Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 1.pdf/18

Rh writings; there is a continuous intellectual process. A group of questions shapes itself steadily and progressively; "What is the drive in me?" "What has it got to do with the other drives?" "What has it got to do with the spectacle without?"

Again and again the author returns to this group of inquiries; he takes this or that aspect of the drive in this or that relationship and experiments with possible answers. Since the human mind is a very infirm implement, and abstract and philosophical phraseology still very unsatisfactory, it has perforce to use symbols and help itself out with concrete imaginations. These writings are sometimes stories, sometimes fables and fantasies; sometimes they are discussions posed in relation to an attitude rather deliberately assumed. The idea of producing a "finished work" was never strong at any time in the writer's mind. Some of the earlier books were very carefully written; "Love and Mr. Lewisham," for example, was sedulously polished, and so was "The First Men in the Moon"; "A Modern Utopia" also was planned and written with considerable care; but most of these writings are sketches, some, like "The World Set Free," quite broken-backed sketches, intended to carry an idea or a group of ideas over to an interested reader and lacking any pretension to "finish" or "execution" or any of the implicit claims of the set and deliberate and dignified work of art. These collected writings aim at something in the flatest contrast with—what shall I call it?—the processional dignity of such a collection as that of the works of Henry James. Such works are essentially x