excellent scholar, with a good acquaintance with the Greek and Latin classics, and his identifications with the plants mentioned by other writers are based on adequate study. The wood-cuts that illustrate the work are of extraordinary beauty and truth, and based on a first-hand study of the habits and structure of plants. These figures established a tradition and standard of plant illustration which is clearly traceable down to the middle of the following century, and is perceptible to this day.

With Fuchs we reach the high-water mark of the Renaissance herbal. The history of the herbal continued for long after his time, and important books were produced by later authors. From now on, however, such works were to develop on more strictly botanical lines. Fuchs was essentially a herbalist in the limited sense. His plants were arranged in alphabetical order and there is in his pages nothing of the nature of classification, hardly anything that can be called plant geography, little or nothing concerning the essential nature of plants, or of their relation to other living things. It is a herbal pure and simple, containing none of the scientific elements except systematic observation. But modern science was dawning. The year after the 'De historia 'stirpium' appeared at Basel there was printed at the same town the ' De fabrica corporis humani' of Andreas Vesalius, and in the same year the' De revolutionibus orbium celestium,' of Nicholas Copernicus, was published at Nurenburg. With these two fundamental works dealing with the microcosm and the macrocosm respectively modern science had dawned. The day of the herbal and all that it represented was over.

CHARLES SINGER

MR. H. G. WELLS

The Works of Mr. H. G. Wells.

THE

HE professional critics of ancient literature assure us that more than one writer has often been concerned in the composition of a work which is conventionally ascribed to a single individual. There are two authors, to say nothing of an editor, of Genesis; there is a greater and a lesser Isaiah; and a case can be made out for almost as many Homers as there are cities clamorous for the honour of his birth.

This interesting discovery may yet be invoked to explain our contemporaries, and the day will possibly dawn when an industrious scholar, surveying the immense catalogue of literature attributed to Mr. H. G. Wells, will show that the word Wells is manifestly a pseudonym signifying inexhaustible abundance and depth, and that a whole academy of writers must have co-operated for some years under a collective name. Some remote University professor, lecturing on what he will certainly call the PostVictorian Period of Revolt in the Later Middle Age of Insular English, will proceed to distinguish Wells the romancer from Wells the prophet; Wells the historian from Wells the psychological novelist; and he may yet find it necessary to spend the best part of a Sabbatical college year excavating the neighbourhood of Dunmow in order to disentangle the remains of Wells the politician from those of Wells the priest of a new religion.

Nor will his task even then be at an end; for he will have to devote a lengthy appendix and the autumn of his days to a demonstration that the Wells who describes himself as a counterjumper in ‘Joan and Peter' must at all costs be separated from Wells the student of biology; since every canon of constructive criticism must recognise the stark impossibility of one and the same man being an authority on drapery and the dinosaur.

Unluckily, we have not yet attained these refinements in the case of the living, and the world is consequently reduced to the miserable alternative of regarding the Wells cycle of literature as VOL. 237. NO. 483.

H

the outcome of a single brain, like Ford motors, Ingersoll watches, and other varieties of modern mass-production. It is twenty-eight years since Mr. Wells first attempted fame and fortune with the modest but almost forgotten' Select Conversations with an Uncle,' and he has now published fifty full-length books, several tracts, pamphlets, essays, articles, and two or three volumes of short stories, while embedded in his writings the curious may discover a poem, a lecture, a vision, and even a sermon.

When a man works at so rapid a rate, and in so many different soils--some at least of which are merely experimental-it almost ceases to be a relevant charge that he sometimes writes below his own best level, that he is often hasty and superficial, that he is apt to repeat himself in situation or idea, and that he shows a tendency to think as he goes along-that insidious solvitur ambulando which has betrayed many a fluent author. If a man were not entitled to be judged by his best, not his worst work, there would be no reputations left in literature; and considering that a great deal of Mr. Wells' writing has been hurriedly done, and published with time for little more than verbal revision, it is surprising that books written almost under the conditions of journalism should so seldom sink to the level of mere journalism Deductions have to be made, passages skipped on re-reading, and irritating blunders or uninspired improvisations ignored; but, at his best, Mr. Wells is unique in his own line, and, at his worst, he never falls to merely mechanical fiction.

