Two Views of H. G. Wells
I am just reading The Passionate Friends, and every time I read anything of Wells’s I wonder why it is I don’t like him better. The World Set Free that has been running in The Century was intensely worth while, I thought—really prophetic. One tasted something almost divine; human nature is capable of such wonderful undreamed of things! It was like Tennyson prophesying the Federation of the World, airships, etc. Wells does seem inspired in some ways. But every time I read any of his novels—well, you remember I have a distinct mid-Victorian flavor that has to be reckoned with. I wasn’t brought up in a minister’s family for nothing! I suppose it’s what we used to call our conscience. Mine isn’t much good, alas; I sometimes think of it as a little old Victorian lady. She sits in the background of my consciousness and knits and knits and nods her head. Meanwhile I go blithely about, espousing all sorts of causes and thinking out all sorts of theories—imagining, you know, that I’m perfectly free. Suddenly she wakes up—she lays aside her knitting with a determined air and says, “Mary Martha, what are you thinking about! Stop that right now; I’m ashamed of you.” And she has authority, too, you know. I stop. Ridiculous, isn’t it?—but so it is.
And every time I read a Wells novel my little old lady folds her hands and sits up very primly and says, “Aha, you’re reading something of that man’s again. Well, I’m not asleep—I’m right on the job and I know just what I think of him.” So you see! And the worst—or the best—of it is that I agree with her. I can’t like him. I read along and it’s all so reasonable—he’s so clever and he thinks; but his conclusions are all so weak—if he comes to any. One passage in The Passionate Friends has made me furious. How can a man who’s at all worth while be so really wicked—(another word gone out of style). I mean this:
It is manifestly true that for the most of us free talk, intimate association, and any real fellowship between men and women turns with extreme readiness to love. And that being so, it follows that under existing conditions the unrestricted meeting and companionship of men and women in society is a notorious sham, a merely dangerous pretence of encounters. The safe reality beneath those liberal appearances is that a woman must be content with the easy friendship of other women and of one man only, letting a superficial friendship towards all other men veil impassable abysses of separation, and a man must in the same way have one sole woman intimate.... To me that is an intolerable state of affairs, but is reality.
Now can you suppose that is Wells’s own reasoning that he puts into the mouth of his unfortunate hero? Talk about Edith Wharton being thin-lipped in the pursuit of her heroines—that’s a great deal better than being loose-lipped; don’t you agree with me? It may be true, and I rather think to some extent it is true, that a man cannot have an absorbing friendship with a woman and not run the risk of falling in love. But what does that prove? That he should be allowed free rein and carry on as many liaisons veiled under the name of friendship as he chooses? Or unveiled, rather, for Wells seems to want everything in the open. He’s like a child who says: Here’s a very dangerous beast in a flimsy, inadequate cage. Frequently he escapes from it and has to be put back in. Let’s abolish the cage and let the beast run about openly, doing what it wants. And the good old-fashioned word for that beast is lust, and it should be caged; if the cage is getting more and more inadequate it’s only a piece with what Agnes Repplier calls our loss of nerve. How I liked that article of hers! What in the name of sense are we in this world for if not to build up a character? That’s all that amounts to anything, and it comes from countless denials and countless responses to duty. And what Goethe said, some time ago, is still everlastingly true: “Entbehren sollst Du, sollst entbehren!” (Deny yourself, deny, deny.) He ought to know, too, because he tried indulgence, goodness knows, and knew the dregs at the bottom of that cup. And I can’t forgive Wells. He knows better than to let people make all manner of experiment with such things. They wouldn’t even be happy; for happiness is built of stability, loyalty, character, and again character. My husband said, after reading that passage in The Passionate Friends, “The trouble with him and the class he writes of is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.”
The trouble lies with poor old human nature, I guess, and the way it wants what it cannot and ought not to have. But Wells says all unreality is hateful to him. Let’s tear down the barriers, let’s show up for what we are. Poor Smith wants something his neighbor has—well, let’s give it to him, whether it’s his neighbor’s success or his wife or his happiness. Nature is still unbearably ugly in lots of ways. When we can train it to be unselfish and disinterested then it will be time to tear down barriers.
