SIX MAJOR PROPHETS

BY

EDWIN E. SLOSSON, M.S., Ph.D.

LITERARY EDITOR OF "THE INDEPENDENT"

ASSOCIATE IN THE COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM

AUTHOR OF "MAJOR PROPHETS OF TO-DAY," ETC.

Whoever dies without recognizing the prophet of his time
dies the death of a pagan. — Mohammedan proverb.

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1917

TO MY SON
PRESTON WILLIAM SLOSSON
WHOSE THOUGHTS AND PHRASES
I HAVE MORE FREELY INCORPORATED
THAN I AM WILLING TO ACKNOWLEDGE
ELSEWHERE THAN ON THIS PAGE,
THIS VOLUME
IS GRATEFULLY DEDICATED

[PREFACE]

A few years ago it occurred to me that there were living on the same planet and at the same time as myself some interesting people whom I had never seen and did not know so much about as I should. Since they or I might die at any moment, I determined not to delay longer. So I prepared a list of twelve men who seemed to me most worth knowing, and then I set out to see them; not with the hope of becoming personally acquainted with them or even with the object of interviewing them, but chiefly to satisfy myself that they really existed. One does not go to Switzerland to find out how high the Alps are or how they look. The traveler can get their altitude from Baedeker and their appearance from photographs, but if he is to talk about them with any sense of self-confidence he must have come within hailing distance of the mountains themselves. It is sufficient to say that I got close enough to the Alps I had chosen to be able to vouch for their actuality.

The men I selected for study were those who, whether they called themselves philosophers or not, seemed to me to have a definite philosophy of life, those who had a message for their own times of sufficient importance and distinctiveness to merit public attention. It is my purpose in these sketches to show the trend and importance of these diverse theories, so that a reader who had not had the opportunity to range over the complete works of a dozen authors might find which of them was best adapted to serve him as "guide, philosopher, and friend." In a word, my part is merely to act as the host at a reception who introduces his guests and then leaves them to follow up such acquaintanceships as seem profitable. My aim is exposition rather than criticism. Although I have not thought it necessary absolutely to suppress my own opinions, I trust this has not prevented me from giving a fair and sufficiently sympathetic presentation of each man's views in turn.

My list of the "Twelve Major Prophets of Today" consisted of the following names: Maurice Maeterlinck, Henri Bergson, Henri Poincaré, Elie Metchnikoff, Wilhelm Ostwald, Ernst Haeckel, George Bernard Shaw, Herbert George Wells, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, F. C. S. Schiller, John Dewey, and Rudolf Eucken. I had not taken nationality into consideration, but I found that I had chosen four from England, three from Germany, two from France, and one each from Belgium, Russia, and the United States of America. Four of the twelve were professors of philosophy; four were men of science, one of these a mathematician, one a physician, one a zoologist, one a chemist; and four were men of letters, authors of novels, dramas, or essays. The twelve sketches appeared in The Independent during the last few years, but they have been considerably extended for book publication. The first six named above were published in the volume "Major Prophets of To-day." The other six are given in the following pages.

EDWIN E. SLOSSON

CONTENTS

Preface

LIST OF PORTRAITS
[George Bernard Shaw]
[H. G. Wells]
[G. K. Chesterton]
[F. C. S. Schiller]
[John Dewey]
[Rudolf Eucken]

To write a book about a man who has written books about himself is an impertinence which only an irresistible charm of manner can carry off. The unpardonable way of doing it, and the commonest, is to undertake to tell the public what a writer has already told them himself, and tell it worse or tell it wrong.

G.B. SHAW.

SIX MAJOR PROPHETS

CHAPTER I

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Dramatic Critic of Life

I am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be of any use whilst it does live. I deal with all periods, but I never study any period but the present; and as a dramatist I have no clue to any historical or other personage save that part of him which is also myself.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.—G. B. S., in "The Sanity of Art."

August 4, 1914, cuts time in two like a knife. The continuity of human progress in science, arts, letters, commerce, philosophy, everything, was broken off at that point—to be taken up again, who knows when? Nothing in the world can remain quite the same as before. Everything is seen in a new light. All our old ideas, even the most ancient and most reverenced, will have to be taken out and looked over to see how many of them remain intact and useful, just as after an earthquake one overhauls the china closet. "The transvaluation of all values", which Nietzsche looked for, has come to pass sooner than he expected, although the results of this reëstimation are not likely to be what he anticipated. It is not merely that the geographies will have to be revised and the histories rewritten, but all books will be classified as antebellum or postbellum literature. It will, however, not be necessary to mark them A. B. or P. B., for they will by their style of thought and language bear an indelible though invisible date with reference to this line of demarcation.

We are already beginning to look back upon the antebellum days as a closed period, and those who were conspicuous in it are being seen in an historical perspective such as the lapse of a generation of ordinary times is needed to produce. Some reputations are shrinking, others are rising, as mountains seem from a departing train to rearrange themselves according to their true height. The true prophets are becoming distinguishable from the false.

Among those who have taken the test and stand higher than before is George Bernard Shaw. Whether he will write better plays than before remains to be seen. Perhaps he will write no more of any kind. But those he has written will be regarded with more respect because we can see their essential truth, whereas before we feared lest we might be merely fascinated by their glitter. Warnings which the world took for jokes because of their fantastic guise now turn out too terribly real, and advice which the world ignored would better have been heeded.

Few writers have as little to take back on account of the war as Shaw, although few have expressed such decided opinions in such extreme language on so many topics. For instance, Kipling's "The Bear that Walks Like a Man" makes queer reading now that England is fighting to give Russia what then she was ready to fight to prevent her getting. But the full significance of Shaw's fable farce of "Androcles and the Lion" is now for the first time being realized. The philosophy of this, his most frivolous and serious play, is summed up by Ferrovius, a converted giant of the Ursus type, who finds it impossible to keep to his Christian principle of nonresistance when brought into the arena. The natural man rises in him and he slays six gladiators single-handed. This delights the emperor, who thereupon offers him a post in the Pretorian Guards which he had formerly refused. The fallen and victorious Ferrovius accepts, saying:

In my youth I worshiped Mars, the god of war. I turned from him to serve the Christian God; but to-day the Christian God forsook me; and Mars overcame me and took back his own. The Christian God is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be. Until then I accept service in the Guard, Caesar.

The great cataclysm does not seem to have changed Shaw's opinions one iota, but all England is changed, and so he appears in a different light. More of his countrymen agree with what he used to preach to them than ever before, yet he was never so disliked as he is to-day—which is saying a great deal. The British press has boycotted him. His letters, once so sought after by the most dignified journals, now no longer appear except in The New Statesman. His speeches, be they never so witty and timely, are not reported or even announced.

Consequently those who wish to hear him have to resort to the advertising expedients of the era before printing. A friend of mine just back from London tells me that he saw chalked on the side-walk a notice of a meeting to be addressed by Shaw in some out-of-the-way hall. Going there, he found it packed with an enthusiastic crowd gathered to hear Shaw discuss the questions of the day. The anti-Shavian press said that he had to keep to his house, that he was afraid to stir abroad for fear of a mob, that his career was over, that he was exploded, repudiated, disgraced, boycotted, dead and done for. At the very time when we were reading things like this, he was, as we since have learned, addressing weekly meetings in one of the largest halls in London. Reporters who were sent to see him hounded off the platform witnessed an ovation instead. The audience at his invitation asked him many questions, but not of a hostile character.

Shaw thrives on unpopularity or at least on public disapproval, which is not quite the same thing. It is not only that Shaw would rather be right than Prime Minister; he would rather be leader of the Opposition than Prime Minister. He would be "in the right with two or three"; in fact, if his followers increased much beyond the poet's minimum, he would begin to feel uneasy and suspect that he was wrong.

When Shaw sees a lonely mistreated kitten or a lonely mistreated theory, his tender heart yearns over it. For instance, when all his set started sneering at "natural rights" as eighteenth-century pedantry, he appeared as their champion, and, practically alone among modern radicals and art lovers, he has dared to commend the Puritans. The iconoclastic views which he expressed as dramatic and musical critic in the nineties have been vindicated by events, and now when a young reader opens for the first time "The Quintessence of Ibsenism", "The Perfect Wagnerite", and the collection of "Dramatic Opinions and Essays", he wonders only why Shaw should get so excited about such conventional and undisputed things. It is no wonder Shaw is "the most hated man in England." Nothing is more irritating than to say "I told you so", and he can—and does—ay it oftener than anybody else, unless it is Doctor Dillon.

Shaw's brain secretes automatically the particular antitoxin needed to counteract whatever disease may be epidemic in the community at the time. This injected with some vigor into the veins of thought may not effect a cure, but always excites a feverish state in the organism. It is his habit of seeing that there is another side to a question and calling attention to it at inconvenient times that makes him so irritating to the public. His opponents tried to intern him in Coventry as a pro-German on account of his pamphlet, "Commonsense about the War." But this is almost the only thing produced in England during the first weeks of the war that reads well now. Compare it with its numerous replies and see which seems absurd. Doubtless it was not tactful, it might have been called treasonable, but it certainly was sensible. Shaw kept his head level when others lost theirs. That was because he had thought out things in advance and so did not have to make up his mind in a hurry with the great probability of making it up wrong. In that pamphlet he presented the case for the Allies in a way much more convincing to the American mind than many that came to us in the early days of the war, and his arguments have been strengthened by the course of events, while others advanced at that time have been weakened. Shaw was arguing before a neutral and international jury, and so he did not rest his case on the specious and patriotic pleas that passed muster at that time with the British public.

As for the charge of pro-Germanism, that may best be met by quoting from a letter written by him to a friend in Vienna early in 1915. The language is evidently not pure Shavian. It has been translated into Austrian-German and thence retranslated into British journalese.

As regards myself, I am not what is called a pro-German. The Germans would not respect me, were I at such a time as this, when all thoughts of culture have vanished, not to stand by my people. But also, I am not an anti-German. The war brings us all on to the same plane of savagery. Every London coster can stick his bayonet deeper into the stomach of Richard Strauss than Richard Strauss would care to do to him.

Militarism has just now compelled me to pay a thousand pounds war taxation in order that some "brave little Servian" may be facilitated in cutting your throat or, that a Russian mujik may cleave your skull in twain, although I would gladly pay twice that sum to save your life, or to buy some beautiful picture in Vienna for our National Gallery.

Shaw has always condemned militarism because of the type of mind it engenders in officers and men. But he has never been opposed to preparedness or to the use of force. In the London Daily News of January 1, 1914,—note the date,—he said:

I like courage (like most constitutionally timid civilians) and the active use of strength for the salvation of the world. It is good to have a giant's strength and it is not at all tyrannous to use it like a giant provided you are a decent sort of giant. What on earth is strength for but to be used and will any reasonable man tell me that we are using our strength now to any purpose?

Let us get the value of our money in strength and influence instead of casting every new cannon in an ecstasy of terror and then being afraid to aim it at anybody.

At that time, seven months before the storm burst, he not only anticipated the war, but said that it might be averted,

By politely announcing that war between France and Germany would be so inconvenient to England that the latter country is prepared to pledge herself to defend either country if attacked by the other.

If we are asked how we are to decide which nation is really the aggressor we can reply that we shall take our choice, or when the problem is unsolvable we shall toss up, but that we will take a hand in the war anyhow.

International warfare is an unmitigated nuisance. Have as much character-building civil war as you like, but there must be no sowing of dragon's teeth like the Franco-Prussian War. England can put a stop to such a crime single-handed easily enough if she can keep her knees from knocking together in her present militarist fashion.

Of course Shaw may have been wrong in supposing that an open announcement of Great Britain's determination to enter the war would have deterred Germany, but as we now know from the White Paper this same opinion was held by the governments of both France and Russia. On July 30 the President of France said to the British Ambassador at Paris that

If His Majesty's Government announced that England would come to the aid of France in the event of a conflict between France and Germany as a result of the present differences between Austria and Servia, there would be no war, for Germany would at once modify her attitude.

And on July 25, M. Sazonof, the Russian Foreign Minister, said to the British Ambassador at Petrograd that

He did not believe that Germany really wanted war, but her attitude was decided by ours. If we took our stand firmly with France and Russia, there would be no war. If we failed her now, rivers of blood would flow, and we would in the end be dragged into war.

Shaw now gives the same advice to the United States that he gave to his own country before the war, that is, to increase its armament and not be afraid to use it. In a recent letter to the American Intercollegiate Socialist he said:

I should strenuously recommend the United States to build thirty-two new dreadnoughts instead of sixteen, and to spend two billion dollars on its armament program instead of one. This would cost only a fraction of the money you are wasting every year in demoralizing luxury, a good deal of it having been in the past scattered over the continental countries which are now using what they saved out of it to slaughter one another.

If the United States wishes to stop war as an institution, that is, to undertake the policing of the world, it will need a very big club for the purpose.

If I were an American statesman I should tell the country flatly that it should maintain a Pacific navy capable of resisting an attack from Japan and an Atlantic navy capable of resisting an attack from England, with Zeppelins on the same scale, a proportionate land equipment of siege guns, and so forth. And until the nations see the suicidal folly of staking everything in the last instance on the ordeal of battle, no other advice will be honest advice.

In "Major Barbara" Cusins abandons the teaching of Greek to take up the manufacture of munitions because he has the courage "to make war on war." It is in this play that is expounded the theory on which President Wilson based his policy. Lady Britomart tells Cusins: "You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals." But Undershaft, the munition-maker, replies: "No; none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here." And when Cusins asks: "What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?" he answers:

To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles; to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to burglar and policeman, to black man, white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes.... I will take an order from a good man as cheerfully as from a bad one. If you good people prefer preaching and shirking to buying my weapons and fighting the rascals, don't blame me. I can make cannons; I cannot make courage and conviction.

In this same conversation Shaw also gives a hint of his theology, when Cusins says to Undershaft: "You have no power. You do not drive this place; it drives you. And what drives this place?" Undershaft answers, enigmatically, "A will of which I am a part." This doctrine of an immanent God working through nature and man to higher things was developed more definitely in an address which Mr. Shaw delivered some years ago in the City Temple at the invitation of the Reverend R. J. Campbell. Here he argued that God created human beings to be "his helpers and servers, not his sycophants and apologists." Shaw continues:

If my actions are God's nobody can fairly hold me responsible for them; my conscience is mere lunacy.... But if I am a part of God, if my eyes are God's eyes, my hands God's hands, and my conscience God's conscience then also I share his responsibility for the world; and wo is me if the world goes wrong!

This position enables him to explain evil on evolutionary principles as "the Method of Trial and Error." When Blake asks of the tiger, "Did he who made the lamb make thee?" Shaw conceives the Life-Force as replying:

Yes, it was the best I could devise at the time; but now that I have evolved something better, part of the work of that something better, Man, to wit, is to kill out my earlier attempt. And in due time I hope to evolve Superman, who will in his turn kill out and supersede Man, whose abominable cruelties, stupidities and follies have utterly disappointed me.

In the unactable third act of his "Man and Superman",[1] this theology is put into the mouths of two most unpromising preachers, Don Juan and the Devil. Here is found one of the most eloquent arraignments of war in all literature. It is, remember, the Devil who is speaking:

I tell you that in the arts of life Man invests nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks. But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind. In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles; they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth. His heart is in his weapons.... Man measures his force by his destructiveness.... In the old chronicles you read of earthquakes and pestilences, and are told that these showed the power and majesty of God and the littleness of Man. Nowadays the chronicles describe battles. In a battle two bodies of men shoot at one another with bullets and explosive shells until one body runs away, when the others chase the fugitives on horseback and cut them to pieces as they fly. And this, the chronicle concludes, shows the greatness and majesty of empires, and the littleness of the vanquished. Over such battles the people run about the streets yelling with delight, and egg their Governments on to spend hundreds of millions of money in the slaughter, whilst the strongest ministers dare not spend an extra penny in the pound against the poverty and pestilence in which they themselves daily walk.... The plague, the famine, the earthquake, the tempest were too spasmodic in their action; the tiger and the crocodile were too easily satiated and not cruel enough; something more constantly, more ruthlessly, more ingeniously destructive was needed; and that something was Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows and the executioner; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism, and all the other isms by which even those clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all destroyers.

Three years before the war Shaw wrote a little satirical skit, "Press Cuttings",[2] which was deemed so dangerous to both Britain and Germany that the censors of both countries agreed in prohibiting its production on the stage. Since the British censor seemed to fear that the principal characters, "Balsquith" and "Mitchener", might be taken by the public as referring to certain well-known statesmen, Shaw offered to change the names to "Bones" and "Johnson." But even that concession would not satisfy the censor's scruples, so the play was never publicly put on the stage, though, since there was then no censorship of literature, it was published as a book. Here is a bit of the dialogue:

Balsquith—The Germans have laid down four more Dreadnoughts.

Mitchener—Then you must lay down twelve.

Balsquith—Oh, yes; it's easy to say that; but think of what they'll cost.

Mitchener—Think of what it would cost to be invaded by Germany and forced to pay an indemnity of five hundred millions....

Balsquith—After all, why should the Germans invade us?

Mitchener—Why shouldn't they? What else have their army to do? What else are they building a navy for?

Balsquith—Well, we never think of invading Germany.

Mitchener—Yes, we do. I have thought of nothing else for the last ten years. Say what you will, Balsquith, the Germans have never recognized, and until they get a stern lesson, they never will recognize, the plain fact that the interests of the British Empire are paramount, and that the command of the sea belongs by nature to England.

Balsquith—But if they wont recognize it, what can I do?

Mitchener—Shoot them down.

Balsquith—I cant shoot them down.

Mitchener—Yes, you can. You dont realize it; but if you fire a rifle into a German he drops just as surely as a rabbit does.

Balsquith—But dash it all, man, a rabbit hasn't got a rifle and a German has. Suppose he shoots you down.

Mitchener—Excuse me, Balsquith; but that consideration is what we call cowardice in the army. A soldier always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.

Balsquith—Oh, come! I like to hear you military people talking of cowardice. Why, you spend your lives in an ecstasy of terror of imaginary invasions. I don't believe you ever go to bed without looking under it for a burglar.

Mitchener—A very sensible precaution,

Balsquith. I always take it. And in consequence I've never been burgled.

Balsquith—Neither have I. Anyhow dont you taunt me with cowardice. I never look under my bed for a burglar. I'm not always looking under the nation's bed for an invader. And if it comes to fighting, Im quite willing to fight without being three to one.

Mitchener—These are the romantic ravings of a Jingo civilian, Balsquith. At least you'll not deny that the absolute command of the sea is essential to our security.

Balsquith—The absolute command of the sea is essential to the security of the principality of Monaco. But Monaco isn't going to get it.

Mitchener—And consequently Monaco enjoys no security. What a frightful thing! How do the inhabitants sleep with the possibility of invasion, of bombardment, continually present to their minds? Would you have our English slumbers broken in this way? Are we also to live without security?

Balsquith—Yes. Theres no such thing as security in the world; and there never can be as long as men are mortal. England will be secure when England is dead, just as the streets of London will be safe when there is no longer a man in her streets to be run over, or a vehicle to run over him. When you military chaps ask for security you are crying for the moon.

Mitchener—Let me tell you, Balsquith, that in these days of aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships, the question of the moon is becoming one of the greatest importance. It will be reached at no very distant date. Can you as an Englishman tamely contemplate the possibility of having to live under a German moon? The British flag must be planted there at all hazards.

The play ends with the establishment of universal military training and equal suffrage, thus doing away with a militarism that was both timorous and tyrannical, snobbish and inefficient, and at the same time making the nation truly democratic. It is characteristic of Shaw that recently, when the papers were discussing what sort of a monument should commemorate Edith Cavell, he interjected the unwelcome suggestion that the country could honor her best by enfranchising her sex.

There is ever something in Bernard Shaw that suggests the eighteenth century, the age of Swift and Voltaire and Doctor Johnson. On the credit side we must reckon lucidity, incisive wit, cleareyed logic, unashamed common sense, love of discussion and openness to new ideas, freedom from prejudice of race or class, humanitarian aspiration —in a word the Aufklärung. On the debit side some items must unhappily be listed also: doctrinaire intellectualism, inability to see either the limits of one's own doctrines or the point in other people's, inadequate appreciation of historic institutions and popular sentiments, contempt for romance, intolerance for science, and incapacity for poetry.

Shaw seems to have inherited the famous saeva indignatio of his great countryman, Swift. For all his simple diet he is not so eupeptic as Chesterton. Chesterton is most closely akin to Dickens, as may be seen from his sympathetic appreciations of Dickens's works. If I may be permitted to express the relationship of the four in a mathematical formula, I should put it:

Shaw: Chesterton = Swift: Dickens.

The mordant wit of the two Irishmen is a very different thing from the genial humor of the two Englishmen. Chesterton as usual makes a theological issue out of it. He says of Shaw:

He is not a humorist, but a great wit, almost as great as Voltaire. Humor is akin to agnosticism, which is only the negative side of mysticism. But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees consistency in things is a wit—and a Calvinist. The man who sees inconsistency in things is a humorist—and a Catholic. However this may be, Bernard Shaw exhibits all that is purest in the Puritan; the desire to see truth face to face even if it slay us, the high impatience with irrelevant sentiment or obstructive symbol; the constant effort to keep the soul at its highest pressure and speed. His instincts upon all social customs and questions are Puritan. His favorite author is Bunyan. But along with what was inspiring and direct in Puritanism, Bernard Shaw has inherited also some of the things that were cumbersome and traditional. If ever Shaw exhibits a prejudice it is a Puritan prejudice.

When Shaw in the preface of his "Plays for Puritans" declared himself "a Puritan in art" it was regarded as one of his jokes. So it was, but, as the world has found out since, his jokes are not nonsense. The main reason why the assumption and ascription of the term "Puritan" to Shaw was thought absurd was because of the prevalent misconception of what sort of people the Puritans were. The word in its common acceptance implies orthodoxy, conventionality, prudishness, asceticism. Now the real Puritan was a revolutionary of the most radical type. Of all the socialists, anarchists, and extremists of various views with whom I am acquainted, there is not one who lives in antagonism to his conventional contemporaries on so many points as did the Puritan in his day. Milton's pamphlets in favor of republicanism, free speech, divorce, and new theology were as scandalous to the seventeenth century as Shaw's "Revolutionist's Handbook" to the nineteenth. The Puritans insisted that marriage was a purely civil contract to be made and annulled by the State, and they even forbade ministers to perform the ceremony, while Catholics, Roman and Anglican, hold the contrary theory, that marriage is a religious rite, only performed by priests and indissoluble. The Pilgrim Fathers who had a dozen children and two or three wives apiece—consecutive, of course—are not to be classed as ascetics; and if any one thinks them prudish, he has not read their literature.

Of course Shaw's opinions are different from those of the Puritans, indeed quite the opposite on some points. The Puritans, for example, were not averse to blood, either in their food, their politics, or their theology, while Shaw is almost Buddhistic in his tender-heartedness. Androcles is his caricature of himself. But still we may say that Shaw is puritanical in his type of mind, his attitude toward the established institutions and moral codes of his time, and even in his faults.

Consider for instance his intolerance. No, I do not mean dogmatism. That he comes to emphatic conclusions is much to his credit and differentiates him from the colloidal-minded mass of modern writers who hold no convictions to have the courage of. But he does not, for instance, content himself with the attitude: "For the life of me I can't see what you find to admire in that absurd, romantic, weak-minded, sentimental, butcherly Scott." He would be quite justified in expressing his opinion thus-wise. He must add: "There's nothing to him and if you say there is, you are deceiving me or—what is wickeder—yourself. In either case you are an Idealist, which in my unique vocabulary means liar." To which we might return an answer of the Quaker sort: "Friend, thee has two eyes and the usual number of brains and so a right to thine opinion. But it need not follow that because thee sees not a merit in a writer that it does in nowise exist." Every one of Shaw's early heroes and heroines, from the Unsocial Socialist and the daughter of Mrs. Warren to Undershaft and Larry Doyle, admires himself or herself immensely for saying to every upholder of supposedly current morality: "Bah! Humbug! Hypocrite!" To which again the gentle reply should come: "Friend, I be not an Humbug, nor yet an Hypocrite, nor even a Bah. A man may differ from thee and yet be sincere in his views, although this fact be dreamed not in thy philosophy. I may be right or I may be wrong, but if thee call me an Idealist yet again, lo, I will lift this brick and cast it at thee."

Wells and Shaw are quite commonly bracketed like Scylla and Charybdis, Dickens and Thackeray, Tennyson and Browning, and the Royal Bloodsweating Chesterbelloc of Holy Writ. These couplings are often absurd but rarely arbitrary. Some likeness of thought or mood or some contrast of viewpoint usually accounts for if not justifies such literary mésalliances. Wells and Shaw are both socialists, but this is not the tie, for, as the English aristocrat said: "We are all socialists now." The real likeness is that each is an intellectual anarchist, although a political Socialist. Shaw is an isolated, not to say eccentric, figure even for a Socialist. Wells has gone further yet in his self-isolation by leaving the Fabian movement. But the unlikeness between the two men lies in the motive driving them to their respective hermitages. Shaw may often change his point of view, but at any given moment it is almost brutally clear and detailed, and he insists upon the fullest conformity on the part of his would-be followers. If they fall a step short of his iron boundary they are mere Philistines and bourgeois, if they go a step beyond they are inefficient and contemptible sentimental revolutionists. Shaw always has "doots o' Jamie's orthodoxy." But Wells seeks a Socialism without boundaries. Marxian Socialism, Fabian Socialism, State Socialism are all too narrow and dogmatic for his taste as he has said time and time again. Finding no true all-inclusive, universe-wide Socialism he erects his own banner for the nations to rally to and as a result suffers the universal fate of those who try to found Churches of Humanity and World Languages, that is, merely succeeding in founding a new sect and a new dialect.

Shaw has two defects which militate against his popularity; first, he is too conventional, and, second, his conventions are peculiarly his own. "There is," says his Undershaft, "only one true morality for every man, but not every man has the same morality." Shaw is easily shocked, but never by the same things that shock other people.

He himself ascribes his inability to see the same as others to his sight being abnormally normal. The oculist who examined them said they were the only pair of absolutely correct eyes he had ever come across.

Of course this illusion of possessing perfect mental vision is common to everybody. All the opinions I hold at this moment are, I believe, absolutely correct; otherwise I should change them instanter, though I must admit, seeing how often I have erred in the past, that a priori the chances are against my being altogether right now. But what Shaw means by his normality of vision is not merely common confidence in one's own orthodoxy, but has reference to his fanatical efforts to tear away all the illusions of life and see things as they are. I do not think that he often succeeds. Isis has many veils, and those who have torn away the first and the second are all the more likely to be deceived in mistaking the third for the naked truth.

There is no doubting Shaw's intent to undeceive the world or his willingness to undeceive himself. "My way of joking is to tell the truth," says his Father Keegan in "John Bull's Other Island." But when he strains his eyes to see something clearly he sees only that one thing. By following consistently one line of logic—instead of several as he should—he gets tangled up in illogicalities. His mode of reasoning is often the reductio ad absurdum of his own theories, and this is not a persuasive way of argumentation.

By temperament Shaw is a mystic, but his conscience compels him to assume the method of cold intellectualism. He is an artist in the disguise of a scientist, not an uncommon thing to see in this so-called age of science.

Probably Shaw is not more inconsistent than any man of agile mind who is capable of seeing in succession different sides of a thing, but he is franker in expressing the point of view he holds at the time. Consequently he has many admirers but few followers. They can't keep up. The only possible Shavian is Shaw.

As somebody has remarked there are two ways of saying a thing; there are writers who provoke thought and writers who provoke thinkers. Shaw does both. This is intentional, and he defends it on the ground that; "If you don't say a thing in an irritating way, you may just as well not say it at all—since nobody will trouble themselves about anything that does not trouble them." In short Shaw first got the ear of the public by pulling it, and he does not know how to let go. Shaw's argument is a wedge, but it is driven in blunt end first. A startling statement, some monstrous paradox, is presented to the reader and rouses his antagonism, then it is gradually qualified and whittled down, or wittily diverted, so that it seems, in contrast to its first form, quite innocuous and acceptable, and the reader is so relieved at not having to swallow the dose first presented to him that he willingly takes more than he otherwise would. Shaw has not the judicial mind and does not want to have. "The way to get at the merits of a case," he says "is not to listen to a fool who imagines himself impartial, but to get it argued with reckless bias for and against." Put this on your bookmark when you read Shaw.

George Bernard Shaw's collection of opinions is unique. Perhaps no single view of his is quite original, but the combination certainly is. He belongs to no type and has founded no school. This makes Shaw an exasperating person for some people to read and causes them to set him down as frivolous or inconsistent. They find, for instance, from "The Revolutionist's Handbook" that Shaw believes in eugenics and the importance of natural science. "Good!" people say, "now we can classify him." They read "The Doctor's Dilemma" and find him a rabid antivivisectionist and filled with a profound contempt for modern medicine in general. Or they find out that he is a vegetarian, a teetotaler, and a Puritan, and classify him as some nonconformist minister of a pallid and overconscientious type. When they read what he actually has to say about marriage in "Misalliance", about popular religion and salvation by money and gunpowder in "Major Barbara", they rush to the opposite conclusion that he is constitutionally an unconstitutional rebel with a fondness for aimless violence such as appears in "Fanny's First Play." Reading "The Conversion of Blanco Bosnet" they discover that he is a devout Theist. Reading the preface to "Androcles" they find him a higher critic. As a Fabian pamphleteer he is in favor of abolishing all individual property of a productive sort and has no use for laissez faire. But when it comes to children (see "Misalliance") there cannot be too much laissez faire. He appears as an ultramodernist, a universal cynic, a disillusioned Ibsenite, and a disbeliever in the very existence of progress. (Preface to "Man and Superman".) He offended half the radicals by his "Impossibilities of Anarchism" and the other half by his "Illusions of Socialism", and the conservatives by both.

But those who will take the trouble to compare these apparent antinomies will find that the contradictions are not so great as they seem from their paradoxical and partisan form, and that Shaw has preserved his intellectual consistency to a remarkable degree.

When Shaw first burst into London, a young, red-haired Irishman, he announced himself as an atheist, an anarchist, and a vegetarian, these heresies being arranged in crescendo fashion, putting last what was most calculated to shock the British public. Now when we look back over his career we find that he has not been any more successful in sticking to his youthful heresy than others are in sticking to their youthful orthodoxy. Whether he has ever violated his vegetarian faith by eating a beefsteak on the sly I do not know, but he has drifted far from orthodox anarchism, for Socialism is, in theory at least, at the opposite pole from anarchy. Once when Shaw was talking Socialism in Hyde Park, he was much annoyed by the anarchists who circulated through the crowd, selling copies of an early pamphlet of his on "The Illusions of Socialism." As for his atheism he seems to have left that still farther behind, for his present theological views, if expressed in less provocative language, would pass muster in many a pulpit to-day. In fact, they have as it is.

