The New Teaching of History / With a reply to some recent criticisms of The Outline of History

For the better part of three years the writer of these notes has been occupied almost entirely in an intensely interesting enterprise. He has been getting his own ideas about the general process of history into order and he has been setting them down, having them checked by various people, and publishing them as a book, The Outline of History, which both in America and Europe has had a considerable vogue. In volumes or in complete sets of parts it has already found over two hundred thousand purchasers; it is still being bought in considerable quantities, and it is being translated and published in several foreign languages; it is quite possible that it has sufficiently interested almost as many people to read it through as it has found purchasers to take the easier step of buying it.

This Outline of History did not by any means contain all the history the writer himself would like to know or ought to know, and much less did it profess to condense all history for its readers. But it did attempt to sketch a framework, which people might have in common, and into which everyone might fit his own particular reading and historical interests. It did try to give all history as one story. And the largeness of the measure of its success is certainly much more due to the widespread desire for such an Outline than to any particular merit of the particular Outline the writer produced. So far as reception goes, almost any enterprising person might have succeeded as the writer has succeeded. He was, as people say, “meeting a long-felt want.” But his years of work in meeting it have necessarily made him something of a specialist in historical generalities, and the adventure of making and spreading the Outline abroad has been full of interesting and suggestive experiences. Some of the criticism to which the Outline has been subjected affords an opportunity for profitable comment. To “answer” all its critics would be a preposterously self-important thing to do, but, from the point of view of our general education, some of them do repay examination. And accordingly he is setting down these present notes to the Outline; partly comments upon the educational significance of its general reception and partly a consideration of the mental attitudes, the moral and intellectual pose, into which it has thrown certain of its critics.

A most fruitful question the writer found was this: “Why was it left for me in 1918 to undertake this task?” There has been a need of some such general account of man’s story in the universe for many years. Such an account is surely a necessary part of any properly conceived education. One might almost say it was the most necessary part. For why do we teach history to our children? To take them out of themselves, to place them in a conscious relationship to the whole community in which they live, to make them realise themselves as actors and authors in a great drama which began long before they were born and which opens out to issues far transcending any personal ends in their interest and importance. And it is a commonplace to say that in the last century or so the sphere of human interest has widened out with marvellous rapidity until it comprehends the whole world. Economically, intellectually, and in many other ways the world becomes one community. But, while there has been this enormous enlargement of human interests, there has been, if anything, a narrowing down of the scope of historical teaching. If the reader will look into the sort of history that is taught in schools to-day and compare it with the yellow old books of our great-grandfathers, he will find rather a shrinkage towards the intensive study of particular periods and phases of history than an extension to meet the more extensive needs of a new age.

This is a curious result, but it is not a very difficult one to understand. Something of the same sort of narrowing down from broad views to closer and more detailed study went on for a time also in the teaching of science. In both cases the narrowing down can be ascribed to the same cause, to the growing accumulation, refinement and elaboration of detailed knowledge, and to the increasing numbers and the consequent increased division in labour and specialisation, of the original workers in the two fields. In the field of physical science particularly, and also in the field of biological science to a lesser degree, an extensive revision of fundamental conceptions has largely corrected this tendency towards narrow and specialised attention, but there has not been the same recasting of fundamentals in historical study. And the teaching of history in schools has followed the movement of the student of history towards concentration and not the needs of the common citizen towards ampler views, because there has never yet been a proper recognition of the difference in aim between study for knowledge, the historical study of the elect, on the one hand, and teaching, the general education of the citizen for the good not only of the citizen but of the community, on the other. But these are divergent aims. The former is a deep and penetrating pursuit of truth; the latter a common instruction and discipline in broad ideas and the general purpose. The material may be the same, the science of physics, biology or history as the case may be, but the method of treatment may be widely different in the two cases.

Education is really one of the newest of the arts and sciences. The idea of particular, exceptional people pursuing learning has been familiar to the world for scores of centuries, but the idea of preparing the minds of whole classes or whole communities for co-operations and common actions by a training in common ideas is comparatively a new one. The idea of education as learning still dominates us, and so it is that while we have numbers of teachers of history who are or who attempt to be, or who pose as historians who teach, we have comparatively few teachers of history who are teachers whose instrument is history. In relation to the science of history, and indeed to all the sciences, the importance of teacher as teacher is still insufficiently recognised.

