Boon Friends fall out. Wells and James, it would seem, and in this.....

Wells in Boon had fun but lost a friend. Henry James was not amused. The chapter in which he ‘slags’ him has the Mallockian conceit of a number of literary gents foregathering in a country house for a state of literature congress. They do so under their own names. Orage of the New Age arrives too late and is locked out:

Mr. Orage, the gifted editor of the New Age, arriving last, is refused admission. The sounds of the conflict at the gates do but faintly perturb the conference within, which is now really getting to business, but afterwards Mr. Orage, slightly wounded in the face by a dexterously plied rake and incurably embittered, makes his existence felt by a number of unpleasant missiles discharged from over the wall in the direction of any audible voices. Ultimately Mr. Orage gets into a point of vantage in a small pine-tree overlooking the seaward corner of the premises, and from this he contributes a number of comments that are rarely helpful, always unamiable, and frequently in the worst possible taste.

Boon (the purported author of the Boon papers) has George Moore and Henry James go for a walk. Can you identify the butt of this pastiche?

“Owing it as we do,” he said, “very, very largely to our friend Gosse, to that peculiar, that honest but restless and, as it were, at times almost malignantly ambitious organizing energy of our friend, I cannot altogether—altogether, even if in any case I should have taken so extreme, so devastatingly isolating a step as, to put it violently, stand out; yet I must confess to a considerable anxiety, a kind of distress, an apprehension, the terror, so to speak, of the kerbstone, at all this stream of intellectual trafficking, of going to and fro, in a superb and towering manner enough no doubt, but still essentially going to and fro rather than in any of the completed senses of the word getting there, that does so largely constitute the aggregations and activities we are invited to traverse. My poor head, such as it is and as much as it can and upon such legs—save the mark!—as it can claim, must, I suppose, play its inconsiderable part among the wheels and the rearings and the toots and the whistles and all this uproar, this—Mm, Mm!—let us say, this infernal uproar, of the occasion; and if at times one has one’s doubts before plunging in, whether after all, after the plunging and the dodging and the close shaves and narrow squeaks, one does begin to feel that one is getting through, whether after all one will get through, and whether indeed there is any getting through, whether, to deepen and enlarge and display one’s doubt quite openly, there is in truth any sort of ostensible and recognizable other side attainable and definable at all, whether to put this thing with a lucidity that verges on the brutal, whether our amiable and in most respects our adorable Gosse isn’t indeed preparing here and now, not the gathering together of a conference but the assembling, the meet, so to speak, of a wild-goose chase of an entirely desperate and hopeless description.”

If that wasn’t enough to put a dent in his dickey, Boon in his own voice, and here he has the hearty support of many readers, declares:

“But James begins by taking it for granted that a novel is a work of art that must be judged by its oneness. Judged first by its oneness. Some one gave him that idea in the beginning of things and he has never found it out. He doesn’t find things out. He doesn’t even seem to want to find things out. You can see that in him; he is eager to accept things—elaborately. You can see from his books that he accepts etiquettes, precedences, associations, claims. That is his peculiarity. He accepts very readily and then—elaborates. He has, I am convinced, one of the strongest, most abundant minds alive in the whole world, and he has the smallest penetration. Indeed, he has no penetration. He is the culmination of the Superficial type. Or else he would have gone into philosophy and been greater even than his wonderful brother…. But here he is, spinning about, like the most tremendous of water-boatmen—you know those insects?—kept up by surface tension. As if, when once he pierced the surface, he would drown. It’s incredible. A water-boatman as big as an elephant. I was reading him only yesterday ‘The Golden Bowl’; it’s dazzling how never for a moment does he go through.”

The bridge being blown and their being no hope of a cockleshell pontoon, Wells/Boon finishes:

“The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins…. His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is aboutis always there. It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string…. Like his ‘Altar of the Dead,’ with nothing to the dead at all…. For if there was they couldn’t all be candles and the effect would vanish…. And the elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made endurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection has made Henry James erects palatial metaphors…. The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast metaphors….

