The World of H.G. Wells Part 2

In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of statesmans.h.i.+p. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of a.s.suming that they can think out the whole--or, at any rate, completely think out definite parts--of the purpose and future of man, clearly and finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that a.s.sumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy.

The man who wrote that is not what is called a whole-hearted man as regards any form of group-action. He does not "fit in." He is at bottom a sceptic, and a sceptic is one who reduces every question to the question of human nature. So that the socialism of Wells is necessarily at variance with all the recognized group-forms of socialism, Administrative, Philanthropic, and Revolutionary. I must briefly indicate in each case what is the quality of this divergence.

As regards the first, he has a complete distrust of what Hilaire Belloc has called the "Servile State;" and what he distrusts he virulently dislikes. In his view, Administrative socialism, as it appears in Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society, and in the tendency of contemporary Liberalism, has led to an excessive conservatism toward the existing machinery of government, it has depended altogether too much on organization without popular support, and as a result has tended to throw the whole force of the socialist movement into a bureaucratic regime of small-minded experts. The activity of the Fabians especially, he says, has set great numbers of socialists working in the old governmental machinery without realizing that the machinery should have been reconstructed first. The whole tendency of this method, as it is exhibited in the works of the English Liberal Party of to-day, is toward a socialization of the poor without a corresponding socialization of the rich; toward a more and more marked chasm between the regimented workers and the free employers.

And it throws the control of affairs into the hands of a ma.s.s of highly specialized officials, technical minds, mutually-unenlightened experts.

In an age when the progress of society depends upon breaking down professional barriers, when the genuine scientist, for instance, is a man who pa.s.ses beyond his own science and sees the inter-relations.h.i.+ps of all knowledge, the mind which has been trained in one habitual routine is the most dangerous type of mind to place in authority. On the one hand, society depends upon the cooperation of all sorts of specialists, their free discussion, and comparison of methods, results, and aims; on the other experts in office are apt to grow narrow, impatient, and contemptuous, seeing nothing beyond their immediate work,--and this particularly when they have been trained for administration without any wide experience of the world.

Therefore upon experts as such, in distinction from constructive and cooperating specialists, Wells, with all the force of his belief in the ventilating of knowledge and the humanizing of affairs, wages an unceasing war. _The First Men in the Moon_ satirizes, after the fas.h.i.+on of Swift, a world where the expert view of life, not only in administration but in all work, prevails. Each inhabitant of the Moon has a single rigidly defined function, to which everything else in his nature is accommodated. Thus certain types of machine-menders are compressed in jars, while others are dwarfed to fit them for fine work, "a really more humane proceeding", as Mr. Cavor observes, "than our method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making machines of them." And in _The Great State_ he returns to his attack on government by experts: "Whatever else may be worked out in the subtler answers our later time prepares, nothing can be clearer than that the necessary machinery of government must be elaborately organized to prevent the development of a managing caste in permanent conspiracy, tacit or expressed, against the normal man." And he adds: "The Great State will, I feel convinced, regard changes in occupation as a proper circ.u.mstance in the life of every citizen; it will value a certain amateurishness in its service, and prefer it to the trite omniscience of the stale official." One of the many and increasing indications, one might suggest, of the remarkable tendency in Wells to find good in the old humanistic Tory, as distinguished from the modern bureaucratic Liberal, view of life.

But lest I be tempted to carry this latter suggestion too far just at this point, I pa.s.s on to his equally virulent dislike of Philanthropic socialism and the busy Superior Person in affairs; especially the type of political woman so dear to Mrs. Humphry Ward's heart. If the expert bureaucratic point of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Liberal Progressive mind, so also the philanthropic superior point of view represents the action of socialist thought on the Conservative mind. It is arrogant, aggressive, and condescending. It implies the raising of one's inferiors, and what weak mortal should a.s.sume that she (for this happens to be a mainly feminine affliction) is the standard according to which other mortals ought to be raised?

