The World of H.G. Wells

by Van Wyck Brooks

  CHAPTER V

  HUMAN NATURE

  There is always a certain disadvantage in approaching human naturethrough a theory or in the light of an ideal. If I am doing that, it ismy own fault and by no means the fault of Wells. He has himselfabandoned socialism, in the ordinary sense of the term, because it hastoo much of the _a priori_ about it; he has abandoned economics becauseit deals with man as a mass-mind; he has come to rest in human natureitself and he has made his theories subject to human nature.

  "All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy thestory," says Thoreau. Most readers of the novels of Wells, I suppose,have no notion that a theory of life runs through them and unites them.And they are right. The force of a work of art does not reside in its"inner meanings." An admirable work of art will always no doubt possess"inner meanings" in plenty and the unhappy mind of man will always routthem out. But to separate the intellectual structure of anything fromthe thing itself is just like any other kind of vivisection: you exposethe brain and you kill the dog. A work of art is a moving living wholethat speaks to the moving living whole which is oneself. We areinsensibly modified by reading as by other experience. We come to feeldifferently, see differently, act differently. Without doubt Wells hasaltered the air we breathe and has made a conscious fact in many mindsthe excellence that resides in certain types of men and modes of livingand the odiousness that resides in others. Socialism, like everythingelse which changes the world, comes as a thief in the night.

  Still, it is plain that Wells himself began with doctrine foremost;richness of experience has led him only after many years to get thehorse before the cart. From the first he was aware of a point ofview--it was the point of view, writ large, of his own self-made career,growing gradually more and more coherent. Throughout his romances, downto the very end, his chief interest was theoretical rather than human.Only this can account for the violent wrenching of life and character inthem to suit the requirements of a predetermined idea. The Food of theGods, for example, is so far the essential fact of the book that bearsits name that the characters in this book are merely employed to givethe Food a recognizable human setting. Throughout his romances, indeed,men exist for inventions, not inventions for men.

  Yet the "human interest," as it is called, was there from the outset,side by side with this main theoretic interest in the scientific andsocialistic possibilities of life. The series of novels began almost asearly as the series of romances. Two "streams of tendency" run side byside throughout the earlier writings of Wells--streams of tendency whichmeet fully for the first time in _Tono-Bungay_, and have formed a singlemain current in the novels subsequent to that. On the one hand was thestream of constructive theory, not yet brought into contact with humannature, on the other the stream of "human interest," not yet broughtinto contact with constructive theory. Mr. Hoopdriver, of _The Wheels ofChance,_ and Kipps, are typical of this earlier fiction, specimens ofmuddled humanity as such, one might say, quite unmitigated by the trainof thought, the possibility of doing something _with_ muddled humanity,which was growing more and more urgent in the romances.

  In _Tono-Bungay_, as I have said, one sees the union of these two trainsof interest, muddled humanity being represented in Uncle Ponderevo,constructive theory in George Ponderevo. And in all the subsequentnovels this fusion continues. The background in each case is the staticworld of muddle from which Wells is always pushing off into the open seaof possibilities, the foreground being occupied by a series of men andwomen who represent this dynamic forward movement. And the philosophy ofWells has finally come to port in human nature.

  "Few modern socialists," he says somewhere, "present their faith as acomplete panacea, and most are now setting to work in earnest upon thoselong-shirked preliminary problems of human interaction through which thevital problem of a collective head and brain can alone be approached."And elsewhere he says: "Our real perplexities are altogetherpsychological. There are no valid arguments against a great-spiritedsocialism but this, that people will not. Indolence, greed, meanness ofspirit, the aggressiveness of authority, and above all jealousy,jealousy from pride and vanity, jealousy for what we esteem ourpossessions, jealousy for those upon whom we have set the heavy fettersof our love, a jealousy of criticism and association, these are the realobstacles to those brave large reconstructions, those profitableabnegations and brotherly feats of generosity that will yet turn humanlife--of which our individual fives are but the momentary parts--into aglad, beautiful and triumphant cooperation all round this sunlit world."

