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THE WORLD OF H.G. WELLS
BY
VAN WYCK BROOKS
NEW YORK
MITCHELL KENNERLEY
MCMXV
_To_
_Max Lippitt Larkin_
CONTENTS
Introduction
I. The First Phase
II. Towards Socialism
III. Socialism "True and False"
IV. The Philosophy of the New Republican
V. Human Nature
VI. A Personal Chapter
VII. The Spirit of Wells
INTRODUCTION
A natural pause appears to have come in the career of Mr. H.G. Wells.After so many years of travelling up and down through time and space,familiarizing himself with all the various parts of the solar system andpresenting himself imaginatively at all the various geological epochs,from the Stone Age to the end of the world, he has for good and alldomesticated himself in his own planet and point of time. This gradualprocess of slowing down, so to speak, had been evident from the momentof his first appearance. The most obvious fact about his romances ofscience, considered as a series, is that each one more nearly approachedthe epoch in which we live, and the realities of this epoch. From theyear A.D. 802, 701, witnessed in his first romance by the TimeTraveller, we found ourselves at last in the presence of a decade onlyso remote as that of the war which has now befallen Europe. A similartendency in his novels has been equally marked. The possibilities ofscience and socialism have received a diminishing attention relativelybeside the possibilities of human reaction to science and socialism. Itis individual men and women, and the motives and personalities ofindividual men and women, which now concern him. Still retaining theentire planet as the playground of his ideas, still upholding scienceand socialism as his essential heroes, he has been driven by experienceto approach these things through human nature as it is. In a recentessay he has told us not to expect any more dramatic novelties: for thepresent at any rate our business must be to make science and socialismfeel at home. Whether or not this may stand as a general diagnosis ofour epoch, it is a remarkable confession with regard to his own place init. For it signifies nothing less than that he has reached the limit ofhis own circle of ideas and finished his own pioneering, and that hiswork for the future will be to relate the discoveries of his youth withhuman experience. He is no longer a "new voice"; his work belongs, forgood or ill, to history and literature, and he presents himself fromthis time forward as a humanist.
In this new posture Wells does not stand alone. He is typical of anentire generation of Englishmen that knows not Oxford, a generationwhich has been busy with all manner of significant movements anddiscoveries, too busy indeed to relate them to the common reason ofhumankind. During these years the word "academic" has been outlawed;naturally so, for the academic mind is to the creative mind what thedigestive system is to the human body: a period of energetic exercisemust precede its operation. But in order that ideas may be incorporatedin society they must submit themselves at the right moment to thosedigestive processes by which they are liquefied and transmitted throughthe veins to all the various members of the common organism.
During the last twenty years modern thought has been dominated to anextraordinary degree by men who have been educated solely through themovements in which they have taken part: seldom has there been souniversal and so hectic an empiricism. But this is the way the earthmoves. Like an inchworm it doubles itself up at intervals and thengradually stretches itself straight again. The whole nineteenth century,according to Taine, was occupied in working out two or three ideasconcocted in Germany during the Napoleonic era. History is a successionof Gothic invasions and academic subversions. It marks the end of one ofthose eras which perpetually overlap one another in various groups ofmen and cycles of thought that our own Visigoths have capitulated. Asthe pressure of their own immediate points of view relaxes and theycease to identify their own progress with the progress of men ingeneral, they become perhaps less striking but certainly more useful.
Intensely preoccupied with contemporary ideas and inventions,brilliantly gifted and full of life, these leaders of thought were moreinnocent of literature and history than a fresh-man. Both Wells andBernard Shaw have confessed that throughout their most activeintellectual careers they believed instinctively that progress wasmainly a matter of chronology. To discover the future Wells consideredit necessary merely to set his imagination at work on Chicago andmultiply it by a thousand; while the famous remark of Shaw that he was"better than Shakespeare" sprang from his assumption that, living threecenturies later, he naturally stood (as a dwarf, in his own phrase) uponShakespeare's shoulders. This naivete placed them at the mercy ofliterature, as they soon discovered. Everyone knows the change that cameover Bernard Shaw's cosmos when for the first time, a few years ago, heread two or three pre-Darwinian philosophers: one could almost haveheard a pin drop when he stopped talking about being better thanShakespeare. A similar experience, exhibited in his books, has befallenWells, and there is no doubt that reading has contributed to theprogressive modesty of his point of view. Each monument of historicexperience that he has absorbed has left its mark on him. Rabelais,Machiavelli, Plato, incorporated at regular intervals in his own work,have certainly contributed to make him less agile and less dramatic.
