The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Mr Wells' Ancients
MR WELLS' ANCIENTS
Men Like Gods. By H. G. Wells. 12mo. 327 pages. The Macmillan Company. $2.
THE significance of Mr Wells' new essay in Utopianism is fully indicated in the title. He has turned a little way from the problem of what men ought to do, to the real problem of morals, what ought to be? He has not, in effect, created imaginary supermen, nor proposed ideal human figures. He has presented a group of beings in the image of men and women, has sketchily indicated what exists in their world, and has said, these men are like gods. They have little enough relation to God, the Invisible King; there are passages in the speech of Urthred which imply an atheism touching even that deity. But the residuum of the argument is clear. It is that the beings of this Utopia are godlike creatures, and that the Earthlings remain in the age of confusion because they do not recognize the attributes of the others as divine. In short Mr Wells despairs of changing man until he has changed god.
This may be sacrilegious, but it is not stupid; it is too close to the commonplaces of religious experience to be that, for it is only a contemporary way of praying for a change of heart. With such a theme the book must divide into two parts: the rendering of actuality, the state of heart from which, and the rendering of Utopia, the state of heart to which we must turn. The framework is classic in one respect—the introduction of Mr Barnstaple, the modern Gulliver; he is the pivot of both flanks, for he is of one world and wishes for the other; near the middle of the book he tries, rather awkwardly, to be the pivot of the action. The novelty of the book is in presenting the right wing—the group of modern men and women who reject the Utopia into which they are flung. The politician, the priest, the philosopher, the millionaire, the fool (aesthetes are fools as in Shaw) the silly women, present with a specious appearance of fairness the case against Utopia, and in a sense, the case for the present.
Naturally the presentation of the actual world is done with greater vigour, with more gusto, than the presentation of the ideal which lacks savour entirely. It is a beautiful, well-ordered, purposefully-striving universe contrasted with our world of chaos, selfishness, and trust in God or Competition or Evolution. Conflict exists in this Utopia—conflict with the still unsubdued forces of nature. But there is no struggle of man against his fellow. There is scope for the great ambition to acquire and to use knowledge. There is room even for martyrdom.
The civilization of this Utopia is based upon Five Principles of which the first is the principle of Privacy, the second that of Free Movement, the third, Unlimited Knowledge, the fourth, that Lying is the Blackest Crime. Here Mr Wells interrupts the list; if he had not long ago repudiated, in precise words, the title of artist, I should imagine that the interlude is "for effect." The effect comes, in spite of him: the fifth principle is Free Discussion and Criticism. It will be seen that three of these five are governmental, that only the first and the fourth involve the individual, and the best thing about the others is that two of them are negative, are inhibitions against excessive interference with the private life. In other words, an enlightened liberalism could do much for this Utopia. Even the first principle is meagrely taken:
"All individual personal facts are private between the citizen and the public organization to which he entrusts them, and can be used only for his convenience and with his sanction. Of course all such facts are available for statistical uses, but not as individual personal facts."
The principle of privacy hardly extends to what the individual does, certainly not to what he is. It is understood that no individual would want to be or to do what would hinder the common good. The "Crowd-mind" has gone for ever, Mr Barnstaple discovers; at its best you could say that it has been displaced by the Universal Mind. But I feel that the individual mind has gone also, and it is characteristic that the Utopians communicate with each other simply by thinking; they do not talk.
The truth about Utopias is that they are all 110-proof. For all of our arguments that they won't work, break on the rock of the Utopian character which can make them work; and all our arguments that they are silly or trivial or inhuman are shattered by the direct rebuttal that the arguments only prove how much we are in need of Utopia. Of Mr Wells' Utopias it may always be said that they are not small private revenges, and I say this not from knowledge of him or of his private life, but from knowledge of his books. It is part of his pleasure in living to believe in perfectability through science; his displeasure with monarchism, competition, and the Soviets of Russia never for a moment alters his good humour. He thinks life can be fine, must be made fine; he is more or less in love with the material and has profound confidence in the machine which is to transform it.
Why then is there a sort of blight over this new statement of his belief? Why is it so lifeless! I confess that I share none of the beliefs I ascribe to him, none I derive from his work; yet I am susceptible to his talents, to his almost ungovernable intensity and his actual creative gift. Why doesn't this Utopia even exasperate me? Is it possibly because Mr Wells doesn't care so much for it himself and has only written it to add another illusion to the world which (Anatole France has said) without illusion would perish of boredom; or is it that something has knocked the whole idea of Utopia, as well as all the special Utopias, into a cocked hat, and that that particular direction of human thought and emotion has no longer any bearing upon actual human existence?