An outline of Wells, the superman in the street

Front matter

H. G. WELLS

From a Drawing by J. Simpson

Reproduced by permission of Messrs. Newnes

Chapter One

A short, stocky man with a scrubby moustache and a high-pitched voice; a man nearer sixty than fifty but looking considerably younger; a man whose like you can see a thousand times a day in every city's streets. Such, superficially, is H. G. Wells whom Anatole France has recently described — and accurately described — as the greatest intellectual force in the English-speaking world.

The weakness of most supermen is their unlikeness to their fellows and this unlikeness is often quite as obvious physically as it is mentally and morally. You cannot meet Bernard Shaw, without realising at once that he is not as other men. There is something strange and unusual about him. You guess at once that he eats differently and drinks differently, thinks differently and dreams differently from the rest of us. The aspirations of such a man, his admonitions and his doctrines are in- 3 tensely interesting but their importance to the world is limited by his detachment from his fellows.

Intellectually, of course, H. G. Wells is immensely superior to the common run of men. He is a born leader and inspirer of men and — this is the point of outstanding importance — he remains a man of like passions with ourselves. Shaw and most of the intellectuals belong to a class apart. They generally recognise their separation from the crowd and glory in it. The intellectual habitually stands at the street corners and thanks God that he is not as other men. The glory of Bunyan and Charles Dickens is that they stood at the street corners and thanked God that they were as other men. Wells has many affinities with Dickens. He does not possess Dickens's glorious humour. He has never been able to realise that even in mean streets life may have its thrills, but he belongs essentially, as Dickens belonged, to the English lower middle class. Wells is an articulate man of the people. And this is the fact that gives him his peculiar importance in the modern world.

Arnold Bennett springs from the same class. But

there is a vast- spiritual difference between the two

men. Bennett writes with composure. Wells

writes with enthusiasm. Bennett is a critic. Wells is a crusader. Bennett is a conscious literary artist who has been vastly influenced by the great French masters. Wells uses his pen to "bash away at the minxes." His genius compels the world to listen to him, and the world listens the more attentively because his is not the voice of a visitor from Mars, but of a superman in the street.

H. G. Wells was born in 1866. He has himself written the story of his early years.

I was born in that queer indefinite class that we call in England the middle class. I am not a bit aristocratic; I do not know any of my ancestors beyond my grandparents, and about them I do not know very much, because I am the youngest son of my father and mother, and their parents were all dead before I was born.

My mother was the daughter of an innkeeper at a place named Midhurst, who supplied post horses to the coaches before the railways came; my father was the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penshurst Castle, in Kent. They had various changes of fortune and position; for most of his life my father kept a little shop in a suburb of London, and eked out his resources by playing a game called cricket, which is not only a pastime, but a show which people will pay to see, and which, therefore, affords a living for professional players. His shop was unsuccessful, and my mother, who had once been a lady's maid, became, when I was twelve years old, housekeeper in a large country house.

I, too, was destined to be a shopkeeper. I left school at thirteen for that purpose. I was apprenticed first to be a chemist, and, that proving unsatisfactory, to a draper. But after a year or so it became evident to me that the facilities for higher education that were and still are constantly increasing in England, offered me better chances in life than a shop and comparative illiteracy could do; and so I struggled for and got various grants and scholarships that enabled me to study and to take a degree in science and some mediocre honours in the new and now great and growing University of London.

After I had graduated I taught biology for two or three years and then became a journalist, partly because it is a more remunerative profession in England than teaching, but partly also because I had always taken the keenest interest in writing English. Some little kink in my mind had always made the writing of prose very interesting to me.

I began first to write literary articles, criticisms, and so forth, and presently short imaginative stories in which I made use of the teeming suggestions of modern science. There is a 6 considerable demand for this sort of fiction in Great Britain and America, and my first book, "The Time Machine," published in 1895, attracted considerable attention; and with two of its successors, "The War of the Worlds" and "The Invisible Man," gave me a sufficient popularity to enable me to devote myself exclusively, and with a certain sense of security, to purely literary work.

This is a strikingly candid autobiography. To it there is little to be added except that at the beginning of his literary career, Wells was one of the many distinguished young writers who received priceless help and encouragement from William Ernest Henley.

Despite the war and despite democratic progress, "gentlemanliness" remains one of England's curses. The traditional manners, prejudices and habits of the well-to-do, carefully cultivated at the great universities, still dominate English life. The Englishman who is not a gentleman is heavily handicapped in whatever vocation he may choose. Consequently, everybody who is eager for position, and everybody who has something to say and wants Englishmen to listen to him, carefully cultivates gentlemanliness if he has not been lucky enough to inherit it. The most gentlemanly men in England are the leaders of the Labour Party in the House of Commons. Socialists save their money to send their sons to a "good" public school and afterwards to Oxford. One of the leaders of the Communist Party in England is a most gentlemanly gentleman.

Thackeray is the typical gentleman in literature. He was so gentlemanly that he deplored his possession of literary genius and continually regretted that he did not belong to a really gentlemanly profession. Dickens was never a gentleman in the true "gentlemanly" sense. Nor is Wells.

So widespread is the worship of gentility that I half fear Wells may regard this statement as an insult. It is intended as a compliment. He is too unrestrained, too individual, too fearlessly candid to fit into the gentleman pattern. Wells admires many of the aristocratic virtues, particularly courage, but he invariably endows common persons with these virtues. To me, there is nothing more heartening in contemporary life than that the son of a professional cricketer should be acclaimed the greatest intellectual force in the English-speaking world at the same time that the son of a Welsh peasant is compelling great English lords and commercial magnates to dance to his pipe. 8

Fiction is oftener the creator of fact. The novelist who is of any real account is first of all the recorder of the spiritual drama of contemporary life. But while he is recording the present he may be inspiring the future. In his study of Ibsen and the Ibsen dramas, Janko Lavrin says:

Art is a symbolical diary of mankind's inner evolution. The history of art is the history of mankind's soul. For each epoch bequeaths its soul to future generations mainly through its art. An artistic creator is thus the best witness to his own time. He is highly contemporary, in so far as the soul of his time finds in him its most intense, its synthetic expression. But the more he feels the secret pulse of his era the greater is the burden he has to sustain — since everyone who is profoundly sensitive to his own epoch is for this very reason spiritually also in advance of it, and, therefore, usually suffers from it, judges it, and, in some way or other, reacts against it. Hence, the importance of an artist's individual attitude towards the vital values of his epoch.

That is to say, the man whose sensitive imagination enables him to have a deep knowledge of the life of his own day is necessarily the man who is 9 shaping the life of the days that will follow. The artist (particularly the literary artist) has affected the history of mankind (and the history of mankind has precious little to do with the exploits of Kings and Parliaments) far more than the statesman and the soldier.

Sometimes the influence is very subtle and is exercised without any intention on the part of the artist himself. Ibsen, for example, not only revolutionised the European theatre but had an immense effect on the development of European thought. But Ibsen always protested that he was nothing but an artist and was vehemently rude to the Norwegian ladies who proposed to erect a statue in his honour as an acknowledgment of his services to the feminist cause.

Wells is a very different man. He has a genius for story telling but his novels have two very obvious purposes. The first purpose is to demonstrate some futility, some inane wastefulness, some unnecessary limitation of happiness and development consequent on the conventions, the customs and the laws of contemporary life. Each of his considerable novels is a crusade, a demonstration of wicked folly at which both the humanist and the scientist in Wells equally revolt. 10

But the Wells novels are more than the bashings of a crusader. They are chapters in an elaborate intellectual and spiritual autobiography. It is an accepted fact that Bernard Shaw is the hero, when he is not the heroine, of every one of his plays. Wells cannot be directly identified with his characters as Shaw can be, but in most of his novels the leading character represents a phase of the author's development.

The difference between the two men is that Shaw is always the same Shaw. The Shavian attitude to life has remained consistent. The philosophy of "Widowers' Houses" is practically the same as the philosophy of "Heartbreak House." The joy of Wells is that he is never the same. Each day brings for him some new adventure and some new discovery.

His intellectual honesty is unqualified. When he has once abandoned a creed he will demonstrate its futility with an enthusiasm equal to that with which he defended it. His instinct for truth is so great that, at its call, he has never hesitated to sacrifice the himself of yesterday. Isaac Wells is always offering Abraham Wells as a sacrifice to the Gods.

Mr. H. L. Mencken protests, in his characteristic caustic fashion, that Wells, the crusader, has dell stroyed Wells, the literary artist, and that the man as artist is now extinct "after a process of gradual obscure decay." I agree with Mr. Mencken that Wells has shown himself "the most brilliant if not always the most profound of contemporary English novelists," but he has never been a conscious literary artist. He said, himself, in a letter to Henry James : "To you literature, like painting, is an end, to me literature, like architecture, is a means, it has a use."

