H. G. WELLS
Scientific Futurist
We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making incident—but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say, "Here it commences, now; last minute was night and this is morning." But insensibly we are in the day. If we care to look, we can foresee growing knowledge, growing order, and presently a deliberate improvement of the blood and character of the race. And what we can see and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination.
It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes. All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.—"The Discovery of the Future" (1902).
Is Wells also among the prophets? Surely, and none with better right, even though we use the word "prophet" in its narrowest and most ordinary sense as one who foretells the future. He has foretold many futures for us, some utterly abhorrent, others more or less attractive. If we shudder at the thought of humanity on a freezing world fighting a losing battle with gigantic crustaceans as in "The Time Machine", or being suffocated on a blazing world as in "The Star", or being crushed under the tyranny of an omnipotent trust as in "When the Sleeper Wakes"—if none of these please us, then we have the option of a businesslike and efficient organization of society under the domination of the engineer as in "Anticipations", or a socialistic state under the beneficent sway of the Samurai as in "A Modern Utopia," or an instantaneous amelioration of human nature as "In the Days of the Comet." In thus presenting various solutions to the world problem Wells is not inconsistent. Every complicated equation has several roots, some of them imaginary. In solving a physical problem the scientist begins by disentangling the forces involved and then, taking them one at a time, calculates what would be the effect if the other forces did not act. So Wells is applying the scientific method to sociology when he attempts to isolate social forces and deal with them singly. If nothing intervenes to divert it, says the hydraulic engineer, the water of this mountain stream will develop such a momentum on reaching the valley. If no limitations are placed upon the consolidation of capital, says Mr. Wells, we may have a handful of directors ruling the world, as depicted in "When the Sleeper Wakes."
In its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation and justification. By this alone it tests its conclusions and demonstrates its usefulness. In fact, the sole object of science is prophecy, as Ostwald and Poincaré make plain. The mind of the scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project into the future. It is, therefore, not a chance direction of his fancy that so many of Wells's books, both romances and studies, deal with the future. It is the natural result of his scientific training, which not only led him to a rich unworked field of fictional motives, but made him consider the problems of life from a novel and very illuminative point of view. He gave definite expression to this philosophy in a remarkable address on "The Discovery of the Future", delivered at the Royal Institution of London, January 24, 1902. Here he shows that there is a growing tendency in modern times to shift the center of gravity from the past to the future and to determine the moral value of an act by its consequences rather than by its relation to some precedent. The justification of a war, for instance, may either be by reference to the past or to the future; that is, it may be based either upon some supposititious claim and violated treaty, or upon the assumed advantage to one or both parties. This idea, that in the moral evaluation of an act its results should be taken into consideration, has been popularly ascribed to the Jesuits, but since they have repeatedly and indignantly denied that it ever formed part of their teaching, it is questionable whether they could claim it now when it is becoming fashionable. At any rate, it is interesting to note that Wells gave very clear expression to this pragmatic principle five years before the publication of "Pragmatism" by James.
I hope that Mr. Wells will work out in detail his theory of prevision as a motive for morality. We cannot have too many such motives, and it is quite possible that this factor has not been fully recognized in our ethical systems, though I have no doubt that, as is usually the case with discoveries, especially in ethics, the theory is not quite so novel as it seems to him. In the meantime, I would call his attention to two weak points in argument, as he has sketched it in this lecture. He gives as an example of the two ways of looking at a problem the old question of whether a bad promise is better broken or kept. The "legal mind" would regard the promise as inviolable; the "creative mind" would say that in view of future consequences it should be disregarded. But I would suggest that, if morality is, as he defines it, "an overriding of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to something to be attained in the future", the one who viewed the act most clearly in the light of the future would keep the promise even at the cost of some suffering to himself and others rather than bring the lack of confidence which results from a violated oath.
I would also point out that the followers of dogma are not to be classed so positively with those who look only on the past. Certainly those whose morality is based on the hope of heaven and the fear of hell—and this is too numerous a class to be ignored—are as truly guided by their ideas of the future as are those who are working for the prosperity of the "Beyond-Man" some thousand years hence. Jonathan Edwards's first resolution was typical. It reads:
I. Resolved, That I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory and my own good, profit and pleasure, on THE WHOLE; without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriads of ages hence; to do whatever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general—whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.
The highest morality is attained, in my opinion, by the class which Mr. Wells despises—namely, those who disregard neither causes nor effects, but consider every act in the light of both the past and the future. For this reason we are grateful to Mr. Wells for the light he is giving us on the future by his efforts in scientific prophecy.
Wells defines two divergent types of mind by the relative importance they attach to things past or things to come. The former type he calls the legal or submissive mind, "because the business, the practice and the training of a lawyer dispose him toward it; he of all men must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself." In opposition to this is "the legislative, creative, organizing, masterful type", which is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things; it is constructive and "interprets the present and gives value to this or that entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen." The use of the term "legislative" for this latter type is confusing, at least to an American, because unfortunately most of our legislators are lawyers and have minds of the legal or conventional type. "Scientific" would be a better term than "legislative", because most of our real revolutions in thought and industry originate in the laboratory.
In his "Modern Utopia" Wells introduces a more complete classification of mankind into (1) the Poietic, that is, the creative and original genius, often erratic or abnormal; (2) the Kinetic, that is, the efficient, energetic, "business man" type; (3) the Dull, "the people who never seem to learn thoroughly or hear distinctly or think clearly", and (4) the Base, those deficient in moral sense. The first two categories of Wells, the Poietic and Kinetic, correspond roughly to Ostwald's Romanticist and Classicist types of scientific men.[1] I have laid stress upon Wells's point of view and classification of temperaments because it seems to me that it gives the clue to his literary work. This is voluminous and remarkably varied, yet through all its forms can be traced certain simple leading motives. Indeed I am unable to resist the temptation to formulate his favorite theme as: The reaction of society against a disturbing force.
This certainly is the basic idea of much of his work and most of the best of it. He hit upon it early and he has repeated it in endless variations since. The disturbing force may be an individual of the creative or poietic type, an overpowering passion, a new idea, a social organization or a material change in the conditions of life. Whatever it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual, or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible. Usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is advantageous, even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and the retardation of progress. Certainly no one is good enough or wise enough to be trusted with irresponsible power.
This is the lesson of "The Invisible Man." We all have been struck, probably, by a thought of the advantages which personal invisibility would confer. It is one of the most valued of fairy gifts. But perhaps only Wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. Assuming that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in water, in what situation would he be? He would be naked, of course, and he could not carry anything in his hands or eat in public. If it were winter he would leave tracks and would catch cold and sneeze. So the invisible man who starts to rob and murder at his own sweet will is soon run down by boys, dogs, and villagers as ignominiously as any common thief.
A more artistic expression to the same theme is given in "The Country of the Blind." A young man tumbled into an isolated valley of the Andes where lived a community which had through some hereditary disease lost many generations ago the power of sight. The stranger first thought of the proverb, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king", but when he tried to demonstrate his superiority he found it impossible. His talk about "seeing" the natives held to be the ravings of a madman and his clumsiness in their dark houses as proof of defective senses. He was as much at a disadvantage in a community where everything is adapted to the sightless as a blind man is in ours. He falls in love with a girl, but before he is allowed to marry her he must be cured of his hallucinations; a simple surgical operation, the removal of the two irritable bodies protuberant from his brain, will restore him to normality, say the blind surgeons, and make a sane and useful citizen of him. The entreaties of his lady love are added to the coercion of public opinion to induce him to consent. The exceptional man is beaten, he must either conform to the community or leave it. No matter how the story ends. The true novelist and dramatist, like the true mathematician, finds his satisfaction in correctly stating a problem, not in working it out.
The theme of these parables, the comparative powerlessness of the individual, however exceptionally endowed, against the coercive force of environment, Wells has developed at length in his novels; in "The New Machiavelli", for instance, where a statesman at the height of his public usefulness is overthrown and banished because he had succumbed to selfish passion and violated the moral code. Parnell is popularly supposed to be the model for this character rather more than the original Machiavelli, but it is, unfortunately, a type not rare either in history or fiction. Indeed this may be called the common plot of tragedy from the time when it began to be written, the vulnerable heel of Achilles, the little defect of character or ability that precipitates the catastrophe.
In Wells's hands this motive takes most fantastic forms. There was, for example, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"; "his name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott's"; "he was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a mustache with ends he twisted up, and freckles." This unpromising looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly possessed of the power to make anything happen that he wills, but he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage. It brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. Mr. Fotheringay lived in Church Row, and since Mr. Wells lives in the same street he perhaps knew him personally.
In "The War of Worlds" the earth is invaded by Martians, who are not in the least like those of Du Maurier or Professor Flournoy, but octopus-like creatures as far above mankind in intellect and command of machinery as we are above the animals, supermen surpassing the imagination of Nietzsche. They stride over the earth in machines of impregnable armor and devastate town and country with searchlights projecting rays more destructive than those of radium and much like Bulwer-Lytton's "vril." They feed on human blood and, if humanity is not to perish or become as sheep to these invaders, men and women must take to sewers and such like hiding places and wage incessant warfare against overwhelming odds.
In a passage that is to me the most gripping of anything Wells has written, a few unconquerable spirits plan the life that mankind must lead under these terrible conditions, but they are relieved from the necessity of putting it into execution by the interposition of an unexpected ally in the form of the most minute of creatures, the microbe. The men from Mars, not being immune to terrestrial diseases, are annihilated by one of them.
The formula remains the same although conditions are reversed in "The First Men in the Moon", for men, being naturally larger than the lunar people, might be supposed to dominate them, but, on the contrary, the ant-like inhabitants of the moon conquer the earthly invaders.
In "The Wonderful Visit" a curate goes out hunting for rare birds and shoots an angel on the wing. But the heavenly visitant does not play the rôle of the angel in Jerome's "The Passing of the Third Floor Back" and transform the character of all he meets. Wells's angel does not fit into the parish life, and everybody is relieved when he disappears. The same idea, the reaction of conventional society toward the unusual, is illustrated by "The Sea-Lady", where, instead of an angel from the sky, we have a mermaid from the ocean brought into the circle of a summer resort. Mr. Wells has said that by the sea-lady he meant to symbolize "love as a disturbing passion", the same theme as "The New Machiavelli." It may be taken to mean that, of course, or half a dozen other things as well. We are at liberty to disregard Mr. Wells's interpretation if we like. It is not an author's business to explain what his works mean. In fact it seems a bit officious and impertinent for him to attempt it. How little would there be left of the great literature of the world if it were reduced to what the author literally and consciously had in mind when he wrote. The value of any work of art depends upon what may be got out of it, not what was put into it.
"The Food of the Gods" is a case in point. These children who are fed on "boom-food" (presumably an extract from the pituitary body of the brain) and grow to gianthood may be taken to represent any new transforming force. If the story was conceived in Wells's earlier days he may have meant by it the power of science. If in the days of "Anticipations" he more likely had in mind efficiency or "scientific management." If when he was a member of the Fabian Society it doubtless stood for Socialism. Such questions may well be left to the future biographer who will take an interest in tracing out the genesis of his thought. Really it makes no difference to the reader, for the essential thing is to note that the reaction of society toward any unprecedented factor is the same. That in various parts of the country a new and gigantic race was growing up aroused at first a certain sensational interest, but this soon died down. People became accustomed to seeing the giant boys and girls and even set them at work. Later as it was realized that the giants could not be adapted to the existing social structure, but meant its overthrow, the government attempted to segregate and limit them, and at length, finding no compromise possible, determined to exterminate them. This brings about a duel to the death between the little race and the big, and there could be no doubt as to the issue.
Chesterton says[2]:
"The Food of the Gods" is the tale of "Jack the Giant-Killer" told from the point of view of the giant. This has not, I think, been done before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force. If (as not infrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head, and one man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant was a particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whether he was a good giant—that is, a giant who was any good to us. What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children—or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense? To use a fine phrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out.
Nothing could better illustrate the difference in standpoint between Chesterton and Wells than this. The sympathies of Wells are undoubtedly with the giants, with the new forces that aim to transform the world, though he is not always confident of their ultimate triumph. Being a man of scientific training, he is a determinist but not a fatalist. All his prophecies are conditional. If the gulf between industrial and parasitic classes keeps on widening there will eventually be two races, and the former will be master; this is the lesson of "The Time Machine." If the engineer and business manager get control we shall have the well ordered prosperity of "Anticipations." If Socialism prevails we shall have the Great State. His stories of the future are about equally divided between optimistic and pessimistic prophecy, between allurements and warnings.
"In the Days of the Comet"[3] he uses again the mechanism of the most artistic of his earlier short stories, "The Star", which is a little gem in its way without a superfluous word or a false tone. But those were the days when Mr. Wells was writing for pleasure; now he writes for a purpose, so the two stories resemble each other only in their common theme, the swishing across the earth of a comet's tail. In the former tale the event was viewed by a man in Mars who reported to his fellow scientists that the earth was little damaged, for the destruction of all life on it was too insignificant an event to be noticed at that distance. In the present book the earth was decidedly benefited, and the history is told by a man more foreign to us than the Martian, for he is a citizen of the new civilization that followed the "Great Change." A wonderful transformation had been effected in our atmosphere by its mingling with the cometary gases. The inert nitrogen of the air had been changed to some life-giving, clarifying, and stimulating gas; it would be unfair to the author to infer that this was nitrous oxid, more familiarly known as "laughing gas." Under its influence the inhabitants of the earth perceive the evils of our present régime and realize that they are mostly avoidable if everybody had good intentions and good sense. As an argument for Socialism it is a very weak one, for it gives away the case by conceding, at the outset, the main objection of the conservative, that you will have to change human nature before Socialism becomes possible. Of course, if all men were well-meaning and wise Socialism would be practical. It would also be unnecessary, because any social machinery, or, indeed, none at all, would work well enough under these conditions. The difficulty is to devise any changes that will make it work better with people as they are. That better people than we would be able to make for themselves better ways of living, nobody denies. That social, institutions influence the character of individuals, and that individuals influence the character of institutions, are correlative truths, but it is difficult for most people to keep them both in mind. Mr. Wells's collectivist conversion by a "green gas" is much the same thing as individualist conversion by religious influence, but we know of instances of the latter, while the former is purely hypothetical.
But, of course, the object of the book is not to show how Socialism can come about, but to assist in making it come about by acting on readers as a dose of the "green gas" and opening our eyes to the vulgarity, silliness, squalor, and wastefulness of our daily life. Mr. Wells is an artist by nature and a scientist by training, and ugliness and stupidity worry him more than wickedness and injustice. In fact, he would probably class all the evils of civilization under stupidity. But long ago it was said that against stupidity even the gods fight in vain, and it remains to be seen whether Socialists will succeed better.
The most attractive pages of the book to me are those that describe "the festival of the rubbish burnings", though Wells does not improve upon Washington Irving's treatment of the same theme. There are several things owned by our neighbors, even by relatives, which we should like to cast upon the flames. But we are afraid to light the bonfire lest the neighbors should burn up some of our treasures. That war is also an example of human stupidity, we agree, but just how to prevent it altogether until the rest of the world comes to our opinion, we do not understand. It takes two to stop a quarrel. The fleets of England and Germany were engaged in bombarding each other when the renovating comet struck the earth, but as soon as the eyes of the combatants and the "statesmen" who had instigated it were opened, and their anger quenched, it seemed incredible to them that they should have sought to kill each other for such trivial and remote causes. Jules Verne has a similar scene in "Dr. Ox's Experiment", but in that case the gas acts in the opposite way to excite the sluggish inhabitants of a peaceful Flemish village to make war against the neighboring village, and as soon as they are out of the contaminated atmosphere they look in bewilderment at the deadly weapons in their hands. Eight years later Wells's worst forebodings came to pass, but no "green gas" came to clear the air of hate.
