Two Books on Wells

little mechanical from so much playing of the same pieces to poor [i.e., uncritical] audiences." Synge's energies were expended on matters such as arranging for the marriage of the actor, Frank Fay, to the underage actress, Brigit O'Dempsey, over her parents' objections. Seeming worse, because it indicated the tenuous governing structure of the group, was the incident in which Synge struggled to get a program printed on time, while waiting for the final word to come down from Yeats and Lady Gregory at Coole—as from Olympus—before he could list what was to be performed and thus commence rehearsals. While reading these letters one cannot help regretting that, thanks to the telephone, future historians will lack the day-by-day documentation of the myriad small details behind such an historic enterprise. This sort of specific material from "the day's war with every knave and dolt" makes vivid what might have been a pallid academic argument of the high ideals that lie behind the founding of the Irish National Theatre. Carl Markgraf Portland State University 6. TWO BOOKS ON WELLS John R. Reed. The Natural History of H. G. Wells. Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1982. $23.95 John Huntington. The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982. $22.50 In 1930, having read reprints of Wells's science fiction in Amazing Stories, I used my weekly allowance to buy a copy of his new novel, The Autocracy of Mr. Parham . On the page opposite the title-page I found that "Mr. Wells has also written the following Novels. . . . The following Fantastic and Imaginative Romances. . . . Numerous Short Stories collected under the following titles.... A series of books on Social, Religious, and Political Questions. . . . And two little books about Children's Play. . . ." for a grand total of 58 volumes. 1 was fascinated by the variety and appalled by the extent of the list, and would have been even more appalled if I had known that the list was somewhat incomplete or that in the next fifteen years new books would be regularly added to each of the three major divisions so that by the time of his death a complete list of Wells's books would include well over a hundred titles. Almost alone among Wellsians, Professor Reed has attempted to cover the whole of Wells's work from 1895 and The Time Machine to 1945 and Mind at the End of Its Tether. Putting aside such questions as whether Wells was a "great thinker" or a "fine novelist," Reed argues that Wells "has survived and will survive" simply because he was "a master of language, capable of shaping original and borrowed ideas into vivid, memorable, and novel arrangements" (pp. 1-2). His purpose is to demonstrate that "Wells had a world view that, while it developed and evolved over the half century of his career, remained coherent and mainly consistent—more so than with most men of letters," a world view that "found expression in powerful sets of images which, when studied with care, reinforce Wells's intellectual constructions" (p. Ix). These constructions and images are surveyed in eight chapters, beginning with the abiding theme of Wells's work "Liberation," and then moving from the forces 326 that bind, "Nature" and "Flesh and Blood," through what Is to be liberated, "Identity : Self and Race," to the means of liberation, "Progress," "Organization, Order, and Education," "The Will," and "Writing." The last chapter is much the longest of the eight, for although Wells abjured the term and called himself a journalist, he was one of most highly self-conscious of artists, and had, from first to last, a great deal to say about the art of writing. All In all, though other books may go more deeply into certain aspects of Wells's work, I think this book the best introduction to Wells that has yet appeared, and one that should be carefully studied by any scholar-critic appalled at the idea of studying all the books that Wells has left us but still determined to have his say on the early Wells, the middle Wells, the late Wells, on Wells...