Wells, Wells, Wells

Mr. H. G. Wells has felt the necessity for a new approach to his rostrum, an impressive, unpoliced approach that will at once command unusual attention and leave him freer than ever to expatiate upon the human spectacle. In The Outline of History he had to deal dutifully with many matters of transient and undisputed consequence. Moreover, history is but the gradient leading up to Mr. Wells' deepest concern, the future of mankind after its scientific emancipation. In his pseudo-scientific novels, several of which he laid in that far future, he felt the cramp of plot and character relations. So while he calls his latest creation* a novel, it stays little closer to the usual kind of thing meant by that term than did James Joyce's Ulysses.

The Approach. Perhaps it was that colossal, utterly abandoned effort by Mr. Joyce to glut up and put on paper the total sensory-esthetic experience of a handful of slovenly Dubliners during 24 hours that encouraged Mr. Wells to cast pattern to the winds and glut up the entire experience, in ideas and emotions, of a British scientist reminiscent on and after his 59th birthday.

It happens that Mr. Wells will be 60 next Tuesday. It happens that his character, William Clissold, enunciates a prodigious amount of Wellsian philosophy. But the "vulgar" reader and reviewer are asked to understand that the book is not Mr. Wells' autobiography, but William Clissold's. The latter is merely a "relative" of Mr. Wells, a mineralogist whose promoter-father committed suicide on the way to prison, leaving the mother free to remarry and the boys, William and Dickon Clissold, to make their own lives.

William Clissold is in London on his 59th birthday. It is dismally wet, so he falls to writing down what it feels like to realize that one's life is some four-fifths finished. Later he writes on and on, mostly in the mas (villa) in Provence where he lives with a young woman named Clementina, trying to make plain to himself and the world the nature and origin of his beliefs, metaphysical, theological, political, social, economic, ethical, etc. To make this writing wholly natural, Mr. Wells permits William Clissold to mention encounters with Dean Inge, Dr. Jung, George Bernard Shaw and many another real person whom a fairly eminent scientist could scarcely help meeting. (English reviewers have been choking fretfully over this feature.) The Mottoes. There are two mottoes for this book. One is quoted from Heraclitus: "pavra pei --All things change (flow)." The other is inadvertently inserted by Author William Clissold-H. G. Wells: "This book, at any rate, is not going to be a home of rest for the tired reader."

This second motto is self-explanatory. Here is no light Wellsian fantasy with a happy ending. Having written two volumes, William Clissold dies in an .automobile smash, as related by his brother in the epilogue.

The other motto, "All things change," epitomizes the Wells-Clisspldian feeling about the world. Physics, most exact of sciences, has made an endless staircase of inorganic matter, proceeding from what used to be called the "concrete" to what seems more and more the discrete. Dean Inge, personifying the modernized church, is "elaborately uninforming about the Virgin Birth and courageously outspoken on birth control." In him, science and religion meet. (Catholicism is told off with an intimate example of its ingenious priestly accommodation. Of the Orthodox church "there is little left . . . save as a method of partisanship in the Balkans.")

All things change, flowing. The Chinese "superior person" is an evolution identical with the Christian saint, the German "overman," the Shavian "superman"--Science interpreting all these as its own ideal of the disinterestedly intelligent individual, humbled before and exalted by the orderly universe of which he is a part. Humanity is not yet awake to these evolutions; and it has not yet seen with Wells-Clissoldian eyes that the flux is not also in reflux; that history does not repeat itself; that there are no mystical cycles, but always progress, increasingly swift, cumulative and complex. Mankind is approaching Utopia, which must, in turn, become a super-Utopia.

Fluctionists naturally distrust systems. Even Science is suspect to Mr. Wells-Clissold. Its technique is ever more admirable, but how many of its most stunning advances have been accidentally stumbled into? Lazy Newton and the apple; Watt dozing by a kettle!

Karl Marx suffers the brunt of the economic onslaught, being reduced to a bearded pomposity. William Clissold is completely forgotten while Mr. Wells calls Communism "the sabotage of civilization by the disappointed," and other names. The industrio-political world of Capitalism is likewise assailed, more dreamily. Its populace is seen in microcosm from the window in Provence: Frenchmen sniping the swart Riffi, ladies in cosmetics fussing over dinner on the Riviera, peasants rooting up their olive trees to plant jasmine for the perfume factories.

And so on, through pages and pages of vital, anxious discussion.

The Significance. Mr. Wells has before this enraged the scientist and excited the layman. This time he bids fair to dismay more laymen than he excites. He has taken two fat volumes to precipitate what he conceives to be the doxy of an intelligent resident of the 20th Century, but, the prefatory note notwithstanding, this doxy seems more than ever Mr. Wells' own, only not so artistically expressed as usual. For practical purposes, the book would make a handy reference volume on Author Wells, if indexed. From a philosophical point of view, Mr. Wells appears once more in his familiar role of a gentle little man gesturing wildly on the edge of a cliff over which he lacks either wit or courage to leap alone.

The Author. His father lived for centuries, the hundreds of runs that a professional cricketer must make to be well paid. Young Herbert George, soon after attending private school in Kent and taking honors in zoology at the Royal College of Science, set out to live for other centuries, of race development and of personal fame. He was and is a stocky little dynamo for energy, working 15 hours a day, holding serious thought sacred. At 29 he started publishing the threescore books whose titles now require nearly a column of fine Who's Who type. He invented time-machines, strange bacilli, invisibility, men in the moon, wars between worlds, Utopias. His immensely popular novels were never without strong social implications and to a host of readers he became an ethical guide as well as an interpreter of science. Mr. Britling Sees It Through was probably as great a patriotic contribution as Britain received from any individual during the War.

His home is in Essex and there, of a Sunday, has been played many a game of hockey (like the one in Mr. Britling), with "H. G." vociferous as captain and umpire. Invariably his merry eye and shrill, rapid accents govern the gathering at tea afterwards. Since the War his writing has been somewhat sobersided, tending toward the purely educational. Taxation has obliged him to dash off articles for U. S. magazines, notably the Cosmopolitan. But his vigor of mind and body are no whit abated. His son, Frank, a brisk youth in his twenties, who arrived in the U. S. last week to spend 10 days learning to be a cinema director, reported his sire as in the best of health and very busy elevating the level of British cinema by writing new scenarios.

* THE WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD--H. G. Wells--Doran (2 vols. $5). To be published in the U. S. Sept. 30.