CHAPTER VI

WE COME TO REAL HISTORY

I now leave Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ in so far as it deals with guesses, unproved statements, and ascertained facts on Man as he existed before any known written record.

I have devoted so large a proportion of my space to this earlier and vaguer part of the book because it is by far the most important. In it Mr. Wells, repeating the various materialist and other anti-Christian theories of his youth, has put before his readers an ethnography and a philosophy confused, indeed, but consistently opposed to the Catholic Faith. And it has been my business to distinguish what was demonstrably wrong in his statements, what exploded by recent scholarship and what solid and demonstrated; blaming his obvious unacquaintance with recent European thought, and his lack of mental grip, but praising his vividly picturesque style and his undoubted sincerity.

The opportunity for speculating at large and affirming without proof in this prehistoric region is unlimited. Therefore it is here that Mr. Wells’s attack on the Catholic Faith is largely delivered; and since it is his antagonism to the Catholic Faith with which I am mainly concerned—for sympathy or antagonism with the Catholic Faith is the only thing of real importance in attempting to teach History—I have given to this section the considerable space my reader has traversed.

Mr. Wells closes his repetitions of the old and often discarded theories upon Man before human record with Chapter XII, the end of his second book, and page 88 of the volume. Thence onwards he is to deal with History to which we have real witness, and it is noticeable that in the last pages of this first part, when he begins to deal with certain scientific fact, ascertained truth, and a certain amount of real knowledge, he becomes not only very much more reliable, but much more successful as a writer.

His remarkable talent for compressing the statements or actual discoveries of others into readable short form comes out brilliantly.

Thus even before he comes to the beginnings of human record, he has to deal with language, and he does so with a firmness of touch and an exactitude of form which everyone must admire, and no one more than I. The little passage only covers seven pages, but it is exceedingly well done.

There is a good reason for this. Mr. Wells is here dealing with a mass of well-known material. His talents for compression and exposition have full scope; his weakness as a reasoner is not tried.

Language is a positive thing. It is there, a real subject for analysis; you can study it. It is not moonshine like the “Old Man” who produced some very nasty God, nor like the palæolithic hunter who could not use bows and arrows, although he made pictures of himself using nothing else.

It is true that even in this most excellent little essay on the differences of language throughout the world, Mr. Wells cannot escape that futility which he shares with everyone of his type, the inability to distinguish hypothesis from fact, and the statement of a vague guess as a known truth. None the less, these seven pages, as a whole, are first-rate. Anyone who had not read about the differences between existing human languages, would, on merely skimming these seven pages, be permanently instructed by them, and soundly instructed. It can honestly be said that this bit of précis writing is a feat.

That weakness, however, to which I have alluded appears in a few sentences which I will quote before passing to the excellences of this passage.

Mr. Wells repeats, at the beginning of the affair (on p. 82) that the people who drew so well in the caves “probably” only made imitative sounds—that is manifest nonsense. People with excellent artistic powers, elaborate decoration, ritual, and so forth are not dumb, or half-dumb, animals. They are men. The only possible reason for dragging in the absurd statement that they “probably” could not use full speech is the mania for making man as base as possible for as long as possible, so as to feed the idea of Progress. He drags in several times the gratuitous and demonstrably false idea of very gradual development in this, as in other matters. He uses the phrases “_very slowly_” in his fourth paragraph, “_very slow process indeed_” in his fifth paragraph, and in general forces (without any evidence) the creation of language to conform to the old dogma of the nineteenth-century materialists that all development necessarily takes place by tiny stages spread over vast spaces of time. We now know that it does nothing of the sort in matters where we can follow it. We know that Evolution goes by jumps in things before our eyes—such as machinery—and we are more and more convinced by evidence that it has gone by jumps in the geological record. Therefore we may presume it did so in this affair of speech.

Mr. Wells is also to blame in saying that a number of tribes using one Aryan tongue “must” have wandered somewhere between Central Europe and Western Asia. That “must” is absurd and highly characteristic of pseudo-science. We do not know anything about the way in which the roots common to the group of languages in question spread, nor whence they spread. It is all mere statement in the void. In the same way he tells us that the Danube, “about eight thousand years ago or less,” flowed into a sea which reached to Turkestan, and which may have sent out arms to the Arctic Ocean; and again “about eight thousand years ago” there were no straits between Asia and Europe where the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles now are. That phrase “about eight thousand years ago” is worthless.

