H. C. WELLS AT THE SORBONHE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3379, 20 June 1927, Page 7

H. C. WELLS AT THE SORBONHE.

DEMOCRACY UNDER REVISION

The Hogarth Press has favoured us with a neat brochure containing Mr H. G. Wells’ lecture ‘ Democracy Under Revisliou,” delivered at the Soibonne yesterday. He declared that to speak at the Sorbonno was the highest distinction ever likely to fall to him. They were receiving him as a man of letters, and as a man of letters ho was not easy to define. Eor his own part he fell back on “journalist” as the least misleading description of his use in the world, but it was not out of modesty that lie called himself a journalist, and he was conceding no superiority in kind and quality, but trying to express so far as his own activities went Ids ser.se of .the temporary, transitory, and personal nature of every statement made by science and every beauty revealed by art. Mr Wells went on to say that he realised the difficulty of defining Democracy. It would be easy to find quite a largo number of intelligent and well-instructed people lie saw who would agree that the sixteenth century saw the germination, the seventeenth and the eighteenth the birth struggles, the nineteenth the rise and prevalence of something called Modern Democracy. Something not merely political, but social, and profoundly differentiating the literature and art of this time—quite as much as the political life—from those of any previous period. Ascendency of Democracy has culminated; and like seine wave that breaks upon a beach, its end follows close upon its culmination ... I suppose we should, nearly all of us, he said, be in agreement that what we meant by Democracy—in the modern sense—was expressed morally by the statement: “All human beings are of equal value in the sight of God”; or legally: “All men are equal before the law”; or practically : “One man’s money is as good as another’s.”

“This implies a repudiation of caste, of inherent rank and function, of all privileges and all fixed subordinations. It is equalitavian or rebellious. And it is mildly paradoxical in the fact that by insisting upon the importance of all individualities, it tends to restrain the exaltation of particular individuals, and by exalting all individuals to an equal level, is subordinates all individuals to the mass.”

Although Democracy was implicit both in Christianity and in Islam, yet it did not come into its own until Feudalism was broken down and Mr Wells believes its appearance everywhere associated with the breakdown of outworn or outpaced systems, with processes of release dnd liberation, and generally also with processes of disintegration. Some Catholic Democrats may question that, but be believes that he will have the general feeling with him. Mr Weiis describes how Democracy firoduced new forms in political life, in iterature, in art and in music. In Ins viaw, “the Democratic spirit in literature found its natural vehicle in the. Novel. That, too, was new and distinctive. The talc, the story of adventures, mankind lias had always—most usually of kings, princes and heroic leaders—but it was only with the ascent of Democracy that stories of characters, histories of common individual lives detatched from politics, detatched from any sense of social function, getting loose from any subordination or any responsibility, rose towards dominance in literature. At the very outset of the ascent of Democracy came the great master Carvantes with his “Don Quixote,” scoffing at aristocracy, scoffing at privileged responsibility, mocking at the final futility of chivalrous mastery, putting his wisest words into the mouth of a clown and letting the flour mills of the common broad-eater overthrow his knight in armour. As modern Democracy rose to its climax, the novel rose to its climax. The common characteristics of all the great novels of the pineteenth century and up to our own time, is that they represent great crowds of individuals who follow trades, professions and so forth, and who have either no public function or, if they have a Eubiic function, are not so differentiated y it that it is of any serious importance to the story and the values of the novel. The crofvd of individuals and its interplay lias become everything. Great ideas that bind people together into any form of collective life are disregarded. ■ Great • religious ideas, great political ideas and developments are not there in any living fermenting, debatable form —are even challenged and forbidden by the critics as having no place there. Consider Balzac, Dickens, Tourgiienieff, Zola, and suchlike representative giants of this dosing age. You thing at once of a picture of humanity like a market-place, like a fair, like the high-road to anywhere on a busy day. When political life appears, it appears just as any other sort of life. Here is a novel about elections and their humours, and hero is one about peasants or fishermen. Just different scenery and costumes for the common story. . ‘lt strikes one at first as paradoxical that a period in which the exaltation of the individual has tended to make everyone a voter, a fractional sovereign of the whole world, should lead in the literary expression of the time to the disappearance, so to speak, of the whole world in a crowd of people. But the paradox involves no real inconsistency. What is everybody's business is nobody's business. Tim literature of the period of Democracy ascendent displays what its political developments mask only very thinly—that Modern Democracy is not a permanent form of political and social life, but a phase of immense dissolution.’' Developments are marked by the same clearness as this analysis of the Novel form and basical developments in these forms were alike.

