CHAPTER VII

MR. WELLS ON PRIESTHOOD

When a man is talking of a social class whereof he knows nothing, you will notice that he does two things. First of all, he goes very much by the current statements about it which he has seen in print or on the stage: what he has met in the books and plays he happens to come across. Baronets are wicked, Dukes haughty, great Ladies disdainful and dazzlingly fair. Next, his imagination plays on that unknown world, creates out of the void, and then takes for granted a number of habits in it which are, as a fact, nonexistent and wholly of his own imagining: as, for instance, Cabinet Ministers wielding awful power in whispered conclaves.

But when he comes to talking of his own world, of his own class, of the things he really knows, his manner changes altogether. He becomes, for one thing, much more interesting, and, for another, much more definite. In _that_ region, one can judge his style and credentials by real standards.

Something like this change from romance and misjudgment to appreciation and reason takes place in Mr. Wells’s book when he turns from what is called to-day “Pre-history” (of which we know hardly anything) to recorded History (of which we know a great deal, and which is in a totally different category).

This change takes place in Mr. Wells’s _Outline of History_ with the opening of Book III.

In the first two books, where he was dealing with the world before Man, and Man before History, he went by such textbooks as he had come across (all of them anti-Catholic, few or none of them continental, and most of them old-fashioned stuff thirty or forty years old, the theories of which are to-day, for the most part, exploded). He filled up the gaps with guesswork, rather confused, even contradictory, and often in direct conflict with the evidence—had he known or noticed what the evidence was. He romanced, and he romanced out of the map. The world he saw in his vivid imagination was an unreal world, much as the English aristocratic world of a popular novel is an unreal world comically unlike the thing itself.

But when it comes to real and tangible stuff, record and monument, and still better, record in writing—in other words, when it comes to real History—Mr. Wells’s excellent qualities as a writer appear in a much better light and are put to a much better purpose. His narrative, which even in its misshapen prehistoric part was lucid, vivid and well put, capable of holding the reader’s attention, retains all these characters, and now becomes in great sections really informing without distortion. There is also a very successful packing of a great deal of information into a short space without redundancy of detail and without too much repetition. The order is well observed, and the survey is as wide as the Author intended it to be—that is, world-wide.

Unfortunately, in this second part of Mr. Wells’s account, he cannot help suffering from the disabilities of the modern industrial town world, under which he naturally labours. He has never experienced the great part played by popular memory and impressions handed down from one generation to another, as the counterpart and corrector of documentary Record. He is, therefore, too prone to treat what is handed down by masses of men living familiarly in neighbourhood (they still do so in our villages) as being, on its large lines and in its general sense, misleading; whereas it is, on its large lines and in its general sense, true. He has no appreciable knowledge of the Catholic Church, and, therefore, does not know how History falls into line under that philosophy which alone properly explains it. He also suffers, as we shall see, from that unfortunate tendency to violent personal hatred for the nobler things, especially for the great and united succession of civilization in Europe: Tradition.

But the merits, at first, outweigh the faults. Until he runs up against the beginnings of Rome—with all the irritation which the mere name of Rome provokes in him—he keeps his head and writes excellently. The thing is well balanced and of real value. The exceptions which must be made, even to the part before Greece and Rome, to this praise do not colour his story of early record as a whole. He gives a rather imaginary account of the beginnings of agriculture, but much of it is more probable than improbable; and he modifies it well enough by conditional adverbs proper to our necessarily speculative attitude towards these early and uncertain things.

Now and then, in a sentence or two, he is unwise enough to abandon this conditional attitude and bolts away again into fiction: for instance, he tells us that when man settled down to agriculture, the Red Sea was still connected with the Mediterranean (p. 91). We do not know that; it is mere guesswork, and ought not to be put up as historical fact. On the other hand, an immediately following remark, that “the Persian Gulf then extended much further northwards than it does now,” is real history; for there is sufficient proof of that.

Again (on p. 92), he puts down as historical fact the invariable conquest of settled populations by barbaric and nomadic populations outside. He treats it as a necessarily recurrent phenomenon and as the only process. Of course, we all know from History that in plain recorded fact the converse is just as common, and far more lasting in its effects. Subjugation of the barbarian by the civilized man is very much more the rule of recorded History than its opposite. And as for agricultural work being regarded as the lot of an inferior, that is a false generalization from our own suburban conditions. On the contrary, the tradition of the Mediterranean peoples, as of the Chinese, is just the other way. Agricultural work was the basis of their society and was clothed with moral dignity.

The account of early Mesopotamian civilization (including in that term the earliest culture before the junction of the Euphrates and Tigris systems) is excellent, and the subsequent short section on the beginnings of Egypt is equally good—with a paragraph on the causes of the difference of record (on p. 98) between the Nile and the Euphrates Valleys particularly well put.

