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-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 42221 ***
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 THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS
 
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 End of Project Gutenberg's The World of H.G. Wells, by Van Wyck Brooks
 
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World of H.G. Wells, by Van Wyck Brooks
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
-
-
-Title: The World of H.G. Wells
-
-Author: Van Wyck Brooks
-
-Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42221]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
-(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-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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-{

-  "DATA": {

-    "CREDIT": "Produced by Marc D'Hooghe (Images generously made available by the Internet Archive)"

-  }

-}

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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World of H.G. Wells, by Van Wyck Brooks
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
-
-
-Title: The World of H.G. Wells
-
-Author: Van Wyck Brooks
-
-Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42221]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ASCII
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
-(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-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 naivete 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 _debacle_, "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 L26,000 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 naive 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 cooperation 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
-cooperating 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 cooperative 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 cooperation 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 Caesar, 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'etre_ 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 cooperation; 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 _a 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 cooperation 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 _degage_
-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 cooperative
-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 Judaea. 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'etre_ 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 cooperative
-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 Duerer 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.
-
-_A 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 mediaeval 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 clientele 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_
-     Duerer
-
-     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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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World of H.G. Wells, by Van Wyck Brooks
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
-
-
-Title: The World of H.G. Wells
-
-Author: Van Wyck Brooks
-
-Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42221]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
-(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-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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-
-
-<h1>THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS</h1>
-
-<h3>BY</h3>
-
-<h2>VAN WYCK BROOKS</h2>
-
-
-
-<h5>NEW YORK</h5>
-
-<h5>MITCHELL KENNERLEY</h5>
-
-<h5>MCMXV</h5>
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<h4><i>To</i></h4>
-
-<h4><i>Max Lippitt Larkin</i></h4>
-
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<h4><a name="CONTENTS" id="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</a></h4>
-
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#INTRODUCTION">Introduction</a></p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#CHAPTER_I">I. The First Phase</a></p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#CHAPTER_II">II. Towards Socialism</a></p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#CHAPTER_III">III. Socialism "True and False"</a></p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">IV. The Philosophy of the New Republican</a></p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#CHAPTER_V">V. Human Nature</a></p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">VI. A Personal Chapter</a></p>
-
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;"><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">VII. The Spirit of Wells</a></p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
-<h3><a name="INTRODUCTION" id="INTRODUCTION">INTRODUCTION</a></h3>
-
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span> contributed to make him less agile and less dramatic.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span> 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&mdash;Wells&mdash;how
-shall one picture him?&mdash;and Matthew Arnold, that superb middle-class
-gentleman with his great face and deprecating hands&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>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 <i>Our Liberal
-Practitioners</i> 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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>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&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span></p>
-<h4><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I">CHAPTER I</a></h4>
-
-<h3>THE FIRST PHASE</h3>
-
-<p>"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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span> and play games upon it and, in a word, for all practical purposes,
-consider it their own.</p>
-
-<p>This idea of the relation between free will and determinism is the
-underlying assumption of Wells, as he explains it in <i>First and Last
-Things</i>:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>And elsewhere he says:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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&mdash;so far as I am concerned.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>In a word, for all the purposes that affect man's need the universe is
-infinitely plastic and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span> amenable to his will. Like every clean-cut
-philosophical conception, this clears the ground for practical conduct
-and a certain sort of direct action.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span> about him than his
-aversion to the good old English theory of "muddling through."</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>débâcle</i>, "he has made a discovery. If the world
-does not please you, <i>you can change it</i>. 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 <i>In the Days of the Comet</i>. 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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>Inherent in this trait is another&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span> 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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>Similar is a passage in <i>A Story of the Days to Come</i>, 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span> 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 <i>Kipps</i> 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, <i>as little pink
-strips of quivering, living stuff</i>, as things like the bodies of little
-ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children&mdash;children who feel pain, who
-are naughty and muddled and suffer, and do not understand why."</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span> 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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span>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 <i>Kipps</i>
-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 <i>Robinson Crusoe</i>. 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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>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&mdash;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?</p>
-
-<p>The human beings who flit through these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span> 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&mdash;it was the only thing I
-wanted&mdash;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."</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span> 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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span> an invisible man you will
-produce the invisibility even though it kills the man.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;Mr. Pope, Mr. Stanley, Mr. Magnet, Mr.
