Герберт Джордж Уэллс
Certain Personal Matters
THE BOOK OF ESSAYS DEDICATORY
I have been bothered about this book this three months. I have written scarcely anything since Llewellyn asked me for it, for when he asked me I had really nothing on hand. I had just published every line I had ever written, at my own expense, with Prigsbys. Yet three months should suffice for one of Llewellyn's books, which consist chiefly of decorous fly-leaves and a dedication or so, and margins. Of course you know Llewellyn's books – the most delightful things in the market: the sweetest covers, with little gilt apples and things carelessly distributed over luminous grey, and bright red initials, and all these delightful fopperies. But it was the very slightness of these bibelots that disorganised me. And perhaps, also, the fact that no one has ever asked me for a book before.
I had no trouble with the title though – "Lichens." I have wondered the thing was never used before. Lichens, variegated, beautiful, though on the most arid foundations, half fungoid, half vernal – the very name for a booklet of modern verse. And that, of course, decided the key of the cover and disposed of three or four pages. A fly-leaf, a leaf with "Lichens" printed fair and beautiful a little to the left of the centre, then a title-page – "Lichens. By H.G. Wells. London: MDCCCXCV. Stephen Llewellyn." Then a restful blank page, and then – the Dedication. It was the dedication stopped me. The title-page, it is true, had some points of difficulty. Should the Christian name be printed in full or not, for instance; but it had none of the fatal fascination of the dedicatory page. I had, so to speak, to look abroad among the ranks of men, and make one of those fretful forgotten millions – immortal. It seemed a congenial task.
I went to work forthwith.
It was only this morning that I realised the magnitude of my accumulations. Ever since then – it was three months ago – I have been elaborating this Dedication. I turned the pile over, idly at first. Presently I became interested in tracing my varying moods, as they had found a record in the heap.
This struck me —
Then again, a little essay in gratitude came to hand —
ToProfessor Augustus Flood,
Whose Admirable Lectures on
Palæontology
First turned my Attention to
Literature
There was a tinge of pleasantry in the latter that pleased me very greatly when I wrote it, and I find immediately overlying it another essay in the same line —
To the Latter-day Reviewer,
These Pearls
For some days I was smitten with the idea of dedicating my little booklet to one of my numerous personal antagonists, and conveying some subtly devised insult with an air of magnanimity. I thought, for instance, of Blizzard —
Sir Joseph Blizzard,
The most distinguished, if not the greatest, of contemporary
anatomists
I think it was "X.L.'s" book, Aut Diabolus aut Nihil, that set me upon another line. There is, after all, your reader to consider in these matters, your average middle-class person to impress in some way. They say the creature is a snob, and absolutely devoid of any tinge of humour, and I must confess that I more than half believe it. At anyrate, it was that persuasion inspired —
To the Countess of X.,
In Memory of Many Happy Days
I know no Countess of X., as a matter of fact, but if the public is such an ass as to think better of my work for the suspicion, I do not care how soon I incur it. And this again is a pretty utilisation of the waste desert of politics —
My Dear Salisbury, – Pray accept this unworthy tribute of my affectionate esteem.
There were heaps of others. And looking at those heaps it suddenly came sharp and vivid before my mind that there – there was the book I needed, already written! A blank page, a dedication, a blank page, a dedication, and so on. I saw no reason to change the title. It only remained to select the things, and the book was done. I set to work at once, and in a very little while my bibelot was selected. There were dedications fulsome and fluid, dedications acrid and uncharitable, dedications in verse and dedications in the dead languages: all sorts and conditions of dedications, even the simple "To J.H. Gabbles" – so suggestive of the modest white stones of the village churchyard. Altogether I picked out one hundred and three dedications. At last only one thing remained to complete the book. And that was – the Dedication. You will scarcely credit it, but that worries me still…
I am almost inclined to think that Dedications are going out of fashion.
THROUGH A MICROSCOPE
SOME MORAL REFLECTIONS
This dabbler person has recently disposed of his camera and obtained a microscope – a short, complacent-looking implement it is, of brass – and he goes about everywhere now with little glass bottles in his pocket, ready to jump upon any stray polly-woggle he may find, and hale it home and pry into its affairs. Within his study window are perhaps half a dozen jars and basins full of green scum and choice specimens of black mud in which his victims live. He persists in making me look through this instrument, though I would rather I did not. It seems to me a kind of impropriety even when I do it. He gets innumerable things in a drop of green water, and puts it on a glass slip under the object glass, and, of course, they know nothing of the change in their condition, and go on living just as they did before they were observed. It makes me feel at times like a public moralist, or Peeping Tom of Coventry, or some such creature.
