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this as the characteristic irony of Wells s romances, and the extract
is introduced by a brief discussion of The War of the Worlds.
Mr. Wells has seen the thawing of the air which is breathed by the Selenites
during their day which lasts a fortnight of ours; he has seen London
terrorized by a score of fantastic beings projected from another planet
and armed with means of destruction unknown to ours. He has seen
millions of men and women passing before him in a desperate and
inexpressible confusion, bewildered, frantic, and rushing straight ahead
like a flock of sheep pursued by a hurricane of panic, or still tinier
like the water-drops of a flood& . Among our author s compatriots, I
wonder if there is one who has been able to give such an intense impression
of the confusion of a great catastrophe. One book only comes to mind:
the Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, who was like Wells
not only in being a Londoner and a child of the petty bourgeoisie, but
also in being a Utopian with a vivid imagination, a reformer in the guise
of a novelist. I do not think I am exaggerating the severe and sombre
grandeur of these two books, the Journal of the Plague Year and The
War of the Worlds, published nearly two centuries apart. The Calvinism
of the one and the determinism of the other coincide on the same ground
to show us the human will and energy of a whole people abdicating
when faced with a cataclysm; but one feels that in both cases, the abdication
54
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
will be brief and that the need to hope, to believe and to act will again
assert itself with the unconquerable optimism of the race. When, having
left England ruined, gasping and disfigured at their feet, the matchless
and invulnerable Martians are killed by microbes, Defoe would have
applauded this dénouement, and would have recognised and worshipped
in it a providential design. For Mr. Wells, it is only the irony of things
the humour of Destiny, the final reversal which his philosophy, inherited
from Darwin and Schopenhauer, suggests to him.
I have sought for this philosophy in Mr. Wells s books, and it can
be glimpsed in The Island of Doctor Moreau. After a shipwreck and
some thrilling adventures, an English traveller is stranded on an almost
unknown Pacific islet. Once there, he is reluctantly given shelter by two
Englishmen who have set up a curious scientific institute on the island.
One is Dr. Moreau, who has been obliged to throw up a distinguished
position on account of the horror excited by his experiments in vivisection.
The other, Montgomery, his assistant, has gone into exile because of a
serious offence, probably committed under the influence of alcoholism.
Moreau has recommenced his experiments in this isolated spot, where
his victims cries will reach neither sensitive souls nor journalists in search
of copy. His absurd and sublime dream is that of condensing the
innumerable slow stages of evolution into a few weeks or a few months.
In his laboratory he manufactures men out of beasts. The operation is
not explained. How could it be? Dr. Moreau discusses the possibilities
of the enterprise with Prendick, his guest. But the instincts? objects
the latter. The instincts can be modified. As educators we are doing
no more than that. Have we not trained pugnacity into courageous self-
sacrifice, and sexual urges into chastity? But you are inflicting terrible
pain. Pain will disappear one day. But it has been and is still necessary
to warn us of danger. It is the necessary condition of progress and, if
modern man is degenerating instead of advancing, he owes it to this
cowardly fear of pain which governs our societies. *
Soon we get to know the bestial humanity which he has created
around him and endowed, at the price of frightful tortures, with
rudiments of speech and thought. The Beast Folk continually repeat
the prescriptions of the code he has instilled into them in order to
hold in check their savage inclinations. Their worship of their executioner
is expressed in a characteristic chant: His are the stars in the sky& .
His is the Hand that wounds. His is the hand that heals& . In this nascent
*
This is a rough paraphrase of Moreau s argument in ch. 14.
55
H.G.WELLS
society, this artificial semi-humanity which is but a day old, there are
already rebels and hypocrites. An apparent order and methodical activity
reign, but all this is felt to be strangely precarious. Let but a single drop
of blood touch the tip of the tongue of that bear which has been taught
to chant and snuffle, and it will drop back onto its four spiked paws
and its carnivorous desires will be unleashed once again. I had before
my eyes, Prendick observes, the epitome of human history, the action
and reaction of forces which intersect and collide or coalesce: instinct,
reason, destiny.
Moreau is killed by one of his victims which has broken its bonds
and escaped from the laboratory. We then witness the deplorable relapse
of these beings into the bestiality from which they had been so abruptly
and violently raised to a higher existence. They carry with them Moreau s
colleague, Montgomery, and if Mr. Wells had not been writing for a
fussy and easily shockable public, the spectacle of this orgy, with its
combination of bestial instinct and civilised vice, might have taken on
all the breadth and the atrocious reality which it demands. But perhaps
it is better from a moral as well as an artistic point of view that these
things should be merely suggested.
After undergoing indescribable suffering and dangers, Prendick returns
to England, where he is haunted by terrible memories which make the
sight and the society of his fellows odious to him. The men and women
around him seem themselves to be no more than animals. Their primitive
instincts try to get the upper-hand again and secretly undermine the artificial
law of duty which oppresses them and contradicts their very nature.
Thus virtue is a struggle, and what is the use of this struggle?
Such is the substance of this book which has had very little
recognition from the English public, whether because of the repulsive
details with which it abounds, or because an anti-Christian symbolism
was discovered in it. The author himself, whose point of view has [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] - zanotowane.pl
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