THE SPIRIT OF WELLS

To prove this one has only to consider his novels. There was a time when he had in common with Dickens and De Foe the quality they have in common with one another—the quality of homeliness. He drew the little world he knew well, the limited and lovable world of small folk. Mr. Hoopdriver, Delia the chambermaid, Kipps and Ann Pornick—a score of these helpless, grown-up little children he pictured with a radiant affection, tempering the wind to the shorn lamb. It is more in the nature of his later thought to see poverty as a wasteful rather than a cruel thing, even though he may not have approached the harsh realism of Bernard Shaw's observation: "I have never had any feeling about the English workingclasses except a desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people."

Certainly he has not experienced any other world in quite this way. "I count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents in my life," he says. Accidental one feels it to be, as of a man inhabiting the great world by virtue of sheer talent, whose nature has not in any sense settled there. His philosophy and his socialism are outgrowths of his own experience; they erect into reasons and theories the nature of a life which is not at home, and which easily unburdens itself of all that seems insensate because it is unfamiliar. To be a socialist at all is to have accustomed oneself, through necessity or imagination, to a certain detachment from a great many of the familiar, lovable, encumbering, delightful stupidities of the world. And Wells has travelled up and down through time and space too much to have any great regard for the present. "I have come to be, I am afraid," he says, inThe Future in America,"even a little insensitive to fine immediate things through this anticipatory habit.... There are times indeed when it makes life seemso transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an equally transitory series of consequences——." His hold upon the present is so far from inevitable thatThe New MachiavelliandMarriage, realistic as they are, are represented as being written some years hence, our own time already appearing retrospectively in them. As little as Faust has he been tempted to call out upon the passing moment. His main characters drift through this period of time, substantial themselves but with a background of substantialities, in a way that recalls Paolo and Francesca looming out of the phantom cloud-procession of theInferno.

Into this larger world, in short, he has carried with him only himself and his own story. We live in two worlds—the primary world of vivid personal realities and the secondary world of our human background. It is the secondary world that anchors us in time and space; the primary world we carry with us as part of ourselves. In Wells there is no secondary world, no human background, no sense of abiding relations. It is his philosophy of life and the quality of his men and women to beexperimental in a plastic scheme. His range is very small: the same figures reappear constantly. There is the Wells hero,—Lewisham, Capes, Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford, Stratton; there is the Wells heroine, Ann Veronica, Isabel, Marjorie, Lady Mary; there is the ineffectual woman with whom the Wells hero becomes entangled, Capes's first wife, Marion, Margaret; there is the ineffectual man with whom the Wells heroine becomes entangled, Magnet, Manning. To strike the lowest common denominator in this tangle is inevitably to arrive once more, one feels, in the region of personal experience. Although it cannot be said that his minor characters are lacking in reality, they are certainly intellectual portraits, and outside the limits of subjective experience. The principal men and women of Wells move through a world seen, but hardly a world felt.

This want of social background makes his characters as detached from the familiar earth as chessmen are detached from a chessboard. They never seem to be, like most men and women either in life or fiction, like the Kipps and Polly of his own earlier fiction, vegetablegrowths. Heredity, fatality, the soil are not mainly operating forces with them. They are creatures of intelligence and free will, freely and intelligently making and moulding themselves and their circumstances. Human nature in Wells is very largely a sheer thing, a thing that begins with itself, answers for itself, lives at first hand. That is the personal quality of the man himself, and it follows that the quality is wholly convincing only where what I have called his primary world is concerned: the rest of the world he builds up by intelligent observation and the literary talent of creating human stuff out of whole cloth.

In this he is well served by his antipathies. His belief in personal self-determinism is so strong that he instinctively sees the vegetative nature of the ordinary life as a kind of moral slough, a state of being detestably without initiative, faith, energy, will. And consequently the Normal Social Life against which he is always tilting is a life seen by him with all the vividness of an intense personal and philosophical animosity. Consider, for example, the portraits of Mr. Pope and Mr. Stanley, survivalsin a sense of the old Sir Roger de Coverley type, with all the sweetness gone out of it and only the odious qualities left, the domineering, vain, proprietary qualities. They exist mainly as symbols of everything that enlightened and right-minded daughters will not put up with; they come as near to being the foils of right destiny as Wells will ever allow; they sum up everything that stands in the way of man's free will. They are mercilessly dealt with, and they are memorable figures.

