The World of H.G. Wells

By Van Wyck Brooks

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Title: The World of H.G. Wells

Author: Van Wyck Brooks

Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42221]

Language: English


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THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS

BY

VAN WYCK BROOKS



NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MCMXV


_To_

_Max Lippitt Larkin_




CONTENTS



Introduction

I. The First Phase

II. Towards Socialism

III. Socialism "True and False"

IV. The Philosophy of the New Republican

V. Human Nature

VI. A Personal Chapter

VII. The Spirit of Wells






INTRODUCTION


A natural pause appears to have come in the career of Mr. H.G. Wells.
After so many years of travelling up and down through time and space,
familiarizing himself with all the various parts of the solar system and
presenting himself imaginatively at all the various geological epochs,
from the Stone Age to the end of the world, he has for good and all
domesticated himself in his own planet and point of time. This gradual
process of slowing down, so to speak, had been evident from the moment
of his first appearance. The most obvious fact about his romances of
science, considered as a series, is that each one more nearly approached
the epoch in which we live, and the realities of this epoch. From the
year A.D. 802, 701, witnessed in his first romance by the Time
Traveller, we found ourselves at last in the presence of a decade only
so remote as that of the war which has now befallen Europe. A similar
tendency in his novels has been equally marked. The possibilities of
science and socialism have received a diminishing attention relatively
beside the possibilities of human reaction to science and socialism. It
is individual men and women, and the motives and personalities of
individual men and women, which now concern him. Still retaining the
entire planet as the playground of his ideas, still upholding science
and socialism as his essential heroes, he has been driven by experience
to approach these things through human nature as it is. In a recent
essay he has told us not to expect any more dramatic novelties: for the
present at any rate our business must be to make science and socialism
feel at home. Whether or not this may stand as a general diagnosis of
our epoch, it is a remarkable confession with regard to his own place in
it. For it signifies nothing less than that he has reached the limit of
his own circle of ideas and finished his own pioneering, and that his
work for the future will be to relate the discoveries of his youth with
human experience. He is no longer a "new voice"; his work belongs, for
good or ill, to history and literature, and he presents himself from
this time forward as a humanist.

In this new posture Wells does not stand alone. He is typical of an
entire generation of Englishmen that knows not Oxford, a generation
which has been busy with all manner of significant movements and
discoveries, too busy indeed to relate them to the common reason of
humankind. During these years the word "academic" has been outlawed;
naturally so, for the academic mind is to the creative mind what the
digestive system is to the human body: a period of energetic exercise
must precede its operation. But in order that ideas may be incorporated
in society they must submit themselves at the right moment to those
digestive processes by which they are liquefied and transmitted through
the veins to all the various members of the common organism.

During the last twenty years modern thought has been dominated to an
extraordinary degree by men who have been educated solely through the
movements in which they have taken part: seldom has there been so
universal and so hectic an empiricism. But this is the way the earth
moves. Like an inchworm it doubles itself up at intervals and then
gradually stretches itself straight again. The whole nineteenth century,
according to Taine, was occupied in working out two or three ideas
concocted in Germany during the Napoleonic era. History is a succession
of Gothic invasions and academic subversions. It marks the end of one of
those eras which perpetually overlap one another in various groups of
men and cycles of thought that our own Visigoths have capitulated. As
the pressure of their own immediate points of view relaxes and they
cease to identify their own progress with the progress of men in
general, they become perhaps less striking but certainly more useful.

Intensely preoccupied with contemporary ideas and inventions,
brilliantly gifted and full of life, these leaders of thought were more
innocent of literature and history than a fresh-man. Both Wells and
Bernard Shaw have confessed that throughout their most active
intellectual careers they believed instinctively that progress was
mainly a matter of chronology. To discover the future Wells considered
it necessary merely to set his imagination at work on Chicago and
multiply it by a thousand; while the famous remark of Shaw that he was
"better than Shakespeare" sprang from his assumption that, living three
centuries later, he naturally stood (as a dwarf, in his own phrase) upon
Shakespeare's shoulders. This naïveté placed them at the mercy of
literature, as they soon discovered. Everyone knows the change that came
over Bernard Shaw's cosmos when for the first time, a few years ago, he
read two or three pre-Darwinian philosophers: one could almost have
heard a pin drop when he stopped talking about being better than
Shakespeare. A similar experience, exhibited in his books, has befallen
Wells, and there is no doubt that reading has contributed to the
progressive modesty of his point of view. Each monument of historic
experience that he has absorbed has left its mark on him. Rabelais,
Machiavelli, Plato, incorporated at regular intervals in his own work,
have certainly contributed to make him less agile and less dramatic.

Let us take advantage of these post-prandial moments to survey some of
the remarkable ideas which have been added to the general stock during
this period. After the fashion of Cato, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells have
come late to the study of Greek. Bernard Shaw read Plato at fifty, and
in his latest book Wells has insisted that in the Great State everyone
will study Greek. Nothing could signify more plainly that these
outriders of the Modern Mind have come to a halt and wish to connect
themselves with tradition, with history, with literature, with religion,
with the grand current of human experience. Having been for so long
experimenting with new and untried forces, sharply separated from what
is received and understood, they should be related to the familiar
landmarks and connected with the main stream of English thought and
literature.

Grotesque and violent as it may at first appear, I believe that in the
future Wells will be thought of as having played toward his own epoch a
part very similar to that played by Matthew Arnold. I say this with full
recognition of their remoteness in personal quality, recognizing also
the difference in their direct objects of attack, in the precise causes
they uphold. One thinks of these two vivid personalities--Wells--how
shall one picture him?--and Matthew Arnold, that superb middle-class
gentleman with his great face and deprecating hands--and the comparison
is instantly ludicrous. In reality the entire trend of Arnold's social
criticism was anti-individualistic and in a straight line with
socialism. Seen retrospectively the main work of Wells has not been to
promote any intellectual or economic doctrine, but to alter the English
frame of mind. The function of each of these men has been to bring home
to the English mind a range of ideas not traditional in it.

Indeed this comparison holds (the shock once over) not merely with
regard to their general function, but in their specific attitude toward
most of the branches of thought and action they have concerned
themselves with. Wells on Education, on Criticism, on Politics and the
nostrums of Liberalism, Wells even on Religion continues the propaganda
of Arnold. Everywhere in these so superficially dissimilar writings is
exhibited the same fine dissatisfaction, the same faith in ideas and
standards, the same dislike of heated bungling, plunging, wilfulness,
and confusion; even the same predominant contempt for most things that
are, the same careful vagueness of ideal. It was Arnold who passed his
life in trying to make England believe in and act upon ideas instead of
"muddling through," who never wearied of holding up the superiority of
everything French and everything German to everything English, who
adopted into his own language that phrase about "seeing things as in
themselves they really are." Read his chapter on _Our Liberal
Practitioners_ and you will find the precise attitude of Wells toward
the premature inadequate doing of things rather than the continued
research, experiment, and discipline which lead to right fulfilments.
Who urged the ventilation of life, affairs, conduct in the light of
world experience? Who preached the gospel of reasonableness, mutual
understanding, and more light? Who spurred England to cultivate the
virtue of intellectual curiosity? Who believed with a paradoxical
passion in coolness and detachment? In each of these things what Arnold
was to his generation Wells remarkably has been to ours. Differing in
their view of the substance of religion, their conception of the Church
as a great common receptacle for the growing experience of the race is
precisely the same, fragmentation, segregation, sectarianism being to
both of them in this matter the greatest of evils. The love of
curiosity, centrality, ventilation, detachment, common understanding,
coolness and reasonableness and a realistic vision, the dislike of
confusion, bungling, wilfulness, incompetence, hot-headedness,
complacency, sectarianism--these are quite fundamental traits, and
Arnold and Wells share them in a remarkable degree. It is quite true
that Arnold lived in a universe which only with some reluctance
confessed to three dimensions, while that of Wells trembles with the
coming of a fourth. But in any case it is worth while to release a
phenomenon like Wells from the medium of purely contemporary influences,
and for this purpose it is convenient to see a socialist in the light of
a man who knew nothing of socialism, to see that socialism is itself a
natural outgrowth of those "best things that have been thought and said
in the world." It is important to realize that the train of thought and
the circle of ideas of this man are connected with a well-recognized
branch of intellectual tradition. And even socialism is benefitted by
having friends at court.




CHAPTER I

THE FIRST PHASE


"I am, by a sort of predestination, a socialist," Wells wrote once. And
everything one can say of him serves merely to explain, justify,
qualify, illuminate and refine that statement.

First of all it implies a certain disposition and certain habits of
mind, habits of mind which are all to be found in the first phase of his
work, in those marvellous tales of Time and Space that won him his
original sensational fame. It is this disposition behind them, this
quality they have as of an inevitable attitude toward life and the
world, which distinguishes them at once from those other superficially
similar tales of Jules Verne. The marvels of Jules Verne are just
marvels, delightful, irresponsible plunderings from a helpless universe.
To the grown-up mind they have a little of that pathetic futility one
associates with a millionaire's picture-gallery, where all sorts of
things have been brought together, without any exercise of inevitable
personal choice, because they are expensive. I don't know that the tales
of Wells are better tales, but they have that ulterior synthetic quality
that belongs to all real expressions of personality. Wells was never
merely inventive; his invention was the first stage of an imaginative
growth.

Now the quality that pervades all these early writings is what may be
called a sense of the infinite plasticity of things. He conceived a
machine that could travel through time, a man who found a way to become
invisible, a drug that made men float like balloons, another drug that
enabled men to live a thousand hours in one, a crystal egg through which
one could watch the life in Mars, a man who could stop the sun like
Joshua, a food that turned men into giants, a biologist who discovered a
method of carving animals into men, an angel who visited a rural vicar,
a mermaid who came to earth in search of a soul, a homicidal orchid, a
gigantic bird hatched from a prehistoric egg, a man who passed outside
space. In short, the universe appeared to him like that magic shop of
which he also wrote, where the most astonishing things may happen, if
you are the Right Sort of Boy.

If all this implies anything it implies that things in general are not
fixed and static, but that they are, on the contrary, infinitely
plastic, malleable, capable of responding to any purpose, any design you
may set working among them. The universe, it seems to assume, may be and
quite possibly is proceeding after some logical method of its own, but
so far as man is concerned this method appears to be one of chance.
Obviously, man can do the most surprising things in it, can take as it
were all sorts of liberties with it. The universe, in short, is like a
vacant field which may or may not belong to some absent landlord who has
designs of his own upon it; but until this absent landlord appears and
claims his field, all the children in the neighborhood can build huts in
it and play games upon it and, in a word, for all practical purposes,
consider it their own.

This idea of the relation between free will and determinism is the
underlying assumption of Wells, as he explains it in _First and Last
Things_:

     Take life at the level of common sensations and common
     experience and there is no more indisputable fact than man's
     freedom of will, unless it is his complete moral
     responsibility. But make only the least penetrating of
     scientific analyses and you perceive a world of inevitable
     consequences, a rigid succession of cause and effect.

And elsewhere he says:

     On the scientific plane one is a fatalist.... But does the
     whole universe of fact, the external world about me, the
     mysterious internal world from which my motives rise, form
     one rigid and fated system as Determinists teach? I incline
     to that belief.... From me as a person this theory of
     predestination has no practical value.... I hesitate, I
     choose just as though the thing was unknowable. For me and
     my conduct there is that much wide practical margin of
     freedom. I am free and freely and responsibly making the
     future--so far as I am concerned.

In a word, for all the purposes that affect man's need the universe is
infinitely plastic and amenable to his will. Like every clean-cut
philosophical conception, this clears the ground for practical conduct
and a certain sort of direct action.

There was a time, no doubt, when he shared the old Utopian folly of
expecting a sudden and unanimous change of human will. When the universe
appears as unconventional as it used to appear to Wells, there can
surely be no reason to think it impossible, after a comet has collided
with the world, for the human race to become suddenly Utopian. Generally
speaking, comets do not collide with the world, and in the same way men
are slow to change. But certainly if Wells ever thought of humanity as
merely a multiplication of one pattern, certainly if he has long since
abandoned the idea of our all turning over a new leaf one fine morning,
he has never lost his faith in free will as regards the individual. He
has always believed in the personal doctrine of summarily "making an end
to things" as distinguished from the old-fashioned doctrine of "making
the best of things"; and there is nothing more modern about him than his
aversion to the good old English theory of "muddling through."

Mr. Polly is a good example of his view of personal direct action, the
getting rid, quickly and decisively, of a situation that has only
sentiment to save it from complete demoralization. "When a man has once
broken through the wall of every-day circumstances," he remarks at the
moment of the Polly _débâcle_, "he has made a discovery. If the world
does not please you, _you can change it_. Determine to alter it at any
price, and you can change it altogether." Mr. Polly sets fire to his
shop, takes to the road and repairs his digestion. Desertion of duty and
the quick repudiation of entanglements make him healthy and sensible and
give him a sense of purpose in things. And I know of nothing in all
Wells that is described with more relish than that Beltane festival
which occurs toward the end of _In the Days of the Comet_. The world's
great age has begun anew, and the enlightened men of the new time revive
the May Day of old in order to burn the useless trappings of the past.
They heap old carpets on the fire, ill-designed furniture, bad music and
cheap pictures, stuffed birds, obsolete school-books, dog-eared penny
fiction, sham shoes, and all the corrugated iron in the world; every
tangible thing that is useless, false, disorderly, accidental, obsolete,
and tawdry to celebrate the beginning of things that are clean,
beautiful, and worthy. Sceptical, hesitant, and personal as Wells has
become, that indicates a strong primitive mental trait. Philosophy does
not spring out of the brain; we hate the hateful things of our own
experience, just as we think the things we desire. And though there are
nine and sixty ways of being a socialist, they all unite in a certain
sense of the plasticity and malleability of things human, a certain
faith in the possibility of asserting order in the midst of disorder and
intelligently cleaning house.

Inherent in this trait is another--detachment. You only become aware of
confusion when you stand free of it, when you cease to be a part of it.
And of all writers who have so immediately felt life I doubt if there
has been one so detached as Wells. The mental detachment of his early
tales is a detachment half scientific, half artistic; scientific as of
one who sees things experimentally in their material, molecular aspect,
artistic as of one conscious of moulding will and placed amid plastic
material. Thus, for example, he sees human beings quite stripped of
their distinctively human qualities; he sees men anatomically, as in
that passage where the Invisible Man, killed with a spade, becomes
visible again as a corpse:

     Everyone saw, faint and transparent as though it were made
     of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and nerves
     could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp
     and prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as they
     stared.... And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet
     and creeping along his limbs to the vital centres of his
     body, that strange change continued. First came the little
     white nerves, a hazy gray stretch of a limb, then the glossy
     bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first
     a faint fogginess, then growing rapidly dense and opaque.

Similar is a passage in _A Story of the Days to Come_, where he
describes an ordinary breakfast of our own day: "the rude masses of
bread needing to be carved and smeared over with animal fat before they
could be made palatable, the still recognizable fragments of recently
killed animals, hideously charred and hacked." That surely is quite as a
man from another planet, or a chemist after a long day's work in the
laboratory, would view our familiar human things. And one recalls
another sentence from _Kipps_ where this detachment links itself with a
deeper social insight and hints at the part it had come to play in
Wells's later mind: "I see through the darkness," he says, toward the
end of the book, "the souls of my Kippses as they are, _as little pink
strips of quivering, living stuff_, as things like the bodies of little
ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children--children who feel pain, who
are naughty and muddled and suffer, and do not understand why."

And just as he sees men and human things chemically and anatomically, so
he sees the world astronomically. He has that double quality (like his
own Mr. Bessel) of being bodily very active in life and at the same time
watching it from a great distance. In his latest book he has figured a
god looking on from the clouds; and there is nothing in his novels more
stimulating and more uncanny than a certain faculty of telescoping his
view suddenly from the very little to the very large, expanding and
contracting his vision of things at will. You find the germ of this
faculty in his early tales. Looking down as though from a balloon he
sees the world as a planet, as a relatively small planet. In doing so he
maintains at first a purely scientific set of values; he is not led, as
he has since been led, and as Leopardi was led by the same imaginative
experience, to adopt poetical values and to feel acutely the littleness
and the powerlessness of man. His values remain scientific, and the
absurdity he feels is the absurdity an astronomer must feel, that in so
small a space men can vaunt themselves and squabble with one another.
Race prejudice, for example, necessarily appears to him as foolish as it
would appear to ordinary eyes among insects that happen to be swarming
on a fallen apple. Once you get it into your mind that the world is a
ball in space, you find a peculiar silliness in misunderstandings on
that ball. This reflection has led to many views of life; in Wells it
led to a sense of the need of human solidarity.

And solidarity implies order. The sense of order is one of those
instincts exhibited everywhere in the writings of Wells that serve as
preliminaries to his social philosophy. There is a passage in _Kipps_
where he pictures the satisfactions of shopkeeping to an elect soul:
"There is, of course, nothing on earth," he says, "and I doubt at times
if there is a joy in heaven, like starting a small haberdasher's shop.
Imagine, for example, having a drawerful of tapes, or again, an array of
neat, large packages, each displaying one sample of hooks and eyes.
Think of your cottons, your drawer of colored silks," etc. De Foe knew a
similar satisfaction and has pictured it in _Robinson Crusoe_. De Foe
was himself a shopkeeper, just as Wells has been in one of his
incarnations; and he knew that good shopkeeping is the microcosm of all
good political economy. The satisfaction of a thoroughly competent man
who is thrown on a desert island, and sets to work to establish upon it
a political economy for one, is a satisfaction by itself. That certainly
is a primitive relish, and it is one of the first gestures of Wells's
sociology.

Now the sense of solidarity, the sense of order, implies the
subordination of details, the discipline of constituent units. Only in
his later works did Wells begin to consider the problems of the
individual life; in his novels he has considered them almost
exclusively, but always in relation to the constructive purpose of
society and as what may be called human reservations from it. The
telescope has been adjusted to a close range, and the wider
relationships are neither so emphasized nor so easily discerned.
Nevertheless it is still the world that matters to Wells--the world, the
race, the future; not the individual human being. And if, relatively, he
has become more interested in the individual and less in the world, that
is because he is convinced that the problems of the world can best be
approached through the study of individuals. His philosophy has grown
less abstract in harmony with his own experience; but the first sketch
of his view of human nature and its function is to be found crudely
outlined in the scientific romances. How does it figure there?

