SOURCE: Hennelly, Mark M., Jr. “The Time Machine: A Romance of ‘The Human Heart’.” Extrapolation 20, no. 2 (summer 1979): 154-67.

[In the following essay, Hennelly relates Wells's scientific writings to his The Time Machine and explores different aspects of the novella, particularly the roles of the Narrator and Time Traveller.]

I felt I lacked a clue. I felt—how shall I put it? Suppose you found an inscription, with sentences here and there in excellent plain English, and interpolated therewith, others made up of words, of letters even, absolutely unknown to you? Well, on the third day of my visit, that was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One presented itself to me!

(pp. 57-58)¹

The reader of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) shares these insecurities with the Time Traveller since the full meaning of his “strange adventures” (p. 95), and especially the enigmatic conclusion, remain “absolutely unknown” after the book is closed, that is, not wholly intelligible as allegories of either Huxlian devolution or Marxian dialectical materialism. Although both science and sociology inform the tale, Wells's own oxymoronic label for his favorite early genre explicitly identifies The Time Machine as a “scientific romance,” not scientific naturalism or realism. Consequently, the missing “clue” to the meaning of this “unknown” Romance world is not blatantly supplied by either the “excellent plain English” of the nameless Narrator or that of the Time Traveller himself.

In the preface to the Random House edition (1931) of The Time Machine, Wells describes his style in the “Chronic Argonauts,” the first version of his Romance, as “the pseudo-Teutonic, Nathaniel Hawthorne style.”² Later in Experiment In Autobiography (1934), he details more fully the genesis of the tale and Hawthorne's influence: “I began a romance, very much under the influence of Hawthorne, which was printed in the Science Schools Journal, the “Chronic Argonauts.” … It was the original draft of what later became The Time Machine, which won me recognition as an imaginative writer.”³ But as Hawthorne's famous distinction between the Novel and the Romance in his “Preface” to The House of the Seven Gables implies, both of Wells's narrative interlocutors, especially the first Narrator, are concerned with “a very minute fidelity” to the “probable” and not the “possible.” Both supply answers from the external, scientific, and “ordinary course of man's experience” although, admittedly, the nature of the experience they are attempting to explain is of the “Marvellous.” Both fail to understand that often in the scientific Romance, the scientific is simply an externalization of, an extrapolation of, the psychological. In fact, in an 1897 interview, Wells refuses to accept that realism and the psychological Romance could ever be totally separate since “the scientific episode which I am treating insists upon interesting me, and so I have to write about the effect of it upon the mind of some particular person.”⁴ Both speakers neglect, then, what Hawthorne calls “the truth of the human heart,” that is, the balanced and unified psychological experience which must be interpolated from ambiguous, external clues. And as Wells himself admits in “Bye-Products in Evolution” (1895), “the logical student of evolution” is “invariably puzzle[d]” by aesthetics, but “with regard to the subtle mechanism of mind, we are even more in the dark than when we deal with chemical equilibrium.”⁵ Consequently, Hawthorne's later advice for understanding the dream-world of his story, “the topsy-turvey commonwealth of sleep,” suggests the value of the same kind of reading for Wells's Romance, which is repeatedly called a dreamlike adventure: “Modern psychology, it may be, will endeavor to reduce these alleged necromanies [the nightmares of the Maules and Pyncheons] within a system instead of rejecting them as altogether fabulous” (Chapt. 1). In “The Custom House” opening of The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne defines the world of his Romances even more relevantly: “a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other.” The Time Traveller's perplexed imaginings upon return to the actual present suggest the same neutral territory:

Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times—but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. And where did the dream come from? … [sic] I must look at that machine. If there is one!