Without this antipathy, and outside his own primary world, he pretty generally fails. One recalls, for example, old Mrs. Trafford inMarriage,evidently intended to be his ideal of the enlightened woman grown old. She is a pale, dimly perfect, automatically wise old lady carved out of wood. Trafford himself, one feels, is a chip of the same block. Trafford obviously is not Wells himself, as Ponderevo and Remington are Wells: he is the Utopian counterpart of these persons, at least in the matter that concerns Wells most, the matter of sex. One could show that, aside from the six or eight chief characters who in their variousways express the nature and experience of Wells himself, he succeeds in his portraiture only where no demand is made on his sympathies.

The same absence of social background which throws into relief his primary world of characters throws into relief also the primary facts of human nature. Trafford and Marjorie, the most conventionally placed of his characters, pull up stakes, leave their children, and go to Labrador. His other men and women are even more independent of the social network. Consequently they are independent of that chain of relationships—friendship, affection, minor obligations—which mitigate, subdue, soften the primary motives of most people. They are almost startlingly physical. Their instincts are as sure as those of cavemen, and their conduct as direct. They are as clear about the essential matter of love as ever Schopenhauer was, or Adam and Eve, and they stand out as sharply against the embarrassments and secrecies of the usual world as a volcanic rock stands out against a tropical landscape. In this without doubt they exhibitthe fact that socialism does and will actually alter human nature, and that in the instinctive socialist human nature is already altered. For socialism inflexibly militates against those more sentimental aspects of love, love of country as such, the paternal and feudal principles, love of property, and the like, which belong properly to the intelligence, all those functions where love, in a majority of cases, goes wrong, blunders, stultifies growth, confuses the public design of the world. As a result it throws love into relief, emphasizes the nature of sex and theraison d'êtreof reproduction; makes it, to use a favorite word of Wells, stark.

I pause at this word. It is one of those talismanic words one finds perpetually cropping up in the writings of men who have a marked point of view, words that express deep and abiding preferences and often set the key of an entire philosophy. "I like bare things," says George Ponderevo, inTono-Bungay;"stripped things, plain, austere, and continent things, fine lines and cold colors." That is the gesture of an artistic mind which repudiates, with an impatient sharpness, all the entanglementsof the ordinary world. It is Oriental, it is Japanese, it is anything you like; but if it is English also it marks an entirely new regime. Without question it is English, and American as well. Thousands of people share that preference, and were economic socialism to go by the board we should still have to reckon with the progress of socialistic human nature. It detaches itself each day a little more from property, locality, and the hope of reward; it ceases to be necessitarian, it becomes voluntary; it relegates drudgery to mechanical devices; it releases the individual to a sense of his own coöperative and contributory place in the scheme of a more orderly future. Relatively speaking, the tendency of our kind is all away from luxury, sloth, complacency, confusion, ignorance, filth, heat, proprietorship, and all in the direction of light, austerity, agility, intelligence, coolness, athletic energy, understanding, cleanliness, order, "bare things, fine lines, and cold colors."

That is evident, and it is equally evident that the personal character and career of Wells are emblematic of this entire tendency. He hasunravelled himself by science, talent, and vigor out of "lower middle class" Victorianism. Is it strange that he has adopted as a kind of sacred image that light, free, and charming product of our decade, the aeroplane, sprung as it is out of the wreckage, out of the secret beginnings, the confused muscularities, the effort and smoke of the most chaotic of all centuries, like a blade of exquisitely tempered and chased steel which justifies everything that was most laborious and unsightly in the forge?

But considered as a sacred image the aeroplane has its limitations. So also, considered as an exponent of fife, has Wells. Philosophy and religion, as he presents them, are simply what he chooses to think and feel, what he has been led by his own experience to think and feel. His main experience has been the experience of disentangling himself, and therefore life, reflected from within himself, is to him a thing also which disentangles itself and grows ever more free, simple, and lucid. In the mind of Wells this process, has taken on an altogether mystical, transcendental significance, a religious aspect. Possible as that is to himselfpersonally, how far can it be taken as an argument to the human soul? How does it qualify him as a teacher, a public voice, a thinker for the mass of men? How does the conception of life purely as a process relate itself to human experience?

