Mr. Wells has written many interesting books, and much could be said of him from the point of view of science, or of style, or of social theory.  That, however, is not our present concern, either with him or with Mr. Shaw.  It is as idealist or pagan influences that we are discussing them and the others.  Mr. Wells boasts a new morality in his books, and Mr. Shaw in his plays.  One feels the same startling sense of a volte face in morality as a young recruit is said to do when he finds all the precepts of his childhood reversed by the ethics of his first battlefield.  Each in his own way falls back upon crude and primitive instincts and justifies them.[5]

Mr. Wells takes the change with zest, and seems to treat the adoption of a new morality in the same light-hearted spirit as he might consider the buying of a new hat.  From the first he has a terrifying way of dealing familiarly with vast things.  Somehow he reminds one of those jugglers who, for a time, toss heavy balls about, and then suddenly astonish the audience by introducing a handkerchief, which flies lightly among its ponderous companions.  So Mr. Wells began to juggle with worlds.  He has latterly introduced that delicate thing, the human soul and conscience, into the play, and you see it precariously fluttering among the immensities of leaping planets.  He persuades himself that the common morality has not gripped people, and that they really don’t believe in it at all.  He aims at a way of thinking which will be so great as to be free from all commonplace and convention.  Honesty is to be practically the only virtue in the new world.  If you say what you mean, you will earn the right to do anything else that you please.  Mr. Wells in this is the counterpart of those plain men in private life so well known to us all, who perpetually remind us that they are people who call a spade a spade.  Such men are apt to interpret this dictum as a kind of charter which enables a man to say anything foolish, or rude, or bad that may occur to him, and earn praise for it instead of blame.  Some of us fail to find the greatness of this way of thinking, however much we may be impressed by its audacity.  Indeed there seems to be much smallness in it which masquerades as immensity.

This smallness is due first of all to sheer ignorance.  When a man tells us that he prefers Oliver Goldsmith to Jesus Christ, he merely shows that upon the subject he is discussing he is not educated, and does not know what he is talking about.  A second source of pettiness is to be found in the mistake of imagining that mere smartness of diction and agility of mind are signs of intellectual keenness.  The mistake is as obvious as it is unfortunate.  Smartness can be learned with perhaps the least expenditure of intellect that is demanded by any literary exercise of the present day.  It is a temptation which a certain kind of clever man always has to face, and it only assumes a serious aspect when it leads the unthinking to mistake it for a new and formidable element of opposition to things which he has counted sacred.