CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

My object in these pages is to follow, for Catholic readers, Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_; to point out the principal popular errors, most of them now out of date, which its author has repeated, and to state the opposing truths with their supporting evidence and reasoning.

If it be asked why I should devote such labour to a book which is but a passing fashion, and that not in the classes or districts which count most, I answer that, though ephemeral, the work has had a wide circulation, and is therefore of some momentary effect worth checking, while it is also representative of its type: writing of wide circulation which repeats as facts for general acceptation theories once respectable and now exploded. Now to check erroneous statement is always worth while.

If it be asked why I envisage a Catholic audience in particular, I answer that the issue in such matters lies between the Catholic Church and its modern opponents. The hosts of modern writers in all countries, of whom Mr. Wells is a local example, act more or less consciously in reaction against the Catholic Church. It is her doctrines they are concerned to attack; and soon, with the increasing effect of the Church upon the one hand, the increasing abandonment (outside her boundaries) of all transcendental belief on the other, there will be but two opposed camps: the Faith and its enemies.

Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption, of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish.

Further, I have the legitimate motive of sustaining others. There are Catholics into whose hands a work of this kind falls, and it is possible that here and there a Catholic may be disturbed in his faith by popular literature of this kind. For the sake of this very small number of chance Catholics, who may suffer from a popular (though ephemeral) work of this kind, I desire to examine the book and distinguish its merits from its absurdities. One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more important than a host of the average reading public of England and America, drowsily accepting stuff they have heard all their lives, and reading it because they have always believed it to be true.

A Catholic disturbed in his faith is like a man troubled with his sight. A Catholic losing his faith is like a man going blind. One should take a great deal of trouble to prevent a man from going blind.

I am aware that to aver such a motive reads presumptuous and a little ridiculous. For faith is strongest in the humble. But the motive is there, and at any rate the important thing is that Mr. Wells’s widely read, though necessarily short-lived, survey of human affairs, with its violently anti-Catholic motive, should not be of effect on any Catholic mind so far as a Catholic critic can provide the antidote.

Every man, even the idlest, occupies his time with something or other. The vast majority of men have their energies absorbed by their daily tasks. So when a man comes forward with a mass of historical facts, drawn from Encyclopædias (which not one man in a thousand has had the leisure to look up in those books of reference), and tacks on to these historical facts all manner of false conclusions (destructive of the only truth worth having, destructive of the one grasp on reality which is of any value to men), the reader may well be misled.

He may easily say to himself, “Since all these historical facts are presumably true, the conclusions tacked on to them are also probably true.” And in this way a false philosophy is insinuated.

Mr. Wells’s main motive—the honestly held conviction which drives him to writing matter of this kind—is reaction against the Catholic Church. But as this motive is not stated—(and, indeed, I fancy, not fully conscious in the mind of the writer)—the reader may take his work to be neutral matter. In doing so, false history, and, therefore, false philosophy (for history is but the illustration of philosophy) may, without his knowledge, pass into his mind. It is this which it is important to prevent.

At the outset of my task it behoves me to set forth the great talents with which Mr. Wells has been endowed by Almighty God, and especially the talents suitable to the writer of general history. For, indeed, he seemed from his earlier works admirably fitted for writing a general outline of history, and would, by the consent of all, have been thought apt for the task—had he not undertaken it.

First, he writes very clearly; he practises an excellent economy in the use of words. This, for popular exposition, is essential; and he never fails in it. He never lapses into verbosity. He is direct, simple, clear.

Next, he possesses a sense of time. Now in history nothing is more valuable. Within his lights, within the measure of his limited instruction, he does see _time_ in right scale; and that is so rare in any historian that one cannot welcome it too warmly.

Next, we should remark that Mr. Wells has (as his works of fiction amply show) a strong power of making the image he has framed in his own mind arise in the mind of his reader. This is, indeed, his chief talent.

It is a talent extremely rare: the very essential of good imaginative writing, but of particular importance in historical writing. For History, as the great Michelet finely put it, should be a resurrection of the flesh. Were I engaged upon a critique of Mr. Wells’s more permanent literary claims I would dilate on this: for such a gift is of quite exceptional power in him. None of our contemporaries possesses it in anything like the same degree. But I am not concerned here with his style, and must reluctantly leave it.

