Thinking It Through With Mr. Wells

FRANK MOORE COLBY

The Awful Moment When He Thinks Things Down and Out

IN common with other admirers of Mr. H. G. Wells, I am always charmed by him and his heroes when they are thinking things out and seeing things through, but I am profoundly disappointed by the sort of thing they think themselves into. Max Beerbohm described the situation with perfect accuracy a few years ago when he represented a Wells hero, after a "lot of clear, steady, merciless thinking" about the muddle of the universe, as finding the solution in the "Provisional Government of England by Female Foundlings." I reproduce a passage of this most righteous parody, which is based, I think, on The New Macchiavelli:

True, there was Evesham. He had shown an exceedingly open mind about the whole thing. He had at once grasped the underlying principles, thrown out some amazingly luminous suggestions. Oh yes, Evesham was a statesman, right enough. But had even he really believed in the idea of a Provisional Gov-, ernment of England by Female Foundlings?

"You've got to pull yourself together, do you hear?" he said to himself. "You've got to do a lot of clear, steady, merciless thinking, now, to-night. You've got to persuade yourself that Foundlings or no Foundlings, this regeneration of mankind business may be set going—and by you."

This is not in the least unfair when you consider Mr. Wells's exultant discoveries during the last half dozen years or so, down to and including his latest discovery of God. Here are just a few of the problems and their solutions:

THE future of America: This to his mind required instant settlement. It was absurd that nobody should have a plan. They were letting America drift—that is what it amounted to—and he simply could not bear the thought of it. "Let America slide?" said he to himself on the way over. "Let a whole continent go to the dogs just for the lack of a little, clear, straight, beautiful thinking? I should be a slinking coward if I shirked it." The solution came to him before he reached New York and was confirmed in a conversation a day or two afterwards. The idea, I think, was that we should all marry negro women, so far as there were enough of them to go around.

What is humanity as a whole doing? That was another question which everybody was dodging at the time out of sheer mental indolence. What is the nature of the world process? His hero thinks it out. His hero "takes high, sweeping views, as larks soar." He spends five years in South Africa, two years in Asia, six months in America, and sketches briefly civilization as it has pottered along in all those continents. "Pottered," that is the word for it. For what is civilization? What is it? Why, hang it all, it's a "mere flourish out of barbarism." What is Bombay? What is Calcutta? Mere "feverish pustules on the face of Hindustan." Something must be done about it. He thinks even harder and at length it flashes on him—the very thing— why had he not thought of it before—a plan at once simple and vast, a plan that was immediately practicable, yet of enormous future potentialities, a plan—. Well, the plan was, I believe, the incorporation of an international book concern which should publish the best works in all languages, along with satisfactory translations.

THEN there was the whole sloppy subject of the British Empire—King, army, colonies, Parliament, Church, education, London Spectator, and all that. A pretty mess they had made of it, and not a blessed soul paying the least attention to it; so another Wells hero had to think it out. "Why," said he, "the Empire and the monarchy and Lords and Commons and patriotism and social reform and all the rest of it is silly, SILLY beyond words," and the hero in his irritation flung himself right over into Labrador to think it out, and finally, after weeks of cold, hard, bitter, ruthless ratiocination, he cut down to the very roots of it, and he emerged from Labrador with a Plan. The plan consisted, I believe, in the publication of a book to be entitled Limits of Language as a Means of Expression—title subsequently changed to From Realism to Reality.

ANOTHER hero of lark-soaring mind is annoyed by the senseless refusal of almost everybody to shape his life in such a manner as will redound to the advantage of the beings who will people the earth a hundred thousand years from now. A plan must be found. The thinking required is., terrific, but he does not flinch, and at last he has it. It is the publication of a magazine called the Blue Weekly, whose motto is to be Love and Fine Thinking.

