A PERSONAL CHAPTER
I doubt if there are many living men of note who, a generation after they are dead, will be so fully and easily "explained" as H.G. Wells. He is a most personal and transparent writer, he is the effect of conditions and forces which have existed for scarcely more than two generations. But for these very reasons it is very difficult to see him in perspective, and to explain him would be to explain the age in which we live. Let me at least give certain facts and reflections about his life written by Wells himself, a few years ago, in the introduction to a Russian translation of his writings:
I was born[1] in that queer indefinite class that we call in England the middle class. I am not a bit aristocratic; I do not know any of my ancestors beyond my grandparents, and about them I do not know very much, because I am the youngest son of my father and mother and their parents were all dead before I was born. My mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at a place called Midhurst, who supplied post-horses to the coaches before the railways came; my father was the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penshurst Castle, in Kent. They had various changes of fortune and position; for most of his life my father kept a little shop in a suburb of London, and eked out his resources by playing a game called cricket, which is not only a pastime, but a show which people will pay to see, and which, therefore, affords a living to professional players. His shop was unsuccessful, and my mother, who had been a lady's maid, became, when I was twelve years old, housekeeper in a large country house. I too was destined to be a shopkeeper. I left school at thirteen for that purpose. I was apprenticed first to a chemist, and, that proving unsatisfactory, to a draper. But after a year or so it became evident to me that the facilities that were and still are increasing in England offered me better chances in life than a shop and comparative illiteracy could do; and so I struggled for and got various grants and scholarships that enabled me to study and take a degree in science and some mediocre honors in the new and now great and growing University of London.... After I had graduated I taught biology for two or three years, and then became a journalist.... I began first to write literary articles, criticisms, and so forth, and presently short imaginative stories in which I made use of the teeming suggestions of modern science....
So much for the facts. The reflections are not less illuminating:
The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure. Success with a book—even such a commercially modest success as mine has been—means in the English-speaking world not merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost freedom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted out of his narrow circumstances into familiar and unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people. He sees the world; if his work excites interest, he meets philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the great, and he may make such use of them as he can. He finds himself no longer reading in books and papers, but hearing and touching at first hand the big questions that sway men, the initiatives that shape human affairs.... To be a literary artist is to want to render one's impressions of the things about one. Life has interested me enormously and filled me with ideas and associations I want to present again. I have liked life and like it more and more. The days in the shop and the servants' hall, the straitened struggles of my early manhood, have stored me with vivid memories that illuminate and help me to appreciate all the wider vistas of my later social experiences. I have friends and intimates now at almost every social level, from that of a peer to that of a pauper, and I find my sympathies and curiosities stretching like a thin spider's web from top to bottom of the social tangle. I count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents of my life, and another is that I am of a diffident and ineffectual presence, unpunctual, fitful, and easily bored by other than literary effort; so that I am not tempted to cut a figure in the world and abandon that work of observing and writing which is my proper business in it.
This candid and exact statement enables us to see just how far, in matters of fact, experience and belief, the autobiographical motive has entered his writings. It would be possible to show how inevitably such an ideal as that of the New Republican Samurai arose from such a life; how much that conscious and deliberate insistence on personal efficiency and orderly ways, that repudiation of mental confusion, sluggishness, and sentiment may figure as a kind of stepping-stone from the world of Kipps and Polly to the world of Remington and Trafford; how a self-wrought scientific education would form the basis of an ideal of aristocracy rising from it; and how the motto "There is no Being but Becoming" would express its own constant desertion of levels achieved, its own pressing upward to levels equally transient. Just as the "democratic person" of Whitman raises his own fervent, chaotic, and standardless experience into an ideal, so also the ideal of Wells is nothing else than the projection of his own experimental opportunism. It is impossible in discussing Wells to ignore this social ascent; for in England a man passes from one stratum to another only by virtue of a certain lack of substantiality, a power to disencumber himself, to shed customs and affections and all the densenesses and coagulations which mark each grade in that closely defined social hierarchy. The world of shopkeeping in England is a world girt about with immemorial subjections; it is, one might say, a moss-covered world; and to shake oneself loose from it is to become a rolling stone, a drifting and unsettled, a detached and acutely personal, individual. It is to pass from a certain confined social maturity, a confused mellowness, into a world wholly adventurous and critical, into a freedom which achieves itself at the expense of solidity and warmth. In Wells, for instance, the sense of the soil is wholly supplanted by the sense of machinery. His evolution has been the reverse of the usual evolution from what Bacon called the lumen siccum to the lumen humidum, from the dry light to the light that is drenched in customs and affections. Instead of growing mellower, he has grown more and more fluid and electric, in direct ratio to the growing width of his social horizon.
