To H. G. Wells

S. S. Cedric, June 6, 1905.

My dear Mr. Wells,—I have just read your "Utopia" (given me by F. C. S. Schiller on the one day that I spent in Oxford on my way back to Cambridge, Mass., after a few weeks on the Continent), and "Anticipations," and "Mankind in the Making" having duly preceded, together with numerous other lighter volumes of yours, the "summation of stimuli" reaches the threshold of discharge and I can't help overflowing in a note of gratitude. You "have your faults, as who has not?" but your virtues are unparalleled and transcendent, and I believe that you will prove to have given a shove to the practical thought of the next generation that will be amongst the greatest of its influences for good. All in the line of the English genius too, no wire-drawn French doctrines, and no German shop technicalities inflicted in an unerbittlich consequent manner, but everywhere the sense of the full concrete, and the air of freedom playing through all the joints of your argument. You have a tri-dimensional human heart, and to use your own metaphor, don't see different levels projected on one plane. In this last book you beautifully soften cocksureness by the penumbra of the outlines—in fact you're a trump and a jewel, and for human perception you beat Kipling, and for hitting off a thing with the right word, you are unique. Heaven bless and preserve you!—You are now an eccentric; perhaps 50 years hence you will figure as a classic! Your Samurai chapter is magnificent, though I find myself wondering what developments in the way of partisan politics those same Samurai would develop, when it came to questions of appointment and running this or that man in. That I believe to be human nature's ruling passion. Live long! and keep writing; and believe me, yours admiringly and sincerely,

WM. JAMES.