The Last Books of H.G. Wells

by HG Wells

  But what we had most in mind was this, that there is a definite limit set to the abundance of any particular Beauty. It is discovered, it is revealed, and that is its end. That God has smiled and passed and returns no more. Other Gods may smile in their turn, and they too will pass away.

  We cited instances of these immortal visitations.

  There was, said a classical scholar, that gracious beauty which was distilled by Hellenic poets and sculptors out of the vast confusion of antique mythology. It has lit this dull world for all its lovers with an inalienable charm. Pan and the dryads haunt the woodlands, the naiads bathe in the stream, Diana steals down the beams of misty silver to Endymion, and eternally amidst the glittering waters, Triton blows his wreathed horn.

  “But one thing goes on,” said a man who called himself an anthologist, “and that is the creative magic in English poetic creation.” Which threw us all into an intricate disputation that carried us over the whole field of English literature and drama and was shot with a flashing multitude of interests and surprises. “There is not one single Goddess here,” we agreed, “but a varied sisterhood, and most of these sisters are wantons and have led lives that make the Olympians seem by comparison calm and consistent and at least superficially decorous.” Gradually we begin to disentangle the preoccupations of these lively Beauties.

  There is that lost Goddess of beautiful English who, with little Latin and less Greek, played with it so delightfully in Shakespearian days and was finally murdered by her Latin lover in a fit of jealousy because she flirted with the far more lively colloquial scullion downstairs. She came to her tragic end before the Stuarts were done for. For a while she lay calm and rigid in death before her ultimate decay. All that Swift and Sterne, Addison and Gray and Gay, albeit they loved her greatly, could achieve was an unexciting pellucid flow. The DUNCIAD is the dirge of a happy lovely language lying dead under a black pall of Hanoverian gut-terals.

  Dear heart! she left one bastard by philosophy, not a Goddess indeed but a demi-Goddess, the Wordsworthian discovery of the mystical loveliness beneath reality, but for the rest, we Dreamland anthologists asked, what later Beauty of English is worth our keeping? Newdigate prizewinners, pompous and pretentious verse-makers, the massive uninspired industrious professionalism of Tennyson, head expert of the industry, Longfellow doing his level best, and never succeeding, to make Laughing-Water Hiawatha laugh, the fumed oak stuff from the Morris antique shop, the vanity, crudity and unimaginative topicality of that overrated etcher, Blake, the jingling vulgarities of Byron, Martin Tupper, Alfred Noyes, T. S. Eliot, Bridges and the rest of them—as void of the mysterious exaltation of Beauty as a crew of disinherited mourners at a bankrupt’s funeral on a wet day. Who in the great world we dream about will delight in any of this later stuff? Have we any use for it at all?

  The anthologist did his best. “There are bits,” he pleaded, digging nervously in the addled egg, that curate’s egg, of later English poetry. “A rose-red city half as old as time,” he quoted, but he could not recall the name of the man who produced that one happy line, and then he bethought himself suddenly of Shelley.

  He dredged up a few quotable lines, “The earth doth like a snake renew its winter skin outworn.” And a fragment of QUEEN MAB.

  “Well?” he said.

  “You shall have that,” I conceded, “though much of Shelley is copious, intellectualized and tedious stuff, last bubbles from the drifting body of the drowned Goddess, and, such as they were, they rose to the surface and broke and vanished a century and a quarter ago. But all the rest was just trying to go on with something that indeed was finished for ever.”

  It was my Dream, entirely mine for a while; no one said anything more; and thus, having left English poesy for dead, these fluctuating dream Elysians fell to discussing one of the most radiant smiles of another of these—wanton English Beauties—who lived so fast and gaily in those days of literary loveliness, the divine imagination of the MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.

  There we agreed, was a piece of the magic that can never lose its charm. “Or THE TEMPEST,” said someone.

  There again we had a culminating finish, something done, for good and all, so that nothing of the same supreme sort could ever be done again. But all through that happy phase of English inspiration beauty flashed and quivered. Brightest among the London Globe galaxy who slapped together plays and poetry which people now call “Shakespeare”, was a brilliant youth of that name, who loved all too freely and retired to Stratford on Avon to die untimely, as his final signatures show, in the mute misery of incipient G.P.I. He stood out among them all in his early years, but, quite apart from these distinctive creations, the language was in such a state that hardly anyone could touch it without striking sparks of loveliness, and one must be very heavily erudite to attribute any particular single flash in the collection to this man or that.

  And as My Dreamland company talked in Elysium we became aware of a curious unanimity about that respectable triology, the Beautiful, the Good and the True. Dear old Professor Gilbert Murray appeared among the eternal sunlit greenery and was greeted with a respectful murmur. He declared with a defiant flash in his glasses and a note of passion in his voice, that he believed in the Good, the Beautiful and the True, but, before he could be asked any questions, he vanished from among us completely, and we were left to consider what he meant by these words. We found we were agreed that he had put three realities, essentially different in their nature, upon a quasi-equality for which there was no justification whatever.

