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In all these prophecies the reader has doubtless already managed to
discern one further characteristic of the Wellsian fantasy a characteristic
inextricably linked with the city, that stone soil in which Wells has his
roots. After all, present-day urban man is inevitably zoon politicon, a
social animal; and from this stems the social element which is woven,
almost without exception, into each of Wells s fantasies. Whatever tale
he tells, however far removed at first sight from social problems, these
are questions with which the reader will unavoidably be confronted.
Take even The First Men in the Moon, a subject apparently as distant
as possible from the earth and all its works. You fly with the heroes of
the novel in their Cavorite sphere, you land on the moon, travel in the
lunar valleys, descend into lunar caves& . And suddenly, to your surprise,
you see that on the moon there exist the very same social diseases as
on our earth. The same division into classes, ruling and ruled, but the
workers here have already turned into a species of hunch-backed spider,
and outside working hours they are simply put to sleep and stacked in
the lunar caves like firewood, until they are needed again.
In The Time Machine you hurtle with the author 800,000 years into
the future and again you find there those same two worlds of ours:
the twilight world of the working class, and the daylight world of the
leisured. Both classes have degenerated, the first from excess of work,
and the second from excess of idleness. And the class conflict has taken
on cruel and brutal forms. In 800,000 the degenerate descendants of
the oppressed classes simply devour their bourgeoisie , like beasts. In
the ugly images of the cruel mirror held up by Wells s fantasy we again
recognise ourselves, our times, and the consequences of these diseases
in the civilisation of old Europe.
The Sleeper has slept through two hundred years, he awakes and
what does he see? Again the same present-day city, the present-day social
system, only the gulf between black and white is a hundred times deeper;
and the workers, under the leadership of the awakened Sleeper, rise up
in mutiny against the capitalists. We open The Days to Come the
sharpest and most ironic of Wellsian grotesques once more a magnificent
parody of contemporary civilisation. And finally, The War in the Air
and The World Set Free a detailed analysis of the epoch preceding a
world war, an epoch when millions were being spent on battleships,
zeppelins and guns, an epoch when in the cellars of the old civilisation s
palace great stacks of explosive had accumulated, and on top, however
strange this may seem now, people were calmly living, working and
playing on top of dynamite. Wells demonstrates with force and conviction
265
H.G.WELLS
that a world war is the only natural conclusion to be drawn from the
whole syllogism of the old civilisation; in these novels loudest of all,
he calls men to their senses, calls on them to remember that they are
not Englishmen, Frenchmen, or Germans, but people, and calls on them
to reconstruct life on new principles.
These principles have not as yet been identified by name. But the reader
has doubtless already filled in the unspoken word: these principles, of
course, are socialist. Wells is a socialist. That is indisputable. But if any
party ever thought of using Wells as a seal to its programme, that would
be as ridiculous as trying to use Tolstoi or Rozanov to affirm Orthodoxy.
I have no intention of comparing Wells to Tolstoi, but all the same,
Wells is first and foremost an artist. And an artist whether greater or
lesser is always a heretic. The artist, like Jehovah in the Bible, creates
for himself his own particular world, with its own particular laws; creates
in his own image and likeness, and not in anyone else s. And that is why
a real artist will never settle into the already created, seven-day, rigidified
world of any dogma. He will inevitably leap outside the articles of such
a dogma; will inevitably be a heretic. Or else he does not have his own
world, his own lineaments and then he cannot be counted an artist.
Wells, I repeat, is above all an artist, and for that reason everything
in his world is his own, and his socialism is his own, Wellsian brand.
In his autobiography* we read:
I have always been a socialist, but not a socialist according to Marx& . For
me, socialism is not a strategy or a conflict of classes: I see in it a plan for the
reconstruction of human life, for the replacement of disorder by order.
The aim of the reconstruction is to introduce into life an organising
principle ratio reason. And therefore, in this reconstruction, Wells
allots a particularly important role to the class of able men, above all
to educated, learned technicians. He proposes this theory in his
Anticipations. The idea acquires an even more curious and, it must be
added, more heretical colouring in his Modern Utopia, where the leaders
of the new life are the Samurai, and the new world is presented to us
as a society constructed to a certain extent on aristocratic principles,
led by a spiritual aristocracy.
*
The document referred to here is Wells s Introduction to the Russian edition
of his novels (1912). The second and third quotations (see below) are taken
direct from this, while the first appears to be a free paraphrase of the same
source.
266
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
There is yet another feature of Wells s socialism, a feature perhaps
more national than personal. Indubitably, socialism is for Wells a way
of curing the cancer which has eaten into the organism of the old world.
But medicine knows two ways of combating this disease: one way is
the knife, surgery, a way that will, perhaps, either cure or kill; the other
slower way is radiotherapy. Wells prefers this bloodless way. Here are
a few more lines from his autobiography:
We English are a paradoxical people, at once progressive and constructive and
intensely conservative of traditional forms, so that we have changed continually
and yet never had any really dramatic and fundamental revolutions& never any
definite overthrowing of the established order, never any beginning again such
as almost every European nation has experienced.
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