Now the virtues required of the historian as of the specialist in any other science are extreme accuracy, fulness, delicacy and discrimination within the department of his work. He is usually not concerned with a philosophical review of the whole field of his science and very chary of invading any unfamiliar provinces of his subject, because of the great risks he will run there of making, if not positive blunders, at least incomplete statements. The specialists will catch him out, and though the point may be an utterly trivial one, he will have been caught out, and that discredits the historian excessively. But the teacher’s concern is primarily with the taught and with giving them a view of their universe as a whole. It is only after undergoing such comprehensive teaching that a student should be handed over to learn, by example and participation in some definite specialisation of study, the finer precisions.

The modern community has yet to develop a type of teacher with the freedom and leisure to make a thorough and continuous study of contemporary historical and other scientific knowledge in order to use these accumulations to the best effect in general education. Because this is work for teachers and not for historians. The insufficient number of teachers we maintain are kept closely to the grindstone of actual lesson-giving. Perhaps a time will come when, over and above the professors and teachers actively in contact with pupils and classes, there will be a considerable organisation of educationists whose work will be this intermediate selection and preparation of knowledge for educational purposes. But in Britain at any rate there are no signs of any development of this broader, more philosophical grade of teacher. The British universities have no philosophy of education and hardly any idea of an educational duty to the community as a whole. At the Reformation they became, and they have remained to this day, meanly and timidly aristocratic in spirit. The typical British university don has little of the spirit that would tolerate and help these master teachers we need. He would not suffer them; he would be jealous of them and spiteful towards them. Such master teachers may be appearing in the United States of America or in some foreign country; in America, for example, such teachers of history as Professors Breasted, John Harvey Robinson and Hutton Webster seem to be doing interpretative work in history of a very original and useful type. Given a class of such educational scholars able to sustain an intelligent criticism and to co-operate generously and intelligently, one can imagine the kind of Outline of History that would be possible, simple, clear, accurate, without fussy pedantries and beautifully proportioned and right. But that class does not exist, and that perfect Outline is at present impossible. So far from sneering at the writer’s brief year or so of special reading and at such superficialities and inadequacies as The Outline of History may betray (and does betray), it would rather become the teacher of history to realise how much better it is than anything the teaching organisation of which he is a part deserved. It is not that the writer has stepped into the field of popular history teaching and done something impertinently and roughly that would otherwise have been done well. It is that he has stepped in and done something urgently necessary that would not otherwise have been done at all.

The Outline of History takes the form of a story of mankind for popular reading. But that is only its first form. It is intended to be the basis, it is presented as a scheme, of elementary historical teaching throughout the world. It was written to help oust such teaching of history as one still finds going on in England—of the history of England from 1066 to the death of Queen Anne, for example, without reference to any remoter past or to the present or to any exterior world—for ever from the schools. The Outline of History may presently be superseded in that work of replacement by some better Outline. But the writer has taken no risks in that matter; if no other and better Outline appears, his Outline will go on being revised and repolished and republished. Its critics may rest assured that nothing but a better Outline will put an end to its career. He has written and issued it in such a fashion that it can benefit by every critical comment. It was first issued in monthly parts whose covers, erring at times in the direction of the gorgeous, brightened the bookstalls for a year. These parts were closely scrutinised by numerous readers, and a considerable amount of detail was amended and improved by their suggestions. Then it was completely reset and issued in book form, and in that form it has been very extensively reviewed. The writer keeps files of all the criticisms and suggestions received, and the text of the book is periodically checked and modified in accordance with these comments. In three or four years’ time it will be possible to make a fresh issue in parts, and this again will be followed up by what will be a real fourth edition. By that time the amount of slips and errors will probably be reduced to very slight proportions indeed.

