Sir Robert Walpole, who sometimes spoke with an eloquent crash that echoes in our ears to-day, once said, “Do not read history to me, for that, I know, must be false.” Walpole may have read the Scienza Nuova of Vico probably in the French translation, and could hardly have failed to know something of Bossuet and Montesquieu. The result of his deliberations on the labours of contemporary historians is expressed thus, in a short, sudden bark of contempt.
Sir Robert made history, and did not dare to attempt the far more arduous task of writing it. When he gave it, his judgment had not so much value as it has to-day. Some of us read the limpid prose of Bossuet still, nor is the Grandeur et Décadence des Romains forgotten. Yet if at this moment a statesman were to repeat the opinion in reference to most of the history taught and written in Oxford, he would only be speaking the literal truth. The youth of a nation are Trustees for posterity, and it is to them in the first place, and to those who are responsible for their education in the second, that this paper is addressed.
I am aware that I am going to say some astonishing things, nor am I, under the sense of a strong conviction, confounding antipathy with duty. My words may fail to penetrate into the gloom of that temple where the fanatic priests of the inarticulate, inaccurate, and dull still sacrifice victims to the idols Freeman and Stubbs. But I have a reasonable expectation of a wider audience, and it lies in the hands of that audience, the undergraduate members of the University and their parents, to say if the present state of things shall continue. The Hebdomadal Council, Congregation and Convocation represent an insignificant minority. It is to the Pupil not the Tutor, to the Parent not the Fellow, to the Majority not to the Minority that I propose to speak.
It is axiomatic that no sum which the well-to-do undergraduate is prepared to pay could be too high for a perfect education and a learned environment. It is the fact that neither the one nor the other is provided, which deserves the attention, and should excite the alarm, of those who expect the former, the latter, or a combination of them both.
The poor man, to whom a good degree means a knife with which he will open the world’s oyster, suffers more greatly than the wealthier man. But both suffer, and both have a right to expect that in paying money for a genuine article they shall certainly obtain it.
The object of this essay, therefore, is to awaken the majority upon the whole matter, more especially that portion of the majority that designs to read history. The power lies in your hands. It is only by your acquiescence that the scandal continues, and it is the money of you and your parents which runs the machine. Once supplies are stopped, the present state of things will also stop with automatic suddenness. The art of history—for it is an art and not a science—will then revive in its full splendour, as the frescoes glow out upon the walls of an ancient church when the disfiguring whitewash is removed. The art of history will take its proper place and exercise its right function in the University, and the Historicides will remove their activities to a sphere in which they will be more appreciated. I believe that a University exists in Hayti....
I purpose a comprehensive summary of this question, and have spared no trouble to make the indictment as fair and accurate as I can. For a considerable period I have been steadily gathering data and forming opinions. Documents of importance and value have been furnished to me, and if something actual and conclusive does not result, then the fault is that of the writer, who has failed to deal adequately with the material which he has himself collected and with which he has been lavishly and generously supplied.
“Doest thou well to be angry?” was the question asked of the Hebrew prophet, who thereupon “went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.” And finally came the answer of Jonah, “I do well to be angry, even unto death.” My friends and I have built our modest place of espial, and we have our idea of what would become of the city were it left in the hands of certain rulers. That we do well to be angry I hope to show.
In the first place, it is really necessary to define history, and the duties of the historian. Until we have done this we have no standpoint. The axiom must always precede the syllogism just as the epithet concludes it. No one can build a basis in a vacuum. Innumerable minds have been at pains to define history.
From the remote time when Lucian published his treatise How History ought to be Written until the depressing moment when Bishop Stubbs first attempted to write it, there has been an enormous divergence of thought on this point. Kant believed that Dynasty and Nation, Emperor and Clown were alike incidents and puppets illustrating the theory that an irresistible, all-pervading Force works through history towards one end—the development of a perfect constitution. If Kant had written history and applied his method instead of indicating it, he would have had us believe that history is a science to be studied under the limiting influence of a rigid formula.
Ranke thought, and thought rightly, that the analysis of original documents alone made possible the synthesis of the past, while the trained historian in his endeavour to get at the truth should be chary of accepting contemporary authors, unless eye-witnesses of the events they chronicled. Yet Ranke definitely placed himself with those who were beginning to believe that history was a science and nothing more.
Guizot, who edited Gibbon, freshly defined the labours of the historian. Guizot’s view was that faithful research, with its results duly applied, ought to enable the historian to supply such a picture of the past that it should be both to his readers and himself a veritable present. I know of no more illuminating conception. But how can an historian supply the picture unless he has a competent knowledge of psychology? To write about human beings in the past without a knowledge of psychology is exactly like writing a history of locomotives without understanding anything whatever about the nature and properties of steam.
It is only quite lately that the scientists have allowed psychology to be a science, with, for example, as fixed a place and purpose as biology. If any one asked me for a list of authors from whom he would learn something of psychology I should probably commend to him Maher (1900), Spencer (1890), Stout (1899), James (1892), M’Cosh (1886), and so on.
You see the dates, do you not? You realize what every one who lives in the realm of thought, as also many who work in the sphere of action, must realize? Briefly it is this. The old historians were concerned only with the simple results of investigation; the best modern historian adds to his equipment a knowledge of the processes of thought. The older sciences are joining hands with the new science of psychology. It is discerned that the individual temperament must clothe the bones of fact with the colour and movement that psychological knowledge alone can give.
It is discerned, but only by the important people as yet—only by the people who matter and count. The Oxford historians whom I am attacking have not realized it and will never realize it, which is the precise reason why we must reform them or give them the alternative of staffing the upper grade board schools.
