As for the rest, we shall conserve the best that THE CENTURY has stood for in the past. We shall offer a larger proportion of fiction than formerly, and shall bring it as near to truth, and make it as interpretative of life, as conditions allow. We shall maintain illustration at the highest point modern method will permit. We shall cultivate history and poetry and the essay. We shall explore conditions at home and abroad. We shall make this magazine, fearlessly and in the white light of to-day, as nearly the magazine of the century as courage and devotion and eyes that see and minds that shrink not can do.
IN LIGHTER VEIN
WORLD REFORMERS—AND DUSTERS
THOUGH often entranced by that brilliant group of cosmic problem-solvers—Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Chesterton, and others—I insist on my personal irresponsibility for the state of Mankind as a whole. These men are always nursing civilization. They regard it as a sort of potted plant which they fear to find frost-bitten of a morning. This is especially clear in the latest writings of Mr. H. G. Wells, who would tidy up the whole world at once. At one swoop he would remove the shirts from our clothes-lines and the errors from our minds. The world is too large for his feather duster; he had thought to find it a smaller planet that he might have kept at least half-way clean. Now see what he has on his hands—everything in a mess, Africa backward, China careless, the sex relation by no means straightened out, socialism, imperialism, industrialism, planless progressivism littering up things, and nobody caring a rap—at times it seems to the good housewifely soul almost too much for one person to manage. And then that infernal human diversity—slow minds, stupid minds, minds made up too soon, or not at all, closed minds, tough minds, tender minds—what’s to be done with them? He burns to do something. At least he says he does.
In one of his books he describes himself in fancy as going about the country and, with the keenest joy, spearing Anglican bishops. Though I am myself a stranger to the sport, I believe the pleasure of spearing bishops is exaggerated. For once begun it must lead logically to a daily drudgery of slaughter among the great crowds of folks who are not intellectually independent or morally daring—lead, in short, to the massacre of those who are not particularly exciting, a large task and tedious.
I wonder if we commonplace persons are not right after all in a certain instinct of distrust toward these gifted writers. We believe implicitly in their fancies and not at all in their facts. We believe in the world they have invented and not in the world they have observed; and we distrust them utterly as world-pushers. The signs are plain—terribly plain sometimes—that it is when they have the smallest notions that they say their largest things.