TOWARDS SOCIALISM
Of all the battered, blurred, ambiguous coins of speech there is none so battered, blurred, and ambiguous as the word socialism. It mothers a dozen creeds at war with one another. And the common enemy looks on, fortified with the Socratic irony of the "plain man," who believes he has at last a full excuse for not understanding these devious doings.
Therefore I take refuge in saying that H.G. Wells is an artist, neither more nor less, that socialism is to him at bottom an artistic idea, and that if it had not existed in the world he would have invented it. This clears me at once of the accusing frowns of any possible Marxian reader, and it also states a truth at the outset. For if the orthodox maintain that socialism is not an affair of choices, may I not retort that here actually is a mind that chooses to make it so? Here is an extraordinary kind of Utopian who has all the equipment of the orthodox and yet remains detached from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is always jealous of its tabernacles and will not see itself dramatically; it has no concern with artistic presentations. But I protest there ought to be no quarrel here. If a socialism fundamentally artistic is an offence to the orthodox, let them accept it, without resentment, as a little harmless fun—all art being that.
Having said so much I return to my own difficulty, for it is very hard to focus H.G. Wells. He has passed through many stages and has not yet attained the Olympian repose. Artist as he is, he has been hotly entangled in practical affairs. There are signs in his early books that he once shared what Richard Jeffries called the "dynamite disposition,"—even now he knows, in imagination alone, the joy of black destruction. He has also been, and ceased to be, a Fabian. But it is plain that he has passed for good and all beyond the emotional plane of propaganda. He has abandoned working-theories and the deceptions of the intellect which make the man of action. He has become at once more practical and more mystical than a party programme permits one to be. Here is a world where things are being done—a world of which capital and labor are but one interpretation. How far can these things and the men who do them be swept into the service of the race? That is the practical issue in his mind, and the mystical issue lies in the intensity and quality of the way in which he feels it.
To see him clearly one has to remember that he is not a synthetic thinker but a sceptical artist, whose writings are subjective even when they seem to be the opposite, whose personality is constantly growing, expanding, changing, correcting itself ("one can lie awake at night and hear him grow," as Chesterton says), and who believes moreover that truth is not an absolute thing but a consensus of conflicting individual experiences, a "common reason" to be wrought out by constant free discussion and the comparison and interchange of personal discoveries and ideas. He is not a sociologist, but, so to say, an artist of society; one of those thinkers who are disturbed by the absence of right composition in human things, by incompetent draughtsmanship and the misuse of colors, who see the various races of men as pigments capable of harmonious blending and the planet itself as a potential work of art which has been daubed and distorted by ill-trained apprentices. In Wells this planetary imagination forms a permanent and consistent mood, but it has the consistency of a mood and not the consistency of a system of ideas. And though he springs from socialism and leads to socialism, he can only be called a socialist in the fashion—to adopt a violently disparate comparison—that St. Francis can be called a Christian. That is to say, no vivid, fluctuating human being, no man of genius can ever be embodied in an institution. He thinks and feels it afresh; his luminous, contradictory, shifting, evanescent impulses may, on the whole, ally him with this or that aggregate social view, but they will not let him be subdued to it. As a living, expanding organism he will constantly urge the fixed idea to the limit of fluidity. So it is with Wells. There are times when he seems as whimsical as the wind and as impossible to photograph as a chameleon.
Just here I should like to give what may be taken as his own view of capital and labor socialism in relation to the constructive socialism he himself has at heart. I am putting together certain brief passages from The Passionate Friends:
I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems only by the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme.... With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world purposeful, I cannot but believe that.... Strangest of saviours, there rises over the conflicts of men the glittering angular promise of the machine. There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are no longer essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom are possible to every human being....
Human thought has begun to free itself from individual entanglements and dramatic necessities and accidental standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or kingdoms or peoples, a mind and will to which we all contribute and which none of us may command nor compromise by our private errors. It ceases to be aristocratic; it detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find ourselves in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and jealousies and conflicts, helping and serving in the making of a new world-city, a new greater State above our legal States, in which all human life becomes a splendid enterprise, free and beautiful....
I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties....