-Manning, Margaret, Marion&mdash;and you realize how much of a certain
-cruelty, a certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span> ruthlessness is in the very nature of his philosophy
-of experimental direct action.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span> 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
-<i>The Sleeper Awakes</i>&mdash;a world of gigantic machines, air fleets, and the
-"swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of an engineer's nightmare&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;a gradual passage from the region of
-religious or<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span> 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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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
-<i>are</i>, 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,&mdash;one sees these glittering shows for what
-they are&mdash;through<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span> their threadbare grandeur shine the little
-significant things that will make the future.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>And the burden of his lecture <i>The Discovery of the Future</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>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&mdash;works deliberately devoted to propaganda or exposition&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span> the subordination of details to design, a personal
-detachment, a pleasure in construction, a curiosity about the future.</p>
-
-<p>These are innate qualities, which inevitably produced their own
-animating purpose.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span></p>
-<h4><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II">CHAPTER II</a></h4>
-
-<h3>TOWARDS SOCIALISM</h3>
-
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span> 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&mdash;all art
-being that.</p>
-
-<p>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,"&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span> 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&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span> 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&mdash;to adopt a violently
-disparate comparison&mdash;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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span> as the wind and as
-impossible to photograph as a chameleon.</p>
-
-<p>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
-<i>The Passionate Friends</i>:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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....</p>
-
-<p>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<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span> 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....</p>
-
-<p>I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of
-human society. Ours are not economic but psychological
-difficulties....</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>When, in <i>New Worlds for Old</i>, Wells set himself to explain socialism as
-he conceived it, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>This notion is in itself quite outside socialism and does not
-necessarily lead into socialism. It <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>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 <i>Ethics and Evolution,</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>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 <i>The New Machiavelli</i>) 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.</p>
-
-<p>Therefore he has come to socialism not by the ordinary course but by a
-route obscure and <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>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&mdash;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&mdash;a chaos of private aims, private virtues,
-private motives, without any collective human design at all.</p>
-
-<p>In the light of these opposed ideas of society as a thing of Chance and
-as a thing of Design, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>let me run over two or three of the tales of
-Wells.</p>
-
-<p>First of all there is the special <i>laissez faire</i> of pure economic
-determinism. <i>The Time Machine</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>Then there is the ordinary <i>laissez faire</i> of <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>capitalism, a result of
-which is pictured in <i>The Sleeper Awakes</i>. 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 <i>laissez
-faire</i>; "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were
-making."</p>
-
-<p>Consider also <i>The Empire of the Ants</i>, in which Wells has figured a
-possible reconquest <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>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 <i>do</i>?" 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.</p>
-
-<p>And then there is <i>The History of Mr. Polly.</i> I ignore for the moment
-the individual aspect of his case, for Mr. Polly is not merely an
-individual&mdash;he is an emblem of the whole, he is <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>society <i>in concreto</i>.
-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&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>Each of the novels of Wells, in one aspect at least, presents the
-accidental nature of our world in some one typical case. <i>Love and Mr.
-Lewisham</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>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"&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>And the life of Kipps under prosperity is
-summed up in the following dialogue:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>"Wonder what I shall do this afternoon," said Kipps, with
-his hands deep in his pockets.</p>
-
-<p>He pondered and lit a cigarette.</p>
-
-<p>"Go for a walk, I s'pose," said Ann.</p>
-
-<p>"I <i>been</i> for a walk this morning."</p>
-
-<p>"S'pose I must go for another," he added after an interval.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>In this aspect <i>Tono-Bungay</i> is the most powerful work of Wells. Just as
-his romances <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>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. <i>Tono-Bungay</i> 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.</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>"What sort of things do they do?" I asked. "Rush about," he
-said. "Do things! Somethin' <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>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&mdash;there's Corners!"</p>
-
-<p>"They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.</p>
-
-<p>"Oh, if you go in for wheat and steel&mdash;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&mdash;staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take
-a drug&mdash;take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac.
-Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren't
-unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha&mdash;can't be!&mdash;and it's a
-thing people <i>must</i> have. Then quinine again! You watch
-your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let's
-say, and collar all the quinine. Where <i>are</i> they? Must
-have quinine, you know&mdash;Eh? ...</p>
-
-<p>"Lord! there's no end of things&mdash;no end of <i>little</i> things.
