by H. G. Wells
this with extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our
political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust
storm and tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we
made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good
writing. It was the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords
were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the
longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and
tumult of that immediate conflict were over. Meanwhile we had to
get into touch with just as many goodminds as possible.
As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly
conceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain
later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused
Shoesmith and Gane great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's
House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic
virtues, and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow
excellencies of that Break-up of the Poor Law agitation, which had
been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. In addition,
without any very definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and
Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set myself
to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.
That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the
confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the
general need of metaphysical training… The great mass of
people-and not simply common people, but people active and
influential in intellectual things-are still quite untrained in the
methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of
method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy
patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by
a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to
their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that
minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general
terms and a certain use for generalisations. They are-to fall back
on the ancient technicality-Realists of a crude sort. When I say
Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not
Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to
Idealist. Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great
prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are
whole regiments of prominent and entirely self-satisfied
contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of
definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest
belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are
using. They are Realists-Cocksurists-in matter of fact;
sentimentalists in behaviour. The Baileys having got to this
glorious stage in mental development-it is glorious because it has
no doubts-were always talking about training "Experts" to apply the
same simple process to all the affairs of mankind. Well, Realism
isn't the last word of human wisdom. Modest-minded people, doubtful
people, subtle people, and the like-the kind of people William
James writes of as "tough-minded," go on beyond this methodical
happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and terms.
They are truer-and less confident. They have reached scepticism
and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new Nominalism.
Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of
intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind,
that the collective mind of this intricate complex modern state can
only function properly upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always
been her side of our mental co-operation rather than mine. Her mind
has the light movement that goes so often with natural mental power;
she has a wonderful art in illustration, and, as the reader probably
knows already, she writes of metaphysical matters with a rare charm
and vividness. So far there has been no collection of her papers
published, but they are to be found not only in the BLUE WEEKLY
columns but scattered about the monthlies; many people must be
familiar with her style. It was an intention we did much to realise
before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE WEEKLY to
maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and at last
scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some large
imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or
mine…
I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social
matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in
London. I hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good
criticism; I was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider,
if not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and
had a dozen men alert to get me special matter of the sort that
draws in the unattached reader. The chief danger on the literary
side of a weekly is that it should fall into the hands of some
particular school, and this I watched for closely. It seems
impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth of view
together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise editor to
secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected the
shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor
thing because it was "in the right direction," or damn a vigorous
piece of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out
with him. Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal…
Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat
persistent appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the
BLUE WEEKLY was printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements,
and went into all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the
country houses where week-end parties gather together. Its sale by
newsagents and bookstalls grew steadily. One got more and more the
reassuring sense of being discussed, and influencing discussion.
5
Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of
Adelphi Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided
window of plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the
corner of the Hotel Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and
the long sweep of south bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past
Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge below the
Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just floated into view on the left
against the hotel facade. By night and day, in every light and
atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view, alive as a
throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and splashed
the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of things
became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror of
steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the
Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements
flashed and flickered, trains went
and came and a rolling drift of
smoke reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a
marvel of shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a
mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details,
minutely fine.
As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, Iam back
there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old
desk. I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is
a green shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and
letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the
shadows are chairs and another table bearing papers and books, a
rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long window seat black in the
darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the window. How
often I would watch some tram-car, some string of barges go from me
slowly out of sight. The people were black animalculae by day,
clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom
face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely between light and
shade.
I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,
hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work.
Once some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful
of time until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp
to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower
Bridge, flushed and banded brightly with the dawn.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE BESETTING OF SEX
1
Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But Iam concerned
with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a
contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the
social organism in relation to that man. To tell my story at all I
have to simplify. I have given now the broad lines of my political
development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to
the conception of a constructive aristocracy. I have tried to set
that out in the form of a man discovering himself. Incidentally
that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife. One
has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two
different languages and coming to an understanding. But Margaret
and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my
own, diverged.
I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended
for me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me
up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement,
tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in
which these interests break upon the life of a young man under
contemporary conditions. I do not think my lot was a very
exceptional one. I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates,
but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small
families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I
was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were encounters of
sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them
things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish
disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had
passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things
inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time
Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and
so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a
little window through which one has been surveying a crowd. She
didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from
my world… And then came this secret separation…
Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development
of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to
have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I
thought these things were over. I went about my career with
Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly
strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished
sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would
not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest
degree if we had.
And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and
her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life
returned. The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its
invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy. I have already
compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in
his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these
high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the
beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and
woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the
light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting,
demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention. I
feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my
time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere
physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she
is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life. She comes to
the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a
thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came to me
and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an
unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and
controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once
trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest,
most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless,
explicitness of understanding…
2
In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed
either that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow
they didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they"
were, had to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was
possible then. But even before 1906 there were endless intimations
that the dams holding back great reservoirs of discussion were
crumbling. We political schemers were ploughing wider than any one
had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruction. We had
also, we realised, to plough deeper. We had to plough down at last
to the passionate elements of sexual relationship and examine and
decide upon them.
The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the
metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one
clamorous aspect of the new problem. The members went about
Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset. A good
proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an
isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would
presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who sought more than
comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and
money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle
fancy for the fr
anchise. The existing laws and conventions of
relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a
disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and
that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.
My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't
propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities
and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that
unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that
were absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except
for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was
amazingly effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed,
I think, to the forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple
argument based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude
expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent feelings, of a
widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the
conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly,
dishonouring, and had to be altered. They had not merely adopted
the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that,
given it, they meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even
vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had
every reason to hate…
I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in
the session of 1909, when-I think it was-fifty or sixty women went
to prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I
came down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a
confusion outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with
an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a
silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part
white-faced and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces
upon me. It was quite different from the general effect of staring
about and divided attention one gets in a political procession of
men. There was an expression of heroic tension.
There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's
organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout
