The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind

by H. G. Wells

[473] R. A. Gregory’s Discovery.

[474] The great Oxford school of Literæ Humaniores, which means a serious study of Ancient Philosophy and Ancient History, was already thirty years old in Gladstone’s time, and was a really serious training in solid philosophy and solid history. It was all the more serious, as every candidate for Honours had to take two schools and to offer Mathematics as well as Literæ Humaniores. Both Peel (about 1810) and Gladstone (about 1830) took these two schools, and both gained Firsts in both. (This, by the way, is the only true and genuine “double first.”) Men with such a training were genuinely and nobly trained for statesmanship.—E. B.

With no knowledge of ethnology, no vision of history as a whole, misconceiving the record of geology, ignorant of the elementary ideas of biological science, of modern political, social, and economic science and modern thought and literature!—H. G. W.

[475] The old classical training had great faults, but not quite those which are here imputed to it. It was the education of an aristocratic leisured class who had not to earn their living. Hence it was (1) entirely idealist and non-utilitarian. It aimed not at fitting people for a paid profession, but at culture and inner development. (2) It depended enormously on leisure. The work done in compulsory work-hours was small in range, but severe, almost entirely classics and mathematics. These were intended as a training of the mind and a test of ability, but were not the real field of ambition. That lay in the large amount of time allotted to free study. Peel, Gladstone, Macaulay, Hallam, etc., show what was expected of the best men. Literature, modern history, French and Italian, theology and philosophy, and even a good deal of generalised science, were things you read in your free time. Think what Macaulay’s “schoolboy” was supposed to know, and reflect that practically none of it was taught in school hours! Some of the best papers on English literature that I ever read were done by a certain sixth form which had, I was told, no time at all given to the subject in the time-table. As the Head Master told me, “A good man was rather laughed at if he did not know Shakespeare and Milton.”

This conception of a small hard nucleus of compulsory work, combined with a wide margin of leisure, was very good for the best men, who used their free time in the right way, but left the weak men thoroughly uneducated. The reaction against it came with long hours, wide curriculum, and compulsory games, leaving no leisure either for study or for mischief.

The modern idea that school should teach all that a boy ought to know, is educationally disastrous; but it is the natural result of boys coming from uneducated homes. The home, not the school, is the real key to the wider and higher side of education. But this raises large questions.—G. M.

G. M., I submit, has not grasped the modern idea in education. The modern idea of a public school as exemplified in such a case as Oundle does not fill up the time of the boy with prescribed work and games; it leaves large spaces for self-development; but also it provides museums, a good collection of pictures, libraries, and an abundance of good music in addition to the mere “playing fields” of the old type of public school. And it inquires into the use a boy is making of his free energies. The phase of “cram” is over, but the new schools do provide good pasture, show the way thither, and “vet” a boy who displays no appetite. G. M. ignores entirely the clear statement in the text that Gladstone was a grossly ignorant man, and the instances given of the feebleness and worthlessness of the “generalized science” these boys of the old persuasion picked up. So far from the old classical training being the education of an aristocratic class, it was, as G. M. admits within a line or so, the education of a few individuals, the rest of the class remaining barbarians. It may have aimed at culture and inner development, but it missed its aim. Consequently, the bright lads of the Gladstone-Macaulay-Peel type who did not pick up a few enlightened ideas by accident or at home, were quite unable to carry their own class with them; it remained politically boorish. They had to appeal for understanding to classes whose education had been free from “classical” pretentiousness....

These notes submitted to E. B. at this stage provoked him to a warm protest. His sympathies were “heart and soul with G. M.,” and Mr. Gladstone, he declared with emphasis, was not an ignorant man. A little more must be said on this question. If the reader realize, what we have been trying to make clear in this history, that human progress is largely mental progress, a clearing and an enlargement of ideas, then he will understand why it is that the compiler of this Outline has given so much space here to these controversial notes upon the education of Mr. Gladstone. For the education of Mr. Gladstone was typical of that ruling-class education which has dominated British and European affairs, so far as they have been dominated by ideas, up to the present time. It is most significant of the differences and difficulties of our age that the statement, which seemed to the writer a simple statement of an obvious fact, that Mr. Gladstone was a profoundly ignorant man, should have so scandalized two of the editors of this work. No doubt Mr. Gladstone knew much and knew many things, and it is just because he did so and was in many respects the fine flower of the education of his period, that his ignorance is so interesting to us. Many Chinese mandarins knew much and many things—beautifully. And were ignorant men. Mr. Gladstone’s was not the ignorance of deficiency, but the ignorance of excess, a copious ignorance; it was not a failure to know this or that particular fact, an ignorance excusable enough, but a profound and sought-after and established ignorance of reality, so that he did not grasp the bearing of definite facts presented to him or of far-reaching ideas put before him, upon the great issues with which he was concerned. He lived, as it were, in a luminous and blinding cloud. That cloud, which I call his ignorance, my two editors call his wonderful and abounding culture. It was a culture that wrapped about and adorned the great goddess Reality. But indeed he is not to be adorned but stripped. She ceases to be herself or to bless her votary unless she is faced stark and faced fearlessly.—H. G. W.

[476] The impression made on me, an old Gladstonian, by Gladstone’s politics, was mainly twofold. (1) A strong assertion that politics were (as Aristotle said) a development of ethics, and concerned with discovering and doing what is Right, not what is convenient or profitable to any particular class or nation. (2) A strong subconscious suggestion that the highest education and culture and knowledge were useful for politics, which was in fact a very high practical art, demanding the highest qualities. Hence largely the horror we had of Dizzy. (3) A general sanguine conviction that Honesty was the best policy; that what was right would also prove to be ultimately the most profitable, so that there was no real conflict.

I do not say that Mr. G. acted consistently up to these principles, or that they could be acted up to; but they formed the milk of the word for most of us.—G. M.