The Last Books of H.G. Wells

by HG Wells

  “Never have disciples,” said Jesus of Nazareth. “it was my greatest mistake. I imitated the tradition of having such divisional commanders to marshal the rabble I led to Jerusalem. It has been the common mistake of all world-menders, and I fell into it in my turn as a matter of course. I had no idea what a real revolution had to be; how it had to go on from and to and fro between man and man, each one making his contribution. I was just another young man in a hurry. I thought I could carry the whole load, and I picked my dozen almost haphazard.

  “What a crew they were! I am told that even these Gospels you talk about, are unflattering in their account of them.

  “There is nothing flattering to be told about them. What a crew to start upon saving the world! From the first they began badgering me about their relative importance…

  “And their stupidity! They would misunderstand the simplest metaphors. I would say, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is like so-and-so and so-and so’…In the simplest terms…

  “They always got it wrong.

  “After a time I realized I could never open my mouth and think aloud without being misunderstood. I remember trying to make our breach with all orthodox and ceremonial limitations clear beyond any chance of relapse. I made up a parable about a Good Samaritan. Not half a bad story.”

  “We have the story,” I said.

  “I was sloughing off my patriotism at a great rate. I was realizing the Kingdom of Heaven had to be a universal thing. Or nothing. Does your version go like that?”

  “It goes like that.”

  “But it never altered their belief that they had come into the business on the ground floor.”

  “You told another good story about some Labourers in the Vineyard.”

  “From the same point of view?”

  “From the same point of view.”

  “Did it alter their ideas in the least?”

  “Nothing seemed to alter their ideas in the least.”

  “It was a dismal time when our great March on Jerusalem petered out. You know when they got us in the Garden of Gethsemane I went to pieces completely… The disciples, when they realized public opinion was against them, just dropped their weapons and dispersed. No guts in them. Simon Peter slashed off a man’s ear and then threw away his sword and pretended not to know me…

  “I wanted to kick myself. I derided myself. I saw all the mistakes I had made in my haste. I spoke in the bitterest irony. Nothing for it now but to know one had had good intentions. ‘My peace,’ I said, ‘I give unto you.’

  “The actual crucifixion was a small matter in comparison. I was worn out and glad to be dying, so far as that went, long before those two other fellows—I forget who they were. One was drunk and abusive. But being crucified upon the irreparable things that one has done, realizing that one has failed, that you have let yourself down and your poor silly disciples down and mankind down, that the God in you has deserted you—that was the ultimate torment. Even on the cross I remember shouting out something about it.”

  “Eli. Eli, lama sabachthani?” I said.

  “Did someone get that down?” he replied.

  “Don’t you read the Gospels?”

  “Good God, No!” he said. “How can I? I was crucified before all that.”

  “But you seem to know how things have gone?”

  “It was plain enough how they were going.”

  “Don’t you,” I asked rather stupidly, forgetting where we were, “keep yourself informed about terrestrial affairs?”

  “They crucify me daily,” he said. “I know that. Yes.”

  2.

  Then without any sign of compunction, with that easy inconsistency which is so natural in the Dreamland atmosphere, he dropped the pose of knowing nothing of the Gospels and began to discuss them with the acutest penetration. He experimented with one explanation.

  “People get here, good religious gentle beings, bringing the books they believe in. I talk to them because they are often so right-hearted that it perplexes me to find how wrong-headed they can be.

  “Though I saw things going wrong after my crucifixion…”

  That was not good enough. He went further and re-told the story of the Resurrection…

  “I saw that fellow Paul. That story is quite true. I fainted but I didn’t die, and that dear old Joseph of Arimathea put me away in his own private sepulcher. Matthew’s Gospel exaggerates about its being sealed and watched, and Mark, Luke and John came nearer the facts. I was put away by Joseph and Nicodemus, among a lot of spices and comforts, there was food and wine and fruit and even some money, and when I awoke I was disgusted beyond measure to realise I was not dead. I sat there eating, because I was exhausted, and wondering what I had best do. Perhaps after all our Heavenly Father had a use for me, and, like yourself, I have never been willing to die. I would just obliterate myself for a time and think things over. You know something of that feeling.”

  “All my life,” I said.

  “Of course I ran up against some of the old set. There’s no end of circumstantial truth in the gospels. Some of the women were hanging about the garden where I had been deposited. I didn’t know what to say to them. I had no clear idea of the next step to take. I still felt there was much to be said and done in spite of the jumble I had made of it all. ‘I must go away,’ I said. “Whither I go you cannot come. Stick to my teachings, and when I come back we’ll have it all gloriously right.’

  “Old Thomas thought I was a ghost, and he had to feel the nail holes in my hands before he would believe.

  “I met two of them in an inn where I had gone for a bite, and we ate together. Gradually I got away from them as I worked my way north, to think things over from the beginning; while they got together to wait for the Second Coming.

  “I was never much of a linguist—no Pentecost for me and so I couldn’t go far into Syria beyond the range of my native Galilee.”

  “You didn’t speak Hebrew?”

