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H. G. Wells, British Patriot in Search of a World State*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Edward Mead Earle
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H. G. Wells exercised an almost unique influence on the o generation which reached maturity during the decade 1910–20. Only Bernard Shaw among men of letters and Wood-row Wilson among men in public life approached Wells in capturing the imagination of that generation and winning it to a particular point of view. There was a flippancy and irresponsibility about Shaw, however, which debased his great abilities; to some, he was a cleverer Oscar Wilde—a court jester for the Fabians and other intellectuals, as Wilde previously had been for salon and café society. Wilson, almost a Messiah during the years 1917–18, was a tragic casualty of the postwar era of disillusion and cynicism. But Wells continued throughout the 'twenties to command its attention and respect.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , January 1950 , pp. 181 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1950

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References

1 Of course we read Kipling, too, but the intellectual climate of the United States was less congenial to Kipling's imperialism than it was in Great Britain. Among academic personalities, the Webbs occupied an especially conspicuous place in our scheme of things but a lesser place than they held among our British contemporaries. Sinclair Lewis, a disciple of Wells, has recalled vividly how much Wells “meant to us from 1910 to 1930 in Greenwich Village or Pekin or Sauk Centre or Twitterton-on-Twit” (“A Generation Nour ished on H. G. Wells,” in the New York Herald Tribune, Book Review Section, October 20, 1946.) See also four articles in the Saturday Review of Literature, August 31, 1946: Clifton Fadiman, “The Passing of a Prophet”; Elmer Davis, “Notes on the Failure of a Mission”; Waldemar Kaempffert, “Evangelist of Utopia”; H. S. Canby, “The Super-journalist.”

2 For an evaluation of Shaw's views see Irvine, William, “Shaw, War and Peace,” in Foreign Affairs, XXV (1947), 314–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 European writers have dealt more seriously and more ponderously with Wells than have Americans or his fellow-countrymen. See, for example, Sonnemann, Ullrich, Der sociale Gedanke im Werk von H. G. Wells, Berlin, 1935Google Scholar; Simon, Wolfgang, Die englische Utopie im Lichte der Entwicklungslehre, Breslau, 1937Google Scholar; Halfmann, H. W. G., “HL G. Wells' Vereinigung von Pazifismus und Imperialismus,” Englische Studien, Leipzig, 1921, LIX, 193–259Google Scholar; Matlick, H., H. G. Wells als Sozialreformer, Leipzig, 1935Google Scholar; Connes, Georges, Étude sur la penséede Wells, Paris, 1926.Google Scholar A discriminating American study is Brooks, Van Wyck, The World of H. G. Wells, New York, Kennerly, 1915.Google Scholar Interesting, too, are Slosson, E. E., Six Major Prophets, Boston, Little, Brown, 1917Google Scholar, Chap. II; and Mumford, Lewis, The Story of Utopias, New York, Boni and Liveright, 1922Google Scholar, Chap. IX.

4 The World of William Clissold (hereafter cited as William Clissold), 2 vols., New York Doran, 1926, 1, 59, 211–12.

5 SirSalter, Arthur, Personality in Politics, London, 1947, pp. 121–22.Google Scholar The chapter on “H. G. Wells, Apostle of a World Society” in this altogether delightful volume is the best essay I know on Wells. I had started this present paper long before Sir Arthur‘s book came my way, but I have nevertheless profited enormously from having read his sympathetic and discriminating critique of Wells's political views and attitudes.

6 Wells said of himself that “he was indeed so much of an educator that quite early he found it imperative to abandon schoolmastering.” If the Empire is lost, it will be lost “if not precisely on the playing fields of Eton, in the mental and moral quality of the men who staff its public schools.” “A time must come when Oxford and Cambridge will signify no more in the current intellectual field of the world than the monastery of Mount Athos or the lamaseries of Tibet do now.” William Clissold, II, 627–60; quotations from pp. 627, 633, 660.

7 Wells, , The Way the World is Going, Garden City, Doubleday, 1929, p. 78.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., Chap. X, “What is the Empire Worth to Mankind?”

9 Wells, , What is Coming?, New York, Macmillan, 1916, p. 225Google Scholar; The Way the World is Going, pp. 78“One of the least satisfactory features of the intellectual atmosphere of the present time is the absence of good controversy,” wrote Wells at the beginning of the century. “We no longer fight obnoxious views but assassinate them.” Anticipations, New York, Harper, 1902, p. 295.

