H. G. Wells

“ And that won’t be done, Wilkins, by leaving War alone. War, war with modern machines, is a damned great horrible trampling monster, a filthy thing, an indecency; we aren’t doing anything heroic, we are trying to lift a foul stupidity off the earth, we are engaged in a colossal sanitary job. These men who go for us into the trenches, they come back with no illusions. They know how dirty and monstrous it is. They are like men who have gone down for the sake of the people they love to clear out a choked drain. They have no illusions about being glorified. ”

“ Wilkins considered for some moments.
“Even if nothing new appears,” he said at last, “the mere beating down and discrediting of the militarist system leaves a world released....”
“But will it be broken down?” said Boon. “Think of the Osborns.”
And then he cried in a voice of infinite despair: “No! War is just the killing of things and the smashing of things. And when it is all over, then literature and civilization will have to begin all over again. They will have to begin lower down and against a heavier load, and the days of our jesting are done. ”

“ The Mind of the Race toils through this jungle of jealous individuality to emerge. And the individual, knowing that single-handed he hasn’t a chance against the immortal, allies himself with this and that, with sham immortalities, and partially effaced and partially confuted general things. And so it sets up its Greatnesses, to save it from greatness, its solemnities to preserve it from the overwhelming gravity of truth. ”

“ The mind you will meet is not in the least like a mind doing something slowly but steadfastly; far more is it like a mind being cruelly smashed about and worried and sticking to its immediate purpose with a narrower and narrower intensity. Until at last it is a pointed intensity. It is like a dying man strangling a robber in his death-grip.... We shall beat them, but we shall be dead beat doing it.... You see, Wilkins, I have tried to think as you do. ”

“ He sets himself to pick the straws out of the hair of Life before he paints her. But without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love. He talks of ‘selection,’ and of making all of a novel definitely about a theme. He objects to a ‘saturation’ that isn’t oriented. And he objects, if you go into it, for no clear reason at all. Following up his conception of selection, see what in his own practice he omits. In practice James’s selection becomes just omission and nothing more. He omits everything that demands digressive treatment or collateral statement. ”

“ For a little while after the war began our people seemed noble and dignified; but see now how all Britain breaks after its first quiet into chatter about spies, sentimentality about the architecture of Louvain, invasion scares, the bitter persecution of stray Germans, and petty disputes and recriminations like a pool under a breeze. And below that nothing. While still the big thing goes on, ungrasped, day after day, a monstrous struggle of our world against the thing it will not have.... No one is clear about what sort of thing we will have. ”

“ It was extraordinary what a power metaphors and fancies had upon Boon. Only those who knew him intimately can understand how necessary Miss Bathwick was to him. He would touch a metaphor and then return and sip it, and then sip and drink and swill until it had intoxicated him hopelessly.
“America,” said Boon, “can produce such a supreme writer as Stephen Crane—the best writer of English for the last half-century—or Mary Austin, who used to write—— What other woman could touch her? But America won’t own such children. It’s amazing. ”

“ He must be altogether a fanatic. He must think of the Mind of the Race in season and out of season. Collective thought will be no joke to him; it will be the supremely important thing. He will be passionately a patriot, entirely convinced of your proposition that ‘the thought of a community is the life of a community,’ and almost as certain that the tide of our thought is ebbing. ”

“ The individual human mind spends itself about equally in headlong flight from the Universal, which it dreads as something that will envelop and subjugate it, and in headlong flight to the Universal, which it seeks as a refuge from its own loneliness and silliness. It knows very certainly that the Universal will ultimately comprehend and incorporate it, yet it desires always that the Universal should mother it, take it up without injuring it in the slightest degree, foment and nourish its egotism, cherish fondly all its distinctions, give it all the kingdoms of existence to play with.... ”

“ He flushed.
“That, you see, is Hallery’s point of view,” he said awkwardly.
“But Wilkins perhaps wouldn’t contradict that. His point is merely that to be exact about words, that God-Mind, that General Mind of yours, isn’t exactly to be called the Mind of the Race.”
“But it is the Mind of the Race,” said Boon. “It is the Mind of the Race. Most of the Race is out of touch with it, lost to it. Much of the Race is talking and doing nonsense and cruelty; astray, absurd. That does not matter to the Truth, Bliss. It matters to Literature. ”

“ Boon said, “you can’t now talk of literature without going through James. James is unavoidable. James is to criticism what Immanuel Kant is to philosophy—a partially comprehensible essential, an inevitable introduction. If you understand what James is up to and if you understand what James is not up to, then you are placed. You are in the middle of the critical arena. You are in a position to lay about you with significance. ”

“ Boon sat on the edge of his hammock.
“The Germans must be beaten,” he said. “The new world is killed; we go back ten thousand years; there is no light, no hope, no thought nor freedom any more unless the Germans are beaten.... Until the Germans are beaten there is nothing more to be done in art, in literature, in life. They are a dull, envious, greedy, cunning, vulgar, interfering, and intolerably conceited people. A world under their dominance will be intolerable. I will not live in it....”
“I had never believed they would do it,” said Wilkins.... ”

“ They trust to panic, to loud accusations, to that fear of complexity that comes with fatigue. They trust to the exhaustion of delicate purposes and sensitive nerves. And this force-loving, bullying silliness is far more likely to come out on top, after the distresses of this war, after the decent men are dead in the trenches and the wise ones shouted to silence, than any finely intellectual, necessarily difficult plan to put an end for ever to all such senseless brutalities.”
“I think you underrate the power of—well, modern sanity,” said Wilkins.
“Time will show,” said Boon. “I hope I do.” ”

