The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

That has been the office of socialism, and just so far as that proof has been established socialism has played its part. Now the point I want to make about Wells is that in him one sees already in an almost precocious form the second stage of this process. In him this new world of intelligence is already exuberant with instinct; the social machine has become a personality; that cold abstraction the world has become in his hands a throbbing, breathing, living thing, as alive, awake, aware of itself, as engaging, adventurous, free, critical, well-primed, continent, and all-of-a-piece as a strong man running a race. People never felt nature as a personality before Wordsworth showed them that it was, or a locomotive before Kipling wrote McAndrew's Hymn; and it seems to me that Wells has done for the social organism very much what Wordsworth did for nature, discovering in a thing previously felt to be inanimate a matter for art and a basis for religious emotion.

But if the world is a personality it is a very stupid, sluggish, unawakened personality, differing from nature in this respect, that we ourselves compose the whole of it and have it in our hands to do what we will with it. It has always been out of joint, a great slipshod Leviathan, at sixes and sevens, invertebrate and fungus-brained. Just so is the average man, sunk in routine, oppressed with microscopic tasks that give birth one to another, his stomach at war with his head, his legs unwilling to exercise him, resentful of his own capacity not to be dull. But certain happier moments bring him an exuberant quickened life in which routine tasks fall nimbly from his fingers and he is aware of a wide, humorous, generous, enlightened vision of things; he pulls himself together, his parts reinforce one another, his mind wakens, his heart opens, his fancy stirs, he is all generosity and happiness, capable of anything that is disinterested, fine, and becoming to a free man. It is in these moments that individual men have done all the things which make up the real history of this planet.

If individual men are capable of this amazing experience, then why not the world? That is the spirited question Wells has propounded in a hundred different forms, in his earlier, more theoretical, and more optimistic writings suggesting that society as a whole should turn over a new leaf, and even picturing it as doing so, in his later work, more experienced and less hopeful but with a compensating fervor, picturing the attempt of delegated individuals to act on society's behalf. I do not wish at this point to become pious and solemn in tone; that would be inept in connection with Wells. But I do wish to make it plain that if he is devoid of those grander traits which spring from the sense of being "tenon'd and mortised" upon something beyond change, if his strength lies wholly in his intelligence, the intelligence itself in Wells is an amazing organ, a troubled and rapturous organ, an organ as visionary and sensitive as the soul of a Christian saint. That is why I have said that in him the new world, governed by the intelligence, is already exuberant with instinct; and anyone who doubts that he has lavished a very genuine religious instinct upon the social process itself and in the dream of a society free, magnanimous and seemly, should turn to the passage where he describes Machiavelli, after the heat and pettiness of the day, retiring into his chamber alone, putting on his dress of ceremony and sitting down before his table in the presence of that magnificent thought.

The mass of men have acted more consistently than they know on the principle that the whole world is nothing in comparison with one soul, for their politics and economic science, solemn as they appear, are as frivolous and secondary as if they actually did believe fervently that heaven is their true home and the world a bad business of little account. In all that concerns private virtue and the private life, in religion, poetry, their lawyer, their doctor, their broker, they exact the last degree of excellence and efficiency, but they trust to the blind enterprise of individual men to push mankind chaotically forward little by little. We are in fact so wonderfully made that if our grocer tells us in the morning that he has no fresh eggs he throws us into a deeper despondency than six readings of the Inferno could ever do. And that explains why so few people can extend themselves imaginatively into the greater circles that surround them, why, on the social plane, we never think of demanding wisdom from politicians, why we never dream of remembering that they should belong to the august family of Plutarch, why it is not the profound views of wise men and the brilliant discoveries of science that fill the newspapers, but the incredibly banal remarks of this president and that prime minister, why presidents and prime ministers in a society that lives from hand to mouth are so much more important than poets and prophets, and why statesmanship has gathered about itself a literature so incomparably trivial and dull. Socialists, indeed, just because they alone are serious about the world, are apt to be the least mundane in spirit; they are, as Wells has himself said, "other-worldly" about the world itself.

But indeed I should make a mistake were I to over-stress the solemnities that underlie the spirit of Wells. In tone he is more profane than sacred, that is to say he is a realist. He wants a world thrillingly alive, curious, exercised, magnanimous, with all its dim corners lighted up, shaken out of its dulness and complacency, keen, elastic, tempered like a fine blade—the counterpart on a grand scale of what he most admires in the individual. "Stephen," says Lady Mary in The Passionate Friends, "promise me. Whatever you become, you promise and swear here and now never to be grey and grubby, never to be humpy and snuffy, never to be respectable and modest and dull and a little fat, like—like everybody." And in First and Last Things he gives the other side of the medal:

Much more to me than the desire to live is the desire to taste life. I am not happy until I have done and felt things. I want to get as near as I can to the thrill of a dog going into a fight or the delight of a bird in the air. And not simply in the heroic field of war and the air do I want to understand. I want to know something of the jolly wholesome satisfaction that a hungry pig must find in its wash. I want to get the fine quintessence of that.

It stands to reason that a spirit of this kind does not consort with any pre-arranged pocket ground-plan, so to speak, of the world as it should be. Of this, to be sure, he is often accused, and he has given us a humorous version of his Utopia as it may appear to certain of his contemporaries:

Mr. G.K. Chesterton mocks valiantly and passionately, I know, against an oppressive and obstinately recurrent anticipation of himself in Socialist hands, hair clipped, meals of a strictly hygienic description at regular hours, a fine for laughing, not that he would want to laugh, and austere exercises in several of the more metallic virtues daily. Mr. Max Beerbohm's conception is rather in the nature of a nightmare, a hopeless, horrid, frozen flight from the pursuit of Mr. Sidney Webb and myself, both of us short, inelegant men, but for all that terribly resolute, indefatigable, incessant to capture him, to drag him off to a mechanical Utopia, and then to take his thumb-mark and his name, number him distinctly in indelible ink, and let him loose (under inspection) in a world of great round lakes of blue lime-water and vistas of white sanitary tiling.

That is a not unjust parody of Wells's Utopia as it would be if he had remained in the circle of his Fabian friends. Being what he is, it bears much the same relation to his idea as that world of harps and crowns and milk and honey bore in the mediæval imagination to the idea of heaven. You have to mingle these notions with your experience of human hearts to realize the inadequacy of symbols. Wells, I suspect, has a fondness for white sanitary tiling, just as plenty of good Christians have found in milk and honey a foretaste of unthinkable felicity; but when it comes to the actual architecture and domestic arrangements of paradise they are both quite willing to take on trust the accommodating good will of God and man. Somehow or other, by the time we have got there, we shall not find it monotonous—to this, at least, one's faith, whatever it may be, ought to be equal.

I have given too few quotations in this book, and now I have left it to a point where if I give any at all it must be to illustrate less the art of Wells as a thing by itself than a train of thought. He is at his best in brief scenes, where all his gifts of humor, satire, characterization and phrase come to a head (think, for example, of Aunt Plessington's speech, the funeral of Mr. Polly's father, the pages dealing with Cousin Nicodemus Frapp's house-hold, and the somewhat prolonged episode of the "reet Staffordshire" cousins in The New Machiavelli); and indeed, so insistent is his point of view that in every one of these episodes one finds in opposition the irrepressible new world of Wells and the stagnant world out of which it springs. One of the best of these scenes, luckily, is brief and connected enough to be quoted as a whole. It is a picture of the tea-hour in the servants' hall at Bladesover House.