11 Some of these prejudices seem petty, such as those which concerned professionals of the Foreign Office, the Armed Forces, the schools, and the universities.

12 Wells studied biology and and zoology for two years under the great Huxley and others at the Normal School (now the Royal College) of Science at Kensington. In Love and Mr. Lemsham (1900) he left a vivid record of the life of a young scientist. See also West, Geoffrey, H. G. Wells, A Sketch for a Portrait, London, 1930Google Scholar, Chap. III; and Wells, , Experiment in Autobiography (hereafter cited as Autobiography), New York, Macmillan, 1934Google Scholar, Chap. V.

13 Wells believed that science and the scientific method could not only diagnose the present but foretell the future. See his memorable address “The 'Discovery of the Future” to the Royal Society in London, January 24, 1902, first published in Nature and in the Report of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 1902. See also What is Coming?, Chap. I, “Fore casting the Future.”

14 The New Machiavelli, Chap. IV, Sections 9–10; quotation is from the Penguin edition, pp. 107–109. Wells was one of the earliest advocates of social planning, and he never lost his faith in its possibilities. “We live in a planning world,” he wrote in 1939. “Everything we do is becoming preparatory and anticipatory. Today has vanished almost completely in our enormous preoccupation with tomorrow. I suppose I have responded as much as anyone in my generation to this mental rotation.” The Fate of Man, New York, Longmans, Green, 1939, p. 67.

15 William Clissold, II, 572; The Way the World is Going, Chap. VI, “The Absurdity of British Politics.” Wells was that rare phenomenon, a British republican. One of his reasons for distrusting and opposing the Crown was his conviction that it lent authority and respectability to “a sort of false England that veils the realities of jingoism.” “While he [the King] remains, the old army system remains, Society remains, the militant tradition remains. They are all bound up together, inseparably. The people cannot apprehend them selves in relation to the world while, at every turn and crisis of the collective life, the national king, the national uniforms, the national flags and bands, thrust blare and bunting across the realities. … How else can a monarchy work considering how monarchs are made and trained and flattered?“ William Clissold, I, 282–83.

16 Wells made this fundamental point as early as 1901. See the eloquent statement in Anticipations, pp. 182“any assembly, mixture, or confusion of people which is either afflicted by or wishes to be afflicted by a foreign office of its own.” (Ibid.) To Wells the most crushing indictment of anything was to call it a bore. The following is not very helpful, even if true: “Patriots are bores; nationalists are bores; kings and princes are ex officio terrible bores.” (William Clissold, II, 573.)

18 The Idea of a League of Nations, Boston, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1919, pp. 5–6. Although Wells was writing twenty-five years before the development of atomic weapons, one is struck by the similarity of much of his argument to that of the Federation of Atomic Scientists and others since Hiroshima. But Wells was not unmindful of the fact that there would be still more terrible weapons than those used during the War of 1914–18. Wells was a close student of physics and had foreseen the development of the atomic bomb. In The World Set Free (New York, Dutton, 1914) he made some truly remarkable prophecies concerning atomic weapons and their impact upon international politics.

19 These ideas are so fundamental to Wells's thinking that it is probably unwise to document them in detail. They appear, of course, in Anticipations and, in much greater detail, in The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (London, 1932). They are dealt with at length in The New Machiavelli and in William Clissold. As we shall presently see, they gave Wells the idea of a world state which, in its early phases at least, might by-pass political methods and build its foundations on international economic activities.

20 For eloquent statements to this general effect see An Englishman Looks at the World, London, 1914, especially pp. 37–38; Joan and Peter, New York, Macmillan, 1918, especially pp. 222–24, 242–43; What is Coming?, Chap. XI; In the Fourth Year, New York, Macmillan, 1918, Chap. V. For a favorable view of certain of the British imperialists—Cromer, Milner, and others—see The New Machiavelli, pp. 268, 342; Autobiography, pp. 650–55; The Way the World is Going, p. 123.

21 Joan and Peter, pp. 223–24. Chamberlain is here referred to as a “demagogue ironmonger” and “nail trust organizer.”

22 On the curious and unfounded legend that Milner had established an imperialist cult at Balliol College, Oxford, see Spender, J. A. and Asquith, Cyril, Life of Herbert Henry Asquith, London, 1932, I, 146–48.Google Scholar

23 The quotation is from Joan and Peter, pp. 223–24; the tenses have been changed from past to present to conform with my text. The idea of the Open Hand was a favorite of Wells and appears in The New Machiavelli and Autobiography, as well as elsewhere.

