"In the Days of the Comet"[3] he uses again the mechanism of the most artistic of his earlier short stories, "The Star", which is a little gem in its way without a superfluous word or a false tone. But those were the days when Mr. Wells was writing for pleasure; now he writes for a purpose, so the two stories resemble each other only in their common theme, the swishing across the earth of a comet's tail. In the former tale the event was viewed by a man in Mars who reported to his fellow scientists that the earth was little damaged, for the destruction of all life on it was too insignificant an event to be noticed at that distance. In the present book the earth was decidedly benefited, and the history is told by a man more foreign to us than the Martian, for he is a citizen of the new civilization that followed the "Great Change." A wonderful transformation had been effected in our atmosphere by its mingling with the cometary gases. The inert nitrogen of the air had been changed to some life-giving, clarifying, and stimulating gas; it would be unfair to the author to infer that this was nitrous oxid, more familiarly known as "laughing gas." Under its influence the inhabitants of the earth perceive the evils of our present régime and realize that they are mostly avoidable if everybody had good intentions and good sense. As an argument for Socialism it is a very weak one, for it gives away the case by conceding, at the outset, the main objection of the conservative, that you will have to change human nature before Socialism becomes possible. Of course, if all men were well-meaning and wise Socialism would be practical. It would also be unnecessary, because any social machinery, or, indeed, none at all, would work well enough under these conditions. The difficulty is to devise any changes that will make it work better with people as they are. That better people than we would be able to make for themselves better ways of living, nobody denies. That social, institutions influence the character of individuals, and that individuals influence the character of institutions, are correlative truths, but it is difficult for most people to keep them both in mind. Mr. Wells's collectivist conversion by a "green gas" is much the same thing as individualist conversion by religious influence, but we know of instances of the latter, while the former is purely hypothetical.
But, of course, the object of the book is not to show how Socialism can come about, but to assist in making it come about by acting on readers as a dose of the "green gas" and opening our eyes to the vulgarity, silliness, squalor, and wastefulness of our daily life. Mr. Wells is an artist by nature and a scientist by training, and ugliness and stupidity worry him more than wickedness and injustice. In fact, he would probably class all the evils of civilization under stupidity. But long ago it was said that against stupidity even the gods fight in vain, and it remains to be seen whether Socialists will succeed better.
The most attractive pages of the book to me are those that describe "the festival of the rubbish burnings", though Wells does not improve upon Washington Irving's treatment of the same theme. There are several things owned by our neighbors, even by relatives, which we should like to cast upon the flames. But we are afraid to light the bonfire lest the neighbors should burn up some of our treasures. That war is also an example of human stupidity, we agree, but just how to prevent it altogether until the rest of the world comes to our opinion, we do not understand. It takes two to stop a quarrel. The fleets of England and Germany were engaged in bombarding each other when the renovating comet struck the earth, but as soon as the eyes of the combatants and the "statesmen" who had instigated it were opened, and their anger quenched, it seemed incredible to them that they should have sought to kill each other for such trivial and remote causes. Jules Verne has a similar scene in "Dr. Ox's Experiment", but in that case the gas acts in the opposite way to excite the sluggish inhabitants of a peaceful Flemish village to make war against the neighboring village, and as soon as they are out of the contaminated atmosphere they look in bewilderment at the deadly weapons in their hands. Eight years later Wells's worst forebodings came to pass, but no "green gas" came to clear the air of hate.
But the particular passion that Wells would sweep away by the breath of his comet is one which, in the opinion of most people, is necessary to the maintenance of morality, that is, jealousy. The young English workingman who tells the story is infuriated against the young aristocrat who had seduced his sweetheart and is pursuing them with a revolver when the "Great Change" comes. Then he is content to share her affections with his former rival, and they all lived together happily ever after. In his works on Socialism Wells gives his reasons for thinking that, whether we wish it or not, the family is disintegrating, and that only under Socialism, which will insure a support sufficient for independence to both men and women, can better relations be established.
We might have known that as soon as science discovered the new world inside the atom the story-writer would follow close behind. We might also have known that H. G. Wells would be the first to exploit this new territory annexed to human knowledge, for he has always kept an eye on scientific progress even while seemingly engrossed in British politics and marriage problems. So he wrote a romance of the atom, "The World Set Free", describing the Great War months before it happened.
Our sleepy earth has been caught napping by every great change that has thus far reached humanity, and probably Mr. Wells is quite right in supposing that a sudden release of the vast stores of energy hidden in the atom would find civilization as unprepared for the social, economic, political, and intellectual results of the new energies in industry as it was for the effects of the great industrial revolution which followed the introduction of steam power not much more than a century ago.
But Mr. Wells has the alertest literary imagination of any modern writer; the significance of the new physics has not escaped him as it has the common run of novelists intently searching for good plots and neglecting entirely the rich ore awaiting any writer who happened to have an elementary knowledge of modern science. Many short stories and one or two novels have introduced more or less accurate accounts of radium as a side-show to a love story or an incident in a detective tale. But it required the boldness of Mr. Wells to throw overboard entirely the conventional novel plot and make a hero of the cosmic energies. "The World Set Free" resembles "The War in the Air" in its vivid account of world-wide war, nations armed with novel weapons and forces, appalling power for destruction and attack in the hands of every nation, together with complete incapacity for defense by any nation, the resulting collapse of credit, panic, starvation, anarchy and a general social débâcle. But while the "war in the air" meant the end of civilization, the war with "atomic bombs" in the present book results in a general treaty of peace, the foundation of a world state under a provisional government, and a successful reorganization of society in which the forces which had been used by nations and empires to conquer each other are directed to the task of subduing nature to human aims.
Like the reconstructed world of "In the Days of the Comet" the future state is very faintly depicted, hinted at rather than described, in "The World Set Free." It differs from the numerous other Utopias of Mr. Wells in that, whereas the world states of "Anticipations", "A Modern Utopia", "In the Days of the Comet", etc., could be brought about by nothing more than taking the author's advice on politics, law, economics, and social customs, "The World Set Free" depends upon scientific discovery. A new hypothesis, in short, has given the inhabitants of this Utopia an advantage over all previous Utopias. They have energy at their command almost as freely accessible as water or air, and so the labor question is annihilated, the whole world becomes a leisure class, and everybody is free to devote his life to gardening, artistic decoration, and scientific research. Country life becomes a constant delight. The agriculturist shrinks to less than one per cent of the population. The lawyer follows the warrior into extinction. "Contentious professions cease to be an honorable employment for men."
The Parliament of the World, which came into existence after the atomic explosions of 1950, was simple and sensible; fifty new representatives elected every five years; proportional representation; every man and woman with an equal vote; election for life subject to recall; each voter putting on his ballot the names of those he wishes elected and those he wishes recalled; a representative recallable by as many votes as the quota that elected him. But political machinery does not count for much in this most modern of Utopias. A scrap of the conversation between the President of the United States and King Egbert, "the young king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe", will illustrate the point of view:
"Science," the King cried presently, "is the new king of the world."
"Our view," said the President, "is that sovereignty resides with the people."
"No," said the King, "the sovereign is a being more subtle than that, and less arithmetical; neither my family nor your emancipated people. It is something that floats about us and above us and through us. It is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which science is the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its demands."