But the particular passion that Wells would sweep away by the breath of his comet is one which, in the opinion of most people, is necessary to the maintenance of morality, that is, jealousy. The young English workingman who tells the story is infuriated against the young aristocrat who had seduced his sweetheart and is pursuing them with a revolver when the "Great Change" comes. Then he is content to share her affections with his former rival, and they all lived together happily ever after. In his works on Socialism Wells gives his reasons for thinking that, whether we wish it or not, the family is disintegrating, and that only under Socialism, which will insure a support sufficient for independence to both men and women, can better relations be established.
We might have known that as soon as science discovered the new world inside the atom the story-writer would follow close behind. We might also have known that H. G. Wells would be the first to exploit this new territory annexed to human knowledge, for he has always kept an eye on scientific progress even while seemingly engrossed in British politics and marriage problems. So he wrote a romance of the atom, "The World Set Free", describing the Great War months before it happened.
Our sleepy earth has been caught napping by every great change that has thus far reached humanity, and probably Mr. Wells is quite right in supposing that a sudden release of the vast stores of energy hidden in the atom would find civilization as unprepared for the social, economic, political, and intellectual results of the new energies in industry as it was for the effects of the great industrial revolution which followed the introduction of steam power not much more than a century ago.
But Mr. Wells has the alertest literary imagination of any modern writer; the significance of the new physics has not escaped him as it has the common run of novelists intently searching for good plots and neglecting entirely the rich ore awaiting any writer who happened to have an elementary knowledge of modern science. Many short stories and one or two novels have introduced more or less accurate accounts of radium as a side-show to a love story or an incident in a detective tale. But it required the boldness of Mr. Wells to throw overboard entirely the conventional novel plot and make a hero of the cosmic energies. "The World Set Free" resembles "The War in the Air" in its vivid account of world-wide war, nations armed with novel weapons and forces, appalling power for destruction and attack in the hands of every nation, together with complete incapacity for defense by any nation, the resulting collapse of credit, panic, starvation, anarchy and a general social débâcle. But while the "war in the air" meant the end of civilization, the war with "atomic bombs" in the present book results in a general treaty of peace, the foundation of a world state under a provisional government, and a successful reorganization of society in which the forces which had been used by nations and empires to conquer each other are directed to the task of subduing nature to human aims.
Like the reconstructed world of "In the Days of the Comet" the future state is very faintly depicted, hinted at rather than described, in "The World Set Free." It differs from the numerous other Utopias of Mr. Wells in that, whereas the world states of "Anticipations", "A Modern Utopia", "In the Days of the Comet", etc., could be brought about by nothing more than taking the author's advice on politics, law, economics, and social customs, "The World Set Free" depends upon scientific discovery. A new hypothesis, in short, has given the inhabitants of this Utopia an advantage over all previous Utopias. They have energy at their command almost as freely accessible as water or air, and so the labor question is annihilated, the whole world becomes a leisure class, and everybody is free to devote his life to gardening, artistic decoration, and scientific research. Country life becomes a constant delight. The agriculturist shrinks to less than one per cent of the population. The lawyer follows the warrior into extinction. "Contentious professions cease to be an honorable employment for men."
The Parliament of the World, which came into existence after the atomic explosions of 1950, was simple and sensible; fifty new representatives elected every five years; proportional representation; every man and woman with an equal vote; election for life subject to recall; each voter putting on his ballot the names of those he wishes elected and those he wishes recalled; a representative recallable by as many votes as the quota that elected him. But political machinery does not count for much in this most modern of Utopias. A scrap of the conversation between the President of the United States and King Egbert, "the young king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe", will illustrate the point of view:
"Science," the King cried presently, "is the new king of the world."
"Our view," said the President, "is that sovereignty resides with the people."
"No," said the King, "the sovereign is a being more subtle than that, and less arithmetical; neither my family nor your emancipated people. It is something that floats about us and above us and through us. It is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which science is the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its demands."
The agency which effects this transformation is the discovery of how to release the internal energy of the atom, which we now know exists, although we do not know how to get at it. Since wealth is essentially nothing but energy this means that we have within reach enough to make multi-millionaires of all of us; a tantalizing thought. The new disintegrating element, according to Mr. Wells, is carolinum, an element that Professor Baskerville also discovered on paper a few years ago. This exhaustless supply of energy being utilized in machinery sets free the laborer and swells the army of the unemployed; and since, incidentally, one of the by-products of its decomposition is gold, the financial systems of the world go to smash. But naturally carolinum finds speedy employment in war. A bomb of it buried in the soil becomes a perpetual volcano, half of it exploding every seventeen days. A few bombs of this radioactive element dropped from aeroplanes demolish Paris and Berlin and throw the world into a chaos of confusion, which Wells's characteristic style, with its flashlight visions, its tumultuous phrases, and its shifting points of view, its alternations of generalization and detail, is particularly adapted to depict.
The value of this romance, aside from its interest, lies in the emphatic way in which it teaches the lesson that civilization is primarily a matter of the utilization of natural energy and is measurable in horse power. Unfortunately we have to depend upon the sunshine, either that of the present or of the carboniferous era; we have no key to the treasure-house of the atom. Radium gives out its energy without haste or rest, just as fast at the temperature of liquid air as at the temperature of liquid iron, always keeping itself a little hotter than its surroundings, however hot these may be. If only we could get at this source of exhaustless energy—but let Wells say what that would mean:
Not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.
It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day toward radio-activity exactly as our ancestor stood toward fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization. The energy we need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but....
Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next.[4]
Wells is a futurist in the true sense of the word, appraising all things by what shall come out of them. This led him to a realization of the importance of eugenics long before the fad came in. In "Mankind in the Making" he formulated his test of civilization in these words:
Any collective human enterprise, institution, party, or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence toward a higher and ampler standard of life.
But when it comes to practical measures for securing these advantages, Wells shows a characteristic timidity. He condemns certain obvious dysgenic measures, such as the action of school boards in imposing celibacy upon women teachers, but in several respects legislation in America has already gone beyond what he ten years ago considered possible. So, too, in his "Anticipations" he suggested as future possibilities inventions and practices that were then familiar to us in this country. It is hard for a man nowadays to be a prophet. If he doesn't look sharp he will find himself an historian instead.
When H. G. Wells in 1902 essayed the rôle of prophet and in his volume entitled "Anticipations" tried to forecast the future of the world on scientific principles, he excited the same popular interest that any guess at coming events arouses, but there were few who took him seriously. Now, however, "Anticipations" makes very interesting reading. Much of it has already come to pass, and we see that Wells's chief mistake lay in putting his forecast too far ahead; for instance, when he says that he is "inclined to believe.... that very probably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound."
The chapter on war in "Anticipations" shows astonishing power of prescience in what he says of the use of the submarine and armored automobile, the development of trench warfare, the substitution of the machine gun for the rifle, and the abolition of the distinction between military and civilian parts of a nation. His discussion of the new forms of warfare and the inadequacy of the old methods of management and training is full of warnings which it were well for his country to have heeded. This is shown if we compare that feeling passage in which he describes a future British army setting out to meet a scientifically organized foe with an actual battle on the Artois field as seen from the German side. The first column is quoted from "Anticipations", published fifteen years ago. The second column is taken from Kellermann's picture of the battle of Loos, September 22, 1915, published in the Continental Times of Berlin. Bernard Kellermann, one of the most brilliant of the younger writers of Germany, is well known in America through his novel, "The Tunnel", dealing with a submarine passage to Europe.
THE PROPHECY, 1902
I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the gray old general—the general who learned his art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with his epaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historical value, his spurs and his sword—riding along on his obsolete horse, by the side of his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. And the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the old time. They will believe in him to the end. They have been brought up in their schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers have mingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their faith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The "smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose for them lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slope their obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death. They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality of the best club in the world have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolute stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the subaltern—the son of the school-burking, share-holding class—a slightly taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical headmaster to use a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."
So the gentlemanly old general—the polished drover to the shambles—rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that haunts my mind.
I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do against modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever they come against a sanely organized army. There is nowhere they can come in; there is nothing they can do.
The scattered, invisible marksmen with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet the bitterest and crudest things will have to happen, thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful disease before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very carefully educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical recognition.[5]
THE FULFILLMENT, 1915
They made the essay with absolutely new, absolutely antiquated tactics—tactics which are no longer recognized in this war. It was something really unheard of! Our staff officers stood and regarded it—their mouths open in astonishment. It was observed, shortly before noon, that the English were advancing toward our positions in dense masses, eight lines deep in echelon—from Loos. A hail of shells that churned up the ground was supposed to smooth the way for the storming columns. At the same time, to the east of Loos (there is a bit of rising ground there scarcely noticeable as you drive over it in a wagon, called Hill 70), we saw English artillery come riding up—quite open—in the broad of day—under the naked heavens! These batteries carried bridge materials with them for the crossing of trenches and natural obstacles. The English general we caught describes this action as one that was especially "sporting." There can be no doubt about its dashing quality. But there was more to come. In the distance, on the level plain, one or two English cavalry regiments were visible—Dragoons of the Guard. Eight lines of infantry? Artillery driving across the open? Cavalry in the background? It was really unbelievable! It was the plan of a veritable pitched battle from a forgotten age, the masterly idea of a senile brain, which had come limping along fifty years behind the times! Generals in our day grow obsolete as rapidly as inventions and sciences. The war has taught us that the blood of nations, the incalculably precious blood, is to be entrusted only to the freshest, the most elastic, the most gifted of military spirits, the very cream of the crop. Those old celebrities of theirs, staggering under their orders, should have been consigned to relay stations by the English. The English troops carried out their attack with a splendid gesture, with admirable bravoure. They were young and they bore no orders on their uniforms. They carried out the commands of their celebrated and senile authorities, carried them out with a blind courage—in this day of mortars, telephones and machine-guns. As magnificent as was their bearing, even so pitiful was the collapse of their onslaught. Before the eightfold storming columns had been able to make ten steps, they came under our combined fire-rifles, machine-guns, cannon. The batteries were lying in wait and they obeyed the telephone. The English knights and baronets had not reckoned with this. Fresh reserves came running up and were mown down in the cross-fire of our machine-guns. Those riding batteries came to a miserable end. They too came within the zone of the machine-guns, and our heavy mortars, notified by telephone, got hold of them so swiftly and so thoroughly, that they were not even given time to unlimber. The regiments of cavalry that were waiting in the background, ready to come dashing through, got salvoes of the heaviest shells full in their faces, and drew back without having drawn a blade from the scabbard. That finished the pitched battle. And the attack broke to pieces in front of our wire entanglements. A prodigious number of their dead lay before our trenches. We had made 800 prisoners, among them a colonel, four majors, and fifteen officers. At a conservative estimate, the losses of the English in this single section of the division, may be fixed in dead and wounded as at least 20,000. It was clear that, apart from a small local success, it had been a disastrous job for the Britishers. Never before has it been so clearly proved that war is not a sport for a dozen or two of privileged dilettantes.[6]
Wells made his first hit with "The Time Machine", written under high pressure of the idea within a fortnight by keeping at his desk almost continuously from nine in the morning to eleven at night. It is based upon the theory that time is a fourth dimension of space,[7] and by a suitable invention one may travel back and forth along that line. Having once got his seat in his time-machine Wells has never abandoned it. He uses it still in his novels, in "Tono-Bungay," "The New Machiavelli", and "The Passionate Friends", telling the story partly in retrospect, partly in prospect, flying back and forth in the most mystifying manner, producing thereby a remarkable effect of the perpetual contemporaneity of existence, though some readers are dizzied by it.
The charm of a masked ball is that it enables people to do and say what they please, in short to reveal themselves because their faces are concealed. Anonymity has the same effect, as many a name from "Currer Bell" to "Fiona McLeod" attests. So it is not surprising that the book[8] which purports to have been written by one "George Boon" and compiled by one "Reginald Bliss" shows Wellsian characteristics more pronounced than any of the volumes of which H. G. Wells owns authorship.
For one thing Wells obviously likes to start things better than to finish them. He is apt to run out of breath before he comes to the end of a novel, and if he gets his second wind it is likely to be some other kind of wind. In most of his books except the short stories the reader feels that the author is saying to himself, "I wish I had this thing off my hands so I could get at that new idea of mine."
Then, too, Wells is fond of putting a story inside of a story, like the Arabian Nights, and it often happens that the "flash-backs", to borrow a cinema phrase, are confusing. The framework of "The Modern Utopia" is an instance of this. It is sometimes hard to tell in this where we are or who is speaking.
Wells is inimitable in his ability to sketch a character in a few swift strokes, but he does not care much for the character afterward. He delights in taking such snapshots, but he hates to develop them. His mind is quick to change. He is liable to be disconcerted by a sudden vision of an opposing view. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he will be seized with a doubt of what he is saying, and being an honest man, he leaves it in air rather than finish it after he has lost confidence. He may double on his track like a hunted fox within the compass of a single volume.
Finally, Wells is fond of satirizing his contemporaries, including his best friends and his former selves. He is given to mixing realistic description with recondite symbolism, desultory argumentation with extraneous personalities, and other incongruous combinations of style and thought.
Now all these peculiarities, call them faults or merits as you like, are to be found intensified in "Boon" Etc. First Mr. Wells introduces Mr. Bliss, who then introduces Mr. Boon, a famous author deceased, and tells how they together invented Mr. Hallery, who introduces a host of living writers, big and little, known and unknown, at the World Conference on the Mind of the Race. He has given me the honor of a seat on a special committee of Section S, devoted to Poiometry, the scientific measurement of literary greatness.
The volume is illustrated by the author—whoever he may be—but the best caricatures are not the graphic but the verbal ones with their amusing parodies of style. Perhaps the best of these is an imaginary conversation between Henry James and George Moore, in which both gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought.
Here's the sketch of "Dodd." We recognize him, although we do not know who Dodd is:
Dodd is a leading member of the Rationalist Press Association, a militant agnostic, and a dear compact man, one of those Middle Victorians who go about with a preoccupied, caulking air, as though, having been at great cost and pains to banish God from the Universe, they were resolved not to permit Him back on any terms whatever. He has constituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a materialistic age, saying suspiciously: "Here, now, what's this rapping under the table here?" and examining every proposition to see that the Creator wasn't being smuggled back under some specious new generalization. Boon used to declare that every night Dodd looked under his bed for the Deity, and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for fear of a revelation.
One advantage of anonymity is that Wells can contradict himself with even more freedom than usual. For instance, he expresses great contempt for Bergson and his "Pragmatism for Ladies." But not long ago, in "Marriage", he was contemptuous of "Doctor Quiller [Schiller] of Oxford," for "ignoring Bergson and fulminating a preposterous insular Pragmatism."
