SOURCE: Bergonzi, Bernard. “The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth.” In H. G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Bernard Bergonzi, pp. 39-55. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1960, Bergonzi underscores the mythical qualities of The Time Machine and outlines the major thematic concerns of the novella.]

H. G. Wells seems so essentially a writer of the first half of the twentieth century that we tend to forget that if he had died in 1900 at the age of thirty-four he would already have had a dozen books to his credit. He first established his reputation by the scientific romances written during these early years of his literary career, and they have remained popular. Historically considered, they are of interest as the forerunners of much latter-day science fiction. Yet, in my opinion, more substantial claims can be made for them. They are often compared with the work of Jules Verne, but this is a misleading comparison even if a plausible one. Wells himself wrote in 1933, “there is no resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies.” His early romances, in fact, despite their air of scientific plausibility, are much more works of pure imagination. They are, in short, fantasies, and the emphasis should be on “romance” rather than “scientific.” And like other kinds of literary romance they are distinguished by a quality which may reasonably be called symbolic, even if not specifically allegorical. Indeed, I would claim that Wells's early fiction is closer to the symbolic romances of Hawthorne or Melville, or to a complex fantasy like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or even to the fables of Kafka, than it is to the more strictly scientific speculations of Verne. This at least, is the assumption on which I base the following examination of The Time Machine, Wells's first novel, which appeared in 1895. This approach has already been hinted at by one of the best of Wells's modern critics, V. S. Pritchett, who has written:

Without question The Time Machine is the best piece of writing. It will take its place among the great stories of our language. Like all excellent works it has meanings within its meaning …¹

An earlier writer on Wells, Edward Shanks, remarked:

If I were to say that many of Mr. Wells's early books have a poetic quality I should run the risk of conveying a false impression. Luckily they have a peculiar quality which enables them to bear a special description. They are, in their degree, myths; and Mr. Wells is a mythmaker.²

Shanks expanded his remarks with particular reference to The Island of Dr. Moreau, though they apply equally to The Time Machine:

These passages suggest one interpretation of the book. But it is a myth, not an allegory; and whereas an allegory bears a single and definite interpretation, a myth does not, but can be interpreted in many ways, none of them quite consistent, all of them more alive and fruitful than the rigid allegorical correspondence.

Pritchett has referred to The Time Machine as a “poetic social allegory.” But this narrows the effective range of the work too much; though on one level the “allegory,” or in Shanks's more appropriate term, the “myth,” does operate in social terms, its further significance is biological and even cosmological. Structurally, The Time Machine belongs to the class of story which includes James's Turn of the Screw, and which Northrop Frye has called “the tale told in quotation marks, where we have an opening setting with a small group of congenial people, and then the real story told by one of the members.” As Frye observes:

The effect of such devices is to present the story through a relaxed and contemplative haze as something that entertains us without, so to speak, confronting us, as direct tragedy confronts us.³

The aesthetic distancing of the central narrative of The Time Machine, “the time traveller's story,” is carefully carried out. At the end of the book, the traveller says:

No, I cannot expect you to believe it. Take it as a lie—or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop. Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race, until I have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do you think of it?

The manifest disbelief of all his friends other than the storyteller—one of them “thought the tale a ‘gaudy lie’”—is balanced by the apparent evidence of his sojourn in the future, the “two strange white flowers” of an unknown species. In fact, Wells demands assent by apparently discouraging it.

The opening chapters of the novel show us the inventor entertaining his friends, a group of professional men, in the solid comfort of his home at Richmond. They recall the “club-man” atmosphere with which several of Kipling's short stories open, and their function in the narrative is to give it a basis in contemporary life at its most ordinary and pedestrian: this atmosphere makes the completest possible contrast with what is to come: an account of a wholly imaginative world of dominantly paradisal and demonic imagery, lying far outside the possible experience of the late Victorian bourgeoisie. These chapters are essential to Wells's purpose, since they prevent the central narrative from seeming a piece of pure fantasy, or a fairy story, and no more. The character of the time traveller himself—cheerful, erratic, and somewhat absurd, faintly suggestive of a hero of Jerome K. Jerome's—has a similar function. In the work of other popular writers of fantastic romance in the nineties, such as Arthur Machen and M. P. Shiel (both clearly deriving from Stevenson), a “weird” atmosphere is striven after from the very beginning and the dramatic power is correspondingly less.

