When a man is talking of a social class whereof he knows nothing, you will notice that he does two things. First of all, he goes very much by the current statements about it which he has seen in print or on the stage: what he has met in the books and plays he happens to come across. Baronets are wicked, Dukes haughty, great Ladies disdainful and dazzlingly fair. Next, his imagination plays on that unknown world, creates out of the void, and then takes for granted a number of habits in it which are, as a fact, nonexistent and wholly of his own imagining: as, for instance, Cabinet Ministers wielding awful power in whispered conclaves.
But when he comes to talking of his own world, of his own class, of the things he really knows, his manner changes altogether. He becomes, for one thing, much more interesting, and, for another, much more definite. In that region, one can judge his style and credentials by real standards.
Something like this change from romance and misjudgment to appreciation and reason takes place in Mr. Wells’s book when he turns from what is called to-day “Pre-history” (of which we know hardly anything) to recorded History (of which we know a great deal, and which is in a totally different category).
This change takes place in Mr. Wells’s Outline of History with the opening of Book III.
In the first two books, where he was dealing with the world before Man, and Man before History, he went by such textbooks as he had come across (all of them anti-Catholic, few or none of them continental, and most of them old-fashioned stuff thirty or forty years old, the theories of which are to-day, for the most part, exploded). He filled up the gaps with guesswork, rather confused, even contradictory, and often in direct conflict with the evidence—had he known or noticed what the evidence was. He romanced, and he romanced out of the map. The world he saw in his vivid imagination was an unreal world, much as the English aristocratic world of a popular novel is an unreal world comically unlike the thing itself.
But when it comes to real and tangible stuff, record and monument, and still better, record in writing—in other words, when it comes to real History—Mr. Wells’s excellent qualities as a writer appear in a much better light and are put to a much better purpose. His narrative, which even in its misshapen prehistoric part was lucid, vivid and well put, capable of holding the reader’s attention, retains all these characters, and now becomes in great sections really informing without distortion. There is also a very successful packing of a great deal of information into a short space without redundancy of detail and without too much repetition. The order is well observed, and the survey is as wide as the Author intended it to be—that is, world-wide.
Unfortunately, in this second part of Mr. Wells’s account, he cannot help suffering from the disabilities of the modern industrial town world, under which he naturally labours. He has never experienced the great part played by popular memory and impressions handed down from one generation to another, as the counterpart and corrector of documentary Record. He is, therefore, too prone to treat what is handed down by masses of men living familiarly in neighbourhood (they still do so in our villages) as being, on its large lines and in its general sense, misleading; whereas it is, on its large lines and in its general sense, true. He has no appreciable knowledge of the Catholic Church, and, therefore, does not know how History falls into line under that philosophy which alone properly explains it. He also suffers, as we shall see, from that unfortunate tendency to violent personal hatred for the nobler things, especially for the great and united succession of civilization in Europe: Tradition.
But the merits, at first, outweigh the faults. Until he runs up against the beginnings of Rome—with all the irritation which the mere name of Rome provokes in him—he keeps his head and writes excellently. The thing is well balanced and of real value. The exceptions which must be made, even to the part before Greece and Rome, to this praise do not colour his story of early record as a whole. He gives a rather imaginary account of the beginnings of agriculture, but much of it is more probable than improbable; and he modifies it well enough by conditional adverbs proper to our necessarily speculative attitude towards these early and uncertain things.
Now and then, in a sentence or two, he is unwise enough to abandon this conditional attitude and bolts away again into fiction: for instance, he tells us that when man settled down to agriculture, the Red Sea was still connected with the Mediterranean (p. 91). We do not know that; it is mere guesswork, and ought not to be put up as historical fact. On the other hand, an immediately following remark, that “the Persian Gulf then extended much further northwards than it does now,” is real history; for there is sufficient proof of that.
Again (on p. 92), he puts down as historical fact the invariable conquest of settled populations by barbaric and nomadic populations outside. He treats it as a necessarily recurrent phenomenon and as the only process. Of course, we all know from History that in plain recorded fact the converse is just as common, and far more lasting in its effects. Subjugation of the barbarian by the civilized man is very much more the rule of recorded History than its opposite. And as for agricultural work being regarded as the lot of an inferior, that is a false generalization from our own suburban conditions. On the contrary, the tradition of the Mediterranean peoples, as of the Chinese, is just the other way. Agricultural work was the basis of their society and was clothed with moral dignity.