24 William Clissold, II, 582; Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p. 607; What is Coming?, Chap. XI.

25 Anticipations, pp. 237–38. See also Chap. X of A Modern V topia (London, 1905), an exceedingly effective answer to the aberrations of racial and nationalistic “superiority” prevalent in our time.

26 Ibid., pp. 340–42.

27 William Clissold, II, 613–15. A German comment on Wells is W. Simon, Die englische Utopie (cited in footnote 3 above), Part II, Sec. 10, “Wells gegen dem Rassenstandpunkt.” But Wells didn't like Jewish nationalism, either. He regarded the Old Testament as one oí the most shocking instances of nationalistic history and tribal incitation. In this sense the “German National Socialist movement is essentially Jewish in spirit and origin, it is Bible-born, an imitation of Old Testament nationalism,” with all “its barbaric cunning and barbaric racialism.” “Only a Bible-saturated people … could take so easily to national egotism, to systematic xenophobia, to self-righteous ideas of conquest and extermination, The German mind, never a very subtle or critical one, the copious abounding German mind, was poisoned in the Lutheran schools,” where the Bible was regarded “as a book sacred beyond criticism.” The Anatomy of Frustration, New York, Macmillan, 1936, pp, 135–43; quotation from p. 141.

28 William Clissold, II, 662. Wells thought liberals frequently were confused by universal application of dogma. “You will find a Labour paper like the Daily Herald scolding vigor. ously at the private ownership of land and minerals in one column and insisting in the next upon the‘right’of some little barbaric nationality to hold its territories and its natural resources, however vast they may happen to be, against the needs of all mankind. It would wrench the northern coalfields from the Duke of Northumberland and leave all the mines of the Riff to Abd-el-Krim.” (Ibid., I, 183.) Again, “One of the most human and interesting things to watch at the present time is the struggle of the Labor parties in the European democracies against their ingrained nationalist feelings and their belligerent patriotism. And still more edifying are the fluctuations of the Labor movement in such countries as Australia and South Africa with regard to yellow and brown immigration and the black vote.” (The Way the World is Going, p. 63.)

29 The Outline of History, II, 435.

30 Autobiography, p. 570.

31 Anticipations, p. 183.

32 What is Coming? (1916), Chap. IX, “The New Map of Europe”; In the Fourth Year (1918).

33 The Way the World is Going, p. 82; The Common Sense of World Peace, London, 1929, p. 32. An earlier judgment of Wilson had been more charitable, although still captious (The Outline of History, II, 543–55). For other vignettes of Wilson see William Clissold, I, 294, 325–26; Autobiography, 604. Wells's views on Wilson were colored by Kevnes's, J. M.Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1920).Google Scholar

34 The Common Sense of World Peace (an address delivered in the Reichstag, Berlin, April 15, 1929), London, 1929, pp. 11–12. International law was not one of the subjects in which Wells claimed competence. But on this question of national sovereignty he finde support among the experts. See, for example, Jessup, Philip, A Modern Law of Nations, New York, Macmillan, 1946Google Scholar, especially Introductory Chapter and pp. 40–42. “Sovereignty,” says Professor Jessup, “in its meaning of an absolute, uncontrolled state will, ultimately free to resort to the final arbitrament of war, is the quicksand on which the foundations of traditional international law are built.” (p. 40.)

35 Salter, , op. cit., p. 134.Google Scholar

36 Mr. Britling Sees It Through (hereafter cited as Mr. Britling), New York, Macmillan, 1916, pp. 15–16, 35.

37 Autobiography, pp. 224–25; William Clissold, II, 456–58, e.g.

38 See, for example, The New Machiavelli, pp. 130–31, for a description of a smug, self-eatisfied businessman who “knew no language but Staffordshire, hated all foreigners because he was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated par ticularly, and in this order, Londoners, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welsh and Irish because they were not‘reet Staffordshire,’and he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently 'reet'.” See also the Autobiography, p. 582, for an upperclass Englishman who “was a curious mixture of sixth-form Anglican sentimentality (about dear old horses, dearer old doggies, brave women, real gentlemen, the old school, the old country and sound stock: Galsworthyissimus in fact) with an adventurous intelligence.” All British professional army officers, ipso jacto, become Colonel Blimps at a very early age.

