Merely to dismiss as dumb folly an all but universal contention of this kind (no doubt in the back of people's minds when they say that socialism, for instance, is "against human nature") is to beg the whole question of intellectualism itself. For, if it could be conclusively shown that any view of life not incidentally but by its nature emasculated life and destroyed the roots of character, then of course, no matter how rationally self-evident it might be and how much confusion and suffering it might avert, it would never even justify its own reason for being—it would never succeed, the best part of human nature would oppose it to the end of time and the intelligence itself would be discredited. And indeed to the man of experience rather than the man of ideas, just because of his rich humanity, just because he never passes out of the personal range, belong the ideal things, morality, philosophy, art. Like charity, these things "begin at home"; and whenever (as in pragmatism, when pragmatism ceases to be a method and claims to be an interpretation of life) they are approached not from the side of experience but from the side of ideas they cease to have any real substance. Morality has no substance when it springs from the mind instead of the conscience, art when it appeals to the mind instead of the perceptions; and as to philosophy, what is any scheme of things that springs out of the head of a man who is not himself wise? It is a certain condemnation of Bergson, for example, that he would never pass muster in a group of old fishermen smoking their pipes on the end of a pier. Not that they would be expected in any case to know what he was talking about, but that his fibre so plainly is the fibre not of a wise but of a clever man and that in everything, as Emerson said, you must have a source higher than your tap.
That is why, as it seems to me, Wells ought not to be considered from any of these absolute standpoints. He has put before us not so much a well-wrought body of artistic work, or a moral programme, or an explanation of life—words quite out of place in connection with him—as a certain new spirit, filled with all sorts of puzzled intimations of a new beauty and even a new religion to be generated out of a new order of things that is only glimpsed at present. And the point I should like to make about this spirit is that it is entirely irrelevant to the values of life as we know them, but that it may in the end prove to have contributed to an altogether fresh basis for human values.
To illustrate what I mean by this irrelevance as regards present values and this possibility as regards future values let me turn to that long brilliant passage in The New Machiavelli where Remington goes from club to club, passing in review the spiritual possibilities of each political party, and finds nothing but a desolation of triviality, pomposity, confusion, and "utterly damned old men." Consider the contempt and hopelessness that fill his mind. One has to forget entirely the ordinary man's view of politics, sincerely held as it is; one has to think of politics as a means of straightening out and re-engendering a whole world of confused anguish before one can see any justification for this righteous wit and savage indignation against the dulness of leaders. Considered by the current values of life in which politics are regarded as an effect of man's incompetence rather than as a cause of his virtue, treated intensively, as a novelist of experience rather than of ideas would have treated them, in what a different light each of these "utterly damned old men" would appear, each one a tiny epic of tragic and comic efforts, disappointments, misconceptions, providing one in the end with how much of an excuse for blame, ridicule or contempt! Everything indeed depends upon where a given mind chooses to lay emphasis. In this scene Wells has judged everything by his ideal of a great society, just as Conrad, faced with the same material, would have judged everything by his ideal of personal character. Conrad would have used those men to give us an understanding of life as it is, whereas Wells has used them simply to throw into relief his idea of what life ought to be. Conrad would have created a work of art, illustrated a moral programme, and interpreted life. Wells, admittedly a clever caricaturist, only rises above the level of a clever caricaturist according as we accept the validity of his ideal and share the spirit in which he writes. Like many children of light, Wells is not wise in his own generation. But perhaps another generation will justify him.
If Wells had lingered in these deep realities of his own time he would have been a greater artist. And indeed so marked has been his own development away from the world of ideas and toward the world of experience that were he to begin afresh it is likely that he would resemble the type of novelist of which I have taken Conrad as an example far more than his former self. Of socialism he has abandoned all the theories and most of the schemes and retained only the frame of mind. He has taken year by year a more intensive view of life, he has grown too conscious of the inertia that impedes ideas and the overwhelming immediacies of the actual world to be called glib and easy any more. "How little and feeble is the life of man, a thing of chances, preposterously unable to find the will to realize even the most timid of its dreams!" he says in one of his latest novels, and if he has kept alive his faith in ideas, who will deny that he has begun to count the cost of it?
