The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

SOCIALISM TRUE AND FALSE

In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that they can think out the whole—or, at any rate, completely think out definite parts—of the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy.

The man who wrote that is not what is called a whole-hearted man as regards any form of group-action. He does not "fit in." He is at bottom a sceptic, and a sceptic is one who reduces every question to the question of human nature. So that the socialism of Wells is necessarily at variance with all the recognized group-forms of socialism, Administrative, Philanthropic, and Revolutionary. I must briefly indicate in each case what is the quality of this divergence.

As regards the first, he has a complete distrust of what Hilaire Belloc has called the "Servile State;" and what he distrusts he virulently dislikes. In his view, Administrative socialism, as it appears in Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society, and in the tendency of contemporary Liberalism, has led to an excessive conservatism toward the existing machinery of government, it has depended altogether too much on organization without popular support, and as a result has tended to throw the whole force of the socialist movement into a bureaucratic regime of small-minded experts. The activity of the Fabians especially, he says, has set great numbers of socialists working in the old governmental machinery without realizing that the machinery should have been reconstructed first. The whole tendency of this method, as it is exhibited in the works of the English Liberal Party of to-day, is toward a socialization of the poor without a corresponding socialization of the rich; toward a more and more marked chasm between the regimented workers and the free employers.

And it throws the control of affairs into the hands of a mass of highly specialized officials, technical minds, mutually-unenlightened experts. In an age when the progress of society depends upon breaking down professional barriers, when the genuine scientist, for instance, is a man who passes beyond his own science and sees the inter-relationships of all knowledge, the mind which has been trained in one habitual routine is the most dangerous type of mind to place in authority. On the one hand, society depends upon the coöperation of all sorts of specialists, their free discussion, and comparison of methods, results, and aims; on the other experts in office are apt to grow narrow, impatient, and contemptuous, seeing nothing beyond their immediate work,—and this particularly when they have been trained for administration without any wide experience of the world.

Therefore upon experts as such, in distinction from constructive and coöperating specialists, Wells, with all the force of his belief in the ventilating of knowledge and the humanizing of affairs, wages an unceasing war. The First Men in the Moon satirizes, after the fashion of Swift, a world where the expert view of life, not only in administration but in all work, prevails. Each inhabitant of the Moon has a single rigidly defined function, to which everything else in his nature is accommodated. Thus certain types of machine-menders are compressed in jars, while others are dwarfed to fit them for fine work, "a really more humane proceeding", as Mr. Cavor observes, "than our method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making machines of them." And in The Great State he returns to his attack on government by experts: "Whatever else may be worked out in the subtler answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that the necessary machinery of government must be elaborately organized to prevent the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy, tacit or expressed, against the normal man." And he adds: "The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circumstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official." One of the many and increasing indications, one might suggest, of the remarkable tendency in Wells to find good in the old humanistic Tory, as distinguished from the modern bureaucratic Liberal, view of life.

But lest I be tempted to carry this latter suggestion too far just at this point, I pass on to his equally virulent dislike of Philanthropic socialism and the busy Superior Person in affairs; especially the type of political woman so dear to Mrs. Humphry Ward's heart. If the expert bureaucratic point of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Liberal Progressive mind, so also the philanthropic superior point of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Conservative mind. It is arrogant, aggressive, and condescending. It implies the raising of one's inferiors, and what weak mortal should assume that she (for this happens to be a mainly feminine affliction) is the standard according to which other mortals ought to be raised?

Two of these energetic ladies have been pictured with a bitter vividness by Wells in Altiora Bailey and Aunt Plessington, the former summing up the Fabian-expert view, the latter summing up the Superior-philanthropic view. Altiora has "P.B.P."—pro bono publico—engraved inside her wedding ring. All the misery of the world she marshals invincibly in statistics. She sees everything as existing in types and classes; she pushes her cause with a hard, scheming, and wholly self-centred eagerness, managing political dinners, indefatigably compiling blue-books, dreaming of a world nailed as tightly and firmly under the rule of experts as a carpet is nailed with brass tacks.

On the other hand Aunt Plessington is the incarnation of a "Movement" somewhat vague in purpose but always aggressively beneficial to the helpless ones of the earth. "Her voice was the true governing-class voice, a strangulated contralto, abundant and authoritative; it made everything she said clear and important, so that if she said it was a fine morning it was like leaded print in the Times." Her mission is principally to interfere with the habits and tastes of the working-class, making it impossible for them to buy tobacco and beer or "the less hygienic and more palatable forms of bread (which do not sufficiently stimulate the coatings of the stomach)." She is, in short, one of those odious managing people who know nothing of and care nothing for human nature, who concern themselves wholly with the effects without penetrating to the causes of misery, who see mankind as irrevocably divided into a governing and a governed class, and whose idea of government is to make the governed as uncomfortably efficient as possible and as lacking in free will. She is exactly one of those arrogant sterile souls, in love with methods rather than men, who have made the Servile State an imminent and horrid possibility and have turned so many misinformed human beings (including Tolstoy) against socialism altogether.

If Wells dislikes Administrative and Philanthropic socialism because they are not sufficiently human, he has an equal aversion to what is called orthodox, that is to say, Revolutionary socialism; and in this he includes all socialism that is fundamentally economic. "I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human society," says Stratton in The Passionate Friends, in words we are justified in taking as the opinion of Wells himself. "Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties."