CHAPTER I

THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS

BY

VAN WYCK BROOKS

NEW YORK

MITCHELL KENNERLEY

MCMXV

_To_

_Max Lippitt Larkin_

CONTENTS

Introduction

I. The First Phase

II. Towards Socialism

III. Socialism "True and False"

IV. The Philosophy of the New Republican

V. Human Nature

VI. A Personal Chapter

VII. The Spirit of Wells

INTRODUCTION

A natural pause appears to have come in the career of Mr. H.G. Wells.

After so many years of travelling up and down through time and space,

familiarizing himself with all the various parts of the solar system and

presenting himself imaginatively at all the various geological epochs,

from the Stone Age to the end of the world, he has for good and all

domesticated himself in his own planet and point of time. This gradual

process of slowing down, so to speak, had been evident from the moment

of his first appearance. The most obvious fact about his romances of

science, considered as a series, is that each one more nearly approached

the epoch in which we live, and the realities of this epoch. From the

year A.D. 802, 701, witnessed in his first romance by the Time

Traveller, we found ourselves at last in the presence of a decade only

so remote as that of the war which has now befallen Europe. A similar

tendency in his novels has been equally marked. The possibilities of

science and socialism have received a diminishing attention relatively

beside the possibilities of human reaction to science and socialism. It

is individual men and women, and the motives and personalities of

individual men and women, which now concern him. Still retaining the

entire planet as the playground of his ideas, still upholding science

and socialism as his essential heroes, he has been driven by experience

to approach these things through human nature as it is. In a recent

essay he has told us not to expect any more dramatic novelties: for the

present at any rate our business must be to make science and socialism

feel at home. Whether or not this may stand as a general diagnosis of

our epoch, it is a remarkable confession with regard to his own place in

it. For it signifies nothing less than that he has reached the limit of

his own circle of ideas and finished his own pioneering, and that his

work for the future will be to relate the discoveries of his youth with

human experience. He is no longer a "new voice"; his work belongs, for

good or ill, to history and literature, and he presents himself from

this time forward as a humanist.

In this new posture Wells does not stand alone. He is typical of an

entire generation of Englishmen that knows not Oxford, a generation

which has been busy with all manner of significant movements and

discoveries, too busy indeed to relate them to the common reason of

humankind. During these years the word "academic" has been outlawed;

naturally so, for the academic mind is to the creative mind what the

digestive system is to the human body: a period of energetic exercise

must precede its operation. But in order that ideas may be incorporated

in society they must submit themselves at the right moment to those

digestive processes by which they are liquefied and transmitted through

the veins to all the various members of the common organism.

During the last twenty years modern thought has been dominated to an

extraordinary degree by men who have been educated solely through the

movements in which they have taken part: seldom has there been so

universal and so hectic an empiricism. But this is the way the earth

moves. Like an inchworm it doubles itself up at intervals and then

gradually stretches itself straight again. The whole nineteenth century,

according to Taine, was occupied in working out two or three ideas

concocted in Germany during the Napoleonic era. History is a succession

of Gothic invasions and academic subversions. It marks the end of one of

those eras which perpetually overlap one another in various groups of

men and cycles of thought that our own Visigoths have capitulated. As

the pressure of their own immediate points of view relaxes and they

cease to identify their own progress with the progress of men in

general, they become perhaps less striking but certainly more useful.

Intensely preoccupied with contemporary ideas and inventions,

brilliantly gifted and full of life, these leaders of thought were more

innocent of literature and history than a fresh-man. Both Wells and

Bernard Shaw have confessed that throughout their most active

intellectual careers they believed instinctively that progress was

mainly a matter of chronology. To discover the future Wells considered

it necessary merely to set his imagination at work on Chicago and

multiply it by a thousand; while the famous remark of Shaw that he was

"better than Shakespeare" sprang from his assumption that, living three

centuries later, he naturally stood (as a dwarf, in his own phrase) upon

Shakespeare's shoulders. This naïveté placed them at the mercy of

literature, as they soon discovered. Everyone knows the change that came

over Bernard Shaw's cosmos when for the first time, a few years ago, he

read two or three pre-Darwinian philosophers: one could almost have

heard a pin drop when he stopped talking about being better than

Shakespeare. A similar experience, exhibited in his books, has befallen

Wells, and there is no doubt that reading has contributed to the

progressive modesty of his point of view. Each monument of historic

experience that he has absorbed has left its mark on him. Rabelais,

Machiavelli, Plato, incorporated at regular intervals in his own work,

have certainly contributed to make him less agile and less dramatic.

Let us take advantage of these post-prandial moments to survey some of

the remarkable ideas which have been added to the general stock during

this period. After the fashion of Cato, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells have

come late to the study of Greek. Bernard Shaw read Plato at fifty, and

in his latest book Wells has insisted that in the Great State everyone

will study Greek. Nothing could signify more plainly that these

outriders of the Modern Mind have come to a halt and wish to connect

themselves with tradition, with history, with literature, with religion,

with the grand current of human experience. Having been for so long

experimenting with new and untried forces, sharply separated from what

is received and understood, they should be related to the familiar

landmarks and connected with the main stream of English thought and

literature.

Grotesque and violent as it may at first appear, I believe that in the

future Wells will be thought of as having played toward his own epoch a

part very similar to that played by Matthew Arnold. I say this with full

recognition of their remoteness in personal quality, recognizing also

the difference in their direct objects of attack, in the precise causes

they uphold. One thinks of these two vivid personalities--Wells--how

shall one picture him?--and Matthew Arnold, that superb middle-class

gentleman with his great face and deprecating hands--and the comparison

is instantly ludicrous. In reality the entire trend of Arnold's social

criticism was anti-individualistic and in a straight line with

socialism. Seen retrospectively the main work of Wells has not been to

promote any intellectual or economic doctrine, but to alter the English

frame of mind. The function of each of these men has been to bring home

to the English mind a range of ideas not traditional in it.

Indeed this comparison holds (the shock once over) not merely with

regard to their general function, but in their specific attitude toward

most of the branches of thought and action they have concerned

themselves with. Wells on Education, on Criticism, on Politics and the

nostrums of Liberalism, Wells even on Religion continues the propaganda

of Arnold. Everywhere in these so superficially dissimilar writings is

exhibited the same fine dissatisfaction, the same faith in ideas and

standards, the same dislike of heated bungling, plunging, wilfulness,

and confusion; even the same predominant contempt for most things that

are, the same careful vagueness of ideal. It was Arnold who passed his

life in trying to make England believe in and act upon ideas instead of

"muddling through," who never wearied of holding up the superiority of

everything French and everything German to everything English, who

adopted into his own language that phrase about "seeing things as in

themselves they really are." Read his chapter on _Our Liberal

Practitioners_ and you will find the precise attitude of Wells toward

the premature inadequate doing of things rather than the continued

research, experiment, and discipline which lead to right fulfilments.

Who urged the ventilation of life, affairs, conduct in the light of

world experience? Who preached the gospel of reasonableness, mutual

understanding, and more light? Who spurred England to cultivate the

virtue of intellectual curiosity? Who believed with a paradoxical

passion in coolness and detachment? In each of these things what Arnold

was to his generation Wells remarkably has been to ours. Differing in

their view of the substance of religion, their conception of the Church

as a great common receptacle for the growing experience of the race is

precisely the same, fragmentation, segregation, sectarianism being to

both of them in this matter the greatest of evils. The love of

curiosity, centrality, ventilation, detachment, common understanding,

coolness and reasonableness and a realistic vision, the dislike of

confusion, bungling, wilfulness, incompetence, hot-headedness,

complacency, sectarianism--these are quite fundamental traits, and

Arnold and Wells share them in a remarkable degree. It is quite true

that Arnold lived in a universe which only with some reluctance

confessed to three dimensions, while that of Wells trembles with the

coming of a fourth. But in any case it is worth while to release a

phenomenon like Wells from the medium of purely contemporary influences,

and for this purpose it is convenient to see a socialist in the light of

a man who knew nothing of socialism, to see that socialism is itself a

natural outgrowth of those "best things that have been thought and said

in the world." It is important to realize that the train of thought and

the circle of ideas of this man are connected with a well-recognized

branch of intellectual tradition. And even socialism is benefitted by

having friends at court.

CHAPTER I

THE FIRST PHASE

"I am, by a sort of predestination, a socialist," Wells wrote once. And

everything one can say of him serves merely to explain, justify,

qualify, illuminate and refine that statement.

First of all it implies a certain disposition and certain habits of

mind, habits of mind which are all to be found in the first phase of his

work, in those marvellous tales of Time and Space that won him his

original sensational fame. It is this disposition behind them, this

quality they have as of an inevitable attitude toward life and the

world, which distinguishes them at once from those other superficially

similar tales of Jules Verne. The marvels of Jules Verne are just

marvels, delightful, irresponsible plunderings from a helpless universe.

To the grown-up mind they have a little of that pathetic futility one

associates with a millionaire's picture-gallery, where all sorts of

things have been brought together, without any exercise of inevitable

personal choice, because they are expensive. I don't know that the tales

of Wells are better tales, but they have that ulterior synthetic quality

that belongs to all real expressions of personality. Wells was never

merely inventive; his invention was the first stage of an imaginative

growth.

Now the quality that pervades all these early writings is what may be

called a sense of the infinite plasticity of things. He conceived a

machine that could travel through time, a man who found a way to become

invisible, a drug that made men float like balloons, another drug that

enabled men to live a thousand hours in one, a crystal egg through which

one could watch the life in Mars, a man who could stop the sun like

Joshua, a food that turned men into giants, a biologist who discovered a

method of carving animals into men, an angel who visited a rural vicar,

a mermaid who came to earth in search of a soul, a homicidal orchid, a

gigantic bird hatched from a prehistoric egg, a man who passed outside

space. In short, the universe appeared to him like that magic shop of

which he also wrote, where the most astonishing things may happen, if

you are the Right Sort of Boy.

If all this implies anything it implies that things in general are not

fixed and static, but that they are, on the contrary, infinitely

plastic, malleable, capable of responding to any purpose, any design you

may set working among them. The universe, it seems to assume, may be and

quite possibly is proceeding after some logical method of its own, but

so far as man is concerned this method appears to be one of chance.

Obviously, man can do the most surprising things in it, can take as it

were all sorts of liberties with it. The universe, in short, is like a

vacant field which may or may not belong to some absent landlord who has

designs of his own upon it; but until this absent landlord appears and

claims his field, all the children in the neighborhood can build huts in

it and play games upon it and, in a word, for all practical purposes,

consider it their own.

This idea of the relation between free will and determinism is the

underlying assumption of Wells, as he explains it in _First and Last

Things_:

Take life at the level of common sensations and common

experience and there is no more indisputable fact than man's

freedom of will, unless it is his complete moral

responsibility. But make only the least penetrating of

scientific analyses and you perceive a world of inevitable

consequences, a rigid succession of cause and effect.

And elsewhere he says:

On the scientific plane one is a fatalist.... But does the

whole universe of fact, the external world about me, the

mysterious internal world from which my motives rise, form

one rigid and fated system as Determinists teach? I incline

to that belief.... From me as a person this theory of

predestination has no practical value.... I hesitate, I

choose just as though the thing was unknowable. For me and

my conduct there is that much wide practical margin of

freedom. I am free and freely and responsibly making the

future--so far as I am concerned.

In a word, for all the purposes that affect man's need the universe is

infinitely plastic and amenable to his will. Like every clean-cut

philosophical conception, this clears the ground for practical conduct

and a certain sort of direct action.

There was a time, no doubt, when he shared the old Utopian folly of

expecting a sudden and unanimous change of human will. When the universe

appears as unconventional as it used to appear to Wells, there can

surely be no reason to think it impossible, after a comet has collided

with the world, for the human race to become suddenly Utopian. Generally

speaking, comets do not collide with the world, and in the same way men

are slow to change. But certainly if Wells ever thought of humanity as

merely a multiplication of one pattern, certainly if he has long since

abandoned the idea of our all turning over a new leaf one fine morning,

he has never lost his faith in free will as regards the individual. He

has always believed in the personal doctrine of summarily "making an end

to things" as distinguished from the old-fashioned doctrine of "making

the best of things"; and there is nothing more modern about him than his

aversion to the good old English theory of "muddling through."

Mr. Polly is a good example of his view of personal direct action, the

getting rid, quickly and decisively, of a situation that has only

sentiment to save it from complete demoralization. "When a man has once

broken through the wall of every-day circumstances," he remarks at the

moment of the Polly _débâcle_, "he has made a discovery. If the world

does not please you, _you can change it_. Determine to alter it at any

price, and you can change it altogether." Mr. Polly sets fire to his

shop, takes to the road and repairs his digestion. Desertion of duty and

the quick repudiation of entanglements make him healthy and sensible and

give him a sense of purpose in things. And I know of nothing in all

Wells that is described with more relish than that Beltane festival

which occurs toward the end of _In the Days of the Comet_. The world's

great age has begun anew, and the enlightened men of the new time revive

the May Day of old in order to burn the useless trappings of the past.

