MACHIAVELLI AND UTOPIA— REVISED VERSION The Holy Terror. By H.
G. Wells. (Michael Joseph. 8s. 6d.) MR. WELLS'S latest novel deals, likc so many of its predecessors, with the immediate future. It traces the career from his birth to his death of the future World Dictator, who, it is to be presumed, is at this moment an undergraduate and will shortly begin hustling Mosleyite speakers off their stands in Hyde Park. It offers four possible directions of interest : a psycho- logical study of the motives which lead a man to desire and achieve popular deification, a " success-story " showing the steps by which he attains his object, a speculative curiosity as to whether any such series of events as Mr. Wells describes is, in fact, likely to occur, and, closely allied to it, the curiosity as to why and how Mr. Wells, in mature years, has retained the exuberant and almost bumptious optimism of his extreme youth. The more earnest the reader, the more likely he is to be disappointed in all four directions; the casual reader, with ruthless skipping, may get considerable enjoyment, for Mr. Wells has still most of the instincts of a novelist, and when he has a story to tell, cannot tell it badly. But story-telling is very much more Arenuous work than political dissertation, and Mr. Wells shows an inclination to take longer and longer naps while his characters are left to take care of themselves and their disembodied voices drone on in a manner that must be easy to write but is almost impossible to read.
Rud—Mr. Wells's hero—is an odious character. There have been many tales in the past of noble or potentially noble men depraved by power. Rud starts as a nasty little boy and grows into a nasty little man, of mean appearance and mediocre talents; even his oratory, to judge from the all too copious
specimens provided, is completely commonplace. The qualities which lead him to eminence are selfishness and luck— the magic gift of being able to identify his own interests with those of the world and to accept the loyalty of others without gratitude, and the flair for choosing the right moment for his coups, the right phrase for his slogans. These are certainly the qualities which make millionaires; they might make a dictator. Mr. Wells has gotten something there.
The " success-story " has been badly shirked. It begins admirably. Rud's first flirtings with the various extreme parties, his choice of colleagues, his first violent push for popularity are well told. Then at the interesting stage—the transition from party leader to World Dictator—Mr. Wells drops into generalisations and tells of his rise not as an intimate but as a remote historian—a historian of a loose and unscholarly kind—the author, in fact, of the Outline of History. There is the further grave disability that the minor characters are quite flat. Lord Horatio, the Leader of the Purple Shirts, offered grand opportunities for caricature which are neglected. The newspaper magnates are cyphers. There is also evidence that Mr. Wells's association with the cinema has been deleterious. The " shots " of Chiffan's domestic felicity are pure film technique of the most hackneyed kind—not even Hollywood; Elstree—and the death of Rud might be the climax to "Should a Doctor Tell ? "
It is all too apparent that Mr. Wells's interest lies in the diffuse political discussions which form the bulk of the book and that the story is incidental—comparable in fact to the sumptuous illustrations in the Outline of History—put there at some expense to make the work saleable. The idea is the familiar one, that Prosperity and Peace are Just Round the Corner. Mr. Wells has believed this consistently for the best part of a lifetime ; now when his liberal contemporaries are in panic, he refuses to budge. The glorious, egalitarian, sanitary, uninhibited world of applied popular science is still there; all that has been changed is the method of getting to it. Mr. Wells sees that the fashion is now for gang rule and hero worship. Very well, here is the gang, here is a figurehead as contemptible as you can want—and yet in spite of—no, because of him the new world comes bouncing in like a football. It is Mr. Wells's way of filling the gap that he himself made in his conception of human destiny. The widely-accepted hypothesis of the Fall of Man and the Atonement—leaving aside the supernatural credentials on which they are held—did and still do explain the peculiar position of man in the universe. Remove them and, if you have a sanguine temperament, you must believe that only the most flimsy and artificial obstruc- tions keep man from boundless physical well-being.
Mr. Wells still sees these obstructions as those which afflicted him with claustrophobia in his youth—religion, nationality, monogamy, the Classics, gentility, general lack of general information. And here, too; in a way, he has gotten something. He refuses to be misled by the preposterous distinctions of Left and Right, that make nonsense of contemporary politics. His hero Rud is able quite effortlessly to absorb both factions. There is, Mr. Wells sees, a single proletarian movement aimed at the destruction of traditional culture; the fact that it is at the moment split only shows the puerile cussedness of people who have not learned chemistry; remove the sentimental obsessions—the schoolgirl " crush " on the leader, the chivalrous concern for the under-dog—and there is basic agreement. Mr. Wells has never been interested in foreigners; at least he has never believed they are foreign in anything but language; the vast heterogeneity of mankind and the rival systems of logic by which they reason, have never perplexed him. Nor does he realise the vitality of the obstructionists. In fact he denies that there is any serious conflict at all. But at least he has done a service in clearing the issues as much as he has, and, if he can persuade the lower-middle-brow public for whom he writes that they are getting fussed about the wrong difficulty, this will be a highly salutary book ; it is all the more regrettable that its intrinsic quality should be so meagre. EVELYN WAUGH.
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