The human beings who flit through these early tales are all
inconspicuous little men, whose private existence is of no account, and
who exist to discover, invent, perform all sorts of wonderful
experiments which almost invariably result in their summary and quite
unimportant destruction. They are merely, in the most complete sense,
experiments in the collective purpose, and their creator has toward them
just the attitude of an anatomist toward the animals upon which he is
experimenting; not indifferent to their suffering as suffering, but
ignoring it in the spirit of scientific detachment necessary to
subordinate means to an end. "I wanted--it was the only thing I
wanted--to find out the limit of plasticity in a living form," says Dr.
Moreau in his confession; "and the study has made me as remorseless as
nature."

Invariably these experiments in human possibility, placed in a world
where charity is not so strong as fear, die quite horribly. Dr. Moreau
is destroyed by the beasts he is attempting to vivisect into the
semblance of men, the Invisible Man is battered to death with a spade,
the Visiting Angel burns to death in attempting to carry out his
celestial errand, the man who travels to the moon cannot get back alive.
Does not all this foreshadow the burden of the later novels, that the
individual who plans and wills for the race is destroyed and broken by
the jealousy, prejudice and inertia in men and the blind immemorial
forces of nature surging through himself? These are the forces that are
figured, in the early tales, by that horrible hostile universe of
nature, and the little intrepid men moving about in the midst of it. And
the mind of Wells is always prepared for the consequences of what it
engenders. The inevitable result of creating an imaginary world of
malignant vegetables and worse than antediluvian monsters is that the
imaginary men you also create shall suffer through them. You reverse the
order of evolution and return men to conditions where life is cheap. An
imagination which has accustomed itself to running loose among planets
and falling stars, which has lived habitually in a universe where worlds
battle with one another, is prepared to stomach a little needless
bloodshed. The inflexible pursuit of an end implies the sacrifice of
means, and if your experiment happens to be an invisible man you will
produce the invisibility even though it kills the man.

Widen the range and this proposition logically transmutes itself into a
second: if your experiment happens to be an orderly society you will
produce order at the expense of everything that represents disorder. And
from the point of view of a collective purpose, ends, motives and
affections that are private and have no collective significance
represent disorder. Now the whole purpose of Wells's later work has been
to illuminate and refine this proposition. He has flatly distinguished
between two sorts of human nature, the constructive, experimental sort
which lives essentially for the race, and the acquiescent, ineffectual
sort which lives essentially for itself or the established fact; and he
gives to his experimental men and women an almost unlimited charter to
make ducks and drakes of the ineffectual. Think of the long list of dead
and wounded in his novels--Mr. Pope, Mr. Stanley, Mr. Magnet, Mr.
Manning, Margaret, Marion--and you realize how much of a certain
cruelty, a certain ruthlessness is in the very nature of his philosophy
of experimental direct action.

Another primitive relish exhibited in these early tales is the delight
of constructing things. The Time Machine, for example, is the work of a
mind that immoderately enjoys inventing, erecting, and putting things
together; and there is not much difference between constructing an
imaginary machine and constructing an imaginary society. If Wells's
early Utopian speculations are ingenious impossibilities, are they any
more or less so than his mechanical speculations? One doesn't begin life
with an overwhelming recognition of the obstacles one may encounter--one
doesn't fret too much about the possible, the feasible, or even the
logical. It was enough for Wells that he had built his Time Machine,
though the logic by which the Time Traveller explains his process is a
logic that gives me, at least, a sense of helpless, blinking
discomfort--partly, I confess, because to this day I don't believe there
is anything the matter with it. In any case it is the sheer delight of
construction that fascinates him, and everything that is associated with
construction fascinates him. He is in love with steel; he speaks with a
kind of ecstasy somewhere of "light and clean and shimmering shapes of
silvered steel"; steel and iron have for him the transcendental charm
that harebells and primroses had for Wordsworth. A world like that in
_The Sleeper Awakes_--a world of gigantic machines, air fleets, and the
"swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of an engineer's nightmare--is
only by afterthought, one feels, the speculation of a sociologist. It
expresses the primitive relish of a constructive instinct. It expresses
also a sheer curiosity about the future.

In a chapter of his book on America Wells has traced the development of
what he calls his prophetic habit of mind as a passage through four
stages: the millennial stage of an evangelical childhood when an
imminent Battle of Armageddon was a natural thing to be looked for; the
stage of ultimate biological possibilities; the stage of prediction by
the rule-of-three; and a final stage of cautious anticipation based upon
the study of existing facts--a gradual passage from the region of
religious or scientific possibilities to the region of human
probabilities. "There is no Being but Becoming" was the first of his
mental discoveries; and finding years later that Heraclitus had said the
same thing, he came to regard the pre-Aristotelian metaphysics as the
right point of departure for modern thought. Consider this passage:

     I am curiously not interested in things and curiously
     interested in the consequences of things.... I have come to
     be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine immediate
     things through this anticipatory habit.... This habit of
     mind confronts and perplexes my sense of things that simply
     _are_, with my brooding preoccupation with how they will
     shape presently, what they will lead to, what seed they will
     sow and how they will wear. At times, I can assure the
     reader, this quality approaches other-worldliness in its
     constant reference to an all-important hereafter. There are
     times indeed when it makes life seem so transparent and
     flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an equally
     transitory series of consequences, that the enhanced sense
     of instability becomes restlessness and distress; but on the
     other hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, remains
     altogether vulgar or dull and dead or hopeless in its
     light.... But the interest is shifted. The pomp and splendor
     of established order, the braying triumphs, ceremonies,
     consummations,--one sees these glittering shows for what
     they are--through their threadbare grandeur shine the little
     significant things that will make the future.

And the burden of his lecture _The Discovery of the Future_ is that an
inductive knowledge of the future is not only very largely possible, but
is considerably more important for us than the study of the past. Even
in the sciences, he says, the test of their validity is their power to
produce confident forecasts. Astronomy is based on the forecast of
stellar movements, medical science exists largely for diagnosis. It is
this thought which determines the nature of his own sociology.

There is usually something inept in speaking of a man, and especially an
artist, as interchangeable with any ism. Socialism, in the common sense
of the word, is a classification of men. Individual socialists are as a
rule something more than socialists; often they are socialists by
necessity, or imagination, or sentiment, or expediency--their socialism
is not inherent, not the frame of their whole being. In the degree that
socialism is a classification, or a school of thought, or an economic
theory, the individual socialist will, in practice, make mental
reservations from it. Now my whole aim in this chapter has been to
suggest that if socialism had not existed Wells would have invented it.
It is not something which at a given moment or even after a long process
of imaginative conversion or conviction came into his life. It is, in
his own formulation of it, the projection of his whole nature, the
expression of his will, the very content of his art. With one or two
exceptions--works deliberately devoted to propaganda or exposition--even
his purely sociological writings are subjective writings, personal and
artistic in motive; socialism figures in them just as Catholicism
figures in the masses of Mozart, or the brotherhood of man in the poems
of Whitman, not as a cause but as a satisfying conception of truth. And
just as, if one were to study the psychology of Mozart or Whitman, one
would find habits of mind that inevitably produced the individual
Catholicism of the one and the individual fraternalism of the other; so
behind the socialism of Wells are certain habits of mind, certain
primitive likes, relishes, instincts, preferences: a faith in free will,
a sense of order and the subordination of details to design, a personal
detachment, a pleasure in construction, a curiosity about the future.

These are innate qualities, which inevitably produced their own
animating purpose.




CHAPTER II

TOWARDS SOCIALISM


Of all the battered, blurred, ambiguous coins of speech there is none so
battered, blurred, and ambiguous as the word socialism. It mothers a
dozen creeds at war with one another. And the common enemy looks on,
fortified with the Socratic irony of the "plain man," who believes he
has at last a full excuse for not understanding these devious doings.

Therefore I take refuge in saying that H.G. Wells is an artist, neither
more nor less, that socialism is to him at bottom an artistic idea, and
that if it had not existed in the world he would have invented it. This
clears me at once of the accusing frowns of any possible Marxian reader,
and it also states a truth at the outset. For if the orthodox maintain
that socialism is not an affair of choices, may I not retort that here
actually is a mind that chooses to make it so? Here is an extraordinary
kind of Utopian who has all the equipment of the orthodox and yet
remains detached from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is always jealous of its
tabernacles and will not see itself dramatically; it has no concern with
artistic presentations. But I protest there ought to be no quarrel here.
If a socialism fundamentally artistic is an offence to the orthodox, let
them accept it, without resentment, as a little harmless fun--all art
being that.

Having said so much I return to my own difficulty, for it is very hard
to focus H.G. Wells. He has passed through many stages and has not yet
attained the Olympian repose. Artist as he is, he has been hotly
entangled in practical affairs. There are signs in his early books that
he once shared what Richard Jeffries called the "dynamite
disposition,"--even now he knows, in imagination alone, the joy of black
destruction. He has also been, and ceased to be, a Fabian. But it is
plain that he has passed for good and all beyond the emotional plane of
propaganda. He has abandoned working-theories and the deceptions of the
intellect which make the man of action. He has become at once more
practical and more mystical than a party programme permits one to be.
Here is a world where things are being done--a world of which capital
and labor are but one interpretation. How far can these things and the
men who do them be swept into the service of the race? That is the
practical issue in his mind, and the mystical issue lies in the
intensity and quality of the way in which he feels it.

To see him clearly one has to remember that he is not a synthetic
thinker but a sceptical artist, whose writings are subjective even when
they seem to be the opposite, whose personality is constantly growing,
expanding, changing, correcting itself ("one can lie awake at night and
hear him grow," as Chesterton says), and who believes moreover that
truth is not an absolute thing but a consensus of conflicting individual
experiences, a "common reason" to be wrought out by constant free
discussion and the comparison and interchange of personal discoveries
and ideas. He is not a sociologist, but, so to say, an artist of
society; one of those thinkers who are disturbed by the absence of right
composition in human things, by incompetent draughtsmanship and the
misuse of colors, who see the various races of men as pigments capable
of harmonious blending and the planet itself as a potential work of art
which has been daubed and distorted by ill-trained apprentices. In Wells
this planetary imagination forms a permanent and consistent mood, but it
has the consistency of a mood and not the consistency of a system of
ideas. And though he springs from socialism and leads to socialism, he
can only be called a socialist in the fashion--to adopt a violently
disparate comparison--that St. Francis can be called a Christian. That
is to say, no vivid, fluctuating human being, no man of genius can ever
be embodied in an institution. He thinks and feels it afresh; his
luminous, contradictory, shifting, evanescent impulses may, on the
whole, ally him with this or that aggregate social view, but they will
not let him be subdued to it. As a living, expanding organism he will
constantly urge the fixed idea to the limit of fluidity. So it is with
Wells. There are times when he seems as whimsical as the wind and as
impossible to photograph as a chameleon.

Just here I should like to give what may be taken as his own view of
capital and labor socialism in relation to the constructive socialism he
himself has at heart. I am putting together certain brief passages from
_The Passionate Friends_:

     I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems
     only by the way. They have played their part in a greater
     scheme.... With my innate passionate desire to find the
     whole world purposeful, I cannot but believe that....
     Strangest of saviours, there rises over the conflicts of men
     the glittering angular promise of the machine. There is no
     longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not
     need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are
     no longer essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his
     brother man out of the need of servitude. He struggles
     through to a new phase, a phase of release, a phase when
     leisure and an unexampled freedom are possible to every
     human being....

      Human thought has begun to free itself from individual
      entanglements and dramatic necessities and accidental
      standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will
      towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or
      kingdoms or peoples, a mind and will to which we all
      contribute and which none of us may command nor compromise
      by our private errors. It ceases to be aristocratic; it
      detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us
      all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find
      ourselves in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and
      jealousies and conflicts, helping and serving in the making
      of a new world-city, a new greater State above our legal
      States, in which all human life becomes a splendid
      enterprise, free and beautiful....

      I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of
      human society. Ours are not economic but psychological
      difficulties....

These last two sentences really tell the whole story. To pass from
economics to psychology is to pass from Man to men, from society as a
direct object of attack to the individuals who compose it. And this
marks the evolution of Wells the romancer and Wells the expositor of
socialist doctrine into Wells the novelist. It is the problems of human
interaction that occupy him now. But informing these problems, reaching
behind and embracing them, is a general view of the world which has only
become more intimate, more personal, and more concrete with time.

When, in _New Worlds for Old_, Wells set himself to explain socialism as
he conceived it, he assumed as his first principle a certain Good Will
in men, an operating will steadily working in life toward betterment. In
other words, he supplemented the ordinary socialist idea of economic
determinism, which may or may not inevitably bring about order on the
industrial plane, with a constructive purpose, which, in his view, can
alone bring about the salvation of the race. But this Good Will is not a
fatality; it exists only by virtue of remaining a conscious effort. In
his experiments in Time and Space Wells had accustomed himself to seeing
that the immense possibilities of what might be, so far as the universe
is concerned, predetermined things, were, so far as man is concerned,
matters of chance. To human society at least, if not to our planet, the
most unpropitious things are possible in the future; and there is no
reason to suppose that the destiny of the universe, which at every turn
cuts athwart the destiny of every species contained in it, should, left
to itself, work favorably to man.

This notion is in itself quite outside socialism and does not
necessarily lead into socialism. It was Huxley who said that the world
and the universe, society and nature, are demonstrably at cross
purposes, and that man has to pit his microcosm against the macrocosm.
Huxley, in his famous lecture on _Ethics and Evolution,_ went on from
this to a kind of informal and unavowed socialism, figuring society as a
well-tended garden preserved by man's careful art from the ravages and
invasions of that hostile world of chance, with its gigantic weeds and
blind impulsions, which everywhere lies waiting round about it. Our
work, he implied, must be in every way to minimize for ourselves the
elements of chance, to become aware of our species in a collective
sense, battling with nature and moulding our own future.

I do not suppose that Wells consciously adopted this idea from Huxley.
In itself that would be of little consequence, except so far as it shows
the continuity of thought and the development of socialism out of
science. But Wells was for several years a pupil of Huxley, and it is
reasonably plain that the mood in which he wrote his scientific romances
was strongly impregnated by Huxley's influence. The sinister,
incalculable, capricious, destructive forces outside man are symbolized,
as I have said, by those colliding comets, invading Martians, and
monstrous creatures among which the earlier Wells moved and had his
being; just as the sinister, incalculable, capricious forces within man
which urge him to destruction form so great a part of his later novels.
Most of his heroes (typified in _The New Machiavelli_) come to grief
through the blind irrational impulsions within themselves. And he is
equally haunted by what he has called the "Possible Collapse of
Civilization." I do not know how much this is due to an evangelical
childhood, in which Time, Death, and Judgment are always imminent; how
much to an overbalancing study of science at the expense of the
humanities; how much to an overdeveloped sense of the hazard that life
is; and how much to plain facts. But there it is: it has always been a
fixed conviction with Wells that man personal and man social is dancing
on a volcano.

Therefore he has come to socialism not by the ordinary course but by a
route obscure and lonely. The sense of possible catastrophe and
collapse, the folly of leaving things to chance, the infinite waste and
peril of committing our affairs to nature rather than to art--these are
some of the negative reasons that have made it impossible for him to
fall in with the non-socialist ideal in human affairs, that "broadening
down from precedent to precedent" which he calls "muddling through": a
doctrine that is wholly compatible with a world of haphazard motives,
accidental fortunes, accidental management, a democratic individualism
that places power in irresponsible hands and suppresses talents that
society cannot afford to lose, a governmental system that concerns
itself with legal and financial arrangements, experts with no sense of a
common purpose, patriotisms that thrive on international bad feelings,
and that competitive principle which succeeds in the degree in which it
ignores the general welfare--a chaos of private aims, private virtues,
private motives, without any collective human design at all.

In the light of these opposed ideas of society as a thing of Chance and
as a thing of Design, let me run over two or three of the tales of
Wells.

First of all there is the special _laissez faire_ of pure economic
determinism. _The Time Machine_ pictures a possible result of the
Marxian process which has led to an irrevocable division of classes. The
rich, who were, in the old time, in comparison with the poor,
disciplined and united, have long since reached a point where work and
fear are for them things of the past. They occupy the surface of the
earth, and idleness and futility have made them light-headed, puny,
helpless creatures, stirring about and amusing themselves in the
sunlight. The poor, meanwhile, driven underground where they burrow and
tend machinery and provide, have lost all human semblance and become
white, horrible ghoul-like creatures that see in the dark; at night they
swarm out of their holes and feed upon the creatures of the upper air.
The one class has lost all power to defend itself and the other all pity
to spare, and gradually, year after year, mankind comes to its end.

Then there is the ordinary _laissez faire_ of capitalism, a result of
which is pictured in _The Sleeper Awakes_. The Sleeper, one recalls,
awakens four generations hence to find himself the master-capitalist,
owner of half the world, and the world is one where capital and labor
have irrevocably destroyed the possibility of a constructive human
scheme. But the responsibility for that future is very ingeniously
placed upon us of the present time; for Graham's ownership of the world
is the outcome of one of those irresponsible whims that in our day
characterize the whole individualistic view of property. His cousin,
having no family to inherit his possessions, has left the whole in trust
for the Sleeper, half in jest, expecting him never to waken; and in time
the trustees of this vested fund have become the irresponsible
bureaucrats of the world. "We were making the future," says the awakened
Sleeper, looking out upon this monstrous outcome of whim and _laissez
faire_; "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were
making."

Consider also _The Empire of the Ants_, in which Wells has figured a
possible reconquest of man by nature, owing to the greater collective
discipline of at least one non-human species. He imagines a species of
poisonous ants with only a little greater faculty of organized
co-operative intelligence than ordinary ants, which have terrorized and
finally routed several villages of unintelligent and unorganized
Brazilian natives far up the Amazon. The Brazilian government sends
against them an outworn inefficient gunboat, with an incompetent captain
and a muddle-headed crew; and when they arrive the ants fall upon the
only man sent ashore and sting him to death. The captain repeats over
and over, "But what can we _do_?" And at last with tremendous decision
he fires a gun at them and retires. The story ends with a report that
the ants are swarming all over the interior of Brazil and that nobody
knows how to prevent them from occupying the whole of South America.

And then there is _The History of Mr. Polly._ I ignore for the moment
the individual aspect of his case, for Mr. Polly is not merely an
individual--he is an emblem of the whole, he is society _in concreto_.
We find him at the opening of the book sitting on a stile, suffering
from indigestion and consequently depressed in spirits. It is two
o'clock of a Sunday afternoon, and he has just finished his mid-day
meal. He has eaten cold potatoes, cold pork, Rashdall's mixed
pickles--three gherkins, two onions, a small cauliflower head and
several capers; cold suet pudding, treacle and pale cheese, three slices
of grey bread, and a jug of beer. He hates himself, he hates his wife,
he hates existence. But Mr. Polly's interior, the things that have gone
into it and the emotions that rise out of it, are only typical of an
entire life that has, to quote Macaulay's eulogy of the British
constitution, thought nothing of symmetry and much of convenience.

