Most people will know H. G. Wells as the author of pioneering works of science fiction, such as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. Yet one of his most popular and influential works was not a work of fiction but a history of the world. Wells’ The Outline of History, published in the 1920s, was an international bestseller, making Wells a very wealthy man.
Wells’ History was an expression of the author’s philosophical approach to history and reality. It was informed by “progressive” scientism and atheist humanism, a belief that the technological fruits of science would ensure that humanity would “progress” beyond religion and superstition, which he saw synonymously, towards a golden age of luxury, comfort, and peace.
The tacitly anti-Christian stance of The Outline of History is epitomized by the fact that Wells devotes more space to the Persian campaign against the Greeks than to the figure of Christ. This is understandable enough, considering the philosophy of materialistic determinism that animated Wells’ understanding of history. If human “progress” is unshakeable, unstoppable, and utterly inexorable, the inevitable consequence of invisible and immutable evolutionary forces, then the figure of Christ is an irrelevance and a distraction. Like the legendary King Canute, the superstitious carpenter’s son from Nazareth was destined to be swept away by the tide of progress. Why waste time and space on such an ultimately futile figure?
The impact of The Outline of History on the faith and historical perspective of the two million people who bought it and read it in the years following its publication was significant. Taking but one example, Joy Davidman, an eight-year-old Jewish girl in New York City, read Wells’ History in 1923 and immediately declared herself an atheist. She would later become a communist and still later a Christian. We will return to her presently because her conversion to Christianity, like her conversion to atheism, is connected to Wells’ book.
The most vociferous and vituperative critic of The Outline of History was Hilaire Belloc, a Catholic historian, poet, and essayist.
Belloc’s first attacks against Wells’ History were published in the London Mercury and the Dublin Review. Thereafter, he systematically dissected Wells’ book in a long series of articles in The Universe, accusing Wells of a prejudiced provincialism and an ignorance of the very science that he sought to enthrone as the driving force of history. Wells had “not kept abreast of the modern scientific and historical work,” and he had “not followed the general thought of Europe and America in matters of physical science.” It was, however, Wells’ defective and deficient grasp of history itself which was most at fault:
[I]n history proper, he was never taught to appreciate the part played by Latin and Greek culture, and never even introduced to the history of the early Church…. With all this Mr Wells suffers from the very grievous fault of being ignorant that he is ignorant. He has the strange cocksuredness of the man who only knows the old conventional text-book of his schooldays and mistakes it for universal knowledge.
The controversy, or what might whimsically be called the “War of the Wells,” reached a conclusion and a climax in 1926, when Belloc’s articles for The Universe were published as A Companion to Mr Wells’s “Outline of History.” Wells responded with a book of his own, entitled Mr Belloc Objects, to which Belloc replied with a further book, entitled Mr Belloc Still Objects. By the end of the six-year struggle with his adversary, Belloc claimed to have written over 100,000 words in refutation of the central arguments of Wells’ book.
The year before the Belloc-Wells confrontation reached its climactic conclusion, G. K. Chesterton entered the fray with the publication of his book, The Everlasting Man. Intended as Chesterton’s own “outline of history,” written as a riposte to Wells, it was very different in tone to Belloc’s published broadsides. Whereas the argument between Belloc and Wells had become a quarrel, creating personal enmity between the two men, The Everlasting Man is a prime example of Chesterton’s ability to argue without quarreling. This is seen in the prefatory note to the book in which he acknowledged his differences with Wells while lauding Wells’ achievement:
As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.
Compare these kind and conciliatory words, offered deferentially to an adversary, with Belloc’s derision of Wells’ ignorance of his own ignorance and his prejudiced provincialism. Such is the difference between Chestertonian charity and Bellocian bellicosity.
The Everlasting Man is divided into two parts. The first part, “On the Creature Called Man,” covers history prior to the time of Christ; the second part, “On the Man Called Christ,” covers the history of Christian civilization, indicating the real difference that the Incarnation makes to human history. The book parallels Wells’ History by commencing with prehistoric man. Without referencing Wells’ book directly, Chesterton questions the scientific or historical accuracy of seeing the “cave man” as some sort of “ape man.” According to popular perception, the “cave man” was a primitive savage: “So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about…. I have never happened to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded.”
After mocking the prejudiced presumptions of those who had psychoanalyzed a mythical prehistoric patient, Chesterton requested an unprejudiced and truly scientific and historical approach to the mystery of prehistoric man. He suggested that those wishing to know more about our neolithic ancestors should be truly radical and look in the caves in which such evidence might be found. In doing so, we might discover “the real cave-man and his cave and not the literary cave-man and his club.” Upon entering the cave, we do not find evidence for the “progressive” presumption that our ancient ancestors were primitive “ape men”:
What was found in the cave was not the club, the horrible gory club notched with the number of women it had knocked on the head. The cave was not a Bluebeard’s Chamber filled with the skeletons of slaughtered wives; it was not filled with female skulls all arranged in rows and all cracked like eggs.
The evidence that we do find in the cave is art, which is the work of men, not the work of apes nor ape men. “Art is the signature of man,” Chesterton writes, indicating that our most remote ancestors were distinct in kind from the brutes that they hunted and painted and that they shared a common kinship and kindred spirit with men of all ages in what makes all men most human.
The Everlasting Man fulfilled its purpose. It was an answer and a charitable riposte to Wells’ Outline of History and an exposé of the shallowness of the atheist humanism and “progressive” scientism that had animated Wells’ approach to history. Although it was not a huge international bestseller, as Wells’ book was, it would prove very influential. Father Ronald Knox was “firmly of the opinion that posterity will regard The Everlasting Man as the best of [Chesterton’s] books,” a view which was echoed by Evelyn Waugh:
Chesterton is primarily the author of The Everlasting Man. In that book all his random thoughts are concentrated and refined; all his aberrations made straight. It is a great, popular book, one of the few really great popular books of the century; the triumphant assertion that a book can be both great and popular. And it needs no elucidation. It is brilliantly clear. It met a temporary need and survives as a permanent monument.
One can deduce from Waugh’s effusive praise that Chesterton’s “great, popular book” had been influential on Waugh’s own conversion to Catholicism in 1930. What is not in doubt is the influence of The Everlasting Man on the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Anglican Christianity a year later.
Lewis had admired Chesterton—without accepting Chesterton’s Christianity—ever since he’d stumbled across a volume of Chesterton’s essays while recovering in a field hospital in France during World War I. “Chesterton had more common sense than all the other moderns put together,” Lewis wrote, “bating, of course, his Christianity.” Although, by the mid-1920s, Lewis had abandoned his earlier atheism for a form of theism, the “God” in whom he believed was very different from “the God of popular religion”: “Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to make sense.”
Having read The Everlasting Man soon after it was first published in September 1925, it would take a further six years for Lewis to finally embrace Christianity. This was following the famous “long night talk” with his great friends, J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, on September 19, 1931, but there is no doubt that reading Chesterton in general and The Everlasting Man in particular had paved the way for his conversion. “In reading Chesterton, as in reading George MacDonald, I did not know what I was letting myself in for,” Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
Many years later, during World War II, Charles Gilmore, the Commandant of the Chaplains’ School of the RAF, remembered that Lewis “would bid me study again Chesterton’s Everlasting Man; would anxiously ask if the chaplains had really got it into their heads that the ancients had got every whit as good brains as we had.”
Considering the influence of The Everlasting Man on Lewis’ and Evelyn Waugh’s conversion, one can but wonder the extent to which the history of twentieth century literature would have altered had Chesterton not written his own “outline of history.” It is possible that we have Chesterton to thank, albeit obliquely, for The Chronicles of Narnia and Brideshead Revisited. Similarly, it is possible that we might have The Everlasting Man to thank for the conversion of Joy Davidman, the young Jewish girl who had become an atheist after reading Wells’ Outline of History. Years later, influenced by the Christian works of C. S. Lewis, she became a Christian, then a regular correspondent, and—finally and eventually—Lewis’ wife. And so, following a strange and circuitous route, Joy Davidman, later Mrs. C. S. Lewis, had passed from Judaism to atheism after reading Wells’ History, and then had come across the writings of C. S. Lewis after Lewis had passed from atheism to Christianity, having read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man. It is difficult not to sense the hand of Providence in this one woman’s experience of the “War of the Wells.”
As for the “War of the Wells” itself, it might be said to have ended with the surrender of Wells to the truths that he had been too gullible to see. Whereas Belloc, Chesterton, and Lewis lacked the credulity to believe in the future golden age ushered in by science, which had been Wells’ inspiration for his History, it was history itself that led to Wells’ final disillusionment with his own optimistic delusions. Faced with the horrors of World War II, Wells was forced to face and confront the multifarious evils that scientific “progress” had unleashed in the service of “progressive” ideologies. His last book, written before his death in 1946, was full of the desolation of disillusionment. Overshadowed by the aftermath of blitzkrieg, gas chamber, genocide, and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his final book was entitled, tragically and appropriately, The Mind at the End of Its Tether. In the end, Wells’ “progressive” optimism was not defeated by Belloc or Chesterton, but by reality.
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