-Dill-water&mdash;all the suff'ring babes yowling for it.
-Eucalyptus again&mdash;cascara&mdash;witch hazel&mdash;menthol&mdash;all the
-toothache things. Then there's antiseptics, and curare,
-cocaine....</p>
-
-<p>"Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.</p>
-
-<p>"They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll
-do you if they can, and you do them. Like <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>brigands. That
-makes it romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George."</p>
-
-<p>He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such
-fragments as: "Fifty per cent, advance, sir;
-security&mdash;to-morrow."</p>
-
-<p>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!</p></blockquote>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span></p>
-<h4><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III">CHAPTER III</a></h4>
-
-<h3>SOCIALISM TRUE AND FALSE</h3>
-
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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&mdash;or, at any rate, completely think out definite
-parts&mdash;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.</p></blockquote>
-
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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,&mdash;and this particularly when they have been trained for
-administration without any wide experience of the world.</p>
-
-<p>Therefore upon experts as such, in distinction <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>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. <i>The First Men in the Moon</i> 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 <i>The Great State</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span>the standard
-according to which other mortals ought to be raised?</p>
-
-<p>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."&mdash;<i>pro bono publico</i>&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>so that if she said it was a
-fine morning it was like leaded print in the <i>Times</i>." 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.</p>
-
-<p>If Wells dislikes Administrative and Philanthropic socialism because
-they are not sufficiently <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>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 <i>The Passionate Friends</i>, in words we are justified in
-taking as the opinion of Wells himself. "Ours are not economic but
-psychological difficulties."</p>
-
-<p>That statement is full of meaning. It expresses, not a fact but a
-personal conviction&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>Creative Evolution</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>I do not mean that Wells is "wrong" in abandoning the economic for the
-psychological approach,&mdash;that is plainly the inevitable course for him.
-I wish simply to mark a distinction. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>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).</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;and there is almost a probability that it will&mdash;the
-hazard is won. If it does not&mdash;and many keen thinkers and men of action
-are obdurate&mdash;then we shall simply have the <i>fait accompli</i> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span>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?</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>The So-called Science of Sociology</i>. "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' <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>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 <i>First and Last Things</i>, "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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>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&mdash;and their
-exhaustive criticism&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>And so one turns to his own illustration of this belief, <i>A Modern
-Utopia</i>. 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 <i>News from Nowhere</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p><i>Mankind in the Making</i> should be taken as introductory to <i>A Modern
-Utopia</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>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 <i>A Modern Utopia</i> 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 <i>The Food of the Gods</i>) 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>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&mdash;it has one initial
-advantage: that every individual in it has been <i>started right</i>, in the
-degree in which the collective knowledge of the world has rendered that
-possible.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>And here where the constructive theory of Wells begins, let me quote a
-passage from <i>The New Machiavelli</i> that gives the gist of it:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <i>Utopia</i> is made possible by the existence in it
-of just such a flexible leading caste&mdash;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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>It appears in a crude form in his first avowedly sociological work,
-<i>Anticipations</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span>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&mdash;doctors, teachers,
-investigators, writers, and the like&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>Such is the argument of this book, and except for the inevitability of
-it&mdash;the belief that all this <i>must</i> come to pass&mdash;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 <i>A Modern Utopia</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>The general intention of all this finds utterance in the most poetic of
-all the fables of Wells, <i>The Food of the Gods</i>. The Food itself,
-invented by two undistinguished-looking <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>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&mdash;<i>aere perennius</i>." 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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span>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:</p>
-
-<p>"Suppose we give up this thing that stirs within us," says the Giant
-Leaguer.... "What then? Will this little world of theirs be <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>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."</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
-<h4><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV">CHAPTER IV</a></h4>
-
-<h3>THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEW REPUBLICAN</h3>
-
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>The Food of the Gods</i>
-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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>The Discovery of the Future</i> he says: "I must
-confess that I believe that if by some juggling with space and time
-Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, Edward IV, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>The first published utterance of Wells was, I think, a paper in <i>The
-Fortnightly Review</i> for July, 1891, called <i>The Rediscovery of the
-Unique</i>. 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"&mdash;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.... <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>The <i>reason d'être</i> of a man's mind
-is to avoid danger and get food&mdash;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."</p>
-
-<p>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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>This conception of human reason as an altogether inadequate organ for
-getting at the truth of things he later expanded in his Oxford lecture,
-<i>Scepticism of the Instrument;</i> and, still further expanded, it forms
-the first or metaphysical book of his <i>First and Last <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>Things</i>. 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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>nature of fact than of artistic expression." And
-therefore he is justified in proceeding as follows:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>And this is the way in which he presents the gist of his beliefs:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>among my warring motives. In it I
-find both concentration of myself and escape from myself, in
-a word, I find <i>Salvation</i>.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>And again later:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>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."</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>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 <i>en rapport</i>
