A companion to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

My object in these pages is to follow, for Catholic readers, Mr. Wells’s Outline of History; to point out the principal popular errors, most of them now out of date, which its author has repeated, and to state the opposing truths with their supporting evidence and reasoning.

If it be asked why I should devote such labour to a book which is but a passing fashion, and that not in the classes or districts which count most, I answer that, though ephemeral, the work has had a wide circulation, and is therefore of some momentary effect worth checking, while it is also representative of its type: writing of wide circulation which repeats as facts for general acceptation theories once respectable and now exploded. Now to check erroneous statement is always worth while.

If it be asked why I envisage a Catholic audience in particular, I answer that the issue in such matters lies between the Catholic Church and its modern opponents. The hosts of modern writers in all countries, of whom Mr. Wells is a local example, act more or less consciously in reaction against the Catholic Church. It is her doctrines they are concerned to attack; and soon, with the increasing effect of the Church upon the one hand, the increasing abandonment (outside her boundaries) of all transcendental belief on the other, there will be but two opposed camps: the Faith and its enemies.

Already the denial of a Personal God, of Immortality, of the Redemption, of the Fall, of the Incarnation, of the Resurrection, is no longer directed against some vague “Christianity”—a word with twenty meanings or none—but against that defined and existing corporation which alone defends in its entirety that body of dogma upon which our civilization has been founded and with the loss of which it will perish.

Further, I have the legitimate motive of sustaining others. There are Catholics into whose hands a work of this kind falls, and it is possible that here and there a Catholic may be disturbed in his faith by popular literature of this kind. For the sake of this very small number of chance Catholics, who may suffer from a popular (though ephemeral) work of this kind, I desire to examine the book and distinguish its merits from its absurdities. One Catholic disturbed in his faith is more important than a host of the average reading public of England and America, drowsily accepting stuff they have heard all their lives, and reading it because they have always believed it to be true.

A Catholic disturbed in his faith is like a man troubled with his sight. A Catholic losing his faith is like a man going blind. One should take a great deal of trouble to prevent a man from going blind.

I am aware that to aver such a motive reads presumptuous and a little ridiculous. For faith is strongest in the humble. But the motive is there, and at any rate the important thing is that Mr. Wells’s widely read, though necessarily short-lived, survey of human affairs, with its violently anti-Catholic motive, should not be of effect on any Catholic mind so far as a Catholic critic can provide the antidote.

Every man, even the idlest, occupies his time with something or other. The vast majority of men have their energies absorbed by their daily tasks. So when a man comes forward with a mass of historical facts, drawn from Encyclopædias (which not one man in a thousand has had the leisure to look up in those books of reference), and tacks on to these historical facts all manner of false conclusions (destructive of the only truth worth having, destructive of the one grasp on reality which is of any value to men), the reader may well be misled.

He may easily say to himself, “Since all these historical facts are presumably true, the conclusions tacked on to them are also probably true.” And in this way a false philosophy is insinuated.

Mr. Wells’s main motive—the honestly held conviction which drives him to writing matter of this kind—is reaction against the Catholic Church. But as this motive is not stated—(and, indeed, I fancy, not fully conscious in the mind of the writer)—the reader may take his work to be neutral matter. In doing so, false history, and, therefore, false philosophy (for history is but the illustration of philosophy) may, without his knowledge, pass into his mind. It is this which it is important to prevent.

At the outset of my task it behoves me to set forth the great talents with which Mr. Wells has been endowed by Almighty God, and especially the talents suitable to the writer of general history. For, indeed, he seemed from his earlier works admirably fitted for writing a general outline of history, and would, by the consent of all, have been thought apt for the task—had he not undertaken it.

First, he writes very clearly; he practises an excellent economy in the use of words. This, for popular exposition, is essential; and he never fails in it. He never lapses into verbosity. He is direct, simple, clear.

Next, he possesses a sense of time. Now in history nothing is more valuable. Within his lights, within the measure of his limited instruction, he does see time in right scale; and that is so rare in any historian that one cannot welcome it too warmly.

Next, we should remark that Mr. Wells has (as his works of fiction amply show) a strong power of making the image he has framed in his own mind arise in the mind of his reader. This is, indeed, his chief talent.

It is a talent extremely rare: the very essential of good imaginative writing, but of particular importance in historical writing. For History, as the great Michelet finely put it, should be a resurrection of the flesh. Were I engaged upon a critique of Mr. Wells’s more permanent literary claims I would dilate on this: for such a gift is of quite exceptional power in him. None of our contemporaries possesses it in anything like the same degree. But I am not concerned here with his style, and must reluctantly leave it.

Next, it is worth noting that Mr. Wells is exceedingly accurate in his use of reference books and proof-readers. The dates are always right, and the names and all the mechanical details of the book are similarly exact. I have a particular right to praise such a quality because in my own case (as in the case of the great Michelet, whom I have just quoted) I despair of accuracy. My own writings on History are full of misprints: “right” for “left” in descriptions of battles, “north” for “south,” “east” for “west,” transposed letters and the rest of it. Mr. Wells’s writing is quite remarkable for its freedom from such irritating verbal blemishes.

But much more important than these advantages which he possesses for a writing of an Outline of History is his sincerity. He feels the importance of History to mankind, and especially, I think, to that part of mankind which he knows best—the mankind of the English Home Counties and London Suburbs. He feels instinctively that he and his must now obtain a general view. It is due to Mr. Wells to say that hardly anyone else in our restricted society feels this as strongly as he does. Our newspapers, our politicians, and even our financiers, cosmopolitan though they are, do not feel the need of trying to understand the past of Europe and of the world. They are still soaked in what is left of the old self-sufficiency. But Mr. Wells has woken up, and it is to his credit.

I put his sincerity thus last in this category of his advantages for writing History, because it is the chief. He is conspicuously and naively sincere. This good quality is apparent in every line of the work as it first appeared. It is equally apparent in the first part of the new revised edition. He does really believe from the bottom of his heart all that he read in the textbooks of his youth. He does really and from the bottom of his heart believe that the little world he knows is the whole world; and that his doctrines of goodwill, vague thinking, loose loving, and the rest—all soaked in the local atmosphere of his life—may be the salvation of mankind. It is not vanity or pride (though, of course, it is ignorance); it is a perfectly honest conviction. He cannot imagine how things could possibly be otherwise; and that, by the way, is the root of his recently acquired hatred of the Catholic Church, which has now become, directly and indirectly, the universally present savour in his writing.

He is sincerely bewildered and exasperated at the power of Something so different from the only world he knows. He hopes vaguely that the Church may be dying: he suspects it is not—the doubt worries him. It moves him to hatred; but that hatred is sincere. This sincerity of his, even where it is misguided and untaught, is respectable. He does sincerely desire to do good to his fellow-men within the narrow circle of his experience and understanding.

If the reader will add up all these advantages for the writing of History, he will find them amount, I think, to a very notable sum.

There are few men who could have produced a general history better than Mr. Wells—had he not suffered from certain graver disadvantages to which I shall presently allude. To be sincere is essential. To have the motive of History is both singular and decisive. To have clarity, economy and a sense of time is rare and of high value. To be accurate in detail of dates, etc., is a most excellent minor virtue in any historian.

Mr. Wells has called me an inveterate antagonist. He is wrong. From the first moment that the Time Machine appeared, so many years ago, I have consistently praised his talents in private conversation and in public writing, and I shall praise them still.

Before I leave this point of his advantages in the writing of History, let me deal very briefly with certain false accusations that have been made against him.

The first and, I think, the stupidest, is that of brevity. I have heard people say, “Here is a man pretending to write a history of the world in a few months and in a few pages,” and they have laughed at him on that ground. The accusation is unintelligent. You can give the outline of the history of anything in a sentence, or a paragraph, or a pamphlet, or a book, or an encyclopædia. If Napier, the great historian of the Peninsular War—perhaps the greatest English writer of History—had been asked to state in one sentence the outline of that struggle, he might have replied, “The Spanish national feeling engaged with French usurpation was supported by a small English regular army possessed of the command of the sea. These two forces combined achieved, after Napoleon’s disaster in Russia, the driving out of the French from the Peninsula.” If he had been given a page in which to write the thing he could have added phrases upon the talent of Wellington as a defensive General, the misconception of the French upon the Spanish national feeling, the skill with which the lines of Torres Vedras were drawn, etc. Had he been given fifty pages, he could have added more details still—and so on, up to a shelf full of books. But the outline from such a pen would have been good History had it covered ten lines or ten thousand. It is thoughtless to say that a man has no right to give an outline of any movement, however great, in any space, however small. The Catechism puts the whole vast business of man through time and eternity into one short phrase, “That we were made to know, love, and serve God, and to be happy with Him for ever.” You could add to that all the rest of true philosophy in as much detail as you like, and still expand; but the original brief outline of less than a score of words remains true. Mr. Wells has a perfect right to produce an outline of general History in one volume, or half a volume, or a page, and, so far as the manner of it goes, he has done it excellently: the drawing is firm, the intention honest; it is the shape of the Outline that is wrong.