TOWARDS SOCIALISM
Of all the battered, blurred, ambiguous coins of speech there is none so
battered, blurred, and ambiguous as the word socialism. It mothers a
dozen creeds at war with one another. And the common enemy looks on,
fortified with the Socratic irony of the "plain man," who believes he
has at last a full excuse for not understanding these devious doings.
Therefore I take refuge in saying that H.G. Wells is an artist, neither
more nor less, that socialism is to him at bottom an artistic idea, and
that if it had not existed in the world he would have invented it. This
clears me at once of the accusing frowns of any possible Marxian reader,
and it also states a truth at the outset. For if the orthodox maintain
that socialism is not an affair of choices, may I not retort that here
actually is a mind that chooses to make it so? Here is an extraordinary
kind of Utopian who has all the equipment of the orthodox and yet
remains detached from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is always jealous of its
tabernacles and will not see itself dramatically; it has no concern with
artistic presentations. But I protest there ought to be no quarrel here.
If a socialism fundamentally artistic is an offence to the orthodox, let
them accept it, without resentment, as a little harmless fun--all art
being that.
Having said so much I return to my own difficulty, for it is very hard
to focus H.G. Wells. He has passed through many stages and has not yet
attained the Olympian repose. Artist as he is, he has been hotly
entangled in practical affairs. There are signs in his early books that
he once shared what Richard Jeffries called the "dynamite
disposition,"--even now he knows, in imagination alone, the joy of black
destruction. He has also been, and ceased to be, a Fabian. But it is
plain that he has passed for good and all beyond the emotional plane of
propaganda. He has abandoned working-theories and the deceptions of the
intellect which make the man of action. He has become at once more
practical and more mystical than a party programme permits one to be.
Here is a world where things are being done--a world of which capital
and labor are but one interpretation. How far can these things and the
men who do them be swept into the service of the race? That is the
practical issue in his mind, and the mystical issue lies in the
intensity and quality of the way in which he feels it.
To see him clearly one has to remember that he is not a synthetic
thinker but a sceptical artist, whose writings are subjective even when
they seem to be the opposite, whose personality is constantly growing,
expanding, changing, correcting itself ("one can lie awake at night and
hear him grow," as Chesterton says), and who believes moreover that
truth is not an absolute thing but a consensus of conflicting individual
experiences, a "common reason" to be wrought out by constant free
discussion and the comparison and interchange of personal discoveries
and ideas. He is not a sociologist, but, so to say, an artist of
society; one of those thinkers who are disturbed by the absence of right
composition in human things, by incompetent draughtsmanship and the
misuse of colors, who see the various races of men as pigments capable
of harmonious blending and the planet itself as a potential work of art
which has been daubed and distorted by ill-trained apprentices. In Wells
this planetary imagination forms a permanent and consistent mood, but it
has the consistency of a mood and not the consistency of a system of
ideas. And though he springs from socialism and leads to socialism, he
can only be called a socialist in the fashion--to adopt a violently
disparate comparison--that St. Francis can be called a Christian. That
is to say, no vivid, fluctuating human being, no man of genius can ever
be embodied in an institution. He thinks and feels it afresh; his
luminous, contradictory, shifting, evanescent impulses may, on the
whole, ally him with this or that aggregate social view, but they will
not let him be subdued to it. As a living, expanding organism he will
constantly urge the fixed idea to the limit of fluidity. So it is with
Wells. There are times when he seems as whimsical as the wind and as
impossible to photograph as a chameleon.
Just here I should like to give what may be taken as his own view of
capital and labor socialism in relation to the constructive socialism he
himself has at heart. I am putting together certain brief passages from
_The Passionate Friends_:
I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems
only by the way. They have played their part in a greater
scheme.... With my innate passionate desire to find the
whole world purposeful, I cannot but believe that....
Strangest of saviours, there rises over the conflicts of men
the glittering angular promise of the machine. There is no
longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not
need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are
no longer essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his
brother man out of the need of servitude. He struggles
through to a new phase, a phase of release, a phase when
leisure and an unexampled freedom are possible to every
human being....
Human thought has begun to free itself from individual
entanglements and dramatic necessities and accidental
standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will
towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or
kingdoms or peoples, a mind and will to which we all
contribute and which none of us may command nor compromise
by our private errors. It ceases to be aristocratic; it
detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us
all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find
ourselves in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and
jealousies and conflicts, helping and serving in the making
of a new world-city, a new greater State above our legal
States, in which all human life becomes a splendid
enterprise, free and beautiful....
I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of
human society. Ours are not economic but psychological
difficulties....
