The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

Yet the "human interest," as it is called, was there from the outset, side by side with this main theoretic interest in the scientific and socialistic possibilities of life. The series of novels began almost as early as the series of romances. Two "streams of tendency" run side by side throughout the earlier writings of Wells—streams of tendency which meet fully for the first time in Tono-Bungay, and have formed a single main current in the novels subsequent to that. On the one hand was the stream of constructive theory, not yet brought into contact with human nature, on the other the stream of "human interest," not yet brought into contact with constructive theory. Mr. Hoopdriver, of The Wheels of Chance, and Kipps, are typical of this earlier fiction, specimens of muddled humanity as such, one might say, quite unmitigated by the train of thought, the possibility of doing something with muddled humanity, which was growing more and more urgent in the romances.

In Tono-Bungay, as I have said, one sees the union of these two trains of interest, muddled humanity being represented in Uncle Ponderevo, constructive theory in George Ponderevo. And in all the subsequent novels this fusion continues. The background in each case is the static world of muddle from which Wells is always pushing off into the open sea of possibilities, the foreground being occupied by a series of men and women who represent this dynamic forward movement. And the philosophy of Wells has finally come to port in human nature.

"Few modern socialists," he says somewhere, "present their faith as a complete panacea, and most are now setting to work in earnest upon those long-shirked preliminary problems of human interaction through which the vital problem of a collective head and brain can alone be approached." And elsewhere he says: "Our real perplexities are altogether psychological. There are no valid arguments against a great-spirited socialism but this, that people will not. Indolence, greed, meanness of spirit, the aggressiveness of authority, and above all jealousy, jealousy from pride and vanity, jealousy for what we esteem our possessions, jealousy for those upon whom we have set the heavy fetters of our love, a jealousy of criticism and association, these are the real obstacles to those brave large reconstructions, those profitable abnegations and brotherly feats of generosity that will yet turn human life—of which our individual fives are but the momentary parts—into a glad, beautiful and triumphant coöperation all round this sunlit world."

Inevitably then he sees the world as divided roughly into two worlds, and human nature as of two general kinds. There is the static world, the normal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself, together with the great mass of men who compose and sanction it; and there is the ever-advancing better world, pushing through this outworn husk in the minds and wills of creative humanity. In one of his essays he has figured this opposition as between what he calls the Normal Social Life and the Great State. And in one of those dégagé touch-and-go sketches in which he so often sums up the history of humankind, he has presented the Normal Social Life as a "common atmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domestic intimacy," an immemorial state of being which implies on the part of men and women a perpetual acquiescence—a satisfied or hopeless consent—to the end of time. But as against this normal conception of life he points out that modern circumstances have developed in men, through machinery, the division of labor, etc., a "surplus life" which does not fit into the Normal scheme at all, and that humanity has returned "from a closely tethered to a migratory existence." And he observes: "The history of the immediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history of the conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions, the boundaries, the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditions established during the home-keeping, localized era of mankind's career."

Two conceptions of life, two general types of character, two ethical standards are here set in opposition, and this opposition is maintained throughout the novels of Wells. Thus on the title-page of The New Machiavelli appears the following quotation from Professor James: "It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-minded people ... do both exist." In A Modern Utopia this division appears typically in the two men from our world who play off against one another, the botanist and the narrator of the story. The "tender-mindedness" of the botanist is exhibited in the fact that he cares nothing for a better world if it is to deprive him of the muddled, inferior and sentimental attachments of his accustomed life, and prefers them to the austerer, braver prospect that is offered him. "Tough-mindedness," on the other hand, is above all the state of living, not in one's attachments, habits, possessions, not in the rut of least resistance, but in the sense of one's constructive and coöperative relationship to the whole sum of things, in being "a conscious part of that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe." And indeed the constant theme of the novels of Wells might be described as tough-mindedness with lapses.

For the heroes of Wells do lapse: they pay that tribute to "human nature" and the overwhelming anti-social forces in the world and in man himself. They fall, as a rule, from "virtue" to the service of secret and personal ends. Cherchez la femme. Mr. Lewisham, insufficiently prepared and made to feel that society does not want him, has to give up his disinterested ambitions in science and scramble for money to support a wife whom instinct has urged him, however imprudently, to marry. George Ponderevo gives up science and is forced into abetting his uncle's patent medicine enterprise for the same reason. For the same reason, too, Capes takes to commercial play-writing to support Ann Veronica; and to stand behind the extravagance of Marjorie, Trafford, having discovered in his researches an immensely valuable method of making artificial india-rubber which he is going to make public for the use of society, is persuaded to compromise his honor as a scientist and monopolize his discovery for private gain. In Tono-Bungay the enterprise is a swindling patent medicine, which many business men would refuse to have anything to do with; but in Marriage the proposition belongs to what is called "legitimate business," and it may be well to quote a passage to show the subtlety and, at the same time, from this point of view, the very substantial nature of temptation and sin:

Solomonson had consulted Trafford about this matter at Vevey, and had heard with infinite astonishment that Trafford had already roughly prepared and was proposing to complete and publish, unpatented and absolutely unprotected, first a smashing demonstration of the unsoundness of Behren's claim and then a lucid exposition of just what had to be done and what could be done to make an india-rubber absolutely indistinguishable from the natural product. The business man could not believe his ears.

"My dear chap, positively—you mustn't!" Solomonson had screamed.... "Don't you see all you are throwing away?"

"I suppose it's our quality to throw such things away," said Trafford.... "When men dropped that idea of concealing knowledge, alchemist gave place to chemist, and all that is worth having in modern life, all that makes it better and safer and more hopeful than the ancient life began."

"My dear fellow," said Solomonson, "I know, I know. But to give away the synthesis of rubber! To just shove it out of the window into the street!"... Everything that had made Trafford up to the day of his marriage was antagonistic to such strategic reservations. The servant of science has as such no concern with personal consequences; his business is the steady relentless clarification of knowledge. The human affairs he changes, the wealth he makes or destroys, are no concern of his; once these things weigh with him, become primary, he has lost his honor as a scientific man.

"But you must think of consequences," Solomonson had cried during those intermittent talks at Vevey. "Here you are, shying this cheap synthetic rubber of yours into the world—for it's bound to be cheap! anyone can see that—like a bomb into a market-place. What's the good of saying you don't care about the market-place, that your business is just to make bombs and drop them out of the window? You smash up things just the same. Why! you'll ruin hundreds and thousands of people, people living on rubber shares, people working in plantations, old, inadaptable workers in rubber works...."

"I believe we can do the stuff at tenpence a pound," said Solomonson, leaning back in his chair at last.... "So soon, that is, as we deal in quantity. Tenpence! We can lower the price and spread the market, sixpence by sixpence. In the end—there won't be any more plantations. Have to grow tea."

There we have Eve and the apple brought up to date, sin being the choice of a private and individual good at the expense of the general good. The honor of a doctor or a scientist consists in not concealing and monopolizing discoveries. But why should the line be drawn at doctors and scientists? There is the crux of socialist ethics.

By this type of compromise the actual New Republicans fall short of their Utopian selves, the Samurai. But compromise is well within the philosophy of Wells. "The individual case," he says in First and Last Things, "is almost always complicated by the fact that the existing social and economic system is based upon conditions that the growing collective intelligence condemns as unjust and undesirable, and that the constructive spirit in men now seeks to supersede. We have to live in a provisional state while we dream of and work for a better one." And elsewhere: "All socialists everywhere are like expeditionary soldiers far ahead of the main advance. The organized State that should own and administer their possessions for the general good has not arrived to take them over; and in the meanwhile they must act like its anticipatory agents according to their lights and make things ready for its coming."

But if the New Republican is justified in compromising himself for the means of subsistence, how much more in the matter of love! "All for love, and the world well lost" might be written over several of Wells's novels. But, in reality, is the world lost at all under these conditions? On the contrary, it is gained, and the more unconsciously the better, in babies. Love belongs to the future and the species with more finality than the greatest constructive work of the present, and the heroines of Wells are inordinately fond of babies. When Schopenhauer analyzed the metaphysics of love he showed that natural selection is a quite inevitable thing seeking its own. In Wells love is equally irresistible and direct. Whenever it appears in his books it makes itself unmistakably known, and, having done so, it cuts its way straight to its consummation, through every obstacle of sentiment, affection, custom, and conventionality. It is as ruthless as the Last Judgment, and like the Last Judgment it occurs only once.