A Short History of the World (2 page)

Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) had many enemies, and his story was rather heroic. He was born into a family in humble circumstances and went through ‘Commercial School' – a rather grand name for his apprenticeships, first as a pharmacist and then in a drapery shop. These did not work out at all well, and he enrolled in the ‘Normal School of Science, Kensington' with a view to becoming a school-teacher. He started teaching in 1883, and taught until 1895, during which time he married. It was a miserable period for him. In the first place, his health was far from good. Also, in late-Victorian England, ‘counter-jumpers' were despised. They could sometimes only find their way forward socially by becoming technicians, needed by society though still, in a way, despised (when Oxford University had a Professor of Engineering foisted upon it a little later, his colleagues dismissed him as ‘Professor of Jam-Making'); and school-teaching, though comparatively better-rewarded than it is now, was the lowliest of professions. Throw into this an unfortunate first marriage, and you have in Wells's misfortunes a picture of much that was wrong with England in the early twentieth century.

His life also reflects much that was right with it. One had to show character, self-reliance, independence, and, once one had got through the initial isolation, there would be a network of friends and sympathizers who would help. In fact, initial troubles in youth give a strength of personality that carries one through middle age and old age, in a way which cannot often happen where things are far easier as in the United States. Dickens remarks that clerks should be put away in cupboards,
like cheeses, before being brought out to start their work. Wells was such an English – it is much more typically English than Scottish – creation: his career up to 1896, when he was thirty, was something of a cheese-cupboard. His immediate way out of it was provided by the virtually chance discovery that he had journalistic talent. His first marriage was a bore, as was teaching science in an extremely hierarchical school of the kind that then existed. The pin in the grenade was pulled out when Wells fell in love; it exploded, and Wells, having to supply funds for both his first wife and the love affair (there were to be many thereafter), took to light journalism. He proved to be good at it – outstandingly good. There was a fizzle and a pop to his writing which had the readers wanting to know what the next ‘piece' would be. He also discovered a truth: that the medium could only really be sustained if there were a message, however disguised, struggling to get out. Wells, with his experience of the hopes and troubles of lower-class late-Victorian South London, did indeed have a ‘message'. He found that he liked writing, too.

He wrote and wrote, and wrote and wrote. By the time he died, in 1946, there was a vast oeuvre. On one level this – as in the case of Balzac – was a tribute to a system that paid a penny a line. On another level, it was evidence of the health of England at the time. For, although Wells addressed himself to a very wide audience, and wrote in language that was much simpler than the language of people with far more educated and sophisticated backgrounds than his own, his subjects were deeply serious; and he sold. Having been himself very poor, and socially and sexually very insecure, he wanted the money, and wrote and wrote, and earned and earned, because he was read and read. There are a great many novels, four of which are masterpieces, but there are also ‘factual' books, beginning with his
Text Book of Biology
, of 1893, which followed the type of practical science associated with T. H. Huxley. In this sense, Wells is part of a nineteenth-century pattern, of men who were almost, though not quite, emancipated from religion, and put fact-counting and experiment-doing science in its place: an outlook which we call materialism. It was a doctrine well-suited to the sort of character emerging from the social mobility of the
later nineteenth century. Its vision was of men with classless accents, but still respectable and even imposing, who, through their mastery of facts and technology, could dominate the ‘feudal', or public-school elements, with their Anglicanism and Classics and ‘horrible horn-rimmed-spectacled refinement' (as Orwell called it: he added, ‘devastating ominiscience'). However, there was in Wells a third level, which was manifest in a rather surreptitious way all along, but emerged in his last book,
Mind at the End of Its Tether
(1945) when he contemplated the world that materialist science had in fact created. There was Stalin, product of social engineering. There was the Atom Bomb, blowing children to smithereens. There was, in anticipation, the end of most of the values that Wells had held. It was not a very coherent book, but there was a seriousness and reality which Wells's intellectual descendants, in the legitimate line, buried beneath a mountain of snow.

