There are men, such as Dr. Johnson, who are mentally active and physically torpid, and there are other men, such as Mr. Jack Johnson, who are very alert physically, but not quite so alert in their minds. It seldom happens that a man combines great physical energy with great intellectual energy. Such a man is Mr. Bernard Shaw. So is Mr. H. G. Wells. I imagine that Mr. Wells is more active, both in body and in mind, than Mr. Shaw, despite the fact that the latter is the slender man of the two and that his tongue works more rapidly in conjunction with his brain; for Mr. Shaw feels fatigue sooner than Mr. Wells. I doubt whether Mr. Wells suffers from fatigue at all or to any serious extent. He takes few, if any, holidays, works for many hours every day, plays games very assiduously, and is unhappy if he has not got some work on hand. He begins to write a new book immediately he has completed its predecessor, having no belief, seemingly, in fallow time. When he is not working or playing, he is talking. His conversation has a curious resemblance in its shape, if I may use that word, to the style of his writing. One listens for the suspended sentence, for the dots with which, in his prose, he breaks a thought so that the reader may himself complete it. Mr. Shaw once told me that he could not work at creative writing for more than two hours every day, and I suspect that he suffers more from physical fatigue than he will admit. Mr. Wells works for considerably more than two hours every day (and sometimes during the night) though I do not suppose he works for two consecutive hours at any time. If you are a guest in his house, you will see him engaged in some game, tennis or hockey or that wild game of his own invention, "barn-ball," or perhaps playing demon patience; and when you are inclined to imagine that he is settling down to a long day of games, you discover that he is no longer with the players, but back in his study working on a manuscript.

One expects a certain amount of sluggishness in every man, and probably there are days when Mr. Wells's mind and body go to sleep or lie about supine, but I do not believe that any one has ever seen him asleep or supine. His mind is so active that one can almost see ideas leaping off his tongue as he talks, and he has a very remarkable capacity for engaging the attention of his auditors without making any perceptible effort to do so. His conversation, unlike that of Mr. Yeats or Mr. George Moore, is unrehearsed conversation. It has not the swift brilliance of Mr. Shaw's talk, and it goes to its point rather jerkily, but it reaches its destination. He is not so easily distracted from his course as Mr. Gilbert Chesterton is, or perhaps I ought to say that he does not take so long to get to his destination. Mr. Chesterton seems to me to be falling with great amiability on his subject, whereas Mr. Wells is eagerly struggling up to it. Mr. Chesterton defers to others with great courtesy, but his mind, I imagine, is already made up. He listens to a controversialist, not because he thinks he is likely to be converted to an opposite opinion—he is fairly certain that he will not be converted—but because he has excellent manners and an exceptionally kindly character. It is hard to believe that any man of merit is without some malice in his nature, some element of cattishness, but if there is a man of merit without these things then that man is Mr. Chesterton. If he could bring himself to throttle the creature he most detests, the international financier, the man without a country, he would, I am sure, do so entirely without prejudice. Mr. Wells listens, not out of politeness, but in the hope that he will receive information, and this hope of his causes him to listen very patiently even to bad or inexpert talkers. He has the additional merit, rare among men of genius, of being an uncommonly good host, very punctilious about the comfort and pleasure of his guests. He is a sociable man, mingling easily with very various people, gregarious where Mr. Yeats and Mr. Shaw are solitary, and he is instinctively friendly. His hospitality is lavish and with something of the Dickensian tradition in it. He has none of the chilly aloofness of Mr. Yeats nor of the shy constraint of Mr. Shaw nor of the nervous coldness of Mr. Galsworthy. Were it not for a degree of cruelty in his nature, I should say that Mr. Chesterton and he were as near to each other in temperament as any two men of merit can be. It is this strain of cruelty in him which makes him so attractive when he loses his temper, for he seems only to be witty when he is about to hit some one very severely on the head. I do not know any man who can lose his temper in print with so much effect and so entertainingly as Mr. Wells can lose his. He is hardly a witty man, as Mr. Shaw and Mr. Yeats and even Mr. Gilbert Chesterton are witty men, but he has a neat, malicious humour which delights him as much as it delights his friends, and is most often displayed when he is attacking some one.