39 Mr. Britling, pp. 53–54, 120.

40 The New Machiavelli, pp. 111, 149.

41 Cited by West, op. cit., pp. 203–04.

42 Autobiography, pp. 569–71.

43 The Common Sense of World Peace, p. 6.

44 In the spring of 1914 Wells had said, indeed, that war with Germany was not imminent and that, if it could be avoided for, say, twenty years, it would never occur (An Englishman Loks at the World, pp. 143–44). On the other hand, in a futuristic tale published early in 1914, Wells foretold the collapse of the social structure in a war which ended with the use of atomic bombs. The war began, prophetically enough, with a German attack on France by way of Belgium (The World Set Free).

45 Hayes, C. J. H., “The War of the Nations,” Political Science Quarterly, XXIX (1914), 687.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46 Mr. Britling, p. 91.

47 Most of this paragraph and the immediately succeeding paragraphs are based upon Mr. Britling, Joan and Peter, The Bulpington of Blup, and William Clissold. These novels, especially the first two, tell more about wartime Britain than do most histories.

48 William Clissold, I, 99.

49 Mr. Britling, pp. 125–26.

50 The War That Will End War, London, 1914, p. 99; What is Coming?, p. 7.

51 Take, for example, his keen appreciation of the cruel dilemma in which the war placed British youth. “These youngsters had grown up with an almost unchallenged assumption of their right to self-development. They had come into what had seemed a world of happy opportunity. They had met with little discipline and less punishment. People had asked them, with intimations of unlimited choice: ‘What would you like to do?’ ‘What would you like to be?’ Suddenly they were confronted with an immense, a universal compulsion. The picture of human happiness and world amplitude was withdrawn and the real situation revealed. Abandon whatever you are doing, it said, cease to be whatever you had proposed to be, and come into the war. Come into the war. The war is everything and you are nothing, nothing whatever, except what you are in relation to the war.” The Bulpington of Blup, New York, Macmillan, 1933 p. 216; see also Joan and Peter, pp. 443–44.

52 See, as an extreme example, the following bitter passage which constitutes the final paragraph of What is Coming? (1916): “My reason insists upon the inevitableness and necessity of this ultimate reconciliation [between the Allied and the German peoples]. I will do no more than I must to injure Germany further, and I will do all that I can to restore the unity of mankind. None the less is it true that for me for all the rest of my life the Germans I shall meet, the German things I shall see, will be smeared with the blood of my people and my friends that the willfulness of Germany has spilt.” This seems less extreme after World War II than it may have seemed during World War I.

53 Herr Heinrich, the German tutor in Mr. Britling, is portrayed sympathetically and affectionately (see e.g., pp. 50–52, 64–66, 67–69, 167–68). And the final chapter of Mr. Britling, consisting of Mr. Britling's letter to Herr Heinrich's parents, is certainly not the work of an unbalanced Germanophobe.

54 An Englishman Looks at the World, pp. 36–37, 143–45; Anticipations, pp. 274–81; Mr. Bruirne, p. 436; Joan and Peter, pp. 216, 390–94; What is Coming?, pp. 64–66, 97–100, 274–81.

55 Anticipations, pp. 274–80. As will be noted, Wells anticipated much of the argument in Veblen, Thorstein, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, New York, Macmillan, 1915.Google Scholar

56 Mr. Britling, pp. 427–29. Much later, Wells said that “the war did no more for mankind than the Black Death or a forest fire.” (William Clissold, I, 293.)

57 Autobiography, pp. 592–94. For some earlier British and American propaganda on behalf of a league of nations see a review article by Hayes, C.J.H.,” “The Peace of the Nations,” Columbia University Quarterly, XIX (1916), 163–82.Google Scholar

58 The Idea of a League of Nations, p. 44. This little volume was almost entirely from Wells's pen. For earlier writings on the League see In The Fourth Year.

59 West, op. cit., p. 231.

60 West, op. cit., p. 241.

61 The foregoing summary and quotations are from Anticipations, pp. 267 et seq. (dealing with “The Larger Synthesis”), pp. 157–64 (principally concerning democracy).

62 Concerning the Samurai see A Modern Utopia, Chap. IX. On an intellectual and technical aristocracy in general see The New Machiavelli, especially pp. 243–45; Autobiogra phy, pp. 196–97; The New World Order, London, 1940, Chaps. III and X; William Clissold, II, 547–77.

63 Anticipations, pp. 298–300; The Open Conspiracy, London, 1928; William Clissold, II, pp. 557 et seq. It is perhaps interesting to note that Wells rejected the international socialist and labor movements as participants in the Open Conspiracy. The (Second) International is without real influence or significance in the forces of the world. “It is so of necessity because of the limited outlook of the common worker,” who is “ill-informed and easily misled” and “has feelings in the place of ideas. His International is a mere community of resentful sentiment directed against the general order of the world and against employers,” who, in reality, are more internationally-minded than the workers. The labor leader of today is “vacuously emotional and unsound” and is a transitory type in human affairs. The real revolutionary will “keep to the right now and not try the left.” He will travel by the Blue Train to the end of his journey; he will come from America rather than from Moscow. (William Clissold, II, pp. 555–59.) As to Soviet Communism, “it is as intellectually bankrupt as any‘capitalist’government.” (Ibid., p. 447.)

64 William Clissold, II, 447–48. “You could steal and hide Washington away for weeks and, if the newspapers made no fuss, the average citizen of the United States would be unaware of his loss.” (Ibid., p. 578.) Wells's contempt for democracy—perhaps contempt is too strong a word—is disturbing but cannot be overlooked. It recurs often in his writings but can be summarized in the sentence: “Muddle isn't ended by transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed many.” (The New Machiavelli, p. 255.)

65 Outline of History, II, 558–59. Wells, reluctant to give up all hope for the League made several trips to Geneva, the last in the mid-twenties. He came away with all his prejudices confirmed; he disliked the official, bureaucratic atmosphere, on the one hand, and the dilettantism of the League hangers-on and evangelists, on the other. Cf. William Clissold, II, 511–15; Salter, , op. cit., pp. 132–33.Google Scholar

66 The Common Sense of World Peace, pp. 12, 15, 21

67 “Federation,” Chap. VII of The New World Order; “The Puerility of Current Federal Union Schemes,” Chap. IX of The Common Sense of War and Peace: World Revolution or War Unending, London, 1940; The Anatomy of Frustration, New York, Macmillan, 1936, Chap. XII.

68 See an eloquent passage in William Clissold, II, 668–72, in which Wells asks and answers the question, “Why should I care? … Why should I become almost miserly with my days and hours in order to work for ends I can never live to see?”

69 On this phase of Wells see The War in the Air, New York, Macmillan, 1908, especially pp. 249–57; and Earle, E. M., “The Influence of Air Power Upon History,” Yale Review, XXXV (1946), 577–93.Google Scholar Wells had been clairvoyant, too, as regards both trench warfare and tanks as the means of breaking the deadlock of trench warfare. An article “The Land Ironclads” in the Strand Magazine for January 1904 (Vol. 26, pp. 661–74) makes extra ordinary reading in the light of events thirteen years later and, again, thirty-six years later. I hope before very long to write a study of Wells as a student of war.

70 The World Set Free, pp. 152,154.

71 Ibid., pp. 192–93. These words, it must be remembered, were in print before the first shots were fired in 1914 and three decades before the test at Alamogordo!

72 Autobiography, pp. 642–43; The Common Sense of World Peace, pp. 22“My reply to anyone who charges me with visionary Utopianism in my demand for the world federation of the common interests of mankind is that it is he who dreams. He is sleeping in a cramped position called patriotism, which can produce nothing for him but a series of … nightmares.”

73 The New Machiavelli, p. 11.

74 The Anatomy of Frustration, p. 116.

75 Autobiography, pp. 642–43.

76 Mind at the End of Its Tether, London, 194S, pp. 17, 30. This is a depressing book, black with pessimism. It is a mitigating circumstance that at the time he wrote it Wells was not only old but mortally III.

77 Salter, , op. cit., p. 137.Google Scholar

78 Salter, , op. cit., p. 129.Google Scholar Wells was on unsound ground, too, in proposing to ignore or by-pass the national state. “Whatever academic reflections may be indulged on the relative merits of cosmopolitanism and internationalism, it is the latter, and not the former, which will appeal to the practical realist of the present generation as the possible and desirable antidote to the poison of nationalism. To go from nationalism to cosmopolitanism is to hurdle from a familiar path and start off in an opposite direction along a path that is strange and choked with underbrush. To go from nationalism to internationalism is merely to take a well-marked turn on the very highway on which the modern world is traveling.” Hayes, C.J.H., Essays on Nationalism, New York, Macmillan, 1926, p. 271.Google Scholar

79 What is Coming?, p. 217.