[In the following essay, Begiebing discusses the Time Traveller as the archetype of the mythic hero.]

In 1915 Van Wyck Brooks hinted at an important quality of H. G. Wells's vision when he said that the author's intelligence is “exuberant” with a “very genuine religious instinct” that Wells “lavished” upon “the social process itself.” And in 1922 and 1946 two foreign writers, Evgeny Zamyatin and Jorge Luis Borges, commented on Wells's timeless symbolic processes and mythmaking. But it was in the 1960's that critics began to focus on the archetypal dimensions of Wells's “scientific romances.” Bernard Bergonzi argued in 1960 and 1961 that Wells's early fantasies were closer to the fables of Hawthorne, Melville, and Kafka than to science. In support of his argument, Bergonzi quoted both V. S. Pritchett, who saw The Time Machine as a “great story … that has meanings within meanings,” and Edward Shanks, who saw Wells as a “mythmaker.” Bergonzi's mythic analysis focused on the “paradisal and demonic” imagery in Wells's first novel and the ironic use of the pastoral myth of the Golden Age. Bergonzi also reminded us that Wells contrasted himself to Jules Verne (whom Wells saw as dealing with “possible things” based on present science) by placing his own work in the class of the Golden Ass of Apuleius, True Histories of Lucian, and Frankenstein. Since Bergonzi, critics such as Patrick Parrinder and Robert Philmus have written of Wells's “barrier-breaking heroes,” “ideological fables,” “primordialism,” and “mythic mode.” And in the later 70's Jean-Pierre Vernier, agreeing with Bergonzi's view of the ironic pastoral myth, argued that The Time Machine awakens “archetypal responses in the reader.”¹

Wells's biographers Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie also have argued that Wells is distinguished by the “symbolic power” of his stories. The MacKenzies remind us that Wells compared his early creative process to a dreaming in which, the MacKenzies say, “powerful and primitive emotions were translated” into visual images and “patterns of archetypal thought,” a pattern of thought Wells himself intimated in his Preface to The Country of the Blind and Other Stories in 1911:

I found that, taking almost anything as a starting point and letting my thoughts play about 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 …, violent conflicts would break out amidst the flowerbeds 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.²

I am suggesting that if there can be little doubt now about the archetypal dimension of Wells's scientific romances, then clarifying one so far unexamined but central mythic pattern in The Time Machine may increase our understanding of that novel's unity and power, and, subordinately, may make one connection, perhaps not adequately recognized, between Wells's first novel and much of his later work. The mythic pattern I refer to is that which Joseph Campbell calls the great “monomyth” of the hero. Wells's otherwise nameless Time Traveller is, to use Wells's own phrase, one of “the active, strong, and subtle.” By his violent journey into a mysterious and misunderstood dimension, the hero gains a wisdom that could, but probably will not, be the salvation of his species. And it was just this salvation of his species to which H. G. Wells later devoted his lifework, a devotion for which he was, finally, censured and ridiculed.

Although he wears the face and dress of a late nineteenth-century scientist, the Time Traveller exhibits at least three characteristics of the primordial heroic figure. These characteristics, as they appear in the art and religion of diverse cultures, have been delineated by such students of the mythic hero as Carl Jung, Erich Neumann, Mircea, Eliade, and Joseph Campbell. If the faces, forms, and quests of the hero are as vast and changeable as the hundreds of cultures that have recreated him, the three characteristics I find in Wells's novel are central to the heroic figure generally, as Campbell's work especially makes clear. Indeed, it is Campbell who best summarizes for us the social, psychological, and spiritual qualities of the hero and his quest.

Beyond the threshold … the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward … represented as … sacred marriage … father atonement … apotheosis, or again—if the powers have remained unfriendly to him—his theft of the boon he came to gain … ; intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. … At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero reemerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).³

“The changes,” Campbell continues, “rung on the simple scale of the monomyth defy description.”

