The World Set Free

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by H. G. Wells


  discredited thing. Contentious professions cease to be an

  honourable employment for men. The peace between nations is also

  a peace between individuals. We live in a world that comes of

  age. Man the warrior, man the lawyer, and all the bickering

  aspects of life, pass into obscurity; the grave dreamers, man the

  curious learner, and man the creative artist, come forward to

  replace these barbaric aspects of existence by a less ignoble

  adventure.

  There is no natural life of man. He is, and always has been, a

  sheath of varied and even incompatible possibilities, a

  palimpsest of inherited dispositions. It was the habit of many

  writers in the early twentieth century to speak of competition

  and the narrow, private life of trade and saving and suspicious

  isolation as though such things were in some exceptional way

  proper to the human constitution, and as though openness of mind

  and a preference for achievement over possession were abnormal

  and rather unsubstantial qualities. How wrong that was the

  history of the decades immediately following the establishment of

  the world republic witnesses. Once the world was released from

  the hardening insecurities of a needless struggle for life that

  was collectively planless and individually absorbing, it became

  apparent that there was in the vast mass of people a long,

  smothered passion to make things. The world broke out into

  making, and at first mainly into aesthetic making. This phase of

  history, which has been not inaptly termed the 'Efflorescence,'

  is still, to a large extent, with us. The majority of our

  population consists of artists, and the bulk of activity in the

  world lies no longer with necessities but with their elaboration,

  decoration, and refinement. There has been an evident change in

  the quality of this making during recent years. It becomes more

  purposeful than it was, losing something of its first elegance

  and prettiness and gaining in intensity; but that is a change

  rather of hue than of nature. That comes with a deepening

  philosophy and a sounder education. For the first joyous

  exercises of fancy we perceive now the deliberation of a more

  constructive imagination. There is a natural order in these

  things, and art comes before science as the satisfaction of more

  elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleasure

  come in a human life before the development of a settled

  purpose…

  For thousands of years this gathering impulse to creative work

  must have struggled in man against the limitations imposed upon

  him by his social ineptitude. It was a long smouldering fire

  that flamed out at last in all these things. The evidence of a

  pathetic, perpetually thwarted urgency to make something, is one

  of the most touching aspects of the relics and records of our

  immediate ancestors. There exists still in the death area about

  the London bombs, a region of deserted small homes that furnish

  the most illuminating comment on the old state of affairs. These

  homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hideously

  proportioned, uncomfortable, dingy, and in some respects quite

  filthy, only people in complete despair of anything better could

  have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous little

  rectangle of land called 'the garden,' containing usually a prop

  for drying clothes and a loathsome box of offal, the dustbin,

  full of egg-shells, cinders, and such-like refuse. Now that one

  may go about this region in comparitive security-for the London

  radiations have dwindled to inconsiderable proportions-it is

  possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some

  effort to make. Here it is a poor little plank summer-house,

  here it is a 'fountain' of bricks and oyster-shells, here a

  'rockery,' here a 'workshop.' And in the houses everywhere there

  are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings.

  These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of

  blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a

  sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the

  walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the

  poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. That

  god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our

  freedom has declared to us…

  In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to

  possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled

  by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And

  what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong, was

  very evidently the dream of self-expression, of doing something

  with it, of playing with it, of making a personal delightfulness,

  a distinctiveness. Property was never more than a means to an

  end, nor avarice more than a perversion. Men owned in order to

  do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own

  privacy secure, this disposition to own has found its release in

  a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may

  leave behind them a series of panels in some public arcade, a row

  of carven figures along a terrace, a grove, a pavilion. Or they

  give themselves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in

  phenomena as once men gave themselves to the accumulation of

  riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social

  existence-for most men spent all their lives in earning a

  living-is now no more than was the burden upon one of those old

  climbers who carried knapsacks of provisions on their backs in

  order that they might ascend mountains. It matters little to the

  easy charities of our emancipated time that most people who have

  made their labour contribution produce neither new beauty nor new

  wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and

  enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, it

  may be, by reception and reverberation, and they hinder nothing.

  …

  Section 11

  Now all this phase of gigantic change in the contours and

  appearances of human life which is going on about us, a change as

  rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to

  manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral

  and mental changes at least as unprecedented. It is not as if old

  things were going out of life and new things coming in, it is

  rather that the altered circumstances of men are making an appeal

  to elements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and

  checking tendencies that have hitherto been over-stimulated and

  over-developed. He has not so much grown and altered his

  essential being as turned new aspects to the light. Such turnings

  round into a new attitude the world has seen on a less extensive

  scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for

  example, were cruel and bloodthirsty robbers, in the nineteenth

  their descendants were conspicuously trusty and honourable men.

  There was not a people in Western Europe in
the early twentieth

  century that seemed capable of hideous massacres, and none that

  had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries.

  The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the prosperous classes in

  any European country before the years of the last wars was in a

  different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy,

  suspicious, secretive, and uncharitable existence of the

  respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor

  and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real

  differences of blood and inherent quality between these worlds;

  their differences were all in circumstances, suggestion, and

  habits of mind. And turning to more individual instances the

  constantly observed difference between one portion of a life and

  another consequent upon a religious conversion, were a standing

  example of the versatile possibilities of human nature.

  The catastrophe of the atomic bombs which shook men out of cities

  and businesses and economic relations shook them also out of

  their old established habits of thought, and out of the lightly

  held beliefs and prejudices that came down to them from the past.

  To borrow a word from the old-fashioned chemists, men were made

  nascent; they were released from old ties; for good or evil they

  were ready for new associations. The council carried them

  forward for good; perhaps if his bombs had reached their

  destination King Ferdinand Charles might have carried them back

  to an endless chain of evils. But his task would have been a

  harder one than the council's. The moral shock of the atomic

  bombs had been a profound one, and for a while the cunning side

  of the human animal was overpowered by its sincere realisation of

  the vital necessity for reconstruction. The litigious and trading

  spirits cowered together, scared at their own consequences; men

  thought twice before they sought mean advantages in the face of

  the unusual eagerness to realise new aspirations, and when at

  last the weeds revived again and 'claims' began to sprout, they

  sprouted upon the stony soil of law-courts reformed, of laws that

  pointed to the future instead of the past, and under the blazing

  sunshine of a transforming world. A new literature, a new

  interpretation of history were springing into existence, a new

  teaching was already in the schools, a new faith in the young.

  The worthy man who forestalled the building of a research city

  for the English upon the Sussex downs by buying up a series of

  estates, was dispossessed and laughed out of court when he made

  his demand for some preposterous compensation; the owner of the

  discredited Dass patents makes his last appearance upon the

  scroll of history as the insolvent proprietor of a paper called

  The Cry for Justice, in which he duns the world for a hundred

  million pounds. That was the ingenuous Dass's idea of justice,

  that he ought to be paid about five million pounds annually

  because he had annexed the selvage of one of Holsten's

  discoveries. Dass came at last to believe quite firmly in his

  right, and he died a victim of conspiracy mania in a private

  hospital at Nice. Both of these men would probably have ended

  their days enormously wealthy, and of course ennobled in the

  England of the opening twentieth century, and it is just this

  novelty of their fates that marks the quality of the new age.

  The new government early discovered the need of a universal

  education to fit men to the great conceptions of its universal

  rule. It made no wrangling attacks on the local, racial, and

  sectarian forms of religious profession that at that time divided

  the earth into a patchwork of hatreds and distrusts; it left

  these organisations to make their peace with God in their own

  time; but it proclaimed as if it were a mere secular truth that

  sacrifice was expected from all, that respect had to be shown to

  all; it revived schools or set them up afresh all around the

  world, and everywhere these schools taught the history of war and

  the consequences and moral of the Last War; everywhere it was

  taught not as a sentiment but as a matter of fact that the

  salvation of the world from waste and contention was the common

  duty and occupation of all men and women. These things which are

  now the elementary commonplaces of human intercourse seemed to

  the councillors of Brissago, when first they dared to proclaim

  them, marvellously daring discoveries, not untouched by doubt,

  that flushed the cheek and fired the eye.

  The council placed all this educational reconstruction in the

  hands of a committee of men and women, which did its work during

  the next few decades with remarkable breadth and effectiveness.

  This educational committee was, and is, the correlative upon the

  mental and spiritual side of the redistribution committee. And

  prominent upon it, and indeed for a time quite dominating it, was

  a Russian named Karenin, who was singular in being a congenital

  cripple. His body was bent so that he walked with difficulty,

  suffered much pain as he grew older, and had at last to undergo

  two operations. The second killed him. Already malformation,

  which was to be seen in every crowd during the middle ages so

  that the crippled beggar was, as it were, an essential feature of

  the human spectacle, was becoming a strange thing in the world.

  It had a curious effect upon Karenin's colleagues; their feeling

  towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that

  it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong

  face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a

  large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and

  wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an

  impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him

  because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust

  through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige

  was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it

  due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world

  spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general

  memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern

  educational system, was probably entirely his work.

  'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is

  the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point

  of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything

  but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work.

  You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that

  you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.

  Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the

  horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their

  curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge

  their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance

  and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to

  shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, andr />
  passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the

  universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened

  out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.

  And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously

  yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,

  every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation

  from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding

  preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is

  hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from

  God…'

  Section 12

  As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one

  begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the

  perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and

  widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.

  Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were

  once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in

  the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the

  sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth

  centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one

  sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the

  conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow

  imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider

  necessities and a possible, more spacious life.

  That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's

  Candide, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as

  happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at

  last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.

  Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy

  complaint that was presently an innumerable multitude of books.

  The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one

  excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness

  to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of

  the lack of that effort. In a thousand aspects, now tragically,

  now comically, now with a funny affectation of divine detachment,

  a countless host of witnesses tell their story of lives fretting

  between dreams and limitations. Now one laughs, now one weeps,

  now one reads with a blank astonishment at this huge and almost

  unpremeditated record of how the growing human spirit, now

 

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