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Modernist Lives
 Historicizing Modernism

Series Editors
Matthew Feldman, Professor of Contemporary History, Teesside
University, UK; and Erik Tonning, Professor of British Literature and
Culture, University of Bergen, Norway.
Assistant Editor: David Tucker, Associate Lecturer, Goldsmiths
College, University of London, UK

Editorial Board
Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago,
New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St. John’s College, University of
Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal
Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English,
University of Reading, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English,
University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Reader in
Comparative Literature, University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet
Wilson, University of Northampton, UK.
Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary
interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing:
a direct response to new documentary sources made available over
the last decade.
Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual
European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters, this series
reassesses established readings of modernist writers by developing
fresh views of intellectual contexts and working methods.
 Series Titles

Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, Laetitia Zecchini

British Literature and Classical Music, David Deutsch
Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, Matthew Feldman, Henry Mead
and Erik Tonning
Charles Henri Ford, Alexander Howard
Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos, David Ten Eyck
Ezra Pound’s Eriugena, Mark Byron
Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson
James Joyce and Absolute Music, Michelle Witen
James Joyce and Catholicism, Chrissie van Mierlo
John Kasper and Ezra Pound, Alec Marsh
Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, edited by Janet Wilson,
Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid
Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer, Alex Latter
The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy, Susan Schreibman
Literary Impressionism, Rebecca Bowler
Modern Manuscripts, Dirk Van Hulle
Modernism at the Microphone, Melissa Dinsman
Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies, Sandeep Parmar
Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong
Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Tucker
Samuel Beckett and The Bible, Iain Bailey
Samuel Beckett and Cinema, Anthony Paraskeva
Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling
Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon
T. E. Hulme and the Ideological Politics of Early Modernism, Henry
Mead
Virginia Woolf’s Late Cultural Criticism, Alice Wood
 Upcoming Titles

Chicago and the Making of American Modernism, Michelle E. Moore

Politics and 1930s Literature, Natasha Periyan
Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley
 Modernist Lives
Biography and Autobiography at Leonard
and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press

Claire Battershill
 Contents

List of Illustrations
Editorial Preface to Historicizing Modernism
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Introduction
1 ‘Works of Merit’: What the Hogarth Press Published (1917–1946)
Beyond Bloomsbury
Quantifying the publisher’s list
Types of books

2 ‘A Fig for Literature! This Is Life’: The Hogarth Press ‘Books on

Tolstoi’ (1920–1924)
‘Carelessly jotted down’: Maxim Gorky’s biographical method
The Autobiography of Countess Sophie Tolstoy
Tolstoi’s Love Letters
Talks with Tolstoi
3 Elastic Categories: Debates about Biography and Autobiography
(1923–1929)
What was new about ‘The New Biography’?
Leonard Woolf and the value of true stories
Harold Nicolson at the Hogarth Press
Lytton Strachey’s ‘haphazard visions’
4 Marketing, Seriousness and Invention: Orlando (1928), Flush
(1933) and Roger Fry (1940)
‘No one wants biography’: Classifying Orlando
‘Not a poet but a red cocker spaniel’: Flush and the problem of
seriousness
Moments of being in Roger Fry
5 Tufty Eyebrows and Salty Countenances: The Hogarth Press
Biography Series (1934–1937)
Biographies through the Eyes of Contemporaries
World-Makers and World-Shakers
6 The Reticent Autobiografictions of Henry Green and Christopher
Isherwood (1938–1940)
Autobiografiction
John Lehmann and the new face of the Hogarth Press
‘Everyone must be his own guinea pig’: Christopher Isherwood’s
Lions and Shadows
Fears of libel and the publishing of Goodbye to Berlin
‘A long intimacy between strangers’: Henry Green’s Pack My Bag

Conclusion: The Legacy of the Hogarth Press

Appendix A: List of Biographies and Autobiographies and Genre

Categorizations
Appendix B: List Prices, Sales Figures for the First Six Months, Print
Run Numbers, and Profit and Loss Figures
Notes
Works Cited
Index
 Illustrations

Figures
1 Hogarth Press titles, 1917–1946
2 Titles in the Hogarth Press catalogue, 1939
3 The Hogarth Press cover for The Autobiography of Countess
Sophie Tolstoi
4 The Hogarth Press cover for The Development of English
Biography in the Hogarth Lectures on Literature series
5 John Banting’s cover design for the World-Makers and World-
Shakers series

Table
1 Leonard Woolf’s account books
 Editorial Preface to Historicizing
Modernism

This book series is devoted to the analysis of late nineteenth- to

twentieth- century literary modernism within its historical contexts.
Historicizing Modernism therefore stresses empirical accuracy and
the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts,
marginalia or other archival materials) in developing monographs
and edited collections on modernist literature. This may take a
number of forms, such as manuscript study and genetic criticism,
documenting interrelated historical contexts and ideas, and exploring
biographical information. To date, no book series has fully laid claim
to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature.
While the series addresses itself to a range of key authors, it also
highlights the importance of non-canonical writers with a view to
establishing broader intellectual genealogies of modernism.
Furthermore, while the series is weighted towards the English-
speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone modernists whose
writings are open to fresh historical exploration are also included.
A key aim of the series is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of
intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many modernists
and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and
should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the
complex continuum of individual literary practices. It is our intent
that the series’ emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of
modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various
reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept
‘modernism’ itself. Indeed, the concept of ‘historicizing’ is itself
debated across its volumes, and the series by no means discourages
more theoretically informed approaches. On the contrary, the editors
hope that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing
Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the
way.
Matthew Feldman
Erik Tonning
 Acknowledgements

