still less, Brieux. Brieux's influence in France is mainly due to the
fact that he is a brilliant and eloquent lecturer. Mr. Shaw's
influence in England is due to his essays, speeches, conversations,
personal vehemence, and ubiquity. People go to see his plays because
they are very witty; they understand them and think they are convinced
by them only when they have read and digested his far more convincing
Prefaces. The reason why it is impossible to be profoundly interested
in his plays is because he is not profoundly interested in them
himself. He evidently wrote them without being excited about his
persons, their experiences, or the emotions which the situation drew
from them; he was excited about his case, about the moral or social
truth which his puppets could be made to illustrate. There is much
ingenious arrangement, much plausible argument, and abundant wit. What
really does delight us is the often irrelevant wit of the
conversation, and this because Mr. Shaw himself delights in irrelevant
wit; it is only when he is writing wittily and irrelevantly that he is
disinterested, that he is doing something for its own sake, that he is
writing in the only way in which an artist can write effectively. But
in so far as he is aiming at something other than a significant
presentation of life--and he generally is--he is attempting to
"indict" society, to show up abuses, to expose political and social
sores; he is ceasing to be interested in his subject, his persons, his
play; he is forcing human nature out of itself; he is distorting it;
he is making it unreal; he is creating monsters--and no dramatist, no
artist of any kind, can deal effectively with monsters. When he writes
a play, Mr. Shaw attempts to do two completely different things at one
and the same time--to present life, and to deduce an arguable and
preconceived conclusion about life. If he has not completely failed,
that is because he has not completely lived up to his theories.
It is not Mr. Shaw's fault that so many of the cleverest younger writers
of the time allow themselves to be led away by his example. But that
they are so led away--not only in drama, but in the kindred art of
fiction--is a fact so important that it requires statement. Mr. Shaw is
entitled to his own opinion that "what we want as the basis of our plays
and novels is not romance, but a really scientific natural history;" he
is quite right, if he feels it to be his own particular function, to
spend his whole force in "indicting" society. But how terrible a loss in
human interest and vitality if all our creative artists are to occupy
themselves in this process of "indictment"--indictment being at all
times the antithesis of fair criticism and presentment. I would venture
to suggest that human life, roughly speaking, may be divided into two
great parts, one of which is completely tabooed by Mr. Shaw. These two
parts or aspects of life may be named and envisaged in a hundred
different ways. Aristotle called them the "practical" and the
"theoretic." The Roman Church called them the "temporal" and the
"spiritual." The social philosophers called them the "State" and the
"Individual." They may be called "Science" and "Art," "Politics" and
"Poetry," "Public" and "Private," "Social" and "Personal," "Public Work"
(Shaw) and "The Will of God," "Philanthropy" and "Friendship," "Justice"
and "Mercy," "Humanitarian" and "Human." Each second term in these
categories is cut clean out of modern life by Mr. Shaw. When he says
that "Ibsen was to the last fascinating and full of a strange moving
beauty," he says it as if he were reproaching Ibsen. His whole influence
is thrown on to the side of an austere common sense which destroys
emotion because it may become fanaticism, which laughs at sentiment
because it may be perverted into nonsense, which is as Puritanically
cruel to the insidious blandishments of romance as Plato was cruel to
the poets.
Is it fanciful to imagine that it is with the Irishman as I have
always fancied it was with the Greek philosopher, that by reason of
his own knowledge of the dangerous burning fever of poetry, from his
own susceptibility to its enchantments, he decided to crown the poets
with garlands and banish them to another city? That, indeed, is an
idle fancy. Mr. Shaw exists to prove that there are Irishmen who do
not suffer from the intoxication of beauty, who are not susceptible to
the windy ardours of romance. Nevertheless Mr. Shaw, too, has his
romance. He learnt it in the eager, fighting days when he held up the
standard of Fabianism before the blinking eyes of suburban audiences;
when he learnt to detest the silly ways of silly people whose
silliness was feebly glorified under the names of morality, religion,
sentiment, and patriotism; whose qualities he soon found himself
exposing in the manner habitual to the trained debater. But this was
no ordinary debater. There were conviction, sincerity, and even
romantic--God save the word!--_romantic_ zeal behind this fire of
argument, laughter, repartee. Life had become for him, as he said to
Dr. Henderson, "a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for
the moment." It became his business "to make it burn as brightly as
possible before handing it on to future generations."
