IVMR. WELLS AND THE WORLD
Mr. Wells is in love with the human race. It is one of the rarest of passions. It is a passion of which not even all imaginative men are capable. It was, perhaps, the grandest of Shelley’s grand passions, and it was the demon in William Morris’s breast. On the other hand, it played a small part if any, in the lives of Shakespeare and Dickens. Their kaleidoscopic sympathy with human beings was at the antipodes from Shelley’s angelic infatuation with the human race. The distinction has often been commented on. It is the difference between affection and prophecy. There is no reason, I suppose, why the two things should not be combined, and, indeed, there have been affectionate prophets both among the religious teachers and among men of letters. But, as a rule, one element flourishes at the expense of the other, and Charles Lamb would have been as incapable of even wishing to write theOutlineof Historyas Mr. Wells would be of attempting to write theEssays of Elia.
Not that Mr. Wells gives us the impression that he loves men in general more than Charles Lamb did. It seems almost as if he loved the destiny of man more than he loves man himself. His hero is an anonymous two-legged creature who was born thousands of years ago and has been reincarnated innumerable times and who will go on being re-born until he has established the foundations of order amid the original slime of things. That is the character in history whom Mr. Wells most sincerely loves. He means more to him than Moses or any of Plutarch’s men. Plutarch’s men, indeed, are for the most part men who might have served man but preferred to take advantage of him. Compare Plutarch’s and Mr. Wells’s treatment of Cato the Elder and Julius Cæsar, and you will see the difference between sympathy with individual men and passion for the purpose of man. You will see the same difference if you compare the Bible we possess with the new Bible of which Mr. Wells draws up a syllabus inThe Salvaging of Civilisation. The older book at the outset hardly pauses to deal with man as a generalisation, but launches almost at once into the story of one man called Adam and onewoman called Eve. Mr. Wells, on the other hand, would begin the human part of his narrative with “the story of our race”:
How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the secrets of metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took to the seas. That story of our common inheritance and of our slow upward struggle has to be taught throughout our entire community in the city slums and in the out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all. By teaching it, we restore again to our people the lost basis of a community, a common idea of their place in space and time.
How through hundreds of thousands of years it won power over nature, hunted and presently sowed and reaped. How it learnt the secrets of metals, mastered the riddle of the seasons, and took to the seas. That story of our common inheritance and of our slow upward struggle has to be taught throughout our entire community in the city slums and in the out-of-the-way farmsteads most of all. By teaching it, we restore again to our people the lost basis of a community, a common idea of their place in space and time.
Mr. Wells’s attitude to men, it is clear, is primarily that of a philosopher, while the attitude of the Bible is primarily that of a poet. It remains to be seen whether a philosopher’s Bible can move the common imagination as the older Bible has moved it. That it can move and excite it in some degree we know. We have only to read the glowing pages with whichThe Salvaging of Civilisationopens in order to realise this. Mr. Wells’s passion for the human group is infectious. He expresses it with the vehemence of a great preacher. He plays, like many great preachers, not on our sympathy so much as on our hopes and fears. His book is a book of salvation and damnation—of warnings to fleefrom the wrath to come, of prophecies of swords turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning-hooks. He loves his ideal group-man almost as Bunyan loved Christian. He offers him, it is true, at the end of his journey, not Paradise, but the World-State. He offers it to him, moreover, not as an individual but as a type. He bids men be ready to perish in order that man may arrive at the goal. His book is a call to personal sacrifice to the end, not of personal, but of general salvation. That, however, is an appeal that has again and again been proved effective in history. It is of the same kind as the appeal of patriotism in time of war. “Who dies if England lives?” sang Mr. Kipling. “Who dies if the World-State lives?” Mr. Wells retorts.
