Some Impressions of My Elders

by St. John G. Ervine

II

If a writer wished to create a character who would most aptly personify the past thirty years of English or of world history, he would have to create a character very like Mr. Wells: a questioning, variable, demanding person, with some impatience and testiness of temper, with, at times, a fantastic and wayward manner, but always superimposed on these superficialities, an eager and unthwartable desire for a true belief. Mr. Chesterton said of him once that "you lie awake at night and hear him grow," and fundamentally that is true, in spite of the temptation one has at times to believe that one lies awake at night and merely hears him changing his mind. One could, were one silly enough to do so, construct a plausible indictment of Mr. Wells of hurriedly accepting a belief and as hurriedly rejecting it; but to do so would be to charge oneself with a superficial mind. Mr. Wells, in his eagerness to discover a reasonable and sane society in which the spirit of man may grow and develop and achieve, has sometimes accepted a theory too swiftly, but his scientific mind has come, sooner or later, to the rescue of his eager heart and has caused him to reject proposals which he had previously found acceptable.

In "First and Last Things" he decides against the community of austere aristocrats who won his advocacy in "A Modern Utopia." The self-disregard of the Samurai of Japan had pleased him as it must please all who contemplate it, and he imagined a state in which the best men would govern "the average, sensual men," formulating their laws and doctrines from the sanctuary of a sort of monastic establishment in which their fleshly desires would be chastened and perhaps eliminated. Mr. Wells, having felt the allure of a select company of selfless aristocrats, devoting themselves to the good government of less gifted men, soon discovered that good government cannot be administered by men who are remote from the emotions and desires of the governed and so, with characteristic courage, he abandoned his Samurai and boldly marched into the company of the crowd. Can any one find ground for sneering in such behaviour as that? Are not those who try to find solutions to puzzles more likely to be successful in their efforts because Mr. Wells has offered one solution and then, finding it useless, repudiated it and tried another?

There was a time when he saw hope for the world in the establishment of a universal language, but I doubt whether he holds to that hope now. A common speech does not keep men at peace any more than a common purpose does, and, in any event, man's incorrigible habit of localizing universal things until they cease to be universal tends in time to make a common speech an impossible possession. The Catholic Church has a common speech in the Latin tongue, but an Italian priest can preach to an English priest in that language and remain incomprehensible. The British and the American people have a common speech, but it has become so permeated with local words that very often the two races are unintelligible to each other, apart altogether from the difficulty of accent.

Mr. Wells has plunged into a few bog-holes of that sort, but he has always extricated himself from them, and less and less, as he develops, does he insist upon uniformity and machinery, and more and more does he insist on diversity and spirit. "Let us be Catholics in this great matter," Mr. Birrell writes on Browning's poetry, "and burn our candles at many shrines. In the pleasant realms of poesy, no liveries are worn, no paths prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop where you like, and worship whom you love. Nothing is demanded of you, save this, that in all your wanderings and worships, you keep two objects steadily in view—two, and two only—truth and beauty." It may fairly be said of Mr. Wells that in all his "wanderings and worships" he has tried to do so.

III

There is a photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, taken by an American photographer, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in which the two men are shown sitting side by side. It is the most illuminating interpretation of their characters that I have ever seen. Mr. Shaw, with something of the look of a prophet, sits beside Mr. Wells who has a smile of disbelief on his face; Mr. Shaw shows a countenance full of faith, while Mr. Wells shows one full of inquiry. Mr. Shaw accepts the pose quite naturally, but Mr. Wells is deprecating. I felt when I saw that photograph in Mr. Wells's study that while Mr. Shaw accepted the status of a great man as his right, Mr. Wells felt uncomfortable about the pose, not because he doubts his right to be regarded as a great man, but because he is reluctant to live on pedestals. "I'm human just as much as you are," he seems to be saying to the photographer, and the smile of deprecation on his face means, if it means anything, that while Mr. Shaw accepts the great man's altitude without a qualm, Mr. Wells feels that the whole thing is humbug. "Shaw is taken in by this Great Man business," the Wells of the photograph says as plainly as if the picture were to take life and utter words, "but don't you imagine I'm deluded by it!..."