II
H.G. WELLS
Mr. Shaw has said that his biography will be the history of his time.
In like manner we might say of Mr. Wells that his life has represented
the English life of his time. The former has touched this English life
at a thousand points, but he has touched it from the outside. The
latter has been an integral part of it, a part which has sprung into
consciousness of itself, so that he has written from within outwards.
Inevitably in writing about the England of his time he has found
himself writing about that England of which he himself is symbolic.
Mr. Shaw is amazingly clever in generalising about England, in
reducing England to formulæ, in expressing the ideas which her life
and society have stirred in his logical mind. But Mr. Wells has felt
this national life within himself; he has known it by conscious and
subconscious experience, this experience being with him a kind of
instinct developing into self-knowledge, and so into a more objective
and philosophical perception. You can tell from Mr. Shaw's light,
debonair, and laughing manner, just as you might guess from his rather
hard and unemotional writing, that experience of living has laid no
heavy toll upon his temperament. How different that nervous and
slightly self-conscious manner of Mr. Wells, that exterior geniality
which never wholly possesses the man, a cover, as it were, to those
inner springs of consciousness to which he has evidently referred the
world!
It was strange when these two men, presenting so marked a contrast,
confronted each other at the Fabian Society--that association of
well-informed, constructive, slightly academic Socialists to which
both at the time belonged. It was evident that Bernard Shaw, supported
by Sidney Webb, standing for a perfectly clear-cut policy and program,
should win the day against a man whose appeal was essentially to
something not clear-cut, not defined, but to instinct and psychology.
I have been told that Mr. Wells was never able to put forward a
coherent program, to state an intelligible case--but all that I know
for certain is that it was not intelligible to the Fabians. It is
probable enough that his program, as a program, was defective, for
whilst it is perfectly easy to define a simple, definite, not widely
inclusive policy of action, it is far harder to define that side of
the life of a nation which belongs to temperament and instinct. This
was what Mr. Wells had in mind; but the social reformers to whom he
addressed himself preferred a definite scheme touching the surface of
life to an indefinite scheme which aimed at the centre. So Mr. Wells
ceased to be a Fabian, and became a Tory-Socialist.
I suggest that Mr. Wells' life and activity may be taken as symbolical
of the life of his time. He has told his own story again and again in
his novels; it is his own story that he has been telling when he
unfolds his ideas about the society in which we live. He, more than
any other considerable living writer, seems to have been born to
realise within the microcosm of his own experience the social
evolution which most of us see in the macrocosm of the nation--an
evolution which has been _observed_ by Mr. Bennett with equal
clearness, but in a less personal and subjective way, with more
detachment. All of us know from the study of history in what way
England has changed in the last hundred years--how scientific thought
suddenly gained a new importance when it was applied to industry--how
the shell of feudalism survived its vitality when the great factory
towns began to dominate the country--how all the classes were shuffled
and left unsettled--how the cities spread out in disorderly suburbs
and slums, without plan or direction--how men and women became factory
workers and office workers without knowing why, most of them scantily
educated, housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit, and
flung into the maelstrom of competitive labour. All this we knew in a
certain sense, but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us
aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible
effective way, the imaginative way. It may almost be said that he gave
it to us as an impressionistic account of his own life. He had lived
in all this; the social system, or lack of system, had expressed
itself in him; and finally he became conscious of all those elements
about him and in him which had left their deep impression. Most of us
have had an experience in some way similar, though not many of us have
been so intimately acquainted with so many classes, so many varieties
of people, or have felt our experiences so acutely. He was singular in
that he found his way to an expression of those effects which the
national life had had upon _him_--that is to say, upon a man who had
been brought up in a lower middle-class family in the Victorian era,
who had watched the London suburbs creeping outwards, who had lived
among shop-assistants, who had studied science in laboratories, who
had aspired to something more fruitful for the spirit. He did not
become aware of these significances all at once. The first eager
desire to express himself and create took the form of those early
romantic stories--_The Invisible Man_, _The Descent of the Martians_,
_The Time Machine_, etc.--stories in which his knowledge of science
and Jules Verne were not yet allied to a philosophic enthusiasm for
human beings in society. Then he began to be conscious of the great
problems of society, and generalised about them in his romantic,
ingenious, philosophically imaginative way in such books as
_Anticipations_, _A Modern Utopia_, etc., until he began to realise
that that personal method which he had adopted in _Kipps_ was the best
method of expressing the consciousness now awake in him of his own
life, of his relations with the people he had met and the country he
had lived in, and of the vague, restless desires--desires cast in the
mould of this material world, yet half mystical in their nature--which
had first made him percipient, then critical and dissatisfied, then
critical and irritable, then critical and religious, and
afterwards--it remains to be seen.