Two of these energetic ladies have been pictured with a bitter vividness by Wells in Altiora Bailey and Aunt Plessington, the former summing up the Fabian-expert view, the latter summing up the Superior-philanthropic view. Altiora has "P.B.P."--_pro bono publico_--engraved inside her wedding ring. All the misery of the world she marshals invincibly in statistics. She sees everything as existing in types and cla.s.ses; she pushes her cause with a hard, scheming, and wholly self-centred eagerness, managing political dinners, indefatigably compiling blue-books, dreaming of a world nailed as tightly and firmly under the rule of experts as a carpet is nailed with bra.s.s tacks.

On the other hand Aunt Plessington is the incarnation of a "Movement"

somewhat vague in purpose but always aggressively beneficial to the helpless ones of the earth. "Her voice was the true governing-cla.s.s voice, a strangulated contralto, abundant and authoritative; it made everything she said clear and important, so that if she said it was a fine morning it was like leaded print in the _Times_." Her mission is princ.i.p.ally to interfere with the habits and tastes of the working-cla.s.s, making it impossible for them to buy tobacco and beer or "the less hygienic and more palatable forms of bread (which do not sufficiently stimulate the coatings of the stomach)." She is, in short, one of those odious managing people who know nothing of and care nothing for human nature, who concern themselves wholly with the effects without penetrating to the causes of misery, who see mankind as irrevocably divided into a governing and a governed cla.s.s, and whose idea of government is to make the governed as uncomfortably efficient as possible and as lacking in free will. She is exactly one of those arrogant sterile souls, in love with methods rather than men, who have made the Servile State an imminent and horrid possibility and have turned so many misinformed human beings (including Tolstoy) against socialism altogether.

If Wells dislikes Administrative and Philanthropic socialism because they are not sufficiently human, he has an equal aversion to what is called orthodox, that is to say, Revolutionary socialism; and in this he includes all socialism that is fundamentally economic. "I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human society," says Stratton in _The Pa.s.sionate Friends_, in words we are justified in taking as the opinion of Wells himself. "Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties."

That statement is full of meaning. It expresses, not a fact but a personal conviction--the personal conviction with which the psychological constructive socialism of Wells begins. But before I pa.s.s on to this I must make one comment that persists in my mind.

Nothing is more remarkable than the unanimity with which during the last few years the advanced world has put all its eggs in the basket of pragmatism, the basket that has been so alluringly garnished by Bergson's _Creative Evolution_, In this movement of thought Wells has inevitably become one of the leaders, and his practical desertion of the socialist cause is one of the main symptoms of it. The creative energies of men, where society as a whole is concerned, are, in this philosophy, conceived as bursting through the husks and inst.i.tutions of the world, not consciously destroying them but shedding them incidentally and pa.s.sing on. Now as regards sociology there is an obvious fatalism in that; for the burden of proof lies once more on a personal basis, on a personal basis qualified by the capacity of the person. It is true that this creative and constructive tendency, like the total tendency of modern life, is in the direction of socialism, it is true that a thousand elements in modern life which could never be engaged in the cla.s.s-war are led by it into line with socialism. Yet there capitalism is! Only the black-browed Marxian steadily contemplates the fact that year by year the rich compound their riches and the poor their poverty, while those that have no chance of creative outlets plant dynamite.

I do not mean that Wells is "wrong" in abandoning the economic for the psychological approach,--that is plainly the inevitable course for him.

I wish simply to mark a distinction. The gospel of Wells is an entirely personal one; it frankly concerns itself with the inner realities of the human mind, and in that lies its great importance. But let us discriminate. Like every purely personal doctrine it contains, in relation to the facts and causes of society, a certain quietism. It withdraws the mind from corporate action and lays emphasis on corporate thought. But it recognizes no corporate enemy. To be an opponent of capitalism as such, is, in this philosophy, as quaint and crude and crusty as to be an anti-suffragist or a believer in politics (for it has become the fas.h.i.+on to believe with fervor in the franchise and scarcely to believe at all in what the franchise stands for).

