The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

That statement is full of meaning. It expresses, not a fact but a personal conviction—the personal conviction with which the psychological constructive socialism of Wells begins. But before I pass on to this I must make one comment that persists in my mind.

Nothing is more remarkable than the unanimity with which during the last few years the advanced world has put all its eggs in the basket of pragmatism, the basket that has been so alluringly garnished by Bergson's Creative Evolution, In this movement of thought Wells has inevitably become one of the leaders, and his practical desertion of the socialist cause is one of the main symptoms of it. The creative energies of men, where society as a whole is concerned, are, in this philosophy, conceived as bursting through the husks and institutions of the world, not consciously destroying them but shedding them incidentally and passing on. Now as regards sociology there is an obvious fatalism in that; for the burden of proof lies once more on a personal basis, on a personal basis qualified by the capacity of the person. It is true that this creative and constructive tendency, like the total tendency of modern life, is in the direction of socialism, it is true that a thousand elements in modern life which could never be engaged in the class-war are led by it into line with socialism. Yet there capitalism is! Only the black-browed Marxian steadily contemplates the fact that year by year the rich compound their riches and the poor their poverty, while those that have no chance of creative outlets plant dynamite.

I do not mean that Wells is "wrong" in abandoning the economic for the psychological approach,—that is plainly the inevitable course for him. I wish simply to mark a distinction. The gospel of Wells is an entirely personal one; it frankly concerns itself with the inner realities of the human mind, and in that lies its great importance. But let us discriminate. Like every purely personal doctrine it contains, in relation to the facts and causes of society, a certain quietism. It withdraws the mind from corporate action and lays emphasis on corporate thought. But it recognizes no corporate enemy. To be an opponent of capitalism as such, is, in this philosophy, as quaint and crude and crusty as to be an anti-suffragist or a believer in politics (for it has become the fashion to believe with fervor in the franchise and scarcely to believe at all in what the franchise stands for).

There is then a certain danger in the creative pragmatism of this particular time. If it actually does penetrate to the head men of the world, if it is able to generate what I suppose may be called a "moral equivalent" of duty—and there is almost a probability that it will—the hazard is won. If it does not—and many keen thinkers and men of action are obdurate—then we shall simply have the fait accompli with compound interest. What if it should turn out in the end, after the best brains of socialism had all withdrawn from the economic programme of socialism, that capitalism grows all the greener in the sunlight of their tacit consent? There is Congress, there is Parliament, and there they propose to remain. Suppose they are not converted from the top? Is it altogether wise to stop persecuting them from the bottom?

So much before I pass on. This comment does not qualify the teaching of Wells. It merely supplements it from the economic side, and the supplement seems to me an important one.

Of a piece with his whole point of view is that he calls the right sociological method not a scientific but an artistic method: it consists of the making and comparing of Utopias. This idea he sets forth in his paper The So-called Science of Sociology. "What is called the scientific method," he says, "the method of observation, of theory about these observations, experiments in verification of that theory and confirmation or modification, really 'comes off' in the sciences in which the individuality of the units can be pretty completely ignored." The method that is all-important in the primary physical sciences where the individuality of atoms and molecules may conveniently be ignored for the sake of practical truth, becomes in his view proportionately untrue as the sciences in their gradation approach the human world. "We cannot," he says in First and Last Things, "put humanity into a museum and dry it for examination; our one still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it and nothing in the real world with which to compare it. We have only the remotest idea of its 'life-cycle' and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny." And in the paper I have just mentioned he speaks of the Social Idea as a thing "struggling to exist and realize itself in a world of egotisms, animals, and brute matter.... Now I submit it is not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavor to disentangle and express one's personal version of that idea, and to measure realities from the standpoint of that realization. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias—and their exhaustive criticism—is the proper and distinctive method of sociology." This notion of sociology as properly artistic in method and diagnostic in aim indicates his main divergence from the methods and aims of Comte and Spencer.