Applied to history, it seems to fail. Wells is devoid of historical imagination. In his portrait of Margaret inThe New Machiavellihe has properly, though somewhat harshly, repudiated what ordinarily passes for culture. But had he himself possessed the reality of what seems to him simply "living at second hand," he would never have been led to refer to Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Dürer as "pathetically reaching out, as it were, with empty desirous hands toward the unborn possibilities of the engineer." That is a very interesting and a very extraordinary statement, and it is quite true that each of these men would have rejoiced in the engineering possibilities of our time. But how much of the soul of Michael Angelo, for example, was involved in engineering? How far can his hands be said to have been "empty" for the want of scope inengineering? The power and the function of Michael Angelo can rightly be seen, not in relation to any sort of social or mechanical process, but in relation to things that are permanent in human nature, in relation to just those matters included in the admonition of Wells to "reject all such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, and Beauty and hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a tissue and succession of births." Again, consider a somewhat similar reference to Marcus Aurelius, of which the gist is that the author of theMeditationswas, actually in consequence of his own character, the father of one of the worst rulers the world has known. The implication here is that the study of self-perfection in the father was complementary to, if not responsible for, the social impotence and blindness of the son. Instead of dedicating himself to the static ideal of personal character, the assumption seems to be, Marcus Aurelius ought to have lived exclusively in his function as ruler and father. He studied himself, not as a ruler but as a man, and the social process had its revenge on his line. To Wells,in a word, the static elements of character and the study of perfection are not to be distinguished from vicious self-consequence.

Consider also a recent passage in which he has given a general impression of literature:

It seems to me more and more as I live longer that most poetry and most literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved and hated more naively, aged sooner, and died younger than we do. Solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not dominate us.

To appreciate this meditation one has to remember the character and career which led to the writing of it. But so far as we others are concerned, how far can the assumption it rests upon be considered valid, the assumption of a process that sweeps men on and leads human nature, as it were, progressively to shed itself? Dr. Johnson, for example, was a man the conditions of whose life were crude and rigid in the extreme, a man singularly dominated bysolitary persons and single events, but is his conversation discordant with the variety, the "reserves, resources, and recuperations of life as we live it to-day"? I can well understand this feeling. To pass directly from the thin, tentative, exhilarating, expansive air of our own time into the presence of that funny, stuffy, cocksure, pompous old man is to receive a preposterous shock. But having come to laugh, one stops with a very different sensation. The depths of personality and wisdom that exist there take on a disconcerting significance in relation to contemporary pragmatism. The mass of men veer about; far-separated epochs have their elective affinities, and if anything about the future is plain it is that this, that, and the other generation will find in Dr. Johnson a strangely premature contemporary.

Wells has himself admitted this principle. To Plutarch, Rabelais, Machiavelli he has paid his tribute. Hear what George Ponderevo has to say about Plutarch in his recollections of Bladesover House:

I found Langhorne'sPlutarchtoo, I remember, on those shelves. It seems queer to me now to think thatI acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years, to teach me that.

Considering what part the notion of a state plays in his range of ideas, that is a remarkable confession. But why stop with statecraft? The human mind could not, in all epochs, have established permanent ideals of statecraft without permanent ideals of a more strictly personal kind.

The truth is that Wells, for all that he has passed outside the economics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas which produced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tell you that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the only true thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by that criterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensive gibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's Fairy Tales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presents itself. To say that "the fundamental nature of life is a tissue and succession ofbirths" is merely a refinement of this. It is true, just as the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the world is full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of a reasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there is a Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue to grow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friendship, or music, or poetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialist must feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and on that point socialism has nothing to say at all.

It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddle that the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. Could Wells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full of meaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life he has felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in English authors. "Modern poetry, with an exception or so," he remarks somewhere, and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as a whole, "does not signify at all." It is the same with regardto music, art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: his writings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outline against a sunset, masses of machinery in the glare of the forge, things that suggest the etcher's eye. But they are curiously impersonal. Consider, for example, his description of Worms Cathedral:

It rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow under a press of canvas.

You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty he feels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is as untouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities of this building, not to mention its connection with human history, as if he had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not the changeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this building stands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is the mechanism, the process—his emotions gather about the physical result which appears to justify these.

À chacun son infini.

There will always be some to whom the significance of things, the meaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conception of mankind as "permanently in transition." Reading those passages where Wells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as I should feel with regard to music if I heard a mass of Mozart played at the rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if a procession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision. The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the pictures as a whole are a tissue and succession of colors. But that is not music, that is not art. Nor is a tissue and succession of births life.

But indeed nothing is easier than to reduce Wells to an absurdity. If he implies anything at all he implies a "transvaluation of all values." It remains to consider him from this point of view.

