The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

  CHAPTER I

  THE FIRST PHASE

  "I am, by a sort of predestination, a socialist," Wells wrote once. Andeverything one can say of him serves merely to explain, justify,qualify, illuminate and refine that statement.

  First of all it implies a certain disposition and certain habits ofmind, habits of mind which are all to be found in the first phase of hiswork, in those marvellous tales of Time and Space that won him hisoriginal sensational fame. It is this disposition behind them, thisquality they have as of an inevitable attitude toward life and theworld, which distinguishes them at once from those other superficiallysimilar tales of Jules Verne. The marvels of Jules Verne are justmarvels, delightful, irresponsible plunderings from a helpless universe.To the grown-up mind they have a little of that pathetic futility oneassociates with a millionaire's picture-gallery, where all sorts ofthings have been brought together, without any exercise of inevitablepersonal choice, because they are expensive. I don't know that the talesof Wells are better tales, but they have that ulterior synthetic qualitythat belongs to all real expressions of personality. Wells was nevermerely inventive; his invention was the first stage of an imaginativegrowth.

  Now the quality that pervades all these early writings is what may becalled a sense of the infinite plasticity of things. He conceived amachine that could travel through time, a man who found a way to becomeinvisible, a drug that made men float like balloons, another drug thatenabled men to live a thousand hours in one, a crystal egg through whichone could watch the life in Mars, a man who could stop the sun likeJoshua, a food that turned men into giants, a biologist who discovered amethod of carving animals into men, an angel who visited a rural vicar,a mermaid who came to earth in search of a soul, a homicidal orchid, agigantic bird hatched from a prehistoric egg, a man who passed outsidespace. In short, the universe appeared to him like that magic shop ofwhich he also wrote, where the most astonishing things may happen, ifyou are the Right Sort of Boy.

  If all this implies anything it implies that things in general are notfixed and static, but that they are, on the contrary, infinitelyplastic, malleable, capable of responding to any purpose, any design youmay set working among them. The universe, it seems to assume, may be andquite possibly is proceeding after some logical method of its own, butso far as man is concerned this method appears to be one of chance.Obviously, man can do the most surprising things in it, can take as itwere all sorts of liberties with it. The universe, in short, is like avacant field which may or may not belong to some absent landlord who hasdesigns of his own upon it; but until this absent landlord appears andclaims his field, all the children in the neighborhood can build huts init and play games upon it and, in a word, for all practical purposes,consider it their own.

  This idea of the relation between free will and determinism is theunderlying assumption of Wells, as he explains it in _First and LastThings_:

  Take life at the level of common sensations and common experience and there is no more indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete moral responsibility. But make only the least penetrating of scientific analyses and you perceive a world of inevitable consequences, a rigid succession of cause and effect.

  And elsewhere he says:

  On the scientific plane one is a fatalist.... But does the whole universe of fact, the external world about me, the mysterious internal world from which my motives rise, form one rigid and fated system as Determinists teach? I incline to that belief.... From me as a person this theory of predestination has no practical value.... I hesitate, I choose just as though the thing was unknowable. For me and my conduct there is that much wide practical margin of freedom. I am free and freely and responsibly making the future--so far as I am concerned.

  In a word, for all the purposes that affect man's need the universe isinfinitely plastic and amenable to his will. Like every clean-cutphilosophical conception, this clears the ground for practical conductand a certain sort of direct action.

  There was a time, no doubt, when he shared the old Utopian folly ofexpecting a sudden and unanimous change of human will. When the universeappears as unconventional as it used to appear to Wells, there cansurely be no reason to think it impossible, after a comet has collidedwith the world, for the human race to become suddenly Utopian. Generallyspeaking, comets do not collide with the world, and in the same way menare slow to change. But certainly if Wells ever thought of humanity asmerely a multiplication of one pattern, certainly if he has long sinceabandoned the idea of our all turning over a new leaf one fine morning,he has never lost his faith in free will as regards the individual. Hehas always believed in the personal doctrine of summarily "making an endto things" as distinguished from the old-fashioned doctrine of "makingthe best of things"; and there is nothing more modern about him than hisaversion to the good old English theory of "muddling through."

