There are few men who could have produced a general history better than Mr. Wells—had he not suffered from certain graver disadvantages to which I shall presently allude. To be sincere is essential. To have the motive of History is both singular and decisive. To have clarity, economy and a sense of time is rare and of high value. To be accurate in detail of dates, etc., is a most excellent minor virtue in any historian.
Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the first moment that the Time Machine appeared, so many years ago, I have consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public writing, and I shall praise them still.
Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History, let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been made against him.
The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn, etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an outline of any movement, however great, in any space, however small. The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far as the manner of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is wrong.
Again, he is wrongly accused of superficiality. That is an accusation made by people who see—what, indeed, is obvious—that the book has no lasting value, and that therefore they can call it hard names with impunity, secure against the judgment of posterity. The book is ephemeral, certainly; but no honest critic can call it superficial. The book is not superficial at all. On the contrary, it goes to the roots of things, and considers what is really important to mankind. One may indeed call the writer superficial in so far as he knows nothing of beauty or tradition—that is due to his unavoidable limitations; but superficial his effort is not. It is as searching in the matter of cause and effect as its writer can make it. That is not saying very much, for its writer has never had the opportunity for digging deep into cause and effect; but the book does not suffer from that prime mark of superficiality—indifference. Mr. Wells means to say all that is in him, and if there is not very much in him, that is not his fault.
He has a neutral quality, neither an advantage nor a disadvantage in the writing of History; or, perhaps, rather an advantage than a disadvantage, and that is, an intense nationalism. An English scientist is supreme. An English book changes the world. An English mode of thought is self-evidently the best. The Catholic Church itself is hateful mainly because it is foreign. Such nationalism is often the unconscious accompaniment of limitation, but, upon the whole, it serves the historical sense. After all, any worker must be himself. He cannot create unless there is a flame within him. Such flames arise from intense conviction, and the historian steeped in his own country does better, in my judgment, despite his inevitable leanings, than one who pretends attachment to nothing: for attachment to nothing is sterility. The three great historians whom good judges most admire were all intense lovers of their country—an Athenian, a Frenchman and a Scotsman.
Now for the disadvantages.
The first and most glaring of these is Provincialism.
But here I must warn my readers that they will not discover in this criticism any of those personal descriptions or offensive allusions to private life by which our vulgarians aim at extending their large circulations. I am concerned only with this one book of Mr. Wells’s, and with History and Religion in it; not with domestic details in the Author’s life or the caricatures of them. The mental formation and social motive of an author must indeed be alluded to in any judgment of his work, as must his defects of instruction or judgment. The rest is irrelevant. I have even, in revising the text, cut out anything which might be mistaken for a personal allusion, and leave it, I believe, confined wholly to the criticism of historical statement, method and motive.