• H G WELLS: THE NEW TEACHING OF HISTORY

These extracts from Wells' The New Teaching of History were made from a tape recording I made from the copy of the booklet in the British Library. (Internet did not exist then). Wells' use of the word 'outline' extended for a generation of writers and publishers.
Wells thought mankind was essentially one species, and that it was becoming unified as technical and emotional changes happened. At least, that's what he said: during the Great War he was publically very anti-German.
He was unimpressed by historians generally, with a few exceptions; they were partisan—it hadn't occurred to them to write general histories of all mankind. He did not consider unpublished critics, of whom the most important were critics of the types typified by Freemasons and Jews, their lives overwhelmingly secretive and undemocratic.
It was very unfortunate that Hilaire Belloc, at the time preparing his book The Jews, went on to write A Companion to Mr Wells' Outline of History in 1926, itself followed by Mr Belloc Objects to the Outline of History also 1926. Belloc mentions ancient Jews a few times, but all his information on Jews and their frauds and general evil is entirely missing from his book on Wells. One of the few men reasonably well-informed on Jews failed to discuss Wells' failure to discuss them.

RW 18 June 2020

These four disputants do not include a representative of Jewish history. In fact, there may be no such person. Jewish policy seems to be non-competitive with other Jews. It's easy to see why: in a ghetto, one man might be targetting an aristocratic family; another targetting the drink industry; another dealing with some part of a church; another specialising in peasant loans. (I'm just making these up). There may be nobody with an overview, including 'rabbis'. I'd guess this would work in international affairs, with one set of people in China, separate from Hungarians, Czechs, English, Scots, Americans, and all the rest.
So a unified view may not exist. It seems possible that composite Jewish history might turn out to be the work of 'goyim'.

RW 25 May 2021

For the better part of three years the writer of these notes has been occupied almost entirely on 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 200,000 purchasers; it is still being bought in considerable quantities, and it has been 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 is an attempt to sketch a framework, which people might have in common, and into which everyone might fit his own particular reading and historical interests. I did try to give all history as one story, and the largeness of the measure of success is certainly much more due to the widespread desire for such an Outline than to any particular merit of a particular Outline that I might have 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 criticisms to which the Outline has been subjected afford 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, partly a consideration of the mental attitudes and moral and intellectual pose, into which it has thrown certain of its critics.

The 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 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 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 this sphere of human interest has widened out with a marvellous rapidity, till 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 today, 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. [Great-grandfathers; say 25 or 30 years per generation gives pre-1848; could include early Grote, Carlyle, Tocqueville, Michelet, Lane on Egypt, India, Chadwick on sanitation, Engels and Marx just possibly!, various antiquarian books e.g. on America and Ireland and Carnac, a chivalry title, Rural Rides, and Macaulay just starting with vol I of History of England - RW].

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 consequent increased division of 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 education, 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 in general purpose. The material may be the same in 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 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 specialists in any other science, are extreme accuracy, fullness, delicacy in discrimination within the department of his work. He is usually not concerned with the philosophical review of the field of the whole 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 be caught out and that discredits the historian excessively. The teacher's concern is primarily with the taught, and with giving them a view of the 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 specialisations 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 and 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 educationalists 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. 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, along with some foreign countries; in America, for example, such teachers of history as Professors Breasted, John Harvey Robinson, [In the Outline Wells mentions Breasted's Ancient Times and Robinson's Medieval and Modern Times- RW] 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 much better it is than anything the teaching organisation of which he is 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 the 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, with elementary historical teaching throughout the world. It was written to help out 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 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. His 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 re-set 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 of 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 judgements 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 upon the writer who re-reads what he has written, and which need to be pruned or altered. A certain clumsiness of construction will be corrected. The account of the Aryan-speaking peoples comes too early in the present edition for perfect lucidity; this 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 applications of the results of psycho-analysis to human history, may soon make it possible to rewrite the account of the stone ages in a 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 materials to qualify the account of the negotiations and temporary settlements of the period of the Paris Conference. [At which the the Versailles Treaty resulted, after the Great War- RW] These are the chief changes probable; the larger part of the Outline, its main masses and dominant lines, must 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 that many reviewers would sneer a little at the idea of novelist-turned-historian, talk of superficiality, and hint of inaccuracies and errors they have 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 issues 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. Among the cultivated gentlemen who "do" the book notices, in the provincial press more particularly, there was a disposition to qualify their approval by condescending reference to slips and mistakes which they imagined must be there. Within the limits set by law of libel, one can have no objection to this sort of thing, which gives the 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 [1921- RW] and in this a considerable amount of hostility against the Outline that certainly smoulders and mutters among classical teachers [Wells refers to teachers of ancient Greek and Latin- RW] and their works 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 a 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 in the early Middle Ages, and the Marxists who have detected heretical divergences from the teachings of Marx (Engels), the First and the Last and the Only, the Wisdom of the Ages, 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 Muslim, makes the Prophet his 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 the 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 admits, or the prepossessions of western readers will allow. The west is learning with extreme reluctance the share of China in human history.

[NB it occurs to me to wonder what Jewish critics thought of the Outline. I know from deciphering personal chats that Jews reject Wells as historian, since he has effectively nothing on finance. Cassell would have been very cautious in printing serious material. Wells knew nothing of the controversial aspects of Jews, which of course must have been a source of quiet satisfaction to them - RW 2020]

The feud which finds expression in Mr A W Gomme's pamphlet is 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 a story of youth going out into the world, I have reflected strongly on education. The "classical" master 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 to 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 for a classical scholar either 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 that he does not understand and opinions he does not share. 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. He 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, [pp 130-135 of my 2-vol copy discuss writing, and printing - RW] or its bearing upon the political future of our race, nor of his foolish footnote on that matter, [p 35 (of Gomme-RW)] because these are novel ideas for his type, and his type isn't capable 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, [pp 78-81 in my copy discuss races; Wells says an 'ethnologist' is a student of race -RW] 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 have 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. [p 251 gives map 250 BC; p 340 has physical geography map; p 397 may be the one Wells means -RW] 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 - with all his industry, it is not a very crushing heap - with 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 latest 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 occasional 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 for the infant foods and condiments that brighten 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 imagine. I must suppose that God has set limits even to the mental possibilities of Mr Gomme. Or possibly Mr Gomme overlooked this controversial opportunity.

[Wells gives examples: a picture of a model restoration of Solomon's Temple, a very exaggerated and glorified restoration. [p 166 in my 2 vol. copy-RW] The only justifiable thing in it is the central temple; all the splendid galleries around it are imaginary. The true walls were probably rough piled stone. ... Why did Mr Wells give it? Wells says The only possible answer is to say with dreadful calm "I didn't give it" (i.e. the illustration)] .. One illustration after another is assailed in much the same manner... 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 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 10,000 talents (a talent = £240) for a tomb. In those days this was an enormous sum.' [p. 245 in my copy-RW] As if it were now a common custom, a very usual 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", 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... 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, described as 'hundreds of mistakes'. Mr Gomme scores I will admit upon two points, which will 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 Graeca and the little Greek cities of Asia to the Greek ensemble; it is really little more than laxity of wording; [perhaps sentence at foot of p 210 in my copy - RW] 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. [Possibly remarks on p 288 of my copy; but I think the 'generalisation' has been edited out-RW] That generalisation I did not make; it was written upon my galley proof 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 criticism 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 with 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. Finally, 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 accusation mounts, his courage grows with it an 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 the 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. [I think the 1930 edition has fewer of these ellipses, though I haven't actually checked]

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 knew 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 a stock victim, now that Mr Gomme has to tell his tale of a 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 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 "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 a Homer.. [p 97 in my copy-RW] If there was no Homer, why did I give a portrait? ..) The Iliad, I said, was one of the most interesting and informing of the prehistoric compositions of the Aryans. [p 98 of my copy-RW] 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 the 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.

[Aryans and so on:] 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 the "Mediterranean race" which is the name of a racial 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. "These ugly words do not seem to mean anything other than Northern" he writes, but of course if it did not, as any undergraduate in science would explain to him, then scientific people would use the term '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 his 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" [Various apeish illustrations in my copy do give the appearance of leaning this way -RW] (I point out the exact contrary in relation to the artistic achievement of palaeolithic and neolithic men) and then, just to show how these things should 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 up one single hill (even up different sides of it) with 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 to 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 then let him realise what a river of glowing exposition the 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.. We had a brief.. dispute in the London Mercury and the Catholic Tablet.. I will not renew the particular issues then discussed, except insofar as they arise again out of Dr Downey's pamphlet. I will direct myself rather to Dr Downey than to Mr Belloc. [Pamphlet by Richard Downey, D.D. 1921]

Like Mr Gomme, Dr Downey 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. .. For example, the weak point in the story of David and Michal, as it was told in the part-issues for instance, has been corrected, [Biblical story of Michal, daughter of Saul. p 169 in my copy; I don't know whether it's been corrected-RW] and my mis-statement of the Sabellian view of the Trinity has been put right. I will 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.. Dr Downey is legitimately entitled to all the advantage that 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 the Sabellian view. [p 370 in my copy refers to Sabellians; I don't know whether this is his corrected version. 541 in 1930 edn refers too] ... 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 discussions. 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 those who have been through the disciplines of modern science on the other. The issue has been very constantly in my mind throughout my life. My first printed article, in the Fortnightly Review, 1893, 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 divergences of the intellectual and religious life of our world, and I express an opinion.. that the method of the Catholic Church was and is essentially Realist. Dr Ernest 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 [p 510 in my copy has a footnote by Barker on Realism] says that Luther denounced Nominalism.. and there are technical uses and common uses of the words 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 readers if I can.. 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. [755 of 1930 edn seems to go with Downey, in fact] .. 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, a sense that would make Professor Huxley a good protestant. Dr Downey, in his opening passage, regrets that I have allowed my "pre-conceived 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 would be a dishonesty. You cannot even arrange a chronological table out of bias to prefer one sort of fact to another [sic, I think]. I am "tendential"; that is perfectly true, but I give my readers full warning that my views are views. On the bulk of Dr Downey's pamphlet.. it is not so much an exposure of "errors".. as a discussion of quite fundamental differences of interpretation between the story I tell and the story imposed 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 Role 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 late 19 C. I may be profoundly wrong, but I share a now widespread belief that there is no evidence in 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 these species relating to man are these man-like creatures the Neanderthal man, who also made fires and shaped huge flint implements and buried their dead. I gave these facts as I can see them, and Dr Downey finds it necessary to treat my description as though it was the 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 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 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.. 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 picture and read its context, he will find 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. [p 40 of my copy has the picture; I could find no reference to Pocock, so I assume my copy is a very early edition -RW] The current edition.. that section has been recast 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 Mr Downey aright, between the disappearance of Neanderthal man and the appearance of 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 men, and because there is an imaginative picture by Sir Harry Johnston [presumably opposite p 48 in my copy; though the word 'pithecanthropus' seems absent -RW] 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. 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 de 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 avail itself of illustration, I do not see why Mr Belloc and Dr Downey should display this iconoclastic fervour towards the secular history.

