Second Mencken Chrestomathy (40 page)

Reviewing it at the time of its publication, I inclined momentarily to the notion that the war was to blame. No one could overestimate the cost of that struggle to the English, not only in men and money, but also and more importantly in the things of the spirit. It developed national traits that were greatly at odds with the old ideal of Anglo-Saxon character—an extravagant hysteria, a tendency to whimper under blows, political radicalism and credulity. It shook the old ruling caste of the land and gave the control of things to upstarts from the lowest classes—snuffling Methodists, shady Jews, prehensile commercial gents, disgusting demagogues, all sorts of self-seeking adventurers. Worst of all, the strain seemed
to work havoc with the customary dignity and reticence, and even with the plain common sense of many Englishmen of a higher level, and in particular many English writers. The astounding bawling of Kipling and the no less astounding bombast of G. K. Chesterton were anything but isolated; there were, in fact, scores of other eminent authors in the same state of eruption, and a study of the resultant literature of objurgation will make a fascinating job for some sweating
Privat Dozent
of tomorrow. It occurred to me, as I say, that Wells might have become afflicted by this same demoralization, but reflection disposed of the notion. On the one hand, there was the plain fact that his actual writings on the war, while marked by the bitterness of the time, were anything but insane, and on the other hand there was the equally plain fact that his decay had been in progress a long while before the Germans made their fateful thrust at Liège.

The precise thing that ailed him I found at last on page 272
et seq.
of the American edition of his book. There it was plainly described, albeit unwittingly, but if you will go back to the other novels after “Marriage” you will find traces of it in all of them, and even more vivid indications in the books of exposition and philosophizing that accompanied them. What slowly crippled him and perhaps disposed of him was his gradual acceptance of the theory, corrupting to the artist and scarcely less so to the man, that he was one of the Great Thinkers of his era, charged with a pregnant Message to the Younger Generations—that his ideas, rammed into enough skulls, would Save the Empire, not only from the satanic Nietzscheism of the public enemy, but also from all those inner Weaknesses that tainted and flabbergasted its vitals, as the tapeworm with nineteen heads devoured Atharippus of Macedon. In brief, he came down with a messianic delusion—and once a man begins to suffer from a messianic delusion his days as a serious artist are ended. He may yet serve the state with laudable devotion; he may yet enchant his millions; he may yet posture and gyrate before the world as a man of mark. But not in the character of artist. Not as a creator of sound books. Not in the separate place of one who observes the eternal tragedy of man with full sympathy and understanding, and yet with a touch of god-like remoteness. Not as Homer saw it, smiting the while his blooming lyre.

I point, as I say, to page 272 of “Joan and Peter,” whereon, imperfectly
concealed by jocosity, you will find Wells’s private view of Wells. What it shows is the submergence of the artist in the tin-pot reformer and professional wise man. A descent, indeed! The man impinged upon us and made his first solid success, not as a merchant of banal pedagogics, not as a hawker of sociological liver-pills, but as a master of brilliant and life-like representation, an evoker of unaccustomed but none the less deep-seated emotions, a dramatist of fine imagination and highly resourceful execution. It was the stupendous drama and spectacle of modern life, and not its dubious and unintelligible lessons, that drew him from his test-tubes and guinea-pigs and made an artist of him, and to the business of that artist, once he had served his apprenticeship, he brought a vision so keen, a point of view so fresh and sane and a talent for exhibition so lively and original that he straightway conquered all of us. Nothing could exceed the sheer radiance of “Tono-Bungay.” It is a work that glows with reality. It projects a whole epoch with unforgettable effect. It is a moving-picture conceived and arranged, not by the usual ex-bartender or chorus man, but by an extremely civilized and sophisticated observer, alert to every detail of the surface and yet acutely aware of the internal play of forces, the essential springs, the larger, deeper lines of it. In brief, it is a work of art of the soundest merit, for it both represents accurately and interprets convincingly, and under everything is a current of feeling that coordinates and informs the whole.