(p. 96)

The consequences of exploring this neutral territory to search for the “truth of the human heart” in The Time Machine illuminate some of those “unknown” words and letters, which puzzle both the Time Traveller and the reader, and consequently demonstrate that attention to morality is as essential as attention to biology for the understanding of the Romance. Thus, this journey forward in time is actually a journey inward and downward in psychological space; the future macrocosm is the present introcosm. Although this thesis precludes a detailed examination of Wells's early essays on science, Robert Philmus and David Hughes's collection of these writings supports this critical volte-face by indicating that 1895 is the watershed year when “The view of nature's laws disposing of what man proposes gives way to the idea of ‘artificial’ evolution, man's consciously taking charge of his future by shaping his sociocultural environment, over which he can exert control” (Early Writings, p. x). At any rate, after taking a brief survey of previous readings, we will discuss Wells's psychologizing with respect to the Narrator, the frame story of the Dinner Guests, the three worlds of the future, and finally the Time Traveller himself.

The Time Machine has not received the critical coverage it deserves; but scholarly response has clearly isolated three major lines of inquiry—scientific, autobiographical, and mythic. Robert Philmus, for example, most cogently explains the anti-Darwinian and Marxian (or anti-Marxian?) issues by discussing the themes of survival of the unfittest or least human in the Eloi and Morlocks and by implying Wells's ambivalent attitude toward the leisure and proletariat classes. For Philmus, consequently, the novel (not Romance) becomes an oracle of devolution:

This vision of social disintegration and devolution as a critique of the ideal of striving towards “ease and delight” can exist only in the dimension of prophecy, that dimension into which the critique can be projected and imaginatively given life—the world, in other words, of science fantasy.⁶

From a different critical vantage point, Alex Eisenstein traces the genesis of Wells's future shock to his past personal history while growing up at Atlas House where the topography approximated the split-levels of 802,701 and where his reading of Strum's Reflections and his viewing of the illustration of an ape from Wood's Natural History jointly spawned a fear of simian creatures like the Morlocks.⁷ Finally, although Bernard Bergonzi also discovers scientific and socialistic allegories in the tale, he alone stresses its Romance genre while locating archetypal patterns:

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. … 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.⁸

Agreeing with Bergonzi's premise concerning genre, but strongly disagreeing with his dismissal of “character,” we can now abandon sociology and biology for psychology and morality.

The primary Narrator in The Time Machine plays a far more significant role than that Eugene D. LeMire credits him with—namely, taking advantage of “the supreme moment of the raconteur … the moment of the long cigar and tall tale.”⁹ That is, he does not simply narrate the tale; but he is also a character in it, one whose point of view naturally colors his narration, whose sensibilities consequently transcend those of the caricatured and wooden Dinner Guests, and who finally serves as a go-between, or mediator between the personalities of the Guests and the Time Traveller and between the Time Traveller and the reader. In an important sense, then, the Narrator is a surrogate for the reader in the Romance; and though less well-drawn, he functions much like Marlowe in Lord Jim, or better still, lawyer Utterson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a tale whose use of Doppelgängers is very similar to The Time Machine's.

Thus, the Narrator's “inadequacy” parallels the Time Traveller's own avowed problems (pp. 94-95) in accurately and credibly describing “strange adventures”:

In writing it down I feel with only too much keenness the inadequacy of pen and ink—and, above all, my own inadequacy—to express its quality. You read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but you cannot see the speaker's white, sincere face in the bright circle of the little lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice.

(pp. 36-37)

At issue here, however, is not only the partial identification between Narrator and Time Traveller, but also the thematic emphasis upon empirical verification, or direct involvement with experience (rather than scienfitic or aesthetic detachment), and upon the reader's own active role in interpretively filling in many thematic spaces which the narrative leaves blank. While the Narrator, like Coleridge's Wedding-Guest, seems “better than” the other, more sceptical, shallow Dinner Guests because he “lay awake most of the night thinking about” the tale (p. 96), he does more than provide an example for sensitive reader response. Unlike Utterson, who vanishes from the last pages of Stevenson's Romance and thereby fails to register either a normative or ironic moral reaction to Jekyll-Hyde's disintegration, he finally editorializes significantly on the Time Traveller's concluding and pivotal disappearance. His commentary, though, apparently fails to accept the moral inferences of the Traveller's quest. Thus, the reader is tempted either to believe the Narrator's own ignorant yet guarded, optimistic prognosis for the future or to accept the Traveller's ambiguous account of the “unknown.” In this latter case, suspecting the simplistic moral tag of the Narrator, as he likewise would in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the reader himself must reinterpret the narrative “clues” for a specific psychological and moral message. The Narrator, at any rate, believes that

the future is still black and blank—is a vast ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers, gifts from Weena—shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle—to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