They heap old carpets on the fire, ill-designed furniture, bad music and

cheap pictures, stuffed birds, obsolete school-books, dog-eared penny

fiction, sham shoes, and all the corrugated iron in the world; every

tangible thing that is useless, false, disorderly, accidental, obsolete,

and tawdry to celebrate the beginning of things that are clean,

beautiful, and worthy. Sceptical, hesitant, and personal as Wells has

become, that indicates a strong primitive mental trait. Philosophy does

not spring out of the brain; we hate the hateful things of our own

experience, just as we think the things we desire. And though there are

nine and sixty ways of being a socialist, they all unite in a certain

sense of the plasticity and malleability of things human, a certain

faith in the possibility of asserting order in the midst of disorder and

intelligently cleaning house.

Inherent in this trait is another--detachment. You only become aware of

confusion when you stand free of it, when you cease to be a part of it.

And of all writers who have so immediately felt life I doubt if there

has been one so detached as Wells. The mental detachment of his early

tales is a detachment half scientific, half artistic; scientific as of

one who sees things experimentally in their material, molecular aspect,

artistic as of one conscious of moulding will and placed amid plastic

material. Thus, for example, he sees human beings quite stripped of

their distinctively human qualities; he sees men anatomically, as in

that passage where the Invisible Man, killed with a spade, becomes

visible again as a corpse:

Everyone saw, faint and transparent as though it were made

of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and nerves

could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp

and prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as they

stared.... And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet

and creeping along his limbs to the vital centres of his

body, that strange change continued. First came the little

white nerves, a hazy gray stretch of a limb, then the glossy

bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first

a faint fogginess, then growing rapidly dense and opaque.

Similar is a passage in _A Story of the Days to Come_, where he

describes an ordinary breakfast of our own day: "the rude masses of

bread needing to be carved and smeared over with animal fat before they

could be made palatable, the still recognizable fragments of recently

killed animals, hideously charred and hacked." That surely is quite as a

man from another planet, or a chemist after a long day's work in the

laboratory, would view our familiar human things. And one recalls

another sentence from _Kipps_ where this detachment links itself with a

deeper social insight and hints at the part it had come to play in

Wells's later mind: "I see through the darkness," he says, toward the

end of the book, "the souls of my Kippses as they are, _as little pink

strips of quivering, living stuff_, as things like the bodies of little

ill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children--children who feel pain, who

are naughty and muddled and suffer, and do not understand why."

And just as he sees men and human things chemically and anatomically, so

he sees the world astronomically. He has that double quality (like his

own Mr. Bessel) of being bodily very active in life and at the same time

watching it from a great distance. In his latest book he has figured a

god looking on from the clouds; and there is nothing in his novels more

stimulating and more uncanny than a certain faculty of telescoping his

view suddenly from the very little to the very large, expanding and

contracting his vision of things at will. You find the germ of this

faculty in his early tales. Looking down as though from a balloon he

sees the world as a planet, as a relatively small planet. In doing so he

maintains at first a purely scientific set of values; he is not led, as

he has since been led, and as Leopardi was led by the same imaginative

experience, to adopt poetical values and to feel acutely the littleness

and the powerlessness of man. His values remain scientific, and the

absurdity he feels is the absurdity an astronomer must feel, that in so

small a space men can vaunt themselves and squabble with one another.

Race prejudice, for example, necessarily appears to him as foolish as it

would appear to ordinary eyes among insects that happen to be swarming

on a fallen apple. Once you get it into your mind that the world is a

ball in space, you find a peculiar silliness in misunderstandings on

that ball. This reflection has led to many views of life; in Wells it

led to a sense of the need of human solidarity.

And solidarity implies order. The sense of order is one of those

instincts exhibited everywhere in the writings of Wells that serve as

preliminaries to his social philosophy. There is a passage in _Kipps_

where he pictures the satisfactions of shopkeeping to an elect soul:

"There is, of course, nothing on earth," he says, "and I doubt at times

if there is a joy in heaven, like starting a small haberdasher's shop.

Imagine, for example, having a drawerful of tapes, or again, an array of

neat, large packages, each displaying one sample of hooks and eyes.

Think of your cottons, your drawer of colored silks," etc. De Foe knew a

similar satisfaction and has pictured it in _Robinson Crusoe_. De Foe

was himself a shopkeeper, just as Wells has been in one of his

incarnations; and he knew that good shopkeeping is the microcosm of all

good political economy. The satisfaction of a thoroughly competent man

who is thrown on a desert island, and sets to work to establish upon it

a political economy for one, is a satisfaction by itself. That certainly

is a primitive relish, and it is one of the first gestures of Wells's

sociology.

Now the sense of solidarity, the sense of order, implies the

subordination of details, the discipline of constituent units. Only in

his later works did Wells begin to consider the problems of the

individual life; in his novels he has considered them almost

exclusively, but always in relation to the constructive purpose of

society and as what may be called human reservations from it. The

telescope has been adjusted to a close range, and the wider

relationships are neither so emphasized nor so easily discerned.

Nevertheless it is still the world that matters to Wells--the world, the

race, the future; not the individual human being. And if, relatively, he

has become more interested in the individual and less in the world, that

is because he is convinced that the problems of the world can best be

approached through the study of individuals. His philosophy has grown

less abstract in harmony with his own experience; but the first sketch

of his view of human nature and its function is to be found crudely

outlined in the scientific romances. How does it figure there?

The human beings who flit through these early tales are all

inconspicuous little men, whose private existence is of no account, and

who exist to discover, invent, perform all sorts of wonderful

experiments which almost invariably result in their summary and quite

unimportant destruction. They are merely, in the most complete sense,

experiments in the collective purpose, and their creator has toward them

just the attitude of an anatomist toward the animals upon which he is

experimenting; not indifferent to their suffering as suffering, but

ignoring it in the spirit of scientific detachment necessary to

subordinate means to an end. "I wanted--it was the only thing I

wanted--to find out the limit of plasticity in a living form," says Dr.

Moreau in his confession; "and the study has made me as remorseless as

nature."

Invariably these experiments in human possibility, placed in a world

where charity is not so strong as fear, die quite horribly. Dr. Moreau

is destroyed by the beasts he is attempting to vivisect into the

semblance of men, the Invisible Man is battered to death with a spade,

the Visiting Angel burns to death in attempting to carry out his

celestial errand, the man who travels to the moon cannot get back alive.

Does not all this foreshadow the burden of the later novels, that the

individual who plans and wills for the race is destroyed and broken by

the jealousy, prejudice and inertia in men and the blind immemorial

forces of nature surging through himself? These are the forces that are

figured, in the early tales, by that horrible hostile universe of

nature, and the little intrepid men moving about in the midst of it. And

the mind of Wells is always prepared for the consequences of what it

engenders. The inevitable result of creating an imaginary world of

malignant vegetables and worse than antediluvian monsters is that the

imaginary men you also create shall suffer through them. You reverse the

order of evolution and return men to conditions where life is cheap. An

imagination which has accustomed itself to running loose among planets

and falling stars, which has lived habitually in a universe where worlds

battle with one another, is prepared to stomach a little needless

bloodshed. The inflexible pursuit of an end implies the sacrifice of

means, and if your experiment happens to be an invisible man you will

produce the invisibility even though it kills the man.

Widen the range and this proposition logically transmutes itself into a

second: if your experiment happens to be an orderly society you will

produce order at the expense of everything that represents disorder. And

from the point of view of a collective purpose, ends, motives and

affections that are private and have no collective significance

represent disorder. Now the whole purpose of Wells's later work has been

to illuminate and refine this proposition. He has flatly distinguished

between two sorts of human nature, the constructive, experimental sort

which lives essentially for the race, and the acquiescent, ineffectual

sort which lives essentially for itself or the established fact; and he

gives to his experimental men and women an almost unlimited charter to

make ducks and drakes of the ineffectual. Think of the long list of dead

and wounded in his novels--Mr. Pope, Mr. Stanley, Mr. Magnet, Mr.

Manning, Margaret, Marion--and you realize how much of a certain

cruelty, a certain ruthlessness is in the very nature of his philosophy

of experimental direct action.