  “Nobody spoke Hebrew in my time. Not a soul. It was a dead language. We used to read the Pentateuch and some of the prophets in the synagogues in Hebrew, and the scholars in Jerusalem kept up the cult, but the sort of Hebrew I knew was almost on a level with the rote-learnt Latin a provincial priest would gabble in the early Dark Ages before the Benedictines bucked up classical learning. A majority of Jews, in Egypt for example, knew the Scriptures only through the Septuagint translation. When I got up and read the Law in the Nazareth synagogue, they realized my limitations and threw me out. This Aramaic we talked carried one far into Syria and along the coasts. So that I would wander away again when the Christians made trouble.

  “I was not a bad carpenter, slow but careful and accurate. I rather liked Antioch—it was big place in which one could lose oneself—if only Paul hadn’t had a way of turning up there and asserting that I was the Son of the Holy Ghost. I knew there were some odd stories about mother. But you see I had every opportunity of hearing Paul on the top of his form. It was no good interrupting him. He would have bawled me out at once. And before I had thought out my problem, I died. I forget my last illness; some form of malaria, I think, and where my body is buried I haven’t the faintest idea…”

  “Not in the Holy Sepulchre?”

  He smiled the Crusades away.

  “And that’s the true life and story of Jesus of Nazareth, the world’s greatest failure?”

  3.

  He began to change again. He smiled that charming confidential smile of his, which commonly preceded his leg-pulling phase, and then he became a different Jesus altogether, something much more Evangelical, the Pastor of a renascent City Temple perhaps. I did not know how to prevent that. You cannot dictate to a dream. He became—business-like. He escaped into the impossible.

  “I don’t know where you get your press cuttings,” said this transfigured Jesus. “The stuff these infernal Christians pour out! I don’t read a tenth of it.”

  Jesus of Nazareth reading press cuttings! “But could you read?” I protested, an
d woke up, before he could explain, as I know this metamorphosed Redeemer would have done, that he had been learning, learning.

  But except for Dreamland the dead are finished and done. We have Holy Writ for it. My Jesus used to be fond of saying “It is written”, but had that Jesus ever heard a single quotation from Ecclesiastes—with its stern insistence upon human finality?....

  “A living dog is better than a dead lion… The dead know not anything… There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

  VI

  THE ARCHITECT PLANS THE WORLD

  BUT THAT CARNIVAL of the Gods and those bishops on broomsticks and that heart to heart talk about the difficulties of world-mending with one of its most celebrated failures, are just two among my endless adventures in Dreamland, and I do not know from night to night what new refreshment awaits me.

  There is a lot of architecture beyond there. Sometimes I dream of a purely architectural world. But that architecture goes far beyond the mere putting-up of buildings and groups of buildings here and there. The architects of Dreamland lay out a whole new world. Their gigantic schemes tower to the stratosphere, plumb the depths of the earth, groom mountains, divert ocean currents and dry up seas. My identity merges inextricably with every dreamland architect. “We” do this; “we” do that. We share a common excitement at every fresh idea.

  The agronomes—there are no farmers in Dreamland—come along and tell us, “We can produce all the food and the best of food and the most delightful of food, not to mention all the drinks that make glad the heart of man, most easily and expeditiously for your happy thousands of millions, in those few hundred thousand square miles we have marked out upon this globe for you, and the rest of the planet you can have to live in and make homes of and gardens of and playgrounds and—slightly controlled—wildernesses, and everything you architects can dream of and devise.”

  The geographers and metallurgists and mineralogists and engineers unfold their possibilities to us. “This is what you will be wise to do,” they will say, “and this you can do if you will, and it is for you architects to see that none of our mines and pits become eyesores and offences against the ever acuter sensibilities of mankind,” and forthwith we shall sit down with them and draw and redraw our plans. The artists will come demanding surfaces to decorate; the musicians will demand great sound-proof auditoria, so that those who want to hear can hear and no one be bothered by unsolicited noise. All roads lead to architecture and building and rebuilding. These things We, the Creative King in Man, will carry out and carry on.

  In these dreams I apprehend gigantic facades, vast stretches of magnificently schemed landscape, moving roads that will take you wherever you want to go instead of your taking them. “All this We do and more also,” I rejoice. And though endless lovely new things are achieved, nothing a human heart has loved will ever be lost. I find myself a child again, the town-bred child I was, rejoicing in the sounds and sights of a country lane, delighting in by-ways where the honeysuckle twines about the ragged robin and one picks and nibbles the bread and cheese buds. Or one creeps through a hedge, conquering its resistance, into a tactfully unguarded garden where there are white raspberry canes and half-ripe gooseberries, black cherries and greengages. And then back to the grownup magnificence once more…

  Old fruits there are in Dreamland, but we feast on many marvelous new ones also. There is a vast Luther Burbank organization at work upon them. And in these latter days, as the war effort strains our lives towards greater and greater austerity, there has been a notable increase of feasting and banqueting in my Dreams. We sit long at table, for there is time for everything where time ceases. I will not tantalize you with my last menu…

  I cannot set any of these things down in sketches and forecasts and detailed descriptions, for how can I foretell what a hundred million brains, all better than mine, will conceive and plan and replan and continually enhance—they dissolve and vanish as I wake, but in my dream, I dream they are delightful beyond all experience, and, with that, Dreamland is satisfied.