One feels, how shall I put it a certain satisfaction that, what was probably James’s assessment of Wells as a common little man and a vulgar futurist, a rotter really, was borne out. Great fun, but.

Ronald Knox and the Omniscientists

Listening in is a subtle idiom. It seems to indicate a voluntary direction of auditory attention by someone. That which they listen in to would go on without them. People were invited to listen in to BBC programs. Perhaps ‘listen’ seemed too imperative to the polite English. In the 30‘s the invitation would be to listen in to Ronald Knox , Julian Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Gerald Heard and John Langdon-Davies. A book which I bought last Saturday for ein euro by Ronald Knox called Broadcast Minds is a critique of what he terms Omniscientism in the others listed. That portmanteau word is of course a coinage of Knox’s and suggests ‘know all ism’ in a smattering sense combined with a touch of scientism in its reverence for the empirical method. Such we have always with us but in the age of the wireless the power of such shallow thinking was enhanced. He likens it to gunpowder and printing which changed everything in their respective spheres. His book was published in September 1932. In 1933 Goebbels having just introduced a cheap radio to the German public was expressing his view of the power of broadcasting as a way of creating a unified nation.

 We on the other hand intend a principled transformation in the worldview of our entire society, a revolution of the greatest possible extent that will leave nothing out, changing the life of our nation in every regard.

(from  propaganda)

What Knox as a cleric impugns in the written works and the broadcasts of those listed is their animus towards religion which is never frankly admitted but advanced by distortion and omission. H.G. Wells in his Outline of History likened by Knox to 1066 and All That set the tone for others.

He has not been without imitators. Nobody, of course, has dared to cover precisely the same ground; he would be afraid of the comparison, for Mr. Wells is readable. But he has pointed the way to a number of anti-Christian writers, and in some case thinkers, who have learned to abandon the old method of direct attack, and bury all religious and metaphysical issues under a cloud of scientific information. This is the technique of the omniscientist; he does not make any sustained attack on religion; he dismisses it in a series of contemptuous allusions, giving us to understand that he is too busy talking about science to delay over such trifling matters. Meanwhile he contrives to insinuate that religion and science are necessarily incompatible; that everything, therefore, which he has said in praise of science is ipso facto a condemnation of religion. He will belittle Christianity by forced contrasts; now dwelling on the long “aeons” which elapsed between the appearance of Moses, now showing how ignorent and brutish the Middle Ages were by comparison with the civilization that dates from Darwin. He is the prophet of a new age, and he has the public ear. He astounds with outpourings of quaint scientific facts; he dazzles with glimpses of the incomprehensible. He creates the impression that religion is of yesterday, science of today.

New Atheists have gone back to firing plague corpses from catapults over the battlements. The Internet has changed everything and perhaps such sly acerbities as ‘and in some cases thinkers’ may be too subtle for distributed micro attention. Knox’s discussion of Sir Julian Huxley’s Religion without Revelation pub. in 1927 and in a revised edition in 1957 must be the topic for a separate post as it dissects the idea of 'religiosity without religion' which continues to coruscate and lure the magpie thinker.

The Passionate Friends by H.G. Wells

Wells like the Sufi Ahmed Ibn Khazruya engaged in doubting interrogations of his soul and found her a sly creature devious and many veiled particularly when most frank. In The Passionate Friends he takes both parts of Animus and Anima and sets them against each other. The Animus is the prig element in himself taken by Stephen Stratton who is a man with a plan for the betterment of the world and the Anima is Lady Mary Christine proponent of the woman question with her own answer to Freud’s - what does woman want.

