A PERSONAL CHAPTER
I doubt if there are many living men of note who, a generation after
they are dead, will be so fully and easily "explained" as H.G. Wells. He
is a most personal and transparent writer, he is the effect of
conditions and forces which have existed for scarcely more than two
generations. But for these very reasons it is very difficult to see him
in perspective, and to explain him would be to explain the age in which
we live. Let me at least give certain facts and reflections about his
life written by Wells himself, a few years ago, in the introduction to a
Russian translation of his writings:
I was born[1] in that queer indefinite class that we call in
England the middle class. I am not a bit aristocratic; I do
not know any of my ancestors beyond my grandparents, and
about them I do not know very much, because I am the
youngest son of my father and mother and their parents were
all dead before I was born. My mother was the daughter of an
innkeeper at a place called Midhurst, who supplied
post-horses to the coaches before the railways came; my
father was the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at
Penshurst Castle, in Kent. They had various changes of
fortune and position; for most of his life my father kept a
little shop in a suburb of London, and eked out his
resources by playing a game called cricket, which is not
only a pastime, but a show which people will pay to see, and
which, therefore, affords a living to professional players.
His shop was unsuccessful, and my mother, who had been a
lady's maid, became, when I was twelve years old,
housekeeper in a large country house. I too was destined to
be a shopkeeper. I left school at thirteen for that purpose.
I was apprenticed first to a chemist, and, that proving
unsatisfactory, to a draper. But after a year or so it
became evident to me that the facilities that were and still
are increasing in England offered me better chances in life
than a shop and comparative illiteracy could do; and so I
struggled for and got various grants and scholarships that
enabled me to study and take a degree in science and some
mediocre honors in the new and now great and growing
University of London.... After I had graduated I taught
biology for two or three years, and then became a
journalist.... I began first to write literary articles,
criticisms, and so forth, and presently short imaginative
stories in which I made use of the teeming suggestions of
modern science....
So much for the facts. The reflections are not less illuminating:
The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure.
Success with a book--even such a commercially modest success
as mine has been--means in the English-speaking world not
merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost
freedom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted
out of his narrow circumstances into familiar and
unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people. He
sees the world; if his work excites interest, he meets
philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists,
professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the
great, and he may make such use of them as he can. He finds
himself no longer reading in books and papers, but hearing
and touching at first hand the big questions that sway men,
the initiatives that shape human affairs.... To be a
literary artist is to want to render one's impressions of
the things about one. Life has interested me enormously and
filled me with ideas and associations I want to present
again. I have liked life and like it more and more. The days
in the shop and the servants' hall, the straitened struggles
of my early manhood, have stored me with vivid memories that
illuminate and help me to appreciate all the wider vistas of
my later social experiences. I have friends and intimates
now at almost every social level, from that of a peer to
that of a pauper, and I find my sympathies and curiosities
stretching like a thin spider's web from top to bottom of
the social tangle. I count that wide social range one of the
most fortunate accidents of my life, and another is that I
am of a diffident and ineffectual presence, unpunctual,
fitful, and easily bored by other than literary effort; so
that I am not tempted to cut a figure in the world and
abandon that work of observing and writing which is my
proper business in it.
This candid and exact statement enables us to see just how far, in
matters of fact, experience and belief, the autobiographical motive has
entered his writings. It would be possible to show how inevitably such
an ideal as that of the New Republican Samurai arose from such a life;
how much that conscious and deliberate insistence on personal efficiency
and orderly ways, that repudiation of mental confusion, sluggishness,
and sentiment may figure as a kind of stepping-stone from the world of
Kipps and Polly to the world of Remington and Trafford; how a
self-wrought scientific education would form the basis of an ideal of
aristocracy rising from it; and how the motto "There is no Being but
Becoming" would express its own constant desertion of levels achieved,
its own pressing upward to levels equally transient. Just as the
"democratic person" of Whitman raises his own fervent, chaotic, and
standardless experience into an ideal, so also the ideal of Wells is
nothing else than the projection of his own experimental opportunism. It
is impossible in discussing Wells to ignore this social ascent; for in
England a man passes from one stratum to another only by virtue of a
certain lack of substantiality, a power to disencumber himself, to shed
customs and affections and all the densenesses and coagulations which
mark each grade in that closely defined social hierarchy. The world of
shopkeeping in England is a world girt about with immemorial
subjections; it is, one might say, a moss-covered world; and to shake
oneself loose from it is to become a rolling stone, a drifting and
unsettled, a detached and acutely personal, individual. It is to pass
from a certain confined social maturity, a confused mellowness, into a
world wholly adventurous and critical, into a freedom which achieves
itself at the expense of solidity and warmth. In Wells, for instance,
the sense of the soil is wholly supplanted by the sense of machinery.
His evolution has been the reverse of the usual evolution from what
Bacon called the _lumen siccum_ to the _lumen humidum_, from the dry
light to the light that is drenched in customs and affections. Instead
of growing mellower, he has grown more and more fluid and electric, in
direct ratio to the growing width of his social horizon.
To prove this one has only to consider his novels. There was a time when
he had in common with Dickens and De Foe the quality they have in common
with one another--the quality of homeliness. He drew the little world he
knew well, the limited and lovable world of small folk. Mr. Hoopdriver,
Delia the chambermaid, Kipps and Ann Pornick--a score of these helpless,
grown-up little children he pictured with a radiant affection, tempering
the wind to the shorn lamb. It is more in the nature of his later
thought to see poverty as a wasteful rather than a cruel thing, even
though he may not have approached the harsh realism of Bernard Shaw's
observation: "I have never had any feeling about the English working
classes except a desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible
people."
Certainly he has not experienced any other world in quite this way. "I
count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents in my
life," he says. Accidental one feels it to be, as of a man inhabiting
the great world by virtue of sheer talent, whose nature has not in any
sense settled there. His philosophy and his socialism are outgrowths of
his own experience; they erect into reasons and theories the nature of a
life which is not at home, and which easily unburdens itself of all that
seems insensate because it is unfamiliar. To be a socialist at all is to
have accustomed oneself, through necessity or imagination, to a certain
detachment from a great many of the familiar, lovable, encumbering,
delightful stupidities of the world. And Wells has travelled up and down
through time and space too much to have any great regard for the
present. "I have come to be, I am afraid," he says, in _The Future in
America,_ "even a little insensitive to fine immediate things through
this anticipatory habit.... 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----." His hold upon the
present is so far from inevitable that _The New Machiavelli_ and
_Marriage_, realistic as they are, are represented as being written some
years hence, our own time already appearing retrospectively in them. As
little as Faust has he been tempted to call out upon the passing moment.
His main characters drift through this period of time, substantial
themselves but with a background of substantialities, in a way that
recalls Paolo and Francesca looming out of the phantom cloud-procession
of the _Inferno_.
Into this larger world, in short, he has carried with him only himself
and his own story. We live in two worlds--the primary world of vivid
personal realities and the secondary world of our human background. It
is the secondary world that anchors us in time and space; the primary
world we carry with us as part of ourselves. In Wells there is no
secondary world, no human background, no sense of abiding relations. It
is his philosophy of life and the quality of his men and women to be
experimental in a plastic scheme. His range is very small: the same
figures reappear constantly. There is the Wells hero,--Lewisham, Capes,
Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford, Stratton; there is the Wells heroine,
Ann Veronica, Isabel, Marjorie, Lady Mary; there is the ineffectual
woman with whom the Wells hero becomes entangled, Capes's first wife,
Marion, Margaret; there is the ineffectual man with whom the Wells
heroine becomes entangled, Magnet, Manning. To strike the lowest common
denominator in this tangle is inevitably to arrive once more, one feels,
in the region of personal experience. Although it cannot be said that
his minor characters are lacking in reality, they are certainly
intellectual portraits, and outside the limits of subjective experience.
The principal men and women of Wells move through a world seen, but
hardly a world felt.
This want of social background makes his characters as detached from the
familiar earth as chessmen are detached from a chessboard. They never
seem to be, like most men and women either in life or fiction, like the
Kipps and Polly of his own earlier fiction, vegetable growths. Heredity,
fatality, the soil are not mainly operating forces with them. They are
creatures of intelligence and free will, freely and intelligently making
and moulding themselves and their circumstances. Human nature in Wells
is very largely a sheer thing, a thing that begins with itself, answers
for itself, lives at first hand. That is the personal quality of the man
himself, and it follows that the quality is wholly convincing only where
what I have called his primary world is concerned: the rest of the world
he builds up by intelligent observation and the literary talent of
creating human stuff out of whole cloth.
In this he is well served by his antipathies. His belief in personal
self-determinism is so strong that he instinctively sees the vegetative
nature of the ordinary life as a kind of moral slough, a state of being
detestably without initiative, faith, energy, will. And consequently the
Normal Social Life against which he is always tilting is a life seen by
him with all the vividness of an intense personal and philosophical
animosity. Consider, for example, the portraits of Mr. Pope and Mr.
Stanley, survivals in a sense of the old Sir Roger de Coverley type,
with all the sweetness gone out of it and only the odious qualities
left, the domineering, vain, proprietary qualities. They exist mainly as
symbols of everything that enlightened and right-minded daughters will
not put up with; they come as near to being the foils of right destiny
as Wells will ever allow; they sum up everything that stands in the way
of man's free will. They are mercilessly dealt with, and they are
memorable figures.