Much of the volume was manifestly written in the calm days before the war, but the fragment entitled "The Wild Asses of the Devil" expresses in fantastic guise his—and the world's—confusion and despair at the catastrophe which has overwhelmed the human race. "It is like a dying man strangling a robber in his death grip. We shall beat them, but we shall be dead beat in doing it," says Boon, and he rejects all suggestions that it may be a good thing in the end:
No! War is just the killing of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over, then civilization will have to begin all over again. They will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load and the days of our jesting are done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose and there is no restraining them. What is the good of pretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence kicking better than we know? It is all evil. Evil.
There are many different Wellses. Probably nobody likes all of them. He does not like all of himselves. In writing a preface or otherwise referring to an earlier work he is, after the manner of Maeterlinck, almost apologetic, and looks back upon the author with a curious wonder as to how he came to hold such opinions and express them in such a way. Those of us who have grown up with him, so to speak, and followed his mind through all its metamorphoses in their natural order can understand him better, I believe, than those of the younger generation who begin with the current serial and read his works backward. Mr. Wells is just about my age. We were in the laboratory together and breathed the same atmosphere, although five thousand miles apart. When he began to write I was ready to read and to admire the skill with which he utilized for literary purposes the wealth of material to be found in the laboratory. Jules Verne had worked the same rich vein, clumsily but with great success. Poe had done marvels in the short story with such scanty science as he had at his command. But Wells, trained under Huxley in biology at the University of London, had all this new knowledge to draw upon. He could handle technicalities with a far defter touch than Verne and almost rivaled Poe in the evocation of emotions of horror and mystery. Besides this he possessed what both these authors lacked, a sense of humor, a keen appreciation of the whimsicalities of human nature. So he was enabled to throw off in the early nineties a swift succession of short stories astonishingly varied in style and theme. As he became more experienced in the art of writing, or rather of marketing manuscripts, he seems to have regretted this youthful prodigality of bright ideas. Many of them he later worked over on a more extensive scale as the metallurgist goes back to a mine and with an improved process extracts more gold from the tailings and dump than the miner got out of the ore originally.
"The Star" was the first of these I came across, clipping it for my scrap book from Harper's Weekly, I believe. First loves in literature make an indelible impression, so I will always hold that nothing Wells has done since can equal it. Certainly it was not improved by expanding it to "In the Days of the Comet." The germ of that creepy tale of advanced vivisection, "The Island of Dr. Moreau", appeared first in the Saturday Review, January, 1895, as a brief sketch, "Doctor Moreau Explains." "The Dream of Armageddon", vivid and swift as a landscape under a flash of lightning, served in large part for two later volumes, "When the Sleeper Wakes" and "The New Machiavelli."
It was, as I have said, "The Star" that first attracted me to Wells. It was "The Sea-Lady" who introduced me to him personally. It was in the back room of a little Italian restaurant in New York, one of those sixty-cent table d'hôtes where rich soup and huge haystacks of spaghetti serve to conceal the meagerness of the other five courses. Here foregathered for years a group of Socialists, near-Socialists, and others of less definable types, alike in holding the belief that the world could be moved and ought to be, but disagreeing agreeably as to where the fulcrum could be placed and what power should move the lever. We called ourselves the "X Club", partly because the outcome of such a combination of diverse factors was highly problematical, partly perhaps in emulation of the celebrated London X. One evening some ten years ago, as I came late to the dinner, I noticed that the members were not all talking at once, as usual, but concentrated their attention upon a guest, a quiet, unassuming individual, rather short, with a sunbrowned face, tired eyes, and a pessimistic mustache—a Londoner, I judged from his accent. Then I was introduced to him as "The man who knows all your works by heart, Mr. Wells." This disconcerting introduction was their revenge for my too frequent quotation in debate. The reason, I suppose, for the old saying, "Beware the man of one book", is because he is such a bore.
Mr. Wells appeared to take the introduction literally and began to examine me on the subject. "Did you ever read 'The Sea-Lady'?" I happily was able to say I had, and was let off from any further questions, for he said that he had never met but two persons before who admitted having read the book. I am glad he did not ask me what it meant, for while I had an opinion on the subject, it might not have agreed with his.
Then we turned the tables on Mr. Wells and for the rest of the evening asked him questions and criticized his views; all of which he took very good-naturedly and was apparently not displeased thereby, since in the book about his trip, "The Future in America", he expressed disappointment at not finding in Washington any "such mentally vigorous discussion centers as the New York X Club."
Five years later I had another glimpse of Mr. Wells, this time a jolly evening at his home, where he kept his guests, a dozen young men and women, entertained, first by playing on the pianola, which he bought at the suggestion of Mr. Shaw; afterward by improvising a drama for the occasion, the star rôle being taken by his wife, whom I had seen a few days before marching in the great London suffrage procession. Mr. Wells's home differs from most London houses in having a view and a park. The back windows look over all the sea of houses, the shipping in the Thames, and, smoke permitting, the Surrey hills beyond. On the other side of the house five minutes' walk uphill brings one to Hampstead Heath, the largest of London's public places, which serves Mr. Wells for his long walks.
Mr. Wells perhaps got his love of outdoor life from his father, Joseph Wells, who was a professional cricketer and the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penhurst Castle, in Kent. His mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst. Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, September 21, 1866, and his childhood impressions of his mother's kitchen and his father's garden and shop he has described in "First and Last Things" and in "Tono-Bungay." In this novel, the first, perhaps, to be devoted to that conspicuous feature of modern life, the patent medicine, he has utilized his brief experience as a chemist's apprentice, or, as we would say, a drug clerk. Next an unsuccessful attempt was made to train him as a draper's assistant—a dry goods clerk, in our language, though we have fortunately nothing that exactly corresponds. The hardships and humiliations of this experience seem to have cut deep into his soul, for he recurs to it again and again, always with bitterness, as in "Mr. Polly", "Kipps", and "The Wheels of Chance", for example. But to untangle the autobiographical threads from the purely fictional in Wells's novels would be to cheat some future candidate for a Ph. D. in English literature of his thesis.
The interesting point to observe is that temperament and training have combined to give him on the one hand a hatred of this muddled, blind, and inefficient state of society in which we live, and on the other a distrust of the orderly, logical, and perfected civilization usually suggested as a possible substitute. He detests chaos, but is skeptical of cosmos. Set between these antipathetic poles, he vibrates continually like an electrified pith ball. He has a horror of waste, war, dirt, cruelty, cowardice, incompetency, vagueness of mind, dissipation of energy, inconvenience of households, and all friction, mental or physical. But yet his ineradicable realization of the concrete will not allow him to escape from these disagreeables by taking refuge in such artificial paradises as Fourier's phalanx or Morris' idyllic anarchism. Wells is a Socialist, yet he finds not merely the Marxians, but even the Fabians, too dogmatic and strait-laced for him. His "Modern Utopia" is, I think, the first to mar the perfection of its picture by admitting a rebel, a permanently irreconcilable, antagonistic individuality, a spirit that continually denies. Yet we know that if a utopia is to come on earth it must have room for such.
Wells would never make a leader in any popular movement. He has the zeal of the reformer, but he has his doubts, and, what's worse, he admits them. In the midst of his most eloquent passages he stops, shakes his head, runs in a row of dots, and adds a few words, hinting at another point of view. He has what James defined as the scientific temperament, an intense desire to prove himself right coupled with an equally intense fear lest he may be wrong.
Your true party man must be quite color blind. He must see the world in black and white; must ignore tints and intermediate shades. Wells as Socialist could not help seeing—and saying—that there were many likable things about the Liberals. As a Liberal he must admit that the Tories have the advantage in several respects. He professes to view religion rationalistically, yet there are outbursts of true mysticism to be found in his books, passages which prove that he has experienced the emotion of personal religion more clearly than many a church member.
He has the courage of his convictions, but it does not extend much beyond putting them into print. I doubt whether, if he were given autocratic power, he would inaugurate his "Modern Utopia" or any other of his visions. At least he has hitherto resisted all efforts to induce him to carry them into effect.
For instance, one of the most original and interesting features of his "Modern Utopia" was the Samurai, the ruling caste, an order of voluntary noblemen; submitting to a peculiar discipline; wearing a distinctive dress; having a bible of their own selected from the inspiring literature of all ages; spending at least a week of every year in absolute solitude in the wilderness as a sort of spiritual retreat and restorative of self-reliance. A curious conception it was, a combination of Puritanism and Bushido, of Fourier and St. Francis, of Bacon's Salomon's House, Plato's philosophers ruling the republic, and Cecil Rhodes's secret order of millionaires ruling the world.
One day a group of ardent young men and women, inspired by this ideal, came to Wells and announced that they had established the order, they had become Samurai, and expected him to become their leader, or at least to give them his blessing; instead of which Wells gave them a lecture on the sin of priggishness and sent them about their business. I have no doubt he was right about it, nor does his disapproval of this premature attempt to incorporate the Samurai in London prove that there was not something worth while in the idea. But it shows that Wells knew what his work was in the world and proposed to stick to it, differing therein from other Utopians: Edward Bellamy, who because his fantastic romance, "Looking Backward", happened to strike fire, spent the rest of his life in trying to bring about the coöperative commonwealth by means of clubs, papers, and parties; Dr. Hertzka, who wasted his substance in efforts to found a real Freeland on the steppes of Kilimanjaro, Africa.
Perhaps the matter with Wells is simply that he cannot find his proper pigeon-hole. Perhaps I can find it. Wells has little sympathy with any political grouping or ideal regnant to-day. The orthodox Tory is in his view simply a man without imagination. The orthodox Liberal is a mere sentimentalist substituting democratic phrases for science and discipline. The Imperialist, though touching Wells at some points, repels him by his mania for military expenditure and his ignorant race prejudice. The Socialist or Labor Party man is appallingly narrow and totally unimpressed with the need for intelligence to rule the State. In "The New Machiavelli" the hero hovers distressfully over the entire field of modern politics, finding as little rest for his soul as Noah's dove on the first trip from the ark found for its feet. Once and once only has Wells's ideal found even partial embodiment, and that was in the best days of the Roman Empire.
There was the Great State (in the familiar capital letters); a world state so far as the world was known and civilized. There was a universal language, exact and lucid. There was freedom and security of travel, at least as great as in those same countries to-day. True, Wells would have disapproved of slavery. But so did the Stoics of the Empire disapprove of slavery, at least in theory. Their ideal was a universal citizenship. In the later Empire every freeman in the Roman Empire was called a citizen. There was tolerance, not only of religion but of manners, such as the narrow and parochial States of Western Europe which succeeded its fall have never known till within a hundred years. Statecraft was a science; devotion to the State a cult. There were the legions, examples of duty and discipline and scientific warfare, and yet a few thousands of troops sufficed to police and guard a whole civilized, wealthy, complex world state.
But most important of all was the Roman Law. Based on logical principles; divested of superstitious accessories and irrational taboos; universal and in the main equitable; raised above the Empire and the muddy immediacies of politics till it seemed the voice of nature itself; flexible and changing, but by growth rather than whim, it was the intellectual fabric of the Empire. It so happened that a despotic Emperor wielded the power of state, but still it was the State and not the mere person of the Emperor that was really reverenced. It was certainly not the man or the artist that was divine in Nero, but the office. Even in its decadent and Byzantine days traces of the old ideal remained, and it was not "Charles Richard Henry Etcetera, by the Grace of God King of Anyland, Duke of Somewherelse, Knight of the Golden Spur, Most Reverend Lord of the Free Cities of Lower Ruritania" in the silly medieval (and modern) style, but "Senatus Populusque Romani" and "Res Publica." The medieval Papacy was as universal in structure, but was obscurantist in basis, and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the crusades and the monasteries and great cathedrals as its monuments. The Roman Empire was rationalist in basis, and left behind it laws, straight roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, libraries, and municipal organizations. Chesterton is a romantic and rather likes than otherwise the whimsical eccentricities of modern national institutions. But Wells, though he loves to play with science, takes statecraft as seriously as Marcus Aurelius, and, like him, he is a citizen of the Great State, the Cosmopolis. The "Modern Utopia" might have grown out of the actual Roman Empire had the right turnings been taken from that time to this; no other state or civilization would have formed its basis.
The significance of Wells's advocacy of Socialism lies in the fact that it is addressed to the middle classes. He might be called "The Apostle to the Genteels." He took part for a time in the aggressive socialistic campaign led by the Fabian Society on lines distinct from but parallel to the Marxian working class propaganda. The orthodox Marxian has little use for middle-class people. He expects them to become extinct so shortly that it is no use trying to convert them. He takes no more interest in them than missionaries do in the Tasmanians. They will be ground fine between the upper and nether millstones of the trusts and the unions. Such individuals who survive will be able to do so only by becoming retainers of the capitalists, and as such will be engulfed with them in the revolutionary cataclysm which will end the present era.
With a firm faith in this theory, it is no wonder that he often manifests annoyance at the slowness of the bourgeoisie in carrying out the part assigned them in the Marxian program. They do not disappear fast enough, nor do they show any eagerness to take sides either with the proletariat or with the capitalists. On the contrary, they view both with a certain distrust and antipathy, and maintain a curious confidence in their ability to manage both factions in the future as they have in the past. In short, they are not a negligible quantity, but hold the balance of power, at least for the present, and can retard or accelerate the progress of Socialism to a considerable though an indefinite extent.
Obviously, if the middle class as a whole is to be converted to Socialism, it must be by different arguments than those found effective with the proletariat. The Manifesto does not appeal to them, because they have more to lose than their "chains." There must be something more alluring than a universal competency and a steady job to arouse them to the need of radical changes.
The sight of capitalists excites emulation and ambition rather than hatred and despair. A man is not inclined to vote millionaires out of existence so long as he cherishes a secret hope of becoming one. They do not see the proletarian papers and would be repelled by them if they did.
Wells's outline of the form that middle-class propaganda should take presents several novel and interesting points, but the most conspicuous is his discussion of the effect of Socialism on family relations. His frankness and honesty in bringing that question into the open is in commendable contrast with the tendency of most advocates of Socialism to conceal or minimize the fact that any such profound rearrangement of economic relations as is involved in Socialism must inevitably affect the family, because the economic factor in this institution is undeniably great, although how great is a matter of dispute.
Wells boldly attempts to convert a prejudice into an argument by appealing to the very classes which, it is generally supposed, would be repelled by the bare mention of the subject, to save the family from its impending disintegration by adopting Socialism.
That Wells is right in thinking that the problem of the family is a serious one at the present time is clearly shown by the statistics collected by Sidney Webb for the Fabian Society. He proves:
That the decline in the birthrate which is depriving England and Wales of at least one-fifth of every year's normal crop of babies is not accounted for by any alteration in the age, sex or marital condition of the population, by any refusal or postponement of marriage, or by any of the effects of "urbanization" or physical deterioration of sections of the community. The statistical evidence points, in fact, unmistakably to the existence of a volitional regulation of the marriage state that is now ubiquitous throughout England and Wales, among, apparently, a large majority of the population.
So much other statisticians have deduced, but Mr. Webb went farther and obtained a direct proof of his conclusion by the circulation of several hundred question blanks among middle-class families. The results are startling. Out of a total of one hundred and twenty families reporting in one category, there were only seven in which the number of children was not intentionally limited. The average number of children in such limited families is one and a half, which is only one third what it was twenty-five years ago. In about sixty per cent of the cases "the poverty of the parents in relation to their standard of comfort" was a cause in the limitation of the family.
