Part 6 (1/2)

The present writer is fully aware of the great work which Mr. Shaw has done. He yields to no one in his admiration for the strength of character and the spirited eagerness which have made him so effective in his onslaught upon pernicious illusions, in making people look beyond the formula and refuse to be blinded by social taboos. But it is just because his influence is so great and in many respects beneficial that we ought to be on our guard against a man who may not always mesmerise us to our advantage. And it is in the matter of the drama and the fine arts in general that Mr. Shaw is proving a dangerous Messiah. He has done much to cleanse the Augean stables of the English theatre. He has discredited though he has not destroyed the artificial ”drawing-room play;” he has poured ridicule upon the so-called ”well-made play” which Scribe, Sardou, and their school could concoct for the delight of Frenchmen; he has exposed the insignificance of the accidents and catastrophes, and the coming down of the curtain ”on a hero slain or married.” He has compelled sensible people to look to the theatre for something more than sentiment, romance, ingenuity; for something relevant to the larger issues of life. That he has done; and it is doubtful if any English-speaking and English-writing man now alive, excepting Mr. Shaw, could have done it with any thoroughness.

But having freed us from these old tyrannies of the stage, he has not rested there. He has imposed new tyrannies of his own which are sanctioned either by his own extraordinary influence or by that swing of the Time-Spirit of which he is the visible pendulum. He is very persuasive, and puts his case so well that he is able to blind us to false issues. He states his case in the Preface which he wrote to _Three Plays by Brieux_. Brieux is for him the greatest French dramatist since Molire; and more important because whilst Molire was content to indict human nature, Brieux devotes his energy to an indictment of society. ”His fisticuffs are not aimed heavenward: they fall on human noses for the good of human souls.”

When he sees human nature in conflict with a political abuse he does not blame human nature, knowing that such blame is the favourite trick of those who wish to perpetuate the abuse without being able to defend it. He does not even blame the abuse: he exposes it, and then leaves human nature to tackle it with its eyes open....

You do not go away from a Brieux play with the feeling that the affair is finished or the problem solved for you by the dramatist.... You come away with a very disquieting sense that you are involved in the affair, and must find the way out of it for yourself and everybody else if civilisation is to be tolerable to your sense of honour.

All this is unmistakable. Mr. Shaw regards the theatre primarily and essentially as a subst.i.tute for the pulpit, as a convenient lecture-hall for the propaganda of Shavian socialism. He takes it for granted that there is to be a social ”problem;” that ”fisticuffs” are to be aimed at somebody's nose as they were in those delightful games of play in which he indulged as a young and earnest Fabian; that the audience is to come away tuned up to social endeavour just as people come away from Revival meetings tuned up to the tasks of spiritual salvation.

This is well enough. Upon two conditions, I agree that there would be no objection to Mr. Shaw or any other dramatist using the theatre as a means of reforming men; these conditions being, firstly, that he is able to do it--which I doubt; and secondly, that he should not insist that this use of the theatre is the only proper and legitimate use.

Mr. Shaw has not yet been able to use the theatre in this way, and still less, Brieux. Brieux's influence in France is mainly due to the fact that he is a brilliant and eloquent lecturer. Mr. Shaw's influence in England is due to his essays, speeches, conversations, personal vehemence, and ubiquity. People go to see his plays because they are very witty; they understand them and think they are convinced by them only when they have read and digested his far more convincing Prefaces. The reason why it is impossible to be profoundly interested in his plays is because he is not profoundly interested in them himself. He evidently wrote them without being excited about his persons, their experiences, or the emotions which the situation drew from them; he was excited about his case, about the moral or social truth which his puppets could be made to ill.u.s.trate. There is much ingenious arrangement, much plausible argument, and abundant wit. What really does delight us is the often irrelevant wit of the conversation, and this because Mr. Shaw himself delights in irrelevant wit; it is only when he is writing wittily and irrelevantly that he is disinterested, that he is doing something for its own sake, that he is writing in the only way in which an artist can write effectively. But in so far as he is aiming at something other than a significant presentation of life--and he generally is--he is attempting to ”indict” society, to show up abuses, to expose political and social sores; he is ceasing to be interested in his subject, his persons, his play; he is forcing human nature out of itself; he is distorting it; he is making it unreal; he is creating monsters--and no dramatist, no artist of any kind, can deal effectively with monsters. When he writes a play, Mr. Shaw attempts to do two completely different things at one and the same time--to present life, and to deduce an arguable and preconceived conclusion about life. If he has not completely failed, that is because he has not completely lived up to his theories.