The circumstances in which Wells wrote his
Outline of History
and his
Short History
, here now reprinted, were peculiar, and Wells's contribution to them was peculiar too. At the end of the First World War, men and women saw that the era of European predominance was coming to an end. There was socialism at home, a threat to the old order; there was Bolshevism abroad. America – aggressively democratic – dominated the world's economy, though not as firmly as in the later 1940s. There were colonial revolts, of which no one could foresee the outcome and a ‘Third-World' country, Japan, had shown Europe how she might be defeated. Writers in Europe tried to make sense of this. Was there some cyclical process, by which Empires rose and fell? Oswald Spengler wrote his
Decline of the West
, in the ruins of Imperial Germany, to say so. In England, Arnold Toynbee constructed a vast
Study of History
, in umpteen volumes, to say much the same, though he ended up with a rather reedy cry for Anglicanism and the League of Nations. There was even a book called
Mein Kampf
, which summarized various Germanic solutions to the problems of the age. Wells's two books on history are, to a degree, his
Kampf
, but, with his English perspective, they were much shorter, much cleaner, and much funnier. Speaking as an historian and
professional, I admire them very greatly. His books combine admirable skill in the compression of material, and extraction of what matters, with a sense of moral purpose and are evidence of the creative genius of Wells.

The first thing that strikes you about Wells's
Short History
is its zest. The reader wants to know what happens next, and though the book can be read on a four-hour train journey, quite a lot of it will stick in the memory. He takes the reader in easy stages from the origins of Earth to the outcome of the First World War – a task that would have daunted anyone with ten times as many pages at his disposal as Wells – and in lesser hands, this little book would have read like an inadequate encyclopedia article, or worse. But Wells had two outstanding talents to bring to a book of this kind. Firstly he had journalistic training: the ability to see the sense of something complicated, and to turn it into something readable. More importantly, he had his point of view which, when he first wrote the book, in 1922, counted as exciting and heretical. For Wells believed in the alliance of Science and the Common People. The hero-country in this book is the United States: classless, technological, pacific.

The young Wells emerged in a world that was heavily dominated by class, empire, religion; he gathered with like-minded people, mainly radical liberals, and promoted what became, in government parlance, ‘the New Efficiency'. England was to become more like Germany – technical schools, better education, proper hygiene, more science at all levels. In a way, H. G. Wells's
Short History
, though not composed until 1922, is an artefact of the Edwardian progressives' world.

In that world, before mass secondary education, there was a widespread movement for Workers' Education, or, in France,
universités populaires
. Night-schools and libraries flourished, and there was a large market for popularizing, which produced some remarkably good books. Authors could simplify without ‘talking down', and could be sure that their readers would understand clear prose. Quite possibly, literacy in anything more than a mechanical sense is of a lower standard nowadays
in England than it was before the First World War. My Penguin edition of this book (1938) has, on the back, a list of outstanding, easily accessible works of serious popularization – Woolley on archaeology, Jeans on science, Bell on civilization, Fry on art, Cole on economics, Halévy on the English People. Wells belongs in this exalted category.

The
Short History
is of course a period-piece, but it is remarkably free, just the same, from the certainties of opinion held in Edwardian England. It is not Euro-centric. In 344 pages, you do not reach Columbus until page 235 or the French Revolution until page 272. This author knows that empires rise and fall, and that the domination of the world by Europe will not be any more lasting than the Western world's one-time domination by Rome. Again, there is no assertion of the superiority of the ‘Aryan', or ‘Indo-Germanic' race, a stock-in-trade of pot-boilers of this time. The science of ‘race-improvement', eugenics, caught on quite widely after 1900, as people, including commentators of the Left, thought that lower classes and lesser breeds would have to be racially improved. There were experiments along these lines in the Soviet Union; the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States paid for the research work of Dr Josef Mengele (though only up to 1941); in several states of the United States, there were provisions for the castration of men not fit to reproduce. Wells will have none of this: on the contrary, he writes respectfully of all races, particularly of Jews, notes with great approval the rise of Japan in the later nineteenth century, and devotes several pages to the Chinese. ‘Aryans' – Greeks, Persians, Romans – had flourished remarkably up to the fourth century
AD
but then they declined for some centuries, until Western Europe started off again. In the interim, Semites, Mongols had dominated most of the Eurasian land-mass.

