AS OTHERS SEE HIM

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 144, 14 December 1940, Page 19

AS OTHERS SEE HIM

MR.H.G* WELLS

! "Reviewing "Babes; in the Darkling od," the latest novel by H. G. Wells, vriter in the. "New York Times" lewhat caustically remarks that one he minor calamities of a world war he inevitable' appearance of a novel novels by Mr. Wells. During the conflagration, the reviewer conies, he discovered, religion, not jugh profound • experience within self, but'with- the unaccountability a coloured, mammy at a revival ;ting. BUt now, in "Babes in the kling Wood," "God is,one of those ■ds that ought forcibly to be moved of circulation." Mr. Wells.has now lovered behaviourism, a theory of chology which every serious stut of the subject has evaluated and , away on the reference shelf. ; jvioreover, your true behaviourist, JSpho deduces mind from biological Action, will1 be surprised to find that the ibaracters do nothing but talk in Mr. I Wells's exp&sition. of the subject. The fovel opens as Stella and Gemini, "two pdividuals of outstanding Intelligence," ire yielding to the exigencies of sex ia a secluded country cottage. They Ire separated by an uncle with a horsewhip and the hero's old-fashioned and therefore brutal papa. Gemini goes off Ito Poland and Finland for want of jtnything else to do, but the reader jremains with Stella and listens to several hundred pages of lectures on behaviourism whick Mr. Wells delivers 4n the character of Dr. Robert KentIjrfre, Stella's uncle. v The atrocities Gemini sees in Iweign parts drive him insane and fc& is brought back to England and then tq> sanity by the "psychosynthesis" of %. Kentlake, but he'refuses to face jjfe and Stella because he is How impotent. Stella thereupon marries him and takes him back to the cottage Where sex was once so delightful. !ffhere she seduces him back to ittormalcy, which no doubt proves that Its a behaviourist Stella is even more ißompetent than her Uncle Robert. * Mr. Wells has the honesty to confess SSiat he has never been able to understand the works of the two. men who lounded the school" of behaviourism— JBtamely, Pavlov and Watson. "They unsold their ideas," he says, "with a certain obscure elaboration and hardly $eem to realise the astounding quality tof their implications." His information pa. the subject, he frankly admits, is BE "second-hand." The astounding implication of such a statement is another Jhing that Mr. Wells does not seem to l&iderstand. This curious attempt at realistic Blinking, half copied from dull textbooks, half translated into Mr. Wells's peculiar mixture of flippancy and vulgarity, ends With the author's customary vague utopianism which contradicts the whole theme of his book. Everybody is to have the "right" education in his world-wide collectEvism, and everybody is to read the bright" books. "Why is there,.-a vast trade in pseudb-boOlts?*"' he asks/'witß* out apparently realising that Mr. Wells Ban reduce their number more speedily than anybody else by simply resisting, How and then, the impulse to write. j H. G. LAUNCHES AN ARK. : In a review of "All Aboard for Ararat," another recent effusion from 3. G. Wells, the London "Times Literary Supplement" remarks that the fcitle-page does not make clear the entire truth, which is that this "longshort" essay in parable is by way of being a collaboration between worldthinker Mr. Wells, on the one hand, Jand that witty, audacious, improvising jconversationalist known to his friends jas H.G. on the other. The lengthy, iapening section, in which God Alpiighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, (confronts, Wellsian (or .should we say B.G, ;Wellsian?): Mr,' Noah Lammock iwitK a demand for another, a 1940, Ark, land is" met' with a barrage of sometimes (pertinent, sometimes impertinent, and iusually highly irreverent Biblical jDriticism, is H.G. in his most wicked jvein. It bubbles and sparkles consistently with a spontaneous invention which shifts easily, almost instantaneously, from a level of gay nonsense to a high level of imaginative insight |md comment. Thereafter Mr. Wells takes charge.. SLG., it.is true, will keep breaking in, but when it is the king's pleasure to ppeak^ jth§ jester's nose is out of joint. gThe general.intention 'of Mr. Wells's ("blue prints for the new Ark" is much Svhat one. w,Quld expect from him—out !©f the 'eo'ngl'orneratioh of ideas which ■be sees v as bogging our contemporary Svorld-la confusion he Would select "one opinion and one only" as "near-, iest to the'truth," rejecting the rest as obvious errdr. The grounds of selection and' the nieans. of evading dogmatism* are less clear, and there seems gome,,;..'.indeed considerable, doubt Whence the crew is to be recruited.

Alas!* under Mr. Wells's captaincy the fcook iails i 6 live up to the promise of H.G.-S Sferilliarit opening. In fact, having set: the sArk afloat, the story goes completely to pieces, and not even Mr. Wells-s; last-minute attempt to impersonate; H,G.—an obvious imposture— can save it.