p impression. Most of us
have had an experience in some way similar, though not many of us have
been so intimately acquainted with so many classes, so many varieties
of people, or have felt our experiences so acutely. He was singular in
that he found his way to an expression of those effects which the
national life had had upon _him_--that is to say, upon a man who had
been brought up in a lower middle-class family in the Victorian era,
who had watched the London suburbs creeping outwards, who had lived
among shop-assistants, who had studied science in laboratories, who
had aspired to something more fruitful for the spirit. He did not
become aware of these significances all at once. The first eager
desire to express himself and create took the form of those early
romantic stories--_The Invisible Man_, _The Descent of the Martians_,
_The Time Machine_, etc.--stories in which his knowledge of science
and Jules Verne were not yet allied to a philosophic enthusiasm for
human beings in society. Then he began to be conscious of the great
problems of society, and generalised about them in his romantic,
ingenious, philosophically imaginative way in such books as
_Anticipations_, _A Modern Utopia_, etc., until he began to realise
that that personal method which he had adopted in _Kipps_ was the best
method of expressing the consciousness now awake in him of his own
life, of his relations with the people he had met and the country he
had lived in, and of the vague, restless desires--desires cast in the
mould of this material world, yet half mystical in their nature--which
had first made him percipient, then critical and dissatisfied, then
critical and irritable, then critical and religious, and
afterwards--it remains to be seen.

It was in _Tono-Bungay_ that Mr. Wells achieved an unquestionable
success. When he wrote that book it seemed that all the experiences of
which hitherto he had been only partially conscious became clear to
him; that all the clever but unrelated literary efforts which he had
hitherto made found here their clue and connecting link, their
inspired synthesis. Long before this he had written astonishing,
ingenious, philosophic, shrewd, suggestive books, but he had achieved
no success on this scale. Here he seemed to have brought together all
the threads of his many intellectual energies, and woven them into a
single fabric fit for wear-and-tear and adornment. At the first he had
written romances such as Jules