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.