HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
Herbert George Wells
H. G. Wells made one of his mistakes—even the wisest of us have to make a few—when, during a controversy with Henry James, he breezily denied that he was an artist and proclaimed himself a journalist. I think he must have said it with his tongue in his cheek; anyhow, it was a mistake to put that opinion into anybody’s mind and those words into anybody’s mouth, for there are always critics and artists, mainly of the lesser breeds, ready enough, without such prompting, to belittle any greatness that gets in their way.
Undoubtedly, Wells is a journalist, and a mightily efficient one; but he is also as subtle and fine an artist as you shall find among our living men of letters, and something of an authentic prophet, to boot. I hope his ideal state will never be realized; it is too dreadfully efficient, too exactly organized, so all mechanical, with human beings clicking in as part of the machinery that, if it ever came to pass, life in it would be reduced to such monotony that I am quite certain he would himself be one of the first to emigrate. You may say the journalist is uppermost in his social and economic gospels, such as “A Modern Utopia” and “New Worlds for Old,” in those wonderful imaginative, inventive scientific romances, “The First Men in the Moon,” “The War of the Worlds,” “The War in the Air,” “Men Like Gods,” and in novels so given over to problems of religion, morals, sex, education and general contemporary life and conduct as are “God the Invisible King,” “Joan and Peter,” “Ann Veronica,” “The Soul of a Bishop,” “The Undying Fire,” and “The Secret Places of the Heart,” yet in all these it could be demonstrated that the artist and the prophet collaborated with the journalist. It has been said that when in those early romances he foresaw the coming of the Great War and the part the aeroplane would play in it he was no prophet but a clever prognosticator who had followed the progress of invention, noted certain tendencies and calculated their developments as one might work out a problem in mathematics, and that a prophet needs no such guides to knowledge but speaks by inspiration and is concerned only with the things of the spirit. However that may be, it is with the things of the spirit that he is mostly preoccupied in at least three of the six later novels I have just mentioned and, to name but one, his vision of “God the Invisible King” is more like prophetic utterance than any we have had in our time.
But he is before all else an artist in the greatest of his novels—in “The Wheels of Chance,” “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” “Kipps,” “The History of Mr. Polly,” “Tono Bungay” and “The New Machiavelli,” in “The Country of the Blind” and nearly all the other short stories in the same volume. That book epitomises Wells’s versatile genius; its stories represent in little nearly every variety of his work. They are by turns fantastic, humorous, supernatural, visionary, grimly terrible and sternly or sympathetically realistic. Personally, I like him best here, as in his larger works, when his stories are all of ordinary men and women living average human lives in the light of common day; but his bizarre studies in psychology, his short tales of the eerie, nightmare order and those that grow out of surprising scientific discoveries are fashioned with an art as sure and as strong and as finished. If the author of “The Country of the Blind” and “Kipps” is not an artist but a journalist the sooner our other writers of fiction take to journalism the better, both for them and for us.
He is one of those exceptional authors who are in themselves exactly what they seem to be in their books. Unaffected, alive with energy, sociable, genially talkative, it is an amusing object lesson to see him seated at a public dinner next to some distinguished but orthodox philosopher of less learning than himself, younger but looking older, with none of his imaginary power, his far-seeing vision, his originality and suggestiveness as a thinker, who is yet clothed in the gravity, reticence, aloofness that are supposed to denote superior wisdom. There is nothing so impressive in Wells’s manner, his quick gestures, his high, not unpleasant voice; but his keen gray eyes, with a humorous twinkle in the depths of them, look out from under a broad, massive forehead that prevents his appearance from being commonplace. Sidney Dark has called him “The Superman-in-the-Street.” He is a great deal more than that, but he owes his deep knowledge of humanity, his broad sympathy with its sufferings and aspirations to the fact that he did at the outset share the homely satisfactions, the limitations and disadvantages that are the lot of the man-in-the-street, grew wise in those experiences, and carried the memory of them with him into the study. A far more profitable proceeding than to arrive in the study ignorant and learn of the outer world from hearsay or from what others have written.