In a recent letter to me, Mr. Shaw refers to the cordial reception he always received when Reverend Reginald Campbell invited him to occupy the pulpit of City Temple,[3] and adds:

My greatest and surest successes as a public speaker have been on religious subjects to religious audiences; but this is the common experience of all speakers. People are still more concerned about religion than anything else, and any reasonably good preacher can easily leave the best political spellbinder behind.

Shaw as a Socialist differs from others who bear that name. He is too intense an individualist to be a good party man. He puts no faith in Marx as the prophet of the millennium, and he has no Utopian vision of his own. But what chiefly distinguishes him as a reformer is his power of penetrating through shams to fundamental realities and his ability to do original constructive thinking.[4] All of us can find fault with the existing order of things, and most of us do. But to point out just "what's wrong with the world" and to suggest a practical line of improvement is not so easy. The Fabian Society has done more than set off fireworks and stir up mud. The Minority Report on the reform of the Poor Law is a fine piece of constructive statesmanship. This Minority Report was largely the work of the Fabian Society, though how much Shaw had to do with it personally I do not know. We now know, however, that he was the author of Fabian Tract Number 2 of 1884 that startled the conservative classes of England, including the orthodox Marxians. Here are a few of the "Opinions Held by the Fabians" set forth in this famous tract:

That since competition among producers admittedly secures to the public the most satisfactory products, the state should compete with all its might in every department of production.

That no branch of industry should be carried on at a profit by the central administration.

That men no longer need special political privileges to protect them against women, and that the sexes should henceforth enjoy equal political rights.

That the established government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather.

Shaw also wrote Fabian Tract Number 45 on "The Impossibilities of Anarchism", in which he pointed out what was not so clear in 1888 as it is to-day, that society was rapidly becoming communistic through the efforts of those who were most opposed to communism as a theory:

Most people will tell you that communism is known in this country only as a visionary project advocated by a handful of amiable cranks. Then they will stroll across a common bridge, along the common embankment, by the light of the common street lamp shining alike on the just and the unjust, up the common street and into the common Trafalgar Square where on the smallest hint that communism is to be tolerated for an instant in a civilized country, they will be handily bludgeoned by a common policeman and hauled off to the common gaol.

Shaw's latest contribution to Fabian literature, the appendix to Pease's "History of the Fabian Society", seems to me one of the most important, for in the final paragraphs he points out clearly a defect in our democracy that is rarely recognized and altogether unremedied:

Another subject which has hardly yet been touched, and which also must begin with deductive treatment, is what may be called the democratization of democracy, and its extension from mere negative and very uncertain check on tyranny to a positive organizing force. No experienced Fabian believes that society can be reconstructed (or rather constructed, for the difficulty is that society is as yet only half removed from chaos) by men of the type produced by popular election under existing circumstances likely to be achieved before the reconstruction. The fact that a hawker cannot ply his trade without a license whilst a man may sit in Parliament without any relevant qualifications is a typical and significant anomaly which will certainly not be removed by allowing everybody to be a hawker at will. Sooner or later, unless democracy is to be discarded in a reaction of disgust such as killed it in ancient Athens, democracy will demand that only such men should be presented to its choice as have proved themselves qualified for more serious and disinterested work than "stoking up" election meetings to momentary and foolish excitement. Without qualified rulers a Socialist State is impossible; and it must not be forgotten (though the reminder is as old as Plato) that the qualified men may be very reluctant men instead of very ambitious ones.

It is this doubt, more or less clearly felt, lest a genuinely democratic society will fail to secure able and qualified leaders, that lies at the bottom of the prevalent distrust of popular government and causes many persons to cling to antiquated and irrational institutions like aristocracy and even monarchy.

I sent Mr. Shaw a copy of an editorial entitled, "And There Shall Be No More Kings", in The Independent of March 22, 1915, and the following, penned on the margin of the clipping in his careful handwriting, is his comment on what he calls "a wise and timely article."

This war raises in an acute form the whole question of republicanism versus German dynasticism. After the mischief done by Franz Josef's second childhood as displayed in his launching the forty-eight-hour ultimatum to Serbia before the Kaiser could return from Stockholm, the world has the right—indeed the duty—to demand that monarchies shall at least be subject to superannuation as well as to constitutional limitation.

All recent historical research has shown that the position of a king, even in a jealously limited monarchy like the British, makes him so strong that George III, who was childish when he was not under restraint as an admitted lunatic, was uncontrollable by the strongest body of statesmen the eighteenth century produced. It is undoubtedly inconvenient that the head of the state should be selected at short intervals; but it does not follow that he (or she) should be an unqualified person or hold office for life or be a member of a dynasty.

I may add that if the policy of dismembering the Central Empires by making separate national states of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, and making Serbia include Bosnia and Herzegovina, is seriously put forward, it would involve making them republics; for if they were kingdoms their thrones would be occupied by cousins of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanoffs, strengthening the German hegemony instead of restraining it.

Perhaps the reader will think that I am rather too presumptuous in professing to know just what Shaw means and believes, when most people are puzzled by him. So I should explain that I have the advantage of a personal acquaintance with Shaw. I may say without boasting—or at least without lying—that at one period of his life I was nearer to him than any other human being. The distance between us was in fact the diameter of one of those round tables in the A. B. C. restaurants, and the period was confined to the time it took to consume a penny bun and a cup of tea, both being paid for by him. I resorted to thorough Fletchering for the purpose of prolonging the interview, and I wished that either he or I had been a smoker. But although a vegetarian, he eschews the weed, and smoking did not seem to be in accordance with Fabian tactics.

The occasion was a recess in a Fabian Society conference. I did not suppose that anything could shut off Socialists in the midst of debate. The theme of discussion was the House of Lords, which the Fabians unanimously agreed ought to be abolished, though no two of them agreed on the substitute. But while they were iconoclasts as to one British institution, they rendered homage to another by stopping to take tea in the midst of a lovely scrap.

The Fabian Society was indirectly the fruit of one of the seeds which Thomas Davidson scattered in many lands. You can track this peripatetic philosopher through life, as you can Johnny Appleseed, by the societies that sprung up along his pathway. In the Adirondacks he founded the Glenmore School of Philosophy. In the Jewish quarter of New York City another of his schools still thrives and is enthused with something of his zeal for learning. The circle of earnest young men and women whom he gathered about him in London were the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, the Fellowship of the New Life, and the Fabian Society. Yet Davidson himself was neither a spiritualist nor a Socialist.[5]

At the Fabian Society one sees Shaw in his element. Every creature, says Browning, like the moon,

Boasts two soul-sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her.

The Fabian Society is Shaw's own true love, and to her he turns a different face than to the outside world. As I watched him during the afternoon—preceding and following the brief period of personal contact of which I have been bragging—I was struck by the tact and kindliness which he showed in the course of the discussion. There was in his occasional remarks no trace of the caustic and dogmatic tone which one gets from his writings. He has been not so much the "shining light" or "presiding genius" of the society, as one of the "wheel horses", and devoted himself diligently to the detailed and inconspicuous work of the organization. He had for twenty-seven years served on the Executive Committee of the society when in 1911 he resigned to make way for the younger generation.

The question under discussion was, as I have said, that of the reconstruction of the House of Lords. This was shortly before the war, when such questions were regarded as important. Various plans were proposed in order to secure the election of the fittest, when Shaw took the floor in defense of genuine democracy. His argument ran like this, as I remember it:

Our idea is that any 670 people is as good as any other for governing, just as any twelve chosen by chance on the jury have our lives and property in their hands.

Now if I and Mr. Sydney Webb here were sent to the House of Commons it should be with unlimited opportunity to talk but not to vote. To give us a vote would be to permit the violation of the fundamental principle of democracy that people should never be governed better than they want to be. If you had a government of saints and philosophers the people would be miserable. For instance, I would want to stop all smoking and meat-eating and liquor drinking, but like all superior persons now I have to convince other people because I cannot compel them.

No elected body can possibly be representative, because no man is elected as a normal man, but as an exceptional one. The House of Lords is more representative than the House of Commons, because a man in the House of Commons is there because he has uncommon abilities, high or low. Representatives ought to be, like jurymen, samples of the commonalty picked at random and compelled to serve. Their function is to explain where the shoe pinches. But the shoe must be made by skilled legislators and statesmen, and these should be eligible only when they have satisfied a very high standard of qualification, and should sit without votes though with unlimited powers of explanation and criticism.

These remarks, delivered in a musical and sympathetic voice with frequent flashes of a broad row of white teeth, sounded very different from the way they read in cold type. I do hope the phonograph will be perfected before Shaw dies or his voice goes cracked, so posterity can have a vocal version of his plays and prefaces. Otherwise his personality stands little chance of being understood.

Shaw is tall and uses his eyeglasses for gesticulating as an orchestra leader uses a baton. His hair was once a fiery red, but is now tempered into gray. His eyes are light blue. Between his brows there are three perpendicular wrinkles, but not of the cross and fretful type. His face is long and pointed, but he looks not in the least Mephistophelian as the caricaturists represent him. In short, Shaw is not so black as he is painted by himself and others.

It is not necessary in this chapter, as it was in the case of some of my "Twelve Major Prophets of To-day", for me to give biographical details at any length, for these are easily accessible. Shaw has not been reticent in talking about himself in various books and prefaces, and he is fortunate in having in Professor Henderson of the University of North Carolina a biographer of the Boswell kind—probably the best kind there is. His big volume contains as much about Shaw's life and words up to the time it was published, 1911, as any one needs to know. Chesterton's book on Shaw is an impressionistic sketch rather than a portrait, giving the author an opportunity of saying "what's wrong with the world", including Shaw. Other lives of Shaw are mentioned in the appendix of this chapter.

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, July 25, 1856. His father was an Irish gentleman, Protestant, improvident and respectable, a wholesale dealer in corn, with a profound contempt for all retail tradesmen. His mother was a musician, and it was to her that Mr. Shaw owed his own moderate talent and remarkable knowledge of music. When he went to London at the age of twenty, with artistic, musical and literary ambitions, his mother practically supported the family by teaching music there. As Shaw says in one of his autobiographical fragments:

I did not throw myself into the struggle for life. I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old age. I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an obscure journal by a personal friend of my own, prefiguring me to some extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this is a handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parents' bread in some sordid trade.

His only schooling was at Dublin, where he says he learned little, and this is confirmed by the school records which place him near the bottom of his class. His opinion of the sort of education he got he has expressed in several places, especially in the preface to "Misalliance."

My school made only the thinnest pretence of teaching anything but Greek and Latin.... To this day, though I can still decline a Latin noun and repeat some of the old paradigms in the old meaningless way, because their rhythm sticks to me, I have never yet seen a Latin inscription on a tomb that I could translate throughout. Of Greek I can decipher perhaps the greater part of the Greek alphabet. In short I am, as to classical education, another Shakespeare. I can read French as easily as English; and under pressure of necessity, I can turn to account some scraps of German and a little operatic Italian; but these three were never taught at school. Instead, I was taught lying, dishonorable submission to tyranny, dirty stories, a blasphemous habit of treating love and maternity as obscene jokes, hopelessness, evasion, derision, cowardice, and all the blackguard's shifts by which the coward intimidates other cowards.

Why is it that British authors give us such horrible pictures of their school days? They usually look back upon them as a most unpleasant and unprofitable period of their lives, and when they attempt to eulogize it they make it all the more shocking. Kipling in "Stalky and Company" reveals an even more detestable state of affairs than Dickens does of "Dotheboys Hall." Shaw takes the American view of it and condemns with horror the "flagellomania" of the British schoolmaster. It is curious to observe that in Great Britain the schoolmasters have weapons, and the policemen have none. In America clubs have been given to the police, and the canes taken away from the teachers. The New York school-teachers are not allowed to deliver even a casual box on the ear or a friendly shaking, yet they are making very decent citizens out of most unpromising material, and the policemen's clubs are mostly used on the immigrants who have been trained in the flagellant schools of Europe.

It is doubtless a good thing that Shaw did not go through Oxford, but he should have had a course in biology under Huxley such as Wells had. This would have given him an acquaintance with the aims and methods of modern science and freed him from such prejudice as he displayed, for instance, in "The Doctor's Dilemma" and "The Philanderer."

Shaw's early efforts at authorship did not meet with encouragement. If we may take his word for it, he earned six pounds in nine years by his pen, and five of those came from writing a patent medicine advertisement. He wrote five novels in five years, all at first rejected by the book publishers. Four of them, "The Unsocial Socialist", "The Irrational Knot", "Cashel Byron's Profession", and "Love Among the Artists" have since been reprinted from the short-lived Socialist periodicals in which they originally appeared. The first novel he wrote, "Immaturity", has never been printed.

William Archer sent these novels to Robert Louis Stevenson, then trying to recover his health at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Stevenson's letters refer to them as "blooming gaseous folly", "horrid fun", "a fever dream of the most feverish",

"I say, Archer, my God, what women!" "If Mr. Shaw is below five and twenty, let him go his path; if he is thirty, he had best be told that he is a romantic and pursue romance with his eyes opened; perhaps he knows it; God knows!—my brain is softened."

A plan to relieve struggling authors and secure the earlier recognition of genius by means of an endowment fund and a system of substantial prizes was once proposed by Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle", who wrote to a number of authors, asking their opinion of the scheme. Among those who responded were Wells, Bennett, De Morgan, Philpotts, Galsworthy, London, and Shaw.[6] I quote part of what Shaw said about it because of its biographical interest:

There is only one serious and effective way of helping young men of the kind in view, and that is by providing everybody with enough leisure in the intervals of well-paid and not excessive work to enable them to write books in their spare time and pay for the printing of them. Nothing else seems to me to be really hopeful. I myself seem an example of a man who achieved literary eminence without assistance; but as a matter of fact certain remnants of family property made all the difference. For fully nine years I had to sponge shamelessly on my father and mother; but even at that we only squeezed through because my mother's grandfather had been a rich man. In fact, I was just the man for whom Upton wants to establish his fund. Yet for the life of me I cannot see how any committee in the world could have given me a farthing. All I had to show was five big novels which nobody would publish, and as the publishers' readers by whose advice they were rejected included Lord Morley and George Meredith, it cannot be said that I was in any worse hands than those of any committee likely to be appointed. Of course Sinclair may say to this that if Morley and Meredith, instead of having to advise a publisher as to the prospects of a business speculation, had only had to consider how to help a struggling talent without reference to commercial consideration, they might have come to my rescue. Unfortunately, I have seen both their verdicts; and I can assure Sinclair that I produced on both of them exactly the impression that is inevitably produced in every such case: that is, that I was a young man with more cleverness than was good for me and that what I needed was snubbing and not encouraging. No doubt there are talents which are not aggressive and do not smell of brimstone; but these are precisely the talents which are marketable, except, of course, in the case of the highest poetry, which, however, is out of the question anyhow as a means of livelihood. William Morris, when he was at the height of his fame as a poet, long after the publication of his popular poem, "The Earthly Paradise", told me that his income from his poems was about a hundred a year; and I happen to know that Robert Browning threatened to leave the country because the Income Tax Commissioners assessed him with a modest but wholly imaginary income on the strength of his reputation. Poetry is thus frankly a matter of endowment, but for the rest I think a writer's chance of being helped by the fund would be in inverse ratio to his qualifications as conceived by Upton Sinclair.

Shaw's first essays in the field where he was to attain his greatest success were as discouraging as his efforts at novel writing. His first play, "Widower's Houses", dealing with tainted money, shocked but did not attract the public. His "The Philanderer" was published before a theater would accept it. His third play, "Mrs. Warren's Profession", was prohibited by the censor. Of the seven that followed only one could be called a decided success on its first presentation in London. But in book form, with attractively written stage directions and argumentative prefaces, they found a host of readers who wanted to see them in the theater. "Candida" was not presented in London till 1904, nearly ten years after it was written. It was with "Candida" that Arnold Daly introduced Shaw to the theater-going public of America, and for the last few years there have often been three Shaw plays running at the same time in New York.