These two men, one Irish, one English, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert George Wells, between them have done more to influence the minds of the young men of my generation than any other two men of their time. Their attitude towards life may, perhaps, be summarized in an account of the way in which they interpret the doctrine of Evolution. Mr. Shaw believes that the Life Force, which ordinary men call God, is an Imperfect Thing seeking to make Itself Perfect. How, when you contemplate the miseries and inequalities and cruelties of existence, can you believe in an All-Powerful God? he says. You must believe that these horrible things happen because God cannot prevent them from happening. The blind-alley argument that the Almighty inflicts pain upon us for our good is insupportable when one considers that an earthly father would not subject his child to convulsions or cause a cancer to consume its life or endow it with a cruel disposition if such things were within his powers of disposal. If, one reasonably argues, an earthly father is incapable of such acts, how less likely is God to be capable of them if He be All-Powerful and All-Good? Since these inexplicable cruelties and horrors occur and recur, surely, argues Mr. Shaw, it is only common sense to assume that they do so in spite of God's good will towards man. Starting from this premise, he goes on to argue that God seeks to obtain that control over material things which He has not yet succeeded in obtaining. He imagines God engaged in a magnificent research, the discovery of a harmonious universe, much in the way in which one imagines a biologist in his laboratory seeking for a preventative of disease. The Life Force uses such instruments for its purpose as are to be found lying at hand. When these prove abortive or useless or insufficient, the Life Force invents a new instrument which it uses until that instrument, too, is found to be useless or inadequate and is scrapped in favour of a new instrument. Like all creators, God must express Himself through His creatures, and the whole of Time has been spent so far in finding a suitable means of expression. In the beginning, God used mammoth beasts, but finding them unsuitable for His purpose, He scrapped them and invented other creatures until at last He achieved His best instrument, Man. God's latest and finest creature differs from all His other creatures in this respect that he is conscious of God's purpose and can help it forward or hold it back. God concealed His intention from all the instruments that preceded the advent of Man, but, in the development of His Being, He found that greater advantage would accrue to Him if He made His instrument aware of its purpose. So we get the reason of Man. God, before the creation of Man, had depended upon Himself. After the creation of Man, he depended partly upon Himself, partly upon His creature. Man, in short, was the first of God's instruments to have the power to help God to realize Himself. To Mr. Shaw, it is an obscuring of God's purpose for Man continually to pray, "God help me!" when it is part of his purpose and duty to affirm, "I will help God!" I have already quoted his dictum that we should so live that when we die, God is in our debt.

It is obvious, from this belief, that Mr. Shaw does not believe in the inevitable march of mankind from bad to good and from good to better. We may be marching towards Utopia or the New Jerusalem, or we may be marching back to Chaos. Man, having the choice between helping God and thwarting Him, may so vex the Deity that He will become impatient with him and throw this instrument away as he has thrown away other useless instruments, and seek for a better one. God scrapped the mammoth beasts because they were not adequate for the execution of His design; He may scrap Man for the same reason or because Man, while adequate, wilfully refuses to help. This theory is expressed continually in Mr. Shaw's plays and prefaces, for example, in a speech by Cæsar in "Cæsar and Cleopatra," where the Emperor gives expression to a violent antipathy to war. War, in Mr. Shaw's mind, is a plain perversion of God's purpose, and he would probably declare that Man, in the Great War whose end may yet be a bloody battle between the Allies, almost reached the end of God's patience. In five years, the British alone had eight hundred thousand of her most valuable men killed. France lost double that number killed. Germany lost more even than France killed. All the potentialities for good, all the fervour and chivalry and idealism and courage that was in those men, their ability to help God to achieve perfection, has vanished utterly from the world; and there is nothing left of it. Most of them died without progeny, and so there is not even the hope that their spirit has passed on to their children and that, at the worst, God's purpose has only been suspended for a generation. They have gone, irretrievably gone. Another such war and Western civilization must perish, if, indeed, it has not already begun to decay. In other words, God, sickened by Man's perversity and wilful obstruction, will have scrapped him....