Part 5 (1/2)
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 fas.h.i.+on; 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 human mind could not, in all epochs, have established permanent ideals of statecraft without permanent ideals of a more strictly personal kind.
The truth is that Wells, for all that he has pa.s.sed outside the economics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas which produced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tell you that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the only true thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by that criterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensive gibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's Fairy Tales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presents itself. To say that ”the fundamental nature of life is a tissue and succession of births” is merely a refinement of this. It is true, just as the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the world is full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of a reasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there is a Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue to grow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friends.h.i.+p, or music, or poetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialist must feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and on that point socialism has nothing to say at all.
It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddle that the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. Could Wells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full of meaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life he has felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in English authors. ”Modern poetry, with an exception or so,” he remarks somewhere, and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as a whole, ”does not signify at all.” It is the same with regard to music, art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: his writings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outline against a sunset, ma.s.ses of machinery in the glare of the forge, things that 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 s.h.i.+p in the evening glow under a press of canvas.
You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty he feels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is as untouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities of this building, not to mention its connection with human history, as if he had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not the changeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this building stands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is the mechanism, the process--his emotions gather about the physical result which appears to justify these.
_a chacun son infini_.
There will always be some to whom the significance of things, the meaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conception of mankind as ”permanently in transition.” Reading those pa.s.sages where Wells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as I should feel with regard to music if I heard a ma.s.s of Mozart played at the rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if a procession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision.
The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the pictures as 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 he implies anything at all he implies a ”transvaluation of all values.” It remains to consider him from this point 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 he belongs to a type of mind which has long existed in European literature but which is comparatively new in the English-speaking world, the type of mind of the so-called ”intellectual.” He is an ”intellectual” rather than an artist; that is to say, he naturally grasps and interprets life in the light of ideas rather than in the light of experience.
To pa.s.s from a definition to an example, let me compare Wells in this respect with the greatest and most typical figure of the opposite camp in contemporary English fiction; I mean Joseph Conrad. This comparison is all the more apt because just as much as Wells Conrad typifies the spirit of ”unrest” (a word he has almost made his own, so often does he use it) which is the note of our age. Both of these novelists have endeavored to express the spirit of unrest; both have suggested a way of making it contributory to the attainment of an ideal. But how different is their method, how different is their ideal! And roughly the difference is this: that to Conrad the spirit of unrest is a personal mood, a thing, as people used to say, between man and his Maker; whereas to Wells the spirit of unrest is not a mood but a rationally explicable frame of mind, a sense of restricted function, an issue to be fought out not 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 by holding fast to certain simple instinctive moral principles, integrity, honor, loyalty, etc., contributing in this way to the ideal of personal character, the spirit of unrest in Wells is to be appeased by working through the established fact, by altering the environment in which man lives, contributing in this way to the ideal of a great society of which personal 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 greatly living individuals, or vice versa. But practically there is a world of difference between them, according as any given mind emphasizes the one or the other. This difference, I say, is the difference between life approached through experience and life approached through ideas. And when we penetrate behind these points of view we find that they are determined very largely by the characters and modes of living of the men who hold them. That explains the vital importance in literary criticism of knowing something about the man one is discussing, as distinguished from the work of his brain pure and simple. There is a reason why the intellectualist point of view occurs as a rule in men who have habitually lived the delocalized, detached, and comparatively depersonalized life of cities, while men of the soil, of the sea, of the elements, men, so to speak, of intensive experience, novelists like Conrad or Tolstoy or Hardy, are fundamentally non-intellectual, pessimistic, and moral.
And this explains the natural opposition between Conrad and Wells. Aside from the original bent of his mind, the intensive quality of Conrad's experience--an experience of s.h.i.+ps and the minute, simple, personal, tragic life of s.h.i.+ps, set off against the impersonal, appalling sea and an always indifferent universe, a life remote from change, in which the relations of things are in a peculiar sense abiding and in which only one problem exists, the problem of character, imminent nature being kept at bay only through the loyalty, integrity and grit of men--the intensive quality of this experience, I say, acting upon an artistic mind, would naturally tend to produce not only a bitterly profound wisdom, but an equally profound contempt for the play of ideas, so irresponsible in comparison, and for a view of the world based upon ideas the real cost of which has never been counted in the face of hunger, icy winds, storm and s.h.i.+pwreck, and the abysmal forces of nature. Men who go down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps have a right to say for themselves (tempering the credulity of those who have remained at home) that the intellectualist view of life is altogether too easy and too glib. It is they who throw into relief the deep, obscure conviction of the ”plain man”--commonly the good man--that to endeavor to make life conform with ideas is in some way to deprive the world of just those elements which create character and to strike at an ideal forged through immemorial suffering and effort.
