The World of H.G. Wells Part 6

"What won't they say next?" said Miss Fison.

"They do say such things!" said Mrs. Booch.

"They say," said Mrs. Mackridge, inflexibly, "the doctors are not recomm-an-ding it now."

My Mother: "No, ma'am?"

Mrs. Mackridge: "No, ma'am."

Then, to the table at large: "Poor Sir Roderick, before he died, consumed great quan-ta-ties of sugar. I have sometimes fancied it may have hastened his end."

This ended the first skirmish. A certain gloom of manner and a pause was considered due to the sacred memory of Sir Roderick.

"George," said my mother, "don't kick the chair!"

Then, perhaps, Mrs. Booch would produce a favorite piece from her repertoire. "The evenings are drawing out nicely,"

she would say, or if the season was decadent, "How the evenings draw in!" It was an invaluable remark to her; I do not know how she would have got along without it.

My mother, who sat with her back to the window, would always consider it due to Mrs. Booch to turn about and regard the evening in the act of elongation or contraction, whichever phase it might be.

A brisk discussion of how long we were to the longest or shortest day would ensue, and die away at last exhausted.

There is, I think, a special sort of connection between Wells and America; and there are times when it seems to me that were the spirit of America suddenly to become critical of itself it would resemble nothing in the world so much as the spirit of Wells magnified by many diameters.

His instincts are all as it were instincts of the intelligence; his mind, like the American mind, is a disinherited mind, not connected with tradition, thinking and acting _de novo_ because there is nothing to prevent it from doing so. Perfectly American is his alertness, his versatility, adaptability, his thorough-going pragmatism, perfectly American are the disconcerting questions that he asks ("Is the Navy _bright_?"). Perfectly American is his view of the traditional English ideal of human nature--that strange compound of good intentions, homely affection, stubborn strength, insensibility to ideas, irrational self-sacrifice, domestic despotism, a strong sense of property in things and people, stupidity, sweetness and confusion of mind--an ideal through which it has been one of his never-failing delights to send electric shocks. And indeed the type of character he has presented in his heroes, in Remington, Trafford and Ponderevo, is a type to be found perhaps more plentifully than elsewhere in American research bureaus, hospitals and laboratories. He thinks and feels critically so many of the things America lives and does unconsciously. Perhaps in this distinction lies the immediate value of his criticism for us.

For in his mind Americans can see themselves reflected in the light of what they chiefly need, that synthetic motive without which a secular and industrial race is as devoid of animating morality as a swarm of flies. This want, most obvious on the political and economic plane, is indeed fundamental. Wells has grasped it from many different angles but never with more point than in his essay _The American Population_.

Consider this pa.s.sage, where he takes as a text one of Arthur Brisbane's editorials in the "New York Journal":

It is the voice of the American tradition strained to the utmost to make itself audible to the new world, and cracking into italics and breaking into capitals with the strain. The rest of that enormous bale of paper is eloquent of a public void of moral ambitions, lost to any sense of comprehensive things, deaf to ideas, impervious to generalizations, a public which has carried the conception of freedom to its logical extreme of entire individual detachment. These telltale columns deal all with personality and the drama of personal life. They witness to no interest but the interest in intense individual experiences. The engagements, the love affairs, the scandals of conspicuous people are given in pitiless detail in articles adorned with vigorous portraits and sensational pictorial comments. Even the eavesdroppers who write this stuff strike the personal note, and their heavily muscular portraits frown beside the initial letter.

Murders and crimes are worked up to the keenest pitch of realization, and any new indelicacy in fas.h.i.+onable costume, any new medical device or cure, any new dance or athleticism, any new breach in the moral code, any novelty in sea-bathing or the woman's seat on horse-back, or the like, is given copious and moving ill.u.s.tration, stirring headlines, and eloquent reprobation. There is a colored supplement of knock-about fun, written chiefly in the quaint dialect of the New York slums. It is a language from which "th" has vanished, and it presents a world in which the kicking by a mule of an endless succession of victims is an inexhaustible joy to young and old. "Dat ole Maud!" There is a smaller bale dealing with sport. In the advertis.e.m.e.nt columns one finds nothing of books, nothing of art; but great choice of bust developers, hair restorers, nervous tonics, clothing sales, self-contained flats, and business opportunities....