The first characteristic of the mythic hero is that he is an extraordinary individual among his fellows—in his powers of perception, his courage and ability to take risks and endure suffering, and his capacity to assert himself and his vision effectively, he is set apart from the mass of humanity. Wells's Time Traveller is certainly an extraordinary man, and the device of the frame story emphasizes this point. By his curiosity, perceptiveness, intelligence, and courage, the first in Wells's series of millenarian heroes stands in sharp contrast to the mundane abilities of his guests—a group of professional and scientific men who serve as foils to the hero. In their dialogue with the Time Traveller, they express only common sense, complacency, positivism, and understood consciousness. If the Traveller's theories are admittedly based on the most advanced thought of “scientific people,” he is the kind of scientist who sees the possibilities within the theories as even the scientific people do not. To the physician, the experiment with the model machine has to be “some sleight-of-hand trick or other” that the “common sense of the morning” will settle. To the psychologist it is “an ingenious paradox and trick.” And even the “joyous” and “irreverent” editor and journalist, who represent a fin de siècle flaccid anarchism, raise objections, resort to caricature, and heap ridicule on the whole “gaudy lie.” By their lack of comprehension they reveal the uncommon imagination and power of the hero. He is an eccentric to them, a man whose “earnestness” and “fecundity” they admire if not understand. He is a source of amusement, is “one of those fellows who are too clever to be believed; you never felt that you saw all around him,” and is so whimsical that they “distrusted him.” Wells's hero is, then, also described as a kind of Trickster figure, a seeming “quack” and magician whose playfulness runs even to Christmas apparitions. “Things that would have made the fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.”⁴

Not only does the hero see and understand things the guests do not, he has the unusual courage to follow his vision, to chase a theory down dark, rustling corridors at the risk of sanity and life. Indeed, the “full temerity” of his voyage comes to the hero as he slows down his machine and contemplates the most horrible possibilities of the future. But the risk, he assures himself, is unavoidable, “one of the risks a man has got to take.” And upon his return, at the threshold of his laboratory, the danger, the suffering, the harrowing test of the voyage is clear:

He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared with green down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and it seemed to me greyer—either with dust or dirt or because its colour had actually faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it—a cut half healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been dazzled by the light.⁵

The second mythic characteristic of Wells's hero lies in the nature of his quest. The heroic journey—however actual it may in one sense seem or be—is a voyage into self as much as, or more than, a physical journey. Here, deep in the self, he meets the helpful and threatening forces with which he must deal, and through or against whom he must earn his own transformation: the wisdom of expanded consciousness and the means of salvation he imparts to others upon his return.

Wells certainly suggests that the voyage may be read as a journey into deepest self. The Traveller's time theory is above all a theory of a fourth dimension that is attached, in his words, “to our mental existences.” The only factor that distinguishes time from the three spatial dimensions is that our bodies move in space, but “our consciousness moves along” time. At many points the voyage is dreamlike: “For the most part of that night,” he says of the Dark Nights in the woods battling Morlocks, “I was persuaded it was a nightmare.” And of Weena's death, he says: “Now, in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream than an actual loss.” And he will invite skeptical listeners to interpret his tale as the dream of a man sleeping in his laboratory and, therefore, either a “lie—or a prophecy” (pp. 88-89, 99). The passage to that laboratory is like the passage to the realm of dreams too. It is a “long, draughty corridor” of “flickering light,” along which one sees “the dance of shadows” and the “queer, broad head in silhouette” of the Traveller. The imagery of the voyage itself has the hallucinatory quality of a dream. Night follows day “like the flapping of a black wing.” The whole “surface of the earth” is “melting and flowing under my eyes” (pp. 22, 30-31).

One's immersion in this realm is a dreadful adventure, a kind of death from one world to be born into another: “I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then,” the Traveller says of the beginning of his voyage. His sensations vary from excessive unpleasantness to “hysterical exhilaration” and a “certain curiosity and therewith a certain dread.” And upon his arrival, the conflicting images of the demonic and the paradisal act as threshold symbols of the strangely primordial realm he has entered. Hail stones assault flower blossoms. Colossal stone figures and buildings loom beyond the rhododendrons; a white sphinx suggests mystery and disease. Soon he is “groping among moon-lit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows” (pp. 29-33).

