7 best short stories by H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells
and credit about two million pounds' worth of property to set off against his vague colossal liabilities, and from first to last he must have had a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions. This irrational muddle of a community in which we live gave him that, paid him at that rate for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies. For he created nothing, he invented nothing, he economised nothing. I cannot claim that a single one of the great businesses we organised added any real value to human life at all."
The enormous success and rapid failure of this futile, ambitious little chemist—a success that is, unhappily, only too conceivable and probable—are seen against the background of his nephew's life, Mr Wells has given a greater value and credulity to the legal criminalities of Ponderevo, by coming at him, as it were, through a wider angle; just as he achieves all the circumstances of reality in his romances by his postulation of an average eye-witness. But there are many threads in George Ponderevo's life that were not immediately intertwined with the Tono-Bungay career, and his love for Beatrice Normanby touches in quite another manner on the sex problem opened in Ann Veronica. In both these books the story is the essential thing, and the attack upon social conditions is relatively indirect. The general criticism is at times quite explicit, but it is subordinated.
In The New Machiavelli (1910) these relations are nearly reversed. The detailed exposure of the moving forces that stimulate our political energies, occupies long sections into which the human relations of Remington (the form is again that of an autobiography) hardly enter, except in an occasional conversation to sharpen up a criticism. This comment on politics (regarded in his own constituency, Remington says, not as a "great constructive process" but as a "kind of dog-fight") is the chief theme; subsidiary to it is the comment on a society that could waste so valuable a life as Remington's for the sake of a moral convention. Both comments point Mr Wells' expression of what he calls in this book "the essential antagonism ... in all human affairs ... between ideas and the established method—that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb." And he adds: "The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world; the thing I and my kind exist for primarily is battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it." This confession is so lucid and characteristic that I cannot improve upon it, and yet I see that it is a statement likely to arouse considerable resentment, "Of course we are detestable," Remington admits in this connection; and in these later, more urgently critical novels, we recognise a little too clearly that note of protest, almost of defensive proclamation. And in none of them do we see it more definitely than in the book now under consideration. In many ways The New Machiavelli stands apart from the other novels. I find it a little bitter in places, because the thing condemned appears too small for such unequivocal condemnation. The following superlative summary is put into the mouth of a minor character, but I think it is fairly representative of Remington's later attitude. "But of all the damned things that ever were damned," says the plain-spoken Britten, "your damned shirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest." As a commentary, I find this exaggerated; and although it is in the mouth of one who is not presented as a spokesman for Mr Wells' own opinions, I feel that it comes very near to being a text for a considerable section of the political criticism; and that it indicates bias, a departure from normality.
And yet, despite this occasional exhibition of temper, The New Machiavelli is a most illuminating book. It reveals with extraordinary clearness the Wells of that period; but it also gives us a sight of the spirit in him that does not change. All his books, romances, novels and essays indicate a gradual process of growth; if we were to apply any label to him, we should inevitably land ourselves in confusion. He is nothing "in the first place" but a man with an intense desire to understand life. As he says in this book: "A human being who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the first place, is thereby and inevitably—though he bring God-like gifts to the pretence—a quack." But while he may dissociate himself from any clique, and disclaim any fixed opinion that might earn for him the offensive and fiercely rejected label, he nevertheless presents to us one unchanging attitude in these very refusals. "I'm going to get experience for humanity out of all my talents—and bury nothing," says Remington; and that purpose is implicit in every book that Wells has written. He is an empiric, using first this test and then that to try the phenomena of life; publishing the detail of his experiment and noting certain deductions. But while he may offer a prescription for certain symptoms, he gives us to understand that he is only diagnosing a phase in human development; that he is seeking an ultimate which he never hopes to find, and that the deductions he draws to-day may be rejected to-morrow without a shadow of regret. He would be constant, I think, only in his inconstancy to any criterion of present conditions as applicable or likely to be applicable to the future; he sees life as a dynamic thing in process of change and growth. "All the history of mankind," he writes, "all the history of life has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives—an effect of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal." And it is for this reason that he is so eager to battle with, annoy, disarrange and reconstruct that rule-of-thumb world he censures so steadily; he is fighting the assumption of a static condition which he knows to be impossible.
And for a moment in The New Machiavelli, and again in his next book, Marriage, he has a passing vision of some greater movement of which we are but the imperfect instruments. He develops and then drops the idea of a "hinterland," not only to the individual mind but to the general consciousness. The "permanent reality," he calls it, "which is never really immediate, which draws continually upon human experience and influences human action more and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call." And in another place he writes in the same connection: " ... the ideas go on—as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding."
We come again to a hint of that explanation at the end of Marriage, published in 1912. The story, reduced to the barest outline, is that of the relations of Trafford to his wife. It is not complicated by any sexual temptations or jealousies, but it gradually evolves the integral problem of the meaning of life.
Trafford, before his engagement to Marjorie Pope, and for a year or two after his marriage, was engaged in research work. His speciality was molecular physics and he was a particularly brilliant investigator. That research, with all the possibilities that it held of some immense discovery of the laws that govern the constitution of inorganic and progressively, perhaps, of organic, matter, was sufficient to engross his mental energies, to give him a sense of satisfaction in life; but his six hundred pounds a year proved insufficient to satisfy the demands of Marjorie's claim to enjoyment. She was not a mere type of the worldly-minded woman. She represents, indeed, the claim of modern women for a distinctive interest and employment not less urgent and necessary than the interests and employments of men. And when she failed, as she plainly must have failed, to find any such occupation, her sense of beauty and her justifiable demand for life found an outlet largely in shopping, in entertaining, in all such ephemeral attractions and amusements as women in her class may seek and reject. That way of escape, however, soon raised financial obstructions to Trafford's work. He had to find a means for increasing his income, and came at last and inevitably to the necessity for making more money and continually still more. The road to wealth was opened for him and he took it by sacrificing his research work, but when the economic problem had been triumphantly solved, he could not return to his first absorption in the problems of molecular physics. Life pressed upon him at every moment of the day, he had been inveigled into a net.
The manner of Trafford's escape from the thing that intrigued him has been severely criticised. After I had first read the book I too was inclined to deprecate the device of taking Trafford and Marjorie into the loneliness of a Labrador winter, in order to set them right with themselves and give them a clearer vision of life. But I have read Marriage twice since I formed that premature judgment, and each time I have found a growing justification for what at first may seem a somewhat whimsical solution to the difficulties of an essentially social problem.
But in effect this is the same specific that I upheld in my comment on the romances; it illustrates the need felt by a certain class of mind for temporary withdrawal from all the immediate urgencies and calls of