The Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe

Patrick Parrinder, John S. Partington

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623568641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

H.G. Wells was described by one of his European critics as a 'seismograph of his age'. He is one of the founding fathers of modern science fiction, and as a novelist, essayist, educationalist and political propagandist his influence has been felt in every European country. This collection of essays by scholarly experts shows the varied and dramatic nature of Wells's reception, including translations, critical appraisals, novels and films on Wellsian themes, and responses to his own well-publicized visits to Russia and elsewhere. The authors chart the intense ideological debate that his writings occasioned, particularly in the inter-war years, and the censorship of his books in Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain. This book offers pioneering insights into Wells's contribution to 20th century European literature and to modern political ideas, including the idea of European union.
Reception of H.G. Wells in Europe Review

1 H. G. Wells’s Critical Reception in France¹

Joseph Altairac; trans. Barbara Ghiringhelli

The ‘English Jules Verne’, or the triumph of the ‘scientific romances’

There are writers, nowadays revered, who had to wait a long time before they were acknowledged by the critics, not to mention the public. This was by no means the case with H. G. Wells. In England and the English-speaking world, after the publication of The Time Machine in 1895, he was praised by the critics and enjoyed rapid and enduring success both as a novelist and an essayist, a success which was to spread to the rest of the world.

In France, the Mercure de France (French Mercury) published a serialized translation of The Time Machine. The book version came out in 1899 under the Mercure de France imprint. Paul Valéry, who would later befriend Wells and meet him on several occasions at Grasse, was immediately impressed. Wells became a pillar of Mercure de France which, up to the eve of the First World War, published around twenty of his novels, collections of short stories and essays in the legendary series with a yellow cover marked by a winged helmet, all of which were translated by Henry-D. Davray and Bronisław Kozakiewicz. Wells’s most important works were all represented, with the curious exception of L’Homme invisible (IM), which was published by Ollendorff.

Part of the appeal of the Mercure de France volumes was that they were sometimes accompanied by a supplementary section consisting of a collection of press extracts entitled ‘H. G. Wells et la critique’ (‘H. G. Wells and the critics’). Since these commentaries aimed to promote both author and publisher, one would hardly expect them to contain negative reviews. In any case, such reviews were extremely rare. We will refer to one of these below, a review which constitutes a real exception, and which seems to have been dictated by motives other than the wish to produce an objective analysis.

Honour where honour is due: let us begin with an appraisal by Rachilde, a famous contributor to the Mercure de France, and a significant advocate of Wells in France:

I would like to say a few words about the distinctive way in which the author sees and makes us see the movement of the crowd. H. G. Wells has no apparent plot, character, nor framework in his strange novels of scientific adventure, and this is what makes him far superior to Jules Verne […]. H. G. Wells seems to be writing for future readers. […] He writes for educated people, not to educate them, but to entertain them, which is more difficult, and it is in accordance with this method that his crowds evolve like armies of atoms or microbes destined to change the face of the globe, rushing either fearfully or rationally from one side to the other of this same globe. […] The passage describing London’s panic when faced by the Martians is one of the finest examples of contemporary naturalist writing. It is as lifelike as possible and it has nothing of the fictional.² (1900, 475)

The comparison of Wells with Jules Verne, to the detriment of the latter, is an almost ubiquitous feature of the criticism of the time. Augustin Filon, writing in La Revue des Deux Mondes (Two Worlds Review), is no exception, although he pretends to refrain:

I have no desire whatsoever to denigrate Jules Verne, to whom I owe hours of very agreeable recreation. […] Such a prolonged and universal success as that of Jules Verne (abroad he is one of our most popular writers) is, at least, symptomatic and it marks him out as ‘representative’. But has Jules Verne ever made you think? I believe that the answer will be negative. When Verne is not content simply with curious facts taken from some geographical dictionary or traveller’s tale, his favourite subject is the science of tomorrow, in other words, topical questions which he presumes to resolve with the help of discoveries that have already been made. Thus he has lived to see the exploits of his Nautilus and Victoria already equalled or surpassed by present-day submarines and airships. Mr Wells has, in my view, more originality and invention in his choice of themes and the manner in which he deals with them. […] I never forget, as I read Jules Verne, that he is a writer who makes use of science in order to document his novels; when I read Mr Wells, I am convinced for a moment that he is an inventor who makes use of the novel to emphasize and popularize an invention.³ (1904, 582)

Augustin Filon’s commentary reminds us that, at the beginning of the twentieth century in France, the ‘roman scientifique’ (scientific novel) – known today as science fiction – was already a recognized genre, which was even appreciated by the critics.

