You are no realist, Mr. Wells. Unlike Mr. Hardy and Joseph Conrad, you have small respect for Chance, and you minimize Necessity, those great powers in the real world. But you have been a brave mythmaker and a heartening poet to the Intellectuals of your time. You have turned an entire generation of novelists and readers from contemplating the fatal forces of heredity and environment and instinct to considering the god-like power of an intelligent will to control instinct, environment and heredity. And I am going to turn upon you your own fine valediction to Oswald in your "Joan and Peter," for I think it sums up your virtue and your valor and that air of being awake and radiant which you have communicated to the more delightful young people of our day:
There was a light upon his life, and the truth was that he could not discover the source of the light nor define its nature; there was a presence in the world about him that made all life worth while and yet it was Nameless and Incomprehensible. . . . Perhaps some men have meant this when they talked of Love, but he himself had loved because of this, and so he held it must be something greater than Love. Perhaps some men have intended it in their use of the word Beauty, but it seemed to him that rather it made and determined Beauty for him. And others again have known it as the living presence of God, but the name of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning. And yet it was by this, by this Nameless, this Incomprehensible, that he lived and was upheld. It did so uphold him that he could go on, he knew, though happiness were denied him; though defeat and death stared him in the face.
