THE SPIRIT OF WELLS
In order to understand Wells at all one must grasp the fact that he
belongs to a type of mind which has long existed in European literature
but which is comparatively new in the English-speaking world, the type
of mind of the so-called "intellectual." He is an "intellectual" rather
than an artist; that is to say, he naturally grasps and interprets life
in the light of ideas rather than in the light of experience.
To pass from a definition to an example, let me compare Wells in this
respect with the greatest and most typical figure of the opposite camp
in contemporary English fiction; I mean Joseph Conrad. This comparison
is all the more apt because just as much as Wells Conrad typifies the
spirit of "unrest" (a word he has almost made his own, so often does he
use it) which is the note of our age. Both of these novelists have
endeavored to express the spirit of unrest; both have suggested a way of
making it contributory to the attainment of an ideal. But how different
is their method, how different is their ideal! And roughly the
difference is this: that to Conrad the spirit of unrest is a personal
mood, a thing, as people used to say, between man and his Maker; whereas
to Wells the spirit of unrest is not a mood but a rationally explicable
frame of mind, a sense of restricted function, an issue to be fought out
not between man and nature but between man and society. In other words,
where Conrad's point of view is moral, Wells's point of view is social;
and whereas in Conrad the spirit of unrest can only be appeased by
holding fast to certain simple instinctive moral principles, integrity,
honor, loyalty, etc., contributing in this way to the ideal of personal
character, the spirit of unrest in Wells is to be appeased by working
through the established fact, by altering the environment in which man
lives, contributing in this way to the ideal of a great society of which
personal character is at once the essence and the product.
In the end, of course, both these views of life come to the same thing,
for you cannot have a great society which is not composed of greatly
living individuals, or vice versa. But practically there is a world of
difference between them, according as any given mind emphasizes the one
or the other. This difference, I say, is the difference between life
approached through experience and life approached through ideas. And
when we penetrate behind these points of view we find that they are
determined very largely by the characters and modes of living of the men
who hold them. That explains the vital importance in literary criticism
of knowing something about the man one is discussing, as distinguished
from the work of his brain pure and simple. There is a reason why the
intellectualist point of view occurs as a rule in men who have
habitually lived the delocalized, detached, and comparatively
depersonalized life of cities, while men of the soil, of the sea, of the
elements, men, so to speak, of intensive experience, novelists like
Conrad or Tolstoy or Hardy, are fundamentally non-intellectual,
pessimistic, and moral.
And this explains the natural opposition between Conrad and Wells. Aside
from the original bent of his mind, the intensive quality of Conrad's
experience--an experience of ships and the minute, simple, personal,
tragic life of ships, set off against the impersonal, appalling sea and
an always indifferent universe, a life remote from change, in which the
relations of things are in a peculiar sense abiding and in which only
one problem exists, the problem of character, imminent nature being kept
at bay only through the loyalty, integrity and grit of men--the
intensive quality of this experience, I say, acting upon an artistic
mind, would naturally tend to produce not only a bitterly profound
wisdom, but an equally profound contempt for the play of ideas, so
irresponsible in comparison, and for a view of the world based upon
ideas the real cost of which has never been counted in the face of
hunger, icy winds, storm and shipwreck, and the abysmal forces of
nature. Men who go down to the sea in ships have a right to say for
themselves (tempering the credulity of those who have remained at home)
that the intellectualist view of life is altogether too easy and too
glib. It is they who throw into relief the deep, obscure conviction of
the "plain man"--commonly the good man--that to endeavor to make life
conform with ideas is in some way to deprive the world of just those
elements which create character and to strike at an ideal forged through
immemorial suffering and effort.
