Mr. Chesterton has illustrated the peculiar quality of the English mind by comparing the roads of France with the roads of England; and thecomparison might be used to illustrate the difference between the mind of Mr. Shaw and the mind of the average man. Mr. Chesterton, with that startling profundity that is to be discovered in much of his writing that seems at first merely to be conjuring stuff, asserts that the design of English and French roads, the first all winding and irregular, the second straight as if drawn with the aid of a ruler, shows a fundamental difference between the two races: the English as wayward and casual as their roads, going lazily and easily to their journey's end; the French as logical and well-defined as their roads, going without any circumlocution to their journey's end. Mr. Shaw's mind goes directly to its goal, and he tries to persuade the rest of mankind to follow his example. But the rest of mankind does not wish to go by the most direct route to any goal: it wants to dally on the ways; it wants to explore all the little bye-paths and hidden corners; it even wants to turn back on its course to examine again some place that it has already seen; and above all, it wants to waste time. When Mr. Shaw contemplates the world engaged in this careless way of living, he bursts into a passion of wit where less gifted men, such as Sheehy Skeffington, wouldburst into anger; and he lashes the world with his tongue. Mankind, because Mr. Shaw is a genius, listens to him, as mankind always has listened to men of genius, in a puzzled fashion, and even speculates on whether it ought not to follow his advice; but it is in the nature of man to be illogical, and so, after a little thought, man goes on being wayward and casual. Even in France, where logic has become an obsession, men are more illogical than Mr. Shaw would have them be; and it is a very curious commentary on his work that in so logical a country as France, his plays make far less stir than in any other country in Europe. I imagine that the French are so cursed with logic that their minds revolt from the extreme reasoning of Mr. Shaw as an overloaded stomach revolts from rich food. Once, in France, when my battalion was marching along a road towards a part of the country in which we had been some weeks before, I heard a soldier in my platoon saying to his comrade as we came to familiar places, "Thank God, they've cut down those bloody trees!" and immediately I understood why the French roads bored the British soldier. That inexorable logic, all that neatness, those terribly straight roads withthe trees growing at regular intervals ... "dressing by the right" as the soldiers said, and looking as if the men who planted them had performed the operation according to some mathematical formula ... all these things, inhumanly tidy and well-ordered, nauseated the mind. I have done much walking on English and French roads, and I will wager that boredom will seize the traveller on a French road long before his interest on an English road has been exhausted. And in their unintellectual, instinctive, wayward fashion, the English are more right about life than the French are. Mr. Shaw, I imagine, is incapable of understanding the state of mind of my soldier who thanked God that the neatly-arranged trees on the neatly-designed French road had been cut down. To him it would seem right that if trees are to be grown at all, they should be grown according to formula. He sees something stupid and wrong in the English method of planting an acorn in any hole that is visible and letting the tree grow as it pleases.
In the chapter on Mr. Wells, I have printed an account of Mr. Shaw's religious faith which ought properly to be printed here, but since the reader can more easily turn to the next chapter than I can re-write it, I will leave the account where it is and proceed with an account of the latest developments of this faith as set forth in "Heartbreak House" and "Back to Methusaleh." These two plays are notable for a growth of religious conviction in their author which has brought him to a condition resembling, in the eyes of some, that of John the Baptist and, in the eyes of others (as I heard a clergyman of the Church of Ireland angrily assert) that of a religious fanatic. They are also notable for a weakening of technical skill as a dramatist. Mr. Shaw has set himself so ably to the task of rejecting drama from his plays, that unconsciously he ruins the effect of his lines by an excess of garrulity. No one, reading and particularly seeing, "Heartbreak House" and "Back to Methusaleh" can escape from the belief that Mr. Shaw is using more words than are necessary to express his thought. Either he despises us aspeople who are not sufficiently intelligent to understand his meaning unless it is delivered to us in a variety of sentences or he has lost his artistic sense and cannot understand that a fine morning is not any finer for being described somewhat in this fashion: "A fine morning is one on which the sun shines from a blue sky in which occasional white clouds may be seen.Thismorning is such a morning as that. Therefore, this is a fine morning. What a fine morning!" The whole of that extravagant speech, invented by me, not by Mr. Shaw, is contained in the last four words. The rest is not only excess, but insult, for it implies an ignorance in the person listening to it which is not human. There are many passages in these two plays which are not unlike that invented passage of mine. There is a passage near the beginning of the second act of "Heartbreak House" which seems to me to indicate a real decline in Mr. Shaw's sense of the theatre. Ellie Dunn and Boss Mangan, to whom she is thinking of getting engaged, are discussing themselves and marriage. He has just described himself in terms which show that he is one of those financial ruffians who are themodern equivalent, (not of highwaymen, for they were gay and adventurous fellows,) but of slave-drivers:
Mangan.... Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?Ellie(dropping her hands): How strange! that my mother, who knew nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you! She always said—not before papa, of course, but to us children—that you were just that sort of a man.Mangan(sitting up much hurt): Oh! did she? And yet she'd have let you marry me.Ellie: Well, you see, Mr. Mangan, my mother married a very good man—for whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul of goodness—and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.
Mangan.... Now what do you think of me, Miss Ellie?
Ellie(dropping her hands): How strange! that my mother, who knew nothing at all about business, should have been quite right about you! She always said—not before papa, of course, but to us children—that you were just that sort of a man.
Mangan(sitting up much hurt): Oh! did she? And yet she'd have let you marry me.
Ellie: Well, you see, Mr. Mangan, my mother married a very good man—for whatever you may think of my father as a man of business, he is the soul of goodness—and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.
The parenthetical clause in each of Ellie's speeches is unnecessary, and in the second speech, it has the effect of ruining a very good "line." I assert, as a dramatist with some technical skill, that Ellie's second speech, minus the parenthetical clause, will rouse laughter every time it is spoken. I assert, with equal confidence, that this speech,withthe parenthetical clause, will not provoke more than a strangled laugh and may not provokeany laughter at all. Mr. Shaw is entitled to reject laughter if he thinks it is likely to destroy the thought in his speech, but no one can believe that the parenthetical clause to which I object adds anything to Ellie's thought. It is mere redundance, and redundance is destructive of drama. It is also destructive of thought for a man is more likely to be irritated than to be stimulated by hearing a thing repeated to excess.
