MR WELLS' ANCIENTS
Men Like Gods. By H. G. Wells. 12mo. 327 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2.
THE significance of Mr Wells' new essay in Utopianism is fully indicated in the title. He has turned a little way from the problem of what men ought to do, to the real problem of morals, what ought to be? He has not, in effect, created imaginary supermen, nor proposed ideal human figures. He has presented a group of beings in the image of men and women, has sketchily indicated what exists in their world, and has said, these men are like gods. They have little enough relation to God, the Invisible King; there are passages in the speech of Urthred which imply an atheism touching even that deity. But the residuum of the argument is clear. It is that the beings of this Utopia are godlike creatures, and that the Earthlings remain in the age of confusion because they do not recognize the attributes of the others as divine. In short Mr Wells despairs of changing man until he has changed god.
This may be sacrilegious, but it is not stupid; it is too close to the commonplaces of religious experience to be that, for it is only a contemporary way of praying for a change of heart. With such a theme the book must divide into two parts: the rendering of actuality, the state of heart from which, and the rendering of Utopia, the state of heart to which we must turn. The framework is classic in one respect—the introduction of Mr Barnstaple, the modern Gulliver; he is the pivot of both flanks, for he is of one world and wishes for the other; near the middle of the book he tries, rather awkwardly, to be the pivot of the action. The novelty of the book is in presenting the right wing—the group of modern men and women who reject the Utopia into which they are flung. The politician, the priest, the philosopher, the millionaire, the fool (aesthetes are fools as in Shaw) the silly women, present with a specious appearance of fairness the case against Utopia, and in a sense, the case for the present.
Naturally the presentation of the actual world is done with greater vigour, with more gusto, than the presentation of the ideal