Merely to dismiss as dumb folly an all but universal contention of this
kind (no doubt in the back of people's minds when they say that
socialism, for instance, is "against human nature") is to beg the whole
question of intellectualism itself. For, if it could be conclusively
shown that any view of life not incidentally but by its nature
emasculated life and destroyed the roots of character, then of course,
no matter how rationally self-evident it might be and how much confusion
and suffering it might avert, it would never even justify its own reason
for being--it would never _succeed,_ the best part of human nature would
oppose it to the end of time and the intelligence itself would be
discredited. And indeed to the man of experience rather than the man of
ideas, just because of his rich humanity, just because he never passes
out of the personal range, belong the ideal things, morality,
philosophy, art. Like charity, these things "begin at home"; and
whenever (as in pragmatism, when pragmatism ceases to be a method and
claims to be an interpretation of life) they are approached not from the
side of experience but from the side of ideas they cease to have any
real substance. Morality has no substance when it springs from the mind
instead of the conscience, art when it appeals to the mind instead of
the perceptions; and as to philosophy, what is any scheme of things that
springs out of the head of a man who is not himself wise? It is a
certain condemnation of Bergson, for example, that he would never pass
muster in a group of old fishermen smoking their pipes on the end of a
pier. Not that they would be expected in any case to know what he was
talking about, but that his fibre so plainly is the fibre not of a wise
but of a clever man and that in everything, as Emerson said, you must
have a source higher than your tap.
That is why, as it seems to me, Wells ought not to be considered from
any of these absolute standpoints. He has put before us not so much a
well-wrought body of artistic work, or a moral programme, or an
explanation of life--words quite out of place in connection with
him--as a certain new spirit, filled with all sorts of puzzled
intimations of a new beauty and even a new religion to be generated out
of a new order of things that is only glimpsed at present. And the point
I should like to make about this spirit is that it is entirely
irrelevant to the values of life as we know them, but that it may in the
end prove to have contributed to an altogether fresh basis for human
values.
To illustrate what I mean by this irrelevance as regards present values
and this possibility as regards future values let me turn to that long
brilliant passage in _The New Machiavelli_ where Remington goes from
club to club, passing in review the spiritual possibilities of each
political party, and finds nothing but a desolation of triviality,
pomposity, confusion, and "utterly damned old men." Consider the
contempt and hopelessness that fill his mind. One has to forget entirely
the ordinary man's view of politics, sincerely held as it is; one has to
think of politics as a means of straightening out and re-engendering a
whole world of confused anguish before one can see any justification for
this righteous wit and savage indignation against the dulness of
leaders. Considered by the current values of life in which politics are
regarded as an effect of man's incompetence rather than as a cause of
his virtue, treated intensively, as a novelist of experience rather than
of ideas would have treated them, in what a different light each of
these "utterly damned old men" would appear, each one a tiny epic of
tragic and comic efforts, disappointments, misconceptions, providing one
in the end with how much of an excuse for blame, ridicule or contempt!
Everything indeed depends upon where a given mind chooses to lay
emphasis. In this scene Wells has judged everything by his ideal of a
great society, just as Conrad, faced with the same material, would have
judged everything by his ideal of personal character. Conrad would have
used those men to give us an understanding of life as it is, whereas
Wells has used them simply to throw into relief his idea of what life
ought to be. Conrad would have created a work of art, illustrated a
moral programme, and interpreted life. Wells, admittedly a clever
caricaturist, only rises above the level of a clever caricaturist
according as we accept the validity of his ideal and share the spirit in
which he writes. Like many children of light, Wells is not wise in his
own generation. But perhaps another generation will justify him.
If Wells had lingered in these deep realities of his own time he would
have been a greater artist. And indeed so marked has been his own
development away from the world of ideas and toward the world of
experience that were he to begin afresh it is likely that he would
resemble the type of novelist of which I have taken Conrad as an example
far more than his former self. Of socialism he has abandoned all the
theories and most of the schemes and retained only the frame of mind. He
has taken year by year a more intensive view of life, he has grown too
conscious of the inertia that impedes ideas and the overwhelming
immediacies of the actual world to be called glib and easy any more.