Each of the novels of Wells, in one aspect at least, presents the
accidental nature of our world in some one typical case. _Love and Mr.
Lewisham_ shows how in the case of one of those young students who have,
as things are, no chance at all, but who are the natural builders of a
better world, the constructive possibility is crushed by the primary
will to live. At eighteen Mr. Lewisham is an assistant master at one of
those incompetent private-enterprise schools which for Wells (as also
for Matthew Arnold) epitomize our haphazard civilization. He has a
"future"--the Schema which he pins to his bedroom wall promises
unimaginable achievements. He marries, and you feel that he should marry
and that he has married the right person. But then with interests
divided he has to find money and in doing so he fails in his
examinations. At last it becomes a choice between his career and his
children, between the present and the future, and the children and the
future win. Society loses just in the degree that Lewisham himself
loses, for he was fitted to be a builder; and society has first, in the
face of all his efforts, imperfectly equipped him and then consistently
refused to take advantage of his talents.

Just as Lewisham is a potential builder of society who is defeated, so
Kipps is a specimen of the raw material, the muddled inferior material
with which society has to deal and refuses to deal. Kipps, like Mr.
Polly, is from the beginning a victim of accident, spawned on the world,
miseducated, apprenticed at fourteen to a Drapery Bazaar. He grows up
ignorant, confused, irresponsible; and then suddenly, as accidentally as
he was born, has £26,000 and responsibility thrust upon him. The fortune
of Kipps lifts him at once out of the obscure negligible world of the
populace and makes him a figure to be reckoned with. Therein lies the
comedy of the book. He tries to make himself what in his own view a man
of means ought to be; naturally he sees money not as a force but as a
thing to be spent, and he finds that even from this point of view he has
no freedom of will, and that his lack of training inevitably places him
in the hands of equally irresponsible persons who want his money. He
wishes to build a house, designed after his own vaguely apprehended
needs and desires, and somehow under the wand of the architect a house
with eleven bedrooms springs from the ground, a house plainly far beyond
his own or Ann's power of management, and the prospect of disrespectful
servants, terrifying callers, and a horde of scheming lawyers,
tradesfolk and satellites. And the life of Kipps under prosperity is
summed up in the following dialogue:

     "Wonder what I shall do this afternoon," said Kipps, with
     his hands deep in his pockets.

      He pondered and lit a cigarette.

      "Go for a walk, I s'pose," said Ann.

      "I _been_ for a walk this morning."

      "S'pose I must go for another," he added after an interval.

May one suggest how the significance of such a story as this varies
according to the point of view? In the ordinary literature of comedy,
Kipps would be merely a parvenu whose want of dignity and ignorance of
the right use of money are laughable--or, if the novelist were a
humanitarian, pitiful. To the socialist, on the other hand, every
incident of his life, every gesture of his mind, is a unique indictment
of things as they are. He stands for the whole waste of human stuff in a
world which has not learned how to economize itself, whose every detail
is accidental in a general chaotic absence of social design.

In this aspect _Tono-Bungay_ is the most powerful work of Wells. Just as
his romances of the future had exhibited the possible effects of
accidental heedless social conduct in the past, so his novels exhibit
the motives that produce this heedlessness to consequences. Thus the
world in which the Sleeper awakes, a world irrevocably ruled by the
bureaucratic trustees of an irresponsible private fortune, is just a
conceivable consequence of such a career as Uncle Ponderevo's, had not
catastrophe overwhelmed him and enabled Wells to point a much more
pregnant moral. _Tono-Bungay_ is a great epic of irresponsible
capitalism from the socialist point of view. Uncle Ponderevo is a born
commercial meteor, and when he first enters the book, a small druggist
in a dead country town, he exhibits the temperament of a Napoleon of
finance spoiling for conquest. He wants to Wake Up Wimblehurst, invent
something, do something, shove something.

     He indicated London as remotely over the top of the
     dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by
     a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.

      "What sort of things do they do?" I asked. "Rush about," he
      said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's cover
      gambling. Ever heard of that, George?" He drew the air in
      through his teeth. "You put down a hundred, say, and buy
      ten thousand pounds' worth. See? That's a cover of one per
      cent. Things go up one, you sell, realize cent per cent;
      down, whiff, it's gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George,
      every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the
      shoutin'!... Well, that's one way, George. Then another
      way--there's Corners!"

      "They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.

      "Oh, if you go in for wheat and steel--yes. But suppose you
      tackled a little thing, George. Just some leetle thing that
      only needed a few thousands. Drugs, for example. Shoved all
      you had into it--staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take
      a drug--take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac.
      Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren't
      unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha--can't be!--and it's a
      thing people _must_ have. Then quinine again! You watch
      your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let's
      say, and collar all the quinine. Where _are_ they? Must
      have quinine, you know--Eh? ...

      "Lord! there's no end of things--no end of _little_ things.
      Dill-water--all the suff'ring babes yowling for it.
      Eucalyptus again--cascara--witch hazel--menthol--all the
      toothache things. Then there's antiseptics, and curare,
      cocaine....

      "Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.

      "They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll
      do you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That
      makes it romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George."

      He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such
      fragments as: "Fifty per cent, advance, sir;
      security--to-morrow."

      The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a
      sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever
      be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense
      one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to
      still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my
      uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since.
      The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee
      something that will probably be needed and put it out of
      reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land
      upon which people will presently want to build houses, you
      secure rights that will bar vitally important developments,
      and so on, and so on. Of course the naïve intelligence of a
      boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human
      inadequacy. He begins life with the disposition to believe
      in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realize how
      casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and
      custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is
      a power as irresistible as a head master's to check
      mischievous, foolish enterprises of every sort. I will
      confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I
      had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do
      that would pretty certainly go to gaol. Now I know that any
      one who could really bring it off would be much more likely
      to go to the House of Lords!

And such or nearly such is this career. Tono-Bungay, that swindling
patent medicine without value or meaning, is the insubstantial
hippogriff upon which Uncle Ponderevo soars upward on the wind of
advertisement. In a society whose basis is unlimited individual rights,
he is able to disorganize the industrial world and to work out his
absurd, inept, extravagant destiny, scattering ruin right and left.

But the spirit of Good Will, the disinterested constructive spirit of
socialism which is the underlying assumption of Wells, appears here as
in all his later books. Out of the wreckage the constructive purpose
emerges, in the person of George Ponderevo. It shapes itself as a steel
destroyer, the work of an engineer's brain, a destroyer which England
has refused and which plunges down the Thames to the open sea, the
symbol of man's intentions, without illusions and without the hope of
personal gain, the disinterested spirit of science and truth.




CHAPTER III

SOCIALISM TRUE AND FALSE


     In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth
     of statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of
     statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt immediately
     to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of
     thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have always
     slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out
     the whole--or, at any rate, completely think out definite
     parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and
     finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct
     on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing
     obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma,
     persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and all
     the stupidities of self-sufficient energy.


The man who wrote that is not what is called a whole-hearted man as
regards any form of group-action. He does not "fit in." He is at bottom
a sceptic, and a sceptic is one who reduces every question to the
question of human nature. So that the socialism of Wells is necessarily
at variance with all the recognized group-forms of socialism,
Administrative, Philanthropic, and Revolutionary. I must briefly
indicate in each case what is the quality of this divergence.

As regards the first, he has a complete distrust of what Hilaire Belloc
has called the "Servile State;" and what he distrusts he virulently
dislikes. In his view, Administrative socialism, as it appears in Sidney
Webb and the Fabian Society, and in the tendency of contemporary
Liberalism, has led to an excessive conservatism toward the existing
machinery of government, it has depended altogether too much on
organization without popular support, and as a result has tended to
throw the whole force of the socialist movement into a bureaucratic
regime of small-minded experts. The activity of the Fabians especially,
he says, has set great numbers of socialists working in the old
governmental machinery without realizing that the machinery should have
been reconstructed first. The whole tendency of this method, as it is
exhibited in the works of the English Liberal Party of to-day, is toward
a socialization of the poor without a corresponding socialization of the
rich; toward a more and more marked chasm between the regimented workers
and the free employers.

And it throws the control of affairs into the hands of a mass of highly
specialized officials, technical minds, mutually-unenlightened experts.
In an age when the progress of society depends upon breaking down
professional barriers, when the genuine scientist, for instance, is a
man who passes beyond his own science and sees the inter-relationships
of all knowledge, the mind which has been trained in one habitual
routine is the most dangerous type of mind to place in authority. On the
one hand, society depends upon the coöperation of all sorts of
specialists, their free discussion, and comparison of methods, results,
and aims; on the other experts in office are apt to grow narrow,
impatient, and contemptuous, seeing nothing beyond their immediate
work,--and this particularly when they have been trained for
administration without any wide experience of the world.

Therefore upon experts as such, in distinction from constructive and
coöperating specialists, Wells, with all the force of his belief in the
ventilating of knowledge and the humanizing of affairs, wages an
unceasing war. _The First Men in the Moon_ satirizes, after the fashion
of Swift, a world where the expert view of life, not only in
administration but in all work, prevails. Each inhabitant of the Moon
has a single rigidly defined function, to which everything else in his
nature is accommodated. Thus certain types of machine-menders are
compressed in jars, while others are dwarfed to fit them for fine work,
"a really more humane proceeding", as Mr. Cavor observes, "than our
method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making
machines of them." And in _The Great State_ he returns to his attack on
government by experts: "Whatever else may be worked out in the subtler
answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that the
necessary machinery of government must be elaborately organized to
prevent the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy,
tacit or expressed, against the normal man." And he adds: "The Great
State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper
circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain
amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of
the stale official." One of the many and increasing indications, one
might suggest, of the remarkable tendency in Wells to find good in the
old humanistic Tory, as distinguished from the modern bureaucratic
Liberal, view of life.

But lest I be tempted to carry this latter suggestion too far just at
this point, I pass on to his equally virulent dislike of Philanthropic
socialism and the busy Superior Person in affairs; especially the type
of political woman so dear to Mrs. Humphry Ward's heart. If the expert
bureaucratic point of view represents the action of socialist thought on
the Liberal Progressive mind, so also the philanthropic superior point
of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Conservative
mind. It is arrogant, aggressive, and condescending. It implies the
raising of one's inferiors, and what weak mortal should assume that she
(for this happens to be a mainly feminine affliction) is the standard
according to which other mortals ought to be raised?

Two of these energetic ladies have been pictured with a bitter vividness
by Wells in Altiora Bailey and Aunt Plessington, the former summing up
the Fabian-expert view, the latter summing up the Superior-philanthropic
view. Altiora has "P.B.P."--_pro bono publico_--engraved inside her
wedding ring. All the misery of the world she marshals invincibly in
statistics. She sees everything as existing in types and classes; she
pushes her cause with a hard, scheming, and wholly self-centred
eagerness, managing political dinners, indefatigably compiling
blue-books, dreaming of a world nailed as tightly and firmly under the
rule of experts as a carpet is nailed with brass tacks.

On the other hand Aunt Plessington is the incarnation of a "Movement"
somewhat vague in purpose but always aggressively beneficial to the
helpless ones of the earth. "Her voice was the true governing-class
voice, a strangulated contralto, abundant and authoritative; it made
everything she said clear and important, so that if she said it was a
fine morning it was like leaded print in the _Times_." Her mission is
principally to interfere with the habits and tastes of the
working-class, making it impossible for them to buy tobacco and beer or
"the less hygienic and more palatable forms of bread (which do not
sufficiently stimulate the coatings of the stomach)." She is, in short,
one of those odious managing people who know nothing of and care nothing
for human nature, who concern themselves wholly with the effects without
penetrating to the causes of misery, who see mankind as irrevocably
divided into a governing and a governed class, and whose idea of
government is to make the governed as uncomfortably efficient as
possible and as lacking in free will. She is exactly one of those
arrogant sterile souls, in love with methods rather than men, who have
made the Servile State an imminent and horrid possibility and have
turned so many misinformed human beings (including Tolstoy) against
socialism altogether.

If Wells dislikes Administrative and Philanthropic socialism because
they are not sufficiently human, he has an equal aversion to what is
called orthodox, that is to say, Revolutionary socialism; and in this he
includes all socialism that is fundamentally economic. "I have long
since ceased to trouble about the economics of human society," says
Stratton in _The Passionate Friends_, in words we are justified in
taking as the opinion of Wells himself. "Ours are not economic but
psychological difficulties."

That statement is full of meaning. It expresses, not a fact but a
personal conviction--the personal conviction with which the
psychological constructive socialism of Wells begins. But before I pass
on to this I must make one comment that persists in my mind.

Nothing is more remarkable than the unanimity with which during the last
few years the advanced world has put all its eggs in the basket of
pragmatism, the basket that has been so alluringly garnished by
Bergson's _Creative Evolution_, In this movement of thought Wells has
inevitably become one of the leaders, and his practical desertion of the
socialist cause is one of the main symptoms of it. The creative energies
of men, where society as a whole is concerned, are, in this philosophy,
conceived as bursting through the husks and institutions of the world,
not consciously destroying them but shedding them incidentally and
passing on. Now as regards sociology there is an obvious fatalism in
that; for the burden of proof lies once more on a personal basis, on a
personal basis qualified by the capacity of the person. It is true that
this creative and constructive tendency, like the total tendency of
modern life, is in the direction of socialism, it is true that a
thousand elements in modern life which could never be engaged in the
class-war are led by it into line with socialism. Yet there capitalism
is! Only the black-browed Marxian steadily contemplates the fact that
year by year the rich compound their riches and the poor their poverty,
while those that have no chance of creative outlets plant dynamite.

I do not mean that Wells is "wrong" in abandoning the economic for the
psychological approach,--that is plainly the inevitable course for him.
I wish simply to mark a distinction. The gospel of Wells is an entirely
personal one; it frankly concerns itself with the inner realities of the
human mind, and in that lies its great importance. But let us
discriminate. Like every purely personal doctrine it contains, in
relation to the facts and causes of society, a certain quietism. It
withdraws the mind from corporate action and lays emphasis on corporate
thought. But it recognizes no corporate enemy. To be an opponent of
capitalism as such, is, in this philosophy, as quaint and crude and
crusty as to be an anti-suffragist or a believer in politics (for it has
become the fashion to believe with fervor in the franchise and scarcely
to believe at all in what the franchise stands for).

There is then a certain danger in the creative pragmatism of this
particular time. If it actually does penetrate to the head men of the
world, if it is able to generate what I suppose may be called a "moral
equivalent" of duty--and there is almost a probability that it will--the
hazard is won. If it does not--and many keen thinkers and men of action
are obdurate--then we shall simply have the _fait accompli_ with
compound interest. What if it should turn out in the end, after the best
brains of socialism had all withdrawn from the economic programme of
socialism, that capitalism grows all the greener in the sunlight of
their tacit consent? There is Congress, there is Parliament, and there
they propose to remain. Suppose they are not converted from the top? Is
it altogether wise to stop persecuting them from the bottom?

So much before I pass on. This comment does not qualify the teaching of
Wells. It merely supplements it from the economic side, and the
supplement seems to me an important one.

Of a piece with his whole point of view is that he calls the right
sociological method not a scientific but an artistic method: it consists
of the making and comparing of Utopias. This idea he sets forth in his
paper _The So-called Science of Sociology_. "What is called the
scientific method," he says, "the method of observation, of theory about
these observations, experiments in verification of that theory and
confirmation or modification, really 'comes off' in the sciences in
which the individuality of the units can be pretty completely ignored."
The method that is all-important in the primary physical sciences where
the individuality of atoms and molecules may conveniently be ignored for
the sake of practical truth, becomes in his view proportionately untrue
as the sciences in their gradation approach the human world. "We
cannot," he says in _First and Last Things_, "put humanity into a museum
and dry it for examination; our one still living specimen is all
history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no
satisfactory means of dividing it and nothing in the real world with
which to compare it. We have only the remotest idea of its 'life-cycle'
and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny." And in the
paper I have just mentioned he speaks of the Social Idea as a thing
"struggling to exist and realize itself in a world of egotisms, animals,
and brute matter.... Now I submit it is not only a legitimate form of
approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of
approach, to endeavor to disentangle and express one's personal version
of that idea, and to measure realities from the standpoint of that
realization. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias--and their
exhaustive criticism--is the proper and distinctive method of
sociology." This notion of sociology as properly artistic in method and
diagnostic in aim indicates his main divergence from the methods and
aims of Comte and Spencer.

And so one turns to his own illustration of this belief, _A Modern
Utopia_. It is a beautiful Utopia, beautifully seen and beautifully
thought; and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one
finds in _News from Nowhere_. Morris, of course, carries us into a world
where right discipline has long since produced right will, so wholly and
instinctively socialized that men can afford to be as free as anarchists
would have the unsocialized men of our own time, a world such as Goethe
had in mind when he said: "There is in man a force, a spring of goodness
which counterbalances egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a moment
suddenly be active in all men, the earth would at once be free from
evil." Well, that is the miracle which has in some way just taken place
before the curtain goes up on most Utopias; and I think that Wells has
never been more skilful than in keeping this miracle quietly in his bag
of tricks and devising meanwhile a plausible transition between us and
that better world. It all happens in a moment and we are there. By an
amazing legerdemain of logic he leaps the gap and presents us with a
planet which at every point tallies with our own. It is a planet which
does not contain a State but is a State, the flexible result of a free
social gesture.

_Mankind in the Making_ should be taken as introductory to _A Modern
Utopia_. It is the sketch of a method towards attaining such a world
state. It is a kind of treatise on education based on the assumption
that "our success or failure with the unending stream of babies is the
measure of our civilization." It opens with a complete repudiation of
"scientific" breeding, as a scheme which ignores the uniqueness of
individual cases and the heterogeneous nature of human ideals. "We are,"
says Wells, "not a bit clear what points to breed for, and what points
to breed out;" while the interplay of strong and varied personalities we
desire is contradictory to any uniform notions of beauty, capacity, and
sanity, which thus cannot be bred for, so to speak, in the abstract. But
in _A Modern Utopia_ he outlines certain conditions limiting parentage,
holding it necessary that in order to be a parent a man must be above a
certain minimum of capacity and income, failing which he is indebted to
the State for the keep of his children. Motherhood is endowed and
becomes in this way a normal and remunerative career, which renders the
mother capable of giving her time to the care and education of her
children, as millions are not in a wage-earning civilization, and makes
both her and her children independent of the ups and downs of her
husband. His very detailed suggestions about the education of young
children (illustrated also in _The Food of the Gods_) are at once a
reminiscence of Rabelais and an anticipation of Madame Montessori. He
insists upon uniform pronunciation (a very important matter in England,
where diversity of language is one of the bulwarks of a rigid
class-system), the universality and constant revision of text-books, the
systematic reorganization of public library and bookselling methods,
with a view to making the race think as a whole. He urges the necessity
of rescuing literature from the accidents of the book-market by endowing
critical reviews, chairs for the discussion of contemporary thought, and
qualified thinkers and writers regardless of their special bias or
principles. To strike a mean between the British abuse of government by
hereditary privilege and the American abuse of government by electoral
machines he ingeniously proposes the election of officials by the jury
method, twenty or thirty men being set aside by lot to determine the
proper holders of office. And he is convinced of the importance in a
democracy of abundant honors, privileges, even titles, and abundant
opportunities for fruitful leisure.