This book is, among other things, a love letter to libraries and
archives. It is the record of time spent in the company of historical
letters, hand-made books, paper samples, sketches, drawings, first
editions, and the people who preserve and care for them. I would
therefore like to thank the staff at the E. J. Pratt Library in Toronto
(especially Roma Kail, Helena Kozar, Lisa Sherlock and Carmen
Socknat) and I would like to honour the memory of Mary Rowell
Jackman who donated her private collection and began what has
become one of the most extensive gatherings of Woolf-related
materials in the world. I would also like to thank the current and
past staff at the University of Reading Archive of Publishing and
Printing (particularly Nancy Jean Fulford and Guy Baxer); and the
current and past staff at the Penguin Random House Library and
Archive in Rushden (particularly Jean Rose, Charlotte Perkins and
Sarah McMahon) who facilitated access to the archive through the
copyright holders’ estates. Penguin Random House kindly gave me
permission to undertake this research, which began as my PhD
dissertation. Many thanks to the reading room staff and curators at
the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University
Library, the Senate House Library, the Harry Ransom Center, the
Simon Fraser University Library and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library. Permission to quote from unpublished archival materials and
to use quotations by Leonard and Virginia Woolf as chapter
epigraphs has been generously granted by the Society of Authors as
the representatives for the estates of Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
The epigraph from Vita Sackville-West’s Joan of Arc is reproduced
with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the
Beneficiaries of the Estate of Vita Sackville-West Copyright © Vita
Sackville-West 1937. Financial support from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada made this project possible
and an Alfred and Blanche K. Knopf fellowship allowed me to travel
to the Harry Ransom Center.
In a book on publishing, it seems particularly fitting to have had
such a smooth and pleasant journey from manuscript to book. I am
grateful for the hard work of everyone at Bloomsbury. Particular
thanks go to the literary editor, David Avital, and the series editors,
Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning. I would also like to thank the
anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their tremendously
helpful reports.
Many thanks to my colleagues and students at the University of
Toronto, the Ontario College of Art and Design University, the
University of Reading and Simon Fraser University for asking
important questions and providing the kind of incisive critical
discussion that is essential to scholarly work. I would also like to
thank the delightful friends and colleagues I’ve met through the
Modernist Studies Association, the International Virginia Woolf
Conference, DHSI, and the Society for the History of Authors,
Readers, and Publishers. This book and the conference papers and
articles deriving from it have been immeasurably improved by the
feedback of more people than I can name here: I feel very lucky to
have already had so many thoughtful readers and interlocutors.
I am so grateful to my doctoral supervisor, Heather Jackson, first,
for being an exemplary mentor and role model in every respect,
second, for her guidance about this project since its beginning, and
finally, for being such a dear and generous friend. I would also like
to thank my postdoctoral supervisors Mary Ann Gillies and Andrew
Nash for their generosity and kindness and for their helpful
comments on successive drafts of this work. I owe a debt of
gratitude to Alice Staveley, Helen Southworth, Elizabeth Willson
Gordon, Nicola Wilson and Mike Widner for providing, in the
Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP), a strong and
supportive feminist collaborative community founded on a shared
love of the Hogarth Press. I am grateful also to Alexandra Peat,
Lindsey Eckert, Letitia Henville, Heather Jessup and Dan Newman for
their unwavering personal and professional support. Thanks to Jen
McDermott, who heroically read an early version of this whole
manuscript and made it much more polished!
Finally, I would like to thank my family, to whom I dedicate this,
and everything I do, with love.
 Abbreviations

BTEC The Hogarth Press’s Biographies through the Eyes of Contemporaries

Series
D Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell and
Andrew McNeillie. 5 vols. London: Hogarth P, 1977–1984.
DNB Dictionary of National Biography
HPA The Hogarth Press Business Archives, University of Reading
HRC The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin
MAPP The Modernist Archives Publishing Project
MHP Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex
ME Majl Ewing Collection of Hogarth Press manuscripts, 1920–1923,
University of California, Los Angeles
N&A The Nation and the Athenaeum
NS The New Statesman
L Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Nigel Nicolson and
Joanne Trautmann. 5 vols. London: Hogarth Press, 1975–1980. All of
Woolf’s published letters are quoted from this edition.
LW Leonard Woolf
LWP Leonard Woolf Papers, University of Sussex
S Smith College Library Special Collections
VW Virginia Woolf
WMWS The Hogarth Press World-Makers and World-Shakers Series
 Introduction

Shall we read [biographies and autobiographies] in the first place to satisfy

that curiosity which possesses us sometimes when in the evening we linger
in front of a house where the lights are lit and the blinds not yet drawn, and
each floor of the house shows us a different section of human life in being?
Biographies and memoirs answer such questions, light up innumerable such
houses; they show us people going about their daily affairs, toiling, failing,
succeeding, eating, hating, loving, until they die.
– Virginia Woolf ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (1925)

Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ dwells on the
pleasure of reading biographies and autobiographies that ‘light up
the many windows of the past’ (262–3). The smallest biographical
detail, Woolf suggests, can set off sparks of imagination and delight:
‘It may be one letter – but what a vision it gives! It may be a few
sentences – but what vistas they suggest!’ (263). Ideas about
biographies and autobiographies are scattered throughout Virginia
Woolf’s writings, sometimes voiced by the characters in her novels,
sometimes in her essays and sometimes in her diaries and personal
writings. ‘As you know,’ she wrote to Hugh Walpole, with a
parenthetical pause for consideration, ‘of all literature (yes, I think
this more or less true) I love autobiography most’ (L 5: 28 December
1932).1 Woolf’s essays ‘The New Biography’ and ‘The Art of
Biography’ have become some of the central theoretical documents
of modernist life writing,2 and many of her other essays and reviews
contain miniature biographies of authors, from ‘George Eliot’ to
‘George Gissing.’ In ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ Virginia Woolf
suggests that as enjoyable as these true stories can be, they offer
readers more than simple voyeuristic pleasure. They are generative
genres, presenting the possibility of exploring new worlds in the
reader’s own thinking, not just revisiting the old worlds of the past.
We can read them, Woolf argues, ‘not to throw light on literature,
not to become familiar with famous people, but to refresh and
exercise our own creative powers’ (263). Woolf’s own creative play
with autobiography and biography throughout her works shows that
she consciously drew from the tropes, rhetorical strategies and
conventions of these genres. This book shows just how interested
Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf were – as writers, as
readers and as publishers – in various forms of what is now often
called ‘life writing.’
Hermione Lee begins her biography of Woolf by suggesting that
Woolf’s preoccupation with life writing ‘haunts her own biographers’
(3). Critics too have had to contend with her strong and complex
ideas about the genre: biography pervades her critical writing and
her thinking about fiction.3 The way she writes about modern fiction
is inextricably linked with her notion that a book in any genre that
manages to capture real life is the pinnacle (to use one of her
preferred words) of literary achievement. Her question about
Galsworthy, Bennett and the other Edwardians was whether actual
vitality could be found in what she saw as overpopulated novels with
overdetermined descriptions. Of Bennett she writes that ‘his
characters live abundantly, even unexpectedly, but it remains to ask
how do they live, and what do they live for?’ (159). Even more
damningly, she suggests that ‘Mr. Bennett has come down with his
magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two on the
wrong side [ . . . ] Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing
else is worthwhile’ (159). Throughout her career Woolf was trying to
find ways of writing, which allowed her to answer essential
questions of meaning rather than simply presenting lives from the
outside.4 What are the literary details that tell us who people really
are and makes them into human beings rather than obvious
fabrications? What literary ‘apparatus’ can lead us to catch life in
writing rather than let it escape? Woolf’s methods in her own works
were, of course, multiple: her experiments in style, famously shifting
from work to work – from the quietly insistent social politics of Night
and Day, to the fevered interiority of The Waves, to the fractured
forms of Between the Acts – returned again and again to these
questions about how characters and real people live, and how we
bring actual living, with all its complexities, into the medium of
language, onto the printed page and into the hands of readers.
The Woolfs were directly involved in all stages of the process of
bringing literary works to life. The Hogarth Press is often mentioned
as a detail in biographies of Virginia Woolf.5 As the story goes, the
Press originated in the drawing room at Hogarth House in Richmond
in 1917. The original idea to start a publishing house arose,
famously, when the Woolfs decided on birthday presents for Virginia
in 1916: a ‘printing press, for all our friends stories’ (L 2: 120) and a
bulldog. For the earliest publications, Virginia Woolf set the type and
Leonard undertook the machine work on their table-top Albion
printing press. The bulldog never materialized, but the arrival of the
printing press, along with cases of Caslon type, almost exactly a
hundred years ago now, marked the beginning of a venture that
became much more than a hobby.
Despite the fact that most scholars of modernism know of the
existence of the Hogarth Press (it is frequently mentioned in passing
not only in Woolf biographies but also in modernist studies as a
publisher of works by T. S. Eliot, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein and,
of course, Virginia Woolf herself), scholarly research on the Press
had, until about ten years ago, focused on a relatively small group of
publications written by prominent figures of modernism, and Woolf
in particular. Studies of Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press – its
influence on her own writing, its role as a vehicle for her
experimental fiction and its place in her daily life – comprise a
subcategory of Woolf studies.6 Scholarly work on the press over the
past decade, coinciding with the rise of material modernisms as a
dominant critical approach in the field and exemplified in Helen
Southworth’s edited collection, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the
Hogarth Press and the Networks of Modernism (2010), has shown
just what a rich and diverse set of materials the Hogarth Press offers
for research. Southworth’s collection ends with an invitation for more
work to be done on the still-untold stories of the Press, and this is an
invitation I happily take up in this book.
Because of her role reading manuscripts, providing editorial
feedback and setting type at the Press, when Woolf wrote about
biographical and autobiographical pleasure, she was not only
thinking about biography from a writer’s point of view. She was also
considering the place of life writing in a rapidly shifting culture of
book publishing and book buying. Biographies and autobiographies
were of particular interest to anyone observing the publishing world
of the early twentieth century because they were very much in
vogue, and both the Woolfs were following the development of the
trend. In the interwar period, biographies were being published in
greater and greater numbers in England. According to annual
summaries from the English Catalogue of Books edition of the trade
journal, the Publisher’s Circular, the number of biographical titles
published annually in England rose by 226 per cent between 1918
and 1939. This is at a rate several times higher than the 41 per cent
overall increase in book publication during the same period.7 There
were many possible historical reasons for this rise in the genre’s
popularity: the glut of military memoirs and soldiers’ memorials
following World War One; the rise of psychoanalysis and
psychoanalytic theory and its associated focus on the self; the rise at
the same time of cinema and celebrity culture; and the new wave of
experimentation with biographical and autobiographical tropes in
fiction. The Woolfs and their contemporaries, as I show in Chapter 3,
were constantly speculating about the reasons for the genre’s
popularity and wondering about its future. From 1917 onwards, the
Woolfs were thinking as professional publishers about the broader
trend for biography, and this thinking informed their own
compositional experiments and their writerly identities, just as their
aesthetic views informed their selections as publishers. They knew
they were not alone in thinking about where, generically speaking,
life resides in writing. They were pleased about the trend for
biography during this period and wanted to understand it thoroughly
as it related to their own work and to the community of
contemporary writers that they were creating at the Hogarth Press.
Virginia is by far the best-known Woolf when it comes to
modernist biographical theory, but Leonard Woolf, too, was an avid
reader of biography and autobiography who saw inherent value in
stories about real life. Leonard read so many such works that in his
‘World of Books’ column in the Nation & Athenaeum (N&A) between
1923 and 1929, there is at least one mentioned nearly every week.
Like Virginia Woolf, he was a practitioner as well as a critic and a
publisher: his own five-volume autobiography, which I will return to
often throughout this book, is one of the most detailed accounts of
Bloomsbury life from the inside.8 Long before he published his own
autobiography in the 1960s, however, Leonard was a frequent
reviewer of biographies and commentator on their status in the
literary world. In ‘The Autumn Crop’, an article assessing the Fall
books for 1927, he wrote of the prevalence of the genre in the
publishers’ lists: ‘the most notable thing in the promised harvest is
the ever growing9 yield of biography. Biographical books are
becoming serious rivals to novels, and it must be assumed that
many get the same, and something more, out of the story of real
people’s lives as they get out of imaginary tales about imaginary
people’ (22).
Diversity was both policy and product of the Press. Its range and
scale of influence went beyond the small circle of Bloomsbury with
which it is usually associated. The Woolfs began, as early as 1920,
to accept for publication works that were far too lengthy to be
reasonably typeset by hand. The various content that the Woolfs
sought to produce also led them to use a range of production
methods. They sent longer works out to commercial printers
throughout the UK from as early as 1919, though they continued to
produce special limited editions of hand-printed works through the
1930s. In this way the Press published over five hundred titles
between 1917 and 1946, and the subject matter of these ranged
across a wide variety of topics and approaches: everything from
best-selling middlebrow novels to privately printed personal
memorial books for family and friends came under the publisher’s
imprint, with its widely recognizable ‘Woolf’s head’ logo.
This diversity was born of an appeal to a specific and
paradoxically individualized notion of value which would become the
defining feature of the imprint. The Hogarth Press’s overall mandate
was, as Virginia Woolf wrote, to publish ‘writing of merit which the
ordinary publisher refuses’ (VW L 2: 242). It is a self-description that
allows for openness to experimental and interesting writing that
might not survive the pressures of a large commercial publisher. It is
perhaps this frequently reiterated aim, to do what mainstream
publishers would not, that has cemented the Hogarth Press’s
reputation as a small and exclusive venture. However, the Woolfs’
preferences were wide-ranging and various, and their aims were
exploratory rather than prescriptive. The phrase ‘writing of merit
which the ordinary publisher refuses’ allows for works that present
contradictory viewpoints to be published alongside one another and
for the contingencies and vagaries of personal taste to play a role in
defining the Press’s list. The very idea of ‘merit’ is evidently
subjective (e.g. not everyone agrees with Virginia Woolf that Arnold
Bennett’s fiction consistently misses the point), and in the Woolfs’
case, working out what they considered meritorious was a
complicated and intellectually rich process. Leonard Woolf was often
unapologetic about his own changeable and therefore unpredictable
tastes: ‘Nothing is more silly than the principle, which too often
fatally influences practice, that you ought to be consistent in your
feelings and your likes and dislikes. Where taste is concerned there
is no law of contradiction’ (Beginning Again 26). Leonard Woolf
wrote frequently in the N&A about what he called his ‘catholic’ tastes
in literature. Virginia Woolf, like Leonard, suggests that individual
taste can’t help but guide reading practices: ‘our taste, the nerve of
sensation that sends shocks through us, is our chief illuminant; we
learn through feeling; we cannot suppress our own idiosyncrasy
without impoverishing it’ (‘How Should One Read a Book?’ 264). The
extensive documentation that remains of the Woolfs’ reading habits
shows that they were willing to try just about anything when it came
to reading material.10 ‘Merit’ for the Woolfs was not necessarily tied
to literariness, or to a specific kind of stylistic experimentalism that
might fit a narrow, circumscribed definition of modernism. Laura
Marcus’s description of the Press as ‘heterogeneous’ (‘Virginia Woolf’
128) is apt and it works so well as a descriptor in part because it
foregrounds the role of inconsistent taste in the Woolfs’ selection
practices. What the Woolfs liked and what interested them mattered
enormously to the Hogarth Press: it was really the main factor,
especially until the late 1930s, that determined their selections.
Nearly any kind of book, and any style of writing, if it were ‘modern’
in the sense of seeming relevant to the contemporary moment,
might be published by the press.
Elizabeth Willson Gordon argues that Virginia Woolf’s own literary
‘brand’ meant that the Press imprint took on an especially powerful
role by the late 1920s.11 The artistic partnership between Vanessa
Bell and Woolf gave that ‘brand’ a post-Impressionist aesthetic,
which has been examined by Diane Gillespie and others alongside
biographical accounts of their sibling relationship.12 As significant as
the Hogarth Press was for Woolf’s own creative independence, it also
afforded several other writers, new and established, the chance to
publish their work. An examination of the Hogarth Press beyond its
more famous authors shows that it was an institution that accepted
work from writers of various social classes, nationalities, ages,
political and ideological persuasions, genders, and sexualities.13
Since the publication of Southworth’s collection, articles and papers
on various aspects of the Press’s list has begun invigorating this
small scholarly field in exciting ways and approaching the Press’s list
by uncovering its offerings of particular genres, political ideologies,
formal tropes, class identities and gender politics. By treating
individual biographies and autobiographies here, I expand on and
am indebted to work by Southworth on working-class writers at the
Press; Emily Kopley’s work on the Hogarth Press poets; Marcus on
the Russian translations and on the Press’s overall history; Gillespie
on detective fiction, religion and, most recently, Viola Tree; Alice
Staveley on the feminist aspects of Woolf’s role at the Press; Nicola
Wilson on Hugh Walpole and the Press’s relationship with the Book
Society; Anna Snaith on its (complicatedly) anti-colonial dimensions;
and Elizabeth Willson Gordon on the Press’s cultural significance and
branding. Each of these critics aims to offer a closer look at the
actual content of what was published at the Hogarth Press by
focusing on particular aspects of its output, and Southworth’s
collection, which contains essays on Vita Sackville-West’s role as a
Hogarth Press author by Stephen Barkway, an analysis of the
precocious teenaged poet Joan Easdale by Mark Hussey, a look at
the transnational modernist writings of William Plomer by John K.
Young, a study of the middlebrow novels of E. M. Delafield and Rose
Macaulay by Melissa Sullivan, and a re-evaluation of the radical
politics of the Press through Jane Harrison’s translation from the
Russian of The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, by Himself by Jean Mills.
Each of these local studies shows a different side of the Press: it was
an operation at once domestic and commercial; English and
international; home-grown and ambitious.
So what were the other five hundred-odd books the Woolfs
published aside from the modernist works that are now frequently
read and studied? Given the Press’s associations with Virginia Woolf
and Bloomsbury, it might come as a surprise to find among its
publications a series of biographies for children, an etiquette book,
or a manual on diet and high blood pressure. There are books of all
shapes, sizes and kinds, and looking at the whole group of
publications together offers a view of early twentieth-century literary
culture, politics, art history, music and essay-writing that is far more
varied than might be expected. Indeed, the Woolfs actively
encouraged debate and dissent, frequently soliciting the most wildly
contradictory works they could find to sit alongside one another.
What the full body of materials offers is an emphasis not on
Bloomsbury as a distinctive aesthetic and class but of modernism
more broadly conceived: an emphasis specifically on the pursuit of
the new, no matter the nature of that newness.