It is not Mr. Shaw's fault that so many of the cleverest younger writers of the time allow themselves to be led away by his example. But that they are so led away--not only in drama, but in the kindred art of fiction--is a fact so important that it requires statement. Mr. Shaw is ent.i.tled to his own opinion that ”what we want as the basis of our plays and novels is not romance, but a really scientific natural history;” he is quite right, if he feels it to be his own particular function, to spend his whole force in ”indicting” society. But how terrible a loss in human interest and vitality if all our creative artists are to occupy themselves in this process of ”indictment”--indictment being at all times the ant.i.thesis of fair criticism and presentment. I would venture to suggest that human life, roughly speaking, may be divided into two great parts, one of which is completely tabooed by Mr. Shaw. These two parts or aspects of life may be named and envisaged in a hundred different ways. Aristotle called them the ”practical” and the ”theoretic.” The Roman Church called them the ”temporal” and the ”spiritual.” The social philosophers called them the ”State” and the ”Individual.” They may be called ”Science” and ”Art,” ”Politics” and ”Poetry,” ”Public” and ”Private,” ”Social” and ”Personal,” ”Public Work”

(Shaw) and ”The Will of G.o.d,” ”Philanthropy” and ”Friends.h.i.+p,” ”Justice”

and ”Mercy,” ”Humanitarian” and ”Human.” Each second term in these categories is cut clean out of modern life by Mr. Shaw. When he says that ”Ibsen was to the last fascinating and full of a strange moving beauty,” he says it as if he were reproaching Ibsen. His whole influence is thrown on to the side of an austere common sense which destroys emotion because it may become fanaticism, which laughs at sentiment because it may be perverted into nonsense, which is as Puritanically cruel to the insidious blandishments of romance as Plato was cruel to the poets.

Is it fanciful to imagine that it is with the Irishman as I have always fancied it was with the Greek philosopher, that by reason of his own knowledge of the dangerous burning fever of poetry, from his own susceptibility to its enchantments, he decided to crown the poets with garlands and banish them to another city? That, indeed, is an idle fancy. Mr. Shaw exists to prove that there are Irishmen who do not suffer from the intoxication of beauty, who are not susceptible to the windy ardours of romance. Nevertheless Mr. Shaw, too, has his romance. He learnt it in the eager, fighting days when he held up the standard of Fabianism before the blinking eyes of suburban audiences; when he learnt to detest the silly ways of silly people whose silliness was feebly glorified under the names of morality, religion, sentiment, and patriotism; whose qualities he soon found himself exposing in the manner habitual to the trained debater. But this was no ordinary debater. There were conviction, sincerity, and even romantic--G.o.d save the word!--_romantic_ zeal behind this fire of argument, laughter, repartee. Life had become for him, as he said to Dr. Henderson, ”a sort of splendid torch, which I have got hold of for the moment.” It became his business ”to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

II

H.G. WELLS

Mr. Shaw has said that his biography will be the history of his time.

In like manner we might say of Mr. Wells that his life has represented the English life of his time. The former has touched this English life at a thousand points, but he has touched it from the outside. The latter has been an integral part of it, a part which has sprung into consciousness of itself, so that he has written from within outwards.

Inevitably in writing about the England of his time he has found himself writing about that England of which he himself is symbolic.

Mr. Shaw is amazingly clever in generalising about England, in reducing England to formul, in expressing the ideas which her life and society have stirred in his logical mind. But Mr. Wells has felt this national life within himself; he has known it by conscious and subconscious experience, this experience being with him a kind of instinct developing into self-knowledge, and so into a more objective and philosophical perception. You can tell from Mr. Shaw's light, debonair, and laughing manner, just as you might guess from his rather hard and unemotional writing, that experience of living has laid no heavy toll upon his temperament. How different that nervous and slightly self-conscious manner of Mr. Wells, that exterior geniality which never wholly possesses the man, a cover, as it were, to those inner springs of consciousness to which he has evidently referred the world!

It was strange when these two men, presenting so marked a contrast, confronted each other at the Fabian Society--that a.s.sociation of well-informed, constructive, slightly academic Socialists to which both at the time belonged. It was evident that Bernard Shaw, supported by Sidney Webb, standing for a perfectly clear-cut policy and program, should win the day against a man whose appeal was essentially to something not clear-cut, not defined, but to instinct and psychology.

I have been told that Mr. Wells was never able to put forward a coherent program, to state an intelligible case--but all that I know for certain is that it was not intelligible to the Fabians. It is probable enough that his program, as a program, was defective, for whilst it is perfectly easy to define a simple, definite, not widely inclusive policy of action, it is far harder to define that side of the life of a nation which belongs to temperament and instinct. This was what Mr. Wells had in mind; but the social reformers to whom he addressed himself preferred a definite scheme touching the surface of life to an indefinite scheme which aimed at the centre. So Mr. Wells ceased to be a Fabian, and became a Tory-Socialist.

I suggest that Mr. Wells' life and activity may be taken as symbolical of the life of his time. He has told his own story again and again in his novels; it is his own story that he has been telling when he unfolds his ideas about the society in which we live. He, more than any other considerable living writer, seems to have been born to realise within the microcosm of his own experience the social evolution which most of us see in the macrocosm of the nation--an evolution which has been _observed_ by Mr. Bennett with equal clearness, but in a less personal and subjective way, with more detachment. All of us know from the study of history in what way England has changed in the last hundred years--how scientific thought suddenly gained a new importance when it was applied to industry--how the sh.e.l.l of feudalism survived its vitality when the great factory towns began to dominate the country--how all the cla.s.ses were shuffled and left unsettled--how the cities spread out in disorderly suburbs and slums, without plan or direction--how men and women became factory workers and office workers without knowing why, most of them scantily educated, housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit, and flung into the maelstrom of compet.i.tive labour. All this we knew in a certain sense, but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible effective way, the imaginative way. It may almost be said that he gave it to us as an impressionistic account of his own life. He had lived in all this; the social system, or lack of system, had expressed itself in him; and finally he became conscious of all those elements about him and in him which had left their deep impression. Most of us have had an experience in some way similar, though not many of us have been so intimately acquainted with so many cla.s.ses, so many varieties of people, or have felt our experiences so acutely. He was singular in that he found his way to an expression of those effects which the national life had had upon _him_--that is to say, upon a man who had been brought up in a lower middle-cla.s.s family in the Victorian era, who had watched the London suburbs creeping outwards, who had lived among shop-a.s.sistants, who had studied science in laboratories, who had aspired to something more fruitful for the spirit. He did not become aware of these significances all at once. The first eager desire to express himself and create took the form of those early romantic stories--_The Invisible Man_, _The Descent of the Martians_, _The Time Machine_, etc.--stories in which his knowledge of science and Jules Verne were not yet allied to a philosophic enthusiasm for human beings in society. Then he began to be conscious of the great problems of society, and generalised about them in his romantic, ingenious, philosophically imaginative way in such books as _Antic.i.p.ations_, _A Modern Utopia_, etc., until he began to realise that that personal method which he had adopted in _Kipps_ was the best method of expressing the consciousness now awake in him of his own life, of his relations with the people he had met and the country he had lived in, and of the vague, restless desires--desires cast in the mould of this material world, yet half mystical in their nature--which had first made him percipient, then critical and dissatisfied, then critical and irritable, then critical and religious, and afterwards--it remains to be seen.

It was in _Tono-Bungay_ that Mr. Wells achieved an unquestionable success. When he wrote that book it seemed that all the experiences of which hitherto he had been only partially conscious became clear to him; that all the clever but unrelated literary efforts which he had hitherto made found here their clue and connecting link, their inspired synthesis. Long before this he had written astonis.h.i.+ng, ingenious, philosophic, shrewd, suggestive books, but he had achieved no success on this scale. Here he seemed to have brought together all the threads of his many intellectual energies, and woven them into a single fabric fit for wear-and-tear and adornment. At the first he had written romances such as Jules Verne would have been glad to write; he had gone on to project new worlds constructed after a.n.a.lysis of the present, or in antic.i.p.ation of the future, or ideally from the ideal; he had written comic stories and weird stories, and one or two true stories; and he had turned to economics and political science with reforming zeal. But here we have it all again, not in parts, but as a comprehensive whole, in a novel which asks us to consider every cla.s.s in the social ladder in modern England, which questions the whole organisation of our society, which raises central questions about birth, marriage, religion, death, and survival, and presents the whole as a personal and human affair.

Mr. Wells set himself to this task in his own queer, plodding, English way. To the niceties of style and form he paid little attention. He tells the story as best he can, in his own slangy, c.u.mbrous, Latin-English, but idiomatic way--there is little selection or self-suppression, but he makes his points. He draws from a copious store. Considered as social satire, it is an exposure of the silliness and futility of our system of compet.i.tive capitalism superimposed on feudalism. Or you may take it as a book of adventure, and find our hero and his erratic uncle plunging into orgies of hazardous exploits and achievements. Or you may take it as a novel of love, and languish with the hero in a misdirected amour, and burn with him in a glorious, futile, and tragic affection. Or you may take it as a novel of England, of the many currents of English life joining in one vast stream on which the barque of the narrator floats. ”'This,' it came to me, 'is England. This is what I wanted to give in my book. This!'” And this, the vision which comes to Mr. Wells through a kind of instinct about the life he has experienced and sought to convey--the vague dream that haunts and baffles him--the desired, intangible, dimly-felt, but unknown thing--is offered as a kind of mystical solution to the insoluble problem of an imperfect world.

The t.i.tle--it is typical of Mr. Wells--suggests at once the farcical element in the whole thing. Tono-Bungay--a quack medicine, ”slightly injurious rubbish” sold at ”one-and-three-halfpence and two-and-nine a bottle, including the Government stamp.” We can only approach Tono-Bungay, which is modern and representative of our whole industrial system, by way of something prior to it--the old social order which exists only as a tradition, which is maintained as a vast, stupid, demoralising pretence, undermined by Tono-Bungayism. The old order, in Mr. Wells' language, is called the Bladesover System, Bladesover being the house where ”I,” George Ponderevo, the housekeeper's son--one of the many incarnations of the author himself--was born, brought up, and acquired his first impressions of life.

The great house, the church, the village, and the labourers, and the servants in their stations and degrees seemed to me, I say, to be a closed and complete social system. About us were other villages and great estates, and from house to house, interlacing, correlated, the gentry, the fine Olympians, came and went. The country towns seemed mere collections of shops, marketing-places for the tenantry, centres for such education as they needed, as entirely dependent on the gentry as the village and scarcely less directly so. I thought this was the order of the whole world.

”All this fine appearance was already sapped.” George himself, as a boy, had already begun to ”question the final rightness of the gentlefolks,” declaring his rebellion by ”resolving to marry a viscount's daughter” and blacking the eye of her half-brother. He is transported to the house of Nicodemus Frapp, baker, of Chatham, where he again rebels, this time against the threat of being burned for ever in h.e.l.l. Thence he is taken to the house of his uncle Ponderevo, chemist, of Wimblehurst, a small town dominated, like Bladesover, by the landed gentry tradition. And he finds in this uncle, whose name is soon to become a household word throughout the country, a veritable embodiment of the new spirit which is invading the Bladesover system and altering England. Mr. Ponderevo is restless and discontented. He does not like Wimblehurst. ”One rubs along. But there's no development--no growth. They just come along here and buy pills when they want 'em--and a horse-ball or such. They've got to be ill before there's a prescription. That sort they are. You can't get 'em to launch out, you can't get 'em to take up anything new.”

Mr. Ponderevo, being bankrupt, moves to London, and in the course of time George, now a student of science, follows him. New vistas of life open up in the midst of this vast, overgrown, ”purposeless,” ”dingy”

city. n.o.body since d.i.c.kens has given us the impression of London in all its mult.i.tudinous, dismal-gay activities as Mr. Wells gives it us.

But it is no longer the London of d.i.c.kens. It is a ”great, stupid giantess,” a ”city of Bladesover ... parasitically occupied, insidiously replaced by alien, unsympathetic, and irresponsible elements.” It was a chaotic ma.s.s of houses built for the middle-cla.s.s Victorian families. And even while these houses were being run up:

Means of transit were developing to carry the moderately prosperous middle-cla.s.s families out of London; education and factory employment were whittling away at the supply of rough hard-working, obedient girls who would stand the subterranean drudgery of these places; new cla.s.ses of hard-up middle-cla.s.s people such as my uncle, employees of various types, were coming into existence, for whom no homes were provided. None of these cla.s.ses have ideas of what they ought to be, or fit in any legitimate way into the Bladesover theory that dominates our minds. It was n.o.body's concern to see them housed under civilised conditions, and the beautiful laws of supply and demand had free play.