I am not concerned in this place to question the validity of that answer, nor to suggest that the Wells of 1914 would not necessarily give the same account of his beliefs as the Wells of 1909, but I must draw attention to the attitude displayed in the book under consideration in order to point the change of feeling recognisable in later books.  In The Sleeper Awakes, even in the revised version, the sociological theory is still mechanical, the prophecy at once too logical, and at the same time deduced from premises altogether too restricted.  The world of A.D. 2100 is the world of to-day, with its more glaring contrasts still more glaringly emphasised; with its social incongruities and blindness raised to a higher power.  And all that it lacked has been put into a romance called In the Days of the Comet (1906), a book to which I shall now leap, returning later to consider the comparatively irrelevant theses of three other romances that chronologically intervened.

The great change wrought by the coming of the Comet might be sentimentally described as a change of heart; I prefer to call it a change of reason.  All the earlier part of the work, which is again told in the first person, presents the life of a Midland industrial area as seen by one who has suffered it.  The Capital-Labour problem bulks in the foreground, and is adequately supported by a passionate exposition of the narrowness and misery of lower-middle-class life in the jumble of limitations, barriers and injustices that arise from the absolute ownership of property.  Also, into this romance—­the only one, by the way—­comes some examination of the relations of the sexes.  And all this jumble is due, if we are to believe the remedy, to human misunderstanding.  The influence of the Comet passed over the earth, and men, after a few hours of trance, awoke to a new realisation.  We come to a first knowledge of the change in one of the most beautiful passages that Mr Wells has written; and although I dislike to spoil a passage by setting it out unclothed by the idea and expectations which have led to its expression, given it form, and fitted it to a just place in the whole composition, I will make an exception in this case in order to justify my metaphor of “normal sight.”  The supposed writer of the description had just awakened from the trance induced by the passing of the Comet.  He says: 

“I came slowly, stepping very carefully because of those drugged, feebly awakening things, through the barley to the hedge.  It was a very glorious hedge, so that it held my eyes.  It flowed along and interlaced like splendid music.  It was rich with lupin, honeysuckle, campions and ragged robin; bed straw, hops and wild clematis twined and hung among its branches, and all along its ditch border the starry stitchwort lifted its childish faces and chorused in lines and masses.  Never had I seen such a symphony of note-like flowers and tendrils and leaves.  And suddenly, in its