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.