The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

When, in New Worlds for Old, Wells set himself to explain socialism as he conceived it, he assumed as his first principle a certain Good Will in men, an operating will steadily working in life toward betterment. In other words, he supplemented the ordinary socialist idea of economic determinism, which may or may not inevitably bring about order on the industrial plane, with a constructive purpose, which, in his view, can alone bring about the salvation of the race. But this Good Will is not a fatality; it exists only by virtue of remaining a conscious effort. In his experiments in Time and Space Wells had accustomed himself to seeing that the immense possibilities of what might be, so far as the universe is concerned, predetermined things, were, so far as man is concerned, matters of chance. To human society at least, if not to our planet, the most unpropitious things are possible in the future; and there is no reason to suppose that the destiny of the universe, which at every turn cuts athwart the destiny of every species contained in it, should, left to itself, work favorably to man.

This notion is in itself quite outside socialism and does not necessarily lead into socialism. It was Huxley who said that the world and the universe, society and nature, are demonstrably at cross purposes, and that man has to pit his microcosm against the macrocosm. Huxley, in his famous lecture on Ethics and Evolution, went on from this to a kind of informal and unavowed socialism, figuring society as a well-tended garden preserved by man's careful art from the ravages and invasions of that hostile world of chance, with its gigantic weeds and blind impulsions, which everywhere lies waiting round about it. Our work, he implied, must be in every way to minimize for ourselves the elements of chance, to become aware of our species in a collective sense, battling with nature and moulding our own future.

I do not suppose that Wells consciously adopted this idea from Huxley. In itself that would be of little consequence, except so far as it shows the continuity of thought and the development of socialism out of science. But Wells was for several years a pupil of Huxley, and it is reasonably plain that the mood in which he wrote his scientific romances was strongly impregnated by Huxley's influence. The sinister, incalculable, capricious, destructive forces outside man are symbolized, as I have said, by those colliding comets, invading Martians, and monstrous creatures among which the earlier Wells moved and had his being; just as the sinister, incalculable, capricious forces within man which urge him to destruction form so great a part of his later novels. Most of his heroes (typified in The New Machiavelli) come to grief through the blind irrational impulsions within themselves. And he is equally haunted by what he has called the "Possible Collapse of Civilization." I do not know how much this is due to an evangelical childhood, in which Time, Death, and Judgment are always imminent; how much to an overbalancing study of science at the expense of the humanities; how much to an overdeveloped sense of the hazard that life is; and how much to plain facts. But there it is: it has always been a fixed conviction with Wells that man personal and man social is dancing on a volcano.

Therefore he has come to socialism not by the ordinary course but by a route obscure and lonely. The sense of possible catastrophe and collapse, the folly of leaving things to chance, the infinite waste and peril of committing our affairs to nature rather than to art—these are some of the negative reasons that have made it impossible for him to fall in with the non-socialist ideal in human affairs, that "broadening down from precedent to precedent" which he calls "muddling through": a doctrine that is wholly compatible with a world of haphazard motives, accidental fortunes, accidental management, a democratic individualism that places power in irresponsible hands and suppresses talents that society cannot afford to lose, a governmental system that concerns itself with legal and financial arrangements, experts with no sense of a common purpose, patriotisms that thrive on international bad feelings, and that competitive principle which succeeds in the degree in which it ignores the general welfare—a chaos of private aims, private virtues, private motives, without any collective human design at all.

In the light of these opposed ideas of society as a thing of Chance and as a thing of Design, let me run over two or three of the tales of Wells.

First of all there is the special laissez faire of pure economic determinism. The Time Machine pictures a possible result of the Marxian process which has led to an irrevocable division of classes. The rich, who were, in the old time, in comparison with the poor, disciplined and united, have long since reached a point where work and fear are for them things of the past. They occupy the surface of the earth, and idleness and futility have made them light-headed, puny, helpless creatures, stirring about and amusing themselves in the sunlight. The poor, meanwhile, driven underground where they burrow and tend machinery and provide, have lost all human semblance and become white, horrible ghoul-like creatures that see in the dark; at night they swarm out of their holes and feed upon the creatures of the upper air. The one class has lost all power to defend itself and the other all pity to spare, and gradually, year after year, mankind comes to its end.

Then there is the ordinary laissez faire of capitalism, a result of which is pictured in The Sleeper Awakes. The Sleeper, one recalls, awakens four generations hence to find himself the master-capitalist, owner of half the world, and the world is one where capital and labor have irrevocably destroyed the possibility of a constructive human scheme. But the responsibility for that future is very ingeniously placed upon us of the present time; for Graham's ownership of the world is the outcome of one of those irresponsible whims that in our day characterize the whole individualistic view of property. His cousin, having no family to inherit his possessions, has left the whole in trust for the Sleeper, half in jest, expecting him never to waken; and in time the trustees of this vested fund have become the irresponsible bureaucrats of the world. "We were making the future," says the awakened Sleeper, looking out upon this monstrous outcome of whim and laissez faire; "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making."

Consider also The Empire of the Ants, in which Wells has figured a possible reconquest of man by nature, owing to the greater collective discipline of at least one non-human species. He imagines a species of poisonous ants with only a little greater faculty of organized co-operative intelligence than ordinary ants, which have terrorized and finally routed several villages of unintelligent and unorganized Brazilian natives far up the Amazon. The Brazilian government sends against them an outworn inefficient gunboat, with an incompetent captain and a muddle-headed crew; and when they arrive the ants fall upon the only man sent ashore and sting him to death. The captain repeats over and over, "But what can we do?" And at last with tremendous decision he fires a gun at them and retires. The story ends with a report that the ants are swarming all over the interior of Brazil and that nobody knows how to prevent them from occupying the whole of South America.

And then there is The History of Mr. Polly. I ignore for the moment the individual aspect of his case, for Mr. Polly is not merely an individual—he is an emblem of the whole, he is society in concreto. We find him at the opening of the book sitting on a stile, suffering from indigestion and consequently depressed in spirits. It is two o'clock of a Sunday afternoon, and he has just finished his mid-day meal. He has eaten cold potatoes, cold pork, Rashdall's mixed pickles—three gherkins, two onions, a small cauliflower head and several capers; cold suet pudding, treacle and pale cheese, three slices of grey bread, and a jug of beer. He hates himself, he hates his wife, he hates existence. But Mr. Polly's interior, the things that have gone into it and the emotions that rise out of it, are only typical of an entire life that has, to quote Macaulay's eulogy of the British constitution, thought nothing of symmetry and much of convenience.

Each of the novels of Wells, in one aspect at least, presents the accidental nature of our world in some one typical case. Love and Mr. Lewisham shows how in the case of one of those young students who have, as things are, no chance at all, but who are the natural builders of a better world, the constructive possibility is crushed by the primary will to live. At eighteen Mr. Lewisham is an assistant master at one of those incompetent private-enterprise schools which for Wells (as also for Matthew Arnold) epitomize our haphazard civilization. He has a "future"—the Schema which he pins to his bedroom wall promises unimaginable achievements. He marries, and you feel that he should marry and that he has married the right person. But then with interests divided he has to find money and in doing so he fails in his examinations. At last it becomes a choice between his career and his children, between the present and the future, and the children and the future win. Society loses just in the degree that Lewisham himself loses, for he was fitted to be a builder; and society has first, in the face of all his efforts, imperfectly equipped him and then consistently refused to take advantage of his talents.