"How little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances,
preposterously unable to find the will to realize even the most timid of
its dreams!" he says in one of his latest novels, and if he has kept
alive his faith in ideas, who will deny that he has begun to count the
cost of it?
From this side, I think, it is no longer possible for anyone to assail
him, so frankly has he given hostages to "actuality." It is from the
other side, his own side, and especially in the light of his own ideal,
that an answer is required for the slackness which has come upon him and
which is very marked in his recent novels. Is it possible to ignore the
fact that since he wrote _The New Machiavelli_ the work of Wells has
lived on its capital and lost the passionate curiosity and personal
conviction that made him the force he was in our epoch? Always unwilling
to check his talent and publish only the results of his genuine mental
progress, he has become, in spite of splendid moments, too much of the
common professional novelist, dealing with levels and phases of life
where he obviously does not belong, astray from his own natural point of
intense contact with things. I want to avoid the usual habit of critics
who think it their business to put authors in their places, but is it
not a fact that Wells understands the Kippses and Pollys far better than
the lords and ladies of England and that he was at his best in
elaborating a bridge--a wonderful visionary bridge--between the little
world of dumb routine and the great world of spacious initiatives?
Carlyle with his Great Man theory, forged out of his own travail and
weakness, in the end fell on his knees before the illusion of lordship.
Fifteen years ago one might have predicted the same future for the
Samurai of Wells, not because the Samurai are themselves equivocal but
because Wells is an Englishman. There so plainly to the English mind the
great gentlemen are, the men who can and the men who never do! Towards
this Circe of the English imagination Wells has travelled with a fatal
consistency, and the result to be foreseen was first of all fatuity and
in the end extinction.
After he had written _The New Machiavelli_ Wells had reached a point
where his ideas, in order to be saved, had to be rescued from himself.
To believe that life can be straightened out by the intelligence is
necessarily to have "travelled light," in a measure; too much experience
is the end of that frame of mind. In _Tono-Bungay_ and _The New
Machiavelli_ ideas and experience met in a certain invisible point
--that is the marvel which has made these books unique and, I suppose,
permanent; the greatest possible faith in ideas was united with the
greatest possible grasp of everything that impedes them. One had
therefore a sense of tragic struggle, in which the whole life of our
time was caught up and fiercely wrestled with; one had the feeling that
here was the greatest moment in the life of a writer suddenly become
great. But with these books some secret virtue seems to have passed out
of Wells. Since then his ideas have been hardly more than a perfunctory
repetition and his experience more and more remote and unreal; and
looking back one seems to discover something highly symbolic in the
tragical conquest of ideas by passion with which _The New Machiavelli_
concludes.
But indeed Wells was always a man whose ideas were greater than himself.
"I stumble and flounder," says George Ponderevo, "but I know that over
all these merry immediate things, there are other things that are great
and serene, very high, beautiful things--the reality. I haven't got it,
but it's there nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with
unimaginable goddesses." And just for this reason the spirit which in
his great days possessed him is independent of any fate that may befall
Wells himself and his art. More than this, by frankly and fully testing
his ideas in a life-and-death struggle with reality he has, even at the
cost of his own shipwreck, removed from the cause of ideas the greatest
reproach which has always been brought against it. Revolutionists,
doctrinaires, idealogues have notoriously failed to test the validity of
their ideas even in the face of their own private passions and
confusions; they have rarely considered for a moment that their own
lives totally unfit them for supposing that men are naturally good and
that to make reason prevail is one of the simplest operations in the
world. Wells, on the other hand, has consistently shown that theory
divorced from practice is a mode of charlatanism, that "love and fine
thinking" must go together, and that precisely because of man's
individual incapacity to live, as things are, with equal honesty the
life of ideas and the life of experience, the cause he has at heart must
be taken out of the hands of the individual and made to form a common
impersonal will and purpose in the mind of the race as a whole.
