Read Ebook: The World of H.G. Wells by Brooks Van Wyck

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

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."

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.

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:

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.

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.

"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 co?peration all round this sunlit world."

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.

"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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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 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.

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."

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.

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?

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.

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