He knows nothing about such a date, nor does anybody else within enormously wide limits of time. These are only guesses based on slight and contradictory evidence.

Conversely, he does not allow for the rapidity with which languages sometimes change before becoming fixed for very long periods; still less does he allow for the amazing differences which a comparatively short time will make in the development of the same word along different lines. No one without record to prove it could possibly think that the French word “guêpe” had any relation to the English word “wasp.” That the English word “penny” was the great-grandson of “denarius,” or that the German word “krieg” and the English word “war” were the same word come down through tortuous channels from an original Latin source, or that the English word “spade” was the same as the French word “epée,” the noble word for a sword.

One could multiply instances indefinitely. Language sometimes changes with the greatest rapidity and takes on wholly new forms; then remains fixed for very long periods. And this development of language, like the development of everything else, completely contradicts the mechanical idea of a slow, inevitable, mechanical, blind process—which idea governed the mid-nineteenth century.

But after allowing for these defects, it remains true that Mr. Wells’s summary on language is, as I have said, exceedingly well done. It is a good instance of the way in which the Author’s mind works best when it is dealing with concrete facts, and worst when it is in the region of hard, independent reasoning. Feed Mr. Wells’s pen with facts and he presents them excellently. Ask him to think, and he either quotes at random (and often confusedly and contradictorily) what other people have deduced (usually wrongly); or, now and then, very rarely, thinks for himself, and is then more confused and self-contradictory than ever.

We shall find, when we come to the later division of his work and deal with his summary of known and recorded History, that there is very much less to complain of than there is in his imaginary Pre-history; though even in these later sections the moment he touches the Catholic Church or the tradition of the European gentry with their foundations in the Roman Empire, he reacts against them with such violence that he loses his judgment altogether.

I desire here, at the end of the first division of my work, to summarize what I have had to say so far about the book, and it is only just that I should put down the bad side first and end with the best that can be said about it.

Mr. Wells’s unfortunate disabilities for a task of this kind are primarily that he has not a sufficient acquaintance with the world, and that he has not supplemented this weakness—as it can in part be supplemented—by wide reading. He has not met many kinds of men nor compared many kinds of thought. He got coached, but he got coached too rapidly and too summarily. He knows little or nothing of the vast Catholic tradition and philosophy which inherits and explains not only Europe but the whole nature of Man. He seems to think that Catholic tradition and philosophy are a hole-and-corner affair, because, in the only society he has really known, Catholics form a very small and unfamiliar minority. He continually reaffirms what he happens to have read in the little popular textbooks of his youth up to about 1893–94. Over and over again one finds him saying things which passed for dogma in the popular science of thirty to forty years ago, and have since been quite done away with.

He has also clearly been very slack in overlooking the work. He has not sufficiently superintended the illustration of his book, nor prevented absurd contradictions between graphic teaching by picture and the statements of the text.

He falls into the common modern trick or error (I prefer to think it an error rather than a trick in this case, for he is a man, though limited, sincere) which I will baptize “the shoe-horn,” and with which I became wonderfully well acquainted at Oxford. It consists in putting a thing as a possibility on one page, as a probability on a later page, and on a still later page as a certitude.

On page 48 he quotes a theory to which he “inclines,” viz. that Neanderthal man and true man did not interbreed. On page 52 it is no longer an “inclination” but a certitude. He says “there is no trace of it.” In exactly the same way on page 44 the Mediterranean area is, in the days of Early Man, “probably” a valley below sea-level. But on page 51 the submergence of the Mediterranean is taken for granted, till, on page 66, we get to the third stage in the “shoe-horn” process. It is by that page “practically certain” that at the end of the last Glacial Age the Mediterranean, not yet flooded from the Atlantic, was but a couple of land-locked basins.

His thought is not connected. Thus he will say of the Tasmanians that they had no Neanderthaloid characters, and then remark that they represent a Neanderthaloid stage in the evolution of true man. He will tell us that one cannot go very much by the measurement of skulls because the shape of the skull sometimes changes rapidly. There he is quite right. But a few pages on he repeats all the modern fashionable nonsense about a Nordic race and a Mediterranean race and an Alpine race and the rest of it—which is based almost entirely on the idea that the skull formation is permanent. He traces religion to certain past terrors and offensive habits in a bestial type prior to Man, but won’t allow it in palæolithic man long after; then he suddenly recurs to it in neolithic man far later still.