There is then a certain danger in the creative pragmatism of this particular time. If it actually does penetrate to the head men of the world, if it is able to generate what I suppose may be called a "moral equivalent" of duty--and there is almost a probability that it will--the hazard is won. If it does not--and many keen thinkers and men of action are obdurate--then we shall simply have the _fait accompli_ with compound interest. What if it should turn out in the end, after the best brains of socialism had all withdrawn from the economic programme of socialism, that capitalism grows all the greener in the sunlight of their tacit consent? There is Congress, there is Parliament, and there they propose to remain. Suppose they are not converted from the top? Is it altogether wise to stop persecuting them from the bottom?

So much before I pa.s.s on. This comment does not qualify the teaching of Wells. It merely supplements it from the economic side, and the supplement seems to me an important one.

Of a piece with his whole point of view is that he calls the right sociological method not a scientific but an artistic method: it consists of the making and comparing of Utopias. This idea he sets forth in his paper _The So-called Science of Sociology_. "What is called the scientific method," he says, "the method of observation, of theory about these observations, experiments in verification of that theory and confirmation or modification, really 'comes off' in the sciences in which the individuality of the units can be pretty completely ignored."

The method that is all-important in the primary physical sciences where the individuality of atoms and molecules may conveniently be ignored for the sake of practical truth, becomes in his view proportionately untrue as the sciences in their gradation approach the human world. "We cannot," he says in _First and Last Things_, "put humanity into a museum and dry it for examination; our one still living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it and nothing in the real world with which to compare it. We have only the remotest idea of its 'life-cycle'

and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its destiny." And in the paper I have just mentioned he speaks of the Social Idea as a thing "struggling to exist and realize itself in a world of egotisms, animals, and brute matter.... Now I submit it is not only a legitimate form of approach, but altogether the most promising and hopeful form of approach, to endeavor to disentangle and express one's personal version of that idea, and to measure realities from the standpoint of that realization. I think, in fact, that the creation of Utopias--and their exhaustive criticism--is the proper and distinctive method of sociology." This notion of sociology as properly artistic in method and diagnostic in aim indicates his main divergence from the methods and aims of Comte and Spencer.

And so one turns to his own ill.u.s.tration of this belief, _A Modern Utopia_. It is a beautiful Utopia, beautifully seen and beautifully thought; and it has in it some of that flavor of airy unrestraint one finds in _News from Nowhere_. Morris, of course, carries us into a world where right discipline has long since produced right will, so wholly and instinctively socialized that men can afford to be as free as anarchists would have the unsocialized men of our own time, a world such as Goethe had in mind when he said: "There is in man a force, a spring of goodness which counterbalances egoism; and if by a miracle it could for a moment suddenly be active in all men, the earth would at once be free from evil." Well, that is the miracle which has in some way just taken place before the curtain goes up on most Utopias; and I think that Wells has never been more skilful than in keeping this miracle quietly in his bag of tricks and devising meanwhile a plausible transition between us and that better world. It all happens in a moment and we are there. By an amazing legerdemain of logic he leaps the gap and presents us with a planet which at every point tallies with our own. It is a planet which does not contain a State but is a State, the flexible result of a free social gesture.

_Mankind in the Making_ should be taken as introductory to _A Modern Utopia_. It is the sketch of a method towards attaining such a world state. It is a kind of treatise on education based on the a.s.sumption that "our success or failure with the unending stream of babies is the measure of our civilization." It opens with a complete repudiation of "scientific" breeding, as a scheme which ignores the uniqueness of individual cases and the heterogeneous nature of human ideals. "We are,"