And so one turns to his own illustration of this belief, A Modern Utopia. It is a beautiful Utopia, beautifully seen and beautifully thought; and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in News from Nowhere. Morris, of course, carries us into a world where right discipline has long since produced right will, so wholly and instinctively socialized that men can afford to be as free as anarchists would have the unsocialized men of our own time, a world such as Goethe had in mind when he said: "There is in man a force, a spring of goodness which counterbalances egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a moment suddenly be active in all men, the earth would at once be free from evil." Well, that is the miracle which has in some way just taken place before the curtain goes up on most Utopias; and I think that Wells has never been more skilful than in keeping this miracle quietly in his bag of tricks and devising meanwhile a plausible transition between us and that better world. It all happens in a moment and we are there. By an amazing legerdemain of logic he leaps the gap and presents us with a planet which at every point tallies with our own. It is a planet which does not contain a State but is a State, the flexible result of a free social gesture.

Mankind in the Making should be taken as introductory to A Modern Utopia. It is the sketch of a method towards attaining such a world state. It is a kind of treatise on education based on the assumption that "our success or failure with the unending stream of babies is the measure of our civilization." It opens with a complete repudiation of "scientific" breeding, as a scheme which ignores the uniqueness of individual cases and the heterogeneous nature of human ideals. "We are," says Wells, "not a bit clear what points to breed for, and what points to breed out;" while the interplay of strong and varied personalities we desire is contradictory to any uniform notions of beauty, capacity, and sanity, which thus cannot be bred for, so to speak, in the abstract. But in A Modern Utopia he outlines certain conditions limiting parentage, holding it necessary that in order to be a parent a man must be above a certain minimum of capacity and income, failing which he is indebted to the State for the keep of his children. Motherhood is endowed and becomes in this way a normal and remunerative career, which renders the mother capable of giving her time to the care and education of her children, as millions are not in a wage-earning civilization, and makes both her and her children independent of the ups and downs of her husband. His very detailed suggestions about the education of young children (illustrated also in The Food of the Gods) are at once a reminiscence of Rabelais and an anticipation of Madame Montessori. He insists upon uniform pronunciation (a very important matter in England, where diversity of language is one of the bulwarks of a rigid class-system), the universality and constant revision of text-books, the systematic reorganization of public library and bookselling methods, with a view to making the race think as a whole. He urges the necessity of rescuing literature from the accidents of the book-market by endowing critical reviews, chairs for the discussion of contemporary thought, and qualified thinkers and writers regardless of their special bias or principles. To strike a mean between the British abuse of government by hereditary privilege and the American abuse of government by electoral machines he ingeniously proposes the election of officials by the jury method, twenty or thirty men being set aside by lot to determine the proper holders of office. And he is convinced of the importance in a democracy of abundant honors, privileges, even titles, and abundant opportunities for fruitful leisure.

I have already spoken of his belief that the right sociological method is the creation and comparison of individual Utopias. Thus his own free-hand sketch of a better world is, in fact, a criticism of all previous works of the kind. As distinguished from them the modern Utopia, he says, has to present not a finally perfect stage but a hopefully ascending one; it has to present men not as uniform types but as conflicting individualities with a common bond; and moreover it has to occupy, not some remote island or province "over the range" but a whole planet. The Utopia of Wells is a world which differs from the present world in one fundamental respect only—it has one initial advantage: that every individual in it has been started right, in the degree in which the collective knowledge of the world has rendered that possible.

But there is no need for me to say anything more about these books. They are the free and suggestive motions of a mind inexhaustibly fertile and given to many devices. Anyone who has read Wells at all is aware of his ingenuity, his equal capacity for large schemes and minute details, his truly Japanese belief in radical changes, once they are seen to be necessary and possible. And indeed the details of social arrangement follow naturally and profusely enough, once you get the frame of mind that wishes them. Wells in his Utopia presupposes the frame of mind. In short, he puts education first; he believes that the essential problems of the present are not economic but psychological.