It was in _Tono-Bungay_ that Mr. Wells achieved an unquestionable
success. When he wrote that book it seemed that all the experiences of
which hitherto he had been only partially conscious became clear to
him; that all the clever but unrelated literary efforts which he had
hitherto made found here their clue and connecting link, their
inspired synthesis. Long before this he had written astonishing,
ingenious, philosophic, shrewd, suggestive books, but he had achieved
no success on this scale. Here he seemed to have brought together all
the threads of his many intellectual energies, and woven them into a
single fabric fit for wear-and-tear and adornment. At the first he had
written romances such as Jules Verne would have been glad to write; he
had gone on to project new worlds constructed after analysis of the
present, or in anticipation of the future, or ideally from the ideal;
he had written comic stories and weird stories, and one or two true
stories; and he had turned to economics and political science with
reforming zeal. But here we have it all again, not in parts, but as a
comprehensive whole, in a novel which asks us to consider every class
in the social ladder in modern England, which questions the whole
organisation of our society, which raises central questions about
birth, marriage, religion, death, and survival, and presents the whole
as a personal and human affair.
Mr. Wells set himself to this task in his own queer, plodding, English
way. To the niceties of style and form he paid little attention. He
tells the story as best he can, in his own slangy, cumbrous,
Latin-English, but idiomatic way--there is little selection or
self-suppression, but he makes his points. He draws from a copious
store. Considered as social satire, it is an exposure of the silliness
and futility of our system of competitive capitalism superimposed on
feudalism. Or you may take it as a book of adventure, and find our
hero and his erratic uncle plunging into orgies of hazardous exploits
and achievements. Or you may take it as a novel of love, and languish
with the hero in a misdirected amour, and burn with him in a glorious,
futile, and tragic affection. Or you may take it as a novel of
England, of the many currents of English life joining in one vast
stream on which the barque of the narrator floats. "'This,' it came to
me, 'is England. This is what I wanted to give in my book. This!'" And
this, the vision which comes to Mr. Wells through a kind of instinct
about the life he has experienced and sought to convey--the vague
dream that haunts and baffles him--the desired, intangible,
dimly-felt, but unknown thing--is offered as a kind of mystical
solution to the insoluble problem of an imperfect world.
The title--it is typical of Mr. Wells--suggests at once the farcical
element in the whole thing. Tono-Bungay--a quack medicine, "slightly
injurious rubbish" sold at "one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a
bottle, including the Government stamp." We can only approach
Tono-Bungay, which is modern and representative of our whole
industrial system, by way of something prior to it--the old social
order which exists only as a tradition, which is maintained as a vast,
stupid, demoralising pretence, undermined by Tono-Bungayism. The old
order, in Mr. Wells' language, is called the Bladesover System,
Bladesover being the house where "I," George Ponderevo, the
housekeeper's son--one of the many incarnations of the author
himself--was born, brought up, and acquired his first impressions of
life.
The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers, and
the servants in their stations and degrees seemed to me, I say,
to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other
villages and great estates, and from house to house,
interlacing, correlated, the gentry, the fine Olympians, came
and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of shops,
marketing-places for the tenantry, centres for such education as
they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village
and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of
the whole world.
"All this fine appearance was already sapped." George himself, as a
boy, had already begun to "question the final rightness of the
gentlefolks," declaring his rebellion by "resolving to marry a
viscount's daughter" and blacking the eye of her half-brother. He is
transported to the house of Nicodemus Frapp, baker, of Chatham, where
he again rebels, this time against the threat of being burned for ever
in Hell. Thence he is taken to the house of his uncle Ponderevo,
chemist, of Wimblehurst, a small town dominated, like Bladesover, by
the landed gentry tradition. And he finds in this uncle, whose name is
soon to become a household word throughout the country, a veritable
embodiment of the new spirit which is invading the Bladesover system
and altering England. Mr. Ponderevo is restless and discontented. He
does not like Wimblehurst. "One rubs along. But there's no
development--no growth. They just come along here and buy pills when
they want 'em--and a horse-ball or such. They've got to be ill before
there's a prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to
launch out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new."
Mr. Ponderevo, being bankrupt, moves to London, and in the course of
time George, now a student of science, follows him. New vistas of life
open up in the midst of this vast, overgrown, "purposeless," "dingy"
city. Nobody since Dickens has given us the impression of London in
all its multitudinous, dismal-gay activities as Mr. Wells gives it us.
But it is no longer the London of Dickens. It is a "great, stupid
giantess," a "city of Bladesover ... parasitically occupied,
insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic, and irresponsible
elements." It was a chaotic mass of houses built for the middle-class
Victorian families. And even while these houses were being run up:
Means of transit were developing to carry the moderately
prosperous middle-class families out of London; education and
factory employment were whittling away at the supply of rough
hard-working, obedient girls who would stand the subterranean
drudgery of these places; new classes of hard-up middle-class
people such as my uncle, employees of various types, were coming
into existence, for whom no homes were provided. None of these
classes have ideas of what they ought to be, or fit in any
legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that dominates our
minds. It was nobody's concern to see them housed under
civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and
demand had free play.
It was such a London, such an England, which offered itself invitingly
to the predatory ambitions of Mr. Ponderevo, so that out of a simple
concoction of drugs and water he was able to capture the money of
hundreds of thousands who fondly believed that Tono-Bungay would give
them new vigour and zest in life. Mr. Wells describes to us the sudden
rise and development of Mr. Ponderevo, to whose fortunes those of
George are linked; he tells us how he grows in importance, how he
moves into houses larger and larger to suit his new place in the
social scale, how vast a position he comes to hold in the financial
world of London, in the philanthropic world, and, of course, in the
social world.
It is whilst he is interesting us in George and his associates that
Mr. Wells makes us aware also of the higher unit of society and the
whole strange fraud of modern life, the pretence that there has been
no change when conditions have radically changed and are still
changing. The theory of the old order broods over the new, chaotic,
haphazard world which flings people up and down, sets their whole
life--birth, marriage, possessions, happiness--at the mercy of mere
chance. In the love interest which is an important part of the story
he presents the modern treatment of marriage and sex as another
disastrous example of muddling and disorder.
But he does not dwell long or didactically on each of these problems.
They arise naturally and inevitably, as a part of human life, in the
course of his story of adventure and love. He does not pretend to
solve the perplexing questions. The hero feels that he is "like a man
floundering in a universe of soap-suds, up and down, east and west."
"I can't stand it. I must get my foot on something solid or--I don't
know what." Behind it all, in its chaos and ugliness, he does not lose
the sense of something other and better, a vague but insistent ideal
cherished by the spirit. "There is something links things for me, a
sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something there was in
Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in Mantegna's
pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make."
There, evidently enough, is something that the artist, the poet even,
wants. It is the mystical need, the desideratum, expressed in terms of
this world's goods--"Marion's form and colour," "Mantegna's pictures,"
the lines of a boat. If there is any solution here, let it be noted
that it is essentially an individual, a personal solution, the
artist's solution of the world-problem in terms of what is personally
significant to individuals. But when applied to men and women in the
mass, how thin and watery this ideal becomes, how unsubstantial and
shadowy, how unsuited to the collective needs of society, which are
practical and material. Every man in his public, social capacity must
necessarily express his ideals in a material and practical form; the
mystical side can only find expression in the private life, in the
personal way which is the way of art and individual intercourse. But
when Mr. Wells became dimly aware of the personal equation in life and
the personal ideal, he, who had already dedicated himself to the
treatment of social problems and men in the mass, attempted, by
mystical contradiction, to identify the private and the public, the
ideal with the material, the free with the bound. To make my meaning
clearer, I will recall again the incident at the Fabian Society. It is
just as if Mr. Wells had gone to that mixed gathering of austere and
flippant socialists, and had said, "We want something to link things
for us; we must remember the things that men cherish most of all, a
sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air. When we are settling the
women's question, we must not forget that Marion cares more about her
form and colour than about her vote; and if we are nationalising the
great masters, let us remember that there is something we may find and
lose in a single Mantegna more important to us than all the galleries
in the world. The derelict 'Victory,' with her romantic lines, means
as much to the nation as the biggest Dreadnought in the world."
And we can imagine Mr. Shaw getting up to question the novelist. "Will
Mr. Wells explain to us how the State is going to preserve Marion's
colour? Does he propose to arrange sunset effects on Primrose Hill?
Will he describe the apparatus by which he intends to capture and
bottle the high air, and distribute it for public consumption? And
where are we to look for the something to be found in Mantegna's
pictures when he has been so unfortunate as to lose it?"
Mr. Wells, naturally enough, broke with the Fabian Society; and at
the same time, discovering the inadequacy of his remedy, broke with
the whole social order, resigned himself for a time to sheer
irritation, and took his revenge upon the world in _The New
Machiavelli_. He devoted his brilliant powers to satirising the whole
public life of Great Britain, in the same breath lampooning the public
persons with whom he had been personally associated, and defending
himself against certain personal charges which had been brought
against him.
It was an effective book. It occasioned not a little gossip,
excitement, scandal, and even heart-burning. Though the author
announced that the persons in the novel were composite characters, not
to be taken as likenesses of real persons, and though no doubt there
were scenes and conversations which he had invented and incidents
which he had transposed, nevertheless in many essentials the story was
photographic. Mr. Wells himself was never, like his hero Remington,
either at Cambridge or in Parliament, but he came under the same
educational, social, and political influences which determined
Remington's character and career. Remington's friends, who are exposed
in all the intimacy of private life to the public gaze, were once,
under other names, the friends of Mr. Wells. No one who has any
acquaintance with public personages in London can fail to identify
those apostles of social organisation, Mr. Bailey and his wife
Altiora. Equally transparent are the young Liberals, Edward and Willie
Crampton. If the novelist has caricatured these persons he has seen to
it that he has never distorted them out of recognition. The realism
with which he describes these and a score of popularly "esteemed"
public men is applied also to their womenkind; Isabel is not spared;
nor is Margaret, Remington's wife.
Here, then, we have what is at the same time Remington's Apologia for
his errors, and his revenge upon the society which decided to
discredit him. He presents himself as an "unarmed, discredited man,"
whose power with the pen cannot be checked; a man "half out of life
already" because of the "red blaze that came out of my unguarded
nature, and closed my career for me;" a man who "cries out of his
heart to the unseen fellowship about him," and to those who "have
heard already some crude inaccurate version of our story and why I did
not take office, and have formed your partial judgment on me."
Remington's reply to the man who urges him to hush up the scandal
gives a colour of personal disinterestedness to the story.