Shaw's plays were popular in America when they were tabooed or pooh-poohed in England. His "Pygmalion" had its première in the Hofburg-theater in Vienna instead of London. I saw it, or rather heard it, since it is a phonetic instead of a spectacular play, at the Deutsches Theater of Irving Place, New York, in March, 1914, six months before Mrs. Patrick Campbell gave it here in English. In spite of the fact that the play depends upon variations in English dialects, it was given better in the German than in the English.

Shaw is in fact an internationalist, much more honored in America, Russia, Germany, France, Scandinavia, and Japan than in his own country, that is, Ireland. It must be interesting to see "You Never Can Tell" or "Man and Superman" on the Tokyo stage. The Kobe Herald says: "He appeals to the Japanese of progressive ideas because he prefers potatoes, cabbages and beans to porter-house steak and lamb chops."

The reason why Shaw's prefaces read so well and his plays go better on the stage than would be anticipated is because they are composed by ear. Since reading aloud has gone out of fashion, there has arisen a generation of young writers who do not realize that language is intended to be spoken. Consequently one has to read them by eye only, switching off for the time the internal auditory apparatus so as to avoid their discords and dull rhythm. A little girl who was trying to read to herself a story by one of our pyrotechnic authors suddenly threw down the magazine with the cry: "I can't read this any more! It dazzles my ears."

Shaw is a musician, and he writes musical prose. He uses shorthand in composing, which is the next best thing to dictating to a phonograph. Naturally he resents the established spelling of English which preserves the form of words while allowing the words themselves to decay, thus sacrificing speech to print. He has often argued for phonetic spelling,[7] and has used as much of it in his works as his publisher would permit. The point he makes in the following passage is undeniably proving true:

All that the conventional spelling has done is to conceal the one change that a phonetic spelling might have checked; namely, the changes in pronunciation, including the waves of debasement that produced the half-rural cockney of Sam Weller and the modern metropolitan cockney of Drinkwater in "Captain Brassbound's Conversion."... Refuse to teach the Board School legions your pronunciation, and they will force theirs on you by mere force of numbers. And serve you right.

Shaw's treatment of the Salvation Army in "Major Barbara" showed that he knew more about religion than some of his churchly critics. So, too, his defense of the Salvation Army music in the London Standard in 1905 proved that he knew more about music than those who sneered at the Army bands. The Germans, who are now fond of analyzing the English character, have discussed at length the question of why such an unmusical people should have good music in the Salvation Army.[8]

The 125-page preface to "Androcles and the Lion" is devoted to a rereading of the Gospels and a rewriting of the life of Christ. Shaw interprets the New Testament like a higher critic but applies it like an early Christian. He rejects the resurrection but accepts the communism. He believes in the Life Force and Its Superman as others do in God and His Messiah. Shaw's Superman obviously belongs to another genus from Nietzsche's Uebermensch. He says in the preface to "Misalliance":

The precise formula for the Superman, ci-devant The Just Made Perfect, has not yet been discovered. Until it is, every birth is an experiment in a Great Research which is being conducted by the Life Force to discover that formula.

This eugenical and well meaning, but far from omnipotent creator, bears a strong resemblance to Bergson's Elan vital, but Shaw was writing about the Life Force long before Bergson wrote his "Creative Evolution." If there was any borrowing about it, both borrowed from Schopenhauer. But Shaw and Bergson, being kindly men and no pessimists, have put a kind heart into Schopenhauer's ruthless Will.

If I were to sum up Shaw in two words it would be that his distinguishing characteristics are courage and kind-heartedness. The sight of suffering and injustice drives him mad, and then he runs amuck, slashing right and left, without much regard to whom he hits and no regard at all as to who hits him. He is, like Swift, a cruel satirist through excess of sympathy. If Ibsen is right, that "the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone", then George Bernard Shaw is not to be ignored.

HOW TO READ SHAW

It does not matter much which of Shaw's books you read first, for after reading it, whichever it is, you will probably read all the others that you can get your hands on. If I must be more specific in recommending a book to begin on, I would suggest that "Major Barbara", "Man and Superman", and "Androcles and the Lion" will give you an idea of what Shaw is like; then, if you are interested, you can pick out others from the following chronological list in which I have indicated by a few words the theme, scene, or argument of the play and its preface. All Shaw's works are published by Brentano's, New York, three plays in one volume, or separately.

"Widowers' Houses", 1892 (tainted money).
"The Philanderer", 1893 (Ibsenites and esthetes).
"Mrs. Warren's Profession", 1893 (prostitution).
"Arms and the Man", 1894 (Serbian and Bulgarian war; anti-militarism).
"Candida", 1894 (triangle).
"You Never Can Tell", 1895 (farce comedy; the most popular of Shaw's plays on the stage).
"The Man of Destiny", 1895 (one act, Napoleon in an unconventional aspect).
"The Devil's Disciple", 1896 (American revolution).
"Caesar and Cleopatra", 1898 (Egypt Anglicized).
"Captain Brassbound's Conversion", 1899 (Morocco; Raisuli, Perdicaris, et al.)
"The Admirable Bashville or Constancy Unrewarded", 1902 (His novel: "Cashel Byron's Profession" put into blank verse "because it is easier to write than prose").
"Man and Superman", 1903 (romance topsy-turvey; marriage by conquest on the part of the woman; containing "The Revolutionist's Handbook" and interlude on heaven and hell).
"John Bull's Other Island", 1904 (Irish and English temperament contrasted, Home Rule question).
"Passion, Poison and Petrification", 1905 (burlesque extravaganza).
"Major Barbara", 1905 (Salvation Army and munition manufacture; problem of poverty).
"How He Lied to her Husband", 1905 (parody on "Candida").
"The Doctor's Dilemma", 1906 (satire on medical professor and attack on vivisection).
"Getting Married", 1908 (absurdities of marriage laws).
"The Showing-up of Blanco Bosnet", 1909 (Wild West; psychology of conversion; prohibited by censor).
"Press Cuttings", 1909 (anti-militarism).
"Misalliance", 1909 ("a debate in one sitting"; preface on parents and children).
"The Dark Lady of the Sonnets", 1910 (showing how Shakespeare got his phrases).
"Fanny's First Play", 1911 (satire of dramatic critics and middle-class morality).
"Androcles and the Lion", 1911 (early Christians; lion from Oz; disquisition on the canon of the
New Testament and the possibility of living Christianity).
"Overruled", 1912 (philandering again).
"Pygmalion", 1913 (phonetics and class prejudice, with a postscript proving that you never can tell how a Shaw play will come out).
"Great Catherine", 1913 (boisterous farce of Catherine II; contrast of Russian and British temperament).
"The Music Cure", 1914 (Marconi scandal; used as curtain raiser for Chesterton's "Magic", unpublished).

"Three Plays by Brieux", (Brentano's, 1911; contain "Damaged Goods" and other plays in which the French playwright attacks social evils as vigorously and outspokenly though not so wittily as Shaw. They are translated by Mrs. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Shaw provides a preface).

Two farcical plays of the war, "The Inca of Perusalem" and "Augustus does his Bit", produced by the London Stage Society and the former also in New York, are ascribed to Shaw though unacknowledged by him.

Of Shaw's critical work we have in book form "The Perfect Wagnerite", 1895, and "The Quintessence of Ibsen", 1890, which championed two unpopular causes; "The Sanity of Art", 1908, attacking Nordau's theory of the degeneracy of artists; and two volumes of "Dramatic Opinions and Essays", which, although reviews of current plays of the nineties, retain a permanent value. Shaw's four early novels "Cashel Byron's Profession", "An Unsocial Socialist", "Love Among the Artists", and "The Irrational Knot" are of less interest than his plays.

His socialism has found expression in "The Common Sense of Municipal Trading" and "Fabian Essays in Socialism", and numerous other tracts and articles as well as most of his plays and prefaces.

Shaw's fugitive contributions to journalism are too numerous and scattered to be cited here, but I will mention a few of them that are of special interest: "The Case Against Chesterton" (Metropolitan, 1916); "The Case for Equality" (Metropolitan, 1913); "The German Case Against Germany" (New York Times, April 16, 1916).

More has been written about Shaw's personality than about all the rest of my "Twelve Major Prophets" put together. The chief and authorized biography is "George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Work" by Professor Archibald Henderson of the University of North Carolina. (Cincinnati: Stewart and Kidd, 1911.) It contains a full bibliography up to its date and some twenty portraits as well as much inaccessible and unpublished material. Besides this we have:

"George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Joseph McCabe (London: Paul, French, Trubner, 1914); "Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study" by Percival P. Howe (Dodd, Mead, 1915); "George Bernard Shaw" by G. K. Chesterton (John Lane, 1909); "Bernard Shaw as Artist-Philosopher", an exposition of Shavianism, by Renée M. Deacon (John Lane, 1910); "George Bernard Shaw: His Plays" by H. L. Mencken (Luce, 1909); "Bernard Shaw" by Holbrook Jackson (Jacobs, 1907); and "The Innocence of Bernard Shaw" by D. Scott (Doran, 1914).

Latest of all is "Bernard Shaw: The Man and the Mask" by Richard Burton, a study of his plays in chronological order by the ex-president of the Drama League of America (Henry Holt, November, 1916).

"Bernard Shaw: An Epitaph" by John Palmer (London: Richards, 1915), "Harlequin or Patriot" (Century). Mr. Palmer comes to bury Shaw, not to praise him, yet gives him more credit than many of his admirers.

Biographical data and criticism are also to be found in Archibald Henderson's "European Dramatists" (Stewart and Kidd) and his "Interpreters of Life and the Modern Spirit" (Kennerley); Ford Madox Hueffer's "Memories and Impressions"; R. A. Scott-James's "Personality in Literature" which also contains sketches of Wells and Chesterton (London: Seeker, 1913); E. E. Hale's "Dramatists of To-day" (Holt, 1911); J. G. Huneker's "Iconoclasts" (Scribner, 1905); Cyril Maude's "The Haymarket Theater"; Edward Pease's "History of the Fabian Society" (London, 1916); Herman Bernstein's "With Master Minds" (Universal Series Co., New York, 1913); and "Bernard Shaw et son oeuvre" by Professor Cestre of the University of Bordeaux (Mercure de France, 1912).

Augustine F. Hamon, who has translated many of Shaw's plays into French, has published the lectures he gave on them at the Sorbonne in the volume "Le Molière du XXe siècle" (Paris: Figuière, 1913) which has been translated "The Twentieth Century Molière" (Stokes, 1915), and a separate chapter of it as "The Technique of Bernard Shaw's Plays" (London: Daniel, 1912).

The following articles on Shaw are noteworthy for one reason or another:

"Shaw Contra Mundum" by C. B. Chilton in The Independent, March 8, 1906, with a sharp retort by Shaw; Personal reminiscences by Frank Harris in Pearson's, 1916; Controversies of Shaw with Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton in The New Witness, 1916; "Bernard Shaw, Musician" by Florence Boylston Pelo in The Bookman, March, 1916; "Shaw in Portrait and Caricature" by H. Jackson in The Idler, 1908; "Shavian Religion" by the Rev. P. Gavan Duffy in The Century, vol. 87, p. 908; "Mr. Bernard Shaw's Philosophy" by A. K. Rogers in Hibbert Journal, 1910; "George Bernard Shaw" by D. A. Lord in Catholic World, March and April, 1916; "Bernard Shaw et la guerre" by Christabel Pankhurst in La Revue, 1915; "The Philosophy of Shaw" by Archibald Henderson in Atlantic, vol. 103, p. 227; "Die Quintessenz des Shawismus" by Helene Richter (Leipzig, 1913); "Bernard Shaw" by Julius Bab (Berlin: Fischer).

The ingenious Allen Upward has written a futuristic satire on Shaw in the form of a play: "Paradise Found or the Superman Found Out" (Houghton Mifflin, 1915). In Act I The Sleeper Wakes, à la Wells, two hundred years hence, finding himself in the Shaw Memorial Hall in the custody of the Most Noble Order of Hereditary Fabians, chief of whom are the Lady Wells and the Lord Keir-Hardie. The second act is set in the Headquarters of the Anti-Shavian League, which the awakened and disillusionized Shaw joins. The third act is in the Cabinet of H. V. M. Maharajah Sri Singh Bahadar, for of course India outvoted England as soon as universal suffrage was introduced into the British Empire.

[1] Published by Brentano's, 1904.

[2] Published by Brentano's, 1909.

[3] Mr. McCabe, in his life of Shaw, gives an interesting account of one of these addresses, that on "Christian Economics" at the City Temple in 1913. But Shaw is too much of a Christian still to suit McCabe.

[4] See for instance Shaw's book on "The Common Sense of Municipal Trading", based upon his experience as Vestryman and Borough Councillor.

[5] Pease, in his "History of the Fabian Society", gives an interesting account of these diverse movements which in their inception were closely allied. See also Knight's "Memorials of Thomas Davidson: the Wandering Scholar" and James' delightful sketch, "The Knight-Errant of the Intellectual Life", in his posthumous volume of "Memories and Studies."

[6] Printed in The Independent, July 28, 1910.

[7] For Shaw's opinions on phonetics see "Pygmalion", "Captain Brassbound's Conversion", and Henderson's biography, p. 326.

[8] Von unmusikalischen England und seiner musikalischen Heilsarmee. Deutscher Wille, February, 1916.

[CHAPTER II]

H. G. WELLS

Scientific Futurist

We are in the beginning of the greatest change that humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no epoch-making incident—but then there is no shock at a cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say, "Here it commences, now; last minute was night and this is morning." But insensibly we are in the day. If we care to look, we can foresee growing knowledge, growing order, and presently a deliberate improvement of the blood and character of the race. And what we can see and imagine gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses the imagination.

It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like when the day has fully come. We are creatures of the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes. All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.—"The Discovery of the Future" (1902).

Is Wells also among the prophets? Surely, and none with better right, even though we use the word "prophet" in its narrowest and most ordinary sense as one who foretells the future. He has foretold many futures for us, some utterly abhorrent, others more or less attractive. If we shudder at the thought of humanity on a freezing world fighting a losing battle with gigantic crustaceans as in "The Time Machine", or being suffocated on a blazing world as in "The Star", or being crushed under the tyranny of an omnipotent trust as in "When the Sleeper Wakes"—if none of these please us, then we have the option of a businesslike and efficient organization of society under the domination of the engineer as in "Anticipations", or a socialistic state under the beneficent sway of the Samurai as in "A Modern Utopia," or an instantaneous amelioration of human nature as "In the Days of the Comet." In thus presenting various solutions to the world problem Wells is not inconsistent. Every complicated equation has several roots, some of them imaginary. In solving a physical problem the scientist begins by disentangling the forces involved and then, taking them one at a time, calculates what would be the effect if the other forces did not act. So Wells is applying the scientific method to sociology when he attempts to isolate social forces and deal with them singly. If nothing intervenes to divert it, says the hydraulic engineer, the water of this mountain stream will develop such a momentum on reaching the valley. If no limitations are placed upon the consolidation of capital, says Mr. Wells, we may have a handful of directors ruling the world, as depicted in "When the Sleeper Wakes."

In its power to forecast the future science finds both its validation and justification. By this alone it tests its conclusions and demonstrates its usefulness. In fact, the sole object of science is prophecy, as Ostwald and Poincaré make plain. The mind of the scientific man is directed forward and he has no use for history except as it gives him data by which to draw a curve that he may project into the future. It is, therefore, not a chance direction of his fancy that so many of Wells's books, both romances and studies, deal with the future. It is the natural result of his scientific training, which not only led him to a rich unworked field of fictional motives, but made him consider the problems of life from a novel and very illuminative point of view. He gave definite expression to this philosophy in a remarkable address on "The Discovery of the Future", delivered at the Royal Institution of London, January 24, 1902. Here he shows that there is a growing tendency in modern times to shift the center of gravity from the past to the future and to determine the moral value of an act by its consequences rather than by its relation to some precedent. The justification of a war, for instance, may either be by reference to the past or to the future; that is, it may be based either upon some supposititious claim and violated treaty, or upon the assumed advantage to one or both parties. This idea, that in the moral evaluation of an act its results should be taken into consideration, has been popularly ascribed to the Jesuits, but since they have repeatedly and indignantly denied that it ever formed part of their teaching, it is questionable whether they could claim it now when it is becoming fashionable. At any rate, it is interesting to note that Wells gave very clear expression to this pragmatic principle five years before the publication of "Pragmatism" by James.

I hope that Mr. Wells will work out in detail his theory of prevision as a motive for morality. We cannot have too many such motives, and it is quite possible that this factor has not been fully recognized in our ethical systems, though I have no doubt that, as is usually the case with discoveries, especially in ethics, the theory is not quite so novel as it seems to him. In the meantime, I would call his attention to two weak points in argument, as he has sketched it in this lecture. He gives as an example of the two ways of looking at a problem the old question of whether a bad promise is better broken or kept. The "legal mind" would regard the promise as inviolable; the "creative mind" would say that in view of future consequences it should be disregarded. But I would suggest that, if morality is, as he defines it, "an overriding of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to something to be attained in the future", the one who viewed the act most clearly in the light of the future would keep the promise even at the cost of some suffering to himself and others rather than bring the lack of confidence which results from a violated oath.

I would also point out that the followers of dogma are not to be classed so positively with those who look only on the past. Certainly those whose morality is based on the hope of heaven and the fear of hell—and this is too numerous a class to be ignored—are as truly guided by their ideas of the future as are those who are working for the prosperity of the "Beyond-Man" some thousand years hence. Jonathan Edwards's first resolution was typical. It reads:

I. Resolved, That I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory and my own good, profit and pleasure, on THE WHOLE; without any consideration of the time, whether now, or never so many myriads of ages hence; to do whatever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general—whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

The highest morality is attained, in my opinion, by the class which Mr. Wells despises—namely, those who disregard neither causes nor effects, but consider every act in the light of both the past and the future. For this reason we are grateful to Mr. Wells for the light he is giving us on the future by his efforts in scientific prophecy.

Wells defines two divergent types of mind by the relative importance they attach to things past or things to come. The former type he calls the legal or submissive mind, "because the business, the practice and the training of a lawyer dispose him toward it; he of all men must most constantly refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent set, and most consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is only seeking to establish itself." In opposition to this is "the legislative, creative, organizing, masterful type", which is perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things; it is constructive and "interprets the present and gives value to this or that entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen." The use of the term "legislative" for this latter type is confusing, at least to an American, because unfortunately most of our legislators are lawyers and have minds of the legal or conventional type. "Scientific" would be a better term than "legislative", because most of our real revolutions in thought and industry originate in the laboratory.

In his "Modern Utopia" Wells introduces a more complete classification of mankind into (1) the Poietic, that is, the creative and original genius, often erratic or abnormal; (2) the Kinetic, that is, the efficient, energetic, "business man" type; (3) the Dull, "the people who never seem to learn thoroughly or hear distinctly or think clearly", and (4) the Base, those deficient in moral sense. The first two categories of Wells, the Poietic and Kinetic, correspond roughly to Ostwald's Romanticist and Classicist types of scientific men.[1] I have laid stress upon Wells's point of view and classification of temperaments because it seems to me that it gives the clue to his literary work. This is voluminous and remarkably varied, yet through all its forms can be traced certain simple leading motives. Indeed I am unable to resist the temptation to formulate his favorite theme as: The reaction of society against a disturbing force.

This certainly is the basic idea of much of his work and most of the best of it. He hit upon it early and he has repeated it in endless variations since. The disturbing force may be an individual of the creative or poietic type, an overpowering passion, a new idea, a social organization or a material change in the conditions of life. Whatever it may be, the natural inertia of society causes it to resist the foreign influence, to enforce compliance upon the aberrant individual, or to meet the new conditions by as little readjustment as possible. Usually the social organism is successful in overpowering the intruder or rebel, and on the whole we must admit that this is advantageous, even though it sometimes does involve the sacrifice of genius and the retardation of progress. Certainly no one is good enough or wise enough to be trusted with irresponsible power.

This is the lesson of "The Invisible Man." We all have been struck, probably, by a thought of the advantages which personal invisibility would confer. It is one of the most valued of fairy gifts. But perhaps only Wells has thought of the disadvantages of invisibility, how demoralizing such a condition would be to the individual, and yet how powerless he would be against the mass of ordinary people. Assuming that a man had discovered a way to become invisible by altering the refractive power of his body, as broken glass becomes invisible in water, in what situation would he be? He would be naked, of course, and he could not carry anything in his hands or eat in public. If it were winter he would leave tracks and would catch cold and sneeze. So the invisible man who starts to rob and murder at his own sweet will is soon run down by boys, dogs, and villagers as ignominiously as any common thief.

A more artistic expression to the same theme is given in "The Country of the Blind." A young man tumbled into an isolated valley of the Andes where lived a community which had through some hereditary disease lost many generations ago the power of sight. The stranger first thought of the proverb, "In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king", but when he tried to demonstrate his superiority he found it impossible. His talk about "seeing" the natives held to be the ravings of a madman and his clumsiness in their dark houses as proof of defective senses. He was as much at a disadvantage in a community where everything is adapted to the sightless as a blind man is in ours. He falls in love with a girl, but before he is allowed to marry her he must be cured of his hallucinations; a simple surgical operation, the removal of the two irritable bodies protuberant from his brain, will restore him to normality, say the blind surgeons, and make a sane and useful citizen of him. The entreaties of his lady love are added to the coercion of public opinion to induce him to consent. The exceptional man is beaten, he must either conform to the community or leave it. No matter how the story ends. The true novelist and dramatist, like the true mathematician, finds his satisfaction in correctly stating a problem, not in working it out.

The theme of these parables, the comparative powerlessness of the individual, however exceptionally endowed, against the coercive force of environment, Wells has developed at length in his novels; in "The New Machiavelli", for instance, where a statesman at the height of his public usefulness is overthrown and banished because he had succumbed to selfish passion and violated the moral code. Parnell is popularly supposed to be the model for this character rather more than the original Machiavelli, but it is, unfortunately, a type not rare either in history or fiction. Indeed this may be called the common plot of tragedy from the time when it began to be written, the vulnerable heel of Achilles, the little defect of character or ability that precipitates the catastrophe.

In Wells's hands this motive takes most fantastic forms. There was, for example, "The Man Who Could Work Miracles"; "his name was George McWhirter Fotheringay—not the sort of name by any means to lead to any expectation of miracles—and he was clerk at Gomshott's"; "he was a little man and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a mustache with ends he twisted up, and freckles." This unpromising looking individual, and he was a blatant skeptic, too, becomes suddenly possessed of the power to make anything happen that he wills, but he finds the use of this mysterious gift by no means to his advantage. It brings him and others into all sorts of trouble, and only his renunciation of it saves the world from destruction. Mr. Fotheringay lived in Church Row, and since Mr. Wells lives in the same street he perhaps knew him personally.

In "The War of Worlds" the earth is invaded by Martians, who are not in the least like those of Du Maurier or Professor Flournoy, but octopus-like creatures as far above mankind in intellect and command of machinery as we are above the animals, supermen surpassing the imagination of Nietzsche. They stride over the earth in machines of impregnable armor and devastate town and country with searchlights projecting rays more destructive than those of radium and much like Bulwer-Lytton's "vril." They feed on human blood and, if humanity is not to perish or become as sheep to these invaders, men and women must take to sewers and such like hiding places and wage incessant warfare against overwhelming odds.

In a passage that is to me the most gripping of anything Wells has written, a few unconquerable spirits plan the life that mankind must lead under these terrible conditions, but they are relieved from the necessity of putting it into execution by the interposition of an unexpected ally in the form of the most minute of creatures, the microbe. The men from Mars, not being immune to terrestrial diseases, are annihilated by one of them.

The formula remains the same although conditions are reversed in "The First Men in the Moon", for men, being naturally larger than the lunar people, might be supposed to dominate them, but, on the contrary, the ant-like inhabitants of the moon conquer the earthly invaders.

In "The Wonderful Visit" a curate goes out hunting for rare birds and shoots an angel on the wing. But the heavenly visitant does not play the rôle of the angel in Jerome's "The Passing of the Third Floor Back" and transform the character of all he meets. Wells's angel does not fit into the parish life, and everybody is relieved when he disappears. The same idea, the reaction of conventional society toward the unusual, is illustrated by "The Sea-Lady", where, instead of an angel from the sky, we have a mermaid from the ocean brought into the circle of a summer resort. Mr. Wells has said that by the sea-lady he meant to symbolize "love as a disturbing passion", the same theme as "The New Machiavelli." It may be taken to mean that, of course, or half a dozen other things as well. We are at liberty to disregard Mr. Wells's interpretation if we like. It is not an author's business to explain what his works mean. In fact it seems a bit officious and impertinent for him to attempt it. How little would there be left of the great literature of the world if it were reduced to what the author literally and consciously had in mind when he wrote. The value of any work of art depends upon what may be got out of it, not what was put into it.

"The Food of the Gods" is a case in point. These children who are fed on "boom-food" (presumably an extract from the pituitary body of the brain) and grow to gianthood may be taken to represent any new transforming force. If the story was conceived in Wells's earlier days he may have meant by it the power of science. If in the days of "Anticipations" he more likely had in mind efficiency or "scientific management." If when he was a member of the Fabian Society it doubtless stood for 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[2]:

"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. If (as not infrequently was the case) he happened to have two heads, he would point out the elementary maxim which declares them to be better than one. He would enlarge on the subtle modernity of such an equipment, enabling a giant to look at a subject from two points of view, or to correct himself with promptitude. But Jack was the champion of the enduring human standards, of the principle of one man one head, and one man one conscience, of the single head and the single heart and the single eye. Jack was quite unimpressed by the question of whether the giant was a particularly gigantic giant. All he wished to know was whether he was a good giant—that is, a giant who was any good to us. What were the giant's religious views; what his views on politics and the duties of the citizen? Was he fond of children—or fond of them only in a dark and sinister sense? To use a fine phrase for emotional sanity, was his heart in the right place? Jack had sometimes to cut him up with a sword in order to find out.

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.

"In the Days of the Comet"[3] he uses again the mechanism of the most artistic of his earlier short stories, "The Star", which is a little gem in its way without a superfluous word or a false tone. But those were the days when Mr. Wells was writing for pleasure; now he writes for a purpose, so the two stories resemble each other only in their common theme, the swishing across the earth of a comet's tail. In the former tale the event was viewed by a man in Mars who reported to his fellow scientists that the earth was little damaged, for the destruction of all life on it was too insignificant an event to be noticed at that distance. In the present book the earth was decidedly benefited, and the history is told by a man more foreign to us than the Martian, for he is a citizen of the new civilization that followed the "Great Change." A wonderful transformation had been effected in our atmosphere by its mingling with the cometary gases. The inert nitrogen of the air had been changed to some life-giving, clarifying, and stimulating gas; it would be unfair to the author to infer that this was nitrous oxid, more familiarly known as "laughing gas." Under its influence the inhabitants of the earth perceive the evils of our present régime and realize that they are mostly avoidable if everybody had good intentions and good sense. As an argument for Socialism it is a very weak one, for it gives away the case by conceding, at the outset, the main objection of the conservative, that you will have to change human nature before Socialism becomes possible. Of course, if all men were well-meaning and wise Socialism would be practical. It would also be unnecessary, because any social machinery, or, indeed, none at all, would work well enough under these conditions. The difficulty is to devise any changes that will make it work better with people as they are. That better people than we would be able to make for themselves better ways of living, nobody denies. That social, institutions influence the character of individuals, and that individuals influence the character of institutions, are correlative truths, but it is difficult for most people to keep them both in mind. Mr. Wells's collectivist conversion by a "green gas" is much the same thing as individualist conversion by religious influence, but we know of instances of the latter, while the former is purely hypothetical.

But, of course, the object of the book is not to show how Socialism can come about, but to assist in making it come about by acting on readers as a dose of the "green gas" and opening our eyes to the vulgarity, silliness, squalor, and wastefulness of our daily life. Mr. Wells is an artist by nature and a scientist by training, and ugliness and stupidity worry him more than wickedness and injustice. In fact, he would probably class all the evils of civilization under stupidity. But long ago it was said that against stupidity even the gods fight in vain, and it remains to be seen whether Socialists will succeed better.

The most attractive pages of the book to me are those that describe "the festival of the rubbish burnings", though Wells does not improve upon Washington Irving's treatment of the same theme. There are several things owned by our neighbors, even by relatives, which we should like to cast upon the flames. But we are afraid to light the bonfire lest the neighbors should burn up some of our treasures. That war is also an example of human stupidity, we agree, but just how to prevent it altogether until the rest of the world comes to our opinion, we do not understand. It takes two to stop a quarrel. The fleets of England and Germany were engaged in bombarding each other when the renovating comet struck the earth, but as soon as the eyes of the combatants and the "statesmen" who had instigated it were opened, and their anger quenched, it seemed incredible to them that they should have sought to kill each other for such trivial and remote causes. Jules Verne has a similar scene in "Dr. Ox's Experiment", but in that case the gas acts in the opposite way to excite the sluggish inhabitants of a peaceful Flemish village to make war against the neighboring village, and as soon as they are out of the contaminated atmosphere they look in bewilderment at the deadly weapons in their hands. Eight years later Wells's worst forebodings came to pass, but no "green gas" came to clear the air of hate.

But the particular passion that Wells would sweep away by the breath of his comet is one which, in the opinion of most people, is necessary to the maintenance of morality, that is, jealousy. The young English workingman who tells the story is infuriated against the young aristocrat who had seduced his sweetheart and is pursuing them with a revolver when the "Great Change" comes. Then he is content to share her affections with his former rival, and they all lived together happily ever after. In his works on Socialism Wells gives his reasons for thinking that, whether we wish it or not, the family is disintegrating, and that only under Socialism, which will insure a support sufficient for independence to both men and women, can better relations be established.

We might have known that as soon as science discovered the new world inside the atom the story-writer would follow close behind. We might also have known that H. G. Wells would be the first to exploit this new territory annexed to human knowledge, for he has always kept an eye on scientific progress even while seemingly engrossed in British politics and marriage problems. So he wrote a romance of the atom, "The World Set Free", describing the Great War months before it happened.

Our sleepy earth has been caught napping by every great change that has thus far reached humanity, and probably Mr. Wells is quite right in supposing that a sudden release of the vast stores of energy hidden in the atom would find civilization as unprepared for the social, economic, political, and intellectual results of the new energies in industry as it was for the effects of the great industrial revolution which followed the introduction of steam power not much more than a century ago.

But Mr. Wells has the alertest literary imagination of any modern writer; the significance of the new physics has not escaped him as it has the common run of novelists intently searching for good plots and neglecting entirely the rich ore awaiting any writer who happened to have an elementary knowledge of modern science. Many short stories and one or two novels have introduced more or less accurate accounts of radium as a side-show to a love story or an incident in a detective tale. But it required the boldness of Mr. Wells to throw overboard entirely the conventional novel plot and make a hero of the cosmic energies. "The World Set Free" resembles "The War in the Air" in its vivid account of world-wide war, nations armed with novel weapons and forces, appalling power for destruction and attack in the hands of every nation, together with complete incapacity for defense by any nation, the resulting collapse of credit, panic, starvation, anarchy and a general social débâcle. But while the "war in the air" meant the end of civilization, the war with "atomic bombs" in the present book results in a general treaty of peace, the foundation of a world state under a provisional government, and a successful reorganization of society in which the forces which had been used by nations and empires to conquer each other are directed to the task of subduing nature to human aims.

Like the reconstructed world of "In the Days of the Comet" the future state is very faintly depicted, hinted at rather than described, in "The World Set Free." It differs from the numerous other Utopias of Mr. Wells in that, whereas the world states of "Anticipations", "A Modern Utopia", "In the Days of the Comet", etc., could be brought about by nothing more than taking the author's advice on politics, law, economics, and social customs, "The World Set Free" depends upon scientific discovery. A new hypothesis, in short, has given the inhabitants of this Utopia an advantage over all previous Utopias. They have energy at their command almost as freely accessible as water or air, and so the labor question is annihilated, the whole world becomes a leisure class, and everybody is free to devote his life to gardening, artistic decoration, and scientific research. Country life becomes a constant delight. The agriculturist shrinks to less than one per cent of the population. The lawyer follows the warrior into extinction. "Contentious professions cease to be an honorable employment for men."

The Parliament of the World, which came into existence after the atomic explosions of 1950, was simple and sensible; fifty new representatives elected every five years; proportional representation; every man and woman with an equal vote; election for life subject to recall; each voter putting on his ballot the names of those he wishes elected and those he wishes recalled; a representative recallable by as many votes as the quota that elected him. But political machinery does not count for much in this most modern of Utopias. A scrap of the conversation between the President of the United States and King Egbert, "the young king of the most venerable kingdom in Europe", will illustrate the point of view:

"Science," the King cried presently, "is the new king of the world."

"Our view," said the President, "is that sovereignty resides with the people."

"No," said the King, "the sovereign is a being more subtle than that, and less arithmetical; neither my family nor your emancipated people. It is something that floats about us and above us and through us. It is that common impersonal will and sense of necessity of which science is the best understood and most typical aspect. It is the mind of the race. It is that which has brought us here, which has bowed us all to its demands."

The agency which effects this transformation is the discovery of how to release the internal energy of the atom, which we now know exists, although we do not know how to get at it. Since wealth is essentially nothing but energy this means that we have within reach enough to make multi-millionaires of all of us; a tantalizing thought. The new disintegrating element, according to Mr. Wells, is carolinum, an element that Professor Baskerville also discovered on paper a few years ago. This exhaustless supply of energy being utilized in machinery sets free the laborer and swells the army of the unemployed; and since, incidentally, one of the by-products of its decomposition is gold, the financial systems of the world go to smash. But naturally carolinum finds speedy employment in war. A bomb of it buried in the soil becomes a perpetual volcano, half of it exploding every seventeen days. A few bombs of this radioactive element dropped from aeroplanes demolish Paris and Berlin and throw the world into a chaos of confusion, which Wells's characteristic style, with its flashlight visions, its tumultuous phrases, and its shifting points of view, its alternations of generalization and detail, is particularly adapted to depict.

The value of this romance, aside from its interest, lies in the emphatic way in which it teaches the lesson that civilization is primarily a matter of the utilization of natural energy and is measurable in horse power. Unfortunately we have to depend upon the sunshine, either that of the present or of the carboniferous era; we have no key to the treasure-house of the atom. Radium gives out its energy without haste or rest, just as fast at the temperature of liquid air as at the temperature of liquid iron, always keeping itself a little hotter than its surroundings, however hot these may be. If only we could get at this source of exhaustless energy—but let Wells say what that would mean:

Not only should we have a source of power so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a fleet of battleships or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated force.

It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day toward radio-activity exactly as our ancestor stood toward fire before he had learnt to make it. He knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know radio-activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax of that civilization which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage, just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an entirely new civilization. The energy we need for our very existence, and with which Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but....

Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare surplus of Nature's energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the pinnacle of this civilization to the beginning of the next.[4]

Wells is a futurist in the true sense of the word, appraising all things by what shall come out of them. This led him to a realization of the importance of eugenics long before the fad came in. In "Mankind in the Making" he formulated his test of civilization in these words:

Any collective human enterprise, institution, party, or state, is to be judged as a whole and completely, as it conduces more or less to wholesome and hopeful births and according to the qualitative and quantitative advance due to its influence toward a higher and ampler standard of life.

But when it comes to practical measures for securing these advantages, Wells shows a characteristic timidity. He condemns certain obvious dysgenic measures, such as the action of school boards in imposing celibacy upon women teachers, but in several respects legislation in America has already gone beyond what he ten years ago considered possible. So, too, in his "Anticipations" he suggested as future possibilities inventions and practices that were then familiar to us in this country. It is hard for a man nowadays to be a prophet. If he doesn't look sharp he will find himself an historian instead.

When H. G. Wells in 1902 essayed the rôle of prophet and in his volume entitled "Anticipations" tried to forecast the future of the world on scientific principles, he excited the same popular interest that any guess at coming events arouses, but there were few who took him seriously. Now, however, "Anticipations" makes very interesting reading. Much of it has already come to pass, and we see that Wells's chief mistake lay in putting his forecast too far ahead; for instance, when he says that he is "inclined to believe.... that very probably before 1950 a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound."

The chapter on war in "Anticipations" shows astonishing power of prescience in what he says of the use of the submarine and armored automobile, the development of trench warfare, the substitution of the machine gun for the rifle, and the abolition of the distinction between military and civilian parts of a nation. His discussion of the new forms of warfare and the inadequacy of the old methods of management and training is full of warnings which it were well for his country to have heeded. This is shown if we compare that feeling passage in which he describes a future British army setting out to meet a scientifically organized foe with an actual battle on the Artois field as seen from the German side. The first column is quoted from "Anticipations", published fifteen years ago. The second column is taken from Kellermann's picture of the battle of Loos, September 22, 1915, published in the Continental Times of Berlin. Bernard Kellermann, one of the most brilliant of the younger writers of Germany, is well known in America through his novel, "The Tunnel", dealing with a submarine passage to Europe.

THE PROPHECY, 1902

I seem to see, almost as if he were symbolic, the gray old general—the general who learned his art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century, the altogether too elderly general with his epaulettes and decorations, his uniform that has still its historical value, his spurs and his sword—riding along on his obsolete horse, by the side of his doomed column. Above all things he is a gentleman. And the column looks at him lovingly with its countless boys' faces, and the boys' eyes are infinitely trustful, for he has won battles in the old time. They will believe in him to the end. They have been brought up in their schools to believe in him and his class, their mothers have mingled respect for the gentlefolk with the simple doctrines of their faith, their first lesson on entering the army was the salute. The "smart" helmets His Majesty, or some such unqualified person, chose for them lie hotly on their young brows, and over their shoulders slope their obsolete, carelessly-sighted guns. Tramp, tramp, they march, doing what they have been told to do, incapable of doing anything they have not been told to do, trustful and pitiful, marching to wounds and disease, hunger, hardship, and death. They know nothing of what they are going to meet, nothing of what they will have to do; religion and the rate-payer and the rights of the parent working through the instrumentality of the best club in the world have kept their souls and minds, if not untainted, at least only harmlessly veneered with the thinnest sham of training or knowledge. Tramp, tramp, they go, boys who will never be men, rejoicing patriotically in the nation that has thus sent them forth, badly armed, badly clothed, badly led, to be killed in some avoidable quarrel by men unseen. And beside them, an absolute stranger to them, a stranger even in habits of speech and thought, and at any rate to be shot with them fairly and squarely, marches the sub­altern—the son of the school-burking, share-holding class—a slightly taller sort of boy, as ill-taught as they are in all that concerns the realities of life, ignorant of how to get food, how to get water, how to keep fever down and strength up, ignorant of his practical equality with the men beside him, carefully trained under a clerical head­master to use a crib, play cricket rather nicely, look all right whatever happens, believe in his gentility, and avoid talking "shop."

So the gentlemanly old general—the polished drover to the shambles—rides, and his doomed column march by, in this vision that haunts my mind.

I cannot foresee what such a force will even attempt to do against modern weapons. Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads, who make up the infantry battalions, the main mass of all the European armies of to-day, whenever they come against a sanely organized army. There is nowhere they can come in; there is nothing they can do.

The scattered, invisible marks­men with their supporting guns will shatter their masses, pick them off individually, cover their line of retreat and force them into wholesale surrenders. It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting. Yet the bitterest and crudest things will have to happen, thousands and thousands of poor boys will be smashed in all sorts of dreadful ways and given over to every conceivable form of avoidable hardship and painful disease before the obvious fact that war is no longer a business for half-trained lads in uniform, led by parson-bred sixth-form boys and men of pleasure and old men, but an exhaustive demand upon very carefully educated adults for the most strenuous best that is in them, will get its practical recognition.[5]

---

THE FULFILLMENT, 1915

They made the essay with absolutely new, absolutely antiquated tactics—tactics which are no longer recognized in this war. It was something really un­heard of! Our staff officers stood and regarded it—their mouths open in astonishment. It was observed, shortly before noon, that the English were advancing toward our positions in dense masses, eight lines deep in echelon—from Loos. A hail of shells that churned up the ground was supposed to smooth the way for the storming columns. At the same time, to the east of Loos (there is a bit of rising ground there scarcely noticeable as you drive over it in a wagon, called Hill 70), we saw English artillery come riding up—quite open—in the broad of day—under the naked heavens! These batteries carried bridge materials with them for the crossing of trenches and natural obstacles. The English general we caught describes this action as one that was especially "sporting." There can be no doubt about its dashing quality. But there was more to come. In the distance, on the level plain, one or two English cavalry regiments were visible—Dragoons of the Guard. Eight lines of infantry? Artillery driving across the open? Cavalry in the background? It was really unbelievable! It was the plan of a veritable pitched battle from a forgotten age, the masterly idea of a senile brain, which had come limping along fifty years behind the times! Generals in our day grow obsolete as rapidly as inventions and sciences. The war has taught us that the blood of nations, the incalculably precious blood, is to be entrusted only to the freshest, the most elastic, the most gifted of military spirits, the very cream of the crop. Those old celebrities of theirs, staggering under their orders, should have been consigned to relay stations by the English. The English troops carried out their attack with a splendid gesture, with admirable bravoure. They were young and they bore no orders on their uniforms. They carried out the commands of their celebrated and senile authorities, carried them out with a blind courage—in this day of mortars, telephones and machine-guns. As magnificent as was their bearing, even so pitiful was the collapse of their onslaught. Before the eightfold storming columns had been able to make ten steps, they came under our combined fire-rifles, machine-guns, cannon. The batteries were lying in wait and they obeyed the telephone. The English knights and baronets had not reckoned with this. Fresh reserves came running up and were mown down in the cross-fire of our machine-guns. Those riding batteries came to a miserable end. They too came within the zone of the machine-guns, and our heavy mortars, notified by telephone, got hold of them so swiftly and so thoroughly, that they were not even given time to unlimber. The regiments of cavalry that were waiting in the background, ready to come dashing through, got salvoes of the heaviest shells full in their faces, and drew back without having drawn a blade from the scabbard. That finished the pitched battle. And the attack broke to pieces in front of our wire entanglements. A prodigious number of their dead lay before our trenches. We had made 800 prisoners, among them a colonel, four majors, and fifteen officers. At a conservative estimate, the losses of the English in this single section of the division, may be fixed in dead and wounded as at least 20,000. It was clear that, apart from a small local success, it had been a disastrous job for the Britishers. Never before has it been so clearly proved that war is not a sport for a dozen or two of privileged dilettantes.[6]

Wells made his first hit with "The Time Machine", written under high pressure of the idea within a fortnight by keeping at his desk almost continuously from nine in the morning to eleven at night. It is based upon the theory that time is a fourth dimension of space,[7] and by a suitable invention one may travel back and forth along that line. Having once got his seat in his time-machine Wells has never abandoned it. He uses it still in his novels, in "Tono-Bungay," "The New Machiavelli", and "The Passionate Friends", telling the story partly in retrospect, partly in prospect, flying back and forth in the most mystifying manner, producing thereby a remarkable effect of the perpetual contemporaneity of existence, though some readers are dizzied by it.

The charm of a masked ball is that it enables people to do and say what they please, in short to reveal themselves because their faces are concealed. Anonymity has the same effect, as many a name from "Currer Bell" to "Fiona McLeod" attests. So it is not surprising that the book[8] which purports to have been written by one "George Boon" and compiled by one "Reginald Bliss" shows Wellsian characteristics more pronounced than any of the volumes of which H. G. Wells owns authorship.

For one thing Wells obviously likes to start things better than to finish them. He is apt to run out of breath before he comes to the end of a novel, and if he gets his second wind it is likely to be some other kind of wind. In most of his books except the short stories the reader feels that the author is saying to himself, "I wish I had this thing off my hands so I could get at that new idea of mine."

Then, too, Wells is fond of putting a story inside of a story, like the Arabian Nights, and it often happens that the "flash-backs", to borrow a cinema phrase, are confusing. The framework of "The Modern Utopia" is an instance of this. It is sometimes hard to tell in this where we are or who is speaking.

Wells is inimitable in his ability to sketch a character in a few swift strokes, but he does not care much for the character afterward. He delights in taking such snapshots, but he hates to develop them. His mind is quick to change. He is liable to be disconcerted by a sudden vision of an opposing view. Sometimes in the middle of a sentence he will be seized with a doubt of what he is saying, and being an honest man, he leaves it in air rather than finish it after he has lost confidence. He may double on his track like a hunted fox within the compass of a single volume.

Finally, Wells is fond of satirizing his contemporaries, including his best friends and his former selves. He is given to mixing realistic description with recondite symbolism, desultory argumentation with extraneous personalities, and other incongruous combinations of style and thought.

Now all these peculiarities, call them faults or merits as you like, are to be found intensified in "Boon" Etc. First Mr. Wells introduces Mr. Bliss, who then introduces Mr. Boon, a famous author deceased, and tells how they together invented Mr. Hallery, who introduces a host of living writers, big and little, known and unknown, at the World Conference on the Mind of the Race. He has given me the honor of a seat on a special committee of Section S, devoted to Poiometry, the scientific measurement of literary greatness.

The volume is illustrated by the author—whoever he may be—but the best caricatures are not the graphic but the verbal ones with their amusing parodies of style. Perhaps the best of these is an imaginary conversation between Henry James and George Moore, in which both gentlemen pursue entirely independent trains of thought.

Here's the sketch of "Dodd." We recognize him, although we do not know who Dodd is:

Dodd is a leading member of the Rationalist Press Association, a militant agnostic, and a dear compact man, one of those Middle Victorians who go about with a preoccupied, caulking air, as though, having been at great cost and pains to banish God from the Universe, they were resolved not to permit Him back on any terms whatever. He has constituted himself a sort of alert customs officer of a materialistic age, saying suspiciously: "Here, now, what's this rapping under the table here?" and examining every proposition to see that the Creator wasn't being smuggled back under some specious new generalization. Boon used to declare that every night Dodd looked under his bed for the Deity, and slept with a large revolver under his pillow for fear of a revelation.

