CHAPTER VI
A PERSONAL CHAPTER
I doubt if there are many living men of note who, a generation afterthey are dead, will be so fully and easily "explained" as H.G. Wells. Heis a most personal and transparent writer, he is the effect ofconditions and forces which have existed for scarcely more than twogenerations. But for these very reasons it is very difficult to see himin perspective, and to explain him would be to explain the age in whichwe live. Let me at least give certain facts and reflections about hislife written by Wells himself, a few years ago, in the introduction to aRussian translation of his writings:
I was born[1] in that queer indefinite class that we call in England the middle class. I am not a bit aristocratic; I do not know any of my ancestors beyond my grandparents, and about them I do not know very much, because I am the youngest son of my father and mother and their parents were all dead before I was born. My mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at a place called Midhurst, who supplied post-horses to the coaches before the railways came; my father was the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penshurst Castle, in Kent. They had various changes of fortune and position; for most of his life my father kept a little shop in a suburb of London, and eked out his resources by playing a game called cricket, which is not only a pastime, but a show which people will pay to see, and which, therefore, affords a living to professional players. His shop was unsuccessful, and my mother, who had been a lady's maid, became, when I was twelve years old, housekeeper in a large country house. I too was destined to be a shopkeeper. I left school at thirteen for that purpose. I was apprenticed first to a chemist, and, that proving unsatisfactory, to a draper. But after a year or so it became evident to me that the facilities that were and still are increasing in England offered me better chances in life than a shop and comparative illiteracy could do; and so I struggled for and got various grants and scholarships that enabled me to study and take a degree in science and some mediocre honors in the new and now great and growing University of London.... After I had graduated I taught biology for two or three years, and then became a journalist.... I began first to write literary articles, criticisms, and so forth, and presently short imaginative stories in which I made use of the teeming suggestions of modern science....
So much for the facts. The reflections are not less illuminating:
The literary life is one of the modern forms of adventure. Success with a book--even such a commercially modest success as mine has been--means in the English-speaking world not merely a moderate financial independence, but the utmost freedom of movement and intercourse. A poor man is lifted out of his narrow circumstances into familiar and unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people. He sees the world; if his work excites interest, he meets philosophers, scientific men, soldiers, artists, professional men, politicians of all sorts, the rich, the great, and he may make such use of them as he can. He finds himself no longer reading in books and papers, but hearing and touching at first hand the big questions that sway men, the initiatives that shape human affairs.... To be a literary artist is to want to render one's impressions of the things about one. Life has interested me enormously and filled me with ideas and associations I want to present again. I have liked life and like it more and more. The days in the shop and the servants' hall, the straitened struggles of my early manhood, have stored me with vivid memories that illuminate and help me to appreciate all the wider vistas of my later social experiences. I have friends and intimates now at almost every social level, from that of a peer to that of a pauper, and I find my sympathies and curiosities stretching like a thin spider's web from top to bottom of the social tangle. I count that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents of my life, and another is that I am of a diffident and ineffectual presence, unpunctual, fitful, and easily bored by other than literary effort; so that I am not tempted to cut a figure in the world and abandon that work of observing and writing which is my proper business in it.
This candid and exact statement enables us to see just how far, inmatters of fact, experience and belief, the autobiographical motive hasentered his writings. It would be possible to show how inevitably suchan ideal as that of the New Republican Samurai arose from such a life;how much that conscious and deliberate insistence on personal efficiencyand orderly ways, that repudiation of mental confusion, sluggishness,and sentiment may figure as a kind of stepping-stone from the world ofKipps and Polly to the world of Remington and Trafford; how aself-wrought scientific education would form the basis of an ideal ofaristocracy rising from it; and how the motto "There is no Being butBecoming" would express its own constant desertion of levels achieved,its own pressing upward to levels equally transient. Just as the"democratic person" of Whitman raises his own fervent, chaotic, andstandardless experience into an ideal, so also the ideal of Wells isnothing else than the projection of his own experimental opportunism. Itis impossible in discussing Wells to ignore this social ascent; for inEngland a man passes from one stratum to another only by virtue of acertain lack of substantiality, a power to disencumber himself, to shedcustoms and affections and all the densenesses and coagulations whichmark each grade in that closely defined social hierarchy. The world ofshopkeeping in England is a world girt about with immemorialsubjections; it is, one might say, a moss-covered world; and to shakeoneself loose from it is to become a rolling stone, a drifting andunsettled, a detached and acutely personal, individual. It is to passfrom a certain confined social maturity, a confused mellowness, into aworld wholly adventurous and critical, into a freedom which achievesitself at the expense of solidity and warmth. In Wells, for instance,the sense of the soil is wholly supplanted by the sense of machinery.His evolution has been the reverse of the usual evolution from whatBacon called the _lumen siccum_ to the _lumen humidum_, from the drylight to the light that is drenched in customs and affections. Insteadof growing mellower, he has grown more and more fluid and electric, indirect ratio to the growing width of his social horizon.
To prove this one has only to consider his novels. There was a time whenhe had in common with Dickens and De Foe the quality they have in commonwith one another--the quality of homeliness. He drew the little world heknew well, the limited and lovable world of small folk. Mr. Hoopdriver,Delia the chambermaid, Kipps and Ann Pornick--a score of these helpless,grown-up little children he pictured with a radiant affection, temperingthe wind to the shorn lamb. It is more in the nature of his laterthought to see poverty as a wasteful rather than a cruel thing, eventhough he may not have approached the harsh realism of Bernard Shaw'sobservation: "I have never had any feeling about the English workingclasses except a desire to abolish them and replace them by sensiblepeople."
