[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
the abysmal idiocy of the constitution of society; no one feels more intensely
the maladjustments, the discontent, the misery of so many of us. But
he starkly refuses to believe other than that something better is to come
of all this. His first and last thought is always for finding a better way
of doing the thing we have hitherto done badly. We scold the critic who
is, as we say, merely destructive; we must then in decent consistency,
recognise the critic of life who is inveterately constructive. Out of these
fumbling attempts to do fine things that seem always to end in such
218
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
utter failure he seeks to pluck some lesson that will serve to make the
next attempt a little less a failure. He offers no solutions of insoluble
problems, but he tries in all honesty to point a way wherein a partial
solution may after innumerable attempts be found.
After all, perhaps the secret of Mr. Wells s success with a hackneyed
literary form is that he has recorded a genuine confession. Make no
mistake, this is real autobiography; not in the mere literal sense, but in
the sense that it comes straight at first hand from the man s own experience
and thought. The strongest impression that remains of The Passionate
Friends is of the author s intellectual honesty. He may or may not be
on the whole a true prophet; as to that there is room for difference of
opinion. But however much he may offend your sober commonsense,
outrage your taste, do violence to your moral standards, he will not
pretend. He is of those men, and they are rare, who seek the truth with
passion. He utters his own soul, and says: Here it is, this mixture of
nobility and meanness, of high altruism and anxious egotistical vulgarity;
at least, the authentic soul of a man. In this, as in much else, Mr. Wells
has placed himself in the line of the Great Succession. If this passionate
quest of the truth, joined to the wisdom of a man who has lived and
the skill of one who has mastered a great craft, be not genius, then it
is something so very like to genius that failure to see the difference may
be more pardonable than refusal to see the resemblance.
219
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
October 1914
71. Walter Lippmann, review in New
Republic
7 November 1914, 27
Walter Lippmann (b. 1889), political journalist, expresses the
disappointment with which some of Wells s admirers realized that
in fiction he was now largely a spent force.
Somewhere in The New Machiavelli H.G.Wells pictures himself surrounded
by piles of manuscripts discarded in an effort to find a true account of
his story. When I finished reading The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman I wondered
whether Mr. Wells had not passed beyond the stage of rejecting any
part of his own work as inadequate. For though this latest book is amusing
and perhaps useful, it is a careless book written with comfortable facility
out of the upper layers of his mind. You say to yourself, Wells has turned
out another book. You cannot say to yourself, as you could of his earlier
work, Wells has learned from fresh experience and Wells is giving of
that experience. For Tono-Bungay and The New Machiavelli were wrung
with tortured sincerity out of a man s own life, and they were scarred
and shapeless with the effort; they seemed to stammer inevitably into
Wells s famous suspension points with their own inner need for the elusive
fringes of the truth.
Since he wrote The New Machiavelli Wells seems like a man who
has retired to live in the country on the proceeds of his accumulated
spiritual capital. Where formerly each book had been a fresh adventure
220
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
and a new conquest, these later ones seem like creations from an armchair
which cost little and give little. No doubt it is understandable that men
should grow weary of danger, that arctic explorers should become lecturers
and that old soldiers should write their memoirs, that Wells should
plagiarize Wells. Few men who write have driven themselves as he has
driven himself. The old Wells seemed to be living in a chronic crisis, in
which there were immense visions and shattering disappointments, a
gorgeous socialism breaking its heart over the actual facts. In the characters
he created love was a pursuit in which the woman his hero desired was
always just beyond the one he possessed. He was forever adjusting his
hope of reality, trying almost in agony to find in England a home for
his dreams. And because that struggle was relentless, Wells had come
to typify the modern man, his weakness and his constant relapses, his
tentative hope and his overwhelming tasks.
For what distinguished Wells among the Utopians is the fact that
his Utopia was never finished and that every new experience amended
it radically. He was not content to indulge his fancy or to clamor for
freedom. He seemed to live in that dangerous region where freedom is
being tried and vision embodied. He seemed to be buffeted from both
sides, challenged by his dreams which revolted at the compromises of
reality, and assaulted by reality which denounced the emptiness of all
dreams. He seemed to spend himself in that struggle the severest that
a man can face; and he seemed to win by a constant renewal of effort
in which he refused to sink either into placid acceptance of the world,
or into self-contained satisfaction with his vision.
But in his later books there has been an evident slackening of effort,
betrayed at first by a too great fluency of style, an increase of mannerism,
a tendency to large rhetoric, and to plots which creak along by accident.
Worse than that, his heroines have become distant and beautiful, they
have moved up in society as heroines do, so that of late a Wells heroine
to have a soul and to suffer must also have a title. Moreover, the villain
has appeared, as the husband in The Passionate Friends, as Sir Isaac in
this book. Now a villain is a device for shirking the issue; you ascribe
all the difficulties to him, and your story can proceed. But he is fatal
to the truth, as the earlier Wells would have proclaimed on every page.
