IV
When one brings the Wellsian doctrine down to the details of life, one discovers what I may call a local pessimism in it. The anger which breaks out of his work is directed against the incompetence and stupidity of man which hold him back from the desirable country towards which he is marching. The greatest optimists—the men who are convinced that man's end is good and seemly—are almost always the most bitter pessimists when they are considering contemporary affairs. The visionary loves mankind in the abstract so much that when he contemplates mankind in the concrete he loses his temper. The Utopian, full of his dream of a decent and free civilization in which every man may move easily to his proper station, feels a dreadful depression when he looks upon society as it exists here and now; and there are times when, in spite of his sure and certain hope that life will ultimately find its level, he feels that man, that perverse, wayward, thwarting creature, will never fulfill the promise of his potentialities because he is too closely concerned with some tiny, personal vanity, because he allows wickedness and stupidity to influence him to a greater degree than goodness and fine thought. Who, thinking over the Big Four in Paris, and remembering that millions of young men of all nations died so that the Big Four might meet and make a more enduring peace than this world has yet known, can feel anything but anger and humiliation at what they did? Clemenceau, the "Tiger" who, having tasted blood, seemed eager to taste more; Lloyd George, who never remembers a friend or forgets an enemy; Orlando, shamelessly extending his itching palm; and Wilson, the man who went to Europe to ask for the moon and returned to America, having accepted a match ... can any of us, contemplating those four men, given by God the greatest opportunity that has ever been offered to men, that may ever be offered to men, help feeling that this world is dead and damned and that the sooner a disgusted God smashes it to pieces, the better will be the universe? Mr. Wells cannot escape, any more than the rest of us, this tendency to despair of human effort, and here and there in his books his local pessimism is expressed; but his universal optimism remains unimpaired, and one comes away from his writings in the knowledge that he believes that man sooner or later will achieve a high destiny. He whips the stupid and the selfish and the idle, but he will not permit them to persuade him from his belief that even out of these elements, a finer Man will yet be made.