[1]September 21, 1866.

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 thesenovelists 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 viewof 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 neversucceed,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 theman 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 oughtnot 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 inThe New Machiavelliwhere 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 viewof 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 tothrow 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 calledglib 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 wroteThe New Machiavellithe 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, astrayfrom 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 writtenThe New MachiavelliWells 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. InTono-BungayandThe New Machiavelliideas 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 bypassion with whichThe New Machiavelliconcludes.

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 arenaturally 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 havemeasured 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 wroteMcAndrew'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 isaware 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" uponsomething 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 allthat 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 theInfernocould 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 soincomparably 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 inThe 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 inFirst and Last Thingshe 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 feltthings. 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 aworld 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 theart 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 inThe 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 invaluableremark 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.

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 invaluableremark 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 actingde novobecause 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 Navybright?"). Perfectly Americanis 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. Wellshas grasped it from many different angles but never with more point than in his essayThe 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. Thereis 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.

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 commandingitself 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 ortheir 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 recognizedgovernmental 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 fromThe Passionate Friendsand 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 "figuringout" 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'sdoit."

"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me half fantasy, "let'sdoit."

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.

America, The Future in,35,136America, Wells and,176-185American Population, The,180-181Ann Veronica,121Anticipations,80-83Arnold, Matthew,15,16,17,54,97,126Bacon,135Beerbohm, Max,174Belloc, Hilaire,62Bergson, Henri,68,94,158Brisbane, Arthur,180Brook Farm,124Carlyle,88,163Catholic Church, the,97Cato,14Chesterton, G.K.,42,174Chicago,13Comet, In the Days of the,24Common Sense of Warfare, The,126Comte,73Confucius,88Conrad, Joseph,153-161Creative Evolution,68Dante,149Darwin,92De Foe,29,135Dickens,135Discovery of the Future, The,37,90Dürer,145Emerson,123,158Empire of the Ants, The,51-52Erasmus,97Ethics and Evolution,47Fabian Society,41,62,66,123,175First and Last Things,22,72,93-99,100,116,173First Men in the Moon, The,64Food of the Gods, The,75,83-87,89,108Fortnightly Review, The,92Francis, St.,43Goethe,73Great State, The,64-65Grimm's Fairy Tales,149Hardy, Thomas,155Hearn, Lafcadio,103Heraclitus,36Hero, The,88History of Mr. Polly, The,24,52Huxley,47Inferno, The,137,172Invisible Man, The,26Island of Dr. Moreau, The,31James, William,94,112Japanese, the,102-104Jeffries, Richard,41Johnson, Dr.,147,148Kipling, Rudyard,127,169Kipps,27,29,54-56,109Leonardo da Vinci,145Leopardi,28Love and Mr. Lewisham,53-54,121Luther,97Macaulay,53Machiavelli,13,148,171Mankind in the Making,74-75,100Marcus Aurelius,146Marriage,101,114-116,121,137,140Michael Angelo,145,146Modern Utopia, A,73-77,83,99,102,112,121Montessori, Madame,75Morris, William,73McAndrew's Hymn,169New Machiavelli, The,48,78-79,112,121,127,128,137,145,159-160,162,163,164,165,176Newman, Cardinal,99New Republican, the,88,89,102,116,117,118News from Nowhere,73New Worlds for Old,45Nietzsche,88,89Our Liberal Practitioners,16Passionate Friends, The,44,45,68,121,128,173,184Plato,13,14Plutarch,148Rabelais,13,75,89,148Rasselas,128Rediscovery of the Unique, The,92Rhodes, Cecil,185Robinson Crusoe,29Samurai, the,79,83,88,99,102,104,105,116,122,123,133,163Scepticism of the Instrument,93Schopenhauer,117,141Servile State, The,62Shakespeare,13,149Shaw, Bernard,12,13,14,135Sleeper Awakes, The,35,51,57So-Called Science of Sociology, The,71Sorel, Georges,127Spencer, Herbert,73Story of the Days to Come, A,26Superman, the,88-90Superior Man, the,88Swift,64Taine, H.A.,12Thoreau,106Time Machine, The,9,34,50Tolstoy,67,155Tono-Bungay,56-60,108,109,114,121,142,164,176,178Verne, Jules,19Ward, Mrs. Humphry,65Webb, Sidney,62,174Wheels of Chance, The,109Whitman, Walt,38,134Wordsworth,35,169Worms Cathedral,150

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