II

If a writer wished to create a character who would most aptly personify the past thirty years of English or of world history, he would have to create a character very like Mr. Wells: a questioning, variable, demanding person, with some impatience and testiness of temper, with, at times, a fantastic and wayward manner, but always superimposed on these superficialities, an eager and unthwartable desire for a true belief. Mr. Chesterton said of him once that "you lie awake at night and hear him grow," and fundamentally that is true, in spite of the temptation one has at times to believe that one lies awake at night and merely hears him changing his mind. One could, were one silly enough to do so, construct a plausible indictment of Mr. Wells of hurriedly accepting a belief and as hurriedly rejecting it; but to do so would be to charge oneself with a superficial mind. Mr. Wells, in his eagerness to discover a reasonable and sane society in which the spirit of man may grow and develop and achieve, has sometimes accepted a theory too swiftly, but his scientific mind has come, sooner or later, to the rescue of his eager heart and has caused him to reject proposals which he had previously found acceptable.

In "First and Last Things" he decides against the community of austere aristocrats who won his advocacy in "A Modern Utopia." The self-disregard of the Samurai of Japan had pleased him as it must please all who contemplate it, and he imagined a state in which the best men would govern "the average, sensual men," formulating their laws and doctrines from the sanctuary of a sort of monastic establishment in which their fleshly desires would be chastened and perhaps eliminated. Mr. Wells, having felt the allure of a select company of selfless aristocrats, devoting themselves to the good government of less gifted men, soon discovered that good government cannot be administered by men who are remote from the emotions and desires of the governed and so, with characteristic courage, he abandoned his Samurai and boldly marched into the company of the crowd. Can any one find ground for sneering in such behaviour as that? Are not those who try to find solutions to puzzles more likely to be successful in their efforts because Mr. Wells has offered one solution and then, finding it useless, repudiated it and tried another?

There was a time when he saw hope for the world in the establishment of a universal language, but I doubt whether he holds to that hope now. A common speech does not keep men at peace any more than a common purpose does, and, in any event, man's incorrigible habit of localizing universal things until they cease to be universal tends in time to make a common speech an impossible possession. The Catholic Church has a common speech in the Latin tongue, but an Italian priest can preach to an English priest in that language and remain incomprehensible. The British and the American people have a common speech, but it has become so permeated with local words that very often the two races are unintelligible to each other, apart altogether from the difficulty of accent.

Mr. Wells has plunged into a few bog-holes of that sort, but he has always extricated himself from them, and less and less, as he develops, does he insist upon uniformity and machinery, and more and more does he insist on diversity and spirit. "Let us be Catholics in this great matter," Mr. Birrell writes on Browning's poetry, "and burn our candles at many shrines. In the pleasant realms of poesy, no liveries are worn, no paths prescribed; you may wander where you will, stop where you like, and worship whom you love. Nothing is demanded of you, save this, that in all your wanderings and worships, you keep two objects steadily in view—two, and two only—truth and beauty." It may fairly be said of Mr. Wells that in all his "wanderings and worships" he has tried to do so.

III

There is a photograph of Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. H. G. Wells, taken by an American photographer, Mr. Alvin Langdon Coburn, in which the two men are shown sitting side by side. It is the most illuminating interpretation of their characters that I have ever seen. Mr. Shaw, with something of the look of a prophet, sits beside Mr. Wells who has a smile of disbelief on his face; Mr. Shaw shows a countenance full of faith, while Mr. Wells shows one full of inquiry. Mr. Shaw accepts the pose quite naturally, but Mr. Wells is deprecating. I felt when I saw that photograph in Mr. Wells's study that while Mr. Shaw accepted the status of a great man as his right, Mr. Wells felt uncomfortable about the pose, not because he doubts his right to be regarded as a great man, but because he is reluctant to live on pedestals. "I'm human just as much as you are," he seems to be saying to the photographer, and the smile of deprecation on his face means, if it means anything, that while Mr. Shaw accepts the great man's altitude without a qualm, Mr. Wells feels that the whole thing is humbug. "Shaw is taken in by this Great Man business," the Wells of the photograph says as plainly as if the picture were to take life and utter words, "but don't you imagine I'm deluded by it!..."

These two men, one Irish, one English, George Bernard Shaw and Herbert George Wells, between them have done more to influence the minds of the young men of my generation than any other two men of their time. Their attitude towards life may, perhaps, be summarized in an account of the way in which they interpret the doctrine of Evolution. Mr. Shaw believes that the Life Force, which ordinary men call God, is an Imperfect Thing seeking to make Itself Perfect. How, when you contemplate the miseries and inequalities and cruelties of existence, can you believe in an All-Powerful God? he says. You must believe that these horrible things happen because God cannot prevent them from happening. The blind-alley argument that the Almighty inflicts pain upon us for our good is insupportable when one considers that an earthly father would not subject his child to convulsions or cause a cancer to consume its life or endow it with a cruel disposition if such things were within his powers of disposal. If, one reasonably argues, an earthly father is incapable of such acts, how less likely is God to be capable of them if He be All-Powerful and All-Good? Since these inexplicable cruelties and horrors occur and recur, surely, argues Mr. Shaw, it is only common sense to assume that they do so in spite of God's good will towards man. Starting from this premise, he goes on to argue that God seeks to obtain that control over material things which He has not yet succeeded in obtaining. He imagines God engaged in a magnificent research, the discovery of a harmonious universe, much in the way in which one imagines a biologist in his laboratory seeking for a preventative of disease. The Life Force uses such instruments for its purpose as are to be found lying at hand. When these prove abortive or useless or insufficient, the Life Force invents a new instrument which it uses until that instrument, too, is found to be useless or inadequate and is scrapped in favour of a new instrument. Like all creators, God must express Himself through His creatures, and the whole of Time has been spent so far in finding a suitable means of expression. In the beginning, God used mammoth beasts, but finding them unsuitable for His purpose, He scrapped them and invented other creatures until at last He achieved His best instrument, Man. God's latest and finest creature differs from all His other creatures in this respect that he is conscious of God's purpose and can help it forward or hold it back. God concealed His intention from all the instruments that preceded the advent of Man, but, in the development of His Being, He found that greater advantage would accrue to Him if He made His instrument aware of its purpose. So we get the reason of Man. God, before the creation of Man, had depended upon Himself. After the creation of Man, he depended partly upon Himself, partly upon His creature. Man, in short, was the first of God's instruments to have the power to help God to realize Himself. To Mr. Shaw, it is an obscuring of God's purpose for Man continually to pray, "God help me!" when it is part of his purpose and duty to affirm, "I will help God!" I have already quoted his dictum that we should so live that when we die, God is in our debt.

It is obvious, from this belief, that Mr. Shaw does not believe in the inevitable march of mankind from bad to good and from good to better. We may be marching towards Utopia or the New Jerusalem, or we may be marching back to Chaos. Man, having the choice between helping God and thwarting Him, may so vex the Deity that He will become impatient with him and throw this instrument away as he has thrown away other useless instruments, and seek for a better one. God scrapped the mammoth beasts because they were not adequate for the execution of His design; He may scrap Man for the same reason or because Man, while adequate, wilfully refuses to help. This theory is expressed continually in Mr. Shaw's plays and prefaces, for example, in a speech by CÆsar in "CÆsar and Cleopatra," where the Emperor gives expression to a violent antipathy to war. War, in Mr. Shaw's mind, is a plain perversion of God's purpose, and he would probably declare that Man, in the Great War whose end may yet be a bloody battle between the Allies, almost reached the end of God's patience. In five years, the British alone had eight hundred thousand of her most valuable men killed. France lost double that number killed. Germany lost more even than France killed. All the potentialities for good, all the fervour and chivalry and idealism and courage that was in those men, their ability to help God to achieve perfection, has vanished utterly from the world; and there is nothing left of it. Most of them died without progeny, and so there is not even the hope that their spirit has passed on to their children and that, at the worst, God's purpose has only been suspended for a generation. They have gone, irretrievably gone. Another such war and Western civilization must perish, if, indeed, it has not already begun to decay. In other words, God, sickened by Man's perversity and wilful obstruction, will have scrapped him....

That is the Shavian doctrine of the Life Force, put plainly and simply.

Mr. Wells differs very sharply from Mr. Shaw in his doctrine. Mr. Shaw believes that the progress from bad to good is not inevitable: Mr. Wells believes that it is, and he produces the records of history to support his belief. Mankind, at this moment, he will admit, is in a very bloody mess, but that mess is not so frightful as, say, the mess after the Thirty Years' War. We, who contemplate the organized Murder of Youth which began in August, 1914, may fairly feel that mankind has sunk very low in barbarism, but when we survey the whole range of humanity so far as it has been recorded, the depths of 1914, deep though they are, appear to be slightly less dreadful than the depths of other days. There is a greater revolt from organized Murder to-day than there was after the Thirty Years' War. There are fewer people to-day who prate about the glories of war than there were then. (Oddly enough, or perhaps naturally enough, most of the people who still think of war as a jolly adventure live in America.) We are a little nearer to a realization of the commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" than we were before 1914. We are learning that there are no qualifications or exceptions to that commandment. It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except in defence of small nationalities!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the purpose of self-determination!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the establishment of a Republic in Ireland!" It does not say, "Thou shalt not kill—except for the purpose of preserving the Empire!" Tersely and without modification, it states that "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in any circumstances whatever.

Here is a dilemma from which the Christian cannot easily escape, and the difficulty of doing so, apart from all ordinary considerations of decency, is bringing man sharply face to face with the fundamentals of human existence. In spite of much occasion for pessimism to-day, there is occasion for greater optimism than man ever before has had. There is a social consciousness at work in our minds and hearts that will yet deliver us from the wicked man. How few are the years since the days when men in one part of England made war on men in another part! How unthinkable it is that men in Lancaster should make war to-day in Yorkshire! True, it is less than a century since men in the Northern States of America made war on men in the Southern States. True, it is less than ten years since men in Ulster prepared themselves to make war on men in the rest of Ireland. True, at this moment, Russian fights Russian, and Sinn Feiner slays Orangeman, and Orangeman slays Sinn Feiner. True, that white man burns black man, that Christian persecutes Jew, true all this and worse, yet it remains true that when the records of time are made up and just balances are drawn in the accounts of Mankind, there is seen to be a greater perception of common purpose to-day than there was a century ago.

His scientific and historic sense keeps Mr. Wells secure in his belief that Man, although he may hinder the development of God's purpose, cannot thwart it. Mr. Shaw would perhaps agree with Mr. Wells in his belief that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression, but he would insist that that expression may be through another instrument than man. Mr. Wells, however, would not yield to him on this point; he would insist that God's Will must ultimately find adequate expression through man. Man may, indeed be obliterated by plague and pestilence or cosmic disaster, but, failing those, man must achieve God's purpose.

IV

When one brings the Wellsian doctrine down to the details of life, one discovers what I may call a local pessimism in it. The anger which breaks out of his work is directed against the incompetence and stupidity of man which hold him back from the desirable country towards which he is marching. The greatest optimists—the men who are convinced that man's end is good and seemly—are almost always the most bitter pessimists when they are considering contemporary affairs. The visionary loves mankind in the abstract so much that when he contemplates mankind in the concrete he loses his temper. The Utopian, full of his dream of a decent and free civilization in which every man may move easily to his proper station, feels a dreadful depression when he looks upon society as it exists here and now; and there are times when, in spite of his sure and certain hope that life will ultimately find its level, he feels that man, that perverse, wayward, thwarting creature, will never fulfill the promise of his potentialities because he is too closely concerned with some tiny, personal vanity, because he allows wickedness and stupidity to influence him to a greater degree than goodness and fine thought. Who, thinking over the Big Four in Paris, and remembering that millions of young men of all nations died so that the Big Four might meet and make a more enduring peace than this world has yet known, can feel anything but anger and humiliation at what they did? Clemenceau, the "Tiger" who, having tasted blood, seemed eager to taste more; Lloyd George, who never remembers a friend or forgets an enemy; Orlando, shamelessly extending his itching palm; and Wilson, the man who went to Europe to ask for the moon and returned to America, having accepted a match ... can any of us, contemplating those four men, given by God the greatest opportunity that has ever been offered to men, that may ever be offered to men, help feeling that this world is dead and damned and that the sooner a disgusted God smashes it to pieces, the better will be the universe? Mr. Wells cannot escape, any more than the rest of us, this tendency to despair of human effort, and here and there in his books his local pessimism is expressed; but his universal optimism remains unimpaired, and one comes away from his writings in the knowledge that he believes that man sooner or later will achieve a high destiny. He whips the stupid and the selfish and the idle, but he will not permit them to persuade him from his belief that even out of these elements, a finer Man will yet be made.

V

There is a cartoon by Mr. Max Beerbohm in which he shows himself being conducted through a gallery where Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Bennett and many other eminent writers are standing on inverted tubs, haranguing the universe. Having listened to the preachers and propagandists, Mr. Beerbohm turns to his guide and says, "But where are the artists?" only to be informed that "These are the artists!" It has been said that Mr. Shaw would rather be known as a great political economist than as a great dramatist, that Mr. Arnold Bennett would rather be known as an eminent business man than as an eminent novelist, that Mr. Galsworthy would prefer to be a reformer than a man of letters, and that Mr. Wells seeks fame as a sociologist and not as an artist. There is enough truth in this statement to give pause to those about whom it is made, but not sufficient to frighten us who admire them. Mr. Wells, for example, can no more elude artistry than he can refrain from thinking. He is extraordinarily indifferent to literary style, seems almost to delight in making a clumsy sentence rather than a shapely one, and, so far as one can discover, does not spend a single second on "finding the right word." The idea is his chief concern, and he cares very little for the way in which it is expressed. Nevertheless, he remains an artist, with a gift for apt expressions and a far greater gift for selection. In one of his books, he describes the prostitute as "that painted disaster of the street." In "First and Last Things," in describing the inability of the intellect to free itself from bias, he says, "the forceps of the mind is a clumsy instrument and crushes the truth a little in seizing it." At the end of "Tono-Bungay" there is an account of a trip down the Thames which is among the great pieces of prose writing. In "The Undying Fire," he gives an account of the purposeless cruelty of Nature and an account of the state of mind of a young German who goes from his remote village to join the Army at the beginning of the war, full of patriotic ardour, offering for this service and for that until at last he becomes a member of the crew of a submarine and his patriotism suffers a sea-change and becomes the desperate courage of a rat in a trap ... and these two accounts are so vivid that it is impossible for any one to rise from them unaware that they have been written by a man of genius, possessed of artistry.

He is probably the most prolific writer of his quality in the world, and if I had exact knowledge of the world's greatest authors, I should probably say that he is the most varied of them. Consider how very dissimilar his books are in range and interest. Consider that the man who wrote "The Time Machine," wrote also "The History of Mr. Polly" and the "The Undying Fire." How many writers have shown such variety as has been shown by the author of "The War in the Air," "Kipps" (that beautiful and tender book), "Tono-Bungay" and "The Soul of a Bishop." At one moment, Mr. Wells is writing "Bealby" and at the next, he is writing "God, the Invisible King." He turns from "The Wonderful Visit" to "The Outline History of the World," and writes "The Future in America" in the trail of "Love and Mr. Lewisham." ("The Future in America" is perhaps the best book of its kind that has ever been written on the problems that lie before the American people.) Queen Victoria, having been enchanted by "Alice in Wonderland," sent to a book-seller for the remainder of "Lewis Carroll's" writings, and was considerably disconcerted when she received "Plane Trigonometry" and "Curiosa Mathematica" by the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. What that excellent old lady would have thought, if having read and liked "The Sea Lady," she had been supplied with "Mankind in the Making" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau" and "Joan and Peter" by the same author, I cannot imagine. Mr. Wells faces life very fairly and squarely, regarding it from all angles of vision. There is only one Truth, but it may be approached by many different paths; and Mr. Wells has attempted most of them. It may seem to some of his readers at times that he is running away from things towards which he formerly ran, but it is more likely that he is merely trying another way of getting to the same point.

VI

One remembers men by odd things. I remember Mr. Yeats chiefly as a dark image, obscurely seen, and Mr. Shaw as a shy, erect man with fine, shapely hands, who talks emphatically because otherwise he would not be talking at all. I remember Mr. Galsworthy as one who is biting his lips or clenching his teeth lest he should say too much, and Mr. George Moore as one who is consumed with the fear that he will not say enough. Mr. Wells comes into my mind as an eager, friendly man, whose speech, thinly uttered, suggests continual testing. But mostly I remember his fine eyes because it is in them that most of his strength is stored.