(p. 98)

Recalling the Time Traveller's earlier caution to the “untravelled” or inexperienced listener of a tale and his anecdote regarding the futility of an African trying to understand an industrial city (pp. 56-57), the reader is certainly invited to side with the Traveller and to dismiss the Narrator as morally naive, a Pollyanna who is neither sadder nor wiser but rather blithefully ignorant of “the heart of man.” However, the narrative problem is not so easily resolved and really cannot be simplified into the either-or logic argued above, just as the same narrative dislocation cannot be so easily solved in The Island of Dr. Moreau where, before his “cure,” the Narrator finds “Beast People” alive and unwell in England, while afterward he perceives only “the shining souls of men.” However, in The Time Machine both commentaries can be accommodated by correctly understanding the Romance-meaning of the Traveller's return journey. And after comparing present and future societies, we will attempt this understanding.

The narrative frame's dramatization of late Victorian society has escaped critical notice entirely, except for Philmus's brief allusion to Northrop Frye's discussion of “tales ‘told in quotation marks,’”¹⁰ LeMire's reference to the “peculiar abstract names of the characters” and the “ironic comment on the stupidities of class-conflict in Wells' own world,”¹¹ and finally Philmus and Hughes's recognition of “the unimaginative complacency … exemplified by his audience” and of the fact that somehow this audience's “narrow scope of consciousness is responsible for cosmic catastrophe” (Early Writings, p. 55). However, and again as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this well-ordered wasteland of insecure, repressed, yet self-satisfied bachelors foreshadows the chaotic future with its schizophrenic upper and lower worlds. Thus, with the Narrator caught between, the microcosmic cross section of upper class gentility apparently contrasts with the hard-working discipline of the Time Traveller, much as the warm and leisurely setting of the smoking room contrasts with the cold (p. 96) and mechanical atmosphere of the scientific laboratory, and as finally the tropical, lotus world of the Eloi contrasts with the cooler, subterranean machine-shop of the Morlocks. In fact, as so often occurs in the allegorical Romance, the tale's very first paragraph provides a threshold symbol for this apparent Jekyll-Hyde polarity by pitting Eloi “laziness” against Morlock “earnestness”:

The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it [some recondite matter] to us in this way—marking the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.

(p. 25)

As in Stevenson's Romance, however, the real point here is not (or not simply) an acknowledgement of Victorian duality, both cultural and psychological, but rather as we shall see, a condemnation of such duality and a moral plea for recognizing the essential, paradoxical unity of a well-balanced and whole personality system. Time Traveller and Guests are One; the Hebraic Morlocks must lie down with the Hellenic Eloi to achieve psychological harmony. Put in another way, the Guests need first to realize they are Eloi (who are called a “wretched aristocracy in decay,” p. 75) and then actualize the Morlock side of themselves; while the Time Traveller must realize that essentially he has been acting like a Morlock and then also accept his Eloi half. Specifically, what all the character groupings share is the common flaw of misoneism—an obsessive hatred and fear of novelty and temporal change. This taboo threat not only reappears throughout The Time Machine, but it is constantly enfleshed in the imagery and finally constitutes, of course, the tale's primary subject matter. As the Time Traveller learns, “There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change” (p. 87). Wells's scientific essays repeatedly emphasize this same point with regard to external adaptation or, to use Wells's term, “plasticity.” In “The Rate of Change in Species” (1894), for instance, he predicts that in the event of “some far-reaching change effected in the conditions of life on this planet,” large organisms like mankind “driving on the old course by virtue of the inertia of their too extensive lives, would have scarcely changed in the century, and, being no longer fitted to the conditions around them, would dwindle and—if no line of retreat offered itself—become extinct” (Early Writings, p. 130). The results of this “inertia” are personified in the hedonistic Eloi who exist in “indolent serenity” (p. 62) only for the present; they haven't learned from the mistakes of the past, nor do they, believing as they do in “absolute permanency” (p. 88), foresee a changeable future. The Morlocks, conversely, labor only for the future overthrow and domination of the Eloi. The indolent Guests serenely indulge in the immediate and present gratification of their pleasure principles—cigars and sherry forever. When the Time Traveller's narrative disturbs this reverie, they discount it, deem it a “gaudy lie” (p. 96), or compulsively check their watches (p. 95) in order to escape, ironically, from this tale of time and change back to the narcotics of their own smoking rooms or the peaceful sleep of their boudoirs.¹² To complete this pattern, though we anticipate ourselves, the Time Traveller, as his name suggests, has attempted to cheat “the inevitable process of decay” (p. 76) by his ivory-tower existence in the laboratory, and more specifically by his machine which is an unnatural attempt to control time, to escape the present. Thus, none of the characters realize, at least at the beginning of the Romance, that their misoneism has reduced them to “a very splendid array of fossils” (p. 76) like those decaying in the Palace of Green Porcelain.

This museum, or giant time-capsule, brings us to the first world of the future, the divided-self of the Eloi and Morlocks. Ostensibly, these “two species” appear to be separate and distinct, polarized races with antithetical, not complementary, cultures:

The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down towards, or had already arrived at an altogether new relationship from that of master-slave. The Eloi, like the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the daylit surfaces intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs, perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service (p. 70). … And so these inhuman sons of men—! I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they were less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago. And the intelligence that would have made this state of things a torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and preyed upon—probably saw to the breeding of.

(pp. 74-75)

I quote this description at length not only to indicate the seeming differences between the two races, but more importantly for the sake of comparing it with passages from Robert Lewis Stevenson and Carl Jung, which will be discussed shortly. The point is twofold. First of all, apparent differences cloak an essential unity—both peoples share the same pigmy size, the same whitish color, and the same curious laugh. Secondly, but most important, both share a symbiotic cosmology whose convex towers and concave wells form one balanced and total circle. In fact, while learning to identify with both Eloi and Morlocks, the Time Traveller discovers this architectural unity: “After a time, too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers standing here and there upon the slopes” (p. 56). Again, as a scientific footnote to the Romance theme, we should recall that in a 1904 essay, “The Scepticism of the Instrument,” Wells criticizes “formal logic” for being unable to cope with what he calls the concept of “complementarity,” that is, for creating an apparent conflict where there exists essential unity (see Early Writings, pp. 6-7). And as Philmus and Hughes indicate, “As early as ‘Zoological Retrogression’ (1891), he uses the term ‘opposite idea’ not as a synonym for ‘antithesis’ or ‘negation,’ but in the sense of ‘essential complement’” (Early Writings, pp. 6-7). In addition, Wells's essays stressed more and more the importance of cooperation, rather than competition, among species. In “Ancient Experiments in cooperation” (1892), for example, he writes: “the cooperative union of individuals to form higher unities, underlies the whole living creation” (Early Writings, p. 191). In this same essay, cooperative unity seems to carry an internal as well as external significance.

It is as startling and grotesque as it is scientifically true, that man is an aggregate of amoeboid individuals in a higher unity, and that such higher unities as may be reasonably likened to man … have united again into yet higher individual unities, and that, therefore, there is no impossibility in science that in the future men should not coalesce into similar unified aggregates.

(Early Writings, p. 192)¹³

In “Mr. Marshall's Doppelganger” (1897) and again in the significantly titled The Secret Places Of The Heart (1922), Wells blatantly dramatizes this internal theme of the divided self. But, he also implies that the symbiotic macrocosm of the future is actually an image of the ruptured relationship between modes and levels of consciousness. The last chapter of Stevenson's Romance, “Henry Jekyll's Full Statement Of the Case,” employs much the same rhetoric but makes the psychological nature of this relationship more clearly than Wells does:

… man is not truly one, but truly two. … I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both. … It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonized womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated?¹⁴

