Critical Woodcuts/H. G. Wells
MR. WELLS now meets his public in a handsome autographed edition, limited to a thousand and fifty copies for the United States, on an excellent paper and in beautiful and legible type.[1] He is no longer a journalist.
On the brink of his sixtieth birthday he and I have been rereading his works. We have found some defects in them, but we have been charmed by them, and, on the whole, we have been tremendously impressed by them. We have felt with fresh force the central drive and ardor which have been animating his labors these thirty years. We see the great masses of his work arranging themselves in intelligible order as the broad and towering features of an architectural design, imaginative and splendid. In the illuminating introduction to the Atlantic Edition, he interprets his works with good humor, with candor and with many flashes of shrewd critical insight. He establishes points of view from which one can take in his main intention and his total effect.
Mr. Wells's main intention developed against the background of that mid-Victorian England which is described with extraordinary gusto in one of his best and most realistic novels, "Tono-Bungay." Mid-Victorian society, as the young Wells envisaged it,
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gazing from somewhere not far from its lower stratum, was a substance in which he seemed to be fixed like a fly at the bottom of a pan of cold mutton tallow. He looked up at Bladesover Hall, where the Olympians sat looking down on the vicarage people, who looked down on the doctor, who looked down on the "vet," who looked down on the tenantry, who looked down on the butler and the housekeeper, and so by immutable degrees one descended from housekeeper to village shopkeeper, to head keeper, to cook, to publican, to second keeper, to blacksmith, to first footman, etc.
After a fist fight with the son of one of the Olympians the low born hero is banished to a stuffy, sniffing religious lower middle class family which on Sundays "met with twenty or thirty other darkened and unclean people, all dressed in dingy colors that would not show the dirt, in a little brick-built chapel equipped with a spavined roarer of a harmonium, and there solaced their minds on the thought that all that was fair and free in life, all that struggled, all that planned and made, all pride and beauty and honor, all fine and enjoyable things, were irrevocably damned to everlasting torments."
If you wish a sympathetic understanding of Mr. Wells's main intention you must first allow the asphyxiating atmosphere of this greasy, malodorous world to enter your lungs. That it may do so, and that you may recognize how easily Mr. Wells might have established a reputation as a "devastating" realist if he had not passionately loathed this reality and deliberately turned away from it, I will quote one other passage descriptive of that beautiful thing which conservatives call "the established order." The sounds and then the scene return, those obscure, undignified people, a fat woman with asthma, an old Welsh milkseller with a tumor on his bald head, who was the intellectual leader of the sect, a huge-voiced haberdasher with a big black beard, a white-faced, extraordinarily pregnant woman, his wife; a spectacled rate-collector with a bent back . . . I hear the talk about souls, the strange battered old phrases that were coined ages ago in the seaports of the sun-dry Levant, of balm of Gilead and manna in the desert, of gourds that give shade and water in a thirsty land; I recall again the way in which at the conclusion of the service the talk remained pious in form, but became medical in substance, and how the women got together for obstetric whisperings.
Having passed from the stratified Bladesover Hall world to evangelical hymn-singing society, George Ponderevo then enters the tradesman's world of his uncle, a small English Babbitt, who wishes he were in America, "where things hum," and with him he enters the field of unscrupulous business, which is the main theme of the book.
Now, I am, of course, aware that the short and easy way to describe Mr. Wells's main intention, and at the same stroke to destroy him, is to say that in reaction from this mid-Victorian background he developed "the Messiah complex." But what does that really mean? Elijah III developed a Messiah complex. How does the "complex" of H. G. Wells differ from that of Elijah III? Perhaps we need not go into that. Perhaps we need only characterize briefly any one of Mr. Wells's heroes—for they are all of the same spiritual family. Suppose we stick to George Ponderevo and take his description of the spirit that was in him when, revolting against the aspects of the established order in which he had passed his youth, he came up to London:
I came up to it, young and without advisers, rather priggish, rather dangerously open-minded and very open-eyed, and with something—it is, I think, the common gift of imaginative youth, and I claim it unblushingly—fine in me, finer than the world and seeking fine responses. I did not want simply to live or simply to live happily or well; I wanted to serve and do and make—with some nobility. It was in me. It is in half the youth of the world.
