And first we may note how swift and supple is the mind that has Greek grammar for its sustenance. It is not necessary for a classical scholar to read either the beginning or the end of the work with which he deals. It is not necessary to comprehend its aim and scope. He just takes up the part dealing with his classical knowledge—which is indeed the only knowledge that matters—and looks for mistakes or, what are really worse than mistakes, things he does not understand and opinions he does not share. And then he writes “Indeed!” or repeats a sentence with a note of interrogation and a grand air of refutation. If Mr. Gomme has looked at all at the end of The Outline of History it was, I believe, to consult the list of errata and make sure that nothing in the way of a misspelling, a wrong date or misplaced title had been overlooked. Because he gives no quarter in that respect. He is determined to make the worst of things. He has just nosed through the few parts that matter to him, he has scored it heavily with pencil; one can almost see his notes of exclamation, his “No!” his “Did he not?” in the margin, and then he has written up these marginal comments and rushed into print with them. His aim was to accumulate as much apparent error as he could to discredit The Outline of History, and he has industriously done his best.
This close-reading method of Mr. Gomme has made him, I hope, one of the most unteachable readers that the Outline has had. I cannot complain of his failure to grasp the importance of print to the human mind and its bearing upon the political future of our race, nor of his foolish footnote on that matter (p. 85), because these are novel ideas for his type and his type is incapable of novel ideas; nor will I complain of the invincible ignorance of ethnology he has preserved, in spite of the clear and simple chapter I have given, but I do find it disappointing that he should repeat the vulgar error that the Roman Empire at the height of its power “united most of the known world.” I have been at particular pains in the Outline to dispel this preposterous idea, so misleading and now so dangerous to Europeans. I have not merely stated the facts, but given a special map which I had imagined would bring home to the weakest intelligence the fact that, contemporary with this Roman Empire, there was in Asia an Empire greater in extent, better organised (as its drive against the Huns shows), and in very many respects more civilised. But manifestly I had not reckoned with Mr. Gomme. He took up the Outline not to learn, but to carp; and he has learnt nothing.
In order to get together this little heap of his—and with all his industry it is not a very crushing heap—of mistakes and pseudo-mistakes, Mr. Gomme has resorted to the oddest expedients. He pretends to be unaware that there has been any revision whatever of The Outline of History. He has taken the first unrevised part issue as if it were the latest text, and he has avoided any comparison with the later book edition. This may be mere laziness or the mental slovenliness that makes one edition seem as good as another to an ill-trained mind. But it does enable Mr. Gomme to swell out his list of charges with perhaps a dozen little things that stand corrected in the current edition. And, in addition, it gives him the extra illustrations with which the part issue was adorned by the publisher. He is either so ignorant as to think, or so warped by the spirit of controversy as to pretend to think, that I am responsible for these extra illustrations, that I have chosen them myself and written the inscriptions underneath them. With these extra illustrations, and very good illustrations they are for the most part though they have no place in the definite edition now before the public, and with the occasionally rather gaudy covers Messrs. Newnes used, he makes great play in his earnest endeavour to pile up a case for inaccuracy against me. Why he does not go on to suppose I wrote the advertisements of infant foods and condiments that brightened the cover-backs and treat these too as an integral part of The Outline of History and comment on the gross materialism that inspired them, I am at a loss to imagine. I must suppose that God has set limits even to the mental possibilities of Mr. Gomme. Or possibly Mr. Gomme overlooked this controversial opportunity.
There is a quality in Mr. Gomme’s manner of attack on these extra illustrations that makes me feel a curious sympathy with the brighter members of his Greek classes at Glasgow. “Some of the illustrations are queerly chosen,” he remarks. He notes my comment inserted at the eleventh hour on one unavoidable picture. “This is a photograph of a model restoration of Solomon’s temple. It is a very exaggerated and glorified restoration. The only justifiable thing in it is the central temple. All the splendid galleries round it are imaginary. The true walls were probably rough piled stone.” He can quote this and never recognise the tale it tells so plainly. “Then why,” he asks with real or affected imbecility, “does he give it?” To which I suppose the only possible answer is to say, with a dreadful calm, “I didn’t give it.”
One illustration after another is assailed in much the same manner, with the same dense disregard of the manifest facts of the case. I am even blamed because an earthquake has damaged one of the temples shown, and to crown all, the legend put to one of the coloured plates by one of Messrs. Newnes’ staff is quoted as a sample of the “affected simplicity” of my style.
In addition to the charges of ignorance and so forth which Mr. Gomme has based on my list of errata, and on his pretence that I chose, designed and arranged the extra illustrations inserted by Messrs. Newnes in their part issue, Mr. Gomme has got together a third set of objections by misunderstanding the English language. Here, for instance—I put it in Italics—is an almost incredible comment. Sometimes, he says, my “reasoning is merely comic. ‘Finally Alexander set aside ten thousand talents (a talent = £240) for a tomb. In those days this was an enormous sum.’ As if it were now a common custom, a very usual thing, to spend two and a half million pounds on the interment of a friend.” You see Mr. Gomme has contrived to think that the words of mine he quotes are some sort of “reasoning” and that the words “for a funeral” follow “enormous sum.” But they don’t. This is but one instance of a number of equally pointless comments with which Mr. Gomme swells the heap of his “corrections.”
