A few years ago I selected for criticism and for praise certain contemporary writers who were refusing to take “opium.”[21] These set themselves definitely in the heart of present affairs to endeavour to understand and to interpret the meaning of their day and generation. In almost every case the progress of things since that estimate has taken them into darker and more ominous outlook upon the future of the modern world. To Mr. Wells it is all a “spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace; the story of a country hectic with a wasting, aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking.” The hero of his greatest novel reveals an experience fragmentary and disconnected in a tumultuous world. Mr. Wells can show that world in its rockings and upheavals, until beneath the seeming calm and conventionality of the surface view, is heard the very sound of the fractures and fallings; an age in the headlong rush of change. George Ponderevo is at one time floating immense financial companies, a king of speculation, courted by the great, one of England’s “Conquerors.” At another he is quarrelling and forgiving and quarrelling again with a little commonplace uncomprehending wife down in a commonplace villa at Ealing. He is learning to fly, absorbed in the work of scientific invention--the one real thing of solid resistance in a universe of slush and mud and make-believe. He is engaged in random, fantastic sociabilities at Beckenham or Chislehurst, discussing, under the conflagrations of sun and star, the respective merits, as domestic pets, of cat or dog. He is plunging, in disconnected adventure, into a piratical raid into West Africa after “quap,” a poisonous radio-active product of enormous value; and again, emerging from that terrific battle with unclean and tenacious forces, he is balancing toast on a tea-cup in a London drawing-room. He tumbles into love, driven forward by blind, tyrannous forces which overthrow reason and conventional restraint, against which he has never been warned, in whose service he can find no meaning. And in problems of sex which appear simple to the orthodox upholders of the existing moral standards, and simple, again, to the orthodox revolters from the existing moral standards, he can find nothing but perplexity and confusion--no certain guidance at all.