These last two sentences really tell the whole story. To pass from economics to psychology is to pass from Man to men, from society as a direct object of attack to the individuals who compose it. And this marks the evolution of Wells the romancer and Wells the expositor of socialist doctrine into Wells the novelist. It is the problems of human interaction that occupy him now. But informing these problems, reaching behind and embracing them, is a general view of the world which has only become more intimate, more personal, and more concrete with time.
When, in New Worlds for Old, Wells set himself to explain socialism as he conceived it, he assumed as his first principle a certain Good Will in men, an operating will steadily working in life toward betterment. In other words, he supplemented the ordinary socialist idea of economic determinism, which may or may not inevitably bring about order on the industrial plane, with a constructive purpose, which, in his view, can alone bring about the salvation of the race. But this Good Will is not a fatality; it exists only by virtue of remaining a conscious effort. In his experiments in Time and Space Wells had accustomed himself to seeing that the immense possibilities of what might be, so far as the universe is concerned, predetermined things, were, so far as man is concerned, matters of chance. To human society at least, if not to our planet, the most unpropitious things are possible in the future; and there is no reason to suppose that the destiny of the universe, which at every turn cuts athwart the destiny of every species contained in it, should, left to itself, work favorably to man.
This notion is in itself quite outside socialism and does not necessarily lead into socialism. It was Huxley who said that the world and the universe, society and nature, are demonstrably at cross purposes, and that man has to pit his microcosm against the macrocosm. Huxley, in his famous lecture on Ethics and Evolution, went on from this to a kind of informal and unavowed socialism, figuring society as a well-tended garden preserved by man's careful art from the ravages and invasions of that hostile world of chance, with its gigantic weeds and blind impulsions, which everywhere lies waiting round about it. Our work, he implied, must be in every way to minimize for ourselves the elements of chance, to become aware of our species in a collective sense, battling with nature and moulding our own future.
I do not suppose that Wells consciously adopted this idea from Huxley. In itself that would be of little consequence, except so far as it shows the continuity of thought and the development of socialism out of science. But Wells was for several years a pupil of Huxley, and it is reasonably plain that the mood in which he wrote his scientific romances was strongly impregnated by Huxley's influence. The sinister, incalculable, capricious, destructive forces outside man are symbolized, as I have said, by those colliding comets, invading Martians, and monstrous creatures among which the earlier Wells moved and had his being; just as the sinister, incalculable, capricious forces within man which urge him to destruction form so great a part of his later novels. Most of his heroes (typified in The New Machiavelli) come to grief through the blind irrational impulsions within themselves. And he is equally haunted by what he has called the "Possible Collapse of Civilization." I do not know how much this is due to an evangelical childhood, in which Time, Death, and Judgment are always imminent; how much to an overbalancing study of science at the expense of the humanities; how much to an overdeveloped sense of the hazard that life is; and how much to plain facts. But there it is: it has always been a fixed conviction with Wells that man personal and man social is dancing on a volcano.
Therefore he has come to socialism not by the ordinary course but by a route obscure and lonely. The sense of possible catastrophe and collapse, the folly of leaving things to chance, the infinite waste and peril of committing our affairs to nature rather than to art—these are some of the negative reasons that have made it impossible for him to fall in with the non-socialist ideal in human affairs, that "broadening down from precedent to precedent" which he calls "muddling through": a doctrine that is wholly compatible with a world of haphazard motives, accidental fortunes, accidental management, a democratic individualism that places power in irresponsible hands and suppresses talents that society cannot afford to lose, a governmental system that concerns itself with legal and financial arrangements, experts with no sense of a common purpose, patriotisms that thrive on international bad feelings, and that competitive principle which succeeds in the degree in which it ignores the general welfare—a chaos of private aims, private virtues, private motives, without any collective human design at all.
In the light of these opposed ideas of society as a thing of Chance and as a thing of Design, let me run over two or three of the tales of Wells.
First of all there is the special laissez faire of pure economic determinism. The Time Machine pictures a possible result of the Marxian process which has led to an irrevocable division of classes. The rich, who were, in the old time, in comparison with the poor, disciplined and united, have long since reached a point where work and fear are for them things of the past. They occupy the surface of the earth, and idleness and futility have made them light-headed, puny, helpless creatures, stirring about and amusing themselves in the sunlight. The poor, meanwhile, driven underground where they burrow and tend machinery and provide, have lost all human semblance and become white, horrible ghoul-like creatures that see in the dark; at night they swarm out of their holes and feed upon the creatures of the upper air. The one class has lost all power to defend itself and the other all pity to spare, and gradually, year after year, mankind comes to its end.
