THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEW REPUBLICAN
It is obvious that the socialism of Wells, touching as it does at every
point the fabric of society, remains at bottom a personal and mystical
conception of life. His typical socialist, or constructive man, or
Samurai, or New Republican, or what you will, is as distinctly a poetic
projection from life as Nietzsche's Superman, or Carlyle's Hero, or the
Superior Man of Confucius. Like them, it implies a rule of conduct and a
special religious attitude.
Nietzsche's Superman is a convenient figure by which for the moment to
throw into relief the point I have in mind. Plainly a conception of this
kind should never be intellectualized and defined. It is a living whole,
as a human being is a living whole, and the only way to grasp it is to
place oneself at the precise angle of the poet who conceived it. But the
fixed intellect of man is not often capable of rising to the height of
such an argument, nor do the run of critics and interpreters rise to
such a height themselves. In the case of Nietzsche, particularly, they
have confounded the confusion, urging precise definitions and at the
same time disagreeing among themselves as to which definitions may be
held valid. But indeed the Superman does not "mean" this or that: it can
merely be approached from different points of view with different
degrees of sympathy. And so it is with the New Republican of Wells.
I have mentioned the Superman because Wells himself has reached a
conception of aristocracy similar in certain respects to that of
Nietzsche but in others wholly antagonistic. In _The Food of the Gods_
he certainly exhibits a sympathy with Nietzsche on the poetical and
ideal side; for his giants are not simply grand-children of Rabelais,
they practise of necessity a morality at variance with that of the
little men among whom they grow. When Caddies comes to London he does
not, and cannot, expect the little men to feed him; not intending evil
and seeing merely that he must live, he sweeps the contents of a baker's
shop into his mouth with just the unconcerned innocence of laws and
prohibitions that a child would feel before a blackberry bush. The very
existence of a larger, freer race implies a larger and freer morality,
and the giants and the little folk alike see that the same world cannot
for long contain them both. But perhaps one can mark the distinction by
saying that, unlike the Superman, they are not masters but servants of
the cosmic process. They themselves are not the goal toward which the
whole creation tends. Humanity is not a setting for their splendor, but
something that wins through them its own significance.
In fact it fully proves how profound is the socialistic instinct in
Wells, that though in English wise and almost in the manner of Carlyle
he has come to believe in the great ones of this world, he has never
lost the invincible socialist conviction that a great man is only a
figure of speech. In _The Discovery of the Future_ he says: "I must
confess that I believe that if by some juggling with space and time
Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, Edward IV, William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery,
and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth, it would not have
produced any serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believe
that these great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and
instruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistent
forces behind them." The individual who stands on his achievement, the
"lord of creation," is to him at best a little misinformed, at the worst
blustering, dishonest, presuming, absurd.
By an original instinct the Wells hero is an inconspicuous little
person, fastidiously untheatrical, who cuts no figure personally and
who, to adopt a phrase from one of his later books, "escapes from
individuality in science and service." He abhors "personages." For the
personage is one who, in some degree, stands on his achievement, and to
Wells man, both in his love and his work, is experimental: he is an
experiment toward an impersonal synthesis, the well-being of the
species. It is true that this idea of man as an experiment does not
conflict with a very full development of personality. It consists in
that; but personality to Wells is attained purely through love and work,
and thus it comes to an end the moment it becomes static, the moment one
accepts the laurel wreath, the moment one verges on self-consequence.
The first published utterance of Wells was, I think, a paper in _The
Fortnightly Review_ for July, 1891, called _The Rediscovery of the
Unique_. It was one of the earliest of those attacks on the logical
approach to life, so characteristic of contemporary thought: it stamped
him from the outset a pragmatist. The burden of his argument was that
since the investigations of Darwin it is no longer possible to ignore
the uniqueness of every individual thing in the universe and that "we
only arrive at the idea of similar beings by an unconscious or
deliberate disregard of an infinity of small differences"--that, in
brief, the method of classification which is the soul of logic is untrue
to the facts of life. "Human reason," he wrote, "in the light of what is
being advanced, appears as a convenient organic process based on a
fundamental happy misconception.... The _reason d'être_ of a man's mind
is to avoid danger and get food--so the naturalists tell us. His
reasoning powers are about as much a truth-seeking tool as the snout of
a pig, and he may as well try to get to the bottom of things by them as
a mole might by burrowing."
I quote thus his rudely graphic early statement of the case, because he
has not since substantially modified it and because it shows that he
already related it to human realities: and indeed in the same paper he
pointed out the relation that such an idea must bear to ordinary
conduct:
Beings are unique, circumstances are unique, and therefore
we cannot think of regulating our conduct by wholesale
dicta. A strict regard for truth compels us to add that
principles are wholesale dicta: they are substitutes of more
than doubtful value for an individual study of cases.
