H. G. Wells - Certain Personal Matters

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CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS

BY

H.G. WELLS

LONDON
T. FISHER UNWIN
PATERNOSTER SQUARE, E.C.
1901

CONTENTS

PAGE

THOUGHTS ON CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHARLOTTE 7

THE TROUBLE OF LIFE 12

ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE 18

THE HOUSE OF DI SORNO 22

OF CONVERSATION 27

IN A LITERARY HOUSEHOLD 32

ON SCHOOLING AND THE PHASES OF MR. SANDSOME 36

THE POET AND THE EMPORIUM 40

THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS 45

THE LITERARY REGIMEN 49

HOUSE-HUNTING AS AN OUTDOOR AMUSEMENT 54

OF BLADES AND BLADERY 59

OF CLEVERNESS 63

THE POSE NOVEL 67

THE VETERAN CRICKETER 71

CONCERNING A CERTAIN LADY 76

THE SHOPMAN 80

THE BOOK OF CURSES 85

DUNSTONE'S DEAR LADY 90

EUPHEMIA'S NEW ENTERTAINMENT (_this is illustrated_) 94

FOR FREEDOM OF SPELLING 98

INCIDENTAL THOUGHTS ON A BALD HEAD 104

OF A BOOK UNWRITTEN 108

THE EXTINCTION OF MAN 115

THE WRITING OF ESSAYS 120

THE PARKES MUSEUM 124

BLEAK MARCH IN EPPING FOREST 128

THE THEORY OF QUOTATION 132

ON THE ART OF STAYING AT THE SEASIDE 135

CONCERNING CHESS 140

THE COAL-SCUTTLE 145

BAGARROW 150

THE BOOK OF ESSAYS DEDICATORY 155

THROUGH A MICROSCOPE 159

THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING 164

THE AMATEUR NATURE-LOVER 169

FROM AN OBSERVATORY 174

THE MODE IN MONUMENTS 177

HOW I DIED 182

CERTAIN PERSONAL MATTERS

THOUGHTS ON CHEAPNESS AND MY AUNT CHARLOTTE

The world mends. In my younger days people believed in mahogany; some of
my readers will remember it--a heavy, shining substance, having a
singularly close resemblance to raw liver, exceedingly heavy to move,
and esteemed on one or other count the noblest of all woods. Such of us
as were very poor and had no mahogany pretended to have mahogany; and
the proper hepatite tint was got by veneering. That makes one incline to
think it was the colour that pleased people. In those days there was a
word "trashy," now almost lost to the world. My dear Aunt Charlotte used
that epithet when, in her feminine way, she swore at people she did not
like. "Trashy" and "paltry" and "Brummagem" was the very worst she could
say of them. And she had, I remember, an intense aversion to plated
goods and bronze halfpence. The halfpence of her youth had been vast and
corpulent red-brown discs, which it was folly to speak of as small
change. They were fine handsome coins, and almost as inconvenient as
crown-pieces. I remember she corrected me once when I was very young.
"Don't call a penny a copper, dear," she said; "copper is a metal. The
pennies they have nowadays are bronze." It is odd how our childish
impressions cling to us. I still regard bronze as a kind of upstart
intruder, a mere trashy pretender among metals.

All my Aunt Charlotte's furniture was thoroughly good, and most of it
extremely uncomfortable; there was not a thing for a little boy to break
and escape damnation in the household. Her china was the only thing with
a touch of beauty in it--at least I remember nothing else--and each of
her blessed plates was worth the happiness of a mortal for days
together. And they dressed me in a Nessus suit of valuable garments. I
learned the value of thoroughly good things only too early. I knew the
equivalent of a teacup to the very last scowl, and I have hated good,
handsome property ever since. For my part I love cheap things, trashy
things, things made of the commonest rubbish that money can possibly
buy; things as vulgar as primroses, and as transitory as a morning's
frost.

Think of all the advantages of a cheap possession--cheap and nasty, if
you will--compared with some valuable substitute. Suppose you need this
or that. "Get a good one," advises Aunt Charlotte; "one that will last."
You do--and it does last. It lasts like a family curse. These great
plain valuable things, as plain as good women, as complacently assured
of their intrinsic worth--who does not know them? My Aunt Charlotte
scarcely had a new thing in her life. Her mahogany was avuncular; her
china remotely ancestral; her feather beds and her bedsteads!--they were
haunted; the births, marriages, and deaths associated with the best one
was the history of our race for three generations. There was more in her
house than the tombstone rectitude of the chair-backs to remind me of
the graveyard. I can still remember the sombre aisles of that house, the
vault-like shadows, the magnificent window curtains that blotted out the
windows. Life was too trivial for such things. She never knew she tired
of them, but she did. That was the secret of her temper, I think; they
engendered her sombre Calvinism, her perception of the trashy quality of
human life. The pretence that they were the accessories to human life
was too transparent. _We_ were the accessories; we minded them for a
little while, and then we passed away. They wore us out and cast us
aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the actors who played on
through the piece. It was even so with clothing. We buried my other
maternal aunt--Aunt Adelaide--and wept, and partly forgot her; but her
wonderful silk dresses--they would stand alone--still went rustling
cheerfully about an ephemeral world.

All that offended my sense of proportion, my feeling of what is due to
human life, even when I was a little boy. I want things of my own,
things I can break without breaking my heart; and, since one can live
but once, I want some change in my life--to have this kind of thing and
then that. I never valued Aunt Charlotte's good old things until I sold
them. They sold remarkably well: those chairs like nether millstones for
the grinding away of men; the fragile china--an incessant anxiety until
accident broke it, and the spell of it at the same time; those silver
spoons, by virtue of which Aunt Charlotte went in fear of burglary for
six-and-fifty years; the bed from which I alone of all my kindred had
escaped; the wonderful old, erect, high-shouldered, silver-faced clock.

But, as I say, our ideas are changing--mahogany has gone, and repp
curtains. Articles are made for man, nowadays, and not man, by careful
early training, for articles. I feel myself to be in many respects a
link with the past. Commodities come like the spring flowers, and vanish
again. "Who steals my watch steals trash," as some poet has remarked;
the thing is made of I know not what metal, and if I leave it on the
mantel for a day or so it goes a deep blackish purple that delights me
exceedingly. My grandfather's hat--I understood when I was a little boy
that I was to have that some day. But now I get a hat for ten shillings,
or less, two or three times a year. In the old days buying clothes was
well-nigh as irrevocable as marriage. Our flat is furnished with
glittering things--wanton arm-chairs just strong enough not to collapse
under you, books in gay covers, carpets you are free to drop lighted
fusees upon; you may scratch what you like, upset your coffee, cast your
cigar ash to the four quarters of heaven. Our guests, at anyrate, are
not snubbed by our furniture. It knows its place.

But it is in the case of art and adornment that cheapness is most
delightful. The only thing that betrayed a care for beauty on the part
of my aunt was her dear old flower garden, and even there she was not
above suspicion. Her favourite flowers were tulips, rigid tulips with
opulent crimson streaks. She despised wildings. Her ornaments were
simply displays of the precious metal. Had she known the price of
platinum she would have worn that by preference. Her chains and brooches
and rings were bought by weight. She would have turned her back on
Benvenuto Cellini if he was not 22 carats fine. She despised
water-colour art; her conception of a picture was a vast domain of oily
brown by an Old Master. The Babbages at the Hall had a display of gold
plate swaggering in the corner of the dining-room; and the visitor
(restrained by a plush rope from examining the workmanship) was told the
value, and so passed on. I like my art unadorned: thought and skill, and
the other strange quality that is added thereto, to make things
beautiful--and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and paper, and,
behold! a thing of beauty!--as they do in Japan. And if it should fall
into the fire--well, it has gone like yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow
there will be another.

