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They bomb one another, they starve one another, they torture children.
There is a Catholic party at the head of the French State today. The
part of Germany it occupies is mainly Catholic too. It is the most
damnably oppressed of all the zones of occupation.
328
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
If I am called upon to choose between Wells s humanism, his impatience,
his exasperation and even his final despair, and the religion of those
who condemn him for the superficiality of his faith in reason and education
and enlightenment, I am on his side, with all my heart and all my mind
and all my soul. They deceive themselves who assert, or even imply,
that there is a Christian alternative to the Wellsian faith. There is only
one alternative to it that is an acceptance of the inevitability of mundane
catastrophe. Christians may be capable of this; but so may non-Christians.
The Christian may call his attitude hope; the non-Christian will call
his despair, or indifference, or acceptance. But neither the hope of the
Christian, nor the despair of the non-Christian, will determine their
behaviour. In so far as they have understanding and charity and imagination
they will try to build against the evil day; they will teach the truth they
know and do the good they can.
Wells had a great genius, perhaps the greatest natural genius that
has been manifest in our day. Had he stuck to writing novels, what a
legacy he would have left to posterity! But he could not help reading
the writing on the wall, when it appeared in 1914. It took him some
time to decipher the message; but when he did, he wasted no time in
trying to rouse his countrymen and the world into awareness of its
predicament. The new freedom which applied science had given to
mankind, except it was controlled by a new order, could only lead mankind
to new disaster: the potentiality of disaster coextensive with the potentiality
of freedom. In didactic fiction, in essays, in encyclopaedic histories, in
pamphlets pleading, angry, cocky, depressed in a prose style which
for sheer vitality will hardly be surpassed, he toiled to open men s eyes
to their condition. Just as it is a narrow and circumscribed judgment
which condemns him for his rationalism, so it is a partial and parochial
vision which accuses him of squandering his magnificent gift as a creative
writer. His greatness and he was great consisted in his power to respond
to the challenge of the times. Even though he came to despair of it
bene meruit de re publica.
329
92. Jorge Luis Borges on the first Wells
1946
Jorge Luis Borges (b. 1899), Argentinian poet and short-story writer.
This essay, which was written at the time of Wells s death under
the title El Primer Wells , is reprinted here from Other Inquisitions
1937 1952 (University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 86 8. The
translation is by Ruth L.C.Simms.
Harris relates that when Oscar Wilde was asked about Wells, he called
him a scientific Jules Verne. That was in 1899; it appears that Wilde
thought less of defining Wells, or of annihilating him, than of changing
the subject. Now the names H.G.Wells and Jules Verne have come to
be incompatible. We all feel that this is true, but still it may be well to
examine the intricate reasons on which our feeling is based.
The most obvious reason is a technical one. Before Wells resigned
himself to the role of a sociological spectator, he was an admirable
storyteller, an heir to the concise style of Swift and Edgar Allan Poe;
Verne was a pleasant and industrious journeyman. Verne wrote for
adolescents; Wells, for all ages. There is another difference, which Wells
himself once indicated: Verne s stories deal with probable things (a
submarine, a ship larger than those existing in 1872, the discovery of
the South Pole, the talking picture, the crossing of Africa in a balloon,
the craters of an extinguished volcano that lead to the center of the
earth); the short stories Wells wrote concern mere possibilities, if not
impossible things (an invisible man, a flower that devours a man, a crystal
egg that reflects the events on Mars, a man who returns from the future
with a flower of the future, a man who returns from the other life with
his heart on the right side, because he has been completely inverted, as
in a mirror). I have read that Verne, scandalized by the license permitted
by The First Men in the Moon, exclaimed indignantly, Il invente!
The reasons I have given seem valid enough, but they do not explain
why Wells is infinitely superior to the author of Hector Servadac, and
330
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
also to Rosney, Lytton, Robert Paltock, Cyrano, or any other precursor
of his methods.* Even his best plots do not adequately solve the problem.
In long books the plot can be only a pretext, or a point of departure. It
is important for the composition of the work, but not for the reader s
enjoyment of it. That is true of all genres; the best detective stories are
not those with the best plots. (If plots were everything, the Quixote would
not exist and Shaw would be inferior to O Neill.) In my opinion, the
excellence of Wells s first novels The Island of Doctor Moreau, for example,
or The Invisible Man has a deeper origin. Not only do they tell an ingenious
story; but they tell a story symbolic of processes that are somehow inherent
in all human destinies. The harassed invisible man who has to sleep as
though his eyes were wide open because his eyelids do not exclude light
is our solitude and our terror; the conventicle of seated monsters who
mouth a servile creed in their night is the Vatican and is Lhasa. Work
that endures is always capable of an infinite and plastic ambiguity; it is
all things for all men, like the Apostle; it is a mirror that reflects the reader s
own traits and it is also a map of the world. And it must be ambiguous
in an evanescent and modest way, almost in spite of the author; he must
appear to be ignorant of all symbolism. Wells displayed that lucid innocence
in his first fantastic exercises, which are to me the most admirable part
of his admirable work.
Those who say that art should not propagate doctrines usually refer
to doctrines that are opposed to their own. Naturally this is not my own
case; I gratefully profess almost all the doctrines of Wells, but I deplore
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