Keith Preston

Keith Preston is a Latin professor with a sense of humor. In my experience this is a usual combination. I have known two others, but neither of them conducted colyums nor wrote humorous verses and essays. Mr. Preston is a native of Chicago, he is a graduate of the University of Chicago, he teaches in Northwestern University. He is small, quick of movement, highly entertaining—a most diverting luncheon companion. He is an enthusiastic member of the Chicago group of writers, eats with them at their luncheons, boosts them when he can; but seems never quite to lose his sense of humor about it all. His verse is gay, pointed, graceful. His paragraphs are considered by many persons to be the best written in the country. As a story-teller he is unexcelled, though his wit has a mordant touch which is alarming in large companies. A person of great vitality, wit, and buoyancy, he yet is domestic and thoroughly tame when seen in the atmosphere of Evanston, Illinois, where he lives. In this cynical bit which he wrote for me on H. G. Wells, he shows his colors. His laughter at the world is often a little bitter; but at the same time it rings with wholesome reproof.

THE DICKENS OF IT

Swinging along through the ages with H. G. Wells, no more than any other reader could we pause to reflect or question. Not until we came to page 676 of the second volume of “The Outline of History” did we recall that in the back of our head a still small something had been a-troubling of us for some time. What could it be, and when did it start? After much knitting of the brows and scratching of the head, we recalled that our subliminal bedevilment had begun on page 530 of the first volume, with the following text:

If the prominent men of this or that British or Gallic city lacked any profound Greek culture themselves, they could always turn to some slave or other, whose learning had been guaranteed of the highest quality by the slave-dealer, to supply the deficiency.

Here it was that we were first reminded of the experts who had assisted at the birth of “The Outline of History” and who hide their diminished heads in the footnotes of the same. Was Mr. Wells quite respectful to his experts? Where, in the first place, did he derive his conception of experts? This last seemed after all to be the main question, and on this we concentrated with complete success. We find that Mr. Wells owes his conception of experts to the immortal Mr. Boffin in Charles Dickens’s “Our Mutual Friend”.

Like H. G. Wells, Mr. Boffin had achieved the highest success in a practical line. At the peak of this practical triumph, Mr. Boffin conceived a cultural project of the first magnitude, a course of historical reading which should include the most solid and serious thought upon man, his achievements, and his destiny. Certain difficulties of time and mechanical equipment at first seemed to interfere. How did Mr. Boffin meet these difficulties? By the idea of experts. In his own words:

“Now, it’s too late for me to begin shoveling and sifting at alphabeds and grammar books. I’m getting to be an old bird, and I want to take it easy. But I want some reading.... How can I get that reading, Wegg? By,” tapping him on the breast with the head of his thick stick, “paying a man truly qualified to do it, so much an hour (say two-pence) to come and do it.”

The reader must beware of forcing an attractive analogy, especially of forcing it beyond the point where it flatters Mr. Wells. It is all very well to admire the economy of time and the enlargement of scope secured by the employment of experts, whether the beneficiary be a Boffin or a Wells. But Mr. Boffin was entirely too deferential to Mr. Silas Wegg, his expert, with a wooden leg.

“I don’t”, said Boffin, in a free-handed manner, “want to tie a literary man—with a wooden leg—down too tight.”

Mr. Wells has tied his experts (with no wooden legs to tax his compassion) in double bowknots; he has trussed them and stowed them in the footnotes. Still more must the reader beware of applying to our author phrases used only of the expert:

“A certain loftiness, likewise, took possession of Mr. Wegg; a condescending sense of being in request as an official expounder of mysteries.”

Mr. Boffin, a humble sort of person, was unable to defend himself against the arrogance of his expert. Mr. Wells, a man of independent thought, has guarded himself against expert impositions; he has sternly repressed that tendency to oppose facts against ideas which is the first and probably the greatest danger in the employment of literal-minded experts.

The legitimate applications of our analogy are, after all, sufficiently numerous. Taking the classical period, with which Boffin started, we find that both Boffin and Wells relied chiefly on Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. The set used by Boffin and Wegg was in “8 wollumes”; exact data on Mr. Wells’s edition are lacking. Both Wells and Boffin were apparently familiar with Polybius, “pronounced Polly Beeious, and supposed by Mr. Boffin to be a Roman virgin”. In this connection we would note that both Wells and Boffin seem to have had certain scandalous interpretations imposed upon them by their experts. In the case of Mr. Wells, this is particularly apparent in the account of Julius Cæsar.

“There can be little doubt”, says Mr. Wells, “that he was a dissolute and extravagant young man—the scandals cluster thick about his sojourn in Bithynia.”

Mr. Wells likewise refers delicately if not darkly to Cæsar’s “amorous pleasantries with Cleopatra”, hints that the hussy followed Julius to Rome, and concludes:

“Such complications with a woman mark the elderly sensualist or sentimentalist—he was fifty-four at the commencement of the affaire—rather than the master-ruler of men.”

Now we are not so much concerned with defending the late Julius (though, hussies or no hussies, we are still convinced that he was a very able person), as we are with inquiring whether Mr. Wells’s judgment in this matter accords with his judgment in his novels. Were Mr. Wells’s fictional heroes subject to such discipline? Not as we remember. What is the difference between novels and history?

“The difference, sir?” says Mr. Wegg. “There you place me in a difficulty, Mr. Boffin. Suffice it to observe, that the difference is best postponed to some other occasion when Mrs. Boffin does not honor us with her company. In Mrs. Boffin’s presence, sir, we had better drop it!”

The truth is that Mr. Wells, possibly on advice of his particular Mr. Wegg, or some other among the council of experts, seems in “The Outline of History” abnormally concerned with Mrs. Boffin, or Mrs. Grundy, or Mrs. Potter. Rereading our “Outline of History” we frequently feel the presence of Mrs. Boffin. Under her eye Mr. Wells has been as unfair to Cæsar, Napoleon, and some others as we, in this little paper, have tried to be to Wells. For Boffinizing history is a game that two can play at, and the reader must be on his guard against taking the results too seriously.