THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEW REPUBLICAN
It is obvious that the socialism of Wells, touching as it does at every point the fabric of society, remains at bottom a personal and mystical conception of life. His typical socialist, or constructive man, or Samurai, or New Republican, or what you will, is as distinctly a poetic projection from life as Nietzsche's Superman, or Carlyle's Hero, or the Superior Man of Confucius. Like them, it implies a rule of conduct and a special religious attitude.
Nietzsche's Superman is a convenient figure by which for the moment to throw into relief the point I have in mind. Plainly a conception of this kind should never be intellectualized and defined. It is a living whole, as a human being is a living whole, and the only way to grasp it is to place oneself at the precise angle of the poet who conceived it. But the fixed intellect of man is not often capable of rising to the height of such an argument, nor do the run of critics and interpreters rise to such a height themselves. In the case of Nietzsche, particularly, they have confounded the confusion, urging precise definitions and at the same time disagreeing among themselves as to which definitions may be held valid. But indeed the Superman does not "mean" this or that: it can merely be approached from different points of view with different degrees of sympathy. And so it is with the New Republican of Wells.
I have mentioned the Superman because Wells himself has reached a conception of aristocracy similar in certain respects to that of Nietzsche but in others wholly antagonistic. In The Food of the Gods he certainly exhibits a sympathy with Nietzsche on the poetical and ideal side; for his giants are not simply grand-children of Rabelais, they practise of necessity a morality at variance with that of the little men among whom they grow. When Caddies comes to London he does not, and cannot, expect the little men to feed him; not intending evil and seeing merely that he must live, he sweeps the contents of a baker's shop into his mouth with just the unconcerned innocence of laws and prohibitions that a child would feel before a blackberry bush. The very existence of a larger, freer race implies a larger and freer morality, and the giants and the little folk alike see that the same world cannot for long contain them both. But perhaps one can mark the distinction by saying that, unlike the Superman, they are not masters but servants of the cosmic process. They themselves are not the goal toward which the whole creation tends. Humanity is not a setting for their splendor, but something that wins through them its own significance.
In fact it fully proves how profound is the socialistic instinct in Wells, that though in English wise and almost in the manner of Carlyle he has come to believe in the great ones of this world, he has never lost the invincible socialist conviction that a great man is only a figure of speech. In The Discovery of the Future he says: "I must confess that I believe that if by some juggling with space and time Julius Cæsar, Napoleon, Edward IV, William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery, and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth, it would not have produced any serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believe that these great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and instruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistent forces behind them." The individual who stands on his achievement, the "lord of creation," is to him at best a little misinformed, at the worst blustering, dishonest, presuming, absurd.
By an original instinct the Wells hero is an inconspicuous little person, fastidiously untheatrical, who cuts no figure personally and who, to adopt a phrase from one of his later books, "escapes from individuality in science and service." He abhors "personages." For the personage is one who, in some degree, stands on his achievement, and to Wells man, both in his love and his work, is experimental: he is an experiment toward an impersonal synthesis, the well-being of the species. It is true that this idea of man as an experiment does not conflict with a very full development of personality. It consists in that; but personality to Wells is attained purely through love and work, and thus it comes to an end the moment it becomes static, the moment one accepts the laurel wreath, the moment one verges on self-consequence.
The first published utterance of Wells was, I think, a paper in The Fortnightly Review for July, 1891, called The Rediscovery of the Unique. It was one of the earliest of those attacks on the logical approach to life, so characteristic of contemporary thought: it stamped him from the outset a pragmatist. The burden of his argument was that since the investigations of Darwin it is no longer possible to ignore the uniqueness of every individual thing in the universe and that "we only arrive at the idea of similar beings by an unconscious or deliberate disregard of an infinity of small differences"—that, in brief, the method of classification which is the soul of logic is untrue to the facts of life. "Human reason," he wrote, "in the light of what is being advanced, appears as a convenient organic process based on a fundamental happy misconception.... The reason d'être of a man's mind is to avoid danger and get food—so the naturalists tell us. His reasoning powers are about as much a truth-seeking tool as the snout of a pig, and he may as well try to get to the bottom of things by them as a mole might by burrowing."
I quote thus his rudely graphic early statement of the case, because he has not since substantially modified it and because it shows that he already related it to human realities: and indeed in the same paper he pointed out the relation that such an idea must bear to ordinary conduct:
Beings are unique, circumstances are unique, and therefore we cannot think of regulating our conduct by wholesale dicta. A strict regard for truth compels us to add that principles are wholesale dicta: they are substitutes of more than doubtful value for an individual study of cases.
