingling with the commonplace.
The first appearance of Graham the Sleeper, tormented then by the
spectres and doubts that accompany insomnia, is made so credible that
we accept his symptoms without the least demur; his condition is
merely unusual enough to excite a trembling interest. Even the passing
of his early years of trance does not arouse scepticism. But then we fall
with one terrific plunge into the world of A.D. 2100, and, like Graham,
we cannot realise it. Moreover this changed, developed world has a
slightly mechanical air. The immense enclosed London, imagined by
Mr Wells, is no Utopia, yet, like the dream of earlier prophets, it is too
logical to