Then there is the ordinary laissez faire of capitalism, a result of which is pictured in The Sleeper Awakes. The Sleeper, one recalls, awakens four generations hence to find himself the master-capitalist, owner of half the world, and the world is one where capital and labor have irrevocably destroyed the possibility of a constructive human scheme. But the responsibility for that future is very ingeniously placed upon us of the present time; for Graham's ownership of the world is the outcome of one of those irresponsible whims that in our day characterize the whole individualistic view of property. His cousin, having no family to inherit his possessions, has left the whole in trust for the Sleeper, half in jest, expecting him never to waken; and in time the trustees of this vested fund have become the irresponsible bureaucrats of the world. "We were making the future," says the awakened Sleeper, looking out upon this monstrous outcome of whim and laissez faire; "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making."
Consider also The Empire of the Ants, in which Wells has figured a possible reconquest of man by nature, owing to the greater collective discipline of at least one non-human species. He imagines a species of poisonous ants with only a little greater faculty of organized co-operative intelligence than ordinary ants, which have terrorized and finally routed several villages of unintelligent and unorganized Brazilian natives far up the Amazon. The Brazilian government sends against them an outworn inefficient gunboat, with an incompetent captain and a muddle-headed crew; and when they arrive the ants fall upon the only man sent ashore and sting him to death. The captain repeats over and over, "But what can we do?" And at last with tremendous decision he fires a gun at them and retires. The story ends with a report that the ants are swarming all over the interior of Brazil and that nobody knows how to prevent them from occupying the whole of South America.
And then there is The History of Mr. Polly. I ignore for the moment the individual aspect of his case, for Mr. Polly is not merely an individual—he is an emblem of the whole, he is society in concreto. We find him at the opening of the book sitting on a stile, suffering from indigestion and consequently depressed in spirits. It is two o'clock of a Sunday afternoon, and he has just finished his mid-day meal. He has eaten cold potatoes, cold pork, Rashdall's mixed pickles—three gherkins, two onions, a small cauliflower head and several capers; cold suet pudding, treacle and pale cheese, three slices of grey bread, and a jug of beer. He hates himself, he hates his wife, he hates existence. But Mr. Polly's interior, the things that have gone into it and the emotions that rise out of it, are only typical of an entire life that has, to quote Macaulay's eulogy of the British constitution, thought nothing of symmetry and much of convenience.
Each of the novels of Wells, in one aspect at least, presents the accidental nature of our world in some one typical case. Love and Mr. Lewisham shows how in the case of one of those young students who have, as things are, no chance at all, but who are the natural builders of a better world, the constructive possibility is crushed by the primary will to live. At eighteen Mr. Lewisham is an assistant master at one of those incompetent private-enterprise schools which for Wells (as also for Matthew Arnold) epitomize our haphazard civilization. He has a "future"—the Schema which he pins to his bedroom wall promises unimaginable achievements. He marries, and you feel that he should marry and that he has married the right person. But then with interests divided he has to find money and in doing so he fails in his examinations. At last it becomes a choice between his career and his children, between the present and the future, and the children and the future win. Society loses just in the degree that Lewisham himself loses, for he was fitted to be a builder; and society has first, in the face of all his efforts, imperfectly equipped him and then consistently refused to take advantage of his talents.