Certainly he has not experienced any other world in quite this way. "Icount that wide social range one of the most fortunate accidents in mylife," he says. Accidental one feels it to be, as of a man inhabitingthe great world by virtue of sheer talent, whose nature has not in anysense settled there. His philosophy and his socialism are outgrowths ofhis own experience; they erect into reasons and theories the nature of alife which is not at home, and which easily unburdens itself of all thatseems insensate because it is unfamiliar. To be a socialist at all is tohave accustomed oneself, through necessity or imagination, to a certaindetachment from a great many of the familiar, lovable, encumbering,delightful stupidities of the world. And Wells has travelled up and downthrough time and space too much to have any great regard for thepresent. "I have come to be, I am afraid," he says, in _The Future inAmerica,_ "even a little insensitive to fine immediate things throughthis anticipatory habit.... There are times indeed when it makes lifeseem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to anequally transitory series of consequences----." His hold upon thepresent
is so far from inevitable that _The New Machiavelli_ and_Marriage_, realistic as they are, are represented as being written someyears hence, our own time already appearing retrospectively in them. Aslittle as Faust has he been tempted to call out upon the passing moment.His main characters drift through this period of time, substantialthemselves but with a background of substantialities, in a way thatrecalls Paolo and Francesca looming out of the phantom cloud-processionof the _Inferno_.
Into this larger world, in short, he has carried with him only himselfand his own story. We live in two worlds--the primary world of vividpersonal realities and the secondary world of our human background. Itis the secondary world that anchors us in time and space; the primaryworld we carry with us as part of ourselves. In Wells there is nosecondary world, no human background, no sense of abiding relations. Itis his philosophy of life and the quality of his men and women to beexperimental in a plastic scheme. His range is very small: the samefigures reappear constantly. There is the Wells hero,--Lewisham, Capes,Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford, Stratton; there is the Wells heroine,Ann Veronica, Isabel, Marjorie, Lady Mary; there is the ineffectualwoman with whom the Wells hero becomes entangled, Capes's first wife,Marion, Margaret; there is the ineffectual man with whom the Wellsheroine becomes entangled, Magnet, Manning. To strike the lowest commondenominator in this tangle is inevitably to arrive once more, one feels,in the region of personal experience. Although it cannot be said thathis minor characters are lacking in reality, they are certainlyintellectual portraits, and outside the limits of subjective experience.The principal men and women of Wells move through a world seen, buthardly a world felt.
This want of social background makes his characters as detached from thefamiliar earth as chessmen are detached from a chessboard. They neverseem to be, like most men and women either in life or fiction, like theKipps and Polly of his own earlier fiction, vegetable growths. Heredity,fatality, the soil are not mainly operating forces with them. They arecreatures of intelligence and free will, freely and intelligently makingand moulding themselves and their circumstances. Human nature in Wellsis very largely a sheer thing, a thing that begins with itself, answersfor itself, lives at first hand. That is the personal quality of the manhimself, and it follows that the quality is wholly convincing only wherewhat I have called his primary world is concerned: the rest of the worldhe builds up by intelligent observation and the literary talent ofcreating human stuff out of whole cloth.
In this he is well served by his antipathies. His belief in personalself-determinism is so strong that he instinctively sees the vegetativenature of the ordinary life as a kind of moral slough, a state of beingdetestably without initiative, faith, energy, will. And consequently theNormal Social Life against which he is always tilting is a life seen byhim with all the vividness of an intense personal and philosophicalanimosity. Consider, for example, the portraits of Mr. Pope and Mr.Stanley, survivals in a sense of the old Sir Roger de Coverley type,with all the sweetness gone out of it and only the odious qualitiesleft, the domineering, vain, proprietary qualities. They exist mainly assymbols of everything that enlightened and right-minded daughters willnot put up with; they come as near to being the foils of right destinyas Wells will ever allow; they sum up everything that stands in the wayof man's free will. They are mercilessly dealt with, and they arememorable figures.
Without this antipathy, and outside his own primary world, he prettygenerally fails. One recalls, for example, old Mrs. Trafford in_Marriage,_ evidently intended to be his ideal of the enlightened womangrown old. She is a pale, dimly perfect, automatically wise old ladycarved out of wood. Trafford himself, one feels, is a chip of the sameblock. Trafford obviously is not Wells himself, as Ponderevo andRemington are Wells: he is the Utopian counterpart of these persons, atleast in the matter that concerns Wells most, the matter of sex. Onecould show that, aside from the six or eight chief characters who intheir various ways express the nature and experience of Wells himself,he succeeds in his portraiture only where no demand is made on hissympathies.
The same absence of social background which throws into relief hisprimary world of characters throws into relief also the primary facts ofhuman nature. Trafford and Marjorie, the most conventionally placed ofhis characters, pull up stakes, leave their children, and go toLabrador. His other men and women are even more independent of thesocial network. Consequently they are independent of that chain ofrelationships--friendship, affection, minor obligations--which mitigate,subdue, soften the primary motives of most people. They are almoststartlingly physical. Their instincts are as sure as those of cavemen,and their conduct as direct. They are as clear about the essentialmatter of love as ever Schopenhauer was, or Adam and Eve, and they standout as sharply against the embarrassments and secrecies of the usualworld as a volcanic rock stands out against a tropical landscape. Inthis without doubt they exhibit the fact that socialism does and willactually alter human nature, and that in the instinctive socialist humannature is already altered. For socialism inflexibly militates againstthose more sentimental aspects of love, love of country as such, thepaternal and feudal principles, love of property, and the like, whichbelong properly to the intelligence, all those functions where love, ina majority of cases, goes wrong, blunders, stultifies growth, confusesthe public design of the world. As a result it throws love into relief,emphasizes the nature of sex and the _raison d'etre_ of reproduction;makes it, to use a favorite word of Wells, stark.
