by H. G. Wells
his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile
at the sight of me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic
entanglement that was destined to involve us both. Gane was
present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member, but I think Bailey was
absent. Either he was absent, or he said something so entirely
characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no impression on
my mind.
I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my
title, which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it
was, "The World Exists for Exceptional People." It is not the title
I should choose now-for since that time I have got my phrase of
"mental hinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The
World Exists for Mental Hinterland."
The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a
thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought
with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the
scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it
the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the
1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled
marginalia.
My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon
lines such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding
sections. I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and
tushed and pished at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were
treated to one of his platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in
his chair with that small obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling,
and a sort of cadaverous glow upon his face, repeating-quite
regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others
in the debate-the sacred empty phrases that were his soul's refuge
from reality. "You may think it very clever," he said with a nod of
his head to mark his sense of his point, "not to Trust in the
People. I do." And so on. Nothing in his life or work had ever
shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the mark.
He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.
After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show
that all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either
recognise aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is
aristocracy in particular, and so I came to my point that the
reality of human progress lay necessarily through the establishment
of freedoms for the human best and a collective receptivity and
understanding. There was a disgusted grunt from Dayton, "Superman
rubbish-Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!" I sailed on over him to my next
propositions. The prime essential in a progressive civilisation was
the establishment of a more effective selective process for the
privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational
opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise
scholarship winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a
reward for virtue. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an
invitation to capacity. We had no more right to drag in virtue, or
any merit but quality, than we had to involve it in a search for the
tallest man. We didn't want a mere process for the selection of
good as distinguished from gifted and able boys-"No, you DON'T,"
from Dayton-we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the world
concentrated upon the development of the world. Just to exasperate
Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in
educational, artistic, and legislative work. "Good teaching," I
said, "is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic about
character."
Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of
agonised aversion.
I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that
is really serving humanity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the
thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter,
are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned
by-how many?-by three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said
Thorns.) To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or
four thousand individuals. We who know some of the band entertain
no illusions as to their innate rarity. We know that they are just
the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and
confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate
moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are lost in the
crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become
commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry
commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous
pollen in a pine forest is waste."
"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his
chin in his necktie. "WASTE!"
"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually
in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of
intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and
opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might
call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by
understanding. It isn't that our-SALT of three or four thousand is
needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and
undifferentiated a public. Most of the good men we know are not
really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a
little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use.
Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle,
futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal
problem of the state-to discover, develop, and use the exceptional
gifts of men. And I see that best done-I drift more and more away
from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activity-by
a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but
by a still more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep
literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all
science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism
going. You know none of these things have ever been kept going
hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."
"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an
expression of mystical profundity.
"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to
darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to
darkness again-and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went
on to attack the present organisation of our schools and
universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-
behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the
authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon
lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this
story…
So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new
ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or
combination of groups these developments of scien
ce and literature
and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I
looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
There I left it to them.
We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we
emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude.
The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.
I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way
we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a
lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a
walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he
said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible
movement. It's not only possible, but necessary-urgently
necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."
"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in
education and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our
neglect of the higher levels."
Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called
the spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community
needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken
seriously," I remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either
dull responsibility or merely witty art."
I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown
out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate
these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind
went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and
how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers
nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some
defensive devices.
"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said
Crupp, with his eye on me. "You can't get away from that. The
Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or
literature."
"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said
Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. "It shows what they were
made of," he added.
"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've
got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make
it work. But he's certainly suggested a method."
"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to
the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."
"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal. "For we can't
do without it."
"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes,
aristocrats indeed-if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said
Britten.
"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.
"I agree," said Gane.
"No one can tell," said Thorns. "I doubt if they will get beaten."
It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with
ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out
suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we
tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I
think, got more said than any one. "You all seem to think you want
to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,"
he insisted. "It isn't that. That's the standing error of
politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a
matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas.
The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question
for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help
this culture forward."
"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You
yourself were asking that a little while ago."
"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a
movement to reorganise aristocracy-Reform of the House of Lords,
they'll call the political form of it."
"Bailey thinks that," said some one.
"The labour people want abolition," said some one. "Let 'em," said
Thorns.
He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.
"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of
those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady
jet of ideas might produce enormous results."
"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."
"We should," said Thorns under his breath.
I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
"I believe we could do-extensive things," I insisted.
"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said
Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."
"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the
peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently
progressive and rejuvenescent."
I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our
presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection
was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the
table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he
said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children.
They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience."
"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.
"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.
"Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget row leads to a storm,
and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to
happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock,
and barrel, who comes in?"
"Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.
"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.
"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns.
"I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in
three years."
"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. "One thing
emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and
almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all
the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march
with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing.
Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I
concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,-I want
to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."
"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly-his first remark for a long
time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.
"Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by
transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed
many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of
a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the
liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except
a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other
progress is secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams
of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no
> free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid
ugliness,-that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to
discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls-
and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people
say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in
which the living element may be saved."
"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became
noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult
that he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do
immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think.
And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was
only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist
in our hands…
We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow-but in
that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration,
and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the
indications of that opening talk.
5
I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my
developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new
trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I
had already hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other
men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that
otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality
than the guardians of Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other
questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that
came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy,
Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the
imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall little
Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just
a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official
by means of the polling booth. "If they don't like things," said
he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens
then-and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional
representation to let in the wild men." I opened my eyes-the lids
had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth sounds-to
see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his