Most people read Wells for his science fiction and don’t bother with the social stuff. That’s a mistake. Nabokov is a fan and his designation of ‘Friends’ as an overlooked masterpiece sent me to it. One can see how he would like it whereas many contemporaries of Wells found it tiresome. Stratton does not know himself and does not know his femme fatale. . Does that remind you of Pale Fire,Lolita and the bewildered cunning of their characters

The novel is a sort of memoir or account of Stratton’s relationship with Lady Mary written for his young son. He wants to record it before the taciturnity of old age that he experienced in his own father overtakes him. His father was an Anglican priest and the rectory was next door the the demesne of a Lord. Coming within the definition of respectable association he was allowed to regularly visit the Christian family. He is fascinated by those languorous aristocrats particularly Mary who is the same age as himself. All very Brideshead now that I think of it. Lady Mary even has a slight lisp:

My attention is constantly being distracted to note how prettily she moves, to wonder why it is I never noticed the sweet fall, the faint delightful whisper of a lisp in her voice before.

To the dream of service to the Empire is joined service to milady but even a gauche youth must know that this cannot be though she also loves him.

I put all sorts of constructions upon the freedom I was given with her, but I perceive now that we still seemed scarcely more than children to Lady Ladislaw, and that the idea of our marriage was as inconceivable to her as if we had been brother and sister. Matrimonially I was as impossible as one of the stable boys. All the money I could hope to earn for years to come would not have sufficed even to buy Mary clothes. But as yet we thought little of matters so remote, glad in our wonderful new discovery of love, and when at last I went off to Oxford, albeit the parting moved us to much tenderness and vows and embraces, I had no suspicion that never more in all our lives would Mary and I meet freely and gladly without restriction. Yet so it was. From that day came restraints and difficulties; the shadow of furtiveness fell between us; our correspondence had to be concealed.

The great critical heresy is liking only books and authors that reflect one’s own political and ethical outlook. A.R. Orage editor of the influential New Age was repelled by the Empire ideology and conservatism of this book not recognising that the hollowing out of the lives of decent people by ideology occurs amongst the left as well as the right. Lady Mary refuses the love of her life for the vanity of being a personage creating an ambience supported by the plutocrat Justin. This conceit she also justifies by a version of feminism which is still current.

"Dear Stephen," she explained, "if I were to come away with you and marry you, in just a little time I should cease to be your lover, I should be your squaw. I should have to share your worries and make your coffee—and disappoint you, disappoint you and fail you in a hundred ways. Think! Should I be any good as a squaw? How can one love when one knows the coffee isn't what it should be, and one is giving one's lover indigestion? And I don'want to be your squaw. I don't want that at all. It isn't how I feel for you. I don't to be your servant and your possession.

This book was published in 1913. In 1912 he had begun a 10 year long affair with Rebecca West a 20 year old feminist who gave herself the nickname ‘panther’. In the book Stephen Stratton is mauled by a panther in India during a hunt. The great cat had tried to pull him from the tree which he thought a safe vantage point. Clinging to a branch he saved himself from the wounded beast who dragged a claw through his leg as it fell.

I went again to Ceylon to look into the conditions of Coolie importation, and then I was going back into Assam once more, still in the wake of indentured labor, when I chanced upon a misadventure. I had my first and only experience of big game shooting in the Garo Hills, I was clawed out of a tree by a wounded panther, he missed his hold and I got back to my branch, but my shoulder was put out, my thigh was badly torn, and my blood was poisoned by the wound.

Wells described this book as one of his prig novels. The protagonist has a plan for a new world order with a World State government. The passage to this Utopia will be eased by mass education via the enormous publishing firm that he establishes with Gidding an American multi millionaire. Wells could enter into this daft fantasy as it was to a degree his own.

Meanwhile Lady Mary Justin, as she now is, lurks in the ‘shrubbery’ waiting to pounce Stratton as narrator does not twig the arrangement of their meetings by the vain schemer who will have it all if she can. This layered writing would appeal to a deep reader such as Nabokov.

Thank you Vladimir old chum.. I will return to Lolita soon. Ah, the ‘bright elusive butterfly of love’.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

*For a long time I had repressed my carnal soul. Then one day a party set out for the wars, and a great desire to accompany them arose within me. My soul reminded me of a number of Traditions concerning the rewards in Heaven for fighting in the cause of God. I was amazed.