  We left the moral factor, the Good, aside for the present. Goodness is a matter of mores, of good social behaviour, and there is so wide a diversity of social values in the world that it seemed unnecessary to my Elysians to question anything so impermanent. The transitoriness of morality is in flat contrast to the deathless finality of beauty.

  But when we turned to literature which does not pretend to beauty in the first place, but to interest of statement or narratives, we found something, that only verges, as it were, in a few incidental passages, and by accident, on poetic beauty. For the rest, literature, both the philosophical, the “scientific” and the fictitious, is telling about what things are, what life is; about its excitements, its emotional effects, its expectations, its laughter and tears. It is as different from poesy as apple pie is from Aurora.

  This work of the human mind in telling and enforcing a view has produced a huge real literature quite apart from the infinitely vaster sham literature which is foisted upon people whose cacotrophically educated undiscriminating minds cannot even perceive they are being told nothing at all, and who read in a muzzy fashion, as people play patience, because they can think of nothing better to do.

  This literature of reality has not the permanence of beauty. It absorbs and reproduces the story-telling and statements of the past. It does its utmost to recapture from the past the experiences swallowed by the maw of time. Or it invents typical or experimental characters to try over problems and variations in conduct. There can be no classical novels or romances. The strictly circumstantial ones last longest. Fielding’s VOYAGE TO LISBON will out live TOM JONES. Stories become tedious as our vision broadens. Nor are there classics of science. Knowledge pours in continually to amplify and correct. Yet every new realization, every fresh discovery, has for those who make it, a quality of beauty, transitory indeed but otherwise as clear and pure as that enduring Beauty we cherish for ever, an ephemeral beauty for one man or for a group of mortals, sufficient to make a life’s devotion to service of truth worth while.

  So we found ourselves in agreement that the human mind may be in a phase of transition to a new, fearless, clear-headed way of living in which understanding will be the supreme interest of life, and beauty a mere smile of approval. So it is at any rate in the Dreamland to which my particular Happy Turning takes me. There shines a world “beyond good and evil”, and there, in a universe completely conscious of itself, Being achieves its end.

  THE EN
D

  MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER

  FOREWORD

  THE TWO PAMPHLETS collected here, THE HAPPY TURNING and MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER, were H. G. Wells’s final publications. He was, respectively, seventy-seven and seventy-nine when he penned these works, and in poor health. He died soon after publishing MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER, on August 13, 1946.

  Like some others of my generation—I was born in 1946—I first heard of Wells’s final work in THE OUTSIDER, Colin Wilson’s study of the literature of alienation (originally published 1956, reprinted Tarcher/Putnam, New York 1982). In his first chapter, Wilson writes that MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER “must be considered the most pessimistic single utterance in modern literature.” As Wilson’s book was the literary guide that got me interested in Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel NAUSEA—a personal touchstone—I was of course intrigued by the possibility that the great old SF Master was a heavy existentialist as well.

  These last works of Wells frighten me, not only because of what they say, but because of how they’re written. Wells rants, inveighs, rambles, self-aggrandizes, repeats himself, and loses the thread of what he’s talking about—in spots the performance verges upon the pitiful. Poor old man.

  But the work snaps into focus in the first three sections of MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER. Very little doddering here. These pages are as shocking as opening one’s bedroom door to find—nothing. A hole in space. The Void.

  When approaching their own deaths, some people fall into what I might call fatalistic synecdoche. They conflate the whole (the world) with the part (themselves), and announce that the world is about to end. I knew an exasperatingly self-centered old man who every few waking minutes during his seven-year final decline would repeat, “We’re all dying.” He predicted our joint death perhaps a quarter of a million times before finally succumbing.

  Yes, we’re all going to die—but not at the same time. To view your own death as the end of the entire outer world is rather conspicuously to miss the point. Each time a spent, decaying tree crashes to the forest floor, a hundred new green shoots spring up. Life is a wheel, eternally renewing herself.

  This said, there is a precise sense in which one particular “world” ends with a given person X’s death; the doomed “world” is the “world-as-X-knew-it.” For each of us human X’s, the end of the world-as-X-knew-it is indeed coming up. When Jesus told his disciples that the end of the world was coming in their own lifetimes, he was, on a person-by-person basis, correct.

  I’m playing intellectual games here, dancing around an unpleasant subject. But in Wells’s last months, the horror of death became immediate and experiential. And so he wrote MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER, and indulged himself to the hilt in fatalistic synecdoche. The effect is chilling, apocalyptic. Here’s a series of quotes from the first section of his grim last testament:

  “The cosmic movement of events is increasingly adverse to the mental make-up of our everyday life...” “... a frightful queerness has come into life... something is happening so that life will never be quite the same ...” “... the Antagonist ... which has endured life for so long by our reckoning ... has now turned against it ... implacably to wipe it out ...” “ ... [events] go on and on to an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which [the] obstinate urgency of our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but will struggle only until it is altogether overcome.”

  The section ends with a hammer-blow that nails the lid upon the coffin: “There is no way out or round or through.”

  Rich and densely woven, the first three sections of MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER bear close rereading. As a more plausible alternative to his claim that the world is coming to an end, Wells suggests that the flow of human history is entering a zone beyond which logical extrapolation must fail.

  “It was natural for [me] to assume there was a limit set to change, that new things and events would appear, but that they would appear consistently, preserving the natural sequence of life.... Hitherto events had been held together by a certain logical consistency ... [but] now it is as if ... everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity ... [and] events now follow one another in an entirely untrustworthy sequence.”

  The view that the world is on the brink of a unique and radical transition is sometimes called millenarianism. The millenarianists of our early twenty-first century say we’re on the verge of a technological Singularity beyond which it is impossible to see. Are they right? Was Wells?

  In hindsight, Wells’s time seems much of a piece with the rest of human history: wars, atrocities, improving technology, population increase. The usual. Extrapolating, one supposes that even the most dramatic twenty-first events will also come to seem like mere history—when viewed from yet further down the timeline.

  Millenarianism is on the one hand a kind of self-aggrandizement: nobody has ever lived in an era as strange as mine! On the other hand, it’s an abdication, a failure of the imagination—a failure that must ultimately beset even so great a futurist and scientific romancer as H. G. Wells.

  Some notions from twenty-first century philosophy of computer science are apposite. Human history can be thought of as a kind of computation, a rule-like distributed process being carried out within the individual brains of human beings as they react to the physical computations of the physical world. The massed mental computations of humanity add up to a hive-mind.

  In the philosophy of computation, we distinguish between predictable and unpredictable computations, and within the subset of the unpredictable ones, we distinguish between those that appear utterly random, and those so-called gnarly ones which generate fleeting illusions of regularity while remaining solidly unpredictable. The weather, a living organism, the motions of a leaf in the wind, your mental processes, a society’s hive-mind, global human history—all of these share the property of being gnarly computations: utterly unpredictable, but not random.

  It’s not the case that absolutely anything can happen at any time. Local determinism holds sway; things happen for reasons; causes lead to effects. But the massed interactions of the hive members produce a human history that appears inscrutably chaotic.

  If you become aware of this, it makes you—queasy. You’re in a small craft headed for more and still more rapids, and there’s no way off the river. For the young, the never-ending ordeal seems a romp, an adventure. For the old, it’s fatiguing—and ultimately terrifying.

  Wells was no hysteric. He was well aware of a distinction between “... his very intermittent and specialized phases as a philosophical enquirer and the normal interests of his life.”

  So far as he was concerned, his world was about to end, and the future had become utterly unpredictable. He remarks that one’s options are to endure such facts or to evade them; “the end will be the same, but the evasion systems involve ... in most cases blind obedience to egotistical leaders, fanatical persecutions, panics, hysterical violence and cruelty.”

  Noblesse oblige. It’s better to face the facts and make the best of the time we have. “[I] would rather our species ended its story in dignity, kindliness and generosity, and not like drunken cowards in a daze or poisoned rats in a sack.”

  The final three sections of MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER are to filler, inserted to bulk the essay to a length sufficient to be published as a pamphlet. I gather from the excellent forward and notes by his son G. P. Wells1 that these sections were in fact written a year earlier; they summarize ideas about evolution, culminating with the suggestion that some future beings of our planet might survive the coming cataclysm. (From a twenty-first century standpoint, it seems possible that our inheritors could well be AIs, robots, or some biotech form of artificial life.)

  Throughout MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER we feel a sense of struggle: Wells’s innate vital optimism versus his moment-by-moment knowledge that the end was near. He was conflicted, unsure, groping. But, right to the end, he never let up.

  A
t the very end of he remarks that, as people are “curious, teachable and experimental from cradle to the grave,” some of them may indeed succeed in —keeping our civilization going? To hell with that. He’s not going to flinch. The final bright flowering of humanity might at best “succeed in seeing life out to its inevitable end.”

  Going down in flames; with a bang, not a whimper.

  —RUDY RUCKER, LOS GATOS, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 12, 2006.

  PREFACE

  THIS LITTLE BOOK brings to a conclusive end the series of essays, memoranda, pamphlets, through which the writer has experimented, challenged discussion, and assembled material bearing upon the fundamental nature of life and time. So far as fundamentals go, he has nothing more and never will have anything more to say.

  The greater bulk of that research material may now go down the laboratory sink. It is either superseded or dismissed. It will go out of print and be heard of no more.

  This applies particularly to a large assemblage of material published under the title of ’42 TO ’44. This was gathered together in the course of five or six years and finally it was rushed into print; it was published at a prohibitive price, because, although the writer wanted to put certain things on record, he was acutely aware how very provisional his record still was. Now it can fall into oblivion. The quintessence is here in this small and reasonably priced volume, and the author may use some of the documentary material that figured in its predecessors and which in most cases was as sound as it is irrelevant to our fundamental theme, as a sourcebook for critical writing in whatever remnant of time still remains for him. It is factually quite sound and much will be available for study of the DECLINE AND FALL OF MONARCHY AND COMPETITIVE IMPERIAL-ISMS should the writer last out to write that.