I pause at this word. It is one of those talismanic words one findsperpetually cropping up in the writings of men who have a marked pointof view, words that express deep and abiding preferences and often setthe key of an entire philosophy. "I like bare things," says GeorgePonderevo, in _Tono-Bungay;_ "stripped things, plain, austere, andcontinent things, fine lines and cold colors." That is the gesture of anartistic mind which repudiates, with an impatient sharpness, all theentanglements of the ordinary world. It is Oriental, it is Japanese, itis anything you like; but if it is English also it marks an entirely newregime. Without question it is English, and American as well. Thousandsof people share that preference, and were economic socialism to go bythe board we should still have to reckon with the progress ofsocialistic human nature. It detaches itself each day a little more fromproperty, locality, and the hope of reward; it ceases to benecessitarian, it becomes voluntary; it relegates drudgery to mechanicaldevices; it releases the individual to a sense of his own cooperativeand contributory place in the scheme of a more orderly future.Relatively speaking, the tendency of our kind is all away from luxury,sloth, complacency, confusion, ignorance, filth, heat, proprietorship,and all in the direction of light, austerity, agility, intelligence,coolness, athletic energy, understanding, cleanliness, order, "barethings, fine lines, and cold colors."
That is evident, and it is equally evident that the personal characterand career of Wells are emblematic of this entire tendency. He hasunravelled himself by science, talent, and vigor out of "lower middleclass" Victorianism. Is it strange that he has adopted as a kind ofsacred image that light, free, and charming product of our decade, theaeroplane, sprung as it is out of the wreckage, out of the secretbeginnings, the confused muscularities, the effort and smoke of the mostchaotic of all centuries, like a blade of exquisitely tempered andchased steel which justifies everything that was most laborious andunsightly in the forge?
But considered as a sacred image the aeroplane has its limitations. Soalso, considered as an exponent of fife, has Wells. Philosophy andreligion, as he presents them, are simply what he chooses to think andfeel, what he has been led by his own experience to think and feel. Hismain experience has been the experience of disentangling himself, andtherefore life, reflected from within himself, is to him a thing alsowhich disentangles itself and grows ever more free, simple, and lucid.In the mind of Wells this process, has taken on an altogether mystical,transcendental significance, a religious aspect. Possible as that is tohimself personally, how far can it be taken as an argument to the humansoul? How does it qualify
him as a teacher, a public voice, a thinkerfor the mass of men? How does the conception of life purely as a processrelate itself to human experience?
Applied to history, it seems to fail. Wells is devoid of historicalimagination. In his portrait of Margaret in _The New Machiavelli_ he hasproperly, though somewhat harshly, repudiated what ordinarily passes forculture. But had he himself possessed the reality of what seems to himsimply "living at second hand," he would never have been led to refer toLeonardo, Michael Angelo, and Duerer as "pathetically reaching out, as itwere, with empty desirous hands toward the unborn possibilities of theengineer." That is a very interesting and a very extraordinarystatement, and it is quite true that each of these men would haverejoiced in the engineering possibilities of our time. But how much ofthe soul of Michael Angelo, for example, was involved in engineering?How far can his hands be said to have been "empty" for the want of scopein engineering? The power and the function of Michael Angelo can rightlybe seen, not in relation to any sort of social or mechanical process,but in relation to things that are permanent in human nature, inrelation to just those matters included in the admonition of Wells to"reject all such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, and Beautyand hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as atissue and succession of births." Again, consider a somewhat similarreference to Marcus Aurelius, of which the gist is that the author ofthe _Meditations_ was, actually in consequence of his own character, thefather of one of the worst rulers the world has known. The implicationhere is that the study of self-perfection in the father wascomplementary to, if not responsible for, the social impotence andblindness of the son. Instead of dedicating himself to the static idealof personal character, the assumption seems to be, Marcus Aurelius oughtto have lived exclusively in his function as ruler and father. Hestudied himself, not as a ruler but as a man, and the social process hadits revenge on his line. To Wells, in a word, the static elements ofcharacter and the study of perfection are not to be distinguished fromvicious self-consequence.
Consider also a recent passage in which he has given a generalimpression of literature:
It seems to me more and more as I live longer that most poetry and most literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and more rigid conditions than ours, lived by people who loved and hated more naively, aged sooner, and died younger than we do. Solitary persons and single events dominated them as they do not dominate us.
To appreciate this meditation one has to remember the character andcareer which led to the writing of it. But so far as we others areconcerned, how far can the assumption it rests upon be considered valid,the assumption of a process that sweeps men on and leads human nature,as it were, progressively to shed itself? Dr. Johnson, for example, wasa man the conditions of whose life were crude and rigid in the extreme,a man singularly dominated by solitary persons and single events, but ishis conversation discordant with the variety, the "reserves, resources,and recuperations of life as we live it to-day"? I can well understandthis feeling. To pass directly from the thin, tentative, exhilarating,expansive air of our own time into the presence of that funny, stuffy,cocksure, pompous old man is to receive a preposterous shock. But havingcome to laugh, one stops with a very different sensation. The depths ofpersonality and wisdom that exist there take on a disconcertingsignificance in relation to contemporary pragmatism. The mass of menveer about; far-separated epochs have their elective affinities, and ifanything about the future is plain it is that this, that, and the othergeneration will find in Dr. Johnson a strangely premature contemporary.
Wells has himself admitted this principle. To Plutarch, Rabelais,Machiavelli he has paid his tribute. Hear what George Ponderevo has tosay about Plutarch in his recollections of Bladesover House:
I found Langhorne's _Plutarch_ too, I remember, on those shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years, to teach me that.
Considering what part the notion of a state plays in his range of ideas,that is a remarkable confession. But why stop with statecraft? The humanmind could not, in all epochs, have established permanent ideals ofstatecraft without permanent ideals of a more strictly personal kind.
The truth is that Wells, for all that he has passed outside theeconomics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas whichproduced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tellyou that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the onlytrue thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by thatcriterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensivegibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's FairyTales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presentsitself. To say that "the fundamental nature of life is a tissue andsuccession of births" is merely a refinement of this. It is true, justas the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the worldis full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of areasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there isa Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue togrow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friendship, or music, orpoetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialistmust feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and onthat point socialism has nothing to say at all.
