H.G. Wells Walks Out on The Fabians
January 21, 2011
H.G. WELLS, the British author, was a lifelong socialist and a member of the Fabian Society when Beatrice and Sydney Webb were its leading lights. In this excellent essay on Wells, Thomas F. Bertonneau describes the author’s encounters with the Webbs, whom he caricatured in his novel The New Machiavelli. As Mr. Bertonneau puts it,
People like the Webbs saw in dislocation and discontentment an opportunity to be in charge, to direct and assemble people, and to pull strings, but without knowing where to direct anyone or what someone ought to do to ameliorate the ills of a disintegrating society. The Webbs liked bossing people about even to the extent of arranging, or attempting to arrange, marriages. Wells finally saw the Webbs as ineffectual dilettantes, self-deluded, not as the architects of a rational utopia, and therefore he saw them as part of the existing confusion.
H.G. Wells Walks Out on the Fabians
Thomas F. Bertonneau
Only a few people nowadays think about H.G. Wells although in his time, the mid-twentieth century, he ranked as one of the best selling Anglophone authors. Translators made him available in just about every European language. Among conservatives nowadays, when one mentions the name of Wells, it is generally in a context of opprobrium because Wells, the lifelong socialist and sometime atheist, the advocate of a world state, seems to stand for an instrumental notion of the future inimical to custom and tradition. The image while not entirely untrue, exaggerates only one aspect of a personality compounded of many and variegated aspects, not a few of them admirable. Worse, the opinion tends to come second-hand: It lacks real knowledge of the Wellsian oeuvre, which abounds in contradictory discussion and exerts its interest even when a reader finds himself in disagreement with the principle under recommendation. God the Invisible King (1917) and The Open Conspiracy (1928) might be outstandingly bad or even pernicious books, as someone at ISI recently proclaimed, but they simply do not sum up Wells, whose dazzling heterogeneity from one tome to the next is one of the characteristics that inclines his devotees, even the conservative ones like me, to admire him.
In his lifetime, Wells showed a knack for provoking both the Left and the Right, a trait that all by itself ought to make him an object of open-minded scrutiny. He could be an audacious prophet, as when he wrote in The World Set Free, already in 1914, about the probable details of atomic warfare; he could be deceived by flattery, as when he let Lenin exploit him for propaganda purposes in Moscow in 1920. Yet Wells, while easily flattered, tended to be non-doctrinaire. He was a great improviser of the imagination. His judgments of the Fabian type of socialism, as promulgated by Beatrice and Sydney Webb, and of Marxism might surprise his peremptory detractors on the conservative side of prevailing political division.
In An Experiment in Autobiography(1934), Wells writes at length about his days as a London science student, in the late 1880s, when the appeal of socialism first addressed him. He recalls lectures given in a hall in Hammersmith by G. B. Shaw and Graham Wallas, but remarks that, “It is impossible alas! to recover my original naïve perception.” The adult Wells saw in this rather literary and artistic type of socialism “a group of mental reaction systems (with very great variations within the group) to the disconcerting consequences of the new change of scale” brought about by the perfection of industrial techniques and the establishment of a global market for trade. Reactionis the sentence’s operative concept. A good deal of the speechifying in Hammersmith entailed a crass posturing of the initiates so as to impress their wisdom on those not yet indoctrinated.
In 1903, already a public figure because of his authorship, Wells joined the Fabian Society, into which the loosely organized literary socialism of England had by then coalesced. In the Experiment, Wells identifies a pleonasm on reality in the desire of the fin-de-siècle socialists, especially the artsy Fabians, to “have a new world,” which they were always talking about. It was, in context, like the canard of change in the 2008 presidential election. Wells writes, “They did not realize that some new world was bound to come and that a new world, new in scale and power, was coming all about them.” The notion is, in its low-key way, comic. It suggests obliviousness of the actual world, a theme that recurs in Wells’ criticisms of other self-described radicals and communists.
Wells came healthily to suspect and distrust the tone-setting manipulators of this mystic communalism, Beatrice and Sydney Webb, for whom, in their cultic view of politics, as Wells puts it apropos the Puritans, “to take difficulties into consideration was to go halfway back to apostasy.” In the Experiment,Wells writes derisively of “the Webb mentality.” These midwives of the radical future were, as his novelist’s eye told Wells, anti-middle-class, thoroughly middle-class snobs, who, despite one or two Bohemian traits, liked hobnobbing with gentry when they could, while managing to live in comfortable conditions, in their inimitable rather tea-total way. “The Webbs had administrative and not scientific minds,” Wells writes in his Experiment, in a phrase that strikes the reader as generous in its context. Wells reserved especial irritation for the Webbs’ priggish imperviousness to ideas, what he calls their “shortened vision.” Wells could see that, “with the coming of electric trams and electric lighting and universal elementary education, every problem of local administration had changed fundamentally.”
In The New Machiavelli(1911), Wells took a rather more barbed approach to representing the Webbs, who appear as Altiora and Oscar Bailey. Wells puts characterizations of the Baileys – that is to say, of the Webbs – in the mouths of various of the novel’s personae, not only its narrator. A museum-director describes them as “Philistines” and Altiora in particular as a “bottle-imp.” I am not sure what a “bottle-imp” is, but it does not seem like praise. As for Oscar (that is, Sydney), he is, in the museum-director’s opinion, “a nasty oily efficient little machine… I don’t like him.” Above all, The New Machiavellirepresents the Webbs as play-actors acting in a fantasy world. “At the Baileys’,” as Wells writes, “one always seemed to be getting one’s hands on the very strings that guided the world” and “you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim termini.” But then –
With all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers street house and at least equally alive, and you saw the chaotic clamour of the hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and accidents bawled at you from placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in the dazzling window shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage…
Wells emphasizes the enormous distance between the Webbs’ cozy idea of a tractable world ready to be reconstructed by the Leftwing political equivalent of the Salvation Army and the actual world, endlessly complex, the result of centuries of history and the intertwining of tradition and innovation – a reality that armchair theory simply could not grasp.
One need not share Wells’ passion for a planned economy, or his cranky view that two grocery stores in one neighborhood represent an irrational duplication, to share his prescient grasp that, in the appearance of global industrialism and world-embracing financial schemes, quantity had produced a new quality; and that few people then or now really grasped (or grasp) what such a qualitative development must imply for old ways of life. (Namely their disintegration.) People like the Webbs saw in dislocation and discontentment an opportunity to be in charge, to direct and assemble people, and to pull strings, but without knowing where to direct anyone or what someone ought to do to ameliorate the ills of a disintegrating society. The Webbs liked bossing people about even to the extent of arranging, or attempting to arrange, marriages. Wells finally saw the Webbs as ineffectual dilettantes, self-deluded, not as the architects of a rational utopia, and therefore he saw them as part of the existing confusion.
When Wells attempted to divert the Fabian Society to his own usage by publicly demonstrating the vapidity and hauteur of its two stellar lights, a minor civil war erupted; but the Webbs prevailed, Wells resigned the Society and went back to writing novels. In Wells’ sketch of his Fabian episode in the Experiment, he shows, even though he is a socialist himself, just how little so much of socialism exceeds mere superciliousness combined with a talent for polysyllabic bunkum. In Fabian circles, as Wells writes, “Socialism was proclaimed as a completed panacea,” and “it was announced in strange, mystical and dogmatic phrases.” In this way, “the ‘Proletariat’ was to rise against the ‘Bourgeoisie’ and ‘expropriate’ them, etc., etc.” Wells compares Fabian beliefin socialism to unalloyed, Bible thumping Puritanism. Thus: “The old Calvinist theologians, equally absolute and unprogressive, announced Salvation by the Blood, and they would never explain what exactly the Blood was, nor how Emmanuel’s vein was to be identified, nor anything more about it. Don’t argue, don’t make difficulties, they said, believe in the Blood and repent.”
Of Marxism and Communism, Wells says a good deal in his Experiment. Marx asserted that his so-called scientific socialism provided a basis, external to the economic system that it proposed to analyze, from which the indoctrinated could make objective or “scientific” observations about the contradictions of the “capitalist” order. Wells sees that Marxism – and the Communist political arrangement that it advocates – far from existing outside the system of the hypertrophied industrialism are pure products of the same. Marx was even more bourgeois, in his way, than the Webbs! He complacently assumed the same “final indulgence of fate” in his schemes that the Fabians later also assumed. “Marx,” writes Wells, “was an uninventive man with… a subconscious knowledge of his own uninventiveness.” He could pose as scientific because of his “intense egoism,” which had the unintended, but predictable, effect that it “fostered among his associates a real jealousy of the creative imagination and a depreciation of any social inventiveness.” Wells hated the class-warfare aspect of socialism, which drew heavily on Marx.
Yet when one reads conservative critiques of contemporary British society in 2011 it becomes clear that the Webb type of socialism – the social worker’s bureaucratic, “nanny-state” type of socialism – triumphed. Of Wells’ own future, as depicted in the film Things to Come (1936), in which a universally British mankind boldly sets out to conquer the universe, nothing is to be seen today.
What of Wells as a socialist? Wells’ two forays into the Soviet Union in 1920, when he interviewed Lenin, and in 1934, when he interviewed Stalin, continue to embarrass his reputation. Two items of his later work, however, suggest that Wells latterly grasped the perversity of those two dictators cum mass murderers. Both items are novelistic. The dystopian novel The Holy Terror(1939) deals with the rise to power of the first world dictator, who, true to history, celebrates the consolidation of his rule with mass arrests and ceaseless executions; the novel suggests that the dictator, Rud Whitlow, was predisposed to paranoia and brutality. The world state is supposed to be based on ideas, but its structural principle, in practice, is terror. It swiftly consumes all the bright-eyed bourgeois types who abetted it in the first place, full of misplaced hope.
The late “Platonist” novel Babes in the Darkling Wood(1942) sends a naïve communist, James Twain – who wants to know whether Russia is “a great promise or a stupendous lie?” – into Poland and Finland in 1940. Communized Polish soldier-stragglers from an eastern province plunder a bombed-out train, heckling the refugee-passengers for being intolerably “bourgeois” and explaining the exercise in brigandage as “expropriation.” Twain sees “planes… from the Land of promise,” the USSR, “setting the proletariat of Finland free and bombing them to hell.” When the titular babes awake, they awake from ideological delusion into acknowledgment of the necessary brute force that ideology conceals. The story, told almost entirely as dialogue, is Wells’ version of The Republic’s Parable of the Cave.
