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Title: The New Teaching of History
       With a reply to some recent criticisms of the outline of history

Author: H. G. Wells

Release Date: June 1, 2019 [EBook #59650]

Language: English

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For the better part of three years the writer of these notes has been occupied almost entirely in an intensely interesting enterprise. He has been getting his own ideas about the general process of history into order and he has been setting them down, having them checked by various people, and publishing them as a book, The Outline of History, which both in America and Europe has had a considerable vogue. In volumes or in complete sets of parts it has already found over two hundred thousand purchasers; it is still being bought in considerable quantities, and it is being translated and published in several foreign languages; it is quite possible that it has sufficiently interested almost as many people to read it through as it has found purchasers to take the easier step of buying it.

This Outline of History did not by any means contain all the history the writer himself would like to know or ought to know, and much less did it profess to condense all history for its readers. But it did attempt to sketch a framework, which people might have in common, and into which everyone might fit his own particular reading and historical interests. It did try to give all history as one story. 4And the largeness of the measure of its success is certainly much more due to the widespread desire for such an Outline than to any particular merit of the particular Outline the writer produced. So far as reception goes, almost any enterprising person might have succeeded as the writer has succeeded. He was, as people say, “meeting a long-felt want.” But his years of work in meeting it have necessarily made him something of a specialist in historical generalities, and the adventure of making and spreading the Outline abroad has been full of interesting and suggestive experiences. Some of the criticism to which the Outline has been subjected affords an opportunity for profitable comment. To “answer” all its critics would be a preposterously self-important thing to do, but, from the point of view of our general education, some of them do repay examination. And accordingly he is setting down these present notes to the Outline; partly comments upon the educational significance of its general reception and partly a consideration of the mental attitudes, the moral and intellectual pose, into which it has thrown certain of its critics.

A most fruitful question the writer found was this: “Why was it left for me in 1918 to undertake this task?” There has been a need of some such general account of man’s story in the universe for many years. Such an account is surely a necessary part of any properly conceived education. One might almost say it was the most necessary part. For why do we teach history to our children? To take them out of themselves, to place them in a conscious relationship to the whole community in which they live, to make them realise themselves as actors and authors in a great drama which began long before they were born and which opens out to issues far transcending any personal ends in their interest and importance. And it is a commonplace to say that in the last century or so the sphere of human interest has widened out with marvellous rapidity 5until it comprehends the whole world. Economically, intellectually, and in many other ways the world becomes one community. But, while there has been this enormous enlargement of human interests, there has been, if anything, a narrowing down of the scope of historical teaching. If the reader will look into the sort of history that is taught in schools to-day and compare it with the yellow old books of our great-grandfathers, he will find rather a shrinkage towards the intensive study of particular periods and phases of history than an extension to meet the more extensive needs of a new age.

This is a curious result, but it is not a very difficult one to understand. Something of the same sort of narrowing down from broad views to closer and more detailed study went on for a time also in the teaching of science. In both cases the narrowing down can be ascribed to the same cause, to the growing accumulation, refinement and elaboration of detailed knowledge, and to the increasing numbers and the consequent increased division in labour and specialisation, of the original workers in the two fields. In the field of physical science particularly, and also in the field of biological science to a lesser degree, an extensive revision of fundamental conceptions has largely corrected this tendency towards narrow and specialised attention, but there has not been the same recasting of fundamentals in historical study. And the teaching of history in schools has followed the movement of the student of history towards concentration and not the needs of the common citizen towards ampler views, because there has never yet been a proper recognition of the difference in aim between study for knowledge, the historical study of the elect, on the one hand, and teaching, the general education of the citizen for the good not only of the citizen but of the community, on the other. But these are divergent aims. The former is a deep and penetrating pursuit of truth; the latter a common instruction and discipline in broad ideas and the general 6purpose. The material may be the same, the science of physics, biology or history as the case may be, but the method of treatment may be widely different in the two cases.

Education is really one of the newest of the arts and sciences. The idea of particular, exceptional people pursuing learning has been familiar to the world for scores of centuries, but the idea of preparing the minds of whole classes or whole communities for co-operations and common actions by a training in common ideas is comparatively a new one. The idea of education as learning still dominates us, and so it is that while we have numbers of teachers of history who are or who attempt to be, or who pose as historians who teach, we have comparatively few teachers of history who are teachers whose instrument is history. In relation to the science of history, and indeed to all the sciences, the importance of teacher as teacher is still insufficiently recognised.

Now the virtues required of the historian as of the specialist in any other science are extreme accuracy, fulness, delicacy and discrimination within the department of his work. He is usually not concerned with a philosophical review of the whole field of his science and very chary of invading any unfamiliar provinces of his subject, because of the great risks he will run there of making, if not positive blunders, at least incomplete statements. The specialists will catch him out, and though the point may be an utterly trivial one, he will have been caught out, and that discredits the historian excessively. But the teacher’s concern is primarily with the taught and with giving them a view of their universe as a whole. It is only after undergoing such comprehensive teaching that a student should be handed over to learn, by example and participation in some definite specialisation of study, the finer precisions.

The modern community has yet to develop a type of teacher with the freedom and leisure to make a thorough 7and continuous study of contemporary historical and other scientific knowledge in order to use these accumulations to the best effect in general education. Because this is work for teachers and not for historians. The insufficient number of teachers we maintain are kept closely to the grindstone of actual lesson-giving. Perhaps a time will come when, over and above the professors and teachers actively in contact with pupils and classes, there will be a considerable organisation of educationists whose work will be this intermediate selection and preparation of knowledge for educational purposes. But in Britain at any rate there are no signs of any development of this broader, more philosophical grade of teacher. The British universities have no philosophy of education and hardly any idea of an educational duty to the community as a whole. At the Reformation they became, and they have remained to this day, meanly and timidly aristocratic in spirit. The typical British university don has little of the spirit that would tolerate and help these master teachers we need. He would not suffer them; he would be jealous of them and spiteful towards them. Such master teachers may be appearing in the United States of America or in some foreign country; in America, for example, such teachers of history as Professors Breasted, John Harvey Robinson and Hutton Webster seem to be doing interpretative work in history of a very original and useful type. Given a class of such educational scholars able to sustain an intelligent criticism and to co-operate generously and intelligently, one can imagine the kind of Outline of History that would be possible, simple, clear, accurate, without fussy pedantries and beautifully proportioned and right. But that class does not exist, and that perfect Outline is at present impossible. So far from sneering at the writer’s brief year or so of special reading and at such superficialities and inadequacies as The Outline of History may betray (and does betray), it would rather become the teacher of history to realise how 8much better it is than anything the teaching organisation of which he is a part deserved. It is not that the writer has stepped into the field of popular history teaching and done something impertinently and roughly that would otherwise have been done well. It is that he has stepped in and done something urgently necessary that would not otherwise have been done at all.

The Outline of History takes the form of a story of mankind for popular reading. But that is only its first form. It is intended to be the basis, it is presented as a scheme, of elementary historical teaching throughout the world. It was written to help oust such teaching of history as one still finds going on in England—of the history of England from 1066 to the death of Queen Anne, for example, without reference to any remoter past or to the present or to any exterior world—for ever from the schools. The Outline of History may presently be superseded in that work of replacement by some better Outline. But the writer has taken no risks in that matter; if no other and better Outline appears, his Outline will go on being revised and repolished and republished. Its critics may rest assured that nothing but a better Outline will put an end to its career. He has written and issued it in such a fashion that it can benefit by every critical comment. It was first issued in monthly parts whose covers, erring at times in the direction of the gorgeous, brightened the bookstalls for a year. These parts were closely scrutinised by numerous readers, and a considerable amount of detail was amended and improved by their suggestions. Then it was completely reset and issued in book form, and in that form it has been very extensively reviewed. The writer keeps files of all the criticisms and suggestions received, and the text of the book is periodically checked and modified in accordance with these comments. In three or four years’ time it will be possible to make a fresh issue in parts, and this again will be followed up by what will be a real fourth edition. By that time the amount 9of slips and errors will probably be reduced to very slight proportions indeed.

On the whole the Outline, as an Outline, has stood the fire of criticism and the silent judgments of reconsideration very well. In the next edition it will be still essentially the same Outline. Naturally, in a copious work of this kind, there are many phrases, loose or weak or indiscreet or unjust, that jar on the writer as he re-reads what he has written, and which need to be pruned and altered. Certain clumsiness of construction will be corrected; the account of the Aryan-speaking peoples comes too early in the present edition for perfect lucidity and it will be moved to a later chapter, and the account of the rise of the Dutch Republic will be put in its proper chronological order before the account of the English commonweal. The chapter upon the changes in the earth’s climate seems to be a little heavy for many readers and may perhaps be taken out, and the work that is now being done by Rivers, Elliot Smith and their associates upon the opening cultural phases from which the first civilisations arose and the application of the results of psycho-analysis to human history, may soon make it possible to rewrite the account of the stone ages in a much fuller and clearer, more assured and less speculative fashion. In one or two places a proliferation of controversial footnotes has led to a distortion that calls for reduction; the dispute about the education of Mr. Gladstone, for example. Perhaps, too, the next year or so may supply material that will qualify the account of the negotiations and temporary settlements of the period of the Paris Conference. These are the chief changes probable; the larger part of the Outline, its main masses and dominant lines, will stand just as it did in the first published parts.

Hardly any critics of the Outline have objected to the idea of dealing with history as one whole, or challenged the possibility of teaching history in so comprehensive a fashion. That is all to the good. It was only to be expected 10that many reviewers would sneer a little at the idea of novelist turned historian, talk of superficiality and hint at inaccuracies and errors they had neither the industry nor the ability to detect. They would have done that if the Outline had been absolutely faultless. As a matter of fact, and thanks very largely to the keen editorial eye of Mr. Ernest Barker—for the writer himself is sometimes a very careless writer—the number of positive inaccuracies and errors that appeared even in the earliest issue of the Outline was very small; most of them were set right in a list of errata at the end of that edition, and there was another still closer pruning before the publication of the second, the book edition. But among the cultivated gentlemen who “do” the book notices in the provincial Press more particularly, there was a disposition to qualify their approval by a condescending reference to slips and mistakes which they imagined must be there. Within the limit set by the law of libel one can have no objection to this sort of thing, which gives a tone of leisured knowledge to the most hastily written review.

Two or three critics will repay a rather fuller attention. One of these is Mr. A. W. Gomme, who teaches Greek in the University of Glasgow. He has published a little pamphlet called Mr. Wells as Historian,^[1] and in this a considerable amount of the hostility against the Outline, that certainly smoulders and mutters among classical teachers in our schools, comes into the light and is available for examination. Then Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey, the latter in a pamphlet called Some Errors of Mr. Wells, develop a case against the Outline from the Roman Catholic point of view. That, too, calls for serious consideration. But with the Irish critics who complain that Ireland is not represented as a dominant force in the European civilisation of the early Middle Ages, and the Marxists who have detected heretical 11divergencies from the teachings of Marx (Engels) the First and the Last and the Only, the Wisdom of the Ages and the Source of all Light, I cannot deal now. The national consciousness of Ireland is too tragically inflamed to tolerate any drawing of Irish history to the scale of the world’s affairs, a scale which makes it a mere point of irritation in the hide of the present British Empire, itself the mushroom growth chiefly of the last hundred years. Some sentences and phrases in the Outline, coloured by the writer’s intense dislike for the extreme nationalism of Sinn Fein, are unjust to Ireland and will need modification. But the Marxist, like the Moslem, makes his prophet the criterion not only of truth but of moral intention. There is no compromise possible with him.

The small amount of space given to Abraham Lincoln and to Mazzini and one or two other such figures has also been a matter for criticism. When the time comes to revise the text I think that criticism will have to be considered. Mazzini is probably a better figure than Gladstone as a centre for the discussion of Nationalism in modern Europe—if indeed that is to be discussed about any particular figure. It is also a valid criticism from a Chinese reader that the history of China is far too brief in comparison with the history of the Western world. The Outline contains no account of its philosophies and little of the struggle between the more nomadic north and the more agricultural south which runs so parallel with the European and Western Asiatic story. But, brief as the space devoted to China in the Outline is, it is better than nothing, and I have given as much as either the existing analysis of Chinese history available for an English writer permits or the prepossessions of Western readers will allow. The West is learning with extreme reluctance the share of China in human history.

The feud which finds expression in Mr. A. W. Gomme’s pamphlet is one of much older origin than the publication of The Outline of History. Mr. Gomme is a teacher of the Greek language, and it is thirty years and more since I first attacked the imposture of the Greek teaching in our public schools. Long before I sank below the possibility of serious consideration by my fellow-countrymen by becoming a novelist, I was a writer upon education; and many of the novels I have written, since, like most novels from the Book of Tobit onward, they tell the story of youth going out into the world, have reflected strongly on education. The “classical” master, who uses up the time of our boys in his devious and wonderful exercises, is generally a very poor Grecian himself, and he rarely produces a working knowledge of Greek in his victims. He uses up time, space and endowment in his futilities, and so he stands in the way of a proper development of lower form work leading up to the Modern Side. The classical interests are still very strong in the Universities, they are a bar to the proper education of the British Civil Service and so a world-wide nuisance, and as a patriot, a parent and a schoolmaster I have raged against them. It was almost more than I could have hoped for, in that long-standing quarrel, that Mr. Gomme should have done up his extraordinary ideas and limitations into the neat packet of this pamphlet and so placed himself, a sample of the scholastic classic, in my hands.

But he has done it, and here he is, and we can see for ourselves how the classical side can criticise a book and what it thinks of the teaching of history.

And first we may note how swift and supple is the mind that has Greek grammar for its sustenance. It is not necessary 13for a classical scholar to read either the beginning or the end of the work with which he deals. It is not necessary to comprehend its aim and scope. He just takes up the part dealing with his classical knowledge—which is indeed the only knowledge that matters—and looks for mistakes or, what are really worse than mistakes, things he does not understand and opinions he does not share. And then he writes “Indeed!” or repeats a sentence with a note of interrogation and a grand air of refutation. If Mr. Gomme has looked at all at the end of The Outline of History it was, I believe, to consult the list of errata and make sure that nothing in the way of a misspelling, a wrong date or misplaced title had been overlooked. Because he gives no quarter in that respect. He is determined to make the worst of things. He has just nosed through the few parts that matter to him, he has scored it heavily with pencil; one can almost see his notes of exclamation, his “No!” his “Did he not?” in the margin, and then he has written up these marginal comments and rushed into print with them. His aim was to accumulate as much apparent error as he could to discredit The Outline of History, and he has industriously done his best.

This close-reading method of Mr. Gomme has made him, I hope, one of the most unteachable readers that the Outline has had. I cannot complain of his failure to grasp the importance of print to the human mind and its bearing upon the political future of our race, nor of his foolish footnote on that matter (p. 85), because these are novel ideas for his type and his type is incapable of novel ideas; nor will I complain of the invincible ignorance of ethnology he has preserved, in spite of the clear and simple chapter I have given, but I do find it disappointing that he should repeat the vulgar error that the Roman Empire at the height of its power “united most of the known world.” I have been at particular pains in the Outline to dispel this preposterous idea, so misleading and now so dangerous to Europeans. I 14have not merely stated the facts, but given a special map which I had imagined would bring home to the weakest intelligence the fact that, contemporary with this Roman Empire, there was in Asia an Empire greater in extent, better organised (as its drive against the Huns shows), and in very many respects more civilised. But manifestly I had not reckoned with Mr. Gomme. He took up the Outline not to learn, but to carp; and he has learnt nothing.

In order to get together this little heap of his—and with all his industry it is not a very crushing heap—of mistakes and pseudo-mistakes, Mr. Gomme has resorted to the oddest expedients. He pretends to be unaware that there has been any revision whatever of The Outline of History. He has taken the first unrevised part issue as if it were the latest text, and he has avoided any comparison with the later book edition. This may be mere laziness or the mental slovenliness that makes one edition seem as good as another to an ill-trained mind. But it does enable Mr. Gomme to swell out his list of charges with perhaps a dozen little things that stand corrected in the current edition. And, in addition, it gives him the extra illustrations with which the part issue was adorned by the publisher. He is either so ignorant as to think, or so warped by the spirit of controversy as to pretend to think, that I am responsible for these extra illustrations, that I have chosen them myself and written the inscriptions underneath them. With these extra illustrations, and very good illustrations they are for the most part though they have no place in the definite edition now before the public, and with the occasionally rather gaudy covers Messrs. Newnes used, he makes great play in his earnest endeavour to pile up a case for inaccuracy against me. Why he does not go on to suppose I wrote the advertisements of infant foods and condiments that brightened the cover-backs and treat these too as an integral part of The Outline of History and comment on the gross materialism that inspired them, I am at a loss to 15imagine. I must suppose that God has set limits even to the mental possibilities of Mr. Gomme. Or possibly Mr. Gomme overlooked this controversial opportunity.

There is a quality in Mr. Gomme’s manner of attack on these extra illustrations that makes me feel a curious sympathy with the brighter members of his Greek classes at Glasgow. “Some of the illustrations are queerly chosen,” he remarks. He notes my comment inserted at the eleventh hour on one unavoidable picture. “This is a photograph of a model restoration of Solomon’s temple. It is a very exaggerated and glorified restoration. The only justifiable thing in it is the central temple. All the splendid galleries round it are imaginary. The true walls were probably rough piled stone.” He can quote this and never recognise the tale it tells so plainly. “Then why,” he asks with real or affected imbecility, “does he give it?” To which I suppose the only possible answer is to say, with a dreadful calm, “I didn’t give it.”

One illustration after another is assailed in much the same manner, with the same dense disregard of the manifest facts of the case. I am even blamed because an earthquake has damaged one of the temples shown, and to crown all, the legend put to one of the coloured plates by one of Messrs. Newnes’ staff is quoted as a sample of the “affected simplicity” of my style.

