The World of H.G. Wells by Van Brooks

Author:Van Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jovian Press

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CHAPTER V

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HUMAN NATURE

THERE IS ALWAYS A CERTAIN disadvantage in approaching human nature through a theory or in the light of an ideal. If I am doing that, it is my own fault and by no means the fault of Wells. He has himself abandoned socialism, in the ordinary sense of the term, because it has too much of the à priori about it; he has abandoned economics because it deals with man as a mass-mind; he has come to rest in human nature itself and he has made his theories subject to human nature.

“All fables, indeed, have their morals; but the innocent enjoy the story,” says Thoreau. Most readers of the novels of Wells, I suppose, have no notion that a theory of life runs through them and unites them. And they are right. The force of a work of art does not reside in its “inner meanings.” An admirable work of art will always no doubt possess “inner meanings” in plenty and the unhappy mind of man will always rout them out. But to separate the intellectual structure of anything from the thing itself is just like any other kind of vivisection: you expose the brain and you kill the dog. A work of art is a moving living whole that speaks to the moving living whole which is oneself. We are insensibly modified by reading as by other experience. We come to feel differently, see differently, act differently. Without doubt Wells has altered the air we breathe and has made a conscious fact in many minds the excellence that resides in certain types of men and modes of living and the odiousness that resides in others. Socialism, like everything else which changes the world, comes as a thief in the night.

Still, it is plain that Wells himself began with doctrine foremost; richness of experience has led him only after many years to get the horse before the cart. From the first he was aware of a point of view—it was the point of view, writ large, of his own self-made career, growing gradually more and more coherent. Throughout his romances, down to the very end, his chief interest was theoretical rather than human. Only this can account for the violent wrenching of life and character in them to suit the requirements of a predetermined idea. The Food of the Gods, for example, is so far the essential fact of the book that bears its name that the characters in this book are merely employed to give the Food a recognizable human setting. Throughout his romances, indeed, men exist for inventions, not inventions for men.

Yet the “human interest,” as it is called, was there from the outset, side by side with this main theoretic interest in the scientific and socialistic possibilities of life. The series of novels began almost as early as the series of romances. Two “streams of tendency” run side by side throughout the earlier writings of Wells—streams of tendency which meet fully for the first time in Tono-Bungay, and have formed a single main current in the novels subsequent to that.

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