Experiment in Autobiography

THE MAN of the MONTH

[Macmillan, $4.00]

IF autobiography should be judged by its candor, and I think it should, this Experiment of Mr. Wells is a performance of the first order.

Whatever he thinks he is, Mr. Wells is a teacher born and made. The passionate desire to spread understanding, the jets of brilliancy, the sudden illumination of ideas, definiteness, clarity — his are the gifts of the Perfect Pedagogue. One of the most interesting of living men, he is no artist. Strange it is that so rich an intelligence, so acute a perceptiveness, should seek a goal of living that has no element of beauty. Deaf to music, blind to the changing seasons, even the Englishman’s birthright of delight in birds and flowers is not in him. Of the miracles which poetry, architecture, painting, sculpture, have wrought in the spirit of man he knows nothing. Henry James, with prodigious circumlocution, labors to show him how a novel may become a work of art. But to Wells the Jamesian mind is ‘edentate as a pseudopodium.’ To him quite obviously art is too toughly irrational to be masticated and Fletcherized. Conrad found Wells ‘unsympathetic and incomprehensible,’ and to him Conrad’s ‘absurd’ preoccupation with form is a shade ridiculous. As to Arnold Bennett, though Wells felt the brotherhood of their common adventure in ‘breaking through,’art, which was the breath of Bennett’s being, bothered and ‘stalled’ him.

Wells’s theory of biography is as interesting and original as his vision of a planned world in which every man will have his own comfortable niche. You start with the Persona, as our old friend Jung described it, which is the personal conception a man has of himself the image in his shaving mirror and all that lies behind it. That is your pou sto, the fulcrum of your universe, and on that pedestal you strip yourself for the world to see, turning yourself, body, soul, and breeches, inside out,.

It must be made evident to your audience that you have a central philosophy, for if you have n’t one you are not educated, and interesting biography is a story of an education. Wells’s own central philosophy, of course, is the planned ideal or a world wherein mankind is liberated by machines. All irks and frictions are banished. Every citizen is measured for his potential, and, if he is worth it, placed among the Kinetics, the doers of administrative work, or abased among the Poietics, whose privilege it is to make suggestions for controlling the base and enkindling the dull.

That is Wells’s first and great commandment, but, being human as well as intellectual, he is perpetually engrossed by a sense of the desirability of women. First he writes of his own women, freely, as suits a man of his manifest ascendency. Then he passes briskly to the women of his acquaintance, dealing out to them a generous publicity which sometimes, somewhere, might prove quite disconcerting. And so he moves by easy stages to the women of his ideal, bare-limbed, free, and bold, who, in his language, belong (with their men) to the race of Samurai, but whom we should be more apt to characterize by a short and incisive Biblical term.

Wells’s brain, he says, is third-class. That I don’t believe, but certainly he uses it in a first-class way. The adventures of that brain are thrilling, He pits it against the absurdity and injustice and convention of the world. Nothing can down him. He and that third-class brain of his are perpetually wriggling forward past all the firstclass entries in the race. He scraps his outworn ideas as manufacturers scrap their old machinery. He is untamable, unsinkable, unbeatable. Always his purpose holds. He is the supreme irritant of mankind. God keep him at it.

ELLERY SEDGWICK