* * * * *
Intellectualism, in fact, the view that life can be determined by ideas
(and of this socialism is the essence) if it can be justified at all has
to be justified in the face of all current human values. It is based on
an assumption, a grand and generous assumption, I maintain, and one that
has to take what is called a sporting chance with all the odds against
it. This assumption is, that on the whole human nature can be trusted to
take care of itself while the surplus energy of life, commonly absorbed
in the struggle against incapacity, sloth, perversity, and disorder
("original sin," to sum it all up), is released for the organization of
a better scheme for mankind; and further, that this better scheme,
acting on a race naturally capable of a richer and fuller life, will
have the effect on men as a whole that re-environing has on any cramped,
ill-nourished, unventilated organism, and that art, religion, morals
(all that makes up the substance and meaning of life) instead of being
checked and blighted in the process will in the end, strong enough to
bear transplantation, be re-engendered on a finer and freer basis. This,
in a word, is the contention of the intellectual, a splendid gambler's
chance, on which the future rests, and to which people have committed
themselves more than they know. It is a bridge thrown out across the
void, resting at one end on the good intentions of mankind and relying
at the other upon mankind's fulfilling those good intentions. It is
based like every great enterprise of the modern world upon credit, and
its only security is the fact that men thus far and on the whole have
measured up to each enlargement of their freedom and responsibility.
To feel the force of this one has to think of the world as a world. Just
here has been the office of socialism, to show that society is a
colossal machine of which we are all parts and that men in the most
exact sense are members one of another. In the intellectualist scheme of
things that mathematical proof has to come first; it has to take root
and bury itself and become the second nature of humankind before the new
world of instinct can spring out of it and come to blossom.
That has been the office of socialism, and just so far as that proof has
been established socialism has played its part. Now the point I want to
make about Wells is that in him one sees already in an almost precocious
form the second stage of this process. In him this new world of
intelligence is already exuberant with instinct; the social machine has
become a personality; that cold abstraction the world has become in his
hands a throbbing, breathing, living thing, as alive, awake, aware of
itself, as engaging, adventurous, free, critical, well-primed,
continent, and all-of-a-piece as a strong man running a race. People
never felt nature as a personality before Wordsworth showed them that it
was, or a locomotive before Kipling wrote _McAndrew's Hymn_; and it
seems to me that Wells has done for the social organism very much what
Wordsworth did for nature, discovering in a thing previously felt to be
inanimate a matter for art and a basis for religious emotion.
But if the world is a personality it is a very stupid, sluggish,
unawakened personality, differing from nature in this respect, that we
ourselves compose the whole of it and have it in our hands to do what we
will with it. It has always been out of joint, a great slipshod
Leviathan, at sixes and sevens, invertebrate and fungus-brained. Just so
is the average man, sunk in routine, oppressed with microscopic tasks
that give birth one to another, his stomach at war with his head, his
legs unwilling to exercise him, resentful of his own capacity not to be
dull. But certain happier moments bring him an exuberant quickened life
in which routine tasks fall nimbly from his fingers and he is aware of a
wide, humorous, generous, enlightened vision of things; he pulls himself
together, his parts reinforce one another, his mind wakens, his heart
opens, his fancy stirs, he is all generosity and happiness, capable of
anything that is disinterested, fine, and becoming to a free man. It is
in these moments that individual men have done all the things which make
up the real history of this planet.
