[In the following essay, Philmus analyzes Wells's own observations on The Time Machine and provides a stylistic examination of the novella.]

The statements that H. G. Wells gave out in the twenties and thirties about his early “scientific romances” or “scientific fantasies,” as he alternately called them, are not sympathetic to the spirit of these works written before the turn of the century. In general, he makes them out to be slighter in substance or more tendentious in tone than the serious reader coming upon them now would find them. Nevertheless, Wells does not attempt wilfully to mislead or mystify his readers in later assessments of his early romances; and in fact his own criticism is sometimes actively helpful in understanding his fiction.

Of particular importance are his various observations about The Time Machine (1895); and his Preface to the Scientific Romances especially—an indispensable account of the theory and practice of his science fiction—draws attention to two aspects of this early fantasy essential to interpreting it. The first of these concerns the Time Traveller's vision of the future, a vision which Wells characterizes as running “counter to the placid assumption” of the nineties “that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind.” The second point, already implicit in this last remark from the Preface, is that The Time Machine is an “assault on human self-satisfaction.”¹

These observations can in effect be taken to summarize the findings of Bernard Bergonzi's study of The Time Machine as an “ironic myth” of degeneration and Mark R. Hillegas' analysis of it as “a serious attack on human complacency.”² Neither of these studies explains, however, the Traveller's compulsion to resume his time-travelling, to return, presumably, to the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks; and it is towards an explanation of this response to the vision or prophecy of The Time Machine that my own interpretation is directed. It seems to me that Wells has structured his romance so as to educe the ultimate consequences of both the myth he develops and the several internal points of view towards it. Since the fantasy thus approaches the very postulates of his science fiction, I propose to examine its structure in detail, considering summarily but analytically the components of that structure: the Time Traveller's vision of the future, his interpretation of it, and the reaction of his audience to the prophetic report.³

I

To begin then with the Time Traveller's vision, “degeneration” is not, I think, a precise enough description of the backsliding of the human species into the less and less recognizably anthropomorphic descendants that the Traveller comes upon in the world of 802,701 and beyond. It is true that Wells himself used that term as early as 1891 in an essay outlining the abstract idea behind his vision of the future;⁴ but in that same essay, entitled “Zoological Retrogression,” Wells also calls this process of reversion “degradation,”⁵ which suggests the step-by-step decline from man to beast that he was to take up in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) as well. More accurately still, one can define the vision in The Time Machine of Homo sapiens gradually reduced to species lower and lower on the evolutionary scale as a vision of devolution.

The human ancestry of the degenerate species that the Traveller discovers in the “Golden Age” of 802,701 is scarcely discernible. The feeble and “childlike” Eloi (p. 38)⁶ are more human than the “ape-like” and predatory Morlocks (p. 77) that emerge nightly from dark catacombs to prey upon the creatures of the “upper-world”; but while “modification of the human type” among the Morlocks has been “far more profound than among the ‘Eloi’” (p. 84), the process of devolution has by no means reached an equilibrium. The oppressive, almost Manichean, threat to the sunlit paradise of the Eloi which the dark and demonic “underworld” of the Morlocks imposes becomes finally the impending destruction of the solar system itself,⁷ foreshadowed in the total blackness of the solar eclipse which concludes the chapter called “The Further Vision.”

The paradise-hell of the Eloi and the Morlocks in fact leads causally as well as temporally to what the Traveller sees as the further vision of devolution tending towards the extinction of all life. In an episode appearing in the New Review but deleted subsequently, he comes next upon a species more degraded than the Morlocks. Of this creature, which he likens to “rabbits or some breed of kangaroo,” the Traveller reports: “I was surprised to see that the thing had five feeble digits to both its fore and hind feet—the fore feet, indeed, were almost as human as the fore feet of a frog. It had, moreover, a roundish head, with a projecting forehead and forward-looking eyes.” As a result of his examination, he admits that “A disagreeable apprehension crossed my mind”; but he has no opportunity to observe “my grey animal, or grey man, whichever it was” at greater length because he perceives that he is being stalked by a monster similar to a gigantic centipede.⁸ It is left for the reader to infer that at this point in the future the Eloi have devolved into creatures with “five feeble digits,” in this case the victims of giant centipedes.

