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compartment: he tells them what they are ready to accept, and part of
what he says is true. His great imaginative gifts, and picture-book method,
make very real to his public the situation that he describes; and as he
does not reason, or draw upon any kind of wisdom inaccessible to the
common man, he imposes no great strain upon the minds of his readers.
And as his proposals are always in world terms, he does not ask of his
readers individually any great exertion from which they would flinch.
On the other hand and this is perhaps something to be mentioned in
common with Mr. Churchill after all he is capable of a kind of bluntness
which is far too rare among the loud-speaker voices of our time. Like
Mr. Churchill, he is capable of putting his foot into it again and again;
and this capacity for rudeness is more endearing, in the long run, than
the cautious, diplomatic politeness of the people who are so careful never
to put their feet into anything. There is something very refreshing about
Mr. Wells s violent hostility to Christianity in general and to the Catholic
Church in particular; and his words about the American attitude towards
the war, and our attitude towards America, in the Fortnightly article
already cited, are worth all the suave palaver and exasperating preachments
to which other publicists treat that country.
There is, I believe, no place for a modern Wells to educate the public
in more modern opinions. Our public is not yet in existence. We can
only hope to provide thought of a very different kind and very different
tendency, formed in very different categories, for a small number of thinking
people prepared for new dogma (in Demant s phrase). This is not to
maintain an attitude of aloofness, but a realistic view of the limits of
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H.G.WELLS
our possible effectiveness. We can have very little hope of contributing
to any immediate social change; and we are more disposed to see our
hope in modest and local beginnings, than in transforming the whole
world at once. On the other hand, though the immediate aims are less
glittering, they may prove less deceptive: for Mr. Wells, putting all his
money on the near future, is walking very near the edge of despair; while
we must keep alive aspirations which can remain valid throughout the
longest and darkest period of universal calamity and degradation.
90. Leading article, The Times Literary
Supplement
17 August 1946, 391
Wells had died on 13 August.
It is a poorer world without H.G.Wells. Perhaps only the middle-aged
or those on whom the years bear more heavily will know how truly
and how astonishingly he enriched it. For more than any other man,
Mr. Shaw alone excepted it may be, it was Wells who created the popular
intellectual climate of the English generation which came immediately
after him, who gave inquiring purpose and direction to current thought
in the era bounded by the last years of the long Victorian glory and
the early years of confidence and doubt after the return of peace in
1918. Wells and Shaw: these were the educators, the prophets, the master
minds of expectant youth, and not in this country only. There was a
time when Wells spoke more clearly than any other man to the youth
of the world.
The magic faded. The single conviction that possessed Wells lost
its spell, and the more impatient, more emphatic tone of voice in which
he preached salvation through the orderly planning of the progress
322
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
of mankind did not secure greater attention for him. The world moved
on. Yet the mind that had conceived the magnificent scientific fantasies,
dreamed of an Open Conspiracy to avert the threatened destruction
and doom of society, and reinterpreted history from the very beginnings
of life for the benefit of a world community in the making, still retained
its irresistible stimulus. The torrent of ideas was never subdued in Wells.
It poured forth from him in a prodigal and intoxicating flow of
improvisation. And with the ideas went a rich, vital, humorous and
essentially common humanity. The Wellsian novel of ideas is less or
more than a novel, sometimes a good deal less, but even at his most
expository or disputative level his delight in idiosyncratic character,
his relish for comic incident and the warmth and sly humour of his
human sympathies are almost always present. They give something of
endearing quality to the creator not of Kipps alone but also of Mr.
Britling and even of William Clissold.
Today it is not difficult to recognize his limitations as an artist and
as a thinker. His most original work, without question, consists of
the scientific romances, whose daring of fancy, often of amazingly
prophetic fancy, has never been surpassed or, indeed, equalled. It is
not originality, however, which distinguishes what must surely be, in
spite of all its modesty of intent and in spite of all Wells s own protests
in later life, the work which gives him the securest title to the affections
and gratitude of posterity. When time has taken its toll of Wells it is
Kipps, Mr. Polly, the Ponderevos and the others who are likely to remain.
There is the imagination that outlasts change and chance. The rest is
all too vulnerable to the years. Wells, it need hardly be said at this
time of day, is a popularizer and educator rather than a thinker, and
as such he belongs somewhat narrowly to his time and place. Boldly
conceived though they are, The Outline of History and The Science
of Life do little more than infect one with the author s own tireless
curiosity of mind. Even so, moreover, they exhibit the fatal touch of
philistinism in his thought and his still more fatal utopian positivism.
Wells s faith in knowledge and reason, in brief, excluded too large,
too central a part of human experience. He was for all that a very
great figure of his epoch, a formative influence upon the mind and
imagination of countless men and women, of society itself, and our
debt to him cannot but be sincerely and gratefully acknowledged at
this fateful moment of history in which we live and which in some
measure he foresaw.
323
91. John Middleton Murry in Adelphi
October December 1946, xxiii, 1 5
John Middleton Murry (1889 1957), literary critic, pacifist and
editor of the Adelphi from 1923 to 1948.
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