One advantage of anonymity is that Wells can contradict himself with even more freedom than usual. For instance, he expresses great contempt for Bergson and his "Pragmatism for Ladies." But not long ago, in "Marriage", he was contemptuous of "Doctor Quiller [Schiller] of Oxford," for "ignoring Bergson and fulminating a preposterous insular Pragmatism."

Much of the volume was manifestly written in the calm days before the war, but the fragment entitled "The Wild Asses of the Devil" expresses in fantastic guise his—and the world's—confusion and despair at the catastrophe which has overwhelmed the human race. "It is like a dying man strangling a robber in his death grip. We shall beat them, but we shall be dead beat in doing it," says Boon, and he rejects all suggestions that it may be a good thing in the end:

No! War is just the killing of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over, then civilization will have to begin all over again. They will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load and the days of our jesting are done. The Wild Asses of the Devil are loose and there is no restraining them. What is the good of pretending that the Wild Asses are the instruments of Providence kicking better than we know? It is all evil. Evil.

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 through 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 sixty-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 of the celebrated London X. One evening some ten 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 sunbrowned 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 rôle 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 pith ball. He has a horror of waste, war, dirt, cruelty, cowardice, incompetency, vagueness of mind, dissipation of energy, inconvenience of households, and all friction, mental or physical. But yet his ineradicable realization of the concrete will not allow him to escape from these disagreeables by taking refuge in such artificial paradises as Fourier's phalanx or Morris' idyllic anarchism. Wells is a Socialist, yet he finds not merely the Marxians, but even the Fabians, too dogmatic and strait-laced for him. His "Modern Utopia" is, I think, the first to mar the perfection of its picture by admitting a rebel, a permanently irreconcilable, antagonistic individuality, a spirit that continually denies. Yet we know that if a utopia is to come on earth it must have room for such.

Wells would never make a leader in any popular movement. He has the zeal of the reformer, but he has his doubts, and, what's worse, he admits them. In the midst of his most eloquent passages he stops, shakes his head, runs in a row of dots, and adds a few words, hinting at another point of view. He has what James defined as the scientific temperament, an intense desire to prove himself right coupled with an equally intense fear lest he may be wrong.

Your true party man must be quite color blind. He must see the world in black and white; must ignore tints and intermediate shades. Wells as Socialist could not help seeing—and saying—that there were many likable things about the Liberals. As a Liberal he must admit that the Tories have the advantage in several respects. He professes to view religion rationalistically, yet there are outbursts of true mysticism to be found in his books, passages which prove that he has experienced the emotion of personal religion more clearly than many a church member.

He has the courage of his convictions, but it does not extend much beyond putting them into print. I doubt whether, if he were given autocratic power, he would inaugurate his "Modern Utopia" or any other of his visions. At least he has hitherto resisted all efforts to induce him to carry them into effect.

For instance, one of the most original and interesting features of his "Modern Utopia" was the Samurai, the ruling caste, an order of voluntary noblemen; submitting to a peculiar discipline; wearing a distinctive dress; having a bible of their own selected from the inspiring literature of all ages; spending at least a week of every year in absolute solitude in the wilderness as a sort of spiritual retreat and restorative of self-reliance. A curious conception it was, a combination of Puritanism and Bushido, of Fourier and St. Francis, of Bacon's Salomon's House, Plato's philosophers ruling the republic, and Cecil Rhodes's secret order of millionaires ruling the world.

One day a group of ardent young men and women, inspired by this ideal, came to Wells and announced that they had established the order, they had become Samurai, and expected him to become their leader, or at least to give them his blessing; instead of which Wells gave them a lecture on the sin of priggishness and sent them about their business. I have no doubt he was right about it, nor does his disapproval of this premature attempt to incorporate the Samurai in London prove that there was not something worth while in the idea. But it shows that Wells knew what his work was in the world and proposed to stick to it, differing therein from other Utopians: Edward Bellamy, who because his fantastic romance, "Looking Backward", happened to strike fire, spent the rest of his life in trying to bring about the coöperative commonwealth by means of clubs, papers, and parties; Dr. Hertzka, who wasted his substance in efforts to found a real Freeland on the steppes of Kilimanjaro, Africa.

Perhaps the matter with Wells is simply that he cannot find his proper pigeon-hole. Perhaps I can find it. Wells has little sympathy with any political grouping or ideal regnant to-day. The orthodox Tory is in his view simply a man without imagination. The orthodox Liberal is a mere sentimentalist substituting democratic phrases for science and discipline. The Imperialist, though touching Wells at some points, repels him by his mania for military expenditure and his ignorant race prejudice. The Socialist or Labor Party man is appallingly narrow and totally unimpressed with the need for intelligence to rule the State. In "The New Machiavelli" the hero hovers distressfully over the entire field of modern politics, finding as little rest for his soul as Noah's dove on the first trip from the ark found for its feet. Once and once only has Wells's ideal found even partial embodiment, and that was in the best days of the Roman Empire.

There was the Great State (in the familiar capital letters); a world state so far as the world was known and civilized. There was a universal language, exact and lucid. There was freedom and security of travel, at least as great as in those same countries to-day. True, Wells would have disapproved of slavery. But so did the Stoics of the Empire disapprove of slavery, at least in theory. Their ideal was a universal citizenship. In the later Empire every freeman in the Roman Empire was called a citizen. There was tolerance, not only of religion but of manners, such as the narrow and parochial States of Western Europe which succeeded its fall have never known till within a hundred years. Statecraft was a science; devotion to the State a cult. There were the legions, examples of duty and discipline and scientific warfare, and yet a few thousands of troops sufficed to police and guard a whole civilized, wealthy, complex world state.

But most important of all was the Roman Law. Based on logical principles; divested of superstitious accessories and irrational taboos; universal and in the main equitable; raised above the Empire and the muddy immediacies of politics till it seemed the voice of nature itself; flexible and changing, but by growth rather than whim, it was the intellectual fabric of the Empire. It so happened that a despotic Emperor wielded the power of state, but still it was the State and not the mere person of the Emperor that was really reverenced. It was certainly not the man or the artist that was divine in Nero, but the office. Even in its decadent and Byzantine days traces of the old ideal remained, and it was not "Charles Richard Henry Etcetera, by the Grace of God King of Anyland, Duke of Somewherelse, Knight of the Golden Spur, Most Reverend Lord of the Free Cities of Lower Ruritania" in the silly medieval (and modern) style, but "Senatus Populusque Romani" and "Res Publica." The medieval Papacy was as universal in structure, but was obscurantist in basis, and left behind it as a legacy the memory of the crusades and the monasteries and great cathedrals as its monuments. The Roman Empire was rationalist in basis, and left behind it laws, straight roads, aqueducts, baths, theaters, libraries, and municipal organizations. Chesterton is a romantic and rather likes than otherwise the whimsical eccentricities of modern national institutions. But Wells, though he loves to play with science, takes statecraft as seriously as Marcus Aurelius, and, like him, he is a citizen of the Great State, the Cosmopolis. The "Modern Utopia" might have grown out of the actual Roman Empire had the right turnings been taken from that time to this; no other state or civilization would have formed its basis.

The significance of Wells's advocacy of Socialism lies in the fact that it is addressed to the middle classes. He might be called "The Apostle to the Genteels." He took part for a time in the aggressive socialistic campaign led by the Fabian Society on lines distinct from but parallel to the Marxian working class propaganda. The orthodox Marxian has little use for middle-class people. He expects them to become extinct so shortly that it is no use trying to convert them. He takes no more interest in them than missionaries do in the Tasmanians. They will be ground fine between the upper and nether millstones of the trusts and the unions. Such individuals who survive will be able to do so only by becoming retainers of the capitalists, and as such will be engulfed with them in the revolutionary cataclysm which will end the present era.

With a firm faith in this theory, it is no wonder that he often manifests annoyance at the slowness of the bourgeoisie in carrying out the part assigned them in the Marxian program. They do not disappear fast enough, nor do they show any eagerness to take sides either with the proletariat or with the capitalists. On the contrary, they view both with a certain distrust and antipathy, and maintain a curious confidence in their ability to manage both factions in the future as they have in the past. In short, they are not a negligible quantity, but hold the balance of power, at least for the present, and can retard or accelerate the progress of Socialism to a considerable though an indefinite extent.

Obviously, if the middle class as a whole is to be converted to Socialism, it must be by different arguments than those found effective with the proletariat. The Manifesto does not appeal to them, because they have more to lose than their "chains." There must be something more alluring than a universal competency and a steady job to arouse them to the need of radical changes.

The sight of capitalists excites emulation and ambition rather than hatred and despair. A man is not inclined to vote millionaires out of existence so long as he cherishes a secret hope of becoming one. They do not see the proletarian papers and would be repelled by them if they did.

Wells's outline of the form that middle-class propaganda should take presents several novel and interesting points, but the most conspicuous is his discussion of the effect of Socialism on family relations. His frankness and honesty in bringing that question into the open is in commendable contrast with the tendency of most advocates of Socialism to conceal or minimize the fact that any such profound rearrangement of economic relations as is involved in Socialism must inevitably affect the family, because the economic factor in this institution is undeniably great, although how great is a matter of dispute.

Wells boldly attempts to convert a prejudice into an argument by appealing to the very classes which, it is generally supposed, would be repelled by the bare mention of the subject, to save the family from its impending disintegration by adopting Socialism.

That Wells is right in thinking that the problem of the family is a serious one at the present time is clearly shown by the statistics collected by Sidney Webb for the Fabian Society. He proves:

That the decline in the birthrate which is depriving England and Wales of at least one-fifth of every year's normal crop of babies is not accounted for by any alteration in the age, sex or marital condition of the population, by any refusal or postponement of marriage, or by any of the effects of "urbanization" or physical deterioration of sections of the community. The statistical evidence points, in fact, unmistakably to the existence of a volitional regulation of the marriage state that is now ubiquitous throughout England and Wales, among, apparently, a large majority of the population.

So much other statisticians have deduced, but Mr. Webb went farther and obtained a direct proof of his conclusion by the circulation of several hundred question blanks among middle-class families. The results are startling. Out of a total of one hundred and twenty families reporting in one category, there were only seven in which the number of children was not intentionally limited. The average number of children in such limited families is one and a half, which is only one third what it was twenty-five years ago. In about sixty per cent of the cases "the poverty of the parents in relation to their standard of comfort" was a cause in the limitation of the family.

This shows how important a factor the increased expense of raising children has become in well-to-do families, and unless the population of the future is to be recruited very largely by the improvident, ignorant, and debased, it points toward some form of state encouragement of the production of well-born children. Wells suggested a differential income tax. Doctor Galton advocated the endowment of gifted parents. The war has brought this question out of the realm of speculative controversy into that of practical necessity. Some of the remedies proposed now make the measures suggested by Wells ten years before seem timid and conservative.

His early training in dynamical physics and evolutionary biology furnished him with the modern scientific point of view when he entered upon the old battlegrounds of sociology and metaphysics. He therefore never could believe in a static state, socialistic or other, and he saw clearly that much of what passes for sound philosophical reasoning is fallacious, because the world cannot be divided up into distinct things of convenient size for handling, each done up in a neat package and plainly labeled as formal logic requires. Here he is extremely radical, going quite as far as Bergson in his anti-intellectualism though attacking the subject in a very different way. He denies the categories, the possibility of number, definition, and classification.[9] He brings three charges against our Instrument of Knowledge: first, that it can work only by disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identically similar objects in this respect or that; and, second, that it can only deal freely with negative terms by treating them as though they were positive; and, third, that the sort of reasoning which is valid for one level of human thought may not work at another. No two things are exactly alike, and when we try to define a class of varied objects we get a term which represents none of them exactly and may therefore lead to an erroneous conclusion when brought back again to a concrete case. Or, as Wells puts it in his laboratory language: "The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it." "Of everything we need to say this is true, but it is not quite true."

What the artist long ago taught us, that there are no lines in nature, the scientist has come to believe, and perhaps in time the logicians will come to see it too. At present, however, they are, as Wells says, in that stage of infantile intelligence that cannot count above two. This is amusingly illustrated in a defense of logic by Mr. Jourdain in which he says:[10]

To these strictures of Mr. Wells on logic we may reply, it seems to me, that either they are psychological—in which case they are irrelevant to logic—or they are false. Thus the principle that "no truth is quite true", implying as it does that itself is quite true, implies its own falsehood, and is therefore false.

This sort of thing might have passed as a good joke in the days of Epimenides, the Cretan, when logic was a novelty, and people amused themselves, like boys learning to lasso, in tripping each other up with it. But it is funny to see this ancient weapon of scholasticism brought out to ward off the attacks of modernism, such attacks from without the ramparts as Wells's essay and from within as F. C. S. Schiller's big volume, "Formal Logic."

Wells has not only the sense of continuity in space, but, what is rarer, the sense of continuity in time. "The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents. This is not any sort of poetical statement: it is a statement of fact." "We are episodes in an experience greater than ourselves." There is a desperate sincerity about the man that I like. He seems always to be struggling to express himself with more exactness than language allows, to say neither more nor less than he really believes at the time. I do not think that he takes delight in shocking the bourgeoisie as Shaw does. Wells would rather, I believe, agree with other people than disagree. He is not a congenital and inveterate nonconformist. But he insists always on "painting the thing as he sees it." His later novels have come under the ban of the British public libraries because, conceiving sex as a disturbing element in life, he put it into his novels as a disturbing element, thus offending both sides, those of puritanical temperament who wanted it left out altogether and those of profligate temperament who wanted to read of amorous adventure with no unpleasant facts obtruded. His sociological works, in which, while insisting on permanent monogamy as the ideal, he prophesied that the future would show greater toleration toward other forms of marital relationship, aroused less criticism than the frank portrayal of existing conditions in his novels.

All his longer novels are largely concerned with the problem of marital life but the only one of them that comes near to a solution is that entitled "Marriage." The couple in this case, the Traffords, are exceptionally decent people for characters in a modern novel, and if their marriage is not a success it is not on account of any interference from a third party, but rather because of the cares and complications that come from family life and financial prosperity. The heroine is a charming specimen of the modern young woman, educated at "Oxbridge", whose chief fault is a constitutional inability to keep her accounts straight. She spends money with excellent taste, but without regard to her husband's bank balance. Consequently Trafford has to lay aside his researches in molecular physics to work out a successful process for synthetic rubber—easy to a man of his ability.

Mr. Wells apparently adopts the theory formulated by Professor Devine, of Columbia, as to the normal division of labor between husband and wife, that men should be experts in the art of getting money and women experts in the art of spending it. Where both parties fail is in regarding these duties as ends in themselves, the men getting absorbed in business and the women buying things that they do not want, that nobody needs, just for the sake of buying. Apparently Mr. Wells has hope of curing the men, but none of curing the women.