This conception of human reason as an altogether inadequate organ for getting at the truth of things he later expanded in his Oxford lecture, Scepticism of the Instrument; and, still further expanded, it forms the first or metaphysical book of his First and Last Things. It is unnecessary to discuss the rights and wrongs of this primary point in a generation familiar with James and Bergson. It is an assumption of the purely personal, experimental nature of truth which has had a sufficient sanction of experience greatly to modify contemporary practice in ethics and sociology. And it should be noted that Wells evolved it in his own study of physical science (a study serious enough to result in text-books of Biology, Zoology, and Physiography) and that he presents it, in accordance with his own postulates, not as truth for everybody, but as his own personal contribution to the sum of experience. The study of science led him to see the limitations of the scientific attitude, outside the primary physical sciences which for practical purposes can afford to ignore individualities, in matters that approach the world of human motives and affairs.
I do not propose to discuss this question of logic. It is quite plain at least, as Wells observes, in the spirit of Professor James, that "all the great and important beliefs by which life is guided and determined are less of the nature of fact than of artistic expression." And therefore he is justified in proceeding as follows:
I make my beliefs as I want them. I do not attempt to go to fact for them. I make them thus and not thus exactly as an artist makes a picture so and not so.... That does not mean that I make them wantonly and regardless of fact.... The artistic method in this field of beliefs, as in the field of visual renderings, is one of great freedom and initiative and great poverty of test, that is all, but of no wantonness; the conditions of Tightness are none the less imperative because they are mysterious and indefinable. I adopt certain beliefs because I feel the need of them, because I feel an often quite unanalyzable Tightness in them, because the alternative of a chaotic life distresses me.
And this is the way in which he presents the gist of his beliefs:
I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that strains and I believe grows toward Beauty, and of a great mental being that strains and I believe grows towards knowledge and power. In this persuasion that I am a gatherer of experience, a mere tentacle that arranged thought beside thought for this Being of the Species, this Being that grows beautiful and powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling idea of which I stand in need, the ruling idea that reconciles and adjudicates among my warring motives. In it I find both concentration of myself and escape from myself, in a word, I find Salvation.
And again later:
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. In so far as we are individuals, so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realize ourselves as experiments of the species for the species, just in so far do we escape from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves.... Now none of this, if you read me aright, makes for the suppression of one's individual difference, but it does make for its correlation. We have to get everything we can out of ourselves for this very reason that we do not stand alone; we signify as parts of a universal and immortal development. Our separate selves are our charges, the talents of which much has to be made. It is because we are episodical in the great synthesis of life that we have to make the utmost of our individual lives and traits and possibilities.
Naturally then, just as he holds by the existing State as a rudimentary collective organ in public affairs, so also, in theory, he holds by the existing Church. His Church of the Future bears to the existing Church just the relation which the ultimate State of socialism bears to the existing State. "The theory of a religion," says Wells, "may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an irascible Deity or a dozen other things as its end and aim. The practical fact is that it draws together great multitudes of diverse individualized people in a common solemnity and self-subordination, however vague, and is so far like the State, and in a manner far more intimate and emotional and fundamental than the State, a synthetic power. And in particular the idea of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic suggestion; it is in many ways an idea broader and finer than the constructive idea of any existing State."
All of which I take to be very much the position of Erasmus face to face with Luther and of Matthew Arnold face to face on the one hand with Nonconformity and on the other with Darwinism: that the Church is a social fact greater in importance than any dogmatic system it contains. To Wells any sort of voluntary self-isolation, any secession from anything really synthetic in society, is a form of "sin." And like many Catholics he justifies a certain Machiavelism in squaring one's personal doubts with the collective end. Thus he holds that test oaths and declarations of formal belief are of the same nature as the oath of allegiance a republican takes to the King, petty barriers that cannot weigh against the good that springs from placing oneself en rapport with the collective religious consciousness; at least in the case of national Churches, which profess to represent the whole spiritual life of a nation and which cannot therefore be regarded as exclusive to any affirmative religious man. The individual, he says, must examine his special case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibility of coöperation; as far as possible he must repress his private tendency toward social fragmentation, hold fast to the idea of the Church as essentially a larger fact than any specific religious beliefs, and work within it for the recognition of this fact. I have mentioned Catholic reasoning; Wells appears to be in general agreement with Newman as to the subordination of private intellectual scruples to the greater unity of faith.
But indeed I doubt if it is fair to take him too much at his word in specific matters of this kind. First and Last Things has that slightly official quality which goes with all Confessions of Faith out loud. If his intention has led him to square himself with lines of thought and conduct where, to speak the truth, he is an alien, his intention remains, and that is plain and fine.