Next, it is worth noting that Mr. Wells is exceedingly accurate in his use of reference books and proof-readers. The dates are always right, and the names and all the mechanical details of the book are similarly exact. I have a particular right to praise such a quality because in my own case (as in the case of the great Michelet, whom I have just quoted) I despair of accuracy. My own writings on History are full of misprints: “right” for “left” in descriptions of battles, “north” for “south,” “east” for “west,” transposed letters and the rest of it. Mr. Wells’s writing is quite remarkable for its freedom from such irritating verbal blemishes.

But much more important than these advantages which he possesses for a writing of an Outline of History is his sincerity. He feels the importance of History to mankind, and especially, I think, to that part of mankind which he knows best—the mankind of the English Home Counties and London Suburbs. He feels instinctively that he and his must now obtain a general view. It is due to Mr. Wells to say that hardly anyone else in our restricted society feels this as strongly as he does. Our newspapers, our politicians, and even our financiers, cosmopolitan though they are, do not feel the need of trying to understand the past of Europe and of the world. They are still soaked in what is left of the old self-sufficiency. But Mr. Wells has woken up, and it is to his credit.

I put his sincerity thus last in this category of his advantages for writing History, because it is the chief. He is conspicuously and naively sincere. This good quality is apparent in every line of the work as it first appeared. It is equally apparent in the first part of the new revised edition. He does really believe from the bottom of his heart all that he read in the textbooks of his youth. He does really and from the bottom of his heart believe that the little world he knows is the whole world; and that his doctrines of goodwill, vague thinking, loose loving, and the rest—all soaked in the local atmosphere of his life—may be the salvation of mankind. It is not vanity or pride (though, of course, it is ignorance); it is a perfectly honest conviction. He cannot imagine how things could possibly be otherwise; and that, by the way, is the root of his recently acquired hatred of the Catholic Church, which has now become, directly and indirectly, the universally present savour in his writing.

He is sincerely bewildered and exasperated at the power of Something so different from the only world he knows. He hopes vaguely that the Church may be dying: he suspects it is not—the doubt worries him. It moves him to hatred; but that hatred is sincere. This sincerity of his, even where it is misguided and untaught, is respectable. He does sincerely desire to do good to his fellow-men within the narrow circle of his experience and understanding.

If the reader will add up all these advantages for the writing of History, he will find them amount, I think, to a very notable sum.

There are few men who could have produced a general history better than Mr. Wells—had he not suffered from certain graver disadvantages to which I shall presently allude. To be sincere is essential. To have the motive of History is both singular and decisive. To have clarity, economy and a sense of time is rare and of high value. To be accurate in detail of dates, etc., is a most excellent minor virtue in any historian.

Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the first moment that the _Time Machine_ appeared, so many years ago, I have consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public writing, and I shall praise them still.

Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History, let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been made against him.

The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn, etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an _outline_ of any movement, however great, in any space, however small. The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far as the _manner_ of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is wrong.

Again, he is wrongly accused of superficiality. That is an accusation made by people who see—what, indeed, is obvious—that the book has no lasting value, and that therefore they can call it hard names with impunity, secure against the judgment of posterity. The book is ephemeral, certainly; but no honest critic can call it superficial. The book is not superficial at all. On the contrary, it goes to the roots of things, and considers what is really important to mankind. One may indeed call the writer superficial in so far as he knows nothing of beauty or tradition—that is due to his unavoidable limitations; but superficial his effort is not. It is as searching in the matter of cause and effect as its writer can make it. That is not saying very much, for its writer has never had the opportunity for digging deep into cause and effect; but the book does not suffer from that prime mark of superficiality—_indifference_. Mr. Wells means to say all that is in him, and if there is not very much in him, that is not his fault.

He has a neutral quality, neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the writing of History; or, perhaps, rather an advantage than a disadvantage, and that is, an intense nationalism. An English scientist is supreme. An English book changes the world. An English mode of thought is self-evidently the best. The Catholic Church itself is hateful mainly because it is foreign. Such nationalism is often the unconscious accompaniment of limitation, but, upon the whole, it serves the historical sense. After all, any worker must be himself. He cannot create unless there is a flame within him. Such flames arise from intense conviction, and the historian steeped in his own country does better, in my judgment, despite his inevitable leanings, than one who pretends attachment to nothing: for attachment to nothing is sterility. The three great historians whom good judges most admire were all intense lovers of their country—an Athenian, a Frenchman and a Scotsman.

Now for the disadvantages.

The first and most glaring of these is Provincialism.