In addition to the charges of ignorance and so forth which Mr. Gomme has based on my list of errata, and on his pretence that I chose, designed and arranged the extra illustrations inserted by Messrs. Newnes in their part issue, Mr. Gomme has got together a third set of objections by misunderstanding the English language. Here, for instance—I put it in Italics—is an almost incredible comment. Sometimes, he says, my “reasoning is merely comic. ‘Finally Alexander set aside ten thousand talents (a talent = £240) for a tomb. In those days this was an enormous sum.’ As if it were now a common custom, a very 16usual thing, to spend two and a half million pounds on the interment of a friend.” You see Mr. Gomme has contrived to think that the words of mine he quotes are some sort of “reasoning” and that the words “for a funeral” follow “enormous sum.” But they don’t. This is but one instance of a number of equally pointless comments with which Mr. Gomme swells the heap of his “corrections.”

After these three sorts of objection have been cleaned up—that is to say, the errata already put right in the book edition, the minor flaws of the discarded Newnes illustrations—and all things considered the Newnes extra illustrations were very well done—and petty quibbles like the one I have just quoted, very little remains of the list of errors Mr. Gomme so valiantly pretends to detect, a list some friend of his writing in The Aberdeen Journal, the sort of friend who gets a newspaper into trouble, describes as “Hundreds of mistakes.” Mr. Gomme scores, I will admit, upon two points which shall be set right in the next edition; one is that by carelessness of phrasing I seem to lay too much stress upon the importance and size of Athens in my Greek chapter—I do not note the scale of such cities as Corinth and Syracuse, nor do proper justice to the philosophical and artistic contributions of Magna Graecia and the Greek cities of Asia to the Greek ensemble; it is really little more than a laxity of wording; and the other is that there is an inaccurate historical generalisation about the opposite shores of the Mediterranean inserted in the opening of the account of the Punic wars. That generalisation I did not make; it was written upon my galley proofs by a friend, and I let it pass; I did not properly examine its implications. There, at any rate, I profit by Mr. Gomme. The rest of his criticisms consist chiefly of a string of remarks round and about Homer, a display of ignorance about ethnology, with both of which issues I will deal in order immediately, and a discussion of the meaning of democracy which is so entirely incoherent that no human being could deal with it anyhow. 17Finally, abandoning his critical efforts altogether, Mr. Gomme gives us a new theory of the origin of Christianity as a purely European religion, and concludes with his own version of history in a passage of great distinction.

Incidentally, as the end draws on and his inglorious pile of sham errors and faked-up accusations mounts, his courage grows with it and he begins to scold. He heartens himself with his scolding, and scolds more boldly until he gets to “ignorance,” “vague and unscientific,” “by nature unfitted for an appreciation of Greece,” “no enquiry,” “no judgment,” “careless of the truth,” “blind to important things and ready with the irrelevant,” and so on and so on, and what, coming from him, is really a great lark, he launches out at last into a disquisition on style. I use a broken form of sentence with four full stops when it is unnecessary to round off a statement, and this it seems is “not in Aristotle.” It is, however, in English, and I have helped to put it there. But we will leave that question of style to the end.

Upon the matter of Homer Mr. Gomme is very strong. His remarks aim not only at myself, but over and beyond me at my friend Professor Gilbert Murray. There seems to be some hostility, of which I know nothing, between Greek teachers and Greek scholars. I should imagine that in the happy little circle at Glasgow which is being led up to the True, the Beautiful and the Good, through the Greek accidence and syntax, by Mr. Gomme, Professor Gilbert Murray comes in at times for some vigorous treatment. Unless, indeed, I have ousted him as the stock victim, now that Mr. Gomme has to tell his tale of the marvellous heap of errors he found in The Outline of History and how he up and slew that book. I follow Professor Murray in disbelieving that Homer was one single individual. But Mr. Gomme knows that he was one—to use his own clear-cut Greek phrase—“immortal bard.” He does not say how it is that he knows this. He just knows it, he proclaims it, and the opposite view is 18“nonsense.” But if he were capable of understanding imaginative quality and differences in inventive method and artistic construction, he would have some glimmering of the reason why men of some creative experience deny the common authorship of the two Greek epics ascribed to Homer. (Of course, Mr. Gomme falls foul of an illustration in the Newnes edition of the head of Homer at this point, and drags the thing into the discussion. If there was no Homer, why did I give a portrait of Homer? Exactly. Why did I?) The Iliad, I said, was one of the most interesting and informing of the prehistoric compositions of the Aryans. Mr. Gomme throws a kind of fit at this. He shrieks into Italics. One of, interesting, informing, prehistoric, composition, Aryan! To which I can only reply, slowly and solemnly, “Exactly—one of—interesting—informing—prehistoric—composition—Aryan.” Mr. Gomme does not elucidate his Italics. This is almost as good controversy as making faces. Also this cry is wrung from him. “It would be interesting to see the answer of a man who knew nothing of Greece but what he had learnt from this Outline to the question of ‘What do you know of Homer?’” “No such person,” I suppose, or “another bard of the same name,” or some such compact reply. It would be still more interesting to have Mr. Gomme replying to the same question. The Outline is written now, but Mr. Gomme might yet distinguish himself by a popular Life of Homer with chapters on his early life, his domestic troubles, his dietary, his dogs and so forth, and of course with model examination questions and answers at the end.

Mr. Gomme makes much play with his remarkably complete ignorance of ethnology. It is really too much that I should be “slated” for anything in my Outline that Mr. Gomme does not know or understand. Judgment by Mr. Gomme’s default would go against me on a thousand issues. He muddles up “Aryan,” which is the name of a language group, with “Mediterranean race,” which is the name of a 19racial group, and gets into a fine muddle with the word “Nordic.” And the deeper he gets into the muddle the crosser he gets with me. “This ugly word does not seem to mean anything other than ‘Northern’” he writes; but, of course, if it did not, as any undergraduate in science at Glasgow would explain to him, then scientific people would use the word “Northern” and not a special term. Amidst “Nordic,” a race name, “Germanic,” a national adjective, “Aryan,” a language name, Mr. Gomme rolls like a puppy in a ball of wool, losing his temper more and more. There are indications of a suspicion that the whole of this ethnology is wicked German propaganda. Mr. Gomme probably believes that the blue eyes so prevalent in Northern Europe are German propaganda organs. I am no scholastic Hercules to clean up the mind of Mr. Gomme. I note these matters merely to make it plain that much of this pamphlet with its air of heaping up a list of “errors” is really no more than the violent expression of Mr. Gomme’s eccentric dissent from views that have passed muster with the generality of sound scholars.