Dr Downey follows Mr Belloc in the 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 in 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 readers of the Dublin Review that natural selection has not been believed in for twenty-five years; it was quite a discarded idea. If the intellectual smart set regard 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 will sooner or later die and in which the individual young ?follow their individual parents then in every generation individuals less adapted to survival are, as a rule, likely to die sooner and to bear fewer offspring than individuals more adapted to these ends, and therefore that, conditions remaining constant, the average specimens produced 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, the average specimens of two sections of a species living under widely different conditions of survival, and separated from each other, must ultimately become 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. If 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 50th 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.. are indeed in a hopeless muddle between the origin of variations and the question of the reaction of the 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 Born's Animal Life and Human Progress, 1919, in which Mr Born 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." [Even the authorship of the book is wrongly ascribed to a Professor who should be called Mr.. collection by various hands.. "I have been at some pains to convince you that the current doctrine that evolution in animals and plants depends upon a ratio of increase so high as to lead to unrestricted competition between the individuals of a species and in consequence to a struggle for existence with the extinction of the less fit and the survival of the fittest no longer commands the universal assent of zoologists." Dr Downey quotes from the words extinction.. to the end. I do not wish to accuse Dr Downey of any deliberate attempt to mislead in his misquotation; he did not understand the point Professor Born was driving at. Generally he shows little or no grip upon these biological questions. Professor Born 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 individuals of the same species. [NB: In USSR, Lysenko denied competition between individuals of the same species and e.g. planted trees close together, many of which died -RW] If Dr Downey had read on he would surely have grasped the idea, for Professor Born 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, 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... 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 without some indication of antipathy, and in the Outline of History I have never mentioned him at all. In a list of 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... [p 77 of my copy, with other titles; mentions "old man"-RW] Downey goes on for some pages, confuting Grant Allen, pretending that he is confuting me. .. 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, or anything more than one factor in the complex synthesis of religion... 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 Lang and Atkinson's Social Origins, and to [sic; misprint] the psychoanalytical 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 religious and social development of mankind.

Upon the third issue raised by Dr Downey, the role of the Church towards knowledge, I am not very well equipped for discussion. Was Cardinal Newman right in saying that the case of Galileo was 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 there were good Catholics who first discovered America and 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... [his dots!] I promise further enquiry here and such amendment of the text and Outline in the next edition as my enquiries shall 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 so darkens and embitters so many human lives. It impresses me as being a rather 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 use of 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 Downey varies in his manner from the pitying and paternal to sprightly defiance. Sometimes he is almost flippant. He closes my last chapter feeling that

"His talk was like a spring which runs
With rapid change from rocks to roses:
It slipped from politics to puns,
It passed from Mahomet to Moses."

But how else could one write an Outline of History? A slight flavour of the Encyclopaedia 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 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 by 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, [Loyola is p 507, mostly, in my copy; Protestant Princes section starts p 503-RW] 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 complaining 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 a Catholic point of view. It is, I submit, a very desirable thing at the present time. I would suppose 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 my 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 countries the Catholic Church plays a very important political role. It is almost inevitable that the facilities offered by this organisation in 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 role of a peace-compelling and world-unifying power.

But 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 whether 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 species. Means of communication and education and political organisation necessarily dominate the story. 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 barely 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 my 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, 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. [This could refer to Florence Deeks though she was in Canada - RW] 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 a 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 for a common understanding and sympathy for all mankind. Each one of us could pursue his particular interest and develop his particular gift to the better within such a common mental framework.

Now if it is true that my Outline of History is a sketch of the 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 methods than in Europe, much may be achieved by steady insistence on the parts 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 leading 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 the 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 the Historical Society, or some special committee, to draw up a sample syllabus of 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, 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" and 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 an incalculable 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 today. [End]

THE NEW TEACHING OF HISTORY by H G WELLS [1921]