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not an unwilling gull. This may seem a severe verdict. But read him on
the ultra-scholastic education that the citizen gets from newspapers,
radio, cinema, and so on (pp. 745ff.): On the whole, it is sound stuff
he gets. I know that Mr. Wells s criteria are not mine; but even by his
own what he lets out elsewhere is enough to brand his complacency as
something worse.
We can respect him as we cannot respect Arnold Bennett, but it is
significant that, for all his disinterestedness, he is not safe from the Arnold
Bennett corruption.
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RETROSPECTIVE AND OBITUARY
89. T.S.Eliot, Wells as journalist
New English Weekly, 8 February 1940, xvi, 237 8
Eliot wrote this article during the phoney war period when a
discussion of the Rights of Man initiated by Wells (and
foreshadowing the United Nations Human Rights Convention) was
taken up eagerly by the British and foreign press.
No one can have failed to observe that since the beginning of this war
two men, whom we had thought of as slowly and unwillingly retiring
from public life, have emerged into a glare of prominence. I mean Mr.
Churchill and Mr. Wells. They must be nearly contemporary; they were
both men of celebrity, I remember, when I was a freshman. Both have
spoken and written a great deal in the last thirty-odd years; neither possesses
what one could call a style, though each has a distinct idiom: that of
Mr. Wells being more like a durable boiler suit, and that of Mr. Churchill
more like a court dress of rather tarnished grandeur from a theatrical
costumier s. I do not know what they have in common, except that at
an age when one would expect them to be withdrawing to the contemplative
life, they are embarking on new and furious careers. I do not speak in
disparagement: I do not suggest that either of them ought to retire
on the contrary. Nobody needs retire until the world is so changed that
he has nothing to say to it. The interesting thing is that the world has
not changed; that Mr. Wells and Mr. Churchill can go on because there
is still a public for them to direct and because there is no one else to
direct it. The situation is so odd that it is worth a moment s consideration.
My own generation does not seem to have produced either a great
demagogue such as have been Mr. Churchill and Mr. Lloyd George
or a great journalist such as have been Mr. Wells, Mr. Shaw and Mr.
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H.G.WELLS
Chesterton. I am not, in this context, using either term, demagogue
or journalist, in any but the most favourable sense. Of men highly
gifted for journalism in this most favourable sense there have been
several. For instance, Mr. Wyndham Lewis, Mr. Middleton Murry and
Mr. John Macmurray all have the necessary fluency, earnestness and
desire to influence as large an audience as possible; and Mr. Lewis, at
least, is unquestionably a writer of as great genius as Mr. Wells. Yet
none of them has ever been listened to by more than a minority public;
and as for the men of my time who have been able to capture a large
audience, I believe they are all, by comparison with Mr. Wells, pygmies.
By individual comparison of gifts alone, ample reason can be found for
Mr. Wells s success. Mr. Wells started as a popular entertainer, and his
advantages of education gave him the opportunity to exploit popular
science for a generation all ready to suspend disbelief in favour of this
form of romance. To this paying activity he brought imagination of a
very high order: some of his short stories, such as The Country of the
Blind, and certain scenes from his romances, such as the description
of sunrise on the moon in The First Men in the Moon, are quite
unforgettable. Later, he employed remarkable gifts as a recorder in
chronicles of the sort of society in which he took his origins. Through
being a popular entertainer, he found an opening as a prophet the nearest
parallel in the last few years is Miss Dorothy Sayers. None of my
contemporaries of a distinction at all comparable to that of Mr. Wells
has started by this popular appeal of entertainment. And I think that
this is more than a personal difference; it is the difference of a generation.
The world into which Mr. Wells and the late Arnold Bennett arrived
(the same world, really, as that of Lord Stamp) was a world of getting
on. For the ambitious youth of literary gifts and humble origins, the
first thing sensibly enough was to make a living by giving the public
its entertainment; when one had got sufficiently established, then one
might be free, either to devote oneself to a work of literary art, or to
preach openly to a public which is docile and respectful to success. In
the course of this rough experience Mr. Wells probably learned a number
of things about writing about putting over ideas to the large public
which his juniors have never learnt. He also suffered, because of his
period, in a way in which younger men have not suffered. He exhibits,
for example, a curious sensitiveness about his origins: in a recent
contribution to the Fortnightly he rebukes the younger generation for
grudging him in middle age the modest competence which is no more
than his due in consideration of his straitened youth. I cannot help
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THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
comparing him here with the man whom I consider the greatest journalist,
in the best sense of the term, of my time: Charles P�guy. P�guy was a
peasant, and makes you feel that he took a deep pride in his origins.
But the difference between Mr. Wells and my own generation is of another
kind. I cannot think of any good English writer of my generation who
is either sensitive because of being humbly born, or who puts on airs
because of being well born: the distinction is of no interest among writers.
Perhaps it is partly that we have found ourselves in a position in which
getting on was always out of the question. There was nowhere to get
to. That kind of success, for a serious man of letters, is no longer possible.
The serious journalism of my generation is all minority journalism.
That is more than a difference between Mr. Wells and my contemporaries;
it is a difference between the worlds into which they were born. The
crowd of season-ticket holders is still there it is bigger than ever
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