The question remains whether the ordinary man can ever be brought to think of the world as a thing worth living and dying for as he has often thought his country worth living and dying for. If the world were attacked by the inhabitants of another planet, world-patriotism would become a necessity of self-defence, and the peoples of the world would be presented with the alternatives of uniting or perishing. Mr. Wells believes, no doubt, that they are presented with these alternatives already. But can they be made to realise this by anything but an externalenemy? It is external enemies that create and intensify patriotism. Can human beings as a whole organise themselves against war as the enemy with the same thoroughness with which Englishmen organised themselves against Germany as the enemy? Mr. Wells obviously believes that they can. But it is to the great religions, not to the great patriotisms, that he looks for examples of how this can be done. He recalls how the Christian religion spread in the first four centuries and how the Moslem religion spread in the seventh century, and he believes that these precedents “support a reasonable hope that such a change in the minds of men, whatever else it may be, is a practicable change.” His gospel of human brotherhood, indeed, is propounded as a larger Christianity rather than as a larger patriotism. He realises, however, the immensity of the difficulties in the way of the spread of this gospel. He sees that the majority of men are still indifferent to it. Unless they are in the vein for it, “it does not really interest them; rather it worries them.” That is why he believes so ardently in the need of a new Bible—a Bible of Civilisation—which will restore to modern men “a sense of personal significance, a sense of destiny, such as no one in politics or literature seems to possess to-day.”That is why he scorns such a compromise and concession to the frailty of human nature as a League of Nations and calls on men to turn their eyes from all such conveniences and makeshifts and to concentrate on the more arduous ideal of human unity. Of the League of Nations he writes:
The praise has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity—no personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a woman’s club instead of loving his wife.For the idea of man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix—even in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula.
The praise has a thin and legal and litigious flavour. What loyalty and what devotion can we expect this multiple association to command? It has no unity—no personality. It is like asking a man to love the average member of a woman’s club instead of loving his wife.
For the idea of man, for human unity, for our common blood, for the one order of the world, I can imagine men living and dying, but not for a miscellaneous assembly that will not mix—even in its name. It has no central idea, no heart to it, this League of Nations formula.
Many people will agree with much of Mr. Wells’s scornful criticism of the League of Nations. He is obviously writing the plainest common sense when he declares that it has failed so far to solve the problem of modifying the traditional idea of sovereign independence and the problem of a super-national force that will be stronger than any national force. The average statesman is still an Imperialist at heart, even when he praises the League of Nations with hislips. He desires a world-order that will confirm the present order of rival Empires rather than a world-order that will supersede it. He desires to avert war, but only if he may preserve all the conditions that make war inevitable. Mr. Wells is impatient of all this as a treachery to the greatest ideal that has come into the world in our time. On the other hand, I think that the advocates of the League of Nations and not the advocates of the World State are going the right way to propagate the sense of world-unity that Mr. Wells desires. The League of Nations, whatever its shortcomings, does make human nature a partner in its ideal. It remembers the ordinary human being’s affection for his own country, and does not treat it as a mere prejudice in the path. It realises that the true victory of internationalism will be not as the destroyer of individualism but as its counterweight. It used to be thought that a man could not be loyal to both his church and his country unless the Church were a State Church. Some Socialists have believed that the family and the State were inevitable rivals. As a matter of fact, every man is in a state of balance among conflicting loyalties—loyalty to himself, to the family, to the school, to the Church, to the State, to the world. The religion of the brotherhoodof man must bow to this fact, or it must fail. To ignore it is to be a doctrinaire—to fail, that is, to bring home one’s doctrine to men’s business and bosoms. It is to sit above the battle so far as the immediate issues with which mankind is faced are concerned. Mr. Wells has rendered an immense service to his time by compelling us to remember the common origin and the common interests of mankind. He has invented a wonderful telescope through which we can look back and see man struggling out of the mud and can look forward and see him climbing a dim and distant pinnacle. I am not sure, however, if he has pointed out the most desirable route to the pinnacle—whether he does not expect us to reach it as the crow flies instead of by winding roads and by bridges across the deep rivers and ravines. He may take the view that, as man has learned to fly mechanically, so he may learn to fly politically. One never knows. The glorious feature of his prophetic writing, meanwhile, is its driving-force. He is one of the few writers who have given momentum to the idea of the world as one place.