I have already spoken of his belief that the right sociological method
is the creation and comparison of individual Utopias. Thus his own
free-hand sketch of a better world is, in fact, a criticism of all
previous works of the kind. As distinguished from them the modern
Utopia, he says, has to present not a finally perfect stage but a
hopefully ascending one; it has to present men not as uniform types but
as conflicting individualities with a common bond; and moreover it has
to occupy, not some remote island or province "over the range" but a
whole planet. The Utopia of Wells is a world which differs from the
present world in one fundamental respect only--it has one initial
advantage: that every individual in it has been _started right_, in the
degree in which the collective knowledge of the world has rendered that
possible.

But there is no need for me to say anything more about these books. They
are the free and suggestive motions of a mind inexhaustibly fertile and
given to many devices. Anyone who has read Wells at all is aware of his
ingenuity, his equal capacity for large schemes and minute details, his
truly Japanese belief in radical changes, once they are seen to be
necessary and possible. And indeed the details of social arrangement
follow naturally and profusely enough, once you get the frame of mind
that wishes them. Wells in his Utopia presupposes the frame of mind. In
short, he puts education first; he believes that the essential problems
of the present are not economic but psychological.

And here where the constructive theory of Wells begins, let me quote a
passage from _The New Machiavelli_ that gives the gist of it:

     The line of human improvements and the expansion of human
     life lies in the direction of education and finer
     initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far
     beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot
     collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much
     richer, broader scale than it does at the present time, it
     cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more
     general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe,
     therefore, that it can develop such a training and
     education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And
     here my initial difficulty as against crude democracy comes
     in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education
     and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must
     its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if
     those who have power and scope and freedom to respond to
     imaginative appeals cannot be won to the idea of collective
     self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won
     to that. From that one passes to what has become my general
     conception in politics, the conception of the constructive
     imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
     people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom
     power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious,
     highly selective, open-minded, devoted, aristocratic
     culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in
     the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not
     as the spontaneous product of crowds of low minds swayed by
     elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of
     intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and
     curiosity liberated and acting at leisure, of human passions
     and motives, modified and redirected by literature and art.

This permeation of the head men of the world, this creation of a natural
collective-minded aristocracy appears now to be the permanent hope of
Wells. It is the stuff of all his novels, it is the centre of his
ethical system; and his _Utopia_ is made possible by the existence in it
of just such a flexible leading caste--the so-called Samurai. But
before coming to the inner implications of this, to the individual and
personal realities and difficulties of this, I must follow the
development of the idea in Wells himself. At various times, in various
works, he has presented it from a dozen different angles: as something
that is certain to come, as something he greatly desires to come, as
something that will not come at all except through prodigious effort, as
something that will come through a general catastrophe, as something
that will come through isolated individual endeavor, and the like. That
is to say he has presented his idea through all the various literary
mediums of exposition, fable, prophecy, psychological analysis, and
ethical appeal.

It appears in a crude form in his first avowedly sociological work,
_Anticipations_. He there attempts to show that the chaos of society is
of itself beginning to generate a constructive class, into whose hands
it must ultimately fall. The advance of mechanism, he predicts, will
produce four clearly defined classes: an immense shareholding class with
all the potentialities of great property and a complete lack of function
with regard to that property; a non-producing class of middle-men
dependent on these, and composed of agents, managers, lawyers, clerks,
brokers, speculators, typists, and organizers; the expropriated class of
propertyless and functionless poor, whose present livelihood is
dependent on the fact that machinery is not yet so cheap as their labor.
And amid this generally disorganized mass a fourth element will define
itself. This in rudiment is the element of mechanics and engineers,
whose work makes it necessary for them to understand the machines they
are making and to be continually on the lookout for new methods. These
men, he holds, will inevitably develop a common character based on a
self-wrought scientific education and view of life. About them as a
nucleus all the other skilled and constructive minds--doctors, teachers,
investigators, writers, and the like--will tend to group themselves; and
as the other classes in their very nature will tend to social
disintegration, these will inevitably grow more and more conscious of a
purpose, a reason, a function in common, and will disentangle themselves
from the aimless and functionless masses about them. Democracy, as we
know it, will meanwhile pass away. For democratic government unavoidably
reduces itself to government by party machines and party machines depend
for their existence on alarms, quarrelsome patriotisms, and
international exasperations whose almost inevitable outcome is war.

Whether war follows or not, the power of society is bound to fall into
the hands of the scientifically trained, constructive middle class,
because this class is the only indispensable element in it. Without war
this must occur just as soon as the spending and purchasing power of the
shareholding class becomes dependent for its existence on the class
which alone can save society from destruction. With war it will occur
with even greater rapidity: for in the warfare of the future that nation
is bound to win which has most effectively realized socialist ideals, in
which the government can command, with least interference from private
control, its roads, its food, its clothing, its material, its resources,
which has most efficiently organized itself as a whole; and the class
that modern warfare will bring to the front is the class that knows how
to handle machinery and how to direct it. But just as this class will be
the most efficient in war, so will it be the most careful to prevent
war: it will in fact confirm the ultimate tendency toward a World State
at peace with itself, through the agency, not of any of the governments
that we know to-day but of an informal coöperative organization which is
altogether outside the governmental systems of society, and which may in
time assimilate the greater part of the population of the world.

Such is the argument of this book, and except for the inevitability of
it--the belief that all this _must_ come to pass--Wells has not since
abandoned it in any essential way. The new aristocracy that figures
there, the advance-guard of a better civilization, is precisely the
ethical ideal which is embodied in the chief characters of his novels.
Thus too the Samurai of _A Modern Utopia_ are figured as having arisen
at first informally as the constructive minds disentangling themselves
from the social chaos. Gradually becoming aware through research,
discussion and coöperation of a common purpose, they have at last
assumed a militant form and supplanted the political organizations of
the world.

The general intention of all this finds utterance in the most poetic of
all the fables of Wells, _The Food of the Gods_. The Food itself,
invented by two undistinguished-looking scientists, becomes current in
the world through the very haphazardness of a society which will not
control discoveries detrimental to it and which consequently has no
means of coping with a discovery capable of superseding it.
"Heracleophorbia" has thus the same initial advantage as Tono-Bungay or
any other shabby patent medicine. It has an additional advantage; for
while patent medicines have the sanction of private enterprise and are
controlled by secret patents for the gain of their inventors, the Food
of the Gods, like every discovery of honorable scientists, is given
freely to the world. Thus the Food and the gigantic race of supermen who
spring from it and bring with them a nobler order of things are
themselves generated by the very chaos they promise to supplant. Just in
proportion as the inventors are frank and open men, having no secret
gainful purpose, the Food spreads far and wide. It is stolen, spilled,
scattered; and wherever it falls every living thing grows gigantic.
Immense wasps drone like motor-cars over the meadows, chickens grow as
large as emus, and here and there a baby fed upon it and unable
thereafter to accept any less robust diet grows gradually to Rabelaisian
proportions. Caddles, a type of all the growing giants, comes to his
forty-foot maturity in a remote village where, as the mellow vicar
observes, "Things change, but Humanity--_aere perennius_." There he is
taught by the little folk to submit himself to all his governors,
teachers, spiritual pastors and masters and to order himself lowly and
reverently to all his betters. They put him to work in the chalk-pits,
where he learns to manage a whole quarry single-handed and makes of
himself a rudimentary engineer, and then he breaks loose and tramps to
London. He finds himself in the crowded New Kent Road, and they tell him
he is obstructing the traffic: "But where is it going?" he says; "where
does it come from? What does it mean?" Around him play the electric
signs advertising Yanker's Yellow Pills and Tupper's Tonic Wine for
Vigor, conveying to his troubled mind the significance of a world of
chaos and accident, perverted instinct, and slavery to base suggestion.

Is it necessary to say that society becomes alarmed at last? Is it
necessary to add that Wells opens fire upon it with his whole battery of
satire? Plainly men and giants cannot live in the same world; the little
men find their little ways, their sacred customs of order, home, and
religion threatened by a strange new thing. The Children of the Food
meanwhile have grown beyond the conventions and proportions of common
life; they have experienced a kind of humanity to which all men can
attain and from which there can be no retrogression to the lesser
scheme. In the end, having found one another, they assemble in their
embankment, the world against them. They sit amid their vast machinery,
Titanic shapes in the darkness broken by searchlights and the flames of
their forges. An ambassador from the old order brings them the terms
upon which they may go free. They must separate themselves from the
world and give up the Food. They refuse:

"Suppose we give up this thing that stirs within us," says the Giant
Leaguer.... "What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it was
before? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of
men, but can they conquer?... For greatness is abroad, and not only in
us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the
nature of all things, it is part of time and space. To grow and still to
grow, from first to last, that is Being, that is the law of life."




CHAPTER IV

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEW REPUBLICAN


It is obvious that the socialism of Wells, touching as it does at every
point the fabric of society, remains at bottom a personal and mystical
conception of life. His typical socialist, or constructive man, or
Samurai, or New Republican, or what you will, is as distinctly a poetic
projection from life as Nietzsche's Superman, or Carlyle's Hero, or the
Superior Man of Confucius. Like them, it implies a rule of conduct and a
special religious attitude.

Nietzsche's Superman is a convenient figure by which for the moment to
throw into relief the point I have in mind. Plainly a conception of this
kind should never be intellectualized and defined. It is a living whole,
as a human being is a living whole, and the only way to grasp it is to
place oneself at the precise angle of the poet who conceived it. But the
fixed intellect of man is not often capable of rising to the height of
such an argument, nor do the run of critics and interpreters rise to
such a height themselves. In the case of Nietzsche, particularly, they
have confounded the confusion, urging precise definitions and at the
same time disagreeing among themselves as to which definitions may be
held valid. But indeed the Superman does not "mean" this or that: it can
merely be approached from different points of view with different
degrees of sympathy. And so it is with the New Republican of Wells.

I have mentioned the Superman because Wells himself has reached a
conception of aristocracy similar in certain respects to that of
Nietzsche but in others wholly antagonistic. In _The Food of the Gods_
he certainly exhibits a sympathy with Nietzsche on the poetical and
ideal side; for his giants are not simply grand-children of Rabelais,
they practise of necessity a morality at variance with that of the
little men among whom they grow. When Caddies comes to London he does
not, and cannot, expect the little men to feed him; not intending evil
and seeing merely that he must live, he sweeps the contents of a baker's
shop into his mouth with just the unconcerned innocence of laws and
prohibitions that a child would feel before a blackberry bush. The very
existence of a larger, freer race implies a larger and freer morality,
and the giants and the little folk alike see that the same world cannot
for long contain them both. But perhaps one can mark the distinction by
saying that, unlike the Superman, they are not masters but servants of
the cosmic process. They themselves are not the goal toward which the
whole creation tends. Humanity is not a setting for their splendor, but
something that wins through them its own significance.

In fact it fully proves how profound is the socialistic instinct in
Wells, that though in English wise and almost in the manner of Carlyle
he has come to believe in the great ones of this world, he has never
lost the invincible socialist conviction that a great man is only a
figure of speech. In _The Discovery of the Future_ he says: "I must
confess that I believe that if by some juggling with space and time
Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, Edward IV, William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery,
and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth, it would not have
produced any serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believe
that these great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and
instruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistent
forces behind them." The individual who stands on his achievement, the
"lord of creation," is to him at best a little misinformed, at the worst
blustering, dishonest, presuming, absurd.

By an original instinct the Wells hero is an inconspicuous little
person, fastidiously untheatrical, who cuts no figure personally and
who, to adopt a phrase from one of his later books, "escapes from
individuality in science and service." He abhors "personages." For the
personage is one who, in some degree, stands on his achievement, and to
Wells man, both in his love and his work, is experimental: he is an
experiment toward an impersonal synthesis, the well-being of the
species. It is true that this idea of man as an experiment does not
conflict with a very full development of personality. It consists in
that; but personality to Wells is attained purely through love and work,
and thus it comes to an end the moment it becomes static, the moment one
accepts the laurel wreath, the moment one verges on self-consequence.

The first published utterance of Wells was, I think, a paper in _The
Fortnightly Review_ for July, 1891, called _The Rediscovery of the
Unique_. It was one of the earliest of those attacks on the logical
approach to life, so characteristic of contemporary thought: it stamped
him from the outset a pragmatist. The burden of his argument was that
since the investigations of Darwin it is no longer possible to ignore
the uniqueness of every individual thing in the universe and that "we
only arrive at the idea of similar beings by an unconscious or
deliberate disregard of an infinity of small differences"--that, in
brief, the method of classification which is the soul of logic is untrue
to the facts of life. "Human reason," he wrote, "in the light of what is
being advanced, appears as a convenient organic process based on a
fundamental happy misconception.... The _reason d'être_ of a man's mind
is to avoid danger and get food--so the naturalists tell us. His
reasoning powers are about as much a truth-seeking tool as the snout of
a pig, and he may as well try to get to the bottom of things by them as
a mole might by burrowing."

I quote thus his rudely graphic early statement of the case, because he
has not since substantially modified it and because it shows that he
already related it to human realities: and indeed in the same paper he
pointed out the relation that such an idea must bear to ordinary
conduct:

     Beings are unique, circumstances are unique, and therefore
     we cannot think of regulating our conduct by wholesale
     dicta. A strict regard for truth compels us to add that
     principles are wholesale dicta: they are substitutes of more
     than doubtful value for an individual study of cases.

This conception of human reason as an altogether inadequate organ for
getting at the truth of things he later expanded in his Oxford lecture,
_Scepticism of the Instrument;_ and, still further expanded, it forms
the first or metaphysical book of his _First and Last Things_. It is
unnecessary to discuss the rights and wrongs of this primary point in a
generation familiar with James and Bergson. It is an assumption of the
purely personal, experimental nature of truth which has had a sufficient
sanction of experience greatly to modify contemporary practice in ethics
and sociology. And it should be noted that Wells evolved it in his own
study of physical science (a study serious enough to result in
text-books of Biology, Zoology, and Physiography) and that he presents
it, in accordance with his own postulates, not as truth for everybody,
but as his own personal contribution to the sum of experience. The study
of science led him to see the limitations of the scientific attitude,
outside the primary physical sciences which for practical purposes can
afford to ignore individualities, in matters that approach the world of
human motives and affairs.

I do not propose to discuss this question of logic. It is quite plain at
least, as Wells observes, in the spirit of Professor James, that "all
the great and important beliefs by which life is guided and determined
are less of the nature of fact than of artistic expression." And
therefore he is justified in proceeding as follows:

     I make my beliefs as I want them. I do not attempt to go to
     fact for them. I make them thus and not thus exactly as an
     artist makes a picture so and not so.... That does not mean
     that I make them wantonly and regardless of fact.... The
     artistic method in this field of beliefs, as in the field of
     visual renderings, is one of great freedom and initiative
     and great poverty of test, that is all, but of no
     wantonness; the conditions of Tightness are none the less
     imperative because they are mysterious and indefinable. I
     adopt certain beliefs because I feel the need of them,
     because I feel an often quite unanalyzable Tightness in
     them, because the alternative of a chaotic life distresses
     me.

And this is the way in which he presents the gist of his beliefs:

     I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that
     strains and I believe grows toward Beauty, and of a great
     mental being that strains and I believe grows towards
     knowledge and power. In this persuasion that I am a gatherer
     of experience, a mere tentacle that arranged thought beside
     thought for this Being of the Species, this Being that grows
     beautiful and powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling
     idea of which I stand in need, the ruling idea that
     reconciles and adjudicates among my warring motives. In it I
     find both concentration of myself and escape from myself, in
     a word, I find _Salvation_.

And again later:

     The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are
     the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement:
     it is a statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals,
     so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are
     accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of
     chance. In so far as we realize ourselves as experiments of
     the species for the species, just in so far do we escape
     from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an
     experience greater than ourselves.... Now none of this, if
     you read me aright, makes for the suppression of one's
     individual difference, but it does make for its correlation.
     We have to get everything we can out of ourselves for this
     very reason that we do not stand alone; we signify as parts
     of a universal and immortal development. Our separate selves
     are our charges, the talents of which much has to be made.
     It is because we are episodical in the great synthesis of
     life that we have to make the utmost of our individual lives
     and traits and possibilities.

Naturally then, just as he holds by the existing State as a rudimentary
collective organ in public affairs, so also, in theory, he holds by the
existing Church. His Church of the Future bears to the existing Church
just the relation which the ultimate State of socialism bears to the
existing State. "The theory of a religion," says Wells, "may propose the
attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an irascible Deity or a
dozen other things as its end and aim. The practical fact is that it
draws together great multitudes of diverse individualized people in a
common solemnity and self-subordination, however vague, and is so far
like the State, and in a manner far more intimate and emotional and
fundamental than the State, a synthetic power. And in particular the
idea of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic suggestion; it is
in many ways an idea broader and finer than the constructive idea of any
existing State."

All of which I take to be very much the position of Erasmus face to face
with Luther and of Matthew Arnold face to face on the one hand with
Nonconformity and on the other with Darwinism: that the Church is a
social fact greater in importance than any dogmatic system it contains.
To Wells any sort of voluntary self-isolation, any secession from
anything really synthetic in society, is a form of "sin." And like many
Catholics he justifies a certain Machiavelism in squaring one's personal
doubts with the collective end. Thus he holds that test oaths and
declarations of formal belief are of the same nature as the oath of
allegiance a republican takes to the King, petty barriers that cannot
weigh against the good that springs from placing oneself _en rapport_
with the collective religious consciousness; at least in the case of
national Churches, which profess to represent the whole spiritual life
of a nation and which cannot therefore be regarded as exclusive to any
affirmative religious man. The individual, he says, must examine his
special case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibility
of coöperation; as far as possible he must repress his private tendency
toward social fragmentation, hold fast to the idea of the Church as
essentially a larger fact than any specific religious beliefs, and work
within it for the recognition of this fact. I have mentioned Catholic
reasoning; Wells appears to be in general agreement with Newman as to
the subordination of private intellectual scruples to the greater unity
of faith.