says Wells, "not a bit clear what points to breed for, and what points to breed out;" while the interplay of strong and varied personalities we desire is contradictory to any uniform notions of beauty, capacity, and sanity, which thus cannot be bred for, so to speak, in the abstract. But in _A Modern Utopia_ he outlines certain conditions limiting parentage, holding it necessary that in order to be a parent a man must be above a certain minimum of capacity and income, failing which he is indebted to the State for the keep of his children. Motherhood is endowed and becomes in this way a normal and remunerative career, which renders the mother capable of giving her time to the care and education of her children, as millions are not in a wage-earning civilization, and makes both her and her children independent of the ups and downs of her husband. His very detailed suggestions about the education of young children (ill.u.s.trated also in _The Food of the G.o.ds_) are at once a reminiscence of Rabelais and an antic.i.p.ation of Madame Montessori. He insists upon uniform p.r.o.nunciation (a very important matter in England, where diversity of language is one of the bulwarks of a rigid cla.s.s-system), the universality and constant revision of text-books, the systematic reorganization of public library and bookselling methods, with a view to making the race think as a whole. He urges the necessity of rescuing literature from the accidents of the book-market by endowing critical reviews, chairs for the discussion of contemporary thought, and qualified thinkers and writers regardless of their special bias or principles. To strike a mean between the British abuse of government by hereditary privilege and the American abuse of government by electoral machines he ingeniously proposes the election of officials by the jury method, twenty or thirty men being set aside by lot to determine the proper holders of office. And he is convinced of the importance in a democracy of abundant honors, privileges, even t.i.tles, and abundant opportunities for fruitful leisure.

I have already spoken of his belief that the right sociological method is the creation and comparison of individual Utopias. Thus his own free-hand sketch of a better world is, in fact, a criticism of all previous works of the kind. As distinguished from them the modern Utopia, he says, has to present not a finally perfect stage but a hopefully ascending one; it has to present men not as uniform types but as conflicting individualities with a common bond; and moreover it has to occupy, not some remote island or province "over the range" but a whole planet. The Utopia of Wells is a world which differs from the present world in one fundamental respect only--it has one initial advantage: that every individual in it has been _started right_, in the degree in which the collective knowledge of the world has rendered that possible.

But there is no need for me to say anything more about these books. They are the free and suggestive motions of a mind inexhaustibly fertile and given to many devices. Anyone who has read Wells at all is aware of his ingenuity, his equal capacity for large schemes and minute details, his truly j.a.panese belief in radical changes, once they are seen to be necessary and possible. And indeed the details of social arrangement follow naturally and profusely enough, once you get the frame of mind that wishes them. Wells in his Utopia presupposes the frame of mind. In short, he puts education first; he believes that the essential problems of the present are not economic but psychological.

And here where the constructive theory of Wells begins, let me quote a pa.s.sage from _The New Machiavelli_ that gives the gist of it:

The line of human improvements and the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that it can develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here my initial difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and scope and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one pa.s.ses to what has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted, aristocratic culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of low minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and acting at leisure, of human pa.s.sions and motives, modified and redirected by literature and art.

This permeation of the head men of the world, this creation of a natural collective-minded aristocracy appears now to be the permanent hope of Wells. It is the stuff of all his novels, it is the centre of his ethical system; and his _Utopia_ is made possible by the existence in it of just such a flexible leading caste--the so-called Samurai. But before coming to the inner implications of this, to the individual and personal realities and difficulties of this, I must follow the development of the idea in Wells himself. At various times, in various works, he has presented it from a dozen different angles: as something that is certain to come, as something he greatly desires to come, as something that will not come at all except through prodigious effort, as something that will come through a general catastrophe, as something that will come through isolated individual endeavor, and the like. That is to say he has presented his idea through all the various literary mediums of exposition, fable, prophecy, psychological a.n.a.lysis, and ethical appeal.

It appears in a crude form in his first avowedly sociological work, _Antic.i.p.ations_. He there attempts to show that the chaos of society is of itself beginning to generate a constructive cla.s.s, into whose hands it must ultimately fall. The advance of mechanism, he predicts, will produce four clearly defined cla.s.ses: an immense shareholding cla.s.s with all the potentialities of great property and a complete lack of function with regard to that property; a non-producing cla.s.s of middle-men dependent on these, and composed of agents, managers, lawyers, clerks, brokers, speculators, typists, and organizers; the expropriated cla.s.s of propertyless and functionless poor, whose present livelihood is dependent on the fact that machinery is not yet so cheap as their labor.

