now under consideration the conception is
too wide for any such lapses into the maudlin. British interests play
an insignificant part in the drama. We have to consider war not as an
incident in the history of a nation, but as a horrible disgrace in the
history of humanity.

And war is the theme also of _The World Set Free_ (1914), but it leads
here to a theory of reconstruction of which we have no sight in the
earlier work. The opening chapters describe the inception of the
means, the discovery of the new source of energy--a perfectly
reasonable conception--that led to the invention of the "atomic bomb,"
a thing so terribly powerful and continuous in its action that after
the first free use of it in a European outbreak, war became
impossible. As a romance, the book fails. The interest is not centred
in a single character, and we are given somewhat disconnected glimpses
of various phases in the discovery of the new energy, in its
application, and of the catastrophes that follow its use as an
instrument of destruction. The essay form has almost dominated the
method of the novelist, and consequently the essential parable has not
the same force as in _The War in the Air_. Nevertheless, the vision is
there, obscured by reason of its more personal expression; and before
I return to consider the three less pertinent romances interposed
between those that have a more recognisable critical tendency, I wish
to sum up the distinctive attitude of the four just considered.

And in this thing I claim that the conscious purpose of the artist is
of comparatively small account. I may be doing Mr Wells an injustice,
either by robbing him of the credit of a clearly conceived intention,
or by reading into his books a deliberation which he might wish to
disclaim. But my business is not justice to the author in this sense,
but an interpretation--necessarily personal--of the message his books
have conveyed to a particular reader. And the plain message that all
these romances--including those that follow--have conveyed to me is
the necessity for ridding the mind of traditions of the hypnotic
suggestions of parents and early teachers, of the parochial influences
of immediate surroundings, of the prejudices and self-interested
dogmatisms and hyperboles of common literature, especially of the
daily and weekly press; in order that we may, if only for an exercise
in simple reason, dissociate ourselves for a moment from all those
intimate forces,