Like Odysseus and a host of heroes before him, the Traveller's survival during the quest and his return depend on, as the Traveller puts it, “force and cunning.” Like his predecessors, too, the Traveller meets helpers and threats among the unfamiliar but strangely intimate forces he encounters. Weena, of course, despite her slight consciousness and her diminutive stature, is friend, guide, and object of “a miniature flirtation.” She provides “signs of the human inheritance,” such as fear, that warn him; she offers flowers that, in the end, become symbols of “gratitude and mutual tenderness,” of that human sympathy which, with “mind and strength,” threatens to die out in the world. “Nor until it was too late did I clearly understand what she was to me. For by … showing in her weak, futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature presently gave my return to the neighbourhood … almost a feeling of coming home” (pp. 55, 63, 104). She is the “child,” as even the Traveller repeatedly calls her, the princess, one face of the Nourishing Mother, who deep in the heroic journey, reveals the lost potential, the unconscious source of life in the hero and humanity. Dreading darkness, playfully clapping and dancing before the fire lost to the Upper-worlders, Weena is indeed a child of light, the one whom the hero had hoped to bring back to his own time, yet can do so only metaphorically through his tale.⁶

And like his mythic progenitors, the Traveller is the fire-starter, he who battles the dark, destructive side of world and mind with the creative power in himself. The task of the hero, as Campbell and Jung have argued, is to carry life energy—symbolized by fire—across the “difficult thresholds of transformation” and change the “patterns of consciousness and unconscious life.”⁷ When he descends to the “Under-world” (to use Wells's own term), the hero battles the destructive human potential, or the bestial insanity, faced at this deepest point of the journey, symbolized by the devouring Terrible Mother in myth and, in Wells's novel, by that “subterranean species of humanity” the cannibal Morlocks—those “bleached, obscene, nocturnal things”—and by the “leprous,” mocking, white sphinx, one gateway to this Under-world.⁸ Here, in the blackness beneath, the only security against the Morlock is fire: “they did not seem to have any fear of me apart from the light” (p. 66). And when these “damned souls” bring the Under-world to the Upper-world during the “Dark Nights,” it is with fire again that the hero—feeling a “strange exultation”—defeats them. Here, in what Campbell calls the nadir of the heroic journey, the Time Traveller knows primitive dread: “I had slept, and my fire had gone out, and the bitterness of death came over my soul. … I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider's web” (p. 86).

More important than the particular qualities and unities of the timeless heroic quest itself, however, are the wisdom gained and the message or boon with which the hero returns. Wells's hero returns with a prophecy that he conveys as compulsively as Coleridge's sea voyager. “I want to tell it” he says. “Badly. … I've lived eight days as no human being ever lived before!” (p. 28). The message is that which, in a variety of ways and degrees of effectiveness, Wells would speak throughout his life: though humanity as a species has been granted the rare opportunity to do otherwise, it stands to lose all that which its positive potential suggests it can develop—courage, humane assertiveness, perceptiveness, intellect, consciousness, endurance, and wholeness of vision.

I grieved to think how brief the dream of human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last. … No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed. …

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

(p. 90)

Stasis and temporary social or technological success lead to psychic, and even physical, decadence, to Eloi and Morlock, to exquisite and fragile children or to soulless beast-men whose only organizing principles are obeisance to machinery and a devouring of humankind.

Wells arrived early at a conception of the degeneration of self and civilization, and he connected the root of all the possibilities and symptoms of degeneracy to that “human selfishness” whose “rigorous punishment” reaches far into the future of the race (p. 75). Such degeneracy is what Erich Neumann called “sclerosis of consciousness” in his own study of the mythic hero's task:

Typical … is the state of affairs in America, though the same holds true for practically the whole Western hemisphere. Every conceivable sort of dominant rules the personality. … The grotesque fact that murders, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants and swindlers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. … Worship of the “beast” is by no means confined to Germany; it prevails wherever … the aggravating complexities of civilized behavior are swept away in favor of bestial rapacity. … [The] integration of the personality, its wholeness, becomes the supreme ethical goal upon which the fate of humanity depends.⁹

The mindless sensuality of Eloi is no less destructive of self and civilization than the bestial rapacity of the Morlock—both adequately symbolized by Wells's headless faun in the garden. “All traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, aspirations … had been swept out of existence,” the Time Traveller tells us, and “from the bottom of my heart I pitied this last rill from the great flood of humanity” (pp. 73-74). Neither the “too perfect triumph” of technology, nor the rapacity of vain and selfish power strugglings or wars between classes and nations, nor the comfort and ease that tempt at every turn can be the salvation of the species. Survival must be based not on these attributes of modern civilization but on some other integrating wholeness of vision—which vision Wells would spend the rest of his life struggling to articulate. If at times Wells slipped and turned toward that “too perfect triumph of man” that led toward Eloi and Morlock, as his son Anthony West has suggested, he was nevertheless fighting the old prophetic battle to change patterns of consciousness.¹⁰