And amid this generally disorganized ma.s.s a fourth element will define itself. This in rudiment is the element of mechanics and engineers, whose work makes it necessary for them to understand the machines they are making and to be continually on the lookout for new methods. These men, he holds, will inevitably develop a common character based on a self-wrought scientific education and view of life. About them as a nucleus all the other skilled and constructive minds--doctors, teachers, investigators, writers, and the like--will tend to group themselves; and as the other cla.s.ses in their very nature will tend to social disintegration, these will inevitably grow more and more conscious of a purpose, a reason, a function in common, and will disentangle themselves from the aimless and functionless ma.s.ses about them. Democracy, as we know it, will meanwhile pa.s.s away. For democratic government unavoidably reduces itself to government by party machines and party machines depend for their existence on alarms, quarrelsome patriotisms, and international exasperations whose almost inevitable outcome is war.

Whether war follows or not, the power of society is bound to fall into the hands of the scientifically trained, constructive middle cla.s.s, because this cla.s.s is the only indispensable element in it. Without war this must occur just as soon as the spending and purchasing power of the shareholding cla.s.s becomes dependent for its existence on the cla.s.s which alone can save society from destruction. With war it will occur with even greater rapidity: for in the warfare of the future that nation is bound to win which has most effectively realized socialist ideals, in which the government can command, with least interference from private control, its roads, its food, its clothing, its material, its resources, which has most efficiently organized itself as a whole; and the cla.s.s that modern warfare will bring to the front is the cla.s.s that knows how to handle machinery and how to direct it. But just as this cla.s.s will be the most efficient in war, so will it be the most careful to prevent war: it will in fact confirm the ultimate tendency toward a World State at peace with itself, through the agency, not of any of the governments that we know to-day but of an informal cooperative organization which is altogether outside the governmental systems of society, and which may in time a.s.similate the greater part of the population of the world.

Such is the argument of this book, and except for the inevitability of it--the belief that all this _must_ come to pa.s.s--Wells has not since abandoned it in any essential way. The new aristocracy that figures there, the advance-guard of a better civilization, is precisely the ethical ideal which is embodied in the chief characters of his novels.

Thus too the Samurai of _A Modern Utopia_ are figured as having arisen at first informally as the constructive minds disentangling themselves from the social chaos. Gradually becoming aware through research, discussion and cooperation of a common purpose, they have at last a.s.sumed a militant form and supplanted the political organizations of the world.

The general intention of all this finds utterance in the most poetic of all the fables of Wells, _The Food of the G.o.ds_. The Food itself, invented by two undistinguished-looking scientists, becomes current in the world through the very haphazardness of a society which will not control discoveries detrimental to it and which consequently has no means of coping with a discovery capable of superseding it.

"Heracleophorbia" has thus the same initial advantage as Tono-Bungay or any other shabby patent medicine. It has an additional advantage; for while patent medicines have the sanction of private enterprise and are controlled by secret patents for the gain of their inventors, the Food of the G.o.ds, like every discovery of honorable scientists, is given freely to the world. Thus the Food and the gigantic race of supermen who spring from it and bring with them a n.o.bler order of things are themselves generated by the very chaos they promise to supplant. Just in proportion as the inventors are frank and open men, having no secret gainful purpose, the Food spreads far and wide. It is stolen, spilled, scattered; and wherever it falls every living thing grows gigantic.

Immense wasps drone like motor-cars over the meadows, chickens grow as large as emus, and here and there a baby fed upon it and unable thereafter to accept any less robust diet grows gradually to Rabelaisian proportions. Caddles, a type of all the growing giants, comes to his forty-foot maturity in a remote village where, as the mellow vicar observes, "Things change, but Humanity--_aere perennius_." There he is taught by the little folk to submit himself to all his governors, teachers, spiritual pastors and masters and to order himself lowly and reverently to all his betters. They put him to work in the chalk-pits, where he learns to manage a whole quarry single-handed and makes of himself a rudimentary engineer, and then he breaks loose and tramps to London. He finds himself in the crowded New Kent Road, and they tell him he is obstructing the traffic: "But where is it going?" he says; "where does it come from? What does it mean?" Around him play the electric signs advertising Yanker's Yellow Pills and Tupper's Tonic Wine for Vigor, conveying to his troubled mind the significance of a world of chaos and accident, perverted instinct, and slavery to base suggestion.

Is it necessary to say that society becomes alarmed at last? Is it necessary to add that Wells opens fire upon it with his whole battery of satire? Plainly men and giants cannot live in the same world; the little men find their little ways, their sacred customs of order, home, and religion threatened by a strange new thing. The Children of the Food meanwhile have grown beyond the conventions and proportions of common life; they have experienced a kind of humanity to which all men can attain and from which there can be no retrogression to the lesser scheme. In the end, having found one another, they a.s.semble in their embankment, the world against them. They sit amid their vast machinery, t.i.tanic shapes in the darkness broken by searchlights and the flames of their forges. An amba.s.sador from the old order brings them the terms upon which they may go free. They must separate themselves from the world and give up the Food. They refuse:

"Suppose we give up this thing that stirs within us," says the Giant Leaguer.... "What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it was before? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer?... For greatness is abroad, and not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things! It is in the nature of all things, it is part of time and s.p.a.ce. To grow and still to grow, from first to last, that is Being, that is the law of life."

CHAPTER IV

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEW REPUBLICAN

It is obvious that the socialism of Wells, touching as it does at every point the fabric of society, remains at bottom a personal and mystical conception of life. His typical socialist, or constructive man, or Samurai, or New Republican, or what you will, is as distinctly a poetic projection from life as Nietzsche's Superman, or Carlyle's Hero, or the Superior Man of Confucius. Like them, it implies a rule of conduct and a special religious att.i.tude.

Nietzsche's Superman is a convenient figure by which for the moment to throw into relief the point I have in mind. Plainly a conception of this kind should never be intellectualized and defined. It is a living whole, as a human being is a living whole, and the only way to grasp it is to place oneself at the precise angle of the poet who conceived it. But the fixed intellect of man is not often capable of rising to the height of such an argument, nor do the run of critics and interpreters rise to such a height themselves. In the case of Nietzsche, particularly, they have confounded the confusion, urging precise definitions and at the same time disagreeing among themselves as to which definitions may be held valid. But indeed the Superman does not "mean" this or that: it can merely be approached from different points of view with different degrees of sympathy. And so it is with the New Republican of Wells.

I have mentioned the Superman because Wells himself has reached a conception of aristocracy similar in certain respects to that of Nietzsche but in others wholly antagonistic. In _The Food of the G.o.ds_ he certainly exhibits a sympathy with Nietzsche on the poetical and ideal side; for his giants are not simply grand-children of Rabelais, they practise of necessity a morality at variance with that of the little men among whom they grow. When Caddies comes to London he does not, and cannot, expect the little men to feed him; not intending evil and seeing merely that he must live, he sweeps the contents of a baker's shop into his mouth with just the unconcerned innocence of laws and prohibitions that a child would feel before a blackberry bush. The very existence of a larger, freer race implies a larger and freer morality, and the giants and the little folk alike see that the same world cannot for long contain them both. But perhaps one can mark the distinction by saying that, unlike the Superman, they are not masters but servants of the cosmic process. They themselves are not the goal toward which the whole creation tends. Humanity is not a setting for their splendor, but something that wins through them its own significance.

In fact it fully proves how profound is the socialistic instinct in Wells, that though in English wise and almost in the manner of Carlyle he has come to believe in the great ones of this world, he has never lost the invincible socialist conviction that a great man is only a figure of speech. In _The Discovery of the Future_ he says: "I must confess that I believe that if by some juggling with s.p.a.ce and time Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Edward IV, William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery, and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth, it would not have produced any serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believe that these great men of ours are no more than images and symbols and instruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistent forces behind them." The individual who stands on his achievement, the "lord of creation," is to him at best a little misinformed, at the worst bl.u.s.tering, dishonest, presuming, absurd.