I may, perhaps, note another matter of technical interest to the student of the Shavian drama, namely, Mr. Shaw's economy in characters. He has or had a strong sense of the theatre which is almost as strong as that possessed by Mr. Galsworthy. The difficulty a critic has in estimating Mr. Shaw's sense of the theatre is increased by the wilfulness with which he rejects technique: one is not always able to decide whether the lack of technique in the later plays is the result of intention or weakness. Mr. Galsworthy is nearly the cleverest technician now writing for the English theatre. He cannot think as clearly as Mr. Shaw can, but he can construct much better. When Mr. Galsworthy treats a theme dramatic initself, such as the theme of "Loyalties," and does not entangle the drama with arguments, he writes an uncommonly good play. "Loyalties" has been called a "crook" play and in a sense it is one, but the difference between it and such a piece as "The Bat" by Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mr. Avery Hopwood is the difference between a crook play written in terms of reality and a crook play written in terms of trick. When, however, Mr. Galsworthy treats a theme not dramatic in itself, such as the theme of "Windows," and entangles any drama it has with much argument, the result is something extraordinarily diffuse and nebulous. Mr. Galsworthy leaves you with a sensation, not only that you do not know what he means, but also thathedoes not know what he means. Mr. Shaw, in his later pieces, leaves you with the sensation that he knows only too well what he means, but he will never admit that you are capable of understanding him. His economy in characters is a certain sign of his mysticism. Mr. Yeats told me on one occasion that when Sir Horace Plunkett invited "A. E." to take a prominent position in the organization of co-operative agriculture in Ireland, Mr. Arthur Balfour commendedthe choice on the ground that a mystic is the most practical of men since he is willing to use any instrument that will serve his purpose, whereas your plain, blunt business man, destitute of imagination and firm purpose, will quarrel with his tools and end up by botching his job. The mystic, moreover, serves his purpose more than himself, whereas your plain, blunt business man serves only himself. Mr. Shaw's method of working is singularly interesting as a demonstration of the way in which the mystic achieves his purpose. I do not know of any writer who is so thrifty with his means as Mr. Shaw. Shakespeare, compared with him, is a prodigal and a spendthrift. Mr. Shaw, compared with Shakespeare, is a miser, uniquely stingy. But it is not stinginess which has made Mr. Shaw so economical in his characters and even in his situations. It is his mysticism which makes him extraordinarily indifferent to his means. Any old plot, however disreputable it might be, would serve Shakespeare for drawing on to the stage a crowd of dissimilar persons and enriching their lives with his verse; and any old character, however remote from human semblance will serve Mr. Shaw as a vent for opinions.Shakespeare primarily was interested in people. Mr. Shaw primarily is interested in doctrine. The principal difference between a dramatist who is interested in people and a dramatist who is interested in doctrines, is that the former will delight in the creation of the greatest variety of characters whereas the latter will not trouble to create a new character if an old one will do. I doubt whether there are more than twelve distinct persons in the whole of Mr. Shaw's work. When he began his career as a dogmatist, he set himself to writing novels, but found after he had written five, of which only four have been published, that he could not use this instrument so effectively for his purpose as he could use the instrument of the play. And so he turned his attention to the stage. But he did not waste his novels: he dramatised them. He lifted passages from his books and put them into his plays. He took some of the novel-characters and, after he had tidied them and changed their names, forced them from between their covers on to the stage. There is little in the thirty-eight plays he has written which is not to be found, developed or suggested, in his four novels. He has preached one doctrine all his life,and has preached it with singular consistency. It is set out in the succeeding chapter to this one. The parsimoniousness with which it has been preached is remarkable. The whole of the first act of "Major Barbara" is almost identically a repetition of the first act of "You Never Can Tell." Lady Britomart Undershaft, of the first piece, is Mrs. Clandon, of the second, under another name. The situation of two women is nearly the same. They are living apart from their husbands whom they have not seen for a number of years. Lady Britomart and Mrs. Clandon have each two daughters and a son with the haziest or no recollections of their fathers. A meeting between the two parents and their children is arranged, in each case, on a flimsy pretext. Lady Britomart, like Mrs. Clandon, is one of those strong-minded, silly women who flourish, nowadays, more commonly in America than in England. (She is the sort of dense female who belongs to the Lucy Stone League and refuses to bear the name of the man she has chosen to be her husband although she is willing to bear the name of the man whom she did not choose to be her father!) Lady Britomart, like Mrs. Clandon, has abandoned her husband for aparticularly fatuous cause. Mr. Crampton (for Mrs. Clandon is really Mrs. Crampton) was deprived of his wife's society (which was probably no great loss) and that of his children (which probably was) because he very properly spanked his elder daughter when she had been naughty. Lady Britomart left her husband because he declined to change the basis of his armaments-factory in the interests of his son. Her excuse for her behaviour was more natural than Mrs. Clandon's excuse for hers, for we are all susceptible to the attractions of primogeniture; but a more sensible woman might have achieved her purpose in being less headstrong. Barbara Undershaft, her elder daughter, is Gloria Clandon, a little older and less priggish. Sarah Undershaft, her younger daughter, is a chastened and spiritless Dolly Clandon. There is a difference, however, between Stephen Undershaft and Philip Clandon so remarkable that I can only surmise that Mr. Shaw in transferring the Clandon family into the Undershaft family mislaid Philip and, in searching for him, discovered another youth, this Stephen, who was the product of an illicit love affair between Mrs. Clandon and the austere Finch McComas! Adolphus Cusins, theProfessor of Greek who beats the big drum in the Salvation Army so that he may be near to Barbara, is Valentine, the dentist, dragged out of "You Never Can Tell," after a brief and misguided career as John Tanner in "Man and Superman."
