Part 20
Nature’s way has always been a paradoxical way, and it is a fundamental fact in this connection that as human life struggles up from the instinctive level we find no prepared adjustment of woman’s mind to man’s. There is no feminine mind different from and reciprocal to a man’s mind. They are both, man’s mind and woman’s mind alike, in the form of pure egotism. As the life of man becomes more civilised and mental, his need for an adequate helpmeet increases. He can no longer get along with a woman bought or captured and set to her special business in the harem. But while his need for a free and willing helpmeet increases and his demands upon her expand, we find no corresponding disposition in able women to co-operate with men. They seem to want to drop their sex and set up as imitations of all the successful male types. They become a new sex of little aggressive pseudo-men. They want to wear the wig of the judge and carry the mace in just the same spirit that makes the dressmaker adapt soldiers’ uniforms and turn the djibba of a dervish into a coquettish garment. They want to substitute Great Women for Great Men in our histories and turn out Buddha and Mahomet and Christ in favour of feminine equivalents. They will presently want a Lady God in a world in which the male will be a fading memory. It will be a parallel and parodied world. That is what makes this tumultuous eager book so significant and so dismaying. It is an incoherent silly sort of book, but it is written in deadly earnest. It is probably widely representative. It expresses very typically a vast movement towards non-co-operation which will involve the profoundest changes in our social life. But it would take up far beyond the limitations set to newspaper articles to discuss the possible treaty that may at last end this profound instinctive breach.
LIII
LIVING THROUGH: THE TRUTH ABOUT AN INTERVIEW
6.9.24
It is a foolish thing for a writer to see an interviewer. Other men may want an intermediary to tell the world of their thoughts and intentions, but a writer should be able to do his own telling. Yet I am always falling again into this folly.
They come along with such nice introductions. They are so young and respectful and reassuring. They do not make it clear that they mean to turn your unguarded civilities into an article until quite at the end of the encounter.
And then arrives the interview, with one’s casual suggestions made into oracular statements, clothed in uncongenial and sometimes horrible phrases, and mixed up with one’s visitor’s ideas and--amplifications. And everybody takes notice of it and judges one by it. One’s writings may be as copious as the Nile in flood, but nobody ever seems to get concerned about what one says in _them_. But let loose an interview, and people quote your alleged utterances as though they were your most polished thoughts, write articles rubbing in the young gentleman’s choicest phrases, preach sermons reproving your unwonted expressions. They seem to feel that at last they have really got you.
I write with one occasion fresh in my mind. A little while ago an interviewer told the world that I said the next few years will be an age of fun--the world was tired of tragedy. For my own part I was to write funny books henceforth.... I shall probably never hear the last of that.
Oddly enough I do not remember that particular interviewer at all distinctly, nor what friend’s introduction it was let him in on me. I shouldn’t know him again. But I do remember the conversation to which he gave this astonishing twist. I remember my train of thought because it is one that has been rather frequently with me nowadays.
He had tried to get me talking of the extravagant horrors of the Next Great War. I suppose he thought I should talk impossible rubbish about bombs as big as houses and whole cities destroyed by poison gas and so forth, and he would be able to retail this monstrous stuff half jeeringly and half credulously. At any rate, I found myself talking of the improbability of there ever being a war in Europe even so mechanically destructive as the last war. The Great War had been the explosion of a vast accumulation of energy, moral and social as well as material. Europe might, and probably would, bicker, murder, bomb, massacre, and starve, but for another generation at least she would not have either the spirit or the discipline or the material to produce such munitions and such wide-sweeping concerted action as devastated her in the Great War. She is morally and physically bankrupt and prostrate. She may go on sinking, as Asia Minor sank, back even to barbarism. Even if she does not do so, it will take forty or fifty years to reassemble energy for another such world-wide outbreak.
I went on to talk of the disappointment of the peace. Which had failed us most, intelligence or moral force? Both had failed us. For four years now Europe had been disintegrating. This poor League of Nations at Geneva, snubbed and brow-beaten by the French and Italians, who belonged to it and did not believe in it, and distrusted and hated by the excluded Russians and Germans, seemed to confirm the futility of any constructive effort. Things grew worse instead of better. Tariffs, currency manipulation, the cost of armaments, were destroying urban and industrial life under our eyes. The parasitic speculator flourished; the peasant in his self-centred way held on; the rest faded out. If one did not foresee another Great War one foresaw the certainty of endless little ones.
And so talking, and perhaps a little forgetful of my hearer, sitting almost knee to knee, intent to translate whatever he could catch of my talk and hand it out in his own phrases and colouring, I recalled a conversation I had had quite recently in Paris with my friend Philippe Millet, who is now dead. We were old friends. We had talked about the affairs of the world in Paris both before the war and during the war and at Washington during the Conference; and even in 1921 at Washington we could still believe that the Western world in which we were born and by which we lived might yet make an effort sufficiently creative and generous to save itself and develop a new and greater phase of civilisation. I was then publicly denouncing the French for their trust in submarines and Senegalese, but that made no difference in our mutual good will. He understood the spirit that moved me. But this last summer, when we met for the last time, Millet was an ailing and disillusioned man.
“My dear Wells,” he said, “you expect too much of this world. In the early part of the war there was splendid heroism and devotion--especially among the young. And they died. That was tragedy. But there is no tragedy now. There is nothing left great enough in Europe now for tragedy. It is a comedy now, a grotesque comedy of haggling and bargaining while the ship sinks. The sinking makes no difference. Absurd and preposterous people will still remain absurd and preposterous, even when they are running about on a sinking ship that they will not even observe to be sinking.” It was a point of view I had been approaching, but which it needed the push of his assertion for me to reach. It is a seizing and desolating point of view.
Suppose it is true that this system in which we live in Europe, the system of national sovereignty reacting upon an economic system of privately owned, profit-seeking capital, is entirely unteachable and inadaptable. Suppose its competitions are incurably destructive. Suppose there is indeed nothing sufficient to arrest this decay. Suppose that in consequence all Europe has to go on breaking down as Russia has broken down, as Germany breaks down, as Poland and Hungary will probably soon break down, with no sufficient attempt at transition or reconstruction, then what are we to do--we who have some vision of what is happening? How are we going to live through it? Whole generations may have to live through it.
I think that we are justified in saving ourselves as far as possible. I think we are bound to do whatever we can to salvage science and art and social experience against the days when the breakdown reaches its final phase and a real rebuilding is possible. I think we have to do all we can to maintain and extend an educational process and educational methods that will lay the foundations of a new order, a civilisation of service. And to do such things at all effectively we must keep our minds as sweet as we can and press our purposes as good-temperedly as possible.
“Grotesque comedy”!--in a world of that quality we must not simply “live dangerously,” but humorously. With aggressive wealth and canting patriotism floundering destructively about us, in an atmosphere of catchwords and wild misconceptions, with masses of people angry, distressed, and misinformed, and with worse to follow, the straight path to martyrdom is a mere evasion of our responsibilities. You cannot make a new world in gaols and exile; you must make it in schools and books, in Legislatures and business affairs, humorously, obstinately, and incessantly. This monstrous, distressful, pathetic, but preposterous social disarticulation is too intricate and complicated for any simple act or any simple formula to avail. We must all do what we can, but our best efforts may, after all, be not so much right as _right-ish_. It would be hard enough to struggle in a world in which other people did not understand, but in which we at least were sure we were right; it is infinitely harder to struggle, as many of us are doing now, with a realisation that our own understanding is limited and faulty.
In such circumstances a jest, laughter, may come as relief, as illumination. Of all men of modern times, I am inclined to think Lincoln was the greatest. He held on; he, more than anyone, saved the unity of the New World. And throughout the worst of that dark and weary struggle against disruption he joked, he told stories. Nobody has ever attempted yet to make an anthology of those extraordinary stories. But they were of infinite benefit to him and the world. They kept him supple. They saved him from the rigor of a pose.
And now, in still darker and more perplexing times, our need for the flexible reconciliations of humour is still greater....
To this effect I thought aloud in the presence of the bright young man who had come to make an interview out of me. He thanked me profusely, won my foolish permission to write something about our “most inspiring” talk, and went out to report to the world that the notorious prophet foretold an age of fun, and was, so to speak, painting his nose for the festival.
LIV
THE CREATIVE PASSION
13.9.24
Do men and women generally want a better world than this?
Do they want a world free from war, general economic security, a higher level of general health, long life, freedom and hope for everyone, beauty as the common quality of their daily lives?
The conventional answer to that question, especially if you put it to a public meeting with the appropriate gestures, is “Of course they do.”
But the true answer is, “Not much!”
They may do so when they read an inspiring book by the fireside or hear a rousing speech, but they do not do so all round the twenty-four hours, or, indeed, at any time when there is any possibility of helping to realise such generous desires. “They,” I write, but I should write “we.” For we all are much of the same quality; the tallest man in the world is not much more than twice the height of the shortest, and the crime for which the murderer dies is just the concrete realisation of the saint’s flash of anger. We are all but very little above egotism; our passions are warm only when they are immediate. I do not believe there has ever been a man who has lived steadfastly, continuously, and completely in pursuit of great ends. We are all vain, amenable to flattery, stirred by physical impulses, by the competitive instinct and jealousy, by anger at opposition, liable to fatigue, irritation, and uncontrollable and sometimes quite unaccountable fluctuations of motive.
Simple people like to believe there are Great Men in the world who are altogether above this tangle of drive and impulse. But indeed there are no such divinities.
What do we all find in our hearts? An immense self-love, a tremendous concentration of our attention upon our personal drama, physical cravings bare and physical cravings disguised and sublimated, desire to possess, desire for securities, and such-like fear-begotten desires, a desire for praise and approval and an instinctive dread of the disapproval and hostility of our fellow-men, an aggressive pride and self-assertion so soon as fear is allayed. We find, too, imitative impulses, competitive impulses--jealousy. In most cases there is also an extension of our egotism to cover our offspring, our dear ones, our friends and near kin. It is an extension of our egotism rather than a suppression of it. Is not that the drive and quality of most of our living?
How much of that complex of motives can be used to bind men together into a civilised state? One can no doubt play upon their fears, represent the dangers of conquest and cruelty by hostile peoples so vividly as to make them fight and compel others to fight for them in great wars, rally them to the flag in a state of panic, fill them with that frantic distrust and hate of strangers which is the basis of vulgar “Patriotism.” With a little coercion one may even get them to pay national taxes under the influence of these same mass-fears. The human animal is a semi-social animal, and though you cannot stampede it, as the American bison used to be stampeded, to rush over cliffs in a heaped herd-suicide, or like the Russian lemming to swarm into the sea and be drowned; yet it can be got moving in masses for collective ends, either good ends or bad ends, in an only very slightly rational manner.
But though these human motives I have cited so far do serve to keep us human beings together in smaller and larger communities with a sort of mutual restraint and help and tolerance, they supply no real force for any progressive betterment of human relations, and still less do they supply any driving force to organise and maintain a higher order of civilisation throughout the world.
As soon as the mass urgency subsides we tend to relapse into our own little personal lives of eating, drinking, and “having a good time,” of “getting on,” of posing to ourselves and others, of thinking and talking ourselves into agreeable states of self-approval, of doing pleasantly spiteful things to people we dislike. And if there is nothing more in our human composition than these common impulses of the everyday life, this coarse stuff of our common humanity, then all our talk and writing about a world peace and a higher civilisation is just dream stuff and nonsense. If that is all we are then we have no more chance of escaping more wars, more famines and disorders, cruelties, and diseases than a trainload of hogs bound for Chicago has of escaping the stockyard. None of the hogs may like the journey to the stockyard, or their experiences when they get there; that does not help them in the slightest degree to escape their destiny.
But there is something more in humanity than this, and it is this something more that transfuses all our life, our politics, our business and social organisation, with the colour of romance and the quality of a great adventure. Let me take two common incidents to show the kind of “something more” that I mean--the something more in which all our hopes reside.
It is night on the embankment of a river that flows through a great city, and a commonplace youngster leans over the parapet watching and thinking. Great warehouses, tall buildings, a tower or so, three or four graceful bridges, one beyond the other, set with bright lights and bearing a luminous traffic, drop their images into the stream, and each light they bear makes a long, slightly wavering reflection upon the smooth black water. A little steam-launch, just blackness and a red head-lamp, fusses by. As it passes it tears through these tranquil banks of lamp reflections, drags a trail of startled and trembling shreds of light behind it, flings them apart, elongates them, re-unites them, weaves them into a dancing pattern that changes every moment into a fresh intricacy. Splash, splash, splash, comes the impact of the little boat’s wash against the embankment. The youngster, struck with a strange wonder of beauty, watches these changes, tries to follow them, tries to detect the law of their dexterous, wonderful rearrangements. All the heat and egotism of his personal life are forgotten. He is lifted outside all our everyday scheme of motives. He is possessed by the desire to know and understand.