After these three sorts of objection have been cleaned up—that is to say, the errata already put right in the book edition, the minor flaws of the discarded Newnes illustrations—and all things considered the Newnes extra illustrations were very well done—and petty quibbles like the one I have just quoted, very little remains of the list of errors Mr. Gomme so valiantly pretends to detect, a list some friend of his writing in The Aberdeen Journal, the sort of friend who gets a newspaper into trouble, describes as “Hundreds of mistakes.” Mr. Gomme scores, I will admit, upon two points which shall be set right in the next edition; one is that by carelessness of phrasing I seem to lay too much stress upon the importance and size of Athens in my Greek chapter—I do not note the scale of such cities as Corinth and Syracuse, nor do proper justice to the philosophical and artistic contributions of Magna Graecia and the Greek cities of Asia to the Greek ensemble; it is really little more than a laxity of wording; and the other is that there is an inaccurate historical generalisation about the opposite shores of the Mediterranean inserted in the opening of the account of the Punic wars. That generalisation I did not make; it was written upon my galley proofs by a friend, and I let it pass; I did not properly examine its implications. There, at any rate, I profit by Mr. Gomme. The rest of his criticisms consist chiefly of a string of remarks round and about Homer, a display of ignorance about ethnology, with both of which issues I will deal in order immediately, and a discussion of the meaning of democracy which is so entirely incoherent that no human being could deal with it anyhow. Finally, abandoning his critical efforts altogether, Mr. Gomme gives us a new theory of the origin of Christianity as a purely European religion, and concludes with his own version of history in a passage of great distinction.
Incidentally, as the end draws on and his inglorious pile of sham errors and faked-up accusations mounts, his courage grows with it and he begins to scold. He heartens himself with his scolding, and scolds more boldly until he gets to “ignorance,” “vague and unscientific,” “by nature unfitted for an appreciation of Greece,” “no enquiry,” “no judgment,” “careless of the truth,” “blind to important things and ready with the irrelevant,” and so on and so on, and what, coming from him, is really a great lark, he launches out at last into a disquisition on style. I use a broken form of sentence with four full stops when it is unnecessary to round off a statement, and this it seems is “not in Aristotle.” It is, however, in English, and I have helped to put it there. But we will leave that question of style to the end.
Upon the matter of Homer Mr. Gomme is very strong. His remarks aim not only at myself, but over and beyond me at my friend Professor Gilbert Murray. There seems to be some hostility, of which I know nothing, between Greek teachers and Greek scholars. I should imagine that in the happy little circle at Glasgow which is being led up to the True, the Beautiful and the Good, through the Greek accidence and syntax, by Mr. Gomme, Professor Gilbert Murray comes in at times for some vigorous treatment. Unless, indeed, I have ousted him as the stock victim, now that Mr. Gomme has to tell his tale of the marvellous heap of errors he found in The Outline of History and how he up and slew that book. I follow Professor Murray in disbelieving that Homer was one single individual. But Mr. Gomme knows that he was one—to use his own clear-cut Greek phrase—“immortal bard.” He does not say how it is that he knows this. He just knows it, he proclaims it, and the opposite view is “nonsense.” But if he were capable of understanding imaginative quality and differences in inventive method and artistic construction, he would have some glimmering of the reason why men of some creative experience deny the common authorship of the two Greek epics ascribed to Homer. (Of course, Mr. Gomme falls foul of an illustration in the Newnes edition of the head of Homer at this point, and drags the thing into the discussion. If there was no Homer, why did I give a portrait of Homer? Exactly. Why did I?) The Iliad, I said, was one of the most interesting and informing of the prehistoric compositions of the Aryans. Mr. Gomme throws a kind of fit at this. He shrieks into Italics. One of, interesting, informing, prehistoric, composition, Aryan! To which I can only reply, slowly and solemnly, “Exactly—one of—interesting—informing—prehistoric—composition—Aryan.” Mr. Gomme does not elucidate his Italics. This is almost as good controversy as making faces. Also this cry is wrung from him. “It would be interesting to see the answer of a man who knew nothing of Greece but what he had learnt from this Outline to the question of ‘What do you know of Homer?’” “No such person,” I suppose, or “another bard of the same name,” or some such compact reply. It would be still more interesting to have Mr. Gomme replying to the same question. The Outline is written now, but Mr. Gomme might yet distinguish himself by a popular Life of Homer with chapters on his early life, his domestic troubles, his dietary, his dogs and so forth, and of course with model examination questions and answers at the end.
Mr. Gomme makes much play with his remarkably complete ignorance of ethnology. It is really too much that I should be “slated” for anything in my Outline that Mr. Gomme does not know or understand. Judgment by Mr. Gomme’s default would go against me on a thousand issues. He muddles up “Aryan,” which is the name of a language group, with “Mediterranean race,” which is the name of a racial group, and gets into a fine muddle with the word “Nordic.” And the deeper he gets into the muddle the crosser he gets with me. “This ugly word does not seem to mean anything other than ‘Northern’” he writes; but, of course, if it did not, as any undergraduate in science at Glasgow would explain to him, then scientific people would use the word “Northern” and not a special term. Amidst “Nordic,” a race name, “Germanic,” a national adjective, “Aryan,” a language name, Mr. Gomme rolls like a puppy in a ball of wool, losing his temper more and more. There are indications of a suspicion that the whole of this ethnology is wicked German propaganda. Mr. Gomme probably believes that the blue eyes so prevalent in Northern Europe are German propaganda organs. I am no scholastic Hercules to clean up the mind of Mr. Gomme. I note these matters merely to make it plain that much of this pamphlet with its air of heaping up a list of “errors” is really no more than the violent expression of Mr. Gomme’s eccentric dissent from views that have passed muster with the generality of sound scholars.