These Japanese are indeed the apostles of cheapness. The Greeks lived to
teach the world beauty, the Hebrews to teach it morality, and now the
Japanese are hammering in the lesson that men may be honourable, daily
life delightful, and a nation great without either freestone houses,
marble mantelpieces, or mahogany sideboards. I have sometimes wished
that my Aunt Charlotte could have travelled among the Japanese nation.
She would, I know, have called it a "parcel of trash." Their use of
paper--paper suits, paper pocket-handkerchiefs--would have made her
rigid with contempt. I have tried, but I cannot imagine my Aunt
Charlotte in paper underclothing. Her aversion to paper was
extraordinary. Her Book of Beauty was printed on satin, and all her
books were bound in leather, the boards regulated rather than decorated
with a severe oblong. Her proper sphere was among the ancient
Babylonians, among which massive populace even the newspapers were
built of brick. She would have compared with the King's daughter whose
raiment was of wrought gold. When I was a little boy I used to think she
had a mahogany skeleton. However, she is gone, poor old lady, and at
least she left me her furniture. Her ghost was torn in pieces after the
sale--must have been. Even the old china went this way and that. I took
what was perhaps a mean revenge of her for the innumerable
black-holeings, bread-and-water dinners, summary chastisements, and
impossible tasks she inflicted upon me for offences against her too
solid possessions. You will see it at Woking. It is a light and graceful
cross. It is a mere speck of white between the monstrous granite
paperweights that oppress the dead on either side of her. Sometimes I am
half sorry for that. When the end comes I shall not care to look her in
the face--she will be so humiliated.

THE TROUBLE OF LIFE

I do not know whether this will awaken a sympathetic lassitude in, say,
fifty per cent. of its readers, or whether my experience is unique and
my testimony simply curious. At anyrate, it is as true as I can make it.
Whether this is a mere mood, and a certain flagrant exhilaration my true
attitude towards things, or this is my true attitude and the exuberant
phase a lapse from it, I cannot say. Probably it does not matter. The
thing is that I find life an extremely troublesome affair. I do not want
to make any railing accusations against life; it is--to my
taste--neither very sad nor very horrible. At times it is distinctly
amusing. Indeed, I know nothing in the same line that can quite compare
with it. But there is a difference between general appreciation and
uncritical acceptance. At times I find life a Bother.

The kind of thing that I object to is, as a good example, all the
troublesome things one has to do every morning in getting up. There is
washing. This is an age of unsolicited personal confidences, and I will
frankly confess that if it were not for Euphemia I do not think I should
wash at all. There is a vast amount of humbug about washing. Vulgar
people not only profess a passion for the practice, but a physical
horror of being unwashed. It is a sort of cant. I can understand a
sponge bath being a novelty the first time and exhilarating the second
and third. But day after day, week after week, month after month, and
nothing to show at the end of it all! Then there is shaving. I have to
get shaved because Euphemia hates me with a blue jowl, and I will admit
I hate myself. Yet, if I were left alone, I do not think my personal
taste would affect my decision; I will say that for myself. Either I
hack about with a blunt razor--my razors are always blunt--until I am a
kind of Whitechapel Horror, and with hair in tufts upon my chin like the
top of a Bosjesman's head, or else I have to spend all the morning being
dabbed about the face by a barber with damp hands. In either case it is
a repulsive thing to have, eating into one's time when one might be
living; and I have calculated that all the hair I have lost in this way,
put end to end, would reach to Berlin. All that vital energy thrown
away! However, "Thorns and bristles shall it bring forth to thee." I
suppose it is part of the primal curse, and I try and stand it like a
man. But the thing is a bother all the same.

Then after shaving comes the hunt for the collar-stud. Of all idiotic
inventions the modern collar is the worst. A man who has to write things
for such readers as mine cannot think over-night of where he puts his
collar-stud; he has to keep his mind at an altogether higher level.
Consequently he walks about the bedroom, thinking hard, and dropping
things about: here a vest and there a collar, and sowing a bitter
harvest against the morning. Or he sits on the edge of the bed jerking
his garments this way and that. "I shot a slipper in the air," as the
poet sings, and in the morning it turns up in the most impossible
quarters, and where you least expect it. And, talking of going to bed,
before Euphemia took the responsibility over, I was always forgetting to
wind my watch. But now that is one of the things she neglects.

