I have said, then, that with so many qualifications for writing a popular general History, Mr. Wells suffers from defects which ruin it; and the first of these is that his book is Provincial. The word “Provincial” is a hard one; but it exactly applies to Mr. Wells’s History; therefore it must be used. I find it the more difficult to use this necessary and precise word here because I know Mr. Wells, from an acquaintance of many years, to be abnormally sensitive to any printed judgment of his work. Such extreme sensitiveness is not rare in men of vivid imagination, especially if they cultivate its literary expression. But in this case it is quite exceptionally developed; and I naturally hesitate to offend it. Greatly as I admire Mr. Wells’s scientific romances, and have always admired them, I am compelled to use exact terms in this criticism. I cannot do otherwise, because the truth of History is a sacred thing—the most sacred next to the truths of Religion. If History is falsely written, the reader not warned of it obtains a distorted view of human action and comes to misunderstand all the most essential things of life, including Religion itself; and Mr. Wells’s History is obviously and fatally distorted through Provincialism. Provincialism does not mean a limitation of experience to some one small department of life—we are all of us subjected to such limitations, and any man’s petty personal experience is always infinitely small compared with the total possible field of knowledge. Nor does Provincialism mean seeing things through the medium of one’s own habitat and character, both necessarily limited. All men must see, and can only see, through some such limited medium. No, Provincialism means thinking that one “knows all about it”; Provincialism means a satisfied ignorance: a simple faith in the non-existence of what one has not experienced. Provincialism involves a contempt for anything foreign and, what is worse, an actual denial of things which the provincial person has not been made familiar with. It is Provincialism in a yokel when he laughs at you for not knowing the way to his local railway station. It is not Provincialism to say, “I don’t know about this. It is new to me. I must examine it before I accept it.” But it is Provincialism to say, as the Frenchman in the story did of Joan of Arc, “It can’t be true. If it were I should have heard of it.”