MR. WELLS SEES IT THROUGH

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 92, 12 January 1935, Page 19

MR. WELLS SEES IT THROUGH

His Personal Story and a History of His Time

"Experiment in Autobiography,” by H. G. Wells (London: Gollancz and Cresset Press. Two volumes. 12/6 each).

These two volumes contain what Mr. Wells is pleased to call the "Discoveries and conclusions of a very ordinary brain (since 1886).” Without discussing the quality of his brain (the world has long since formed its own opinion on that), it must be said at once that the discoveries and conclusions are altogether exceptional, extraordinarily comprehensive and extremely fascinating to read. Mr. Wells prophesied truly when he wrote at the beginning of his task, “My story will be at once a very personal one, and it will be a history of my sort and my time.” To read these volumes is to live through the social history of the past sixty years, made immediate and vivid as much by the writer’s scrupulous honesty in analysis, his ardour, courage and idealism, as bv his genius in expression. What strikes one first about the early part of Mr. Wells’s career is the lack of any positive urge driving him toward the goal he was later to reach. There was certainly always a dormant inclination to achieve satisfaction in things above commercialism, yet this

could seldom prevail against the pressing urgencies of the moment. His environment had its coils well wound about him as a boy and it was by a negative process that he came first to any interest in books and later \to the professions of teaching and writing for which his reading qualified him. Once he had broken free, however, he was able, as he had always perhaps vaguely wished, to turn his attention from individuals to that earnest preoccupation with more universal aspects of life which has been the mark of his literary work. The first volume, like the other intiifiately personal and revealing while commanding a full measure of respect, takes the story to a stage round about the author’s thirtieth year, when he had already a reputation as a writer and thinker firnj,- established. It is in no way complete in itself; its record of mental and emotional development leads inevitably and with no sensible break to the mature though not necescarily fixed conclusions stated in the second volume. The account of the earlier years make particularly interesting reading. There is an absence of any haphazardness in the selection of the material and an ever-present sense of continuity of experience prevails in spite of the complexity that must attend these revelations of a former self. It is a narrative richly set ■with incident, its dramatic value enhanced l>y the constancy of its truth. From tie record of successive phases as schoolboy, draper’s apprentice, science scholar, teacher and writer, Mr Wells ip the second volume comes to smoother waters. The storm-tossed days are over and he has peace to pur-

sue the main motive of his life, the unravelling of mental tangles in people’s minds, the attempt to compel their brains to see how the world can be made a better place. The volume is in three long sections. The first deals primarily with sex —“the second main system of motive in the working out of my personal destiny,” he calls it. It is exceptionally intimate an decidedly frank. The second is chiefly literary in content and has some delightfully precise character sketches of famous men, most of them friends of his. The third, easily the most important, if not the most entertaining, chapter of the whole work, is entitled “The Idea of a Planned World,” and is concerned with the efforts made in his sociological writings to establish his own vision, the World State, in the minds of men. In the course of it he reveals with some gusto his knowledge and opinions of those people in key positions toward whom he has always directed the main force of this argument.

Early in this ffiost significant work Mr. Wells, writing of his efforts in the past, says, “I have shown that human life as we know it is only the disIpersed raw material for human life as It might be.” He is a man with a dream seeking its fulfilment and his experiment in autobiography, this focussing of a searchlight on the past, may well by its reflected effect, hoped fo rat the outset, make for him and others the next move a clear step forward to reality.