The variety of works published by the Hogarth Press reflects this
sense of a complex and shifting taste that might be equally
interesting in two opposing viewpoints or aesthetic sensibilities, the
mind open, as Woolf suggests, to the ‘fast flocking of innumerable
impressions’ (264) and governed chiefly by preference. Looking at
the surprises on the Hogarth Press’s list (Why this novel about an
obnoxious landlady? That poem about a scholar’s pet monkey?), it is
sometimes difficult at first glance to imagine what might have
possessed them to publish what they did. Luckily, the Hogarth
Press’s archive is an unusually rich one. Like much of both Woolfs’
activity in other arenas, the day-to-day life of the Hogarth Press was
hyper-documented. Although some of the records were destroyed
when the Press’s offices were bombed in the Blitz, some thousands
of files, ledgers, letters, proofs, pictures and postcards remain. The
capaciousness of the Press’s mandate allowed for openness and
flexibility about the selection of works, and the archive allows us to
learn more about why and how each work was published from the
publisher’s side as well as from the author’s. Particular patterns
emerge in these files: it is clear that both Woolfs especially liked
biography and were convinced that it had a special status in the
book world of their historical moment. I have chosen to focus on
biographies and autobiographies in part because the archive shows
their importance to the Press. The Woolfs were, of course, broadly
interested in publishing books that added something to the critical or
literary landscape of their chosen field. For them, biography and
autobiography were vital sites of modernist experimentation, and the
fact that there was a vogue for these genres in the publishing world
encouraged their already strong interest.
If life writing was so important to Virginia Woolf, and Virginia
Woolf is so important to our critical understandings of life writing,
what can the biographical and autobiographical works published at
the Hogarth Press tell us about those genres and their relation to
literary modernism? The eclectic materials that the Hogarth Press
published in these genres stage some of the most important
contemporary debates about modernist biographical and
autobiographical practices. From issues of truth and fidelity to real
life, to narrative strategy and the aesthetics of composition, the
Hogarth Press facilitated a flexible approach to a form that they saw
as crucially modern and primed for experimental work. It would be
equally possible to select another genre as a focus for articulating
the Hogarth Press’s values and priorities; to write a study, for
instance, of the Hogarth Press novels or the Hogarth Press poems.14
However, the Woolfs themselves wrote over and over that
biographies and autobiographies were their favourite kinds of books
to read. Even as the breadth and diversity of materials published
shows the eclecticism of their taste, the Woolfs’ preferences do merit
special attention. If, as Woolf suggests, ‘the biographer must go
ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s canary, testing the
atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete
conventions,’ it is the publishing house that set those song birds free
to test the air.
The Hogarth Press’s relationship with book trade conventions and
the early twentieth-century publishing world was complicated and
has consequently often been described in a way that reinforces
myths and assumptions about the Woolfs and about the nature of
the Press. As Mark Hussey and Faye Hammill point out, there
remains an ‘entrenched (and erroneous) notion that [the Press] was
[ . . . ] still a cottage industry in the 1930s’ (102). Aaron Jaffe, for
example, situates it where most people would assume it belongs:
among other small modernist presses. Jaffe describes this group of
publishers as ‘the rarefied, small houses willing to preserve authorial
privilege at all costs – presses such as The Hours, Black Sun, Cuala,
Hogarth, The Egoist; boutique operations recalling an Arts and Crafts
ethos of the prior century’ (399).15 Although it is tempting and in
some ways instructive to think of the Hogarth Press alongside these
presses, and although the emphasis Jaffe identifies on ‘authorial
privilege’ certainly reflects the Hogarth Press’s mandate, there is also
a sense in which, over time, the Hogarth Press became much more
like the other, larger publishers. Jaffe describes Faber & Faber,
Chatto & Windus and Elkin Mathews in contrast to the small presses,
since, he writes, they were ‘more publicity-savvy firms [ . . . ] that
kept modern literary lists significantly invested in modernist trends’
(399). It is more accurate, however, to say that the Hogarth Press
began with the spirit and method of a little magazine or a small
press inheriting traditions from the Arts and Crafts Movement – its
earliest handmade books did have a small circulation among friends
and members of Bloomsbury, and of course the focus on taste
recalls many of William Morris’s aesthetic priorities – but it rapidly
became a larger operation whose books found an international
readership. It was only three years after the Press’s beginning, in
1920, that The Reminiscences of Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, the first of
the Press’s biographical publications, was commercially printed. It
sold over a thousand copies in the first six months and required a
second printing almost immediately. By the 1930s, the Press was
producing titles with circulations in the tens of thousands. The
publications were selected as Book Society choices and advertised in
newspapers of all kinds (not just little magazines or even intellectual
weeklies) and in cinemas. Although the Press always kept that
nebulous idea of ‘merit’ at the centre of its project, the Hogarth
Press Business Archives show the development of publicity strategies
and a professionalization of the Press that might align it much more
closely with Faber or Chatto than with Cuala. This shift from
domestic hobby to professional operation happened within the first
five years of the Press’s existence. Hogarth Press publications, like
those of larger commercial firms and unlike those of the specialist
presses that dealt exclusively in limited special editions, were often
produced in large print runs, reviewed in regional papers all over
England, borrowed in circulating libraries and sold internationally in
colonial cloth editions. By the time the business was taken over in
1946 by Chatto & Windus, the Hogarth Press had networks and
relations with literary agents, publishers and distributors all over the
world, its influence reaching far beyond Bloomsbury Squares and
Richmond basements. Its output of over five hundred titles over
nearly thirty years is also much larger than the small modernist
presses with which it is often compared: Cuala published seventy
titles in total, for example, and the Black Sun Press published thirty-
five.16
Another key distinction between the Hogarth Press and some of
the smaller ventures (and especially the Arts and Crafts lineage), is
that despite their handmade nature, the Hogarth Press volumes
were never intended to be expensive specimens of fine printing. It’s
true that the present-day locations of Hogarth Press books in special
collections and the high prices they fetch at rare book auctions
indicate a value for the material object that is often absent from
more overtly commercial publications of this period. However, at the
time of their publication, the books were intended to be of the
moment – meant to be read first and perhaps kept and collected
second. Early subscribers to the Press were subscribing as much to a
cultural identity and an affiliation with the Woolfs as tastemakers as
they were to a purchasing scheme, and in that sense the poems or
stories themselves were primary. The early books and pamphlets
were vibrant objects.17 Functionality and accessibility were also
significant in press production, which Angelica Garnett links with
Woolf’s notion of the ‘common reader’:
The Hogarth Press books were meant for the common reader and not, for
example, like those of the Nonesuch Press, intended to be lasting objects of
beauty, something that, because of what seemed like her excessive self-
consciousness, Vanessa would have felt uncomfortable. Far from designing
for future generations she concentrated on the moment, searching for
spontaneity, consigning it to poor quality paper and simple line block printing
which exactly suited her gift for the abstract and purely visual. (Bradshaw 7)