But indeed I doubt if it is fair to take him too much at his word in
specific matters of this kind. _First and Last Things_ has that slightly
official quality which goes with all Confessions of Faith out loud. If
his intention has led him to square himself with lines of thought and
conduct where, to speak the truth, he is an alien, his intention
remains, and that is plain and fine.

The synthetic motive gains its very force through the close-knitting of
keenly-developed, proud, and valiant individualities. In Wells the
synthetic motive and the individual motive qualify and buttress one
another; and he is quite as much opposed to the over-predominance of the
synthetic motive where the personal motive is deficient as he is to the
self-indulgence of the purely personal life. Thus the Assembly in _A
Modern Utopia_ is required to contain a certain number of men outside
the Samurai class, because, as they explain, "there is a certain sort of
wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is necessary to the perfect
ruling of life," and their Canon contains a prayer "to save the world
from unfermented men." So also in _First and Last Things_ Wells remarks:
"If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue of sins by
asking, 'Are you a man of regular life?' and I would charge my penitent
to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving irregularity; to
fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork and beans or give
up smoking or spend a month with publicans and sinners." Plainly his
collective purpose is nothing unless it consists of will, will even to
wilfulness, even to perversity.

And this leads one back to that early assertion of his that since beings
and circumstances are unique, we must get rid of the idea that conduct
should be regulated by general principles. Similarly, at the outset of
_Mankind in the Making_ he says it is necessary "to reject and set aside
all abstract, refined, and intellectualized ideas as starting
propositions, such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, or Beauty,
and to hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a
tissue and succession of births." Goodness and Beauty, he says, cannot
be considered apart from good and beautiful things and one's personal
notions of the good and beautiful have to be determined by one's
personal belief about the meaning of life. Thus, to take an illustration
from his novels, one of the most odious traits of such a father as Ann
Veronica's or Mr. Pope in _Marriage_ is that they wish to regulate their
daughters, not by a study of what is and must be good in their eyes, but
by a general sweeping view of what good daughters ought to be.

Now since his own idea of the purpose of life is the development of the
collective consciousness of the race, his idea of the Good is that which
contributes to this synthesis, and the Good Life is that which, as he
says, "most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience and
renders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively to
the collective growth." And as a corollary to this, Sin is essentially
"the service of secret and personal ends." The conflict in one way or
another between this Good and this Evil forms the substance of each of
the main group of his novels. Aside from the novels of shop-life, each
of his principal men begins life with a passionate and disinterested
ambition to gather and prepare experience and render it available for
the race; each one falls from this ambition to the service of secret and
personal ends. Lewisham, Capes, Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford are, each
in his own way, human approximations, with all the discount of actual
life, of the ethical standard of Wells himself as it is generalized in
the New Republicans and the Samurai. They illustrate how fully the
socialism of Wells is summed up in a conception of character.

But before turning to the actual men and women who form the substance of
his novels, I must add something about those wraith-like beings, the
Samurai of _A Modern Utopia,_ which fully embody his ideal.

The name Samurai, to begin with, is not a random choice, for it is plain
that the Japanese temper is akin to that of Wells. The career of the
Japanese as a nation during the last fifty years perfectly illustrates
his frequent contention that in modern warfare success falls to the
nation that has most completely realized the socialistic, as
distinguished from the individualistic, notion of society. "Behind her
military capacity is the disciplined experience of a thousand years,"
says Lafcadio Hearn, who proceeds to show at what cost, in everything we
are apt to regard as human, this disciplined power has been
achieved--the cost of individual privacy in rights, property, and
conduct.

But aside from social ideals and achievements one instinctively feels
that Wells likes Japanese human nature. In one of his early essays, long
since out of print, he remarks:

     I like my art unadorned; thought and skill and the other
     strange quality that is added thereto to make things
     beautiful--and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and
     paper, and behold! a thing of beauty!--as they do in Japan.
     And if it should fall into the fire--well, it has gone like
     yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.

He contrasts this with the ordinary English view of art and property,
mahogany furniture and "handsome" possessions:

     The pretence that they were the accessories to human life
     was too transparent. _We_ were the accessories; we minded
     them for a little while, and then we passed away. They wore
     us out and cast us aside. We were the changing scenery; they
     were the actors who played on through the piece.

_There is no Being but Becoming_ is the special dictum of Wells, a
dictum which does not consort with mahogany sideboards, but is tangibly
expressed in Japanese architecture. And if Wells naturally likes
Japanese art, its economy, delicacy, ephemerality, its catlike nicety,
its paucity of color, its emphasis of design, its "starkness," it is
plain also that many qualities of the Japanese character must also
appeal irresistibly to him: the light hold they have on all those things
into which one settles down, from stolid leather arm-chairs to
comfortable private fortunes; their lack of self-consequence, their
alertness, their athletic freedom from everything that encumbers, their
remoteness from port-wine and _embonpoint._ These things exist in
Wells's notion of right human nature.

Thus the Samurai. They are delegates of the species, experimenting and
searching for new directions; they instinctively view themselves as
explorers for the race, as disinterested agents. And their own
self-development on this disinterested basis is not only the purpose of
their own lives, but also the method by which the Life Impulse discovers
and records itself and pushes on to ever wider and richer
manifestations.

The socialism of Wells is merely a building out from this conception. He
is persuaded that this kind of experimental exercise is not simply a
happy indulgence for the few fortunately placed, but that it is actually
virtue and the only virtue. And this notion of personal virtue--personal
in quality, social in effect--once conceded, it follows that the
moulding of life must proceed with reference to this.




CHAPTER V

HUMAN NATURE


There is always a certain disadvantage in approaching human nature
through a theory or in the light of an ideal. If I am doing that, it is
my own fault and by no means the fault of Wells. He has himself
abandoned socialism, in the ordinary sense of the term, because it has
too much of the _à priori_ about it; he has abandoned economics because
it deals with man as a mass-mind; he has come to rest in human nature
itself and he has made his theories subject to human nature.

"All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the
story," says Thoreau. Most readers of the novels of Wells, I suppose,
have no notion that a theory of life runs through them and unites them.
And they are right. The force of a work of art does not reside in its
"inner meanings." An admirable work of art will always no doubt possess
"inner meanings" in plenty and the unhappy mind of man will always rout
them out. But to separate the intellectual structure of anything from
the thing itself is just like any other kind of vivisection: you expose
the brain and you kill the dog. A work of art is a moving living whole
that speaks to the moving living whole which is oneself. We are
insensibly modified by reading as by other experience. We come to feel
differently, see differently, act differently. Without doubt Wells has
altered the air we breathe and has made a conscious fact in many minds
the excellence that resides in certain types of men and modes of living
and the odiousness that resides in others. Socialism, like everything
else which changes the world, comes as a thief in the night.

Still, it is plain that Wells himself began with doctrine foremost;
richness of experience has led him only after many years to get the
horse before the cart. From the first he was aware of a point of
view--it was the point of view, writ large, of his own self-made career,
growing gradually more and more coherent. Throughout his romances, down
to the very end, his chief interest was theoretical rather than human.
Only this can account for the violent wrenching of life and character in
them to suit the requirements of a predetermined idea. The Food of the
Gods, for example, is so far the essential fact of the book that bears
its name that the characters in this book are merely employed to give
the Food a recognizable human setting. Throughout his romances, indeed,
men exist for inventions, not inventions for men.

Yet the "human interest," as it is called, was there from the outset,
side by side with this main theoretic interest in the scientific and
socialistic possibilities of life. The series of novels began almost as
early as the series of romances. Two "streams of tendency" run side by
side throughout the earlier writings of Wells--streams of tendency which
meet fully for the first time in _Tono-Bungay_, and have formed a single
main current in the novels subsequent to that. On the one hand was the
stream of constructive theory, not yet brought into contact with human
nature, on the other the stream of "human interest," not yet brought
into contact with constructive theory. Mr. Hoopdriver, of _The Wheels of
Chance,_ and Kipps, are typical of this earlier fiction, specimens of
muddled humanity as such, one might say, quite unmitigated by the train
of thought, the possibility of doing something _with_ muddled humanity,
which was growing more and more urgent in the romances.

In _Tono-Bungay_, as I have said, one sees the union of these two trains
of interest, muddled humanity being represented in Uncle Ponderevo,
constructive theory in George Ponderevo. And in all the subsequent
novels this fusion continues. The background in each case is the static
world of muddle from which Wells is always pushing off into the open sea
of possibilities, the foreground being occupied by a series of men and
women who represent this dynamic forward movement. And the philosophy of
Wells has finally come to port in human nature.

"Few modern socialists," he says somewhere, "present their faith as a
complete panacea, and most are now setting to work in earnest upon those
long-shirked preliminary problems of human interaction through which the
vital problem of a collective head and brain can alone be approached."
And elsewhere he says: "Our real perplexities are altogether
psychological. There are no valid arguments against a great-spirited
socialism but this, that people will not. Indolence, greed, meanness of
spirit, the aggressiveness of authority, and above all jealousy,
jealousy from pride and vanity, jealousy for what we esteem our
possessions, jealousy for those upon whom we have set the heavy fetters
of our love, a jealousy of criticism and association, these are the real
obstacles to those brave large reconstructions, those profitable
abnegations and brotherly feats of generosity that will yet turn human
life--of which our individual fives are but the momentary parts--into a
glad, beautiful and triumphant coöperation all round this sunlit world."

Inevitably then he sees the world as divided roughly into two worlds,
and human nature as of two general kinds. There is the static world, the
normal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself,
together with the great mass of men who compose and sanction it; and
there is the ever-advancing better world, pushing through this outworn
husk in the minds and wills of creative humanity. In one of his essays
he has figured this opposition as between what he calls the Normal
Social Life and the Great State. And in one of those _dégagé_
touch-and-go sketches in which he so often sums up the history of
humankind, he has presented the Normal Social Life as a "common
atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domestic
intimacy," an immemorial state of being which implies on the part of men
and women a perpetual acquiescence--a satisfied or hopeless consent--to
the end of time. But as against this normal conception of life he points
out that modern circumstances have developed in men, through machinery,
the division of labor, etc., a "surplus life" which does not fit into
the Normal scheme at all, and that humanity has returned "from a closely
tethered to a migratory existence." And he observes: "The history of the
immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of
the conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions,
the boundaries, the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditions
established during the home-keeping, localized era of mankind's career."

Two conceptions of life, two general types of character, two ethical
standards are here set in opposition, and this opposition is maintained
throughout the novels of Wells. Thus on the title-page of _The New
Machiavelli_ appears the following quotation from Professor James: "It
suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded
people ... do both exist." In _A Modern Utopia_ this division appears
typically in the two men from our world who play off against one
another, the botanist and the narrator of the story. The
"tender-mindedness" of the botanist is exhibited in the fact that he
cares nothing for a better world if it is to deprive him of the muddled,
inferior and sentimental attachments of his accustomed life, and prefers
them to the austerer, braver prospect that is offered him.
"Tough-mindedness," on the other hand, is above all the state of living,
not in one's attachments, habits, possessions, not in the rut of least
resistance, but in the sense of one's constructive and coöperative
relationship to the whole sum of things, in being "a conscious part of
that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe." And
indeed the constant theme of the novels of Wells might be described as
tough-mindedness with lapses.

For the heroes of Wells do lapse: they pay that tribute to "human
nature" and the overwhelming anti-social forces in the world and in man
himself. They fall, as a rule, from "virtue" to the service of secret
and personal ends. _Cherchez la femme_. Mr. Lewisham, insufficiently
prepared and made to feel that society does not want him, has to give up
his disinterested ambitions in science and scramble for money to support
a wife whom instinct has urged him, however imprudently, to marry.
George Ponderevo gives up science and is forced into abetting his
uncle's patent medicine enterprise for the same reason. For the same
reason, too, Capes takes to commercial play-writing to support Ann
Veronica; and to stand behind the extravagance of Marjorie, Trafford,
having discovered in his researches an immensely valuable method of
making artificial india-rubber which he is going to make public for the
use of society, is persuaded to compromise his honor as a scientist and
monopolize his discovery for private gain. In _Tono-Bungay_ the
enterprise is a swindling patent medicine, which many business men would
refuse to have anything to do with; but in _Marriage_ the proposition
belongs to what is called "legitimate business," and it may be well to
quote a passage to show the subtlety and, at the same time, from this
point of view, the very substantial nature of temptation and sin:

     Solomonson had consulted Trafford about this matter at
     Vevey, and had heard with infinite astonishment that
     Trafford had already roughly prepared and was proposing to
     complete and publish, unpatented and absolutely unprotected,
     first a smashing demonstration of the unsoundness of
     Behren's claim and then a lucid exposition of just what had
     to be done and what could be done to make an india-rubber
     absolutely indistinguishable from the natural product. The
     business man could not believe his ears.

      "My dear chap, positively--you mustn't!" Solomonson had
      screamed.... "Don't you see all you are throwing away?"

      "I suppose it's our quality to throw such things away,"
      said Trafford.... "When men dropped that idea of concealing
      knowledge, alchemist gave place to chemist, and all that is
      worth having in modern life, all that makes it better and
      safer and more hopeful than the ancient life began."

      "My dear fellow," said Solomonson, "I know, I know. But to
      give away the synthesis of rubber! To just shove it out of
      the window into the street!"... Everything that had made
      Trafford up to the day of his marriage was antagonistic to
      such strategic reservations. The servant of science has as
      such no concern with personal consequences; his business is
      the steady relentless clarification of knowledge. The human
      affairs he changes, the wealth he makes or destroys, are no
      concern of his; once these things weigh with him, become
      primary, he has lost his honor as a scientific man.

      "But you _must_ think of consequences," Solomonson had
      cried during those intermittent talks at Vevey. "Here you
      are, shying this cheap synthetic rubber of yours into the
      world--for it's bound to be cheap! anyone can see
      that--like a bomb into a market-place. What's the good of
      saying you don't care about the market-place, that _your_
      business is just to make bombs and drop them out of the
      window? You smash up things just the same. Why! you'll ruin
      hundreds and thousands of people, people living on rubber
      shares, people working in plantations, old, inadaptable
      workers in rubber works...."

      "I believe we can do the stuff at tenpence a pound," said
      Solomonson, leaning back in his chair at last.... "So soon,
      that is, as we deal in quantity. Tenpence! We can lower the
      price and spread the market, sixpence by sixpence. In the
      end--there won't be any more plantations. Have to grow
      tea."

There we have Eve and the apple brought up to date, sin being the choice
of a private and individual good at the expense of the general good. The
honor of a doctor or a scientist consists in not concealing and
monopolizing discoveries. But why should the line be drawn at doctors
and scientists? There is the crux of socialist ethics.

By this type of compromise the actual New Republicans fall short of
their Utopian selves, the Samurai. But compromise is well within the
philosophy of Wells. "The individual case," he says in _First and Last
Things_, "is almost always complicated by the fact that the existing
social and economic system is based upon conditions that the growing
collective intelligence condemns as unjust and undesirable, and that the
constructive spirit in men now seeks to supersede. We have to live in a
provisional state while we dream of and work for a better one." And
elsewhere: "All socialists everywhere are like expeditionary soldiers
far ahead of the main advance. The organized State that should own and
administer their possessions for the general good has not arrived to
take them over; and in the meanwhile they must act like its anticipatory
agents according to their lights and make things ready for its coming."

But if the New Republican is justified in compromising himself for the
means of subsistence, how much more in the matter of love! "All for
love, and the world well lost" might be written over several of Wells's
novels. But, in reality, is the world lost at all under these
conditions? On the contrary, it is gained, and the more unconsciously
the better, in babies. Love belongs to the future and the species with
more finality than the greatest constructive work of the present, and
the heroines of Wells are inordinately fond of babies. When Schopenhauer
analyzed the metaphysics of love he showed that natural selection is a
quite inevitable thing seeking its own. In Wells love is equally
irresistible and direct. Whenever it appears in his books it makes
itself unmistakably known, and, having done so, it cuts its way straight
to its consummation, through every obstacle of sentiment, affection,
custom, and conventionality. It is as ruthless as the Last Judgment, and
like the Last Judgment it occurs only once.

Why then does it appear promiscuous? The answer to this question refers
one back to the underlying contention of Wells that there are two kinds
of human beings and two corresponding ethics, and that in the end the
New Republican who has become aware of himself cannot consort with the
Normal Social breed. But in actual life this standard becomes entangled
with many complexities. Just as, in a world of commercial competition,
it is the lot of most of those who try to give themselves
whole-heartedly to disinterested work that they place themselves at such
a disadvantage as ultimately to have to make a choice between work and
love, so the pressure of society and the quality of human nature itself
create entanglements of every kind. It is the nature of life that one
grows only gradually to the secure sense of a personal aim, and that
meanwhile day by day one has given hostages to fortune. To wake up and
find oneself suddenly the master of a purpose is without doubt, in the
majority of cases, to find oneself mortgaged beyond hope to the existing
fact. The writer who sets out to make his way temporarily and as a
stepping-stone by journalism finds himself in middle age with ample
means to write what he wishes to write only to find also that he has
become for good and all--a journalist! And so it is with lovers. Only in
the degree to which free will remains a perpetual and present faith can
"love and fine thinking" remain themselves; free of their attachments,
free of their obligations, and mortgages, and discounts. That is the
quality of a decent marriage, and the end of a marriage that is not
decent.

It is no business of mine to justify the sexual ethics of Wells. But
there is a difference between a fact and an intention, and what I have
just said serves to explain the intention. Consider, in the light of it,
a few of his characters, both in and out of marriage. Ann Veronica from
the first frankly owns that she is not in love with Manning, but every
kind of social hypnotism is brought into motion to work on her ignorance
of life and to confuse her sense of free-will. George Ponderevo simply
outgrows Marion; but you cannot expect him not to grow, and who is
responsible for the limited, furtive, second-hand world in which Marion
has lived and which has irrevocably moulded her? Margaret's world, too,
is a second-hand world, though on a socially higher plane: she lives in
a pale dream of philanthropy and Italian art, shocked beyond any mutual
understanding by everything that really belongs in the first-hand world
of her husband. These characters meet and pass one another like moving
scales; they never stand on quite the same plane. And then the
inevitable always occurs. For, just as the Children of the Food cannot
consort with the little folk they promise to supersede, so it appears to
be a fixed part of the programme of Wells that New Republicans can only
love other New Republicans with success.

He implies this indeed in _A Modern Utopia_:

     "A man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow
     it, must either leave the Samurai to marry her, or induce
     her to accept what is called the Woman's Rule, which, while
     it exempts her from the severer qualifications and
     disciplines, brings her regimen into a working harmony with
     his."

      "Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?"

      "He must leave either her or the order."

      "There is matter for a novel or so in that."

      "There has been matter for hundreds."