But here I must warn my readers that they will not discover in this criticism any of those personal descriptions or offensive allusions to private life by which our vulgarians aim at extending their large circulations. I am concerned only with this one book of Mr. Wells’s, and with History and Religion in it; not with domestic details in the Author’s life or the caricatures of them. The mental formation and social motive of an author must indeed be alluded to in any judgment of his work, as must his defects of instruction or judgment. The rest is irrelevant. I have even, in revising the text, cut out anything which might be _mistaken_ for a personal allusion, and leave it, I believe, confined wholly to the criticism of historical statement, method and motive.

* * * * *

I have said, then, that with so many qualifications for writing a popular general History, Mr. Wells suffers from defects which ruin it; and the first of these is that his book is Provincial.

The word “Provincial” is a hard one; but it exactly applies to Mr. Wells’s History; therefore it must be used.

I find it the more difficult to use this necessary and precise word here because I know Mr. Wells, from an acquaintance of many years, to be abnormally sensitive to any printed judgment of his work.

Such extreme sensitiveness is not rare in men of vivid imagination, especially if they cultivate its literary expression. But in this case it is quite exceptionally developed; and I naturally hesitate to offend it.

Greatly as I admire Mr. Wells’s scientific romances, and have always admired them, I am compelled to use exact terms in this criticism. I cannot do otherwise, because the truth of History is a sacred thing—the most sacred next to the truths of Religion. If History is falsely written, the reader not warned of it obtains a distorted view of human action and comes to misunderstand all the most essential things of life, including Religion itself; and Mr. Wells’s History is obviously and fatally distorted through Provincialism.

Provincialism does not mean a limitation of experience to some one small department of life—we are all of us subjected to such limitations, and any man’s petty personal experience is always infinitely small compared with the total possible field of knowledge. Nor does Provincialism mean seeing things through the medium of one’s own habitat and character, both necessarily limited. All men must see, and can only see, through some such limited medium.

No, Provincialism means thinking that one “knows all about it”; Provincialism means a satisfied ignorance: a simple faith in the non-existence of what one has not experienced. Provincialism involves a contempt for anything foreign and, what is worse, an actual denial of things which the provincial person has not been made familiar with.

It is Provincialism in a yokel when he laughs at you for not knowing the way to his local railway station. It is not Provincialism to say, “I don’t know about this. It is new to me. I must examine it before I accept it.” But it is Provincialism to say, as the Frenchman in the story did of Joan of Arc, “It can’t be true. If it were I should have heard of it.”

It is not Provincialism to say, “I far prefer the atmosphere and institutions of my own country to those of any other.” But it is Provincialism to think that the Cathedral of Seville must necessarily be inferior to the Crystal Palace because it was built by Dagoes, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is either a humbug or a fool. It would not have been provincial in Mr. Wells to have written “the character of Napoleon repels me; give me rather the honest Englishman of my acquaintance than this hard and profound Southerner”; but it is dreadfully provincial to belittle Napoleon’s immense capacities. It would not be Provincialism in me, who do not know German, to say that Heine in translation had not moved me, and that when the German of Heine was read aloud to me it seemed to me harsh compared with the exquisite music of Keats; but it would be gross Provincialism in me were I to lay it down, ignorant as I am of German, that Heine was no poet, that his reputation was exaggerated, and that, say, Schiller was his superior in the management of the German tongue; yet that is how Mr. Wells treats Napoleon.

Now this vice of Provincialism runs right through Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ from beginning to end.

The moment he is on a thing that is not of his own religion and social experience he rejects it or blunders on it. I shall have many occasions for pointing this out in my criticism of the book, but I may mention here, by way of example, one out of these many, to which I shall return. This is Mr. Wells’s hopelessly provincial attitude towards the fragmentary record of the Gospels. He can only think of the events recorded as though they were taking place in the time and place he himself has known—they took place, as a fact, in the first century and in the Roman Empire. He imagines them taking place in a world where the supernatural elements of the story could only have been introduced gradually and after the death of the founder; whereas, in point of fact, the atmosphere of that time was in every class of society especially apt to the reception of the supernatural. There was scepticism among them—but the scepticism of society in the first century was not like our scepticism and—quite apart from the question whether such a state of mind were wise or unwise—the men of the first century accepted the Thaumaturge and expected the marvellous in connection with religion.

The next disadvantage which I find in Mr. Wells for the writing of an outline of History is one which he has developed somewhat late in his life, which is more and more warping his writing as a whole, and which is quite fatal to any attempt at History. This is his entertaining unreasoning reactions which one may now without exaggeration term rabid.

These reactions have a common root. They are all provoked by anything _traditional_. It is _Tradition_, its usage and Nobility which irks our author. Lineage offends him, and whatever is venerable and great.

He suffers these reactions against the Gentry—especially the Gentry of his own country—against soldiers, great military characters in history, against certain contemporaries of his, but, most of all, against the Catholic Church. To be thus provoked to action by others—not to direct one’s pen of one’s own initiative, but to have it jerked into action by the strength of another—is weakening to all authors, but it is death to the historian. For History, of all forms of writing, most demands a general and balanced action of the mind, free from all control save that of a calm, inward judgment.

Here I would have my reader note the exact words I use; for I use them with discretion and after having fully weighed them. I do not mean that the dislike of a particular type—such as that of the English gentleman—or of certain individuals, or of a powerful institution, such as is the Catholic Church—necessarily makes a man a bad historian. Every vivid writer must have affections and distastes, and History that is not vivid is not worth writing. But when the distaste becomes _unreasoning_ through violence, when it has that quality which we call “rabid”—a quality of impulse and unrestraint, the quality which makes men yell or pile on superlatives or descend to mere insult—then you have a quality useful perhaps in pamphleteering, but fatal to the reputation of an historian.

I do not mean that this quality is to be deplored in all writing or speaking: far from it. It is of great value in rhetoric; it will often move men in the direction desired; it is often justly applied to something evil against which an honest indignation is felt. What I do say is that in History it is out of place in proportion to its being unreasoning: and unreason is the very essence of these instinctive reactions. Cobbett’s _History of the Reformation_, for instance, is a first-rate piece of literary work, but bad history, because in his hatred of the Reformation he accepts anything against it—such as the impossible story of Anne Boleyn being Henry VIII’s daughter—and loses the faculty for weighing evidence.

To judge by his books, Mr. Wells came up against the English idea of a Gentleman early in life. He probably thought it an illusion, and a harmful one, from the first. Very many will here agree with him. But later on he became obsessed by the thing. He came to hate everything connected with what used to be called in England “the governing class.” He grew to hate Latin and Greek because these are, or were, the basis of a gentleman’s schooling; soldiering, because it was by tradition a gentleman’s profession—he hates it all, even down to the spurs worn by officers.

But Mr. Wells’s violent and blind reaction against the Catholic Church is a much more important matter. Here he is quarrelling with the very matter of History; for the foundation and career of the Catholic Church is the chief event in the history of mankind.

To judge (again) by his books, Mr. Wells seems to have come up against the Catholic Church late in life—he does not yet really know what it is. But here, again, he found a power opposed to many ideas which he cherished, and (more exasperating) to many things which he sympathized with and practised. Perhaps he felt that in a world turned Catholic a man like himself would have difficulty in carrying on, and therefore came to hate the idea of a world turned Catholic as a fish would hate the idea of a world without water. But this mere impulse—this mere instinctive kick, lacking sufficient knowledge and lacking reasoning power—this mere attack without any sufficient ammunition of instruction—this mere impatience—makes it impossible for the man who suffers thus to write History as it should be written.

For instance, his hatred of the Church makes him wish to believe that its influence is dying. Instead of looking around him, and seeing that Catholic influence over the more intelligent of modern men is markedly increasing, he shuts his eyes and screams his passionate refusal to accept so plain, if unpalatable, a fact. It has recently led him to write that sufficient income and interesting occupation would make Catholic priests pour out of the Church _en masse_: a judgment clearly ridiculous.

Again, in dealing with the Galileo case, he will have it that the advance of physical science broke down the Catholic scheme. The motive of such a statement is clearly to suggest that the Faith is incompatible with real knowledge and that all extension of ascertained truth tends to destroy the Christian Religion.

But that is not rational history; it lacks even elementary instruction; a schoolboy ought to know better than to write thus. The historical process whereby so much of Europe was lost to European religion was not _first_ an advance of physical science, _then_ a loosening of the Catholic authority, and, _lastly_, a wide denial of that authority and the establishment of various heresies. The historical process was just the other way—_first_ came the violent explosion of spiritual revolt and anarchy which nearly wrecked our civilization altogether; _then_, later, a large but not complete recovery; then, _last_, and principally in societies which had retained or recovered the Catholic culture, a new and remarkable advance in physical science.

It is not historically possible that astronomical discovery in the seventeenth century, the telescope, and the great new development of mathematics, could lead to the denial of Catholic doctrine in the sixteenth. Not only is it impossible in History; it could not possibly be true in psychology. No one with an elementary knowledge of Catholic spirit and doctrine could conceive that doctrine and spirit to be affected by any discovery in the plane of physical science. You might as well say that a man’s judgment on his duties to his country would be affected by a new ordnance survey, or his admiration of Bach by the discovery of zinc photography for printing music.

