The World of H.G. Wells Read online

  CHAPTER II

  TOWARDS SOCIALISM

  Of all the battered, blurred, ambiguous coins of speech there is none sobattered, blurred, and ambiguous as the word socialism. It mothers adozen creeds at war with one another. And the common enemy looks on,fortified with the Socratic irony of the "plain man," who believes hehas at last a full excuse for not understanding these devious doings.

  Therefore I take refuge in saying that H.G. Wells is an artist, neithermore nor less, that socialism is to him at bottom an artistic idea, andthat if it had not existed in the world he would have invented it. Thisclears me at once of the accusing frowns of any possible Marxian reader,and it also states a truth at the outset. For if the orthodox maintainthat socialism is not an affair of choices, may I not retort that hereactually is a mind that chooses to make it so? Here is an extraordinarykind of Utopian who has all the equipment of the orthodox and yetremains detached from orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is always jealous of itstabernacles and will not see itself dramatically; it has no concern withartistic presentations. But I protest there ought to be no quarrel here.If a socialism fundamentally artistic is an offence to the orthodox, letthem accept it, without resentment, as a little harmless fun--all artbeing that.

  Having said so much I return to my own difficulty, for it is very hardto focus H.G. Wells. He has passed through many stages and has not yetattained the Olympian repose. Artist as he is, he has been hotlyentangled in practical affairs. There are signs in his early books thathe once shared what Richard Jeffries called the "dynamitedisposition,"--even now he knows, in imagination alone, the joy of blackdestruction. He has also been, and ceased to be, a Fabian. But it isplain that he has passed for good and all beyond the emotional plane ofpropaganda. He has abandoned working-theories and the deceptions of theintellect which make the man of action. He has become at once morepractical and more mystical than a party programme permits one to be.Here is a world where things are being done--a world of which capitaland labor are but one interpretation. How far can these things and themen who do them be swept into the service of the race? That is thepractical issue in his mind, and the mystical issue lies in theintensity and quality of the way in which he feels it.

  To see him clearly one has to remember that he is not a syntheticthinker but a sceptical artist, whose writings are subjective even whenthey seem to be the opposite, whose personality is constantly growing,expanding, changing, correcting itself ("one can lie awake at night andhear him grow," as Chesterton says), and who believes moreover thattruth is not an absolute thing but a consensus of conflicting individualexperiences, a "common reason" to be wrought out by constant freediscussion and the comparison and interchange of personal discoveriesand ideas. He is not a sociologist, but, so to say, an artist ofsociety; one of those thinkers who are disturbed by the absence of rightcomposition in human things, by incompetent draughtsmanship and themisuse of colors, who see the various races of men as pigments capableof harmonious blending and the planet itself as a potential work of artwhich has been daubed and distorted by ill-trained apprentices. In Wellsthis planetary imagination forms a permanent and consistent mood, but ithas the consistency of a mood and not the consistency of a system ofideas. And though he springs from socialism and leads to socialism, hecan only be called a socialist in the fashion--to adopt a violentlydisparate comparison--that St. Francis can be called a Christian. Thatis to say, no vivid, fluctuating human being, no man of genius can everbe embodied in an institution. He thinks and feels it afresh; hisluminous, contradictory, shifting, evanescent impulses may, on thewhole, ally him with this or that aggregate social view, but they willnot let him be subdued to it. As a living, expanding organism he willconstantly urge the fixed idea to the limit of fluidity. So it is withWells. There are times when he seems as whimsical as the wind and asimpossible to photograph as a chameleon.

  Just here I should like to give what may be taken as his own view ofcapital and labor socialism in relation to the constructive socialism hehimself has at heart. I am putting together certain brief passages from_The Passionate Friends_:

  I have come to believe now that labor problems are problems only by the way. They have played their part in a greater scheme.... With my innate passionate desire to find the whole world purposeful, I cannot but believe that.... Strangest of saviours, there rises over the conflicts of men the glittering angular promise of the machine. There is no longer any need for slavery, open or disguised. We do not need slaves nor toilers nor mere laborers any more; they are no longer essential to a civilization. Man has ridden on his brother man out of the need of servitude. He struggles through to a new phase, a phase of release, a phase when leisure and an unexampled freedom are possible to every human being....

