[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
novels. More than three-quarters of The World of William Clissold
is taken up with discussions of opinion; it contains, as he says, religious,
historical, economic, and sociological discussions. Does that make it
anything but a novel? he asks. Perhaps not. But we can assure Mr. Wells
that we could make him a present of all the opinions in the entire world
for his emporium, and it would hardly make a pin s difference to literature,
for nearly the whole of life would be left for other writers to deal with.
Mr. Wells has, in fact, never yet shown how literature can be made out
of opinions. The theme of Tess of the D Urbervilles might be called
sociological by gentlemen who go in for cataloguing ideas, but it is the
human experience, the human tragedy, and the human passion, bare
of all opinions, bare of all discussion, which makes Tess a great novel.
Is it not as much life to meet and deal with a new idea as with a new
lover, he asks.
It is not. First of all, because an idea by itself is not life of the kind
that can be put into a novel, whereas a lover most intensely is, and secondly,
because it requires far more creative power to deal with a new lover in
a work of fiction than with a new idea. He shows the direst dislike to
such as might be reckoned on to call this book an autobiography and
he points out certain superficial differences between his own life and
that of William Clissold. According to his emphatic statement this book
is not an autobiography. It is my belief that the reader and not the author
is the best judge of this. Among the real people whom Mr. Wells introduces
is Dr. Jung, the psychoanalyst. Now, if Mr. Wells, instead of making
Dr. Jung an automatic figure could have really got into his consciousness
the philosophy the great Doctor stands for, he would know that an author
might not be able to tell whether his own book was an autobiography
or not, and that a reader with a certain knowledge of psychoanalysis
278
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
could prove that it was. The World of William Clissold is not the whole
and complete autobiography of Mr. Wells, but it is perhaps a larger
part of it than if it were written in the first person over his own name,
because far less self-conscious than such a work would naturally be.
William Clissold, like the usual Wells hero, marries young; he divorces
his wife and during the rest of his career indulges in varied sex-adventures
for which love, as a rule, appears to be left out; in fact, with extraordinary
crudity, he gives us his notion of love as something that may come into
a sexual relationship. We have seen this hero under various names such
as Mr. Remington or Mr. Britling get a little older and older, but always
with the illusion, no matter what his age, that he can be an object of
passionate love to a young woman, until we now arrive at William Clissold,
who, at the age of sixty, really believes that a woman of thirty is gloriously
enamoured of his beaux yeux. Perhaps one of the reasons why Mr. Wells
prefers dealing with ideas to dealing with lovers is that he cannot deal
with lovers his lovers have gradually become the biggest bores and
the most fatuous old fools in contemporary literature. Like certain other
Wells heroes he starts as something in science; he gives up the pursuit
of pure science and becomes an industrialist, a holder of patents and
an exploiter of secret processes, but, as we are assured, he has always
been a taker of moderate profits. Like Mr. Wells, Mr. Clissold makes
the fatal mistake of trying to think in terms of a world. When Mr. Wells
left the territory of Kipps and Mr. Polly, and Dr. Moreau, and took
the world as the place for the gyrations of his mind, his mind was unequal
to the effort. As the historian of Mr. Polly and Kipps and Dr. Moreau,
he had an unique gift; as the historian of the world and the world of
William Clissold he becomes merely a generous-minded, highly intelligent
Main streeter whose intelligence never reaches the point where it becomes
intellect, but always remains on a plane where ideas can easily be reduced
to platitudes.
In The World of William Clissold he struggles to explain the ideas that
moved our elders and contemporaries, and the ideas that he thinks will
move our descendants. It is a sort of outline of opinion. We are brought
through the golden age of Socialism in England, when Karl Marx shocked
so many remarkable minds into motion, and made, as Bernard Shaw
has told us, a man of him. Mr. Clissold is somewhat vindictive about
Socialism, about Karl Marx, and about the Fabian Society which Wells
once adorned. In his sixtieth year Mr. Clissold finds his Socialism little
279
H.G.WELLS
more than an old label on a valise. Socialism, he tells us, is gone out
of his world, having borne a narrow-souled, defective, and malignant
child, Communism. What is called the Russian experiment fills him with
resentment; he gives the impression of a man who simply so much dislikes
the ideas the Russians have that he will not bother trying to understand
what lies at the root of the order that they are imposing on their world,
be it for good or evil. He calls Karl Marx the maggot of his decayed
Socialism, and says he poisoned and embittered the whole Socialist idea
by arousing class-hatred. Without any interest in either Socialism or
Communism, I am yet shocked into resentment by the unfairness of his
treatment of Karl Marx and the present Russian system. It is unexpected
in a gentleman who stands for a more generous ordering of the world.
All this is of course of interest to the historian of the future, as well
as the skill with which he describes the dawn of advertisement in England,
when the psychology of making people buy things by persuading them
they wanted them whether they did or not first came into use. There
are also the usual Wellsian discussions about Paleolithic man and the
Ancient World and an elaborate discourse on Finance from which we
gather that nobody understands anything about money, least of all,
financiers and bankers, and that it has a helpless, uncontrolled manner
of tearing through the world, making everybody its slave. If this be the
case, wouldn t it be a simple way out of the muddle to give all the money
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]