FICTION.
MEN LIKE GODS.*
Ma. BARNSTAPLE, sub-editor of The Liberal, "that well- known organ of the more depressing aspects of advanced thought," decided that he must take a holiday. He was an idealist, and post-War England had rattled him badly. The confusion and overcrowding of this ffi-conditioned, short.. tempered, almost starving world, over which Mr. Peeve, who was a pessimist, gloated with many an "I told you so," distressed Mr. Barnstaple. He must have a holiday ; he must be alone ; his family grated upon him ; and so he slipped away for a fortnight in his little two-seater, and once in London posted a letter to his wife explaining how a compla- cent doctor had ordered him a sort of ambulatory rest cure.
It was on the road to Maidenhead that the great adventure happened. The little yellow car was trundling along nicely when two big, powerful limousines passed it. "Now, the meekest motorist does not like to be passed," so Mr. Barn- staple put on a spurt, in a moment was round the next corner, and there stretched a half-mile of perfectly straight, empty road with no turning to right or left, and no sign of either of the big cars. Fifty . . . sixty miles an hour they had been doing, perhaps, but not the 120 or so that could alone have taken them beyond that stretch of sunlit road. Much puzzled, Mr. Barnstaple proceeded, and then came the explanation of the phenomenon. There was a side-slip . . a sound like the snap of a violin string . . . and Mr. Barn- staple's adventure was well launched.
With a wealth of those plausible detailed circumstances for which Mr. Wells's adventure stories are so delightfully remarkable, we learn how he and the people in the two big cars found themselves unhurt in Utopia. Two Utopians had been carrying out an experiment, and in this beautiful world the first things that the Earthlings see are the dead bodies of the two young scientists, a man and a girl, who have been killed in the course of their experiment. All Mr. Wells's powers as a writer have been lavished to make his new world charming, and it is fascinating. It is a vast garden, an Eden of miraculously lovely flowers, of tame beasts, of wise and beautiful men and women, a place of the Christian virtues, of co-operation instead of competition, a place where men's combative instincts are turned not upon each other, but towards the conquest of the powers of Nature. It is a land of open places, or of exquisite little cities set in lawns, a land where there are not too many people, where there is no noise and no disease.
Once Mr. Wells has got his Earthmen into Utopia he has • Men Like Gods, By H. G. Wells. tendon Cassell and Co. r7s. ed. neti
done with the miraculous. These people are simply two or three thousand years older than the earth people. They are men who have passed through an age—" the last Age' of Confusion "—parallel with ours. They have raised them- selves by their own efforts. They have had no advantage of natural resources or original superiority. The wonders have all been brought about by .human means, indeed, by the following of principles to which we all pay lip service.
But Men Like Gods is not a rhapsody. It is a book with a tang about it, with plenty of humour, and plenty of satire. The inhabitants of the other two cars were distinguished persons, whom it is not only amusing, but easy to recognize among living, indeed topical, personages, three statesmen, a great newspaper proprietor, a lady of fashion, a music-hall comedienne, a priest, and a dilettante. Mr. Wells does not spare them. His treatment of the priest and of Mr. Mush is, indeed, the only thing to which one could take exception in the book on the score of taste. He has made the priest especially too much of a figure of fun. Such men exist, but pathos would have been added to the humour if the poor man had been made a little worthier, a little humbler, a little more genuinely well-meaning. The only Earthling, except the always enchanting Mr. Barnstaple, who is treated at all sympathetically is the lady of fashion. As to how the murders, starvations, hairbreadth escapes, agonized dilemmas, and all the most exciting properties of the shocker are brought into this book we shall not say here, but most of it is extremely exciting. At the end the charming Mr. Barnstaple gets back safe to his villa, not only safe, but as one who has seen a vision.
Men Like Gods is one of the most delightful novels that Mr. Wells has ever written. It Is, of course, not without its faults. Carefully dwelt on and analysed, his Utopia is not, perhaps, quite perfect. For instance, it seems as if humour had been improved away. For all we know, too, scientists or students of constitutional 4iistory may find some of the machinery crude ; but the book is not meant to be dwelt on. Its admixture of excitement and adventure are like the directions on a piece of music—allegro . . . allegro con brio. It is a brilliant and inspired coup d'oeil and the best possible tonic for a Ruhr-depressed public. We wish it many editions.
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