If individual men are capable of this amazing experience, then why not
the world? That is the spirited question Wells has propounded in a
hundred different forms, in his earlier, more theoretical, and more
optimistic writings suggesting that society as a whole should turn over
a new leaf, and even picturing it as doing so, in his later work, more
experienced and less hopeful but with a compensating fervor, picturing
the attempt of delegated individuals to act on society's behalf. I do
not wish at this point to become pious and solemn in tone; that would be
inept in connection with Wells. But I do wish to make it plain that if
he is devoid of those grander traits which spring from the sense of
being "tenon'd and mortised" upon something beyond change, if his
strength lies wholly in his intelligence, the intelligence itself in
Wells is an amazing organ, a troubled and rapturous organ, an organ as
visionary and sensitive as the soul of a Christian saint. That is why I
have said that in him the new world, governed by the intelligence, is
already exuberant with instinct; and anyone who doubts that he has
lavished a very genuine religious instinct upon the social process
itself and in the dream of a society free, magnanimous and seemly,
should turn to the passage where he describes Machiavelli, after the
heat and pettiness of the day, retiring into his chamber alone, putting
on his dress of ceremony and sitting down before his table in the
presence of that magnificent thought.
The mass of men have acted more consistently than they know on the
principle that the whole world is nothing in comparison with one soul,
for their politics and economic science, solemn as they appear, are as
frivolous and secondary as if they actually did believe fervently that
heaven is their true home and the world a bad business of little
account. In all that concerns private virtue and the private life, in
religion, poetry, their lawyer, their doctor, their broker, they exact
the last degree of excellence and efficiency, but they trust to the
blind enterprise of individual men to push mankind chaotically forward
little by little. We are in fact so wonderfully made that if our grocer
tells us in the morning that he has no fresh eggs he throws us into a
deeper despondency than six readings of the _Inferno_ could ever do. And
that explains why so few people can extend themselves imaginatively into
the greater circles that surround them, why, on the social plane, we
never think of demanding wisdom from politicians, why we never dream of
remembering that they should belong to the august family of Plutarch,
why it is not the profound views of wise men and the brilliant
discoveries of science that fill the newspapers, but the incredibly
banal remarks of this president and that prime minister, why presidents
and prime ministers in a society that lives from hand to mouth are so
much more important than poets and prophets, and why statesmanship has
gathered about itself a literature so incomparably trivial and dull.
Socialists, indeed, just because they alone are serious about the world,
are apt to be the least mundane in spirit; they are, as Wells has
himself said, "other-worldly" about the world itself.
But indeed I should make a mistake were I to over-stress the solemnities
that underlie the spirit of Wells. In tone he is more profane than
sacred, that is to say he is a realist. He wants a world thrillingly
alive, curious, exercised, magnanimous, with all its dim corners lighted
up, shaken out of its dulness and complacency, keen, elastic, tempered
like a fine blade--the counterpart on a grand scale of what he most
admires in the individual. "Stephen," says Lady Mary in _The Passionate
Friends_, "promise me. Whatever you become, you promise and swear here
and now never to be grey and grubby, never to be humpy and snuffy, never
to be respectable and modest and dull and a little fat, like--like
everybody." And in _First and Last Things_ he gives the other side of
the medal:
Much more to me than the desire to live is the desire to
taste life. I am not happy until I have done and felt
things. I want to get as near as I can to the thrill of a
dog going into a fight or the delight of a bird in the air.
And not simply in the heroic field of war and the air do I
want to understand. I want to know something of the jolly
wholesome satisfaction that a hungry pig must find in its
wash. I want to get the fine quintessence of that.
It stands to reason that a spirit of this kind does not consort with any
pre-arranged pocket ground-plan, so to speak, of the world as it should
be. Of this, to be sure, he is often accused, and he has given us a
humorous version of his Utopia as it may appear to certain of his
contemporaries:
Mr. G.K. Chesterton mocks valiantly and passionately, I
know, against an oppressive and obstinately recurrent
anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped,
meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a
fine for laughing, not that he would want to laugh, and
austere exercises in several of the more metallic virtues
daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's conception is rather in the nature
of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid, frozen flight from the
pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of us short,
inelegant men, but for all that terribly resolute,
indefatigable, incessant to capture him, to drag him off to
a mechanical Utopia, and then to take his thumb-mark and his
name, number him distinctly in indelible ink, and let him
loose (under inspection) in a world of great round lakes of
blue lime-water and vistas of white sanitary tiling.
