“Nothing was dead, but everything had changed to beauty!  And I stood for a time with clean and happy eyes looking at the intricate delicacy before me and marvelling how richly God has made his worlds....”

And not only the writer but also every other person on the earth had been miraculously cured of their myopia and astigmatism.  They saw beauty and the means to still more perfect beauty, and, seeing, they had but to believe and the old miseries vanished.  In the old days men preached a furious denial of self that led to the fatuity of an asceticism such as that of St Simon Stylites.  The lesson—­I cannot deny that the book is didactic—­of the change wrought by the comet is that man should find the full expression of his personality in sympathy and understanding.  The egotism remains, but it works to a collective end....

War is necessarily touched upon in this book as an inevitable corollary to the problems of personal and a fortiori of national property; but the real counterblast against wholesale fratricide was reserved for the following romance, published in 1908.

The War in the Air definitely disclosed a change of method that was adumbrated in its predecessor.  The agent of experience is still retained in the person of Bert Smallways, but the restrictions imposed by the report of an eye-witness have become too limiting, and, like Hardy in The Dynasts, Mr Wells alternates between a near and a distant vision.  The Welt-Politik could not be explained through the intelligence of a “little Cockney cad,” even though he was “by no means a stupid person and up to a certain limit not badly educated”; and the general development of the world-war, the account of the collapse of the credit system and all such large and general effects necessitated the broad treatment of the historian.  So the intimate, personal narrative of Smallways’ adventures is occasionally dropped for a few pages; Mr Wells shuts off his magic-lantern and fills the interval with an analysis of larger issues.

And the issues are so vital, the denouement so increasingly probable, that, despite all the exaggerations necessary in a fiction of this kind, the warning contained in this account of a world-war is one that must remain in the minds of any thoughtful reader.  Smallways’ pert reflection on the causes of the immense downfall represents the wisdom that comes of bitter experience, and the application of it is very pertinent to present conditions.  “There was us in Europe all at sixes and sevens with our silly flags and our silly newspapers raggin’ us up against each other and keepin’ us apart,” says Smallways, and for the briefest analysis of causes that continually threaten us with all the useless horrors of war, the summary could scarcely be bettered.