Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 1.pdf/26

Rh Inseparable from the question "What is the drive in me?" are the questions: "What should one do?" "What ought one to do?" There is no such thing as an impersonal discussion of conduct or absolute detachment in art. Contemporary criticism is too often vitiated by a pretence that such an aloofness is possible. It would be easier to study anatomy without a body to touch and see and dissect, than to discuss conduct without experiences, personalities, and imperatives. For, to be a little franker than he was in his opening paragraphs, the writer confesses his profound disbelief in any perfect or permanent work of art. All art, all science, and still more certainly all writing are experiments in statement. There will come a time for every work of art when it will have served its purpose and be bereft of its last rag of significance. Here in these collected volumes are fantasy, fiction, discussion, and stated case, all openly and deliberately experimental, all in essence sketches and trials. This edition is a diary of imaginations and ideas much more than a set display, the record of a life lived in a time of great readjustment rather than of creative achievement.

Necessarily where the standpoint varies there are many variations in statement. Quite apart from the real blunders, the wanderings into dead alleys, and the slow tentative realisations, step by step, of a limited and fallible man, there must also be many merely apparent inconsistencies in such writings. A man may say one day that Monte Rosa lies to the right of the Matterhorn and another day he may say it lies to the left, and he may be an entirely trustworthy xviii