Once the reader has been initiated into the group of friends, he is prepared for whatever is to come next. First the model time machine is produced—“a glittering metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made. … There was ivory in it, and some crystalline substance”—and sent off into time, never to be seen again. Then we are shown the full scale machine, and the account of it is a brilliant example of Wells's impressionistic method:

I remember vividly the flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how there in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench besides some sheets of drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to be.

The assemblage of details is strictly speaking meaningless but nevertheless conveys very effectively a sense of the machine without putting the author to the taxing necessity of giving a direct description.

The central narrative of The Time Machine is of a kind common to several of Wells's early romances: a central character is transferred to or marooned in a wholly alien environment, and the story arises from his efforts to deal with the situation. This is the case with the time traveller, with the angel in The Wonderful Visit and with Prendick in The Island of Dr. Moreau, while Griffin in The Invisible Man becomes the victim of his environment in attempting to control it. Though Wells is a writer of symbolic fiction—or a myth-maker—the symbolism is not of the specifically heraldic kind that we associate, for instance, with Hawthorne's scarlet letter, Melville's white whale, or James's golden bowl. In Wells the symbolic element is inherent in the total fictional situation, rather more in the manner of Kafka. When, for instance, we are shown in The Time Machine a paradisal world on the surface of the earth inhabited by beautiful carefree beings leading a wholly aesthetic existence, and a diabolic or demonic world beneath the surface inhabited by brutish creatures who spend most of their time in darkness in underground machine shops, and only appear on the surface at night, and when we are told that these two races are the descendents respectively of the present-day bourgeoisie and proletariat, and that the latter live by cannibalistically preying on the former—then clearly we are faced with a symbolic situation of considerable complexity, where several different “mythical” interpretations are possible.

The time traveller—unlike his predecessor, Nebogipfel (hero of “The Chronic Argonauts,” Wells's first version of The Time Machine, published in a student magazine in 1888), and his successors, Moreau and Griffin—is not a solitary eccentric on the Frankenstein model, but an amiable and gregarious bourgeois. Like Wells himself, he appears to be informed and interested in the dominant intellectual movements of his age, Marxism and Darwinism. Wells had come across Marx at South Kensington, and though in later years he was to become extremely anti-Marxist, in his immediate post-student days he was prepared to uphold Marxian socialism as “a new thing based on Darwinism.” However doubtfully historical this may be, the juxtaposition of the two names is very important for Wells's early imaginative and speculative writing. The time traveller, immediately after he has arrived in the world of 802701, is full of forebodings about the kind of humanity he may discover:

What might not have happened to men? What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness, and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently slain.

At first, however, his more fearful speculations are not fulfilled. Instead of what he had feared, he discovers the Eloi, who are small, frail and beautiful. He is rather shocked and then amused by their child-like ways and manifest lack of intellectual powers—“the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible merriment, to my mind.” Such a “grave and intellectual posterity” had in fact been postulated by Bulwer Lytton in The Coming Race, 1871, a work, which it has been suggested had some influence on The Time Machine, though the resemblances are very slight. But it is quite possible that Wells was here alluding to Bulwer Lytton's romance, as well as to the wider implications of optimistic evolutionary theory.

Subsequently the traveller becomes charmed with the Eloi and the relaxed communism of their way of life. They live, not in separate houses, but in large semi-ruinous buildings of considerable architectural splendour, sleeping and eating there communally. Their only food is fruit, which abounds in great richness and variety, and they are described in a way which suggests the figures of traditional pastoral poetry: “They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping.” Later the traveller takes stock of their world:

I have already spoken of the great palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and some still occupied. Here and there rose a white silvery figure in the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the sharp vertical line of some cupola or obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.

There appear to be no animals, wild or domestic, left in the world, and such forms of life as remain have clearly been subject to a radical process of selection:

The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained. Disease had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later that even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly affected by these changes.

