MR. WELLS LOOKS OUT OF HIS WINDOW
AN author who can make his public pay seven-and- sixpence three times over, at intervals of a month, for one full-length book, is certainly not without financial acumen. But this is not the chief reason for considering Mr. Wells as an economist. He has one incontestable merit over most other writers in this field, and that is that his works are read. "William Clissold" (with whom Mr. Wells only admits cousinship) is a reporter of the opinions of people who think—or who think they think, one might say if one were inclined to be cynical. Whether his views are profound or not, they are certainly important. As a novel William Clissold is reviewed on another page ; as a statement of the latest development of the Wellsian systematic universe, this economic tract of Clissold's deserves separate treatment.
First, Mr. Wells pours out his wrath on professors who make fairylands of economic theory for their private shelter. A student of physics or biology, he says, must serve facts sublimated and released, facts that will blow him to pieces or corrode him to death at the least levity on his part. A student of history or economics, on the other hand, goes into
"a cave of the winds in which documents whirl about before imaginative gales. All the circumstances of a scholar's life conspire to turn the mind inward, away from the dusty bickering of the common life. . . . Visit him in college and you will see he does not live there so much as lurk. . . . Once he has secured his cell he encounters little opposition : he may bid good-bye to his worst timidities and set to work secreting his soul's protection. To deny a fact in that secure and protected atmosphere becomes more and more like defeating it."
So much for the professors.
• Karl Marx is even more severely mauled by Clissold. He is the "maggot at the core of decaying Socialism." Again, in another place, he is "an imperfectly aerated old gentleman who sits in the British Museum," suffering from a surfeit of notes, and who becomes impatient to Ft a generalization in control of his facts, so that pre- sently we have a harvest of tares—Communism. Marx led a limited, liverish, theorizing, sedentary life, remote from industrialism, as also did Lenin before 1917, and Clissold suggests that the methods of psycho-analysis might be applied to both of them, to elucidate their prophecy that the proletariat would solidaritate (" my word," says Clissold proudly !) and arrive en masse as Master of the world.
The truth is, says Clissold, that there is no reserve of creative power in the masses. The masses, as masses, are nothing but an untrustworthy explosive force :— " The greater revolution must be a deliberate and not a convulsive progress. It has to fight the egoist and the fool in man, the ancestral instinctive brute, as much in the suspicious and angry mob below as in the timid, mean, and violent propertied elasses above. . . . I do not see why thwarted pedants and unlicked youngsters should be allowed to monopolize the excellent name of Revolutionary for ever."
Clissold's revolution, in short, is merely evolution, but why this must be in charge of "a few obstinately clear- headed men and women," rather than within the frame- work of our present democracy, he does not explain. However, his forte is not politics, but exposition.
The short section on money is at least a masterpiece of condensation. Money "is not an institution that has replaced simpler and less convenient institutions ;. it is a tradition that has grown and exfoliated, and crowded older usages out of e?cistence. It is not a safe device. It can fail to keep faith." But financiers "no more want an inquiry into what lies beneath it than cricketers want people to geologize beneath their pitch." Such generaliza- tions, of course, are sometimes a little too easy. Of bankers, for instance, we ak told that they "take money for granted as a terrier takes rats ; when they see it they go for it; but they are absolutely immune from any philosophical curiosity about it". If the reading-room of the British Museum did not remind Clissold of the interior of a gasometer (as he confesses) and if he could be pre. vailed upon to visit it, he would find a score of books there to refute this assertion. No doubt Mr. Wells has read Bagehot, but perhaps he has forgotten that he has read that philosophical and literary banker. - But William Clissold's failings as much as his virtues have made the book what it is, not a story, but a fascinat- ing survey of the world we live in, with its dangers and liberations, implications and possibilities. The fate of the countryside, the passengers in the fat-tyred cars that go hooting past his window (" Never were people so entirely passengers. They are carried along like sacks. The clothes they wear, the very complexions of the women seem to have been put on their passive persons by the tradesmen of Paris and London before they were packed off in their cars. One cannot believe that their financial reactions are other than automatic"), the wretched frivolities of fashionable life on the Riviera, the per. petual flux of creation which never stands still however enduring it may appear, and the possibilities of a new way of life (" broad and gracious and lovely and beau. tifully eventful beyond anything we can now dream of or desire "—surely, by the way, this is Clissold's cousin speaking ?) are all passed in review before his window in Provence. The conclusion of these sociological chapters is a reverberating dominant hope. "Supreme above wars and disasters, surpassing and at last redeeming all the present torments of man, is the growth of a being of thought. Such circles of light as this beneath my lamp- shade are more formidable than all the armies and navies of the world. We are 'passing beyond superstition and out of the age of fear."
Mr. Clissold should have submitted his plot to his relative, Mr. H. G. Wells, before calling it a novel, but as an entertaining sermon, a sermon about the most interest- ing thing in the world—ourselves—this is an important book because it is supremely easy to read and yet makes the reader think.
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