-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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span>Newman as to
-the subordination of private intellectual scruples to the greater unity
-of faith.</p>
-
-<p>But indeed I doubt if it is fair to take him too much at his word in
-specific matters of this kind. <i>First and Last Things</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>A
-Modern Utopia</i> 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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>ruling of life," and their Canon contains a prayer "to save the world
-from unfermented men." So also in <i>First and Last Things</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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
-<i>Mankind in the Making</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>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 <i>Marriage</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>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. <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>A Modern Utopia,</i> which fully embody his ideal.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span>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&mdash;the cost of individual privacy in rights, property, and
-conduct.</p>
-
-<p>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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>I like my art unadorned; thought and skill and the other
-strange quality that is added thereto to make things
-beautiful&mdash;and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and
-paper, and behold! a thing of beauty!&mdash;as they do in Japan.
-And if it should fall into the fire&mdash;well, it has gone like
-yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>He contrasts this with the ordinary English view of art and property,
-mahogany furniture and "handsome" possessions:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>The pretence that they were the accessories to human life
-was too transparent. <i>We</i> were the accessories; <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p><i>There is no Being but Becoming</i> 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 <i>embonpoint.</i> These things exist in
-Wells's notion of right human nature.</p>
-
-<p>Thus the Samurai. They are delegates of the species, experimenting and
-searching for new directions; they instinctively view <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;personal
-in quality, social in effect&mdash;once conceded, it follows that the
-moulding of life must proceed with reference to this.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span></p>
-<h4><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V">CHAPTER V</a></h4>
-
-<h3>HUMAN NATURE</h3>
-
-
-<p>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 <i>à priori</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>"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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;streams of tendency which
-meet fully for the first time in <i>Tono-Bungay</i>, 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>brought
-into contact with constructive theory. Mr. Hoopdriver, of <i>The Wheels of
-Chance,</i> 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 <i>with</i> muddled humanity,
-which was growing more and more urgent in the romances.</p>
-
-<p>In <i>Tono-Bungay</i>, 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.</p>
-
-<p>"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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>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&mdash;of which our individual fives are but the momentary parts&mdash;into a
-glad, beautiful and triumphant coöperation all round this sunlit world."</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>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 <i>dégagé</i>
-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&mdash;a satisfied or hopeless consent&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>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."</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>The New
-Machiavelli</i> appears the following quotation from Professor James: "It
-suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded
-people ... do both exist." In <i>A Modern Utopia</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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. <i>Cherchez la femme</i>. 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>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 <i>Tono-Bungay</i> the
-enterprise is a swindling patent medicine, which many business men would
-refuse to have anything to do with; but in <i>Marriage</i> 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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>"My dear chap, positively&mdash;you mustn't!" <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>Solomonson had
-screamed.... "Don't you see all you are throwing away?"</p>
-
-<p>"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."</p>
-
-<p>"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.</p>
-
-<p>"But you <i>must</i> 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&mdash;for it's bound to be cheap! anyone can see
-that&mdash;like a bomb into a market-place. What's the good of
-saying you don't care about the market-place, that <i>your</i>
-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...."</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>"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&mdash;there won't be any more plantations. Have to grow
-tea."</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>First and Last
-Things</i>, "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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>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."</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>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&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>He implies this indeed in <i>A Modern Utopia</i>:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>"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."</p>
-
-<p>"Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?"</p>
-
-<p>"He must leave either her or the order."</p>
-
-<p>"There is matter for a novel or so in that."</p>
-
-<p>"There has been matter for hundreds."</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>Wells has written six himself. <i>Love and Mr. Lewisham, Ann Veronica,
-Tono-Bungay, The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends</i>, 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
-<i>Marriage</i>, 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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>human nature and the better nature of socialism, and become Samurai in
-fact.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span>itself. It is the development of the collective
-self-consciousness of humanity.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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&mdash;and I am
-aware of the limits of any secular solution&mdash;there are few as effective
-as Wells.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>Consider him in relation to a single concrete issue, the issue of
-militarism:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>And in <i>The Common Sense of Warfare</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o'
-doing things rather more or less.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>But no one, I think, has measured the <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>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. <i>The New Machiavelli</i> is a modern <i>Rasselas</i> 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.</p>
-
-<p>And as with parties, so with men. Consider that scene in <i>The Passionate
-Friends</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>slowly in a field.... Why couldn't we and why
-didn't we talk together!"</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span></p>
-<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI">CHAPTER VI</a></h4>
-
-<h3>A PERSONAL CHAPTER</h3>
-
-
-<p>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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>I was born<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>stories in which I made use of the teeming suggestions of
-modern science....</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>So much for the facts. The reflections are not less illuminating:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure.