The use that Wells has made of literature is to demonstrate the unscientific futilities of modern life. Sometimes he has employed autobiographical novels as his means of demonstration. He was impelled to the novel, as he has confessed, by the fact that novel writing is a financially profitable employment, by the fact that the novel provides him with a far larger audience than the tract, by the fact that he has a genius for story telling, and by the fact that he finds immense pleasure in writing about himself. Sometimes he has used the essay. Recently, in that marvellous achievement "The Outline of History," he has used historical narrative. But whatever means he has employed, the deliberate end has always been the same. Wells is a man with a mission. The object of the mission and the 12 subject of the sermon have not always been quite the same, but the man himself has always been a preacher.

Mr. Mencken says that Wells "suffers from a messianic delusion and once a man begins to suffer from a messianic delusion his days as a serious artist are ended." But Mr. Mencken is also suffering from a delusion in supposing that Wells first put on the messianic robe in 1912. He was wearing it ostentatiously fifteen years earlier. His own declaration of the function of the novelist is the sufficient proof that, as he suggested to Henry James, art means "every conscious human activity." He has never in his life sat down to write a novel with the ambition that has influenced men like Henry James, George Moore, Joseph Conrad or Flaubert.

He has written about life. He has created dozens of actual characters. He has exhibited his own personality under various fascinating guises, but he has never been interested in the drama that occurs from the crash of personalities, and rarely interested, as Joseph Conrad is always interested, in the dramatic struggle of the individual with the eternal forces of the world. Wells is interested in the fight of the individual against the conditions of 13 modern society. This peculiar interest is evidenced in his famous declaration of the subjects with which a novelist may rightly deal.

We are going to write, subject only to our own limitations, about the whole of human life. We are going to deal with political questions and social questions. We cannot present people unless we have this free hand, this unrestricted field. What is the good of telling stories about people's lives if one may not deal freely with the religious beliefs and organisations that have controlled or failed to control them ?

What is the good of pretending to write about love and the loyalties and treacheries and quarrels of men and women if one must not glance at those varieties of physical temperament and organic quality, those deeply passionate needs and distresses from which half the storms of human life are brewed? We are going to write about it all. We are going to write about business and finance and politics and precedents and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum until a thousand pretences and ten thousand impostors shrivel in the cold clear air of our elucidations.

Here there is no nonsense about art for art's sake. Here there is a clear assertion that the novel- 14 ist has a mission. Here there is a definite separation from the mere artist. Here too there is a significant confession. It is business and social prejudice and politics and particularly machinery with which Mr. Wells is interested and not the minute study of the hopeless struggles of men with life and with themselves that has absorbed the interest of most of the world's great poets and novelists. In "Kipps" and "The History of Mr. Polly" it is the soul of man struggling against the petty stupidities of English retail shops. In "Tono -Bungay" it is the soul of man struggling against the dishonest stupidity of a commercial system built on grotesque advertising. In "Anne Veronica" it is the soul of man struggling against the stupidity of the family. Always the individual is in the meshes not of fate but of folly.

In these introductory pages, I am endeavouring definitely to "place" the man about whom I am writing. I am endeavouring in broad generalisations, which I shall subsequently develop, to answer the question "Whom went ye out for to see?" The answer is a crusader, a fierce critic of his own generation, a man with a mission, a preacher with a gospel which he has arrived at after many experiments and after embracing and abandoning many 15 creeds. The answer, too, is a man with a vehement personality, with amazing courage, with a comprehensive understanding of contemporary life, with such a genius for expression and such red hot purpose that the placid Henry James was moved to write to him: "You stand out intensely vivid and alone, making nobody else signify at all."

He is, as I have said, superficially undistinguished in appearance, but this want of distinction disappears immediately one begins to talk to him. His whole being quivers with energy. His grasp on life is amazingly comprehensive. His criticisms, his denunciations, his theories, are all his own and are heaped up in an inexhaustible intellectual storehouse. Wells is always "keen." Whatever he does, he does with all his might. At his pleasant country house in Essex, he plays hockey and other games (some of which he has invented for himself) with exactly the same zest as he has in attacking folly and preaching the way of salvation. Like all humanists (or nearly all) Wells has humour, humour enough anyway to realise that he is not always right. His humour finds expression in the odd little pen and ink drawings that he gives to his friends (the public can find specimens in "Boon") and in the pretty lines he writes in the copies of his books 16

JOSEPH CONRAD Reproduced by permission of "John O'London's Weekly'

that he gives away. He is a man with many detractors and many friends — and among his friends are more women than men.

