Yet the "human interest," as it is called, was there from the outset, side by side with this main theoretic interest in the scientific and socialistic possibilities of life. The series of novels began almost as early as the series of romances. Two "streams of tendency" run side by side throughout the earlier writings of Wells--streams of tendency which meet fully for the first time in _Tono-Bungay_, and have formed a single main current in the novels subsequent to that. On the one hand was the stream of constructive theory, not yet brought into contact with human nature, on the other the stream of "human interest," not yet brought into contact with constructive theory. Mr. Hoopdriver, of _The Wheels of Chance,_ and Kipps, are typical of this earlier fiction, specimens of muddled humanity as such, one might say, quite unmitigated by the train of thought, the possibility of doing something _with_ muddled humanity, which was growing more and more urgent in the romances.
In _Tono-Bungay_, as I have said, one sees the union of these two trains of interest, muddled humanity being represented in Uncle Ponderevo, constructive theory in George Ponderevo. And in all the subsequent novels this fusion continues. The background in each case is the static world of muddle from which Wells is always pushing off into the open sea of possibilities, the foreground being occupied by a series of men and women who represent this dynamic forward movement. And the philosophy of Wells has finally come to port in human nature.
"Few modern socialists," he says somewhere, "present their faith as a complete panacea, and most are now setting to work in earnest upon those long-shirked preliminary problems of human interaction through which the vital problem of a collective head and brain can alone be approached." And elsewhere he says: "Our real perplexities are altogether psychological. There are no valid arguments against a great-spirited socialism but this, that people will not. Indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of authority, and above all jealousy, jealousy from pride and vanity, jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those upon whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love, a jealousy of criticism and association, these are the real obstacles to those brave large reconstructions, those profitable abnegations and brotherly feats of generosity that will yet turn human life--of which our individual fives are but the momentary parts--into a glad, beautiful and triumphant coöperation all round this sunlit world."