In order to keep the survey parallel and marching on one front, there follow a few lines on the early civilization of India and on the early history of China; in which, by the way, Mr. Wells rightly rejects the somewhat shadowy hypothesis put forward of late years, which gives a Mesopotamian origin to the Chinese culture.

If only Mr. Wells had also rejected from these first stones of his building in real History such pure guesswork as the supposed “heliolithic” culture—an imaginary matrix for all future civilization—this early part might be called completely well done. It is a pity he yielded to that temptation, for it is one of the things that will “date” the book most seriously in a few years. Theories of this kind come and go, like the weather. The passage (pp. 107, 108) in which he quotes from another authority upon the development of the rowing ship in the Mediterranean, is a good example of sane reasoning and informing conjecture. While the conclusion—a rapid review of the Cretan discoveries and of the Phœnician civilization—is on the same high level.

Unfortunately, the reader is, of course, left under the impression that civilization of any complexity came very late, a judgment which the author has to make in order to fit it in with his Messianic ideas—his ardent inherited faith in a Millennium for which we are only beginning to prepare.

In point of fact, we do not know how far back the origins of our complex civilization may stretch, and these very Cretan discoveries should give us pause before we make any confident statement upon the point.

It is not forty years ago that all popular history was roundly affirming the original semi-barbarism of the Greek world at a time long after the culture of the Labyrinthine Palace fell—if fall it did—or decayed. The really interesting thing about the whole affair is that we cannot find a transition from barbaric to civilized conditions. We find civilization in all essentials fully present at the very origin of research. We have not yet, and probably we never shall, have final information upon the phase by which it passed from embryonic to mature. On the analogy of nearly all other development we may believe that change to have been a rapid leap. But where it took place or when, whether Egypt or Western Asia arose of themselves or whether there lay behind them some tradition of culture, far older, which they inherited, or which one of them inherited, and which later either by submergence or in any other way disappeared, we simply do not know.

The next section, Chapter XV, is, so far, the best of all. It deals with the development of the various forms of writing, and will be read with the greatest profit. It has all the qualities of Mr. Wells’s close précis writing at its best. Nor should the Author be blamed for having left out the theory (Sergi’s, if I remember right) that the alphabetic system had an origin of its own, connected neither with the Egyptian script nor with the Phœnician, but rather one from which the Phœnician itself derived. He has put the necessary facts simply and clearly and in the right order. He notes the reaction of writing on thought, and even (as in the case of China) upon social systems and method of government. And he has done well not to confuse so short a catalogue with too much consideration of learned theories.

But even this first-rate chapter is somewhat marred by a conclusion based upon the false hypothesis of a perpetual change in human nature. Writing is made to play a part far too great in the creation of something like a new man. That is not, historically, what happens to Man through any of his own inventions. Man’s inventions do not change Man in essentials. Man remains Man throughout. And when Mr. Wells goes on to say that the very widespread use (and abuse) of printing to-day will create a further apocalyptic transformation of our poor minds, he is going right against the common experience of all cultivated men, and living in an unreal newspaper world of his own. The modern mind, in countries where this quite recent habit of promiscuous and universal reading has arisen, has not improved; it has visibly degenerated; it thinks less clearly, it has a less intelligent grip than had the more sparing readers of the past.

You have only to contrast the peasant or fisherman to-day against the average newspaper-skimming townsman artisan, with an equal or higher material revenue, to appreciate this truth. In the popular appreciation of life and philosophy it is self-evident. The peasant is immeasurably superior. When, therefore, Mr. Wells concludes this admirable little section with the confident remark that “our world to-day is only in the beginning of knowledge,” he must be told that all that is mere Messianic stuff, part of a false religion, and worthless. It is the mood in which the same false Puritan religion from which he comes produced the Seventh Monarchy men, Second Adventists, Jump to Glory Jane, and the rest of them: the facile and contemptible mood of “The Good Time Coming” as an imaginary escape from this _Lachrymarum Vallis_: the “Great Rosy Dawn.”

The detail of what will happen to Man in the future we do not know. One thing we do know quite certainly: he will be Man in the future just as he has been Man in the past. The type will not change. He will yield to the same temptations, be strengthened by discipline and renunciation, weakened by indulgence and excessive opportunity—especially weakened by his own material creations when they are abused. And we further know, from all the records of our race, that a contempt for the past and a planting of standards in an imaginary future is the destruction of culture. Of all popular moods which a failing civilization can catch, it is the most fatal.

At the end of this section comes in again (with Chapter XVI) that note which is the principal motive for these comments. For it is with this