The synthetic motive gains its very force through the close-knitting of keenly-developed, proud, and valiant individualities. In Wells the synthetic motive and the individual motive qualify and buttress one another; and he is quite as much opposed to the over-predominance of the synthetic motive where the personal motive is deficient as he is to the self-indulgence of the purely personal life. Thus the Assembly in A Modern Utopia is required to contain a certain number of men outside the Samurai class, because, as they explain, "there is a certain sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is necessary to the perfect ruling of life," and their Canon contains a prayer "to save the world from unfermented men." So also in First and Last Things Wells remarks: "If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue of sins by asking, 'Are you a man of regular life?' and I would charge my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with publicans and sinners." Plainly his collective purpose is nothing unless it consists of will, will even to wilfulness, even to perversity.
And this leads one back to that early assertion of his that since beings and circumstances are unique, we must get rid of the idea that conduct should be regulated by general principles. Similarly, at the outset of Mankind in the Making he says it is necessary "to reject and set aside all abstract, refined, and intellectualized ideas as starting propositions, such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, or Beauty, and to hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as a tissue and succession of births." Goodness and Beauty, he says, cannot be considered apart from good and beautiful things and one's personal notions of the good and beautiful have to be determined by one's personal belief about the meaning of life. Thus, to take an illustration from his novels, one of the most odious traits of such a father as Ann Veronica's or Mr. Pope in Marriage is that they wish to regulate their daughters, not by a study of what is and must be good in their eyes, but by a general sweeping view of what good daughters ought to be.
Now since his own idea of the purpose of life is the development of the collective consciousness of the race, his idea of the Good is that which contributes to this synthesis, and the Good Life is that which, as he says, "most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience and renders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively to the collective growth." And as a corollary to this, Sin is essentially "the service of secret and personal ends." The conflict in one way or another between this Good and this Evil forms the substance of each of the main group of his novels. Aside from the novels of shop-life, each of his principal men begins life with a passionate and disinterested ambition to gather and prepare experience and render it available for the race; each one falls from this ambition to the service of secret and personal ends. Lewisham, Capes, Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford are, each in his own way, human approximations, with all the discount of actual life, of the ethical standard of Wells himself as it is generalized in the New Republicans and the Samurai. They illustrate how fully the socialism of Wells is summed up in a conception of character.
But before turning to the actual men and women who form the substance of his novels, I must add something about those wraith-like beings, the Samurai of A Modern Utopia, which fully embody his ideal.
The name Samurai, to begin with, is not a random choice, for it is plain that the Japanese temper is akin to that of Wells. The career of the Japanese as a nation during the last fifty years perfectly illustrates his frequent contention that in modern warfare success falls to the nation that has most completely realized the socialistic, as distinguished from the individualistic, notion of society. "Behind her military capacity is the disciplined experience of a thousand years," says Lafcadio Hearn, who proceeds to show at what cost, in everything we are apt to regard as human, this disciplined power has been achieved—the cost of individual privacy in rights, property, and conduct.
But aside from social ideals and achievements one instinctively feels that Wells likes Japanese human nature. In one of his early essays, long since out of print, he remarks:
I like my art unadorned; thought and skill and the other strange quality that is added thereto to make things beautiful—and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and paper, and behold! a thing of beauty!—as they do in Japan. And if it should fall into the fire—well, it has gone like yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.
He contrasts this with the ordinary English view of art and property, mahogany furniture and "handsome" possessions:
The pretence that they were the accessories to human life was too transparent. We were the accessories; we minded them for a little while, and then we passed away. They wore us out and cast us aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on through the piece.
There is no Being but Becoming is the special dictum of Wells, a dictum which does not consort with mahogany sideboards, but is tangibly expressed in Japanese architecture. And if Wells naturally likes Japanese art, its economy, delicacy, ephemerality, its catlike nicety, its paucity of color, its emphasis of design, its "starkness," it is plain also that many qualities of the Japanese character must also appeal irresistibly to him: the light hold they have on all those things into which one settles down, from stolid leather arm-chairs to comfortable private fortunes; their lack of self-consequence, their alertness, their athletic freedom from everything that encumbers, their remoteness from port-wine and embonpoint. These things exist in Wells's notion of right human nature.
Thus the Samurai. They are delegates of the species, experimenting and searching for new directions; they instinctively view themselves as explorers for the race, as disinterested agents. And their own self-development on this disinterested basis is not only the purpose of their own lives, but also the method by which the Life Impulse discovers and records itself and pushes on to ever wider and richer manifestations.
The socialism of Wells is merely a building out from this conception. He is persuaded that this kind of experimental exercise is not simply a happy indulgence for the few fortunately placed, but that it is actually virtue and the only virtue. And this notion of personal virtue—personal in quality, social in effect—once conceded, it follows that the moulding of life must proceed with reference to this.