H.G. Wells : the scientific romances

Abstract

In his study of twentieth-century literature in The Modern Writer and his World, Mr G.S. Fraser talks about two ancestors of the contemporary novel: Henry James, the representative of the aesthetic school, and H.G. Wells, the staunch advocate of the school of writers who emphasized content rather than style. Whatever type of novel Wells wrote, whether it was a scientific romance, a novel of ideas of a sociological one, he always regarded it as an important vehicle for instruction, especially for the masses who had been long kept in their places by their betters. Forceful and energetic, he was temperamentally well-equipped to express his hostility to convention and the established norm. He was at one with the age in refusing to accept dogma in anything, including religion, science and society. He reacted against that aspect of Victorianism which liked to regard things sub specie aeternitatis. Everything was held to be open to question. People had to probe into the nature of things, go into the very marrow and sinews and see for themselves, since there was, in Wells's own words, "a flow of things" (The World of William Clissold). Earlier in the nineteenth century when Ruskin had told his Victorian audiences that they "must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring themselves of their meaning, syllable by syllable - nay, letter by letter", his advice was sound but little heeded. Now, in the last decade of the century, after the impetus of the Darwinian theory of evolution and scientific discoveries, the Age of Interrogation had set in. To be sure, there was a minority of people who continued to profess old beliefs, but, generally speaking, the new zeitgeist was, as Shaw once put it, "Question! Examine! Test!" Far-ranging repercussions could not fail to materialize as a result of this. Clearly, the new inquisitive attitude challenged authority, both civil and religious, and so affected the lives of millions. With the last years of the nineteenth century there was, then, a crisis, not only in the artistic or aesthetic fields, but also in the moral and social ethos. There was a transvaluation of values, to use Nietzsohe's phrase. The fin de siecle had made its mark.