Man has, in short, at some period long past obtained complete control of his environment, and has been able to manipulate the conditions of life to his absolute satisfaction. The “struggle for existence” has been eliminated, and as a result of this manipulation the nature of the species has undergone profound modification. Not only have the apparent physical differences between male and female disappeared, but their mental powers have declined as well as their physical. The human race, as it presents itself to the traveller, is plainly in its final decadence. The Eloi, with their childlike and sexually ambiguous appearance, and their consumptive type of beauty, are clearly reflections of fin de siècle visual taste. The Time Machine is in several respects a book of its time, for speculations about decadence and degeneration were much in the air in the eighties and early nineties, reaching their peak in Max Nordau's massive work of destructive criticism, Degeneration. Wells certainly knew the English edition of this book, which appeared in March 1895, when The Time Machine was already completed, for he makes a satirical reference to it in his second novel, The Wonderful Visit, published the following October.

In the world that the traveller surveys, aesthetic motives have evidently long been dominant as humanity has settled down to its decline. “This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languour and decay.” But in the age of the Eloi even artistic motives seem almost extinct. “To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight; so much was left to the artistic spirit, and no more.” The implied comment on fin de siècle aestheticism is, again, unmistakable. The first chapter of the time traveller's narrative is called “In the Golden Age,” and the following chapter, “The Sunset of Mankind”: there is an ironic effect, not only in the juxtaposition, but in the very reference to a “golden age.” Such an age, the Saturnia regna, when men were imagined as living a simple, uncomplicated and happy existence, before in some way falling from grace, was always an object of literary nostalgia, and traditionally thought of as being at the very beginning of man's history. Wells, however, places it in the remotest future, and associates it not with dawn but with sunset. The time traveller sees the Eloi as leading a paradisal existence, and his sense of this is imparted to the reader by the imagery of the first part of his narrative. They are thoroughly assimilated to their environment, where “the whole earth had become a garden,” and “everywhere were fruits and sweet and delicious flowers; brilliant butterflies flew hither and thither.” Their appearance and mode of life makes a pointed contrast to the drab and earnest figure of the traveller:

Several more brightly-clad people met me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy nineteenth-century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with flowers, and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft-coloured robes and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl of laughter and laughing speech.

The writing here suggests that Wells was getting a little out of his depth, but the intention is clearly to present the Eloi as in some sense heirs to Pre-Raphaelite convention. This implicit contrast between the aesthetic and the utilitarian, the beautiful and idle set against the ugly and active, shows how The Time Machine embodies another profound late-Victorian preoccupation, recalling, for instance, the aesthetic anti-industrialism of Ruskin and Morris. The world of the Eloi is presented as not only a golden age, but as something of a lotos land, and it begins to exercise its spell on the traveller. After his immediate panic on discovering the loss of his machine, he settles down to a philosophic resignation:

Suppose the worst? I said. Suppose the machine altogether lost—perhaps destroyed? It behoves me to be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people, to get a clear idea of the method of my loss, and the means of getting materials and tools; so that in the end, perhaps, I may make another. That would be my only hope, a poor hope, perhaps, but better than despair. And, after all, it was a beautiful and curious world.

The traveller's potential attachment to the Eloi and their world is strengthened when he rescues the little female, Weena, from drowning, and begins a prolonged flirtation with her. This relationship is the biggest flaw in the narrative, for it is totally unconvincing, and tends to embarrass the reader (Pritchett has referred to the “faint squirms of idyllic petting.”) But though the traveller feels the attraction of the kind of life she represents, he is still too much a man of his own age, resourceful, curious and active, to succumb to it. As he says of himself, “I am too Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to wait inactive for twenty-four hours—that is another matter.”

But it is not long before he becomes aware that the Eloi are not the only forms of animal life left in the world, and his curiosity is once more aroused. He realises that Weena and the Eloi generally have a great fear of darkness: “But she dreaded the dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things.” Here we have the first hint of the dominant imagery of the second half of the narrative, the darkness characteristic of the Morlocks, and the ugly, shapeless forms associated with it, contrasting with the light and the brilliant colours of the Eloi and their world. Looking into the darkness one night just before dawn the traveller imagines that he can see vague figures running across the landscape, but cannot be certain whether or not his eyes have deceived him. And a little later, when he is exploring one of the ruined palaces, he comes across a strange creature—“a queer little ape-like figure” that runs away from him and disappears down one of the well-like shafts that are scattered across the country, and whose purpose and nature had puzzled the traveller on his arrival: “My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a dull white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was flaxen hair on its head and down its back.” The traveller now has to reformulate his ideas about the way the evolutionary development of man has proceeded: “Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals.” He has to modify his previous “Darwinian” explanation by a “Marxist” one: “it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer was the key to the whole position.” Even in his own day, he reflects, men tend to spend more and more time underground: “There is a tendency to utilise underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilisation.” Even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?” Similarly the rich have tended to preserve themselves more and more as an exclusive and self-contained group, with fewer and fewer social contacts with the workers, until society has stratified rigidly into a two-class system. “So, in the end, above ground, you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots; the workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour.” The analysis represents, it will be seen, a romantic and pessimistic variant of orthodox Marxist thought: the implications of the class-war are accepted, but the possibility of the successful proletarian revolution establishing a classless society is rigidly excluded. Thus, the traveller concludes, the social tendencies of nineteenth century industrialism have become rigidified and then built in, as it were, to the evolutionary development of the race. Nevertheless, he is still orthodox enough in his analysis to assume that the Eloi, despite their physical and mental decline, are still the masters and the Morlocks—as he finds the underground creatures are called—are their slaves. It is not long before he discovers that this, too, is a false conclusion.

Soon enough, despite his dalliance with Weena, and her obvious reluctance to let him go, the traveller decides that he must find out more about the Morlocks, and resolves to descend into their underworld. It is at this point that, in Pritchett's phrase, “the story alters its key, and the Time Traveller reveals the foundation of slime and horror on which the pretty life of his Arcadians is precariously and fearfully resting.”⁴ The descent of the traveller into the underworld has, in fact, an almost undisplaced mythical significance: it suggests a parody of the Harrowing of Hell, where it is not the souls of the just that are released but the demonic Morlocks, for it is they who dominate the subsequent narrative. During his “descent into hell” the traveller is seized by the Morlocks, but he keeps them at bay by striking matches, for they recoil from light in any form, which is why they do not normally appear on the surface of the earth by day. During his brief and confused visit to their world he sees and hears great machines at work, and notices a table spread for a meal. He observes that the Morlocks are carnivorous, but does not, for a time, draw the obvious conclusion about the nature of the meat they are eating. However, it is readily apparent to the reader. The Morlocks have a complex symbolic function, for they not only represent an exaggerated fear of the nineteenth century proletariat, but also embody many of the traditional mythical images of a demonic world. This will soon be apparent if one compares Wells's account of them and their environment with the chapter on “Demonic Imagery” in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. As Frye writes:

Images of perverted work belong here too: engines of torture, weapons of war, armour, and images of a dead mechanism which, because it does not humanise nature, is unnatural as well as inhuman. Corresponding to the temple or One Building of the Apocalypse, we have the prison or dungeon, the sealed furnace of heat without light, like the city of Dis in Dante.⁵

Indeed nothing is more remarkable about The Time Machine than the way in which its central narrative is polarised between opposed groups of imagery, the paradisal (or, in Frye's phrase, the apocalyptic) and the demonic, representing extreme forms of human desire and repulsion.

A further significance of the Morlocks can be seen in the fact that they are frequently referred to in terms of unpleasant animal life: thus they are described as, or compared with, “apes,” “lemurs,” “worms,” “spiders,” and “rats.” One must compare these images with the traveller's original discovery that all forms of non-human animal life—with the apparent exception of butterflies—had been banished from the upper world, whether noxious or not. There is a powerful irony in his subsequent discovery that the one remaining form of animal life, and the most noxious of all, is a branch of humanity. Furthermore this confusion of human and animal—with its origin in some kind of imaginative perturbation over the deeper implications of Darwinism—was to provide the central theme of The Island of Dr. Moreau.

The traveller narrowly escapes with his life from the Morlocks and returns to the surface to make another reappraisal of the world of 802701. The image of the “golden age” as it has presented itself to him on his arrival has been destroyed: “there was an altogether new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks—a something inhuman and malign.” He has to reject his subsequent hypothesis that the Eloi were the masters, and the Morlocks their slaves. A new relationship has clearly evolved between the two races; the Eloi, who are in terror of dark and moonless nights, are in some way victims of the Morlocks, though he is still not certain precisely how. His experience underground has shattered his previous euphoria (symbolically perhaps an end of the paradisal innocence in which he has been participating), and his natural inventiveness and curiosity reassert themselves. He makes his way with Weena to a large green building that he has seen in the distance many miles off, which he later calls “the Palace of Green Porcelain.” On their way they spend a night in the open: the traveller looks at the stars in their now unfamiliar arrangements and reflects on his present isolation.

Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organisations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror. Then I thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and star-like under the stars, and forthwith dismissed the thought.

The traveller's knowledge of the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, and the relation between them, is almost complete. When they reach the Palace of Green Porcelain, he finds, as if to belie his reflections on the disappearance of all traces of the past, that it is a vast museum: “Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington!” The museum, with its semi-ruinous remains of earlier phases of human achievement, puts the traveller once more in a direct emotional relation with the past, and, by implication, with his own age. Here, the Arcadian spell is finally cast off. He remembers that he is, after all, a late-Victorian scientist with a keen interest in technology. He is intrigued by various great machines, some half destroyed, and others in quite good condition:

You know I have a certain weakness for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these: the more so as for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make only the vaguest guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers that might be of use against the Morlocks.

The Morlocks, after all, are a technological race, and if he is to defend himself against them—as he has decided he must—he must match himself against their mechanical prowess. The images of machinery in this part of the narrative are sufficient to suggest to the reader the presence of the Morlocks, and before long the traveller sees footprints in the dust around him, and hears noises coming from one end of a long gallery, which mean that the Morlocks are not far away. He breaks an iron lever off one of the machines to use as a mace. By now, his feelings for the Morlocks are those of passionate loathing: “I longed very much to kill a Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one's own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in the things.” Since the Morlocks on one level stand for the late nineteenth century proletariat, the traveller's attitude towards them clearly symbolises a contemporary bourgeois fear of the working class, and it is not fanciful to impute something of this attitude to Wells himself. From his schooldays in Bromley he had disliked and feared the working class in a way wholly appropriate to the son of a small tradesman—as various Marxist critics have not been slow to remark. The traveller's gradual identification with the beautiful and aristocratic—if decadent—Eloi against the brutish Morlocks is indicative of Wells's own attitudes, or one aspect of them, and links up with a common theme in his realistic fiction: the hypergamous aspirations of a low-born hero towards genteel heroines: Jessica Milton in The Wheels of Chance, Helen Walsingham in Kipps, Beatrice Normandy in Tono-Bungay, and Christabel in Mr. Polly.

Wells's imagination was easily given to producing images of mutilation and violence, and the traveller's hatred of the Morlocks gives them free rein. The reader is further prepared for the scenes of violence and destruction which end the traveller's expedition to the museum by his discovery of “a long gallery of rusting stands of arms,” where he “hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword.” But he could not carry both and kept the crowbar. He contented himself with a jar of camphor from another part of the museum, since this was inflammable and would make a useful weapon against the Morlocks. By now we have wholly moved from the dominantly paradisal imagery of the first half of the narrative to the demonic imagery of the second. Instead of a golden age, or lotos land, we are back in the familiar world of inventiveness and struggle.

When Weena and the traveller are once more outside the museum and are making their way homeward through the woods, he decides to keep the lurking Morlocks at bay during the coming night by lighting a fire. He succeeds only too well, and before long discovers that he has set the whole forest ablaze. Several Morlocks try to attack him, but he fights them off with his iron bar. He then discovers the creatures all fleeing in panic before the advancing fire: in the confusion Weena is lost. There are some powerful descriptions of the Morlocks' plight:

And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I think, of all that I beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as day with the reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hillock or tumulus, surmounted by a scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of the burning forest, with yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely encircling the space with a fence of fire. Upon the hillside were some thirty or forty Morlocks, dazzled by the light and heat and blundering hither and thither against each other in their bewilderment. At first I did not realise their blindness, and struck furiously at them with my bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me, killing one and crippling several more. But when I watched the gestures of one of them groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard their moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of them.

Eventually, on the following morning, the traveller gets back to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx, whence he had started. Everything is as it was when he left. The beautiful Eloi are still moving across the landscape in their gay robes, or bathing in the river. But now his disillusion with their Arcadian world and his realisation of the true nature of their lives is complete.

I understood now what all the beauty of the over-world people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle they knew of no enemies, and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.

