Chapter II: H. G. Wells (2)

There are many different Wellses. Probably nobody likes all of them. He does not like all of himselves. In writing a preface or otherwise referring to an earlier work he is, after the manner of Maeterlinck, almost apologetic, and looks back upon the author with a curious wonder as to how he came to hold such opinions and express them in such a way. Those of us who have grown up with him, so to speak, and followed his mind through all its metamorphoses in their natural order can understand him better, I believe, than those of the younger generation who begin with the current serial and read his works backward. Mr. Wells is just about my age. We were in the laboratory together and breathed the same atmosphere, although five thousand miles apart. When he began to write I was ready to read and to admire the skill with which he utilized for literary purposes the wealth of material to be found in the laboratory. Jules Verne had worked the same rich vein, clumsily but with great success. Poe had done marvels in the short story with such scanty science as he had at his command. But Wells, trained under Huxley in biology at the University of London, had all this new knowledge to draw upon. He could handle technicalities with a far defter touch than Verne and almost rivaled Poe in the evocation of emotions of horror and mystery. Besides this he possessed what both these authors lacked, a sense of humor, a keen appreciation of the whimsicalities of human nature. So he was enabled to throw off in the early nineties a swift succession of short stories astonishingly varied in style and theme. As he became more experienced in the art of writing, or rather of marketing manuscripts, he seems to have regretted this youthful prodigality of bright ideas. Many of them he later worked over on a more extensive scale as the metallurgist goes back to a mine and with an improved process extracts more gold from the tailings and dump than the miner got out of the ore originally.

"The Star" was the first of these I came across, clipping it for my scrap book from _Harper's Weekly_, I believe. First loves in literature make an indelible impression, so I will always hold that nothing Wells has done since can equal it. Certainly it was not improved by expanding it to "In the Days of the Comet." The germ of that creepy tale of advanced vivisection, "The Island of Dr. Moreau", appeared first in the _Saturday Review_, January, 1895, as a brief sketch, "Doctor Moreau Explains." "The Dream of Armageddon", vivid and swift as a landscape under a flash of lightning, served in large part for two later volumes, "When the Sleeper Wakes" and "The New Machiavelli."

It was, as I have said, "The Star" that first attracted me to Wells. It was "The Sea-Lady" who introduced me to him personally. It was in the back room of a little Italian restaurant in New York, one of those sixty-cent table d'hôtes where rich soup and huge haystacks of spaghetti serve to conceal the meagerness of the other five courses. Here foregathered for years a group of Socialists, near-Socialists, and others of less definable types, alike in holding the belief that the world could be moved and ought to be, but disagreeing agreeably as to where the fulcrum could be placed and what power should move the lever. We called ourselves the "X Club", partly because the outcome of such a combination of diverse factors was highly problematical, partly perhaps in emulation of the celebrated London X. One evening some ten years ago, as I came late to the dinner, I noticed that the members were not all talking at once, as usual, but concentrated their attention upon a guest, a quiet, unassuming individual, rather short, with a sunbrowned face, tired eyes, and a pessimistic mustache--a Londoner, I judged from his accent. Then I was introduced to him as "The man who knows all your works by heart, Mr. Wells." This disconcerting introduction was their revenge for my too frequent quotation in debate. The reason, I suppose, for the old saying, "Beware the man of one book", is because he is such a bore.

Mr. Wells appeared to take the introduction literally and began to examine me on the subject. "Did you ever read 'The Sea-Lady'?" I happily was able to say I had, and was let off from any further questions, for he said that he had never met but two persons before who admitted having read the book. I am glad he did not ask me what it meant, for while I had an opinion on the subject, it might not have agreed with his.

Then we turned the tables on Mr. Wells and for the rest of the evening asked him questions and criticized his views; all of which he took very good-naturedly and was apparently not displeased thereby, since in the book about his trip, "The Future in America", he expressed disappointment at not finding in Washington any "such mentally vigorous discussion centers as the New York X Club."

Five years later I had another glimpse of Mr. Wells, this time a jolly evening at his home, where he kept his guests, a dozen young men and women, entertained, first by playing on the pianola, which he bought at the suggestion of Mr. Shaw; afterward by improvising a drama for the occasion, the star rôle being taken by his wife, whom I had seen a few days before marching in the great London suffrage procession. Mr. Wells's home differs from most London houses in having a view and a park. The back windows look over all the sea of houses, the shipping in the Thames, and, smoke permitting, the Surrey hills beyond. On the other side of the house five minutes' walk uphill brings one to Hampstead Heath, the largest of London's public places, which serves Mr. Wells for his long walks.

Mr. Wells perhaps got his love of outdoor life from his father, Joseph Wells, who was a professional cricketer and the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penhurst Castle, in Kent. His mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst. Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, September 21, 1866, and his childhood impressions of his mother's kitchen and his father's garden and shop he has described in "First and Last Things" and in "Tono-Bungay." In this novel, the first, perhaps, to be devoted to that conspicuous feature of modern life, the patent medicine, he has utilized his brief experience as a chemist's apprentice, or, as we would say, a drug clerk. Next an unsuccessful attempt was made to train him as a draper's assistant--a dry goods clerk, in our language, though we have fortunately nothing that exactly corresponds. The hardships and humiliations of this experience seem to have cut deep into his soul, for he recurs to it again and again, always with bitterness, as in "Mr. Polly", "Kipps", and "The Wheels of Chance", for example. But to untangle the autobiographical threads from the purely fictional in Wells's novels would be to cheat some future candidate for a Ph. D. in English literature of his thesis.

The interesting point to observe is that temperament and training have combined to give him on the one hand a hatred of this muddled, blind, and inefficient state of society in which we live, and on the other a distrust of the orderly, logical, and perfected civilization usually suggested as a possible substitute. He detests chaos, but is skeptical of cosmos. Set between these antipathetic poles, he vibrates continually like an electrified pith ball. He has a horror of waste, war, dirt, cruelty, cowardice, incompetency, vagueness of mind, dissipation of energy, inconvenience of households, and all friction, mental or physical. But yet his ineradicable realization of the concrete will not allow him to escape from these disagreeables by taking refuge in such artificial paradises as Fourier's phalanx or Morris' idyllic anarchism. Wells is a Socialist, yet he finds not merely the Marxians, but even the Fabians, too dogmatic and strait-laced for him. His "Modern Utopia" is, I think, the first to mar the perfection of its picture by admitting a rebel, a permanently irreconcilable, antagonistic individuality, a spirit that continually denies. Yet we know that if a utopia is to come on earth it must have room for such.

Wells would never make a leader in any popular movement. He has the zeal of the reformer, but he has his doubts, and, what's worse, he admits them. In the midst of his most eloquent passages he stops, shakes his head, runs in a row of dots, and adds a few words, hinting at another point of view. He has what James defined as the scientific temperament, an intense desire to prove himself right coupled with an equally intense fear lest he may be wrong.

Your true party man must be quite color blind. He must see the world in black and white; must ignore tints and intermediate shades. Wells as Socialist could not help seeing--and saying--that there were many likable things about the Liberals. As a Liberal he must admit that the Tories have the advantage in several respects. He professes to view religion rationalistically, yet there are outbursts of true mysticism to be found in his books, passages which prove that he has experienced the emotion of personal religion more clearly than many a church member.

He has the courage of his convictions, but it does not extend much beyond putting them into print. I doubt whether, if he were given autocratic power, he would inaugurate his "Modern Utopia" or any other of his visions. At least he has hitherto resisted all efforts to induce him to carry them into effect.

For instance, one of the most original and interesting features of his "Modern Utopia" was the Samurai, the ruling caste, an order of voluntary noblemen; submitting to a peculiar discipline; wearing a distinctive dress; having a bible of their own selected from the inspiring literature of all ages; spending at least a week of every year in absolute solitude in the wilderness as a sort of spiritual retreat and restorative of self-reliance. A curious conception it was, a combination of Puritanism and Bushido, of Fourier and St. Francis, of Bacon's Salomon's House, Plato's philosophers ruling the republic, and Cecil Rhodes's secret order of millionaires ruling the world.

One day a group of ardent young men and women, inspired by this ideal, came to Wells and announced that they had established the order, they had become Samurai, and expected him to become their leader, or at least to give them his blessing; instead of which Wells gave them a lecture on the sin of priggishness and sent them about their business. I have no doubt he was right about it, nor does his disapproval of this premature attempt to incorporate the Samurai in London prove that there was not something worth while in the idea. But it shows that Wells knew what his work was in the world and proposed to stick to it, differing therein from other Utopians: Edward Bellamy, who because his fantastic romance, "Looking Backward", happened to strike fire, spent the rest of his life in trying to bring about the coöperative commonwealth by means of clubs, papers, and parties; Dr. Hertzka, who wasted his substance in efforts to found a real Freeland on the steppes of Kilimanjaro, Africa.

Perhaps the matter with Wells is simply that he cannot find his proper pigeon-hole. Perhaps I can find it. Wells has little sympathy with any political grouping or ideal regnant to-day. The orthodox Tory is in his view simply a man without imagination. The orthodox Liberal is a mere sentimentalist substituting democratic phrases for science and discipline. The Imperialist, though touching Wells at some points, repels him by his mania for military expenditure and his ignorant race prejudice. The Socialist or Labor Party man is appallingly narrow and totally unimpressed with the need for intelligence to rule the State. In "The New Machiavelli" the hero hovers distressfully over the entire field of modern politics, finding as little rest for his soul as Noah's dove on the first trip from the ark found for its feet. Once and once only has Wells's ideal found even partial embodiment, and that was in the best days of the Roman Empire.

There was the Great State (in the familiar capital letters); a world state so far as the world was known and civilized. There was a universal language, exact and lucid. There was freedom and security of travel, at least as great as in those same countries to-day. True, Wells would have disapproved of slavery. But so did the Stoics of the Empire disapprove of slavery, at least in theory. Their ideal was a universal citizenship. In the later Empire every freeman in the Roman Empire was called a citizen. There was tolerance, not only of religion but of manners, such as the narrow and parochial States of Western Europe which succeeded its fall have never known till within a hundred years. Statecraft was a science; devotion to the State a cult. There were the legions, examples of duty and discipline and scientific warfare, and yet a few thousands of troops sufficed to police and guard a whole civilized, wealthy, complex world state.

But most important of all was the Roman Law. Based on logical principles; divested of superstitious accessories and irrational taboos; universal and in the main equitable; raised above the Empire and the muddy immediacies of politics till it seemed the voice of nature itself; flexible and changing, but by growth rather than whim, it was the intellectual fabric of the Empire. It so happened that a despotic Emperor wielded the power of state, but still it was the State and not the mere person of the Emperor that was really reverenced. It was certainly not the man or the artist that was divine in Nero, but the office. Even in its decadent and Byzantine days traces of the old ideal remained, and it was not "Charles Richard Henry Etcetera, by the Grace of God King of Anyland, Duke of Somewherelse, Knight of the Golden Spur, Most Reverend Lord of the Free Cities of Lower Ruritania" in the silly medieval (and modern) style, but "Senatus Populusque Romani" and "Res Publica." The medieval Papacy was as universal in structure, but was obscurantist in basis, and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the crusades and the monasteries and great cathedrals as its monuments. The Roman Empire was rationalist in basis, and left behind it laws, straight roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, libraries, and municipal organizations. Chesterton is a romantic and rather likes than otherwise the whimsical eccentricities of modern national institutions. But Wells, though he loves to play with science, takes statecraft as seriously as Marcus Aurelius, and, like him, he is a citizen of the Great State, the Cosmopolis. The "Modern Utopia" might have grown out of the actual Roman Empire had the right turnings been taken from that time to this; no other state or civilization would have formed its basis.

The significance of Wells's advocacy of Socialism lies in the fact that it is addressed to the middle classes. He might be called "The Apostle to the Genteels." He took part for a time in the aggressive socialistic campaign led by the Fabian Society on lines distinct from but parallel to the Marxian working class propaganda. The orthodox Marxian has little use for middle-class people. He expects them to become extinct so shortly that it is no use trying to convert them. He takes no more interest in them than missionaries do in the Tasmanians. They will be ground fine between the upper and nether millstones of the trusts and the unions. Such individuals who survive will be able to do so only by becoming retainers of the capitalists, and as such will be engulfed with them in the revolutionary cataclysm which will end the present era.

With a firm faith in this theory, it is no wonder that he often manifests annoyance at the slowness of the bourgeoisie in carrying out the part assigned them in the Marxian program. They do not disappear fast enough, nor do they show any eagerness to take sides either with the proletariat or with the capitalists. On the contrary, they view both with a certain distrust and antipathy, and maintain a curious confidence in their ability to manage both factions in the future as they have in the past. In short, they are not a negligible quantity, but hold the balance of power, at least for the present, and can retard or accelerate the progress of Socialism to a considerable though an indefinite extent.

Obviously, if the middle class as a whole is to be converted to Socialism, it must be by different arguments than those found effective with the proletariat. The Manifesto does not appeal to them, because they have more to lose than their "chains." There must be something more alluring than a universal competency and a steady job to arouse them to the need of radical changes.

The sight of capitalists excites emulation and ambition rather than hatred and despair. A man is not inclined to vote millionaires out of existence so long as he cherishes a secret hope of becoming one. They do not see the proletarian papers and would be repelled by them if they did.

Wells's outline of the form that middle-class propaganda should take presents several novel and interesting points, but the most conspicuous is his discussion of the effect of Socialism on family relations. His frankness and honesty in bringing that question into the open is in commendable contrast with the tendency of most advocates of Socialism to conceal or minimize the fact that any such profound rearrangement of economic relations as is involved in Socialism must inevitably affect the family, because the economic factor in this institution is undeniably great, although how great is a matter of dispute.

Wells boldly attempts to convert a prejudice into an argument by appealing to the very classes which, it is generally supposed, would be repelled by the bare mention of the subject, to save the family from its impending disintegration by adopting Socialism.

That Wells is right in thinking that the problem of the family is a serious one at the present time is clearly shown by the statistics collected by Sidney Webb for the Fabian Society. He proves:

That the decline in the birthrate which is depriving England
and Wales of at least one-fifth of every year's normal crop
of babies is not accounted for by any alteration in the age,
sex or marital condition of the population, by any refusal
or postponement of marriage, or by any of the effects of
"urbanization" or physical deterioration of sections of
the community. The statistical evidence points, in fact,
unmistakably to the existence of a volitional regulation
of the marriage state that is now ubiquitous throughout
England and Wales, among, apparently, a large majority of
the population.

So much other statisticians have deduced, but Mr. Webb went farther and obtained a direct proof of his conclusion by the circulation of several hundred question blanks among middle-class families. The results are startling. Out of a total of one hundred and twenty families reporting in one category, there were only seven in which the number of children was not intentionally limited. The average number of children in such limited families is one and a half, which is only one third what it was twenty-five years ago. In about sixty per cent of the cases "the poverty of the parents in relation to their standard of comfort" was a cause in the limitation of the family.

This shows how important a factor the increased expense of raising children has become in well-to-do families, and unless the population of the future is to be recruited very largely by the improvident, ignorant, and debased, it points toward some form of state encouragement of the production of well-born children. Wells suggested a differential income tax. Doctor Galton advocated the endowment of gifted parents. The war has brought this question out of the realm of speculative controversy into that of practical necessity. Some of the remedies proposed now make the measures suggested by Wells ten years before seem timid and conservative.

His early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. He therefore never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning is fallacious, because the world cannot be divided up into distinct things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. Here he is extremely radical, going quite as far as Bergson in his anti-intellectualism though attacking the subject in a very different way. He denies the categories, the possibility of number, definition, and classification.[9] He brings three charges against our Instrument of Knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work at another. No two things are exactly alike, and when we try to define a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought back again to a concrete case. Or, as Wells puts it in his laboratory language: "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." "Of everything we need to say this is true, but it is not quite true."

What the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature, the scientist has come to believe, and perhaps in time the logicians will come to see it too. At present, however, they are, as Wells says, in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two. This is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by Mr. Jourdain in which he says:[10]

To these strictures of Mr. Wells on logic we may reply, it
seems to me, that either they are psychological--in which
case they are irrelevant to logic--or they are false. Thus
the principle that "no truth is quite true", implying as it
does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood,
and is therefore false.

This sort of thing might have passed as a good joke in the days of Epimenides, the Cretan, when logic was a novelty, and people amused themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with it. But it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the ramparts as Wells's essay and from within as F. C. S. Schiller's big volume, "Formal Logic."

Wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves." There is a desperate sincerity about the man that I like. He seems always to be struggling to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. I do not think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as Shaw does. Wells would rather, I believe, agree with other people than disagree. He is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. But he insists always on "painting the thing as he sees it." His later novels have come under the ban of the British public libraries because, conceiving sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant facts obtruded. His sociological works, in which, while insisting on permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship, aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions in his novels.

All his longer novels are largely concerned with the problem of marital life but the only one of them that comes near to a solution is that entitled "Marriage." The couple in this case, the Traffords, are exceptionally decent people for characters in a modern novel, and if their marriage is not a success it is not on account of any interference from a third party, but rather because of the cares and complications that come from family life and financial prosperity. The heroine is a charming specimen of the modern young woman, educated at "Oxbridge", whose chief fault is a constitutional inability to keep her accounts straight. She spends money with excellent taste, but without regard to her husband's bank balance. Consequently Trafford has to lay aside his researches in molecular physics to work out a successful process for synthetic rubber--easy to a man of his ability.

Mr. Wells apparently adopts the theory formulated by Professor Devine, of Columbia, as to the normal division of labor between husband and wife, that men should be experts in the art of getting money and women experts in the art of spending it. Where both parties fail is in regarding these duties as ends in themselves, the men getting absorbed in business and the women buying things that they do not want, that nobody needs, just for the sake of buying. Apparently Mr. Wells has hope of curing the men, but none of curing the women.

Premature attempts at realization, the demand for immediate results, the disregard of purely scientific research, the swamping of life by restless activity and futile efforts at reform, these are the ailments of the modern world, according to our author. His satire spares neither conservatives nor radicals. The following passage would apply to New York as well as London:

London, of course, is always full of Movements. Essentially
they are absorbents of superfluous feminine energy. They
have a common flavor of progress and revolutionary purpose,
and common features in abundant meetings, officials,
and organization generally. Few are expensive and still
fewer produce any tangible results in the world. They
direct themselves at the most various ends: the poor,
that favorite butt, either as a whole or in such typical
sections as the indigent invalid or the indigent aged, the
young, public health, the woman's cause, the prevention of
animal food, anti-vivisection, the gratuitous advertisement
of Shakespeare (that neglected poet), novel but genteel
modifications of medical or religious practice, dress
reform, the politer aspects of socialism, the encouragement
of aeronautics, universal military service, garden suburbs,
domestic arts, proportional representation, duodecimal
arithmetic, and the liberation of the drama. They range
in size and importance from campaigns on a Plessingtonian
scale to sober little intellectual Beckingham things
that arrange to meet half yearly and die quietly before
the second assembly. If Heaven by some miracle suddenly
gave every Movement in London all it professed to want, our
world would be standing on its head and everything would
be extremely unfamiliar and disconcerting. But, as Mr.
Roosevelt once remarked, the justifying thing about life
is the effort and not the goal, and few Movements involve
any real and impassioned struggle to get to the ostensible
object. They exist as an occupation; they exercise the
intellectual and moral activities without undue disturbance
of the normal routines of life. In the days when everybody
was bicycling an ingenious mechanism called Hacker's home
bicycle used to be advertised. Hacker's home bicycle was a
stand bearing small rubber wheels, upon which one placed
one's bicycle (properly equipped with a cyclometer) in
such a way that it could be mounted and ridden without any
sensible forward movement whatever. In bad weather, or when
the state of the roads made cycling abroad disagreeable,
Hacker's home bicycle could be placed in front of an open
window and ridden furiously for any length of time. Whenever
the rider tired, he could descend--comfortably at home
again--and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had
been. In exactly the same way the ordinary London Movement
gives scope for the restless and progressive impulse in
human nature without the risk of personal entanglements or
any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.[11]

To accomplish a cure, or at least to obtain a diagnosis of the evil, Mr. Wells resorts to a curious expedient which he suggested first in his "Modern Utopia", where he laid down as one of the rules of his new order of Samurai that a man who aspired to be a leader of men should for a week every year go off into the desert and live absolutely alone, without books or other distractions to keep him from thinking. But in "Marriage" Mr. Wells improves upon this plan, for Trafford and his wife go into the wilds of Labrador together. "How sweet is solitude," as the Irishman said, "when you have your sweetheart with you." So, indeed, they found it, and in their fight with cold, starvation, and wild beasts they learned how to found their love upon mutual comprehension and respect, and made of their marriage a true union. The change of heart which Trafford experiences is not altogether unlike what Christians call conversion. His line of argument, or, more properly speaking, development of thought, finds expression in fragmentary sentences muttered in the delirium of fever, a Freudian emergence of fundamental feelings, as in the following passage:

"Of course," he said, "I said it--or somebody said it--about
this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's
something arising out of life--not the common stuff of life.
An exhalation. ... It's like the little tongues of fire
that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back
to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet....
The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I
saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall
pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself
purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear
in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression
of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I
achieve salvation.... Salvation!...

"I wonder is salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for
one man salvation is research and thought, and for another
expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. Provided
he does it in the spirit. He has to do it in the spirit....

"This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from
purposeless triviality, _isn't_ life. Let me get hold of
that. That's a point. That's a very important point."

This passage from "Marriage" showed that in 1912 Wells's thought was entering upon a new phase, considerably in advance of that revealed in his "First and Last Things." He seemed to be working toward some sort of belief in God, a Bergsonian God, struggling upward in spite of and by means of inert matter and recalcitrant humanity. It would indeed be queer to find Wells not only among the prophets, but among the Christian prophets, and, as he intimates, some of the other Christians would not like it.

Wells's catholicity of sympathy recognizes no limitations of race. He has an abhorrence for race prejudice of every kind. The greatest blot he found upon American civilization was our ill treatment of the negro.[12]

In his article on "Race Prejudice" he puts it foremost among the evils of the age but even his "anticipations" could not conceive of such an insensate revival of racial animosity between civilized nations as the Great War has, brought about:

Knight errantry is as much a part of a wholesome human being
as falling in love or self-assertion, and therein lies
one's hope for mankind. Nearly every one, I believe--I've
detected the tendency in old cheats even and disreputable
people of all sorts--is ready to put in a little time
and effort in dragon-slaying now and then, and if any one
wants a creditable dragon to write against, talk against,
study against, subscribe against, work against, I am
convinced they can find no better one--that is to say, no
worse one--than Race Prejudice. I am convinced myself that
there is no more evil thing in this present world than
Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately--it is
the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds
together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any
other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs
the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and
persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul.
It is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours
youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and
servitude, and desolates wide regions. It is a monster
begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to
be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own
dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable
share.

The abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward his ideal. And his ideal is that of an evolutionist, the opportunity for continuous growth. He has exp rest it best, perhaps, in "The Food of the Gods," in the speech of one of the new race of giants, of supermen, to his fellows as they are about to give battle to the community of ordinary people determined to destroy them:

It is not that we would oust the little people from the
world in order that we, who are no more than one step upward
from their littleness, may hold their world forever. It is
the step we fight for and not ourselves.... We are here,
Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose
that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for
ourselves--for we are but the momentary hands and eyes
of the Life of the World. Through us and through the
little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word
and birth and act it must pass--to still greater lives.
This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing
place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little
people's knife, having no greater right to live than they.
And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin.
We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that
goes on forever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth
will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit
forevermore. To grow according to the will of God! To grow
out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and
darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater, he said,
speaking with slow deliberation, greater, my Brothers! And
then--still greater. To grow and again--to grow. To grow at
last into the fellowship and understanding of God.

The Great War has inspired or at least instigated many works of fiction already, but the best of these, in my opinion, is Wells's "Mr. Britling Sees It Through." It does not deal much with the fighting at the front. The author is chiefly concerned with another aspect of the war, its effect upon the psychology of the Englishman. The book is divided into two parts; the first half is light, carefree and amusing after the manner of Wells's earlier romances; the other half is darkened by the war cloud and is written with more emotional power than he has hitherto shown.

Knowing Wells's habit of introducing autobiographical details into his romances, we inevitably surmise that Mr. Britling is himself. Mr. Britling is a writer whom "lots of people found interesting and stimulating, and a few found seriously exasperating." "He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and China and esthetics and America and the education of mankind in general.... And all that sort of thing."

This certainly reads like Wells's repertory of ideas. And to make the resemblance closer Mr. Britling writes a pamphlet, "And Now War Ends", shortly after the war began--just as Mr. Wells wrote "The War That Will End War." Several of the characters are recognizable as Mr. Wells' neighbors. At any rate we may be sure that the book reveals the changing moods not only of the author but of every thinking Englishman as the enormity, the awfulness, the all-pervasiveness of the war became slowly realized in the course of many months.

As a contrast to his typical Englishman Mr. Wells brings in an American, handled with more skill than British writers usually show in dealing with American psychology. The delight of his Mr. Direck at the recognition of the scenes and customs he had known from history and novels is well presented:

The Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too
good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever
seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a
marked accent and accosting some passerby with the question,
"Say! But is this little wet ditch here the Historical River
Thames?" In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke
a very good and careful English indeed, but he now found
the utmost difficulty in controlling his impulse to use a
high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in dry Americanisms and
poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people asked him
questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure", words he would
no more have used in America than he could have used a bowie
knife. But he had a sense of rôle. He wanted to be just
exactly what he supposed an Englishman would expect him to
be.

Every American tourist in England has felt this temptation. He also has the experience ascribed by Mr. Wells to his American of finding that England on closer acquaintance is not so antiquated as she looks. When asked what his impression of England is Mr. Direck answers:

That it looks and feels more like the traditional Old
England than any one could possibly have believed, and
that in reality it is less like the traditional Old England
than any one would ever possibly have imagined. I thought
when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come
to the England of Washington Irving. I find that it is not
even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

To complete this study of national psychology there is also a German in the family circle at first, a tutor whose hobbies are Ido and internationalism and a universal index, traits drawn from Professor Ostwald apparently. He is not caricatured but we suspect that like Mr. Direck, the American, Herr Heinrich is affected by British expectations and appears more German than he is.

The book reëchoes all the passions of the war,--love, hatred, courage, despair, meanness, sacrifice, heroism, selfishness, stoicism and mad wrath,--but ends upon a clear religious tone such as has been heard but faintly in any work of Mr. Wells before. What Mr. Britling sees through is not the war, for nobody can yet see so far as that, but he sees through the doubt and turmoil of his own mind and finds internal peace in the midst of warfare. When he sits down to write a letter to the parents of Heinrich, who like his own son had fallen in France, his mind is torn by conflicting emotions, but finally these are resolved into one common chord and he writes:

Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until
a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no
beginning, he works to no end. He may have his friendships,
his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these
things fall into place and life falls into place only with
God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against
Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end,
who is the meaning. He is the only King.... Of course I
must write about Him. I must tell all my world of Him. And
before the coming of the true King, the inevitable King,
the King who is present whenever just men foregather, this
bloodstained rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings
and tawdry emperors, these wily politicians and artful
lawyers, these men who claim and grab and trick and compel,
these war makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and
pass--like paper thrust into a flame. Our sons have shown us
God.

HOW TO READ WELLS

The curious thing about H. G. Wells is his diversity. For a person of any intellectual consistency it is impossible thoroughly to appreciate him in certain moods without disliking him in others. He is the stern moralist of "The Sleeper Awakes", the detached and exquisite artist of "Thirty Strange Stories" and "Tales of Space and Time", the genial and conciliatory sociologist of "New Worlds for Old", the intolerant Imperialist of "Anticipations", the subtle anti-moralist of "The New Machiavelli" and "Ann Veronica", the sympathetic if somewhat cynical portrayer of the shop-keeping classes of "Mr. Polly" and "The Wheels of Chance", the vague philosopher at large of "First and Last Things", the imaginative rationalist of "A Modern Utopia", the Jules-Vernish romancer of "The War of Worlds" and "The First Men in the Moon", the scientific transcendentalist of "The Food of the Gods", and in addition he seriously chronicles "Floor Games" with his boys and takes interest in fugitive essays on modern warfare and "The Misery of Boots." Unless one is alien to everything human (and superhuman), it is impossible to escape being interested in at least some of these.

Wells's philosophy is, as I have said, expressed symbolically in many of his stories. It is most fully explained in "First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life" (Putnam), and in the two essays previously referred to, "Scepticism of the Instrument" (in "A Modern Utopia") and "The Discovery of the Future", first published in _Nature_, February 6, 1902, and in the "Report of the Smithsonian Institution", 1902, and later in book form (Huebsch, New York, 1913).

His sociological studies comprise the following volumes: "Anticipations" (1901, Harper), "Mankind in the Making" (1903, Scribner), "A Modern Utopia" (1904, Scribner), "The Future in America" (1906, Harper), "New Worlds for Old" (1908, Macmillan), "Socialism and the Great State", with the collaboration of fourteen other authors (1911, Harper), "Social Forces in England and America" (1914, Harper), published in England under the title "An Englishman Looks at the World" (Cassell), "The War That Will End War" (1915), "What Is Coming?" (1916, Macmillan), "Italy, France and Britain at War" (1917, Macmillan), and "God the Invisible King" (1917, Macmillan).

His short stories have been collected in several different volumes, in part overlapping: "Thirty Strange Stories" (1898, Harper), "Tales of Time and Space" (1899, Doubleday), "Twelve Stories and a Dream" (1903, Scribner), "The Plattner Story and Others" (1897, Macmillan), "The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents" (1895, Macmillan).

Eight of the best of his short stories (including "The Star", "Armageddon" and "The Country of the Blind") are published in a sumptuous edition with Coburn's photographic illustrations by Mitchell Kennerley ("The Door in the Wall and Other Stories", 1911).

His romances include: "The Time Machine" (1895, Holt), "The Wonderful Visit" (1895), "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896, Duffield), "The War of the Worlds" (1898, Harper), "The Invisible Man" (1897, Harper), "The Sea-Lady" (1902) "The First Men in the Moon" (1901), "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899, Harper), rewritten (1911) as "The Sleeper Awakes" (Nelson, London), "In the Days of the Comet" (1906, Century), "The Food of the Gods" (1904, Scribner), "The War in the Air" (1908, Macmillan), "The World Set Free" (1914, Macmillan).

His novels fall naturally into two classes: first those of a lighter and humorous character: "The Wheels of Chance" (1896, Macmillan), "Love and Mr. Lewisham" (1900, Stokes), "Kipps" (1906, Scribner), "The History of Mr. Polly" (1910, Duffield), "Bealby" (1915, Macmillan), "Boon" etc. (1915, Doran).

His longer and more serious novels are: "Ann Veronica" (1909, Harper), "The New Machiavelli" (1910, Duffield), "Tono-Bungay" (1908, Duffield), "Marriage" (Duffield), "The Passionate Friends" (1913, Harper), "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon" (1914, Macmillan), "The Research Magnificent" (1915, Macmillan), "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" (1916, Macmillan).

To these we must add some early works: a "Textbook on Biology" in two volumes (1892) and two volumes of essays, "Select Conversations with an Uncle" (1895, Saalfield) and "Certain Personal Matters" (1897). He has, like Stevenson, devoted much attention to devising floor games for children and has published two books upon it: "Floor Games" and "Little Wars" (Small, Maynard).

Wells still awaits his Boswell, but we have "The World of H. G. Wells" by Van Wyck-Brooks (1915, Kennerley), a lively and appreciative critique, and "H. G. Wells, A Biography and a Critical Estimate of his Work" by J. D. Beresford (1915, Holt), still briefer, equally interesting, and containing a list of his writings to date. An autobiographical sketch was written for the Russian edition of his works (1909) and published in T. P.'s Magazine (1912).

Of magazine articles and critiques the following have for one reason or another special interest:

"Les Idées de Wells sur l'Humanité future" by Charles Duguet in _Revue des Idées_, 1908.

"Wells" by Chesterton in _American Magazine_, vol. 71, p. 32 (1910).

"Wells and his Point of View" in _Catholic World_, vol. 91 (four articles, 1910).

"Wells and Bergson" by P. E. B. Jourdain in _Hibbert Journal_, vol. 10, p. 835, July, 1912. "H. G. Wells et la Pensée contemporaine" by René Leguy in _Mercure de France_ (1912).

The contributions of Mr. Wells to current magazines and newspapers are too numerous to enumerate, but I must not omit the two articles on Socialism which he contributed to _The Independent_, October 25 and November 3, 1906, and an article on "The Nature of Love" (_The Independent_, August 13, 1908).

[1] See "Major Prophets of To-day", p. 232.

[2] "Heretics", by G. K. Chesterton, p. 85.

[3] "In the Days of the Comet", by H. G. Wells. New York: The Century Company.

[4] The World Set Free.

[5] From Wells's "Anticipations."

[6] From Kellermann's account of the Battle of Loos.

[7] It would be interesting to learn where Wells happened to get hold of the idea that time is the fourth dimension of reality and how much he knew then of the history of the conception. He could not, at any rate, for all his prophetic powers, have foreseen the important part it was to play in scientific thought and metaphysical speculation in the coming century. Lorentz, Einstein and Minkowski have incorporated it into their new theory of relativity which threatens to abolish the ether and to make mass a variable, dependent on velocity. Our ordinary Euclidean or three dimensional space would thus be a cross-section at a certain time. (See "The Time-Space Manifold of Relativity", by Edwin B. Wilson and G. N. Lewis, in _Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences_, November, 1912.) Heinrich Czolbe in 1875 brought forward the theory (see Müller, _Archiv für systematische Philosophie_, XVII, p. 106), and Lotze discusses it in his "Microcosmos." Bergson's philosophy is based upon the distinction he draws between psychological duration and the physical treatment of time as a kind of space. Professor Pitkin of Columbia criticizes Wells's time-machine from the metaphysical standpoint in "Time and Pure Activity" (_Journal Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods_, Vol. ii, No. 19).

[8] "Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump. Being a First Selection from the Literary Remains of George Boon, Appropriate to the Times. Prepared for Publication by Reginald Bliss, with an Ambiguous Introduction by H. G. Wells." (Doran, 1915.)

[9] He has given three statements of his views on this point: First, in an article, "Rediscovery of the Unique", in Fortnightly Review, July, 1891; second, in a paper read to the Oxford Philosophical Society and published in Mind, XIII, No. 51, and as an appendix to "A Modern Utopia"; and, third, in Book I of "First and Last Things."

[10] "Logic, M. Bergson and Mr. H. G. Wells", by Philip E. B. Jourdain in _Hibbert Journal_, X, p. 835.

[11] "Marriage," Duffield and Company, 1912.

[12] See "The Tragedy of Color", chapter xii of "The Future in America", and his article on "Race Prejudice", in _The Independent_ of February 14, 1907.