Certainly there are odd things enough in the water. Among others, certain queer green things that are neither plants nor animals. Most of the time they are plants, quiet green threads matted together, but every now and then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts off with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see the world. The dabbler says it's quite a usual thing among the lower plants —Algæ he calls them, for some reason – to disgorge themselves in this way and go swimming about; but it has quite upset my notions of things. If the lower plants, why not the higher? It may be my abominable imagination, but since he told me about these – swarm spores I think he called them – I don't feel nearly so safe with my geraniums as I did.
A particularly objectionable thing in these water drops, the dabbler insists upon my spying at is the furious activity of everything you see in them. You look down his wretched tube, and there, bright and yellow with the lamplight in the round field of the microscope, is a perfect riot of living things. Perhaps it's the water he got from Hampstead, and a dozen flat things the shape of shortbreads will be fussing about. They are all quite transparent and colourless, and move about like galleys by means of a lot of minute oars that stick out all over them. Never a moment's rest. And, presently, one sees that even the green plant threads are wriggling across the field. The dabbler tries to moralise on this in the vein of Charles Kingsley, and infer we have much to learn from these ridiculous creatures; but, so far as I can see, it's a direct incentive to sloth to think how low in the scale of creation these things are, in spite of all their fussing. If they had sat about more and thought, they might be fishing the dabbler out of ponds and examining him instead of his examining them. Your energetic people might do worse things than have a meditative half-hour at the microscope. Then there are green things with a red spot and a tail, that creep about like slugs, and are equally transparent. Euglena viridis the dabbler calls them, which seems unnecessary information. In fact all the things he shows me are transparent. Even the little one-eyed Crustacea, the size of a needle-point, that discredit the name of Cyclops. You can see their digestion and muscle and nerve, and, in fact, everything. It's at least a blessing we are not the same. Fancy the audible comments of the temperance advocate when you get in the bus! No use pulling yourself together then. "Pretty full!" And "Look," people would say, "his wife gives him cold mutton."
Speaking of the name of Cyclops reminds me that these scientific people have been playing a scurvy trick upon the classics behind our backs. It reminds one of Epistemon's visit to Hades, when he saw Alexander a patcher of clouts and Xerxes a crier of mustard. Aphrodite, the dabbler tells me, is a kind of dirty mud-worm, and much dissected by spectacled pretenders to the London B.Sc.; every candidate, says the syllabus, must be able to dissect, to the examiner's satisfaction, and demonstrate upon Aphrodite, Nereis, Palæmon. Were the gods ever so insulted? Then the snaky Medusa and Pandora, our mother, are jelly-fish; Astræa is still to be found on coral reefs, a poor thing, and much browsed upon by parrot fish; and Doris and Tethys and Cydippe are sea slugs. It's worse than Heine's vision of the gods grown old. They can't be content with the departed gods merely. Evadne is a water flea – they'll make something out of Mrs. Sarah Grand next; and Autolycus, my Autolycus! is a polymorphic worm, whatever subtlety of insult "polymorphic worm" may convey.
However, I wander from the microscope. These shortbread things are fussing about hither and thither across the field, and now and then an amœba comes crawling into view. These are invertebrate jelly-like things of no particular shape, and they keep on thrusting out a part here, and withdrawing a part there, and changing and advancing just as though they were popular democratic premiers. Then diatoms keep gliding athwart the circle. These diatoms are, to me at least, the most perplexing things in the universe. Imagine a highly ornamental thing in white and brown, the shape of a spectacle case, without any limbs or other visible means of progression, and without any wriggling of the body, or indeed any apparent effort at all, gliding along at a smart pace. That's your diatom. The dabbler really knows nothing of how they do it. He mumbles something about Bütschli and Grenfell. Imagine the thing on a larger scale, Cleopatra's Needle, for instance, travelling on its side up the Thames Embankment, and all unchaperoned, at the rate of four or five miles an hour.
