Mr. H. G. Wells, I understand, is engaged not on
an autobiography, but on an experiment in auto- biography. The distinction is subtle, but it exists. If you sit down to write your life's history you sit down and write it—and often enough it is dull stuff. That is autobiography. The other way you begin to put facts on paper and ask yourself perpetually whether they ever ought to be put on paper, or whether in their essence they can be. According to the answer you decide whether to continue or desist, to publish or cremate. That Mr. Wells' reminiscences and reflections will sooner or later be published I have little doubt— not, I hope, posthumously, like Arnold Bennett's note- books. But it will be harder work than the "Outline of History" and I am not surprised that it should still be called experimental. For Mr. Wells is not the man to be content with any mere record of places visited and things done and people seen. He will want to analyse his own personality, recapture his own impres- sions and reactions and sensations year by year, paint in the background of people and events against which he lived his life. In short, it will be not merely an autobiography of II. G. Wells, but the biographies—or patches of the biography—of a vast number of interesting people besides. Manifestly a literary event of the first magnitude—when it comes.
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