In the preface to 'The Sleeper Awakes,' Mr. Wells accuses himself of a slovenliness which seems to be an almost unavoidable 'defect in me.' It is a handsome admission, which must be set against the exuberant imagination that even his detractors are compelled to acknowledge. Indeed, the defect and the quality have in his case proved complementary. The ideas flow so fast that he is apt to grow tired of a theme before its possibilities are exploited; he reminds one a little of the typical farmer in a primitive country, who moves to a fresh location after every reaping.

It is for this reason, no doubt, that the beginnings of Mr. Wells' books are apt to be better than the endings. Nobody can start out so well-he is already doing his sixty miles an hour before he is clear of the suburban entanglements of the first chapter. But towards the summit level of the middle pages the locomotive

begins to labour, the pace gets slower and slower, and finally we come to a full stop at Sociological Junction; the guard discusses modern thought with the engine-driver, the station-master intervenes with a dissertation on the superior advantages of State railways, and, finally, Mr. Wells, the reformer, pokes his head out of the window, and Mr. Wells, the romancer, having taken his ticket to the terminus, quietly curls himself up in a corner and goes to sleep.

It is a discouraging situation, not provided for in the ordinary time-tables of fiction. Eventually, of course, the train starts again, but the swing and the rush and the glory of the first rapid motion have vanished; and as we crawl through the last wayside stations, tired and a little irritated, we notice that the weary attendants are already putting out the lamps with a series of explosive dots. . .

But we know that Mr. Wells, the romancer, refreshed and strengthened after his snooze, has already started on another journey, and although the chances are that he will land us again at some dismal jungle of controversy, which promises to lead everywhere but in fact leads nowhere, few can resist the pleasure of another excursion into an unknown land.

Only the supreme masters in the art of story-telling succeed in making the end more impressive than the beginning, and Mr. Wells, for all his gifts, is not quite one of these. Indeed, in some ways, the paradox is true that he might have been a greater novelist had he been a lesser man.

In a contribution to one of the reviews some years ago, Mr. Wells rather truculently defended the novel as a vehicle of thought, and suggested that it was still only in its infancy; it was indicated that it would tackle such grave matters as economics, philosophy, the conflict of religion and science, and any other problem that the writer chose to touch. There is really no need to defend the novel, which has dethroned the drama, and may yet be dethroned by the cinema; but it is not, and it never has been, a satisfactory substitute for the treatise. The imperative necessity for incident and action, which dogs the footsteps of the novelist, the insistent demand of readers to be interested and not instructed, continually hamper and limit its range.

What Mr. Wells really meant, no doubt, was that the popularity of the novel made it a good vehicle for propaganda, and that is true; but the operation bears too near a resemblance

to those surgical triumphs which cure the disease and kill the patient for the wary reader to be quite comfortable under the process. The new type of novel may teach a great deal, but there is some danger that it may kill our interest in fiction.

Mr. Wells at least has lived consistently up to his creed, and Mr. Keable and others show an obvious inclination to follow in his footsteps. But the experiment is as hazardous as that of getting the djinn into the bottle. There is so much of the djinn and so little of the bottle, and when the thing is done at last, the reader is under such manifest temptations to imitate the fable still further and throw the bottle, djinn and all, into the sea, that there is at least an arguable case for the time-honoured practice of keeping the romancer and the expositor apart.

The difficulty with this particular variety of fiction is that the thesis is apt to overwhelm the tale as completely as the moral overwhelms the anecdote of the converted drunkard on the revivalist platform. There is much to be said for a good story, and I am assured on unimpeachable authority that there is even something to be said for a good sermon; but the two together are likely to be as deadly to the mental digestion as the mixture of meat and milk is to the physical.

We all know the novel with a purpose in which the characters are no longer human beings, but edifying types. They are never really alive, but they talk without ceasing; and there comes a time when even the pretence of conversational debate is abandoned and great slabs of exposition are linked together by a bare he 'said,' or ' she replied.' In real life, people do not act like that, and we should hate them if they did. As it is, we merely hate the author for trading under a false flag. He is an enemy who has run the blockade as a neutral.

Mr. Wells, of course, is too good a captain to put quite so much cargo into the boat as that; the craft never actually settles down to sink by the head. But there is apt to be more space given to cargo than to passengers in his later ventures, and this autocratic master mariner never stows the cargo safely in the hold as not wanted on the voyage, but insists on littering up the saloons and even unpacking the crates on the main deck at the very moment when we are crossing the line. No doubt the cargo is very valuable, but one has a prejudice against barking one's shins even on bars of pure gold.