  Inevitably then he sees the world as divided roughly into two worlds,and human nature as of two general kinds. There is the static world, thenormal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself,together with the great mass of men who compose and sanction it; andthere is the ever-advancing better world, pushing through this outwornhusk in the minds and wills of creative humanity. In one of his essayshe has figured this opposition as between what he calls the NormalSocial Life and the Great State. And in one of those _degage_touch-and-go sketches in which he so often sums up the history ofhumankind, he has presented the Normal Social Life as a "commonatmosphere of cows, hens, dung, toil, ploughing, economy, and domesticintimacy," an immemorial state of being which implies on the part of menand women a perpetual acquiescence--a satisfied or hopeless consent--tothe end of time. But as against this normal conception of life he pointsout that modern circumstances have developed in men, through machinery,the division of labor, etc., a "surplus life" which does not fit intothe Normal scheme at all, and that humanity has returned "from a closelytethered to a migratory existence." And he observes: "The history of theimmediate future will, I am convinced, be very largely the history ofthe conflict of the needs of this new population with the institutions,the boundaries, the laws, prejudices, and deep-rooted traditionsestablished during the home-keeping, localized era of mankind's career."

  Two conceptions of life, two general types of character, two ethicalstandards are here set in opposition, and this opposition is maintainedthroughout the novels of Wells. Thus on the title-page of _The NewMachiavelli_ appears the following quotation from Professor James: "Itsuffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough-mindedpeople ... do both exist." In _A Modern Utopia_ this division appearstypically in the two men from our world who play off against oneanother, the botanist and the narrator of the story. The"tender-mindedness" of the botanist is exhibited in the fact that hecares nothing for a better world if it is to deprive him of the muddled,inferior and sentimental attachments of his accustomed life, and prefersthem to the austerer, braver prospect that is offered him."Tough-mindedness," on the other hand, is above all the state of living,not in one's attachments, habits, possessions, not in the rut of leastresistance, but in the sense of one's constructive and cooperativerelationship to the whole sum of things, in being "a conscious part ofthat web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe." Andindeed the constant theme of the novels of Wells might be described astough-mindedness with lapses.

  For the heroes of Wells do lapse: they pay that tribute to "humannature" and the overwhelming anti-social forces in the world and in manhimself. They fall, as a rule, from "virtue" to the service of secretand personal ends. _Cherchez la femme_. Mr. Lewisham, insufficientlyprepared and made to feel that society does not want him, has to give uphis disinterested ambitions in science and scramble for money to supporta wife whom instinct has urged him, however imprudently, to marry.George Ponderevo gives up science and is forced into abetting hisuncle's patent medicine enterprise for the same reason. For the samereason, too, Capes takes to commercial play-writing to support AnnVeronica; and to stand behind the extravagance of Marjorie, Trafford,having discovered in his researches an immensely valuable method ofmaking artificial india-rubber which he is going to make public for theuse of society, is persuaded to compromise his honor as a scientist andmonopolize his discovery for private gain. In _Tono-Bungay_ theenterprise is a swindling patent medicine, which many bu
siness men wouldrefuse to have anything to do with; but in _Marriage_ the propositionbelongs to what is called "legitimate business," and it may be well toquote a passage to show the subtlety and, at the same time, from thispoint of view, the very substantial nature of temptation and sin:

  Solomonson had consulted Trafford about this matter at Vevey, and had heard with infinite astonishment that Trafford had already roughly prepared and was proposing to complete and publish, unpatented and absolutely unprotected, first a smashing demonstration of the unsoundness of Behren's claim and then a lucid exposition of just what had to be done and what could be done to make an india-rubber absolutely indistinguishable from the natural product. The business man could not believe his ears.

  "My dear chap, positively--you mustn't!" Solomonson had screamed.... "Don't you see all you are throwing away?"

  "I suppose it's our quality to throw such things away," said Trafford.... "When men dropped that idea of concealing knowledge, alchemist gave place to chemist, and all that is worth having in modern life, all that makes it better and safer and more hopeful than the ancient life began."

  "My dear fellow," said Solomonson, "I know, I know. But to give away the synthesis of rubber! To just shove it out of the window into the street!"... Everything that had made Trafford up to the day of his marriage was antagonistic to such strategic reservations. The servant of science has as such no concern with personal consequences; his business is the steady relentless clarification of knowledge. The human affairs he changes, the wealth he makes or destroys, are no concern of his; once these things weigh with him, become primary, he has lost his honor as a scientific man.

  "But you _must_ think of consequences," Solomonson had cried during those intermittent talks at Vevey. "Here you are, shying this cheap synthetic rubber of yours into the world--for it's bound to be cheap! anyone can see that--like a bomb into a market-place. What's the good of saying you don't care about the market-place, that _your_ business is just to make bombs and drop them out of the window? You smash up things just the same. Why! you'll ruin hundreds and thousands of people, people living on rubber shares, people working in plantations, old, inadaptable workers in rubber works...."

  "I believe we can do the stuff at tenpence a pound," said Solomonson, leaning back in his chair at last.... "So soon, that is, as we deal in quantity. Tenpence! We can lower the price and spread the market, sixpence by sixpence. In the end--there won't be any more plantations. Have to grow tea."

  There we have Eve and the apple brought up to date, sin being the choiceof a private and individual good at the expense of the general good. Thehonor of a doctor or a scientist consists in not concealing andmonopolizing discoveries. But why should the line be drawn at doctorsand scientists? There is the crux of socialist ethics.

  By this type of compromise the actual New Republicans fall short oftheir Utopian selves, the Samurai. But compromise is well within thephilosophy of Wells. "The individual case," he says in _First and LastThings_, "is almost always complicated by the fact that the existingsocial and economic system is based upon conditions that the growingcollective intelligence condemns as unjust and undesirable, and that theconstructive spirit in men now seeks to supersede. We have to live in aprovisional state while we dream of and work for a better one." Andelsewhere: "All socialists everywhere are like expeditionary soldiersfar ahead of the main advance. The organized State that should own andadminister their possessions for the general good has not arrived totake them over; and in the meanwhile they must act like its anticipatoryagents according to their lights and make things ready for its coming."

  But if the New Republican is justified in compromising himself for themeans of subsistence, how much more in the matter of love! "All forlove, and the world well lost" might be written over several of Wells'snovels. But, in reality, is the world lost at all under theseconditions? On the contrary, it is gained, and the more unconsciouslythe better, in babies. Love belongs to the future and the species withmore finality than the greatest constructive work of the present, andthe heroines of Wells are inordinately fond of babies. When Schopenhaueranalyzed the metaphysics of love he showed that natural selection is aquite inevitable thing seeking its own. In Wells love is equallyirresistible and direct. Whenever it appears in his books it makesitself unmistakably known, and, having done so, it cuts its way straightto its consummation, through every obstacle of sentiment, affection,custom, and conventionality. It is as ruthless as the Last Judgment, andlike the Last Judgment it occurs only once.

  Why then does it appear promiscuous? The answer to this question refersone back to the underlying contention of Wells that there are two kindsof human beings and two corresponding ethics, and that in the end theNew Republican who has become aware of himself cannot consort with theNormal Social breed. But in actual life this standard becomes entangledwith many complexities. Just as, in a world of commercial competition,it is the lot of most of those who try to give themselveswhole-heartedly to disinterested work that they place themselves at sucha disadvantage as ultimately to have to make a choice between work andlove, so the pressure of society and the quality of human nature itselfcreate entanglements of every kind. It is the nature of life that onegrows only gradually to the secure sense of a personal aim, and thatmeanwhile day by day one has given hostages to fortune. To wake up andfind oneself suddenly the master of a purpose is without doubt, in themajority of cases, to find oneself mortgaged beyond hope to the existingfact. The writer who sets out to make his way temporarily and as astepping-stone by journalism finds himself in middle age with amplemeans to write what he wishes to write only to find also that he hasbecome for good and all--a journalist! And so it is with lovers. Only inthe degree to which free will remains a perpetual and present faith can"love and fine thinking" remain themselves; free of their attachments,free of their obligations, and mortgages, and discounts. That is thequality of a decent marriage, and the end of a marriage that is notdecent.