These last two sentences really tell the whole story. To pass from
economics to psychology is to pass from Man to men, from society as a
direct object of attack to the individuals who compose it. And this
marks the evolution of Wells the romancer and Wells the expositor of
socialist doctrine into Wells the novelist. It is the problems of human
interaction that occupy him now. But informing these problems, reaching
behind and embracing them, is a general view of the world which has only
become more intimate, more personal, and more concrete with time.
When, in _New Worlds for Old_, Wells set himself to explain socialism as
he conceived it, he assumed as his first principle a certain Good Will
in men, an operating will steadily working in life toward betterment. In
other words, he supplemented the ordinary socialist idea of economic
determinism, which may or may not inevitably bring about order on the
industrial plane, with a constructive purpose, which, in his view, can
alone bring about the salvation of the race. But this Good Will is not a
fatality; it exists only by virtue of remaining a conscious effort. In
his experiments in Time and Space Wells had accustomed himself to seeing
that the immense possibilities of what might be, so far as the universe
is concerned, predetermined things, were, so far as man is concerned,
matters of chance. To human society at least, if not to our planet, the
most unpropitious things are possible in the future; and there is no
reason to suppose that the destiny of the universe, which at every turn
cuts athwart the destiny of every species contained in it, should, left
to itself, work favorably to man.
This notion is in itself quite outside socialism and does not
necessarily lead into socialism. It was Huxley who said that the world
and the universe, society and nature, are demonstrably at cross
purposes, and that man has to pit his microcosm against the macrocosm.
Huxley, in his famous lecture on _Ethics and Evolution,_ went on from
this to a kind of informal and unavowed socialism, figuring society as a
well-tended garden preserved by man's careful art from the ravages and
invasions of that hostile world of chance, with its gigantic weeds and
blind impulsions, which everywhere lies waiting round about it. Our
work, he implied, must be in every way to minimize for ourselves the
elements of chance, to become aware of our species in a collective
sense, battling with nature and moulding our own future.
I do not suppose that Wells consciously adopted this idea from Huxley.
In itself that would be of little consequence, except so far as it shows
the continuity of thought and the development of socialism out of
science. But Wells was for several years a pupil of Huxley, and it is
reasonably plain that the mood in which he wrote his scientific romances
was strongly impregnated by Huxley's influence. The sinister,
incalculable, capricious, destructive forces outside man are symbolized,
as I have said, by those colliding comets, invading Martians, and
monstrous creatures among which the earlier Wells moved and had his
being; just as the sinister, incalculable, capricious forces within man
which urge him to destruction form so great a part of his later novels.
Most of his heroes (typified in _The New Machiavelli_) come to grief
through the blind irrational impulsions within themselves. And he is
equally haunted by what he has called the "Possible Collapse of
Civilization." I do not know how much this is due to an evangelical
childhood, in which Time, Death, and Judgment are always imminent; how
much to an overbalancing study of science at the expense of the
humanities; how much to an overdeveloped sense of the hazard that life
is; and how much to plain facts. But there it is: it has always been a
fixed conviction with Wells that man personal and man social is dancing
on a volcano.
Therefore he has come to socialism not by the ordinary course but by a
route obscure and lonely. The sense of possible catastrophe and
collapse, the folly of leaving things to chance, the infinite waste and
peril of committing our affairs to nature rather than to art--these are
some of the negative reasons that have made it impossible for him to
fall in with the non-socialist ideal in human affairs, that "broadening
down from precedent to precedent" which he calls "muddling through": a
doctrine that is wholly compatible with a world of haphazard motives,
accidental fortunes, accidental management, a democratic individualism
that places power in irresponsible hands and suppresses talents that
society cannot afford to lose, a governmental system that concerns
itself with legal and financial arrangements, experts with no sense of a
common purpose, patriotisms that thrive on international bad feelings,
and that competitive principle which succeeds in the degree in which it
ignores the general welfare--a chaos of private aims, private virtues,
private motives, without any collective human design at all.
In the light of these opposed ideas of society as a thing of Chance and
as a thing of Design, let me run over two or three of the tales of
Wells.
First of all there is the special _laissez faire_ of pure economic
determinism. _The Time Machine_ pictures a possible result of the
Marxian process which has led to an irrevocable division of classes. The
rich, who were, in the old time, in comparison with the poor,
disciplined and united, have long since reached a point where work and
fear are for them things of the past. They occupy the surface of the
earth, and idleness and futility have made them light-headed, puny,
helpless creatures, stirring about and amusing themselves in the
sunlight. The poor, meanwhile, driven underground where they burrow and
tend machinery and provide, have lost all human semblance and become
white, horrible ghoul-like creatures that see in the dark; at night they
swarm out of their holes and feed upon the creatures of the upper air.
The one class has lost all power to defend itself and the other all pity
to spare, and gradually, year after year, mankind comes to its end.
Then there is the ordinary _laissez faire_ of capitalism, a result of
which is pictured in _The Sleeper Awakes_. The Sleeper, one recalls,
awakens four generations hence to find himself the master-capitalist,
owner of half the world, and the world is one where capital and labor
have irrevocably destroyed the possibility of a constructive human
scheme. But the responsibility for that future is very ingeniously
placed upon us of the present time; for Graham's ownership of the world
is the outcome of one of those irresponsible whims that in our day
characterize the whole individualistic view of property. His cousin,
having no family to inherit his possessions, has left the whole in trust
for the Sleeper, half in jest, expecting him never to waken; and in time
the trustees of this vested fund have become the irresponsible
bureaucrats of the world. "We were making the future," says the awakened
Sleeper, looking out upon this monstrous outcome of whim and _laissez
faire_; "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were
making."
Consider also _The Empire of the Ants_, in which Wells has figured a
possible reconquest of man by nature, owing to the greater collective
discipline of at least one non-human species. He imagines a species of
poisonous ants with only a little greater faculty of organized
co-operative intelligence than ordinary ants, which have terrorized and
finally routed several villages of unintelligent and unorganized
Brazilian natives far up the Amazon. The Brazilian government sends
against them an outworn inefficient gunboat, with an incompetent captain
and a muddle-headed crew; and when they arrive the ants fall upon the
only man sent ashore and sting him to death. The captain repeats over
and over, "But what can we _do_?" And at last with tremendous decision
he fires a gun at them and retires. The story ends with a report that
the ants are swarming all over the interior of Brazil and that nobody
knows how to prevent them from occupying the whole of South America.
And then there is _The History of Mr. Polly._ I ignore for the moment
the individual aspect of his case, for Mr. Polly is not merely an
individual--he is an emblem of the whole, he is society _in concreto_.
We find him at the opening of the book sitting on a stile, suffering
from indigestion and consequently depressed in spirits. It is two
o'clock of a Sunday afternoon, and he has just finished his mid-day
meal. He has eaten cold potatoes, cold pork, Rashdall's mixed
pickles--three gherkins, two onions, a small cauliflower head and
several capers; cold suet pudding, treacle and pale cheese, three slices
of grey bread, and a jug of beer. He hates himself, he hates his wife,
he hates existence. But Mr. Polly's interior, the things that have gone
into it and the emotions that rise out of it, are only typical of an
entire life that has, to quote Macaulay's eulogy of the British
constitution, thought nothing of symmetry and much of convenience.
Each of the novels of Wells, in one aspect at least, presents the
accidental nature of our world in some one typical case. _Love and Mr.
Lewisham_ shows how in the case of one of those young students who have,
as things are, no chance at all, but who are the natural builders of a
better world, the constructive possibility is crushed by the primary
will to live. At eighteen Mr. Lewisham is an assistant master at one of
those incompetent private-enterprise schools which for Wells (as also
for Matthew Arnold) epitomize our haphazard civilization. He has a
"future"--the Schema which he pins to his bedroom wall promises
unimaginable achievements. He marries, and you feel that he should marry
and that he has married the right person. But then with interests
divided he has to find money and in doing so he fails in his
examinations. At last it becomes a choice between his career and his
children, between the present and the future, and the children and the
future win. Society loses just in the degree that Lewisham himself
loses, for he was fitted to be a builder; and society has first, in the
face of all his efforts, imperfectly equipped him and then consistently
refused to take advantage of his talents.
Just as Lewisham is a potential builder of society who is defeated, so
Kipps is a specimen of the raw material, the muddled inferior material
with which society has to deal and refuses to deal. Kipps, like Mr.
Polly, is from the beginning a victim of accident, spawned on the world,
miseducated, apprenticed at fourteen to a Drapery Bazaar. He grows up
ignorant, confused, irresponsible; and then suddenly, as accidentally as
he was born, has £26,000 and responsibility thrust upon him. The fortune
of Kipps lifts him at once out of the obscure negligible world of the
populace and makes him a figure to be reckoned with. Therein lies the
comedy of the book. He tries to make himself what in his own view a man
of means ought to be; naturally he sees money not as a force but as a
thing to be spent, and he finds that even from this point of view he has
no freedom of will, and that his lack of training inevitably places him
in the hands of equally irresponsible persons who want his money. He
wishes to build a house, designed after his own vaguely apprehended
needs and desires, and somehow under the wand of the architect a house
with eleven bedrooms springs from the ground, a house plainly far beyond
his own or Ann's power of management, and the prospect of disrespectful
servants, terrifying callers, and a horde of scheming lawyers,
tradesfolk and satellites. And the life of Kipps under prosperity is
summed up in the following dialogue:
"Wonder what I shall do this afternoon," said Kipps, with
his hands deep in his pockets.
