A Modern Utopia - H. G. Wells

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socialism. Such questions may well be left to the future biographer who will take an interest in tracing out the genesis of his thought. Really it makes no difference to the reader, for the essential thing is to note that the reaction of society toward any unprecedented factor is the same. That in various parts of the country a new and gigantic race was growing up aroused at first a certain sensational interest, but this soon died down. People became accustomed to seeing the giant boys and girls and even set them at work. Later as it was realized that the giants could not be adapted to the existing social structure, but meant its overthrow, the government attempted to segregate and limit them, and at length, finding no compromise possible, determined to exterminate them. This brings about a duel to the death between the little race and the big and there could be no doubt as to the issue.

      Chesterton says: The Food of the Gods is the tale of "Jack the Giant-Killer" told from the point of view of the giant. This has not, I think, been done before in literature; but I have little doubt that the psychological substance of it existed in fact. I have little doubt that the giant whom Jack killed did regard himself as the Superman. It is likely enough that he considered Jack a narrow and parochial person who wished to frustrate a great forward movement of the life-force.

      Nothing could better illustrate the difference in standpoint between Chesterton and Wells than this. The sympathies of Wells are undoubtedly with the giants, with the new forces that aim to transform the world, though he is not always confident of their ultimate triumph. Being a man of scientific training, he is a determinist but not a fatalist. All his prophecies are conditional. If the gulf between industrial and parasitic classes keeps on widening there will eventually be two races and the former will be master; this is the lesson of The Time Machine. If the engineer and business manager get control we shall have the well ordered prosperity of Anticipations. If Socialism prevails we shall have the Great State. His stories of the future are about equally divided between optimistic and pessimistic prophecy, between allurements and warnings. There are many different Wellses. Probably nobody likes all of them. He does not like all of himselves. In writing a preface or otherwise referring to an earlier work he is, after the manner of Maeterlinck, almost apologetic and looks back upon the author with a curious wonder as to how he came to hold such opinions and express them in such a way. Those of us who have grown up with him, so to speak, and followed his mind thru all its metamorphoses in their natural order can understand him better, I believe, than those of the younger generation who begin with the current serial and read his works backward. Mr. Wells is just about my age. We were in the laboratory together and breathed the same atmosphere, although five thousand miles apart. When he began to write I was ready to read and to admire the skill with which he utilized for literary purposes the wealth of material to be found in the laboratory. Jules Verne had worked the same rich vein, clumsily but with great success. Poe had done marvels in the short story with such scanty science as he had at his command. But Wells, trained under Huxley in biology at the University of London, had all this new knowledge to draw. upon. He could handle technicalities with a far defter touch than Verne and almost rivaled Poe in the evocation of emotions of horror and mystery. Besides this he possessed what both these authors lacked, a sense of humor, a keen appreciation of the whimsicalities of human nature. So he was enabled to throw off in the early nineties a swift succession of short stories astonishingly varied in style and theme. As he became more experienced in the art of writing, or rather of marketing manuscripts, he seems to have regretted this youthful prodigality of bright ideas. Many of them he later worked over on a more extensive scale as the metallurgist goes back to a mine and with an improved process extracts more gold from the tailings and dump than the miner got out of the ore originally.

      The Star was the first of these I came across, clipping it for my scrap book from Harper's Weekly, I believe. First loves in literature make an indelible impression, so I will always hold that nothing Wells has done since can equal it. Certainly it was not improved by expanding it to In the Days of the Comet. The germ of that creepy tale of advanced vivisection The Island of Dr. Moreau appeared first in the Saturday Review, January, 1895, as a brief sketch, "Doctor Moreau Explains." The Dream of Armageddon, vivid and swift as a landscape under a flash of lightning, served in large part for two later volumes, When the Sleeper Wakes and The New Machiavelli. It was, as I have said, The Star that first attracted me to Wells. It was The Sea-Lady who introduced me to him personally. It was in the back room of a little Italian restaurant in New York, one of those 60 cent table d'hôtes where rich soup and huge haystacks of spaghetti serve to conceal the meagerness of the other five courses. Here foregathered for years a group of Socialists, near-Socialists and others of less definable types, alike in holding the belief that the world could be moved and ought to be, but disagreeing agreeably as to where the fulcrum could be placed and what power should move the lever. We called ourselves the "X Club," partly because the outcome of such a combination of diverse factors was highly problematical, partly perhaps in emulation o£ the celebrated London X. One evening some eight years ago, as I came late to the dinner, I noticed that the members were not all talking at once, as usual, but concentrated their attention upon a guest, a quiet, unassuming individual, rather short, with a sun browned face, tired eyes and a pessimistic mustache—a Londoner, I judged from his accent. Then I was introduced to him as "The man who. knows all your works by heart, Mr. Wells." This disconcerting introduction was their revenge for my too. frequent quotation in debate. The reason, I suppose, for the old saying, "Beware the man of one book," is because he is such a bore. Mr. Wells appeared to take the introduction literally and began to. examine me on the subject. "Did you ever read The Sea-Lady?" I happily was able to say I had, and was let off from any further questions, for he said that he had never met but two persons before who admitted having read the book. I am glad he did not ask me what it meant, for while I had an opinion on the subject, it might not have agreed with his.

      Then we turned the tables on Mr. Wells and for the rest of the evening asked him questions and criticized his views; all of which he took very good-naturedly and was apparently not displeased thereby, since in the book about his trip, The Future in America, he expressed disappointment at not finding in Washington any "such mentally vigorous discussion centers as the New York X Club."

      Five years later I had another glimpse of Mr. Wells, this time a jolly evening at his home, where he kept his guests, a dozen young men and women, entertained, first by playing on the pianola, which he bought at the suggestion of Mr. Shaw; afterward by improvising a drama for the occasion, the star role being taken by his wife, whom I had seen a few days before marching in the great London suffrage procession. Mr. Wells's home differs from most London houses in having a view and a park. The back windows look over all the sea of houses, the shipping in the Thames, and, smoke permitting, the Surrey hills beyond. On the other side of the house five minutes' walk uphill brings one to Hampstead Heath, the largest of London's public places, which serves Mr. Wells for his long walks. Mr. Wells perhaps got his love of outdoor life from his father, Joseph Wells, who was a professional cricketer and the son of the head gardener of Lord de Lisle at Penhurst Castle, in Kent. His mother was the daughter of. an innkeeper at Midhurst. Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, September 21, 1866, and his childhood impressions of his mother's kitchen and his father's garden and shop he has described in First and Last Things and in Tono-Bungay. In this novel, the first, perhaps, to be devoted to that conspicuous feature of modern life, the patent medicine, he has utilized his brief experience as a chemist's apprentice, or, as we would say, a drug clerk. Next an unsuccessful attempt was made to train him as a draper's assistant—a dry goods clerk, in our language, though we have fortunately nothing that exactly corresponds. The hardships and humiliations of this experience seem to have cut deep into his soul, for he recurs to it again and again, always with bitterness, as in Mr. Polly, Kipps and The Wheels of Chance, for example. But to untangle the autobiographical threads from the purely fictional in Wells's novels would be to cheat some future candidate for a Ph. D. in English literature of his thesis.

      The interesting point to observe is that temperament and training have combined to give him on the one hand a hatred of this muddled, blind and inefficient state of society in which we live, and on the other a distrust of the orderly, logical and perfected civilization usually suggested as a possible substitute. He detests chaos, but is skeptical of cosmos. Set between these antipathetic poles, he vibrates continually like an electrified

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