  VII

  MIRACLES, DEVILS AND THE GADARENE SWINE

  1.

  “THESE ARE THE unavoidable distresses of a sick world. There is no way out of it. Every human being is a poisoned human being. We are all infected. A thousand contagions are in our blood. There is no health in us.”

  “And no magic remedy,” we agree.

  “Baptism? So natural and obvious to turn to that, and just symbolize our cleansing. So natural for poor infected things to hope and seek for Healers and Leaders to Well Being. So hard to tell them that there is no Salvation but in and through themselves.”

  “They used,” said Jesus, detaching himself a little from me, “to crowd upon me—just as they would have crowded upon any passing novelty, gaping for me to do the tricks they called miracles. A lot of them were bed-rid malingerers and lazy spiritless people, but when I told them to get up and walk, with a threat in my eye, they walked all right. Also I made the disciples baptize and wash them. That proved an effective remedy in many cases. I never handled them myself. I’ve always had a sort of physical fastidiousness. Poor physique, I suppose…

  “Beggars with good marketable sores used to get out of my way for fear of exposure. If sympathetic friends caught them and dragged them up to me, they had the alternatives of confessing themselves humbugs, which might have had disagreeable consequences for them, or adding to my thaumaturgic prestige. So they added to my thaumaturgic prestige.

  “A lot of people in my time were possessed by devils, talked aloud, muttered queer things, frightened the timid and the children. Once they got that way with their neighbors, it was hard to get out of it. They liked being feared, of course, but they did not liked being shunned and stoned. They appreciated the distinction of being possessed, but it is very inconvenient to be always possessed and never have a quiet moment. They found my stern exorcisms restful and acceptable. But many, when they realized that nobody was taking notice of them, decided after a time to relapse and take unto themselves seven devils, each worse than the first…”

  “The Gospels,” I said, “are rather vague about that. They read rather as if you were just letting fly at the eagerness with which the enlightened relapse. Did you really believe there were devils?”

  “Not finally. But at first yes. It was the prevalent idea and people lent themselves to it. There was that absurd affair with the pigs. Where was it?”

  “The Gadarene swine? I’d love to hear about that.”

  “Yes, yes. One of my minor failures.

  “The people came and begged me to stop my confounded miracles and get right out of the country as soon as possible. This fellow used to prowl about stark staring naked, exhibiting himself disgustingly, scaring girls and children and assaulting people, howling and cursing and having a great time. At first everyone wanted me to do something about it. And he thought I could and would dispossess him. He hid in a graveyard and when he realised I had got him, he came out in tremendous style. No solitary devil possessed him, he howled. Never was a man so bedeviled. He was a whole Legion. There were some pigs feeding near by and he made such an uproar that they took fright and stampeded down a steep place and into the sea. Quite a lot were drowned, and then it was the people came out and begged me to be off. They insisted. They saw me to my boat.”

  “I’m glad to have the story from you,” I said. As you know, the dear old Gospels are at sixes and sevens. Matthew, exaggerating as usual and spoiling his story, says there were two madmen, Mark says there was only one and that there were precisely two thousand pigs, while Luke tells a long story of how poor Legion wanted to come away with you out of the country. I can quite understand he felt he might be a bit unpopular… You left him behind.”

  “He was the aggressive sort of man anyone would leave behind,” said Jesus. “Gladly.”

  “And you don’t know what became of him?”

  “I think they went up the hill t
o look for him after they had seen me off. They were business-like people, those Gadarenes. Whether they got him I don’t know. The Gospels, you will have observed, tell nothing about it.”

  “Well, you had brought away all your Gospel witnesses.”

  2.

  “Those crowds! I used to insist upon the children coming nearest… They smelt—weaker. And they were artless. Yes—… With or without a reason, I loved and pitied these foredoomed sacrifices to life. So long as they were little. It was a queer thing going from place to place, with something very urgent to say, that I knew ought to be said and which I was honestly trying to find words for, and to have to push my way through a smelly press of human degradation… All the time it was: ‘Just one little miracle! Something we can tell our friends about. Something to show!’

  “They would ask to have a wart or a whitlow cured—as a souvenir!

  “A lot of them who had no luck with me couldn’t bear the humiliation. So they went off and invented things. These downright liars just loaded me with wonders, far beyond anything else I did. They had a free hand…”

  “That has been the common lot of everyone who felt there was something he ought to say,” I remarked. “Everyone. Buddha and St. Benedict, every saint in the calendar is half buried under a cairn of marvel-mongers’ lies. Mankind would have smothered itself in its own lies long ago, if history were not so plainly incredible. Truth has a way of heaving up through the cracks of history. Or we should be damned without hope.”

  3.

  We sat digging our toes into the Elysian greensward, reflecting, in the infinite leisure of finished lives, upon our particular failures to release the human thought that still seeks release and realization in time and space.

  “Your miracle cadgers remind me of autograph hunters,” I remarked.