Another primitive relish exhibited in these early tales is the delight

of constructing things. The Time Machine, for example, is the work of a

mind that immoderately enjoys inventing, erecting, and putting things

together; and there is not much difference between constructing an

imaginary machine and constructing an imaginary society. If Wells's

early Utopian speculations are ingenious impossibilities, are they any

more or less so than his mechanical speculations? One doesn't begin life

with an overwhelming recognition of the obstacles one may encounter--one

doesn't fret too much about the possible, the feasible, or even the

logical. It was enough for Wells that he had built his Time Machine,

though the logic by which the Time Traveller explains his process is a

logic that gives me, at least, a sense of helpless, blinking

discomfort--partly, I confess, because to this day I don't believe there

is anything the matter with it. In any case it is the sheer delight of

construction that fascinates him, and everything that is associated with

construction fascinates him. He is in love with steel; he speaks with a

kind of ecstasy somewhere of "light and clean and shimmering shapes of

silvered steel"; steel and iron have for him the transcendental charm

that harebells and primroses had for Wordsworth. A world like that in

_The Sleeper Awakes_--a world of gigantic machines, air fleets, and the

"swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of an engineer's nightmare--is

only by afterthought, one feels, the speculation of a sociologist. It

expresses the primitive relish of a constructive instinct. It expresses

also a sheer curiosity about the future.

In a chapter of his book on America Wells has traced the development of

what he calls his prophetic habit of mind as a passage through four

stages: the millennial stage of an evangelical childhood when an

imminent Battle of Armageddon was a natural thing to be looked for; the

stage of ultimate biological possibilities; the stage of prediction by

the rule-of-three; and a final stage of cautious anticipation based upon

the study of existing facts--a gradual passage from the region of

religious or scientific possibilities to the region of human

probabilities. "There is no Being but Becoming" was the first of his

mental discoveries; and finding years later that Heraclitus had said the

same thing, he came to regard the pre-Aristotelian metaphysics as the

right point of departure for modern thought. Consider this passage:

I am curiously not interested in things and curiously

interested in the consequences of things.... I have come to

be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine immediate

things through this anticipatory habit.... This habit of

mind confronts and perplexes my sense of things that simply

_are_, with my brooding preoccupation with how they will

shape presently, what they will lead to, what seed they will

sow and how they will wear. At times, I can assure the

reader, this quality approaches other-worldliness in its

constant reference to an all-important hereafter. There are

times indeed when it makes life seem so transparent and

flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an equally

transitory series of consequences, that the enhanced sense

of instability becomes restlessness and distress; but on the

other hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, remains

altogether vulgar or dull and dead or hopeless in its

light.... But the interest is shifted. The pomp and splendor

of established order, the braying triumphs, ceremonies,

consummations,--one sees these glittering shows for what

they are--through their threadbare grandeur shine the little

significant things that will make the future.

And the burden of his lecture _The Discovery of the Future_ is that an

inductive knowledge of the future is not only very largely possible, but

is considerably more important for us than the study of the past. Even

in the sciences, he says, the test of their validity is their power to

produce confident forecasts. Astronomy is based on the forecast of

stellar movements, medical science exists largely for diagnosis. It is

this thought which determines the nature of his own sociology.

There is usually something inept in speaking of a man, and especially an

artist, as interchangeable with any ism. Socialism, in the common sense

of the word, is a classification of men. Individual socialists are as a

rule something more than socialists; often they are socialists by

necessity, or imagination, or sentiment, or expediency--their socialism

is not inherent, not the frame of their whole being. In the degree that

socialism is a classification, or a school of thought, or an economic

theory, the individual socialist will, in practice, make mental

reservations from it. Now my whole aim in this chapter has been to

suggest that if socialism had not existed Wells would have invented it.

It is not something which at a given moment or even after a long process

of imaginative conversion or conviction came into his life. It is, in

his own formulation of it, the projection of his whole nature, the

expression of his will, the very content of his art. With one or two

exceptions--works deliberately devoted to propaganda or exposition--even

his purely sociological writings are subjective writings, personal and

artistic in motive; socialism figures in them just as Catholicism

figures in the masses of Mozart, or the brotherhood of man in the poems

of Whitman, not as a cause but as a satisfying conception of truth. And

just as, if one were to study the psychology of Mozart or Whitman, one

would find habits of mind that inevitably produced the individual

Catholicism of the one and the individual fraternalism of the other; so

behind the socialism of Wells are certain habits of mind, certain

primitive likes, relishes, instincts, preferences: a faith in free will,

a sense of order and the subordination of details to design, a personal

detachment, a pleasure in construction, a curiosity about the future.

These are innate qualities, which inevitably produced their own

animating purpose.