Mr. Wells is further much to be congratulated upon his contrast between the universality of writing and reading in the world of Arabic culture at its height, and the lack of them in the contemporary world of Latin culture, which was, perhaps, the chief external difference between them. He is careful to note (in quoting another authority—and this is an example of his accuracy in detail) the presence of the so-called Arabic numerals in our civilization long before Islam arose. He very justly puts down the development of algebra to Islam, and adds, what is much less known, its possible or probable connection with India. He emphasizes with right judgment the historic function of Islam in creating a flux, as it were, between Asia and Europe and making a passage for ideas between the world east of the old Roman boundary and our world. But where he is most to be congratulated is in his emphasis upon the effect of the Mongol irruption upon Europe, and much more upon the Mohammedan world.
It is true that this feature in universal history has long been appreciated. It has been fully present in the minds of historians for more than a lifetime; but an appreciation of it is not yet popularized, and Mr. Wells, writing for a popular audience, has underlined it much more than any other contemporary whom I can call to mind. It would perhaps have been better had he given the origins of the catastrophe (in so far as concerned Islam) with more emphasis. It is true that the horrible Mongolian disaster of the thirteenth century was on another scale, and had ultimately far more effect; but the Turkish beginnings are very important; he gives a short paragraph to the Kahzars (pp. 411–12) who determined the history of Russia—or at any rate begin the determination of it. He very rightly says that the second Turkish branch, the Seljuks, raiding the original Mohammedan Empire of the Near East, was more important. He gives this barely half a page, but he very properly emphasizes the supreme importance of their breaking through the mountain-wall which had hitherto been the defence of our civilization upon the East from the Black Sea to the Levantine coast; and the few lines in which he alludes to the battle of Manzikart and its effect, are striking and just.
I am not surprised at, but regret, the inevitable failure of the author to note here something which should give pause to every opponent of the Christian religion such as himself. He perceives (and very well describes) the breakdown of Islam as a culture after its early brilliancy. He notes that the second chapter in its power was only begun by that tide of abominable barbarism in the eleventh century—the Turkish hordes. He might have noted—it is certainly a thing which every judicial student of religion should note (unfortunately Mr. Wells cannot possibly be judicial when the Catholic Church is anywhere within ten miles)—that the Christian culture alone has not shown this recurrent “fainting sickness.” Its material circumstance has risen and fallen slowly. It has had a rhythm, as every living organism must have; but it has not had fatal fatigues. Its resurrections have been from within. Attacks from without have always strengthened it, whether it were attack upon the spiritual body—martyrdom and heresy—or attack upon the political body—Mohammedan and Pagan invasions. This Character in the Catholic culture is unique. The comparative history of religion will give you no parallel to this: and I say again that the impartial and really sceptical student of religion would note immediately in his studies this mark peculiar to the Catholic Church; account for it as best he could by some natural explanation, but note it.
The long passages upon the Ottoman Turks, upon the great thirteenth-century Mongol move, form the opening of Book VII. The description is full and good, and the accompanying sketch maps illuminating. Mr. Wells is to be blamed in sparing those men the epithets which he is ready to fling at any Christian armies and particularly at those which impose orthodoxy upon the mortal enemies of our culture. But that is only to be expected; and I think I have wearied the reader enough with emphasizing this unfortunate feature which deprives his work of solidity and permanence. Our armies never reached the barbaric depths of cruelty and mere destruction. They were creative.
The section on the travels of Marco Polo is first-rate. I find in it again, of course, the silly little sentences against Catholicism which he cannot avoid, the condemnation of the word “illiterate” coupled with the word “theologian” as applied to Charlemagne; the contrasting of the Catholic Church with an imaginary “teaching of Jesus” (p. 443); an absurd suggestion that the Mongols would have become Catholics if it had not been for the Priest; a sneer at the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century (of all centuries!) for its loss of the conquering fire of the early Christian Missions; a complaint that the Papacy did not convert the Empire of Kubla-Khan—which he imagines to have been thirsting for conversion to Papistry, but only willing (apparently) to accept it in a Protestant form.
Apart from these inevitable breakdowns in judgment, such as fanaticism can never escape, the description of the period is, as I have said, good, and that of the travels of Marco Polo excellent. The succeeding pages which begin the story of the Ottoman Turks I must leave to a later chapter.
I lay down this, the best of the passages I have yet come across in this popular work, and I cannot resist an inclination to muse a little upon the conditions which make it a failure. I hope that I appreciate as much as anyone the great qualities possessed by Mr. Wells for making it a success. He need only, for instance, in this excellent summary of the Middle History of Islam, with its very just and powerful appreciation of the effect upon universal history of the “Asiatic Tide,” have written with detachment to have made it a perfect piece of work; and had he carried a similar detachment with him throughout all his pages he might have done something enduring, or, if not that, at any rate something valuable for his own generation.
But his nervous reaction against the Catholic Church is too strong for him, and the result is that the colouring of the picture is all wrong. In proportion as a set of known facts are remote from our own civilization and do not touch upon the philosophy which made us all (including Mr. Wells), in that proportion his judgment is well balanced and his selection sound enough. That is why he is best when he talks of China or Islam, third rate when he talks of his own blood, the European, and quite below the average level of his popular contemporaries when he has to deal with the great debate as to whether religion be from God or from man, and as to whether the Catholic Church be what it claims to be or a maleficent illusion.
It is perfectly possible to write enduring and, in a fashion, valuable, historical stuff with as complete a conviction as Mr. Wells himself has that all religion is from mankind, and the Catholic Faith not only man-made, but ill-made.
What one cannot do is to write good History under the effect of mere irritation, and exasperated irritation at that. There is between such nervous weakness and a proper balance something comparable to the contrast between the advocacy of a good lawyer and the temper of a touchy witness. The lawyer, though pleading for a false cause, keeps himself, if he knows his trade, detached from the passions of that cause; presents the arguments soberly though cumulatively, throwing stress upon what will achieve his result, but without betraying loss of control. And that is what the historian should do: he should so write that his reader says to himself, “I am reading what actually happened,” and not so that the reader says to himself, “There he is off again at his bête noire”!