Wells's first fictional hero, then, endures a quest, as we have seen, that traces the traditional patterns of the hero myth central to diverse cultures. Even the return of the hero to the fourth dimension at the end of the novel is not anomalous to the heroic pattern. Frequently, as Campbell points out, the hero may “refuse the responsibility” to return “into the kingdom of humanity” where the boon “redounds to the renewing of humanity,” or having returned to mankind, may pass again back into the realm discovered in the quest. Indeed, it is by the freedom to pass back and forth between the world of time and the timeless world of the quest—“permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other,” that one recognizes the hero as “Master of Two Worlds.” For it is in combining the eternal symbols and experience with the historical moment that the myth conveys its truth, not in the lasting physical presence of the hero in his time.¹¹

Yet even if we limit our consideration of the heroic journey to Wells's hero specifically, that hero's ultimate return to the dimension of the vision can be seen as an affirmation rather than a denial of his prophetic value for Wells's theme. As Robert Philmus has argued, for example, the Traveller by vanishing into the other world accepts his vision literally and demands that it be not only metaphorically true:

The Traveller's return … far from vitiating the impact of The Time Machine, reinforces its claim to integrity: by having the Time Traveller act out the ultimate consequence of his taking the myth literally, Wells illustrates the rigor that he has submitted himself to in satirizing certain “present ideals.” The romance, as I see it, is thus rigorously self-contained in “working to a logical conclusion” both the myth of devolution that exposes tendencies “of our own age” and the various points of view regarding the truth of that prophetic myth.¹²

The prophecy, the wisdom gained, is, for the traditional hero as for Wells's first hero, a new pattern of consciousness, a revolutionary vision against entropy and degeneration that may destroy the old canon and build a new.¹³ If the wisdom learned from the heroic journey in The Time Machine is the awareness of the avenues to human degeneracy, a degeneracy connected in Chapter 11 to the cosmos, it remains for each generation to avoid the fate of “energy in security,” to renew for itself—so long as it is a cosmic possibility—its physical power and its positive psychic evolution. If the Traveller “saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end,” as the narrator tells us, it also “remains for us to live as though it were not so” (p. 104).

As late as 1942 in his D.Sc. thesis at London University, Wells argued that our collective survival lay “in some sort of super-individual, a brave new persona” that would integrate the whole human social organism, “the ecology of Homo sapiens.” Human ecology Wells defined as the science of working out “biological, intellectual, and economic consequences” to enable us to see the possibilities of the future.¹⁴ What the hero brings to his culture is what Campbell calls the “primitive health” or new consciousness of interrelationships—the ecology if you will—of humanity, nature, and social order.

There is a continuity in much of Wells's work, I am suggesting, that builds upon his first novel's hero and upon that hero's earned wisdom. And perhaps our understanding of Wells will benefit from other critics' still closer examination of that continuity. Let me suggest a few sources of this continuity in closing.

The Invisible Man (1897) presents another visionary scientist among “floundering yokels.” Yet he is motivated, even to the point of murder, by pride, vanity, and paranoiac dreams of power. This time it is through a flawed or false hero and his “evil experiment” that Wells defines human degeneracy-through-selfishness by depicting again the death of human sympathy and by warning of the dangers of uncontrolled rational intellect. And this novel and its theme were directly preceded and initially developed by The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) in which an earlier Rappaccini-like scientist dreams of Godlike power and argues for the uselessness of concepts such as pleasure and pain while extolling the delights of “intellectual desires.” The theme of responsibility for one's actions and for others (even other creatures) is suggested through the vivisectionist, who is unaware of his victims' agonies and of his responsibilities for his grotesque creations. Yet when the narrator Pendrick returns to London, he sees the beast in all humanity and wonders if God, too, had blundered, if progress or evolution is even possible.