The tendency to align the Hogarth Press with much smaller

modernist operations is understandable given the Woolfs’ own
emphasis on the handmade, small-scale aspects of the Press’s
output. If the Press seems smaller than it was, it is partly because
they continued to produce slim handset poetry books even later into
their existence as a business, and that they were thoughtful about
and attentive to the visual design of their dust jackets, which aligned
them with that other handmade Bloomsbury initiative, the Omega
Workshop. All this is not to argue that the Press was a large
commercial publisher: it was still, of course, a domestic operation at
least partially run out of the Woolf’s home, and its rate of production
was nowhere near the largest commercial firms (such as Everyman),
which were producing over a hundred books a year in the 1930s. It
was, however, in the rare position of being a culturally influential
press with a relatively wide reach that nevertheless held fast to the
tastes and predilections of its founders. My own sense is that by the
1930s, the Hogarth Press could fairly be described as a midsized firm
that began small and maintained a small-press, author-centred ethos
when it came to editorial practice but was more commercially
oriented when it came to distribution practices and marketing
strategies.
Another random document with
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 The Project Gutenberg eBook of Mr. Belloc
still objects to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
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Title: Mr. Belloc still objects to Mr. Wells's "Outline of history"

Author: Hilaire Belloc

Release date: December 5, 2023 [eBook #72334]

Language: English

Original publication: San Francisco: Ecclesiastical Supply

Association, 1927

Credits: Aaron Adrignola, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was
produced from images made available by the HathiTrust
Digital Library.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. BELLOC

STILL OBJECTS TO MR. WELLS'S "OUTLINE OF HISTORY" ***
MR. BELLOC STILL OBJECTS
 MR. BELLOC
STILL OBJECTS
TO MR. WELLS’S “OUTLINE OF HISTORY”

