So much for the facts. The reflections are not less illuminating:
The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure. Success with a book--even such a commercially modest success as mine has been--means in the English-speaking world not merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost freedom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted out of his narrow circumstances into familiar and unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people. He sees the world; if his work excites interest, he meets philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the great, and he may make such use of them as he can. He finds himself no longer reading in books and papers, but hearing and touching at first hand the big questions that sway men, the initiatives that shape human affairs.... To be a literary artist is to want to render one's impressions of the things about one. Life has interested me enormously and filled me with ideas and associations I want to present again. I have liked life and like it more and more. The days in the shop and the servants' hall, the straitened struggles of my early manhood, have stored me with vivid memories that illuminate and help me to appreciate all the wider vistas of my later social experiences. I have friends and intimates now at almost every social level, from that of a peer to that of a pauper, and I find my sympathies and curiosities stretching like a thin spider's web from top to bottom of the social tangle. I count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents of my life, and another is that I am of a diffident and ineffectual presence, unpunctual, fitful, and easily bored by other than literary effort; so that I am not tempted to cut a figure in the world and abandon that work of observing and writing which is my proper business in it.
This candid and exact statement enables us to see just how far, in matters of fact, experience and belief, the autobiographical motive has entered his writings. It would be possible to show how inevitably such an ideal as that of the New Republican Samurai arose from such a life; how much that conscious and deliberate insistence on personal efficiency and orderly ways, that repudiation of mental confusion, sluggishness, and sentiment may figure as a kind of stepping-stone from the world of Kipps and Polly to the world of Remington and Trafford; how a self-wrought scientific education would form the basis of an ideal of aristocracy rising from it; and how the motto "There is no Being but Becoming" would express its own constant desertion of levels achieved, its own pressing upward to levels equally transient. Just as the "democratic person" of Whitman raises his own fervent, chaotic, and standardless experience into an ideal, so also the ideal of Wells is nothing else than the projection of his own experimental opportunism. It is impossible in discussing Wells to ignore this social ascent; for in England a man passes from one stratum to another only by virtue of a certain lack of substantiality, a power to disencumber himself, to shed customs and affections and all the densenesses and coagulations which mark each grade in that closely defined social hierarchy. The world of shopkeeping in England is a world girt about with immemorial subjections; it is, one might say, a moss-covered world; and to shake oneself loose from it is to become a rolling stone, a drifting and unsettled, a detached and acutely personal, individual. It is to pass from a certain confined social maturity, a confused mellowness, into a world wholly adventurous and critical, into a freedom which achieves itself at the expense of solidity and warmth. In Wells, for instance, the sense of the soil is wholly supplanted by the sense of machinery. His evolution has been the reverse of the usual evolution from what Bacon called the _lumen siccum_ to the _lumen humidum_, from the dry light to the light that is drenched in customs and affections. Instead of growing mellower, he has grown more and more fluid and electric, in direct ratio to the growing width of his social horizon.