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.