By an original instinct the Wells hero is an inconspicuous little person, fastidiously untheatrical, who cuts no figure personally and who, to adopt a phrase from one of his later books, "escapes from individuality in science and service." He abhors "personages." For the personage is one who, in some degree, stands on his achievement, and to Wells man, both in his love and his work, is experimental: he is an experiment toward an impersonal synthesis, the well-being of the species. It is true that this idea of man as an experiment does not conflict with a very full development of personality. It consists in that; but personality to Wells is attained purely through love and work, and thus it comes to an end the moment it becomes static, the moment one accepts the laurel wreath, the moment one verges on self-consequence.

The first published utterance of Wells was, I think, a paper in _The Fortnightly Review_ for July, 1891, called _The Rediscovery of the Unique_. It was one of the earliest of those attacks on the logical approach to life, so characteristic of contemporary thought: it stamped him from the outset a pragmatist. The burden of his argument was that since the investigations of Darwin it is no longer possible to ignore the uniqueness of every individual thing in the universe and that "we only arrive at the idea of similar beings by an unconscious or deliberate disregard of an infinity of small differences"--that, in brief, the method of cla.s.sification which is the soul of logic is untrue to the facts of life. "Human reason," he wrote, "in the light of what is being advanced, appears as a convenient organic process based on a fundamental happy misconception.... The _reason d'etre_ of a man's mind is to avoid danger and get food--so the naturalists tell us. His reasoning powers are about as much a truth-seeking tool as the snout of a pig, and he may as well try to get to the bottom of things by them as a mole might by burrowing."

I quote thus his rudely graphic early statement of the case, because he has not since substantially modified it and because it shows that he already related it to human realities: and indeed in the same paper he pointed out the relation that such an idea must bear to ordinary conduct:

Beings are unique, circ.u.mstances are unique, and therefore we cannot think of regulating our conduct by wholesale dicta. A strict regard for truth compels us to add that principles are wholesale dicta: they are subst.i.tutes of more than doubtful value for an individual study of cases.

This conception of human reason as an altogether inadequate organ for getting at the truth of things he later expanded in his Oxford lecture, _Scepticism of the Instrument;_ and, still further expanded, it forms the first or metaphysical book of his _First and Last Things_. It is unnecessary to discuss the rights and wrongs of this primary point in a generation familiar with James and Bergson. It is an a.s.sumption of the purely personal, experimental nature of truth which has had a sufficient sanction of experience greatly to modify contemporary practice in ethics and sociology. And it should be noted that Wells evolved it in his own study of physical science (a study serious enough to result in text-books of Biology, Zoology, and Physiography) and that he presents it, in accordance with his own postulates, not as truth for everybody, but as his own personal contribution to the sum of experience. The study of science led him to see the limitations of the scientific att.i.tude, outside the primary physical sciences which for practical purposes can afford to ignore individualities, in matters that approach the world of human motives and affairs.

I do not propose to discuss this question of logic. It is quite plain at least, as Wells observes, in the spirit of Professor James, that "all the great and important beliefs by which life is guided and determined are less of the nature of fact than of artistic expression." And therefore he is justified in proceeding as follows:

I make my beliefs as I want them. I do not attempt to go to fact for them. I make them thus and not thus exactly as an artist makes a picture so and not so.... That does not mean that I make them wantonly and regardless of fact.... The artistic method in this field of beliefs, as in the field of visual renderings, is one of great freedom and initiative and great poverty of test, that is all, but of no wantonness; the conditions of Tightness are none the less imperative because they are mysterious and indefinable. I adopt certain beliefs because I feel the need of them, because I feel an often quite una.n.a.lyzable Tightness in them, because the alternative of a chaotic life distresses me.

And this is the way in which he presents the gist of his beliefs: