Personality in Literature

by R. A. Scott-James

It is whilst he is interesting us in George and his associates that Mr. Wells makes us aware also of the higher unit of society and the whole strange fraud of modern life, the pretence that there has been no change when conditions have radically changed and are still changing. The theory of the old order broods over the new, chaotic, haphazard world which flings people up and down, sets their whole life—birth, marriage, possessions, happiness—at the mercy of mere chance. In the love interest which is an important part of the story he presents the modern treatment of marriage and sex as another disastrous example of muddling and disorder.

But he does not dwell long or didactically on each of these problems. They arise naturally and inevitably, as a part of human life, in the course of his story of adventure and love. He does not pretend to solve the perplexing questions. The hero feels that he is "like a man floundering in a universe of soap-suds, up and down, east and west." "I can't stand it. I must get my foot on something solid or—I don't know what." Behind it all, in its chaos and ugliness, he does not lose the sense of something other and better, a vague but insistent ideal cherished by the spirit. "There is something links things for me, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air, something there was in Marion's form and colour, something I find and lose in Mantegna's pictures, something in the lines of these boats I make."

There, evidently enough, is something that the artist, the poet even, wants. It is the mystical need, the desideratum, expressed in terms of this world's goods—"Marion's form and colour," "Mantegna's pictures," the lines of a boat. If there is any solution here, let it be noted that it is essentially an individual, a personal solution, the artist's solution of the world-problem in terms of what is personally significant to individuals. But when applied to men and women in the mass, how thin and watery this ideal becomes, how unsubstantial and shadowy, how unsuited to the collective needs of society, which are practical and material. Every man in his public, social capacity must necessarily express his ideals in a material and practical form; the mystical side can only find expression in the private life, in the personal way which is the way of art and individual intercourse. But when Mr. Wells became dimly aware of the personal equation in life and the personal ideal, he, who had already dedicated himself to the treatment of social problems and men in the mass, attempted, by mystical contradiction, to identify the private and the public, the ideal with the material, the free with the bound. To make my meaning clearer, I will recall again the incident at the Fabian Society. It is just as if Mr. Wells had gone to that mixed gathering of austere and flippant socialists, and had said, "We want something to link things for us; we must remember the things that men cherish most of all, a sunset or so, a mood or so, the high air. When we are settling the women's question, we must not forget that Marion cares more about her form and colour than about her vote; and if we are nationalising the great masters, let us remember that there is something we may find and lose in a single Mantegna more important to us than all the galleries in the world. The derelict 'Victory,' with her romantic lines, means as much to the nation as the biggest Dreadnought in the world."

And we can imagine Mr. Shaw getting up to question the novelist. "Will Mr. Wells explain to us how the State is going to preserve Marion's colour? Does he propose to arrange sunset effects on Primrose Hill? Will he describe the apparatus by which he intends to capture and bottle the high air, and distribute it for public consumption? And where are we to look for the something to be found in Mantegna's pictures when he has been so unfortunate as to lose it?"

Mr. Wells, naturally enough, broke with the Fabian Society; and at the same time, discovering the inadequacy of his remedy, broke with the whole social order, resigned himself for a time to sheer irritation, and took his revenge upon the world in The New Machiavelli. He devoted his brilliant powers to satirising the whole public life of Great Britain, in the same breath lampooning the public persons with whom he had been personally associated, and defending himself against certain personal charges which had been brought against him.

It was an effective book. It occasioned not a little gossip, excitement, scandal, and even heart-burning. Though the author announced that the persons in the novel were composite characters, not to be taken as likenesses of real persons, and though no doubt there were scenes and conversations which he had invented and incidents which he had transposed, nevertheless in many essentials the story was photographic. Mr. Wells himself was never, like his hero Remington, either at Cambridge or in Parliament, but he came under the same educational, social, and political influences which determined Remington's character and career. Remington's friends, who are exposed in all the intimacy of private life to the public gaze, were once, under other names, the friends of Mr. Wells. No one who has any acquaintance with public personages in London can fail to identify those apostles of social organisation, Mr. Bailey and his wife Altiora. Equally transparent are the young Liberals, Edward and Willie Crampton. If the novelist has caricatured these persons he has seen to it that he has never distorted them out of recognition. The realism with which he describes these and a score of popularly "esteemed" public men is applied also to their womenkind; Isabel is not spared; nor is Margaret, Remington's wife.

Here, then, we have what is at the same time Remington's Apologia for his errors, and his revenge upon the society which decided to discredit him. He presents himself as an "unarmed, discredited man," whose power with the pen cannot be checked; a man "half out of life already" because of the "red blaze that came out of my unguarded nature, and closed my career for me;" a man who "cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him," and to those who "have heard already some crude inaccurate version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed your partial judgment on me." Remington's reply to the man who urges him to hush up the scandal gives a colour of personal disinterestedness to the story.

"It's our duty to smash now openly in the sight of everyone. I've got that as clear and plain—as prison whitewash. I am convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost now—I mean it—until every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have kicked man after man out of English public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To think this tottering, old-woman-ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score!"

But Mr. Wells intends something more than to explain the state of mind which led a distinguished politician and moralist, a married, middle-aged man, to victimise—that is the "worldly" way of looking at it—a beautiful young girl who had fallen in love with his genius. Here we have the life-story and character of Remington portrayed at full length—Remington an individual product of our social environment—Remington in relation to the vast national processes which have been changing England from the "muddle" of the Victorians to the muddle of to-day—a Remington clever enough to see our representative institutions stripped of their hollowness and their cant; quick to pierce through the shell of Liberalism, not perhaps quite to the kernel of it, but to the insincere part of it; quick to see a profound psychological meaning in the Suffragette movement, and to distinguish between the outer bearing of public men and the individuality behind it—the "hinterland." The whole was a brilliant analysis of England in macrocosm and microcosm welded into the life-story of Remington. And his hero is not like one of Mrs. Humphry Ward's puppets, set up to be a great politician. Remington as a thinker is almost a great man; he is a profound analyst of society on its human side; he is a gifted critic of public institutions; even his absurd perversity in trying to invent a constructive, motherhood-endowing Toryism is the perversity of a versatile and clever man whose action is precipitated by bitterness or pique.

But the extraordinary thing about The New Machiavelli is, that this envisaging of England in her social, political, and intellectual life, this acutely and almost diabolically observed crowd of real persons, this minute psychology, this exact history, this elaborate philosophy—all are subservient to the purpose of explaining how it was that Remington was driven into the net of sex, and Isabel was enabled to "darn his socks." Parturiunt montes. Is it thus that Remington will make himself immortal in literature, the twentieth-century Benvenuto Cellini, swaggering, in a self-conscious, twentieth-century way, through the tale of his glorious peccadilloes? Or is it to be a Jonathan Wild, memorable as the hero of a hundred magnificent felonies with which a Fielding or a Wells could glorify a sturdy vagabond? But Remington writes in bitterness. His pen is steeped in the gall of Swift. He feels rancour against Altiora, against the Cramptons, against all the "Pinky-Dinkies" who prescribe morals for a genius erratic in his desires.