That is a not unjust parody of Wells's Utopia as it would be if he had
remained in the circle of his Fabian friends. Being what he is, it bears
much the same relation to his idea as that world of harps and crowns and
milk and honey bore in the mediæval imagination to the idea of heaven.
You have to mingle these notions with your experience of human hearts to
realize the inadequacy of symbols. Wells, I suspect, has a fondness for
white sanitary tiling, just as plenty of good Christians have found in
milk and honey a foretaste of unthinkable felicity; but when it comes to
the actual architecture and domestic arrangements of paradise they are
both quite willing to take on trust the accommodating good will of God
and man. Somehow or other, by the time we have got there, we shall not
find it monotonous--to this, at least, one's faith, whatever it may be,
ought to be equal.
I have given too few quotations in this book, and now I have left it to
a point where if I give any at all it must be to illustrate less the art
of Wells as a thing by itself than a train of thought. He is at his best
in brief scenes, where all his gifts of humor, satire, characterization
and phrase come to a head (think, for example, of Aunt Plessington's
speech, the funeral of Mr. Polly's father, the pages dealing with Cousin
Nicodemus Frapp's house-hold, and the somewhat prolonged episode of the
"reet Staffordshire" cousins in _The New Machiavelli_); and indeed, so
insistent is his point of view that in every one of these episodes one
finds in opposition the irrepressible new world of Wells and the
stagnant world out of which it springs. One of the best of these scenes,
luckily, is brief and connected enough to be quoted as a whole. It is a
picture of the tea-hour in the servants' hall at Bladesover House.
I sat among these people on a high, hard, early Gregorian
chair, trying to exist, like a feeble seedling amidst great
rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to
suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality. It was
hard on me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather
over-fed, ageing, pretending people, that my youthful
restlessness and rebellious unbelieving eyes should be
thrust in among their dignities.
Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat
it out perforce; and day after day the talk was exactly the
same.
"Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?" my mother used to ask. "Sugar,
Mrs. Latude-Fernay?"
The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They
say," she would begin, issuing her proclamation--at least
half her sentences began "they say"--"sugar is fatt-an-ing,
nowadays. Many of the best people do not take it at all."
"Not with their tea, ma'am," said Rabbits, intelligently.
"Not with anaything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of
crushing repartee, and drank.
"What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.
"They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.
"They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors
are not recomm-an-ding it now."
My Mother: "No, ma'am?"
Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."
Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he
died, consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have
sometimes fancied it may have hastened his end."
This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner
and a pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir
Roderick.
"George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"
Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favorite piece
from her repertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely,"
she would say, or if the season was decadent, "How the
evenings draw in!" It was an invaluable remark to her; I do
not know how she would have got along without it.
My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would
always consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and
regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction,
whichever phase it might be.
A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or
shortest day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.
There is, I think, a special sort of connection between Wells and
America; and there are times when it seems to me that were the spirit of
America suddenly to become critical of itself it would resemble nothing
in the world so much as the spirit of Wells magnified by many diameters.
His instincts are all as it were instincts of the intelligence; his
mind, like the American mind, is a disinherited mind, not connected with
tradition, thinking and acting _de novo_ because there is nothing to
prevent it from doing so. Perfectly American is his alertness, his
versatility, adaptability, his thorough-going pragmatism, perfectly
American are the disconcerting questions that he asks ("Is the Navy
_bright_?"). Perfectly American is his view of the traditional English
ideal of human nature--that strange compound of good intentions, homely
affection, stubborn strength, insensibility to ideas, irrational
self-sacrifice, domestic despotism, a strong sense of property in things
and people, stupidity, sweetness and confusion of mind--an ideal through
which it has been one of his never-failing delights to send electric
shocks. And indeed the type of character he has presented in his heroes,
in Remington, Trafford and Ponderevo, is a type to be found perhaps more
plentifully than elsewhere in American research bureaus, hospitals and
laboratories. He thinks and feels critically so many of the things
America lives and does unconsciously. Perhaps in this distinction lies
the immediate value of his criticism for us.