Without this antipathy, and outside his own primary world, he pretty
generally fails. One recalls, for example, old Mrs. Trafford in
_Marriage,_ evidently intended to be his ideal of the enlightened woman
grown old. She is a pale, dimly perfect, automatically wise old lady
carved out of wood. Trafford himself, one feels, is a chip of the same
block. Trafford obviously is not Wells himself, as Ponderevo and
Remington are Wells: he is the Utopian counterpart of these persons, at
least in the matter that concerns Wells most, the matter of sex. One
could show that, aside from the six or eight chief characters who in
their various ways express the nature and experience of Wells himself,
he succeeds in his portraiture only where no demand is made on his
sympathies.
The same absence of social background which throws into relief his
primary world of characters throws into relief also the primary facts of
human nature. Trafford and Marjorie, the most conventionally placed of
his characters, pull up stakes, leave their children, and go to
Labrador. His other men and women are even more independent of the
social network. Consequently they are independent of that chain of
relationships--friendship, affection, minor obligations--which mitigate,
subdue, soften the primary motives of most people. They are almost
startlingly physical. Their instincts are as sure as those of cavemen,
and their conduct as direct. They are as clear about the essential
matter of love as ever Schopenhauer was, or Adam and Eve, and they stand
out as sharply against the embarrassments and secrecies of the usual
world as a volcanic rock stands out against a tropical landscape. In
this without doubt they exhibit the fact that socialism does and will
actually alter human nature, and that in the instinctive socialist human
nature is already altered. For socialism inflexibly militates against
those more sentimental aspects of love, love of country as such, the
paternal and feudal principles, love of property, and the like, which
belong properly to the intelligence, all those functions where love, in
a majority of cases, goes wrong, blunders, stultifies growth, confuses
the public design of the world. As a result it throws love into relief,
emphasizes the nature of sex and the _raison d'être_ of reproduction;
makes it, to use a favorite word of Wells, stark.
I pause at this word. It is one of those talismanic words one finds
perpetually cropping up in the writings of men who have a marked point
of view, words that express deep and abiding preferences and often set
the key of an entire philosophy. "I like bare things," says George
Ponderevo, in _Tono-Bungay;_ "stripped things, plain, austere, and
continent things, fine lines and cold colors." That is the gesture of an
artistic mind which repudiates, with an impatient sharpness, all the
entanglements of the ordinary world. It is Oriental, it is Japanese, it
is anything you like; but if it is English also it marks an entirely new
regime. Without question it is English, and American as well. Thousands
of people share that preference, and were economic socialism to go by
the board we should still have to reckon with the progress of
socialistic human nature. It detaches itself each day a little more from
property, locality, and the hope of reward; it ceases to be
necessitarian, it becomes voluntary; it relegates drudgery to mechanical
devices; it releases the individual to a sense of his own coöperative
and contributory place in the scheme of a more orderly future.
Relatively speaking, the tendency of our kind is all away from luxury,
sloth, complacency, confusion, ignorance, filth, heat, proprietorship,
and all in the direction of light, austerity, agility, intelligence,
coolness, athletic energy, understanding, cleanliness, order, "bare
things, fine lines, and cold colors."
That is evident, and it is equally evident that the personal character
and career of Wells are emblematic of this entire tendency. He has
unravelled himself by science, talent, and vigor out of "lower middle
class" Victorianism. Is it strange that he has adopted as a kind of
sacred image that light, free, and charming product of our decade, the
aeroplane, sprung as it is out of the wreckage, out of the secret
beginnings, the confused muscularities, the effort and smoke of the most
chaotic of all centuries, like a blade of exquisitely tempered and
chased steel which justifies everything that was most laborious and
unsightly in the forge?
But considered as a sacred image the aeroplane has its limitations. So
also, considered as an exponent of fife, has Wells. Philosophy and
religion, as he presents them, are simply what he chooses to think and
feel, what he has been led by his own experience to think and feel. His
main experience has been the experience of disentangling himself, and
therefore life, reflected from within himself, is to him a thing also
which disentangles itself and grows ever more free, simple, and lucid.
In the mind of Wells this process, has taken on an altogether mystical,
transcendental significance, a religious aspect. Possible as that is to
himself personally, how far can it be taken as an argument to the human
soul? How does it qualify him as a teacher, a public voice, a thinker
for the mass of men? How does the conception of life purely as a process
relate itself to human experience?
Applied to history, it seems to fail. Wells is devoid of historical
imagination. In his portrait of Margaret in _The New Machiavelli_ he has
properly, though somewhat harshly, repudiated what ordinarily passes for
culture. But had he himself possessed the reality of what seems to him
simply "living at second hand," he would never have been led to refer to
Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Dürer as "pathetically reaching out, as it
were, with empty desirous hands toward the unborn possibilities of the
engineer." That is a very interesting and a very extraordinary
statement, and it is quite true that each of these men would have
rejoiced in the engineering possibilities of our time. But how much of
the soul of Michael Angelo, for example, was involved in engineering?
