the great majority of our modern Truth-hunters are very different, as they will, with their frank candor, be the first to admit. They are free "to drop their swords and daggers" whenever so commanded, and it is high time they did.

With these two exceptions I think my prescription will 5 be found of general utility, and likely to promote a healthy flow of good works.

I had intended to say something as to the effect of speculative habits upon the intellect, but cannot now do so. The following shrewd remark of Mr. Latham's in his interesting 10 book on the "Action of Examinations" may, however, be quoted; its bearing will be at once seen, and its truth recognized by many:

"A man who has been thus provided with views and acute observations may have destroyed in himself the germs 15 of that power which he simulates. He might have had a thought or two now and then if he had been let alone, but if he is made first to aim at a standard of thought above his years, and then finds he can get the sort of thoughts he wants without thinking, he is in fair way to be spoiled." 20

5-7: W.

1, 2, 3, 6, 7. 9, 11, 12, 14.

H. G. WELLS

1866

ADOLESCENCE

Part of Chapter IV of "The New Machiavelli ” 1

SI

I FIND it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and interpretation followed interpretation in my everspreading, ever-deepening, ever-multiplying, and enriching vision of this world into which I had been born. Every 5 day added its impressions, its hints, its subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day after day the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey 10 some idea of the factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by the first intimations of 15 the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused avidity toward the centers of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down that one realizes how marvelously crowded, how marvelously analytical and synthetic those ears must be. One begins with the little 20 child to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen 1Copyright, 1911, by Duffield & Company, New York.

1-6: c, x. 6-16: e, a, x. 19-185, 8: a, c, e, h.

of opaque and disconnected facts, the home a thing eternal, and "being good" just simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of partial understanding, here massed by mists, here refracted 5 and distorted through half-translucent veils, here showing broad prospects and limitless vistas, and here impenetrably dark.

I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts, and even prayers by night, and strange occasions when by a sort of 10 hypnotic contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is hard to measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an utter horror of 15 death was replaced by the growing realization of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of reformation in the future seem but the grim- 20 mest irony upon now irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me away

from it.

I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and 25 in that passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for some permanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that Incom- 30 prehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling of it, feeling by it, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite clearly 12-24: V. 23, 24: b. 28-186, 7: c, q.

and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even 5 though life hurts so that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure, no promise but pain. . . .

But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe 10 the secrecies of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile and disgraceful in its 15 quality. The world was never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time.

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I knew the thing as a haunting and alluring 20 mystery that I tried to keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my upbringing.

The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and huge gray terraces of the Crystal Palace 25 were the first intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to look at them not simply, but curiously and askance. Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in 30 admission chiefly for the sake of them. . .

The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to me now that swathing up of all the splendors of the flesh, that strange combination of fanatical terror

8-16: x, m. 31-187, 6: c, a, h.

ism and shyness that fenced me about with prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonored by shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled 5 like a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the twilight, a Venus IO with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passions-stirring atmosphere rather than incarnation in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a picture.

All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a 15 locked avoided chamber.

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what we called at first 20 sociological discussion. I can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but we also used to talk a great deal at a man's in King's, a man named, 25 if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere at Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings-he had suffered the martyrdom of ducking for it—and a huge French May-day 30 poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations. Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and all

6: b. 7-14: e, h. 15, 16: b. 21-33:1.