-Success with a book&mdash;even such a commercially modest success
-as mine has been&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>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 <i>lumen siccum</i> to the <i>lumen humidum</i>, 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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>classes except a desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible
-people."</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>The Future in
-America,</i> "even a little insensitive to fine immediate things through
-this anticipatory habit.... There are times indeed when it makes life
-seem <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an
-equally transitory series of consequences&mdash;&mdash;." His hold upon the
-present is so far from inevitable that <i>The New Machiavelli</i> and
-<i>Marriage</i>, 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 <i>Inferno</i>.</p>
-
-<p>Into this larger world, in short, he has carried with him only himself
-and his own story. We live in two worlds&mdash;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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>experimental in a plastic scheme. His range is very small: the same
-figures reappear constantly. There is the Wells hero,&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>Without this antipathy, and outside his own primary world, he pretty
-generally fails. One recalls, for example, old Mrs. Trafford in
-<i>Marriage,</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>ways express the nature and experience of Wells himself,
-he succeeds in his portraiture only where no demand is made on his
-sympathies.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;friendship, affection, minor obligations&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span>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 <i>raison d'être</i> of reproduction;
-makes it, to use a favorite word of Wells, stark.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>Tono-Bungay;</i> "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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>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."</p>
-
-<p>That is evident, and it is equally evident that the personal character
-and career of Wells are emblematic of this entire tendency. He has
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>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?</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span>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?</p>
-
-<p>Applied to history, it seems to fail. Wells is devoid of historical
-imagination. In his portrait of Margaret in <i>The New Machiavelli</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>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 <i>Meditations</i> 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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span>in a word, the static elements of
-character and the study of perfection are not to be distinguished from
-vicious self-consequence.</p>
-
-<p>Consider also a recent passage in which he has given a general
-impression of literature:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>I found Langhorne's <i>Plutarch</i> too, I remember, on those
-shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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&mdash;his emotions gather about the physical result
-which appears to justify these.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span><i>À chacun son infini</i>.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-
-<div class="footnote">
-
-<p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a> September 21, 1866.</p></div>
-
-
-<hr class="chap" />
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span></p>
-<h4><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII">CHAPTER VII</a></h4>
-
-<h3>THE SPIRIT OF WELLS</h3>
-
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>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&mdash;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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>of life is altogether too easy and too
-glib. It is they who throw into relief the deep, obscure conviction of
-the "plain man"&mdash;commonly the good man&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;it would never <i>succeed,</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 1508]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>That is why, as it seems to me, Wells ought <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>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&mdash;words quite out of place in connection with
-him&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>The New Machiavelli</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>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?</p>
-
-<p>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 <i>The New Machiavelli</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>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&mdash;a wonderful visionary bridge&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>After he had written <i>The New Machiavelli</i> <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>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 <i>Tono-Bungay</i> and <i>The New
-Machiavelli</i> ideas and experience met in a certain invisible point
-&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span>passion with which <i>The New Machiavelli</i>
-concludes.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<hr class="tb" />
-