It is easy, I think, to trace the life of each one of the twelve Shavian characters in this fashion. Consider, for example, the vivid and very interesting career of that brutal ruffian, Bill Walker, in "Major Barbara." Bill began his life in "Widowers' Houses" under the name of Lickcheese and flourished so well as a speculative property-owner that he was able to climb into middle-class society, under the name of Burgess, and marry his daughter Candida to the Reverend James Mavor Morell. His association with the clergy, however, must have had a disastrous effect on him for we find him, in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion," leading an adventurous, but misunderstood, career under the name of Drinkwater. Religion had peculiar allurements for Drinkwater, understandably enough when one remembers his former association with his son-in-law, the clergyman, and we are not surprised, therefore, to find him in the Salvation Army's West Ham Shelter,now named Bill Walker and looking less than his years. He suffers terribly from the spiritual garrulity of Major Barbara. The reader who is familiar with the play will remember that Bill cruelly misused a little Salvation Army lass, called Jenny Hill, whowouldkeep on praying for him and turning the other cheek. He struck her on the mouth and twisted her arm and almost tore her hair out by the roots. She cried with the pain, but she went on praying for him!... Then Major Barbara twisted Bill's heart for him as cruelly as he had twisted Jenny Hill's arm, by preaching with terrible iteration the doctrine of forgiveness and non-resistance. We know how Bill, at the penultimate moment, escaped from the penitent form, but few of us realise what happened to him after he had fled, precipitately and full of bitter cynicism, from that Salvation Army Shelter in West Ham. Who could have believed, after witnessing his behaviour in the presence of Barbara and snivelling Jenny Hill, that Jenny Hill herself would be the means of his undoing in the wilds of America to which he had hurried under the name of Blanco Posnet? And here we discover a characteristic example of Mr. Shaw's sardonichumour. For Bill was nabbed, not by the strong Barbara, not even by the weak, though willing, Jenny, but by Jenny's helpless, croup-stricken child. The lion is caught by the mouse; the strong are brought down by the weak; a little child shall lead them into a trap. God, in Mr. Shaw's religion, is not a just God: he is a God determined to have His own way and entirely indifferent to the desires of His creatures. If man will not help God to fulfil His purpose, then God will destroy man and invent another and more submissive instrument whereby He may do so. Such is the Shavian gospel. In what respect does it differ from the most devastating and blasting form of Calvinism? When I was a child in Belfast, I was taught that if I persisted in being a wicked boy, I would be roasted for ever in a red-hot hell. Is there any real difference between the Calvinist who tells a child that he will be burned for all eternity and Mr. Shaw who tells it that it will be scrapped for all eternity. There is one difference, in favour of the Calvinist. I was taught to believe in the All-Perfection of God. Even if I persisted in being a wicked child and thus damned myself for ever, my relatives couldcomfort themselves with the reflection that God would fulfil Himself in His own time. Somewhere, somewhen, there would be "peace, perfect peace." But Mr. Shaw's God offers no such guarantee. He cannot assure us, even if we help Him by every means in our power, that He will ever become perfect. He makes inexorable demands upon our service, but cannot offer us any hope that our labour will not be in vain. Serve me without question or be scrapped, says the Shavian God, but he will not assure us that we are not being bilked. And is not the desolation of desolations a religious faith in which there is no certainty and very little hope? I prefer the romantic delusions of my Ulster forefathers to the practical religion of Mr. Shaw. I dislike the thought that I may be roasted for ever in a red-hot hell, but I like even less the coal-black nullity with which Mr. Shaw threatens me if I persist in my evil courses. There will at least be colour and excitement in Calvin's hell, but there will be nothing whatever in Mr. Shaw's. And I am not sure, after all, that God, Perfect or Imperfect, will not prefer to spend eternity in the company of people like me who decline to accept life on any but theirown terms, rather than in the society of servile instruments.
Mr. Shaw's thirty-eight plays are not thirty-eight separate plays but one long, continuous piece, in which his twelve characters, in every conceivable disguise and situation, strive to elude the hand of God but are nabbed by Him in the end. Twist how you may, He'll get you in the end, unless, indeed, He wearies of trying to make use of you, when, inexorably, without a pang, He will cast you on to the scrap-heap where you will perish utterly as your little brothers, the mammoth beasts, perished long ago.
Mr. Shaw has some of Shakespeare's carelessness over details. I have sometimes wondered why Claudius succeeded to his brother's throne when Hamlet was alive to do so. There is an explanation of this curious succession in Frazer's "The Golden Bough," but I do not suppose that the facts cited by Sir James Frazer were known to Shakespeare and even if it were, he has not made the matter dramatically clear. Hamlet does notappear to resent his uncle's accession to the throne of Denmark. His resentment is roused by the marriage of his mother to her brother-in-law. He probably never liked his uncle, but he is willing to live in his castle as his heir. Shakespeare was always ready to sacrifice verisimilitude to dramatic effects. Ophelia, for example, is denied complete Christian burial because the Church authorities suspect her of having committed suicide, although the account of her death clearly establishes that she was accidentally drowned through the breaking of a branch. Hamlet, too, is unaware of Ophelia's death or dementia when he arrives in the graveyard where she is to be buried, although he has been in the company of Horatio for some time, and Horatio is fully acquainted with the circumstances of Ophelia's misfortunes and death and knows that there have been passages of love between Hamlet and her. Very little trouble was needed to put these minor matters right, but when a god is creating a universe, he is unlikely to trouble himself greatly about specks of dust. Mr. Shaw shows himself equally indifferent to details when they no longer serve his purpose. He has been charged with spoofing his audience onoccasion, notably in the first act of "Man and Superman" where he trumps up a case of impending maternity for shocking effects, and then, his purpose achieved, says no more about it for the remainder of the play! He brings the Undershaft family together in the first act of "Major Barbara" in the pretence that they are about to discuss important questions of family finance which are never once discussed during the act! I do not believe that Mr. Shaw had any intention of spoofing his audience when he invented these situations. He simply did not bother about the details. He had used the effect for his purpose, and since it was no longer serviceable to him, he scrapped it without even troubling to clear away the debris—which, presumably, is what His God will do with us when He no longer needs us. Less happens in the first act of "Major Barbara" than in any other first act by Mr. Shaw. It is a protasis from which all mention of plot is deliberately omitted. Bottom, had he been at Mr. Shaw's elbow while the play was being written, might have begged him to "grow to a point," but Bottom would have had less success with Mr. Shaw than he had with Quince,for Bottom's point was a dramatic one, whereas Mr. Shaw's is doctrinal; and a propounder of doctrine pays little heeds to the laws of stagecraft or anything else. The mystic gets his way because he can neither be frightened nor disconcerted. Death and Tradition have no terrors for him. That is why, in face of the opposition of common sense and practical experience, he always does what he wants to do.
One might profitably compare Mr. Shaw to Cassius in "Julius Cæsar." Marcus Brutus, in that play, is surely the prototype of all muddlers and gentlemanly idiots. It was he who, against the pleas of Cassius, insisted that the life of Mark Anthony should be spared. It was he who, disregarding the dissuasions of Cassius, permitted Anthony to speak in the forum. It was he who, over-ruling the arguments of Cassius, ordered the disastrous march to Phillipi. Cassius was the wise man of the two, though his heart was made impotent by his asperities. The resemblancebetween him and Mr. Shaw must not be drawn too closely, but it is sufficient, as stated in Shakespeare's terms, to be interesting:
He reads much;He is a great observer, and he looksQuite through the deeds of men.