How familiar it all is!

Meanwhile, throughout the whole of the work there appears that wretched _a priori_ bias which is the bane of all insufficient or false religions: the determination to squeeze facts to any shape, however unnatural, if only they may thus be forced to fit theories; the effect of a fixed mythology to which evidence must correspond, or be neglected, or so distorted as to become wholly unnatural, and under the influence of which the absence of evidence is supplied by sheer fiction. We have seen how this could lead so intelligent a man to affirm that men with capacity to fashion instruments, use fire and bury their dead with ceremony and gift, could not speak a consecutive language. It also makes him say of men who hunted the reindeer in an Arctic climate and were remarkable artists, that “perhaps” they had no clothing. It leads him to postulate as necessary an exceedingly slow and unceasing process for all development—right against known evidence—and thus bring him to deny or neglect or forget plain record, such as armament, ornament, burial.

In other words, the disadvantages of Mr. Wells, in all the prehistoric part of his work, flow from exactly the same mental defects as warped his ancestors in religion. Just as his spiritual forbears, the Puritans (who lasted on to our own time), could not believe anything outside the family Bible, could only understand the literal interpretations of its English printed word, and were inhibited by their isolation from a wide philosophy; so, in their newer form, the Bible Christians and Puritans in revolt still demand the infallibility of a document (in Mr. Wells’s case, the popular scientific textbooks of his youth), and reject without reasoning any facts which militate against an accepted theology which they have been taught in youth. Just as the old-fashioned Bible Christians, from whom he (and his audience) derive, could construct no general philosophy of the world, so he, or, rather, the people from whom he has learned these things, reject any general philosophy, and are not afraid of perpetual self-contradiction. Just as the religious enthusiasts of the sects from whom he (and his audience) derive replaced reason by violent emotion, so does he.

All that is bad enough, but one must end by summarizing his many and remarkable qualities for the task he attempted.

All his work so far (that is, down to the end of the Pre-history) shows to the full those qualities I praise in my first article. He is devoid of charlatanry. He always gives the name of the book he is quoting from. He is free from envy. He advertises the works from which he draws. The narrative is vivid, the power of presenting the writer’s mental image to the reader is quite exceptionally strong. Indeed, Mr. Wells is here unique in his generation. As this gift is one of the principal things to be admired in my own trade of writing, and one which I cannot pretend to have myself, I feel a special respect for it. Anyone reading a passage in this book has a mental image of the brightest kind called up before him. He can almost see and smell the apish “Old Man”—though he is as imaginary as the Giant Blunderbore. He can assist as an agonized witness at the barbarous slaughter at Stonehenge—which is as imaginary as the beheading of Puss in Boots.

Mr. Wells is also, as I have said, limpid, sincere, accepting all his simple, uncoordinated beliefs with a candour which is morally admirable, though intellectually deplorable. Best of all, he can put into the briefest and clearest form the main statements upon which his story depends. And here I am so much his inferior that I would like to take this opportunity of saluting his superiority. I would give worlds myself to be able to put true things in History as tersely and as sharply as he puts unsubstantial things, and to be able to strike a true outline as firm and as strong as his fantastic one.

For, to repeat a metaphor already used, Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ may be compared to one of those vivid profile charcoal sketches which we had in the music-halls of his youth and mine: to a vivid charcoal sketch of Mr. Gladstone’s profile, for instance—but presented to the audience as that of Queen Victoria. The drawing is rapid, firm, accurate, successful—but it is startlingly unlike the original.

It remains true that if the draughtsman had known reality well enough he would have done useful and permanent work in this field. He would have been a leader instead of a follower. As he has a wide public he would have given the average men of his own tongue a view of the past which would have rung true, and he would have been confirmed by every new fact as he accumulated experience. Unfortunately, he was given by those on whom he relied a view of the past which is already badly out of date and necessarily doomed to be forgotten in a few years.

Seeing how remarkable his talents are, and how he might have used them, it is a very great pity indeed.