-<p>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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>measured up to each enlargement of their freedom and responsibility.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>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, <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>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 <i>McAndrew's Hymn</i>; 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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>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 <i>Inferno</i> 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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>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&mdash;the counterpart on a grand scale of what he most
-admires in the individual. "Stephen," says Lady Mary in <i>The Passionate
-Friends</i>, "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&mdash;like
-everybody." And in <i>First and Last Things</i> he gives the other side of
-the medal:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>world of great round lakes of
-blue lime-water and vistas of white sanitary tiling.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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&mdash;to this, at least, one's faith, whatever it may be,
-ought to be equal.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>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 <i>The New Machiavelli</i>); 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.</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>"Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?" my mother used to ask. "Sugar,
-Mrs. Latude-Fernay?"</p>
-
-<p>The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They
-say," she would begin, issuing her proclamation&mdash;at least
-half her sentences began "they say"&mdash;"sugar is
-fatt-an-ing, nowadays. Many of the best people do not take
-it at all."</p>
-
-<p>"Not with their tea, ma'am," said Rabbits, intelligently.</p>
-
-<p>"Not with anaything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of
-crushing repartee, and drank.</p>
-
-<p>"What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.</p>
-
-<p>"They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.</p>
-
-<p>"They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors
-are not recomm-an-ding it now."</p>
-
-<p>My Mother: "No, ma'am?"</p>
-
-<p>Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."</p>
-
-<p>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."</p>
-
-<p>This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner
-and a pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir
-Roderick.</p>
-
-<p>"George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>remark to her; I do
-not know how she would have got along without it.</p>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<p>A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or
-shortest day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <i>de novo</i> 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
-<i>bright</i>?"). Perfectly American <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>is his view of the traditional English
-ideal of human nature&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>has grasped it from many different angles but
-never with more point than in his essay <i>The American Population</i>.
-Consider this passage, where he takes as a text one of Arthur Brisbane's
-editorials in the "New York Journal":</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>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....</p>
-
-<p>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.</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>If the future is anywhere going to follow the lines that Wells has
-suggested for it&mdash;and being an opportunist his aims are always in touch
-with agreeable probabilities&mdash;it will most likely be in America. He has
-lately given his idea of what the State should aim to be&mdash;"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
-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>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 <i>The
-Passionate Friends</i> and the character of the American, Gidding, which is
-indicated in it:</p>
-
-<blockquote>
-
-<p>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 <span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>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.</p>
-
-<p>"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had
-seemed to me half fantasy, "let's <i>do</i> it."</p></blockquote>
-
-<p>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.</p>
-
-<hr class="full" />
-
-<h4>INDEX</h4>
-<p style="margin-left: 40%;">
-<br />
-<br />
-<i>America, The Future in</i>, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_136'>136</a><br />
-America, Wells and, <a href="#Page_176">176</a>-<a href='#Page_185'>185</a><br />
-<i>American Population, The</i>, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a>-<a href='#Page_181'>181</a><br />
-<i>Ann Veronica</i>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a><br />
-<i>Anticipations</i>, <a href='#Page_80'>80</a>-<a href='#Page_83'>83</a><br />
-Arnold, Matthew, <a href='#Page_15'>15</a>, <a href='#Page_16'>16</a>, <a href='#Page_17'>17</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a><br />
-<br />
-Bacon, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
-Beerbohm, Max, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a><br />
-Belloc, Hilaire, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a><br />
-Bergson, Henri, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a><br />
-Brisbane, Arthur, <a href='#Page_180'>180</a><br />
-Brook Farm, <a href='#Page_124'>124</a><br />
