The moment he is on a thing that is not of his own religion and social experience he rejects it or blunders on it. I shall have many occasions for pointing this out in my criticism of the book, but I may mention here, by way of example, one out of these many, to which I shall return. This is Mr. Wells’s hopelessly provincial attitude towards the fragmentary record of the Gospels. He can only think of the events recorded as though they were taking place in the time and place he himself has known—they took place, as a fact, in the first century and in the Roman Empire. He imagines them taking place in a world where the supernatural elements of the story could only have been introduced gradually and after the death of the founder; whereas, in point of fact, the atmosphere of that time was in every class of society especially apt to the reception of the supernatural. There was scepticism among them—but the scepticism of society in the first century was not like our scepticism and—quite apart from the question whether such a state of mind were wise or unwise—the men of the first century accepted the Thaumaturge and expected the marvellous in connection with religion.
The next disadvantage which I find in Mr. Wells for the writing of an outline of History is one which he has developed somewhat late in his life, which is more and more warping his writing as a whole, and which is quite fatal to any attempt at History. This is his entertaining unreasoning reactions which one may now without exaggeration term rabid.
These reactions have a common root. They are all provoked by anything traditional. It is Tradition, its usage and Nobility which irks our author. Lineage offends him, and whatever is venerable and great.
He suffers these reactions against the Gentry—especially the Gentry of his own country—against soldiers, great military characters in history, against certain contemporaries of his, but, most of all, against the Catholic Church. To be thus provoked to action by others—not to direct one’s pen of one’s own initiative, but to have it jerked into action by the strength of another—is weakening to all authors, but it is death to the historian. For History, of all forms of writing, most demands a general and balanced action of the mind, free from all control save that of a calm, inward judgment.
Here I would have my reader note the exact words I use; for I use them with discretion and after having fully weighed them. I do not mean that the dislike of a particular type—such as that of the English gentleman—or of certain individuals, or of a powerful institution, such as is the Catholic Church—necessarily makes a man a bad historian. Every vivid writer must have affections and distastes, and History that is not vivid is not worth writing. But when the distaste becomes unreasoning through violence, when it has that quality which we call “rabid”—a quality of impulse and unrestraint, the quality which makes men yell or pile on superlatives or descend to mere insult—then you have a quality useful perhaps in pamphleteering, but fatal to the reputation of an historian.
I do not mean that this quality is to be deplored in all writing or speaking: far from it. It is of great value in rhetoric; it will often move men in the direction desired; it is often justly applied to something evil against which an honest indignation is felt. What I do say is that in History it is out of place in proportion to its being unreasoning: and unreason is the very essence of these instinctive reactions. Cobbett’s History of the Reformation, for instance, is a first-rate piece of literary work, but bad history, because in his hatred of the Reformation he accepts anything against it—such as the impossible story of Anne Boleyn being Henry VIII’s daughter—and loses the faculty for weighing evidence.
To judge by his books, Mr. Wells came up against the English idea of a Gentleman early in life. He probably thought it an illusion, and a harmful one, from the first. Very many will here agree with him. But later on he became obsessed by the thing. He came to hate everything connected with what used to be called in England “the governing class.” He grew to hate Latin and Greek because these are, or were, the basis of a gentleman’s schooling; soldiering, because it was by tradition a gentleman’s profession—he hates it all, even down to the spurs worn by officers.
But Mr. Wells’s violent and blind reaction against the Catholic Church is a much more important matter. Here he is quarrelling with the very matter of History; for the foundation and career of the Catholic Church is the chief event in the history of mankind.
To judge (again) by his books, Mr. Wells seems to have come up against the Catholic Church late in life—he does not yet really know what it is. But here, again, he found a power opposed to many ideas which he cherished, and (more exasperating) to many things which he sympathized with and practised. Perhaps he felt that in a world turned Catholic a man like himself would have difficulty in carrying on, and therefore came to hate the idea of a world turned Catholic as a fish would hate the idea of a world without water. But this mere impulse—this mere instinctive kick, lacking sufficient knowledge and lacking reasoning power—this mere attack without any sufficient ammunition of instruction—this mere impatience—makes it impossible for the man who suffers thus to write History as it should be written.
For instance, his hatred of the Church makes him wish to believe that its influence is dying. Instead of looking around him, and seeing that Catholic influence over the more intelligent of modern men is markedly increasing, he shuts his eyes and screams his passionate refusal to accept so plain, if unpalatable, a fact. It has recently led him to write that sufficient income and interesting occupation would make Catholic priests pour out of the Church en masse: a judgment clearly ridiculous.