Just as Lewisham is a potential builder of society who is defeated, so Kipps is a specimen of the raw material, the muddled inferior material with which society has to deal and refuses to deal. Kipps, like Mr. Polly, is from the beginning a victim of accident, spawned on the world, miseducated, apprenticed at fourteen to a Drapery Bazaar. He grows up ignorant, confused, irresponsible; and then suddenly, as accidentally as he was born, has £26,000 and responsibility thrust upon him. The fortune of Kipps lifts him at once out of the obscure negligible world of the populace and makes him a figure to be reckoned with. Therein lies the comedy of the book. He tries to make himself what in his own view a man of means ought to be; naturally he sees money not as a force but as a thing to be spent, and he finds that even from this point of view he has no freedom of will, and that his lack of training inevitably places him in the hands of equally irresponsible persons who want his money. He wishes to build a house, designed after his own vaguely apprehended needs and desires, and somehow under the wand of the architect a house with eleven bedrooms springs from the ground, a house plainly far beyond his own or Ann's power of management, and the prospect of disrespectful servants, terrifying callers, and a horde of scheming lawyers, tradesfolk and satellites. And the life of Kipps under prosperity is summed up in the following dialogue:
"Wonder what I shall do this afternoon," said Kipps, with his hands deep in his pockets.
He pondered and lit a cigarette.
"Go for a walk, I s'pose," said Ann.
"I been for a walk this morning."
"S'pose I must go for another," he added after an interval.
May one suggest how the significance of such a story as this varies according to the point of view? In the ordinary literature of comedy, Kipps would be merely a parvenu whose want of dignity and ignorance of the right use of money are laughable—or, if the novelist were a humanitarian, pitiful. To the socialist, on the other hand, every incident of his life, every gesture of his mind, is a unique indictment of things as they are. He stands for the whole waste of human stuff in a world which has not learned how to economize itself, whose every detail is accidental in a general chaotic absence of social design.
In this aspect Tono-Bungay is the most powerful work of Wells. Just as his romances of the future had exhibited the possible effects of accidental heedless social conduct in the past, so his novels exhibit the motives that produce this heedlessness to consequences. Thus the world in which the Sleeper awakes, a world irrevocably ruled by the bureaucratic trustees of an irresponsible private fortune, is just a conceivable consequence of such a career as Uncle Ponderevo's, had not catastrophe overwhelmed him and enabled Wells to point a much more pregnant moral. Tono-Bungay is a great epic of irresponsible capitalism from the socialist point of view. Uncle Ponderevo is a born commercial meteor, and when he first enters the book, a small druggist in a dead country town, he exhibits the temperament of a Napoleon of finance spoiling for conquest. He wants to Wake Up Wimblehurst, invent something, do something, shove something.
He indicated London as remotely over the top of the dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.
"What sort of things do they do?" I asked. "Rush about," he said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's cover gambling. Ever heard of that, George?" He drew the air in through his teeth. "You put down a hundred, say, and buy ten thousand pounds' worth. See? That's a cover of one per cent. Things go up one, you sell, realize cent per cent; down, whiff, it's gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George, every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the shoutin'!... Well, that's one way, George. Then another way—there's Corners!"
"They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.
"Oh, if you go in for wheat and steel—yes. But suppose you tackled a little thing, George. Just some leetle thing that only needed a few thousands. Drugs, for example. Shoved all you had into it—staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take a drug—take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren't unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha—can't be!—and it's a thing people must have. Then quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let's say, and collar all the quinine. Where are they? Must have quinine, you know—Eh? ...
"Lord! there's no end of things—no end of little things. Dill-water—all the suff'ring babes yowling for it. Eucalyptus again—cascara—witch hazel—menthol—all the toothache things. Then there's antiseptics, and curare, cocaine....
"Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.
"They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll do you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George."
He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as: "Fifty per cent, advance, sir; security—to-morrow."
The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will probably be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on. Of course the naïve intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with the disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realize how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a power as irresistible as a head master's to check mischievous, foolish enterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to gaol. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!
And such or nearly such is this career. Tono-Bungay, that swindling patent medicine without value or meaning, is the insubstantial hippogriff upon which Uncle Ponderevo soars upward on the wind of advertisement. In a society whose basis is unlimited individual rights, he is able to disorganize the industrial world and to work out his absurd, inept, extravagant destiny, scattering ruin right and left.
But the spirit of Good Will, the disinterested constructive spirit of socialism which is the underlying assumption of Wells, appears here as in all his later books. Out of the wreckage the constructive purpose emerges, in the person of George Ponderevo. It shapes itself as a steel destroyer, the work of an engineer's brain, a destroyer which England has refused and which plunges down the Thames to the open sea, the symbol of man's intentions, without illusions and without the hope of personal gain, the disinterested spirit of science and truth.