It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddlethat the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. CouldWells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full ofmeaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life hehas felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in Englishauthors. "Modern poetry, with an exception or so," he remarks somewhere,and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as awhole, "does not signify at all." It is the same with regard to music,art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: hiswritings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outlineagainst a sunset, masses of machinery in the glare of the forge, thingsthat suggest the etcher's eye. But they are curiously impersonal.Consider, for example, his description of Worms Cathedral:
It rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow under a press of canvas.
You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty hefeels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is asuntouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities ofthis building, not to mention its connection with human history, as ifhe had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not thechangeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this buildingstands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is themechanism, the process--his emotions gather about the physical resultwhich appears to justify these.
_A chacun son infini_.
There will always be some to whom the significance of things, themeaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conceptionof mankind as "permanently in transition." Reading those passages whereWells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as Ishould feel with regard to music if I heard a mass of Mozart played atthe rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if aprocession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision.The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the picturesas a whole are a tissue and succession of colors. But that is not music,that is not art. Nor is a tissue and succession of births life.
But indeed nothing is easier than to reduce Wells to an absurdity. If heimplies anything at all he implies a "transvaluation of all values." Itremains to consider him from this poi
nt of view.
[Footnote 1: September 21, 1866.]
CHAPTER VII
THE SPIRIT OF WELLS
In order to understand Wells at all one must grasp the fact that hebelongs to a type of mind which has long existed in European literaturebut which is comparatively new in the English-speaking world, the typeof mind of the so-called "intellectual." He is an "intellectual" ratherthan an artist; that is to say, he naturally grasps and interprets lifein the light of ideas rather than in the light of experience.
To pass from a definition to an example, let me compare Wells in thisrespect with the greatest and most typical figure of the opposite campin contemporary English fiction; I mean Joseph Conrad. This comparisonis all the more apt because just as much as Wells Conrad typifies thespirit of "unrest" (a word he has almost made his own, so often does heuse it) which is the note of our age. Both of these novelists haveendeavored to express the spirit of unrest; both have suggested a way ofmaking it contributory to the attainment of an ideal. But how differentis their method, how different is their ideal! And roughly thedifference is this: that to Conrad the spirit of unrest is a personalmood, a thing, as people used to say, between man and his Maker; whereasto Wells the spirit of unrest is not a mood but a rationally explicableframe of mind, a sense of restricted function, an issue to be fought outnot between man and nature but between man and society. In other words,where Conrad's point of view is moral, Wells's point of view is social;and whereas in Conrad the spirit of unrest can only be appeased byholding fast to certain simple instinctive moral principles, integrity,honor, loyalty, etc., contributing in this way to the ideal of personalcharacter, the spirit of unrest in Wells is to be appeased by workingthrough the established fact, by altering the environment in which manlives, contributing in this way to the ideal of a great society of whichpersonal character is at once the essence and the product.
In the end, of course, both these views of life come to the same thing,for you cannot have a great society which is not composed of greatlyliving individuals, or vice versa. But practically there is a world ofdifference between them, according as any given mind emphasizes the oneor the other. This difference, I say, is the difference between lifeapproached through experience and life approached through ideas. Andwhen we penetrate behind these points of view we find that they aredetermined very largely by the characters and modes of living of the menwho hold them. That explains the vital importance in literary criticismof knowing something about the man one is discussing, as distinguishedfrom the work of his brain pure and simple. There is a reason why theintellectualist point of view occurs as a rule in men who havehabitually lived the delocalized, detached, and comparativelydepersonalized life of cities, while men of the soil, of the sea, of theelements, men, so to speak, of intensive experience, novelists likeConrad or Tolstoy or Hardy, are fundamentally non-intellectual,pessimistic, and moral.
And this explains the natural opposition between Conrad and Wells. Asidefrom the original bent of his mind, the intensive quality of Conrad'sexperience--an experience of ships and the minute, simple, personal,tragic life of ships, set off against the impersonal, appalling sea andan always indifferent universe, a life remote from change, in which therelations of things are in a peculiar sense abiding and in which onlyone problem exists, the problem of character, imminent nature being keptat bay only through the loyalty, integrity and grit of men--theintensive quality of this experience, I say, acting upon an artisticmind, would naturally tend to produce not only a bitterly profoundwisdom, but an equally profound contempt for the play of ideas, soirresponsible in comparison, and for a view of the world based uponideas the real cost of which has never been counted in the face ofhunger, icy winds, storm and shipwreck, and the abysmal forces ofnature. Men who go down to the sea in ships have a right to say forthemselves (tempering the credulity of those who have remained at home)that the intellectualist view of life is altogether too easy and tooglib. It is they who throw into relief the deep, obscure conviction ofthe "plain man"--commonly the good man--that to endeavor to make lifeconform with ideas is in some way to deprive the world of just thoseelements which create character and to strike at an ideal forged throughimmemorial suffering and effort.
Merely to dismiss as dumb folly an all but universal contention of thiskind (no doubt in the back of people's minds when they say thatsocialism, for instance, is "against human nature") is to beg the wholequestion of intellectualism itself. For, if it could be conclusivelyshown that any view of life not incidentally but by its natureemasculated life and destroyed the roots of character, then of course,no matter how rationally self-evident it might be and how much confusionand suffering it might avert, it would never even justify its own reasonfor being--it would never _succeed,_ the best part of human nature wouldoppose it to the end of time and the intelligence itself would bediscredited. And indeed to the man of experience rather than the man ofideas, just because of his rich humanity, just because he never passesout of the personal range, belong the ideal things, morality,philosophy, art. Like charity, these things "begin at home"; andwhenever (as in pragmatism, when pragmatism ceases to be a method andclaims to be an interpretation of life) they are approached not from theside of experience but from the side of ideas they cease to have anyreal substance. Morality has no substance when it springs from the mindinstead of the conscience, art when it appeals to the mind instead ofthe perceptions; and as to philosophy, what is any scheme of things thatsprings out of the head of a man who is not himself wise? It is acertain condemnation of Bergson, for example, that he would never passmuster in a group of old fishermen smoking their pipes on the end of apier. Not that they would be expected in any case to know what he wastalking about, but that his fibre so plainly is the fibre not of a wisebut of a clever man and that in everything, as Emerson said, you musthave a source higher than your tap.
