cowardice,
baseness, the love of ease and safety, all the paltrier aspects of our
nature; but a triumph over death it is not. If it be true (which I do
not believe) that German soldiers sign a declaration devoting the
glycerine in their dead bodies to their country's service, one may
imagine that some of them feel a species of satisfaction in resolving
upon this final proof of patriotism; but it will be a gloomy
satisfaction at best; there will be a lack of exhilaration about it;
if the Herr Hauptmann who witnesses their signatures congratulates
them on having triumphed over death, they will be apt to think it a
rather empty form of words. If they had had the advantage of reading
Jane Austen, they would probably say with Mr. Bennet, "Let us take a
more cheerful view of the subject, and suppose that I survive."

I fear that not even the companionship offered by the modern God in
the act of dissolution will make death a cheerful experience, or
induce ordinary, unaffected mortals to glory in their mortality. It
is too much the habit of Gods to pretend to die when they don't really
die at all--when, in fact, the whole idea is a mere intellectual
hocus-pocus.

VII

BACK TO THE VEILED BEING

Why has Mr. Wells partly goaded and partly hypnotized himself into the
belief that he is the predestined prolocutor of a new hocus-pocus?
Rightly or wrongly, I diagnose his case thus: What he really cares for
is the future of humanity, or, in more concrete language, social
betterment. He suffers more than most of us from the spectacle of the
world of to-day, because he has the constructive imagination which can
place alongside of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision
of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some
malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds
himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are.
Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the
part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes
very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a
fertile and inventive brain; his works of fiction have won for him a
great public, both in Europe and America; yet he feels that his social
philosophy, his ardent and enlightened meliorism, makes no more
impression than the buzzing of a gnat in the ear of a drowsy mastodon.
At the same time he has persuaded himself, whether on internal or on
ext