I acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the germ of public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred years, to teach me that.

Considering what part the notion of a state plays in his range of ideas, that is a remarkable confession. But why stop with statecraft? The human mind could not, in all epochs, have established permanent ideals of statecraft without permanent ideals of a more strictly personal kind.

The truth is that Wells, for all that he has passed outside the economics of socialism, is really bounded by the circle of ideas which produced them. The typical Marxian, the concentrated Marxian, will tell you that life is summed up in the theory of value, and that the only true thing is economic determinism. Measuring all thought by that criterion, he finds Dante and Shakespeare unintelligible and offensive gibberish, and will scent the trail of the capitalist in Grimm's Fairy Tales. That is the crude form in which exclusive socialism presents itself. To say that "the fundamental nature of life is a tissue and succession of

さ

births" is merely a refinement of this. It is true, just as the economic determinism of Marx on the whole is true. But the world is full of a number of things; or rather it is the business of a reasonable mind to see it in a number of ways at once. Because there is a Will to Live and a Will to Power, because things grow and continue to grow, that does not explain love, or pain, or friendship, or music, or poetry, or indeed life. Life is a tangle, a tangle which every socialist must feel to be disentangling itself; but it is also a riddle, and on that point socialism has nothing to say at all.

It is in presenting life wholly as a tangle and not at all as a riddle that the philosophy and religion of Wells appear so inadequate. Could Wells write a poem? one asks oneself, and the question is full of meaning. There is nothing to suggest that at any moment of his life he has felt this impulse, which has been the normal thing in English authors. "Modern poetry, with an exception or so," he remarks somewhere, and for all his writings reveal of him he might have said poetry as a whole, "does not signify at all." It is the same with regard

to music, art, external nature. He is not wanting in the plastic sense: his writings are filled with picturesque groupings, figures cut in outline against a sunset, masses of machinery in the glare of the forge, things that suggest the etcher's eye. But they are curiously impersonal. Consider, for example, his description of Worms Cathedral:

It rises over this green and flowery peace, a towering, lithe, light brown, sunlit, easy thing, as unconsciously and irrelevantly splendid as a tall ship in the evening glow under a press of canvas.

You cannot doubt that he has felt a beauty in this, but the beauty he feels is essentially the beauty of a piece of engineering; he is as untouched by the strictly personal artistic and religious qualities of this building, not to mention its connection with human history, as if he had seen it through a telescope from another planet. It is not the changeless riddle and partial solution of life for which this building stands that stir in Wells the sense of beauty and meaning: it is the mechanism, the process -his emotions gather about the physical result which appears to justify these.

A chacun son infini.

There will always be some to whom the significance of things, the meaning of any given present will seem to evaporate in this conception of mankind as "permanently in transition." Reading those passages where Wells has expressed the meaning life has for him, I feel much as I should feel with regard to music if I heard a mass of Mozart played at the rate of sixty beats a second, or, with regard to painting, if a procession of Rembrandts were moved rapidly across my field of vision. The music as a whole is a tissue and succession of sounds, the pictures as a whole are a tissue and succession of colors. But that is not music, that is not art. Nor is a tissue and succession of births life.

But indeed nothing is easier than to reduce Wells to an absurdity. If he implies anything at all he implies a "transvaluation of all values." It remains to consider him from this point of view.

CHAPTER VII

THE SPIRIT OF WELLS

N order to understand Wells at all one must

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grasp the fact that he belongs to a type of mind which has long existed in European literature but which is comparatively new in the English-speaking world, the type of mind of the so-called "intellectual." He is an "intellectual" rather than an artist; that is to say, he naturally grasps and interprets life in the light of ideas rather than in the light of experience.

To pass from a definition to an example, let me compare Wells in this respect with the greatest and most typical figure of the opposite camp in contemporary English fiction; I mean Joseph Conrad. This comparison is all the more apt because just as much as Wells, Con. rad typifies the spirit of "unrest" (a word hy has almost made his own, so often does he usl, it) which is the note of our age. Both of thes