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to a human master, and their profound dread of that  house of pain
in which they have been made and fashioned into half-baked men. The
hero of the story, who has been thrown into Dr. Moreau s grisly society,
comes suddenly on the huts of these spoiled animals who have been
fashioned into a bad imitation of men, and hears them proclaim their
new law in the following creed:
[Quotes ch. 12  The Ape Man looked to  stars in the sky .]
Our readers may gain from this passage some faint idea of the power
with which this grim conception of the mauling and maiming of brutes
into bad imitations of human beings has been worked out by Mr. Wells.
It is, of course, a very ingenious caricature of what has been done in
certain exceptional efforts of human surgery,  a caricature inspired
by the fanaticism of a foul ambition to remake God s creatures by
confusing and transfusing and remoulding human and animal organs
so as to extinguish so far as possible the chasm which divides man
from brute. Mr. Wells has had the prudence, too, not to dwell on the
impossibilities of his subject too long. He gives us a very slight, though
a very powerful and ghastly, picture, and may, we hope, have done
more to render vivisection unpopular, and that contempt for animal
pain, which enthusiastic physiologists seem to feel, hideous, than all
the efforts of the societies which have been organised for that wholesome
and beneficent end. Dr. Moreau is a figure to make an impression on
the imagination, and his tragic death under the attack of the puma
which he has been torturing so long, has a kind of poetic justice in it
which satisfies the mind of the reader. Again, the picture of the rapid
reversion to the brute, of the victims which Dr. Moreau had so painfully
47
H.G.WELLS
fashioned, so soon as the terrors of his  house of pain are withdrawn,
is very impressively painted. Altogether, though we do not recommend
The Island of Doctor Moreau to readers of sensitive nerves, as it might
well haunt them only too powerfully, we believe that Mr. Wells has
almost rivalled Swift in the power of his very gruesome, but very salutary
as well as impressive, conception.
7. Unsigned review, Manchester Guardian
14 April 1896, 4
In The Island of Doctor Moreau Mr. H.G.Wells gains our attention at
once by the closeness and vigour of his narrative style and by his terse
and natural dialogue. His realism of detail is, in fact, the sign of
imagination. It is full of skilful and subtle touches, and, harrowing as
is the whole effect, he cannot be accused of forcing the note beyond
the limits of his conception by any irrelevant accumulation of horrors.
But this curious fantasy, with its quasi-scientific foundation, in which
a doctor upon a remote island practises vivisection in the spirit of a
modern and unsentimental Frankenstein, is intrinsically horrible. The
impressions should not be put to the test of analysis or reflection. As
it is, they grip the mind with a painful interest and a fearful curiosity.
The mysteries of the forbidden enclosure; the cries of the tortured puma;
the pursuit through the dark wood by the leopard man; the strange litany
of the beast folk; Prendick s flight and frantic apprehensions; the revolt
of the beast folk such scenes and incidents crowd upon us with a persistent
fascination. Absolute success in such a narrative is impossible; to play
these curious tricks with science is not the highest art; it might even be
contended that this is no legitimate subject for art at all; but in its kind
Mr. Wells has achieved a success unquestionable and extraordinary. There
must be, of course, a weak place where science and fantasy join. To
obscure this plausibly is the great difficulty, and we think that here, as
too in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there is some little creaking of the
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THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
machinery. But if the chapter  Dr. Moreau Explains brings us dangerously
near a too critical habit of mind, it is full of striking things the masterful,
overbearing manner of the Doctor, his dreadful plausibility in maintaining
his impossible position, his perfect devotion to investigation, the fine
contempt for both pleasure and pain which enables him to make the
effective counterstroke of accusing his opponent of materialism.  The
study of nature makes a man at last as remorseless as nature, he says,
and with Prendick we are thrown on our resources to combat this appalling
inversion. Here is the picture of the terrible Doctor: 
[Quotes ch. 14  I looked at him to  comfortable old gentleman .]
But though the reader of this book must sup full of horrors, it must
not be supposed that there are no mitigations and no relief. There is a
grotesque pathos about the beast folk which redeems them, and
Montgomery, a character very much in Mr. Stevenson s manner, is
reassuring and quite human in his vulgarity. The effect of the final chapter,
 The Man Alone , is admirable, and that he should find solace and a
 sense of infinite peace and protection in the study of the stars is one
of the many points that differentiate Mr. Wells from the mere sensational
story-spinner. Yet, great as is the ability and pronounced as is the success
of this book, we are convinced that Mr. Wells is too strong and original
a writer to devote himself exclusively to fantastic themes.
49
8. Unsigned review, Speaker
18 April 1896, xiii, 429 30
A typical example of the moral denunciations which greeted the
book.
We should have thought it impossible for any work of fiction to surpass
in gruesome horror some of the problem-novels relating to the great
sexual question which have been recently published, if we had not read
the Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.G.Wells. Having read it, we are bound
to admit that there are still lower depths of nastiness, and still cruder
manifestations of fantastic imbecility than any attained by the ladies
who have been so much with us in recent years. Mr. Wells is a very
clever person, who has written one or two stories which have had the
merit of originality. In these stories he has shown that he possesses distinct
gifts as a writer of fiction, and that he could interest a reader, even if
his theme was comparatively commonplace. But the commonplace is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]