MR. H. G. WELLS WRITES HIS OWN OBITUARY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 277, 23 November 1936, Page 10

MR. H. G. WELLS WRITES HIS OWN OBITUARY

What He Would Wish to have Said of Him on His Death—- “ More the Scientific Man than *he Artist

ItFK IL G. WELLB is, of course, very much alive. But here is what he would wish to have said of him when the time comes for his obituary to be written, says the The name of Mr ](. G. Wells, who died yesterday afternoon of heart failure in the Paddington Infirmary at the age of 97, will have few associations for the younger generation. But those listeners whose adult memories stretch back to the opening decades of the present century and who shared the miscellaneous reading of the period, may recall a number of titles of books he wrote and may even find in some odd attic an actual volume or so of his works. He was indeed one ot the most prolific “literary hacks” of that time; he not only wrote books himself, but critical studies and even short volumes were written about him, and the number of entries under his name in the catalogue of that mighty literary mausoleum, the Reading Room (long since deserted by any readers) of the British Museum in London, amount to nearly six hundred. Au interesting study of Wells was broadcast live years ago from the London centre bv Miss Phelps Lemon, and little has arisen since to modify her verdict. She describes him as something between a portent and a pioneer. He wrote a very frank and explicit autobiography which was published in 1934 and he added a supplement which, though it has never been printed, is accessible to the curious in the manuscript collection in the British Museum. From these documents we learn that his origins were common, and socially if not chronologically he reached back to the eighteenth century and the ascendancy of Ihe British “landed gentry.” He was born in 1860. His father was a gardener who became a small shopkeeper and professional cricketer, and his mother was the daughter of an old world innkeeper, and before her marriage a “lady's maid” and subsequently a • 1 housekeeper. * ’ The most interesting thing about Wells was his refusal to accept the social inferiority to which he seemed to hav e been born and the tenacity with which, he insisted upon his role as the free citizen of a new world that was arising out of the debacle of the warring national states of lhe

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He had a flair for “what is coining.” Jte was a liberal democrat in the sense that he claimed an unlimited right to think, criticise, discuss and suggest, and he was a socialist in his antagonism to personal, racial or national monopolisation. Jt was his vanity to compare himself to Roger Bacon, and his attempts to anticipate the comprehensive synthesis of our present World Encyclopaedia, in his now forgotten “Outline of History,” his “Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind,” his contribu tions to the “Science of Life” and his “Anatomy of Frustration,” are still remarkable, having regard to this period, for the boldness of their aim, even if the necessary impatience, limitations and ineptitudes of his treatment disqualify them now as serious contributions to general education. Wells was a copious and repetitive essayist upon public affairs and a still mo r e copious writer of fiction. He wrote scientific romances, whoso original freshness has long since been destroyed by the general advance of knowledge, and novels which have neither the circumstantial correctitude which gi v e his contemporaries, Galsworthy and Bennett, their documentary value, nor that ruthless frankness which endow such work as Maugham's “Ashenden” and so much of the younger American school of that time, with a sort of bleeding immortality.

Wells was essentially a.i intellectual with an instinctive dislike for the vvhemenc.ies the zeals, patriotisms and partisanships, in tensities and emotional floods of life. When he dealt with passion he was apt lu write insincerely. His keenest feeling seems tc have been a cold anger at intellectual and moral pretentiousness. The question whether ho was to be considered a ‘ humorist ’ was discussed but never settled and it need not trouble us now. He played a "iot very successful part in the early attempts to make the films mean something. The organisation, he says, was too much for him. It expelled whatever of his ideas had survived the director, automatically in the cutting room. Perhaps the organisation knew its own appeal bettor than he did. Ho was seriously injured i.i a brawl with some Fascist roughs brought about, by a rare fit of indignation on his part in 193-8, and his health was further impaired by a spell in a concentration eamp under the brief communist dictatorship of 1942. Thereafter hi? once considerable vitality seems to have deserted him. He had no recorded share in the vigorous mental and social renaissance we have witnessed in the past decade, in spite of the fact that it followed so closely upon lines he had foreshadowed. From being a premature, ho became a forgotten man. His immediate needs were relieved by a small civil list pension in l!»55. He occupied an old tu nble-down house upon the border of Regent’s Park ami his bent, shabby, slovenly ami latterly somewhat obese figure was frequently to be seen i.i the adjacent, gardens, sitting and looking idl\ at lhe boat on the lake or the flowers in the beds, or hobbling painfully about with the aid of a. stick, coughing and talking to himself. “Someday,” he would be heard to say, “f shall write a book, a real book.” Miss Phcljw Lemon has compared him not inaptly tn the reef-building coral polyp. He was much more the scientific man than the artist, though he dealt in literary forms. Scarcely anything remains of him now ami yet, without, him and his like, the reef of common ideas on which our civilisation stands to-day could never have arisen.