The Time Machine, despite certain obvious faults of imagination and style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and finding it, more particularly, incomplete.  At the age of twenty-seven or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of conventional thought, and is prepared to examine, and to present life from the detached standpoint of one who views it all from a respectable distance; but who is able, nevertheless—­an essential qualification—­to enter life with all the passion and generosity of his own humanity.

And in The Wonderful Visit—­published in the same year as The Time Machine—­he comes closer to earth.  That ardent ornithologist, the Rev. K. Hilyer, Vicar of Siddermouth, who brought down an angel with a shot-gun, is tenderly imagined; a man of gentle mind, for all the limitations of his training.  The mortalised angel, on the other hand, is rather a tentative and simple creature.  He may represent, perhaps, the rather blank mind of one who sees country society without having had the inestimable privilege of learning how it came about.  His temperament was something too childlike—­without the child’s brutality—­to investigate the enormous complexities of adjustment that had brought about the conditions into which he was all too suddenly plunged by a charge of duck-shot.  He came and was filled with an inalterable perplexity, but some of his questions were too ingenuous; and while we may sympathise with the awful inertia of Hilyer before the impossible task of explaining the inexplicable differences between mortal precept and mortal practice, we feel that we might, in some cases at least, have made a more determined effort.  We might have found some justification for chairs, by way of instance, and certainly an excuse for raising beds above the floor.  But the wounded angel, like the metal machine, is only a device whereby the searching examination of our author may be displayed in an engrossing and intimate form.  And in The Wonderful Visit, that exuberance we postulated, that absorption in the development of idea, is more marked; in the unfolding of the story we can trace the method of the novelist.

Indeed, the three romances that follow discover hardly a trace of the social investigator. The Island of Dr Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds are essays in pure fantasy, and although the first of the three is influenced by biology I class it unhesitatingly among the works of sheer exuberance.  Each of these books is, in effect, an answer to some rather whimsical question, and the problem that Dr Moreau attempted to solve was:  “Can we, by surgery, so accelerate the evolutionary process as to make man out of a beast in a few days or weeks?” And within limits he found that the answer was:  “Yes.”