  It is no business of mine to justify the sexual ethics of Wells. Butthere is a difference between a fact and an intention, and what I havejust said serves to explain the intention. Consider, in the light of it,a few of his characters, both in and out of marriage. Ann Veronica fromthe first frankly owns that she is not in love with Manning, but everykind of social hypnotism is brought into motion to work on her ignoranceof life and to confuse her sense of free-will. George Ponderevo simplyoutgrows Marion; but you cannot expect him not to grow, and who isresponsible for the limited, furtive, second-hand world in which Marionhas lived and which has irrevocably moulded her? Margaret's world, too,is a second-hand world, though on a socially higher plane: she lives ina pale dream of philanthropy and Italian art, shocked beyond any mutualunderstanding by everything that really belongs in the first-hand worldof her husband. These characters meet and pass one another like movingscales; they never stand on quite the same plane. And then theinevitable always occurs. For, just as the Children of the Food cannotconsort with the little folk they promise to supersede, so it appears tobe a fixed part of the programme of Wells that New Republicans can onlylove other New Republicans with success.

  He implies this indeed in _A Modern Utopia_:

  "A man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not follow it, must either leave the Samurai to marry her, or induce her to accept what is called the Woman's Rule, which, while it exempts her from the severer qualifications and disciplines, brings her regimen into a working harmony with his."

  "Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards?"

  "He must leave either her or the order."

  "There is matter for a novel or so in that."

  "There has been matter for hundreds."

  Wells has written six himself. _Love and Mr. Lewisham, Ann Veronica,Tono-Bungay, The New Mac
hiavelli, Marriage, The Passionate Friends_, areall variations on this theme. In one of these alone life's double motivesucceeds in establishing itself, and it is for this reason that_Marriage_, to my thinking the weakest of his novels from an artisticpoint of view, is the most important concrete presentation of thephilosophy of Wells. It is an inferior book, but it gives one the senseof a problem solved. By passing through a necessary yet feasiblediscipline, Trafford and Marjorie bridge over the gap between haphazardhuman nature and the better nature of socialism, and become Samurai infact.

  These entanglements of the actual world would be an overwhelmingobstacle to a socialism less vigorous than that of Wells. But obstaclesgive edge to things, and for a man who loves order no one could havepictured disorder with more relish than he. Only a pure theorist couldregret the artistic zest with which he portrays our muddled world.Running amuck was a constant theme in his early writings; his comets ranamuck, and so did Mr. Bessel, and there is no more relished wanton scenethan that of the Invisible Man running amuck through the Surreyvillages. Intentionally or not, this relish in disorder reinforces theprime fact about his view of order. He abhors the kind of order which isoften ignorantly confounded with the socialist aim, the order whichclassifies and standardizes. He desires a collective consciousness onlythrough the exercise of a universally unimpeded free will, and he wouldrather have no collectiveness at all than one that implies the sacrificeof this free will. He wishes to work only on the most genuine humanstuff. This was the basis of his break with the Fabian Society; it isthe basis of his dislike of bureaucratic methods which deprive people ofbeer when they want beer. It defines his notion of the true method ofsocialism as first of all an education of the human will towardvoluntary right discipline.

  His appeal, then, is a personal one. He has proved this indeed by hisrepudiation of all attempts to embody in practice his proposed order ofvoluntary nobility, the Samurai. Certain groups of young people actuallyorganized themselves upon the Rule that he had outlined, and it was thisthat led him to see how entirely his ideal had been personal andartistic rather than practical. Anyone at all familiar with religioushistory and psychology will see how inevitably any such group would tendto emphasize the Rule and the organization rather than the sociallyconstructive spirit for which the whole was framed, and how theorganization would itself separate from the collective life of the worldand become a new sect among the many sects. It was the same instinctthat led Emerson, Transcendental communist as he was, to look askance atBrook Farm. It has been the want of an equal tact in eminent religiousminds that has made society a warfare of sect and opinion.

  When one tries to focus the nature of his appeal one recalls a passagein one of his books where he sums up the ordinary mind of the world andthe function which all socialism bears to this mind:

  It is like a very distended human mind; it is without a clear aim; it does not know except in the very vaguest terms what it wants to do; it has impulses, it has fancies; it begins and forgets. In addition, it is afflicted with a division within itself that is strictly analogous to that strange mental disorder which is known to psychologists as multiple personality. It has no clear conception of the whole of itself, it goes about forgetting its proper name and address. Part of it thinks of itself as one great thing, as, let us say, Germany; another thinks of itself as Catholicism, another as the white race, or Judaea. At times one might deem the whole confusion not so much a mind as incurable dementia--a chaos of mental elements, haunted by invincible and mutually incoherent fixed ideas.... In its essence the socialistic movement amounts to this: it is an attempt in this warring chaos of a collective mind to pull itself together, to develop and establish a governing idea of itself. It is the development of the collective self-consciousness of humanity.

  Certainly the road to this can only be through a common understanding.The willing and unwilling servitudes of men, the institutions of societythat place love and work in opposition to one another, the shibbolethsof party, the aggressive jingoisms of separate peoples, the immemorialconspiracy by which men have upheld the existing fact, these things dospring from the want of imagination, the want of energetic faith, thewant of mutual understanding. To this inner and personal problem Wellshas applied himself. Can life be ventilated, can the mass of men beawakened to a sense of those laws of social gravitation and thetransmutation of energy by which life is proved a myriad-mindedorganism, can the ever-growing sum of human experience and discoveryclear up the dark places within society and within man? Among those whohave set themselves to the secular solution of these questions--and I amaware of the limits of any secular solution--there are few as effectiveas Wells.

  Consider him in relation to a single concrete issue, the issue ofmilitarism:

  Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two classes: there is expenditure upon things that have a diminishing value, things that grow old-fashioned and wear out, such as fortifications, ships, guns, and ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a permanent and even growing value, such as organized technical research, military and naval experiment, and the education and increase of a highly trained class of war experts.

  And in _The Common Sense of Warfare_ he urges a lavish expenditure on"education and training, upon laboratories and experimental stations,upon chemical and physical research and all that makes knowledge andleading." Separate the principle involved here from the issue it isinvolved in, get the intention clear of the fact, and you find that heis saying just the better sort of things that Matthew Arnold said.Militarism granted, are you going to do military things or are you goingto make military things a stepping-stone toward the clarification ofthought, the training of men, the development of race-imagination?Militarism has been to a large extent the impetus that has made theGermans and the Japanese the trained, synthetic peoples they are. Andthese very qualities are themselves in the end hostile to militarism.Militarism considered in this sense is precisely what the General Strikeis in the idea of M. Georges Sorel: a myth, a thing that never comes topass, but which trains the general will by presenting it with a concreteimage toward which the will readily directs itself. Kipling, in the eyesof the New Machiavelli, at least made the nation aware of what comes.

  All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o' doing things rather more or less.

  There is in this no defence of militarism. Granting the facts ofsociety, there is a way that accepts and secures them as they are andanother way of turning them into the service of the future, and a peoplethat has trained itself with reference to a particular issue hasvirtually trained itself for all issues.

  But no one, I think, has measured the difficulties of real progress morekeenly than Wells has come to measure them. The further he haspenetrated into human nature the more alive he has become to thesedifficulties. _The New Machiavelli_ is a modern _Rasselas_ that has nohappy valley in the end, and Remington passes from party to party,penetrating inward from ideas to the better stuff of mankind, hoping toembody his "white passion of statecraft," and in the end demonstratingto himself the futility of all groups and parties alike.

  And as with parties, so with men. Consider that scene in _The PassionateFriends_ where Stratton tries to explain in writing to his father whathe has been experiencing and why he must go away. He writes page afterpage without expressing himself and at last, certain that he and hisfather cannot come into touch, sends off a perfunctory note and receivesa perfunctory reply. "There are times," he adds, "when theinexpressiveness of life comes near to overwhelming me, when it seems tome we are all asleep or entranced, and but a little way above the stillcows who stand munching slowly in a field.... Why couldn't we and whydidn't we talk together!"

  That is the burden of his latest novel. By this touchstone he has cometo measure the possibility of that openness of mind, that mutualunderstanding, that ventilation of life and thought through which alonethe Great
State can exist.