There will always be some to whom the significance of things, the meaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conception of mankind as "permanently in transition." Reading those passages where Wells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as I should feel with regard to music if I heard a mass of Mozart played at the rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if a procession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision. The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the pictures as a whole are a tissue and succession of colors. But that is not music, that is not art. Nor is a tissue and succession of births life. But indeed nothing is easier than to reduce Wells to an absurdity. If he implies anything at all he implies a "transvaluation of all values." It remains to consider him from this point of view. [Footnote 1: September 21, 1866.] CHAPTER VII THE SPIRIT OF WELLS In order to understand Wells at all one must grasp the fact that he belongs to a type of mind which has long existed in European literature but which is comparatively new in the English-speaking world, the type of mind of the so-called "intellectual." He is an "intellectual" rather than an artist; that is to say, he naturally grasps and interprets life in the light of ideas rather than in the light of experience. To pass from a definition to an example, let me compare Wells in this respect with the greatest and most typical figure of the opposite camp in contemporary English fiction; I mean Joseph Conrad. This comparison is all the more apt because just as much as Wells Conrad typifies the spirit of "unrest" (a word he has almost made his own, so often does he use it) which is the note of our age. Both of these novelists have endeavored to express the spirit of unrest; both have suggested a way of making it contributory to the attainment of an ideal. But how different is their method, how different is their ideal! And roughly the difference is this: that to Conrad the spirit of unrest is a personal mood, a thing, as people used to say, between man and his Maker; whereas to Wells the spirit of unrest is not a mood but a rationally explicable frame of mind, a sense of restricted function, an issue to be fought out not between man and nature but between man and society. In other words, where Conrad's point of view is moral, Wells's point of view is social; and whereas in Conrad the spirit of unrest can only be appeased by holding fast to certain simple instinctive moral principles, integrity, honor, loyalty, etc., contributing in this way to the ideal of personal character, the spirit of unrest in Wells is to be appeased by working through the established fact, by altering the environment in which man lives, contributing in this way to the ideal of a great society of which personal character is at once the essence and the product.