“My soul is not always so eager to obey,” I said. “Perhaps this is because I always keep my soul fasting. My soul cannot endure hunger any longer and wishes to break its fast.” So I said.” I do not break my fast on a journey.”
“I quite agree,” replied my soul.

(from Muslim Saints and Mystics by Farid Al-Din Attar)

He goes on thus with his soul continuing to agree to greater asceticism as the Sufi wishes to rob it of some secret benefit. Ahmad is puzzled and has recourse to God.

Reduced to impotence, I had resort to humble petition to God, praying that he might disclose to me the cunning machinations of my soul, or make my soul confess. Then my soul spoke.
“Every day you slay me a hundred times by opposing my desires and other men are not aware. There at least in the wars I shall be killed once and for all and get deliverance, and the report will be noised through all the world, “Bravo,, Ahmad-e-Khazruya! They killed him, and he achieved the martyr’s crown.’”

“Glory to Him,” I cried, “who created a soul to be a hypocrite while alive, and a hypocrite still after death. It will never be a true Muslim, either in this world or the next. I thought you were seeking to obey God, I did not realize you were tying the girdle.”
Thereafter I redoubled my struggle against my soul.

The Accumulator in H.G. Wells's The New Machiavelli

More on the ‘accumulators’ this time from Wells in his novel The New Machiavelli.The queer little twist towards metaphysics is evident and could account for its adhesive properties given a mind like Taylors. There is also mention of the denial of the validity of general laws, the concern of the chapter in which 'the new accumulator' was mentioned. 'In Search of Taylor Khan'. Quite!

This novel was published in 1911 and Elements of Metaphysics was first published in 1903 with subsequent editions. My print copy is the seventh from 1924.

I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable difference,—once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadow my outlines. I hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... I got things clearer as time went on. Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws. The Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic sense—which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word "Realists." They believed classes were REAL and independent of their individuals. This is the common habit of all so-called educated people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training. It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a chamber of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of actuality and the people one knew....

The New Accelerator by H.G. Wells

There is an error in the footnote of A.E. Taylors which referred to the story of H.G. Wells. (cf .previous post) The correct title of the story is The New Accelerator and it is available at
the new accelerator
Taylor was confusing it with the Jules Verne story In the Year 2889 to be had via gutenberg project:
2889
in which reference is made to a ‘new accumulator’. Both stories were published around the same time 1889 and 1901 and this might account for the conflation.

Wells is as always witty while the Verne is heavier going but uncannily prescient. The internet like hive of the newspaper:

Mr. Smith continues his round and enters the reporters' hall. Here 1500 reporters, in their respective places, facing an equal number of telephones, are communicating to the subscribers the news of the world as gathered during the night. The organization of this matchless service has often been described. Besides his telephone, each reporter, as the reader is aware, has in front of him a set of commutators, which enable him to communicate with any desired telephotic line. Thus the subscribers not only hear the news but see the occurrences. When an incident is described that is already past, photographs of its main features are transmitted with the narrative. And there is no confusion withal. The reporters' items, just like the different stories and all the other component parts of the journal, are classified automatically according to an ingenious system, and reach the hearer in due succession. Furthermore, the hearers are free to listen only to what specially concerns them. They may at pleasure give attention to one editor and refuse it to another.

Wells on the potential of the new accelerator potion:

My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time. I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we are all the time. The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors use! But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical points to enter very keenly into my aspect of the question.

That queer little twist towards metaphysics would have caused this story to be retained in in Taylor’s mind. But what is the new accumulator? No less than Free Energy or possibly the composition of greatly diffuse energy.

