Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump. H. G. Wells

libraries, book distribution, lecturing, teaching. Then there is the effect of laws, of inventions. … “Done in a large, dull, half-abstract way,” said Boon, “one might fill volumes. One might become an Eminent Sociologist. You might even invent terminology. It’s a chance——”

      We let it pass. He went on almost at once to suggest a more congenial form, a conversational novel. I followed reluctantly. I share the general distrust of fiction as a vehicle of discussion. We would, he insisted, invent a personality who would embody our Idea, who should be fanatically obsessed by this idea of the Mind of the Race, who should preach it on all occasions and be brought into illuminating contact with all the existing mental apparatus and organization of the world. “Something of your deep, moral earnestness, you know, only a little more presentable and not quite so vindictive,” said Boon, “and without your—lapses. I seem to see him rather like Leo Maxse: the same white face, the same bright eyes, the same pervading suggestion of nervous intensity, the same earnest, quasi-reasonable voice—but instead of that anti-German obsession of his, an intelligent passion for the racial thought. He must be altogether a fanatic. He must think of the Mind of the Race in season and out of season. Collective thought will be no joke to him; it will be the supremely important thing. He will be passionately a patriot, entirely convinced of your proposition that ‘the thought of a community is the life of a community,’ and almost as certain that the tide of our thought is ebbing.”

      “Is it?” said I.

      “I’ve never thought. The ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ says it is.”

      “We must call the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica.’ ”

      “As a witness—in the book—rather! But, anyhow, this man of ours will believe it and struggle against it. It will make him ill; it will spoil the common things of life for him altogether. I seem to see him interrupting some nice, bright, clean English people at tennis. ‘Look here, you know,’ he will say, ‘this is all very well. But have you thought to-day? They tell me the Germans are thinking, the Japanese.’ I see him going in a sort of agony round and about Canterbury Cathedral. ‘Here are all these beautiful, tranquil residences clustering round this supremely beautiful thing, all these well-dressed, excellent, fresh-coloured Englishmen in their beautiful clerical raiment—deans, canons—and what have they thought, any of them? I keep my ear to the Hibbert Journal, but is it enough?’ Imagine him going through London on an omnibus. He will see as clear as the advertisements on the hoardings the signs of the formal breaking up of the old Victorian Church of England and Dissenting cultures that have held us together so long. He will see that the faith has gone, the habits no longer hold, the traditions lie lax like cut string—there is nothing to replace these things. People do this and that dispersedly; there is democracy in beliefs even, and any notion is as good as another. And there is America. Like a burst Haggis. Intellectually. The Mind is confused, the Race in the violent ferment of new ideas, in the explosive development of its own contrivances, has lost its head. It isn’t thinking any more; it’s stupefied one moment and the next it’s diving about——

      “It will be as clear as day to him that a great effort of intellectual self-control must come if the race is to be saved from utter confusion and dementia. And nobody seems to see it but he. He will go about wringing his hands, so to speak. I fancy him at last at a writing-desk, nervous white fingers clutched in his black hair. ‘How can I put it so that they must attend and see?’ ”

      So we settled on our method and principal character right away. But we got no farther because Boon insisted before doing anything else on drawing a fancy portrait of this leading character of ours and choosing his name. We decided to call him Hallery, and that he should look something like this—

      Hallery preparing to contradict.

      That was how “The Mind of the Race” began, the book that was to have ended at last in grim burlesque with Hallery’s murder of Dr. Tomlinson Keyhole in his villa at Hampstead, and the conversation at dawn with that incredulous but literate policeman at Highgate—he was reading a World’s Classic—to whom Hallery gave himself up.