The Guardian: The Church Newspaper(26 Jan 1940) 43
Sir, – I am afraid that the correspondence in your columns from Mr. H. G. Wells and his critics, if it continues, is in danger of pursuing a direction which the occasion does not warrant, and ending in nothing but acrimony. 1 I cannot find anything in Mr. Roberts’s letter to justify Mr. Wells’s accusation of mock humility; and I am not hasty to join Mr. Murry in the charge of lack of charity. 2 But I think that Mr. Roberts is chiefly responsible for the discussion taking the wrong course, by having written, not about Mr. Wells’s letter, but about Mr. Wells. The letter itself is all that the correspondence should be concerned with. For Mr. Roberts to make his point in that context, he would have to show, not merely that Mr. Wells’s origins and education explain the views expressed in his letter, but that the letter could not have been written by a man of very different origin and education. I can, however, think of men, who according to ordinary standards have had every advantage – even members of Mr. Roberts’s university, 3 and not scientists but men who have distinguished themselves in the Classical Tripos – who could have written substantially the same letter: and therefore I submit that Mr. Wells’s education is not relevant. Incidentally, I regret to observe, from the heat of the subsequent correspondence, that the term “lower middle-class” seems to be taken, not as a simple label of status, but as a term of reproach or abuse: I hesitate to believe that Mr. Roberts so intended it. 4
The interesting point at issue is whether it is so easy as Mr. Wells seems to think, to erase a word like “God” from one’s vocabulary, without substituting some other word to do duty for it. Since early times men have arisen to proclaim that there was no God: it is quite a different thing to assert that the word“God” “conveys no positive meaning at all.” It very likely does not mean any of the number of things which Mr. Wells will allow to be meant: but I wonder whether Mr. Wells should not be led to expunge also most words of philosophical meaning, and all propositions that do not pass the censorship of logical positivism. It would be interesting to have a 6list of all the words of which, on careful thought, Mr. Wells would be obliged to “drop the use.”
t. s. eliot