But in the success of the book and of the two or three following it there was a temptation, and in the temptation a peril. The audience was there, high in expectation, eagerly demanding more. And in the ego of the man—a true proletarian, and hence born with morals, faiths, certainties, vastly gaseous hopes—there was an urge. That urge, it seems to me, began to torture him when he set about “The Passionate Friends” (1913). In the presence of it, he was dissuaded from the business of an artist,—made discontented with the business of an artist. It was not enough to display the life of his time with accuracy and understanding; it was not even enough to criticize it with a penetrating humor and sagacity. From the depths of his being, like some foul miasma, there arose the old, fatuous yearning to change it, to improve it, to set it right where it was wrong, to make it over according to some pattern superior
to the one followed by the Lord God Jehovah. With this sinister impulse, as aberrant in an artist as a taste for legs in an archbishop, the instinct that had created “Tono-Bungay” and “The New Machiavelli” gave battle, and for a while the issue was in doubt. But with “Marriage” (1912) its trend began to be apparent—and before long the evangelist was triumphant, and his bray battered the ear, and in the end there was a quite different Wells before us, and a Wells worth infinitely less than the one driven off. Today one must put him where he had begun to put himself—not among the literary artists of English, but among the brummagem prophets of England.

The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius. The lesser fellow—and Wells, for all his cleverness, was surely one of the lesser fellows—is bound to come to grief at it, and one of the first signs of his coming to grief is the drying up of his sense of humor. Compare “The Soul of a Bishop” or “Joan and Peter” to “Ann Veronica” or “The History of Mr. Polly” (1910). One notices instantly the disappearance of the comic spirit, the old searching irony. It was in “Boon” (1915), I believe, that this irony showed its last flare. There is a passage in that book which somehow lingers in the memory: a portrait of the United States as it arose in the mind of an Englishman reading the
Nation
of the pre-war years: “a vain, garrulous and prosperous female of uncertain age, and still more uncertain temper, with unfounded pretensions to intellectuality and an idea of refinement of the most negative description … the Aunt Errant of Christendom.” A capital whimsy—but blooming almost alone. A sense of humor, had it been able to survive the theology, would certainly have saved us from Lady Sunderbund, in “The Soul of a Bishop,” and from Lady Charlotte Sydenham in “Joan and Peter.” But it did not and could not survive. It always withers in the presence of the messianic delusion, like justice and the truth in front of patriotic passion. What takes its place is the oafish, witless buffoonishness of the radio—for example, the sort of thing that makes an intolerable bore of “Bealby.”

Nor were Wells’s ideas, as he so laboriously expounded them, worth the sacrifice of his old lively charm. They were, in fact, second-hand, and he often muddled them in the telling. In “First
and Last Things” (1908) he preached a flabby Socialism, and then, toward the end, admitted frankly that it would not work. In “Boon” he erected a whole book upon an eighth-rate platitude, to wit, the platitude that English literature, in these latter times, is platitudinous—a three-cornered banality, indeed, for his own argument was a case in point, and so helped to prove what was already obvious. In “The Research Magnificent” he smouched an idea from Nietzsche, and then mauled it so badly that one began to wonder whether he was in favor of it or against it. In “The Undying Fire” (1919) he first stated the obvious, and then fled from it in alarm. In his war books he borrowed right and left—from Dr. Wilson, from the British Socialists, from Romain Rolland, even from such profound thinkers as James M. Beck, Lloyd George and the editor of the New York
Tribune
—and everything that he borrowed was flat. In “Joan and Peter” he first argued that England was going to pot because English education was too formal and archaic, and then that Germany was going to pot because German education was too realistic and opportunist. He seemed to respond to all the varying crazes and fallacies of the day; he swallowed them without digesting them; he tried to substitute mere timeliness for reflection and feeling. And under all the rumble-bumble of bad ideas lay the imbecile assumption of the jitney messiah at all times and everywhere: that human beings may be made over by changing the rules under which they live, that progress is a matter of intent and foresight, that an act of Parliament can cure the blunders and check the practical joking of God.

Such notions are surely no baggage for a serious novelist. A novelist, of course, must have a point of view, but it must be a point of view untroubled by the crazes of the moment, it must regard the internal workings and meanings of existence and not merely its superficial appearances. A novelist must view life from some secure rock, drawing it into a definite perspective, interpreting it upon an ordered plan. Even if he hold (like Conrad, Dreiser, Hardy and Anatole France) that it is essentially meaningless, he must at least display that meaninglessness with reasonable clarity and consistency. Wells showed no such solid and intelligible attitude. He was too facile, too enthusiastic, too eager to teach today what he had learned only yesterday.

