INTRODUCTION

A NATURAL PAUSE APPEARS TO have come in the career of Mr. H.G. Wells. After so many years of travelling up and down through time and space, familiarizing himself with all the various parts of the solar system and presenting himself imaginatively at all the various geological epochs, from the Stone Age to the end of the world, he has for good and all domesticated himself in his own planet and point of time. This gradual process of slowing down, so to speak, had been evident from the moment of his first appearance. The most obvious fact about his romances of science, considered as a series, is that each one more nearly approached the epoch in which we live, and the realities of this epoch. From the year A.D. 802, 701, witnessed in his first romance by the Time Traveller, we found ourselves at last in the presence of a decade only so remote as that of the war which has now befallen Europe. A similar tendency in his novels has been equally marked. The possibilities of science and socialism have received a diminishing attention relatively beside the possibilities of human reaction to science and socialism. It is individual men and women, and the motives and personalities of individual men and women, which now concern him. Still retaining the entire planet as the playground of his ideas, still upholding science and socialism as his essential heroes, he has been driven by experience to approach these things through human nature as it is. In a recent essay he has told us not to expect any more dramatic novelties: for the present at any rate our business must be to make science and socialism feel at home. Whether or not this may stand as a general diagnosis of our epoch, it is a remarkable confession with regard to his own place in it. For it signifies nothing less than that he has reached the limit of his own circle of ideas and finished his own pioneering, and that his work for the future will be to relate the discoveries of his youth with human experience. He is no longer a “new voice”; his work belongs, for good or ill, to history and literature, and he presents himself from this time forward as a humanist.

In this new posture Wells does not stand alone. He is typical of an entire generation of Englishmen that knows not Oxford, a generation which has been busy with all manner of significant movements and discoveries, too busy indeed to relate them to the common reason of humankind. During these years the word “academic” has been outlawed; naturally so, for the academic mind is to the creative mind what the digestive system is to the human body: a period of energetic exercise must precede its operation. But in order that ideas may be incorporated in society they must submit themselves at the right moment to those digestive processes by which they are liquefied and transmitted through the veins to all the various members of the common organism.

During the last twenty years modern thought has been dominated to an extraordinary degree by men who have been educated solely through the movements in which they have taken part: seldom has there been so universal and so hectic an empiricism. But this is the way the earth moves. Like an inchworm it doubles itself up at intervals and then gradually stretches itself straight again. The whole nineteenth century, according to Taine, was occupied in working out two or three ideas concocted in Germany during the Napoleonic era. History is a succession of Gothic invasions and academic subversions. It marks the end of one of those eras which perpetually overlap one another in various groups of men and cycles of thought that our own Visigoths have capitulated. As the pressure of their own immediate points of view relaxes and they cease to identify their own progress with the progress of men in general, they become perhaps less striking but certainly more useful.

Intensely preoccupied with contemporary ideas and inventions, brilliantly gifted and full of life, these leaders of thought were more innocent of literature and history than a fresh-man. Both Wells and Bernard Shaw have confessed that throughout their most active intellectual careers they believed instinctively that progress was mainly a matter of chronology. To discover the future Wells considered it necessary merely to set his imagination at work on Chicago and multiply it by a thousand; while the famous remark of Shaw that he was “better than Shakespeare” sprang from his assumption that, living three centuries later, he naturally stood (as a dwarf, in his own phrase) upon Shakespeare’s shoulders. This naïveté placed them at the mercy of literature, as they soon discovered. Everyone knows the change that came over Bernard Shaw’s cosmos when for the first time, a few years ago, he read two or three pre-Darwinian philosophers: one could almost have heard a pin drop when he stopped talking about being better than Shakespeare. A similar experience, exhibited in his books, has befallen Wells, and there is no doubt that reading has contributed to the progressive modesty of his point of view. Each monument of historic experience that he has absorbed has left its mark on him. Rabelais, Machiavelli, Plato, incorporated at regular intervals in his own work, have certainly contributed to make him less agile and less dramatic.

Let us take advantage of these post-prandial moments to survey some of the remarkable ideas which have been added to the general stock during this period. After the fashion of Cato, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells have come late to the study of Greek. Bernard Shaw read Plato at fifty, and in his latest book Wells has insisted that in the Great State everyone will study Greek. Nothing could signify more plainly that these outriders of the Modern Mind have come to a halt and wish to connect themselves with tradition, with history, with literature, with religion, with the grand current of human experience. Having been for so long experimenting with new and untried forces, sharply separated from what is received and understood, they should be related to the familiar landmarks and connected with the main stream of English thought and literature.

Grotesque and violent as it may at first appear, I believe that in the future Wells will be thought of as having played toward his own epoch a part very similar to that played by Matthew Arnold. I say this with full recognition of their remoteness in personal quality, recognizing also the difference in their direct objects of attack, in the precise causes they uphold. One thinks of these two vivid personalities—Wells—how shall one picture him?—and Matthew Arnold, that superb middle-class gentleman with his great face and deprecating hands—and the comparison is instantly ludicrous. In reality the entire trend of Arnold’s social criticism was anti-individualistic and in a straight line with socialism. Seen retrospectively the main work of Wells has not been to promote any intellectual or economic doctrine, but to alter the English frame of mind. The function of each of these men has been to bring home to the English mind a range of ideas not traditional in it.

Indeed this comparison holds (the shock once over) not merely with regard to their general function, but in their specific attitude toward most of the branches of thought and action they have concerned themselves with. Wells on Education, on Criticism, on Politics and the nostrums of Liberalism, Wells even on Religion continues the propaganda of Arnold. Everywhere in these so superficially dissimilar writings is exhibited the same fine dissatisfaction, the same faith in ideas and standards, the same dislike of heated bungling, plunging, wilfulness, and confusion; even the same predominant contempt for most things that are, the same careful vagueness of ideal. It was Arnold who passed his life in trying to make England believe in and act upon ideas instead of “muddling through,” who never wearied of holding up the superiority of everything French and everything German to everything English, who adopted into his own language that phrase about “seeing things as in themselves they really are.” Read his chapter on Our Liberal Practitioners and you will find the precise attitude of Wells toward the premature inadequate doing of things rather than the continued research, experiment, and discipline which lead to right fulfilments. Who urged the ventilation of life, affairs, conduct in the light of world experience? Who preached the gospel of reasonableness, mutual understanding, and more light? Who spurred England to cultivate the virtue of intellectual curiosity? Who believed with a paradoxical passion in coolness and detachment? In each of these things what Arnold was to his generation Wells remarkably has been to ours. Differing in their view of the substance of religion, their conception of the Church as a great common receptacle for the growing experience of the race is precisely the same, fragmentation, segregation, sectarianism being to both of them in this matter the greatest of evils. The love of curiosity, centrality, ventilation, detachment, common understanding, coolness and reasonableness and a realistic vision, the dislike of confusion, bungling, wilfulness, incompetence, hot-headedness, complacency, sectarianism—these are quite fundamental traits, and Arnold and Wells share them in a remarkable degree. It is quite true that Arnold lived in a universe which only with some reluctance confessed to three dimensions, while that of Wells trembles with the coming of a fourth. But in any case it is worth while to release a phenomenon like Wells from the medium of...