Wells has written six himself. _Love and Mr. Lewisham, Ann Veronica,
Tono-Bungay, The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends_, are
all variations on this theme. In one of these alone life's double motive
succeeds in establishing itself, and it is for this reason that
_Marriage_, to my thinking the weakest of his novels from an artistic
point of view, is the most important concrete presentation of the
philosophy of Wells. It is an inferior book, but it gives one the sense
of a problem solved. By passing through a necessary yet feasible
discipline, Trafford and Marjorie bridge over the gap between haphazard
human nature and the better nature of socialism, and become Samurai in
fact.

These entanglements of the actual world would be an overwhelming
obstacle to a socialism less vigorous than that of Wells. But obstacles
give edge to things, and for a man who loves order no one could have
pictured disorder with more relish than he. Only a pure theorist could
regret the artistic zest with which he portrays our muddled world.
Running amuck was a constant theme in his early writings; his comets ran
amuck, and so did Mr. Bessel, and there is no more relished wanton scene
than that of the Invisible Man running amuck through the Surrey
villages. Intentionally or not, this relish in disorder reinforces the
prime fact about his view of order. He abhors the kind of order which is
often ignorantly confounded with the socialist aim, the order which
classifies and standardizes. He desires a collective consciousness only
through the exercise of a universally unimpeded free will, and he would
rather have no collectiveness at all than one that implies the sacrifice
of this free will. He wishes to work only on the most genuine human
stuff. This was the basis of his break with the Fabian Society; it is
the basis of his dislike of bureaucratic methods which deprive people of
beer when they want beer. It defines his notion of the true method of
socialism as first of all an education of the human will toward
voluntary right discipline.

His appeal, then, is a personal one. He has proved this indeed by his
repudiation of all attempts to embody in practice his proposed order of
voluntary nobility, the Samurai. Certain groups of young people actually
organized themselves upon the Rule that he had outlined, and it was this
that led him to see how entirely his ideal had been personal and
artistic rather than practical. Anyone at all familiar with religious
history and psychology will see how inevitably any such group would tend
to emphasize the Rule and the organization rather than the socially
constructive spirit for which the whole was framed, and how the
organization would itself separate from the collective life of the world
and become a new sect among the many sects. It was the same instinct
that led Emerson, Transcendental communist as he was, to look askance at
Brook Farm. It has been the want of an equal tact in eminent religious
minds that has made society a warfare of sect and opinion.

When one tries to focus the nature of his appeal one recalls a passage
in one of his books where he sums up the ordinary mind of the world and
the function which all socialism bears to this mind:

     It is like a very distended human mind; it is without a
     clear aim; it does not know except in the very vaguest terms
     what it wants to do; it has impulses, it has fancies; it
     begins and forgets. In addition, it is afflicted with a
     division within itself that is strictly analogous to that
     strange mental disorder which is known to psychologists as
     multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the
     whole of itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name
     and address. Part of it thinks of itself as one great thing,
     as, let us say, Germany; another thinks of itself as
     Catholicism, another as the white race, or Judæa. At times
     one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind as
     incurable dementia--a chaos of mental elements, haunted by
     invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas.... In its
     essence the socialistic movement amounts to this: it is an
     attempt in this warring chaos of a collective mind to pull
     itself together, to develop and establish a governing idea
     of itself. It is the development of the collective
     self-consciousness of humanity.

Certainly the road to this can only be through a common understanding.
The willing and unwilling servitudes of men, the institutions of society
that place love and work in opposition to one another, the shibboleths
of party, the aggressive jingoisms of separate peoples, the immemorial
conspiracy by which men have upheld the existing fact, these things do
spring from the want of imagination, the want of energetic faith, the
want of mutual understanding. To this inner and personal problem Wells
has applied himself. Can life be ventilated, can the mass of men be
awakened to a sense of those laws of social gravitation and the
transmutation of energy by which life is proved a myriad-minded
organism, can the ever-growing sum of human experience and discovery
clear up the dark places within society and within man? Among those who
have set themselves to the secular solution of these questions--and I am
aware of the limits of any secular solution--there are few as effective
as Wells.

Consider him in relation to a single concrete issue, the issue of
militarism:

     Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into
     two classes: there is expenditure upon things that have a
     diminishing value, things that grow old-fashioned and wear
     out, such as fortifications, ships, guns, and ammunition,
     and expenditure upon things that have a permanent and even
     growing value, such as organized technical research,
     military and naval experiment, and the education and
     increase of a highly trained class of war experts.

And in _The Common Sense of Warfare_ he urges a lavish expenditure on
"education and training, upon laboratories and experimental stations,
upon chemical and physical research and all that makes knowledge and
leading." Separate the principle involved here from the issue it is
involved in, get the intention clear of the fact, and you find that he
is saying just the better sort of things that Matthew Arnold said.
Militarism granted, are you going to do military things or are you going
to make military things a stepping-stone toward the clarification of
thought, the training of men, the development of race-imagination?
Militarism has been to a large extent the impetus that has made the
Germans and the Japanese the trained, synthetic peoples they are. And
these very qualities are themselves in the end hostile to militarism.
Militarism considered in this sense is precisely what the General Strike
is in the idea of M. Georges Sorel: a myth, a thing that never comes to
pass, but which trains the general will by presenting it with a concrete
image toward which the will readily directs itself. Kipling, in the eyes
of the New Machiavelli, at least made the nation aware of what comes.

     All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o'
     doing things rather more or less.

There is in this no defence of militarism. Granting the facts of
society, there is a way that accepts and secures them as they are and
another way of turning them into the service of the future, and a people
that has trained itself with reference to a particular issue has
virtually trained itself for all issues.

But no one, I think, has measured the difficulties of real progress more
keenly than Wells has come to measure them. The further he has
penetrated into human nature the more alive he has become to these
difficulties. _The New Machiavelli_ is a modern _Rasselas_ that has no
happy valley in the end, and Remington passes from party to party,
penetrating inward from ideas to the better stuff of mankind, hoping to
embody his "white passion of statecraft," and in the end demonstrating
to himself the futility of all groups and parties alike.

And as with parties, so with men. Consider that scene in _The Passionate
Friends_ where Stratton tries to explain in writing to his father what
he has been experiencing and why he must go away. He writes page after
page without expressing himself and at last, certain that he and his
father cannot come into touch, sends off a perfunctory note and receives
a perfunctory reply. "There are times," he adds, "when the
inexpressiveness of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to
me we are all asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still
cows who stand munching slowly in a field.... Why couldn't we and why
didn't we talk together!"

That is the burden of his latest novel. By this touchstone he has come
to measure the possibility of that openness of mind, that mutual
understanding, that ventilation of life and thought through which alone
the Great State can exist.




CHAPTER VI

A PERSONAL CHAPTER


I doubt if there are many living men of note who, a generation after
they are dead, will be so fully and easily "explained" as H.G. Wells. He
is a most personal and transparent writer, he is the effect of
conditions and forces which have existed for scarcely more than two
generations. But for these very reasons it is very difficult to see him
in perspective, and to explain him would be to explain the age in which
we live. Let me at least give certain facts and reflections about his
life written by Wells himself, a few years ago, in the introduction to a
Russian translation of his writings:

     I was born[1] in that queer indefinite class that we call in
     England the middle class. I am not a bit aristocratic; I do
     not know any of my ancestors beyond my grandparents, and
     about them I do not know very much, because I am the
     youngest son of my father and mother and their parents were
     all dead before I was born. My mother was the daughter of an
     innkeeper at a place called Midhurst, who supplied
     post-horses to the coaches before the railways came; my
     father was the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at
     Penshurst Castle, in Kent. They had various changes of
     fortune and position; for most of his life my father kept a
     little shop in a suburb of London, and eked out his
     resources by playing a game called cricket, which is not
     only a pastime, but a show which people will pay to see, and
     which, therefore, affords a living to professional players.
     His shop was unsuccessful, and my mother, who had been a
     lady's maid, became, when I was twelve years old,
     housekeeper in a large country house. I too was destined to
     be a shopkeeper. I left school at thirteen for that purpose.
     I was apprenticed first to a chemist, and, that proving
     unsatisfactory, to a draper. But after a year or so it
     became evident to me that the facilities that were and still
     are increasing in England offered me better chances in life
     than a shop and comparative illiteracy could do; and so I
     struggled for and got various grants and scholarships that
     enabled me to study and take a degree in science and some
     mediocre honors in the new and now great and growing
     University of London.... After I had graduated I taught
     biology for two or three years, and then became a
     journalist.... I began first to write literary articles,
     criticisms, and so forth, and presently short imaginative
     stories in which I made use of the teeming suggestions of
     modern science....

So much for the facts. The reflections are not less illuminating:

     The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure.
     Success with a book--even such a commercially modest success
     as mine has been--means in the English-speaking world not
     merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost
     freedom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted
     out of his narrow circumstances into familiar and
     unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people. He
     sees the world; if his work excites interest, he meets
     philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists,
     professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the
     great, and he may make such use of them as he can. He finds
     himself no longer reading in books and papers, but hearing
     and touching at first hand the big questions that sway men,
     the initiatives that shape human affairs.... To be a
     literary artist is to want to render one's impressions of
     the things about one. Life has interested me enormously and
     filled me with ideas and associations I want to present
     again. I have liked life and like it more and more. The days
     in the shop and the servants' hall, the straitened struggles
     of my early manhood, have stored me with vivid memories that
     illuminate and help me to appreciate all the wider vistas of
     my later social experiences. I have friends and intimates
     now at almost every social level, from that of a peer to
     that of a pauper, and I find my sympathies and curiosities
     stretching like a thin spider's web from top to bottom of
     the social tangle. I count that wide social range one of the
     most fortunate accidents of my life, and another is that I
     am of a diffident and ineffectual presence, unpunctual,
     fitful, and easily bored by other than literary effort; so
     that I am not tempted to cut a figure in the world and
     abandon that work of observing and writing which is my
     proper business in it.

This candid and exact statement enables us to see just how far, in
matters of fact, experience and belief, the autobiographical motive has
entered his writings. It would be possible to show how inevitably such
an ideal as that of the New Republican Samurai arose from such a life;
how much that conscious and deliberate insistence on personal efficiency
and orderly ways, that repudiation of mental confusion, sluggishness,
and sentiment may figure as a kind of stepping-stone from the world of
Kipps and Polly to the world of Remington and Trafford; how a
self-wrought scientific education would form the basis of an ideal of
aristocracy rising from it; and how the motto "There is no Being but
Becoming" would express its own constant desertion of levels achieved,
its own pressing upward to levels equally transient. Just as the
"democratic person" of Whitman raises his own fervent, chaotic, and
standardless experience into an ideal, so also the ideal of Wells is
nothing else than the projection of his own experimental opportunism. It
is impossible in discussing Wells to ignore this social ascent; for in
England a man passes from one stratum to another only by virtue of a
certain lack of substantiality, a power to disencumber himself, to shed
customs and affections and all the densenesses and coagulations which
mark each grade in that closely defined social hierarchy. The world of
shopkeeping in England is a world girt about with immemorial
subjections; it is, one might say, a moss-covered world; and to shake
oneself loose from it is to become a rolling stone, a drifting and
unsettled, a detached and acutely personal, individual. It is to pass
from a certain confined social maturity, a confused mellowness, into a
world wholly adventurous and critical, into a freedom which achieves
itself at the expense of solidity and warmth. In Wells, for instance,
the sense of the soil is wholly supplanted by the sense of machinery.
His evolution has been the reverse of the usual evolution from what
Bacon called the _lumen siccum_ to the _lumen humidum_, from the dry
light to the light that is drenched in customs and affections. Instead
of growing mellower, he has grown more and more fluid and electric, in
direct ratio to the growing width of his social horizon.

To prove this one has only to consider his novels. There was a time when
he had in common with Dickens and De Foe the quality they have in common
with one another--the quality of homeliness. He drew the little world he
knew well, the limited and lovable world of small folk. Mr. Hoopdriver,
Delia the chambermaid, Kipps and Ann Pornick--a score of these helpless,
grown-up little children he pictured with a radiant affection, tempering
the wind to the shorn lamb. It is more in the nature of his later
thought to see poverty as a wasteful rather than a cruel thing, even
though he may not have approached the harsh realism of Bernard Shaw's
observation: "I have never had any feeling about the English working
classes except a desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible
people."

Certainly he has not experienced any other world in quite this way. "I
count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents in my
life," he says. Accidental one feels it to be, as of a man inhabiting
the great world by virtue of sheer talent, whose nature has not in any
sense settled there. His philosophy and his socialism are outgrowths of
his own experience; they erect into reasons and theories the nature of a
life which is not at home, and which easily unburdens itself of all that
seems insensate because it is unfamiliar. To be a socialist at all is to
have accustomed oneself, through necessity or imagination, to a certain
detachment from a great many of the familiar, lovable, encumbering,
delightful stupidities of the world. And Wells has travelled up and down
through time and space too much to have any great regard for the
present. "I have come to be, I am afraid," he says, in _The Future in
America,_ "even a little insensitive to fine immediate things through
this anticipatory habit.... There are times indeed when it makes life
seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an
equally transitory series of consequences----." His hold upon the
present is so far from inevitable that _The New Machiavelli_ and
_Marriage_, realistic as they are, are represented as being written some
years hence, our own time already appearing retrospectively in them. As
little as Faust has he been tempted to call out upon the passing moment.
His main characters drift through this period of time, substantial
themselves but with a background of substantialities, in a way that
recalls Paolo and Francesca looming out of the phantom cloud-procession
of the _Inferno_.

Into this larger world, in short, he has carried with him only himself
and his own story. We live in two worlds--the primary world of vivid
personal realities and the secondary world of our human background. It
is the secondary world that anchors us in time and space; the primary
world we carry with us as part of ourselves. In Wells there is no
secondary world, no human background, no sense of abiding relations. It
is his philosophy of life and the quality of his men and women to be
experimental in a plastic scheme. His range is very small: the same
figures reappear constantly. There is the Wells hero,--Lewisham, Capes,
Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford, Stratton; there is the Wells heroine,
Ann Veronica, Isabel, Marjorie, Lady Mary; there is the ineffectual
woman with whom the Wells hero becomes entangled, Capes's first wife,
Marion, Margaret; there is the ineffectual man with whom the Wells
heroine becomes entangled, Magnet, Manning. To strike the lowest common
denominator in this tangle is inevitably to arrive once more, one feels,
in the region of personal experience. Although it cannot be said that
his minor characters are lacking in reality, they are certainly
intellectual portraits, and outside the limits of subjective experience.
The principal men and women of Wells move through a world seen, but
hardly a world felt.

This want of social background makes his characters as detached from the
familiar earth as chessmen are detached from a chessboard. They never
seem to be, like most men and women either in life or fiction, like the
Kipps and Polly of his own earlier fiction, vegetable growths. Heredity,
fatality, the soil are not mainly operating forces with them. They are
creatures of intelligence and free will, freely and intelligently making
and moulding themselves and their circumstances. Human nature in Wells
is very largely a sheer thing, a thing that begins with itself, answers
for itself, lives at first hand. That is the personal quality of the man
himself, and it follows that the quality is wholly convincing only where
what I have called his primary world is concerned: the rest of the world
he builds up by intelligent observation and the literary talent of
creating human stuff out of whole cloth.

In this he is well served by his antipathies. His belief in personal
self-determinism is so strong that he instinctively sees the vegetative
nature of the ordinary life as a kind of moral slough, a state of being
detestably without initiative, faith, energy, will. And consequently the
Normal Social Life against which he is always tilting is a life seen by
him with all the vividness of an intense personal and philosophical
animosity. Consider, for example, the portraits of Mr. Pope and Mr.
Stanley, survivals in a sense of the old Sir Roger de Coverley type,
with all the sweetness gone out of it and only the odious qualities
left, the domineering, vain, proprietary qualities. They exist mainly as
symbols of everything that enlightened and right-minded daughters will
not put up with; they come as near to being the foils of right destiny
as Wells will ever allow; they sum up everything that stands in the way
of man's free will. They are mercilessly dealt with, and they are
memorable figures.

Without this antipathy, and outside his own primary world, he pretty
generally fails. One recalls, for example, old Mrs. Trafford in
_Marriage,_ evidently intended to be his ideal of the enlightened woman
grown old. She is a pale, dimly perfect, automatically wise old lady
carved out of wood. Trafford himself, one feels, is a chip of the same
block. Trafford obviously is not Wells himself, as Ponderevo and
Remington are Wells: he is the Utopian counterpart of these persons, at
least in the matter that concerns Wells most, the matter of sex. One
could show that, aside from the six or eight chief characters who in
their various ways express the nature and experience of Wells himself,
he succeeds in his portraiture only where no demand is made on his
sympathies.

The same absence of social background which throws into relief his
primary world of characters throws into relief also the primary facts of
human nature. Trafford and Marjorie, the most conventionally placed of
his characters, pull up stakes, leave their children, and go to
Labrador. His other men and women are even more independent of the
social network. Consequently they are independent of that chain of
relationships--friendship, affection, minor obligations--which mitigate,
subdue, soften the primary motives of most people. They are almost
startlingly physical. Their instincts are as sure as those of cavemen,
and their conduct as direct. They are as clear about the essential
matter of love as ever Schopenhauer was, or Adam and Eve, and they stand
out as sharply against the embarrassments and secrecies of the usual
world as a volcanic rock stands out against a tropical landscape. In
this without doubt they exhibit the fact that socialism does and will
actually alter human nature, and that in the instinctive socialist human
nature is already altered. For socialism inflexibly militates against
those more sentimental aspects of love, love of country as such, the
paternal and feudal principles, love of property, and the like, which
belong properly to the intelligence, all those functions where love, in
a majority of cases, goes wrong, blunders, stultifies growth, confuses
the public design of the world. As a result it throws love into relief,
emphasizes the nature of sex and the _raison d'être_ of reproduction;
makes it, to use a favorite word of Wells, stark.

I pause at this word. It is one of those talismanic words one finds
perpetually cropping up in the writings of men who have a marked point
of view, words that express deep and abiding preferences and often set
the key of an entire philosophy. "I like bare things," says George
Ponderevo, in _Tono-Bungay;_ "stripped things, plain, austere, and
continent things, fine lines and cold colors." That is the gesture of an
artistic mind which repudiates, with an impatient sharpness, all the
entanglements of the ordinary world. It is Oriental, it is Japanese, it
is anything you like; but if it is English also it marks an entirely new
regime. Without question it is English, and American as well. Thousands
of people share that preference, and were economic socialism to go by
the board we should still have to reckon with the progress of
socialistic human nature. It detaches itself each day a little more from
property, locality, and the hope of reward; it ceases to be
necessitarian, it becomes voluntary; it relegates drudgery to mechanical
devices; it releases the individual to a sense of his own coöperative
and contributory place in the scheme of a more orderly future.
Relatively speaking, the tendency of our kind is all away from luxury,
sloth, complacency, confusion, ignorance, filth, heat, proprietorship,
and all in the direction of light, austerity, agility, intelligence,
coolness, athletic energy, understanding, cleanliness, order, "bare
things, fine lines, and cold colors."