Jean Lionnet, in la Quinzaine (The Fortnightly), insists upon Wells’s superiority over Verne to an extent that aficionados of the latter will rightly find excessive, to say the least:

Oh yes, Wells has read Jules Verne: he even quotes him in his last book (the only one which slightly resembles in its subject the works of the author of Voyage autour de la Lune [sic]).⁴ Besides, we would be wrong not to take Jules Verne seriously: he has been of great help to French youths in awakening their energy and giving them, so to speak, lessons in curiosity. But one doesn’t have to believe that these works count as literature! The characters are little more than puppets; the invention, though sometimes ingenious, has no artistic merit; long passages of mediocre scientific popularization interrupt the action almost in every chapter. […] Finally the language, so flat, so often incorrect, in a word so ‘journalistic’, makes everything even worse […].

Wells, by contrast, not only has a more powerful imagination, but knows how to bring his characters to life, in the same way as our best contemporary novelists do […].

And I must add that Wells interests me even for his ideas. His considerable study of science, at the service of an exceptionally inventive mind, enables him to observe humanity in a way unlike our own.⁵ (Lionnet 1905, 229–31)

It cannot be said, at any rate, that French critics at the beginning of the twentieth century were remarkable for their chauvinism!

Adolphe Brisson, in Les Annales politiques et littéraires (Literary and Political Annals), extends the usual comparison with Jules Verne to other writers:

Mr Wells is a novelist-prophet of the school of Jules Verne and Robida […]. He tries to foresee what the future of humankind will be when the scientific progress which is presently in its infancy has been accomplished.

Sometimes these ingenious storytellers deal exclusively with the domain of facts – like Jules Verne – and sometimes they are concerned with the moral destiny of humankind; they add a grain of philosophy to their palette. This is the case with Swift and Edgar Poe. Mr Wells draws on both methods and that is his originality.⁶ (1901, 92)

After reading these incessant and sometimes rather offensive references to the work of Jules Verne, one can better understand the hint of exasperation evident in the famous interview that he gave to the American journalist Robert H. Sherard in 1903 (Lacassin 1979). When asked what he thought of Wells, Verne replied:

Je pensiez bien que vous alliez me demander cela[…]. His books were sent to me, and I have read them. It is very curious, and, I will add, very English. But I do not see the possibility of comparison between his work and mine. We do not proceed in the same manner. It occurs to me that his stories do not repose on very scientific bases. No, there is no rapport between his work and mine. I make use of physics. He invents. I go to the moon in a cannon ball, discharged from a cannon. Here there is no invention. He goes to Mars [sic] in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation. Ça c’est très joli, […] but show me this metal. Let him produce it.⁷ (Parrinder 1972, 101–02)

Of course, any slightly critical reader of De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) and Hector Servadac might wish to dispute Verne’s credentials as a specialist in gravitation.

The minor role of the social novels

The scientific romances were, then, unanimously welcomed by the critics who, with a certain injustice, were happy to use Verne’s work as a foil. By contrast, the social novels were cited less often, perhaps because of the delays in their translation. Kipps (1905), Tono-Bungay (1909), The New Machiavelli (1911), Marriage (1912) and The Passionate Friends (1913) were published in France only after the war, and by publishers other than Mercure de France. André Chaumeix, in the Journal des Débats (Parliamentary Record), after once again praising the quality of Wells’s scientific novels, remarks:

At this juncture the novelist abandons his usual style and gives us a book which is not at all fantastic and which owes much less to his imagination than to his faculties of observation. Love and Mr Lewisham is a story taken from reality, and H. G. Wells, unconcerned on this occasion with the physics, the metaphysics, the scientific reveries and illusions of the prophet, has modestly restricted himself to an everyday theme.⁸ (1904, 4)

This is less than enthusiastic. However, Teodor de Wyzewa, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, considered that ‘Mr Wells, if he has changed his style, has not changed his spirit or his talent. […][A]lready one could […] recognize [in the scientific romances], without much effort, the sentimental humorist who has just written Love and Mr Lewisham’⁹ (1900, 944). We might add that Henri Ghéon, in the Nouvelle Revue Française (New French review), pronounced a favourable judgement on L’Histoire de M. Polly (HMP) (1912, 126–28), which was an occasion for him, as Jean-Marc Gouanvic remarks in Europe (1986), ‘to assert the importance of adventure in the novel’¹⁰ (1986, 15). We are, all the same, far from the eulogies heaped on the scientific romances.