Let us take advantage of these post-prandial moments to survey some ofthe remarkable ideas which have been added to the general stock duringthis period. After the fashion of Cato, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells havecome late to the study of Greek. Bernard Shaw read Plato at fifty, andin his latest book Wells has insisted that in the Great State everyonewill study Greek. Nothing could signify more plainly that theseoutriders of the Modern Mind have come to a halt and wish to connectthemselves with tradition, with history, with literature, with religion,with the grand current of human experience. Having been for so longexperimenting with new and untried forces, sharply separated from whatis received and understood, they should be related to the familiarlandmarks and connected with the main stream of English thought andliterature.
Grotesque and violent as it may at first appear, I believe that in thefuture Wells will be thought of as having played toward his own epoch apart very similar to that played by Matthew Arnold. I say this with fullrecognition of their remoteness in personal quality, recognizing alsothe difference in their direct objects of attack, in the precise causesthey uphold. One thinks of these two vivid personalities--Wells--howshall one picture him?--and Matthew Arnold, that superb middle-classgentleman with his great face and deprecating hands--and the comparisonis instantly ludicrous. In reality the entire trend of Arnold's socialcriticism was anti-individualistic and in a straight line withsocialism. Seen retrospectively the main work of Wells has not been topromote any intellectual or economic doctrine, but to alter the Englishframe of mind. The function of each of these men has been to bring hometo the English mind a range of ideas not traditional in it.
Indeed this comparison holds (the shock once over) not merely withregard to their general function, but in their specific attitude towardmost of the branches of thought and action they have concernedthemselves with. Wells on Education, on Criticism, on Politics and thenostrums of Liberalism, Wells even on Religion continues the propagandaof Arnold. Everywhere in these so superficially dissimilar writings isexhibited the same fine dissatisfaction, the same faith in ideas andstandards, the same dislike of heated bungling, plunging, wilfulness,and confusion; even the same predominant contempt for most things thatare, the same careful vagueness of ideal. It was Arnold who passed hislife in trying to make England believe in and act upon ideas inste
ad of"muddling through," who never wearied of holding up the superiority ofeverything French and everything German to everything English, whoadopted into his own language that phrase about "seeing things as inthemselves they really are." Read his chapter on _Our LiberalPractitioners_ and you will find the precise attitude of Wells towardthe premature inadequate doing of things rather than the continuedresearch, experiment, and discipline which lead to right fulfilments.Who urged the ventilation of life, affairs, conduct in the light ofworld experience? Who preached the gospel of reasonableness, mutualunderstanding, and more light? Who spurred England to cultivate thevirtue of intellectual curiosity? Who believed with a paradoxicalpassion in coolness and detachment? In each of these things what Arnoldwas to his generation Wells remarkably has been to ours. Differing intheir view of the substance of religion, their conception of the Churchas a great common receptacle for the growing experience of the race isprecisely the same, fragmentation, segregation, sectarianism being toboth of them in this matter the greatest of evils. The love ofcuriosity, centrality, ventilation, detachment, common understanding,coolness and reasonableness and a realistic vision, the dislike ofconfusion, bungling, wilfulness, incompetence, hot-headedness,complacency, sectarianism--these are quite fundamental traits, andArnold and Wells share them in a remarkable degree. It is quite truethat Arnold lived in a universe which only with some reluctanceconfessed to three dimensions, while that of Wells trembles with thecoming of a fourth. But in any case it is worth while to release aphenomenon like Wells from the medium of purely contemporary influences,and for this purpose it is convenient to see a socialist in the light ofa man who knew nothing of socialism, to see that socialism is itself anatural outgrowth of those "best things that have been thought and saidin the world." It is important to realize that the train of thought andthe circle of ideas of this man are connected with a well-recognizedbranch of intellectual tradition. And even socialism is benefitted byhaving friends at court.