The Undying Fire
By New York: The Macmillan Company. 1919.
MR. WELLS has never written a poorer novel, or a better argument. His story leaps from the ground in a spirited take-off, like the biplane of Hawker’s interrupted flight; but it has no sooner got well into the air than it drops its under-carriage of plot into the sea, surrenders itself to the momentum of argument and social passion alone, and takes its chance of 'crashing' at the end. Unlike Hawker, it reaches the end. And it certainly does crash, bringing a dead son to life and generally showering the hero with bliss, in the tritest of happy endings. The nominal excuse for this paroxysm of blessedness is that The Undying Fire is a parody of the Book of Job (perhaps a modern parallel is a fairer term), in which the protagonist is Mr. Job Huss, the variously afflicted head master of Woldingstanton, a great English school. Eliphaz the Temanite is Sir Eliphaz Burrows, patentee and manufacturer of the Temanite building block; Bildad the Shuhite is Mr. William Dad, maker of the Dad and Showhite car de luxe; and Zophar the Naamathite is Mr. Joseph Farr, head of the technical section of Mr. Huss’s school. To sustain the parody, it is clearly necessary that Mr. Huss’s school shall be restored to him, that his soured wife shall at length look upon him more kindly, that he shall come into money, that his cancer shall prove non-malignant after all, and that his son shall turn up in a German prison camp. But why should the parody be sustained, or undertaken at all?
Essentially, the book is an impassioned plea for a certain idea in education. Mr. Huss’s idea is that a modern school should equip youths, through history and science broadly taught and correlated, with a sense of their own relation to the cosmos. Men have lived, he says, ‘in an uninformed world with no common understanding and no collective plan, a world ignorant of its true history and with no conception of its future. Into these horrors they drifted for the want of a world-education. Out of these horrors no lesson will be learned, no will can arise, for the same reason. Every man live signorantly in his own circumstances, from hand to mouth, from day to day, swayed first of all by this catchword and then by that.’ He would have men taught to face the universe as a ‘windy desolation’ in which the only gleam of sense is the undying fire in man, that which is ‘likest God within the soul.’
Men have accepted the principle of aimless creation and destruction which runs through nature. They have embodied this principle in their civilization, which is a congeries of competitive destructions; and one proof that they have accepted it is that the most striking achievement of education is its technological service to war. Mr. Huss has a vision of education as the destroying nemesis of war and waste and futility. It is a vision which could change the shape of the world, if only something could initiate the process by taking the school system out of the hands of the Temanites and Shuhites and Naamathites who administer everything in this world — except creative ideas, which they jail and censor as efficiently as they know how. Something might come to pass, though, if this glorified tract of Mr. Wells were to reach those to whom it is dedicated: ‘All Schoolmasters and Schoolmistresses and every Teacher in the World.’ W. F.