When one brings the Wellsian doctrine down to the details of life,
one discovers what I may call a _local_ pessimism in it. The anger
which breaks out of his work is directed against the incompetence
and stupidity of man which hold him back from the desirable country
towards which he is marching. The greatest optimists--the men who are
convinced that man's end is good and seemly--are almost always the
most bitter pessimists when they are considering contemporary affairs.
The visionary loves mankind in the abstract so much that when he
contemplates mankind in the concrete he loses his temper. The Utopian,
full of his dream of a decent and free civilization in which every man
may move easily to his proper station, feels a dreadful depression when
he looks upon society as it exists here and now; and there are times
when, in spite of his sure and certain hope that life will ultimately
find its level, he feels that man, that perverse, wayward, thwarting
creature, will never fulfill the promise of his potentialities because
he is too closely concerned with some tiny, personal vanity, because he
allows wickedness and stupidity to influence him to a greater degree
than goodness and fine thought. Who, thinking over the Big Four in
Paris, and remembering that millions of young men of all nations died
so that the Big Four might meet and make a more enduring peace than
this world has yet known, can feel anything but anger and humiliation
at what they did? Clemenceau, the "Tiger" who, having tasted blood,
seemed eager to taste more; Lloyd George, who never remembers a friend
or forgets an enemy; Orlando, shamelessly extending his itching
palm; and Wilson, the man who went to Europe to ask for the moon
and returned to America, having accepted a match ... can any of us,
contemplating those four men, given by God the greatest opportunity
that has ever been offered to men, that may ever be offered to men,
help feeling that this world is dead and damned and that the sooner a
disgusted God smashes it to pieces, the better will be the universe?
Mr. Wells cannot escape, any more than the rest of us, this tendency to
despair of human effort, and here and there in his books his _local_
pessimism is expressed; but his universal optimism remains unimpaired,
and one comes away from his writings in the knowledge that he believes
that man sooner or later will achieve a high destiny. He whips the
stupid and the selfish and the idle, but he will not permit them to
persuade him from his belief that even out of these elements, a finer
Man will yet be made.
V
There is a cartoon by Mr. Max Beerbohm in which he shows himself being
conducted through a gallery where Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Galsworthy,
Mr. Bennett and many other eminent writers are standing on inverted
tubs, haranguing the universe. Having listened to the preachers and
propagandists, Mr. Beerbohm turns to his guide and says, "But where
are the artists?" only to be informed that "_These_ are the artists!"
It has been said that Mr. Shaw would rather be known as a great
political economist than as a great dramatist, that Mr. Arnold Bennett
would rather be known as an eminent business man than as an eminent
novelist, that Mr. Galsworthy would prefer to be a reformer than a man
of letters, and that Mr. Wells seeks fame as a sociologist and not as
an artist. There is enough truth in this statement to give pause to
those about whom it is made, but not sufficient to frighten us who
admire them. Mr. Wells, for example, can no more elude artistry than
he can refrain from thinking. He is extraordinarily indifferent to
literary style, seems almost to delight in making a clumsy sentence
rather than a shapely one, and, so far as one can discover, does not
spend a single second on "finding the right word." The idea is his
chief concern, and he cares very little for the way in which it is
expressed. Nevertheless, he remains an artist, with a gift for apt
expressions and a far greater gift for selection. In one of his
books, he describes the prostitute as "that painted disaster of the
street." In "First and Last Things," in describing the inability of
the intellect to free itself from bias, he says, "the forceps of the
mind is a clumsy instrument and crushes the truth a little in seizing
it." At the end of "Tono-Bungay" there is an account of a trip down
the Thames which is among the great pieces of prose writing. In "The
Undying Fire," he gives an account of the purposeless cruelty of Nature
and an account of the state of mind of a young German who goes from
his remote village to join the Army at the beginning of the war, full
of patriotic ardour, offering for this service and for that until at
last he becomes a member of the crew of a submarine and his patriotism
suffers a sea-change and becomes the desperate courage of a rat in a
trap ... and these two accounts are so vivid that it is impossible for
any one to rise from them unaware that they have been written by a man
of genius, possessed of artistry.
He is probably the most prolific writer of his quality in the world,
and if I had exact knowledge of the world's greatest authors, I should
probably say that he is the most varied of them. Consider how very
dissimilar his books are in range and interest. Consider that the man
who wrote "The Time Machine," wrote also "The History of Mr. Polly"
and the "The Undying Fire." How many writers have shown such variety
as has been shown by the author of "The War in the Air," "Kipps" (that
beautiful and tender book), "Tono-Bungay" and "The Soul of a Bishop."
At one moment, Mr. Wells is writing "Bealby" and at the next, he
is writing "God, the Invisible King." He turns from "The Wonderful
Visit" to "The Outline History of the World," and writes "The Future
in America" in the trail of "Love and Mr. Lewisham." ("The Future
in America" is perhaps the best book of its kind that has ever been
written on the problems that lie before the American people.) Queen
Victoria, having been enchanted by "Alice in Wonderland," sent to a
book-seller for the remainder of "Lewis Carroll's" writings, and was
considerably disconcerted when she received "Plane Trigonometry" and
"Curiosa Mathematica" by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. What
that excellent old lady would have thought, if having read and liked
"The Sea Lady," she had been supplied with "Mankind in the Making" and
"The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "Joan and Peter" by the same author,
I cannot imagine. Mr. Wells faces life very fairly and squarely,
regarding it from all angles of vision. There is only one Truth, but it
may be approached by many different paths; and Mr. Wells has attempted
most of them. It may seem to some of his readers at times that he is
running away from things towards which he formerly ran, but it is more
likely that he is merely trying another way of getting to the same
point.