For in his mind Americans can see themselves reflected in the light of
what they chiefly need, that synthetic motive without which a secular
and industrial race is as devoid of animating morality as a swarm of
flies. This want, most obvious on the political and economic plane, is
indeed fundamental. Wells has grasped it from many different angles but
never with more point than in his essay _The American Population_.
Consider this passage, where he takes as a text one of Arthur Brisbane's
editorials in the "New York Journal":
It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the
utmost to make itself audible to the new world, and cracking
into italics and breaking into capitals with the strain. The
rest of that enormous bale of paper is eloquent of a public
void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of comprehensive
things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalizations, a
public which has carried the conception of freedom to its
logical extreme of entire individual detachment. These
telltale columns deal all with personality and the drama of
personal life. They witness to no interest but the interest
in intense individual experiences. The engagements, the love
affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in
pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits
and sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers
who write this stuff strike the personal note, and their
heavily muscular portraits frown beside the initial letter.
Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of
realization, and any new indelicacy in fashionable costume,
any new medical device or cure, any new dance or
athleticism, any new breach in the moral code, any novelty
in sea-bathing or the woman's seat on horse-back, or the
like, is given copious and moving illustration, stirring
headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a colored
supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint
dialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which
"th" has vanished, and it presents a world in which the
kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims is an
inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole Maud!" There is
a smaller bale dealing with sport. In the advertisement
columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but
great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous
tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business
opportunities....
Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as
people say, taken off its frills.... The "New York
American" represents a clientèle to be counted by the
hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes,
just burning to live and living to burn.
Now that is a very fair picture, not merely of popular America but of
the whole contemporary phase of popular civilization, uprooted from the
state of instinct, intensive experience and the immemorial immediacies
of duty and the soil. To the artist and the moralist it is a cause of
hopeless pessimism, as any civilization must be which has lost touch
with all its values and been rationalized to the point of anarchy. For
this there is only one salvation. If civilization has lost the faculty
of commanding itself and pulling itself together in its individual
aspect, it must pull itself together collectively. That essentially is
the fighting chance of intellectualism, the hope that, inasmuch as the
world has already lost touch with experience and committed itself to a
regime of ideas, by organizing this regime of ideas and by mechanizing
so far as possible the material aspect of things, the values of life can
be re-engendered on a fresh basis. From this follows the oft-repeated
phrase of Wells that the chief want of the American people is a "sense
of the state." For the peril and the hope of American life (granting
that, as things are, society must be brought into some kind of coherence
before morality, art and religion can once more attain any real meaning)
lies in the fact that while at present Americans are aware of themselves
only as isolated individuals they are unconsciously engaged in works of
an almost appalling significance for the future of society. A Trust is a
work of this kind, and whether it is to be a gigantic good or a gigantic
evil depends wholly upon whether its controlling minds are more
conscious of their individual or their social function. The mechanism of
society in America is already developed to a very high point; what is
wanting, and without this everything is wanting, is an understanding of
the right function of this mechanism. So much does it all depend upon
whether the financial mind can subdue itself to the greater mind of the
race.