From this side, I think, it is no longer possible for anyone to assail him, so frankly has he given hostages to "actuality." It is from the other side, his own side, and especially in the light of his own ideal, that an answer is required for the slackness which has come upon him and which is very marked in his recent novels. Is it possible to ignore the fact that since he wrote The New Machiavelli the work of Wells has lived on its capital and lost the passionate curiosity and personal conviction that made him the force he was in our epoch? Always unwilling to check his talent and publish only the results of his genuine mental progress, he has become, in spite of splendid moments, too much of the common professional novelist, dealing with levels and phases of life where he obviously does not belong, astray from his own natural point of intense contact with things. I want to avoid the usual habit of critics who think it their business to put authors in their places, but is it not a fact that Wells understands the Kippses and Pollys far better than the lords and ladies of England and that he was at his best in elaborating a bridge—a wonderful visionary bridge—between the little world of dumb routine and the great world of spacious initiatives? Carlyle with his Great Man theory, forged out of his own travail and weakness, in the end fell on his knees before the illusion of lordship. Fifteen years ago one might have predicted the same future for the Samurai of Wells, not because the Samurai are themselves equivocal but because Wells is an Englishman. There so plainly to the English mind the great gentlemen are, the men who can and the men who never do! Towards this Circe of the English imagination Wells has travelled with a fatal consistency, and the result to be foreseen was first of all fatuity and in the end extinction.
After he had written The New Machiavelli Wells had reached a point where his ideas, in order to be saved, had to be rescued from himself. To believe that life can be straightened out by the intelligence is necessarily to have "travelled light," in a measure; too much experience is the end of that frame of mind. In Tono-Bungay and The New Machiavelli ideas and experience met in a certain invisible point —that is the marvel which has made these books unique and, I suppose, permanent; the greatest possible faith in ideas was united with the greatest possible grasp of everything that impedes them. One had therefore a sense of tragic struggle, in which the whole life of our time was caught up and fiercely wrestled with; one had the feeling that here was the greatest moment in the life of a writer suddenly become great. But with these books some secret virtue seems to have passed out of Wells. Since then his ideas have been hardly more than a perfunctory repetition and his experience more and more remote and unreal; and looking back one seems to discover something highly symbolic in the tragical conquest of ideas by passion with which The New Machiavelli concludes.
But indeed Wells was always a man whose ideas were greater than himself. "I stumble and flounder," says George Ponderevo, "but I know that over all these merry immediate things, there are other things that are great and serene, very high, beautiful things—the reality. I haven't got it, but it's there nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love with unimaginable goddesses." And just for this reason the spirit which in his great days possessed him is independent of any fate that may befall Wells himself and his art. More than this, by frankly and fully testing his ideas in a life-and-death struggle with reality he has, even at the cost of his own shipwreck, removed from the cause of ideas the greatest reproach which has always been brought against it. Revolutionists, doctrinaires, idealogues have notoriously failed to test the validity of their ideas even in the face of their own private passions and confusions; they have rarely considered for a moment that their own lives totally unfit them for supposing that men are naturally good and that to make reason prevail is one of the simplest operations in the world. Wells, on the other hand, has consistently shown that theory divorced from practice is a mode of charlatanism, that "love and fine thinking" must go together, and that precisely because of man's individual incapacity to live, as things are, with equal honesty the life of ideas and the life of experience, the cause he has at heart must be taken out of the hands of the individual and made to form a common impersonal will and purpose in the mind of the race as a whole.
Intellectualism, in fact, the view that life can be determined by ideas (and of this socialism is the essence) if it can be justified at all has to be justified in the face of all current human values. It is based on an assumption, a grand and generous assumption, I maintain, and one that has to take what is called a sporting chance with all the odds against it. This assumption is, that on the whole human nature can be trusted to take care of itself while the surplus energy of life, commonly absorbed in the struggle against incapacity, sloth, perversity, and disorder ("original sin," to sum it all up), is released for the organization of a better scheme for mankind; and further, that this better scheme, acting on a race naturally capable of a richer and fuller life, will have the effect on men as a whole that re-environing has on any cramped, ill-nourished, unventilated organism, and that art, religion, morals (all that makes up the substance and meaning of life) instead of being checked and blighted in the process will in the end, strong enough to bear transplantation, be re-engendered on a finer and freer basis. This, in a word, is the contention of the intellectual, a splendid gambler's chance, on which the future rests, and to which people have committed themselves more than they know. It is a bridge thrown out across the void, resting at one end on the good intentions of mankind and relying at the other upon mankind's fulfilling those good intentions. It is based like every great enterprise of the modern world upon credit, and its only security is the fact that men thus far and on the whole have measured up to each enlargement of their freedom and responsibility.
To feel the force of this one has to think of the world as a world. Just here has been the office of socialism, to show that society is a colossal machine of which we are all parts and that men in the most exact sense are members one of another. In the intellectualist scheme of things that mathematical proof has to come first; it has to take root and bury itself and become the second nature of humankind before the new world of instinct can spring out of it and come to blossom.