Is there any real escape from the fact that for each of us the one thing that actually exists is our individual consciousness? It is our universe; and if its trembling flame is blown out, that particular universe is no more. If its limits of "individuation" are irrecoverably lost, what avails it to tell us that the flame is absorbed into the light of the world or the dayspring on high? Is it possible to imagine that the rain-drop which falls in the Atlantic thrills with a great rapture as its molecules disperse in the moment of coalescence, because it is now part of an infinite and immortal entity? Yes, it is possible to imagine it rejoicing that its "chagrins of egotism," as an individual drop, are now over; in fact, this is precisely the sort of thing that some poets love to imagine; but has it any real relevance to our sublunary lot? Can it minister any substantial comfort or fortification to the normal man in the moment of peril or agony? I ask; I do not answer. Can Mr. Wells put in the witness-box any flight-lieutenant who will swear that in his reeling aeroplane, as death seemed on the point of engulfing him, he felt uncertain whether it was God or he that was about to die, and gloriously certain that in any case he was about to "step straight into the immortal being of God"? And even if, in the excitement of violent action, such hallucinations do mean something to a peculiar type of mind, has any one dying of pneumonia or Bright's disease been known to declare that, though his mortal spark was on the point of extinction, he felt that "by the incorporation of the motives of his life into an undying purpose" he had triumphed over death and the grave? The simple soul who says "We shall meet in Heaven" no doubt enjoys such a triumph—and even if he fails to keep the appointment, no one is any the worse. But where are the men and women who feel the immortality of God, however we define or construct him, a rich compensation for their own mortality?
It may be said that I am applying shockingly terrestrial tests to Mr. Wells's soaring transcendentalisms. I am simply asking: "Will they work?" A world-religion cannot be what I have called a luxury for the intellectually wealthy. It must be within the reach of plain men and women; and plain men and women cannot, as the French say, "pay themselves with words." Take them all round, they do not make too much of death. With or without the aid of religion, they generally meet it with tolerable fortitude. But it will be hard to persuade them that annihilation is a thing to be faced with rapture, because a synthetic God is indestructible; or that death is not death because other people will be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence. Even if you cannot offer them another life, you may tell them of the grave as a place where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest, and they will understand. But will they understand if you tell them that we triumph over the grave because God dies with us and yet never dies? I fear it will need something clearer and more credible than this to make the undertaker a popular functionary.
The doctrines of "the modern religion" may give us a new motive for living; but how can they at the same time diminish our distaste for dying? That might be their effect, no doubt, in cases where we felt that our death was promoting some great and sacred cause more than our life could have done; but such cases must always be extremely rare. Even the soldier on the battlefield will help his country more by living than by dying, if he can do so without failing in his duty. His death is not a triumph, but only a lesser evil than cowardice and disgrace. And what shall we say, for example, of the case of a young biologist who dies of blood-poisoning on the eve of a great and beneficent discovery? Is not this a case in which the modern God might with advantage have swerved from his principles and (for once) played the part of Providence? It is better, no doubt, to die in a good cause than to throw away life in the pursuit of folly or vice; but is it not playing with words to say that even the end of a martyr to science like Captain Scott, or a martyr to humanity like Edith Cavell, is a triumph over death and the grave? It is a triumph over cowardice, baseness, the love of ease and safety, all the paltrier aspects of our nature; but a triumph over death it is not. If it be true (which I do not believe) that German soldiers sign a declaration devoting the glycerine in their dead bodies to their country's service, one may imagine that some of them feel a species of satisfaction in resolving upon this final proof of patriotism; but it will be a gloomy satisfaction at best; there will be a lack of exhilaration about it; if the Herr Hauptmann who witnesses their signatures congratulates them on having triumphed over death, they will be apt to think it a rather empty form of words. If they had had the advantage of reading Jane Austen, they would probably say with Mr. Bennet, "Let us take a more cheerful view of the subject, and suppose that I survive."
I fear that not even the companionship offered by the modern God in the act of dissolution will make death a cheerful experience, or induce ordinary, unaffected mortals to glory in their mortality. It is too much the habit of Gods to pretend to die when they don't really die at all—when, in fact, the whole idea is a mere intellectual hocus-pocus.
VII
BACK TO THE VEILED BEING
Why has Mr. Wells partly goaded and partly hypnotized himself into the belief that he is the predestined prolocutor of a new hocus-pocus? Rightly or wrongly, I diagnose his case thus: What he really cares for is the future of humanity, or, in more concrete language, social betterment. He suffers more than most of us from the spectacle of the world of to-day, because he has the constructive imagination which can place alongside of that chaos of cupidities and stupidities a vision of a rational world-order which seems easily attainable if only some malignant spell could be lifted from the spirit of man. But he finds himself impotent in face of the crass inertia of things-as-they-are. Except the gift of oratory, he has all possible advantages for the part of a social regenerator. He has the pen of a ready and sometimes very impressive writer; he has a fair training in science; he has a fertile and inventive brain; his works of fiction have won for him a great public, both in Europe and America; yet he feels that his social philosophy, his ardent and enlightened meliorism, makes no more impression than the buzzing of a gnat in the ear of a drowsy mastodon. At the same time he has persuaded himself, whether on internal or on external evidence—partly, I daresay, on both—that men cannot thrive, either as individuals or as world-citizens, without some relation of reverence and affection to something outside and above themselves. He foresees that Christianity will come bankrupt out of the War, and yet that the huge, shattering experience will throw the minds of men open to spiritual influences. At the same time (of this one could point to several incidental evidences) he has come a good deal in contact with Indian religiosity, and learnt to know a type of mind to which God, in one form or another, is indeed an essential of life, while the particular form is a matter of comparative indifference. Then the idea strikes him: "Have we not here a great opportunity for placing the motive-power of spiritual fervor behind, or within, the sluggish framework of social idealism? Here it lies, well thought-out, carefully constructed, but inert, like an aeroplane without an engine. By giving the glow of supernaturalism, of the worship of a personal God, to the good old Religion of Humanity, may we not impart to our schemes for a well-ordered world precisely the uplift they at present lack? It was all very well for chilly New England transcendentalism to 'hitch its waggon to a star,' but the result is that Boston is governed by a Roman Catholic Archbishop. It is really much easier and more effective to hitch our waggon to God, who, being a synthesis of our own higher selves, will naturally pull it in whatever direction we want. Thus the mass of mankind will escape from that spiritual loneliness which is so discomfortable to them, and will find, in one and the same personification, a deity to listen to their prayers, and a 'boss,' in the Tammany sense of the term, to herd them to the polling-booths. What we want is collectivism touched with emotion. By proclaiming it to be the will of God, and identifying sound politics with ecstatic piety, we may shorten by several centuries the path to a new world-order."
This is a translation into plain English of the thoughts which would seem to have possessed Mr. Wells's mind during the past year or so. I do not for a moment mean that he put them to himself in plain English. That would be to accuse him of insincerity—a thought which I most sincerely disclaim. I have not the least doubt that the Invisible King does actually supply a "felt want" in his spiritual outfit, and that he is perfectly convinced that most other people are similarly constituted and will welcome this new object of loyalty and devotion. Time will show whether his psychology is correct. If it is, then he has indeed made an important discovery. To use a very homely illustration: a carrot dangled from the end of a stick before a donkey's nose makes no mechanical difference in the problem of traction presented by the costermonger's barrow. If anything, it adds to the weight to be drawn. But if the sight of it cheers, heartens, and inspires the donkey, helping him to overcome those fits of lethargy so characteristic of his race, then the carrot may quite appreciably accelerate the general rate of progress. It all depends on the psychology of the donkey.