If the future is anywhere going to follow the lines that Wells has
suggested for it--and being an opportunist his aims are always in touch
with agreeable probabilities--it will most likely be in America. He has
lately given his idea of what the State should aim to be--"planned as
an electric traction system is planned, without reference to
pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines"; an idea remarkably of a
piece with the American imagination and one which the American
imagination is perfectly capable of translating into fact. American,
too, are the methods in which Wells has come to believe for bringing the
Great State into existence. His conviction is that socialism will come
through an enlightened individualism, outside the recognized
governmental institutions, and that the ostensible States will be
superseded virtually by informal centres of gravity quite independent of
them. America alone at present justifies this speculation. For the
centre of gravity in American affairs has always been extra-governmental,
and consistently in America where wealth gathers there also the
institutions of socialism spring into being. The rudiments of the
Socialist State, falsely based as they are but always tending to subvert
this false basis, are certainly to be found, if anywhere, in the
Rockefeller Institute, the Carnegie and Russell Sage Foundations, the
endowed universities and bureaus of research, and in the type of men
they breed. Consider the following passage from _The Passionate Friends_
and the character of the American, Gidding, which is indicated in it:
To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably
magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all
science, all knowledge, all philosophical and political
ideas, round about the habitable globe. His mind began
producing concrete projects as a firework being lit produces
sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the most colossal of
printing and publishing projects, as a man might work out
the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so
entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to
go on from the proposition that understanding was the
primary need of humanity to the systematic organization of
free publishing, exhaustive discussion, intellectual
stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists
might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.
"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had
seemed to me half fantasy, "let's _do_ it."
It is perfectly possible in fact that socialism will come into being
first of all under the form of Cecil Rhodes's dream, as a secret order
of millionaires "promoting" not their own aims but society itself. That
is one of the possibilities at least that lie in what Wells has called
the "gigantic childishness" of the American mind.
INDEX
_America, The Future in_
America, Wells and
_American Population, The_
_Ann Veronica_
_Anticipations_
Arnold, Matthew
Bacon
Beerbohm, Max
Belloc, Hilaire
Bergson, Henri
Brisbane, Arthur
Brook Farm
Carlyle
Catholic Church, the
Cato
Chesterton, G.K.
Chicago
_Comet, In the Days of the_
_Common Sense of Warfare, The_
Comte
Confucius
Conrad, Joseph
_Creative Evolution_
Dante
Darwin
De Foe
Dickens
_Discovery of the Future, The_
Dürer
Emerson
_Empire of the Ants, The_
Erasmus
_Ethics and Evolution_
Fabian Society
_First and Last Things_
_First Men in the Moon, The_
_Food of the Gods, The_
_Fortnightly Review, The_
Francis, St.
Goethe
_Great State, The_
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Hardy, Thomas
Hearn, Lafcadio
Heraclitus
Hero, The
_History of Mr. Polly, The_
Huxley
_Inferno, The_
_Invisible Man, The_
_Island of Dr. Moreau, The_
James, William
Japanese, the
Jeffries, Richard
Johnson, Dr.
Kipling, Rudyard
_Kipps_
Leonardo da Vinci
Leopardi
_Love and Mr. Lewisham_
Luther
Macaulay
Machiavelli
_Mankind in the Making_
Marcus Aurelius
_Marriage_
Michael Angelo
_Modern Utopia, A_
Montessori, Madame
Morris, William
_McAndrew's Hymn_
_New Machiavelli, The_
Newman, Cardinal
New Republican, the
_News from Nowhere_
_New Worlds for Old_
Nietzsche
_Our Liberal Practitioners_
_Passionate Friends, The_
Plato
Plutarch
Rabelais
_Rasselas_
_Rediscovery of the Unique, The_
Rhodes, Cecil
_Robinson Crusoe_
Samurai, the
_Scepticism of the Instrument,_
Schopenhauer
_Servile State, The_
Shakespeare
Shaw, Bernard
_Sleeper Awakes, The_
_So-Called Science of Sociology, The_
Sorel, Georges
Spencer, Herbert
_Story of the Days to Come, A_
Superman, the
Superior Man, the
Swift
Taine, H.A.
Thoreau
_Time Machine, The_
Tolstoy
_Tono-Bungay_
Verne, Jules
Ward, Mrs. Humphry
Webb, Sidney
_Wheels of Chance, The_
Whitman, Walt
Wordsworth
Worms Cathedral
End of Project Gutenberg's The World of H.G. Wells, by Van Wyck Brooks