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stand against all his tests. Again and again, without cessation, he applies
them to every level and phase of society, and society smashes about him.
Life breaks down at that inhuman questioning, until at last there seems
nothing left. In the last chapter, one of the most wonderful passages
Wells has ever written, is focussed the whole spirit of the book. The
reticent prose drives on like the destroyer it tells of; it comes very near
to poetry, it exalts and moves beyond all rational explanation.
[Quotes Bk IV, ch. 3 I and my destroyer to England passes .]
This is the book itself! George Ponderevo, himself the destroyer, has
passed by and darkened the old lights, has found these prides and devotions
but empty things, and goes beyond them out to new horizons. Into darkness
he goes, into darkness& . There is not in all modern literature, one might
say, so exact an image of the progress and the end of the intellectual
consciousness.
But that is not the end. On the next page, the last in the book, we
find something of which there has been no hint at all before.
[Quotes Bk IV, ch. 3 But through the confusion sounds another note
to dreams that have no words .]
295
H.G.WELLS
I am forced to see this last page as a repudiation, a confession of failure,
of the intellectual consciousness. Its utmost power has discovered no
ultimate reality beyond this worthless material reality; this is the inevitable
victory of the intellect, and in the moment of victory there comes defeat.
This victory is unbearable, a thing which the soul cannot admit; in the
vital hour Wells fails, and has to take refuge in a conception which,
whatever it is, certainly has nothing to do with the intellectual
consciousness.
I doubt, indeed, whether that last page was not forced in quite against
the original design. The value of Tono-Bungay to me lies in its effort
to find a final reality; in it man the individual carries the banner of the
intellectual consciousness to the last barrier it is only when he is beaten
back that his deeper self cries out an instinctive knowledge. But, despite
that last cry, Wells could not allow himself to see in the failure of George
Ponderevo the failure of the intellectual consciousness. His attitude had
divided him against himself; he had no self certain enough to stand alone
in its own strength. He had therefore to see in that failure the failure
of man the individual. From that intolerable loneliness which was George
Ponderevo s end he flies, and the later books almost without exception
are a record of that flight to something stronger and more enduring
than anything he finds within himself. He comes at last, inevitably, to
the idea of God; to the idea of God rather than to God himself.
For God the Invisible King is not the book of a man who knows
God; it is that of one tortured by a need for him. Wells must have God,
and his God must be God. No longer the collective intelligence of mankind,
the Mind of the Race, but God, a Being in himself, as real as a bayonet
thrust or an embrace. God is a person, he insists, and then takes away
from him every quality that constitutes personality in all but the most
esoteric meaning of the word. One must believe that he has had some
kind of religious experience, but he destroys it by the very act of trying
to make it real to the intellectual consciousness through a process of
formulation. There is a lack of real spiritual quality in Wells for that
comes utterly and necessarily from the depths of the united self, and
that self Wells has rejected.
Few things are more significant in the later books than this rejection.
Between God and the believer there is no other way, there is nothing
else, but self-surrender and the ending of self. All his heroes, from Trafford
to Preemby, come to that. That cherished personal life which men and
women struggled to round off and make noble and perfect, disappears
from the scheme of things. Wells is, in fact a Romantic who has rejected
296
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
the Romantic tradition, even as he is an artist who has rejected art.
Our fundamental beliefs, our rules of conduct, we must all make for
ourselves, he says, but at the same time rejects the complete for the
partial judgment. One measure of his rejection may be found in his attitude
to art; to take a particular case, his attitude to Shakespeare. What did
Shakespeare add to the world s totality? Some delightful plays, some
exquisite passages, some deliciously observed characters. He was a great
playwright, a great humorist, the sweetest laughter in the world& . But
if he had never lived, things would be very much as they are& Shakespeare s
thought amounted to very little. He added no idea, he altered no idea,
in the growing understanding of mankind. And elsewhere, again with
reference to Shakespeare: Great art exists for joy. The joy in literature
is its only justification& . Written and made poetry is not necessary for
everyone. There are many who can take the grandeur of history, the
splendour of the stars, the majesty of natural law, the ripple in the water,
and the beauty of a flower without the help of the poet. Surely Wells
doesn t know in the least what he is talking about! Yet to the intellectual
consciousness, strictly applied, art perhaps can be no more than this,
and it may well seem absurd to consider Shakespeare as more than the
entertaining playwright, the jolly soul, to find in his works, indeed, man s
final lore. It is all one, though, with Wells s declaration of himself as
not artist but journalist; as one, that is, who sees with a contemporary
rather than an eternal vision.
This is not to say, of course, that his work has not a very great immediate
value, but the larger part of it must in time, I think, except for extracts
and fragments, fall into oblivion. Of many of his books it may be said,
as he himself says of The Outline of History, that it is a book of to-
day with no pretensions to immortality. It is the current account. Even
to-day his own interest seems more in the journalist than in the artist;
it is the logical conclusion of that which has gone before, and yet I cannot
believe that it was a chosen conclusion. No man who was in himself,
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