This conception of human reason as an altogether inadequate organ for
getting at the truth of things he later expanded in his Oxford lecture,
_Scepticism of the Instrument;_ and, still further expanded, it forms
the first or metaphysical book of his _First and Last Things_. It is
unnecessary to discuss the rights and wrongs of this primary point in a
generation familiar with James and Bergson. It is an assumption of the
purely personal, experimental nature of truth which has had a sufficient
sanction of experience greatly to modify contemporary practice in ethics
and sociology. And it should be noted that Wells evolved it in his own
study of physical science (a study serious enough to result in
text-books of Biology, Zoology, and Physiography) and that he presents
it, in accordance with his own postulates, not as truth for everybody,
but as his own personal contribution to the sum of experience. The study
of science led him to see the limitations of the scientific attitude,
outside the primary physical sciences which for practical purposes can
afford to ignore individualities, in matters that approach the world of
human motives and affairs.
I do not propose to discuss this question of logic. It is quite plain at
least, as Wells observes, in the spirit of Professor James, that "all
the great and important beliefs by which life is guided and determined
are less of the nature of fact than of artistic expression." And
therefore he is justified in proceeding as follows:
I make my beliefs as I want them. I do not attempt to go to
fact for them. I make them thus and not thus exactly as an
artist makes a picture so and not so.... That does not mean
that I make them wantonly and regardless of fact.... The
artistic method in this field of beliefs, as in the field of
visual renderings, is one of great freedom and initiative
and great poverty of test, that is all, but of no
wantonness; the conditions of Tightness are none the less
imperative because they are mysterious and indefinable. I
adopt certain beliefs because I feel the need of them,
because I feel an often quite unanalyzable Tightness in
them, because the alternative of a chaotic life distresses
me.
And this is the way in which he presents the gist of his beliefs:
I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that
strains and I believe grows toward Beauty, and of a great
mental being that strains and I believe grows towards
knowledge and power. In this persuasion that I am a gatherer
of experience, a mere tentacle that arranged thought beside
thought for this Being of the Species, this Being that grows
beautiful and powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling
idea of which I stand in need, the ruling idea that
reconciles and adjudicates among my warring motives. In it I
find both concentration of myself and escape from myself, in
a word, I find _Salvation_.
And again later:
The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are
the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement:
it is a statement of fact. In so far as we are individuals,
so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are
accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of
chance. In so far as we realize ourselves as experiments of
the species for the species, just in so far do we escape
from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an
experience greater than ourselves.... Now none of this, if
you read me aright, makes for the suppression of one's
individual difference, but it does make for its correlation.
We have to get everything we can out of ourselves for this
very reason that we do not stand alone; we signify as parts
of a universal and immortal development. Our separate selves
are our charges, the talents of which much has to be made.
It is because we are episodical in the great synthesis of
life that we have to make the utmost of our individual lives
and traits and possibilities.
Naturally then, just as he holds by the existing State as a rudimentary
collective organ in public affairs, so also, in theory, he holds by the
existing Church. His Church of the Future bears to the existing Church
just the relation which the ultimate State of socialism bears to the
existing State. "The theory of a religion," says Wells, "may propose the
attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an irascible Deity or a
dozen other things as its end and aim. The practical fact is that it
draws together great multitudes of diverse individualized people in a
common solemnity and self-subordination, however vague, and is so far
like the State, and in a manner far more intimate and emotional and
fundamental than the State, a synthetic power. And in particular the
idea of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic suggestion; it is
in many ways an idea broader and finer than the constructive idea of any
existing State."
All of which I take to be very much the position of Erasmus face to face
with Luther and of Matthew Arnold face to face on the one hand with
Nonconformity and on the other with Darwinism: that the Church is a
social fact greater in importance than any dogmatic system it contains.
To Wells any sort of voluntary self-isolation, any secession from
anything really synthetic in society, is a form of "sin." And like many
Catholics he justifies a certain Machiavelism in squaring one's personal
doubts with the collective end. Thus he holds that test oaths and
declarations of formal belief are of the same nature as the oath of
allegiance a republican takes to the King, petty barriers that cannot
weigh against the good that springs from placing oneself _en rapport_
with the collective religious consciousness; at least in the case of
national Churches, which profess to represent the whole spiritual life
of a nation and which cannot therefore be regarded as exclusive to any
affirmative religious man. The individual, he says, must examine his
special case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibility
of coöperation; as far as possible he must repress his private tendency
toward social fragmentation, hold fast to the idea of the Church as
essentially a larger fact than any specific religious beliefs, and work
within it for the recognition of this fact. I have mentioned Catholic
reasoning; Wells appears to be in general agreement with Newman as to
the subordination of private intellectual scruples to the greater unity
of faith.
But indeed I doubt if it is fair to take him too much at his word in
specific matters of this kind. _First and Last Things_ has that slightly
official quality which goes with all Confessions of Faith out loud. If
his intention has led him to square himself with lines of thought and
conduct where, to speak the truth, he is an alien, his intention
remains, and that is plain and fine.