On the whole the Outline, as an Outline, has stood the fire of criticism and the silent judgments of reconsideration very well. In the next edition it will be still essentially the same Outline. Naturally, in a copious work of this kind, there are many phrases, loose or weak or indiscreet or unjust, that jar on the writer as he re-reads what he has written, and which need to be pruned and altered. Certain clumsiness of construction will be corrected; the account of the Aryan-speaking peoples comes too early in the present edition for perfect lucidity and it will be moved to a later chapter, and the account of the rise of the Dutch Republic will be put in its proper chronological order before the account of the English commonweal. The chapter upon the changes in the earth’s climate seems to be a little heavy for many readers and may perhaps be taken out, and the work that is now being done by Rivers, Elliot Smith and their associates upon the opening cultural phases from which the first civilisations arose and the application of the results of psycho-analysis to human history, may soon make it possible to rewrite the account of the stone ages in a much fuller and clearer, more assured and less speculative fashion. In one or two places a proliferation of controversial footnotes has led to a distortion that calls for reduction; the dispute about the education of Mr. Gladstone, for example. Perhaps, too, the next year or so may supply material that will qualify the account of the negotiations and temporary settlements of the period of the Paris Conference. These are the chief changes probable; the larger part of the Outline, its main masses and dominant lines, will stand just as it did in the first published parts.

Hardly any critics of the Outline have objected to the idea of dealing with history as one whole, or challenged the possibility of teaching history in so comprehensive a fashion. That is all to the good. It was only to be expected that many reviewers would sneer a little at the idea of novelist turned historian, talk of superficiality and hint at inaccuracies and errors they had neither the industry nor the ability to detect. They would have done that if the Outline had been absolutely faultless. As a matter of fact, and thanks very largely to the keen editorial eye of Mr. Ernest Barker—for the writer himself is sometimes a very careless writer—the number of positive inaccuracies and errors that appeared even in the earliest issue of the Outline was very small; most of them were set right in a list of errata at the end of that edition, and there was another still closer pruning before the publication of the second, the book edition. But among the cultivated gentlemen who “do” the book notices in the provincial Press more particularly, there was a disposition to qualify their approval by a condescending reference to slips and mistakes which they imagined must be there. Within the limit set by the law of libel one can have no objection to this sort of thing, which gives a tone of leisured knowledge to the most hastily written review.

Two or three critics will repay a rather fuller attention. One of these is Mr. A. W. Gomme, who teaches Greek in the University of Glasgow. He has published a little pamphlet called Mr. Wells as Historian,^[1] and in this a considerable amount of the hostility against the Outline, that certainly smoulders and mutters among classical teachers in our schools, comes into the light and is available for examination. Then Mr. Belloc and Dr. Downey, the latter in a pamphlet called Some Errors of Mr. Wells, develop a case against the Outline from the Roman Catholic point of view. That, too, calls for serious consideration. But with the Irish critics who complain that Ireland is not represented as a dominant force in the European civilisation of the early Middle Ages, and the Marxists who have detected heretical divergencies from the teachings of Marx (Engels) the First and the Last and the Only, the Wisdom of the Ages and the Source of all Light, I cannot deal now. The national consciousness of Ireland is too tragically inflamed to tolerate any drawing of Irish history to the scale of the world’s affairs, a scale which makes it a mere point of irritation in the hide of the present British Empire, itself the mushroom growth chiefly of the last hundred years. Some sentences and phrases in the Outline, coloured by the writer’s intense dislike for the extreme nationalism of Sinn Fein, are unjust to Ireland and will need modification. But the Marxist, like the Moslem, makes his prophet the criterion not only of truth but of moral intention. There is no compromise possible with him.

The small amount of space given to Abraham Lincoln and to Mazzini and one or two other such figures has also been a matter for criticism. When the time comes to revise the text I think that criticism will have to be considered. Mazzini is probably a better figure than Gladstone as a centre for the discussion of Nationalism in modern Europe—if indeed that is to be discussed about any particular figure. It is also a valid criticism from a Chinese reader that the history of China is far too brief in comparison with the history of the Western world. The Outline contains no account of its philosophies and little of the struggle between the more nomadic north and the more agricultural south which runs so parallel with the European and Western Asiatic story. But, brief as the space devoted to China in the Outline is, it is better than nothing, and I have given as much as either the existing analysis of Chinese history available for an English writer permits or the prepossessions of Western readers will allow. The West is learning with extreme reluctance the share of China in human history.