There's another odd thing about these microscope things which redeems, to some extent at least, their singular frankness. To use the decorous phrase of the text-book, "They multiply by fission." Your amœba or vorticella, as the case may be, splits in two. Then there are two amœbæ or vorticellæ. In this way the necessity of the family, that middle-class institution so abhorrent to the artistic mind, is avoided. In my friend's drop of ditch-water, as in heaven, there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. There are no waste parents, which should appeal to the scholastic mind, and the simple protozoon has none of that fitful fever of falling in love, that distressingly tender state that so bothers your mortal man. They go about their business with an enviable singleness of purpose, and when they have eaten and drunk, and attained to the fulness of life, they divide and begin again with renewed zest the pastime of living.
In a sense they are immortal. For we may look at this matter in another light, and say our exuberant protozoon has shed a daughter, and remains. In that case the amœba I look at may have crawled among the slime of the Silurian seas when the common ancestor of myself and the royal family was an unassuming mud-fish like those in the reptile house in the Zoo. His memoirs would be interesting. The thought gives a solemn tint to one's meditations. If the dabbler wash him off this slide into his tube of water again, this trivial creature may go on feeding and growing and dividing, and presently be thrown away to wider waters, and so escape to live … after I am dead, after my masterpieces are forgotten, after our Empire has passed away, after the human animal has passed through I know not what vicissitudes. It may be he will still, with the utmost nonchalance, be pushing out his pseudopodia, and ingesting diatoms when the fretful transitory life of humanity has passed altogether from the earth. One may catch him in specimen tubes by the dozen; but still, when one thinks of this, it is impossible to deny him a certain envious, if qualified, respect.
And all the time these creatures are living their vigorous, fussy little lives; in this drop of water they are being watched by a creature of whose presence they do not dream, who can wipe them all out of existence with a stroke of his thumb, and who is withal as finite, and sometimes as fussy and unreasonably energetic, as themselves. He sees them, and they do not see him, because he has senses they do not possess, because he is too incredibly vast and strange to come, save as an overwhelming catastrophe, into their lives. Even so, it may be, the dabbler himself is being curiously observed… The dabbler is good enough to say that the suggestion is inconceivable. I can imagine a decent amœba saying the same thing.
THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING
Your cultivated man is apt to pity the respectable poor, on the score of their lack of small excitements, and even in the excess of his generous sympathy to go a Toynbee-Halling in their cause. And Sir Walter Besant once wrote a book about Hoxton, saying, among other things, how monotonous life was there. That is your modern fallacy respecting the lower middle class. One might multiply instances. The tenor of the pity is always the same.
"No music," says the cultivated man, "no pictures, no books to read nor leisure to read in. How can they pass their lives?"
The answer is simple enough, as Emily Brontë knew. They quarrel. And an excellent way of passing the time it is; so excellent, indeed, that the pity were better inverted. But we all lack the knowledge of our chiefest needs. In the first place, and mainly, it is hygienic to quarrel, it disengages floods of nervous energy, the pulse quickens, the breathing is accelerated, the digestion improved. Then it sets one's stagnant brains astir and quickens the imagination; it clears the mind of vapours, as thunder clears the air. And, finally, it is a natural function of the body. In his natural state man is always quarrelling – by instinct. Not to quarrel is indeed one of the vices of our civilisation, one of the reasons why we are neurotic and anæmic, and all these things. And, at last, our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for enjoying a "jolly good row."
There can be no more melancholy sight in the world than that of your young man or young woman suffering from suppressed pugnacity. Up to the end of the school years it was well with them; they had ample scope for this wholesome commerce, the neat give and take of offence. In the family circle, too, there are still plentiful chances of acquiring the taste. Then, suddenly, they must be gentle and considerate, and all the rest of it. A wholesome shindy, so soon as toga and long skirts arrive, is looked upon as positively wrong; even the dear old institution of the "cut" is falling into disrepute. The quarrelling is all forced back into the system, as it were; it poisons the blood. This is why our literature grows sinister and bitter, and our daughters yearn after this and that, write odd books, and ride about on bicycles in remarkable clothes. They have shut down the safety valve, they suffer from the present lamentable increase of gentleness. They must find some outlet, or perish. If they could only put their arms akimbo and tell each other a piece of their minds for a little, in the ancient way, there can be not the slightest doubt that much of this fin-de-siècle unwholesomeness would disappear.
Possibly this fashion of gentleness will pass. Yet it has had increasing sway now for some years. An unhealthy generation has arisen – among the more educated class at least – that quarrels little, regards the function as a vice or a nuisance, as the East-ender does a taste for fine art or literature. We seem indeed to be getting altogether out of the way of it. Rare quarrels, no doubt, occur to everyone, but rare quarrelling is no quarrelling at all. Like beer, smoking, sea-bathing, cycling, and the like delights, you cannot judge of quarrelling by the early essay. But to show how good it is – did you ever know a quarrelsome person give up the use? Alcohol you may wean a man from, and Barrie says he gave up the Arcadia Mixture, and De Quincey conquered opium. But once you are set as a quarreller you quarrel and quarrel till you die.