  Mr. Polly is a good example of his view of personal direct action, thegetting rid, quickly and decisively, of a situation that has onlysentiment to save it from complete demoralization. "When a man has oncebroken through the wall of every-day circumstances," he remarks at themoment of the Polly _debacle_, "he has made a discovery. If the worlddoes not please you, _you can change it_. Determine to alter it at anyprice, and you can change it altogether." Mr. Polly sets fire to hisshop, takes to the road and repairs his digestion. Desertion of duty andthe quick repudiation of entanglements make him healthy and sensible andgive him a sense of purpose in things. And I know of nothing in allWells that is described with more relish than that Beltane festivalwhich occurs toward the end of _In the Days of the Comet_. The world'sgreat age has begun anew, and the enlightened men of the new time revivethe May Day of old in order to burn the useless trappings of the past.They heap old carpets on the fire, ill-designed furniture, bad music andcheap pictures, stuffed birds, obsolete school-books, dog-eared pennyfiction, sham shoes, and all the corrugated iron in the world; everytangible thing that is useless, false, disorderly, accidental, obsolete,and tawdry to celebrate the beginning of things that are clean,beautiful, and worthy. Sceptical, hesitant, and personal as Wells hasbecome, that indicates a strong primitive mental trait. Philosophy doesnot spring out of the brain; we hate the hateful things of our ownexperience, just as we think the things we desire. And though there arenine and sixty ways of being a socialist, they all unite in a certainsense of the plasticity and malleability of things human, a certainfaith in the possibility of asserting order in the midst of disorder andintelligently cleaning house.

  Inherent in this trait is another--detachment. You only become aware ofconfusion when you stand free of it, when you cease to be a part of it.And of all writers who have so immediately felt life I doubt if therehas been one so detached as Wells. The mental detachment of his earlytales is a detachment half scientific, half artistic; scientific as ofone who sees things experimentally in their material, molecular aspect,artistic as of one conscious of moulding will and placed amid plasticmaterial. Thus, for example, he sees human beings quite stripped oftheir distinctively human qualities; he sees men anatomically, as inthat passage where the Invisible Man, killed with a spade, becomesvisible again as a corpse:

  Everyone saw, faint and transparent as though it were made of glass, so that veins and arteries and bones and nerves could be distinguished, the outline of a hand, a hand limp and prone. It grew clouded and opaque even as they stared.... And so, slowly, beginning at his hands and feet and creeping along his limbs to the vital centres of his body, that strange change continued. First came the little white nerves, a hazy gray stretch of a limb, then the glossy bones and intricate arteries, then the flesh and skin, first a faint fogginess, then growing rapidly dense and opaque.

  Similar is a passage in _A Story of the Days to Come_, where hedescribes an ordinary breakfast of our own day: "the rude masses ofbread needing to be carved and smeared over with animal fat before theycould be mad
e palatable, the still recognizable fragments of recentlykilled animals, hideously charred and hacked." That surely is quite as aman from another planet, or a chemist after a long day's work in thelaboratory, would view our familiar human things. And one recallsanother sentence from _Kipps_ where this detachment links itself with adeeper social insight and hints at the part it had come to play inWells's later mind: "I see through the darkness," he says, toward theend of the book, "the souls of my Kippses as they are, _as little pinkstrips of quivering, living stuff_, as things like the bodies of littleill-nourished, ailing, ignorant children--children who feel pain, whoare naughty and muddled and suffer, and do not understand why."

  And just as he sees men and human things chemically and anatomically, sohe sees the world astronomically. He has that double quality (like hisown Mr. Bessel) of being bodily very active in life and at the same timewatching it from a great distance. In his latest book he has figured agod looking on from the clouds; and there is nothing in his novels morestimulating and more uncanny than a certain faculty of telescoping hisview suddenly from the very little to the very large, expanding andcontracting his vision of things at will. You find the germ of thisfaculty in his early tales. Looking down as though from a balloon hesees the world as a planet, as a relatively small planet. In doing so hemaintains at first a purely scientific set of values; he is not led, ashe has since been led, and as Leopardi was led by the same imaginativeexperience, to adopt poetical values and to feel acutely the littlenessand the powerlessness of man. His values remain scientific, and theabsurdity he feels is the absurdity an astronomer must feel, that in sosmall a space men can vaunt themselves and squabble with one another.Race prejudice, for example, necessarily appears to him as foolish as itwould appear to ordinary eyes among insects that happen to be swarmingon a fallen apple. Once you get it into your mind that the world is aball in space, you find a peculiar silliness in misunderstandings onthat ball. This reflection has led to many views of life; in Wells itled to a sense of the need of human solidarity.

  And solidarity implies order. The sense of order is one of thoseinstincts exhibited everywhere in the writings of Wells that serve aspreliminaries to his social philosophy. There is a passage in _Kipps_where he pictures the satisfactions of shopkeeping to an elect soul:"There is, of course, nothing on earth," he says, "and I doubt at timesif there is a joy in heaven, like starting a small haberdasher's shop.Imagine, for example, having a drawerful of tapes, or again, an array ofneat, large packages, each displaying one sample of hooks and eyes.Think of your cottons, your drawer of colored silks," etc. De Foe knew asimilar satisfaction and has pictured it in _Robinson Crusoe_. De Foewas himself a shopkeeper, just as Wells has been in one of hisincarnations; and he knew that good shopkeeping is the microcosm of allgood political economy. The satisfaction of a thoroughly competent manwho is thrown on a desert island, and sets to work to establish upon ita political economy for one, is a satisfaction by itself. That certainlyis a primitive relish, and it is one of the first gestures of Wells'ssociology.

  Now the sense of solidarity, the sense of order, implies thesubordination of details, the discipline of constituent units. Only inhis later works did Wells begin to consider the problems of theindividual life; in his novels he has considered them almostexclusively, but always in relation to the constructive purpose ofsociety and as what may be called human reservations from it. Thetelescope has been adjusted to a close range, and the widerrelationships are neither so emphasized nor so easily discerned.Nevertheless it is still the world that matters to Wells--the world, therace, the future; not the individual human being. And if, relatively, hehas become more interested in the individual and less in the world, thatis because he is convinced that the problems of the world can best beapproached through the study of individuals. His philosophy has grownless abstract in harmony with his own experience; but the first sketchof his view of human nature and its function is to be found crudelyoutlined in the scientific romances. How does it figure there?

  The human beings who flit through these early tales are allinconspicuous little men, whose private existence is of no account, andwho exist to discover, invent, perform all sorts of wonderfulexperiments which almost invariably result in their summary and quiteunimportant destruction. They are merely, in the most complete sense,experiments in the collective purpose, and their creator has toward themjust the attitude of an anatomist toward the animals upon which he isexperimenting; not indifferent to their suffering as suffering, butignoring it in the spirit of scientific detachment necessary tosubordinate means to an end. "I wanted--it was the only thing Iwanted--to find out the limit of plasticity in a living form," says Dr.Moreau in his confession; "and the study has made me as remorseless asnature."

  Invariably these experiments in human possibility, placed in a worldwhere charity is not so strong as fear, die quite horribly. Dr. Moreauis destroyed by the beasts he is attempting to vivisect into thesemblance of men, the Invisible Man is battered to death with a spade,the Visiting Angel burns to death in attempting to carry out hiscelestial errand, the man who travels to the moon cannot get back alive.Does not all this foreshadow the burden of the later novels, that theindividual who plans and wills for the race is destroyed and broken bythe jealousy, prejudice and inertia in men and the blind immemorialforces of nature surging through himself? These are the forces that arefigured, in the early tales, by that horrible hostile universe ofnature, and the little intrepid men moving about in the midst of it. Andthe mind of Wells is always prepared for the consequences of what itengenders. The inevitable result of creating an imaginary world ofmalignant vegetables and worse than antediluvian monsters is that theimaginary men you also create shall suffer through them. You reverse theorder of evolution and return men to conditions where life is cheap. Animagination which has accustomed itself to running loose among planetsand falling stars, which has lived habitually in a universe where worldsbattle with one another, is prepared to stomach a little needlessbloodshed. The inflexible pursuit of an end implies the sacrifice ofmeans, and if your experiment happens to be an invisible man you willproduce the invisibility even though it kills the man.

  Widen the range and this proposition logically transmutes itself into asecond: if your experiment happens to be an orderly society you willproduce order at the expense of everything that represents disorder. Andfrom the point of view of a collective purpose, ends, motives andaffections that are private and have no collective significancerepresent disorder. Now the whole purpose of Wells's later work has beento illuminate and refine this proposition. He has flatly distinguishedbetween two sorts of human nature, the constructive, experimental sortwhich lives essentially for the race, and the acquiescent, ineffectualsort which lives essentially for itself or the established fact; and hegives to his experimental men and women an almost unlimited charter tomake ducks and drakes of the ineffectual. Think of the long list of deadand wounded in his novels--Mr. Pope, Mr. Stanley, Mr. Magnet, Mr.Manning, Margaret, Marion--and you realize how much of a certaincruelty, a certain ruthlessness is in the very nature of his philosophyof experimental direct action.

