H. G. Wells by J. D. Beresford
J >>
J. D. Beresford >> H. G. Wells
[Illustration: H.G. WELLS]
H.G. WELLS
By
J.D. BERESFORD
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_First Published in 1915_
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION 9
II. THE ROMANCES 17
III. THE NOVELS 58
IV. SOCIOLOGY 97
BIBLIOGRAPHY 117
AMERICAN BIBLIOGRAPHY 121
INDEX 125
[Transcriber's Notes for e-book:
The spelling and punctuation are consistent with the original scans
with the following exceptions. If you are using this book for research, please
verify any spelling or punctuation with another source.
I added ["] at end of phrase: "to recover the full-bodied
self-satisfaction of his early days."
In the following sentence, I changed 'succeded' to 'succeeded': And
Bensington, the other experimenter, succeeded in separating a food
that produced regular instead of intermittent growth.]
TO
R.A.A.B.
THIS ESSAY IS FRATERNALLY
DEDICATED
I
INTRODUCTION
THE NORMALITY OF MR WELLS
In his Preface to the _Unpleasant Plays_, Mr Shaw boasts his
possession of "normal sight." The adjective is the oculist's, and the
application of it is Mr Shaw's, but while the phrase is misleading
until it is explained to suit a particular purpose, it has a pleasing
adaptability, and I can find none better as a key to the works of Mr
H.G. Wells.
We need not bungle over the word "normal," in any attempt to meet the
academic objection that it implies conformity to type. In this
connection, the gifted possessor of normal sight is differentiated
from his million neighbours by the fact that he wears no glasses; and
if a few happy people still exist here and there who have no need for
the mere physical assistance, the number of those whose mental outlook
is undistorted by tradition, prejudice or some form of bias is so
small that we regard them as inspired or criminal according to the
inclination of our own beloved predilection. And no spectacles will
correct the mental astigmatism of the multitude, a fact that is often
a cause of considerable annoyance to the possessors of normal sight.
That defect of vision, whether congenital or induced by the
confinements of early training, persists and increases throughout
life, like other forms of myopia. The man who sees a ball as slightly
flattened, like a tangerine orange too tightly packed (an "oblate
spheroid" would be the physicist's brief description), seeks the
society of other men who share his illusion; and the company of them
take arms against the opposing faction, which is confirmed in the
belief that the ball is egg-shaped, that the bulge, in fact, is not
"oblate" but "prolate."
I will not elaborate the parable; it is sufficient to indicate that in
my reading of Mr Wells, I have seen him as regarding all life from a
reasonable distance. By good fortune he avoided the influences of his
early training, which was too ineffectual to leave any permanent mark
upon him. His readers may infer, from certain descriptions in _Kipps_,
and _The History of Mr Polly_, that Wells himself sincerely regrets
the inadequacies of that "private school of dingy aspect and still
dingier pretensions, where there were no object lessons, and the
studies of book-keeping and French were pursued (but never effectually
overtaken) under the guidance of an elderly gentleman, who wore a
nondescript gown and took snuff, wrote copperplate, explained nothing,
and used a cane with remarkable dexterity and gusto." But, properly
considered, that inadequate elderly gentleman may be regarded as our
benefactor. If he had been more apt in his methods, he might have
influenced the blessed normality of his pupil, and bound upon him the
spectacles of his own order. Worse still, Mr Wells might have been
born into the leisured classes, and sent to Eton and Christchurch, and
if his genius had found any expression after that awful experience, he
would probably, at the best, have written polite essays or a history
of Napoleon, during the intervals of his leisured activity as a member
of the Upper House.
Happily, Fate provided a scheme for preserving his eyesight, and
pitched him into the care of Mr and Mrs Joseph Wells on the 21st
September 1866; behind or above a small general shop in Bromley. Mrs
Wells was the daughter of an innkeeper at Midhurst and had been in
service as a lady's maid before her marriage. Joseph Wells had had a
more distinguished career. He had been a great Kent bowler in the
early sixties, and it must have been, I think, only the year before
the subject of our essay appeared at Bromley that his father took four
wickets with consecutive balls and created a new record in the annals
of cricket. The late Sir Francis Galton might have made something out
of this ancestry; I must confess that it is entirely beyond my powers,
although I make the reservation that we know little of the abilities
of H.G. Wells' mother. She has not figured as a recognisable portrait
in any of his novels.
