PUBLIC MEN ATTACKED BY H. G. WELLS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19946, 13 November 1926, Page 19

PUBLIC MEN ATTACKED BY H. G. WELLS.

ASTC WISHING PASSAGES IX A NEW BOOK. “You don’t think there’s something grand about such a type us Arthur Balfour?” said I. “That damned Madonna lily!” said Dickon. “He grows where he's planted.” . . .

This is a sample of the astonishing comments ■on public men which Mr H. G. Wells puts in the mouths of his characters in volume two of "The World of William Clissold.”

‘T give Dickon’s views as well as I can,” says William Clissold, recalling his discussions with his brother. “They are not precisely my views,” he adds, “but they are the brothers of my views.” Dickon dubs “Asquith, Balfour and Grey” as “locums”—men “incapable of freshness or adaptation. . . . An active figure like Lloyd George,” ho says, “made them look like historical monuments.” Then he turns on Lloyd George, and declares that in him also there was something made for futility. “He’s just a magnificent weed,” says Dickon. "In flower. He lives from hand to mouth. He’s as clever as six foxes. Sane —too sane. Meanly sane. What’s the matter with him . . . No end of cool, clear brains, but they don’t seem to be in the right place or the right way up or something. ...” RECONSTRUCTION. In another passage Dickon, discussing the time when Dr Addison was Minister of Health, says: “Reconstruction was quack medicine and Lloyd George is a liar, and here wo are bilked and done.” William Clissold himself characterises Mr Ramsay MacDonald as “that queer, vain simulacrum of a statesman,” who was “posturing with poor Herriot.” “MacDonald,” he says, “played to an imaginary audience, a Victorian audience that had been dead five and twenty years.” This was at Geneva, where “his second in command, Parmoor. amazed the gathering by a display of simple evangelical piety unusual in European statesmen.” Dickon likened various prominent men to Indian gods—“ Vishnu, the stubborn Conservative,” “Siva, the democratic destroyer,” and others. William Clissold observes:— “Dickon’s treatment of Lord Northcliffe and Mr Lloyd George as Sons of the Morning, lit by the spirit of Brahma, is decidedly unsatisfactory. Something has gone wrong there. I make identifications in quite another direction, but of these I will tell later. “Mr Baldwin is better as Vishnu’s Prime Minister, and there is much to be said for the view that the Duke of Northumberland is a modern incarnation of Vishnu. “TEMPLE IN MOSCOW.” “But the genteel Ramsay MacDonald and the inexpressive Clynes, man-of-the-world Thomas, and Catholic Communist Wheatley, are not very good, as—shall I say Sivatheria? Siva keeps his temple, if he keeps a temple anywhere, in Moscow.” The to have taken place a few years ago —turns on newspaper proprietors, and Dickon says: “ ‘Beaverbrook ? Ho has as much brains and imagination as anyone. But—he’s impish !' Where Northcliffe was disposed to be grandiose. ‘Northcliffe,’ said Dickon again, ‘that’s the big man.’ “Beaverbrook was devoted to Bonar Law —they came from the same Canadian village, Dickon believed —and he meant to make his friend Prime Minister. “Possibly ho will. And beyond that, so far as I can see, he regards the world as a playground, and isn’t quite sure of his fun. Eager, feverishly eager, to be all alive, and no idea what life is. Will be grow up? If he grew up. . . . He’s young still.” NEW MEN. William Clissold continues his recapitulalation of Dickon’s views. , “That night,” he says, “he reviewed our political world entirely as a display of these newspaper adventurers and ‘new men’ of his—Lord Birkenhead, with his careless freedom of word and act, and Lord Reading, who was Rufus Isaacs, almost as ‘new’ in type, he held, as Lloyd George or Northcliffe—and he declared that only s realisation of their common interest in a boldlyconstructed political and social order could prolong and stabilise their adventure.” Dickon elsewhere describes Mr Clynes as “a little intelligent-looking Cockatoo of a man, who like Brer Rabbit, kept on saying nuffing. ...” The Countess of Oxford comes into William Clissold’s picture. “Wherever,” he says, “there is a foreground, there also will bi the Countess of Oxford and Asquith.’’ The foreground is Ascot, which William Clissold calls this immense inane gathering.’ Then there is a “charabanc crowd of the merely prosperous. . . They have no God, and Michael Arlen is their prophet.’ Discussing the drama, William Clissold refers to the days when “two leaden masters, Henry Arthur Jones and Pinero. _ to whom no Dunciad has ever done justice, produced large, slow, pretentious three-act affairs that were rather costume shows than dramas, with scenery like the advertisements of fashionable resorts, the reallest furniture and the unreallist _ passions and morals it is possible to conceive.” He adds that in these days he “lumped Ibsen—except for Peer Gynt—with |hnero and Jones, and all the other ‘serious, dramatic shams of the Victorian time, and that he regarded most of the “popular fuss” about Shakespeare ‘exactly as I regard the popular fuss about the Prince of Wales’s smile. I mean there is about the same amount of original judgment in both cases.”