Again, Mr. Wells does not understand what it is that makes men in the Catholic culture either definitely Catholic or definitely and wholly sceptical. It is that men in the Catholic culture think; they use the human reason. If they have the Faith they argue that a Divine authority will be infallible; they therefore accept all its doctrine. If they have lost the Faith, if they think the Church to be of human institution, their reason bids them as a consequence combat an organization which makes such enormous pretensions to authority without (as they believe) any right to it.
The reason, for instance, that you do not have mawkish religious sentiment hanging about such minds as, in Catholic countries, have lost the Faith, is that those minds are founded upon Intelligence and despise muddle-headed emotionalism. They admit their loss of doctrine, and they are not afraid to face the consequence of whatever they conceive to be the truth.
But in nations not of Catholic culture it is the other way about. Men like Mr. Wells, who have ceased to believe that Our Blessed Lord was God, or even that He had Divine authority, cling desperately to the emotions which the old belief aroused—because they find those emotions pleasant. That is a piece of intellectual weakness for which corresponding men, atheists of the Catholic culture, very properly feel a hearty contempt.
When Mr. Wells goes on to the climax of the affair abroad, which is the French Revolution, his work becomes a mixture of good and bad. The précis side of it is good in so far as it proceeds from his own pen. It is, in my judgment, an error to print great wads of Carlyle, column after column. Mr. Wells’s own less picturesque way of writing is much better suited for an outline—but that is a small point. The sequence of events and their proportion is well kept, and there is a very good little sketch map of the Campaign of Valmy which shows that the author—or whoever else it was that drew the map—has got a good clear comprehension of that rather complicated and very important episode.
But in his attempts to judge the characters of the Revolution he goes all wrong, because he is dealing with a whole side of Europe which is unfamiliar to him. For instance, he does not know what the trouble was with Marie Antoinette. It was not that she was grossly extravagant; that is a mere legend. She was a lady; and certainly Mr. Wells would not give one to understand that; moreover, during all the later part of her life she had become a very sincerely religious woman, practising, frequenting the Sacraments. The tragedy of the queen lay in the intimate relations of her early married life. Now, everybody ought to know that who pretends to deal with the period at all. The details have been fully printed (by myself among others) and are available to popular writers.
In the same way he has got Robespierre all wrong. He has evidently read nothing modern on Robespierre, and he commits the old error of recording the last and worst of the Terror as being in particular Robespierre’s work.
The point is of no very great importance, but it is worth quoting because it is very characteristic. Ask one of Mr. Wells’s myriad-headed popular public, who Robespierre was, and they would answer a fanatical Republican who attempted to force his views upon France by guillotine, and was at last put down because people sickened of the increasing slaughter. Now when a popular author writes what his very large and uninstructed public already believe they know, he naturally goes down; if he wrote historical truth instead, his work would be less pleasant to them and far less saleable. Yet, after all, truth is the test of good history; not momentary selling value.
Now the truth about Robespierre is to-day fairly well known. Hamel’s great monograph, though far too favourable to his subject, is crammed with document and reference. It was not Robespierre, it was the Committee of Public Safety, and Carnot in particular, who created the Terror as an instrument of martial law. They created it in order to win the desperate battle in which they were engaged on every frontier and upon the sea, and the first sign of Robespierre’s downfall was his desertion of the Committee of Public Safety. Carnot in particular saw that Robespierre was interfering with the Committee’s rigour. The Committee had no idea that when they had got rid of Robespierre the false popular conception upon his character and position would release the very heavy strain which the Terror had created and make the continuation of it impossible: but though they did not see what was coming, it was they that deposed Robespierre, and they deposed him not because he represented the Terror, but, on the contrary, because he would have modified and restricted their power, of which the Terror was the instrument.
If Mr. Wells would be at the pains to read the actual indictments on which people were put to death in Paris, he would find that the great majority of them were humble people, and most of them, humble or prominent, were put to death for some form of weakening the military effort; for sending money abroad, for attempting desertion to the enemy, or helping him, or uttering “defeatist” sentiments, and so on.
On Mr. Wells’s very long and violent diatribe against Napoleon I shall not delay. It is merely silly. Mr. Wells seems to have a personal grudge against anyone in history who shows remarkable military talent, or, indeed, remarkable powers of any kind, and these in the case of Napoleon were combined with all the qualities which are to Mr. Wells like red rags to a bull. He was of the Catholic culture, he had an immense genius in nearly every department of human activity, he was a gentleman by birth, he was a soldier by profession. It is, therefore, natural that our author should be opposed to him strongly. But surely one can be strongly opposed to an historical character without making a fool of one’s self! I, for instance, am strongly opposed to Oliver Cromwell’s character, I have no indulgence for his particular kind of vices, cruelty and avarice and pride, while I have a natural indulgence for the sensual frailties to which Cromwell was not inclined. But what would any competent critic think of me as an historian if I denied Cromwell’s energy, belittled his capacity as a cavalry leader, or doubted the reality of his fanatical religion? If I made him out an insignificant fellow?