On Contemporary Literature

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n THE UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF H. G. WELLS (before The War) It is a singularly incurious person who has never looked into the books of H. G. Wells; for through his innumerable pages swarm the figures, flash the colors, hum the voices of strictly contemporary life. Though he is on the brink of fifty, he...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n THE UTOPIAN NATURALISM OF H. G. WELLS (before The War) It is a singularly incurious person who has never looked into the books of H. G. Wells; for through his innumerable pages swarm the figures, flash the colors, hum the voices of strictly contemporary life. Though he is on the brink of fifty, he remains the copious and incessant spokesman for the Younger Generation which he has stung into consciousness of itself. He helps us also to understand the stupidity of our fathers and the absurdity of our mothers. When Ann Veronica, in the novel bearing her name, announces her intention of attending an unchaperoned dance in London and spending the remnant of the night in a hotel, her aunt packs an entire system of ideas into the little apprehensive phrase, But, my dear If you feel that the exclamation is delightfully ridiculous, you may consider yourself of the Younger Generation. If you elevate pained eyebrows with the aunt, you must set yourself down as Victorian. When the Queen's great reign closed with her death in 1901, Mr. Wells did not go so far as to insist that the bones of her statesmen should be hung in chains and the ashes of her men of letters scattered to the winds.But he recognized, as did the court poets at the Restoration, that the readiest way to brighten a new epoch is to blacken its predecessor; violating the Victorians was an expedient justified, to adapt a military expression, by literary necessity. Accordingly he has put into circulation the popular epithets for the politics, religion, art, and morals which prevailed in the dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging, English world of our fathers, with its muddled system, its emasculated orthodoxy, its shabby subservience, its unreasonable prohibitions, its meek surrender of mind and bo...