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to a work of art. If you could isolate the seed from which the whole
fabric has sprung you would find it, we believe, to consist of a fiery
passion for the rights of youth a passion for courage, vitality, initiative,
inventiveness, and all the qualities that Mr Wells likes best. And as Mr
Wells can never think without making a picture of his thought, we do
not have youth in the abstract, but Joan and Peter, Wilmington and
Troop, Huntley and Hetty Reinhart. We have Christmas parties and
dressings up and dances and night clubs and Cambridge and London
and real people disguised under fictitious names, and very bright covers
on the chairs and Post Impressionist pictures on the walls and advanced
books upon the tables. This power of visualizing a whole world for his
latest idea to grow in is the power that gives these hybrid books their
continuity and vitality.
But because Mr Wells s ideas put on flesh and blood so instinctively
and admirably we are able to come up close to them and look them in
the face; and the result of seeing them near at hand is, as our suspicions
assured us that it would be, curiously disappointing. Flesh and blood
have been lavished upon them, but in crude lumps and unmodelled masses,
as if the creator s hand, after moulding empires and sketching deities,
had grown too large and slack and insensitive to shape the fine clay of
men and women. It is curious to observe, for example, what play Mr
Wells is now constrained to make with the trick of modernity. It is as
if he suspected some defect in the constitution of his characters and
sought to remedy it with rouge and flaxen wigs and dabs of powder,
which he is in too great a hurry nowadays to fix on securely or plaster
in the right places. But if Joan and Peter are merely masquerading rather
clumsily at being the heirs of the ages, Mr Wells s passion for youth is
no make-believe. The sacrifice, if we choose to regard it so, of his career
as a novelist has been a sacrifice to the rights of youth, to the needs of
the present moment, to the lives of the rising generation. He has run
up his buildings to house temporary departments of the Government.
But if he is one of those writers who snap their fingers in the face of
the future, the roar of genuine applause which salutes every new work
of his more than makes up, we are sure, for the dubious silence, and
possibly the unconcealed boredom, of posterity.
247
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
July and November 1920
77. E.M.Forster, review in Athenaeum
2 and 9 July 1920, 8 9, 42 3
A review of the first volume of Wells s History. Forster later made
some brief but illuminating comments on Wells as a comic novelist
in Aspects of the Novel (1927).
I
It s no good humming and hawing; at least it is, but before the operation
begins the following sentence must be penned: A great book. The writer
tries to outline the history of the world, from the epoch of igneous gas
to the establishment of Christianity; he succeeds, and it is the first duty
of a reviewer to emphasize his success. Whatever he may do in his second
volume he has achieved a masterpiece in his first, and one desires to
offer him not only praise but thanks. Unconvincing as a Samurai or a
bishop, he has surely come through as a historian. A great book; a
possession for ever, for the ever of one s tiny life.
But now let us lower the voice a little, otherwise nothing gets said.
What, after reading the book, is one s main sensation? Perhaps that it
wasn t so much a book as a lecture, delivered by a vigorous, fair-minded
and well-informed free lance. He was assisted by a lantern its assistance
was essential and bright and clear upon the sheet he projected the misty
beginnings of fact. The rocks bubbled and the sea smoked. Presently
there was an inter-tidal scum: it was life, trying to move out of the warm
248
THE CRITICAL HERITAGE
water, and subsequent slides showed the various forms it took. A movement
also became perceptible among the audience; one or two of the prehistoric
experts, discontented at so much lucidity, withdrew. Man, Neanderthalian,
Palæo- and Neo-Lithic; man in Mesopotamia and Egypt; nomad man;
man in Judæa (more experts go out), in Greece (still more), in India
(exeunt the theosophists), in China (murmurs of me no likee ) and in
Rome. Over Rome there is a serious disturbance; the Public School masters
rise to protest against the caricature of Julius Cæsar, while the neo-Catholics
denounce the belittlement of the Pax Romana and the Latin Thing, and
lumber out to drink beer. The lecturer, undeterred by these secessions,
describes the origins of Christianity and loses the Anglican section of
his flock meanwhile, though the withdrawal is quieter in this case, and
due more to bewilderment than wrath. Finally the lights are turned up,
and the room seems as full as ever: one can t believe that a single person
has left it. Immense applause. The lecturer thanks the lanternist&
In praising so large a work, one must presumably begin with its
arrangement. Arrangement is a negative quality, but a great one: it is
the faculty of not muddling the reader, and Wells possesses it in a high
degree. He masses his facts together, kith with kin, yet they seldom overlap
chronologically: there is a little confusion as one crosses from prehistory
into history, but really this is all. How masterly, for example, is the
arrangement of the Roman and the Chinese Empires! One knew that
they were contemporary and alike menaced by barbarians, but here
one sees China elbowing off the attack, and so generating a westerly
movement with nomad tribes which is communicated across Asia and
Europe, and finally overwhelms Rome. Maps and time-charts elucidate
the process. How masterly again, and how necessary, is the emphasis
laid upon the novelty of civilization! It is an episode, the latest in the
career of Man, just as Man is only an episode in the career of the earth.
Half the duration of human civilization and the keys to all its chief
institutions are to be found before Sargon I.; yet man is thousands of
years older than the earliest institution, and millions of years before
man there was life. With the help of time-diagrams this proportion is
made clear: another triumph of arrangement. Arrangement seldom receives
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