rn of peasant parents,
uneducated and set to work in a chalk quarry, is the true enquirer. He
walked up to London to solve his problem, and his fundamental
question: "What's it all _for_?" remained unanswered. The "little
people" could not exchange ideas with him, and he never met his
brother giants. It is, however, exceedingly doubtful whether they
could have offered him any satisfactory explanation of the purpose of
the universe. Their only ambition seemed to be reconstruction on a
larger scale.

I think the partial failure of _The Food of the Gods_ to furnish any
ethical satisfaction is due to the fact that in this romance Mr Wells
has identified himself too closely with the giants; a fault that
indicates a slight departure from normality. The inevitable contrast
between great and little lacks a sympathy and appreciation we find
elsewhere. "Endless conflict. Endless misunderstanding. All life is
that. Great and little cannot understand one another" is the true text
of the book; and it implies a weakness in the great not less than in
the little; a weakness that is hardly exonerated by the closing
sentence: "But in every child born of man lurks some seed of
greatness--waiting for the food." I find a quality of reasonableness
in the little people's antagonism to the blundering superiority of
those giants.

To the tail of these romances I may pin the majority of Mr Wells'
short stories. The best of them are all included in the collection
published under the title of _The Country of the Blind_. In this form
Mr Wells displays nothing but the exuberance of his invention. In the
Preface to the collection he defines his conception of short-story
writing as "the jolly art of making something very bright and moving;
it may be horrible or pathetic or funny, or beautiful, or profoundly
illuminating, having only this essential, that it should take from
fifteen to twenty minutes to read aloud." I can add nothing to that
description, and would only take away from it so much as is implied by
the statement that I cannot call to mind any one of these stories
which is "profoundly illuminating" in the same sense that I would
certainly apply the phrase to some of the romances. Jolly and bright
they undoubtedly are, but when they are moving, they provide food for
wonder rather than for enlightenment....

I cannot leave these romances without a comment on Mr Wells'
justification as preacher and prophet. Writing in the midst of the
turm