At the next stop in the distant future (in both the Heinemann and the New Review versions) all anthropomorphic life seems to have disappeared, and the Traveller sees instead “a thing like a huge white butterfly” and “a monstrous crab-like creature” (p. 137). He goes on until, thirty million years hence, it appears as if animal life has devolved out of existence. Plant life has degenerated to “livid green liverworts and lichens” (p. 139). Here he witnesses a solar eclipse which prefigures the end of the world.

The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it … As the darkness thickened, the eddying flakes grew more abundant … and the cold of the air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black.

(pp. 140-141)

In retrospect, it seems that the unbalanced struggle between the Eloi and the Morlocks prepares for this final vision, that a terrible logic compels the conclusion: “The sky was absolutely black.” “People unfamiliar with such speculations as those of the younger Darwin,” the Time Traveller had remarked earlier, “forget that the planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body” (p. 76). This is a vision hardly in accord with “Excelsior” optimism; on the contrary, it is precisely calculated to “run counter to the placid assumption … that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind.”⁹

Indeed, the ideas Wells is dealing with are, as he stated in the early essay on “Zoological Retrogression,” an “evolutionary antithesis”:

… there is almost always associated with the suggestion of advance in biological phenomena an opposite idea, which is its essential complement. The technicality expressing this would, if it obtained sufficient currency in the world of culture, do much to reconcile the naturalist and his traducers. The toneless glare of optimistic evolution would then be softened by a shadow; the monotonous reiteration of ‘Excelsior’ by people who did not climb would cease; the too sweet harmony of the spheres would be enhanced by a discord, this evolutionary antithesis—degradation.

(“Retrogression,” p. 246)

Wells goes on to illustrate “the enormous importance of degeneration as a plastic process in nature” and its “parity with evolution” by giving examples of species which have retrogressed and of vestigial features now observable which perhaps presage future degeneration. His concluding remarks are especially relevant to the vision presented in The Time Machine:

There is, therefore, no guarantee in scientific knowledge of man's permanence or permanent ascendancy … The presumption is that before him lies a long future of profound modification, but whether this will be, according to his present ideals, upward or downward, no one can forecast. Still, so far as any scientist can tell us, it may be that, instead of this, Nature is, in unsuspected obscurity, equipping some now humble creature with wider possibilities of appetite, endurance, or destruction, to rise in the fulness of time and sweep homo away into the darkness from which his universe arose. The Coming Beast must certainly be reckoned in any anticipatory calculations regarding the Coming Man.

(“Retrogression,” p. 253)

Clearly this speculation goes beyond the mere softening of the “glare of optimistic evolution” with a “shadow.” The “opposite idea” dominates Wells's imagination—the vision of man's being swept away “into the darkness from which his universe arose”—of “life that … is slowly and remorselessly annihilated,” as he says in “On Extinction”¹⁰—the vision, in other words, of The Time Machine. And his prophecy of the “Coming Beast”—in stories like “The Sea Raiders” (1896), The War of the Worlds (1898), and “The Empire of the Ants” (1904), as well as in The Time Machine—though more literal than Yeats's vision of the Second Coming—is no less forceful in its dramatic impact.

II

The vision of the future as a devolutionary process, in reversing the expectations of “optimistic evolution,” is not isolated in The Time Machine as an imaginative possibility for its own sake. The structure of the world of 802,701, for instance, suggests a critique of the pastoral utopia of Morris' News from Nowhere (1891) and other pre-Wellsian utopian romances, since the idyllic world of the Eloi is quite literally undermined by the machine-dominated world of the Morlocks. Thus the vision of the future in The Time Machine both reflects and evaluates man's “present ideals,” a point that the Time Traveller emphasizes by insisting that the theories he has developed to explain the world of the future derive from what he sees in the present state of human affairs.