Here we have the solution to a riddle that was implicitly posed at the beginning of the traveller's narrative. Soon after his arrival among the Eloi he had found that there were no domestic animals in their world: “horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into extinction.” Yet the life led by the Eloi is clearly that contained in conventional literary pastoral, and the first part of the traveller's narrative partakes of the nature of pastoral—but it is a pastoral world without sheep or cattle. And a little later, during his speculations on the possibilities of eugenic development, he had reflected:

We improve our favourite plants and animals—and how few they are—gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle.

Something of the sort, he concludes, has brought about the world of 802701. But the paradox latent in the observation is only made manifest in his return from the museum, now possessing a complete knowledge of this world. There are no sheep or cattle in the pastoral world of the Eloi because they are themselves the cattle, fattened and fed by their underground masters. They are both a “sweeter and larger flower” and “a more convenient breed of cattle.” Thus the complex symbolism of the central narrative of The Time Machine is ingeniously completed on this note of diabolical irony. Such knowledge has made the Arcadian world intolerable to the traveller. He is now able to escape from it: the Morlocks have produced his machine and placed it as a trap for him, but he is able to elude them, and travels off into the still more remote future.

The final part of the time traveller's narrative, the chapter called “The Further Vision,” is an extended epilogue to the story of the Eloi and the Morlocks. The traveller moves further and further into the future, until he reaches an age when all traces of humanity have vanished and the world is given over to giant crabs. The earth has ceased to rotate, and has come to rest with one face always turned to the sun:

I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the darkness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a growing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh, reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one sees on forest moss or on lichen in caves: plants which like these grow in a perpetual twilight.

The whole of this vision of a dying world is conveyed with a poetic intensity which Wells was never to recapture. The transition from the social and biological interest of the “802701” episode to the cosmological note of these final pages is extremely well done: the previous account of the decline of humanity is echoed and amplified by the description of the gradual death of the whole physical world. The traveller moves on and on, seeking to discover the ultimate mystery of the world's fate.

At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky, and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish-white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.

Finally, after an eclipse of the sun has reduced this desolate world to total darkness, the traveller returns to his own time, and the waiting circle of friends in his house at Richmond.

A contemporary reviewer paid special tribute to these final pages, and referred to “that last fin de siècle, when earth is moribund and man has ceased to be.”⁶ This reference to the fin de siècle is appropriate both in its immediate context and in a larger sense, for, as I have already suggested, The Time Machine is pre-eminently a book of its time, giving imaginative form to many of the fears and preoccupations of the final years of the nineteenth century. Max Nordau, in fact, had attacked these preoccupations and attitudes in a passage which curiously anticipates the themes and dominant images of The Time Machine:

Fin de siècle is at once a confession and a complaint. The old Northern faith contained the fearsome doctrine of the Dusk of the Gods. In our days there have arisen in more highly developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.⁷

Since The Time Machine is a romance and not a piece of realistic fiction, it conveys its meaning in poetic fashion through images, rather than by the revelation of character in action. It is, in short, a myth, and in Shanks's words, “can be interpreted in many ways, none of them quite consistent, all of them more alive and fruitful than the rigid allegorical correspondence.” I have tried to indicate some of the thematic strands to be found in the work. Some of them are peculiarly of their period, others have a more general and a more fundamental human relevance. The opposition of Eloi and Morlocks can be interpreted in terms of the late nineteenth-century class struggle, but it also reflects an opposition between aestheticism and utilitarianism, pastoralism and technology, contemplation and action, and ultimately, and least specifically, between beauty and ugliness, and light and darkness. The book not only embodies the tensions and dilemmas of its time, but others peculiar to Wells himself, which a few years later were to make him cease to be an artist, and become a propagandist. Since the tensions are imaginatively and not intellectually resolved we find that a note of irony becomes increasingly more pronounced as the traveller persists in his disconcerting exploration of the world where he has found himself. The Time Machine is not only a myth, but an ironic myth, like many other considerable works of modern literature. And despite the complexity of its thematic elements, Wells's art is such that the story is a skilfully wrought imaginative whole, a single image.

Notes

1. The Living Novel (London, 1946), pp. 119-20.

2. First Essays on Literature (London, 1923), p. 158.

3. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 202.

4. [“The Scientific Romances” in The Living Novel. It is the essay preceding this in the present volume.—Ed.]

5. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 150.

6. Daily Chronicle, 27 July, 1895.

7. Degeneration (London, 1895), p. 2.