Such criticism is parallel to what one has to say too often with regard to military history. It is essential to good military history that its writer should be absorbed in the combinations of the affair, and see battle and campaign with apparent indifference to either combatant, or, at any rate, with a major interest only in war as war. While the bad military historian is he who, however great his interest in the main affair, cannot avoid a Jingo note—or an anti-Jingo, they are equally bad—in his writing. It is the difference between seeing human events from above as on a map—which should be the whole business of an outline of History—and seeing them slantways from the ground, and therefore out of proportion.
There, then, is Mr. Wells on one great chapter of History: Islam. He shows in it both his advantages and his defects. He is quick to grasp the real meaning of it as a social phenomenon; he shows admirable skill in simple and lucid concentration upon main historical features. But he also betrays here his two main weaknesses. He can’t keep off a petty and violent anti-Christian obsession which ruins his work and deprives it of any chance of permanence; and he shows occasional examples of quite startling ignorance in matters which are common knowledge to his educated contemporaries.
CHAPTER XII
THE CHRISTIAN DARK AGES
Mr. Wells’s Outline continues in good proportion and lucid in his general description of what we call, in Christian history, “The Dark Ages”: that is, the period between the first spread of the Mohammedan disaster (which he, of course, regards as a benefit because it destroyed or wounded the Catholic Church in the areas occupied by Mohammedans) and the German capture of the Papacy towards the year 1000.
The general tone is that of the ordinary textbooks written in the anti-Catholic vein; although there is a rather more violent irritation than usual against the Faith in Mr. Wells’s general position and occasional references, it occupies little of this division. To the errors I will allude in a moment, but I must first point out the merits of this passage which brings us up to the eve of the Crusades and takes us from the end of Book V to the midst of Book VI.
Apart from his general lucid and vigorous presentation of a long period very difficult to summarize, there is an excellent metaphor upon page 396 comparing the fragmentary cohesion of society in the Dark Ages, and the gradual formation of feudalism in their most disturbed period, to the physical formation of crystals. The author is naturally a little confused about his general dates, because he has not had occasion to read History seriously. Thus he strangely considers the Fourth and Fifth(!) centuries to have been particularly chaotic in territorial arrangement, and immediately afterwards uses the term “Feudalism.” That is, of course, a complete misunderstanding of comparative dates and a misapprehension of the length of the period and the great changes which took place in such a length. In the Fourth century the Western world was entirely united and ordered from Rome, though there was the usual heavy local fighting and difficulty in guarding the frontiers from irruption. In the Fifth century there were armed bands raiding across the frontiers in not very large numbers, and accepted as soldiers of the Empire, one very bad Asiatic invasion en masse, which was beaten, and, at the end, the disassociation of the Western part of the Empire into separate vast regional governments under local generals.
Feudalism was an altogether later thing; as much later as we are later than the Wars of the Roses. It was a thing which became established in the Ninth century, though you can already see it forming (unconsciously) in the Eighth. It was the break-up of society into a mass of local governments, very unsystematic and held together only by personal bond of overlord and vassal. To talk of it in connection with the Fourth and Fifth centuries is like talking of industrial capitalism in the same breath with the peasants’ revolt of 1381.
Nevertheless, though the centuries are wildly wrong, the metaphor of crystals as applied to feudal groupment and regroupment is very good, and is an excellent example of Mr. Wells’s powers of analogy and illustration.
I should not quarrel either in this commentary upon Mr. Wells’s general acceptance of the old-fashioned History which is still conventional in most of our official teaching here in England, although it is already badly out of date. Were I writing a commentary upon the book treated seriously as an essay on European history, I should be more severe upon this simple acceptation of stuff on which most of our students are still fed, but which, in the light of modern scholarship, especially of French scholarship, has the effect of Crinolines and Pegtop Trousers.
I am concerned here with the much more important business of Mr. Wells’s anti-Catholic motive in writing, and though the false conventional history which we are still largely taught in England is ultimately anti-Catholic in motive, yet it is so largely accepted, and the connection between it and the ultimate religious motive behind it is so much disguised, that it would hardly be fair to ridicule an old-fashioned statement save where it is so thoroughly and admittedly out of date that not even a best-seller ought to admit it into his popular writing.