I pause at this word. It is one of those talismanic words one finds perpetually cropping up in the writings of men who have a marked point of view, words that express deep and abiding preferences and often set the key of an entire philosophy. "I like bare things," says George Ponderevo, in _Tono-Bungay;_ "stripped things, plain, austere, and continent things, fine lines and cold colors." That is the gesture of an artistic mind which repudiates, with an impatient sharpness, all the entanglements of the ordinary world. It is Oriental, it is Japanese, it is anything you like; but if it is English also it marks an entirely new regime. Without question it is English, and American as well. Thousands of people share that preference, and were economic socialism to go by the board we should still have to reckon with the progress of socialistic human nature. It detaches itself each day a little more from property, locality, and the hope of reward; it ceases to be necessitarian, it becomes voluntary; it relegates drudgery to mechanical devices; it releases the individual to a sense of his own coöperative and contributory place in the scheme of a more orderly future. Relatively speaking, the tendency of our kind is all away from luxury, sloth, complacency, confusion, ignorance, filth, heat, proprietorship, and all in the direction of light, austerity, agility, intelligence, coolness, athletic energy, understanding, cleanliness, order, "bare things, fine lines, and cold colors."
That is evident, and it is equally evident that the personal character and career of Wells are emblematic of this entire tendency. He has unravelled himself by science, talent, and vigor out of "lower middle class" Victorianism. Is it strange that he has adopted as a kind of sacred image that light, free, and charming product of our decade, the aeroplane, sprung as it is out of the wreckage, out of the secret beginnings, the confused muscularities, the effort and smoke of the most chaotic of all centuries, like a blade of exquisitely tempered and chased steel which justifies everything that was most laborious and unsightly in the forge?
But considered as a sacred image the aeroplane has its limitations. So also, considered as an exponent of fife, has Wells. Philosophy and religion, as he presents them, are simply what he chooses to think and feel, what he has been led by his own experience to think and feel. His main experience has been the experience of disentangling himself, and therefore life, reflected from within himself, is to him a thing also which disentangles itself and grows ever more free, simple, and lucid. In the mind of Wells this process, has taken on an altogether mystical, transcendental significance, a religious aspect. Possible as that is to himself personally, how far can it be taken as an argument to the human soul? How does it qualify him as a teacher, a public voice, a thinker for the mass of men? How does the conception of life purely as a process relate itself to human experience?