Indeed, I think that The War in the Air is the greatest of Mr Wells’ achievements in fantasy that has a deeper purpose than mere amusement.  The story is absorbing and Smallways a perfectly conceived character, recommendations that serve to popularise the book as a romance; but all the art of the construction is relevant to the theme, and to the logical issue which is faced unflinchingly.  In the many wild prophecies that have been incorporated in various stories of a great European war, there has been discoverable now and again some hint of insight into the real dangers that await mankind.  But such stories as these degenerate into some accidental, but inferentially glorious, victory of British arms, and any value in the earlier comments is swamped in the sentimentality of the fortuitous, and designedly popular, sequel.  In the book now under consideration the conception is too wide for any such lapses into the maudlin.  British interests play an insignificant part in the drama.  We have to consider war not as an incident in the history of a nation, but as a horrible disgrace in the history of humanity.

And war is the theme also of The World Set Free (1914), but it leads here to a theory of reconstruction of which we have no sight in the earlier work.  The opening chapters describe the inception of the means, the discovery of the new source of energy—­a perfectly reasonable conception—­that led to the invention of the “atomic bomb,” a thing so terribly powerful and continuous in its action that after the first free use of it in a European outbreak, war became impossible.  As a romance, the book fails.  The interest is not centred in a single character, and we are given somewhat disconnected glimpses of various phases in the discovery of the new energy, in its application, and of the catastrophes that follow its use as an instrument of destruction.  The essay form has almost dominated the method of the novelist, and consequently the essential parable has not the same force as in The War in the Air.  Nevertheless, the vision is there, obscured by reason of its more personal expression; and before I return to consider the three less pertinent romances interposed between those that have a more recognisable critical tendency, I wish to sum up the distinctive attitude of the four just considered.

And in this thing I claim that the conscious purpose of the artist is of comparatively small account.  I may be doing Mr Wells an injustice, either by robbing him of the credit of a clearly conceived intention, or by reading into his books a deliberation which he might wish to disclaim.  But my business is not justice to the author in this sense, but an interpretation—­necessarily personal—­of the message his books have conveyed to a particular reader.  And the plain message that all these romances—­including those that follow—­have conveyed to me is the necessity for ridding the mind of traditions of the hypnotic suggestions of parents and early teachers,