The Bromley shop, like most of its kind, was a failure. Moderate
success might have meant a Grammar School for young Wells, and the
temptations of property, but Fate gave our young radical another twist
by thrusting him temporarily within sight of an alien and magnificent
prosperity, where as the son of the housekeeper at Up Park, near
Petersfield, he might recognise his immense separation from the
members of the ruling class, as described in _Tono-Bungay_.
After that came "the drapery," first at Windsor and then at Southsea;
but we have no autobiography of this period, only the details of the
trade and its circumstances. For neither Hoopdriver, nor Kipps, nor
Polly could have qualified for the post of assistant at Midhurst
Grammar School, a position that H.G. Wells obtained at sixteen after
he had broken his indentures with the Southsea draper.
At this point we come up with Mr Lewisham, and may follow him in his
experiences after he obtained what was, in fact, a scholarship at the
Normal School of Science, South Kensington; but we drop that hero
again before his premature marriage and failure, to follow the
uncharted course of Wells obtaining his B.Sc. with first-class
honours; passing to an assistant-mastership at the Henley House
School, St John's Wood, and so coming by way of tutor, lecturer and
demonstrator to the beginnings of journalism, to the breaking of a
blood-vessel and thence, without further diversion, to the trade of
letters, somewhere in the summer of 1893.
I lave taken as my text the normality of Mr Wells, on the
understanding that I shall define the essential term as I will; and
this brief outline of his early experiences may help to show, _inter
alia_, that he viewed life from many angles before he was
twenty-seven. That he had the capacity so to see life was either a
lucky accident or due to some untraceable composition of heredity.
That he kept his power was an effect of his casual education. He was
fortunate enough to escape training in his observation of the sphere.
Persistent repetition will finally influence the young mind, however
gifted, and if Mr Wells had been subject to the discipline of what may
be called an efficient education, he might have seen his sphere at the
age of twenty-seven as slightly flattened--whether it appeared oblate
or prolate is no consequence--and I could not have crowned him with
the designation that heads this Introduction.
He is, in fact, normal just in so far as his gift of vision was
undistorted by the precepts and dogmas of his parents, teachers and
early companions.
II
THE ROMANCES
Mr Wells' romances have little or nothing in common with those of
Jules Verne, not even that peculiar quality of romance which revels in
the impossible. The heroes of Jules Verne were idealised creatures
making use of some wonderful invention for their own purposes; and the
future of mankind was of no account in the balance against the lust
for adventure under new mechanical conditions. Also, Jules Verne's
imagination was at the same time mathematical and Latin; and he was
entirely uninfluenced by the writings of Comte.
Mr Wells' experiments with the relatively improbable have become
increasingly involved with the social problem, and it would be
possible to trace the growth of his opinions from this evidence alone,
even if we had not the valuable commentary afforded by his novels and
his essays in sociology. But his interest in the present and future
welfare of man would not in the first place have prompted him to the
writing of romance (unless it had been cast in the severely
allegorical form of _The Pilgrim's Progress_), and if we are to
account for that ebullition, we shall be driven--like Darwin with his
confounding peacock--to take refuge in some theory of exuberance. The
later works have been so defensive and, in one sense, didactic that
one is apt to forget that many of the earlier books, and all the short
stories, must have originated in the effervescence of creative
imagination.
Mr Wells must, also, have been slightly intoxicated by the first
effects of reaction. A passage from _The Future in America_ exhibits
him somewhat gleefully reviving thoughts of the prison-house, and I
quote it in order to account for his first exercises in prophecy by a
study of contrasts. "I remember," he writes, "that to me in my boyhood
speculation about the Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of
my generation, I was launched into life with millennial assumptions.
This present sort of thing, I believed, was going on for a time,
interesting personally, perhaps, but as a whole inconsecutive, and
then--it might be in my lifetime or a little after it--there would be
trumpets and shoutings and celestial phenomena, a battle of
Armageddon, and the Judgment.... To talk about the Man of the year
Million was, of course, in the face of this great conviction, a
whimsical play of fancy. The year Million was just as impossible, just
as gaily nonsensical as fairyland...."
