Why then does it appear promiscuous? The answer to this question refers one back to the underlying contention of Wells that there are two kinds of human beings and two corresponding ethics, and that in the end the New Republican who has become aware of himself cannot consort with the Normal Social breed. But in actual life this standard becomes entangled with many complexities. Just as, in a world of commercial competition, it is the lot of most of those who try to give themselves whole-heartedly to disinterested work that they place themselves at such a disadvantage as ultimately to have to make a choice between work and love, so the pressure of society and the quality of human nature itself create entanglements of every kind. It is the nature of life that one grows only gradually to the secure sense of a personal aim, and that meanwhile day by day one has given hostages to fortune. To wake up and find oneself suddenly the master of a purpose is without doubt, in the majority of cases, to find oneself mortgaged beyond hope to the existing fact. The writer who sets out to make his way temporarily and as a stepping-stone by journalism finds himself in middle age with ample means to write what he wishes to write only to find also that he has become for good and all—a journalist! And so it is with lovers. Only in the degree to which free will remains a perpetual and present faith can "love and fine thinking" remain themselves; free of their attachments, free of their obligations, and mortgages, and discounts. That is the quality of a decent marriage, and the end of a marriage that is not decent.
It is no business of mine to justify the sexual ethics of Wells. But there is a difference between a fact and an intention, and what I have just said serves to explain the intention. Consider, in the light of it, a few of his characters, both in and out of marriage. Ann Veronica from the first frankly owns that she is not in love with Manning, but every kind of social hypnotism is brought into motion to work on her ignorance of life and to confuse her sense of free-will. George Ponderevo simply outgrows Marion; but you cannot expect him not to grow, and who is responsible for the limited, furtive, second-hand world in which Marion has lived and which has irrevocably moulded her? Margaret's world, too, is a second-hand world, though on a socially higher plane: she lives in a pale dream of philanthropy and Italian art, shocked beyond any mutual understanding by everything that really belongs in the first-hand world of her husband. These characters meet and pass one another like moving scales; they never stand on quite the same plane. And then the inevitable always occurs. For, just as the Children of the Food cannot consort with the little folk they promise to supersede, so it appears to be a fixed part of the programme of Wells that New Republicans can only love other New Republicans with success.
He implies this indeed in A Modern Utopia:
"A man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow it, must either leave the Samurai to marry her, or induce her to accept what is called the Woman's Rule, which, while it exempts her from the severer qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen into a working harmony with his."
"Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?"
"He must leave either her or the order."
"There is matter for a novel or so in that."
"There has been matter for hundreds."
Wells has written six himself. Love and Mr. Lewisham, Ann Veronica, Tono-Bungay, The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends, are all variations on this theme. In one of these alone life's double motive succeeds in establishing itself, and it is for this reason that Marriage, to my thinking the weakest of his novels from an artistic point of view, is the most important concrete presentation of the philosophy of Wells. It is an inferior book, but it gives one the sense of a problem solved. By passing through a necessary yet feasible discipline, Trafford and Marjorie bridge over the gap between haphazard human nature and the better nature of socialism, and become Samurai in fact.
These entanglements of the actual world would be an overwhelming obstacle to a socialism less vigorous than that of Wells. But obstacles give edge to things, and for a man who loves order no one could have pictured disorder with more relish than he. Only a pure theorist could regret the artistic zest with which he portrays our muddled world. Running amuck was a constant theme in his early writings; his comets ran amuck, and so did Mr. Bessel, and there is no more relished wanton scene than that of the Invisible Man running amuck through the Surrey villages. Intentionally or not, this relish in disorder reinforces the prime fact about his view of order. He abhors the kind of order which is often ignorantly confounded with the socialist aim, the order which classifies and standardizes. He desires a collective consciousness only through the exercise of a universally unimpeded free will, and he would rather have no collectiveness at all than one that implies the sacrifice of this free will. He wishes to work only on the most genuine human stuff. This was the basis of his break with the Fabian Society; it is the basis of his dislike of bureaucratic methods which deprive people of beer when they want beer. It defines his notion of the true method of socialism as first of all an education of the human will toward voluntary right discipline.
His appeal, then, is a personal one. He has proved this indeed by his repudiation of all attempts to embody in practice his proposed order of voluntary nobility, the Samurai. Certain groups of young people actually organized themselves upon the Rule that he had outlined, and it was this that led him to see how entirely his ideal had been personal and artistic rather than practical. Anyone at all familiar with religious history and psychology will see how inevitably any such group would tend to emphasize the Rule and the organization rather than the socially constructive spirit for which the whole was framed, and how the organization would itself separate from the collective life of the world and become a new sect among the many sects. It was the same instinct that led Emerson, Transcendental communist as he was, to look askance at Brook Farm. It has been the want of an equal tact in eminent religious minds that has made society a warfare of sect and opinion.
When one tries to focus the nature of his appeal one recalls a passage in one of his books where he sums up the ordinary mind of the world and the function which all socialism bears to this mind:
It is like a very distended human mind; it is without a clear aim; it does not know except in the very vaguest terms what it wants to do; it has impulses, it has fancies; it begins and forgets. In addition, it is afflicted with a division within itself that is strictly analogous to that strange mental disorder which is known to psychologists as multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the whole of itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name and address. Part of it thinks of itself as one great thing, as, let us say, Germany; another thinks of itself as Catholicism, another as the white race, or Judæa. At times one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind as incurable dementia—a chaos of mental elements, haunted by invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas.... In its essence the socialistic movement amounts to this: it is an attempt in this warring chaos of a collective mind to pull itself together, to develop and establish a governing idea of itself. It is the development of the collective self-consciousness of humanity.
Certainly the road to this can only be through a common understanding. The willing and unwilling servitudes of men, the institutions of society that place love and work in opposition to one another, the shibboleths of party, the aggressive jingoisms of separate peoples, the immemorial conspiracy by which men have upheld the existing fact, these things do spring from the want of imagination, the want of energetic faith, the want of mutual understanding. To this inner and personal problem Wells has applied himself. Can life be ventilated, can the mass of men be awakened to a sense of those laws of social gravitation and the transmutation of energy by which life is proved a myriad-minded organism, can the ever-growing sum of human experience and discovery clear up the dark places within society and within man? Among those who have set themselves to the secular solution of these questions—and I am aware of the limits of any secular solution—there are few as effective as Wells.