War and the Future: Italy, France and Britain at WarWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
War and the Future: Italy, France and Britain at War
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World War, 1914-1918
If the Resentful Employee provides the emotional impulse of the
resisting pacifist, whose horizon is bounded by his one passionate
desire that the particular social system that has treated him so ill
should collapse and give in, and its leaders and rulers be humiliated
and destroyed, the intellectual direction of a mischievous pacifism
comes from an entirely different class.
The Genteel Whig, though he differs very widely in almost every other
respect from the Resentful Employee, has this much in common, that he
has never been drawn into the whirl of collective life in any real and
assimilative fashion. This is what is the matter with both of them.
He is a little loose, shy, independent person. Except for eating and
drinking--in moderation, he has never done anything real from the day
he was born. He has frequently not even faced the common challenge of
matrimony. Still more frequently is he childless, or the daring parent
of one particular child. He has never traded nor manufactured. He has
drawn his dividends or his salary with an entire unconsciousness of any
obligations to policemen or navy for these punctual payments. Probably
he has never ventured even to reinvest his little legacy. He is acutely
aware of possessing an exceptionally fine intelligence, but he is
entirely unconscious of a fundamental unreality. Nothing has ever
occurred to him to make him ask why the mass of men were either not
possessed of his security or discontented with it. The impulses that
took his school friends out upon all sorts of odd feats and adventures
struck him as needless. As he grew up he turned with an equal distrust
from passion or ambition. His friends went out after love, after
adventure, after power, after knowledge, after this or that desire, and
became men. But he noted merely that they became fleshly, that effort
strained them, that they were sometimes angry or violent or heated. He
could not but feel that theirs were vulgar experiences, and he sought
some finer exercise for his exceptional quality. He pursued art or
philosophy or literature upon their more esoteric levels, and realised
more and more the general vulgarity and coarseness of the world about
him, and his own detachment. The vulgarity and crudity of the things
nearest him impressed him most; the dreadful insincerity of the Press,
the meretriciousness of success, the loudness of the rich, the baseness
of common people in his own land. The world overseas had by comparison
a certain glamour. Except that when you said “United States” to him he
would draw the air sharply between his teeth and beg you not to...
Nobody took him by the collar and shook him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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