Premature attempts at realization, the demand for immediate results, the disregard of purely scientific research, the swamping of life by restless activity and futile efforts at reform, these are the ailments of the modern world, according to our author. His satire spares neither conservatives nor radicals. The following passage would apply to New York as well as London:

London, of course, is always full of Movements. Essentially they are absorbents of superfluous feminine energy. They have a common flavor of progress and revolutionary purpose, and common features in abundant meetings, officials, and organization generally. Few are expensive and still fewer produce any tangible results in the world. They direct themselves at the most various ends: the poor, that favorite butt, either as a whole or in such typical sections as the indigent invalid or the indigent aged, the young, public health, the woman's cause, the prevention of animal food, anti-vivisection, the gratuitous advertisement of Shakespeare (that neglected poet), novel but genteel modifications of medical or religious practice, dress reform, the politer aspects of socialism, the encouragement of aeronautics, universal military service, garden suburbs, domestic arts, proportional representation, duodecimal arithmetic, and the liberation of the drama. They range in size and importance from campaigns on a Plessingtonian scale to sober little intellectual Beckingham things that arrange to meet half yearly and die quietly before the second assembly. If Heaven by some miracle suddenly gave every Movement in London all it professed to want, our world would be standing on its head and everything would be extremely unfamiliar and disconcerting. But, as Mr. Roosevelt once remarked, the justifying thing about life is the effort and not the goal, and few Movements involve any real and impassioned struggle to get to the ostensible object. They exist as an occupation; they exercise the intellectual and moral activities without undue disturbance of the normal routines of life. In the days when everybody was bicycling an ingenious mechanism called Hacker's home bicycle used to be advertised. Hacker's home bicycle was a stand bearing small rubber wheels, upon which one placed one's bicycle (properly equipped with a cyclometer) in such a way that it could be mounted and ridden without any sensible forward movement whatever. In bad weather, or when the state of the roads made cycling abroad disagreeable, Hacker's home bicycle could be placed in front of an open window and ridden furiously for any length of time. Whenever the rider tired, he could descend—comfortably at home again—and examine the cyclometer to see how far he had been. In exactly the same way the ordinary London Movement gives scope for the restless and progressive impulse in human nature without the risk of personal entanglements or any inconvenient disturbance of the milieu.[11]

To accomplish a cure, or at least to obtain a diagnosis of the evil, Mr. Wells resorts to a curious expedient which he suggested first in his "Modern Utopia", where he laid down as one of the rules of his new order of Samurai that a man who aspired to be a leader of men should for a week every year go off into the desert and live absolutely alone, without books or other distractions to keep him from thinking. But in "Marriage" Mr. Wells improves upon this plan, for Trafford and his wife go into the wilds of Labrador together. "How sweet is solitude," as the Irishman said, "when you have your sweetheart with you." So, indeed, they found it, and in their fight with cold, starvation, and wild beasts they learned how to found their love upon mutual comprehension and respect, and made of their marriage a true union. The change of heart which Trafford experiences is not altogether unlike what Christians call conversion. His line of argument, or, more properly speaking, development of thought, finds expression in fragmentary sentences muttered in the delirium of fever, a Freudian emergence of fundamental feelings, as in the following passage:

"Of course," he said, "I said it—or somebody said it—about this collective mind being mixed with other things. It's something arising out of life—not the common stuff of life. An exhalation. ... It's like the little tongues of fire that came at Pentecost.... Queer how one comes drifting back to these images. Perhaps I shall die a Christian yet.... The other Christians won't like me if I do. What was I saying?... It's what I reach up to, what I desire shall pervade me, not what I am. Just as far as I give myself purely to knowledge, to making feeling and thought clear in my mind and words, to the understanding and expression of the realities and relations of life, just so far do I achieve salvation.... Salvation!...

"I wonder is salvation the same for every one? Perhaps for one man salvation is research and thought, and for another expression in art, and for another nursing lepers. Provided he does it in the spirit. He has to do it in the spirit....

"This flame that arises out of life, that redeems life from purposeless triviality, isn't life. Let me get hold of that. That's a point. That's a very important point."

This passage from "Marriage" showed that in 1912 Wells's thought was entering upon a new phase, considerably in advance of that revealed in his "First and Last Things." He seemed to be working toward some sort of belief in God, a Bergsonian God, struggling upward in spite of and by means of inert matter and recalcitrant humanity. It would indeed be queer to find Wells not only among the prophets, but among the Christian prophets, and, as he intimates, some of the other Christians would not like it.

Wells's catholicity of sympathy recognizes no limitations of race. He has an abhorrence for race prejudice of every kind. The greatest blot he found upon American civilization was our ill treatment of the negro.[12]

In his article on "Race Prejudice" he puts it foremost among the evils of the age but even his "anticipations" could not conceive of such an insensate revival of racial animosity between civilized nations as the Great War has, brought about:

Knight errantry is as much a part of a wholesome human being as falling in love or self-assertion, and therein lies one's hope for mankind. Nearly every one, I believe—I've detected the tendency in old cheats even and disreputable people of all sorts—is ready to put in a little time and effort in dragon-slaying now and then, and if any one wants a creditable dragon to write against, talk against, study against, subscribe against, work against, I am convinced they can find no better one—that is to say, no worse one—than Race Prejudice. I am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than Race Prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately—it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poisons of the human soul. It is this much like the dragons of old, that it devours youth, spoils life, holds beautiful people in shame and servitude, and desolates wide regions. It is a monster begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our own dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable share.

The abolition of hatred between castes and classes and countries, the growth of toleration and extension of coöperation, the improvement of education, and the advancement of science, are what will lead toward his ideal. And his ideal is that of an evolutionist, the opportunity for continuous growth. He has exp rest it best, perhaps, in "The Food of the Gods," in the speech of one of the new race of giants, of supermen, to his fellows as they are about to give battle to the community of ordinary people determined to destroy them:

It is not that we would oust the little people from the world in order that we, who are no more than one step upward from their littleness, may hold their world forever. It is the step we fight for and not ourselves.... We are here, Brothers, to what end? To serve the spirit and the purpose that has been breathed into our lives. We fight not for ourselves—for we are but the momentary hands and eyes of the Life of the World. Through us and through the little folk the Spirit looks and learns. From us by word and birth and act it must pass—to still greater lives. This earth is no resting place; this earth is no playing place, else indeed we might put our throats to the little people's knife, having no greater right to live than they. And they in their turn might yield to the ants and vermin. We fight not for ourselves but for growth, growth that goes on forever. To-morrow, whether we live or die, growth will conquer through us. That is the law of the spirit forevermore. To grow according to the will of God! To grow out of these cracks and crannies, out of these shadows and darknesses, into greatness and the light! Greater, he said, speaking with slow deliberation, greater, my Brothers! And then—still greater. To grow and again—to grow. To grow at last into the fellowship and understanding of God.

The Great War has inspired or at least instigated many works of fiction already, but the best of these, in my opinion, is Wells's "Mr. Britling Sees It Through." It does not deal much with the fighting at the front. The author is chiefly concerned with another aspect of the war, its effect upon the psychology of the Englishman. The book is divided into two parts; the first half is light, carefree and amusing after the manner of Wells's earlier romances; the other half is darkened by the war cloud and is written with more emotional power than he has hitherto shown.

Knowing Wells's habit of introducing autobiographical details into his romances, we inevitably surmise that Mr. Britling is himself. Mr. Britling is a writer whom "lots of people found interesting and stimulating, and a few found seriously exasperating." "He had ideas in the utmost profusion about races and empires and social order and political institutions and gardens and automobiles and the future of India and China and esthetics and America and the education of mankind in general.... And all that sort of thing."

This certainly reads like Wells's repertory of ideas. And to make the resemblance closer Mr. Britling writes a pamphlet, "And Now War Ends", shortly after the war began—just as Mr. Wells wrote "The War That Will End War." Several of the characters are recognizable as Mr. Wells' neighbors. At any rate we may be sure that the book reveals the changing moods not only of the author but of every thinking Englishman as the enormity, the awfulness, the all-pervasiveness of the war became slowly realized in the course of many months.

As a contrast to his typical Englishman Mr. Wells brings in an American, handled with more skill than British writers usually show in dealing with American psychology. The delight of his Mr. Direck at the recognition of the scenes and customs he had known from history and novels is well presented:

The Thames, when he sallied out to see it, had been too good to be true, the smallest thing in rivers he had ever seen, and he had had to restrain himself from affecting a marked accent and accosting some passerby with the question, "Say! But is this little wet ditch here the Historical River Thames?" In America, it must be explained, Mr. Direck spoke a very good and careful English indeed, but he now found the utmost difficulty in controlling his impulse to use a high-pitched nasal drone and indulge in dry Americanisms and poker metaphors upon all occasions. When people asked him questions he wanted to say "Yep" or "Sure", words he would no more have used in America than he could have used a bowie knife. But he had a sense of rôle. He wanted to be just exactly what he supposed an Englishman would expect him to be.

Every American tourist in England has felt this temptation. He also has the experience ascribed by Mr. Wells to his American of finding that England on closer acquaintance is not so antiquated as she looks. When asked what his impression of England is Mr. Direck answers:

That it looks and feels more like the traditional Old England than any one could possibly have believed, and that in reality it is less like the traditional Old England than any one would ever possibly have imagined. I thought when I looked out of the train this morning that I had come to the England of Washington Irving. I find that it is not even the England of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

To complete this study of national psychology there is also a German in the family circle at first, a tutor whose hobbies are Ido and internationalism and a universal index, traits drawn from Professor Ostwald apparently. He is not caricatured but we suspect that like Mr. Direck, the American, Herr Heinrich is affected by British expectations and appears more German than he is.

The book reëchoes all the passions of the war,—love, hatred, courage, despair, meanness, sacrifice, heroism, selfishness, stoicism and mad wrath,—but ends upon a clear religious tone such as has been heard but faintly in any work of Mr. Wells before. What Mr. Britling sees through is not the war, for nobody can yet see so far as that, but he sees through the doubt and turmoil of his own mind and finds internal peace in the midst of warfare. When he sits down to write a letter to the parents of Heinrich, who like his own son had fallen in France, his mind is torn by conflicting emotions, but finally these are resolved into one common chord and he writes:

Religion is the first thing and the last thing, and until a man has found God and been found by God, he begins at no beginning, he works to no end. He may have his friendships, his partial loyalties, his scraps of honor. But all these things fall into place and life falls into place only with God. Only with God. God, who fights through men against Blind Force and Night and Non-Existence; who is the end, who is the meaning. He is the only King.... Of course I must write about Him. I must tell all my world of Him. And before the coming of the true King, the inevitable King, the King who is present whenever just men foregather, this bloodstained rubbish of the ancient world, these puny kings and tawdry emperors, these wily politicians and artful lawyers, these men who claim and grab and trick and compel, these war makers and oppressors, will presently shrivel and pass—like paper thrust into a flame. Our sons have shown us God.

HOW TO READ WELLS

The curious thing about H. G. Wells is his diversity. For a person of any intellectual consistency it is impossible thoroughly to appreciate him in certain moods without disliking him in others. He is the stern moralist of "The Sleeper Awakes", the detached and exquisite artist of "Thirty Strange Stories" and "Tales of Space and Time", the genial and conciliatory sociologist of "New Worlds for Old", the intolerant Imperialist of "Anticipations", the subtle anti-moralist of "The New Machiavelli" and "Ann Veronica", the sympathetic if somewhat cynical portrayer of the shop-keeping classes of "Mr. Polly" and "The Wheels of Chance", the vague philosopher at large of "First and Last Things", the imaginative rationalist of "A Modern Utopia", the Jules-Vernish romancer of "The War of Worlds" and "The First Men in the Moon", the scientific transcendentalist of "The Food of the Gods", and in addition he seriously chronicles "Floor Games" with his boys and takes interest in fugitive essays on modern warfare and "The Misery of Boots." Unless one is alien to everything human (and superhuman), it is impossible to escape being interested in at least some of these.

Wells's philosophy is, as I have said, expressed symbolically in many of his stories. It is most fully explained in "First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and a Rule of Life" (Putnam), and in the two essays previously referred to, "Scepticism of the Instrument" (in "A Modern Utopia") and "The Discovery of the Future", first published in Nature, February 6, 1902, and in the "Report of the Smithsonian Institution", 1902, and later in book form (Huebsch, New York, 1913).

His sociological studies comprise the following volumes: "Anticipations" (1901, Harper), "Mankind in the Making" (1903, Scribner), "A Modern Utopia" (1904, Scribner), "The Future in America" (1906, Harper), "New Worlds for Old" (1908, Macmillan), "Socialism and the Great State", with the collaboration of fourteen other authors (1911, Harper), "Social Forces in England and America" (1914, Harper), published in England under the title "An Englishman Looks at the World" (Cassell), "The War That Will End War" (1915), "What Is Coming?" (1916, Macmillan), "Italy, France and Britain at War" (1917, Macmillan), and "God the Invisible King" (1917, Macmillan).

His short stories have been collected in several different volumes, in part overlapping: "Thirty Strange Stories" (1898, Harper), "Tales of Time and Space" (1899, Doubleday), "Twelve Stories and a Dream" (1903, Scribner), "The Plattner Story and Others" (1897, Macmillan), "The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents" (1895, Macmillan).

Eight of the best of his short stories (including "The Star", "Armageddon" and "The Country of the Blind") are published in a sumptuous edition with Coburn's photographic illustrations by Mitchell Kennerley ("The Door in the Wall and Other Stories", 1911).

His romances include: "The Time Machine" (1895, Holt), "The Wonderful Visit" (1895), "The Island of Dr. Moreau" (1896, Duffield), "The War of the Worlds" (1898, Harper), "The Invisible Man" (1897, Harper), "The Sea-Lady" (1902) "The First Men in the Moon" (1901), "When the Sleeper Wakes" (1899, Harper), rewritten (1911) as "The Sleeper Awakes" (Nelson, London), "In the Days of the Comet" (1906, Century), "The Food of the Gods" (1904, Scribner), "The War in the Air" (1908, Macmillan), "The World Set Free" (1914, Macmillan).

His novels fall naturally into two classes: first those of a lighter and humorous character: "The Wheels of Chance" (1896, Macmillan), "Love and Mr. Lewisham" (1900, Stokes), "Kipps" (1906, Scribner), "The History of Mr. Polly" (1910, Duffield), "Bealby" (1915, Macmillan), "Boon" etc. (1915, Doran).

His longer and more serious novels are: "Ann Veronica" (1909, Harper), "The New Machiavelli" (1910, Duffield), "Tono-Bungay" (1908, Duffield), "Marriage" (Duffield), "The Passionate Friends" (1913, Harper), "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon" (1914, Macmillan), "The Research Magnificent" (1915, Macmillan), "Mr. Britling Sees It Through" (1916, Macmillan).

To these we must add some early works: a "Textbook on Biology" in two volumes (1892) and two volumes of essays, "Select Conversations with an Uncle" (1895, Saalfield) and "Certain Personal Matters" (1897). He has, like Stevenson, devoted much attention to devising floor games for children and has published two books upon it: "Floor Games" and "Little Wars" (Small, Maynard).

Wells still awaits his Boswell, but we have "The World of H. G. Wells" by Van Wyck-Brooks (1915, Kennerley), a lively and appreciative critique, and "H. G. Wells, A Biography and a Critical Estimate of his Work" by J. D. Beresford (1915, Holt), still briefer, equally interesting, and containing a list of his writings to date. An autobiographical sketch was written for the Russian edition of his works (1909) and published in T. P.'s Magazine (1912).

Of magazine articles and critiques the following have for one reason or another special interest:

"Les Idées de Wells sur l'Humanité future" by Charles Duguet in Revue des Idées, 1908.

"Wells" by Chesterton in American Magazine, vol. 71, p. 32 (1910).

"Wells and his Point of View" in Catholic World, vol. 91 (four articles, 1910).

"Wells and Bergson" by P. E. B. Jourdain in Hibbert Journal, vol. 10, p. 835, July, 1912. "H. G. Wells et la Pensée contemporaine" by René Leguy in Mercure de France (1912).

The contributions of Mr. Wells to current magazines and newspapers are too numerous to enumerate, but I must not omit the two articles on Socialism which he contributed to The Independent, October 25 and November 3, 1906, and an article on "The Nature of Love" (The Independent, August 13, 1908).

[1] See "Major Prophets of To-day", p. 232.

[2] "Heretics", by G. K. Chesterton, p. 85.