That is why, as it seems to me, Wells ought not to be considered fromany of these absolute standpoints. He has put before us not so much awell-wrought body of artistic work, or a moral programme, or anexplanation of life--words quite out of place in connection withhim--as a certain new spirit, filled with all sorts of puzzledintimations of a new beauty and even a new religion to be generated outof a new order of things that is only glimpsed at present. And the pointI should like to make about this spirit is that it is entirelyirrelevant to the values of life as we know them, but that it may in theend prove to have contributed to an altogether fresh basis for humanvalues.
To illustrate what I mean by this irrelevance as regards present valuesand this possibility as regards future values let me turn to that longbrilliant passage in _The New Machiavelli_ where Remington goes fromclub to club, passing in review the spiritual possibilities of eachpolitical party, and finds nothing but a desolation of triviality,pomposity, confusion, and "utterly damned old men." Consider thecontempt and hopelessness that fill his mind. One has to forget entirelythe ordinary man's view of politics, sincerely held as it is; one has tothink of politics as a means of straightening out and re-engendering awhole world of confused anguish before one can see any justification forthis righteous wit and savage indignation against the dulness ofleaders. Considered by the current values of life in which politics areregarded as an effect of man's incompetence rather than as a cause ofhis virtue, treated intensively, as a novelist of experience rather thanof ideas would have treated them, in what a different light each ofthese "utterly damned old men" would appear, each one a tiny epic oftragic and comic efforts, disappointments, misconceptions, providing onein the end with how much of an excuse for blame, ridicule or contempt!Everything indeed depends upon where a given mind chooses to layemphasis. In this scene Wells has judged everything by his ideal of agreat society, just as Conrad, faced with the same material, would havejudged everything by his ideal of personal character. Conrad would haveused those men to give us an understanding of life as it is, whereasWells has used them simply to throw into relief his idea of what lifeought to be. Conrad would have created a work of ar
t, illustrated amoral programme, and interpreted life. Wells, admittedly a clevercaricaturist, only rises above the level of a clever caricaturistaccording as we accept the validity of his ideal and share the spirit inwhich he writes. Like many children of light, Wells is not wise in hisown generation. But perhaps another generation will justify him.
If Wells had lingered in these deep realities of his own time he wouldhave been a greater artist. And indeed so marked has been his owndevelopment away from the world of ideas and toward the world ofexperience that were he to begin afresh it is likely that he wouldresemble the type of novelist of which I have taken Conrad as an examplefar more than his former self. Of socialism he has abandoned all thetheories and most of the schemes and retained only the frame of mind. Hehas taken year by year a more intensive view of life, he has grown tooconscious of the inertia that impedes ideas and the overwhelmingimmediacies 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 ofits dreams!" he says in one of his latest novels, and if he has keptalive his faith in ideas, who will deny that he has begun to count thecost of it?
From this side, I think, it is no longer possible for anyone to assailhim, so frankly has he given hostages to "actuality." It is from theother 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 andwhich is very marked in his recent novels. Is it possible to ignore thefact that since he wrote _The New Machiavelli_ the work of Wells haslived on its capital and lost the passionate curiosity and personalconviction that made him the force he was in our epoch? Always unwillingto check his talent and publish only the results of his genuine mentalprogress, he has become, in spite of splendid moments, too much of thecommon professional novelist, dealing with levels and phases of lifewhere he obviously does not belong, astray from his own natural point ofintense contact with things. I want to avoid the usual habit of criticswho think it their business to put authors in their places, but is itnot a fact that Wells understands the Kippses and Pollys far better thanthe lords and ladies of England and that he was at his best inelaborating a bridge--a wonderful visionary bridge--between the littleworld of dumb routine and the great world of spacious initiatives?Carlyle with his Great Man theory, forged out of his own travail andweakness, in the end fell on his knees before the illusion of lordship.Fifteen years ago one might have predicted the same future for theSamurai of Wells, not because the Samurai are themselves equivocal butbecause Wells is an Englishman. There so plainly to the English mind thegreat gentlemen are, the men who can and the men who never do! Towardsthis Circe of the English imagination Wells has travelled with a fatalconsistency, and the result to be foreseen was first of all fatuity andin the end extinction.
After he had written _The New Machiavelli_ Wells had reached a pointwhere his ideas, in order to be saved, had to be rescued from himself.To believe that life can be straightened out by the intelligence isnecessarily to have "travelled light," in a measure; too much experienceis the end of that frame of mind. In _Tono-Bungay_ and _The NewMachiavelli_ 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 thegreatest possible grasp of everything that impedes them. One hadtherefore a sense of tragic struggle, in which the whole life of ourtime was caught up and fiercely wrestled with; one had the feeling thathere was the greatest moment in the life of a writer suddenly becomegreat. But with these books some secret virtue seems to have passed outof Wells. Since then his ideas have been hardly more than a perfunctoryrepetition and his experience more and more remote and unreal; andlooking back one seems to discover something highly symbolic in thetragical 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 overall these merry immediate things, there are other things that are greatand serene, very high, beautiful things--the reality. I haven't got it,but it's there nevertheless. I'm a spiritual guttersnipe in love withunimaginable goddesses." And just for this reason the spirit which inhis great days possessed him is independent of any fate that may befallWells himself and his art. More than this, by frankly and fully testinghis ideas in a life-and-death struggle with reality he has, even at thecost of his own shipwreck, removed from the cause of ideas the greatestreproach which has always been brought against it. Revolutionists,doctrinaires, idealogues have notoriously failed to test the validity oftheir ideas even in the face of their own private passions andconfusions; they have rarely considered for a moment that their ownlives totally unfit them for supposing that men are naturally good andthat to make reason prevail is one of the simplest operations in theworld. Wells, on the other hand, has consistently shown that theorydivorced from practice is a mode of charlatanism, that "love and finethinking" must go together, and that precisely because of man'sindividual incapacity to live, as things are, with equal honesty thelife of ideas and the life of experience, the cause he has at heart mustbe taken out of the hands of the individual and made to form a commonimpersonal 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 hasto be justified in the face of all current human values. It is based onan assumption, a grand and generous assumption, I maintain, and one thathas to take what is called a sporting chance with all the odds againstit. This assumption is, that on the whole human nature can be trusted totake care of itself while the surplus energy of life, commonly absorbedin the struggle against incapacity, sloth, perversity, and disorder("original sin," to sum it all up), is released for the organization ofa better scheme for mankind; and further, that this better scheme,acting on a race naturally capable of a richer and fuller life, willhave 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 beingchecked and blighted in the process will in the end, strong enough tobear transplantation, be re-engendered on a finer and freer basis. This,in a word, is the contention of the intellectual, a splendid gambler'schance, on which the future rests, and to which people have committedthemselves more than they know. It is a bridge thrown out across thevoid, resting at one end on the good intentions of mankind and relyingat the other upon mankind's fulfilling those good intentions. It isbased like every great enterprise of the modern world upon credit, andits only security is the fact that men thus far and on the whole havemeasured 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. Justhere has been the office of socialism, to show that society is acolossal machine of which we are all parts and that men in the mostexact sense are members one of another. In the intellectualist scheme ofthings that mathematical proof has to come first; it has to take rootand bury itself and become the second nature of humankind before the newworld of instinct can spring out of it and come to blossom.
That has been the office of socialism, and just so far as that proof hasbeen established socialism has played its part. Now the point I want tomake about Wells is that in him one sees already in an almost precociousform the second stage of this process. In him this new world ofintelligence is already exuberant with instinct; the social machine hasbecome a personality; that cold abstraction the world has become in hishands a throbbing, breathing, living thing, as alive, awake, aware ofitself, as engaging, adventurous, free, critical, well-primed,continent, and all-of-a-piece as a strong man running a race. Peoplenever felt nature as a personality before Wordsworth showed them that itwas, or a locomotive before Kipling wrote _McAndrew's Hymn_; and it
seems to me that Wells has done for the social organism very much whatWordsworth did for nature, discovering in a thing previously felt to beinanimate 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 weourselves compose the whole of it and have it in our hands to do what wewill with it. It has always been out of joint, a great slipshodLeviathan, at sixes and sevens, invertebrate and fungus-brained. Just sois the average man, sunk in routine, oppressed with microscopic tasksthat give birth one to another, his stomach at war with his head, hislegs unwilling to exercise him, resentful of his own capacity not to bedull. But certain happier moments bring him an exuberant quickened lifein which routine tasks fall nimbly from his fingers and he is aware of awide, humorous, generous, enlightened vision of things; he pulls himselftogether, his parts reinforce one another, his mind wakens, his heartopens, his fancy stirs, he is all generosity and happiness, capable ofanything that is disinterested, fine, and becoming to a free man. It isin these moments that individual men have done all the things which makeup the real history of this planet.
If individual men are capable of this amazing experience, then why notthe world? That is the spirited question Wells has propounded in ahundred different forms, in his earlier, more theoretical, and moreoptimistic writings suggesting that society as a whole should turn overa new leaf, and even picturing it as doing so, in his later work, moreexperienced and less hopeful but with a compensating fervor, picturingthe attempt of delegated individuals to act on society's behalf. I donot wish at this point to become pious and solemn in tone; that would beinept in connection with Wells. But I do wish to make it plain that ifhe is devoid of those grander traits which spring from the sense ofbeing "tenon'd and mortised" upon something beyond change, if hisstrength lies wholly in his intelligence, the intelligence itself inWells is an amazing organ, a troubled and rapturous organ, an organ asvisionary and sensitive as the soul of a Christian saint. That is why Ihave said that in him the new world, governed by the intelligence, isalready exuberant with instinct; and anyone who doubts that he haslavished a very genuine religious instinct upon the social processitself and in the dream of a society free, magnanimous and seemly,should turn to the passage where he describes Machiavelli, after theheat and pettiness of the day, retiring into his chamber alone, puttingon his dress of ceremony and sitting down before his table in thepresence of that magnificent thought.
The mass of men have acted more consistently than they know on theprinciple that the whole world is nothing in comparison with one soul,for their politics and economic science, solemn as they appear, are asfrivolous and secondary as if they actually did believe fervently thatheaven is their true home and the world a bad business of littleaccount. In all that concerns private virtue and the private life, inreligion, poetry, their lawyer, their doctor, their broker, they exactthe last degree of excellence and efficiency, but they trust to theblind enterprise of individual men to push mankind chaotically forwardlittle by little. We are in fact so wonderfully made that if our grocertells us in the morning that he has no fresh eggs he throws us into adeeper despondency than six readings of the _Inferno_ could ever do. Andthat explains why so few people can extend themselves imaginatively intothe greater circles that surround them, why, on the social plane, wenever think of demanding wisdom from politicians, why we never dream ofremembering that they should belong to the august family of Plutarch,why it is not the profound views of wise men and the brilliantdiscoveries of science that fill the newspapers, but the incrediblybanal remarks of this president and that prime minister, why presidentsand prime ministers in a society that lives from hand to mouth are somuch more important than poets and prophets, and why statesmanship hasgathered 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 hashimself said, "other-worldly" about the world itself.
