The Outline of History, Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind
by . Written with the advice and editorial help of Mr. Ernest Barker, Sir H. H. Johnston, Sir E. Ray Lankester, and Professor Gilbert Murray. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1920. Two vols., royal 8vo, xx-+-648 and xii-+-076 pp. Illustrated by J. F. Horrabin. $10.50.
THIS is an ambitious book, both in conception and in execution. It is a bold thing to conceive the world’s history from primal chaos to 1920 and after, and it is even bolder to assume that this can be compassed by a brilliant novelist rather than by the tried historian. Always undaunted by the future, Mr. Wells now goes up courageously against the giant of the past, taking with him eminent scholars to guide him to good books and save him from gross error. The result is a notable work, enlarging, stimulating, often informing. Those who know considerable history will profit by its reading; those who know little will have much to learn when they have finished it; it should be neither one’s first nor one’s last book on the subject. The task was well worth doing, and it will be worth doing again and better.
Decidedly interesting as a whole, the work has sweep and vividness rather than flow. The minimum of historical fact is often given in desiccated form, and the citation of widely differing views is apt to be confusing, especially in the earlier chapters, so that one is tempted to jump from one to another of the luminous passages of reflection or portrayal which Mr. Wells intersperses. The nature of these observations can often be predicted by those who know their Wells. We are not surprised to find him stressing religion, world-peace, the comforts and conveniences of mechanical invention, much interested in the dinosaur and the swastika and all those obscure periods and peoples which give scope to the imagination. The comparison of President Wilson to Daisy Miller is novel, but we rather expect the author to be cold to a lawyerly people like the Roman; to that unsocialized person, ‘the bent Scholarly Man’; to one Aristotle, who was ‘terribly wanting in self-sacrificial enthusiasm’; to Napoleon, who might have been the maker of a new world but ‘preferred to be the son-in-law of the old,’ The institutional sense is lacking, and there is no appreciation of the social and intellectual values of tradition. Some of the more superficial remarks remind us of the swallows whom Lowell saw plastering their nests on ' the awful Past’ at Chartres. Mr. Wells is not in awe of the past, for he is thinking of the superiority of the present and the far greater superiorities of the future; but he cannot escape the past’s abiding power, and therein lies much comfort for the historically minded.
The book is more accurate than the run of general histories, but its information is inevitably second or third hand, based for the most part upon cyclopædias and standard histories and school textbooks, nearly always in English. This means that its scholarship is likely to be behind the times, inspite of the revision by eminent assistants. Even so up-to-date a person as Mr. Wells is often living in the past of historical and scientific knowledge, and for the events of 1919 he is content to clip from such dubious and partisan sources as Keynes and Dillon. Greater calm in treating his own time would have strengthened our confidence in Mr. Wells’s power to see all history sub specie œternitatis.
The judicious reader will get much joy from the pungent footnotes, the last refuge of the scholars who pull Mr. Wells’s coat-tails as he races through the ages. Here a running fight is waged over such issues as the place of conscience in the Puritan Revolution and the value of classical education as seen in Gladstone, while at times the barriers of small type are broken and the upper air witnesses such a battle royal as that between the author and Sir Gilbert Murray over the comparative civilization of the ancient Athenians and a music-hall mob. Sir Gilbert likewise finds the text ‘too dogmatic about Helen’ of Troy. But then, Mr. Wells has always been rather dogmatic about his Helens! C. H. H.