The answer to this pivotal question, which is also central to the meaning of both the Beast People in The Island of Dr. Moreau and the Eloi-Morlock division in The Time Machine, is that society, epitomized here by high Victorian obsession with order, security, and intelligence and its repressive terror of chaos, impulse, and desire, has “dissociated” these “polar twins.” In fact, in “Morals and Civilization” (1897), Wells links such repression to static inertia, or misoneism: “It is no inevitable force which changes militant into static civilizations. As much as anything it is the demoralisation due to security,—a disorganization of the forces of moral suggestion” (Early Writings, p. 226). And Jung's commentary on “visionary” literature in “Psychology And Literature” addresses this same compulsive “security” and the consequent “primitive duality of man” (which ought ideally to be a unity), thereby helping to explain why the Traveller “had a vague sense of something familiar” (p. 71) from what he “had seen in the Underworld” (p. 71):¹⁵

But the primordial experiences rend from top to bottom the curtain upon which is painted the picture of an ordered world, and allow a glimpse into the unfathomable abyss of the unforn and of things yet to be. Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the darknesses of the spirit, or of the primal beginnings of the human psyche? … We are reminded of nothing in everyday life, but rather of dreams, night-time fears, and the dark uncanny recesses of the human mind. … However dark and unconscious this night-world may be, it is not wholly unfamiliar. Man has known it from time immemorial, and for primitives it is a self-evident part of their cosmos. It is only we who have repudiated it because of our fear of superstition and metaphysics, building up in its place an apparently safer and more manageable world of consciousness in which natural law operates like human law in a society. The poet now and then catches sight of the figures that people the night-world—spirits, demons, and gods; he feels the secret quickening of human fate by a suprahuman design, and has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the pleorama. In short, he catches a glimpse of the psychic world that terrifies the primitive and is at the same time his greatest hope.¹⁶

Comparing this account with Wells's own tell-tale description of the origin of his Romances, we can certainly see its significance:

I found that, taking almost anything as a starting point and letting my thoughts play about with it, there would presently come out of the darkness, in a manner quite inexplicable, some absurd or vivid little nucleus. Little men in canoes upon sunlit oceans would come floating out of nothingness, incubating the eggs of prehistoric monsters unawares; violent conflicts would break out amidst the flower beds of suburban gardens. I would discover I was peering into remote and mysterious worlds ruled by an order, logical indeed, but other than our common sanity.¹⁷

However, by revealing the general danger of repudiating darkness for light and the greatest hope in reconciling the two in Wells's “mysterious worlds,” cited above, Jung's insights only diagnose a portion of the disease of the human heart. The Palace of Green Porcelain and the White Sphinx provide clues to the rest of the mystery. Both symbols deal with time, change, and misoneism. The Palace, “this ancient monument of an intellectual age” (p. 77), is complex. Its fossilized treasures not only warn against the vanity of human wishes and the “futility of all ambition” (p. 79), such as the Time Traveller's and the Morlocks' emphases on future glory, but it also admonishes hedonists like the Dinner Guests and Eloi who live only for the present and thus court no great expectations. Neither response can arrest “the inevitable process of decay” (p. 76); and both sins of wasting time render the sinners into “dessicated mummies in jars” (p. 77), like the “stuffed animals” who are wasted by time in the museum.

The White Sphinx, on the other hand, parallels the temporal dimensions of the Time Machine and the Palace by placing the blighted worlds of the future, and thus the world of the present, in their proper wasteland context as it overlooks “a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a long-neglected and yet weedless garden” (p. 44). Although, in a sense, the Time Traveller finally fulfills the redemptive function of Oedipus, the riddle of this Sphinx has not yet been solved by a questing hero; and thus the sought-for answer, which admits change and time in the three ages of man, has not provided renewing, spring rains. The Sphinx's “white leprous face” (p. 51), “weather-worn” condition, and “unpleasant suggestion of disease” (p. 40), all indicate that wasteland sterility has infected even this major symbol of potential health. Finally, the Sphinx, like the “griffins' heads” (p. 47) and the “Faun” (p. 72), implies the unification of a dual nature; and consequently these three sole survivors of past art are all imaginative reminders of the Romance's psychological theme. As Wells indicates in “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process,” published the year following The Time Machine and vital to its understanding, civilized man is a compound of “an inherited factor, the natural man, … the culminating ape” and “an acquired factor, the artificial man, the highly plastic creature of tradition, suggestion, and reasoned thought” (Early Writings, p. 217). Such a compound certainly suggests the symbiotic Morlocks and Eloi, as do the following remarks whose moral psychologizing is as true of The Time Machine as of The Island of Dr. Moreau: “in this view, what we call Morality becomes the padding of suggested emotional habits necessary to keep the round Palaeolithic savage in the square hole of the civilised state. And Sin is the conflict of the two factors—as I have tried to convey in my Island of Dr. Moreau” (p. 217). Wells concludes the essay by hoping that men “have the greatness of heart” to create “a social organization … cunningly balanced” (p. 218) between savagery and civilization (p. 218).

