The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

  CHAPTER IV

  THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE NEW REPUBLICAN

  It is obvious that the socialism of Wells, touching as it does at everypoint the fabric of society, remains at bottom a personal and mysticalconception of life. His typical socialist, or constructive man, orSamurai, or New Republican, or what you will, is as distinctly a poeticprojection from life as Nietzsche's Superman, or Carlyle's Hero, or theSuperior Man of Confucius. Like them, it implies a rule of conduct and aspecial religious attitude.

  Nietzsche's Superman is a convenient figure by which for the moment tothrow into relief the point I have in mind. Plainly a conception of thiskind 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 toplace oneself at the precise angle of the poet who conceived it. But thefixed intellect of man is not often capable of rising to the height ofsuch an argument, nor do the run of critics and interpreters rise tosuch a height themselves. In the case of Nietzsche, particularly, theyhave confounded the confusion, urging precise definitions and at thesame time disagreeing among themselves as to which definitions may beheld valid. But indeed the Superman does not "mean" this or that: it canmerely be approached from different points of view with differentdegrees of sympathy. And so it is with the New Republican of Wells.

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

  In fact it fully proves how profound is the socialistic instinct inWells, that though in English wise and almost in the manner of Carlylehe has come to believe in the great ones of this world, he has neverlost the invincible socialist conviction that a great man is only afigure of speech. In _The Discovery of the Future_ he says: "I mustconfess that I believe that if by some juggling with space and timeJulius Caesar, Napoleon, Edward IV, William the Conqueror, Lord Rosebery,and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth, it would not haveproduced any serious dislocation of the course of destiny. I believethat these great men of ours are no more than images and symbols andinstruments taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and consistentforces behind them." The individual who stands on his achievement, the"lord of creation," is to him at best a little misinformed, at the worstblustering, dishonest, presuming, absurd.

  By an original instinct the Wells hero is an inconspicuous littleperson, fastidiously untheatrical, who cuts no figure personally andwho, to adopt a phrase from one of his later books, "escapes fromindividuality in science and service." He abhors "personages." For thepersonage is one who, in some degree, stands on his achievement, and toWells man, both in his love and his work, is experimental: he is anexperiment toward an impersonal synthesis, the well-being of thespecies. It is true that this idea of man as an experiment does notconflict with a very full development of personality. It consists inthat; 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 oneaccepts the laurel wreath, the moment one verges on self-consequence.

  The first published utterance of Wells was, I think, a paper in _TheFortnightly Review_ for July, 1891, called _The Rediscovery of theUnique_. It was one of the earliest of those attacks on the logicalapproach to life, so characteristic of contemporary thought: it stampedhim from the outset a pragmatist. The burden of his argument was thatsince the investigations of Darwin it is no longer possible to ignorethe uniqueness of every individual thing in the universe and that "weonly arrive at the idea of similar beings by an unconscious ordeliberate disregard of an infinity of small differences"--that, inbrief, the method of classification which is the soul of logic is untrueto the facts of life. "Human reason," he wrote, "in the light of what isbeing advanced, appears as a convenient organic process based on afundamental happy misconception.... The _reason d'etre_ of a man's mindis to avoid danger and get food--so the naturalists tell us. Hisreasoning powers are about as much a truth-seeking tool as the snout ofa pig, and he may as well try to get to the bottom of things by them asa mole might by burrowing."

  I quote thus his rudely graphic early statement of the case, because hehas not since substantially modified it and because it shows that healready related it to human realities: and indeed in the same paper hepointed out the relation that such an idea must bear to ordinaryconduct:

  Beings are unique, circumstances 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 substitutes of more than doubtful value for an individual study of cases.

  This conception of human reason as an altogether inadequate organ forgetting at the truth of things he later expanded in his Oxford lecture,_Scepticism of the Instrument;_ and, still further expanded, it formsthe first or metaphysical book of his _First and Last Things_. It isunnecessary to discuss the rights and wrongs of this primary point in ageneration familiar with James and Bergson. It is an assumption of thepurely personal, experimental nature of truth which has had a sufficientsanction of experience greatly to modify contemporary practice in ethicsand sociology. And it should be noted that Wells evolved it in his ownstudy of physical science (a study serious enough to result intext-books of Biology, Zoology, and Physiography) and that he presentsit, in accordance with his own postulates, not as truth for everybody,but as his own personal contribution to the sum of experience. The studyof science led him to see the limitations of the scientific attitude,outside the primary physical sciences which for practical purposes canafford to ignore individualities, in matters that approach the world ofhuman motives and affairs.