With all this I will deal later in more detail when I come to those parts of Mr. Wells’s work which specially show his general animus against the Faith. Meanwhile, let me conclude with another disadvantage which I find in him for the task he has undertaken. It is the inability he has shown for consulting the right people.

It is a laudable thing in any popular novelist who has acquired a large public and can attract its attention to set out with the sincere intention of instructing his fellow-beings, even in a department wherein he has had hitherto no practice.

Thus some such popular novelist might say to himself: “I think people ought to know more about the laws of health. I will therefore use my wide circulation and my large audience for the purpose of spreading knowledge upon hygiene.” There is nothing blameworthy in this, nor need the effort be insufficient. The popular novelist, being hitherto ignorant of modern medicine, would have to go for instruction to men who were already experienced in the matter: he would have to read certain textbooks; he would have to “get up the subject,” and might, if he selected his tutors and guides with a good _flair_ for the right sources, produce a really useful elementary treatise upon a matter of which he had, till lately, known nothing. His name being well known to the multitude, his little effort would probably have a wide sale, and that wide sale would do nothing but good. But it is essential that he should make himself acquainted with the difference between what was certain and what was hypothetical; with the most recent debates upon disputed points; with at least the main arguments on either side, etc., and it would further be essential that he should hear the latest results of research. For though a theory is not better than another merely for being later than that other, yet as there is new _fact_ continually being discovered, and new arguments concluded, their bearing upon theory must be appreciated.

Now, Mr. Wells has been very remiss indeed in this duty of consulting the right authorities, before sitting down to write even so elementary a history as this “Outline” of his. He had, at the outset, not more faculty for writing an elementary history than any other best-seller might have for writing a book on elementary mathematics; indeed, a good deal less, for our schools give a certain amount of elementary training in mathematics, but as yet no training to speak of in history. But it was manifestly apparent from the first issue of his book that Mr. Wells was rarely given the latest historical theories, let alone the latest historical discoveries.

What is more extraordinary in a man so interested in such things, he does not know the modern trend of controversy in Pre-history and Anthropology. He remains away back in what I may call “the early Golden-Bough-Period”—that of Grant Allen’s _Evolution of the Idea of God_ in Pre-history. From internal evidence it would seem, as I shall point out in the text, that his studies in these matters stopped short—or at any rate crystallized—in 1893, the date of Ball’s book on Croll’s Theory of Glaciation and of the Weissmann articles in the _Contemporary Review_.

And I am appalled to discover that he knows nothing of all the modern work against Darwinism, in which system—that is, in Darwinian Natural Selection—he retains the simple faith of the day—over thirty years ago—when he was “doing” elementary science in a class.

It is the same with the recorded history of Europe. His informers referred him to no books wherein he might learn what force that Catholic Church was which made Europe. He did not compare—perhaps he never heard of—the various sources ascribed to our main political institutions, and the increasing evidence for their Latin origin.

Now these disadvantages taken together have ruined the book. Had they not done so, I should have taken for Catholic readers a different line. I should have said: “This History is full of knowledge; its statements in Anthropology and Biology are cautious and well balanced, its conclusions on historical cause and effect are correct; its knowledge of fundamental historical processes, though slight, is sound: the outline is just. Nevertheless, do not follow the author in his antagonism to the Faith, in defence of which we have arguments both historical and philosophical of such and such a kind.” As it is, my task is an easier one. I can say to my readers: “Mr. Wells’s sketch of History is not insincere in spirit; it is simply out of drawing from lack of common instruction. He has not kept abreast of the modern scientific and historical work. He has not followed the general thought of Europe and America in matters of physical science. While, in history proper, he was never taught to appreciate the part played by Latin and Greek culture, and never even introduced to the history of the early Church.

“And this is the more remarkable as he assures us that he has a wide knowledge of modern languages, in which he reads French like English, and can handle German, Spanish, Italian and even Portuguese.

“With all this Mr. Wells suffers from the very grievous fault of being ignorant that he is ignorant. He has the strange cocksureness of the man who only knows the old conventional textbook of his schooldays and thinks it universal knowledge.”

So much for the general consideration of the author, and of what he has attempted, and failed, to do. I next turn to the particular consideration of points in his writing which will illustrate the truth of the contentions I have advanced in this Introduction.