Lady Mary in The Passionate Friends is an unconvincing character, too. I can conceive of a woman who will take all of a man’s possessions, giving him nothing in return, not even fidelity, but I cannot conceive of her justifying herself unless she is an utter moral degenerate. The danger of such writers as Wells is that they are plausible enough till you look below the surface. He tries to represent Lady Mary as charming, but she, it seems to me, even more than modern society which he arraigns, is “honeycombed and rotten with evil.”
“M. M.”
The description of a “little old Victorian lady” who sits in the background of our consciousness and plays conscience for us is charming; but.... She’s a sweet-faced little lady to whom the universe is as clear as crystal and as simple as plane geometry. She is always knitting, and what she knits is a fine web of sentimentality with which to cover the nakedness of truth—“for it is not seemly, my dear, that anything, even truth, should be naked.”
This web of hers is as fine as soft silk and as strong as chain mail. It’s sticky, too. And it clothes truth so thoroughly that she grows unrecognizable to any but the most penetrating searcher—to H. G. Wells, for instance. It’s natural enough that the old lady should dislike Wells, for he’s found her out; he’s made the astonishing discovery that underneath the web life is not sentimentally simple. He discloses to her scandalized eyes various unfortunate facts which she has done her best to conceal, as for instance the fact that there is such a thing as sex.
“Sex,” says Wells in effect in every one of his novels, “is a disturbing element, the disturbing element, in life. So long as sex exists it is a physical impossibility that life should be the sweetly pretty parlor game our little Victorian lady would have it.”
Right here the husband of the little lady has something to say: “The trouble with him and the class he writes of,” he announces, “is that they aren’t busy enough. Let ’em work for a living, be interested in something vitally for ten hours out of the twenty-four, and they’ll forget all about their neighbors’ wives and be content with good men friends and casual women friends.” This is an excellent example of what Wells finds the next most disturbing element in life—“muddle-headedness,” the lack of ability to think straight, to think things through. “Let Wells be vitally interested in something for ten hours of the twenty-four!” Doesn’t he see that if Wells had ever limited himself to ten hours of interest he would be making shirts today? It is because Wells works twenty-five hours of the twenty-four at being “vitally interested in something” that he is one of the major prophets of our time. And the thing in which he is interested is life itself, the great unsolvable mystery, life which extends below the simple, polished surface that is all the Victorian lady knows as the sea extends below its glassy smoothness on a summer day.
One of the greatest things that Wells has done for some of us who came on him young enough so that our minds did not close automatically at his first startling revelation, is this: he taught us to look at life squarely, without moral cant, and with a scientific disregard as to whether it pleased us personally or not. We may not always agree with him—very likely we don’t—but at least we must face the issue squarely and not take refuge in the vague sentimentality and slushy hopefulness of the Victorian lady.
Wells states facts and very frequently lets it go at that. Witness the shock this method is to our little old lady. She asks how anyone at all worth while can be so “really wicked” as to write about sex and society as he does.
She admits that what he says is a fact, but—it sticks out like a jagged, untidy rock from the smooth surface of things; therefore it is wicked. As a matter of fact that statement of his has no more to do with morality, is no more wicked, or virtuous, than the statement of a physical fact—to say, for instance, that glass breaks when hurled against a stone wall. It is unfortunate, but it is not “wicked.”
No, the day of Victorianism is past. We are slashing away the web, we are learning to think. It is a slow and painful process and we know not yet where the struggle will end. But at least we shall be nearer to the divine nakedness of truth. If Wells has done nothing else than to prove to us how much of our thinking is dictated not by our own souls but by the artificially-imposed sentimentality of the “little old Victorian lady” he has done a full man’s work. And we who owe our emancipation largely to his vision can never be too thankful to him.
Frances Trevor.