To prove this one has only to consider his novels. There was a time when he had in common with Dickens and De Foe the quality they have in common with one another—the quality of homeliness. He drew the little world he knew well, the limited and lovable world of small folk. Mr. Hoopdriver, Delia the chambermaid, Kipps and Ann Pornick—a score of these helpless, grown-up little children he pictured with a radiant affection, tempering the wind to the shorn lamb. It is more in the nature of his later thought to see poverty as a wasteful rather than a cruel thing, even though he may not have approached the harsh realism of Bernard Shaw's observation: "I have never had any feeling about the English working classes except a desire to abolish them and replace them by sensible people."
Certainly he has not experienced any other world in quite this way. "I count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents in my life," he says. Accidental one feels it to be, as of a man inhabiting the great world by virtue of sheer talent, whose nature has not in any sense settled there. His philosophy and his socialism are outgrowths of his own experience; they erect into reasons and theories the nature of a life which is not at home, and which easily unburdens itself of all that seems insensate because it is unfamiliar. To be a socialist at all is to have accustomed oneself, through necessity or imagination, to a certain detachment from a great many of the familiar, lovable, encumbering, delightful stupidities of the world. And Wells has travelled up and down through time and space too much to have any great regard for the present. "I have come to be, I am afraid," he says, in The Future in America, "even a little insensitive to fine immediate things through this anticipatory habit.... There are times indeed when it makes life seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an equally transitory series of consequences——." His hold upon the present is so far from inevitable that The New Machiavelli and Marriage, realistic as they are, are represented as being written some years hence, our own time already appearing retrospectively in them. As little as Faust has he been tempted to call out upon the passing moment. His main characters drift through this period of time, substantial themselves but with a background of substantialities, in a way that recalls Paolo and Francesca looming out of the phantom cloud-procession of the Inferno.
Into this larger world, in short, he has carried with him only himself and his own story. We live in two worlds—the primary world of vivid personal realities and the secondary world of our human background. It is the secondary world that anchors us in time and space; the primary world we carry with us as part of ourselves. In Wells there is no secondary world, no human background, no sense of abiding relations. It is his philosophy of life and the quality of his men and women to be experimental in a plastic scheme. His range is very small: the same figures reappear constantly. There is the Wells hero,—Lewisham, Capes, Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford, Stratton; there is the Wells heroine, Ann Veronica, Isabel, Marjorie, Lady Mary; there is the ineffectual woman with whom the Wells hero becomes entangled, Capes's first wife, Marion, Margaret; there is the ineffectual man with whom the Wells heroine becomes entangled, Magnet, Manning. To strike the lowest common denominator in this tangle is inevitably to arrive once more, one feels, in the region of personal experience. Although it cannot be said that his minor characters are lacking in reality, they are certainly intellectual portraits, and outside the limits of subjective experience. The principal men and women of Wells move through a world seen, but hardly a world felt.
This want of social background makes his characters as detached from the familiar earth as chessmen are detached from a chessboard. They never seem to be, like most men and women either in life or fiction, like the Kipps and Polly of his own earlier fiction, vegetable growths. Heredity, fatality, the soil are not mainly operating forces with them. They are creatures of intelligence and free will, freely and intelligently making and moulding themselves and their circumstances. Human nature in Wells is very largely a sheer thing, a thing that begins with itself, answers for itself, lives at first hand. That is the personal quality of the man himself, and it follows that the quality is wholly convincing only where what I have called his primary world is concerned: the rest of the world he builds up by intelligent observation and the literary talent of creating human stuff out of whole cloth.
In this he is well served by his antipathies. His belief in personal self-determinism is so strong that he instinctively sees the vegetative nature of the ordinary life as a kind of moral slough, a state of being detestably without initiative, faith, energy, will. And consequently the Normal Social Life against which he is always tilting is a life seen by him with all the vividness of an intense personal and philosophical animosity. Consider, for example, the portraits of Mr. Pope and Mr. Stanley, survivals in a sense of the old Sir Roger de Coverley type, with all the sweetness gone out of it and only the odious qualities left, the domineering, vain, proprietary qualities. They exist mainly as symbols of everything that enlightened and right-minded daughters will not put up with; they come as near to being the foils of right destiny as Wells will ever allow; they sum up everything that stands in the way of man's free will. They are mercilessly dealt with, and they are memorable figures.