However, the subsequent future worlds, of the giant butterflies and crabs and finally of the great “Silence,” are dramatic condemnations of the wasteland's denial of the “truth of the human heart” and thus seem to refute Wells's dream of balance. The wish-fulfillment of misoneism has already cursed the earth in the next world since stellar motion is “growing slower and slower” (p. 90) and the sun has “halted motionless upon the horizon” (p. 90). Now the changeless wasteland no longer betrays even a semblance of the Eloi's Eden. The “eternal sea” (p. 91) and “perpetual twilight” (p. 90) reflect “the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world” (p. 91). Finally, the “huge white butterfly” and “monster crab” (p. 91) are the only survivors of psychological devolution; they are the end-products of, and commentaries upon, the anemic Eloi and blood-thirsty Morlocks. Remembering Stein's classification of humanity into butterflies and beetles in Lord Jim, we might reinterpret his metaphor to suggest that caterpillars (crabs) and butterflies are, in essence, the same creature; and it is for this reason that the Greeks were so fond of viewing the butterfly as an emblem of the total psyche. Again, dualistic appearances cloak an inner, unified reality. A “thousand years or more” later (p. 92), the “eternal sunset” (p. 92) is replaced by the Silence, or “black central shadow of the eclipse” (p. 93); and this Gotterdämmerung leaves the world in “rayless obscurity” (p. 93), totally without solar change. In a startling and haunting last image, which recalls the false dichotomy between spectators and participants in the previous worlds and starkly joins the human and subhuman, the Traveller describes the final mutant form of life as the hybrid of a soccerball (British football) and octopus: “It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it … it was hopping fitfully about” (p. 93). This, then, is the end-result of fear of change and fear of unifying the contraries of the human heart.

The previous discussions of the Narrator, the Dinner Guests, and the future worlds, however, make most sense when viewed in the light of the Time Traveller's “growing knowledge” (p. 81). This repeated gnostic theme, which is rooted in the Romance, branches out into several different but related genres—the Bildungsroman, the myth of the hero, and, as I have argued elsewhere,¹⁸ the Victorian novel which focuses upon some major crisis in epistemology. Most generally, the Time Traveller's reiterated “pale” but also “animated” (see pp. 25 and 36) personality suggests that he, and by extension his wasted culture, is caught between two worlds: one, of pleasure, is externalized in feeble aristocracy like the Eloi and is all but dead; the other, of labor and thought (see p. 88 for Morlock thought), is personified by the Morlocks and is powerless to be born without the correct kind of ideological conception. Like the mythic questers of old and like each individual personality, the Time Traveller can insure this conception by “boldly penetrating … underground mysteries” (p. 65), that is, by harrowing hell, reconciling spirit and sense, discovering the hidden truth of the human heart, and living fully in the present.

Specifically, as indicated before, the Time Traveller must admit the Morlock side of himself and integrate this with his more deeply suppressed Eloi side. However, at the tale's outset in London, he is blithefully ignorant of both halves of his heart; and so once in the future, he immediately feels “naked in a strange world” (p. 41). This stripping away of his old personality masks prepares him for his inevitable identity crisis—“my mind was already in revolution” (p. 62) he admits in 802,701. The Time Traveller verbalizes it on the scientific level as “Man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals” (p. 61). After feeling initial disgust for the Morlocks (machinists and meat-eaters like himself) and condescension toward the Eloi (whose enervated spontaneity still highlights his own emotional sterility), the Traveller identifies with both in order to reintegrate these now “distinct animals.” Having first struck “in a frenzy of fear” (p. 85) at the Morlocks during the forest fire, he significantly empathizes with their plight: “I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the glare, and I struck no more of them” (p. 85). Previously, in the Palace of Green Porcelain, he had recognized his own “certain weakness for mechanism” (p. 77) and then therapeutically and thematically “felt that I was wasting my time in this academic examination of machinery” (p. 78, italics mine). This newly-discovered “knowledge” is put into practice when the Time Traveller, who in previous drafts is called The Philosopher, spontaneously “turned to Weena. ‘Dance,’ I cried to her in her own tongue” (p. 79). Thus Morlock and Eloi are joined; and, unlike Dr. Moreau's Beast People, their extremes are tempered. Earlier in his quest for the truth of the human heart, the Traveller feels that “my growing knowledge would lead me back” to solve “the mystery of the bronze doors under the sphinx” (p. 55), or, implicitly, the mysterious unity of the future world. And even here he anticipates the redeeming solution to the Sphinx's riddle, which would best prepare him and his culture to accept “the wear of time” (p. 79): “To sit among all those unknown things [the mysteries of the Sphinx] before a puzzle like that is hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways, watch it, be careful of too many hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you will find clues to it all” (p. 55). Thus like any good scientist, but also like any good Romancifier, the Traveller learns in the new world by employing the “experimental method,” constantly testing hypotheses against experience, both external and internal.

In “Human Evolution, An Artificial Process,” Wells predicts that only in “Education lies the possible salvation of mankind from misery and sin” (Early Writings, p. 219). And through his Romance, the Time Traveller certainly tries to dramatize to the Narrator, the Dinner Guests, and, by extension, the Victorian audience at large what Wells means by “Education,” that is, that desired balance between savagery and civilization, between past and present. But what of the Victorian wasteland? Does the Time Traveller educate and thereby redeem it; or does he reject it? Put another way, is his final role that of a savior, as when he saves Weena from drowning; or is his final role that of a destroyer, as when the forest fires he lights burns her to death? These questions are as complex, but as thematically significant, as the riddle of the Sphinx since the meaning of his enigmatic return journey back to the future depends upon our answers. If the future is taken realistically, as it would be in a scientific novel, then the Traveller's withdrawal from the present merely confirms his sins against time and his escapist obsession with the future. This reading, then, effectively negates the success of his first wonderful visit into the future. If, on the other hand, the future is considered as an allegory of the present, as it should be in the psychological Romance, then the Time Traveller's return journey does not indicate the hero's escape from his destiny but rather suggests a simple redirection of his quest.¹⁹ The Dinner Guests believe the Time Traveller to be either delirious or duplistic, and thus his new-found “knowledge” has not yet saved them. He consequently returns with trusty “kodak” (p. 97) in hand to gather empirical proof for these doubting Thomases. But as the Narrator reports, “he has never returned” (p. 98). Has he failed and been killed by the Morlocks, whom by now he should certainly know how to handle? Has he escaped to settle down with the pretty Eloi, perhaps even returning prior to the death of Weena to save her again, before the fact, by committing another sin against time? There is obviously no textual evidence for this reading. Is the future merely a possible future, a potential schizophrenia which will only be realized if the current wasteland mentality is not cured; and thus the Time Traveller, attempting to verify this ominous portent to the Guests, is destroyed by his own dualism? Or, following the conditions of the Romance, which the Narrator fails to understand, has he simply returned to the allegorical present to save both the Eloi and the Morlocks and thereby redeem the realistic present of Victorian England?