My friend, E. T. Raymond, the author of "Uncensored Celebrities" says of Wells:

Both by temperament and by conviction, Mr. H. G. Wells is a good hater; a fairly complete philosophy of hatred as a useful element in life could, indeed, be distilled from his works. Mr. Wells has been described as the sworn foe of Things as They Are. But not less remarkable is his detestation of Things as They Were. Things and men — for he has the rather rare capacity (Macaulay had it also in a lesser degree) of hating fiercety — as if they still lived next door — people whose dust has for ages mingled with the soil of far-distant lands.

In the matter of Mr. Wells's animosities a thousand years are but as a day. He hates Constantine. He hates Caesar and most of the Romans. He hates Alexander. He detests Demosthenes as he might "Pertinax" to-day or Count Westarp the day before yesterday. The only "old 'uns" (to quote Mr. Durdles) to whom he is any way partial are a few rather vague Chinamen and Indians. But chiefly he loathes a certain kind of early-Christian Father, represented by that "little, red-haired, busy, 17 wirepulling" person whom the Church honours as Saint Athanasius.

My purpose in this book is to summarise Wells's message to his own generation and to discover the actual man from the books that he has written. I do not profess that this second task is very difficult. In that masterly book, "The Man Shakespeare," Mr. Frank Harris succeeded in discovering Shakespeare, the most impersonal of artists, from the Shakespeare plays. Wells is an easy discovery. He scorns to be impersonal. He is always giving himself away. Precise literary criticism is no part of my task. It is certainly true, as Ford Madox Hueffer has said, that Wells "writes without the help of any aesthetic laws." Sometimes he writes admirably well. Sometimes he writes clumsily. Wells is a volcano and volcanoes rarely vomit out their lava according to the rules. His style horrified Henry James who wrote of "its weakness and looseness, the utter going by the board of every self respect of composition and expression." But Wells has so much to say that he is naturally more concerned with matter than with manner.

It is not easy briefly to summarise the Wells philosophy owing to the habitual development of 18 mind and to a certain insistent waywardness which he has himself acknowledged. In the preface to the 1914 edition of "Anticipations" he says: "An occasional turn of harshness and moments of leaping ignorance are in the blood of H. G. Wells."

On the title page of "The New Machiavelli," Wells quotes Professor William James's assertion that tender-minded and tough-minded people do both exist. Wells himself is certainly to be numbered with the tough-minded, but his toughmindedness is qualified by a measure, perhaps one should say a large measure, of sentimentality. This sentimentality is to be traced to his origin. It is the mark of the English middle class and no one born into that class can ever quite escape from it. There are passages in almost all the Wells novels of an almost Dickensian sentimentality. Take for example the scene between Isabel and Remington towards the end of "The New Machiavelli." It is a question whether the woman has the man all to herself or whether he continues a brilliantly promising political career.

"I am going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over, I am so discontented and 19 miserable; I've got to tell you. It would come between us if I didn't. I am in love with you, with everything — with all my brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, never you fear. But to-day I am crying out with all my being. This election — you're going up; you're going on. In these papers — you're a great big fact. It's suddenly come home to me. At the back of my mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow presently for myself — I mean to have you to go long tramps with, to keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an evening."

And so on and so on. The speech itself is unreal and sentimental. It, at once, suggests that the man will finally give up his career in order to go long tramps with the woman, which he actually does in the novel, but which he would not do in real life. It is these lapses into English middle class sentimentality that qualify Wells's toughmindedness but which at the same time have their importance in proving that he is a genuine representative of his nation and his age despite his pre-eminent intelligence and originality.

Disregarding unessentials and disregarding abandoned faiths and phases that have passed, it may be said that Wells has continually insisted 20 that the human mind is the final and culminating achievement of creation and that by right thinking and right thinking alone can the world be saved. In "The Outline of History" he says:

The history of our race for the last few thousand years is no more than a history of the development and succession of states of mind and of acts arising from them.

To Wells, evil, suffering, sin are the consequences of stupidity and want of judgment. To think rightly is to act rightly. Utopia can only be reached along the road of common-sense. Gilbert Chesterton continually insists that this is a funny world. Thomas Hardy continually deplores that this is a tragically sad world. Anatole France regards the world as utterly, hopelessly meaningless. Wells looks out on the world and is perplexed and enraged by the stupidity that he discovers all around him.

Sometimes, he has his moods of despair. Sometimes he feels that stupidity has bitten so deep into the life of man that it can never be eradicated and that there is no real chance for the triumph of wisdom, happiness and virtue. This mood finds expression in the striking speech put into the mouth 21 of Kipps: "I tell you we're in a blessed drain pipe and we've got to crawl along it till we die."

Sometimes Wells believes in the ultimate victory of common-sense over conventional stupidity as when he allows Mr. Polly to escape from indigestion and a nagging wife to easy happiness with the comfortably fat landlady of the Potwell Inn. He has definitely proclaimed himself an optimist in "New Worlds for Old."

Though the writer is neither a very strong nor a very healthy nor a very successful person, though he find much unattainable and much to regret, yet life presents itself to him more and more with every year as a spectacle of inexhaustible interest, of unfolding and intensifying beauty, and as a splendid field for high attempts and stimulating desires. Yet none the less is it a spectacle shot strangely with pain, with mysterious insufficiencies and cruelties, with pitfalls into anger and regret, with aspects unaccountably sad. Its most exalted moments are most fraught for him with the appeal for endeavour, with the urgency of unsatisfied wants. These shadows and pains and instabilities do not, to his sense at least, darken the whole prospect; it may be indeed that they intensify its splendours to his perceptions; yet all these evil ugly aspects of life 22 come to him with an effect of challenge, as something not to be ignored but passionately disputed, as an imperative call for whatever effort and courage lurk in his composition. Life and the world are fine, but not as an abiding place; as an arena.

I do not think it would be possible to find in any of Wells's books a more satisfactory summary of his relation to the world. He is a first-class fighting man and life is a good thing because it gives the first-class fighting man continual opportunity for exciting struggle and insistent battle. Wells goes out into the arena of life tremendously sure of himself, perfectly confident that, for whatever cause he may be fighting at the moment, his cause must be pre-eminently right, quite sure of victory and equally confident that he is armed with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon and that his opponents are the children of darkness. With his head held high and with a brilliant pennon at his lance head, he joyously rides to battle with what Henry James has called "the easy impudence of genius."

Chapter Two

Before beginning the discovery of Wells from the Wells novels, it will be worth while to continue the endeavour to "place" him by comparisons with some of his most conspicuous contemporaries. It is inevitable that the first comparison should be with Bernard Shaw. Both writers claim to be students of science as well as literary artists. Both men are interested in sociology and profess and call themselves Socialists. Both men love to talk about themselves, and are, in a sense, the chief protagonists of their novels and their plays. Both men are combative, assertive, and immensely sure of themselves.

As I have pointed out, one fundamental difference between Wells and Shaw is that while Wells is a fellow of infinite change, Shaw always remains the same Shaw. The consequence is that, while Wells is always up to date, Shaw has now become hopelessly out of date.

A literary epoch came to an end on August 24 fourth, 1914. Shaw has never contrived to get into the new epoch. He has used the war as a proof that he has always been right. Wells confesses that the war has proved that he has very often been wrong. Shaw is a philosophic Bourbon. He has learned nothing from the greatest convulsion in modern history. Wells was compelled by the war to reconsider almost every proposition that before the autumn of 1914 he had accepted as true, and to modify many of his pre-war opinions.

"Heartbreak House," the latest of the Shaw plays to be produced in London, is an extraordinarily amusing and witty commentary on English life, but it is a commentary on a life which is dead and gone, not on the life that has been created by the war and by the industrial chaos that has followed the war.

The second distinction between Wells and Shaw is that Wells is English and Shaw is not. Shaw has always been particularly anxious to insist that he has no sort of connection with "leprechaun Ireland" — the Ireland of fairies and fantasy, the Ireland of Synge and Lady Gregory, the Ireland of Father Keegan, the poet priest in his own "John Bull's Other Island."

In the days when the Gaelic League was first arousing the nationalist enthusiasm which led to the Sinn Fein movement and to the creation of the Irish Free State, most of the Irish literary men settled in England shook the dust of London off their feet and hurried to take up their residence in Dublin. Mr. George Moore followed Mr. W. B. Yeats across the Irish Channel, though his stay in Dublin was a short one and he was soon forced to confess that he preferred the Anglo- Saxon flesh pots of the West End of London to the dull provincialism of the Irish capital. Shaw never made the journey. He was asked by an interviewer whether he intended to take up his residence in Dublin and he replied: "Not while I can find a comfortable residence in St. Helena."

Shaw belongs to the class, not a very large class, perhaps, but a definite one, of "denationalised Irishmen" and the "denationalised Irishman" is one of the very few people who have ever succeeded in having no country of their own. His soul may not be dead but he can never say: "This is my own, my native land!" All Shaw's criticisms, therefore, of social conventions and national prejudices must be considered with the fact that he has no country and no children. 26