Instead, then, of attempting to destroy Mr. Wells by saying that he developed the "Messiah complex," let us say this: He developed a loathing for a society as fixed and as unappetizing as cold mutton tallow. He thought it unendurable, and with that thought came a strong conviction that it is not necessary to endure it. It could be changed. In this age of astounding industrial and scientific progress the instruments were at hand for producing swiftly enormous and epoch-making changes in the political, social and personal life of all mankind. It was undeniable.
What stood in the way? What made the processes of beneficent change so slow? The vast inertia of humanity, its vast ignorance, its vast fear, its vast indolence, the well-nigh impossible task of clearing a free and open place for adventurous men to go forward amid the intricate labyrinths of old crooked customary ways. Not the means but the will to use the means was lacking. It was not that fine ends were impossible, but that the mass of men had not yet conceived of them. And so in Mr. Wells the vague adolescent yearning for something finer than cold mutton tallow ripened into his life's main intention, which has been to kindle the imagination, to magnify, glorify and energize the will and reason of man, and to persuade our generation that the human will and reason are the legitimate successors to a creative and governing Providence.
Mr. Wells began his literary career with the publication of a series of fantastic romances, such as "The Time Machine," showing a "chronic" aeroplane in which one could visit the year 2000; "The Island of Doctor Moreau," in which a surgeon with infinitely cruel and protracted operations transforms the lower animals into the shape of men; "The Invisible Man," a study in applied chemistry; "The War of the Worlds," in which the planet Mars bombards Southern England with canisters full of super-scientists who march on London with heat-rays and gas attack, decisively anticipating the Germans; "When the Sleeper Wakes," a new Rip Van Winkle; "The First Men in the Moon," "The Sea Lady," in which a mermaid vamps a most eligible young man, who is already engaged to a suitable young mortal; "The Food of the Gods," more applied chemistry, directed to making people grow forty feet tall.
I am not sure that most of us when these romances first appeared saw anything in them but exciting yarns, "fairy tales of science," the mere exuberance of Mr. Wells's imagination. I notice, for example, that Mr. J. D. Beresford, one of Mr. Wells's innumerable disciples in fiction, classes "The Island of Dr. Moreau" among the "essays in pure fancy," though he notes that some absurd reviewers imagined it to be a defense of vivisection. Mr. Beresford's little book on Wells was published in 1915. In my own recent rereading of the tales I have been much struck by their purposefulness with reference to Mr. Wells's main intention. They are all essays toward a new point of view, essays toward seeing things differently, essays toward liberating the mind and the imagination from the nightmare of our present life and plunging them into another sort of nightmare! They are the religious myths and heroic fables and allegories in the new scriptures which Mr. Wells has been writing for our generation. Boys and girls will read them for their surface meaning as they read Gulliver, but persons of my generation may return to them and find a fresh fascination in regarding them as the meaningful grandiose "poetry" of the leader of the English intelligentsia.
I am supported in this notion by Mr. Wells's prefatory note in the Atlantic Edition on "The Island of Dr. Moreau." It originated, he tells us, as an imaginative response to the pitiful downfall and scandalous trial of a man of genius—presumably Oscar Wilde—which took place in 1895. It was written, he says, "just to give the utmost vividness to that conception of men as hewn and confused and tormented beasts." He calls it a "theological grotesque." Unless one so regards it it is quite too horrible to read. If one thinks of Dr. Moreau as a man cutting up living beasts and reshaping them, it is unendurable. But if one thinks of Dr. Moreau as God cutting up living men and reshaping them, then it is quite what we are accustomed to, and causes no gooseflesh. But if one takes a step further and thinks of Dr. Moreau as Mr. Wells, exploring the plasticity of men and states, attempting to cut up living men and reshape them into something better than the existing race, then one has a really stunning symbol of Mr. Wells's actual life effort as a radical mind of his generation; and in the lapse of Dr. Moreau's semi-human beings back to bestiality—well, consider the time still bleeding in memory when for some years the effort of every patriotic man, woman and child in the greater part of the civilized world was bent on homicide.
"When the reader comes to read the writings upon history in this collection," says Mr. Wells, "he will find the same idea of man as a re-shaped animal no longer in flaming caricature, but as a weighed and settled conviction." See "The Outline of History."
One might go through these "fantastic tales" and show how burdened they are with Mr. Wells's moral meanings, now clearly enough legible in the light of his main intention. For example, the attack of the Martians in "The War of the Worlds"—it is really a magnificent fable which ought, if it ever sinks in, to do something to persuade Mark Twain's "damned human race" that they can't afford to risk cutting one another's throats, like a lot of Mexican bandits, but had better get together and concert measures of defense against the invisible, inscrutable, known and unknown foes which threaten the extinction of humanity.
"The Food of the Gods" is an heroic allegory about the world's superior men and women, men and women whose intellectual stature exceeds that of the average man as the height of these forty-foot giants exceeds the human pygmies at their feet. These giants are benevolent creatures of great strength, long vision, creative passion. They would like to do good turns Hfor the little people—make crooked ways straight and rough places plain, but the little people fear them, hedge them, pen them in, forbid their union and finally shoot them—in a sincere conviction that there isn't any place for big people in the world.
In "The Sea Lady" Mr. Wells gives one of his earliest pictures of that dream-woman which all the young men in his sociall novels go seeking so vainly through the world. She is really quite—a lovely and delicious creature, this woman whom Mr. Wells has created out of "infinite yearning." She is free, free and easy. She sings to the heart of man like the Lorelei. And if you desire to know why many people wish that Mr. Wells were Dr. Moreau or the King of the World or God the Invisible King—in his more sanguine moments I think it indubitable that he has identified himself with all three—it is because, if Mr. Wells had Eternal Femininity in his hands to reshape to the heart's desire, he would make it over in some such shape as this:
To go to her is like going out of a house, a very fine and dignified house, I admit, into something larger, something adventurous and incalculable. She is—she has an air of being—natural. She is as lax and lawless as the sunset, she is as free and familiar as the wind. She doesn't—if I may put it in this way—she doesn't love and respect him when he is this, and disapprove of him highly when he is that; she takes him altogether. She has the quality of the open sky, of the flight of birds, of deep-tangled places, she has the quality of the high sea. That I think is what she is for him, she is the Great Outside.
And with a flick of her mermaid's tail she slips down into the depths of the sea, leaving the hero to the sort of woman that many of us get on with, well enough, so long as we believe there is no other sort.
I have been describing Mr. Wells's imagination, moving with perfect freedom in the group of his works which he calls "fantastic romances." The relation between the romances and the novels of social life might be suggested by comparing Dr. Moreau with Stratton in "Passionate Friends," with Trafford in "Marriage," with Capes in "Ann Veronica," with the narrator in "The New Machiavelli," with Mr. Britling,—best of all, perhaps, with Benham in "The Research Magnificent."
As a novelist Mr. Wells believes in an adequate "register." He has, I think, endowed each one of his heroes with most of the interests, virtues, and aspirations uppermost in his own mind at the time of composition. They are men of wide embrace, these heroes. Their stream of consciousness customarily includes science, sociology, politics, and education, all subtly implicated with the pursuit of some freer, happier intercourse between the sexes. Each hero has a clear sense that there is something fine in him, "finer than the world and craving fine responses," and he explains this to a heroine, who, being a possessive "female" creature, doesn't more than half understand why he has to cart her off to Labrador or exile himself in Africa in order to understand what she and the world are about. But each hero incarnates what I have described as Mr. Wells's main intention: his desire to glorify, magnify, and energize the will and the reason as rulers and creators of a new world order, a new social order, new forms and qualities of personal relations.
The specific ideas which they have are discussed at length in "A Modern Utopia," "New Worlds for Old," "First and Last Things," "God the Invisible King," etc. Their proposals for reconstruction have included from time to time most of the forms of social tyranny contemplated by the Socialists. But their spontaneous impulses, like those of Mr. Wells himself, are romantic and egotistic, as he has acknowledged. The instinctive aspiration of each is to be an aristocrat, a prince, an autocrat, or, as Benham in his megalomania puts it, an "uncrowned king of the world," or a kind of mortal God. Benham, as I have said, may be compared with Dr. Moreau because his research is into the plasticity of human nature: he is trying to make himself over in accordance with an ideal, which obliges him to cut out of his nature three of the most elemental and deep-seated passions: fear, desire, and jealousy.
What does Mr. Wells actually think to-day about the possibility of making men like gods by the excision of jealousy, desire, fear? You may find what he thought from week to week throughout 1924 by reading the fifty-five articles in "A Year of Prophesying." If you will turn to the fifty-fourth article, entitled "The Creative Passion," you will come upon this brief statement of his present attitude:
Do men and women generally want a better world than this?
Do they want a world free from war, general economic security, a higher level of general health, long life, freedom and hope for everyone, beauty as the common quality of their daily lives?
The conventional answer to that question, especially if you put it to a public meeting with the appropriate gestures, is "Of course they do."
But the true answer is, "Not much!"
Yes, evil is immortal. The genius in which the old theology incarnates it, Satan, will survive the last man, and will remain alone, seated, his wings folded, upon the débris of extinct worlds. And we have not even the right to desire the death of Satan. A high philosophy will not groan at the eternity of universal evil. It will recognize, on the contrary, that evil is necessary and that it ought to endure; for, without it, man would have nothing to do in this world.
There are always, aren't there, plenty of men who see the indispensability of Satan and who mock the heat of those who attempt to dislodge him?
I suppose few men now living have striven more comprehensively than Mr. Wells to understand the whole meaning of the world and the world's needs, and to put fine meanings and purposes into the world where he saw none. He has grown sage with disillusions, and has relinquished many projects and withdrawn from many experiments. He turns more and more, as all wise men do, from the expectation of reforming nations to the hope of educating a few individuals. But to leave Satan sitting "alone" there, after the death of the last man, upon the débris of extinct worlds?—no, he can never assent to that! Opposite him Something Else will be sitting, with unsheathed sword, breathing for a moment in the pause of the eternal combat.
You are no realist, Mr. Wells. Unlike Mr. Hardy and Joseph Conrad, you have small respect for Chance, and you minimize Necessity, those great powers in the real world. But you have been a brave mythmaker and a heartening poet to the Intellectuals of your time. You have turned an entire generation of novelists and readers from contemplating the fatal forces of heredity and environment and instinct to considering the god-like power of an intelligent will to control instinct, environment and heredity. And I am going to turn upon you your own fine valediction to Oswald in your "Joan and Peter," for I think it sums up your virtue and your valor and that air of being awake and radiant which you have communicated to the more delightful young people of our day:
There was a light upon his life, and the truth was that he could not discover the source of the light nor define its nature; there was a presence in the world about him that made all life worth while and yet it was Nameless and Incomprehensible. . . . Perhaps some men have meant this when they talked of Love, but he himself had loved because of this, and so he held it must be something greater than Love. Perhaps some men have intended it in their use of the word Beauty, but it seemed to him that rather it made and determined Beauty for him. And others again have known it as the living presence of God, but the name of God was to Oswald a name battered out of all value and meaning. And yet it was by this, by this Nameless, this Incomprehensible, that he lived and was upheld. It did so uphold him that he could go on, he knew, though happiness were denied him; though defeat and death stared him in the face.
- ↑ The Works of H. G. Wells, Atlantic Edition, New York, 1924—.