“ Being wounded and impoverished, being hurt and seeing things destroyed, is as much living and learning as anything else in the world. The tremendous present disaster of Europe may not be, after all, a disaster for mankind. Horrible possibilities have to be realized, and they can be realized only by experience; complacencies, fatuities have to be destroyed; we have to learn and relearn what Boon once called “the bitter need for honesty.” ”

“ Clowns and dons and prigs, cults of the precious and cults of style, a few squeaking author-journalists and such time-serving scoundrels as I, with my patent Bathwick filter, my twenty editions, and my thousands a year. None of us with any sense of a whole community or a common purpose! Where is our strength to go against that strength of the heavy German mind? Where is the Mind of our Race? ”

“ The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins.... His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is about is always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. ”

“ Your literature and philosophy are really just the private entertainment of old gentlemen out of the hurly-burly and ambitious young men too delicate to hunt or shoot. Thought is nothing in the world until it begins to operate in will and act, and the history of mankind doesn’t show now, and it never has shown, any consecutive relation to human thinking. ”

“ We talked perpetually of literature and creative projects, but never of that “output” of his. We talked as men must talk who talk at all, with an untrammelled freedom; now we were sublime and now curious, now we pursued subtleties and now we were utterly trivial, but always it was in an undisciplined, irregular style quite unsuitable for publication. That, indeed, was the whole effect of the George Boon I am now trying to convey, that he was indeed essentially not for publication. ”

“ Dodd, I remember, protested he had a self-consciousness that held all these constituents together, but there was a time when Dodd was six months old, let us say, and there are times now when Dodd sleeps or is lost in some vivid sensation or action, when that clear sense of self is in abeyance. There is no reason why the collective mind of the world should not presently become at least as self-conscious as Dodd. Boon, indeed, argued that that was happening even now, that our very talk in the greenhouse was to that synthetic over-brain like a child’s first intimations of the idea of “me.” ”

“ Boon’s eye that she will presently demand conclusive decisions. In a world that has grown suddenly chilly and lonely I know I must go on with my work under difficult and novel conditions (and now well into the routines of middle age) as if there were no such things as loss and disappointment. I am, I learned long ago, an uncreative, unimportant man. ”

“ So that every man who writes to express or change or criticize an idea, every man who observes and records a fact in the making of a research, every man who hazards or tests a theory, every artist of any sort who really expresses, does thereby, in that very act, participate, share in, become for just that instant when he is novel and authentically true, the Mind of the Race, the thinking divinity. ”

“ James was to have buttonholed Hallery’s American, and in the warm bath of his sympathy to have opened and bled slowly from another vein of thought.
“I admit the abundance of—what shall I say?—activities that our friend is summoning, the tremendous wealth of matter, of material for literature and art, that has accumulated during the last few decades. No one could appreciate, could savour and watch and respond, more than myself to the tremendous growing clangour of the mental process as the last half-century has exhibited it. ”

“ In peace-time they maintain an attitude of dyspeptic hostility to free art, to free literature, to fresh thought. They stand uncompromisingly for ugliness, dullness, and restriction—as ends in themselves. When you talk, Wilkins, of the intellectual good of the war, I ask you to note the new exultation that has come into these evil papers. When they speak of the ‘moral benefits’ of war they mean the smashing up of everything that they hate and we care for. They mean reaction. This good man Osborn, whom I have never seen or heard of before, seems to be quintessential of all that side. ”

“ Of course, one knows that real literature is something that has to do with leisure and cultivated people and books and shaded lamps and all that sort of thing. But Hallery wants to drag in not only cathedrals and sanctuaries, but sky-signs and hoardings.... He wants literature to embrace whatever is in or whatever changes the mind of the race, except purely personal particulars. ”

“ People went about in the newly invented automobile and played open-air games; they diverted what attention they had once given to their minds to the more rational treatment of their stomachs. Reading became the last resort of those too sluggish or too poor to play games; one had recourse to it as a substitute for the ashes of more strenuous times in the earlier weeks of mourning for a near relative, and even the sale of classics began at last to decline. An altogether more satisfying and alluring occupation for the human intelligence was found in the game of Bridge. ”

“ Philosophy, which is the discussion of the relation of the general to the particular, of the whole to the part, of the great and yet vague life of the race to the intense yet manifestly incomplete life of the individual, is still not three thousand years old. Man has lived consciously as man it may be for hundreds of thousands of years, he has learnt of himself by talking to his fellows, he has expressed personal love and many personal feelings with a truth and beauty that are well nigh final, but the race does but begin to live as a conscious being. ”

“ In a sense it is no doubt true that literature is a kind of over-mind of the race, and in a sense, no doubt, the Bible and the Koran, the Talmud and the Prayer Book are literature. In a sense Mr. Upton Sinclair’s “Bible” for Socialists of bits from ancient and modern writings is literature. In a sense, too, literature does go on rather like a continuous mind thinking.... But I feel that all this is just in a sense.... I don’t really believe it. I am not quite sure what I do really believe, but I certainly recoil from anything so crudely positive as Hallery’s wild assertions.... ”

“ Was there anything that amounted to an intellectual life at all in all our beastly welter of writing, of nice-young-man poetry, of stylish fiction and fiction without style, of lazy history, popular philosophy, slobbering criticism, Academic civilities? Is there anything here to hold a people together? ”

“ We people who sit in studies and put in whole hours of our days thinking and joining things together do get a kind of coherence into our ideas about the world. Just because there is leisure and time for us to think. But are you sure that is the Race at all? That is my point. Aren’t we intellectually just a by-product? If you went back to the time of Plato, you would say that the idea of his “Republic” was what was going on in the Mind of the Race then. ”

“ Into this impressive scene of decline and the ebb of all thinking comes this fanatic Hallery of ours, reciting with passionate conviction, ‘the thought of a nation is the life of a nation.’ You see our leading effect? ”