H. Wells - The World Set Free

first this aspect and then that of the legal, social, and

political order. Already in the early nineteenth century Shelley,

with no scrap of alternative, is denouncing the established

rulers of the world as Anarchs, and the entire system of ideas

and suggestions that was knownas Socialism, and more

particularly its international side, feeble as it was in creative

proposals or any method of transition, still witnesses to the

growthof a conception of a modernised system of

inter-relationships that should supplant the existingtangle of

proprietary legal ideas.

The word 'Sociology' was invented by Herbert Spencer, a popular

writer upon philosophical subjects, who flourished about the

middle of the nineteenth century, but the idea of a state,

planned as an electric-traction system is planned, without

reference to pre-existing apparatus, upon scientific lines, did

not take a very strong hold upon the popular imagination of the

world until the twentieth century. Then, the growingimpatience

of the American people with the monstrous and socially paralysing

party systems that had sprung out of their absurd electoral

arrangements, led to the appearance of what came to be called the

'Modern State' movement, and a galaxy of brilliant writers, in

America, Europe, and the East, stirred up the world to the

thoughtof bolder rearrangements of social interaction, property,

employment, education, and government, than had ever been

contemplated before. No doubtthese Modern State ideas were very

largely the reflection upon social and political thoughtof the

vast revolution in material things that had been in progress for

two hundred years, but for a long time they seemed to be having

no more influenceupon existinginstitutions than the writings of

Rousseau and Voltaire seemed to have had at the time of the death

of the latter. They were fermenting in men's minds, and it needed

only just such social and political stresses as the coming of the

atomic mechanisms brought about, to thrust them forward abruptly

into crude and startling realisation.

Section 5

Frederick Barnet's Wander Jahre is one of those autobiographical

novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades

of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must

understandWander Jahre rather in a spiritualand intellectual

than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title,

carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a

century and a half earlier.

Its author, Frederick Barnet, gives a minute and curious history

of his life and ideas between his nineteenth and his twenty-third

birthdays. He was neither a very original nor a very brilliant

man, but he had a trick of circumstantial writing; and though no

authentic portrait was to survive for the information of

posterity, he betrays by a score of casual phrases that he was

short, sturdy, inclined to be plump, with a 'rather blobby' face,

and full, rather projecting blue eyes. He belonged until the

financial debacle of 1956 to the class of fairly prosperous

people, he was a student in London, he aeroplaned to Italy and

then had a pedestrian tour from Genoa to Rome, crossed in the air

to Greece and Egypt, and came back over the Balkans and Germany.

His family fortunes, which were largely invested in bank shares,

coal mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to

penury, he sought to earn a living. He suffered great hardship,

and was then caught up by the war and had a year of soldiering,

first as an officer in the English infantry and then in the army

of pacification. His book tells all these things so simply and

at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an

eye by which future generations may have at least one man's

vision of the years of the Great Change.

And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' from

the beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and

laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long

and delicately beautiful facade, along the South Bank of the

Thames opposite the ancient dignity of Somerset House. Such

thoughtwas interwoven with the very fabric of that pioneer

school in the educational renascence in England. After the

customary exchange years in Heidelberg and Paris, he went into

the classical school of London University. The older so-called

'classical' education of the British pedagogues, probably the

most paralysing, ineffective, and foolish routine that ever

wasted human life, had already been swept out of this great

institution in favour of modern methods; and he learnt Greek and

Latin as well as he had learnt German, Spanish, and French, so

that he wrote and spoke them freely, and used them with an

unconscious ease in his study of the foundation civilisations of

the European system to which they were the key. (This change was

still so recent that he mentions an encounter in Rome with an

'Oxford don' who 'spoke Latin with a Wiltshire accent and

manifest discomfort, wrote Greek letters with his tongue out, and

seemed to thinka Greek sentence a charm when it was a quotation

and an impropriety when it wasn't.')

Barnet sawthe last days of the coal-steam engines upon the

English railways and the gradual cleansing of the London

atmosphere as the smoke-creating sea-coal fires gave place to

electric heating. The building of laboratories at Kensington was

still in progress, and he took part in the students' riots that

delayed the removal of the Albert Memorial. He carried a banner

with 'We like Funny Statuary' on one side, and on the other

'Seats and Canopies for Statues, Why should our Great Departed

Stand in the Rain?' He learnt the rather athletic aviation of

those days at the University grounds at Sydenham, and he was

fined for flying over the new prison for political libellers at

Wormwood Scrubs, 'in a manner calculated to exhilarate the

prisoners while at exercise.' That was the time of the attempted

suppression of any criticism of the public judicature and the

place was crowded with journalists who had ventured to call

attention to the dementia of Chief Justice Abrahams. Barnet was

not a very goodaviator, he confesses he was always a little

afraid of his machine-there was excellent reason for every one

to be afraid of those clumsy early types-and he never attempted

steep descents or very high flying. He also, he records, owned

one of those oil-driven motor-bicycles whose clumsy complexity

and extravagant filthiness still astonish the visitors to the

museum of machinery at South Kensington. He mentions running

over a dog and complains of the ruinous price of 'spatchcocks' in

Surrey. 'Spatchcocks,' it seems, was a slang term for crushed

hens.

He passed the examinations necessary to reduce his military

service to a minimum, and his want of any special scientific or

technical qualification and a certain precocious corpulence that

handicapped his aviation indicated the infantry of the line as

his sphere of training. That was the most generalised formof

soldiering. The development of the theory of war had been for

some decades but little assisted by any practical experience.

What fighting had occurred in recent years, had been fighting in

minor or uncivilised states, with peasant or barbaric soldiers

and with but a small equipment of modern contrivances, and the