He reads much;He is a great observer, and he looksQuite through the deeds of men.
He reads much;He is a great observer, and he looksQuite through the deeds of men.
He reads much;
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men.
Cassius, of course, loved no plays and heard no music and smiled with difficulty; and these disabilities prevent him from complete ancestry to Mr. Shaw; but, if, like Cassius, Mr. Shaw sometimes feels that he has lived "to be but mirth and laughter to his Brutus," he can, like Cassius again, comfort himself with the thought that he was in the right when Brutus was in the wrong, and that he told him so. His Cassius mood is plainest in "Heartbreak House." This play is described as "a Fantasia in the Russian manner on English themes," and was written, presumably, after Mr. Shaw had witnessed performances of plays by Chekhov. That is not to say, however, that there is any resemblance between the work of Mr. Shaw and the Russian dramatist. There isn't. Mr. Shaw is as talkative as Chekhov was reticent. Chekhov's purpose is to make his people say as little aspossible: Mr. Shaw's purpose is to make his people say a great deal more than necessary. Chekhov suggestsinactivitythrough dialogue: Mr. Shaw suggests through argumentativeness. Chekhov writes drama: Mr. Shaw debates. No receptive person can come away from a performance of "The Cherry Orchard" unimpressed by a vision of life. A moderately-intelligent person, having seen this play with eyes of understanding, could write a true summary of the state of Russia in the last hundred years. I doubt whether as much can be said of "Heartbreak House," the whole action of which (thoughactionis an inappropriate word to use about it) takes place in the course of an afternoon and evening, inside six or seven hours, in England soon after the outbreak of the War. There is, however, no mention of the War in the play, and the only link between them is the sudden interruption of the conversation in the last act by an air-raid, as a result of which two of the characters are blown to pieces. There is some clumsiness in the use of this device for ending the play, artistically at all events, though that is a consideration which is unlikely to move Mr. Shaw much, but, ethically and socially, it is not clumsy at all, for"Heartbreak House" is less a play than a parable. The bombs drop as suddenly, and with as little warning, on the gifted conversationalists sitting in the dusky garden as the War burst upon Europe in 1914. There we were, all of us, living pleasantly, as Burke begged us to live, and committing our affairs into the hands of men concerning whose abilities to conduct them we had no certificates—and suddenly the ship ran on to the rocks, the train went off the rails, the ceiling fell. "I'm always expecting something," says Ellie Dunn in the last act. "I don't know what it is; but life must come to a point some time." And while she and her companions are arguing about the responsibility for the mess in which the world is, bombs drop out of heaven and life comes to a full stop:
Hector: And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call England?Captain Shotover: The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forcastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?Hector: Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?Captain Shotover: Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman.Hector: And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?Captain Shotover: Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.
Hector: And this ship that we are all in? This soul's prison we call England?
Captain Shotover: The captain is in his bunk, drinking bottled ditch-water; and the crew is gambling in the forcastle. She will strike and sink and split. Do you think the laws of God will be suspended in favour of England because you were born in it?
Hector: Well, I don't mean to be drowned like a rat in a trap. I still have the will to live. What am I to do?
Captain Shotover: Do? Nothing simpler. Learn your business as an Englishman.
Hector: And what may my business as an Englishman be, pray?
Captain Shotover: Navigation. Learn it and live; or leave it and be damned.
In other words of Mr. Shaw's, if you do not help God to perfect Himself, He will scrap you. This play, in some respects the best that Mr. Shaw has written, is full of mad laughter, of bitter, self-mocking, torturing laughter. I knew a man who burst into shrieks of laughter when he saw a comrade blown into the air by a German shell; but if any one imagines that that man's terrible mirth came from an unkindly heart, he imagines without understanding; for "even in laughter the heart is sorrowful, and the end of that mirth is heaviness." I feel about "Heartbreak House" exactly as I felt about my friend who laughed when his comrade was blown up and dismembered: that here is a depth of feeling which cannot be fathomed. Like Job, Mr. Shaw cries out, "changes and war are against me," but, unlike Job, he finds no comfort in the end. "If men will not learn until their lessons are written in blood, why, bloodthey must have, their own for preference." As for him, he throws up the sponge. Our culture is but the plaything of fribbles; our democracy is merely government of fools by fools. "The question is," said Boswell to Dr. Johnson and Mr. Cambridge, "which is worst, one wild beast or many?" And the answer, in Mr. Shaw's terms, is "Both!" He sees man, according to this play, refusing to help God to perfect Himself, deliberately thwarting God, and he almost sees him already on the scrap-heap.
In "Back to Methusaleh," he seems to me to have suffered a spiritual set-back, and to be preoccupied by material considerations. We are no longer concerned with Man's destiny and God's purpose, but with matters of mere longevity. "So much to do—so little time in which to do it!" If man could live for three hundred or three thousand or thirty thousand years, he would then have time in which to profit by his experience—so Mr. Shaw's argument seems to run. But would he? Do any of us profit by our experience? If we could go back to the beginning of our lives and start again with the knowledge we had acquired inthe previous existence, we might be able to avoid this or that mistake. But we cannot do that. Each experience is a new one, and the wisdom we have gained from those through which we have passed is of little help to us in dealing with the new one, particularly if it comes upon us, as most of the critical events of life do come upon us, unexpectedly, without warning. There is not much difference, except physically, between the Mr. Shaw who wrote "Candida" and the Mr. Shaw who wrote "Back to Methusaleh," and I do not believe that he would be much, if any different, at the age of three hundred or thirty thousand from what he now is. Man may develop this or that aspect of himself more than another, but essentially he remains the same. It is not length of years that is important to us, but what we do in them. Keats and Shelley were young when they died: Tennyson was old; but the length of their years seems immaterial to their reputation. Mr. Shaw tells us that if wewillhard enough, we can achieve longevity, but, apart from the fact that longevity first happens in his play to people who have not willed it, but had it thrust upon them, I am puzzled to understand how Mr. Shaw expects mankind towill a state of existence which, portrayed by him, is extraordinarily repellent. I do not wish to be born at the age of seventeen out of an egg so that I may become a He-Ancient and live for thousands of years in a state of inactive ratiocination. And if a life of thought without action does not attract my fancy, how can I be expected to aspire to it? I cannot find anything in the long lives of Mr. Shaw's characters which seems to me likely to excite the desire and hope of mankind. The He-Ancients and the She-Ancients are morose and sterile, ugly and unsociable, hairless and unhappy, liable to death by discouragement, long, lean and hopeless. I would rather be scrapped!... Nor is there any greater virtue in the long-lived than there is in us. In "The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman" (the fourth act of "Back to Methusaleh") where mankind is divided into two classes, the long-lived and the short-lived, we discover that the long-lived spend their three hundred years of existence in humbugging the short-lived.... Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower: he fleeth as it were a shadow, andnever continueth in one place; but, in spite of his misery and the shortness of his life, he gets more fun and satisfaction than are likely to be enjoyed by man that is born out of an egg.