-<br />
-Carlyle, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a><br />
-Catholic Church, the, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a><br />
-Cato, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a><br />
-Chesterton, G.K., <a href='#Page_42'>42</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a><br />
-Chicago, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a><br />
-<i>Comet, In the Days of the</i>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a><br />
-<i>Common Sense of Warfare, The</i>, <a href='#Page_126'>126</a><br />
-Comte, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a><br />
-Confucius, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a><br />
-Conrad, Joseph, <a href='#Page_153'>153</a>-<a href='#Page_161'>161</a><br />
-<i>Creative Evolution</i>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a><br />
-<br />
-Dante, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a><br />
-Darwin, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a><br />
-De Foe, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
-Dickens, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
-<i>Discovery of the Future, The</i>, <a href='#Page_37'>37</a>, <a href='#Page_90'>90</a><br />
-Dürer, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a><br />
-<br />
-Emerson, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_158'>158</a><br />
-<i>Empire of the Ants, The</i>, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>-<a href='#Page_52'>52</a><br />
-Erasmus, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a><br />
-<i>Ethics and Evolution</i>, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a><br />
-<br />
-Fabian Society, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a>, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_66'>66</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_175'>175</a><br />
-<i>First and Last Things,</i> <a href='#Page_22'>22</a>, <a href='#Page_72'>72</a>, <a href='#Page_93'>93</a>-<a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a><br />
-<i>First Men in the Moon, The</i>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a><br />
-<i>Food of the Gods, The</i>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>-<a href='#Page_87'>87</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a><br />
-<i>Fortnightly Review, The</i>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a><br />
-Francis, St., <a href='#Page_43'>43</a><br />
-<br />
-Goethe, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a><br />
-<i>Great State, The</i>, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a>-<a href='#Page_65'>65</a><br />
-Grimm's Fairy Tales, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a><br />
-<br />
-Hardy, Thomas, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a><br />
-Hearn, Lafcadio, <a href='#Page_103'>103</a><br />
-Heraclitus, <a href='#Page_36'>36</a><br />
-Hero, The, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a><br />
-<i>History of Mr. Polly, The</i>, <a href='#Page_24'>24</a>, <a href='#Page_52'>52</a><br />
-Huxley, <a href='#Page_47'>47</a><br />
-<br />
-<i>Inferno, The</i>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_172'>172</a><br />
-<i>Invisible Man, The</i>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a><br />
-<i>Island of Dr. Moreau, The</i>, <a href='#Page_31'>31</a><br />
-<br />
-James, William, <a href='#Page_94'>94</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a><br />
-Japanese, the, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>-<a href='#Page_104'>104</a><br />
-Jeffries, Richard, <a href='#Page_41'>41</a><br />
-Johnson, Dr., <a href='#Page_147'>147</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a><br />
-<br />
-Kipling, Rudyard, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a><br />
-<i>Kipps</i>, <a href='#Page_27'>27</a>, <a href='#Page_29'>29</a>, <a href='#Page_54'>54</a>-<a href='#Page_56'>56</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a><br />
-<br />
-Leonardo da Vinci, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a><br />
-Leopardi, <a href='#Page_28'>28</a><br />
-<i>Love and Mr. Lewisham</i>, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a>-<a href='#Page_54'>54</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a><br />
-Luther, <a href='#Page_97'>97</a><br />
-<br />
-Macaulay, <a href='#Page_53'>53</a><br />
-Machiavelli, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a>, <a href='#Page_171'>171</a><br />
-<i>Mankind in the Making</i>, <a href='#Page_74'>74</a>-<a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_100'>100</a><br />
-Marcus Aurelius, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a><br />
-<i>Marriage</i>, <a href='#Page_101'>101</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>-<a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_140'>140</a><br />
-Michael Angelo, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_146'>146</a><br />
-<i>Modern Utopia, A</i>, <a href="#Page_73">73</a>-<a href='#Page_77'>77</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a><br />
-Montessori, Madame, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a><br />
-Morris, William, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a><br />
-<i>McAndrew's Hymn</i>, <a href="#Page_169">169</a><br />
-<br />
-<i>New Machiavelli, The</i>, <a href="#Page_48">48</a>, <a href='#Page_78'>78</a>-<a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_112'>112</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a>,<br />
-<a href="#Page_128">128</a>, <a href='#Page_137'>137</a>, <a href='#Page_145'>145</a>, <a href='#Page_159'>159</a>-<a href='#Page_160'>160</a>,<br />