How far can his hands be said to have been "empty" for the want of scope
in engineering? The power and the function of Michael Angelo can rightly
be seen, not in relation to any sort of social or mechanical process,
but in relation to things that are permanent in human nature, in
relation to just those matters included in the admonition of Wells to
"reject all such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, and Beauty
and hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a
tissue and succession of births." Again, consider a somewhat similar
reference to Marcus Aurelius, of which the gist is that the author of
the _Meditations_ was, actually in consequence of his own character, the
father of one of the worst rulers the world has known. The implication
here is that the study of self-perfection in the father was
complementary to, if not responsible for, the social impotence and
blindness of the son. Instead of dedicating himself to the static ideal
of personal character, the assumption seems to be, Marcus Aurelius ought
to have lived exclusively in his function as ruler and father. He
studied himself, not as a ruler but as a man, and the social process had
its revenge on his line. To Wells, in a word, the static elements of
character and the study of perfection are not to be distinguished from
vicious self-consequence.
Consider also a recent passage in which he has given a general
impression of literature:
It seems to me more and more as I live longer that most
poetry and most literature and particularly the literature
of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the
reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live
it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and
more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved
and hated more naively, aged sooner, and died younger than
we do. Solitary persons and single events dominated them as
they do not dominate us.
To appreciate this meditation one has to remember the character and
career which led to the writing of it. But so far as we others are
concerned, how far can the assumption it rests upon be considered valid,
the assumption of a process that sweeps men on and leads human nature,
as it were, progressively to shed itself? Dr. Johnson, for example, was
a man the conditions of whose life were crude and rigid in the extreme,
a man singularly dominated by solitary persons and single events, but is
his conversation discordant with the variety, the "reserves, resources,
and recuperations of life as we live it to-day"? I can well understand
this feeling. To pass directly from the thin, tentative, exhilarating,
expansive air of our own time into the presence of that funny, stuffy,
cocksure, pompous old man is to receive a preposterous shock. But having
come to laugh, one stops with a very different sensation. The depths of
personality and wisdom that exist there take on a disconcerting
significance in relation to contemporary pragmatism. The mass of men
veer about; far-separated epochs have their elective affinities, and if
anything about the future is plain it is that this, that, and the other
generation will find in Dr. Johnson a strangely premature contemporary.
Wells has himself admitted this principle. To Plutarch, Rabelais,
Machiavelli he has paid his tribute. Hear what George Ponderevo has to
say about Plutarch in his recollections of Bladesover House:
I found Langhorne's _Plutarch_ too, I remember, on those
shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired
pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of
public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that
it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen
hundred years, to teach me that.
Considering what part the notion of a state plays in his range of ideas,
that is a remarkable confession. But why stop with statecraft? The human
mind could not, in all epochs, have established permanent ideals of
statecraft without permanent ideals of a more strictly personal kind.
The truth is that Wells, for all that he has passed outside the
economics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas which
produced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tell
you that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the only
true thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by that
criterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensive
gibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's Fairy
Tales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presents
itself. To say that "the fundamental nature of life is a tissue and
succession of births" is merely a refinement of this. It is true, just
as the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the world
is full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of a
reasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there is
a Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue to
grow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friendship, or music, or
poetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialist
must feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and on
that point socialism has nothing to say at all.
It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddle
that the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. Could
Wells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full of
meaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life he
has felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in English
authors. "Modern poetry, with an exception or so," he remarks somewhere,
and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as a
whole, "does not signify at all." It is the same with regard to music,
art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: his
writings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outline
against a sunset, masses of machinery in the glare of the forge, things
that suggest the etcher's eye. But they are curiously impersonal.
Consider, for example, his description of Worms Cathedral:
It rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering,
lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and
irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow
under a press of canvas.
You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty he
feels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is as
untouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities of
this building, not to mention its connection with human history, as if
he had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not the
changeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this building
stands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is the
mechanism, the process--his emotions gather about the physical result
which appears to justify these.
_À chacun son infini_.
There will always be some to whom the significance of things, the
meaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conception
of mankind as "permanently in transition." Reading those passages where
Wells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as I
should feel with regard to music if I heard a mass of Mozart played at
the rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if a
procession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision.
The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the pictures
as a whole are a tissue and succession of colors. But that is not music,
that is not art. Nor is a tissue and succession of births life.
But indeed nothing is easier than to reduce Wells to an absurdity. If he
implies anything at all he implies a "transvaluation of all values." It
remains to consider him from this point of view.
[Footnote 1: September 21, 1866.]