That is evident, and it is equally evident that the personal character
and career of Wells are emblematic of this entire tendency. He has
unravelled himself by science, talent, and vigor out of "lower middle
class" Victorianism. Is it strange that he has adopted as a kind of
sacred image that light, free, and charming product of our decade, the
aeroplane, sprung as it is out of the wreckage, out of the secret
beginnings, the confused muscularities, the effort and smoke of the most
chaotic of all centuries, like a blade of exquisitely tempered and
chased steel which justifies everything that was most laborious and
unsightly in the forge?

But considered as a sacred image the aeroplane has its limitations. So
also, considered as an exponent of fife, has Wells. Philosophy and
religion, as he presents them, are simply what he chooses to think and
feel, what he has been led by his own experience to think and feel. His
main experience has been the experience of disentangling himself, and
therefore life, reflected from within himself, is to him a thing also
which disentangles itself and grows ever more free, simple, and lucid.
In the mind of Wells this process, has taken on an altogether mystical,
transcendental significance, a religious aspect. Possible as that is to
himself personally, how far can it be taken as an argument to the human
soul? How does it qualify him as a teacher, a public voice, a thinker
for the mass of men? How does the conception of life purely as a process
relate itself to human experience?

Applied to history, it seems to fail. Wells is devoid of historical
imagination. In his portrait of Margaret in _The New Machiavelli_ he has
properly, though somewhat harshly, repudiated what ordinarily passes for
culture. But had he himself possessed the reality of what seems to him
simply "living at second hand," he would never have been led to refer to
Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Dürer as "pathetically reaching out, as it
were, with empty desirous hands toward the unborn possibilities of the
engineer." That is a very interesting and a very extraordinary
statement, and it is quite true that each of these men would have
rejoiced in the engineering possibilities of our time. But how much of
the soul of Michael Angelo, for example, was involved in engineering?
How far can his hands be said to have been "empty" for the want of scope
in engineering? The power and the function of Michael Angelo can rightly
be seen, not in relation to any sort of social or mechanical process,
but in relation to things that are permanent in human nature, in
relation to just those matters included in the admonition of Wells to
"reject all such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, and Beauty
and hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a
tissue and succession of births." Again, consider a somewhat similar
reference to Marcus Aurelius, of which the gist is that the author of
the _Meditations_ was, actually in consequence of his own character, the
father of one of the worst rulers the world has known. The implication
here is that the study of self-perfection in the father was
complementary to, if not responsible for, the social impotence and
blindness of the son. Instead of dedicating himself to the static ideal
of personal character, the assumption seems to be, Marcus Aurelius ought
to have lived exclusively in his function as ruler and father. He
studied himself, not as a ruler but as a man, and the social process had
its revenge on his line. To Wells, in a word, the static elements of
character and the study of perfection are not to be distinguished from
vicious self-consequence.

Consider also a recent passage in which he has given a general
impression of literature:

     It seems to me more and more as I live longer that most
     poetry and most literature and particularly the literature
     of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the
     reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live
     it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and
     more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved
     and hated more naively, aged sooner, and died younger than
     we do. Solitary persons and single events dominated them as
     they do not dominate us.

To appreciate this meditation one has to remember the character and
career which led to the writing of it. But so far as we others are
concerned, how far can the assumption it rests upon be considered valid,
the assumption of a process that sweeps men on and leads human nature,
as it were, progressively to shed itself? Dr. Johnson, for example, was
a man the conditions of whose life were crude and rigid in the extreme,
a man singularly dominated by solitary persons and single events, but is
his conversation discordant with the variety, the "reserves, resources,
and recuperations of life as we live it to-day"? I can well understand
this feeling. To pass directly from the thin, tentative, exhilarating,
expansive air of our own time into the presence of that funny, stuffy,
cocksure, pompous old man is to receive a preposterous shock. But having
come to laugh, one stops with a very different sensation. The depths of
personality and wisdom that exist there take on a disconcerting
significance in relation to contemporary pragmatism. The mass of men
veer about; far-separated epochs have their elective affinities, and if
anything about the future is plain it is that this, that, and the other
generation will find in Dr. Johnson a strangely premature contemporary.

Wells has himself admitted this principle. To Plutarch, Rabelais,
Machiavelli he has paid his tribute. Hear what George Ponderevo has to
say about Plutarch in his recollections of Bladesover House:

     I found Langhorne's _Plutarch_ too, I remember, on those
     shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired
     pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of
     public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that
     it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen
     hundred years, to teach me that.

Considering what part the notion of a state plays in his range of ideas,
that is a remarkable confession. But why stop with statecraft? The human
mind could not, in all epochs, have established permanent ideals of
statecraft without permanent ideals of a more strictly personal kind.

The truth is that Wells, for all that he has passed outside the
economics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas which
produced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tell
you that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the only
true thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by that
criterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensive
gibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's Fairy
Tales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presents
itself. To say that "the fundamental nature of life is a tissue and
succession of births" is merely a refinement of this. It is true, just
as the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the world
is full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of a
reasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there is
a Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue to
grow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friendship, or music, or
poetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialist
must feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and on
that point socialism has nothing to say at all.

It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddle
that the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. Could
Wells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full of
meaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life he
has felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in English
authors. "Modern poetry, with an exception or so," he remarks somewhere,
and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as a
whole, "does not signify at all." It is the same with regard to music,
art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: his
writings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outline
against a sunset, masses of machinery in the glare of the forge, things
that suggest the etcher's eye. But they are curiously impersonal.
Consider, for example, his description of Worms Cathedral:

     It rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering,
     lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and
     irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow
     under a press of canvas.

You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty he
feels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is as
untouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities of
this building, not to mention its connection with human history, as if
he had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not the
changeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this building
stands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is the
mechanism, the process--his emotions gather about the physical result
which appears to justify these.

_À chacun son infini_.

There will always be some to whom the significance of things, the
meaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conception
of mankind as "permanently in transition." Reading those passages where
Wells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as I
should feel with regard to music if I heard a mass of Mozart played at
the rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if a
procession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision.
The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the pictures
as a whole are a tissue and succession of colors. But that is not music,
that is not art. Nor is a tissue and succession of births life.

But indeed nothing is easier than to reduce Wells to an absurdity. If he
implies anything at all he implies a "transvaluation of all values." It
remains to consider him from this point of view.


[Footnote 1: September 21, 1866.]




CHAPTER VII

THE SPIRIT OF WELLS


In order to understand Wells at all one must grasp the fact that he
belongs to a type of mind which has long existed in European literature
but which is comparatively new in the English-speaking world, the type
of mind of the so-called "intellectual." He is an "intellectual" rather
than an artist; that is to say, he naturally grasps and interprets life
in the light of ideas rather than in the light of experience.

To pass from a definition to an example, let me compare Wells in this
respect with the greatest and most typical figure of the opposite camp
in contemporary English fiction; I mean Joseph Conrad. This comparison
is all the more apt because just as much as Wells Conrad typifies the
spirit of "unrest" (a word he has almost made his own, so often does he
use it) which is the note of our age. Both of these novelists have
endeavored to express the spirit of unrest; both have suggested a way of
making it contributory to the attainment of an ideal. But how different
is their method, how different is their ideal! And roughly the
difference is this: that to Conrad the spirit of unrest is a personal
mood, a thing, as people used to say, between man and his Maker; whereas
to Wells the spirit of unrest is not a mood but a rationally explicable
frame of mind, a sense of restricted function, an issue to be fought out
not between man and nature but between man and society. In other words,
where Conrad's point of view is moral, Wells's point of view is social;
and whereas in Conrad the spirit of unrest can only be appeased by
holding fast to certain simple instinctive moral principles, integrity,
honor, loyalty, etc., contributing in this way to the ideal of personal
character, the spirit of unrest in Wells is to be appeased by working
through the established fact, by altering the environment in which man
lives, contributing in this way to the ideal of a great society of which
personal character is at once the essence and the product.

In the end, of course, both these views of life come to the same thing,
for you cannot have a great society which is not composed of greatly
living individuals, or vice versa. But practically there is a world of
difference between them, according as any given mind emphasizes the one
or the other. This difference, I say, is the difference between life
approached through experience and life approached through ideas. And
when we penetrate behind these points of view we find that they are
determined very largely by the characters and modes of living of the men
who hold them. That explains the vital importance in literary criticism
of knowing something about the man one is discussing, as distinguished
from the work of his brain pure and simple. There is a reason why the
intellectualist point of view occurs as a rule in men who have
habitually lived the delocalized, detached, and comparatively
depersonalized life of cities, while men of the soil, of the sea, of the
elements, men, so to speak, of intensive experience, novelists like
Conrad or Tolstoy or Hardy, are fundamentally non-intellectual,
pessimistic, and moral.

And this explains the natural opposition between Conrad and Wells. Aside
from the original bent of his mind, the intensive quality of Conrad's
experience--an experience of ships and the minute, simple, personal,
tragic life of ships, set off against the impersonal, appalling sea and
an always indifferent universe, a life remote from change, in which the
relations of things are in a peculiar sense abiding and in which only
one problem exists, the problem of character, imminent nature being kept
at bay only through the loyalty, integrity and grit of men--the
intensive quality of this experience, I say, acting upon an artistic
mind, would naturally tend to produce not only a bitterly profound
wisdom, but an equally profound contempt for the play of ideas, so
irresponsible in comparison, and for a view of the world based upon
ideas the real cost of which has never been counted in the face of
hunger, icy winds, storm and shipwreck, and the abysmal forces of
nature. Men who go down to the sea in ships have a right to say for
themselves (tempering the credulity of those who have remained at home)
that the intellectualist view of life is altogether too easy and too
glib. It is they who throw into relief the deep, obscure conviction of
the "plain man"--commonly the good man--that to endeavor to make life
conform with ideas is in some way to deprive the world of just those
elements which create character and to strike at an ideal forged through
immemorial suffering and effort.

Merely to dismiss as dumb folly an all but universal contention of this
kind (no doubt in the back of people's minds when they say that
socialism, for instance, is "against human nature") is to beg the whole
question of intellectualism itself. For, if it could be conclusively
shown that any view of life not incidentally but by its nature
emasculated life and destroyed the roots of character, then of course,
no matter how rationally self-evident it might be and how much confusion
and suffering it might avert, it would never even justify its own reason
for being--it would never _succeed,_ the best part of human nature would
oppose it to the end of time and the intelligence itself would be
discredited. And indeed to the man of experience rather than the man of
ideas, just because of his rich humanity, just because he never passes
out of the personal range, belong the ideal things, morality,
philosophy, art. Like charity, these things "begin at home"; and
whenever (as in pragmatism, when pragmatism ceases to be a method and
claims to be an interpretation of life) they are approached not from the
side of experience but from the side of ideas they cease to have any
real substance. Morality has no substance when it springs from the mind
instead of the conscience, art when it appeals to the mind instead of
the perceptions; and as to philosophy, what is any scheme of things that
springs out of the head of a man who is not himself wise? It is a
certain condemnation of Bergson, for example, that he would never pass
muster in a group of old fishermen smoking their pipes on the end of a
pier. Not that they would be expected in any case to know what he was
talking about, but that his fibre so plainly is the fibre not of a wise
but of a clever man and that in everything, as Emerson said, you must
have a source higher than your tap.

That is why, as it seems to me, Wells ought not to be considered from
any of these absolute standpoints. He has put before us not so much a
well-wrought body of artistic work, or a moral programme, or an
explanation of life--words quite out of place in connection with
him--as a certain new spirit, filled with all sorts of puzzled
intimations of a new beauty and even a new religion to be generated out
of a new order of things that is only glimpsed at present. And the point
I should like to make about this spirit is that it is entirely
irrelevant to the values of life as we know them, but that it may in the
end prove to have contributed to an altogether fresh basis for human
values.

To illustrate what I mean by this irrelevance as regards present values
and this possibility as regards future values let me turn to that long
brilliant passage in _The New Machiavelli_ where Remington goes from
club to club, passing in review the spiritual possibilities of each
political party, and finds nothing but a desolation of triviality,
pomposity, confusion, and "utterly damned old men." Consider the
contempt and hopelessness that fill his mind. One has to forget entirely
the ordinary man's view of politics, sincerely held as it is; one has to
think of politics as a means of straightening out and re-engendering a
whole world of confused anguish before one can see any justification for
this righteous wit and savage indignation against the dulness of
leaders. Considered by the current values of life in which politics are
regarded as an effect of man's incompetence rather than as a cause of
his virtue, treated intensively, as a novelist of experience rather than
of ideas would have treated them, in what a different light each of
these "utterly damned old men" would appear, each one a tiny epic of
tragic and comic efforts, disappointments, misconceptions, providing one
in the end with how much of an excuse for blame, ridicule or contempt!
Everything indeed depends upon where a given mind chooses to lay
emphasis. In this scene Wells has judged everything by his ideal of a
great society, just as Conrad, faced with the same material, would have
judged everything by his ideal of personal character. Conrad would have
used those men to give us an understanding of life as it is, whereas
Wells has used them simply to throw into relief his idea of what life
ought to be. Conrad would have created a work of art, illustrated a
moral programme, and interpreted life. Wells, admittedly a clever
caricaturist, only rises above the level of a clever caricaturist
according as we accept the validity of his ideal and share the spirit in
which he writes. Like many children of light, Wells is not wise in his
own generation. But perhaps another generation will justify him.

If Wells had lingered in these deep realities of his own time he would
have been a greater artist. And indeed so marked has been his own
development away from the world of ideas and toward the world of
experience that were he to begin afresh it is likely that he would
resemble the type of novelist of which I have taken Conrad as an example
far more than his former self. Of socialism he has abandoned all the
theories and most of the schemes and retained only the frame of mind. He
has taken year by year a more intensive view of life, he has grown too
conscious of the inertia that impedes ideas and the overwhelming
immediacies of the actual world to be called glib and easy any more.
"How little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances,
preposterously unable to find the will to realize even the most timid of
its dreams!" he says in one of his latest novels, and if he has kept
alive his faith in ideas, who will deny that he has begun to count the
cost of it?

From this side, I think, it is no longer possible for anyone to assail
him, so frankly has he given hostages to "actuality." It is from the
other side, his own side, and especially in the light of his own ideal,
that an answer is required for the slackness which has come upon him and
which is very marked in his recent novels. Is it possible to ignore the
fact that since he wrote _The New Machiavelli_ the work of Wells has
lived on its capital and lost the passionate curiosity and personal
conviction that made him the force he was in our epoch? Always unwilling
to check his talent and publish only the results of his genuine mental
progress, he has become, in spite of splendid moments, too much of the
common professional novelist, dealing with levels and phases of life
where he obviously does not belong, astray from his own natural point of
intense contact with things. I want to avoid the usual habit of critics
who think it their business to put authors in their places, but is it
not a fact that Wells understands the Kippses and Pollys far better than
the lords and ladies of England and that he was at his best in
elaborating a bridge--a wonderful visionary bridge--between the little
world of dumb routine and the great world of spacious initiatives?
Carlyle with his Great Man theory, forged out of his own travail and
weakness, in the end fell on his knees before the illusion of lordship.
Fifteen years ago one might have predicted the same future for the
Samurai of Wells, not because the Samurai are themselves equivocal but
because Wells is an Englishman. There so plainly to the English mind the
great gentlemen are, the men who can and the men who never do! Towards
this Circe of the English imagination Wells has travelled with a fatal
consistency, and the result to be foreseen was first of all fatuity and
in the end extinction.

After he had written _The New Machiavelli_ Wells had reached a point
where his ideas, in order to be saved, had to be rescued from himself.
To believe that life can be straightened out by the intelligence is
necessarily to have "travelled light," in a measure; too much experience
is the end of that frame of mind. In _Tono-Bungay_ and _The New
Machiavelli_ ideas and experience met in a certain invisible point
--that is the marvel which has made these books unique and, I suppose,
permanent; the greatest possible faith in ideas was united with the
greatest possible grasp of everything that impedes them. One had
therefore a sense of tragic struggle, in which the whole life of our
time was caught up and fiercely wrestled with; one had the feeling that
here was the greatest moment in the life of a writer suddenly become
great. But with these books some secret virtue seems to have passed out
of Wells. Since then his ideas have been hardly more than a perfunctory
repetition and his experience more and more remote and unreal; and
looking back one seems to discover something highly symbolic in the
tragical conquest of ideas by passion with which _The New Machiavelli_
concludes.

But indeed Wells was always a man whose ideas were greater than himself.
"I stumble and flounder," says George Ponderevo, "but I know that over
all these merry immediate things, there are other things that are great
and serene, very high, beautiful things--the reality. I haven't got it,
but it's there nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with
unimaginable goddesses." And just for this reason the spirit which in
his great days possessed him is independent of any fate that may befall
Wells himself and his art. More than this, by frankly and fully testing
his ideas in a life-and-death struggle with reality he has, even at the
cost of his own shipwreck, removed from the cause of ideas the greatest
reproach which has always been brought against it. Revolutionists,
doctrinaires, idealogues have notoriously failed to test the validity of
their ideas even in the face of their own private passions and
confusions; they have rarely considered for a moment that their own
lives totally unfit them for supposing that men are naturally good and
that to make reason prevail is one of the simplest operations in the
world. Wells, on the other hand, has consistently shown that theory
divorced from practice is a mode of charlatanism, that "love and fine
thinking" must go together, and that precisely because of man's
individual incapacity to live, as things are, with equal honesty the
life of ideas and the life of experience, the cause he has at heart must
be taken out of the hands of the individual and made to form a common
impersonal will and purpose in the mind of the race as a whole.

       *       *       *       *       *

Intellectualism, in fact, the view that life can be determined by ideas
(and of this socialism is the essence) if it can be justified at all has
to be justified in the face of all current human values. It is based on
an assumption, a grand and generous assumption, I maintain, and one that
has to take what is called a sporting chance with all the odds against
it. This assumption is, that on the whole human nature can be trusted to
take care of itself while the surplus energy of life, commonly absorbed
in the struggle against incapacity, sloth, perversity, and disorder
("original sin," to sum it all up), is released for the organization of
a better scheme for mankind; and further, that this better scheme,
acting on a race naturally capable of a richer and fuller life, will
have the effect on men as a whole that re-environing has on any cramped,
ill-nourished, unventilated organism, and that art, religion, morals
(all that makes up the substance and meaning of life) instead of being
checked and blighted in the process will in the end, strong enough to
bear transplantation, be re-engendered on a finer and freer basis. This,
in a word, is the contention of the intellectual, a splendid gambler's
chance, on which the future rests, and to which people have committed
themselves more than they know. It is a bridge thrown out across the
void, resting at one end on the good intentions of mankind and relying
at the other upon mankind's fulfilling those good intentions. It is
based like every great enterprise of the modern world upon credit, and
its only security is the fact that men thus far and on the whole have
measured up to each enlargement of their freedom and responsibility.

