H. G. Wells is not the hero of this book. I am holding my roses for a
figure that has not yet appeared upon my little stage. But the career
of Mr. Wells, whose novels have almost every quality except charm, is
interesting to contemplate. That he is a born novelist was clear to me
so early as the year 1895, when one of his best stories appeared--_The
Wheels of Chance_. Not long after came the novels of science and
socialism that carried his name around the world; he was discussed
in the salons of Paris and in the prisons of Siberia. His books were
all busy, noisy, talkative, restless; they reflected in their almost
truculent mental aggressiveness the mass of undigested and indigestible
quasi-scientific fodder that perhaps disturbs more than it nourishes
the twentieth century stomach; they made many readers fondly believe
they were living the intellectual life. I mistakenly supposed he would
keep up this squirrel-cage activity to the end of his days; for I
mistakenly supposed in all this clatter he was incapable of hearing the
voice of the spirit. I used to think that if all the world suddenly
became religious except one man, that man would be H. G. Wells.
The war, which diverted the energies of so many quiet thinkers to
matters of immediate and practical efficiency, produced a rather
different effect upon this interesting man. He began to regard things
that are temporal in relation to those of eternal import. He became
converted--I have no hesitation in using the good old word--and while
I can see no evidence of conviction of sin, for humility is not his
most salient characteristic, he did come to believe and believes now,
that religion ought to be the motive power of man. What direction
his ideas may take in the future I cannot divine; but I am thankful
for his conversion, if only for the reason that it inspired him to
produce a masterpiece, _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_. This novel is
not only far and away his best book, it is the ablest work of fiction
about the war that I have read. But it owes its eminence not to its
accurate reporting of the course of social history during the war, for
after all, the much admired hockey-game is not much higher than major
journalism, but rather to the profound sense of spiritual values which
is the core of the book.
I regard it as unfortunate that Mr. Wells felt it necessary to follow
up the triumph of this tale with a treatise on theology called _God
the Invisible King_, and with a propagandist novel, called _The Soul
of a Bishop_. For the last-named book illustrates all the faults of
its species, as well as the cardinal sin against art. _Mr. Britling
Sees It Through_ is religious; _The Soul of a Bishop_ is sectarian. And
_God the Invisible King_, while it should be read with sympathy for its
author's sincerity and newly-found idealism, has all the arrogance and
cock-sureness of an old-fashioned theologian without the preliminary
years of devoted learning that gave the old-fashioned one some right
to a hearing, provided of course he could induce any one to listen to
him. No orthodox evangelist has ever been more sure of God than Mr.
Wells. The novel was properly named _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_; and
we might with equal propriety name the treatise, _Mr. Britling Sees
Through It_.
Strange and unfortunate that Mr. Wells should think that the religious
element in Mr. Britling needed additional emphasis. A work of art
founded on eternal verities will accomplish more for the cause
of religion than any tract. Solely from the moral point of view,
_Anna Karenina_ is a more impressive book than most of its author's
subsequent exhortations.
_The Soul of a Bishop_ is not a realistic novel, for there is no
real character in it. It is already on its way to limbo, along with
_Robert Elsmere_ and _The Inside of the Cup_. But it is an excellent
illustration of the fate that awaits an artist when he sacrifices the
truth of art for the enforcement of personal opinion. There was a time
when the excitement over the question of trades-unions produced by
_Put Yourself in His Place_ was at fever heat; but that novel today is
almost forgotten, while _The Cloister and the Hearth_ will be read by
generation after generation, simply because it is a great story.