The Traveller's symbolic identification with Prometheus throughout the tale supports this last hypothesis and thus sustains the Narrator's belief that “gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.” As the Traveller explains during the unrelieved darkness of the Eloi's night: “In this decadence, too, the art of fire-making had been forgotten on the earth” (p. 82); and then he begins to educate Weena about the magic of matches. Thus on the realistic level, he brings the gift of fire to the future as Prometheus had brought it from the gods to the human world; on the psychological, or Romance level, he brings back “foreknowledge” (the Greek meaning of Prometheus) from the Eloi (Lord or God in the Bible) and Morlocks to the Dinner Guests in the educating form of his Romance. Whether his return journey is intended to help the future or bring help from the future, the meaning is the same; and the Narrator's optimism is implicitly upheld. For the Time Traveller at least, time is no longer out of joint; and his Romance-quest has revealed the unified and balanced truth of the human heart.

In conclusion, as R. H. Hutton's review in the Spectator (July 13, 1895) implies, it is indeed a pity that Wells's own Victorian audience, like the Dinner Guests, did not as yet understand this truth and remained wasteland unbelievers:

We have no doubt that, so far as Mr. Wells goes, his warning is wise. But we have little fear that the languid, ease-loving, and serene temperament will ever paralyse the human race after the manner he supposes, even though there may be at present some temporary signs of the growth of the appetite for mere amusement.²⁰

Notes

1. The Time Machine/The War of the Worlds, with an introduction by Isaac Asimov (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1968); all quotations will be taken from this edition, which is one of the more generally available, and noted within the text.

2. (New York: Random House, 1931), p. ix.

3. (London: Victor Gollancz and The Cresset Press, 1934), I, 309.

4. To-day, 2 (Sept., 1897), as quoted in Bernard Bergonzi's The Early H. G. Wells: A Study Of The Scientific Romances (Manchester: The University Press, 1961), p. 44, italics mine. The interested reader should consult this book-length study of the genre of the scientific romance, especially Chapter 2 which deals with The Time Machine.

5. Early Writings In Science And Science Fiction By H. G. Wells, eds. Robert Philmus and David Y. Hughes (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), pp. 204-05. This collection will subsequently be noted within the text as Early Writings.

6. “‘The Time Machine’; or, the Fourth Dimension as Prophecy,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 534.

7. “Very Early Wells: Origins of Some Physical Motifs in The Time Machine and The War Of The Worlds,” Extrapolation, 13 (1972), 119-126 passim.

8. “The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth,” Critical Quarterly 2 (1960), 305; this essay later makes up part of Bergonzi's chapter on The Time Machine in his study of the scientific romances. See note 4.

9. “H. G. Wells And The World Of Science Fiction,” Univ. of Windsor Review, 2 (1967), 60.

10. Philmus, 535; the reference is to Anatomy of Criticism, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 202-203.

11. LeMire, 61-62.

12. Discussing the tale as a scientific treatise, Alfred Borrello confirms Wells's condemnation of misoneistic tendencies: “The species, he believed, is cursed with a fundamental yearning for the status quo, for a changeless existence in which life proceeds at the same pointless pace as it always proceeded—witness its desire for a never-ending Heaven,” in H. G. Wells: Author in Agony (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1972), p. 13.

13. See Borrello's discussion of the lack of cultural “individuality” in the Morlocks and Eloi, pp. 11-12.

14. It is interesting to note here that Wells's Victorian audience saw no relationship between his Romance and Stevenson's—even though it could not help linking the two tales. For example an unsigned review in the Daily Chronicle (July 27, 1895) reads: “No two books could well be more unlike than The Time Machine and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but since the appearance of Stevenson's creepy romance we have had nothing in the domain of pure fantasy so bizarre as this ‘invention’ by Mr. H. G. Wells.” This review is reprinted in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 38.

15. Here the specific reference is to the resemblance between the meat in the Underworld and the bodies of the Eloi.

16. Reprinted in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 90-91, 95-96. For the sake of unity, I have combined excerpts from a series of paragraphs dealing with “visionary” literature.

17. Quoted in Kenneth Young's H. G. Wells (Essex: Longman Group Ltd., 1974), pp. 13-14.

18. “Dracula: The Gnostic Quest and Victorian Wasteland,” English Literature in Transition, 20 (1977), 13-26. This essay also clarifies the relationships between gnosticism, the wasteland theme, and Victorian literature.

19. See Philmus' relevant description of the future as a fourth dimension, fantasy world, 534-535.

20. Reprinted in H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, p. 36.