I have neither time nor space here to deal with Mr. Gomme’s original view that Christianity is a “purely European” religion. One can best return him his “Nonsense!” and let the stuff go with that. I have already noted his utter unteachableness about the universality of the Roman Empire. His avoidance of instruction in the history of the Christian religion is, if possible, more complete. Let me come now to his conclusion. He declares, which is totally untrue, that it is “one of Mr. Wells’ curious theories” that “primitive men are in all ways inferior to their successors.” (I point out the exact contrary in relation to the artistic achievements of Palæolithic and Neolithic men.) And then, just to show how these things could be done, he floats away into this sublime specimen of classical-side prose:—

“But a saner view of history suggests that it is not a story of mankind climbing one single hill (even up different sides of it) 20with ourselves high up, and all earlier peoples in darkness below left struggling up the same paths. Rather have the peoples of the earth climbed up their several hills, some higher than others (difficult as it may be to say which), all different; but the hills of Greece and Rome are among the highest; while we, climbing up our own, already perhaps higher than they, have the good fortune of being able to look across to their summits to learn something of their achievement, and receive light from those radiant peaks.”

A line of stars concludes, and one feels that nothing else could fitly conclude the perfect loveliness of this passage. Let the reader read it aloud in a firm, clear voice to savour the delicate charm of its parentheses, and let him realise what a river of glowing exposition an Outline of History might have been in the hands of Mr. Gomme. Let the reader reflect, too, upon the hopeless despair so perfect, so entirely Greek a passage must arouse in the mind of a writer who never experienced the blessings of a smattering of Greek. Not without reason is Mr. Gomme a stylist, and a fastidious critic of style.

It is a relief to turn from the vanity and peevishness of Mr. Gomme to two more serious antagonists. Mr. Belloc is something of a special pleader, and both he and Dr. Downey forgo few controversial advantages. Dr. Downey is not ashamed to write of my “showman’s gestures” and so forth, but they both have minds and tempers that are disciplined; they are intelligently interested in The Outline of History as a whole; a passionate objection to my existence does not appear among their motives. They realise I have a definite standpoint and they state an understandable difference.

Mr. Belloc’s criticisms appeared in the Dublin Review and the London Mercury, and I do not think he has reprinted them. We had a brief but animated dispute in the 21London Mercury and the Catholic Tablet arising out of his comments, and I will not renew the particular issues then discussed, except in so far as they arise again out of Dr. Downey’s pamphlet. I will direct myself rather to Dr. Downey than to Mr. Belloc.

Like Mr. Gomme, Dr. Downey^[2] has gone to the first edition of the Outline, and, like Mr. Gomme, he has not checked his comments by any reference to the current version. He is thus able to score very effectively over phrases and passages that the owners of the book edition will look for in vain. The weak point in the story of David and Michal, as it was told in the part issues, for instance, has been corrected, and my misstatement of the Sabellian view of the Trinity has been put right. Let me admit that I did not know what Sabellianism was when I wrote The Outline of History. Arianism I knew, and Trinitarianism I knew, but not the views of the Sabellians. It was not an oversight, it was complete ignorance that caused that misstatement, and Dr. Downey is legitimately entitled to all the advantage this confession entails. The fact remains that the second edition of The Outline of History does not contain the four or five words that betrayed my ignorance of this refinement of doctrine, but gives instead a correct statement of this Sabellian view. I doubt if there was any general delusion that I was an expert in the theological disputes of the early Church even before Dr. Downey called attention to the matter. Unlike Mr. Gomme, who evidently found the list of errata at the end of the Newnes edition of the Outline very useful, Dr. Downey has not troubled to look at that list. He would have found this Sabellian error already set right there.

A criticism like that of Dr. Downey necessarily goes from point to point, and it is impossible to follow him closely without developing these notes into a confused miscellany of 22discussions. I leave with some regret a very fundamental and interesting issue, the issue between Realism and Nominalism, which is so closely interwoven with, and related to, the issue between the methods of thought of such Catholics as Dr. Downey and Mr. Belloc on the one hand, and of those who have been through the disciplines of modern science on the other. This issue has been very constantly in my mind throughout my life; my first printed article (in the Fortnightly Review in 1898) dealt with it, and it is discussed very fully in my First and Last Things. It crops up again and again in my writings, because I am persuaded that very many of the intellectual tangles of our time are due to the differences in intellectual temperament and training that the dispute between Realist and Nominalist developed and emphasised, and can only be resolved after a thorough discussion of these fundamentals of thought. I have sought in the limited space of the Outline to call attention to the fact that this difference is at the root of the main divergencies in the intellectual and religious life of our world, and I have expressed an opinion, which Dr. Downey and a hastily injected footnote from Mr. Ernest Barker completely fail to modify, that the method of the Catholic Church was, and is, essentially Realist. Mr. Barker says that, although Realism was at first the Church philosophy, after Occam Nominalism became the philosophy of the Church; Dr. Downey says it didn’t, and that Occam’s followers were prohibited from teaching; Mr. Barker says that Luther denounced Nominalism (upon which I am moved to remark that I do not care very greatly what Luther did or did not denounce); and there are technical uses and common uses of the word “class” and “species” which give great scope for a brilliant controversialist. I will confess I quail before the dusty possibilities of this three-cornered wrangle. And since I want to come to terms with Catholic teachers if I can—because it is surely as much their task as mine to supplant the present mischievous narrow teaching of national egotism in schools 23throughout the world by some wider and more widening instruction—I will in future editions of the Outline drop any reference to the philosophy of the Church out of this discussion of the opposition of Realist and Nominalist.

But my attitude towards the human story will not become catholic by that or any similar concession. The Outline of History is not a catholic history; it is rather an ultra-protestant history—using protestant in a sense that would shock a good Ulsterman profoundly—in a sense, that is, that would make Professor Huxley a good protestant. Dr. Downey in his opening passage regrets that I have allowed my “preconceived philosophical and religious notions to enter so largely into what purports to be a record of fact.” But no one can write a history of mankind without expressing one’s own philosophical and religious ideas at every turn. You cannot stand on nothing and hold up a world. You may pretend and attempt to do so, but that will be a dishonesty. You cannot even arrange a chronological table without a bias to prefer one sort of fact to another. I am “tendential”; that is perfectly true. But I give my readers full warning that my views are views. And the bulk of Dr. Downey’s pamphlet (and Mr. Belloc’s criticisms) is not so much an exposure of “errors” in the narrower sense of the word, as a discussion of quite fundamental differences of interpretation between the story I tell and the story implicit in orthodox Catholic teaching.

Three main issues are raised by Dr. Downey, and they are all acutely interesting ones: the Historical Fall of Man, the Origin of Religion, and the rôle of the Catholic Church in restraining knowledge.

The issue of the Fall has been made a very important one in Catholic theology. In the Outline I discuss some consequences of this insistence upon the Fall in the account given of the moral disorganisation of the middle and later nineteenth century. I may be profoundly wrong, but I share a now widespread belief that there is no evidence of anything 24in the nature of a moral Fall, such as Catholic theology requires, in human history; that, on the contrary, there is now a pressure of evidence, which I find irresistible, towards the belief that the human species arose through a quite natural series of changes, side by side with various kindred species of apes and man-like creatures, out of a monkey-like ancestry deriving itself through vast periods of time from reptilian and fish-like progenitors. Most interesting of all the species related to men are these man-like creatures, the Neanderthal men, who also made fires and shaped huge flint implements and buried their dead. I give these facts as I conceive them, and Dr. Downey finds it necessary to treat my description as though it was a complete argument designed to state and prove the human family tree, and to pretend that, when I mention such intermediate types between ape and man as Pithecanthropus, I mean that they are genetically intermediate. It is, I submit, rather girlish to write in this fashion: “We are thrilled to think that in this chapter Mr. Wells is at last about to solve the knotty problem of our simian ancestry.” I do not believe Dr. Downey was thrilled a bit. Dr. Downey heads one page “Exit the Ape Ancestor Theory”—it is what the London journalist would call a streamer headline—because he has found an article by Major Thomas Cherry pointing out the many reasons there are for doubting a very close genetic connection between man and the living arboreal anthropoids. This eager headline is followed on the next page by a still more eager comment, by which Dr. Downey comes one of those controversial croppers that will happen in this sort of fragmentary discussion. He quotes Major Cherry, “the specialised monkey foot may be ruled out as a stage in the ancestry of man,” and adds, “sad blow to Mr. Wells with his diagrammatic picture of ‘foot of man and gorilla.’” On several occasions in his criticism of the Outline Dr. Downey uses the dramatic phrase, “one rubs one’s eyes.” Well, if he will rub his eyes again and have a good look at that 25picture and read the context, he will find that it is given to show the difference, not the resemblance, of the two feet, and that the “sad blow” recoils with some severity upon himself. Because it shows that I at any rate am tied to no brief, and have no hesitation in giving a piece of evidence that may seem to qualify the general drift of my story.

If Dr. Downey, by the bye, had looked up the current edition of the Outline, he would not have found that figure. It has gone, and the section has been recast so as to include an excellent note by Mr. R. I. Pocock which makes it simpler and clearer.

I hope, if Catholics will not accept and use The Outline of History, they will give us one of their own, and when they do there will be no part I shall read with greater interest and curiosity than the part devoted to these curious subhuman creatures and the account of the Fall that occurred, if I read Dr. Downey aright, between the disappearance of Neanderthal Man and the appearance of the Cro-Magnon people in Europe. Both Dr. Downey and Mr. Belloc make a great fuss because I have given pictures of Pithecanthropus and the Neanderthal Man, and because there is an imaginative picture by Sir Harry Johnston of “Our Neanderthaloid ancestor” in the Newnes edition. They point out that these pictures are made up with only a few bones and theories to go upon. They are. They are to help the imagination of the weaker brethren, and they pretend to do no more than that. But it was amusing to read this objection in Dr. Downey’s pamphlet just after a visit to the Vatican, where portraits of Adam and Eve and the snake who tempted them occur in some profusion. I have seen at Cava di Tirrene a hair of the Virgin Mary, a bone of St. Matthew, and a number of other osseous and horny fragments of saints and divine persons, very reassuring evidence of the material truth of the Catholic religion, but I have still to learn of any vestiges of Adam to compare with the thigh bone, the teeth and the skull fragments of Pithecanthropus. If Catholicism is to 26avail itself of illustration, I do not see why Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey should display this iconoclastic fervour towards a secular history.

Dr. Downey follows Mr. Belloc in a curious disposition to score a point by declaring that this or that view of mine is twenty-five years old, quite out of date: “Mr. Wells has not kept pace with the rationalist movement,” and so forth. I do not understand this passion in Catholics for the latest mental wear; for my own part, if a thing is convincing to me, I do not care when it was first believed nor who has given it up. I thought that was the way with Catholics too. But Mr. Belloc assured the readers of the Dublin Review that Natural Selection had not been believed in for twenty-five years; it was quite a discarded idea. If the intellectual smart set regards Natural Selection as out of date, that shows merely that the intellectual smart set has taken leave of common sense. The proposition is invincible that, given a species in which the individuals reproduce in greater or less abundance young with individual differences, and sooner or later die, and in which the individual young favour their individual parents, then in every generation the individuals less adapted to survive and reproduce are, as a rule, likely to die sooner and to bear fewer offspring than the individuals more adapted to these ends, and therefore that, conditions remaining constant, the average specimen of the species must become more and more perfectly adapted as time goes on to the conditions of its existence. And equally invincible is the proposition that a permanent change of conditions must involve a change in the average of a species to which no apparent limit is set short of perfect adaptation, and the parallel proposition that the average specimens of each of two sections of a species living under widely different conditions of survival, and separated from each other, must ultimately become widely different. I write of this not, as Dr. Downey says, with the “full-blooded confidence of the Sciolist,” but with the assurance of a normally sane man. 27If anyone can start from the premises I have just given and arrive at any other than the conclusion at which I have arrived, there is need for a psychological Einstein.