Meanwhile, aside from the sweepings of his heroes, Mr. Wells in his own name was doing some rather brisk chamber-work about the universe. He let in the light on the labor question, as one might open a blind. He shot his mind back to the twitching, thrusting, protoplasm of the Carboniferous slime and he shot it forward to the final man, half-angel, who should stand on the earth as on a footstool and stretch his hand among the stars, and he delivered a lecture on that final man before some learned body. He gave a ship-shape account of the human race in twenty pages or so, seeing it through the ape-man stage, barbarism, and civilization, and well along toward the Great Solution, and then at the end pat it all into a diagram, not too long for a busy man to carry in his pocketbook; it ran from complete savagery all the way to the great, harmonious, happy future state; and it was only about five inches long.

Some people complain that a Wells hero really does not think at all but merely explodes into fragments of periodical literature. I cannot see the force of this objection. Of course, Mr. Wells is not, in the austere sense of the term, a thoughtful person, and he does not make his characters engage in any such dry, lonely, and unpopular process as thinking. If he did, they would be quite generally repulsive. But he does somehow contrive the illusion that a good deal is going on in their minds, and he makes them spit out between clenched teeth a platitude that you will often mistake for an astonishing idea. That is the .measure of Mr. Wells's skill. The hero's mind does really sometimes seem to soar over the whole of civilization, when it is merely coquetting with last month's magazines.

Analyze the conversation in a Wells novel, and it will remind you sometimes of the cumulative index to periodical literature, and sometimes of the table of contents of a text-book, on geology; but what other novelist could give you the impression that an index to periodicals was a fiery thing or that a geological title-list was almost passionate? I for one surrender instantly to the persuasiveness of Mr. H. G. Wells, and when the thoughts come red-hot from the hero's brain, they almost always warm me up, even though I have met them months before, cold and clammy, in some magazine. But then comes that awful moment of deflation, when the hero finally thinks things out—thinks things utterly down and out —gets what he is after—the great solution or the great keynote, or the mighty mission that is proportionate to the mighty measure of his mind—and the solution is something like the Endowment of Maternity, and the keynote is, perhaps, God bless our home, and the mission is, for example, the chairmanship of an international commission for the promotion of poultry farming.

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IT is, of course, exorbitant to demand of Mr. Wells that the great idea when once attained shall come up to our expectations, but he might at least kill the hero off while still pursuing, and never let him bag the game. It is unsportsmanlike to start him off after the biggest sort of scientific bull moose, and then have him end up by stealing somebody's poor little magazine farmyard chickens. Something of this sort happens in a good many of his novels, and I believe it results from his too great preoccupation with the details of an unimaginable future state.

Out of an apparently impenetrable past, says Mr. Wells, science has reconstructed the megatherium, and he swears that the megatherium is every bit as real to him as any hippopotamus he has ever met. Why then is it not possible, he asks, that the same amount of scientific energy should ultimately evoke from an impenetrable future the creatures that shall succeed us on this earth? Nobody approaching science by way of Mr. Wells can deny this cheerful possibility. If, from the past, science can produce a pre-horse or ëohippus, it may call up from the future an afterhorse or hystero-hippus, if it has not already done so, and if, on looking back, it finds the ape-man or pithecanthrope, it might conceivably, on looking forward, chance on one of Mr. Wells's angel-men, which, in its mad desire to raise the devil with the English language, it would call either an angelanthrope or an anthropangeloid, No one will dispute the point with Mr. Wells.

THE only important point to the reader is what happens to Mr. Wells when he is too much preoccupied with these two extremes. However real the megatherium may seem to Mr. Wells, to him the hippopotamus for fiction's purpose is infinitely better company. The imagination can play around a hippopotamus but on a megatherium it can only toil. In the same way, owing to the lack of a generally understood social background, ape-men, cave men and the like are always failures in contemporary novels, and half-angels are worse still. Fiction cannot proceed in a social vacuum and the future space which a Wells hero thinks himself out into is, socially speaking, void.

That is why he comes back so empty-minded that he snatches at the first progressive-sounding magazine title he finds. It is too bad that a writer who can deal so delightfully with actual human beings should think himself clean out of all relations. Of late Mr. Wells seems more concerned with the thinking out than with the people who do the thinking. That's the trouble with his latest story, The Bishop. It is not important that the bishop does not see God or that Mr. Wells does not make us see religion, but it is important that he does not make us even see the bishop.