He pondered and lit a cigarette.
"Go for a walk, I s'pose," said Ann.
"I _been_ for a walk this morning."
"S'pose I must go for another," he added after an interval.
May one suggest how the significance of such a story as this varies
according to the point of view? In the ordinary literature of comedy,
Kipps would be merely a parvenu whose want of dignity and ignorance of
the right use of money are laughable--or, if the novelist were a
humanitarian, pitiful. To the socialist, on the other hand, every
incident of his life, every gesture of his mind, is a unique indictment
of things as they are. He stands for the whole waste of human stuff in a
world which has not learned how to economize itself, whose every detail
is accidental in a general chaotic absence of social design.
In this aspect _Tono-Bungay_ is the most powerful work of Wells. Just as
his romances of the future had exhibited the possible effects of
accidental heedless social conduct in the past, so his novels exhibit
the motives that produce this heedlessness to consequences. Thus the
world in which the Sleeper awakes, a world irrevocably ruled by the
bureaucratic trustees of an irresponsible private fortune, is just a
conceivable consequence of such a career as Uncle Ponderevo's, had not
catastrophe overwhelmed him and enabled Wells to point a much more
pregnant moral. _Tono-Bungay_ is a great epic of irresponsible
capitalism from the socialist point of view. Uncle Ponderevo is a born
commercial meteor, and when he first enters the book, a small druggist
in a dead country town, he exhibits the temperament of a Napoleon of
finance spoiling for conquest. He wants to Wake Up Wimblehurst, invent
something, do something, shove something.
He indicated London as remotely over the top of the
dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by
a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.
"What sort of things do they do?" I asked. "Rush about," he
said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's cover
gambling. Ever heard of that, George?" He drew the air in
through his teeth. "You put down a hundred, say, and buy
ten thousand pounds' worth. See? That's a cover of one per
cent. Things go up one, you sell, realize cent per cent;
down, whiff, it's gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George,
every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the
shoutin'!... Well, that's one way, George. Then another
way--there's Corners!"
"They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.
"Oh, if you go in for wheat and steel--yes. But suppose you
tackled a little thing, George. Just some leetle thing that
only needed a few thousands. Drugs, for example. Shoved all
you had into it--staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take
a drug--take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac.
Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren't
unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha--can't be!--and it's a
thing people _must_ have. Then quinine again! You watch
your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let's
say, and collar all the quinine. Where _are_ they? Must
have quinine, you know--Eh? ...
"Lord! there's no end of things--no end of _little_ things.
Dill-water--all the suff'ring babes yowling for it.
Eucalyptus again--cascara--witch hazel--menthol--all the
toothache things. Then there's antiseptics, and curare,
cocaine....
"Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.
"They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll
do you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That
makes it romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George."
He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such
fragments as: "Fifty per cent, advance, sir;
security--to-morrow."
The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a
sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever
be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense
one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to
still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my
uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since.
The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee
something that will probably be needed and put it out of
reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land
upon which people will presently want to build houses, you
secure rights that will bar vitally important developments,
and so on, and so on. Of course the naïve intelligence of a
boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human
inadequacy. He begins life with the disposition to believe
in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realize how
casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and
custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is
a power as irresistible as a head master's to check
mischievous, foolish enterprises of every sort. I will
confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I
had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do
that would pretty certainly go to gaol. Now I know that any
one who could really bring it off would be much more likely
to go to the House of Lords!
And such or nearly such is this career. Tono-Bungay, that swindling
patent medicine without value or meaning, is the insubstantial
hippogriff upon which Uncle Ponderevo soars upward on the wind of
advertisement. In a society whose basis is unlimited individual rights,
he is able to disorganize the industrial world and to work out his
absurd, inept, extravagant destiny, scattering ruin right and left.
But the spirit of Good Will, the disinterested constructive spirit of
socialism which is the underlying assumption of Wells, appears here as
in all his later books. Out of the wreckage the constructive purpose
emerges, in the person of George Ponderevo. It shapes itself as a steel
destroyer, the work of an engineer's brain, a destroyer which England
has refused and which plunges down the Thames to the open sea, the
symbol of man's intentions, without illusions and without the hope of
personal gain, the disinterested spirit of science and truth.