Wells--the Gloomy Dreamer
By MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
HG. WELLS is now, on the centenary of his birth, a persistently underrated, neglected and, above all, misunderstood writer; yet fifty years ago he was one of the most famous and influential men in the world. It is partly his own fault. On August 1, 1920, Ford Madox Ford
wrote to him: have said over and over again that I thought you a genius who wasted too much of his time on journalism—by journalism I mean social speculation. . . . Really you ought to believe this—if only for your own peace of mind. . . .' And Ford, as so often, was right. But the reasons why Wells the propagandist, the inconsistent and irascible generaliser, who ad- vertised himself in his mock-obituary (1936) as `much more the scientific man than the artist, though he dealt in literary forms,' was con- tinually led to betray the creative writer in him- self, and the ways in which he rapped himself over the knuckles for it, are exceptionally in- teresting. They reveal a writer of incomparably greater imaginative power than Shaw, and one who possessed an obstinately self-regenerative creative integrity, which we can see, for example, in the new impression of his short stories.* The most destructive criticism of Wells the so-called 'thinker,' the Utopian, is still Max Beerbohm's deadly parody, Perkins and Man- kind, in which he has Wells writing an account of an old man happily going to the 'Municipal Lethal Chamber' on 'General Cessation Day,' `walking with a firm step in the midst of his progeny. . . . He will not be thinking of him- self. . . . He will be filled with joy at the thought that he is about to die for the good of the race . . . for the beautiful young breed of men and women who, in simple, antiseptic garments, are disporting themselves so gladly on this day of days. . .
But Wells the Utopian, the public figure with `brains but no tact' (his uncle said this of him when he was fourteen), is only the least im- portant part of a story that is much more com- plicated than is generally acknowledged. The popular idea of Wells seems to be that he betrayed the gloi/ing optimism of a lifetime only in his gloomy last work, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945). Nothing could be further from the truth. The root of the misunderstanding lies in the notion that Wells was an optimist. He was not. Beneath the excited, 'cheeky,' volatile, familiarly busy surface of his personality—the energy of which enabled him to pull himself up, as sensationally as anyone ever has, by his own bootstraps—lay a gloomy dreamer: a man of profound imaginative capabilities, who read Blake as well as science textbooks.
Allying itself to this depressive streak was Wells's feeling of social inferiority, which never really left him, and which he exploited to superb comic effect in his early straight novels. No doubt it was because of this that he failed to develop to the full his not sufficiently recognised poten- tialities as a stylist, and that he deliberately behaved like a 'bounder' (intriguing and back- biting) to the members of the Fabian Society when they wouldn't do what he wanted. But it was the submerged, poetic, satirical element in Wells, working through the curious, ebullient, scientifically-trained exterior, that led him to make his most startling prophecies and antici- pations. For besides the better-known scientific prophecies, some of which we cannot yet even assess (for example, the value of dirigibles, or 'cavorite), Wells made many astute sociological * THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES OF H. G. WELLS. (Ernest Been, 21s.) guesses—and all of them, significantly, are nega- tive, satirical, gloomy.
The cannibals of Rampole Island who call their new enemies 'cannibals' is as good an example of Doublethink as anything in 1984; their failure to refer to unpleasant manifestations of state-authority by their proper name (criminals are `reproached,' not punished) is worthy of Swift. Compare this dystopian, morbid side of Wells—the far future envisaged in The Time Machine (1895), the death of Griffin in The Invisible Man (1897), even the 'success' of Theodore Bulpington in The Bulpington of Blup (1932)—with the antiseptic, imagination-free, laboured naivety of A Modern Utopia (1905) or the lecture on his World Encyclopaedia project (1936). . . . It is noteworthy that in all the fiction in which Wells creates a Utopia he never quite knows what to do with it because he does not believe in it.
Writing of Wells's fiction in 1914, Henry James said: The composition . . . is simply at any and every moment "about" Mr Wells's own most general adventure.' This was shrewd, because as a novelist Wells was a total egotist. If in the scientific romances he projects him- self into Moreau, Griffin—and less agressively into Cavor—then certainly in the novels he 'is' Kipps, Polly, and even Christina Alberta's father, seeking God, and thus reflecting Wells's own unhappy flirtation with religion, well after the event. But James's use of the word 'adventure' was well advised. For it has not been sufficiently emphasised that Wells, despite the fact that as a writer he found it nearly impossible to imagine the actual existence of other people, used him- self very harshly in his fiction: that is to say, when polemical zeal or undue haste do not mar his performance altogether, his creative pro- cedure is exploratory rather than self-compen- satory. Kipps does come into money, does give up his genteel fiancée—but then Wells, too, had 'come into money' (by his writing), and he, too, had separated from a wife he found too genteel. If he had written Kipps in 1894, it would indeed have been a piece of wish-fulfilment. But it would not have lived as it lives today.
And so the creative Wells continued• to appraise the public Wells. The preposterous Out- line of History (1919), still in print in Raymond Postgate's revision, a welter of ambitious generalisations, is redeemed by the ferocious IMr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928)—and so on. Mind at the End of its Tether is no more than an embarrassed, exhausted confirmation of the continued existence of Wells the pessimist, the mysterious intuitive. Judged by the highest standards, Wells failed; he never allowed his creative side to develop to a point where it could at last work positively—and thus produce a more valid, imaginative, genuinely and warmly humanitarian version of A Modern Utopia. But what he tried to keep down in himself—no doubt largely because it made him feel guilty, depressed and unhappy—operated in him with singular obstinacy and force. He kept it in check, denied it, but it savaged his public self like a tiger. It IS as strongly evident as ever in his last novel, Xiitt Can't be Too Careful (1941). In the last few words of Kipps he expressed as delicately as anywhere how his cocky 'go-forward' egotism was always haunted by elements that, while they never fully realised themselves, never gave up. Artie is rowing Ann down the Hythe canal: . . I don't suppose there ever was a chap quite like me before.'
He reflected for another minute.
'Oo!—I dunno,' he said at last, and roused himself to pull.
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