Although the Traveller revises his theories as he learns about the nature of the Morlocks, he temporarily settles on an etiological interpretation of the relationship between the effete (and virtually androgynous) Eloi and their more energetic predators. “The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general co-operation as I had imagined. Instead, I saw a real aristocracy, armed with perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the industrial system of today. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over nature, but a triumph over nature and the fellow-man” (p. 84). To be sure, he himself reserves a doubt concerning this account of how the future world had come to be: “My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one.” His ambivalence here reminds one, not accidentally, of his subsequent remark as to how the reader may accept this vision of the future. “Take it as a lie—or a prophecy … Consider I have been speculating on the destinies of our race, until I have hatched this fiction” (p. 145). Together, these statements suggest that any explanation of the imaginary world of the Eloi and the Morlocks is important only insofar as it makes it clear that the world projected in the fiction is prophecy; that is, the “working to a logical conclusion” of what can be observed in the world of the present.

The Time Traveller himself says that he has arrived at his explanation by extrapolating (to appropriate a useful word from the jargon of science fiction) from tendencies existing in the present:

At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer, was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque enough to you—and wildly incredible!—and yet even now there are existing circumstances to point that way.

(pp. 81-82; my emphasis)

What this passage implies is that the procedure for interpreting the vision of The Time Machine recapitulates the process by which the fiction was “hatched”; so that the science-fictional method of prophecy is itself “the key to the whole position.” Moreover, on the evidence of the Traveller's own theories, the future that Wells has projected does not, precisely speaking, embody only the consequences of “the industrial system of to-day,” but also the consequences of the ideal which directs the course and uses of technological advance.

While they summarily describe a world resulting from man's present ideals, the Time Traveller's theories are also evaluative. In saying, for example, that “the great triumph of Humanity … had not been simply a triumph over nature” (as T. H. Huxley had urged¹¹) “but a triumph over nature and the fellow-man,” the Time Traveller makes a negative moral judgment: “moral education and general co-operation” had not been achieved. And condemnation is again entailed in his observation that the human intellect “had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security as its watchword”; for “Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers” (p. 130). The ideal (perfect security) therefore undermines the means of maintaining it (intelligence); and the result, the Traveller continues, is that “the upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the underworld to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection—absolute permanency” (pp. 130-131). This final interpretation, which elaborates on and at the same time supersedes his previous explanations, accounts more fully for the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks as it obviously impugns man's “present ideals.” The ideal of subjugating man and nature to realize a state of “comfort and ease” is satirically judged by projecting its consequences as a vision of the future.

Both the Traveller's principle for interpreting the vision and the process by which that vision has been arrived at assume, therefore, that man's ideals to affect the course of evolution, that the world of 802,701 and beyond is the “working to a logical conclusion” of man's striving for comfort and ease. This point is made explicitly in the version of The Time Machine published in the National Observer, a version inferior in conception and structure to that put out by Heinemann, and one containing more cross-discussion between the Traveller (referred to as the Philosopher) and his fictive audience than Wells finally (and rightly) decided was necessary. In the serialized episode called “The Refinement of Humanity: A.D. 12,203,” the Philosopher remarks to a doctor in his audience:

You believe that the average height, average weight, average longevity will all be increased, that in the future humanity will breed and sanitate itself into human Megatheria … But … what I saw is just what one might have expected. Man, like other animals, has been moulded, and will be, by the necessities of his environment. What keeps men so large and so strong as they are? The fact that if any drop below a certain level of power and capacity for competition, they die. Remove dangers, render physical exertion no longer a necessity but an excrescence upon life, abolish competition by limiting population … [and you get degeneration].

Somewhere between now and then [i.e., 12,203] your sanitary science must have won the battle it is beginning now.¹²

Here and elsewhere in this early draft Wells does not really achieve any degree of detachment from the Philosopher; but at least passages such as this help to clarify how a vision antithetical to “the placid assumption of that time that Evolution was a pro-human force” can also illustrate the consequences of an ideal seemingly inseparable from that assumption—namely, the ideal of evolving towards greater and greater “comfort and ease.”

As far as the Time Traveller's theories are necessary for understanding the prophecy, then, it is somewhat misleading to say that “This horrible degeneration [of the Eloi and the Morlocks] has occurred because mankind, as Huxley feared, was ultimately unable to control the cosmic or evolutionary process.”¹³ Rather, the Traveller implies, mankind apparently controlled the cosmic process too well, according to an ideal the consequences of which no one could foresee. One of those consequences is that by 802,701 no species has the intelligence any more to set limits on the struggle for existence, in which the defenseless Eloi fall victim to the carnivorous Morlocks. Among these descendants of homo sapiens, the struggle for survival—which, engendered by “Necessity,” makes the “absolute permanency” of “mechanical perfection” impossible—now resumes the character that struggle takes among other animals. “Man,” the Traveller reflects, “had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his fellow-man, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the fulness of time Necessity had come home to him” (pp. 105-106). And once this “Necessity” reasserts itself, once, that is to say, man's descendants begin reverting to beasts, anthropomorphic life, according to the vision of The Time Machine, is irrevocably on the downward path of devolution.

III

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.¹⁴ The fourth dimension as a dimension in time is thus a metaphor: it is the dimension open to the imagination. “Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension” (p. 6), the Traveller had said in introducing his audience to the concept of this new dimension. As a world wherein the consequences of the accepted ideal can be envisioned, the fourth dimension provides a critical and comprehensive point of view from which to evaluate the present.

That at the beginning of The Time Machine no one except the Time Traveller has conceived of—or even can conceive of—this dimension already indicates a lack of imaginative (and critical) awareness on the part of his audience. His argument for a fourth dimension, prefaced by the caveat that “I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted” (pp. 1-2), meets with incomprehension and complacent skepticism. Quite predictably, his audience fails to take seriously—if the point is grasped at all—the relevance of the Time Traveller's vision. No one else seems to connect the vision of “The two species that had resulted from the evolution of man … sliding down towards, or … already arrived at, an altogether new relationship” (p. 97) with his preconception of an “inevitable tendency to higher and better things” (“Retrogression,” p. 247). Perhaps no one in the audience takes this vision seriously because, as Wells speculated elsewhere, “It is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal that the bare idea of its extinction seems incredible to it.”¹⁵ Certainly there is no sign that anyone among the listeners sees how, or that, this vision implicates his present ideals, which are responsible for the shape of the future. On the contrary, the reactions typifying the attitude of the audience are the skepticism of the Medical Man, who wants to analyze the flowers that the Traveller has brought back with him, and the arrant disbelief of the Editor, who considers the Traveller's account a “gaudy lie” (p. 148). Only the unidentified narrator of the entire Time Machine lies “awake most of the night thinking about it.”

In fact, the Time Traveller himself does not seem to be wholly cognizant of the implications of his theories. If his etiology is correct, the cause of the degeneration he discovers exists in the present. Therefore, the burden of what he calls “moral education” remains here and now; and his return to the world of 802,701 would appear to be either a romantic evasion and of a piece with the sentimental “squirms of idyllic petting” that V. S. Pritchett finds embarrassing,¹⁶ or a pessimistic retreat from a world “that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers” (p. 152). In any case, the Traveller's point of view, though more comprehensive than that of the other characters, is still limited; and this limitation has its structural correlative in the fact that his narrative is related secondhand, as it were, three years after his disappearance, and comprises only a part—albeit a large part—of the fiction.

That the structure of The Time Machine encompasses, and thereby defines the limits of, the Traveller's point of view indicates that the romance follows an inner logic of its own, a logic, like that governing the Time Traveller's vision, which compels ultimate consequences from a given premise. Accordingly, the logic which necessitates the Traveller's vanishing into the world of his vision depends upon how he accepts that vision. His insistence that “The story I told you was true” (p. 148) implies that he takes his prophecy literally, that he allows it the same ontological status that he himself has. Thus to dramatize the assertion that his tale is literally true, he must go back into the world of the future: since he cannot accept it as fiction, as an invented metaphor, he must disappear into the dimension where his vision “exists.” The demand that his vision be literally true, in other words, requires that the Traveller be no more real than it is; and his return to that world fulfills this demand.

In being subsumed in his vision, however, he also renders it no less real than any member of the fictive audience; so that one is forced to give the same degree of credibility to the futuristic fantasy as to the contemporary scene in which the Traveller relates his story. What the reader is left with, that is, is the prophecy, the metaphorical truth which mediates between the blind and complacent optimism evidenced by the fictive audience and the resultant devolution envisioned by the Time Traveller.

