Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. [Illustration: H.G. WELLS] H.G. WELLS By J.D. BERESFORD [Illustration] NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY _First Published in 1915_ CONTENTS PAGE I. INTRODUCTION 9 II. THE ROMANCES 17 III. THE NOVELS 58 IV. SOCIOLOGY 97 BIBLIOGRAPHY 117 AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 121 INDEX 125 [Transcriber's Notes for e-book: The spelling and punctuation are consistent with the original scans with the following exceptions. If you are using this book for research, please verify any spelling or punctuation with another source. I added ["] at end of phrase: "to recover the full-bodied self-satisfaction of his early days." In the following sentence, I changed 'succeded' to 'succeeded': And Bensington, the other experimenter, succeeded in separating a food that produced regular instead of intermittent growth.] TO R.A.A.B. THIS ESSAY IS FRATERNALLY DEDICATED I INTRODUCTION THE NORMALITY OF MR WELLS In his Preface to the _Unpleasant Plays_, Mr Shaw boasts his possession of "normal sight." The adjective is the oculist's, and the application of it is Mr Shaw's, but while the phrase is misleading until it is explained to suit a particular purpose, it has a pleasing adaptability, and I can find none better as a key to the works of Mr H.G. Wells. We need not bungle over the word "normal," in any attempt to meet the academic objection that it implies conformity to type. In this connection, the gifted possessor of normal sight is differentiated from his million neighbours by the fact that he wears no glasses; and if a few happy people still exist here and there who have no need for the mere physical assistance, the number of those whose mental outlook is undistorted by tradition, prejudice or some form of bias is so small that we regard them as inspired or criminal according to the inclination of our own beloved predilection. And no spectacles will correct the mental astigmatism of the multitude, a fact that is often a cause of considerable annoyance to the possessors of normal sight. That defect of vision, whether congenital or induced by the confinements of early training, persists and increases throughout life, like other forms of myopia. The man who sees a ball as slightly flattened, like a tangerine orange too tightly packed (an "oblate spheroid" would be the physicist's brief description), seeks the society of other men who share his illusion; and the company of them take arms against the opposing faction, which is confirmed in the belief that the ball is egg-shaped, that the bulge, in fact, is not "oblate" but "prolate."