The imprisoning bottle was opened when he became a student of biology,
under Huxley, and the liquid of his suppressed thought began to
bubble. He prefaced his romances by a sketch in the old _Pall Mall
Gazette_, entitled _The Man of the Year Million_, an a priori study
that made one thankful for one's prematurity. After that physiological
piece of logic, however, he tried another essay in evolution,
published in 1895 in book form under the title of _The Time
Machine_--the first of his romances.
The machine itself is the vaguest of mechanical assumptions; a thing
of ivory, quartz, nickel and brass that quite illogically carries its
rider into an existing past or future. We accept the machine as a
literary device to give an air of probability to the essential thing,
the experience; and forget the means in the effect. The criterion of
the prophecy in this case is influenced by the theory of "natural
selection." Mr Wells' vision of the "Sunset of Mankind" was of men so
nearly adapted to their environment that the need for struggle, with
its corollary of the extermination of the unfit, had practically
ceased. Humanity had become differentiated into two races, both
recessive; one, the Eloi, a race of childlike, simple, delicate
creatures living on the surface of a kindly earth; the other, the
Morlocks, a more active but debased race, of bestial habits, who lived
underground and preyed cannibalistically on the surface-dwellers whom
they helped to preserve, as a man may preserve game. The Eloi,
according to the hypothesis of the Time Traveller, are the descendants
of the leisured classes; the Morlocks of the workers. "The Eloi, like
the Carlovingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful futility. They
still possessed the earth on sufferance; since the Morlocks,
subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to find the
day-lit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their garments, I
inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs perhaps through
the survival of an old habit of service." All this is in the year
802,701 A.D.
The prophecy is less convincing than the wonderful sight of the
declining earth some million years later, sinking slowly into the
dying fires of the worn-out sun. Man and the vertebrates have
disappeared, and the highest wonder of animal life is represented by
giant crustaceans, which in turn give way to a lower form. We have a
vision of an involution that shall succeed the highest curve of
development; of life ending where it began in the depths of the sea,
as the initial energy of the solar system is dissipated and the
material of it returns to rest at the temperature of the absolute
zero. And the picture is made more horrible to the imaginative by the
wonder whether the summit of the evolutionary curve has not already
been reached--or it may be passed in the days of the Greek
philosophers.
_The Time Machine_, despite certain obvious faults of imagination and
style, is a brilliant fantasy; and it affords a valuable picture of
the young Wells looking at the world, with his normal eyes, and
finding it, more particularly, incomplete. At the age of twenty-seven
or so, he has freed himself very completely from the bonds of
conventional thought, and is prepared to examine, and to present life
from the detached standpoint of one who views it all from a
respectable distance; but who is able, nevertheless--an essential
qualification--to enter life with all the passion and generosity of
his own humanity.
And in _The Wonderful Visit_--published in the same year as _The Time
Machine_--he comes closer to earth. That ardent ornithologist, the
Rev. K. Hilyer, Vicar of Siddermouth, who brought down an angel with a
shot-gun, is tenderly imagined; a man of gentle mind, for all the
limitations of his training. The mortalised angel, on the other hand,
is rather a tentative and simple creature. He may represent, perhaps,
the rather blank mind of one who sees country society without having
had the inestimable privilege of learning how it came about. His
temperament was something too childlike--without the child's
brutality--to investigate the enormous complexities of adjustment that
had brought about the conditions into which he was all too suddenly
plunged by a charge of duck-shot. He came and was filled with an
inalterable perplexity, but some of his questions were too ingenuous;
and while we may sympathise with the awful inertia of Hilyer before
the impossible task of explaining the inexplicable differences between
mortal precept and mortal practice, we feel that we might, in some
cases at least, have made a more determined effort. We might have
found some justification for chairs, by way of instance, and
certainly an excuse for raising beds above the floor. But the wounded
angel, like the metal machine, is only a device whereby the searching
examination of our author may be displayed in an engrossing and
intimate form. And in _The Wonderful Visit_, that exuberance we
postulated, that absorption in the development of idea, is more
marked; in the unfolding of the story we can trace the method of the
novelist.