But indeed I should make a mistake were I to over-stress the solemnitiesthat underlie the spirit of Wells. In tone he is more profane thansacred, that is to say he is a realist. He wants a world thrillinglyalive, curious, exercised, magnanimous, with all its dim corners lightedup, shaken out of its dulness and complacency, keen, elastic, temperedlike a fine blade--the counterpart on a grand scale of what he mostadmires in the individual. "Stephen," says Lady Mary in _The PassionateFriends_, "promise me. Whatever you become, you promise and swear hereand now never to be grey and grubby, never to be humpy and snuffy, neverto be respectable and modest and dull and a little fat, like--likeeverybody." And in _First and Last Things_ he gives the other side ofthe 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 anypre-arranged pocket ground-plan, so to speak, of the world as it shouldbe. Of this, to be sure, he is often accused, and he has given us ahumorous version of his Utopia as it may appear to certain of hiscontemporaries:
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 hadremained in the circle of his Fabian friends. Being what he is, it bearsmuch the same relation to his idea as that world of harps and crowns andmilk and honey bore in the mediaeval imagination to the idea of heaven.You have to mingle these notions with your experience of human hearts torealize the inadequacy of symbols. Wells, I suspect, has a fondness forwhite sanitary tiling, just as plenty of good Christians have found inmilk and honey a foretaste of unthinkable felicity; but when it comes tothe actual architecture and domestic arrangements of paradise they areboth quite willing to take on trust the accommodating good will of Godand man. Somehow or other, by the time we have got there, we shall notfind 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 toa point where if I give any at all it must be to illustrate less the artof Wells as a thing by itself than a train of thought. He is at his bestin brief scenes, where all his gifts of humor, satire, characterizationand phrase come to a head (think, for example, of Aunt Plessington'sspeech, the funeral of Mr. Polly's father, the pages dealing with CousinNicodemus Frapp's house-hold, and the somewhat prolonged episode of the"reet Staffordshire" cousins in _The New Machiavelli_); and indeed, soinsistent is his point of view that in every one of these episodes onefinds in opposition the irrepressible new world of Wells and thestagnant 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 apicture of the tea-hour in the servants' hall at Bladesover House.
I sat among these people on a high, hard, early Gregorian chair, trying to e
xist, like a feeble seedling amidst great rocks, and my mother sat with an eye upon me, resolute to suppress the slightest manifestation of vitality. It was hard on me, but perhaps it was also hard upon these rather over-fed, ageing, pretending people, that my youthful restlessness and rebellious unbelieving eyes should be thrust in among their dignities.
Tea lasted for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and I sat it out perforce; and day after day the talk was exactly the same.
"Sugar, Mrs. Mackridge?" my mother used to ask. "Sugar, Mrs. Latude-Fernay?"
The word sugar would stir the mind of Mrs. Mackridge. "They say," she would begin, issuing her proclamation--at least half her sentences began "they say"--"sugar is fatt-an-ing, nowadays. Many of the best people do not take it at all."
"Not with their tea, ma'am," said Rabbits, intelligently.
"Not with anaything," said Mrs. Mackridge, with an air of crushing repartee, and drank.
"What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.
"They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.
"They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors are not recomm-an-ding it now."
My Mother: "No, ma'am?"
Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."
Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he died, consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have sometimes fancied it may have hastened his end."
This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir Roderick.
"George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"
Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favorite piece from her repertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely," she would say, or if the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw in!" It was an invaluable remark to her; I do not know how she would have got along without it.
My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction, whichever phase it might be.
A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.
There is, I think, a special sort of connection between Wells andAmerica; and there are times when it seems to me that were the spirit ofAmerica suddenly to become critical of itself it would resemble nothingin the world so much as the spirit of Wells magnified by many diameters.His instincts are all as it were instincts of the intelligence; hismind, like the American mind, is a disinherited mind, not connected withtradition, thinking and acting _de novo_ because there is nothing toprevent it from doing so. Perfectly American is his alertness, hisversatility, adaptability, his thorough-going pragmatism, perfectlyAmerican are the disconcerting questions that he asks ("Is the Navy_bright_?"). Perfectly American is his view of the traditional Englishideal of human nature--that strange compound of good intentions, homelyaffection, stubborn strength, insensibility to ideas, irrationalself-sacrifice, domestic despotism, a strong sense of property in thingsand people, stupidity, sweetness and confusion of mind--an ideal throughwhich it has been one of his never-failing delights to send electricshocks. And indeed the type of character he has presented in his heroes,in Remington, Trafford and Ponderevo, is a type to be found perhaps moreplentifully than elsewhere in American research bureaus, hospitals andlaboratories. He thinks and feels critically so many of the thingsAmerica lives and does unconsciously. Perhaps in this distinction liesthe immediate value of his criticism for us.
For in his mind Americans can see themselves reflected in the light ofwhat they chiefly need, that synthetic motive without which a secularand industrial race is as devoid of animating morality as a swarm offlies. This want, most obvious on the political and economic plane, isindeed fundamental. Wells has grasped it from many different angles butnever with more point than in his essay _The American Population_.Consider this passage, where he takes as a text one of Arthur Brisbane'seditorials in the "New York Journal":
It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to make itself audible to the new world, and cracking into italics and breaking into capitals with the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paper is eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of comprehensive things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalizations, a public which has carried the conception of freedom to its logical extreme of entire individual detachment. These telltale columns deal all with personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to no interest but the interest in intense individual experiences. The engagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write this stuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits frown beside the initial letter. Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of realization, and any new indelicacy in fashionable costume, any new medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism, any new breach in the moral code, any novelty in sea-bathing or the woman's seat on horse-back, or the like, is given copious and moving illustration, stirring headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a colored supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint dialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which "th" has vanished, and it presents a world in which the kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims is an inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole Maud!" There is a smaller bale dealing with sport. In the advertisement columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business opportunities....
Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say, taken off its frills.... The "New York American" represents a clientele to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.
Now that is a very fair picture, not merely of popular America but ofthe whole contemporary phase of popular civilization, uprooted from thestate of instinct, intensive experience and the immemorial immediaciesof duty and the soil. To the artist and the moralist it is a cause ofhopeless pessimism, as any civilization must be which has lost touchwith all its values and been rationalized to the point of anarchy. Forthis there is only one salvation. If civilization has lost the facultyof commanding itself and pulling itself together in its individualaspect, it must pull itself together collectively. That essentially isthe fighting chance of intellectualism, the hope that, inasmuch as theworld has already lost touch with experience and committed itself to aregime of ideas, by organizing this regime of ideas and by mechanizingso far as possible the material aspect of things, the values of life canbe re-engendered on a fresh basis. From this follows the oft-repeatedphrase of Wells that the chief want of the American people is a "senseof the state." For the peril and the hope of American life (grantingthat, as things are, society must be brought into some kind of coherencebefore morality, art and religion can once more attain any real meaning)lies in the fact that while at present Americans are aware of themselvesonly as isolated individuals they are unconsciously engaged in works ofan almost appalling significance for the future of society. A Trust is awork of this kind, and whether it is to be a gigantic good or a giganticevil depends wholly upon whether its controlling minds are moreconscious of their individual or their social function. The mechanism ofsociety in America is already developed to a very high point; what iswanting, and without this everything is wanting, is an understanding ofthe right function of this mechanism. So much does it all depend uponwhether the financial mind can subdue itself to the greater mind of t
herace.
If the future is anywhere going to follow the lines that Wells hassuggested for it--and being an opportunist his aims are always in touchwith agreeable probabilities--it will most likely be in America. He haslately given his idea of what the State should aim to be--"planned asan electric traction system is planned, without reference topre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines"; an idea remarkably of apiece with the American imagination and one which the Americanimagination is perfectly capable of translating into fact. American,too, are the methods in which Wells has come to believe for bringing theGreat State into existence. His conviction is that socialism will comethrough an enlightened individualism, outside the recognizedgovernmental institutions, and that the ostensible States will besuperseded virtually by informal centres of gravity quite independent ofthem. America alone at present justifies this speculation. For thecentre of gravity in American affairs has always been extra-governmental,and consistently in America where wealth gathers there also theinstitutions of socialism spring into being. The rudiments of theSocialist State, falsely based as they are but always tending to subvertthis false basis, are certainly to be found, if anywhere, in theRockefeller Institute, the Carnegie and Russell Sage Foundations, theendowed universities and bureaus of research, and in the type of menthey breed. Consider the following passage from _The Passionate Friends_and the character of the American, Gidding, which is indicated in it:
To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a firework being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the most colossal of printing and publishing projects, as a man might work out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to the systematic organization of free publishing, exhaustive discussion, intellectual stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.
"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me half fantasy, "let's _do_ it."
It is perfectly possible in fact that socialism will come into beingfirst of all under the form of Cecil Rhodes's dream, as a secret orderof millionaires "promoting" not their own aims but society itself. Thatis one of the possibilities at least that lie in what Wells has calledthe "gigantic childishness" of the American mind.
INDEX
_America, The Future in_ America, Wells and _American Population, The_ _Ann Veronica_ _Anticipations_ Arnold, Matthew
Bacon Beerbohm, Max Belloc, Hilaire Bergson, Henri Brisbane, Arthur Brook Farm
Carlyle Catholic Church, the Cato Chesterton, G.K. Chicago _Comet, In the Days of the_ _Common Sense of Warfare, The_ Comte Confucius Conrad, Joseph _Creative Evolution_
Dante Darwin De Foe Dickens _Discovery of the Future, The_ Duerer
Emerson _Empire of the Ants, The_ Erasmus _Ethics and Evolution_
Fabian Society _First and Last Things_ _First Men in the Moon, The_ _Food of the Gods, The_ _Fortnightly Review, The_ Francis, St.
Goethe _Great State, The_ Grimm's Fairy Tales
Hardy, Thomas Hearn, Lafcadio Heraclitus Hero, The _History of Mr. Polly, The_ Huxley
_Inferno, The_ _Invisible Man, The_ _Island of Dr. Moreau, The_
James, William Japanese, the Jeffries, Richard Johnson, Dr.
Kipling, Rudyard _Kipps_
Leonardo da Vinci Leopardi _Love and Mr. Lewisham_ Luther
Macaulay Machiavelli _Mankind in the Making_ Marcus Aurelius _Marriage_ Michael Angelo _Modern Utopia, A_ Montessori, Madame Morris, William _McAndrew's Hymn_
_New Machiavelli, The_ Newman, Cardinal New Republican, the _News from Nowhere_ _New Worlds for Old_ Nietzsche
_Our Liberal Practitioners_ _Passionate Friends, The_ Plato Plutarch
Rabelais _Rasselas_ _Rediscovery of the Unique, The_ Rhodes, Cecil _Robinson Crusoe_
Samurai, the _Scepticism of the Instrument,_ Schopenhauer _Servile State, The_ Shakespeare Shaw, Bernard _Sleeper Awakes, The_ _So-Called Science of Sociology, The_ Sorel, Georges Spencer, Herbert _Story of the Days to Come, A_ Superman, the Superior Man, the Swift
Taine, H.A. Thoreau _Time Machine, The_ Tolstoy _Tono-Bungay_
Verne, Jules
Ward, Mrs. Humphry Webb, Sidney _Wheels of Chance, The_ Whitman, Walt Wordsworth Worms Cathedral
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