The admired ‘prophet’

As the precursor of futurology, on the other hand, Wells was highly appreciated. One critic in la Lecture (Reading) of Geneva saw Anticipations as ‘A tremendous work, a formidable accumulation of facts, of appeals for discussion, of utopian dreams, of humanitarian prophecies, of ironies, sarcasm, wishes, practices and improvements, but an accumulation which is ordered according to the rules of an implacable and lucid logic.’¹¹ Georges Art, writing in the Phare de la Loire (Loire Beacon), was eager to distinguish between the Wellsian vision in Anticipations and simple fiction:

It is certainly not a novel, a work of pure imagination, like the famous Battle of Dorking, but a scientific prophecy so to speak, which follows a rigorous method deduced from actual facts that are carefully examined.

In the light of this method the author brings together the elements which contribute to the formation of the human community around the year 2000. He sees its roads, its residences, he reads its newspapers, analyses its moral and aesthetic condition, and pictures this community during wartime.¹²

The same position was taken by Gustave Kahn in L’Aurore (The dawn):

Nearly every hypothesis about the future of civilization starts out from a scientific premise. Neither Thomas More nor Campanella is without reason, and Cyrano was no mere crank. However, all these visionaries of the future have framed their erudite research with an adventure narrative and have sought the aid of literature. To present his investigations, hypotheses and utopias quite scientifically, without any hint of artistic ornamentation; such is Wells’s desire in his book Anticipations, a new word which says what it means. Wells does not give us prophecies, but predictions […] Anticipations is not a novel, but a book of social criticism.¹³

We learn from this passage that the word ‘anticipation’ was new to France at the beginning of the twentieth century, and that Wells therefore contributed to the enrichment of the French language. That is hardly surprising on the part of an Englishman who, as Marius-Ary Leblond emphasized in the Revue scientifique (Scientific Review), had predicted that French would eventually triumph over English and German. Other critics, such as Gustave Lanson in the Revue universitaire (Universities’ Review), were critical of Wells’s Anglocentrism. Another of those expressing reservations was Léon Daudet, the future co-founder of Action Française. In an article in le Gaulois (The Gaul) he compared Anticipations to Ernest Renan’s L’Avenir de la science (The Future of Science), arguing that both works were marred by their dedication to scientific perfectionism (1904, 1). Arsène Alexandre, of the cyclists’ magazine Vélo (Cycling), welcomed Anticipations more warmly, perhaps because he recognized in Wells a fellow cyclist:

You have, sir, one of the most inquiring and sensible minds of your time. […] One reason why your book is so inspired is that the starting point of all your Anticipations concerns the modifications that new means of transport will impose on the conditions and aspects of life.¹⁴

One critic, writing in Pages libres (Free Pages), even managed to review a work which was destined to remain unpublished in French:

In his excellent book Mankind in the Making, H. G. Wells says that modern academics have not known how to take advantage of an invention as widespread as that of printing. They give lectures, just as they did in the Middle Ages, a time when lectures were indispensable because books were expensive. […] This observation, which sounds like an inspiration of the moment, is most apposite.¹⁵

One could give many more examples of the French critical admiration for Wells. His reputation, on the eve of the First World War, was almost as great in France as it was in England and in the United States. Wells was known as the author of the scientific romances and as a pioneer futurologist, but much less as the author of social novels, which were barely known to the French public.

An acute crisis of envy

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Timeline: European Reception of H. G. Wells
• Introduction
• 1 H. G. Wells’s Critical Reception in France
• 2 Henry-D. Davray and the Mercure de France
• 3 Russia Revisited
• 4 H. G. Wells in Russian Literary Criticism, 1890s–1940s
• 5 Future Perfect: H. G. Wells and Bolshevik Russia, 1917–32
• 6 White Elephants and Black Machines: H. G. Wells and German Culture, 1920–45
• 7 Ignorance, Opportunism, Propaganda and Dissent: The Reception of H. G. Wells in Nazi Germany
• 8 H. G. Wells’s Polish Reception
• 9 On Translations of H. G. Wells’s Works into Polish
• 10 A Welcome Guest: The Czech Reception of H. G. Wells
• 11 Critics and Defenders of H. G. Wells in Interwar Hungary
• 12 The Puzzling Connection between H. G. Wells and Frigyes Karinthy
• 13 H. G. Wells, Italian Futurism and Marinetti’s Gli Indomabili (The Untamables)
• 14 An Approximation of H. G. Wells’s Impact on Catalonia
• 15 H. G. Wells and the Discourse of Censorship in Franco’s Spain
• 16 News from Nowhere: Portuguese Dialogues with H. G. Wells
• 17 Clashing Utopias: H. G. Wells and Catholic Ireland
• 18 A Tale of Two Science Fictions: H. G. Wells in France and the Soviet Union
• 19 ‘The Invisible Wells’ in European Cinema and Television
• 20 H. G. Wells and the International Pan-European Union
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes