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.