Socialist, scientist, practical idealist, immensely interested in men and affairs, insatiably curious about all life, its origins, implications, possibilities, restlessly delving into the history and mystery of the past for truths that would light his guesses at the darker mystery of the future, it was natural for Wells to put his latest interests into each new book that he wrote, whether it was a matter-of-fact philosophical treatise or romantic or realistic fiction. If this habit of using as material for his work whatever was readiest to hand led to his scandalizing friends and acquaintance by putting even them, under thin disguises, into certain of his novels, he has, at least, put himself into them also and no little of his autobiography. You may trace the growth of his mind, the development of his ideas through his successive books. He has been accused of inconsistency by those who fancied his opinion had changed because it had matured, that he had acquired a new root when he had merely grown new branches. All his life, as somebody once said, he has been thus educating himself in the public eye, but he was educating himself strenuously and in face of many difficulties long before the eye of the public became aware of him.
He was born, in 1866, at Bromley, Kent, where his father, a noted cricketer who played in the County team, kept a small glass and china and general shop. But the business failed; his father had to find employment; his mother went as housekeeper to a great house near Petersfield and Wells, then about thirteen, was apprenticed to a draper at Windsor. Before long, he left there to go to Midhurst as assistant to a chemist, and presently abandoned that profession to resume his interrupted schooling at Wimblehurst. Thence, in 1881, he went to be, for a brief period, pupil teacher at his uncle’s school in Somerset, and gave that up to take to his first trade again in a draper’s shop at Southsea. After two years of this, he emerged as assistant teacher at Midhurst Grammar School, till, having won a scholarship at the South Kensington School of Science, and taken his B.Sc. degree with honors, he secured an appointment to teach Science and English at Henley House School, St. John’s Wood. To increase his income, he passed from that to work as lecturer and tutor to some University Correspondence Classes, and the incessant and arduous labor this involved resulted in such a complete breakdown of health that he had to resign his appointment and go away to the south coast to rest and recuperate.
But before he was fairly convalescent the irksomeness of doing nothing and the need of getting an income prompted him to try his luck with his pen. So far his literary work had not gone beyond what I am told was an admirable biological text-book, contributions to technical journals, and a few occasional newspaper articles. He turned now to writing essays and sketches of a light and humorous kind, and found a ready market for them in the Pall Mall Gazette, and other papers. Once in the lists as a literary free-lance, he rode from success to success with astonishing deftness and energy. In 1895 he published “Select Conversations with an Uncle,” but it was eclipsed by the appearance in the same year of “The Stolen Bacillus and Other Stories,” and two of the most original and characteristic of his early imaginative tales, “The Time Machine” and “The Wonderful Visit.” Next year, hard on the heels of that grim fantasy, “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” came the most charmingly humorous, realistic-idyllic of his novels, “The Wheels of Chance.”
No man with a serious purpose should, in this country, retain a sense of humor. If nature has afflicted him with one, he should do his best to have it removed; it is more inimical to his well-being than an appendix. But Wells seems to be incurable, and that he has carelessly broken through all manner of prejudices to almost universal acceptance, in spite of his handicap of humor, is in itself a testimony to the power and quality of his work. If Darwin had followed “The Origin of Species” by writing “Three Men in a Boat” I doubt whether the pundits would have taken him seriously enough to have him buried in Westminster Abbey. Wells, having published a novel and three searching and profoundly earnest books on the Great War in 1914, burst forth next year with the farcical, bitingly satirical “Boon” and the irresponsibly laughable, “Bealby,” and immediately after appealed to us with his prophetic “What is Coming?” and one of his finest novels, and certainly the finest novel of the War, “Mr. Britling Sees it Through.”
All which is, of course, as it should be. It is your little man who has only one mood for all occasions, and dare not laugh and unbend from his pose and come down from his pedestal lest he should seem no bigger than those who had looked up to him. While other scholars are toiling laboriously to write the record of a single nation, or a single reign, Wells sandwiches between novel and novel that stupendous survey, “The Outline of History,” which is not only a scholarly and vastly comprehensive chronicle of the evolution of man and the progress of humanity the world over from the dawn of time to the day before yesterday, but is, as Macaulay rightly said all history ought to be, as easy and fascinating reading as any work of fiction.
No English author has a wider vogue outside his own country—he is popular in America, and in Russia, Germany, Scandinavia, where many other of our famous writers are unknown; and who was that Frenchman that, on a visit to London, expressed himself as agreeably surprised to discover that Wells is nearly as much appreciated over here as he is in France?