BY
HILAIRE BELLOC

ECCLESIASTICAL * SUPPLY * ASSOCIATION

E * S * A
PUBLISHERS AND IMPORTERS

328–330 STOCKTON ST. SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

1927
 Made and Printed in Great Britain at
The Mayflower Press, Plymouth. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.
 CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction vii
I. Mr. Wells’s General Grievances 1
II. Mr. Wells as Biologist 12
III. Mr. Wells’s Ignorance of the Catholic Church 22
IV. My Errors 28
V. Mr. Wells Shirks 36
VI. The Great Rosy Dawn 40
 INTRODUCTION
MR. H. G. WELLS brought out some time ago an Outline of History,
the object of which was to deny the Christian religion.
I examined this production for the benefit of my co-religionists in
the columns of certain Catholic papers. I did full justice to Mr. Wells’s
talents as a writer, but I exposed his ill acquaintance with modern work
on Biology, with early Christian writing and tradition, with Christian
doctrine itself: and, in general, his incompetence.
Stung by this exposure, Mr. Wells has just brought out against me
a small pamphlet, under the title of Mr. Belloc Objects to the “Outline of
History.” It is an excited, popular, crude attack, full of personal insult
and brawling, and ample proof that he is hit. But it is singularly weak in
argument, confused in reply, and, as I shall show in a moment, shirks
nine-tenths of the very damaging criticism which I directed against his
book.
That book denies a creative God. There is no God, the Father
Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth. The Incarnation is a myth; the
Resurrection a falsehood; the Eucharist a mummery.
Probably Mr. Wells is thus infuriated, not only at being exposed,
but also because he cannot understand how such an assault upon
religious truth should possibly provoke resentment; yet I think I can
explain the thing to him by a parable.
Supposing (it is mere hypothesis) that a man were to attack the
Royal Family, and His Majesty in particular, jeering at the functions
which monarchy performs for the State and holding up the King of
England to contempt.
Mr. Wells would be the first to admit that a man so misbehaving
himself would receive very hard knocks indeed. He would be called
severely to account on all sides. It would be said that his spite arose
from some personal grievance against the Great; that he thus relieved
his soreness at feeling himself socially neglected, and so on. He might
justify himself as a martyr in the cause of political duty, but he would be
a fool if he did not look out for squalls.
Now the great and fundamental truths of the Christian religion are
still sacred to quite a number of Mr. Wells’s fellow-citizens, including
myself. Our attachment to them is at least as strong as the loyalty of
the average Englishman to the Royal Family; and if he attacks them by
way of History—making out that History disproves the Christian
religion—then it is not, as he seems to imagine, an outrage; but, on the
contrary, a natural and inevitable consequence that he should be taken
to task, and his competence for writing history severely examined.
I propose to reply in this pamphlet, not because I have any
intention of being drawn into a slanging match with a writer who is my
superior in this form of art, but because no challenge to Truth must be
allowed to pass unheeded. So far from imitating Mr. Wells, I shall take
care when I publish—as I do in a few weeks—my whole book, entitled
A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline of History,” to go carefully over my
text and to cut out anything which could be construed into mere
personal attack; though I shall preserve, of course, and even add to,
the due and often severe criticism which Mr. Wells deserves for
pretending to teach others on the basis of his own most insufficient
instruction.
I should, no doubt, greatly increase the circulation of this little
pamphlet of mine were I to season it with those offensive references to
personal habits and appearance which are now fashionable between
contemporaries. But I do not aim at any large circulation, beyond that
reasonable amount which will secure my being heard by the people
whose attention is worth having.
Invective such as Mr. Wells substitutes for argument is wholly
irrelevant. When you are discussing the competence of a man to write
history, it is utterly meaningless to throw about the jeers of the gutter
on his dress, accent or any other private detail concerning him. If you
discover a man pretending to write about Roman antiquity and yet
wholly blind to the effect of Latin literature, you rightly point out his
ignorance. But it is not to the purpose to accuse him of having a round
face or a thin voice. Indeed, were invective my object (which it most
certainly is not), I should rather have answered in verse as being the
more incisive and enduring form.
If it be a test of literary victory over an opponent to make him foam
at the mouth, then I have won hands down; but I do not regard Mr.
Wells as my opponent, nor am I seeking any victory. I am simply taking
a book which proposes to destroy the Faith of Christian men by the
recital of pretended history, and showing that the history is bad. While
praising many qualities in the book, I point out with chapter and verse
that the history is uninformed. That is my point and my only point.
Now that I have made it, I hope, quite clear that I am neither
interested in Mr. Wells’s personalities nor intend to go one better upon
them, but to deal strictly with things capable of argument and intelligent
examination, let us cut the cackle and come to the horses.

* * * * *
Mr. Wells’s pamphlet against me, to which I am here replying, is a
web of six elements. These are not put in any regular order, and the
author himself would probably not be capable of analysing them; but a
competent critic has no difficulty in separating them one from the other.
They are:—
First: A number of shrill grievances on general grounds. For
instance, that though I have praised him highly I have not praised him
highly enough; that where I had to blame him I have used adjectives
upon his work such as “confused,” “ignorant,” which were not
warranted; that in general he is an ill-used fellow, and is moved to
complain most bitterly.
Secondly: He violently (and this is the main gist of all his pamphlet)
assaults me for pointing out that his statement of Darwinian Natural
Selection as the chief agent of evolution is antiquated stuff, exploded,
and proves him quite unacquainted with modern work. Here he jeers at
me as putting on a pose of special learning, and challenges me to
quote any modern authorities substantiating my criticism. He calls my
argument fantastic, a thing made up out of my own head, without any
authority from competent biologists. He denies the existence of any
such group of modern men of science opposed to Darwinian Natural
Selection. It is an amazing thing that his ignorance should reach such
a level as that, but it does. And it is there I am going to hammer him.
Thirdly: There runs all through the little pamphlet, and still more
through the book itself, a startling ignorance upon the Catholic Church,
and in particular the idea that the Church is opposed to scientific work,
even such elementary science as Mr. Wells attempts to expound.
Fourthly: He complains that I have in certain specific points
misread his meaning, misstated his conclusions or affirmations, and
made errors myself in attempting to correct his. He brings, it is true, no
more than three specific allegations; three out of a total of I know not
how many score, in a body of work which catches him up and exposes
him over and over again. Nevertheless, such as they are, being
specific allegations, however few, they must in justice be met; and I will
here meet them.
Fifthly: (and most significant): There is the embarrassed silence of
Mr. Wells’s pamphlet: his inability to meet nine-tenths of the points I
have brought against him, and his discreet shirking all mention of
them.
Sixthly: The book ends with Mr. Wells’s usual glorious vision of a
glorious Millennium contrasted with the sad blindness of Catholics in
general, and myself in particular, to this approaching Seventh
Monarchy.
I will deal with these six matters which build up Mr. Wells’s
pamphlet, taking them in the order I have given.
 I
MR. WELLS’S GENERAL GRIEVANCES

I CANNOT pretend in so short a pamphlet as this to deal with all the

separate lamentations with which Mr. Wells has filled the air. But I
can state the principal of them, and try to make him understand how
wrong-headed he is in his objections.
Of these general points, the first and, perhaps, most important is
that he was refused a right of reply. On page v of his pamphlet he
distinctly insinuates that I was afraid of hearing his reply, and had it
suppressed. For he says that the Editor of the paper in which my
articles appeared would not give him his opportunity, and that he so
refused “after various consultations with Mr. Belloc.”
As to the space which was offered, and the exceptional facilities
which, I understand, were granted to this angry man, the Editor
must, of course, speak for himself, and has, I believe, done so. But
as to the part which I took, it can be stated very simply. I was told by
the Editor (who had asked to see me on the matter) that Mr. Wells
desired to reply in the same columns in which he had been criticised.
I was asked what my attitude was in the matter, and I affirmed in the
strongest fashion (to which the Editor will bear witness) my belief
that the fullest right of reply should always be given to anyone
criticised on matters of fact or judgment. The interview did not last
ten minutes, but, to give a record of my attitude, I wrote a strong and
clear letter to the same effect. So far as I am concerned I asked for
nothing better than a reply, and I believe the Editor offered it.
Of two things, one, either Mr. Wells knew my attitude, in which
case his insinuation is inexcusable, or he did not, in which case it
was only rash; but at any rate he is, in this first grievance of his, quite
wrong. I particularly wanted him to have every opportunity for reply.
Nothing could suit me better.
Next he complains that I have not given him sufficient praise, or,
at any rate, not praised him as continuously, highly and
enthusiastically as I ought to have done. He complains that I only
give him “slow” and “formal compliments” (page 2) and “patronising
praise” (page 5).
He is wounded because I accuse him of violent antagonism to
the Catholic Church (page 1) (an accusation which he denies very
earnestly).
He indignantly repudiates any bias against the gentry in history
—which social class I ask him to revere.
Lastly, he accuses me of using such terms about many
passages in the History as “ignorant,” “childish,” “confused.”
I am afraid it is necessary before touching on these grievances
to explain to Mr. Wells what criticism is, for it is clear that he has
never considered the nature of that literary function.
When you criticise the writing of a man who deals with definite
facts and the conclusions to be drawn from them, it is your business
to praise what is praiseworthy in his effort, and to condemn what is
insufficient, false or bad.
You do not praise (if you are a serious critic) simply as a sort of
sop or counterbalance to blame; you praise because you find things
worthy of praise—and you blame where you find things worthy of
blame.
There was nothing oily or patronising, nor even adventitious and
artificial in the praise which I saw fit to offer. It was not vague, it was
very definite, and, I think, just. Moreover, it was very strong praise, of
which any writer might be proud at the hands of a colleague. I
praised Mr. Wells’s lucidity and economy of manner, his sense of
proportion, and, above all, his most remarkable talent for presenting
a vivid picture to the reader. In this my words were, “None of our
contemporaries possesses it” (the gift of lucid and vivid description)
“in anything like the same degree.” In other words, I said that he
possessed a talent of the most important literary kind, which any
writer would envy, and that he possessed it in a degree which made
him superior to any contemporary.
I also said that he was conspicuously sincere, that he wrote very
clearly, with an “excellent economy in the use of words,” and was
unreserved in my hearty appreciation of his accuracy in details of
reference, such as dates, spelling of names, etc.
I went on to say how strongly he felt the importance of history to
mankind, though it is true that I qualified this by saying that by
mankind he meant the only sort of mankind he knew. I said of his
honesty of purpose, “that it was a quality apparent in every line of the
work.”
Really, if that sort of thing is “oiliness,” Mr. Wells must be very
difficult to please! It may be “slow”; it is not a torrent of
undiscriminating adulation; it is mixed with justified blame. But it is
such a catalogue of remarkable literary powers as I would not make
for another writer.
I did much more than this. I specifically praised whole portions of
the book as being quite excellent, notably his handling of the story of
language, and the précis on many sections of history. I have no
space here to give a list of the passages in which I compliment him;
but they are numerous, as any one of my readers will see when my
book (A Companion to Mr. Wells’s “Outline”) shall appear.
But he is not satisfied; and I am afraid the truth must be that
these recent large, popular circulations of his have gone to his head,
and now make him think himself much more talented than he is.
Next he has a grievance which I have no doubt is quite sincere
in his own mind, but which any impartial observer, I think, would
smile at. I have said that he acts with violent antagonism to the
Catholic Church, and I have called that his motive. That it is his
motive Mr. Wells “earnestly denies.”
Well, the whole book is written quite clearly round the object of
convincing the reader, by so-called evidence, rather than reasoned
argument, that there is no design in nature, and therefore no all-
powerful creative God as the Author of nature; therefore, again, no
revelation of such a God to men, therefore, naturally, no question of
the Incarnation in Jesus Christ. The Atonement is man-made
nonsense: The Fall of Man never happened, the Resurrection is a
foolish story, and the Eucharist a make-believe.
Now what Body is it which maintains in their entirety the
doctrines thus attacked? Can anyone deny that it is the Catholic
Church? Many of them have been held by other Bodies schismatical
or heretical to it, and therefore the doctrines are often alluded to as
those not of the Catholic Church, but of a vague entity, impossible to
define, called “Christianity.” Nevertheless, we all know that the denial
to-day of those doctrines does not provoke determined resistance in
any large organised Body outside the Catholic Church.
Apart from this, there are expressions of contempt which quite
clearly show the rabidness of the author’s reaction against the
Creed. There is no doubt at all that the Church makes him “see
red”—as she does so many others.
He says he is not conscious of any such motive in attacking all
the prime dogmas of the Christian Faith.
Well, I will give him a parallel. Suppose a foreigner were to write
an Outline of Nineteenth Century History, and to say in it that
Islanders were always rascals, that the love of sport and games was
degrading—and particularly vicious that of football and cricket—that
the English language was an offensive vehicle of thought and had
produced nothing worthy; that sea-power was a myth, and that
Nelson in particular was a bungler at handling ships; that the
administration of India was a failure and a crime; and that the
creation of large Overseas Colonies from the Mother Country was a
fatuous experiment.
Should we not say that the gentleman had some bias against
England?
Were he to tell us that he was not conscious of such a motive,
we should answer, “Very well, then, you aren’t—since you say so.
But the motive is certainly there, and your case is the most
extraordinary case of the subconscious ever presented to a
bewildered onlooker.”
Next, Mr. Wells objects most emphatically that I have done him
the grievous wrong of calling him a patriot.
I am quite willing to withdraw the words, to admit my blunder,
and to apologise to Mr. Wells for having made it. Every man is the
judge of his own thoughts, and if he assures me that he hates his
country, or is even indifferent to its fate, I will readily accept the
statement. I will substitute in my book for the word “patriot” the word
“national,” my only point being that Mr. Wells is highly local in his
outlook. I was careful to say that the patriotic (or national) motive
was, in my opinion, an advantage to the historian; but that its great
danger was limitation, and that in the particular case of Mr. Wells the
limitation was so narrow as to be disastrous to a general view of
Europe: making him unable to understand anything that was not of
his own particular suburban world.
He is wounded because I pointed out his odd reaction against
the idea of a gentleman, and his dislike of the gentry, and says that I
bid him “revere” them. I never asked him to do anything so silly as to
revere the gentry. I am sure I do not revere them myself. What I did
say was that it weakened an historian and pretty well put him out of
court when he wrote, not with balanced judgment, but negatively, out
of hatred; and that piece of criticism I must maintain.
As for his attitude towards the type called “a gentleman” in
history, and in contemporary life, it would be easy to give examples
out of other books from the same pen. But I am rigidly confining
myself to this book—the Outline of History—and I submit that right
through this work you see this strong dislike appearing. It appears in
his treatment of the type, Roman, French or English, ancient,
mediæval or modern. To take one instance out of a hundred, his
sneer at the late Lord Salisbury in the pamphlet against me is
characteristic. He suggests that this great man and considerable
scientist was incompetent to discuss a simple question in biology,
and had to be coached for the purpose, and badly coached. All our
generation is a witness to the great talent of Lord Salisbury and to
the range of his learning, and since he was no man’s enemy, and
certainly never can have done any harm, direct or indirect, to Mr.
Wells, I can only suggest that the word “Lord” was sufficient to throw
Mr. Wells off his balance.
Now for the condemnatory words to which he objects,—
presumably on account of their force—words which I have, indeed,
used in connection with his work, and shall certainly use again: such
words as “ignorance,” “blunders,” “childish,” “unscientific,” etc. I see I
must again explain to Mr. Wells an obvious principle in criticism
which he fails to grasp. A word is not out of place in criticism unless
it is either irrelevant or false in statement or in degree. The mere
strength of a word does not put it out of court. On the contrary, if the
strength of the word is exactly consonant to the degree of error
noted the criticism is more just than if a milder word had been used.
To say that a man who poisons his mother in order to obtain her
fortune is “reprehensible” is bad criticism. To call him an “inhuman
criminal” is sound criticism.
Irrelevant condemnatory words are very properly objected to by
their victims. But relevant condemnatory words are not only
admissible, but just and even necessary.
I must not fill the whole of this little reply of mine with a mass of
quotation illustrating the justice of the words I have used, but I can
give a few examples which are conclusive, and which the reader has
only to hear to be convinced.
As to “ignorance.” This is a word exactly applicable to point after
point in the Outline which I have thoroughly exposed. For instance, it
is ignorance not to appreciate the overwhelming effect of Latin
literature upon all our civilisation. It is not mere omission which has
left out this capital factor from Mr. Wells’s strange idea of Rome; it is,
and could only be, an insufficient knowledge of what that factor was.
If a schoolboy, writing an outline of the Battle of Waterloo, leave out
all mention of Blücher, that is not a mere omission, it is ignorance.
There is an example of ignorance on a very wide general point.
Next let me give an example of a highly particular point. It is really
startling in its effect.
 Mr. Wells nourishes the idea that the technical name for the
Incarnation is the Immaculate Conception!
It is perfectly legitimate to say that the man of average education
is not bound to be familiar with technical terms in a special
department, such as that of religious terminology; but when he sets
out to discuss that particular department, he must at least have the
alphabet of it. Had he never mentioned the Immaculate Conception
at all, the accusation would not lie: as he has foolishly blundered into
mentioning it, the accusation does lie. A Frenchman who has never
been to England cannot be called ignorant because he is unfamiliar
with the streets of London. But what of a Frenchman who writes a
guide to London and mixes up Victoria Station with Buckingham
Palace?
But by far the most striking example of ignorance in his work, an
example upon so astonishing a scale that one could hardly believe it
even of popular “scientific” stuff, is to be found in Mr. Wells’s
complete ignorance of the modern destructive criticism of Darwinian
Natural Selection. He not only (as we shall see in a moment) has
never heard of this European, English and American work—he
actually denies its existence and imagines I have made it up!
Again, I have used the word “childish” of his attitude on more
than one occasion.
Is the word “childish” too strong? I will give examples. In his fury
against me he suggests that I cannot “count beyond zero,” and he
admits, with a sneer, that I perhaps understand the meaning of the
word “strata.”
He tries to make capital of my giving the name of the very
eminent anthropologist, E. Boule, without putting “Monsieur” before
it, and says that I “elevate Monsieur Boule to the eminence of
‘Boule.’” That is childish. All the world cites eminent men by their
unsupported name. It is a sign of honour. For instance, that great
authority, Sir Arthur Keith (whom Mr. Wells sets up to have read and
followed), says “Boule.” Didn’t Mr. Wells know that?
 He says that he uses the term “Roman” Catholic because it is
the only one he knows with which to distinguish between the many
kinds of Catholics. Whereas (and everybody knows it, including Mr.
Wells in his more sober moments) the term is only used either
because it is the legal and traditional word of English Protestantism,
or, much more legitimately, to distinguish between us of the world-
wide Roman Communion and those sincere men (many of whom I
am proud to count my friends) who emphasise Catholic doctrine in
the English Church and call themselves “Anglo-Catholics.” This wild
protest, that there are any number of other Catholics—Scotto-
Catholics, Americano-Catholics, Morisco-Catholics, Indo-Catholics,
Mongolo-Catholics—is frankly ridiculous, and ridiculous after a
fashion which it is legitimate to call “childish”: the mere explosion of a
man in a passion.
Yet another example. Finding me to have overlooked a tiny
misprint (“ai” for “ia”) in the printing of a proper name, he writes a
whole page about it.
The proper adjective for absurdities of that kind is the adjective
“childish.” I could give any number of other examples, but I think
these are quite enough.
In point of fact, I only use the word “childish” rarely—I do not
know how often in my whole book, but at a guess I should say not
more than three times. But each time I am sure that it is well
deserved. However, if he prefer a more dignified adjective, such as
“immature” or “unstable” or “puerile,” or any other, I am quite willing
to meet him, so long as he allows me to say that he only too often in
his violence does write things which make him ridiculous from their
lack of poise.
And what of the adjective “confused” or (for I am afraid I allowed
myself that licence) “muddle-headed”? Well, I can give examples of
that innumerable. For instance, he cannot conceive that I should call
him unscientific, seeing that he was one of Huxley’s students. What
on earth has that got to do with my accusation? If a man should call
me a very poor Latin scholar (which I am—but then I do not write
popular manuals on Latin poetry), would it be any reply to tell him