What remains of him? There remains a little shelf of truly excellent books, beginning with “Tono-Bungay” and ending with “Marriage.” It is a shelf flanked on the one side by a long row of extravagant romances in the manner of Jules Verne, and on the other side by an even longer row of puerile tracts. But let us not underestimate it because it is in such uninviting company. There is on it some of the liveliest, most original, most amusing, and withal most respectable fiction that England has produced in our time. In that fiction there is a sufficient memorial to a man who, between two debauches of claptrap, had his day as an artist.

From P
REJUDICES
: F
IRST
S
ERIES
, 1919, pp. 36–51. My reviews of Bennett’s books in the
Smart Set
began with one of Denry the Audacious (published in England as The Card) in May, 1911. The following essay, in large part, was first printed in the magazine for Sept., 1919, pp. 138–44. Bennett was born in 1867 and died in 1931

Of Bennett it is quite easy to conjure up a recognizable picture by imaging everything that Wells was not—that is, everything interior, everything having to do with attitudes and ideas, everything beyond the mere craft of arranging words in ingratiating sequences. As stylists, of course, they had many points of contact. Each wrote a journalese that was extraordinarily fluent and tuneful; each was apt to be carried away by the rush of his own smartness. But in their matter they stood at opposite poles. Wells had a believing mind, and could not resist the lascivious beckonings and eye-winkings of meretricious novelty; Bennett carried skepticism so far that it often took on the appearance of a mere peasant-like suspicion of ideas, bellicose and unintelligent. Wells was astonishingly intimate and confidential, and more than one of his novels reeked with a shameless sort of autobiography; Bennett, even when he made use of personal experience, contrived to get impersonality into it. Wells, finally, was a sentimentalist, and could not conceal his feelings; Bennett, of all the English novelists of his day, was the most steadily aloof and ironical.

This habit of irony, in truth, was the thing that gave him all his characteristic color, and was at the bottom of both his peculiar merit and his peculiar limitation. On the one hand it set him free from the besetting sin of the contemporary novelist: he never preached, he had no messianic delusion, he was above the puerile theories that have engulfed more romantic men. But on the other hand it left him empty of the passion that is, when all is said and done, the chief mark of the true novelist. The trouble with him was that he could not feel with his characters, that he never involved himself emotionally in their struggles against destiny, that the drama of their lives never thrilled or damaged him—and the result was that he was unable to arouse in the reader that penetrating sense of kinship, that profound and instinctive sympathy, which in its net effect is almost indistinguishable from the understanding born of experiences actually endured and emotions actually shared. Joseph Conrad, in a memorable piece of criticism, once put the thing clearly. “My task,” he said, “is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you
see.
” Here seeing, it must be obvious, is no more than feeling put into physical terms; it is not the outward aspect that is to be seen, but the inner truth—and the end to be sought by that apprehension of inner truth is responsive recognition, the sympathy of poor mortal for poor mortal, the tidal uprush of feeling that makes us all one. Bennett, it seems to me, could not evoke it. His characters, as they pass, have a deceptive brilliance of outline, but they soon fade; one never finds them haunting the memory as Lord Jim haunts it, or Carrie Meeber, or Huck Finn, or Tom Jones. The reason is not so far to seek. It lies in the plain fact that they appeared to their creator, not as men and women whose hopes and agonies were of poignant concern, not as tragic comedians in isolated and concentrated dramas, but as mean figures in an infinitely dispersed and unintelligible farce, as helpless nobodies in an epic struggle that transcended both their volition and their comprehension. In brief, he failed to humanize them completely, and so he failed to make their emotions contagious. They are, in their way, often vividly real; they are thoroughly accounted for; what there is of them is unfailingly life-like; they move and breathe in an environment that pulses and glows. But
the attitude of the author toward them remains, in the end, the attitude of a biologist toward his laboratory animals. He does not feel with them—and neither does his reader.