Without this antipathy, and outside his own primary world, he pretty generally fails. One recalls, for example, old Mrs. Trafford in Marriage, evidently intended to be his ideal of the enlightened woman grown old. She is a pale, dimly perfect, automatically wise old lady carved out of wood. Trafford himself, one feels, is a chip of the same block. Trafford obviously is not Wells himself, as Ponderevo and Remington are Wells: he is the Utopian counterpart of these persons, at least in the matter that concerns Wells most, the matter of sex. One could show that, aside from the six or eight chief characters who in their various ways express the nature and experience of Wells himself, he succeeds in his portraiture only where no demand is made on his sympathies.
The same absence of social background which throws into relief his primary world of characters throws into relief also the primary facts of human nature. Trafford and Marjorie, the most conventionally placed of his characters, pull up stakes, leave their children, and go to Labrador. His other men and women are even more independent of the social network. Consequently they are independent of that chain of relationships—friendship, affection, minor obligations—which mitigate, subdue, soften the primary motives of most people. They are almost startlingly physical. Their instincts are as sure as those of cavemen, and their conduct as direct. They are as clear about the essential matter of love as ever Schopenhauer was, or Adam and Eve, and they stand out as sharply against the embarrassments and secrecies of the usual world as a volcanic rock stands out against a tropical landscape. In this without doubt they exhibit the fact that socialism does and will actually alter human nature, and that in the instinctive socialist human nature is already altered. For socialism inflexibly militates against those more sentimental aspects of love, love of country as such, the paternal and feudal principles, love of property, and the like, which belong properly to the intelligence, all those functions where love, in a majority of cases, goes wrong, blunders, stultifies growth, confuses the public design of the world. As a result it throws love into relief, emphasizes the nature of sex and the raison d'être of reproduction; makes it, to use a favorite word of Wells, stark.
I pause at this word. It is one of those talismanic words one finds perpetually cropping up in the writings of men who have a marked point of view, words that express deep and abiding preferences and often set the key of an entire philosophy. "I like bare things," says George Ponderevo, in Tono-Bungay; "stripped things, plain, austere, and continent things, fine lines and cold colors." That is the gesture of an artistic mind which repudiates, with an impatient sharpness, all the entanglements of the ordinary world. It is Oriental, it is Japanese, it is anything you like; but if it is English also it marks an entirely new regime. Without question it is English, and American as well. Thousands of people share that preference, and were economic socialism to go by the board we should still have to reckon with the progress of socialistic human nature. It detaches itself each day a little more from property, locality, and the hope of reward; it ceases to be necessitarian, it becomes voluntary; it relegates drudgery to mechanical devices; it releases the individual to a sense of his own coöperative and contributory place in the scheme of a more orderly future. Relatively speaking, the tendency of our kind is all away from luxury, sloth, complacency, confusion, ignorance, filth, heat, proprietorship, and all in the direction of light, austerity, agility, intelligence, coolness, athletic energy, understanding, cleanliness, order, "bare things, fine lines, and cold colors."
That is evident, and it is equally evident that the personal character and career of Wells are emblematic of this entire tendency. He has unravelled himself by science, talent, and vigor out of "lower middle class" Victorianism. Is it strange that he has adopted as a kind of sacred image that light, free, and charming product of our decade, the aeroplane, sprung as it is out of the wreckage, out of the secret beginnings, the confused muscularities, the effort and smoke of the most chaotic of all centuries, like a blade of exquisitely tempered and chased steel which justifies everything that was most laborious and unsightly in the forge?
But considered as a sacred image the aeroplane has its limitations. So also, considered as an exponent of fife, has Wells. Philosophy and religion, as he presents them, are simply what he chooses to think and feel, what he has been led by his own experience to think and feel. His main experience has been the experience of disentangling himself, and therefore life, reflected from within himself, is to him a thing also which disentangles itself and grows ever more free, simple, and lucid. In the mind of Wells this process, has taken on an altogether mystical, transcendental significance, a religious aspect. Possible as that is to himself personally, how far can it be taken as an argument to the human soul? How does it qualify him as a teacher, a public voice, a thinker for the mass of men? How does the conception of life purely as a process relate itself to human experience?
Applied to history, it seems to fail. Wells is devoid of historical imagination. In his portrait of Margaret in The New Machiavelli he has properly, though somewhat harshly, repudiated what ordinarily passes for culture. But had he himself possessed the reality of what seems to him simply "living at second hand," he would never have been led to refer to Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Dürer as "pathetically reaching out, as it were, with empty desirous hands toward the unborn possibilities of the engineer." That is a very interesting and a very extraordinary statement, and it is quite true that each of these men would have rejoiced in the engineering possibilities of our time. But how much of the soul of Michael Angelo, for example, was involved in engineering? How far can his hands be said to have been "empty" for the want of scope in engineering? The power and the function of Michael Angelo can rightly be seen, not in relation to any sort of social or mechanical process, but in relation to things that are permanent in human nature, in relation to just those matters included in the admonition of Wells to "reject all such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, and Beauty and hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a tissue and succession of births." Again, consider a somewhat similar reference to Marcus Aurelius, of which the gist is that the author of the Meditations was, actually in consequence of his own character, the father of one of the worst rulers the world has known. The implication here is that the study of self-perfection in the father was complementary to, if not responsible for, the social impotence and blindness of the son. Instead of dedicating himself to the static ideal of personal character, the assumption seems to be, Marcus Aurelius ought to have lived exclusively in his function as ruler and father. He studied himself, not as a ruler but as a man, and the social process had its revenge on his line. To Wells, in a word, the static elements of character and the study of perfection are not to be distinguished from vicious self-consequence.
Consider also a recent passage in which he has given a general impression of literature:
It seems to me more and more as I live longer that most poetry and most literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved and hated more naively, aged sooner, and died younger than we do. Solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not dominate us.
To appreciate this meditation one has to remember the character and career which led to the writing of it. But so far as we others are concerned, how far can the assumption it rests upon be considered valid, the assumption of a process that sweeps men on and leads human nature, as it were, progressively to shed itself? Dr. Johnson, for example, was a man the conditions of whose life were crude and rigid in the extreme, a man singularly dominated by solitary persons and single events, but is his conversation discordant with the variety, the "reserves, resources, and recuperations of life as we live it to-day"? I can well understand this feeling. To pass directly from the thin, tentative, exhilarating, expansive air of our own time into the presence of that funny, stuffy, cocksure, pompous old man is to receive a preposterous shock. But having come to laugh, one stops with a very different sensation. The depths of personality and wisdom that exist there take on a disconcerting significance in relation to contemporary pragmatism. The mass of men veer about; far-separated epochs have their elective affinities, and if anything about the future is plain it is that this, that, and the other generation will find in Dr. Johnson a strangely premature contemporary.
Wells has himself admitted this principle. To Plutarch, Rabelais, Machiavelli he has paid his tribute. Hear what George Ponderevo has to say about Plutarch in his recollections of Bladesover House:
I found Langhorne's Plutarch too, I remember, on those shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years, to teach me that.
Considering what part the notion of a state plays in his range of ideas, that is a remarkable confession. But why stop with statecraft? The human mind could not, in all epochs, have established permanent ideals of statecraft without permanent ideals of a more strictly personal kind.
The truth is that Wells, for all that he has passed outside the economics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas which produced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tell you that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the only true thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by that criterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensive gibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's Fairy Tales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presents itself. To say that "the fundamental nature of life is a tissue and succession of births" is merely a refinement of this. It is true, just as the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the world is full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of a reasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there is a Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue to grow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friendship, or music, or poetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialist must feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and on that point socialism has nothing to say at all.
It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddle that the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. Could Wells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full of meaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life he has felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in English authors. "Modern poetry, with an exception or so," he remarks somewhere, and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as a whole, "does not signify at all." It is the same with regard to music, art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: his writings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outline against a sunset, masses of machinery in the glare of the forge, things that suggest the etcher's eye. But they are curiously impersonal. Consider, for example, his description of Worms Cathedral:
It rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow under a press of canvas.
You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty he feels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is as untouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities of this building, not to mention its connection with human history, as if he had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not the changeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this building stands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is the mechanism, the process—his emotions gather about the physical result which appears to justify these.
There will always be some to whom the significance of things, the meaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conception of mankind as "permanently in transition." Reading those passages where Wells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as I should feel with regard to music if I heard a mass of Mozart played at the rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if a procession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision. The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the pictures as a whole are a tissue and succession of colors. But that is not music, that is not art. Nor is a tissue and succession of births life.
But indeed nothing is easier than to reduce Wells to an absurdity. If he implies anything at all he implies a "transvaluation of all values." It remains to consider him from this point of view.
[1] September 21, 1866.