The Dream

This Wells' utopia is a kind of Arcadia temperered with modernistic devices, an Arcadia of two thousand years hence inhabited by men and women quite without those human failings which would seem to have undergone so little alteration during the past four or five thousand years. Yet these splendid beings who enjoy feeling the rain "like a whip on their bare strong bodies," who oftern laugh aloud for sheer joy in living, have been "so taught and trained to think of others that their pain is ours," and whose meals of "roast fowl with sweet corn and chestnuts, . . . trout and various fruits and... golden wine" no one would seem to be obliged to prepare, are yet but the "ampler selves" of the sad lives that were. And in a dream Sarnac relives the life of Harry Mortimer Smith of the present day. When he awakes, he tells his mate Sunray, and their friends Radiant, Starlight, Willow and Firefly, the story of his dream, which, with their amazed, pitying or indignant comments upon it, forms the present book. The theme has been deftly handled, with the comments of Sarnac's friends expressing, of course, Mr. Wells's view of the present time, that view being his customary one, that whatever is, is wrong. The characters in the dream are types well known to Mr. Wells's readers. There is Harry Mortimer Smith, the greengrocer's son, ambitious, with a mind hungry for knowledge; his drunken, disappointed father; his scolding, harassed, futile mother. He has a brother and two sisters, of whom Fanny is the only one who stands out vividly; she becomes the mistress of a married man, and is happy-happy, that is, compared with the general misery of every one else. Harry falls in love and marries, but his "dark-eyed, warm-skinned, wayward and fragile." Hetty Marcus proves to belong to the order Fanny thus describes: "Some girls-the backbone goes out of them when they feel a man's kisses." Hetty's backbone departed in this way during her husband's absence, and when he discovered that the baby soon to be born was not his child, he disliked the situation so intensely that he divorced Hetty, married another woman...