Then, after getting up, there is breakfast. Autolycus of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_ may find heaven there, but I am differently constituted. There
is, to begin with the essence of the offence--the stuff that has to be
eaten somehow. Then there is the paper. Unless it is the face of a
fashionable beauty, I know of nothing more absolutely uninteresting than
a morning paper. You always expect to find something in it, and never
do. It wastes half my morning sometimes, going over and over the thing,
and trying to find out why they publish it. If I edited a daily I think
I should do like my father does when he writes to me. "Things much the
same," he writes; "the usual fussing about the curate's red socks"--a
long letter for him. The rest margin. And, by the bye, there are letters
every morning at breakfast, too!

Now I do not grumble at letters. You can read them instead of getting on
with your breakfast. They are entertaining in a way, and you can tear
them up at the end, and in that respect at least they are better than
people who come to see you. Usually, too, you need not make a reply. But
sometimes Euphemia gets hold of some still untorn, and says in her
dictatorial way that they _have_ to be answered--insists--says I _must_.
Yet she knows that nothing fills me with a livelier horror than having
to answer letters. It paralyses me. I waste whole days sometimes
mourning over the time that I shall have to throw away presently,
answering some needless impertinence--requests for me to return books
lent to me; reminders from the London Library that my subscription is
overdue; proposals for me to renew my ticket at the stores--Euphemia's
business really; invitations for me to go and be abashed before
impertinent distinguished people: all kinds of bothering things.

And speaking of letters and invitations brings me round to friends. I
dislike most people; in London they get in one's way in the street and
fill up railway carriages, and in the country they stare at you--but I
_hate_ my friends. Yet Euphemia says I _must_ "keep up" my friends. They
would be all very well if they were really true friends and respected my
feelings and left me alone, just to sit quiet. But they come wearing
shiny clothes, and mop and mow at me and expect me to answer their
gibberings. Polite conversation always appears to me to be a wicked
perversion of the blessed gift of speech, which, I take it, was given us
to season our lives rather than to make them insipid. New friends are
the worst in this respect. With old friends one is more at home; you
give them something to eat or drink, or look at, or something--whatever
they seem to want--and just turn round and go on smoking quietly. But
every now and then Euphemia or Destiny inflicts a new human being upon
me. I do not mean a baby, though the sentence has got that turn
somehow, but an introduction; and the wretched thing, all angles and
offence, keeps bobbing about me and discovering new ways of worrying me,
trying, I believe, to find out what topics interest me, though the fact
is no topics interest me. Once or twice, of course, I have met human
beings I think I could have got on with very well, after a time; but in
this mood, at least, I doubt if any human being is quite worth the
bother of a new acquaintance.

These are just sample bothers--shaving, washing, answering letters,
talking to people. I could specify hundreds more. Indeed, in my sadder
moments, it seems to me life is all compact of bothers. There are the
details of business--knowing the date approximately (an incessant
anxiety) and the time of day. Then, having to buy things. Euphemia does
most of this, it is true, but she draws the line at my boots and gloves
and hosiery and tailoring. Then, doing up parcels and finding pieces of
string or envelopes or stamps--which Euphemia might very well manage for
me. Then, finding your way back after a quiet, thoughtful walk. Then,
having to get matches for your pipe. I sometimes dream of a better
world, where pipe, pouch, and matches all keep together instead of being
mutually negatory. But Euphemia is always putting everything into some
hiding-hole or other, which she calls its "place." Trivial things in
their way, you may say, yet each levying so much toll on my brain and
nervous system, and demanding incessant vigilance and activity. I
calculated once that I wasted a masterpiece upon these mountainous
little things about every three months of my life. Can I help thinking
of them, then, and asking why I suffer thus? And can I avoid seeing at
last how it is they hang together?

For there is still one other bother, a kind of _bother botherum_, to
tell of, though I hesitate at the telling. It brings this rabble herd of
worries into line and makes them formidable; it is, so to speak, the
Bother Commander-in-Chief. Well! Euphemia. I simply worship the ground
she treads upon, mind, but at the same time the truth is the truth.
Euphemia is a bother. She is a brave little woman, and helps me in
every conceivable way. But I wish she would not. It is so obviously all
her doing. She makes me get up of a morning--I would not stand as much
from anybody else--and keeps a sharp eye on my chin and collar. If it
were not for her I could sit about always with no collar or tie on in
that old jacket she gave to the tramp, and just smoke and grow a beard
and let all the bothers slide. I would never wash, never shave, never
answer any letters, never go to see any friends, never do any
work--except, perhaps, an insulting postcard to a publisher now and
again. I would just sit about.

Sometimes I think this may be peculiar in me. At other times I fancy I
am giving voice to the secret feeling of every member of my sex. I
suspect, then, that we would all do as the noble savage does, take our
things off and lie about comfortable, if only someone had the courage to
begin. It is these women--all love and reverence to Euphemia
notwithstanding--who make us work and bother us with Things. They keep
us decent, and remind us we have a position to support. And really,
after all, this is not my original discovery! There is the third chapter
of Genesis, for instance. And then who has not read Carlyle's gloating
over a certain historical suit of leather? It gives me a queer thrill of
envy, that Quaker Fox and his suit of leather. Conceive it, if you can!
One would never have to quail under the scrutiny of a tailor any more.
Thoreau, too, come to think of it, was, by way of being a prophet, a
pioneer in this Emancipation of Man from Bothery.

Then the silent gentry who brew our Chartreuse; what are they in
retirement for? Looking back into history, with the glow of discovery in
my eyes, I find records of wise men--everyone acknowledged they were
wise men--who lived apart. In every age the same associate of solitude,
silence, and wisdom. The holy hermits!... I grant it, they professed to
flee wickedness and seek after righteousness, but now my impression is
that they fled bothers. We all know they had an intense aversion to any
savour of domesticity, and they never shaved, washed, dined, visited,
had new clothes. Holiness, indeed! They were _viveurs_.... We have
witnessed Religion without Theology, and why not an Unsectarian Thebaid?
I sometimes fancy it needs only one brave man to begin.... If it were
not for the fuss Euphemia would make I certainly should. But I know she
would come and worry me worse than St. Anthony was worried until I put
them all on again, and that keeps me from the attempt.

I am curious whether mine is the common experience. I fancy, after all,
I am only seeing in a clearer way, putting into modern phrase, so to
speak, an observation old as the Pentateuch. And looking up I read upon
a little almanac with which Euphemia has cheered my desk:--

"The world was sad" (sweet sadness!)
"The garden was a wild" (a picturesque wild)
"And man the hermit" (he made no complaint)
"Till the woman smiled."--CAMPBELL.

[And very shortly after he had, as you know, all that bother about the
millinery.]

ON THE CHOICE OF A WIFE

Wife-choosing is an unending business. This sounds immoral, but what I
mean will be clearer in the context. People have lived--innumerable
people--exhausted experience, and yet other people keep on coming to
hand, none the wiser, none the better. It is like a waterfall more than
anything else in the world. Every year one has to turn to and warn
another batch about these stale old things. Yet it is one's duty--the
last thing that remains to a man. And as a piece of worldly wisdom, that
has nothing to do with wives, always leave a few duties neglected for
the comfort of your age. There are such a lot of other things one can do
when one is young.

Now, the kind of wife a young fellow of eight- or nine-and-twenty
insists on selecting is something of one-and-twenty or less,
inexperienced, extremely pretty, graceful, and well dressed, not too
clever, accomplished; but I need not go on, for the youthful reader can
fill in the picture himself from his own ideal. Every young man has his
own ideal, as a matter of course, and they are all exactly alike. Now, I
do not intend to repeat all the stale old saws of out-of-date wiseacres.
Most of them are even more foolish than the follies they reprove. Take,
for instance, the statement that "beauty fades." Absurd; everyone knows
perfectly well that, as the years creep on, beauty simply gets more
highly coloured. And then, "beauty is only skin-deep." Fantastically
wrong! Some of it is not that; and, for the rest, is a woman like a toy
balloon?--just a surface? To hear that proverb from a man is to know him
at once for a phonographic kind of fool. The fundamental and enduring
grace of womanhood goes down to the skeleton; you cannot have a pretty
face without a pretty skull, just as you cannot have one without a good
temper.

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