Every one of us has had such moments of pure mental desire. For most of us they pass; we are too busy and preoccupied. Some few of us they seize upon and make into those devotees of inquiry, men of science.
Now take my second instance, a row of yards behind a row of mean houses in the same great city. Scarcely one of these yards is neglected or purely utilitarian. In more than half of them are evidences of effort to make some sort of garden or arbour or such-like pleasant and orderly arrangement. You rarely see people playing in these yards or resting in them; they are overlooked by a railway and very noisy. But nevertheless there you have the plainest evidence of an impulse to order and make, the rudiment of the garden-making, house-building impulse. In most of these yards it has been an unprofitable, useless, and perhaps disappointing effort, but it has been at work there. In nearly every man and woman there is something of this same garden-making, arbour-building impulse. Here again is a second impersonal motive to which we can turn from the personal and jealous passions that commonly possess us. It is an ennobling motive; witness the face of a skilful painter or carpenter intent upon his work.
Now this desire for knowledge and the impulse to make are the really hopeful creative forces in human life. They are the something more and the something different, on which I base all my hopes. Submerged and undeveloped, overridden by competition, fear, jealousy, vanity, they are yet to be found in nearly all of us. The aim of true education is to release them, nourish them, give them power and the possibility of co-operation. In this possibility lies our sole hope that the ultimate fate of mankind, now packed in its nationalist trucks upon the railroad of nationalism, warfare, and economic selfishness, will not be the same as that of those hogs upon their way to Chicago.
LV
AFTER A YEAR OF JOURNALISM: AN OUTBREAK OF AUTO-OBITUARY
20.9.24
Fifty-four articles have I written in the past twelve months and this will be the fifty-fifth and last. I desist. I turn over the book into which my secretary with a relentless regularity has pasted them all. Some I like; most seem to be saying something quite acceptable to me, but imperfectly in a rather ill-fitting form; some are just bad. My admiration for the masters of journalism has grown to immense proportions after these efforts. Their confidence! Their unstrained directness! Their amazing certainty of their length! And their unfaltering quality!
I had never realised before the tremendous hardship of periodicity. Every week or every day the writer must chew the cud of events and deliver his punctual copy. Every day, wet or fine, the newspaper sheet must be filled: filled, but not congested. But it is only now and then that the phase is good for really happy writing. Sometimes everything is germinating, but nothing seems to happen; at others a dozen issues compete for attention. Now one does not want to write because there is nothing to stimulate one to utterance; now because one wants time to consider some dominating event. But the columns stand waiting. Henceforth for my poor irregular brain there shall be no more periodicity.
I look over these articles and suddenly there joins on to my sense of them the fact that on my table are lying the proofs of a collected edition of my writings; eight and twenty fat volumes they will make. I perceive I have already lived a long, industrious life. I celebrate my death as a periodic journalist--and these proofs extend the obituary sense beyond the scope of that event. If I am not actually tucked up in my literary death-bed I am at least sitting on it. Possibly I may yet take a few more airings before I send for the clergyman and the heirs and turn in for good and start blessing and forgiving people from my pillow, but the longer part is finished. What does it all amount to, that mass of written matter?
The gist of it is an extraordinarily sustained and elaborated adverse criticism of the world as it is, a persistent refusal to believe that this is the best or even the most interesting of all possible worlds. There is a developing attempt culminating in the _Outline of History_ to show that the world of men is only temporarily what it is, and might be altered to an enormous extent. There is a search through every sort of revolutionary project and effort for the material for conclusive alteration. The total effect of these articles and these books of mine on my mind, is of a creature trying to find its way out of a prison into which it has fallen.
I recall how that in my boyhood I made a little prison of paper and cardboard for a beetle, and how I heard the poor perplexed beast incessantly crawling and scratching and fluttering inside. I forget what became of it. Perhaps I gave it its freedom; perhaps it pressed and worried at the corners where the light came through, and made an enlarged hole and worried its own way out. But I remember the dirty scratches and traces of its explorations on the unfolded paper cage. To a larger mind these books and articles of mine will seem very like those markings.