Individuality has, in fact, got home to itself, and, as people say, taken off its frills.... The "New York American" represents a clientele to be counted by the hundred thousand, manifestly with no other solicitudes, just burning to live and living to burn.

Now that is a very fair picture, not merely of popular America but of the whole contemporary phase of popular civilization, uprooted from the state of instinct, intensive experience and the immemorial immediacies of duty and the soil. To the artist and the moralist it is a cause of hopeless pessimism, as any civilization must be which has lost touch with all its values and been rationalized to the point of anarchy. For this there is only one salvation. If civilization has lost the faculty of commanding itself and pulling itself together in its individual aspect, it must pull itself together collectively. That essentially is the fighting chance of intellectualism, the hope that, inasmuch as the world has already lost touch with experience and committed itself to a regime of ideas, by organizing this regime of ideas and by mechanizing so far as possible the material aspect of things, the values of life can be re-engendered on a fresh basis. From this follows the oft-repeated phrase of Wells that the chief want of the American people is a "sense of the state." For the peril and the hope of American life (granting that, as things are, society must be brought into some kind of coherence before morality, art and religion can once more attain any real meaning) lies in the fact that while at present Americans are aware of themselves only as isolated individuals they are unconsciously engaged in works of an almost appalling significance for the future of society. A Trust is a work of this kind, and whether it is to be a gigantic good or a gigantic evil depends wholly upon whether its controlling minds are more conscious of their individual or their social function. The mechanism of society in America is already developed to a very high point; what is wanting, and without this everything is wanting, is an understanding of the right function of this mechanism. So much does it all depend upon whether the financial mind can subdue itself to the greater mind of the race.

If the future is anywhere going to follow the lines that Wells has suggested for it--and being an opportunist his aims are always in touch with agreeable probabilities--it will most likely be in America. He has lately given his idea of what the State should aim to be--"planned as an electric traction system is planned, without reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines"; an idea remarkably of a piece with the American imagination and one which the American imagination is perfectly capable of translating into fact. American, too, are the methods in which Wells has come to believe for bringing the Great State into existence. His conviction is that socialism will come through an enlightened individualism, outside the recognized governmental inst.i.tutions, and that the ostensible States will be superseded virtually by informal centres of gravity quite independent of them. America alone at present justifies this speculation. For the centre of gravity in American affairs has always been extra-governmental, and consistently in America where wealth gathers there also the inst.i.tutions of socialism spring into being. The rudiments of the Socialist State, falsely based as they are but always tending to subvert this false basis, are certainly to be found, if anywhere, in the Rockefeller Inst.i.tute, the Carnegie and Russell Sage Foundations, the endowed universities and bureaus of research, and in the type of men they breed. Consider the following pa.s.sage from _The Pa.s.sionate Friends_ and the character of the American, Gidding, which is indicated in it:

To Gidding it was neither preposterous nor insufferably magnificent that we should set about a propaganda of all science, all knowledge, all philosophical and political ideas, round about the habitable globe. His mind began producing concrete projects as a firework being lit produces sparks, and soon he was "figuring out" the most colossal of printing and publis.h.i.+ng projects, as a man might work out the particulars for an alteration to his bathroom. It was so entirely natural to him, it was so entirely novel to me, to go on from the proposition that understanding was the primary need of humanity to the systematic organization of free publis.h.i.+ng, exhaustive discussion, intellectual stimulation. He set about it as a company of pharmacists might organize the distribution of some beneficial cure.

"Say, Stratton," he said, after a conversation that had seemed to me half fantasy, "let's _do_ it."

It is perfectly possible in fact that socialism will come into being first of all under the form of Cecil Rhodes's dream, as a secret order of millionaires "promoting" not their own aims but society itself. That is one of the possibilities at least that lie in what Wells has called the "gigantic childishness" of the American mind.