ous reasons: first,
that he strains his eyes more than any other men to see them; second,
that he is more overwhelmed and uplifted with them when they come;
third, that he records them more exactly and sincerely and with less
adulteration from his more commonplace and more conceited everyday
self. Adventures are to those to whom they are most unexpected--that
is, most romantic. Adventures are to the shy: in this sense
adventures are to the unadventurous.

Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be, like a
great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult to
illustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it, I
should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. The most
interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he is the only one of
his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can
lie awake at night and hear him grow. Of this growth the most evident
manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it is no mere
change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to
another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous
advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But
the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the
fact that it has been upon the whole in advance from more startling
opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an
advance from unconventional opinions to conventional opinions. This
fact fixes Mr. Wells's honesty and proves him to be no poseur. Mr.
Wells once held that the upper classes and the lower classes would be
so much differentiated in the future that one class would eat the
other. Certainly no paradoxical charlatan who had once found arguments
for so startling a view would ever have deserted it except for
something yet more startling. Mr. Wells has deserted it in favour of
the blameless belief that both classes will be ultimately subordinated
or assimilated to a sort of scientific middle class, a class of
engineers. He has abandoned the sensational theory with the same
honourable gravity and simplicity with which he adopted it. Then he
thought it was true; now he thinks it is not true. He has come to the
most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion
that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and
wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand
people and