M Britling commence a voir clair
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
I have just got the new paperback edition of Mr Britling Sees it Through, which I had not read for at least forty years, and I started to read it with the apprehension with which one always re-reads a book one has greatly liked but now feels one might have outgrown. But I am de- lighted to report that Mr Britling stands re- reading extremely well, and this pleasure has been a genuine one for me, for I think the re- putation of H. G. Wells has suffered more, and more unjustly, than that of any of the leading writers of the period just before the First Great War. It was one of the causes of the melancholy of H.G.'s later years that people stopped reading him, and there has been no real revival, as far as I know, of his once great reputation.
H. G. Wells suffered from a false reputation as an optimistic prophet of the triumphs of science. As some critics have pointed out fairly recently, he showed, in fact, at least as much scepticism about the triumphs of science as he showed hope in -them. And now that men are whizzing round the moon and may soon be land- ing on it, it is well worth recalling that in that admirable piece of science fiction, The First Men in the Moon, the Grand Lunar who rules the moon, is not an attractive, or, indeed, a re- assuring figure, and from the very beginning this double attitude of Wells to the possibilities of natural science is visible. His first book, The Time Machine, ends not merely in the death of our world, but with a preliminary view of what our society may come to, with the Morlocks as the real rulers of a planet which is run down socially before it finally runs down physically.
But, to return to Mr Britling, Wells has also suffered from the belief that he had an entirely optimistic view about the future of organised society, that the socialist paradise of a scienti- fically organised community was just around the corner or could be produced by open con- spiracies, renewed Fabian societies, new tracts or the entrusting of rule over the backward human race to groups of technocrats like the samurai of A Modern Utopia. But Mr Brisling (as well as many other books) shows that Wells had a very healthy scepticism and conducted his education in public with almost indecent candour, which at any rate seems to me much more admirable than the failure of people like Shaw and the Webbs to learn anything that they had not already known in their early tind pre- sumptuous youth.
The French title of Mr Drilling has long been used as an example of the inability of French translators to understand the subtleties of the English language, but I think the French trans- lator has got the right end of the stick. For if Mr Britling begins as an account of how the First World War struck the complacent worlds of southern England and western Europe, if it begins with impressions of what seems to us absurd optimism about the dura- tion, the results, and the causes of 'the War that will end War,' it ends with Mr Britling reflect- ing on his early illusions and discarding them. By 1916, when the book was published. Wells had begun to see that life was not nearly as simple as he occasionally thought it was, and as
Shaw and the Webbs always thought it was. , We begin with `Matchings Easy at Ease,'
which is the little society round the Countess of Warwick's famous house at Easton Lodge, on the edge of Which Wells dwelt physically and, to some extent, spiritually. The summer of 1914 (as I can remember) was magnificent and, despite the political worries "caused by the threatened rebellion of 'loyalists' in Ulster, many people did not foresee danger of a Euro- pean war. (I may say in passing that the com- mon statement that no one expected it is wrong. I did. So did a good many older and better in- formed people.) The theme of Mr Brilling is the education of this man of letters (not represented as a scientist) as the war develops and changes and threatens the destruction of the old com- placent social order of England, a destruction that Wells in many ways welcomed. For in Mr Brisling we can see Wells performing the role for which G. M. Young gave him credit, of writing another chapter in his modern English version of Castiglione's 11 Corti giano. As Young pointed out, Wells represented and stood for the standards of conduct and of ambition of the increasingly important and increasingly numerous new technologically educated classes in England, breaking through the old academic and even the old scientific order of Oxbridge, the public schools and the Royal Society.
The failure of the old English society to pre- pare England for the terrible ordeal of the war is a theme which grows. Wells, like many other people in 1914, thought that the war would be short and easily victorious. But there are few better phrases to describe the impact of the first bad news from the Western Front than the real- isation by Mr Britling (prematurely, it turned out) that 'David had slung his stone at Goliath and missed. The Battle of the Marne postponed the disaster, but quick victory was no longer probable.
I cannot think of any better way of getting back into the atmosphere of the first years of the First Great War than re-reading Mr Brit- ling. My father was a subscriber to the Nation in which it appeared as a serial, and, reading it week by week I as a precocious boy had a feeling of listening in on the realities of the war and of society. I think it was the serial in the Nation rather than the story in book form that so deeply impressed me—how deeply I realised in the past few days when I remembered, again and again, without thinking that I remembered, a great many very effective and penetrating phrases of H.G.'s. I discovered that my memory had not betrayed me and that they were there in the book.
As a chronicler of the war, Wells had an im- mense advantage over most of the Fabians he had quarrelled with. As I have said, he bad a streak of pessimism which was very necessary in those years. Also he had taken an extremely intelligent interest in warfare. Nothing seemed less important to the Webbs than war, although war, if only as a promoter of revolution, has been the single greatest political and economic force of this century. The Webbs did not ex- pect war in 1914; they did not expect it in 1939; and they never understood anything about it from 1939 to their dying day. Shaw was con-
tent with his usual superficial reach-me-down views of history, exemplified in The Man of Destiny. Belloc was blinded by his credulity about the high state of French military art. But Wells had views about tanks, views about weapons, views about the training of army officers. It was not accidental that one of the favourite games he played was an elaborate war game. He knew the great importance of ideo- logy: he also knew the great importance of power.
It is the ideology that tends to put us off to- day. 'The War that will end War' was the unfor- tunate title of an article in a weekly war maga- zine. The War Illuvrated, published by H.G.'s friend, Alfred Harmsworth. Wells underesti- mated the power of nationalism. (Although he was very deeply English and consciously so; he was even, it might be suggested, a little inclined to doubt whether Jews knew as much about English life cr, indeed, about life, as they tended to think.) But in his remarkable Modern Utopia, as in some of the less valuable prophetic novels he wrote, Wells exaggerated the degree to which rationality was likely to triumph. The strong dislike of marxism which he revealed in his autobiography saved him, a few years later, from a great deal of the credulous nonsense which it was fashionable then to swallow in en- lightened Hampstead circles. But some of his optimism remained right down, roughly speak- ing, to the Great Depression of 1929. Yet prob- ably only Bertrand Russell can reprint his pamphlets and his polemical works of this period with less reason to blush than H.G.- even in the melancholy years of the Second World War when despair overtook him : though he was taken in by that very brusque reformer J. V. Stalin.
Mr Drilling is not, of course, a very good novel. Wells did not think so himself, though he underestimated it in comparison with some other books of his which seem to me much less valuable. The fictional part is an inferior ver- sion of standard Wells themes, especially themes about 'love.' The two most attractive ladies in the book are called respectively Cecily and Letty which is clue enough to what and who was on Wells's mind while he was writing Mr Brining. But it is notoriously difficult to get the flavour of a recent historical period, and Mr Britling seems to do this admirably.
It is possible that a great deal of our troubles today come from the fact that Wells was too optimistic about the necessary recon- struction of English society which he preached in novels as well as in pamphlets and articles, but which did not come about. Perhaps Mr Wil- son and Mr Heath might read this and see if they are shaken in their apparent conviction that they know the answers to a new crisis of British life (not only English life) as serious as, and perhaps more alarming than, that which led Mr Britling to begin to see through some of the illusions he had shared with his contemporanes, although he was much less illusion-ridden than were most of them.
Previous page