Yet here is the villain drawn as an uncannily malignant figure who
is responsible for modern commercialism and for the suffering of generous
souls like the wife, Lady Harman. Poor Sir Isaac had lived like a blind [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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the abysmal idiocy of the constitution of society; no one feels more intensely
the maladjustments, the discontent, the misery of so many of us. But
he starkly refuses to believe other than that something better is to come
of all this. His first and last thought is always for finding a better way
of doing the thing we have hitherto done badly. We scold the critic who
is, as we say, merely destructive; we must then in decent consistency,
recognise the critic of life who is inveterately constructive. Out of these
fumbling attempts to do fine things that seem always to end in such
218
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
utter failure he seeks to pluck some lesson that will serve to make the
next attempt a little less a failure. He offers no solutions of insoluble
problems, but he tries in all honesty to point a way wherein a partial
solution may after innumerable attempts be found.
After all, perhaps the secret of Mr. Wells s success with a hackneyed
literary form is that he has recorded a genuine confession. Make no
mistake, this is real autobiography; not in the mere literal sense, but in
the sense that it comes straight at first hand from the man s own experience
and thought. The strongest impression that remains of The Passionate
Friends is of the author s intellectual honesty. He may or may not be
on the whole a true prophet; as to that there is room for difference of
opinion. But however much he may offend your sober commonsense,
outrage your taste, do violence to your moral standards, he will not
pretend. He is of those men, and they are rare, who seek the truth with
passion. He utters his own soul, and says: Here it is, this mixture of
nobility and meanness, of high altruism and anxious egotistical vulgarity;
at least, the authentic soul of a man. In this, as in much else, Mr. Wells
has placed himself in the line of the Great Succession. If this passionate
quest of the truth, joined to the wisdom of a man who has lived and
the skill of one who has mastered a great craft, be not genius, then it
is something so very like to genius that failure to see the difference may
be more pardonable than refusal to see the resemblance.
219
THE WIFE OF SIR ISAAC HARMAN
October 1914
71. Walter Lippmann, review in New
Republic
7 November 1914, 27
Walter Lippmann (b. 1889), political journalist, expresses the
disappointment with which some of Wells s admirers realized that
in fiction he was now largely a spent force.
Somewhere in The New Machiavelli H.G.Wells pictures himself surrounded
by piles of manuscripts discarded in an effort to find a true account of
his story. When I finished reading The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman I wondered
whether Mr. Wells had not passed beyond the stage of rejecting any
part of his own work as inadequate. For though this latest book is amusing
and perhaps useful, it is a careless book written with comfortable facility
out of the upper layers of his mind. You say to yourself, Wells has turned
out another book. You cannot say to yourself, as you could of his earlier
work, Wells has learned from fresh experience and Wells is giving of
that experience. For Tono-Bungay and The New Machiavelli were wrung
with tortured sincerity out of a man s own life, and they were scarred
and shapeless with the effort; they seemed to stammer inevitably into
Wells s famous suspension points with their own inner need for the elusive
fringes of the truth.
Since he wrote The New Machiavelli Wells seems like a man who
has retired to live in the country on the proceeds of his accumulated
spiritual capital. Where formerly each book had been a fresh adventure
220
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
and a new conquest, these later ones seem like creations from an armchair
which cost little and give little. No doubt it is understandable that men
should grow weary of danger, that arctic explorers should become lecturers
and that old soldiers should write their memoirs, that Wells should
plagiarize Wells. Few men who write have driven themselves as he has
driven himself. The old Wells seemed to be living in a chronic crisis, in
which there were immense visions and shattering disappointments, a
gorgeous socialism breaking its heart over the actual facts. In the characters
he created love was a pursuit in which the woman his hero desired was
always just beyond the one he possessed. He was forever adjusting his
hope of reality, trying almost in agony to find in England a home for
his dreams. And because that struggle was relentless, Wells had come
to typify the modern man, his weakness and his constant relapses, his
tentative hope and his overwhelming tasks.
For what distinguished Wells among the Utopians is the fact that
his Utopia was never finished and that every new experience amended
it radically. He was not content to indulge his fancy or to clamor for
freedom. He seemed to live in that dangerous region where freedom is
being tried and vision embodied. He seemed to be buffeted from both
sides, challenged by his dreams which revolted at the compromises of
reality, and assaulted by reality which denounced the emptiness of all
dreams. He seemed to spend himself in that struggle the severest that
a man can face; and he seemed to win by a constant renewal of effort
in which he refused to sink either into placid acceptance of the world,
or into self-contained satisfaction with his vision.
But in his later books there has been an evident slackening of effort,
betrayed at first by a too great fluency of style, an increase of mannerism,
a tendency to large rhetoric, and to plots which creak along by accident.
Worse than that, his heroines have become distant and beautiful, they
have moved up in society as heroines do, so that of late a Wells heroine
to have a soul and to suffer must also have a title. Moreover, the villain
has appeared, as the husband in The Passionate Friends, as Sir Isaac in
this book. Now a villain is a device for shirking the issue; you ascribe
all the difficulties to him, and your story can proceed. But he is fatal
to the truth, as the earlier Wells would have proclaimed on every page.
Yet here is the villain drawn as an uncannily malignant figure who
is responsible for modern commercialism and for the suffering of generous
souls like the wife, Lady Harman. Poor Sir Isaac had lived like a blind [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]