A Net to Snare the Sun
The World Set Free, by H. G. Wells. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]
Do you remember the little verse of Kipling’s in the Just So Stories about the small person who kept so many serving men
“One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys?”
There’s something very much like that small person in a decidedly larger person called H. G. Wells. For all the great sweep and astonishing convincingness of his later novels he still keeps the child-like quality of asking startling questions about everything in the universe. He still wants to know: “Why can’t I catch the sun, and what would happen if I did?”
In his last half dozen novels he has been asking about various phases of our modern society, politics, and the sex question. But in this latest book, The World Set Free, he goes back to a type of question that interested him some years ago, the type half fanciful and half sociological that produced In the Days of the Comet, The Time Machine, and When the Sleeper Wakes. But this book is not entirely like the earlier ones. For one thing the science is for the first time so nearly possible that it is almost probable, and for another this book is the work of an older, quieter soul with less regard for externals and with more faith in the ultimate high hope for mankind.
What Wells has asked himself this time is: “What would happen if man were suddenly given command over an unlimited amount of physical power?” He brings this about by modern chemistry. A scientist discovers a new theory of matter which enables him to break down metals by radio-activity and so generate practically limitless power. The first use the world makes of this power is to go to war. We can hardly quarrel with Wells for the improbability of this because it sweeps the board so clear for his reconstruction period, which is the heart of the story.
A strange story it is; one whose hero is mankind—mankind in the bulk, groping, struggling, trying half blindly to adapt himself to the new conditions, and at last, after a desperate period of reconstruction, coming out into the sunlight, triumphant, clean, and at peace. Now and then an individual is caught up for an instant into the story, transfigured for the moment by circumstances into a mouthpiece for the mass of mankind,—a scientist, a middle-class Englishman who wrote his memoirs, the Slavic Fox, a dying prophet of the later age,—but for the most part it is just mankind who speaks. Wells, by the great sweep and vision of his ideas and the almost super-human handling of the technical difficulties of such an impersonal story, succeeds in raising us for a moment out of our personal selves so that we are completely identified with the race, and view its later successes with a serene and personal pride.
Each of us becomes a link in the great chain of humanity that reaches from the cave man through the “chuckle-headed youth” to the dying professor, the men who dreamed of snaring the sun in a net and taming it to their hand. “Ye auld red thing ...” we say with the chuckle-headed youth, “We’ll have you yet!” And the dying prophet cries for each of us to the setting orb:
“Old Sun, I gather myself together out of the pools of the individual that have held me dispersed so long. I gather my billion thoughts into science and my million wills into a common purpose. Well may you slink down behind the mountain from me, well may you cower....”
Eunice Tietjens.