Indeed, the three romances that follow discover hardly a trace of the
social investigator. _The Island of Dr Moreau_, _The Invisible Man_
and _The War of the Worlds_ are essays in pure fantasy, and although
the first of the three is influenced by biology I class it
unhesitatingly among the works of sheer exuberance. Each of these
books is, in effect, an answer to some rather whimsical question, and
the problem that Dr Moreau attempted to solve was: "Can we, by
surgery, so accelerate the evolutionary process as to make man out of
a beast in a few days or weeks?" And within limits he found that the
answer was: "Yes."
In the seclusion of his island, and with the poor assistance of the
outlawed medical student, Montgomery, Dr Moreau succeeded in producing
some creditable parodies of humanity by his operations on pigs, bulls,
dogs and other animals. These cut and remoulded creatures had
something the appearance and intelligence of Homo Sapiens, and could
be maintained at that level by the exercise of discipline and the
constant recital of "the Law"; left to themselves they gradually
reverted to the habits and manners of the individual beasts out of
which they had been carved. We may infer that some subtle organic
chemistry worked its determination upon their uncontrolled wills, but
Mr Wells offers no explanation, psychic, chemical or biological, and
I do not think that he intended any particular fable beyond the
evident one that, physically, one species is as like to the next as
makes no matter. What Moreau did well another man might have done
better. It is a good story, and the adventures of the marooned
Prendick, alone, are sufficient justification for the original
conception. (I feel bound to note, however, the absurd comments of
some early reviewers who seemed to imagine that the story was a
defence of vivisection.)
The next romance (1897) seeks to answer the question: "What could a
man do if he were invisible?" Various attempts to answer that question
had been made by other writers, but none of them had come to it with
Mr Wells' practical grasp of the real problem; the earlier romantics
had not grappled with the necessity for clothes and the various ways
in which a material man, however indistinguishable his body by our
sense of sight, must leave traces of his passage. The study from
beginning to end is finely realistic; and even the theory of the
albino, Griffin, and in a lesser degree his method of winning the
useless gift of invisibility, are convincing enough to make us wonder
whether the thing is not scientifically possible. As a pure romance
set in perfectly natural surroundings, _The Invisible Man_ is possibly
the high-water mark of Mr Wells' achievement in this kind. He has
perfected his technique, and the interest in the development of the
story works up steadily to the splendid climax, when the form of the
berserker Griffin returns to visibility, his hands clenched, his eyes
wide open, and on his face an expression of "anger and dismay," the
elements--as I choose to think--of man's revolt against imprisonment
in the flesh. It is worth while to note that by another statement, the
same problem is posed and solved in the short story called _The
Country of the Blind_.
_The War of the Worlds_ (1898), although written in the first person,
is in some ways the most detached of all these fantasies; and it is in
this book that Mr Wells frankly confesses his own occasional sense of
separation. "At times," says the narrator of the history, "I suffer
from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about
me, I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere
inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and
tragedy of it all." That sense must have remained with him as he wrote
the account of the invading Martians, so little passion does the book
contain. The vision, however, is clear enough and there is more
invention than in many of the other romances. The picture of the
Martians themselves develops in one direction the theory of human
evolution expressed in _The Man of the Year Million_. The expansion
of the brain case, and the apotheosis of pure intellect, devoid, so
far as we can judge, of any emotional expression, are the steadily
biological deductions that we should expect from the Wells of this
period. The fighting machines of these incomprehensible entities, the
heat ray and the black smoke, are all excellent conceptions; and the
narrative is splendidly graphic. But only in the scenes with the
curate, when the narrator is stirred to passionate anger, and in his
later passages with the sapper, do we catch any glimpses of the
novelist intrigued with the intimate affairs of humanity. Even the
narrator's brother, in his account of the escape with two women in a
pony-carriage, has become infected with that sense of detachment. The
two women are strongly differentiated but leave little impression of
personality.