This shows how important a factor the increased expense of raising children has become in well-to-do families, and unless the population of the future is to be recruited very largely by the improvident, ignorant, and debased, it points toward some form of state encouragement of the production of well-born children. Wells suggested a differential income tax. Doctor Galton advocated the endowment of gifted parents. The war has brought this question out of the realm of speculative controversy into that of practical necessity. Some of the remedies proposed now make the measures suggested by Wells ten years before seem timid and conservative.
His early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. He therefore never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning is fallacious, because the world cannot be divided up into distinct things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. Here he is extremely radical, going quite as far as Bergson in his anti-intellectualism though attacking the subject in a very different way. He denies the categories, the possibility of number, definition, and classification.[9] He brings three charges against our Instrument of Knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work at another. No two things are exactly alike, and when we try to define a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought back again to a concrete case. Or, as Wells puts it in his laboratory language: "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." "Of everything we need to say this is true, but it is not quite true."
What the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature, the scientist has come to believe, and perhaps in time the logicians will come to see it too. At present, however, they are, as Wells says, in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two. This is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by Mr. Jourdain in which he says:[10]
To these strictures of Mr. Wells on logic we may reply, it seems to me, that either they are psychological—in which case they are irrelevant to logic—or they are false. Thus the principle that "no truth is quite true", implying as it does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood, and is therefore false.
This sort of thing might have passed as a good joke in the days of Epimenides, the Cretan, when logic was a novelty, and people amused themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with it. But it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the ramparts as Wells's essay and from within as F. C. S. Schiller's big volume, "Formal Logic."
Wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves." There is a desperate sincerity about the man that I like. He seems always to be struggling to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. I do not think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as Shaw does. Wells would rather, I believe, agree with other people than disagree. He is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. But he insists always on "painting the thing as he sees it." His later novels have come under the ban of the British public libraries because, conceiving sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant facts obtruded. His sociological works, in which, while insisting on permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship, aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions in his novels.
All his longer novels are largely concerned with the problem of marital life but the only one of them that comes near to a solution is that entitled "Marriage." The couple in this case, the Traffords, are exceptionally decent people for characters in a modern novel, and if their marriage is not a success it is not on account of any interference from a third party, but rather because of the cares and complications that come from family life and financial prosperity. The heroine is a charming specimen of the modern young woman, educated at "Oxbridge", whose chief fault is a constitutional inability to keep her accounts straight. She spends money with excellent taste, but without regard to her husband's bank balance. Consequently Trafford has to lay aside his researches in molecular physics to work out a successful process for synthetic rubber—easy to a man of his ability.
Mr. Wells apparently adopts the theory formulated by Professor Devine, of Columbia, as to the normal division of labor between husband and wife, that men should be experts in the art of getting money and women experts in the art of spending it. Where both parties fail is in regarding these duties as ends in themselves, the men getting absorbed in business and the women buying things that they do not want, that nobody needs, just for the sake of buying. Apparently Mr. Wells has hope of curing the men, but none of curing the women.
Premature attempts at realization, the demand for immediate results, the disregard of purely scientific research, the swamping of life by restless activity and futile efforts at reform, these are the ailments of the modern world, according to our author. His satire spares neither conservatives nor radicals. The following passage would apply to New York as well as London:
London, of course, is always full of Movements. Essentially they are absorbents of superfluous feminine energy. They have a common flavor of progress and revolutionary purpose, and common features in abundant meetings, officials, and organization generally. Few are expensive and still fewer produce any tangible results in the world. They direct themselves at the most various ends: the poor, that favorite butt, either as a whole or in such typical sections as the indigent invalid or the indigent aged, the young, public health, the woman's cause, the prevention of animal food, anti-vivisection, the gratuitous advertisement of Shakespeare (that neglected poet), novel but genteel modifications of medical or religious practice, dress reform, the politer aspects of socialism, the encouragement of aeronautics, universal military service, garden suburbs, domestic arts, proportional representation, duodecimal arithmetic, and the liberation of the drama. They range in size and importance from campaigns on a Plessingtonian scale to sober little intellectual Beckingham things that arrange to meet half yearly and die quietly before the second assembly. If Heaven by some miracle suddenly gave every Movement in London all it professed to want, our world would be standing on its head and everything would be extremely unfamiliar and disconcerting. But, as Mr. Roosevelt once remarked, the justifying thing about life is the effort and not the goal, and few Movements involve any real and impassioned struggle to get to the ostensible object. They exist as an occupation; they exercise the intellectual and moral activities without undue disturbance of the normal routines of life. In the days when everybody was bicycling an ingenious mechanism called Hacker's home bicycle used to be advertised. Hacker's home bicycle was a stand bearing small rubber wheels, upon which one placed one's bicycle (properly equipped with a cyclometer) in such a way that it could be mounted and ridden without any sensible forward movement whatever. In bad weather, or when the state of the roads made cycling abroad disagreeable, Hacker's home bicycle could be placed in front of an open window and ridden furiously for any length of time. Whenever the rider tired, he could descend—comfortably at home again—and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had been. In exactly the same way the ordinary London Movement gives scope for the restless and progressive impulse in human nature without the risk of personal entanglements or any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.[11]
To accomplish a cure, or at least to obtain a diagnosis of the evil, Mr. Wells resorts to a curious expedient which he suggested first in his "Modern Utopia", where he laid down as one of the rules of his new order of Samurai that a man who aspired to be a leader of men should for a week every year go off into the desert and live absolutely alone, without books or other distractions to keep him from thinking. But in "Marriage" Mr. Wells improves upon this plan, for Trafford and his wife go into the wilds of Labrador together. "How sweet is solitude," as the Irishman said, "when you have your sweetheart with you." So, indeed, they found it, and in their fight with cold, starvation, and wild beasts they learned how to found their love upon mutual comprehension and respect, and made of their marriage a true union. The change of heart which Trafford experiences is not altogether unlike what Christians call conversion. His line of argument, or, more properly speaking, development of thought, finds expression in fragmentary sentences muttered in the delirium of fever, a Freudian emergence of fundamental feelings, as in the following passage:
"Of course," he said, "I said it—or somebody said it—about this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out of life—not the common stuff of life. An exhalation. ... It's like the little tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet.... The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieve salvation.... Salvation!...
"I wonder is salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for one man salvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. Provided he does it in the spirit. He has to do it in the spirit....
"This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from purposeless triviality, isn't life. Let me get hold of that. That's a point. That's a very important point."
This passage from "Marriage" showed that in 1912 Wells's thought was entering upon a new phase, considerably in advance of that revealed in his "First and Last Things." He seemed to be working toward some sort of belief in God, a Bergsonian God, struggling upward in spite of and by means of inert matter and recalcitrant humanity. It would indeed be queer to find Wells not only among the prophets, but among the Christian prophets, and, as he intimates, some of the other Christians would not like it.
Wells's catholicity of sympathy recognizes no limitations of race. He has an abhorrence for race prejudice of every kind. The greatest blot he found upon American civilization was our ill treatment of the negro.[12]
In his article on "Race Prejudice" he puts it foremost among the evils of the age but even his "anticipations" could not conceive of such an insensate revival of racial animosity between civilized nations as the Great War has, brought about:
Knight errantry is as much a part of a wholesome human being as falling in love or self-assertion, and therein lies one's hope for mankind. Nearly every one, I believe—I've detected the tendency in old cheats even and disreputable people of all sorts—is ready to put in a little time and effort in dragon-slaying now and then, and if any one wants a creditable dragon to write against, talk against, study against, subscribe against, work against, I am convinced they can find no better one—that is to say, no worse one—than Race Prejudice. I am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately—it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul. It is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and servitude, and desolates wide regions. It is a monster begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable share.
The abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward his ideal. And his ideal is that of an evolutionist, the opportunity for continuous growth. He has exp rest it best, perhaps, in "The Food of the Gods," in the speech of one of the new race of giants, of supermen, to his fellows as they are about to give battle to the community of ordinary people determined to destroy them:
It is not that we would oust the little people from the world in order that we, who are no more than one step upward from their littleness, may hold their world forever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves.... We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves—for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and birth and act it must pass—to still greater lives. This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on forever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit forevermore. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater, he said, speaking with slow deliberation, greater, my Brothers! And then—still greater. To grow and again—to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God.
The Great War has inspired or at least instigated many works of fiction already, but the best of these, in my opinion, is Wells's "Mr. Britling Sees It Through." It does not deal much with the fighting at the front. The author is chiefly concerned with another aspect of the war, its effect upon the psychology of the Englishman. The book is divided into two parts; the first half is light, carefree and amusing after the manner of Wells's earlier romances; the other half is darkened by the war cloud and is written with more emotional power than he has hitherto shown.
Knowing Wells's habit of introducing autobiographical details into his romances, we inevitably surmise that Mr. Britling is himself. Mr. Britling is a writer whom "lots of people found interesting and stimulating, and a few found seriously exasperating." "He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and China and esthetics and America and the education of mankind in general.... And all that sort of thing."
This certainly reads like Wells's repertory of ideas. And to make the resemblance closer Mr. Britling writes a pamphlet, "And Now War Ends", shortly after the war began—just as Mr. Wells wrote "The War That Will End War." Several of the characters are recognizable as Mr. Wells' neighbors. At any rate we may be sure that the book reveals the changing moods not only of the author but of every thinking Englishman as the enormity, the awfulness, the all-pervasiveness of the war became slowly realized in the course of many months.
As a contrast to his typical Englishman Mr. Wells brings in an American, handled with more skill than British writers usually show in dealing with American psychology. The delight of his Mr. Direck at the recognition of the scenes and customs he had known from history and novels is well presented:
The Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passerby with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch here the Historical River Thames?" In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke a very good and careful English indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty in controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in dry Americanisms and poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people asked him questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure", words he would no more have used in America than he could have used a bowie knife. But he had a sense of rôle. He wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an Englishman would expect him to be.
Every American tourist in England has felt this temptation. He also has the experience ascribed by Mr. Wells to his American of finding that England on closer acquaintance is not so antiquated as she looks. When asked what his impression of England is Mr. Direck answers:
That it looks and feels more like the traditional Old England than any one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like the traditional Old England than any one would ever possibly have imagined. I thought when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find that it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
To complete this study of national psychology there is also a German in the family circle at first, a tutor whose hobbies are Ido and internationalism and a universal index, traits drawn from Professor Ostwald apparently. He is not caricatured but we suspect that like Mr. Direck, the American, Herr Heinrich is affected by British expectations and appears more German than he is.
The book reëchoes all the passions of the war,—love, hatred, courage, despair, meanness, sacrifice, heroism, selfishness, stoicism and mad wrath,—but ends upon a clear religious tone such as has been heard but faintly in any work of Mr. Wells before. What Mr. Britling sees through is not the war, for nobody can yet see so far as that, but he sees through the doubt and turmoil of his own mind and finds internal peace in the midst of warfare. When he sits down to write a letter to the parents of Heinrich, who like his own son had fallen in France, his mind is torn by conflicting emotions, but finally these are resolved into one common chord and he writes:
Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end. He may have his friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these things fall into place and life falls into place only with God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end, who is the meaning. He is the only King.... Of course I must write about Him. I must tell all my world of Him. And before the coming of the true King, the inevitable King, the King who is present whenever just men foregather, this bloodstained rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings and tawdry emperors, these wily politicians and artful lawyers, these men who claim and grab and trick and compel, these war makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and pass—like paper thrust into a flame. Our sons have shown us God.
HOW TO READ WELLS
The curious thing about H. G. Wells is his diversity. For a person of any intellectual consistency it is impossible thoroughly to appreciate him in certain moods without disliking him in others. He is the stern moralist of "The Sleeper Awakes", the detached and exquisite artist of "Thirty Strange Stories" and "Tales of Space and Time", the genial and conciliatory sociologist of "New Worlds for Old", the intolerant Imperialist of "Anticipations", the subtle anti-moralist of "The New Machiavelli" and "Ann Veronica", the sympathetic if somewhat cynical portrayer of the shop-keeping classes of "Mr. Polly" and "The Wheels of Chance", the vague philosopher at large of "First and Last Things", the imaginative rationalist of "A Modern Utopia", the Jules-Vernish romancer of "The War of Worlds" and "The First Men in the Moon", the scientific transcendentalist of "The Food of the Gods", and in addition he seriously chronicles "Floor Games" with his boys and takes interest in fugitive essays on modern warfare and "The Misery of Boots." Unless one is alien to everything human (and superhuman), it is impossible to escape being interested in at least some of these.
Wells's philosophy is, as I have said, expressed symbolically in many of his stories. It is most fully explained in "First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life" (Putnam), and in the two essays previously referred to, "Scepticism of the Instrument" (in "A Modern Utopia") and "The Discovery of the Future", first published in Nature, February 6, 1902, and in the "Report of the Smithsonian Institution", 1902, and later in book form (Huebsch, New York, 1913).
His sociological studies comprise the following volumes: "Anticipations" (1901, Harper), "Mankind in the Making" (1903, Scribner), "A Modern Utopia" (1904, Scribner), "The Future in America" (1906, Harper), "New Worlds for Old" (1908, Macmillan), "Socialism and the Great State", with the collaboration of fourteen other authors (1911, Harper), "Social Forces in England and America" (1914, Harper), published in England under the title "An Englishman Looks at the World" (Cassell), "The War That Will End War" (1915), "What Is Coming?" (1916, Macmillan), "Italy, France and Britain at War" (1917, Macmillan), and "God the Invisible King" (1917, Macmillan).
His short stories have been collected in several different volumes, in part overlapping: "Thirty Strange Stories" (1898, Harper), "Tales of Time and Space" (1899, Doubleday), "Twelve Stories and a Dream" (1903, Scribner), "The Plattner Story and Others" (1897, Macmillan), "The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents" (1895, Macmillan).
Eight of the best of his short stories (including "The Star", "Armageddon" and "The Country of the Blind") are published in a sumptuous edition with Coburn's photographic illustrations by Mitchell Kennerley ("The Door in the Wall and Other Stories", 1911).
His romances include: "The Time Machine" (1895, Holt), "The Wonderful Visit" (1895), "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896, Duffield), "The War of the Worlds" (1898, Harper), "The Invisible Man" (1897, Harper), "The Sea-Lady" (1902) "The First Men in the Moon" (1901), "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899, Harper), rewritten (1911) as "The Sleeper Awakes" (Nelson, London), "In the Days of the Comet" (1906, Century), "The Food of the Gods" (1904, Scribner), "The War in the Air" (1908, Macmillan), "The World Set Free" (1914, Macmillan).
His novels fall naturally into two classes: first those of a lighter and humorous character: "The Wheels of Chance" (1896, Macmillan), "Love and Mr. Lewisham" (1900, Stokes), "Kipps" (1906, Scribner), "The History of Mr. Polly" (1910, Duffield), "Bealby" (1915, Macmillan), "Boon" etc. (1915, Doran).
His longer and more serious novels are: "Ann Veronica" (1909, Harper), "The New Machiavelli" (1910, Duffield), "Tono-Bungay" (1908, Duffield), "Marriage" (Duffield), "The Passionate Friends" (1913, Harper), "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon" (1914, Macmillan), "The Research Magnificent" (1915, Macmillan), "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" (1916, Macmillan).
To these we must add some early works: a "Textbook on Biology" in two volumes (1892) and two volumes of essays, "Select Conversations with an Uncle" (1895, Saalfield) and "Certain Personal Matters" (1897). He has, like Stevenson, devoted much attention to devising floor games for children and has published two books upon it: "Floor Games" and "Little Wars" (Small, Maynard).
Wells still awaits his Boswell, but we have "The World of H. G. Wells" by Van Wyck-Brooks (1915, Kennerley), a lively and appreciative critique, and "H. G. Wells, A Biography and a Critical Estimate of his Work" by J. D. Beresford (1915, Holt), still briefer, equally interesting, and containing a list of his writings to date. An autobiographical sketch was written for the Russian edition of his works (1909) and published in T. P.'s Magazine (1912).
Of magazine articles and critiques the following have for one reason or another special interest:
"Les Idées de Wells sur l'Humanité future" by Charles Duguet in Revue des Idées, 1908.
"Wells" by Chesterton in American Magazine, vol. 71, p. 32 (1910).
"Wells and his Point of View" in Catholic World, vol. 91 (four articles, 1910).
"Wells and Bergson" by P. E. B. Jourdain in Hibbert Journal, vol. 10, p. 835, July, 1912. "H. G. Wells et la Pensée contemporaine" by René Leguy in Mercure de France (1912).
The contributions of Mr. Wells to current magazines and newspapers are too numerous to enumerate, but I must not omit the two articles on Socialism which he contributed to The Independent, October 25 and November 3, 1906, and an article on "The Nature of Love" (The Independent, August 13, 1908).
[1] See "Major Prophets of To-day", p. 232.
[2] "Heretics", by G. K. Chesterton, p. 85.
[3] "In the Days of the Comet", by H. G. Wells. New York: The Century Company.
[4] The World Set Free.
[5] From Wells's "Anticipations."
[6] From Kellermann's account of the Battle of Loos.
[7] It would be interesting to learn where Wells happened to get hold of the idea that time is the fourth dimension of reality and how much he knew then of the history of the conception. He could not, at any rate, for all his prophetic powers, have foreseen the important part it was to play in scientific thought and metaphysical speculation in the coming century. Lorentz, Einstein and Minkowski have incorporated it into their new theory of relativity which threatens to abolish the ether and to make mass a variable, dependent on velocity. Our ordinary Euclidean or three dimensional space would thus be a cross-section at a certain time. (See "The Time-Space Manifold of Relativity", by Edwin B. Wilson and G. N. Lewis, in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, November, 1912.) Heinrich Czolbe in 1875 brought forward the theory (see Müller, Archiv für systematische Philosophie, XVII, p. 106), and Lotze discusses it in his "Microcosmos." Bergson's philosophy is based upon the distinction he draws between psychological duration and the physical treatment of time as a kind of space. Professor Pitkin of Columbia criticizes Wells's time-machine from the metaphysical standpoint in "Time and Pure Activity" (Journal Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. ii, No. 19).
[8] "Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump. Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times. Prepared for Publication by Reginald Bliss, with an Ambiguous Introduction by H. G. Wells." (Doran, 1915.)
[9] He has given three statements of his views on this point: First, in an article, "Rediscovery of the Unique", in Fortnightly Review, July, 1891; second, in a paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society and published in Mind, XIII, No. 51, and as an appendix to "A Modern Utopia"; and, third, in Book I of "First and Last Things."
[10] "Logic, M. Bergson and Mr. H. G. Wells", by Philip E. B. Jourdain in Hibbert Journal, X, p. 835.
[11] "Marriage," Duffield and Company, 1912.
[12] See "The Tragedy of Color", chapter xii of "The Future in America", and his article on "Race Prejudice", in The Independent of February 14, 1907.
[CHAPTER III]
G. K. CHESTERTON
Knight Errant of Orthodoxy
The central truth to be uttered about Mr. Chesterton is that he is the greatest prophet of our generation. He is as great as Tolstoy or Ibsen. It may seem rash to set him beside these great prophets, but time will ratify my rashness. A prophet is a man of genius with a spiritual message for his age.
The spiritual message delivered by Mr. Chesterton is mightier than any other sounding in our ears. He is a bigger man than Maeterlinck or Bergson, though we know it not. As a prophet he is larger in every way than Mr. Shaw or Mr. Wells or Mr. Arnold Bennett, because he deals with the soul, whereas they deal with the soul's environment. They deal with man as a social animal. He deals with man as a spiritual being.
Our failure to salute the prophet is complete, and it is emphasized by our failure to perceive that he is the authentic voice of that English soul which is now wrestling with the Teutonic soul for the soul of the world. He is the soul of England.—James Douglas in the Observer, 1916.
Can a journalist have a philosophy of life, and if so would it be worth talking about? In answer to the first question I shall quote Chesterton to the effect that everybody has a philosophy, even generals and journalists. To prove the affirmative of the second I shall present, as Exhibit B, the whole body of Chesterton's works. Perhaps the most heretical passage of his book on "Heretics" was that which begins:
But there are some people, nevertheless—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy's numbers, but still more important to know the enemy's philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.
Like many other things in Chesterton's works this does not sound so heretical now as when it was written, about the time when the weary old world had finished Chapter XIX of the second volume of his history and had turned over the page in hopes of finding something new and exciting in Chapter XX—and found it. Chesterton's countrymen then were keeping careful count of Germany's soldiers and ships, but they were contentedly ignorant of German philosophy. But as soon as the war broke out they began with feverish haste to translate and study Treitschke, Nietzsche, Bernhardi, and any other books which might throw light upon the German Weltanschauung, but which in the leisurely days of peace they had no time to read.
It is convenient to compare Shaw and Chesterton because they are antithetic in temperament and opinion and represent two opposite currents of modern thought. Shaw stands for the earlier rationalistic, socialistic revolt against the conventions of society. Chesterton stands for the later conservative reaction to all this, for ecclesiasticism, nationalism, and traditionalism. Shaw is a vegetarian and teetotaler. Chesterton is quite the opposite; he champions the public house as a good old English institution. Shaw is a suffragist; Chesterton is dead set against anything of the kind. Shaw came from the most pronounced Protestant stock, the Ulster kind, and, as we can see from his introduction to "Androcles and the Lion", he has constructed a sort of religion for himself, though he could hardly be accounted orthodox. Chesterton is a Catholic, though of the Anglican rather than the Roman variety, a champion of orthodoxy, and a defender of all forms of ritualism and medievalism. Chesterton makes it his business to find a logical basis for popular traditions, customs, and superstitions which have always been regarded as purely irrational and arbitrary even by those who liked them and defended them as poetic and conforming to a deeper reality than that of reason. Shaw is always showing how absurd and illogical are the soundest axioms and the most unquestioned platitudes, whether of orthodox conservative or orthodox revolutionary thought. Chesterton discovers new reasons in things; Shaw discovers new unreasons in things.
Chesterton appears in the capacity of permanent minority leader. But this is in respect to that really small minority of professional writers, speakers, and agitators who set the fashions for the Zeitgeist. Actually he has the backing of the great inarticulate immobile mass of the people.
Chesterton has discovered how to be witty though orthodox. But his orthodoxy is so extreme that it seems heterodoxy to most of us. Perhaps that accounts for his success in making it sound paradoxical. As Wesley determined that the devil had no right to all the pretty music, so Chesterton determined that the iconoclasts should not monopolize all the cleverness. His originality consists in his genius for turning platitudes into epigrams. He can put the most unquestioned axiom in a way to shock the world. If he is right in what he says in his books on Watts that "there is only one thing that requires real courage to say and that is a truism", Chesterton must be the bravest man alive. But even he finds it necessary to promulgate his truisms in the disguise of sensational novelties.
Chesterton's ideal is a complete democracy, not merely democracy in politics but democracy in science, religion, literature, sport, and art. If you say this is impracticable he doubtless would retort that it was the essence of an ideal to be impracticable, otherwise it would be confounded with dull reality. He always champions the opinion of the many against that of the few, the laymen against the expert.
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If scientific civilization goes on (which is most improbable) only one man will laugh because he can laugh better than the rest.—"Heretics."
It was absurd to say that Waterloo was won on Eton cricket fields. But it might have fairly been said that Waterloo was won on the village green, where clumsy boys played a very clumsy cricket.
... It is a good sign in a nation when such things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is a bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them and that the nation is merely looking on.—"All Things Considered."
On this ground he hated Germany even before the war, as a nation ruled by experts. He denounced its workingmen's insurance, its governmental efficiency, its higher criticism, and the like. "I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it if I knew what it was."[1]
It is on the basis of democracy that he defends religion:
That Christianity is identical with democracy is the hardest of gospels: there is nothing that so strikes men with fear as that they are all sons of God.—"Twelve Types."
It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. The man who quotes some German historian against the tradition of the Catholic Church, for instance, is strictly appealing to aristocracy. He is appealing to the superiority of one expert against the awful authority of a mob. It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated and ought to be treated more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in a village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.... If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes—our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.... Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our groom: tradition asks us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.—"Orthodoxy."
I expect some time to find Chesterton defending the Trinity on the ground that it is more democratic than Mohammedan monotheism, a sort of commission government extended to the universe.
Chesterton has the true artist's love for the individual and the concrete. He delights in clear outlines and bright colors. He thinks in pictures. I have never seen any of his painting, but he must have the color sense strongly developed. He will halt in a stern chase or in the height of an argument to describe a sunset with the most chromatic language at his command. He studied art at the Slade School in London, and although he was soon switched off into journalism he still reverts to the pencil on occasion. He has supplied the illustrations to three of Belloc's books; "The Great Enquiry", "The Green Overcoat", and "Emmanuel Burden."[2] The last, a satire on imperialistic financiering, is one of the cleverest pieces of irony to be found in all literature, but it raises the question of whether the ironical tone can be sustained through a whole volume without a decline of interest. When the question of illustration arose Chesterton sent out for a bundle of wrapping paper, and in the course of one evening drew all of the portraits in the book as well as a lot that were not used.
For the understanding of Chesterton's romances it is necessary to remember that the more non-sensical they seem, the more sense they have in them. This is because when he gets blinded by a big idea he sees men as concepts walking. He is too much of a Platonist to be a good novelist. He admires Dickens but never imitates him, for Chesterton's stories are singularly devoid of individuals. All the little variations and accidental peculiarities that make a type into a person in the great novels of the world are lacking. In "The Ball and the Cross" Mac Ian is simply the archetype of the Catholic Romanticist and Turnbull of the Revolutionary Rationalist. Neither of them ever does anything out of character, but then neither of them has any character outside of the Idea that made them what they are. Each falls in love with a girl of the opposite type, drawn to scale. This is carried farther yet by the introduction of an incredibly consistent Tolstoyan and a Nietzschean beside whom Nietzsche would seem all too human. Thus the whole book is balanced and matched like old-fashioned wall paper or an Italian garden.
Manalive comes closer to being real. He certainly is alive, but he is not a man; he is an ideal, Chesterton's superman. "All habits are bad habits" is the text of G. K. Chesterton's "Manalive", which proved as delightful to his admirers and distasteful to his antipathists as any of his former productions. In his essays Mr. Chesterton's method is first to set down something that sounds like a wild absurdity and then to argue the reader into the admission—cheerful or indignant, according to his temperament—that it is a very sensible thing after all. In his romances his method is essentially the same. Nobody could act crazier than Mr. Innocent Smith in the first chapters of this volume, but in the end he is proved, by a long legal process, to be the only really sane man of the lot. He is accused of about as many crimes as the hero of Jokai's tale, "The Death's Head", confessed to, but he turns out to be quite as guiltless. Charges of murder, burglary, bigamy, and kidnaping, amply certificated, slip off him like water off a duck's back. Neither prison nor asylum can hold Manalive. Smith's theory is that if you keep the commandments, you may violate the conventions; which, being the reverse of the ordinary rule of procedure, gets him into all sorts of misunderstandings. He had evidently read Schopenhauer's theory that the only happiness is the pursuit of happiness, and, what is more, he acts upon it by letting go what he most delights in that he may recapture it. He goes round the world in search of his own home, and his series of amorous adventures are conducted in strict accord with monogamous morality. By getting outside of himself he can gain the joy of coveting his own possessions. The economic law of diminishing returns applies to all our habitual pleasures, and to escape it we must be continually seeking new investments.
So Manalive is distinguished from ordinary men in that he has legs that he uses. He is not rooted. He breaks out and runs around and discovers the most novel and wonderful things in the most commonplace environment.
Mr. Chesterton is as fond of a chase as a fox hunter or a kinetoscope man. We have it in "Manalive" as we have it in "The Man Who Was Thursday" and "The Ball and the Cross." As usual he stops every little while and paints a cloudscape to rest our eyes; and all along he enlivens the way by epigrams and inverted proverbs. Here are a few:
When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but when they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. We are never free until some institution frees us; and liberty cannot exist until it is declared by authority.
For she was one of those women who at bottom regard all men as equally mad, wild animals of some utterly separate species.
Though she never spoke she always looked as if she might speak any minute. Perhaps this is the very definition of a companion.
All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been or ever will be.
The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
With our weak spirits we should grow old in eternity, if we were not kept young by death. Providence has to cut immortality into lengths for us, as nurses cut the bread and butter into fingers.
The most fantastic and therefore characteristic of Chesterton's romances is "The Man Who Was Thursday" which the French are able more concisely to entitle Nommé Jeudi. The author calls it "A Nightmare", and it is. The only books to compare with it are George Macdonald's "Lilith", Strindberg's "Dream Plays", and Andreyev's "Masked Ball"; but for wild imagining, grotesquerie, farcicality, and swift transformations it cannot be matched. It is a detective story, a motion-picture chase, and a system of theology, all in one. Like all dreams, according to Freud, it is symbolic, but the symbolism is not to be interpreted in the usual Freudian way, for Chesterton is clean-minded. The clue to it is to be found in his earliest book of essays, "The Defendant", when he argues for the moral value of the detective story in the following fashion: "By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war upon a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but traitors within our gates."
The detective, he says, who stands alone and fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves' kitchen, is the original and poetic figure, and the criminals surrounding him represent cosmic conservatism. But in "The Man Who Was Thursday" each one of the six detectives, separately commissioned by the mysterious head of the secret police to enter the inner circle of seven anarchists, believes himself to be fighting single-handed for law and order against a criminal conspiracy to destroy civilization. The seven pseudo-anarchists go through all sorts of perilous and absurd adventures in the course of which they are metamorphosed successively into the seven days of the week, the seven days of creation, the seven orders of created things, and the seven angels of heaven. Finally seated upon seven thrones, robed in state, blazoned—of course, since it is Chesterton—with heraldic devices, they recognize one another as friends and allies through all their strange strife. It reminds one of Emerson's Brahma: "If the red slayer thinks he slays." But Chesterton is too much of a Manichean to let it go at that. One of the anarchists turns out to be genuine, the only real one in the world, the irreconcilable rebel, the Eternal Anarchist, the spirit that continually denies, the leader of His Majesty's Opposition. In some ways Chesterton's conception of the devil reminds one of Andreyev's "Anathema" or perhaps rather of the Satan whom Dostoievsky introduces into his "Brothers Karamazarov." Chesterton's mind seems to have a curious affinity to the Russian, though so far as I remember his writings show no evidence of being influenced by Russian literature.