How to quarrel well and often has ever been something of an art, and it becomes more of an art with the general decline of spirit. For it takes two to make a quarrel. Time was when you turned to the handiest human being, and with small care or labour had the comfortable warmth you needed in a minute or so. There was theology, even in the fifties it was ample cause with two out of three you met. Now people will express a lamentable indifference. Then politics again, but a little while ago fat for the fire of any male gathering, is now a topic of mere tepidity. So you are forced to be more subtle, more patient in your quarrelling. You play like a little boy playing cricket with his sisters, with those who do not understand. A fellow-votary is a rare treat. As a rule you have to lure and humour your antagonist like a child. The wooing is as intricate and delicate as any wooing can well be. To quarrel now, indeed, requires an infinity of patience. The good old days of thumb-biting – "Do you bite your thumbs at us, sir?" and so to clash and stab – are gone for ever.
There are certain principles in quarrelling, however, that the true quarreller ever bears in mind, and which, duly observed, do much to facilitate encounters. In the first place, cultivate Distrust. Have always before you that this is a wicked world, full of insidious people, and you never know what villainous encroachments upon you may be hidden under fair-seeming appearances. That is the flavour of it. At the first suspicion, "stick up for your rights," as the vulgar say. And see that you do it suddenly. Smite promptly, and the surprise and sting of your injustice should provoke an excellent reply. And where there is least ground for suspicion, there, remember, is the most. The right hand of fellowship extended towards you is one of the best openings you have. "Not such a fool," is the kind of attitude to assume, and "You don't put upon me so easy." Your adversary resents this a little, and, rankling, tries to explain. You find a personal inference in the expostulation.
Next to a wariness respecting your interests is a keen regard for your honour. Have concealed in the privacy of your mind a code of what is due to you. Expand or modify it as occasion offers. Be as it were a collector of what are called "slights," and never let one pass you. Watch your friend in doorways, passages; when he eats by you, when he drinks with you, when he addresses you, when he writes you letters. It will be hard if you cannot catch him smuggling some deadly insult into your presence. Tax him with it. He did not think, forsooth! Tell him no gentleman would do such a thing, thinkingly or not; that you certainly will not stand it again. Say you will show him. He will presently argue or contradict. So to your climax.
Then, again, there is the personal reference. "Meaning me, sir?" Your victim with a blithe heart babbles of this or that. You let him meander here and there, watching him as if you were in ambush. Presently he comes into your spring. "Of course," you say, "I saw what you were driving at just this minute, when you mentioned mustard in salad dressing, but if I am peppery I am not mean. And if I have a thing to say I say it straight out." A good gambit this, and well into him from the start. The particular beauty of this is that you get him apologetic at first, and can score heavily before he rises to the defensive.
Then, finally, there is your abstract cause, once very fruitful indeed, but now sadly gone in decay, except perhaps in specialist society. As an example, let there be one who is gibing genially at some topic or other, at Japanese king-crabs, or the inductive process, or any other topic which cannot possibly affect you one atom. Then is the time to drop all these merely selfish interests, and to champion the cause of truth. Fall upon him in a fine glow of indignation, and bring your contradiction across his face – whack! – so that all the table may hear. Tell him, with his pardon, that the king-crab is no more a crab than you are a jelly-fish, or that Mill has been superseded these ten years. Ask: "How can you say such things?" From thence to his general knowledge is a short flight, and so to his veracity, his reasoning powers, his mere common sense. "Let me tell you, sir," is the special incantation for the storm.
These are the four chief ways of quarrelling, the four gates to this delightful city. For it is delightful, once your 'prentice days are past. In a way it is like a cold bath on a winter's morning, and you glow all day. In a way it is like football, as the nimble aggravation dances to and fro. In a way it is like chess. Indeed, all games of skill are watered quarrels, quarrel and soda, come to see them in a proper light. And without quarrelling you have not fully appreciated your fellow-man. For in the ultimate it is the train and complement of Love, the shadow that rounds off the delight we take in poor humanity. It is the vinegar and pepper of existence, and long after our taste for sweets has vanished it will be the solace of our declining years.