  Another primitive relish exhibited in these early tales is the delightof constructing things. The Time Machine, for example, is the work of amind that immoderately enjoys inventing, erecting, and putting thingstogether; and there is not much difference between constructing animaginary machine and constructing an imaginary society. If Wells'searly Utopian speculations are ingenious impossibilities, are they anymore or less so than his mechanical speculations? One doesn't begin lifewith an overwhelming recognition of the obstacles one may encounter--onedoesn't fret too much about the possible, the feasible, or even thelogical. It was enough for Wells that he had built his Time Machine,though the logic by which the Time Traveller explains his process is alogic that gives me, at least, a sense of helpless, blinkingdiscomfort--partly, I confess, because to this day I don't believe thereis anything the matter with it. In any case it is the sheer delight ofconstruction that fascin
ates him, and everything that is associated withconstruction fascinates him. He is in love with steel; he speaks with akind of ecstasy somewhere of "light and clean and shimmering shapes ofsilvered steel"; steel and iron have for him the transcendental charmthat harebells and primroses had for Wordsworth. A world like that in_The Sleeper Awakes_--a world of gigantic machines, air fleets, and the"swimming shadows and enormous shapes" of an engineer's nightmare--isonly by afterthought, one feels, the speculation of a sociologist. Itexpresses the primitive relish of a constructive instinct. It expressesalso a sheer curiosity about the future.

  In a chapter of his book on America Wells has traced the development ofwhat he calls his prophetic habit of mind as a passage through fourstages: the millennial stage of an evangelical childhood when animminent Battle of Armageddon was a natural thing to be looked for; thestage of ultimate biological possibilities; the stage of prediction bythe rule-of-three; and a final stage of cautious anticipation based uponthe study of existing facts--a gradual passage from the region ofreligious or scientific possibilities to the region of humanprobabilities. "There is no Being but Becoming" was the first of hismental discoveries; and finding years later that Heraclitus had said thesame thing, he came to regard the pre-Aristotelian metaphysics as theright point of departure for modern thought. Consider this passage:

  I am curiously not interested in things and curiously interested in the consequences of things.... I have come to be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine immediate things through this anticipatory habit.... This habit of mind confronts and perplexes my sense of things that simply _are_, with my brooding preoccupation with how they will shape presently, what they will lead to, what seed they will sow and how they will wear. At times, I can assure the reader, this quality approaches other-worldliness in its constant reference to an all-important hereafter. There are times indeed when it makes life seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on to an equally transitory series of consequences, that the enhanced sense of instability becomes restlessness and distress; but on the other hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, remains altogether vulgar or dull and dead or hopeless in its light.... But the interest is shifted. The pomp and splendor of established order, the braying triumphs, ceremonies, consummations,--one sees these glittering shows for what they are--through their threadbare grandeur shine the little significant things that will make the future.

  And the burden of his lecture _The Discovery of the Future_ is that aninductive knowledge of the future is not only very largely possible, butis considerably more important for us than the study of the past. Evenin the sciences, he says, the test of their validity is their power toproduce confident forecasts. Astronomy is based on the forecast ofstellar movements, medical science exists largely for diagnosis. It isthis thought which determines the nature of his own sociology.

  There is usually something inept in speaking of a man, and especially anartist, as interchangeable with any ism. Socialism, in the common senseof the word, is a classification of men. Individual socialists are as arule something more than socialists; often they are socialists bynecessity, or imagination, or sentiment, or expediency--their socialismis not inherent, not the frame of their whole being. In the degree thatsocialism is a classification, or a school of thought, or an economictheory, the individual socialist will, in practice, make mentalreservations from it. Now my whole aim in this chapter has been tosuggest that if socialism had not existed Wells would have invented it.It is not something which at a given moment or even after a long processof imaginative conversion or conviction came into his life. It is, inhis own formulation of it, the projection of his whole nature, theexpression of his will, the very content of his art. With one or twoexceptions--works deliberately devoted to propaganda or exposition--evenhis purely sociological writings are subjective writings, personal andartistic in motive; socialism figures in them just as Catholicismfigures in the masses of Mozart, or the brotherhood of man in the poemsof Whitman, not as a cause but as a satisfying conception of truth. Andjust as, if one were to study the psychology of Mozart or Whitman, onewould find habits of mind that inevitably produced the individualCatholicism of the one and the individual fraternalism of the other; sobehind the socialism of Wells are certain habits of mind, certainprimitive likes, relishes, instincts, preferences: a faith in free will,a sense of order and the subordination of details to design, a personaldetachment, a pleasure in construction, a curiosity about the future.

  These are innate qualities, which inevitably produced their ownanimating purpose.