I remember very vividly the first occasion on which I saw and heard Mr. Shaw. He was lecturing on "Some Necessary Repairs to Religion" to a religious organization, now defunct, called "The Guild of St. Mathew." His lecture was extraordinarily startling to a young man, fresh from Belfast and still influenced by his fathers' faith, although in revolt against much of it. When the lecture was over, a lady asked him to say what his belief was about the Resurrection, and he replied, that if she would promise not to tell any one, he would say that he did not believe it ever took place. And then came one of those strange lapses from serious argument which are characteristic of him. Another questioner asked him if he believed in the Immaculate Conception. "Of course I do," he said. "I believe that all conceptions are immaculate!" The questioner was so paralysed by thisreply that she sat down without pointing out to him that the Catholic Church believes in the Immaculate Conception on the assumption that all conceptions are not immaculate. On many occasions, Mr. Shaw has brilliantly dodged the point in that manner; but they are not occasions that need be remembered against him. Ever and always he has given his best and hardest thought to the service of mankind. He has practiced what he preaches, and if we are thrown on the scrap-heap, it will not be because Mr. Shaw has failed to do his uttermost to help God to realise Himself. What a shock it will be to him to find that the scrap-heap is a more likeable place than his God's heaven!
He is greatly generous to young men. Like most of my contemporaries I have imposed upon his good nature very often. I sent "Jane Clegg" and "John Ferguson" in manuscript to him and asked him if he would read them and tell me what his opinion of them might be. Probably a dozen or more young men were doing exactly the samething with their MSS. He could spend the whole of his time reading other men's plays, if he were to let his good nature go uncontrolled. But he read my plays and wrote long, valuable letters of advice about them to me. I hesitate to mention this fact lest it should cause an avalanche of MSS. to fall upon him, but I am trying to draw his portrait, and unless I mention his generosity to young men, the portrait will not be a faithful one. I am under personal obligations to him of many sorts, and I do not know of any man who so freely helps his friends and says so little about it. He is now sixty-six years old, but there are no signs of age about him other than the fact that his hair and his beard, once red, have turned white. He still has the mind and eagerness of a young man. His walk is as springy and alert as it was when I first knew him, as I am sure it has always been. When I see him in the street sometimes, tall, lean, very tidy and almost foppish in an unusual way, walking with great assurance and ease, examining now and then his very shapely hands, and gazing about him with that queer, quizzical, kindly look in his pleasant eyes that is so significant of him, I feel that although he is thirty years older thanI am, according to the official records, he is, in spirit, thirty years younger. He will never be old. If he lives to be a centenarian, he will still be talking like a young man; and perhaps it is his extraordinary youth and vitality, as much as his disrespect for established things, that draws young men inevitably to him. His fearless, challenging spirit attracted all those who were in revolt against stagnant beliefs; and even now, when the multitude seems to have caught up with him and his views are less startling than they were a few years ago, he still stimulates the minds of the young and the eager and sends them bounding forward. "You should so live," he once said, "that when you die, God is in your debt!" He bids men and women strive to put more into the common pool than they take out, and he asserts with something like moral fury that any one who is taking more from the common pool than he puts in, is cheating both God and man. There are querulous persons who say that his work will not live. Their forefathers probably said that Shakespeare's work would not live, that Cervantes's work would not live, that Fielding's work would not live, that Dickens's work would not live; and no doubt they producedsound arguments to support their faith. Who could have believed that "Don Quixote," a mere skit on contemporary novelettes, would win universal favor, or that "Pickwick Papers," mere verbiage for a set of pictures drawn by a popular artist, would live? Yet these local, topical, and very contemporary things will not perish. Mr. Shaw has indisputably affected the thoughts and lives of thinking men and women on two continents for thirty years. He is a very daring fellow who asks us to believe that this brilliant, original, forceful mind will not continue to affect the thoughts and lives of men and women for generations to come.
There are men, such as Dr. Johnson, who are mentally active and physically torpid, and there are other men, such as Mr. Jack Johnson, who are very alert physically, but not quite so alert in their minds. It seldom happens that a man combines great physical energy with great intellectual energy. Such a man is Mr. Bernard Shaw. So is Mr. H. G. Wells. I imagine that Mr. Wells is more active, both in body and in mind, than Mr. Shaw, despite the fact that the latter is the slender man of the two and that his tongue works more rapidly in conjunction with his brain; for Mr. Shaw feels fatigue sooner than Mr. Wells. I doubt whether Mr. Wells suffers from fatigue at all or to any serious extent. He takes few, if any, holidays, works for many hours every day, plays games very assiduously, and is unhappy if he has not got some work on hand. He begins to write a new book immediately he has completed itspredecessor, having no belief, seemingly, in fallow time. When he is not working or playing, he is talking. His conversation has a curious resemblance in its shape, if I may use that word, to the style of his writing. One listens for the suspended sentence, for the dots with which, in his prose, he breaks a thought so that the reader may himself complete it. Mr. Shaw once told me that he could not work at creative writing for more than two hours every day, and I suspect that he suffers more from physical fatigue than he will admit. Mr. Wells works for considerably more than two hours every day (and sometimes during the night) though I do not suppose he works for two consecutive hours at any time. If you are a guest in his house, you will see him engaged in some game, tennis or hockey or that wild game of his own invention, "barn-ball," or perhaps playing demon patience; and when you are inclined to imagine that he is settling down to a long day of games, you discover that he is no longer with the players, but back in his study working on a manuscript.
One expects a certain amount of sluggishness in every man, and probably there are days when Mr. Wells's mind and body go to sleep or lie aboutsupine, but I do not believe that any one has ever seen him asleep or supine. His mind is so active that one can almost see ideas leaping off his tongue as he talks, and he has a very remarkable capacity for engaging the attention of his auditors without making any perceptible effort to do so. His conversation, unlike that of Mr. Yeats or Mr. George Moore, is unrehearsed conversation. It has not the swift brilliance of Mr. Shaw's talk, and it goes to its point rather jerkily, but it reaches its destination. He is not so easily distracted from his course as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton is, or perhaps I ought to say that he does not take so long to get to his destination. Mr. Chesterton seems to me to be falling with great amiability on his subject, whereas Mr. Wells is eagerly struggling up to it. Mr. Chesterton defers to others with great courtesy, but his mind, I imagine, is already made up. He listens to a controversialist, not because he thinks he is likely to be converted to an opposite opinion—he is fairly certain that he will not be converted—but because he has excellent manners and an exceptionally kindly character. It is hard to believe that any man of merit is without some malice in his nature, some element ofcattishness, but if there is a man of merit without these things then that man is Mr. Chesterton. If he could bring himself to throttle the creature he most detests, the international financier, the man without a country, he would, I am sure, do so entirely without prejudice. Mr. Wells listens, not out of politeness, but in the hope that he will receive information, and this hope of his causes him to listen very patiently even to bad or inexpert talkers. He has the additional merit, rare among men of genius, of being an uncommonly good host, very punctilious about the comfort and pleasure of his guests. He is a sociable man, mingling easily with very various people, gregarious where Mr. Yeats and Mr. Shaw are solitary, and he is instinctively friendly. His hospitality is lavish and with something of the Dickensian tradition in it. He has none of the chilly aloofness of Mr. Yeats nor of the shy constraint of Mr. Shaw nor of the nervous coldness of Mr. Galsworthy. Were it not for a degree of cruelty in his nature, I should say that Mr. Chesterton and he were as near to each other in temperament as any two men of merit can be. It is this strain of cruelty in him which makes him so attractive when he loses histemper, for he seems only to be witty when he is about to hit some one very severely on the head. I do not know any man who can lose his temper in print with so much effect and so entertainingly as Mr. Wells can lose his. He is hardly a witty man, as Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats and even Mr. Gilbert Chesterton are witty men, but he has a neat, malicious humour which delights him as much as it delights his friends, and is most often displayed when he is attacking some one.
If a writer wished to create a character who would most aptly personify the past thirty years of English or of world history, he would have to create a character very like Mr. Wells: a questioning, variable, demanding person, with some impatience and testiness of temper, with, at times, a fantastic and wayward manner, but always superimposed on these superficialities, an eager and unthwartable desire for a true belief. Mr. Chesterton said of him once that "you lie awake at night and hear him grow," and fundamentally that is true, in spite of the temptation one has at times tobelieve that one lies awake at night and merely hears him changing his mind. One could, were one silly enough to do so, construct a plausible indictment of Mr. Wells of hurriedly accepting a belief and as hurriedly rejecting it; but to do so would be to charge oneself with a superficial mind. Mr. Wells, in his eagerness to discover a reasonable and sane society in which the spirit of man may grow and develop and achieve, has sometimes accepted a theory too swiftly, but his scientific mind has come, sooner or later, to the rescue of his eager heart and has caused him to reject proposals which he had previously found acceptable.
In "First and Last Things" he decides against the community of austere aristocrats who won his advocacy in "A Modern Utopia." The self-disregard of the Samurai of Japan had pleased him as it must please all who contemplate it, and he imagined a state in which the best men would govern "the average, sensual men," formulating their laws and doctrines from the sanctuary of a sort of monastic establishment in which their fleshly desires would be chastened and perhaps eliminated. Mr. Wells, having felt the allure of a select company of selfless aristocrats, devotingthemselves to the good government of less gifted men, soon discovered that good government cannot be administered by men who are remote from the emotions and desires of the governed and so, with characteristic courage, he abandoned his Samurai and boldly marched into the company of the crowd. Can any one find ground for sneering in such behaviour as that? Are not those who try to find solutions to puzzles more likely to be successful in their efforts because Mr. Wells has offered one solution and then, finding it useless, repudiated it and tried another?
There was a time when he saw hope for the world in the establishment of a universal language, but I doubt whether he holds to that hope now. A common speech does not keep men at peace any more than a common purpose does, and, in any event, man's incorrigible habit of localizing universal things until they cease to be universal tends in time to make a common speech an impossible possession. The Catholic Church has a common speech in the Latin tongue, but an Italian priest can preach to an English priest in that language and remain incomprehensible. The British and the American people have a common speech, butit has become so permeated with local words that very often the two races are unintelligible to each other, apart altogether from the difficulty of accent.
Mr. Wells has plunged into a few bog-holes of that sort, but he has always extricated himself from them, and less and less, as he develops, does he insist upon uniformity and machinery, and more and more does he insist on diversity and spirit. "Let us be Catholics in this great matter," Mr. Birrell writes on Browning's poetry, "and burn our candles at many shrines. In the pleasant realms of poesy, no liveries are worn, no paths prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop where you like, and worship whom you love. Nothing is demanded of you, save this, that in all your wanderings and worships, you keep two objects steadily in view—two, and two only—truth and beauty." It may fairly be said of Mr. Wells that in all his "wanderings and worships" he has tried to do so.
There is a photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, taken by an Americanphotographer, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in which the two men are shown sitting side by side. It is the most illuminating interpretation of their characters that I have ever seen. Mr. Shaw, with something of the look of a prophet, sits beside Mr. Wells who has a smile of disbelief on his face; Mr. Shaw shows a countenance full of faith, while Mr. Wells shows one full of inquiry. Mr. Shaw accepts the pose quite naturally, but Mr. Wells is deprecating. I felt when I saw that photograph in Mr. Wells's study that while Mr. Shaw accepted the status of a great man as his right, Mr. Wells felt uncomfortable about the pose, not because he doubts his right to be regarded as a great man, but because he is reluctant to live on pedestals. "I'm human just as much as you are," he seems to be saying to the photographer, and the smile of deprecation on his face means, if it means anything, that while Mr. Shaw accepts the great man's altitude without a qualm, Mr. Wells feels that the whole thing is humbug. "Shaw is taken in by this Great Man business," the Wells of the photograph says as plainly as if the picture were to take life and utter words, "but don't you imagine I'm deluded by it!..."
These two men, one Irish, one English, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert George Wells, between them have done more to influence the minds of the young men of my generation than any other two men of their time. Their attitude towards life may, perhaps, be summarized in an account of the way in which they interpret the doctrine of Evolution. Mr. Shaw believes that the Life Force, which ordinary men call God, is an Imperfect Thing seeking to make Itself Perfect. How, when you contemplate the miseries and inequalities and cruelties of existence, can you believe in an All-Powerful God? he says. You must believe that these horrible things happen because God cannot prevent them from happening. The blind-alley argument that the Almighty inflicts pain upon us for our good is insupportable when one considers that an earthly father would not subject his child to convulsions or cause a cancer to consume its life or endow it with a cruel disposition if such things were within his powers of disposal. If, one reasonably argues, an earthly father is incapable of such acts, how less likely is God to be capable of them if He be All-Powerful and All-Good? Since these inexplicable cruelties andhorrors occur and recur, surely, argues Mr. Shaw, it is only common sense to assume that they do so in spite of God's good will towards man. Starting from this premise, he goes on to argue that God seeks to obtain that control over material things which He has not yet succeeded in obtaining. He imagines God engaged in a magnificent research, the discovery of a harmonious universe, much in the way in which one imagines a biologist in his laboratory seeking for a preventative of disease. The Life Force uses such instruments for its purpose as are to be found lying at hand. When these prove abortive or useless or insufficient, the Life Force invents a new instrument which it uses until that instrument, too, is found to be useless or inadequate and is scrapped in favour of a new instrument. Like all creators, God must express Himself through His creatures, and the whole of Time has been spent so far in finding a suitable means of expression. In the beginning, God used mammoth beasts, but finding them unsuitable for His purpose, He scrapped them and invented other creatures until at last He achieved His best instrument, Man. God's latest and finest creature differs from all His other creatures in this respect that heis conscious of God's purpose and can help it forward or hold it back. God concealed His intention from all the instruments that preceded the advent of Man, but, in the development of His Being, He found that greater advantage would accrue to Him if He made His instrument aware of its purpose. So we get the reason of Man. God, before the creation of Man, had depended upon Himself. After the creation of Man, he depended partly upon Himself, partly upon His creature.Man, in short, was the first of God's instruments to have the power to help God to realize Himself.To Mr. Shaw, it is an obscuring of God's purpose for Man continually to pray, "God help me!" when it is part of his purpose and duty to affirm, "I will help God!" I have already quoted his dictum that we should so live that when we die, God is in our debt.
It is obvious, from this belief, that Mr. Shaw does not believe in the inevitable march of mankind from bad to good and from good to better. We may be marching towards Utopia or the New Jerusalem, or we may be marching back to Chaos. Man, having the choice between helping God and thwarting Him, may so vex the Deity that He willbecome impatient with him and throw this instrument away as he has thrown away other useless instruments, and seek for a better one. God scrapped the mammoth beasts because they were not adequate for the execution of His design; Hemayscrap Man for the same reason or because Man, while adequate, wilfully refuses to help. This theory is expressed continually in Mr. Shaw's plays and prefaces, for example, in a speech by Cæsar in "Cæsar and Cleopatra," where the Emperor gives expression to a violent antipathy to war. War, in Mr. Shaw's mind, is a plain perversion of God's purpose, and he would probably declare that Man, in the Great War whose end may yet be a bloody battle between the Allies, almost reached the end of God's patience. In five years, the British alone had eight hundred thousand of her most valuable menkilled. France lost double that numberkilled. Germany lost more even than Francekilled. All the potentialities for good, all the fervour and chivalry and idealism and courage that was in those men, their ability to help God to achieve perfection, has vanished utterly from the world; and there is nothing left of it. Most of them died withoutprogeny, and so there is not even the hope that their spirit has passed on to their children and that, at the worst, God's purpose has only been suspended for a generation. They have gone, irretrievably gone. Another such war and Western civilization must perish, if, indeed, it has not already begun to decay. In other words, God, sickened by Man's perversity and wilful obstruction, will have scrapped him....
That is the Shavian doctrine of the Life Force, put plainly and simply.
Mr. Wells differs very sharply from Mr. Shaw in his doctrine. Mr. Shaw believes that the progress from bad to good is not inevitable: Mr. Wells believes that it is, and he produces the records of history to support his belief. Mankind, at this moment, he will admit, is in a very bloody mess, but that mess is not so frightful as, say, the mess after the Thirty Years' War. We, who contemplate the organized Murder of Youth which began in August, 1914, may fairly feel that mankind has sunk very low in barbarism, but when we survey the whole range of humanity so far as it has been recorded, the depths of 1914, deep though they are, appear to be slightly less dreadful thanthe depths of other days. There is a greater revolt from organized Murder to-day than there was after the Thirty Years' War. There are fewer people to-day who prate about the glories of war than there were then. (Oddly enough, or perhaps naturally enough, most of the people who still think of war as a jolly adventure live in America.) We are a little nearer to a realization of the commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" than we were before 1914. We are learning that there are no qualifications or exceptions to that commandment. It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except in defence of small nationalities!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the purpose of self-determination!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the establishment of a Republic in Ireland!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the purpose of preserving the Empire!" Tersely and without modification, it states that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in any circumstances whatever.
Here is a dilemma from which the Christian cannot easily escape, and the difficulty of doing so, apart from all ordinary considerations of decency, is bringing man sharply face to face with thefundamentals of human existence. In spite of much occasion for pessimism to-day, there is occasion for greater optimism than man ever before has had. There is a social consciousness at work in our minds and hearts that will yet deliver us from the wicked man. How few are the years since the days when men in one part of England made war on men in another part! How unthinkable it is that men in Lancaster should make war to-day in Yorkshire! True, it is less than a century since men in the Northern States of America made war on men in the Southern States. True, it is less than ten years since men in Ulster prepared themselves to make war on men in the rest of Ireland. True, at this moment, Russian fights Russian, and Sinn Feiner slays Orangeman, and Orangeman slays Sinn Feiner. True, that white man burns black man, that Christian persecutes Jew, true all this and worse, yet it remains true that when the records of time are made up and just balances are drawn in the accounts of Mankind, there is seen to be a greater perception of common purpose to-day than there was a century ago.
His scientific and historic sense keeps Mr. Wells secure in his belief that Man, although he mayhinder the development of God's purpose, cannot thwart it. Mr. Shaw would perhaps agree with Mr. Wells in his belief that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression, but he would insist that that expression may be through another instrument than man. Mr. Wells, however, would not yield to him on this point; he would insist that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression through man. Man may, indeed be obliterated by plague and pestilence or cosmic disaster, but, failing those, man must achieve God's purpose.
When one brings the Wellsian doctrine down to the details of life, one discovers what I may call alocalpessimism in it. The anger which breaks out of his work is directed against the incompetence and stupidity of man which hold him back from the desirable country towards which he is marching. The greatest optimists—the men who are convinced that man's end is good and seemly—are almost always the most bitter pessimists when they are considering contemporary affairs. Thevisionary loves mankind in the abstract so much that when he contemplates mankind in the concrete he loses his temper. The Utopian, full of his dream of a decent and free civilization in which every man may move easily to his proper station, feels a dreadful depression when he looks upon society as it exists here and now; and there are times when, in spite of his sure and certain hope that life will ultimately find its level, he feels that man, that perverse, wayward, thwarting creature, will never fulfill the promise of his potentialities because he is too closely concerned with some tiny, personal vanity, because he allows wickedness and stupidity to influence him to a greater degree than goodness and fine thought. Who, thinking over the Big Four in Paris, and remembering that millions of young men of all nations died so that the Big Four might meet and make a more enduring peace than this world has yet known, can feel anything but anger and humiliation at what they did? Clemenceau, the "Tiger" who, having tasted blood, seemed eager to taste more; Lloyd George, who never remembers a friend or forgets an enemy; Orlando, shamelessly extending his itching palm; and Wilson, the man who went to Europe to askfor the moon and returned to America, having accepted a match ... can any of us, contemplating those four men, given by God the greatest opportunity that has ever been offered to men, that may ever be offered to men, help feeling that this world is dead and damned and that the sooner a disgusted God smashes it to pieces, the better will be the universe? Mr. Wells cannot escape, any more than the rest of us, this tendency to despair of human effort, and here and there in his books hislocalpessimism is expressed; but his universal optimism remains unimpaired, and one comes away from his writings in the knowledge that he believes that man sooner or later will achieve a high destiny. He whips the stupid and the selfish and the idle, but he will not permit them to persuade him from his belief that even out of these elements, a finer Man will yet be made.
There is a cartoon by Mr. Max Beerbohm in which he shows himself being conducted through a gallery where Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Bennett and many other eminentwriters are standing on inverted tubs, haranguing the universe. Having listened to the preachers and propagandists, Mr. Beerbohm turns to his guide and says, "But where are the artists?" only to be informed that "Theseare the artists!" It has been said that Mr. Shaw would rather be known as a great political economist than as a great dramatist, that Mr. Arnold Bennett would rather be known as an eminent business man than as an eminent novelist, that Mr. Galsworthy would prefer to be a reformer than a man of letters, and that Mr. Wells seeks fame as a sociologist and not as an artist. There is enough truth in this statement to give pause to those about whom it is made, but not sufficient to frighten us who admire them. Mr. Wells, for example, can no more elude artistry than he can refrain from thinking. He is extraordinarily indifferent to literary style, seems almost to delight in making a clumsy sentence rather than a shapely one, and, so far as one can discover, does not spend a single second on "finding the right word." The idea is his chief concern, and he cares very little for the way in which it is expressed. Nevertheless, he remains an artist, with a gift for apt expressions and a far greater gift forselection. In one of his books, he describes the prostitute as "that painted disaster of the street." In "First and Last Things," in describing the inability of the intellect to free itself from bias, he says, "the forceps of the mind is a clumsy instrument and crushes the truth a little in seizing it." At the end of "Tono-Bungay" there is an account of a trip down the Thames which is among the great pieces of prose writing. In "The Undying Fire," he gives an account of the purposeless cruelty of Nature and an account of the state of mind of a young German who goes from his remote village to join the Army at the beginning of the war, full of patriotic ardour, offering for this service and for that until at last he becomes a member of the crew of a submarine and his patriotism suffers a sea-change and becomes the desperate courage of a rat in a trap ... and these two accounts are so vivid that it is impossible for any one to rise from them unaware that they have been written by a man of genius, possessed of artistry.
He is probably the most prolific writer of his quality in the world, and if I had exact knowledge of the world's greatest authors, I should probablysay that he is the most varied of them. Consider how very dissimilar his books are in range and interest. Consider that the man who wrote "The Time Machine," wrote also "The History of Mr. Polly" and the "The Undying Fire." How many writers have shown such variety as has been shown by the author of "The War in the Air," "Kipps" (that beautiful and tender book), "Tono-Bungay" and "The Soul of a Bishop." At one moment, Mr. Wells is writing "Bealby" and at the next, he is writing "God, the Invisible King." He turns from "The Wonderful Visit" to "The Outline History of the World," and writes "The Future in America" in the trail of "Love and Mr. Lewisham." ("The Future in America" is perhaps the best book of its kind that has ever been written on the problems that lie before the American people.) Queen Victoria, having been enchanted by "Alice in Wonderland," sent to a book-seller for the remainder of "Lewis Carroll's" writings, and was considerably disconcerted when she received "Plane Trigonometry" and "Curiosa Mathematica" by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. What that excellent old lady would have thought,if having read and liked "The Sea Lady," she had been supplied with "Mankind in the Making" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "Joan and Peter" by the same author, I cannot imagine. Mr. Wells faces life very fairly and squarely, regarding it from all angles of vision. There is only one Truth, but it may be approached by many different paths; and Mr. Wells has attempted most of them. It may seem to some of his readers at times that he is running away from things towards which he formerly ran, but it is more likely that he is merely trying another way of getting to the same point.
One remembers men by odd things. I remember Mr. Yeats chiefly as a dark image, obscurely seen, and Mr. Shaw as a shy, erect man with fine, shapely hands, who talks emphatically because otherwise he would not be talking at all. I remember Mr. Galsworthy as one who is biting his lips or clenching his teeth lest he should say too much, and Mr. George Moore as one who is consumed with the fear that he will not say enough. Mr. Wells comes into my mind as an eager, friendlyman, whose speech, thinly uttered, suggests continual testing. But mostly I remember his fine eyes because it is in them that most of his strength is stored.