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The World Set Free-Part27_H. G. WELLS (1866-1946)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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towards him was mingled with pity and a sense of inhumanity that

it needed usage rather than reason to overcome. He had a strong



face, with little bright brown eyes rather deeply sunken and a

large resolute thin-lipped mouth. His skin was very yellow and



wrinkled, and his hair iron gray. He was at all times an

impatient and sometimes an angry man, but this was forgiven him



because of the hot wire of suffering that was manifestly thrust

through his being. At the end of his life his personal prestige



was very great. To him far more than to any contemporary is it

due that self-abnegation, self-identification with the world



spirit, was made the basis of universal education. That general

memorandum to the teachers which is the key-note of the modern



educationalsystem, was probably entirely his work.

'Whosoever would save his soul shall lose it,' he wrote. 'That is



the device upon the seal of this document, and the starting point

of all we have to do. It is a mistake to regard it as anything



but a plain statement of fact. It is the basis for your work.

You have to teach self-forgetfulness, and everything else that



you have to teach is contributory and subordinate to that end.

Education is the release of man from self. You have to widen the



horizons of your children, encourage and intensify their

curiosity and their creative impulses, and cultivate and enlarge



their sympathies. That is what you are for. Under your guidance

and the suggestions you will bring to bear on them, they have to



shed the old Adam of instinctive suspicions, hostilities, and

passions, and to find themselves again in the great being of the



universe. The little circles of their egotisms have to be opened

out until they become arcs in the sweep of the racial purpose.



And this that you teach to others you must learn also sedulously

yourselves. Philosophy, discovery, art, every sort of skill,



every sort of service, love: these are the means of salvation

from that narrow loneliness of desire, that brooding



preoccupation with self and egotistical relationships, which is

hell for the individual, treason to the race, and exile from



God....'

Section 12



As things round themselves off and accomplish themselves, one

begins for the first time to see them clearly. From the



perspectives of a new age one can look back upon the great and

widening stream of literature with a complete understanding.



Things link up that seemed disconnected, and things that were

once condemned as harsh and aimless are seen to be but factors in



the statement of a gigantic problem. An enormous bulk of the

sincerer writing of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth



centuries falls together now into an unanticipated unanimity; one

sees it as a huge tissue of variations upon one theme, the



conflict of human egotism and personal passion and narrow

imaginations on the one hand, against the growing sense of wider



necessities and a possible, more spacious life.

That conflict is in evidence in so early a work as Voltaire's



Candide, for example, in which the desire for justice as well as

happiness beats against human contrariety and takes refuge at



last in a forced and inconclusive contentment with little things.

Candide was but one of the pioneers of a literature of uneasy



complaint that was presently an innumerablemultitude of books.

The novels more particularly of the nineteenth century, if one



excludes the mere story-tellers from our consideration, witness

to this uneasy realisation of changes that call for effort and of






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