But Mr Wells considers that in the sphere of science the ascent of Democracy has nob meant dissolution, although modern science owes its present form to the mental releases made possible by Democracy in politics, art and literature. It was only with the release of the human mind from authority that science began to be systematic and coherent. So while the broad visible history of the Age of Democracy so far has been one of release, escape, go-as-you-please, less conspicuous in laboratories and faculties and books and classes —but in the end infinitely more significant —has been the growth of one consistent vision of reality to which all things must be referred, in which the moods of a man are made to march with chemical changes, and the structure of the smallest atom is brought into relation with the physics of the remotest star. Mr Wells sees during the age of Democracy the paradoxical co-existing Age of Nationalism, and he says of national and racial antagonisms that their dangerous growth is “entirely inconsistent with the larger and completer aspirations of Democracy, which have insisted always that there shall be no distinctions of class or creed or race. One of the most human and interesting things to watch at the present time is the struggle of the Labour parties in the European democracies against their ingrained nationalist feelings and their belligerent patriotism. And still more edifying are tbe flnnctualions of tbo Labour movement in such countries as Australia and South Africa with regard to yellow and brown immigration and the black vote.”

This growth of nationalism ho regards as a force working against Democracy and he discovers another opponent, the synthetic drive in economic life and the great Trusts. The latter great crystallisations of business, he belives too, arc plainly duo to the releases of Democracy, the

freedom of science, invention, experiment and enterprise, the lack of control and restriction the ascent of Democracy has involved. But just as plainly do these crystallisations run .ounter to the more intimate feelings of Democracy that every man is us good as every man, that every man should be his own master and live his life in his own fashion after his own heart. Essential to the life and success of these big businesses is an intricate system of specialisation and subordination of functions, and great freedoms of action for the executives.

He gives a withering description of the Distributive State, which he describes as cutting up big businesses periodically aiid handing the bleeding fragments back to the common man, and Socialism is described as an attempt to democratise economic life as political life has already been democratised. The major objection to Socialism, in his view, is that politicians and elected people are not good enough for the job. He cites in proof recent events in Italy, France, Russia and China in proof of his generalisation. Mr Wells’ thesis that Democracy is entering upon a phase of revision in which parliamentary rule is destined to disappear. Mr Wells, in fact, gives us, in slightly different form but essesntially the same in idea, some of the views which ho set forth in “William Clissold.” According to his lecture, ho now sees us entering on a new phase in human affairs, and he bases his opinion on _ the belief that there is a “profoundly serious minority in the mass of our generally indifferent species. I cannot understand the esistence of any of the great religions, I cannot explain any fine and grave constructive process in history, unless there is such a serious minority amidst our confusions. They are the salt of the earth, these people capable of devotion and of living lives for remote and mighty ends —and, unless tlie composition of our species has altered, they are as numerous as they have everbeen. I see them less and less satisfied nud used by existing loyalties and traditional faiths. I see them ready to crystallise about any constructive idea powerful enough to grip their minds. It is not reasonable then to hold that these associations, these concentrations of mentally energetic types for political ends, there revelations of politico-religious fervour in the community—considerable as they are even now —are the more beginnings of much greater things? The breakdown of the old loyalties and the old faiths in the past age has released this great fund of effort and synthetic possibility for new applications. And over against it we have the need for world peace—which can be achieved only by some sort of political unity—and for social adjustment, which seems only possible through the comprehensive handling of world economic affairs as one great systcm.” In essence his meaning is that the phase of Democracy has now come to its end and we are already in the beginning of the phase of Democratic Synthesis, a great religious-spirited phase.