If a writer wished to create a character who would most aptly personify
the past thirty years of English or of world history, he would have
to create a character very like Mr. Wells: a questioning, variable,
demanding person, with some impatience and testiness of temper, with,
at times, a fantastic and wayward manner, but always superimposed on
these superficialities, an eager and unthwartable desire for a true
belief. Mr. Chesterton said of him once that "you lie awake at night
and hear him grow," and fundamentally that is true, in spite of the
temptation one has at times to believe that one lies awake at night
and merely hears him changing his mind. One could, were one silly
enough to do so, construct a plausible indictment of Mr. Wells of
hurriedly accepting a belief and as hurriedly rejecting it; but to do
so would be to charge oneself with a superficial mind. Mr. Wells, in
his eagerness to discover a reasonable and sane society in which the
spirit of man may grow and develop and achieve, has sometimes accepted
a theory too swiftly, but his scientific mind has come, sooner or
later, to the rescue of his eager heart and has caused him to reject
proposals which he had previously found acceptable.
In "First and Last Things" he decides against the community of
austere aristocrats who won his advocacy in "A Modern Utopia." The
self-disregard of the Samurai of Japan had pleased him as it must
please all who contemplate it, and he imagined a state in which
the best men would govern "the average, sensual men," formulating
their laws and doctrines from the sanctuary of a sort of monastic
establishment in which their fleshly desires would be chastened and
perhaps eliminated. Mr. Wells, having felt the allure of a select
company of selfless aristocrats, devoting themselves to the good
government of less gifted men, soon discovered that good government
cannot be administered by men who are remote from the emotions and
desires of the governed and so, with characteristic courage, he
abandoned his Samurai and boldly marched into the company of the crowd.
Can any one find ground for sneering in such behaviour as that? Are not
those who try to find solutions to puzzles more likely to be successful
in their efforts because Mr. Wells has offered one solution and then,
finding it useless, repudiated it and tried another?
There was a time when he saw hope for the world in the establishment
of a universal language, but I doubt whether he holds to that hope
now. A common speech does not keep men at peace any more than a common
purpose does, and, in any event, man's incorrigible habit of localizing
universal things until they cease to be universal tends in time to
make a common speech an impossible possession. The Catholic Church has
a common speech in the Latin tongue, but an Italian priest can preach
to an English priest in that language and remain incomprehensible.
The British and the American people have a common speech, but it has
become so permeated with local words that very often the two races are
unintelligible to each other, apart altogether from the difficulty of
accent.
Mr. Wells has plunged into a few bog-holes of that sort, but he has
always extricated himself from them, and less and less, as he develops,
does he insist upon uniformity and machinery, and more and more does
he insist on diversity and spirit. "Let us be Catholics in this great
matter," Mr. Birrell writes on Browning's poetry, "and burn our candles
at many shrines. In the pleasant realms of poesy, no liveries are worn,
no paths prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop where you
like, and worship whom you love. Nothing is demanded of you, save this,
that in all your wanderings and worships, you keep two objects steadily
in view--two, and two only--truth and beauty." It may fairly be said of
Mr. Wells that in all his "wanderings and worships" he has tried to do
so.