H. Wells: THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former

years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the

teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of

grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other

methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with

questions and then dictated model replies.

That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes

as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,

and it is so I rememberhim, sitting on the edge of a table,

smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible

formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of

desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to

a blackboard on an easel and draw on that very slowly and

deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in

coloured pencils, and sometimes he would display a specimen or

arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute in

which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus

prescribed as necessary for subject this and subject that by the

Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with

maps and diagrams and drawings of his own.

But he never reallydid experiments, except that in the class in

systematic botany he sometimes made us tease common flowers to

pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly helpit,

because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen

burner and goodmaterial in a ruinous fashion, and in the second

they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger

the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.

Then thirdly, realexperiments involved washing up. And moreover

they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant

learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite

early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the

unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is

fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for

example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic

Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a

glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue

to blow it clears again, whereas in truthyou may blow into the

stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face

and painfulunder the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And

I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a

retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and

may be collected over water, whereas in reallife if you do anything

of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium

chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says

"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady

student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite

understandthat ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own

undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference

for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an

arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing

whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,

and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it

when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond

illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you

did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in

this way he could make us seeall he described. The class, freed

from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life

without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then

my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be

copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any

exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as

"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."

Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I rememberonce

sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description,

"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"

"The precipitate is."

"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"

"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent! Why-" he extended

his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.

"Like that," he said.

I thoughtthe explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment

after giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and

resumed his discourse.

My father, I amafraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical

affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical

incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine

temperament, in a manner that I have never seenparalleled in any

human being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest

manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own

spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do

anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were

extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes

for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the

peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical

theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memoriesfor a lifetime.

The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near

the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I

was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and

assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that

wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up

both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour

alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And

for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every

meal.

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a

thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does

not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its

own. Intensive culture greatly increases this dispositionto

trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchyand hysterical, a drugged

and demoralised and over-irritated garden. My father got at cross

purposes with our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew

wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified

nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The

peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the

beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a

spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for

beingill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the

catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your

cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its

occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,

because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one

watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome

spiritof inquiry in hardy natures.

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding

string and trusted to his eye altogether too much, and the

consequent obliquity and the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he

erected, and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and