Merely to dismiss as dumb folly an all but universal contention of this kind (no doubt in the back of people's minds when they say that socialism, for instance, is ”against human nature”) is to beg the whole question of intellectualism itself. For, if it could be conclusively shown that any view of life not incidentally but by its nature emasculated life and destroyed the roots of character, then of course, no matter how rationally self-evident it might be and how much confusion and suffering it might avert, it would never even justify its own reason for being--it would never _succeed,_ the best part of human nature would oppose it to the end of time and the intelligence itself would be discredited. And indeed to the man of experience rather than the man of ideas, just because of his rich humanity, just because he never pa.s.ses out of the personal range, belong the ideal things, morality, philosophy, art. Like charity, these things ”begin at home”; and whenever (as in pragmatism, when pragmatism ceases to be a method and claims to be an interpretation of life) they are approached not from the side of experience but from the side of ideas they cease to have any real substance. Morality has no substance when it springs from the mind instead of the conscience, art when it appeals to the mind instead of the perceptions; and as to philosophy, what is any scheme of things that springs out of the head of a man who is not himself wise? It is a certain condemnation of Bergson, for example, that he would never pa.s.s muster in a group of old fishermen smoking their pipes on the end of a pier. Not that they would be expected in any case to know what he was talking about, but that his fibre so plainly is the fibre not of a wise but of a clever man and that in everything, as Emerson said, you must have a source higher than your tap.
That is why, as it seems to me, Wells ought not to be considered from any of these absolute standpoints. He has put before us not so much a well-wrought body of artistic work, or a moral programme, or an explanation of life--words quite out of place in connection with him--as a certain new spirit, filled with all sorts of puzzled intimations of a new beauty and even a new religion to be generated out of a new order of things that is only glimpsed at present. And the point I should like to make about this spirit is that it is entirely irrelevant to the values of life as we know them, but that it may in the end prove to have contributed to an altogether fresh basis for human values.
To ill.u.s.trate what I mean by this irrelevance as regards present values and this possibility as regards future values let me turn to that long brilliant pa.s.sage in _The New Machiavelli_ where Remington goes from club to club, pa.s.sing in review the spiritual possibilities of each political party, and finds nothing but a desolation of triviality, pomposity, confusion, and ”utterly d.a.m.ned old men.” Consider the contempt and hopelessness that fill his mind. One has to forget entirely the ordinary man's view of politics, sincerely held as it is; one has to think of politics as a means of straightening out and re-engendering a whole world of confused anguish before one can see any justification for this righteous wit and savage indignation against the dulness of leaders. Considered by the current values of life in which politics are regarded as an effect of man's incompetence rather than as a cause of his virtue, treated intensively, as a novelist of experience rather than of ideas would have treated them, in what a different light each of these ”utterly d.a.m.ned old men” would appear, each one a tiny epic of tragic and comic efforts, disappointments, misconceptions, providing one in the end with how much of an excuse for blame, ridicule or contempt!
Everything indeed depends upon where a given mind chooses to lay emphasis. In this scene Wells has judged everything by his ideal of a great society, just as Conrad, faced with the same material, would have judged everything by his ideal of personal character. Conrad would have used those men to give us an understanding of life as it is, whereas Wells has used them simply to throw into relief his idea of what life ought to be. Conrad would have created a work of art, ill.u.s.trated a moral programme, and interpreted life. Wells, admittedly a clever caricaturist, only rises above the level of a clever caricaturist according as we accept the validity of his ideal and share the spirit in which he writes. Like many children of light, Wells is not wise in his own generation. But perhaps another generation will justify him.
If Wells had lingered in these deep realities of his own time he would have been a greater artist. And indeed so marked has been his own development away from the world of ideas and toward the world of experience that were he to begin afresh it is likely that he would resemble the type of novelist of which I have taken Conrad as an example far more than his former self. Of socialism he has abandoned all the theories and most of the schemes and retained only the frame of mind. He has taken year by year a more intensive view of life, he has grown too conscious of the inertia that impedes ideas and the overwhelming immediacies 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 of its dreams!” he says in one of his latest novels, and if he has kept alive his faith in ideas, who will deny that he has begun to count the cost of it?
From this side, I think, it is no longer possible for anyone to a.s.sail him, so frankly has he given hostages to ”actuality.” It is from the other 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 and which is very marked in his recent novels. Is it possible to ignore the fact that since he wrote _The New Machiavelli_ the work of Wells has lived on its capital and lost the pa.s.sionate curiosity and personal conviction that made him the force he was in our epoch? Always unwilling to check his talent and publish only the results of his genuine mental progress, he has become, in spite of splendid moments, too much of the common professional novelist, dealing with levels and phases of life where he obviously does not belong, astray from his own natural point of intense contact with things. I want to avoid the usual habit of critics who think it their business to put authors in their places, but is it not a fact that Wells understands the Kippses and Pollys far better than the lords and ladies of England and that he was at his best in elaborating a bridge--a wonderful visionary bridge--between the little world of dumb routine and the great world of s.p.a.cious initiatives?
Carlyle with his Great Man theory, forged out of his own travail and weakness, in the end fell on his knees before the illusion of lords.h.i.+p.
Fifteen years ago one might have predicted the same future for the Samurai of Wells, not because the Samurai are themselves equivocal but because Wells is an Englishman. There so plainly to the English mind the great gentlemen are, the men who can and the men who never do! Towards this Circe of the English imagination Wells has travelled with a fatal consistency, and the result to be foreseen was first of all fatuity and in the end extinction.