Voice of Reason

To the English writer whom Anatole France once called the greatest intellectual force in the English-speaking world, death came last week. Herbert G. (for George) Wells had described himself to a friend just a few weeks before as having "one foot in the grave and the other waving about."

The last time Wells left his house alive was to vote in the 1945 general election. When he left it for the last time one day last week, the London Daily Herald observed that, more than any other one man, H. G. Wells was responsible for Socialist England.

He had looked like, and was, the quintessence of the Common Man. It was as a common man, and through the convictions and aspirations which history made available to common men in his generation, that he grew to stature.

Wells was possibly the greatest British journalist since Defoe. To the respectful Henry James he once said that he had no interest in being a literary artist; but three of Wells's novels (Kipps, Mr. Polly, Tono Bungay) are considered the best pieces of genre comedy since Dickens. His scientific romances were immensely entertaining and often clairvoyant in their view of the future. His realistic novels are pretty certain to live. His novels of sex propaganda (Ann Veronica, et al.), in their time, were notable liberating forces. His Science of Life (written with his son G. P. Wells and Julian Huxley) may come to be recognized as an achievement still more remarkable than his world-famous Outline of History.

Evangelist of Reason. When he was 19, Wells wrote an essay called The Past and Future of the Human Race. Seldom thereafter did he tackle a less ambitious subject in a spirit less sanguine. He disliked and soon left the evangelistic Protestantism in which he was brought up; but he always remained the most passionate of Protestants, the most eloquent of evangelists.

He worked his way through London University by writing digests of textbooks for lazy classmates; he worked his way through the rest of his life by doing just about the same thing. His courage and intelligence, activated rather than stunned by a drab, lower-middle-class childhood, were touched off by the kind of illumination most characteristic of his day--rationalism.

He early became aware that the forces and skills which scientific research was turning loose on the world could possibly liberate, and might destroy it. Wells believed that in order to cope with these forces and with himself, man had only to embrace all that a scientist would call reasonable, and reject all that a scientist would call unreasonable.

This belief was the essence of his gospel. For five decades, in most of his 76 volumes, Wells preached it with the intense passion and reckless zeal of a religious fanatic.

Much of the world was already starving for such a gospel. So gifted and disarming a preacher was all that was needed. But it was not enough, as it turned out, to help the world to save itself from disaster.

Second Thought. It was H. G. Wells's tragedy that he lived long enough to have a second thought. All his life he had worked to warn and teach the human race and, within the limits of thought, to save it. At the end, he was forced to realize that his work and his hopes were vain; that either he or the human race were, somehow, dreadfully wrong. Characteristically, with the last of the valiant, innocent optimism which had always sustained him, he blamed it all on the human race.

Some people found his last bitter utterances offensive, even cracked. Others found them unbearably pathetic, for there is no anguish to compare with that of a man who has lived on a faith of any kind and found it wanting. H. G. Wells was such a man, a great pietistic writer, set on fire by reason, not by God; but in his era, among the most devoted, eloquent and honest.

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