Modernism and disciplinary history: On H. G. Wells and T. S. Eliot

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Lisa Fluet

In the instances when The Outline ceases to be merely an amateur history and takes on, for Wells, the character of a general public education, we find Wells taking on the roles of popular intellectual and cultural critic that modernist contemporaries like T.S. Eliot would find so ill-suited to him and to the modern public that Eliot hoped to edify. Later critiques of The Outline as history, primarily emerging from historical disciplines, justifiably emphasize its inaccuracy in attempting to demonstrate how "all recorded history had been moving fumblingly forward toward a planned world-state" (Taylor 83) or highlight Wells's "cashing-in" (Novick 193) on the popularity of amateur scholarly works in the interwar period. While these critiques are clearly borne out both by the tone and organization of The Outline and by its enormous sales, I want to call attention to Wells's self-appointed status as a conspicuously interdisciplinary intellectual--a modern man of letters impelled by synthesis rather than specialization--in his narrativizing competing histories between nations, ethnicities, and ideologies as one coherent, shared world story. Whatever rightful postmodern suspicions we may have about totalizing world histories, when we consider Wells's overarching motives behind The Outline, we find an impulse toward "world education" (Experiment 611) heavily invested in alleviating the alienating, atomic effects of heightened disciplinarity for the modern Everyman and in situating the man of letters at the center of that alleviation.

Wells delineates for his readers the organizing motivation behind The Outline most succinctly in his first defense of it: "History for Everybody: A Postscript to The Outline of History," a response to criticisms that the first publication of The Outline had evoked from scholars in historical, classical, and religious fields. In "History for Everybody" Wells asserts that he conceived of The Outline as "a framework, which people might have in common, and into which everyone might fit his own particular reading and historical interests" (887). This single historical narrative, designed for the common possession of an international readership, was intended to counteract what Wells perceived, in his early and rather vexed participation in the League of Nations Union, as the "most vague, heterogeneous, and untidy assumptions about what the world of men was, what it had been, and therefore of what it could be" (Outline 2):

     My League of Nations Union experience had enforced my conviction
     that for a new order in the world there must be a new education and
     that for a real world civilization there must be a common basis of
     general ideas, that is to say a world-wide common-school education
     presenting the same vision of reality. (Experiment 616)

The Outline's new education toward global civilization was intended to achieve a common basis of general ideas and serve as a means of counteracting the effects of heightened disciplinarity within specialized fields--the "narrowing down from broad views to closer and more detailed study" that Wells attributed to