Swinging along through the ages with H. G. Wells, no more than any
other reader could we pause to reflect or question. Not until we came
to page 676 of the second volume of “The Outline of History” did we
recall that in the back of our head a still small something had been
a-troubling of us for some time. What could it be, and when did it
start? After much knitting of the brows and scratching of the head, we
recalled that our subliminal bedevilment had begun on page 530 of the
first volume, with the following text:
If the prominent men of this or that British or Gallic city lacked
any profound Greek culture themselves, they could always turn to
some slave or other, whose learning had been guaranteed of the
highest quality by the slave-dealer, to supply the deficiency.
Here it was that we were first reminded of the experts who had assisted
at the birth of “The Outline of History” and who hide their diminished
heads in the footnotes of the same. Was Mr. Wells quite respectful to
his experts? Where, in the first place, did he derive his conception
of experts? This last seemed after all to be the main question, and
on this we concentrated with complete success. We find that Mr. Wells
owes his conception of experts to the immortal Mr. Boffin in Charles
Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend”.
Like H. G. Wells, Mr. Boffin had achieved the highest success in a
practical line. At the peak of this practical triumph, Mr. Boffin
conceived a cultural project of the first magnitude, a course of
historical reading which should include the most solid and serious
thought upon man, his achievements, and his destiny. Certain
difficulties of time and mechanical equipment at first seemed to
interfere. How did Mr. Boffin meet these difficulties? By the idea of
experts. In his own words:
“Now, it’s too late for me to begin shoveling and sifting at
alphabeds and grammar books. I’m getting to be an old bird, and I
want to take it easy. But I want some reading.... How can I get
that reading, Wegg? By,” tapping him on the breast with the head of
his thick stick, “paying a man truly qualified to do it, so much an
hour (say two-pence) to come and do it.”
The reader must beware of forcing an attractive analogy, especially of
forcing it beyond the point where it flatters Mr. Wells. It is all
very well to admire the economy of time and the enlargement of scope
secured by the employment of experts, whether the beneficiary be a
Boffin or a Wells. But Mr. Boffin was entirely too deferential to Mr.
Silas Wegg, his expert, _with_ a wooden leg.
“I don’t”, said Boffin, in a free-handed manner, “want to tie a
literary man--_with_ a wooden leg--down too tight.”
Mr. Wells has tied his experts (with no wooden legs to tax his
compassion) in double bowknots; he has trussed them and stowed them in
the footnotes. Still more must the reader beware of applying to our
author phrases used only of the expert:
“A certain loftiness, likewise, took possession of Mr. Wegg; a
condescending sense of being in request as an official expounder of
mysteries.”
Mr. Boffin, a humble sort of person, was unable to defend himself
against the arrogance of his expert. Mr. Wells, a man of independent
thought, has guarded himself against expert impositions; he has
sternly repressed that tendency to oppose facts against ideas which
is the first and probably the greatest danger in the employment of
literal-minded experts.
The legitimate applications of our analogy are, after all, sufficiently
numerous. Taking the classical period, with which Boffin started, we
find that both Boffin and Wells relied chiefly on Gibbon’s “Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire”. The set used by Boffin and Wegg was in “8
wollumes”; exact data on Mr. Wells’s edition are lacking. Both Wells
and Boffin were apparently familiar with Polybius, “pronounced Polly
Beeious, and supposed by Mr. Boffin to be a Roman virgin”. In this
connection we would note that both Wells and Boffin seem to have had
certain scandalous interpretations imposed upon them by their experts.
In the case of Mr. Wells, this is particularly apparent in the account
of Julius Cæsar.
“There can be little doubt”, says Mr. Wells, “that he was a dissolute
and extravagant young man--the scandals cluster thick about his sojourn
in Bithynia.”
Mr. Wells likewise refers delicately if not darkly to Cæsar’s “amorous
pleasantries with Cleopatra”, hints that the hussy followed Julius to
Rome, and concludes:
“Such complications with a woman mark the elderly sensualist or
sentimentalist--he was fifty-four at the commencement of the
_affaire_--rather than the master-ruler of men.”
Now we are not so much concerned with defending the late Julius
(though, hussies or no hussies, we are still convinced that he was
a very able person), as we are with inquiring whether Mr. Wells’s
judgment in this matter accords with his judgment in his novels. Were
Mr. Wells’s fictional heroes subject to such discipline? Not as we
remember. What is the difference between novels and history?
“The difference, sir?” says Mr. Wegg. “There you place me in a
difficulty, Mr. Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that the difference is
best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs. Boffin does not honor
us with her company. In Mrs. Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop
it!”
The truth is that Mr. Wells, possibly on advice of his particular Mr.
Wegg, or some other among the council of experts, seems in “The Outline
of History” abnormally concerned with Mrs. Boffin, or Mrs. Grundy, or
Mrs. Potter. Rereading our “Outline of History” we frequently feel the
presence of Mrs. Boffin. Under her eye Mr. Wells has been as unfair
to Cæsar, Napoleon, and some others as we, in this little paper, have
tried to be to Wells. For Boffinizing history is a game that two can
play at, and the reader must be on his guard against taking the results
too seriously.
_Mary Roberts Rinehart_
Mrs. Rinehart works swiftly and she works constantly. Her life has
been a succession of amazing successes; but they have come as a result
of a genius for understanding the public mind, a fine ability for
story-telling, an excellent sense of characterization, an unusual
executive sense, and a gift of fortune--luck, if you like. Mrs.
Rinehart became a nurse when she was very young. In the hospital
she met Dr. Rinehart. At nineteen, she was married to him. It was
not until after her three sons were born that she started writing.
Her first efforts were children’s poems, which she tells you were
exceedingly bad. Then she wrote short stories with some success. From
then on her progress has been steady. Her first novel, “The Circular
Staircase”, was immediately popular. She has never since written a
failure. Her attitude toward the war was remarkably sane. Her work
for the Department of Justice was secret, brave and successful. To
meet Mrs. Rinehart in her Washington home is to see a hostess of
charm, and to hear a _raconteur_ of ability. She has the rare gift
of dramatizing truth so that it has the thrill of a mystery story.
Fresh, dark, faultlessly dressed, with graceful hands and the deep
eyes that are at once penetrating and sympathetic, she is a beautiful
and a forceful woman. In “The Unreality of Modern Realism” she states
clearly her literary creed. The great strength of her books lies in the
fact that human beings find in them stories about other human beings
like themselves, who have similar difficulties, and who find, often, a
solution to life’s problem.