It does not affect this question a jot that Mr. Bateson, always something of an enfant terrible among biologists, celebrated the centenary of Charles Darwin, and the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species, by writing in a collection of pious contributions to Darwin’s memory that “the time is not ripe for a discussion of the Origin of Species.” That was just Mr. Bateson’s fun. He himself has discussed it immensely. But he has discussed it from the point of view of the cause of the individual difference, and the theory of Natural Selection is not concerned with that. Natural Selection is merely a logical deduction from the facts of inheritance and individual difference. It explains neither, and no clear-headed biologist has ever thought that it did.

Both Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey are indeed in a hopeless muddle between the discussion of the origin of variations and the question of the reaction of a variable species to its environment. Among all these biological questions they are helplessly at sea. I doubt if they have ever looked into a biological book except in a state of controversial prepossession. At the moment I am unable to verify Dr. Downey’s quotation from Mr. Bourne’s Animal Life and Human Progress (1919), in which Mr. Bourne is made to say that the “extinction of the less fit and the survival of the fittest no longer commands the universal assent of zoologists,” but I am disposed to think that it must be clipped in some way. This sentence, I guess, is only the tail of a sentence. As it stands it is nonsense. [My guess, I find on returning to England, is correct. Even the authorship of the book is improperly ascribed to Professor (not Mr.) Bourne. It is a collection of papers by various hands. The passage in Professor Bourne’s paper runs as follows:—

“I have been at some pains to convince you that the current 28doctrine that evolution in animals and plants depends upon a ratio of increase so high as to lead to unrestricted competition among the individuals of a species, and in consequence to a Struggle for Existence, with extinction of the less fit and Survival of the Fittest, no longer commands the universal assent of zoologists. Indeed it has been severely undermined by the discoveries of recent years.”

Dr. Downey quotes from the words “extinction of the less fit” to the end.

I do not wish to accuse Dr. Downey of any deliberate attempt to deceive in this misquotation. He did not understand the point Professor Bourne was driving at—generally he shows little or no grip upon these biological questions. Professor Bourne here is not discussing Natural Selection at all; he is discussing the entirely different question of whether there is normally a bitter struggle for existence between the individuals of the same species. If Dr. Downey had read on he would surely have grasped the idea—for Professor Bourne is very plain and simple—that a species may undergo natural selection without any struggle for existence between individuals at all. But Dr. Downey did not, I think, read on. He just took the words that seemed to suit his purpose—rather carelessly—and threw the book down. It is a little tedious, however, that one should have to verify the quotations of an antagonist in this way.]

When it comes to the question of the origin of religion I find Dr. Downey displaying the same controversial ingenuity and missing my plain intention in much the same way. He makes me out to be a follower of Herbert Spencer and Grant Allen, which is rather hard on me: Herbert Spencer is my philosophical bête noire; I have rarely mentioned him in my writings without some indication of my antipathy, and in The Outline of History I have never mentioned him at all. In a list of the opinions of various writers taken haphazard, to show what divergent views exist about the origin of religion, I mention Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God—Dr. Downey, I don’t know why, says “with evident 29respect.” Then he goes on for some pages confuting Grant Allen and pretending that he is confuting me. No doubt he thought he was confuting me, but if he had turned back to The Outline of History instead of going off at this tangent, he would have seen that I do not write of the fear and worship of the Old Man—which, as Dr. Downey will learn some day, is not quite the same thing as ancestor worship—as anything more than one factor in the complex synthesis of religion. And the case for considering obsession by the thought of the Old Man, an important factor in that synthesis, rests on very much stronger foundations than Grant Allen’s not very substantial book. I wish I could think of Dr. Downey reading any scientific book for instruction rather than to find little bits for controversial use. I would send him to Lang and Atkinson’s Social Origins and to the psycho-analytical work of Jung. He would learn then something of the real quality of the double stream of evidence, in human institutions and in childish psychology, for the importance of Old Man fear in the religious and social development of mankind.

Upon the third issue raised by Dr. Downey, the rôle of the Church towards knowledge, I am not very well equipped for discussion. Was Cardinal Newman right in saying that the case of Galileo is the exception that proves the rule, the rule that the Church has never put barriers in the way of scientific progress? I rub my eyes when I find Dr. Downey endorsing this—these habits are catching. Lord Bacon, says Dr. Downey, “violently opposed the Copernican system.” But did he make anyone kneel and recant? I must learn more about these questions. Certainly they were good Catholics who discovered America and first circumnavigated the globe—a point Dr. Downey misses. I shall find perhaps that there were Catholic schools of human anatomy in the Middle Ages and that the Inquisition was a debating society that took for its motto “Hear all sides,” and that it had a burning curiosity to learn some new thing.... I promise 30further inquiry here and such amendment of the text of the Outline in my next edition as these inquiries may justify. As I have said already, I look to the Catholic Church as an organisation logically obliged to teach the universal brotherhood of mankind, to apply the healing parable of the Good Samaritan to political and social life, and to discourage the vile nationalism that at present darkens and embitters so many human lives. It impresses me as being rather a weak and negligent teacher of these things nowadays, but I have no disposition to go into blank antagonism to the Church on that account. I offer Catholics The Outline of History for use in their schools in the most amiable spirit. If they will not have it, I will not grieve, if only they will produce a universal history of their own. I shall certainly read such a history with interest and delight. It will be different. Catholics, I gather, do not believe in “progress.” It will be, I presume, a History of the Creation (explaining logically why the ichthyosaurus was made), the Salvation and the subsequent Stagnation of mankind.

Before I leave these two critics I may perhaps say a word or two about their manner towards me. Mr. Belloc’s is rather amusing. I am a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions. I am a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction in biological science. Mr. Belloc is a journalist and writer of books, some novels, some books on public questions, and a university graduate of respectability rather than distinction—I believe in modern history. He is a younger man than myself, and by that measure less experienced in life and affairs. But for some unfathomable reason he writes as if he were a monstrously wise old historian and I were a bright little boy who had gone to the wrong authorities instead of coming to him before I wrote my little essay. He is lucky not to have adopted this attitude towards me thirty years ago, because then I should have put him across my knees and established a truer relationship in the simple way boys have. Dr. 31Downey varies in his manner from the pitying and paternal to sprightly defiance. Sometimes he is almost flippant. He closes my last chapter “feeling that—

But how else could one write an Outline of History? A slight flavour of the encyclopædia is unavoidable, as Dr. Downey will find out for himself when his turn to write an Outline of History arrives; the rocks, and Moses and Mahomet will insist on coming in. If he leaves out the rocks as being irrelevant to a Catholic history, the critics will throw them at him.