Wells did not endorse the ‘cyclical' theories of history which were then in vogue. On the contrary, he was a progressive, and strongly believed that Mind could prolong it indefinitely. The key passage in this book occurs on page 250, and it is unfortunately the only one in which you sense a Fabian on auto-pilot:

From the sixteenth century onward the history of mankind is a story of political and social institutions becoming more and more plainly misfits… and of the slow reluctant realization of the need for a conscious and deliberate reconstruction of the whole scheme of human societies in the face of needs and possibilities new to all the former experiences of life.

New weaponry, better communications, the rise of printing, and a whole host of mechanical inventions – he catalogues these with great verve – made it more and more important for men's social affairs to be rationally ordered. In other words: down with kings, horses and priests; up with science, planning and fun.

Wells's book is really about political organization, and there are vast areas which he makes no attempt to cover: music, virtually all literature, painting, architecture. Did he understand them? He writes, of the emerging Roman Empire, that ‘Art and literature, science and philosophy… are the fruits of free and happy minds' – a late-Victorian cliché, beyond which he does not go. In the same way, religion appears sometimes as rather vicious pantomime, and he is rather perfunctory about the Middle Ages in the West.
Le cléricalisme, voilà l'ennemi
, remarked a French Radical Prime Minister, a contemporary of Wells's: across Europe, opposition to organized religion was the stock-in-trade of left-liberals and, in Switzerland, still supplies the name (
Freisinn
) for what survives of their party. In this view, priests have, again and again, to be swept aside by sensible and energetic people – although sometimes, as with the founders of the great religions (Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Muhammad), religious and social doctrines combine to great effect, at least for a while, before they turn back into mumbo-jumbo. Pythagoras and the splendid Greek sixth century mark the first time in which knowledge is taken out of the priests' hands and (so to speak) ‘democratized'. The great museum of Alexandria, under the first two Ptolemies, produced measurements of the earth's diameter, acknowledgement of the world's being round, and anticipations of the mechanical revolution of much later times, until Egyptian priests took it over. This pat
tern occurs repeatedly. There is an obvious point here, in that fanatical Church hierarchies have not generally been on the side of Progress. On the other hand, why are they so successful? There is a further point that Wells misses. In the history of the West since about 1600, one can frequently notice that Dissenters and Jews form a disproportionate part of the entrepreneurial class. They were not, usually, fanatically religious; but their grandparents had been. That question occurs, implicitly, in several nineteenth-century works on the development of capitalism – Werner Sombart or Max Weber being the obvious continental instances – and it occurred in some of the great Victorian books, Buckle's
Civilization
being a good example. It noted that Spain and Scotland had both done far more for Progress than their size warranted; both had been, once upon a time, places of religious fanaticism; and yet the religion – obscurantist, cruel (Buckle quotes some very bloodthirsty sermons) – had obviously done nothing for Progress as we now understand it.

Wells's inability to observe and describe the connections between medieval Christianity and the development of what we now call Early Modern Europe (in Germany it is called ‘the early-bourgeois revolution') weakens what he has to say about the Middle Ages. On the other hand, he is very knowledgeable on the Ancient world, which exercised such fascination for the West (some might say, tyranny) between the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century. He saw the ruin of Rome in a lack of will: the common people impoverished, and politics run by mercenaries or plutocrats who manipulated mobs against each other. Was this, again, an echo of the Fabians' criticism of Edwardian times? Probably so.