The truth is that Wells, for all that he has passed outside the economics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas which produced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tell you that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the only true thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by that criterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensive gibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's Fairy Tales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presents itself. To say that "the fundamental nature of life is a tissue and succession of births" is merely a refinement of this. It is true, just as the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the world is full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of a reasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there is a Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue to grow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friendship, or music, or poetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialist must feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and on that point socialism has nothing to say at all. It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddle that the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. Could Wells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full of meaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life he has felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in English authors. "Modern poetry, with an exception or so," he remarks somewhere, and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as a whole, "does not signify at all." It is the same with regard to music, art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: his writings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outline against a sunset, masses of machinery in the glare of the forge, things that suggest the etcher's eye. But they are curiously impersonal. Consider, for example, his description of Worms Cathedral: It rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow under a press of canvas. You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty he feels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is as untouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities of this building, not to mention its connection with human history, as if he had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not the changeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this building stands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is the mechanism, the process--his emotions gather about the physical result which appears to justify these. _À chacun son infini_.