But in one section Dr. Downey has a third manner with regard to me. When first I turned over Dr. Downey’s pamphlet I was much surprised to find a little group of pages studded with such delightful phrases as “we owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Wells,” “graceful pen,” “sympathy and insight.” The reader will guess, of course, that I rubbed my eyes. He will guess wrong. I did nothing of the sort, I rub my eyes very rarely, but probably they dilated. On Loyola and the Protestant princes, it seems, I am perfectly sound—and then my style becomes admirable....

Yet only the other day I had a letter from an indignant Protestant in Australia explaining that in these very sections my style and my history reached its nadir of smattering ineptitude.

I will revert for a moment to my suggestion of an Outline of History for Catholics from the Catholic point of view. It is, I submit, a very desirable thing at the present time. I 32suppose the Church, at its head and as a whole, has a policy, a definable relationship towards the States and nations of the world. As an organisation one feels that it should make for peace and human co-operation—wherever it operates. If any sort of men can be expected to have the same political ideas wherever they are found, and to have had something like an identical historical training, it is surely the priesthood of the Catholic Church. But the Church does not seem to give its priests any systematic instruction in the history of mankind, after the period covered by the Bible story. Much less does it attend to the minds of its laity in this matter. Everywhere the Catholic priest, instead of restraining the local and patriotic prejudices of his flock, seems rather to be swayed by them. In very many centuries the Catholic Church plays a very important political rôle; it is almost inevitable that the facilities offered by its organisation and solidarity should be used politically. But it does not seem to be used coherently throughout the world in the cause of human unity. Its weight is rather on the side of the intenser Nationalisms. I believe that a Catholic History of Man written for world-wide use would do much to turn the influence of the Church throughout the world back towards its former rôle of a peace-compelling and world-unifying power.

Of course, I cannot pretend to understand how a Catholic Outline of History would be designed and written. I do not see how any writer can see history except from his own standpoint, and my conception of how that Catholic history would be planned, were I to give it here, would certainly strike any Catholic as at least a grotesque caricature of his vision.

That opens up the still larger question of the possibility of other Outlines of History written from different angles of vision from my own. My vision of history is essentially one of mental synthesis and material co-operation, from the completely isolated individual life and death of the primordial animal to the continuing mental life and the social organisation now growing to planetary dimensions, of the human 33species. Means of communication and educational and political organisation necessarily dominate the story. The triumphs of art and of poetic literature are secondary in such a scheme. Mr. Gomme complains that an examinee would get low marks if he had to write an account of Homer from my Outline. If the question concerned Shakespeare or Giotto, I doubt if he would get any marks at all. For the plain truth is that such outbreaks of beauty scarcely affect the Outline—as such. They may be very important to the human soul and so forth, and a list of them—an Outline of History can do no more than that—may be very necessary to struggling examinees; but these were considerations beyond the intention of the Outline.

Other minds may see the question differently. It has been suggested that the Outline could have been told as a history of art. Or, as the Marxists are disposed to insist, as a history of economic relationship and its consequences. (Because the Marxists believe that first a man produces and then he exists.) Either method may be possible, but to my mind neither is possible. For me, I can only imagine a history of art or of economic development being written after the Outline as I conceive it has been apprehended. And the same remark applies to a project which is, I gather, afoot in the United States for a History of Woman. I do not see how such a history can be written until you have the fundamental Outline of the development of human societies in space and time as the framework in which it can be hung.

I would like to lay stress upon this idea of universal history as an educational framework. Combined with the study of physiography, as Professor Huxley defined it, it gives something that may be made the basis of a common understanding and sympathy for all mankind. Each one of us could pursue his particular interests and develop his particular gifts the better within such a common mental framework.

Now if it is true that my Outline of History is a sketch of 34the real Outline of History, this framework of which we stand in need; and if it is true that either by effective revision or replacement we may presently get a generally satisfactory Outline of History that will be available as an educational framework, the next question we have to ask is how we can best get that Outline into operation in schools. In America, where there is much more freedom and variety in educational method than in Europe, much may be achieved by a steady insistence on the part of groups of parents and journalists upon the introduction of the new teaching of history into schools and colleges. But in Europe, where the schools of both boys and girls are much more dominated by the requirements of the various leaving-schools, qualifying and competitive examinations by which they pass on into business or professional or student life, the method of attack may need to be a different one. It becomes a matter of importance under such conditions to do one’s utmost to introduce into such examinations what will be at first an alternative paper in the Outlines of History, a paper which may be taken as an alternative to the paper upon the national history of a special period which is at present the usual requirement in history of such examinations. The two sorts of history teaching would then go on, for a time at least, side by side. Some schools and some candidates would follow the extensive, and some the intensive, method. And a thing now very urgently needed is for teachers of history, or for the Historical Society, or some special committee, to draw up a sample syllabus, or two or three such documents, to define a course of instruction in the outlines of world history. My own contribution to that is, of course, the list of contents of the Outline I have written. It would be an extraordinarily useful thing to produce and to criticise and revise such a syllabus now, and then when it was in fairly good shape to agitate for its adoption as an alternative scheme of instruction to the existing history courses.

So soon as the Outline of History becomes a “subject” 35and a “paper” in these various examinations that mean so much to the youth of Europe, enterprising teachers would begin to qualify themselves for the new work, and enterprising publishers would set themselves to abstract, improve, paraphrase, plagiarise and adapt the Outline for class use. In a very little while, with incalculably great benefit to mankind, we could have the broad facts of human history taught, as chemistry is taught to-day, in practically the same terms throughout all Europe. And later, as the students went on to a closer study of their own nation and its literature, they would do so with a sound sense of historical perspective, and with their disposition towards national egotism and conceit at least corrected. On minds prepared in this fashion it would be possible to build the new conceptions of an organised world peace that struggle so hopelessly at present against the dark prejudices of to-day.

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