"The Man Who Was Thursday" affects readers variously. To some it seems ridiculous; to others blasphemous. Julius West, usually sympathetic, dismisses it in his biography of Chesterton as incomprehensible and tiresome. Yet three people I know—a man, a woman, and a child—consider it one of the most wonderful books in the world, and know it almost by heart.
My own opinion is that it shows that Chesterton has not yet found the true medium for the expression of his genius. Drawing and writing are too slow and cold to give scope to his pictorial imagination. He should, like D'Annunzio, take to the screen. "The Man Who Was Thursday" would make a magnificent scenario as it stands, and Chesterton could then add all of the things he thought of or saw while composing it but could not put into words.
Blake, too, was a man who would have done wonders with the cinematograph if it had only been invented sooner. Chesterton, in his sketch of Blake, explains his difficulties of expression by word and picture:
How shall we manage to state in an obvious and alphabetical manner the ultimate query, the primordial pivot on which the whole modern problem turns? It cannot be done in long rationalistic words: they convey by their very sound the suggestion of something subtle. One must try to think of something in the way of a plain street metaphor or an obvious analogy. For the thing is not too hard for human speech: it is actually too obvious for human speech.
Chesterton's theory of the use of symbolism, even absurd symbolism, is given in his "Defense of Nonsense".
Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle....
Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth that to draw out the soul of things with a syllogism is as impossible as to draw out Leviathan with a hook.
Chesterton at the beginning of his career wrote "A Defense of Detective Stories"[3] and he has since shown that he knows how to write them, in the collections entitled "The Club of Queer Trades", "The Innocence of Father Brown", and "The Wisdom of Father Brown." But they are different from ordinary detective stories not merely because a mild-mannered priest takes the place of Sherlock Holmes but more because they frequently have nothing to do with crime and all parties turn out, as in "Thursday", to have the best of intentions, whatever their actions. Chesterton's method in these stories is much the same as he employs in his essays; that is, he piles up paradoxical impossibilities, and then by some simple expedient resolves them into apparent reasonableness. The author's obvious enjoyment of his own ingenuity adds to the reader's delight. It would be interesting to know whether he has in mind the solution when he lays out the plot or whether he is not playing a game with himself like jackstraws, pitting his skill as a disentangler against a muddle of his own making.
As an artist Chesterton has always been attracted by the Orient, with its mystical fanaticisms, its cruel colors, and its unfamiliar habits of thought. But while Turkey is all very well at a distance, Turkey in Europe is to him a distinct and horrible menace. In "The Flying Inn" we have a story of Mohammedan influence not only in Europe but in England itself. This novel is an allegory of the war between the sacred symbol of the cross and the sacred symbol of the crescent, as Chesterton has similarly related the struggle of the Ball and the Cross in his book of that name.
The champions of the crescent are Misysra Ammon, the Prophet of the Moon, and Lord Ivywood, an eccentric nobleman, a fanatic against the liquor traffic as the embodiment of Christian custom as opposed to Moslem. Misysra, who is as fertile with impossible theories as with plausible arguments to support them, maintains that England is Mohammedan at heart and proves it in a hundred ways from the contempt with which the pig is popularly spoken of to the absence of any "idolatrous" animal or vegetable forms in modern cubist painting. Lord Ivywood's persecution of the inn-keepers sends one of them adrift throughout the country carrying his inn-sign with him and accompanied by Captain Dalroy, an athletic Irishman who champions the cause of the cross.
So far we have a straight Chesterton novel, a symbolic theme variegated by satires on modern life. But Chesterton really seems uncertain that he aimed to write a prose novel at all, for the book is plentifully interspersed with verses, serious, comic, ironical, militant, in good meter and in bad, till the novel takes on the not unpleasant appearance of a Chesterton anthology of songs.
Everybody who likes G. K. Chesterton has wished that he might be induced to follow the example of Charles Dickens and write a Child's History of England. When a literary man of wayward genius undertakes to interpret and record the story of his country the result is almost always worth while. We do not get the white sunlight of impartiality, but we get a beautiful rainbow of prejudices, personal opinions, and mystical insight. Chesterton has still to write us a complete English history, but he has dealt faithfully with about a century and a half of it in "The Crimes of England." It is due to him to say that the unhistorical character of the work is caused rather by partisan emphasis than by any inaccuracy of detail. Rarely if ever has Chesterton written with such care for his facts, and, as for his transcendental interpretation of them, he has as much warrant to philosophize as Carlyle or Taine or any other literary historian. But one does tend to get the impression from the book that only Prussians had ever incurred the scriptural curse on him who removes his neighbor's landmark.
For the "crimes of England" are really the crimes of Prussia, and England's guilt is summed up in the phrase that English politics has been devoted ever since the time of Frederick the Great to "the belittlement of France and the gross exaggeration of Germany." Chesterton denounces the part played by his country in the wars of Frederick the Great, in the Napoleonic struggles, in the repression of Ireland, in tolerating Bismarck's schemes of aggrandizement, only to bring into darker relief the wickedness of the state which used England throughout all these years as a catspaw. Yet the indictment of England as Prussia's accomplice is delivered in very sharp terms; so far as Chesterton shows bias it is pro-French or pro-Irish rather than pro-British. He really believes that the war is an epic struggle between the old soul of Christendom, most clearly incarnated in the Catholic nations, and a blast of sinister materialism from the wastes and forests of Brandenburg. In this belief he writes not only seriously, but soberly, as befits the great hour, and concludes his book with a vivid and moving description of the Battle of the Marne which has in it a world of eloquence and no "cleverness" at all.
The large volume of "Criticisms and Appreciations of Dickens" is composed of his prefaces to the separate books of Dickens. Although not so important a piece of work as Chesterton's biography of Dickens, they are well worth bringing together in this way, because they form not only a brilliant piece of literary interpretation, but because they show that it is possible to write prefaces to the classics which will increase the desire to read the book instead of dampening one's ardor at the start with a mass of dry and trivial details of the author's life and environment. Chesterton has the first requisite of a good introducer, an enthusiasm for his subject and a belief in the importance of his message for the times in which we live. His comparison of Dickens and Thackeray, if not quite fair, has at least sufficient point to suggest thought.
Thackeray has become classical; but Dickens has done more; he has remained modern. There was a painful moment (somewhere about the eighties) when we watched anxiously to see whether Dickens was fading from the modern world. We have watched a little longer, and with great relief we begin to realize that it is the modern world that is fading. All that universe of ranks and respectabilities in comparison with which Dickens was called a caricaturist, all that Victorian universe in which he seemed vulgar—all that is itself—breaking up like a cloud-land. And only the caricatures of Dickens remain like things carved in stone.
But whether his medium is fiction, criticism, or editorial, Chesterton is always a moralist, differing, however, from most moralists in that he is never prosy and never directs his preachments at obsolete evils and deceased sinners.
Prose and poetry are such widely sundered fields that a reputation made in one does not carry over into the other. When Scott dropped poetry to take up novel writing he found it expedient to leave his name behind. When Kipling passed in the reverse direction from prose to poetry he had to cultivate a new clientèle. It is very amusing to hear two lovers of Hardy or of Meredith sing peans of praise to their favorite author in strophe and antistrophe until on descending from the general to the particular they discover that one was extolling the poet and the other the novelist and that each had never read, or but lightly esteemed what the other most admired.
So while the essays and romances of Gilbert Keith Chesterton reach thousands of readers week by week through the journals, and are bought with avidity in volume form, his poems are but little known to readers of his prose, although they have, I fancy, a circle of their own. Yet no one can understand Chesterton fully who ignores his verse, for his thought, expressed through this medium, is seen from another angle and so gains solidity to the view.
Chesterton, like Tennyson, has taken one of England's legendary heroes as the theme of an epic by which to express his philosophy of life and his message to his age. The stories of Alfred he accepts as uncritically and handles as freely as Tennyson did those of Arthur, but the poems resultant show not merely the difference between the authors, but also, in a way, the difference between the past century and the present one, the contrast between a faintly hopeful agnosticism and a robustious affirmation of faith.
In his "Alarms and Discursions" he has told us in prose of the impressions made upon him by his visit to the Vale of the White Horse and Ethandune. These he transmutes into poetry in "The Ballad of the White Horse."[4] In the beautiful dedication to his wife he gives her credit for having opened his eyes to the Christian significance of the wars of Alfred against the Danes. Miss Frances Blogg, whom he married in 1900, was described by one who knew her then as "a conservative rebel against the conventions of the unconventional." We may assume that it was largely through her influence that he was converted from youthful atheism to extremest orthodoxy. I can quote only a few stanzas from this dedication although such fragments are distressing to those who know the whole and aggravating to those who do not.
Lady, by one light only
We look from Alfred's eyes,
We know he saw athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchizedek
Is dead and never dies.
Therefore I bring these rimes to you,
Who brought the cross to me,
Since on you flaming without flaw
I saw the sign that Guthrum saw
When he let break his ships of awe,
And laid peace upon the sea.
Do you remember when we went
Under a dragon moon,
And 'mid volcanic tints of night
Walked where they fought the unknown fight
And saw black trees on the battle-height,
Black thorn on Ethandune?
And I thought "I will go with you,
As man with God has gone,
And wander with a wandering star,
The wandering heart of things that are,
The fiery cross of love and war
That like your self goes on."
O go you onward, where you are
Shall honor and laughter be,
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God's winged pavilion free to roam,
Your face, that is a wandering home,
A flying home to me.
* * * * * * *
Up through an empty house of stars
Being what heart you are,
Up the inhuman steeps of space
As on a staircase go in grace,
Carrying the firelight on your face
Beyond the loneliest star.
It is hard to carry the ballad meter through a whole volume without its growing monotonous. Chesterton's poetry, like his prose, should be taken in small doses. "The Ballad of the White Horse" contains some wearisome stretches, particularly in the most exciting parts, the fights. When I want real zest in blood letting and the enjoyment of hand to hand combat I should turn to Percy's Reliques, or to Homer. My volume of the "Ballad" opens easiest, as it has opened oftenest, at three passages. The first is that where King Alfred as a fugitive in the forest is set to mind the cakes and gets to musing, not, as we children used to be told, about how to beat the Danes, but, according to the Chestertonian version, about the Christian view of the labor question. As the old, bent woman leaves the hut Alfred wonders what shall become of such as she.
And well may God with the serving-folk
Cast in His dreadful lot:
Is not He too a servant
And is not He forgot?
For was not God my gardener
And silent like a slave:
That opened oaks on the uplands
Or thicket in graveyard grave?
And was not God my armorer,
All patient and unpaid,
That sealed my skull as a helmet
And ribs for hauberk made?
* * * * * * *
For God is a great servant
And rose before the day,
From some primordial slumber torn;
But all things living later born
Sleep on, and rise after the morn,
And the Lord has gone away.
On things half sprung from sleeping,
All sleepy suns have shone;
They stretch stiff arms, the yawning trees,
The beasts blink upon hands and knees,
Man is awake and does and sees—
But Heaven has done and gone.
* * * * * * *
But some see God like Guthrum
Crowned, with a great beard curled,
But I see God like a good giant,
That, laboring, lifts the world.
Wherefore was God in Golgotha,
Slain as a serf is slain:
And hate He had of prince and peer,
And love He had and made good cheer
Of them that, like this woman here,
Go powerfully in pain.
But whether Alfred pondered problems of war or labor the cakes got burnt just the same.
Next I turn to the page where men come to Alfred on the island of Athelney and beg him to become the ruler of all England. This gives Chesterton a chance to expound his anti-imperialism.
And Alfred in the orchard,
Among apples green and red,
With the little book in his bosom,
Looked at green leaves and said:
"When all philosophies shall fail,
This word alone shall fit;
That a sage feels too small for life,
And a fool too large for it.
"Asia and all imperial plains
Are all too little for a fool:
But for one man whose eyes can see,
The little island of Athelney
Is too large a land to rule.
* * * * * * *
"An island like a little book,
Full of a hundred tales,
Like the gilt page the good monks pen
That is all smaller than a wren,
Yet hath high towers, meteors and" men,
And suns and spouting whales.
"A land having a light in it,
In a river dark and fast,
An isle with utter, clearness lit,
Because a saint has stood in it,
Where flowers are flowers indeed and fit,
And trees are trees at last."
As his men clear the weeds from the White Horse that had ages before been cut upon the chalk bluff, Alfred has a vision of the day when the ancient symbol shall be again overgrown and forgotten and when a new and less manly kind of heathen than the Danes shall overrun England:
I know that weeds shall grow in it
Faster than man can burn:
And though they scatter now and go,
In some far century, sad and slow,
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.
They shall not come with war-ships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.
* * * * * * *
The dear sun dwarfed of dreadful suns,
Like fiercer flowers on stalk,
Earth lost and little like a pea,
In high heaven's towering forestry
—These be the small weeds ye shall see
Crawl, covering the chalk.
* * * * * * *
By terror and the cruel tales
Of curse in bone and kin,
By weird and weakness winning,
Accursed from the beginning,
By detail of the sinning,
And denial of the sin:
By thought a crawling ruin,
By life a leaping mire,
By a broken heart in the breast of the world,
And the end of the world's desire:
By God and man dishonored,
By death and life made vain,
Know ye the old barbarian,
The barbarian come again.
When is great talk of trend and tide,
And wisdom and destiny,
Hail that undying heathen
That is sadder than the sea.
In this specification of "the marks of the Beast" we may recognize Chesterton's antipathies; materialism, commercialism, Darwinism, imperialism, cosmopolitanism, pacifism, and Socialism. He is haunted by the same nightmare as Samuel Butler, that the day may come when machines will master the world and men be merely their slaves. For relief he looks to a revolution like the French Revolution, only worse. Chesterton is like the Eton boys who, after a debate over woman suffrage, passed a unanimous resolution disapproving of the aim of the suffragettes but approving of their methods. The socialists say we must have a revolution, peaceful if possible. Chesterton would say, "we must have a revolution, bloody if possible." The guillotine, he says somewhere, had many sins to answer for, but, at least, there was nothing evolutionary about it. And he makes the English people say:
It may be we shall rise the last as Frenchmen rose the first.
Our wrath come after Russia's wrath and our wrath be the worst.
Like Hilaire Belloc and other Neo-Catholics, he manages somehow to combine an admiration for the French Revolution with a devotion to Catholicism. They are ardent advocates of democracy notwithstanding the very explicit condemnations of popular government by the Popes. They are more inclined toward syndicalism than Socialism and place their hopes in the peasant proprietorship instead of in the nationalized trust. It is an interesting novelty in the labor problem, for it cuts across the old classifications, and I hope it will have a chance to develop into something concrete. The similar movement in France, the Sillon of Marc Sangnier, was crushed out by a papal encyclical in 1912. Chesterton might be called an English Sillonist, and in a literal sense if we recall his essay on The Furrows in "Alarms and Discursions." Chesterton sometimes praises the achievements of modern science and industry, but always as ingenious toys. He is convinced that mankind in the mass will never take the city seriously.
When the rest of the world was looking for the advent of cosmopolitanism and the reign of peace, the earth lapped in universal law and all the local idiosyncrasies ironed out, wherein all obstacles to freedom of movement had been crushed out and one could buy a tourist ticket to Timbuktu with the same accommodation all along the route, Chesterton set his bugle to his lips and blew a fanfare of audacious challenge to the spirit of the times in the form of a nonsensical romance, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." In this he carries particularism to an extreme, breaking up London again into warring wards, each with its own banner and livery, its gilds and folk ways. The book is inscribed, as we might expect, to his friend, Hilaire Belloc, and I quote part of the dedication as it sums up the message of the volume and is strangely prophetic:
For every tiny town or place
God made the stars especially:
Babies look up with owlish face
And see them tangled in a tree;
You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,
A Sussex moon, untraveled still.
I saw a moon that was the town's,
The largest lamp on Campden Hill.
Yes, Heaven is everywhere at home,
The big blue cap that always fits,
And so it is (be calm; they come
To goal at last, my wandering wits),
So it is with the heroic thing
This shall not end for the world's end,
And though the sullen engines swing,
Be you not much afraid, my friend.
This did not end by Nelson's urn
Where an immortal England sits—
Nor where your tall young men in turn
Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.
And when the pedants bade us mark
What cold mechanic happenings
Must come; our souls said in the dark,
"Belike; but there are likelier things."
Likelier across these flats afar,
These sulky levels smooth and free,
The drums shall crash a waltz of war
And Death shall dance with Liberty!
Likelier the barricades shall flare
Slaughter below and smoke above,
And death and hate and hell declare
That men have found a thing to love.[5]
Remember this was written in 1904, at a time when it was commonly thought that the last of the wars had been fought and the nations might disarm, for henceforth the Hague Court would hold sway; when the socialists were becoming opportunists and the anarchists had laid aside their bombs; when such scientists as Metchnikoff were saying that self-sacrifice and heroism of the fighting sort were antiquated virtues for which the peaceful and sanitary world of the future would have little use. Chesterton was wrong about the nature of the catastrophe. He was looking and, I fear, hoping for a social revolution, and that has not yet come although it seems now less improbable than it did then.
But the Great War has given an irresistible impulse to the movement toward particularism as against cosmopolitanism. Whether we like it or not, we must admit that the tide has turned in the other direction and that it will be many years, perhaps more than one generation, before there will be the freedom of trade, intercourse, and migration that prevailed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Even England has abandoned free trade, and every country will hereafter strive to secure economic independence by developing its own resources. Even before the war there was a tendency toward the sort of local differentiation of which Chesterton gave a fantastic forecast in "The Napoleon of Notting Hill." This tendency manifested itself in a variety of ways; in the cultivation of local industries, the revival of folk dances and historic costumes, in pageantry and community celebrations, in the interest in town history and in the struggle to reëstablish disappearing languages, like Gaelic, Czech, and Ruthenian.
From Chesterton's latest book devoted to the crimes of Germany, and characteristically entitled "The Crimes of England",[6] we can see that it is the primitive little peasant kingdom of Montenegro that he most admires and the machine-like efficiency of the German empire that he most abhors. Montenegro, since he wrote this volume, has been overwhelmed by the tide of war, but probably Chesterton has faith to believe that it will reappear like Ararat when the waters subside. This faith he expressed in the poem, "The March of the Black Mountain", written during the Balkan war which Montenegro initiated by a single-handed attack upon the Turk:
But men shall remember the Mountain,
Though it fall down like a tree,
They shall see the sign of the Mountain
Faith cast into the sea;
Though the crooked swords overcome it
And the Crooked Moon ride free,
When the Mountain comes to Mahomet
It has more life than he.
Chesterton has a better right to appear now as the champion of small nationalities than some other English authors we could name, for he first entered the lists of public life to break a lance in defense of the Boers at a time when it was most unpopular if not dangerous to say a word in their favor. He refers to these youthful days in his "Song of Defeat", published some ten years afterward. I quote part of one stanza:
I dream of the days when work was scrappy,
And rare in our pockets the mark of the mint:
When we were angry and poor and happy,
And proud of seeing our names in print.
For so they conquered and-so we scattered,
When the Devil rode and his dogs smelt gold,
And the peace of a harmless folk was shattered,
When I was twenty and odd years old.
When mongrel men that the market classes,
Had slimy hands on England's rod
And sword in hand upon Afric's passes
Her last Republic cried to God![7]
One of his youthful dreams was to see a reunion of the United States and England which he imagined would come about in some great foreign war. But by 1905, when he included the poem on "The Anglo-Saxon Alliance" in a volume,[8] he had lost faith in such ethnic generalities as the Anglo-Saxon race, so he explains in his preface:
I have come to see that our hopes of brotherhood with America are the same in kind as our hopes of brotherhood with any other of the great independent nations of Christendom. And a very small study of history was sufficient to show me that the American nation, which-is a hundred years old, is at least fifty years older than the Anglo-Saxon race.
But the poem, both because he wrote it and because he repudiated it, has an especial interest now when American sympathy with England is stronger than ever before, the traditional hostility has been largely swept away, and there is talk of joining England in this bloodiest of all wars.
This is the weird of a world-old folk,
That not till the last link breaks
Not till the night is blackest,
The blood of Hengist wakes.
When the sun is black in heaven,
The moon as blood above,
And the earth is full of hatred,
This people tells its love.
In change, eclipse and peril,
Under the whole world's scorn,
By blood and death and darkness
The Saxon peace is sworn;
That all our fruit be gathered,
And all our race take hands,
And the sea be a Saxon river
That runs through Saxon lands.
* * * * * * *
Deep grows the hate of kindred.
Its roots take hold on hell;
No peace or praise can heal it,
But a stranger heals it well.
Seas shall be red as sunsets,
And kings' bones float as foam,
And heaven be dark with vultures,
The night our son comes home.
In some respects we should expect Chesterton to go better in verse than in prose. He thinks in metaphors and pictures, vivid, fantastic, and colorful. The peculiarities of his prose style that grate upon the taste of some readers, such as the repetition of the same words, the alliteration, the unqualified assertion of half truths, the queer rhythms, the verbal tricks, and the superabundance of tropes, are by tradition permissible in poetry and so arouse no resentment.
On the other hand, poetry is a painstaking art, and Chesterton does not like to take pains. He is too indolent or too indifferent to hunt for the best possible word or rime. Consequently we find in his verse many a perfect line, rarely a perfect stanza, and never a perfect poem. But scattered all through his verse, even in the most nonsensical, we happen upon curious cadences that linger in the memory like the chant of some strange ritual. His ballads abound in unconventional rhythms that haunt one like those of Lanier's "Ballad of the Trees and the Master."
Although Chesterton often seems to disregard the canons of versification from carelessness or caprice, yet at other times he takes delight in subjecting himself to the most rigid of models, as, for instance, the old French ballade, which, he says, is "the easiest because it is the most restricted." He shows us how he constructs one in "The Ballade of a Strange Town."[9] The strange town into which he was shunted by the accident of taking the wrong tramcar one rainy day while "fooling about Flanders" was Lierre, an unknown and uninteresting way station then, but now one of the famous places of world history, for it stood for days the shock of the German attack on Antwerp. While waiting for the next car to take him away Chesterton scribbled on the back of an envelope with an aniline pencil a poem which begins in nonsense but ends with as good an expression of his creed as he has given anywhere:
Happy is he and more than wise
Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
This world through all the gray disguise
Of sleep and custom in between.
Yes: we may pass the heavenly screen,
But shall we know when we are there?
Who know not what these dead stones mean,
The lovely city of Lierre.
Chesterton is so fond of the ballade that I must quote one specimen complete.[10] For the benefit of those who have taken no interest in versification I may call attention to the technical difficulties of the form of the ballade that he has chosen. It consists of three octaves and a quatrain all ending in the same refrain and using only two rimes. The first rime is used in the first and third lines of the first quatrain and in the second and fourth of the second quatrain. The second rime is used in the second and fourth lines of the first quatrain and in the first and third of the second quatrain. The closing quatrain or l'envoi is in the ballade addressed to a prince or other royal personage. Since Chesterton hates princes his apostrophe to the prince in this ballade is not in the usual sycophantic style.
A BALLADE OF SUICIDE
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbors—on the wall—
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me... After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay—
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall—
I see a little cloud all pink and grey—
Perhaps the rector's mother will not call—
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way—
I never read the works of Juvenal—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H. G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational—
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
L'ENVOI
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall—
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
Those who assisted—with more or less enthusiasm—in the Shakespeare Tercentenary celebration will appreciate Chesterton's verses about a similar commemoration decreed by the calendar.
THE SHAKESPEARE MEMORIAL
Lord Lilac thought it rather rotten
That Shakespeare should be quite forgotten,
And therefore got on a Committee
With several chaps out of the city,
And Shorter and Sir Herbert Tree,
Lord Rothschild and Lord Rosebery,
And F. C. G. and Comyns Carr,
Two dukes and a dramatic star,
Also a clergyman now dead;
And while the vain world careless sped
Unheeding the heroic name—
The souls most fed with Shakespeare's flame
Still sat unconquered in a ring,
Remembering him like anything.
Lord Lilac did not long remain,
Lord Lilac did not come again,
He softly lit a cigarette
And sought some other social set
Where, in some other knots or rings,
People were doing cultured things,
—Miss Zwilt's Humane Vivarium
—The little men who paint on gum
—The exquisite Gorilla Girl....
He sometimes in the giddy whirl
(Not being really bad at heart),
Remembered Shakespeare with a start—
But not with that grand constancy
Of Clement Shorter, Herbert Tree,
Lord Rosebery, and Comyns Carr
And all the other names there are;
Who stuck like limpets to the spot,
Lest they forgot, lest they forgot.
Lord Lilac was of slighter stuff;
Lord Lilac had had quite enough.[11]
Chesterton's poetic versatility range may be inferred from the fact that he has written a drinking song that is used as a whisky advertisement and a devotional song that has been incorporated into the hymn book. The former may be found in "The Flying Inn", the latter in the "English Hymnal", also in "Poems." The hymn is as follows, omitting, as the preachers always say,[12] the third stanza. Sing it to the tune of "Webb."
O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die.
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us
But take away our pride.
From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honor and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation
Deliver us, good Lord!
But I know of some people—and more sensible people than you would suppose—who say that they like "Quoodle" the best of Chesterton's poetry. Since there is no accounting for taste and some of my readers may have taste, I must also quote this:
SONG OF THE DOG NAMED QUOODLE
They haven't got no noses,
The fallen sons of Eve.
Even the smell of roses
Is not what they supposes,
But more than mind discloses,
And more than men believe.
They haven't got no noses,
They cannot even tell
When door and darkness closes
The park old Gluck encloses,
Where even the Law of Moses
Will let you steal a smell.
The brilliant smell of water,
The brave smell of a stone,
The smell of dew and thunder,
And old bones buried under
Are things in which they blunder
And err, if left alone.
The wind from winter forests,
The scent of scentless flowers,
The breath of bride's adorning
The smell of snare and warning,
The smell of Sunday morning,
God gave to us for ours.
* * * * * * *
And Quoodle here discloses
All things that Quoodle can;
They haven't got no noses,
They haven't got no noses,
And goodness only knowses
The Noselessness of Man.[13]
According to Mendelism new species are most apt to come from the crossing of diverse forms. We should then naturally expect Chesterton's verse to be original, since it is the result of a cross between Whitman and Swinburne. At any rate these were the poets who most influenced Chesterton when in his teens he began to write poetry. In philosophy of life Whitman and Swinburne were not so far apart, since they were both pagans and democrats, but in form they are antipodes. Whitman was the father or the grandfather of the vers-librists. He cultivated the unconventional and introduced the most unpoetic and uncouth words. Swinburne, on the other hand, sought his themes in the classics and sacrificed anything to the music of his lines.
The early poetry of Chesterton shows traces of both influences. One very interesting instance of this is found in a poem that he wrote at school, when he was about sixteen. It is an Ave Maria in the Swinburnian meter. That is, he has borrowed the weapon of the atheist and used it in defense of Catholicism—a trick that he has been playing ever since. The poem begins:
Hail Mary! Thou blest among women; generations
shall rise up to greet,
After ages of wrangle and dogma, I come with a
prayer to thy feet.
Where Gabriel's red plumes are a wind in the lanes
of thy lilies at eve
We pray, who have done with the churches; we
worship, who may not believe.
From his twelfth to his seventeenth year he went to St. Paul's school, where, as he says, "I did no work but wrote a lot of bad poetry which fortunately perished with the almost equally bad exercises. I got a prize for one of these poems—Golly, what a bad poem it was!"
The prize was known as the Milton Prize and the subject assigned to the pupils competing for it was St. Francis Xavier. A soliloquy of Danton on the scaffold, written at the age of sixteen, shows how early began his fascination for the French Revolution. His fondness for discussion was cultivated at the St. Paul's school in the Junior Debating Club, of which he was chairman, and the monthly periodical of the society, The Debater, contains many essays and poems signed "G. K. C." His first contribution to the outside press was a Socialist poem appearing in The Clarion, but a few years later he was busy trying to puncture the balloon of Socialism with his sharp-pointed pen.
After leaving St. Paul's he studied art at the Slade School in London and has illustrated half a dozen books with cartoons, for he draws as readily as he writes. His first book was a volume of jingles and sketches entitled "Gray-Beards at Play; Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen."
His propensity for dropping into nonsense rhymes and sketches may be ascribed to heredity, for his father, Edward Chesterton, though a respectable real estate agent by profession, was responsible for a slim volume of child verse and drawings, "The Wonderful Story of Dunder van Haeden and His Seven Little Daughters."
G. K. Chesterton was born in Kensington, London, May 29, 1874. There is nothing in his heredity or early training to account for his conservative and High Church tendencies, for his father was a liberal in politics and religion and attended Bedford Chapel where the Reverend Stopford Brooke was preaching what was then called "the new theology." Although educated as an artist, G. K. Chesterton soon passed from sketching through art criticism to journalism. He began by writing pro-Boer articles for The Speaker, a Liberal weekly. The originality of his thought and the vigor of his style attracted public attention, and The Daily News took him over to write a weekly article in spite of the fact that he differed in opinion from the editors and readers on certain points. As his anonymous biographer says:
"Thousands of peaceful semi-Tolstoyan non-conformists have for years been compelled to listen every Saturday morning to a fiery apostle preaching consistently the praise of three things which seem to them most obviously the sign-manuals of Hell—War, Drink, and Catholicism."
But more recently his antagonism to "cocoa"—extended symbolically to the politics as well as to the beverage of Cadbury—became so great as to break this incongruous alliance and he has found in his brother's weekly The New Witness a more congenial although a smaller audience. He has also contributed for many years a weekly page to The Illustrated London News, which is under entirely different management from The Daily News. Besides these and frequent contributions to other periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic, he manages to turn out a volume or two of stories every year as well as poetry and criticism, an amazing output considering that there is hardly a dull page in it. To keep it up so long and steadily must be a strain upon one of his easy-going temperament. Fleet Street men tell me that it is hard to get his copy on time. As press day draws near runners are sent around to his clubs and other London haunts to tell him that the editor must have his article immediately. Once caught Chesterton surrenders good-naturedly and taking any paper handy will dash off his essay, carrying on a lively conversation at the same time.
Producing under such pressure or at least under the compulsion of filling a certain number of columns every week with witty comment on current events inevitably tends to careless writing. Chesterton's work is all equally readable, but not all equally worth reading. He is an inspired writer, but he goes on writing quite as brilliantly after the inspiration has given out, just as a man writing in the dark goes on after his fountain pen has run dry and is only making meaningless scratches on the paper. His display of gems of thought is hardly to be matched by any other show window, but there are so many paste diamonds among them of equal brilliancy that the half of the world which does not like Chesterton takes it for granted that they are all paste. They may even quote Chesterton in support of their view for he says: "All is gold that glitters for the glitter is the gold."
When ex-President Roosevelt, on his return from Africa, was given a dinner by the journalists of London, he was asked by the committee on arrangements whom he would like to have placed by his side to talk with during the meal, and he promptly chose Chesterton. I was of much the same mind when I went to England, but not being in a position to summon him to my side I sought him out in his home, Overroads. This is a little way out of London, near the town of Beaconsfield from which Disraeli took his title,—uncomfortable quarters, I should say, for Chesterton, considering his antipathy for Disraeli and his race.
Arriving at Beaconsfield by the tea-time train I walked up the hill to where I saw a big man sitting on the little porch of a little house. He impressed me as Sunday impressed Symes. I do not mean Billy Sunday, but quite a different personage, the Sunday of "The Man Who Was Thursday." Great men are apt to shrink when you get too close to them. Mr. Chesterton did not. He was too big to fit his environment. The house was what we should call a bungalow; I don't know what they call it in England. It was on a little triangular lot set with trees half his height and a rustic arbor patiently awaiting vines. Afterward I saw in the paper that Mr. Chesterton broke a leg on that arbor. I suppose he must have tripped over it like a croquet wicket.
Mr. Chesterton has a big head covered with curly locks, two of them gray. He is gifted with a Taft-like smile, and talks in a deep-toned, wheezy voice, punctuating his remarks with an engaging chuckle. It is no trouble to interview him. I never met a man who talked more easily or more interestingly. "There are no uninteresting subjects," he says, "there are only uninterested persons." Start any idea you please as unexpectedly as a rabbit from its lair, and he will after it in a second and follow all its turns and windings until he runs it down. His mind is as agile as a movie actor. Epigrams, paradoxes, puns, anecdotes, characterizations, metaphors, fell from his lips in such profusion that I, who knew the market value of such verbal gems, felt as nervous as a jeweler who sees a lady break her necklace. I wanted him to stop while I got down on my knees and picked them up. But he did not mind wasting clever things on me, for there were so many more where those came from. Besides they were not so completely lost as I feared. I recognized some of them a few weeks later in his causerie page of The Illustrated London News.
But when you visit Mr. Chesterton don't make the mistake that I did and attempt to please him by telling him how much he reminds you of Doctor Johnson. He admitted to me that he had "paged a bit" in that rôle, but I judge from what he says in "The Mystery of a Pageant"[14] he does not regard his selection for the part as altogether complimentary to his personal appearance.
Perhaps he would not like it any better to be told that the resemblance was more psychical than physical. Chesterton is doubtless the most dogmatic man England has seen since Doctor Johnson died. He has equally violent prejudices, and he expresses them with equal wit. Unfortunately he has no Boswell. Chesterton has written a book about Shaw, but so far Shaw has shown no disposition to return the compliment.
Shaw, in speaking of Coburn's portrait of Chesterton says: "He is our Quinbus Flestrin, the young Man Mountain, a large abounding gigantically cherubic person."
It is Shaw's theory that G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc are not two persons, but one mythological monster to be known as "The Chesterbelloc."
Chesterton's ideals are large and generous and very solid: A divinely ordered church, a really democratic state, and a life of that hopeful and humble wonder that men call romance. But his usefulness as a moral philosopher is impaired by the possession of a number of blind spots or inveterate prejudices that prevent him from seeing clearly. He is like the tenor who had aelurophobia and was upset whenever a cat came into the room. So whenever one of these phobias comes into his mind Chesterton loses his poise and sings false. Some of the things for which he has a particular abhorrence are: cocoa, colonies, divorce, equal suffrage, Esperanto, eugenics, large scale production, latitudinarianism, Lloyd George, official sanitation, organized charity, peace movement, pragmatism, prohibition, public schools, simplified spelling, vaccination, vivisection, and workingmen's insurance, all of which some of the rest of us look upon with favor. His inability to see any good in these and a score of other modern movements brings him into curious inconsistencies. For instance, he is an enthusiast for universal manhood suffrage. But any mention of woman suffrage is like waving a red coat before an Irish bull. His statement that there are three things which women can never understand, liberty, equality, and fraternity, is as brutal and untrue as anything Nietzsche or Strindberg has said.
In his essay on William James he says "pragmatism is bosh", yet his whole system of apologetics is based upon the pragmatic argument; religion is true because it works. "If Christianity makes a man happy while his legs are being eaten off by a lion, might it not make me happy while my legs are still attached to me and walking down the street?" In order to make due allowance for Chesterton's class and race prejudices while reading his works, it is convenient to keep a list like this as a bookmark:
TABLE OF CHESTERTON'S AFFECTIONS AND AVERSIONS
CLASSES
He likes most: 1. Children
2. Peasants
3. Domestic women
4. Artisans and laborers
5. Priests and soldiers
6. Poets and adventurers
7. Shopkeepers
(hereabouts is a great gulf fixed)
8. Business and professional men
9. Criminals (including politicians)
10. The conceited professional classes (the intellectuals)
11. Landlords
12. Millionaires
He dislikes most: 13. Multimillionaires
RACES
He likes most: 1. Irish
2. French
3. English
4. Russians
5. Turks
6. Jews
7. Germans
He dislikes most: 8. Cosmopolites
In his youth Chesterton wrote a poem in defense of Dreyfus, "To A Certain Nation", but by the time he came to publish it in his first volume, "The Wild Knight", he had so changed his opinion that he makes a partial apology for it in the preface. Since then he has, in connection with his brother Cecil and Mr. Belloc, introduced into British journalism a foreign element from which it had formerly been free, the political anti-Semitism which has been the cause of so much disturbance in France, Russia, and Germany. Almost every number of The New Witness, edited by Cecil Chesterton, contains sneers at Jewish financiers and politicians, and in 1912 he went so far that he was fined five hundred dollars and costs for defamatory libel of Godfrey Isaacs, director of the Marconi Company. The prosecution significantly was conducted by Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith.
It is greatly to be hoped that The New Witness group may get rid of their race prejudice and cut down on their muckraking, which, though often necessary, is never nice, and bring forward the constructive part of their program, for this is the time when there is a chance to do something. For instance, the British Party system against which they so long clamored without effect has now broken down under stress of the war, but there is nothing in sight to take its place. G. K. Chesterton was quite right when he said that "the party system of England is an enormous and most efficient machine for preventing political conflicts",[15] and that what party politics had done was to turn Balfour from the analysis of the doubtful to the defense of the dubious and Morley from writing on compromise to practicing it. And again, "I think the cabinet minister should be taken a little less seriously and the cabinet maker a little more."[16]
Chesterton protests against being regarded as a mere obstructionist and reactionary in such language as the following:
I do not propose (like some of my revolutionary friends) that we should abolish the public schools. I propose the much more lurid and desperate experiment that we should make them public. I do not wish to make Parliament stop working, but rather to make it work; not to shut up the churches, but rather to open them; not to put out the lamp of learning or destroy the hedge of property, but only to make some rude effort to make universities fairly universal and property decently proper.[17]
Man has always believed in a paradise, but he has never been certain whether to look for it in the past or the future, or both. We have very detailed descriptions of Atlantis, Valhalla, the Golden Age, Utopia, and the like, but the tense of the verb is indeterminable. Chesterton is equally uncertain as to whether to look forward or backward for his ideal state. His "Christmas Song for Three Gilds" is headed "To be sung a long time ago—or hence." He has not yet favored us with a blueprint of his Utopia, so we are left to surmise what he likes from the very plain indications he has given us of what he does not like. Chesterton seems to obey a negative magnetism and orients himself by his antipathies.
We may infer that his ideal would be a self-governing community of equally well-to-do, leisurely, patriotic, domestic, religious, jolly, beer-drinking, pork-eating, art-loving, freehold farmers and gild craftsmen, clustered about the village inn and church. They would all be of one race and creed, healthy without doctors, wealthy without financiers, governed without politicians. He believes with Belloc that the nearest historical approach to this ideal was Western Europe about 1200-1500. He probably would agree with Doctor James J. Walsh in calling the thirteenth "the greatest of all centuries." Among contemporary communities I should say that the mujiks of the Russian mir come the nearest to complying with his specifications, although he has not, to my knowledge, shown any disposition to leave London and take to the steppes in order to live the simple life in these communities of pure democracy. But perhaps this is because women vote in the mir. Of the made-to-order utopias I presume that of William Morris's "News from Nowhere" would suit him better than the Socialists for whom it was written.
To sum up Chesterton in a sentence, I must borrow the words of the Forum article of O. W. Firkins:
A man who preaches an impassioned and romantic Christianity, and who adds to that the Jeffersonian doctrine of democracy, the Wordsworthian and Tolstoyan doctrine of the majesty of the untutored man, the Carlylean doctrine of wonder, the Emersonian doctrine of the spirituality latent in all objects, the Dickensian faith in the worth and wisdom of the feeble-minded, the Browningesque standard of optimism, affects us as a man with whom, whatever his vagaries and harlequinries, it would be wholesome and inspiriting to live.
HOW TO READ CHESTERTON
Read whatever is handiest, for there is no order and sequence is not important. Chesterton expresses much the same philosophy of life in essays, stories, and poems and there has been little change in his opinions or style in the sixteen years he has been writing.
Nowhere has he given a complete and orderly presentation of his views. He is a born journalist and prefers to fire at a moving target. About once a year he gathers up a sheaf of his contributions to the press and puts them out under as general and indefinite a title as he can think up, but he never can think up a title broad enough to cover the variety of topics he treats. The heading to a chapter gives no clue to the theme or its importance. One is apt to find his deepest philosophy tucked away in some corner of a discourse on cheese or mumming or penny dreadfuls. He is like a submarine; when he goes under you never can tell where he will come out. Consequently, as I say, it does not matter much which volume you pick up; they are equally brilliant and inconsequential.
His views on religion and society are expounded most thoroughly in "Orthodoxy" (1908), "Heretics" (1905) both published by John Lane Company, and "What's Wrong With the World" (1910, published by Dodd, Mead & Company). Somewhat briefer, more varied, and trivial in topic are "All Things Considered" (1908, Lane), "Tremendous Trifles" (1909, Dodd), "Alarms and Discursions" (1910, Dodd), "A Miscellany of Men" (1912, Dodd).
Since the war began he has published "The Barbarism of Berlin" (1914), "The Appetite of Tyranny" including "Letters to an Old Garibaldian" (1915, Dodd), and "The Crimes of England" (1916, Lane). To this we should add his first work, "The Defendant" (1901, Dodd). In The New Witness he has been running a weekly page under the head of "At the Sign of the World's End", and when his brother, Cecil Chesterton, enlisted as a private in October, 1916, he assumed the editorship of that lively journal.
His youthful poetry is in "The Wild Knight and Other Poems" (1900, Dutton). "The Ballad of the White Horse" (1911, Lane) contains his epic of King Alfred, and "Poems" (1915, Lane) contains all the rest of his poetry except what still remains buried in "the files." Of these I must mention "The Wife of Flanders", which may be found in the Literary Digest, Current Opinion, or Living Age of 1914.
Chesterton has written one play, "Magic: A Fantastic Comedy" (1913, Putnam), which was a success on the London and New York stage.
Of his allegorical fantasias I have discussed at some length "The Man Who Was Thursday" (1908, Dodd). "The Ball and the Cross" (1910, Lane) describes the conflict between a religious fanatic and an equally intolerant atheist. "Manalive" (1912, Lane) deals with domesticity, and "The Flying Inn" (1915, Lane) is a defense of the public house. In "Napoleon of Notting Hill" (1908, Lane), his first romance, he preaches parochialism.
His detective or rather mystery stories are: "The Club of Queer Trades" (1905, Harper); "The Innocence of Father Brown" (1911, Lane); and "The Wisdom of Father Brown" (1914, Lane).
His literary criticism, mostly written as prefaces to standard reprints, makes delightful reading, although sometimes he uses his author merely as a point of departure. Of Dickens he has written most and best in the prefaces to Everyman's Library edition (collected in "Appreciations and Criticism of Dickens", Dutton) and "Charles Dickens; A Critical Study" (1906, Dodd). His "Victorian Age in Literature" (1913, Home University Library, Holt) is not quite so interesting because he does not have room to ramble. His "George Bernard Shaw" (1910, Lane) is not much of a biography, but it is valuable as bringing into close contrast these representatives of opposing points of view. His "Robert Browning" forms an admirable volume of the English Men of Letters series (1908, Macmillan). Besides these he has written many biographical sketches and critiques, among which may be mentioned: "Five Types" (1911, Holt); "Varied Types" (1902, Dodd); "G. F. Watts" (1902, Dutton); "William Blake" (1910, Dutton); "Samuel Johnson" (1903, and 1911); "Carlyle" (1902 and 1904) and "R. L. Stevenson" (Pott).
Chesterton is eminently quotable, and the pocket volume of "Wit and Wisdom of Chesterton" (1911, Dodd) will afford plenty of food for thought for any one.
There are two biographies of Chesterton. One published anonymously in 1908 gives the best account of his early life; the other by Julius West (1916, Dodd) gives the most complete criticism of his work up to date, with a bibliography.
His picturesque personality and peculiar views have supplied innumerable journalists with material for articles. Specially noteworthy for one reason or another are: the excellent piece of criticism by O. W. Firkins in The Forum (vol. 48,. p. 597). "The Defender of the Discarded", The Forum (vol. 44, p. 707), is harsh and unsympathetic. "Chesterton as an Artist" by Joseph B. Gilder (Bookman, vol. 39, p. 468, see also vol. 34, p. 117), containing his sketches, a sketch by Henry Murray, with sixteen portraits from childhood up, in the London Bookman, May, 1910. Wells, in his "Social Forces in England and America" (p. 205), discusses Chesterton and Belloc. "A Visit to G. K. C." by B. Russell Herts in The Independent, November 7, 1912, contains some of Chesterton's sketches; reprinted with other interviews in Herts's "Depreciations" (1915, Boni). Chesterton wrote on "Shall the United States Fight?" in The Independent, January 12, 1916.
[1] "The Crimes of England", p. 98.
[2] For specimens of his sketches see "Chesterton as an Artist" by Joseph B. Gilder in The Bookman.
[3] See also "The Divine Detective" in "A Miscellany of Men."
[4] Published, 1911, by John Lane Co., New York.
[5] Republished, 1913, in "Poems" (John Lane Co., New York).
[6] Published, 1916, by John Lane Co., New York.
[7] From "Poems" (John Lane).
[8] "The Wild Knight" (Dutton & Co., New York).
[9] "In Tremendous Trifles ", 1909 (Dodd, Mead & Co., New York).
[10] From "Poems" (John Lane).
[11] From "Poems" (John Lane).
[12] It has always been a puzzle to me why congregations have to be warned against singing the third stanza of any hymn. I never could see that it was any worse than the rest, but I assume the clergy know best about it.
[13] I quote from The New Witness. The version in "The Flying Inn" is a trifle different.
[14] "Tremendous Trifles", p. 317.
[15] In Chesterton's book on Shaw.
[16] "Miscellany of Men."
[17] "What's Wrong with the World."