By George

Vacation draws to an end and once more I have delved (delven?) into far more books than I can finish anytime soon.  The good part of this is that I am able to compare and contrast disparate authors who, at first blush, seem to have little in common.

For instance, I am currently reading George McDonald's "Phantastes," the work which so enchanted CSL; not to mention favorable retrospecive reviews by WH Auden and GK Chesterton. 

But also I am perusing the texts of one of the "prophetic" novels of HG Well, "When the Sleeper Awakes."

Try to imagine Wells writing--or even reading--these lines by McDonald:

"The sun, like a golden knot on high/gathers the glories of the sky,
and binds them into a shining tent,/ roofing the world with the firmament."

In fact, I don't find any poetry anywhere in Wells--was he incapable of it, or just intolerant of it? I suspect the latter. McDonald by contrast, ranged much further, and was not only famous for his fantasies but also for his didactic readings and lectures.  He was as famous as (the) Dickens in his time, and much more successful on his American tours, which Dickens botched by his intolerance of American half-developed literary and social sensibilities.

CSL was also famous for both fantasy--like McDonald--and his science fiction, which one great sci-fi writer opined was one of the few writers in the genre that had any literary genius embedded in his works.

But Wells was both hopelessly prosaic, and helplessly dismal, as portrayed more clearly by his latter work, "The World at the end of Its Tether."  As a committed materialist he had, as says the Book he so despised, "No hope in this world."  He was very consistently anti-sanguine about humanity, even though he was occasionally capable of the outlines of a love story--but one always doomed to be impaled on his theories of history. Tolstoy was far superior in mixing these two aspects of storytelling. 

Wells was best as a techno-prophet.  Many of the devices he saw coming are now commonplace--although he foresaw television as a kind of kinetoscope, he believed that color TV would not be possible even beyond 2100.  And he did accurately predict, unlike Orwell who was mainly talking about the USSR--that the future would be in control of mega-corporations and compulsory urbanization. Hard to argue with that...  

Enough for now--as I said, vacation is almost done, and my grandson is still stuck in the womb.  Bulletins as circumstances warrant...