The Traveller's return to the world of 802,701, 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 a prophetic 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.

According to this interpretation, Wells's experiment in fiction is comparable in the artistry of its narrative to the contemporaneous experiments of, say Joseph Conrad, who also wrote tales “told in quotation marks”¹⁷ and who found in Wells an early admirer; and for the complexity of its structure and point of view, The Time Machine deserves the praise that Henry James in fact bestowed on it.¹⁸

Notes

1. The Scientific Romances of H. G. Wells (London, 1933), p. ix.

2. Bergonzi, “The Time Machine: An Ironic Myth,” Critical Quarterly, II (1960), 293-305, and The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Toronto, 1961), pp. 42-61; Hillegas, “Cosmic Pessimism in H. G. Wells' Scientific Romances,” Papers of the Mich. Acad. of Sci., Arts, and Letters, XLVI (1961), 657-658, and The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (New York, 1967), pp. 24-34.

3. All published drafts of The Time Machine share these components, though the serialized versions appearing in the National Observer (1894) and the New Review (1895) differ from the first English edition, published by Heinemann, in many respects—not all of them minor. Sometimes these differences give insight into the meaning of Wells's fantasy, though the serialized versions of course count only as outside evidence for any interpretation. Otherwise they are of interest solely to a study of Wells's progress as a literary artist, a subject it is not my intention to discuss explicitly here.

   Some evaluation of the merits of the Heinemann version of The Time Machine relative to the various previously published drafts, including the first American edition, can be found in Bergonzi's “The Publication of The Time Machine 1894-5,” RES, N.S., IX (1960), 42-51.

4. The fact that Wells was familiar with the notion of degeneration at this early date would seem to reduce the possible extent of any influence on him of Max Nordau's Degeneration (1894), which Bergonzi adduces as a source for the vision of the future in The Time Machine.

5. “Zoological Retrogression,” The Gentleman's Magazine, 7 Sept. 1891, p. 246.

6. All quotations from The Time Machine refer to the first English edition (London, 1895).

7. As Bergonzi observes of The Time Machine, “its central narrative is polarised between opposed groups of imagery, the paradisal … and the demonic” (“An Ironic Myth,” p. 300).

8. The Time Machine in the New Review, XII (1895), 578-579.

9. The Time Machine is part of a reaction on the part of many writers of the late eighties and nineties to the strident optimism that permeated the official rhetoric of the Victorian age. See Bergonzi's discussion of the fin du globe in his Early H. G. Wells, pp. 3-14, et passim. Some material may also be found in Hillegas' Future as Nightmare (see n. 2 above), relevant to attitudes towards evolution during the period in which Wells was writing The Time Machine.

10. “On Extinction,” Chamber's Journal, X (30 Sept. 1893), 623.

11. In “Evolution and Ethics” and other essays, Huxley declares that ethical man can exist only if he modifies the “cosmic process.”

12. “The Refinement of Humanity,” National Observer, N.S., XI (21 Apr. 1894), 581-582.

13. Hillegas, “Cosmic Pessimism,” p. 658.

14. As late as Men Like Gods (1923), the utopian fantasy that takes place in the “F dimension,” Wells has one of his characters say of another (neither has yet been initiated into Utopia): “He has always had too much imagination. He thinks that things that don't exist can exist. And now he imagines himself in some sort of scientific romance and out of our world altogether” (Men Like Gods, New York, 1923, pp. 21-22).

15. “The Extinction of Man,” Certain Personal Matters (London, 1898 [1897]), p. 172. This essay first appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette for 23 Sept. 1894.

16. The Living Novel (London, 1946), p. 119.

17. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N. J., 1957), pp. 202-203.

18. On 21 Jan. 1900, James wrote to Wells: “It was very graceful of you to send me your book—I mean the particular masterpiece entitled The Time Machine, after I had so un-gracefully sought it at your hands” (Henry James and H. G. Wells, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray, Urbana, Ill., 1958, p. 63).