The Sea Lady (1902) stands alone among Mr Wells’ romances.  The realistic method remains, but the conception is touched with a poetic fancy of a kind that I have not found elsewhere in these books.  The Venus Annodomini who came out of the sea at Folkestone in the form of an authentic mermaid was something more than a mere critic of our civilised conventions.  She was that, too; she asked why people walked on the Leas “with little to talk about and nothing to look at, and bound not to do all sorts of natural things, and bound to do all sorts of preposterous things.”  But she was also the personification of “other dreams.”  She had “the quality of the open sky, of deep tangled places, of the flight of birds ... of the high sea.”  She represented to one man, at 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