A Short History of the World Read Free Page A

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 thelater 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