The synthetic motive gains its very force through the close-knitting of
keenly-developed, proud, and valiant individualities. In Wells the
synthetic motive and the individual motive qualify and buttress one
another; and he is quite as much opposed to the over-predominance of the
synthetic motive where the personal motive is deficient as he is to the
self-indulgence of the purely personal life. Thus the Assembly in _A
Modern Utopia_ is required to contain a certain number of men outside
the Samurai class, because, as they explain, "there is a certain sort of
wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is necessary to the perfect
ruling of life," and their Canon contains a prayer "to save the world
from unfermented men." So also in _First and Last Things_ Wells remarks:
"If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue of sins by
asking, 'Are you a man of regular life?' and I would charge my penitent
to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving irregularity; to
fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork and beans or give
up smoking or spend a month with publicans and sinners." Plainly his
collective purpose is nothing unless it consists of will, will even to
wilfulness, even to perversity.
And this leads one back to that early assertion of his that since beings
and circumstances are unique, we must get rid of the idea that conduct
should be regulated by general principles. Similarly, at the outset of
_Mankind in the Making_ he says it is necessary "to reject and set aside
all abstract, refined, and intellectualized ideas as starting
propositions, such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, or Beauty,
and to hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a
tissue and succession of births." Goodness and Beauty, he says, cannot
be considered apart from good and beautiful things and one's personal
notions of the good and beautiful have to be determined by one's
personal belief about the meaning of life. Thus, to take an illustration
from his novels, one of the most odious traits of such a father as Ann
Veronica's or Mr. Pope in _Marriage_ is that they wish to regulate their
daughters, not by a study of what is and must be good in their eyes, but
by a general sweeping view of what good daughters ought to be.
Now since his own idea of the purpose of life is the development of the
collective consciousness of the race, his idea of the Good is that which
contributes to this synthesis, and the Good Life is that which, as he
says, "most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience and
renders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively to
the collective growth." And as a corollary to this, Sin is essentially
"the service of secret and personal ends." The conflict in one way or
another between this Good and this Evil forms the substance of each of
the main group of his novels. Aside from the novels of shop-life, each
of his principal men begins life with a passionate and disinterested
ambition to gather and prepare experience and render it available for
the race; each one falls from this ambition to the service of secret and
personal ends. Lewisham, Capes, Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford are, each
in his own way, human approximations, with all the discount of actual
life, of the ethical standard of Wells himself as it is generalized in
the New Republicans and the Samurai. They illustrate how fully the
socialism of Wells is summed up in a conception of character.
But before turning to the actual men and women who form the substance of
his novels, I must add something about those wraith-like beings, the
Samurai of _A Modern Utopia,_ which fully embody his ideal.
The name Samurai, to begin with, is not a random choice, for it is plain
that the Japanese temper is akin to that of Wells. The career of the
Japanese as a nation during the last fifty years perfectly illustrates
his frequent contention that in modern warfare success falls to the
nation that has most completely realized the socialistic, as
distinguished from the individualistic, notion of society. "Behind her
military capacity is the disciplined experience of a thousand years,"
says Lafcadio Hearn, who proceeds to show at what cost, in everything we
are apt to regard as human, this disciplined power has been
achieved--the cost of individual privacy in rights, property, and
conduct.
But aside from social ideals and achievements one instinctively feels
that Wells likes Japanese human nature. In one of his early essays, long
since out of print, he remarks:
I like my art unadorned; thought and skill and the other
strange quality that is added thereto to make things
beautiful--and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and
paper, and behold! a thing of beauty!--as they do in Japan.
And if it should fall into the fire--well, it has gone like
yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.
He contrasts this with the ordinary English view of art and property,
mahogany furniture and "handsome" possessions:
The pretence that they were the accessories to human life
was too transparent. _We_ were the accessories; we minded
them for a little while, and then we passed away. They wore
us out and cast us aside. We were the changing scenery; they
were the actors who played on through the piece.
_There is no Being but Becoming_ is the special dictum of Wells, a
dictum which does not consort with mahogany sideboards, but is tangibly
expressed in Japanese architecture. And if Wells naturally likes
Japanese art, its economy, delicacy, ephemerality, its catlike nicety,
its paucity of color, its emphasis of design, its "starkness," it is
plain also that many qualities of the Japanese character must also
appeal irresistibly to him: the light hold they have on all those things
into which one settles down, from stolid leather arm-chairs to
comfortable private fortunes; their lack of self-consequence, their
alertness, their athletic freedom from everything that encumbers, their
remoteness from port-wine and _embonpoint._ These things exist in
Wells's notion of right human nature.
Thus the Samurai. They are delegates of the species, experimenting and
searching for new directions; they instinctively view themselves as
explorers for the race, as disinterested agents. And their own
self-development on this disinterested basis is not only the purpose of
their own lives, but also the method by which the Life Impulse discovers
and records itself and pushes on to ever wider and richer
manifestations.
The socialism of Wells is merely a building out from this conception. He
is persuaded that this kind of experimental exercise is not simply a
happy indulgence for the few fortunately placed, but that it is actually
virtue and the only virtue. And this notion of personal virtue--personal
in quality, social in effect--once conceded, it follows that the
moulding of life must proceed with reference to this.