H. G. Wells | Page 9

least, "the Great Outside." And, if we still find a repetition of the old
statement in that last description, it is, nevertheless, surrounded with a
glamour that is not revealed in such books as In the Days of the Comet.
The ideal that is faintly shadowed in The Sea Lady is more ethereal,
less practical; the story, despite the naturalistic, half-cynical manner of
its recountal, has the elements of romance. The closing scene describes
the perplexity of a practical Kentish policeman "who in the small hours
before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady had been wearing, just
as the tide overtook it," He stands there on the foreshore with a foolish
bewilderment, wondering chiefly "what people are up to." He is the
"simple citizen of a plain and obvious world." And Mr Wells concludes:
"I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little way, a

stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast serenity of the
night." And I make an application of the parable for my own purposes,
and wonder how far the curiosity of Mr Wells' readers will carry them
into the great mystery that lies behind the illusion of this apparently
obvious world.
We come, finally, without any suggestion of climax, to _The Food of
the Gods_ (1904). The food was produced, casually in the first instance,
by two experimenters who served no cause but that of their own
inquisitive science. One of them, Redwood, had become intrigued by
the fact that the growth of all living things proceeded with bursts and
intermissions; it was as if they had "to accumulate force to grow, grew
with vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space before they
could go on growing again." And Bensington, the other experimenter,
succeeded in separating a food that produced regular instead of
intermittent growth. It was universal in its effects, influencing
vegetable as well as animal life; and in the course of twenty years it
produced human giants, forty feet high. This is a theme for Mr Wells to
revel in, and he does, treating the detail of the first two-thirds of the
book with a fine realism. Like Bensington, he saw, "behind the
grotesque shapes and accidents of the present, the coming world of
giants and all the mighty things the future has in store--vague and
splendid, like some glittering palace seen suddenly in the passing of a
sunbeam far away." The parable is plain enough, but the application of
it weakens when we realise that so far as the merely physical
development goes, the food of the gods is only bringing about a change
of scale. If we grant that this "insurgent bigness" must conquer the
world, the final result is only humanity in the same relation to life that
it now occupies, and we are left to reflect with Bensington, after the
vision had faded, on "sinister shadows, vast declivities and darknesses,
inhospitable immensities, cold, wild and terrible things."
The change of scale, however, so long as it was changing, presents in
another metaphor the old contrasts. The young giants, the Cossars and
Redwood, looking down on common humanity from a vantage-point
some thirty to forty feet higher than the "little people," are critical by
force of circumstances; and they are at the same time handicapped by

an inability to comprehend the thing criticised. They are too
differentiated; and for the purpose of the fable none of them is gifted
with the power to study these insects with the sympathy of a Henri
Fabre. We may find some quality of blundering stupidity in the Cossars
and in young Redwood, they were too prejudiced by their physical
scale; but the simple Caddles, born of peasant parents, uneducated and
set to work in a chalk quarry, is the true enquirer. He walked up to
London to solve his problem, and his fundamental question: "What's it
all for?" remained unanswered. The "little people" could not exchange
ideas with him, and he never met his brother giants. It is, however,
exceedingly doubtful whether they could have offered him any
satisfactory explanation of the purpose of the universe. Their only
ambition seemed to be reconstruction on a larger scale.
I think the partial failure of The Food of the Gods to furnish any ethical
satisfaction is due to the fact that in this romance Mr Wells has
identified himself too closely with the giants; a fault that indicates a
slight departure from normality. The inevitable contrast between great
and little lacks a sympathy and appreciation we find elsewhere.
"Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is that. Great and
little cannot understand one another" is the true text of the book; and it
implies a weakness in the great not less than in the little; a weakness