Truly was he a great benefactor of the human race. His admirable discovery led to many another. Hence is sprung a pleiad of inventors, its brightest star being our great Joseph Jackson. To Jackson we are indebted for those wonderful instruments the new accumulators. Some of these absorb and condense the living force contained in the sun's rays; others, the electricity stored in our globe; others again, the energy coming from whatever source, as a waterfall, a stream, the winds, etc. He, too, it was that invented the transformer, a more wonderful contrivance still, which takes the living force from the accumulator, and, on the simple pressure of a button, gives it back to space in whatever form may be desired, whether as heat, light, electricity, or mechanical force, after having first obtained from it the work required. From the day when these two instruments were contrived is to be dated the era of true progress. They have put into the hands of man a power that is almost infinite. As for their applications, they are numberless. Mitigating the rigors of winter, by giving back to the atmosphere the surplus heat stored up during the summer, they have revolutionized agriculture. By supplying motive power for aërial navigation, they have given to commerce a mighty impetus. To them we are indebted for the continuous production of electricity without batteries or dynamos, of light without combustion or incandescence, and for an unfailing supply of mechanical energy for all the needs of industry.

Such an invention may be in the papers of Nicola Tesla which the F.B.I. reportedly impounded after his death. It is likely that we shall never know as the powers that be would never take the risk of destroying the energy creation sector of the economy. There are too many vested interests that are well connected.

**************

- You mean to say that a time will come when a researcher may discover in a mere 15 minutes what two weeks in a library would not.

- Yes, said Quincy, mechanical retrieval of information will make connections the human mind would never think of. We are bound by the logic of association.

- In that case, I said, I fear that bounders and dismal sciolists will pass themselves off as pansophists. Plato may have been right when he said somewhere that only the things which cannot be written down are worth talking about.

- But he wrote that didn’t he? said Quincy with perfunctory supination.

A.E. Taylor and The Meaning of Law

I haven’t read H.G. Wells’s The New Accumulator but I note that A.E. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics makes reference to it in an interesting passage. He has been discussing The Meaning of Law and remarking how our natural span of attention may have implications for our sense of what is free and what is determined:

It is easy to point out some of the conditions upon which failure to detect actually existing individual deviations from uniformity may depend. Professor Royce has, in this connection, laid special stress upon one such condition, the limitation of what he calls the time-span of our attention. We are unable, as the student of Psychology knows, to attend to a process as a whole if its duration exceeds or falls short of certain narrow limits. Now, there seems no foundation in the nature of the attentive process for the special temporal limitations to which it is subject in our own experience, and we have no means of denying the possibility that there may be intelligent beings whose attention-span is much wider, or again, much more contracted, than our own. One can even conceive the possibility of a being with a power of varying the span of attention at will. Now, it is clear that if we could so vary our attention-span as to be able to take in as single wholes processes which are at present too rapid or too slow to be perceived by us in their individual detail, such a purely subjective change in the conditions of our own attention might reveal individuality and purpose where at present we see nothing but routine uniformity. In the same way, we can readily understand that a being with a much wider attention-span than our own might fail to see anything but purposeless routine in the course of human history. Supposing that we are placed in the midst of a universe of intelligent purposive action, it is clear that we can only hope to recognise the nature of that action in the case of beings who live, so to say, at the same rate as ourselves. A purposive adaptation to environment with consequent deviation from uniformity in reaction would necessarily escape our notice if it took place with the rapidity of the beat of a gnat's wing, or again, if it required centuries for its establishment.
Other similar subjective conditions which would necessarily cut us off from the recognition of purposive fresh adaptations widely dififerent from those which occur in our own life, are the limitations of our power of attending to more than a certain number of presentations simultaneously ; and again, the restriction of our sense-perception to a few types, and the impossibility of perceiving contents belonging to those types when they fall below or above the lower and upper " thresholds " of sensibility. These considerations do not, of course, positively prove that the routine uniformity of natural processes is only subjective appearance, but they are sufficient to show that there is no valid reason for taking it to be more, and in conjunction with our previous positive argument for the sentient individuality of all real existence, they suffice to bring our general interpretation of the physical order under Mr. Bradley's canon that "What must be and can be, that is''

Science establishes different forms of acuity and the mathematization of space and time. We have the differential calculus and cosmic and local time. These are our limited ways of expanding our attention span by stopping it, halting in a world of pure form as Plato understood. There is the poetic grasp of duration in the Bergsonian sense with its intense compression of meaning in the moment through metaphor that extends the local reference and packs it with a larger significance.