The War of the Worlds (1898) then carries forward Wells's program for the total reform of humanity and social order by warning, as his first hero did, of the dangers of becoming over-specialized prisoners of technology, like the Martians, or of becoming prisoners of the decadence born of the naive yet supreme confidence in the future as progress. And from this point onward to the end of his life, in fiction and nonfiction, Wells will frequently focus on the possible avenues of salvation for the species. Anticipations (1901), which Wells accurately called the “keystone to the main arch of my work,” more emphatically focuses his concern for secular salvation through revolutionary change: “I'm going to write, talk, preach revolution for the next five years,” he promised. It is at this point that Wells approaches a “new synthesis” through his search for a group of heroic individuals, a search that moves from the “New Republicans” to the “Open Conspiracy,” to the “Samuari” of A Modern Utopia (1905), and beyond, Wells searches for offshoots, if at times terminal branches, of the heroic personality of the Time Traveller.

In 1933-34 Wells looked back on Utopia in his autobiography and continued to argue that through the creation of a heroic class we may attain the knowledge to outrun catastrophe. And widest knowledge he continues to attach, as in Utopia, to the best in humanity: to individual uniqueness and liberty, to dynamic society and state, to pluralism of morality, to originality of mind, to courage, self-sufficiency, renunciation, and to endurance. Even economics, Wells argues, like all social theories or institutions, must be attached to human psychology or forever flounder dangerously.

To the end of his life, Wells maintained the thread of continuity that reached back to the Time Traveller's prophecy. In Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945), it is ordinary man who is at the end, and only an extraordinary minority of the highly adaptable (or “Over-Man”) may survive. We have come so far, Wells said, outside the order of Nature, have become so much the evolutionary objects of some new, implacable, universal hostility, that we perch on the brink of extinction, perch quite beyond “quantitative adjustments,” so that we will have to move so steeply up or steeply down the evolutionary chain that few indeed, if any, may now adapt. Wells concludes his final prophetic warning with two points that return us to the message of his earliest hero. First, the only fight worth the effort is the heroic battle for human advancement, however great the odds now, as if even Hiroshima “were not so.” Better, Wells reminds us, to end as a species in “dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack.” And second, the chief form of human adaptability for survival will be a revolutionary change of consciousness, that “mental adaptability” which the mythic hero has always earned and prophesied to humankind.¹⁵

As Wells's first hero said, and as so many of Wells's later works echoed, “What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision” (p. 44). If the first part of these words sounds like mere Social Darwinism, and in one sense it does, the second part has new significance for the post-Hiroshima generation.

Notes

1. Van Wyck Brooks, The World of H. G. Wells (New York: Kennerley, 1915), pp. 168-71; Evgeny Zamyatin, “Herbert Wells,” A Soviet Heretic: Essays of Yevgeny Zamyatin, trans. Mirra Ginsburg (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 259-90; Jorge Luis Borges, “The First Wells,” Other Inquisitions: 1937-1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 81-88. Bernard Bergonzi, “The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth,” in H. G. Wells: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Bernard Bergonzi (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1976), pp. 39-53, hereafter cited as Critical Essays, and Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 16-20, 42-43, 49-61. See also Patrick Parrinder, H. G. Wells (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1970), and Robert M. Philmus, Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970). Jean-Pierre Vernier, “The Time Machine and Its Context,” in The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds: A Critical Edition, trans. and ed. Frank D. McConnell (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 314-320, hereafter cited as Critical Edition.

2. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, H. G. Wells (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 118-19.

3. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 245-46. Hereafter cited as Hero.

4. The Trickster is one face of the mythic hero, see esp. Critical Edition, pp. 18-20, 22-24. And cf. Hero, pp. 44-45, 90, 184.

   On the subject of the guests' response to Wells's hero's tale, Campbell again is helpful. Upon returning from his journey the hero always meets the “return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.” How to “communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void”—that is the problem the hero faces “throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly,” Hero, pp. 216, 218. Erich Neumann, in The Origins and History of Consciousness (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), adds that the hero is ever the “outsider” who brings into conflict his “new images” and values (from an inner compelling voice) with the collective, the old order, thereby sacrificing friendship and normal living. See esp. pp. 375, 378.

