MR. WELLS'S MEMOIRS

Re-shaping The World

Experiment in Autobiography. Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)." By H. G. Wells. Volume H. London: Victor Gollancz and the Cresset Press.
The second volume of Mr. Wells's "experiment" in autobiographical vivisection is much less a story of events than an exposition of ideas. The thread of actual narrative is thin. Mr. Wells's "very ordinary brain" theorises about everything, from his domestic affairs, the books he has written, and the interesting people he has met, to large problems of human life and world-reconstruction. He reveals himself as a restless, combative, able but rather dogmatic personality, with an inborn spirit of rebellion. Within a definitely restricted range of mental activity he has a fertile imagination, generalising talent, and constructive power, but he manifests little sympathy with the higher spiritual values and the finer shades of aesthetic appreciation. The funny "picshuas" with which he was in the habit of decorating his letters and other documents are evidence of a sense of humor, but for any correcting or softening influence it might have been expected to have on his sociological speculations and criticism of contemporaries we look in vain. His heavily-phrased abstract style, with its lack of moderation and suavity, expresses an attitude of intolerance towards almost any standpoint or view that differs from his own. It must be admitted, however, that in his searching self-analysis he does not spare himself.

Questions Of Sex

The new volume begins with chapters on sexual relations. It appears that it was not merely Mr. Wells's first wife's inability to meet him on his own intellectual level that led him to run away from her with another woman. Flame leaping to flame was what his passion asked; Isabel gave him only a cold submissiveness. He tells of a much less frigid damsel, a cheerfully "a-moral" person, who flung herself delightedly into the arms of this married man, and was welcomed with equal warmth. It may be hoped, for decency's sake, that the name he gives this impulsive and accommodating young lady is fictitious. Isabel in time married again, and her divorced husband was, as he confesses, unreasonably jealous. If he had hoped for passionate love from the young student, Amy Catherine Robbins, with whom he eloped, again he was disappointed. Until she died in 1927 his second wife was always an affectionate and devoted friend, a true helpmeet, but he and she were, he says, never passionate lovers. Their life together was just a good working compromise. She suppressed any jealous impulse she may have felt, and gave him all the freedom he desired. Her humor and charity, and the fundamental human love between them were, he observes, to be tried very severely in the years that lay ahead but they stood the test. Mr. Wells condemns the Fabian Socialism of his formative years for excluding any theory of sexual conduct from its programme. If he does not too severely reflect upon the sexual irregularities of that gay Lothario, Hubert Bland (husband of E. Nesbit), who filled his and her home with bastards, it would have been difficult for Fabians to work such promiscuous amours on the part of their comrade into any scientific or decent theory of sex. Mr. Wells himself in "Modern Utopia" proposed "a cheerful, healthy sexual go-as-you-please for mankind," but the personal freedom he claimed far men and women was to be allowed for the experimental discovery of centres of "fixation" in love, the whole business to be regulated by collective social responsibility for the family, and a tempering provision for birth control. Mr. Wells does not explain what he thinks of the Russian system of easy marriage, divorce and officially facilitated abortion.

A Socialised World-State

Even his novels. Mr. Wells wrote as a Socialist thinker rather than as a literary artist. Neither Henry James nor Joseph Conrad could understand his point of view. To them fiction was an art, concentrated (as Mr. Wells puts it) on the interplay of individual character in a rigid social framework, the inevitableness and permanence of which they took for granted. To him, who did not make that assumption, the novel was primarily a field for the imaginative discussion of social relations. The problems of character he dealt with were problems of more or less imperfect adjustment to the social environment or of revolt against it; the characters, for the most part, were not so much individualities as types. Hostility to the existing social order, out of which Mr. Wells himself has done extremely well, is the keynote of this book. He claims to have set out in his political writings "the human prospectus" for the future, but he rarely descends from indefinite generalities to details of a practical programme. As early as 1900, he states, he had grasped the broad idea of a socialised world-State. The current Parliamentary system of democratic government is, he declares, utterly insufficient. What he is after is an "open conspiracy" of all the advanced minds of the world in favor of a new cosmopolitan economy to be run by a Samurai order of superior intelligences. We are given no particulars here beyond a statement that international "planning" is to begin with the public control of credit and the reconstruction of the monetary system. The Wellsian world-State, to be brought about without class war, is to be something very different from the "State capitalism" of Soviet Russia, where fundamental questions of social and economic reorganisation are, in the author's view just as much unsolved as in Western Europe. Mr. Wells would like Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt to join in a universal socialising movement, but the Soviet dictator is too busy with his Russian plans, and the American President is similarly engrossed with the domestic situation.

A Muddled World

A few samples of Mr. Wells's judgments on statesmen and soldiers will serve to illustrate the bitterness of his strictures. In the Great War, "not one of all the generals who prance across the page of History developed the ability to handle the vast armies and mechanisms under his nominal control." We, on the British side. were afflicted with "the fuddled dulness of Kitchener, the small-army cleverness of French, Haig's mediocrity, and the stolid professionalism of the army people throughout." President Wilson, "essentially ill-informed, narrowly limited to an old-fashioned American conception of history, self-confident, and profoundly self-righteous" came to Europe, and passed by on the other side the men (including Mr. Wells) who had given him the idea of a really worthwhile League of Nations, for which, in the fiasco of Versailles, was substituted the existing "sham world Parliament," a "powerless, pedantic bit of stage scenery." Concerning Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Mr Wells makes the outrageous remark, "I think he wanted the war, and I think he wanted it to come when it did"— this of a high-minded statesman who had for years been struggling for a Concert of Europe, tried hard to get Germany into it. and in the crisis of 1914 left no stone unturned to avoid war by means of conference or arbitration. Lord Curzon and Lord Tyrrell are contemptuously dismissed by Mr. Wells as men with "governess trained minds" and as "infantile defectives." Compared with "the blinkered stupidity of Grey and Curzon," and the "elaborate unreality" of Lord Haldane. Lenin, it appears, was "a very great man." Mr. Wells's literary contemporaries are treated somewhat more gently, but go few of the outstanding men of the twentieth century satisfy his exacting demands that one is left wondering where we are to look for the new Samurai, the marvellous supermen, who are to turn this muddled world inside out and refurnish it with scientific reasonableness and comfort.

Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : 1931 - 1954), Saturday 8 December 1934, page 8