  Human thought has begun to free itself from individual entanglements and dramatic necessities and accidental standards. It becomes a collective mind, a collective will towards achievement, greater than individuals or cities or kingdoms or peoples, a mind and will to which we all contribute and which none of us may command nor compromise by our private errors. It ceases to be aristocratic; it detaches itself from persons and takes possession of us all. We are involved as it grows free and dominant, we find ourselves in spite of ourselves, in spite of quarrels and jealousies and conflicts, helping and serving in the making of a new world-city, a new greater State above our legal States, in which all human life becomes a splendid enterprise, free and beautiful....

  I have long since ceased to trouble about the economics of human society. Ours are not economic but psychological difficulties....

  These last two sentences really tell the whole story. To pass fromeconomics to psychology is to pass from Man to men, from society as adirect object of attack to the individuals who compose it. And thismarks the evolution of Wells the romancer and Wells the expositor ofsocialist doctrine into Wells the novelist. It is the problems of humaninteraction that occupy him now. But informing these problems, reachingbehind and embracing them, is a general view of the world which has onlybecome more intimate, more personal, and more concrete with time.

  When, in _New Worlds for Old_, Wells set himself to explain socialism ashe conceived it, he assumed as his first principle a certain Good Willin men, an operating will steadily working in life toward betterment. Inother words, he supplemented the ordinary socialist idea of economicdeterminism, which may or may not inevitably bring about order on theindustrial plane, with a constructive purpose, which, in his view, canalone bring about the salvation of the race. But this Good Will is not afatality; it exists only by virtue of remaining a conscious effort. Inhis experiments in Time and Space Wells had accustomed himself to seeingthat the immense possibilities of what might be, so far as the universeis concerned, predetermined things, were, so far as man is concerned,matters of chance. To human society at least, if not to our planet, themost unpropitious things are possible in the future; and there is noreason to suppose that the destiny of the universe, which at every turncuts athwart the destiny of every species contained in it, should, leftto itself, work favorably to man.

  This notion is in itself quite outside socialism and does notnecessarily lead into socialism. It was Huxley who said that the worldand the universe, society and nature, are demonstrably at crosspurposes, and that man has to pit his microcosm against the macrocosm.Huxley, in his famous lecture on _Ethics and Evolution,_ went on fromthis to a kind of informal and unavowed socialism, figuring society as awell-tended garden preserved by man's careful art from the ravages andinvasions of that hostile world of chance, with its gigantic weeds andblind impulsions, which everywhere lies waiting round about it. Ourwork, he implied, must be in every way to minimize for ourselves theelements of chance, to become aware of our species in a collectivesense, battling with nature and moulding our own future.

  I do not suppose that Wells consciously adopted this idea from Huxley.In itself that would b
e of little consequence, except so far as it showsthe continuity of thought and the development of socialism out ofscience. But Wells was for several years a pupil of Huxley, and it isreasonably plain that the mood in which he wrote his scientific romanceswas strongly impregnated by Huxley's influence. The sinister,incalculable, capricious, destructive forces outside man are symbolized,as I have said, by those colliding comets, invading Martians, andmonstrous creatures among which the earlier Wells moved and had hisbeing; just as the sinister, incalculable, capricious forces within manwhich urge him to destruction form so great a part of his later novels.Most of his heroes (typified in _The New Machiavelli_) come to griefthrough the blind irrational impulsions within themselves. And he isequally haunted by what he has called the "Possible Collapse ofCivilization." I do not know how much this is due to an evangelicalchildhood, in which Time, Death, and Judgment are always imminent; howmuch to an overbalancing study of science at the expense of thehumanities; how much to an overdeveloped sense of the hazard that lifeis; and how much to plain facts. But there it is: it has always been afixed conviction with Wells that man personal and man social is dancingon a volcano.

  Therefore he has come to socialism not by the ordinary course but by aroute obscure and lonely. The sense of possible catastrophe andcollapse, the folly of leaving things to chance, the infinite waste andperil of committing our affairs to nature rather than to art--these aresome of the negative reasons that have made it impossible for him tofall in with the non-socialist ideal in human affairs, that "broadeningdown from precedent to precedent" which he calls "muddling through": adoctrine that is wholly compatible with a world of haphazard motives,accidental fortunes, accidental management, a democratic individualismthat places power in irresponsible hands and suppresses talents thatsociety cannot afford to lose, a governmental system that concernsitself with legal and financial arrangements, experts with no sense of acommon purpose, patriotisms that thrive on international bad feelings,and that competitive principle which succeeds in the degree in which itignores the general welfare--a chaos of private aims, private virtues,private motives, without any collective human design at all.

  In the light of these opposed ideas of society as a thing of Chance andas a thing of Design, let me run over two or three of the tales ofWells.

  First of all there is the special _laissez faire_ of pure economicdeterminism. _The Time Machine_ pictures a possible result of theMarxian process which has led to an irrevocable division of classes. Therich, who were, in the old time, in comparison with the poor,disciplined and united, have long since reached a point where work andfear are for them things of the past. They occupy the surface of theearth, and idleness and futility have made them light-headed, puny,helpless creatures, stirring about and amusing themselves in thesunlight. The poor, meanwhile, driven underground where they burrow andtend machinery and provide, have lost all human semblance and becomewhite, horrible ghoul-like creatures that see in the dark; at night theyswarm out of their holes and feed upon the creatures of the upper air.The one class has lost all power to defend itself and the other all pityto spare, and gradually, year after year, mankind comes to its end.

  Then there is the ordinary _laissez faire_ of capitalism, a result ofwhich is pictured in _The Sleeper Awakes_. The Sleeper, one recalls,awakens four generations hence to find himself the master-capitalist,owner of half the world, and the world is one where capital and laborhave irrevocably destroyed the possibility of a constructive humanscheme. But the responsibility for that future is very ingeniouslyplaced upon us of the present time; for Graham's ownership of the worldis the outcome of one of those irresponsible whims that in our daycharacterize the whole individualistic view of property. His cousin,having no family to inherit his possessions, has left the whole in trustfor the Sleeper, half in jest, expecting him never to waken; and in timethe trustees of this vested fund have become the irresponsiblebureaucrats of the world. "We were making the future," says the awakenedSleeper, looking out upon this monstrous outcome of whim and _laissezfaire_; "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we weremaking."

  Consider also _The Empire of the Ants_, in which Wells has figured apossible reconquest of man by nature, owing to the greater collectivediscipline of at least one non-human species. He imagines a species ofpoisonous ants with only a little greater faculty of organizedco-operative intelligence than ordinary ants, which have terrorized andfinally routed several villages of unintelligent and unorganizedBrazilian natives far up the Amazon. The Brazilian government sendsagainst them an outworn inefficient gunboat, with an incompetent captainand a muddle-headed crew; and when they arrive the ants fall upon theonly man sent ashore and sting him to death. The captain repeats overand over, "But what can we _do_?" And at last with tremendous decisionhe fires a gun at them and retires. The story ends with a report thatthe ants are swarming all over the interior of Brazil and that nobodyknows how to prevent them from occupying the whole of South America.

  And then there is _The History of Mr. Polly._ I ignore for the momentthe individual aspect of his case, for Mr. Polly is not merely anindividual--he is an emblem of the whole, he is society _in concreto_.We find him at the opening of the book sitting on a stile, sufferingfrom indigestion and consequently depressed in spirits. It is twoo'clock of a Sunday afternoon, and he has just finished his mid-daymeal. He has eaten cold potatoes, cold pork, Rashdall's mixedpickles--three gherkins, two onions, a small cauliflower head andseveral capers; cold suet pudding, treacle and pale cheese, three slicesof grey bread, and a jug of beer. He hates himself, he hates his wife,he hates existence. But Mr. Polly's interior, the things that have goneinto it and the emotions that rise out of it, are only typical of anentire life that has, to quote Macaulay's eulogy of the Britishconstitution, thought nothing of symmetry and much of convenience.

  Each of the novels of Wells, in one aspect at least, presents theaccidental nature of our world in some one typical case. _Love and Mr.Lewisham_ shows how in the case of one of those young students who have,as things are, no chance at all, but who are the natural builders of abetter world, the constructive possibility is crushed by the primarywill to live. At eighteen Mr. Lewisham is an assistant master at one ofthose incompetent private-enterprise schools which for Wells (as alsofor Matthew Arnold) epitomize our haphazard civilization. He has a"future"--the Schema which he pins to his bedroom wall promisesunimaginable achievements. He marries, and you feel that he should marryand that he has married the right person. But then with interestsdivided he has to find money and in doing so he fails in hisexaminations. At last it becomes a choice between his career and hischildren, between the present and the future, and the children and thefuture win. Society loses just in the degree that Lewisham himselfloses, for he was fitted to be a builder; and society has first, in theface of all his efforts, imperfectly equipped him and then consistentlyrefused to take advantage of his talents.

  Just as Lewisham is a potential builder of society who is defeated, soKipps is a specimen of the raw material, the muddled inferior materialwith which society has to deal and refuses to deal. Kipps, like Mr.Polly, is from the beginning a victim of accident, spawned on the world,miseducated, apprenticed at fourteen to a Drapery Bazaar. He grows upignorant, confused, irresponsible; and then suddenly, as accidentally ashe was born, has L26,000 and responsibility thrust upon him. The fortuneof Kipps lifts him at once out of the obscure negligible world of thepopulace and makes him a figure to be reckoned with. Therein lies thecomedy of the book. He tries to make himself what in his own view a manof means ought to be; naturally he sees money not as a force but as athing to be spent, and he finds that even from this point of view he hasno freedom of will, and that his lack of training inevitably places himin the hands of equally irresponsible persons who want his money. Hewishes to build a house, designed after his own vaguely apprehendedneeds and desires, and somehow under the wand of the architect a housewith eleven bedrooms springs from the ground, a house plainly far beyondhis own or Ann's power of management, a
nd the prospect of disrespectfulservants, terrifying callers, and a horde of scheming lawyers,tradesfolk and satellites. And the life of Kipps under prosperity issummed up in the following dialogue:

  "Wonder what I shall do this afternoon," said Kipps, with his hands deep in his pockets.

  He pondered and lit a cigarette.

  "Go for a walk, I s'pose," said Ann.

  "I _been_ for a walk this morning."

  "S'pose I must go for another," he added after an interval.

  May one suggest how the significance of such a story as this variesaccording to the point of view? In the ordinary literature of comedy,Kipps would be merely a parvenu whose want of dignity and ignorance ofthe right use of money are laughable--or, if the novelist were ahumanitarian, pitiful. To the socialist, on the other hand, everyincident of his life, every gesture of his mind, is a unique indictmentof things as they are. He stands for the whole waste of human stuff in aworld which has not learned how to economize itself, whose every detailis accidental in a general chaotic absence of social design.

  In this aspect _Tono-Bungay_ is the most powerful work of Wells. Just ashis romances of the future had exhibited the possible effects ofaccidental heedless social conduct in the past, so his novels exhibitthe motives that produce this heedlessness to consequences. Thus theworld in which the Sleeper awakes, a world irrevocably ruled by thebureaucratic trustees of an irresponsible private fortune, is just aconceivable consequence of such a career as Uncle Ponderevo's, had notcatastrophe overwhelmed him and enabled Wells to point a much morepregnant moral. _Tono-Bungay_ is a great epic of irresponsiblecapitalism from the socialist point of view. Uncle Ponderevo is a borncommercial meteor, and when he first enters the book, a small druggistin a dead country town, he exhibits the temperament of a Napoleon offinance spoiling for conquest. He wants to Wake Up Wimblehurst, inventsomething, do something, shove something.

  He indicated London as remotely over the top of the dispensing counter, and then as a scene of great activity by a whirl of the hand and a wink and a meaning smile at me.

  "What sort of things do they do?" I asked. "Rush about," he said. "Do things! Somethin' glorious. There's cover gambling. Ever heard of that, George?" He drew the air in through his teeth. "You put down a hundred, say, and buy ten thousand pounds' worth. See? That's a cover of one per cent. Things go up one, you sell, realize cent per cent; down, whiff, it's gone! Try again! Cent per cent, George, every day. Men are made or done for in an hour. And the shoutin'!... Well, that's one way, George. Then another way--there's Corners!"

  "They're rather big things, aren't they?" I ventured.

  "Oh, if you go in for wheat and steel--yes. But suppose you tackled a little thing, George. Just some leetle thing that only needed a few thousands. Drugs, for example. Shoved all you had into it--staked your liver on it, so to speak. Take a drug--take ipecac, for example. Take a lot of ipecac. Take all there is! See? There you are! There aren't unlimited supplies of ipecacuanha--can't be!--and it's a thing people _must_ have. Then quinine again! You watch your chance, wait for a tropical war breaking out, let's say, and collar all the quinine. Where _are_ they? Must have quinine, you know--Eh? ...

  "Lord! there's no end of things--no end of _little_ things. Dill-water--all the suff'ring babes yowling for it. Eucalyptus again--cascara--witch hazel--menthol--all the toothache things. Then there's antiseptics, and curare, cocaine....

  "Rather a nuisance to the doctors," I reflected.

  "They got to look out for themselves. By Jove, yes. They'll do you if they can, and you do them. Like brigands. That makes it romantic. That's the Romance of Commerce, George."

  He passed into a rapt dream, from which escaped such fragments as: "Fifty per cent, advance, sir; security--to-morrow."

  The idea of cornering a drug struck upon my mind then as a sort of irresponsible monkey trick that no one would ever be permitted to do in reality. It was the sort of nonsense one would talk to make Ewart laugh and set him going on to still odder possibilities. I thought it was part of my uncle's way of talking. But I've learnt differently since. The whole trend of modern money-making is to foresee something that will probably be needed and put it out of reach, and then to haggle yourself wealthy. You buy up land upon which people will presently want to build houses, you secure rights that will bar vitally important developments, and so on, and so on. Of course the naive intelligence of a boy does not grasp the subtler developments of human inadequacy. He begins life with the disposition to believe in the wisdom of grown-up people, he does not realize how casual and disingenuous has been the development of law and custom, and he thinks that somewhere in the state there is a power as irresistible as a head master's to check mischievous, foolish enterprises of every sort. I will confess that when my uncle talked of cornering quinine, I had a clear impression that any one who contrived to do that would pretty certainly go to gaol. Now I know that any one who could really bring it off would be much more likely to go to the House of Lords!

  And such or nearly such is this career. Tono-Bungay, that swindlingpatent medicine without value or meaning, is the insubstantialhippogriff upon which Uncle Ponderevo soars upward on the wind ofadvertisement. In a society whose basis is unlimited individual rights,he is able to disorganize the industrial world and to work out hisabsurd, inept, extravagant destiny, scattering ruin right and left.

  But the spirit of Good Will, the disinterested constructive spirit ofsocialism which is the underlying assumption of Wells, appears here asin all his later books. Out of the wreckage the constructive purposeemerges, in the person of George Ponderevo. It shapes itself as a steeldestroyer, the work of an engineer's brain, a destroyer which Englandhas refused and which plunges down the Thames to the open sea, thesymbol of man's intentions, without illusions and without the hope ofpersonal gain, the disinterested spirit of science and truth.