  I do not propose to discuss this question of logic. It is quite plain atleast, as Wells observes, in the spirit of Professor James, that "allthe great and important beliefs by which life is guided and determinedare less of the nature of fact than of artistic expression." Andtherefore 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 unanalyzable 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:

  I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that strains and I believe grows toward Beauty, and of a great mental being that strains and I believe grows towards knowledge and power. In this persuasion that I am a gatherer of experience, a mere tentacle that arranged thought beside thought for this
Being of the Species, this Being that grows beautiful and powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling idea of which I stand in need, the ruling idea that reconciles and adjudicates among my warring motives. In it I find both concentration of myself and escape from myself, in a word, I find _Salvation_.

  And again later:

  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. In so far as we are individuals, so far as we seek to follow merely individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance, the sport of chance. In so far as we realize ourselves as experiments of the species for the species, just in so far do we escape from the accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves.... Now none of this, if you read me aright, makes for the suppression of one's individual difference, but it does make for its correlation. We have to get everything we can out of ourselves for this very reason that we do not stand alone; we signify as parts of a universal and immortal development. Our separate selves are our charges, the talents of which much has to be made. It is because we are episodical in the great synthesis of life that we have to make the utmost of our individual lives and traits and possibilities.

  Naturally then, just as he holds by the existing State as a rudimentarycollective organ in public affairs, so also, in theory, he holds by theexisting Church. His Church of the Future bears to the existing Churchjust the relation which the ultimate State of socialism bears to theexisting State. "The theory of a religion," says Wells, "may propose theattainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an irascible Deity or adozen other things as its end and aim. The practical fact is that itdraws together great multitudes of diverse individualized people in acommon solemnity and self-subordination, however vague, and is so farlike the State, and in a manner far more intimate and emotional andfundamental than the State, a synthetic power. And in particular theidea of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic suggestion; it isin many ways an idea broader and finer than the constructive idea of anyexisting State."

  All of which I take to be very much the position of Erasmus face to facewith Luther and of Matthew Arnold face to face on the one hand withNonconformity and on the other with Darwinism: that the Church is asocial fact greater in importance than any dogmatic system it contains.To Wells any sort of voluntary self-isolation, any secession fromanything really synthetic in society, is a form of "sin." And like manyCatholics he justifies a certain Machiavelism in squaring one's personaldoubts with the collective end. Thus he holds that test oaths anddeclarations of formal belief are of the same nature as the oath ofallegiance a republican takes to the King, petty barriers that cannotweigh against the good that springs from placing oneself _en rapport_with the collective religious consciousness; at least in the case ofnational Churches, which profess to represent the whole spiritual lifeof a nation and which cannot therefore be regarded as exclusive to anyaffirmative religious man. The individual, he says, must examine hisspecial case and weigh the element of treachery against the possibilityof cooperation; as far as possible he must repress his private tendencytoward social fragmentation, hold fast to the idea of the Church asessentially a larger fact than any specific religious beliefs, and workwithin it for the recognition of this fact. I have mentioned Catholicreasoning; Wells appears to be in general agreement with Newman as tothe subordination of private intellectual scruples to the greater unityof faith.

  But indeed I doubt if it is fair to take him too much at his word inspecific matters of this kind. _First and Last Things_ has that slightlyofficial quality which goes with all Confessions of Faith out loud. Ifhis intention has led him to square himself with lines of thought andconduct where, to speak the truth, he is an alien, his intentionremains, and that is plain and fine.

  The synthetic motive gains its very force through the close-knitting ofkeenly-developed, proud, and valiant individualities. In Wells thesynthetic motive and the individual motive qualify and buttress oneanother; and he is quite as much opposed to the over-predominance of thesynthetic motive where the personal motive is deficient as he is to theself-indulgence of the purely personal life. Thus the Assembly in _AModern Utopia_ is required to contain a certain number of men outsidethe Samurai class, because, as they explain, "there is a certain sort ofwisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which is necessary to the perfectruling of life," and their Canon contains a prayer "to save the worldfrom unfermented men." So also in _First and Last Things_ Wells remarks:"If I were a father confessor I should begin my catalogue of sins byasking, 'Are you a man of regular life?' and I would charge my penitentto go away forthwith and commit some practicable saving irregularity; tofast or get drunk or climb a mountain or sup on pork and beans or giveup smoking or spend a month with publicans and sinners." Plainly hiscollective purpose is nothing unless it consists of will, will even towilfulness, even to perversity.

  And this leads one back to that early assertion of his that since beingsand circumstances are unique, we must get rid of the idea that conductshould be regulated by general principles. Similarly, at the outset of_Mankind in the Making_ he says it is necessary "to reject and set asideall abstract, refined, and intellectualized ideas as startingpropositions, such ideas as Right, Liberty, Happiness, Duty, or Beauty,and to hold fast to the assertion of the fundamental nature of life as atissue and succession of births." Goodness and Beauty, he says, cannotbe considered apart from good and beautiful things and one's personalnotions of the good and beautiful have to be determined by one'spersonal belief about the meaning of life. Thus, to take an illustrationfrom his novels, one of the most odious traits of such a father as AnnVeronica's or Mr. Pope in _Marriage_ is that they wish to regulate theirdaughters, not by a study of what is and must be good in their eyes, butby a general sweeping view of what good daughters ought to be.

  Now since his own idea of the purpose of life is the development of thecollective consciousness of the race, his idea of the Good is that whichcontributes to this synthesis, and the Good Life is that which, as hesays, "most richly gathers and winnows and prepares experience andrenders it available for the race, that contributes most effectively tothe collective growth." And as a corollary to this, Sin is essentially"the service of secret and personal ends." The conflict in one way oranother between this Good and this Evil forms the substance of each ofthe main group of his novels. Aside from the novels of shop-life, eachof his principal men begins life with a passionate and disinterestedambition to gather and prepare experience and render it available forthe race; each one falls from this ambition to the service of secret andpersonal ends. Lewisham, Capes, Ponderevo, Remington, Trafford are, eachin his own way, human approximations, with all the discount of actuallife, of the ethical standard of Wells himself as it is generalized inthe New Republicans and the Samurai. They illustrate how fully thesocialism of Wells is summed up in a conception of character.

  But before turning to the actual men and women who form the substance ofhis novels, I must add something about those wraith-like beings, theSamurai of _A Modern Utopia,_ which fully embody his ideal.

  The name Samurai, to begin with, is not a random choice, for it is plainthat the Japanese temper is akin to that of Wells. The career of theJapanese as a nation during the last fifty years perfectly illustrateshis frequent contention that in modern warfare success falls to thenation that has most completely realized the socialistic, asdistinguished from the individualistic, notion of society. "Behind hermilitary capacity is the disciplined experience of a thousand years,"says Lafcadio Hearn, who proceeds to show at what cost, in everything weare apt to regard as human, this disciplined power has beenachieved--the cost of individual privacy in rights, property, andconduct.

  But aside from social ideals and achievements one instinctively feelsthat Wells likes Japanese human nature. In one of his early essays, longsince out of print, he remarks:

&nb
sp; I like my art unadorned; thought and skill and the other strange quality that is added thereto to make things beautiful--and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and paper, and behold! a thing of beauty!--as they do in Japan. And if it should fall into the fire--well, it has gone like yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow there will be another.

  He contrasts this with the ordinary English view of art and property,mahogany furniture and "handsome" possessions:

  The pretence that they were the accessories to human life was too transparent. _We_ were the accessories; we minded them for a little while, and then we passed away. They wore us out and cast us aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on through the piece.

  _There is no Being but Becoming_ is the special dictum of Wells, adictum which does not consort with mahogany sideboards, but is tangiblyexpressed in Japanese architecture. And if Wells naturally likesJapanese art, its economy, delicacy, ephemerality, its catlike nicety,its paucity of color, its emphasis of design, its "starkness," it isplain also that many qualities of the Japanese character must alsoappeal irresistibly to him: the light hold they have on all those thingsinto which one settles down, from stolid leather arm-chairs tocomfortable private fortunes; their lack of self-consequence, theiralertness, their athletic freedom from everything that encumbers, theirremoteness from port-wine and _embonpoint._ These things exist inWells's notion of right human nature.

  Thus the Samurai. They are delegates of the species, experimenting andsearching for new directions; they instinctively view themselves asexplorers for the race, as disinterested agents. And their ownself-development on this disinterested basis is not only the purpose oftheir own lives, but also the method by which the Life Impulse discoversand records itself and pushes on to ever wider and richermanifestations.

  The socialism of Wells is merely a building out from this conception. Heis persuaded that this kind of experimental exercise is not simply ahappy indulgence for the few fortunately placed, but that it is actuallyvirtue and the only virtue. And this notion of personal virtue--personalin quality, social in effect--once conceded, it follows that themoulding of life must proceed with reference to this.