H.G.
By JULIAN HUXLEY
WI'I'H the death of H. G. Wells, it is as if an epoch had come to an end, though one would be hard put to it to define it precisely or give it a name. It is difficult to realise that Wells was a student under T. H. Huxley, and had started publishing books before Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee. In spite of this, we may perhaps call Wells the exponent par excellence of post-Victorianism—restless, intellectual, critical and yet construc- tive. His entry in Who's Who lists just over roo publications—more than two a year for 50 years. In this astonishing output, there are really four different Wellses—Wells the novelist, Wells the scientific story-teller, Wells the commentator, pamphleteer and prophet, and Wells the encyclopaedist—and each of the four was outstanding.
The first Wells has earned a permanent place in English literature with Kipps and Tono-Bungay and Mr. Polly. The second Wells has given us the best scientific romances ever written ; think of The War of the Worlds, The Food of the Gods, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine, The Stolen Bacillus, The Crystal Egg, The Valley of the Spiders, The Man Who Could Work Miracles. The third Wells popularised Socialism in its Fabian days, gave the most astonishing forecasts of future warfare (incidentally demon- strating how embarrassing it is for a prophet's prophecies to be not °thy realised but left behind by events), showed himself a master of satire in All Aboard for Ararat, and a master of the Utopian tech- nique in A Modern Utopia, and threw out comments on the Russian Revolution, on modern trends in education, on religion, on world organisation, on the frustration of the Great Depression, and a great many other topics of the present and the future.
A number of his books, of course, were essentially pamphlets, or tracts for the times, but cast in fictional form. Thus Pan and Peter was a pamphlet on education, The New Machiavelli on contempor- ary politics, William Clissold on the industrial magnate, Mr. Britling on the last war and the mental upheaval it provoked. (Incidentally I may recall that Mr. Britling suffered from a really remarkable piece of mistranslation. The French edition appeared with the title "Monsieur Britling voit ,clair "—an interesting testimony to the subtlety of English and the difficulty for a foreigner of distinguishing between "sees it through" and "sees through it.") His Experiment in Autobiography, too, keeps on breaking out of autobiography in the strict sense into commentary on general ideas. or particular events.
Finally, the fourth Wells planned and largely executed an aston- ishing trilogy of comprehensive works on world history, on general biology and on economics and sociology. Wells. the encyclopaedist received some hard knocks from specialists and pedants. But the best comment on this side of his work was made to me by a reason- ably eminent history don at one of our older universities, who, after criticising the Outline of History up and down dale, eventually burst out with the confessiOn that he would rather have produced that one work than all he had actually written or was ever likely to write. Undoubtedly Wells' instinct was right in this matter. By 1920, the old unity of approach had been smashed by the advance of science, but the new knowledge had been built up in a series of largely thought-tight compartments, with forbidding barriers of jealous specialist professionalism round each. Wells felt the urgent need for unification, for synthesis, for the recovery of a single world-view. And he did more than any single man to lay the foundations for such a synthesis—foundations on which the new building of unified knowledge is now beginning to rise. For the last decade or so lie had been pressing for a new world encyclopaedia. This project remains as yet unrealised, though during the recent war 'Nt got together a distinguished committee and managed to make it formulate a comprehensive and valuable document on the Rights of Man.
We must not forget Wells' excursions into the practical field. His Prophecy of the tank secured for him a place on the War Inventions Board, while during thern first world war he was by no means the
least successful member of the interesting group of men engaged on official propaganda under Northcliffe. And if Wells was remarkable in what I may call the spatial extent of his interests and achievements, his evolution in time was no less remarkable. The son of the gardener and professional cricketer and the lady's maid and housekeeper ; the draper's and the chemist's assistant ; the grant-earning student and uncertificated assistant master ; the teacher-in-training under T. H. Huxley ; the voracious reader and pursuer of ideas ; the ardent young Socialist ; the young man whom a smashed kidney and a threat of T.B. turned into a writer ; the explorer of personal relationships with women, so brilliantly if incompletely described in the Autobiography ; the ex- plorer of the world of knowledge and thought, of intelligent antici- pations ; the adventurer into the fringes and foundations of politics and practical affairs ; the fervent internationalist of the first world war and after ; the theoretical planner, but the critic of planning as he found it in Russia ; and finally the deliberate encyclo- paedist.
Wells, like everyone else, had his gaps and his defects. Lenin's reported labelling of him as a bourgeois little Philistine was an exaggeration, perhaps provoked by Wells' indubitably provocative manner of arguing at their interview ; but it had (as Wells himself acknowledges with regard to his version of the remark—" incurably middle-class ") a grain of truth in it. Wells liked good music and handsome architecture and pleasant paintings and interior decoration (though I do not recall any interest in poetry, or any mention of it in the Autobiography), but I am sure that at the back of his mind there was the conviction that devotion of all one's energies to art or music or poetry was in some way an inferior vocation compared to the pursuits of knowledge or of ideas, or to the application of ideas in practice.
In all spheres, the sciences as well as the arts, he could not bear to see people of great gifts insensitive to the pain of the world. This was a sentiment which took an even deeper hold on him with the passage of time. In the intellectual sphere, his intensely quick mind was apt to be impatient of anything slow or plodding, however necessary such activities might be in the building up of the edifice of science and learning. But these were the defects of his qualities. Without them he would have been unable to achieve that comprehen- sive range over the whole world of the intellect which was the chief secret of his effectiveness. His activity overflowed into his personal life. He wrote two books about the "Floor Games" he invented for his sons—or rather to play with his sons. It was a memorable experience to participate in his "Barn Game "at Easton Glebe, and equally memorable to enjoy his hospitality near Grasse and share his motoring enthusiasms in the neighbouring country.
H. G. Wells was a rare combination of scientist and humanist If his agility of mind and the insatiable range of his interests stood in the way of that focussing of energy on a particular problem which is needed for successful scientific research, yet he certainly was one of the chief agents in bringing the free curiosity and the experimental spirit of modem science to bear upon political and social thought and action. And if, as I have suggested, he tended to underrate some activities such as the arts, ir is certainly true that his intensely human nature and broadly humanist interests kept him from any narrowness of scientific or intellectualist approach.
So much of what he fought for is today taken for granted and accepted as part of our general outlook that the magnitude of his contribution may sometimes be overlooked by his juniors, the younger generation. Certainly the generation which was younger in the war of 1914-1918 knew that he had been a potent agent in their intellectual and social liberation. In any case, do not let us forget what that contribution was—nothing less than having done more than any single man of the present century to alter the current of modern thought, and to alter it in a progressive direction.
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