The fact that I have made this comment on lack of passion in
describing one of these earlier romances is indicative of a particular
difference between Mr Wells' method in this sort and the method of the
lesser writer of fantasias. The latter, whatever his idea, and it may
be a brilliant idea, is always intent on elaborating the wonder of his
theme by direct description. Mr Wells is far more subtle and more
effective. He takes an average individual, identifies him with the
world as we know it, and then proceeds gradually to bring his marvel
within the range of this individual's apprehension. We see the
improbable, not too definitely, through the eyes of one who is
prepared with the same incredulity as the reader of the story, and as
a result the strange phenomenon, whether fallen angel, invisible man,
converted beast or invading Martian, takes all the shape of reality.
That this shape is convincing is due to the brilliance of Mr Wells'
imagination and his power of graphic expression; the lesser writer
might adopt the method and fail utterly to attain the effect; but it
is this conception of the means to reach the intelligence and senses
of the average reader that chiefly distinguishes these romances from
those of such writers as Jules Verne. Our approach to the wonderful is
so gradual and so natural that when we are finally confronted with it
the incredible thing has become inevitable and expected. Finally, it
has become so identified with human surprise, anger or dismay that any
failure of humanity in the chief person of the story reacts upon our
conception of the wonderful intrusion among familiar phenomena.
Now, this power of creating the semblance of fact out of an ideal was
too valuable a thing to be wasted on the making of stories that had no
purpose beyond that of interesting or exciting the reader with such
imaginations as the Martians, whose only use was to threaten humanity
with extinction. Mr Wells' own sight of our blindness, our complacent
acceptance of the sphere as an oblate or prolate spheroid, might be,
he hoped, another of the marvels which we should come to accept
through the medium of romance. So he began tentatively at first to
introduce a vivid criticism of the futility of present-day society
into his fantasies, and the first and the least of these books was
that published in 1899 as _When the Sleeper Wakes_, a title afterwards
changed to _The Sleeper Awakes_.
In the two opening chapters we find the same delightfully realistic
treatment of the unprecedented slowly mingling with the commonplace.
The first appearance of Graham the Sleeper, tormented then by the
spectres and doubts that accompany insomnia, is made so credible that
we accept his symptoms without the least demur; his condition is
merely unusual enough to excite a trembling interest. Even the
passing of his early years of trance does not arouse scepticism. But
then we fall with one terrific plunge into the world of A.D. 2100,
and, like Graham, we cannot realise it. Moreover this changed,
developed world has a slightly mechanical air. The immense enclosed
London, imagined by Mr Wells, is no Utopia, yet, like the dream of
earlier prophets, it is too logical to entice us into any
hallucination; and we come, fatally, to a criticism of the syllogism.
Mr Wells himself has confessed, in a new Preface, that this is "one of
the most ambitious and least satisfactory" of his books; and explains
that it was written against time, when he was on the verge of a
serious illness. It is superfluous, therefore, to criticise it in
detail, but one or two points in relation to the sociological idea
must be emphasised.
The main theme is the growing division between Capital and Labour.
The Giant Trust--managing the funds accumulated in Graham's name, a
trust that has obtained possession of so immense a capital that it
controls the chief activities of the world--is figured in the command
of a certain Ostrog, who, with all the dependents that profit by the
use of his wealth and such mercenaries as he can hold to himself,
represents one party in opposition to the actual workers and
producers, generically the People. The picture is the struggle of our
own day in more acute form; the result, in the amended edition, is
left open. "Who will win--Ostrog or the People?" Mr Wells writes in
the Preface referred to above, and answers: "A thousand years hence
that will still be just the open question we leave to-day."
I am not concerned in this place to question the validity of that
answer, nor to suggest that the Wells of 1914 would not necessarily
give the same account of his beliefs as the Wells of 1909, but I must
draw attention to the attitude displayed in the book under
consideration in order to point the change of feeling recognisable in
later books. In _The Sleeper Awakes_, even in the revised version, the
sociological theory is still mechanical, the prophecy at once too
logical, and at the same time deduced from premises altogether too
restricted. The world of A.D. 2100 is the world of to-day, with its
more glaring contrasts still more glaringly emphasised; with its
social incongruities and blindness raised to a higher power. And all
that it lacked has been put into a romance called _In the Days of the
Comet_ (1906), a book to which I shall now leap, returning later to
consider the comparatively irrelevant theses of three other romances
that chronologically intervened.