A fascinating missive by George Orwell writing about HG Wells in 1941, during the London Blitz… Essentially, Orwell agrees with all of Wells’s aims and goals, and considered him a godsend to boys who before WWI wanted to dream of a world not dominated by upper class prigs. orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws “But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them.” and: “If one had to choose among Wellss own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military ‘glory’. Kipling would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern world.”
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 01:40:37 +0000
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