Part 4 (1/2)
”Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?”
”He must leave either her or the order.”
”There is matter for a novel or so in that.”
”There has been matter for hundreds.”
Wells has written six himself. _Love and Mr. Lewisham, Ann Veronica, Tono-Bungay, The New Machiavelli, Marriage, The Pa.s.sionate Friends_, are all variations on this theme. In one of these alone life's double motive succeeds in establis.h.i.+ng itself, and it is for this reason that _Marriage_, to my thinking the weakest of his novels from an artistic point of view, is the most important concrete presentation of the philosophy of Wells. It is an inferior book, but it gives one the sense of a problem solved. By pa.s.sing through a necessary yet feasible discipline, Trafford and Marjorie bridge over the gap between haphazard human nature and the better nature of socialism, and become Samurai in fact.
These entanglements of the actual world would be an overwhelming obstacle to a socialism less vigorous than that of Wells. But obstacles give edge to things, and for a man who loves order no one could have pictured disorder with more relish than he. Only a pure theorist could regret the artistic zest with which he portrays our muddled world.
Running amuck was a constant theme in his early writings; his comets ran amuck, and so did Mr. Bessel, and there is no more relished wanton scene than that of the Invisible Man running amuck through the Surrey villages. Intentionally or not, this relish in disorder reinforces the prime fact about his view of order. He abhors the kind of order which is often ignorantly confounded with the socialist aim, the order which cla.s.sifies and standardizes. He desires a collective consciousness only through the exercise of a universally unimpeded free will, and he would rather have no collectiveness at all than one that implies the sacrifice of this free will. He wishes to work only on the most genuine human stuff. This was the basis of his break with the Fabian Society; it is the basis of his dislike of bureaucratic methods which deprive people of beer when they want beer. It defines his notion of the true method of socialism as first of all an education of the human will toward voluntary right discipline.
His appeal, then, is a personal one. He has proved this indeed by his repudiation of all attempts to embody in practice his proposed order of voluntary n.o.bility, the Samurai. Certain groups of young people actually organized themselves upon the Rule that he had outlined, and it was this that led him to see how entirely his ideal had been personal and artistic rather than practical. Anyone at all familiar with religious history and psychology will see how inevitably any such group would tend to emphasize the Rule and the organization rather than the socially constructive spirit for which the whole was framed, and how the organization would itself separate from the collective life of the world and become a new sect among the many sects. It was the same instinct that led Emerson, Transcendental communist as he was, to look askance at Brook Farm. It has been the want of an equal tact in eminent religious minds that has made society a warfare of sect and opinion.
When one tries to focus the nature of his appeal one recalls a pa.s.sage in one of his books where he sums up the ordinary mind of the world and the function which all socialism bears to this mind:
It is like a very distended human mind; it is without a clear aim; it does not know except in the very vaguest terms what it wants to do; it has impulses, it has fancies; it begins and forgets. In addition, it is afflicted with a division within itself that is strictly a.n.a.logous to that strange mental disorder which is known to psychologists as multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the whole of itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name and address. Part of it thinks of itself as one great thing, as, let us say, Germany; another thinks of itself as Catholicism, another as the white race, or Judaea. At times one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind as incurable dementia--a chaos of mental elements, haunted by invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas.... In its essence the socialistic movement amounts to this: it is an attempt in this warring chaos of a collective mind to pull itself together, to develop and establish a governing idea of itself. It is the development of the collective self-consciousness of humanity.
Certainly the road to this can only be through a common understanding.
The willing and unwilling servitudes of men, the inst.i.tutions of society that place love and work in opposition to one another, the s.h.i.+bboleths of party, the aggressive jingoisms of separate peoples, the immemorial conspiracy by which men have upheld the existing fact, these things do spring from the want of imagination, the want of energetic faith, the want of mutual understanding. To this inner and personal problem Wells has applied himself. Can life be ventilated, can the ma.s.s of men be awakened to a sense of those laws of social gravitation and the trans.m.u.tation of energy by which life is proved a myriad-minded organism, can the ever-growing sum of human experience and discovery clear up the dark places within society and within man? Among those who have set themselves to the secular solution of these questions--and I am aware of the limits of any secular solution--there are few as effective as Wells.
Consider him in relation to a single concrete issue, the issue of militarism:
Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two cla.s.ses: there is expenditure upon things that have a diminis.h.i.+ng value, things that grow old-fas.h.i.+oned and wear out, such as fortifications, s.h.i.+ps, guns, and ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a permanent and even growing value, such as organized technical research, military and naval experiment, and the education and increase of a highly trained cla.s.s of war experts.
And in _The Common Sense of Warfare_ he urges a lavish expenditure on ”education and training, upon laboratories and experimental stations, upon chemical and physical research and all that makes knowledge and leading.” Separate the principle involved here from the issue it is involved in, get the intention clear of the fact, and you find that he is saying just the better sort of things that Matthew Arnold said.
Militarism granted, are you going to do military things or are you going to make military things a stepping-stone toward the clarification of thought, the training of men, the development of race-imagination?
Militarism has been to a large extent the impetus that has made the Germans and the j.a.panese the trained, synthetic peoples they are. And these very qualities are themselves in the end hostile to militarism.
Militarism considered in this sense is precisely what the General Strike is in the idea of M. Georges Sorel: a myth, a thing that never comes to pa.s.s, but which trains the general will by presenting it with a concrete image toward which the will readily directs itself. Kipling, in the eyes of the New Machiavelli, at least made the nation aware of what comes.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o'
doing things rather more or less.
There is in this no defence of militarism. Granting the facts of society, there is a way that accepts and secures them as they are and another way of turning them into the service of the future, and a people that has trained itself with reference to a particular issue has virtually trained itself for all issues.
But no one, I think, has measured the difficulties of real progress more keenly than Wells has come to measure them. The further he has penetrated into human nature the more alive he has become to these difficulties. _The New Machiavelli_ is a modern _Ra.s.selas_ that has no happy valley in the end, and Remington pa.s.ses from party to party, penetrating inward from ideas to the better stuff of mankind, hoping to embody his ”white pa.s.sion of statecraft,” and in the end demonstrating to himself the futility of all groups and parties alike.
And as with parties, so with men. Consider that scene in _The Pa.s.sionate Friends_ where Stratton tries to explain in writing to his father what he has been experiencing and why he must go away. He writes page after page without expressing himself and at last, certain that he and his father cannot come into touch, sends off a perfunctory note and receives a perfunctory reply. ”There are times,” he adds, ”when the inexpressiveness of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems to me we are all asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the still cows who stand munching slowly in a field.... Why couldn't we and why didn't we talk together!”
That is the burden of his latest novel. By this touchstone he has come to measure the possibility of that openness of mind, that mutual understanding, that ventilation of life and thought through which alone the Great State can exist.
CHAPTER VI
A PERSONAL CHAPTER
I doubt if there are many living men of note who, a generation after they are dead, will be so fully and easily ”explained” as H.G. Wells. He is a most personal and transparent writer, he is the effect of conditions and forces which have existed for scarcely more than two generations. But for these very reasons it is very difficult to see him in perspective, and to explain him would be to explain the age in which we live. Let me at least give certain facts and reflections about his life written by Wells himself, a few years ago, in the introduction to a Russian translation of his writings:
I was born[1] in that queer indefinite cla.s.s that we call in England the middle cla.s.s. 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.