-<a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_165'>165</a>, <a href='#Page_176'>176</a><br />
-Newman, Cardinal, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a><br />
-New Republican, the, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_118'>118</a><br />
-<i>News from Nowhere</i>, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a><br />
-<i>New Worlds for Old</i>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a><br />
-Nietzsche, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a><br />
-<br />
-<i>Our Liberal Practitioners,</i> <a href='#Page_16'>16</a><br />
-<br />
-<i>Passionate Friends, The,</i> <a href='#Page_44'>44</a>, <a href='#Page_45'>45</a>, <a href='#Page_68'>68</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_128'>128</a>, <a href='#Page_173'>173</a>, <a href='#Page_184'>184</a><br />
-<br />
-Plato, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a><br />
-Plutarch, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a><br />
-<br />
-Rabelais, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_75'>75</a>, <a href='#Page_89'>89</a>, <a href='#Page_148'>148</a><br />
-<i>Rasselas</i>, <a href="#Page_128">128</a><br />
-<i>Rediscovery of the Unique, The</i>, <a href='#Page_92'>92</a><br />
-Rhodes, Cecil, <a href='#Page_185'>185</a><br />
-<i>Robinson Crusoe</i>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a><br />
-<br />
-Samurai, the, <a href='#Page_79'>79</a>, <a href='#Page_83'>83</a>, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>, <a href='#Page_99'>99</a>, <a href='#Page_102'>102</a>, <a href='#Page_104'>104</a>, <a href='#Page_105'>105</a>, <a href='#Page_116'>116</a>, <a href='#Page_122'>122</a>, <a href='#Page_123'>123</a>, <a href='#Page_133'>133</a>, <a href='#Page_163'>163</a><br />
-<i>Scepticism of the Instrument,</i> <a href='#Page_93'>93</a><br />
-Schopenhauer, <a href='#Page_117'>117</a>, <a href='#Page_141'>141</a><br />
-<i>Servile State, The</i>,62<br />
-Shakespeare, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_149'>149</a><br />
-Shaw, Bernard, <a href='#Page_12'>12</a>, <a href='#Page_13'>13</a>, <a href='#Page_14'>14</a>, <a href='#Page_135'>135</a><br />
-<i>Sleeper Awakes, The</i>,35, <a href='#Page_51'>51</a>, <a href='#Page_57'>57</a><br />
-<i>So-Called Science of Sociology, The</i>, <a href='#Page_71'>71</a><br />
-Sorel, Georges, <a href='#Page_127'>127</a><br />
-Spencer, Herbert, <a href='#Page_73'>73</a><br />
-<i>Story of the Days to Come, A</i>, <a href='#Page_26'>26</a><br />
-Superman, the, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a>-<a href='#Page_90'>90</a><br />
-Superior Man, the, <a href='#Page_88'>88</a><br />
-Swift, <a href='#Page_64'>64</a><br />
-<br />
-Taine, H.A., <a href='#Page_12'>12</a><br />
-Thoreau, <a href='#Page_106'>106</a><br />
-<i>Time Machine, The</i>, <a href='#Page_9'>9</a>, <a href='#Page_34'>34</a>, <a href='#Page_50'>50</a><br />
-Tolstoy, <a href='#Page_67'>67</a>, <a href='#Page_155'>155</a><br />
-<i>Tono-Bungay</i>,56-<a href='#Page_60'>60</a>, <a href='#Page_108'>108</a>, <a href='#Page_109'>109</a>, <a href='#Page_114'>114</a>, <a href='#Page_121'>121</a>, <a href='#Page_142'>142</a>, <a href='#Page_164'>164</a>, <a href='#Page_176'>176</a>, <a href='#Page_178'>178</a><br />
-<br />
-Verne, Jules, <a href='#Page_19'>19</a><br />
-<br />
-Ward, Mrs. Humphry, <a href='#Page_65'>65</a><br />
-Webb, Sidney, <a href='#Page_62'>62</a>, <a href='#Page_174'>174</a><br />
-<i>Wheels of Chance, The,</i> <a href='#Page_109'>109</a><br />
-Whitman, Walt, <a href='#Page_38'>38</a>, <a href='#Page_134'>134</a><br />
-Wordsworth, <a href='#Page_35'>35</a>, <a href='#Page_169'>169</a><br />
-Worms Cathedral, <a href='#Page_150'>150</a><br />
-</p>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The World of H.G. Wells, by Van Wyck Brooks
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license
-
-
-Title: The World of H.G. Wells
-
-Author: Van Wyck Brooks
-
-Release Date: February 27, 2013 [EBook #42221]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ASCII
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org
-(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive)
-
-
-
-
-
-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 naivete 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 _debacle_, "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 L26,000 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 naive 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 cooperation 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
-cooperating 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 cooperative 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 cooperation 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 Caesar, 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'etre_ 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 cooperation; 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 _a 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 cooperation 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 _degage_
-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 cooperative
-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 Judaea. 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'etre_ 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 cooperative
-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 Duerer 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.
-
-_A 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 mediaeval 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 clientele 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_
-     Duerer
-
-     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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