To put it very plainly, Mr. Wells does not know what happened. He writes as one of his own type in a foreign country might write about the English industrial revolution, proclaiming that it destroyed English national feeling and tradition, and substituted democracy for aristocracy. He cannot see the gigantic religious cataclysm of Europe in its main lines: the first sweeping tide, then the ebb, then the crystallization of the offensive and defensive positions after one hundred years of armed struggle throughout the Continent.
I do not think the subject is too big for him. I think that he has not taken upon it even enough trouble to grasp the main structure.
If he had written with great contempt, or, better still, with great anger, of the saving of the Catholic Church in spite of the storm, he would have been historical, though an opponent. Not understanding that it was saved, and that, having been saved, its fortunes of success or failure will make up the future story of our race, he must, in what is left of his history, blunder still worse than he has blundered before; for he will have to account for modern Europe as though the Church were not there, and to do that is a little like trying to account for modern England as though the English climate were not there.
In this exposure of such nullity in the chief event in modern history I have had little time for the praise which is Mr. Wells’s due in lesser matters touched upon during the period of the great change. I owe it by way of postscript.
Thus the summary of the literary and artistic Renaissance, though a little dull from cramming in much detail (a fault, as a rule, conspicuously absent from Mr. Wells’s, who excels in economy of words) is accurate and sufficient. He appreciates thoroughly the greatness of Magellan’s heroic adventure. The pages upon Columbus (492 and 493) are good and sufficient.
There is only one foolish note in all this rapid sketch of Springtime of the Arts, and that is where Mr. Wells has the folly to say of Shakespeare that he was “happily” without the Classics. It is an idea which obsesses our author. Because gentlemen are trained in the Classics, therefore, he cannot believe that the Classics have any value.
But Mr. Wells, in spite of his violent antipathy to culture, is right by power of vivid imagination and original use of brain in many points where his fellow popular writers are wrong. For instance, he does not make out Francis Bacon to have invented a new philosophical method. He knows that printing was of gradual development (though he hardly understands what ill effect it had upon the mind as well as what good), he is original and interesting on the effect of the coming of paper into general use—though naturally materialist in his exaggerated judgment of its effect.
I could quote a dozen little touches of the sort, in all of which he is to be congratulated. They do not make up for the lack of acquaintance with the main matter of his discourse, and that lack of acquaintance is not to be remedied by any amount of reading. It is not lack of scholarship; it is lack of appreciation and judgment. He knows no more of the Catholic Church, which made Europe and still sustains Europe in its peril, than he does of the other things which infuriate him, such as the Gentleman.
I may sum up by saying that the whole of this attitude towards the Catholic Church, and even towards the religious sense as a whole, reminds me of an incident in my own life. A certain commercial traveller in the town of Lichfield confided to me his conviction that “all this talk about wine is great rot. One wine is much the same as another; and, anyhow, it’s all sour, nasty stuff, as everybody would admit if people weren’t afraid of their neighbours.”