To feel the force of this one has to think of the world as a world. Just
here has been the office of socialism, to show that society is a
colossal machine of which we are all parts and that men in the most
exact sense are members one of another. In the intellectualist scheme of
things that mathematical proof has to come first; it has to take root
and bury itself and become the second nature of humankind before the new
world of instinct can spring out of it and come to blossom.

That has been the office of socialism, and just so far as that proof has
been established socialism has played its part. Now the point I want to
make about Wells is that in him one sees already in an almost precocious
form the second stage of this process. In him this new world of
intelligence is already exuberant with instinct; the social machine has
become a personality; that cold abstraction the world has become in his
hands a throbbing, breathing, living thing, as alive, awake, aware of
itself, as engaging, adventurous, free, critical, well-primed,
continent, and all-of-a-piece as a strong man running a race. People
never felt nature as a personality before Wordsworth showed them that it
was, or a locomotive before Kipling wrote _McAndrew's Hymn_; and it
seems to me that Wells has done for the social organism very much what
Wordsworth did for nature, discovering in a thing previously felt to be
inanimate a matter for art and a basis for religious emotion.

But if the world is a personality it is a very stupid, sluggish,
unawakened personality, differing from nature in this respect, that we
ourselves compose the whole of it and have it in our hands to do what we
will with it. It has always been out of joint, a great slipshod
Leviathan, at sixes and sevens, invertebrate and fungus-brained. Just so
is the average man, sunk in routine, oppressed with microscopic tasks
that give birth one to another, his stomach at war with his head, his
legs unwilling to exercise him, resentful of his own capacity not to be
dull. But certain happier moments bring him an exuberant quickened life
in which routine tasks fall nimbly from his fingers and he is aware of a
wide, humorous, generous, enlightened vision of things; he pulls himself
together, his parts reinforce one another, his mind wakens, his heart
opens, his fancy stirs, he is all generosity and happiness, capable of
anything that is disinterested, fine, and becoming to a free man. It is
in these moments that individual men have done all the things which make
up the real history of this planet.

If individual men are capable of this amazing experience, then why not
the world? That is the spirited question Wells has propounded in a
hundred different forms, in his earlier, more theoretical, and more
optimistic writings suggesting that society as a whole should turn over
a new leaf, and even picturing it as doing so, in his later work, more
experienced and less hopeful but with a compensating fervor, picturing
the attempt of delegated individuals to act on society's behalf. I do
not wish at this point to become pious and solemn in tone; that would be
inept in connection with Wells. But I do wish to make it plain that if
he is devoid of those grander traits which spring from the sense of
being "tenon'd and mortised" upon something beyond change, if his
strength lies wholly in his intelligence, the intelligence itself in
Wells is an amazing organ, a troubled and rapturous organ, an organ as
visionary and sensitive as the soul of a Christian saint. That is why I
have said that in him the new world, governed by the intelligence, is
already exuberant with instinct; and anyone who doubts that he has
lavished a very genuine religious instinct upon the social process
itself and in the dream of a society free, magnanimous and seemly,
should turn to the passage where he describes Machiavelli, after the
heat and pettiness of the day, retiring into his chamber alone, putting
on his dress of ceremony and sitting down before his table in the
presence of that magnificent thought.

The mass of men have acted more consistently than they know on the
principle that the whole world is nothing in comparison with one soul,
for their politics and economic science, solemn as they appear, are as
frivolous and secondary as if they actually did believe fervently that
heaven is their true home and the world a bad business of little
account. In all that concerns private virtue and the private life, in
religion, poetry, their lawyer, their doctor, their broker, they exact
the last degree of excellence and efficiency, but they trust to the
blind enterprise of individual men to push mankind chaotically forward
little by little. We are in fact so wonderfully made that if our grocer
tells us in the morning that he has no fresh eggs he throws us into a
deeper despondency than six readings of the _Inferno_ could ever do. And
that explains why so few people can extend themselves imaginatively into
the greater circles that surround them, why, on the social plane, we
never think of demanding wisdom from politicians, why we never dream of
remembering that they should belong to the august family of Plutarch,
why it is not the profound views of wise men and the brilliant
discoveries of science that fill the newspapers, but the incredibly
banal remarks of this president and that prime minister, why presidents
and prime ministers in a society that lives from hand to mouth are so
much more important than poets and prophets, and why statesmanship has
gathered about itself a literature so incomparably trivial and dull.
Socialists, indeed, just because they alone are serious about the world,
are apt to be the least mundane in spirit; they are, as Wells has
himself said, "other-worldly" about the world itself.

But indeed I should make a mistake were I to over-stress the solemnities
that underlie the spirit of Wells. In tone he is more profane than
sacred, that is to say he is a realist. He wants a world thrillingly
alive, curious, exercised, magnanimous, with all its dim corners lighted
up, shaken out of its dulness and complacency, keen, elastic, tempered
like a fine blade--the counterpart on a grand scale of what he most
admires in the individual. "Stephen," says Lady Mary in _The Passionate
Friends_, "promise me. Whatever you become, you promise and swear here
and now never to be grey and grubby, never to be humpy and snuffy, never
to be respectable and modest and dull and a little fat, like--like
everybody." And in _First and Last Things_ he gives the other side of
the medal:

     Much more to me than the desire to live is the desire to
     taste life. I am not happy until I have done and felt
     things. I want to get as near as I can to the thrill of a
     dog going into a fight or the delight of a bird in the air.
     And not simply in the heroic field of war and the air do I
     want to understand. I want to know something of the jolly
     wholesome satisfaction that a hungry pig must find in its
     wash. I want to get the fine quintessence of that.

It stands to reason that a spirit of this kind does not consort with any
pre-arranged pocket ground-plan, so to speak, of the world as it should
be. Of this, to be sure, he is often accused, and he has given us a
humorous version of his Utopia as it may appear to certain of his
contemporaries:

     Mr. G.K. Chesterton mocks valiantly and passionately, I
     know, against an oppressive and obstinately recurrent
     anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped,
     meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a
     fine for laughing, not that he would want to laugh, and
     austere exercises in several of the more metallic virtues
     daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's conception is rather in the nature
     of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid, frozen flight from the
     pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of us short,
     inelegant men, but for all that terribly resolute,
     indefatigable, incessant to capture him, to drag him off to
     a mechanical Utopia, and then to take his thumb-mark and his
     name, number him distinctly in indelible ink, and let him
     loose (under inspection) in a world of great round lakes of
     blue lime-water and vistas of white sanitary tiling.

That is a not unjust parody of Wells's Utopia as it would be if he had
remained in the circle of his Fabian friends. Being what he is, it bears
much the same relation to his idea as that world of harps and crowns and
milk and honey bore in the mediæval imagination to the idea of heaven.
You have to mingle these notions with your experience of human hearts to
realize the inadequacy of symbols. Wells, I suspect, has a fondness for
white sanitary tiling, just as plenty of good Christians have found in
milk and honey a foretaste of unthinkable felicity; but when it comes to
the actual architecture and domestic arrangements of paradise they are
both quite willing to take on trust the accommodating good will of God
and man. Somehow or other, by the time we have got there, we shall not
find it monotonous--to this, at least, one's faith, whatever it may be,
ought to be equal.

I have given too few quotations in this book, and now I have left it to
a point where if I give any at all it must be to illustrate less the art
of Wells as a thing by itself than a train of thought. He is at his best
in brief scenes, where all his gifts of humor, satire, characterization
and phrase come to a head (think, for example, of Aunt Plessington's
speech, the funeral of Mr. Polly's father, the pages dealing with Cousin
Nicodemus Frapp's house-hold, and the somewhat prolonged episode of the
"reet Staffordshire" cousins in _The New Machiavelli_); and indeed, so
insistent is his point of view that in every one of these episodes one
finds in opposition the irrepressible new world of Wells and the
stagnant world out of which it springs. One of the best of these scenes,
luckily, is brief and connected enough to be quoted as a whole. It is a
picture of the tea-hour in the servants' hall at Bladesover House.

     I sat among these people on a high, hard, early Gregorian
     chair, trying to exist, like a feeble seedling amidst great
     rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to
     suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality. It was
     hard on me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather
     over-fed, ageing, pretending people, that my youthful
     restlessness and rebellious unbelieving eyes should be
     thrust in among their dignities.

      Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat
      it out perforce; and day after day the talk was exactly the
      same.

      "Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?" my mother used to ask. "Sugar,
      Mrs. Latude-Fernay?"

      The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They
      say," she would begin, issuing her proclamation--at least
      half her sentences began "they say"--"sugar is fatt-an-ing,
      nowadays. Many of the best people do not take it at all."

      "Not with their tea, ma'am," said Rabbits, intelligently.

      "Not with anaything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of
      crushing repartee, and drank.

      "What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.

      "They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.

      "They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors
      are not recomm-an-ding it now."

      My Mother: "No, ma'am?"

      Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."

      Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he
      died, consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have
      sometimes fancied it may have hastened his end."

      This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner
      and a pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir
      Roderick.

      "George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"

      Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favorite piece
      from her repertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely,"
      she would say, or if the season was decadent, "How the
      evenings draw in!" It was an invaluable remark to her; I do
      not know how she would have got along without it.

      My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would
      always consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and
      regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction,
      whichever phase it might be.

      A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or
      shortest day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.

There is, I think, a special sort of connection between Wells and
America; and there are times when it seems to me that were the spirit of
America suddenly to become critical of itself it would resemble nothing
in the world so much as the spirit of Wells magnified by many diameters.
His instincts are all as it were instincts of the intelligence; his
mind, like the American mind, is a disinherited mind, not connected with
tradition, thinking and acting _de novo_ because there is nothing to
prevent it from doing so. Perfectly American is his alertness, his
versatility, adaptability, his thorough-going pragmatism, perfectly
American are the disconcerting questions that he asks ("Is the Navy
_bright_?"). Perfectly American is his view of the traditional English
ideal of human nature--that strange compound of good intentions, homely
affection, stubborn strength, insensibility to ideas, irrational
self-sacrifice, domestic despotism, a strong sense of property in things
and people, stupidity, sweetness and confusion of mind--an ideal through
which it has been one of his never-failing delights to send electric
shocks. And indeed the type of character he has presented in his heroes,
in Remington, Trafford and Ponderevo, is a type to be found perhaps more
plentifully than elsewhere in American research bureaus, hospitals and
laboratories. He thinks and feels critically so many of the things
America lives and does unconsciously. Perhaps in this distinction lies
the immediate value of his criticism for us.

For in his mind Americans can see themselves reflected in the light of
what they chiefly need, that synthetic motive without which a secular
and industrial race is as devoid of animating morality as a swarm of
flies. This want, most obvious on the political and economic plane, is
indeed fundamental. Wells has grasped it from many different angles but
never with more point than in his essay _The American Population_.
Consider this passage, where he takes as a text one of Arthur Brisbane's
editorials in the "New York Journal":

     It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the
     utmost to make itself audible to the new world, and cracking
     into italics and breaking into capitals with the strain. The
     rest of that enormous bale of paper is eloquent of a public
     void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of comprehensive
     things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalizations, a
     public which has carried the conception of freedom to its
     logical extreme of entire individual detachment. These
     telltale columns deal all with personality and the drama of
     personal life. They witness to no interest but the interest
     in intense individual experiences. The engagements, the love
     affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in
     pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits
     and sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers
     who write this stuff strike the personal note, and their
     heavily muscular portraits frown beside the initial letter.
     Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of
     realization, and any new indelicacy in fashionable costume,
     any new medical device or cure, any new dance or
     athleticism, any new breach in the moral code, any novelty
     in sea-bathing or the woman's seat on horse-back, or the
     like, is given copious and moving illustration, stirring
     headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a colored
     supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint
     dialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which
     "th" has vanished, and it presents a world in which the
     kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims is an
     inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole Maud!" There is
     a smaller bale dealing with sport. In the advertisement
     columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but
     great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous
     tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business
     opportunities....

      Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as
      people say, taken off its frills.... The "New York
      American" represents a clientèle to be counted by the
      hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes,
      just burning to live and living to burn.

Now that is a very fair picture, not merely of popular America but of
the whole contemporary phase of popular civilization, uprooted from the
state of instinct, intensive experience and the immemorial immediacies
of duty and the soil. To the artist and the moralist it is a cause of
hopeless pessimism, as any civilization must be which has lost touch
with all its values and been rationalized to the point of anarchy. For
this there is only one salvation. If civilization has lost the faculty
of commanding itself and pulling itself together in its individual
aspect, it must pull itself together collectively. That essentially is
the fighting chance of intellectualism, the hope that, inasmuch as the
world has already lost touch with experience and committed itself to a
regime of ideas, by organizing this regime of ideas and by mechanizing
so far as possible the material aspect of things, the values of life can
be re-engendered on a fresh basis. From this follows the oft-repeated
phrase of Wells that the chief want of the American people is a "sense
of the state." For the peril and the hope of American life (granting
that, as things are, society must be brought into some kind of coherence
before morality, art and religion can once more attain any real meaning)
lies in the fact that while at present Americans are aware of themselves
only as isolated individuals they are unconsciously engaged in works of
an almost appalling significance for the future of society. A Trust is a
work of this kind, and whether it is to be a gigantic good or a gigantic
evil depends wholly upon whether its controlling minds are more
conscious of their individual or their social function. The mechanism of
society in America is already developed to a very high point; what is
wanting, and without this everything is wanting, is an understanding of
the right function of this mechanism. So much does it all depend upon
whether the financial mind can subdue itself to the greater mind of the
race.

If the future is anywhere going to follow the lines that Wells has
suggested for it--and being an opportunist his aims are always in touch
with agreeable probabilities--it will most likely be in America. He has
lately given his idea of what the State should aim to be--"planned as
an electric traction system is planned, without reference to
pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines"; an idea remarkably of a
piece with the American imagination and one which the American
imagination is perfectly capable of translating into fact. American,
too, are the methods in which Wells has come to believe for bringing the
Great State into existence. His conviction is that socialism will come
through an enlightened individualism, outside the recognized
governmental institutions, and that the ostensible States will be
superseded virtually by informal centres of gravity quite independent of
them. America alone at present justifies this speculation. For the
centre of gravity in American affairs has always been extra-governmental,
and consistently in America where wealth gathers there also the
institutions of socialism spring into being. The rudiments of the
Socialist State, falsely based as they are but always tending to subvert
this false basis, are certainly to be found, if anywhere, in the
Rockefeller Institute, the Carnegie and Russell Sage Foundations, the
endowed universities and bureaus of research, and in the type of men
they breed. Consider the following passage from _The Passionate Friends_
and the character of the American, Gidding, which is indicated in it:

     To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably
     magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all
     science, all knowledge, all philosophical and political
     ideas, round about the habitable globe. His mind began
     producing concrete projects as a firework being lit produces
     sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the most colossal of
     printing and publishing projects, as a man might work out
     the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so
     entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to
     go on from the proposition that understanding was the
     primary need of humanity to the systematic organization of
     free publishing, exhaustive discussion, intellectual
     stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists
     might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.

      "Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had
      seemed to me half fantasy, "let's _do_ it."

It is perfectly possible in fact that socialism will come into being
first of all under the form of Cecil Rhodes's dream, as a secret order
of millionaires "promoting" not their own aims but society itself. That
is one of the possibilities at least that lie in what Wells has called
the "gigantic childishness" of the American mind.





     INDEX


     _America, The Future in_
     America, Wells and
     _American Population, The_
     _Ann Veronica_
     _Anticipations_
     Arnold, Matthew

     Bacon
     Beerbohm, Max
     Belloc, Hilaire
     Bergson, Henri
     Brisbane, Arthur
     Brook Farm

     Carlyle
     Catholic Church, the
     Cato
     Chesterton, G.K.
     Chicago
     _Comet, In the Days of the_
     _Common Sense of Warfare, The_
     Comte
     Confucius
     Conrad, Joseph
     _Creative Evolution_

     Dante
     Darwin
     De Foe
     Dickens
     _Discovery of the Future, The_
     Dürer

     Emerson
     _Empire of the Ants, The_
     Erasmus
     _Ethics and Evolution_

     Fabian Society
     _First and Last Things_
     _First Men in the Moon, The_
     _Food of the Gods, The_
     _Fortnightly Review, The_
     Francis, St.

     Goethe
     _Great State, The_
     Grimm's Fairy Tales

     Hardy, Thomas
     Hearn, Lafcadio
     Heraclitus
     Hero, The
     _History of Mr. Polly, The_
     Huxley

     _Inferno, The_
     _Invisible Man, The_
     _Island of Dr. Moreau, The_

     James, William
     Japanese, the
     Jeffries, Richard
     Johnson, Dr.

     Kipling, Rudyard
     _Kipps_

     Leonardo da Vinci
     Leopardi
     _Love and Mr. Lewisham_
     Luther

     Macaulay
     Machiavelli
     _Mankind in the Making_
     Marcus Aurelius
     _Marriage_
     Michael Angelo
     _Modern Utopia, A_
     Montessori, Madame
     Morris, William
     _McAndrew's Hymn_

     _New Machiavelli, The_
     Newman, Cardinal
     New Republican, the
     _News from Nowhere_
     _New Worlds for Old_
     Nietzsche

     _Our Liberal Practitioners_
     _Passionate Friends, The_
     Plato
     Plutarch

     Rabelais
     _Rasselas_
     _Rediscovery of the Unique, The_
     Rhodes, Cecil
     _Robinson Crusoe_

     Samurai, the
     _Scepticism of the Instrument,_
     Schopenhauer
     _Servile State, The_
     Shakespeare
     Shaw, Bernard
     _Sleeper Awakes, The_
     _So-Called Science of Sociology, The_
     Sorel, Georges
     Spencer, Herbert
     _Story of the Days to Come, A_
     Superman, the
     Superior Man, the
     Swift

     Taine, H.A.
     Thoreau
     _Time Machine, The_
     Tolstoy
     _Tono-Bungay_

     Verne, Jules

     Ward, Mrs. Humphry
     Webb, Sidney
     _Wheels of Chance, The_
     Whitman, Walt
     Wordsworth
     Worms Cathedral






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