5. Critical Edition, p. 25. Future references are cited in parentheses.

6. Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hull. Vol. 5 (New Jersey: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 242, 272, 292-93, 300-01. Hereafter cited as Symbols. Cf. Neumann's discussion of the “mythological goal of the dragon fight” for the captive woman in Consciousness, pp. 105, 201; and the Critical Edition, pp. 54-56, 63, 71.

7. Symbols, pp. 121, 149, 170, 212, and Hero, pp. 8, 10. When Wells and Jung met in 1923, Wells found Jung's collective unconscious similar to his own concept of the “Mind of the Race”; see MacKenzie, pp. 338, 346.

8. To the Traveller the Sphinx represents disease and the mysteries “which I could not face” of the Under-world (p. 64). She seems to hover, to watch him, to smile in mockery, and the Traveller finally realizes that he cannot defeat her or open her mysteries by force so much as, like Oedipus, by craft and cunning (pp. 36, 50). And somehow this “crouching white shape” seems to him connected to the riddles of how mankind has evolved (pp. 33, 36, 50). The Sphinx is the traditional symbol of the dragon devourer, the Terrible Mother, the guardian of the mysteries of destruction and regeneration or creative evolution. It is her defeat that allows for the enthronement or prophecy of the Good Mother. See Consciousness, pp. 161-62, 324.

9. Neumann, Consciousness, pp. 391-92.

10. Anthony West, “H. G. Wells,” in Critical Essays, pp. 10, 12-13, 20. West suggests that Wells strayed from his “deeper intuitions” during his “middle period” of scientific utopianism beginning around 1901 with Anticipations. But, West argues, Wells returned in later years to his belief that virtue does not reside in intellect alone. The idea of revolutionary change, West reminds us, was the sine qua non of Wells's utopias. West is on this point in considerable contrast to Frederick Karl in “Conrad, Wells and the Two Voices,” PMLA, 88 (1973), 1049-65. Karl argues that after the scientific romances especially, Wells, unlike Conrad, was an “ahistorical” ameliorist in the liberal, utilitarian, scientific tradition.

11. See Hero, esp. pp. 193, 229, 356, 358. Campbell's examples range from Buddha, the Hindu Muchukunda, saints dying in supernal ecstasy, and to numerous heroes “fabled to have taken up residence forever” in the realm discovered in the journey. “The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure”; yet he remains a “synthesizing image” of the historical and the timeless worlds.

12. Robert Philmus, “The Time Machine; or, the Fourth Dimension as Prophecy,” PMLA, 84 (1969), 530-35.

13. Campbell argues that the mythic hero is always connected to larger cosmic forces and that he is therefore an “evolutionary” hero leading humanity to further stages of development in social, artistic, and spiritual realms. He is the “creative power” of things becoming; see Hero, esp. 315, 336-37. Compare Neumann, Consciousness, p. 131. Both Neumann and Mircea Eliade have argued equally emphatically for the hero as “revolutionary” figure who “brings to birth those forms the age is most lacking,” who restores a balance to his age, and who “regenerates time” as a representative of eternal powers and truths. See Consciousness, pp. 376-77, 381, and Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), esp. pp. 35-47, 55-57, 69, 87-88.

14. See MacKenzie, pp. 163, 437.

15. See Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (London: William Heinemann, 1945), esp. pp. 4, 18, 30, 34. Campbell's and Neumann's argument for the significance of the timeless heroic quest in the mid- and late-twentieth century world is remarkably similar to Wells's, but especially as the argument culminates in Tether. Campbell, to take one instance, also emphasizes the delicate ecology of planetary community now as a new, dangerous stage in human evolution as much in need as preceding stages of some new heroic consciousness. The whole thing is being worked out, Campbell argues, on a level deeper than the boundaries of nationalism or ego-consciousness; it is being worked out, toward success or failure, in the collective unconscious and on the “titanic battlefields” of the planet, and it is bound to be a “long and very frightening process.” It is man who has become the “alien presence” and “mystery” whose “image of society is to be reformed” toward non-nationalistic and non-egocentric systems. The “whole destiny” of a species is to be, or not, atoned. See Hero, esp. pp. 388-90. Neumann similarly argues, in his appendices most clearly, that the global revolution of modern times is an evolutionary storm-center. The regeneration of the species toward some new stage of advancement must go beyond mere re-collectivization as well as beyond mere nationalism and egocentricity or selfishness. See Consciousness, pp. 422, 436, 441.