James Anthony Froude did realize this certainty, and his works are not recommended to be read by candidates for history honours. The malignant personal hatred of Freeman, the stupidity of lesser men, long endeavoured to crush and limit the influence of the greatest historian, because the completest artist, who wrote history in our era. The endeavour to suppress him continues, but it is no longer anything but an endeavour. The times are changing very rapidly, and the triumphant war-whoops of some years ago have sunk to-day into the moribund whimpers of the discredited and deposed.
Everybody in Oxford is waking up to the fact that if history is to have unity of organism and purpose it must have artistic proportion and be informed by art. The leaven has been working for a long time, unobserved by the people it is destined to destroy at the moment of completed fermentation. It is always thus with revolutions. The period of gestation is lengthy and its processes are obscure. But the completed moment arrives, the goddess bursts in full armour from her sire, or Gargantua is born “crying not as other babes used to do, miez, miez, miez, miez, but with a high, sturdy, and big voice!”
The occasion that has set in motion forces which in no short time will destroy the little eminence of the Oxford Historicides, was the publication of Mr. Herbert Paul’s Life of James Anthony Froude. Everything had led up to that; I was cognizant of all the restlessness and disgust which were seething below the surface, and when at last the volume fell into Oxford with the noise and reverberation of a thunder-bolt, I was daily informed of the hideous consternation of those who realized that their day was over, that the judge was set and the doom begun, that no one could stay it.
I wish that I could write frankly and openly of the disturbance and alarm the book occasioned. If I were publishing this essay in the first instance in America I should certainly do so. However, as it will appear in England and afterwards in the Land of Freedom of Speech, this joy is not permitted to me. As Mr. H. G. Wells would say, “Figure that the bomb fell upon the green of All Souls’ while the clock in the gateway of Christ Church was in the act of striking twelve.”
The rush and hurry, the frightened consultations, the squeaks of those who realized that Nemesis was at hand at last and was beating at the door, were, I can assure the public that will read this paper, comparable to nothing so much as the occasion when the feet of the ferret are heard drumming down the hollow burrows of the warren, while the rabbits know the day of irresponsible frolic is over and that they must die in the dark or in the open, but must die.
The Historicides of Oxford have always feared an extended public and distrusted a name that has been made without their connivance, and which is beyond their reach. I find it difficult to suppose that those who do not realize the incredible narrowness and stupidity of a certain type of history don, will believe the anecdote I am about to tell. Nevertheless, it is true. A pedant, whose name I will not give, was recently heard to refer to Mr. Thomas Hardy in these words, “Hardy? Hardy? Oh, do you mean the little novelist man?”
Let me put it before you quite plainly and in antithesis. Hardly anything could better illustrate the appalling mental position of the camarilla that has got to go. Here is a priggish person, whom no one has ever heard of outside Oxford, piping out his contempt for a man who is generally recognized as one of the most distinguished novelists and one of the chief artists alive in our time.
It is possible that many people will not immediately appreciate the reason for all the terror excited by Mr. Paul’s biography. The outside man cannot quite know how Froude is, and always was, hated and feared by a certain section of the Oxford historians. They were always trying to hit him below the belt because he hit them above the intellect. There was a definite conspiracy among the malignant, from Freeman downwards, to lie about Froude in every conceivable way, and to complete their malicious impudence by calling Froude himself a liar. Froude was a master of English prose; the highest praise that can be given to the jargon which his detractors wrote, and write, is that it is not exactly Esperanto. Froude understood the colour of words, the movements of a paragraph, the harmonic rhythm of an emotion expressed in prose. His words were the incarnation of his original thought, theirs but accentuated their borrowings. While the genius of this great man was coming into its own, while it burned brightly and yet more bright, while all thoughtful England was beginning to be moved and stirred by a new force, and the possessor of it was living with intellects as great and gracious as his own, the Oxford historians slept in their padded rooms, and because they snored loudly imagined they were thinking. Too indolent to search for the truth, they contented themselves with dodging difficulties, and persuading each other that their ostentatious obscurity was fame.
There came a time at last when James Anthony Froude could no longer be ignored. His achievement was beginning to be a national possession, and he shared the councils of the rulers. The echoes of his fame reached the ears of the troglodytes, and, led by Freeman, they swarmed to the attack, yelping a pæan to mediocrity and brandishing weapons from a more than doubtful armoury.
Froude, as Mr. Paul has pointed out, “toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the calligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or original document of any kind.”
Freeman,—the head of the daguerreotypical historians,—attacked a man whom he very well knew was his superior, pretending publicly to a greater knowledge of the special subject under discussion, and cynically denying any special knowledge in private. In public Freeman represented his hostile attitude as the natural outcome of his zeal for truth; in private it was known that he was actuated by personal hatred, and the discoveries made by Mr. J. B. Rye on the margins of Freeman’s books in Owens College library have discredited him for all time. Again I quote from Mr. Paul’s Life of Froude:—
“Freeman’s biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean’s conduct was judicious. But there is no reason why a biographer of Froude should follow his example. On the contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for Freeman’s assiduous efforts, first in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more about Freeman’s qualifications for the task which he so lightly and eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857, ‘You have found me out about the sixteenth century. I fancy that from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are quite right when you say that I “have never thrown the whole force of my mind on that portion of history.”’ These words pour a flood of light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as he says, ‘very small,’ but sufficient for enabling him to dispose satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, ‘I find I have a reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of which I am profoundly ignorant.’ It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude’s critic, he deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private disclaims.
“Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman’s death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude’s History. He once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, ‘In truth there is no kind of temper in the case, but only a strong sense of amusement in bowling down one thing after another.’ Let us see. Here are some extracts from his marginal notes. ‘A lie, teste Stubbs,’ as if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original documents. Another entry is ‘Beast,’ and yet another is ‘Bah!’ ‘May I live to embowel James Anthony Froude,’ is the pious aspiration with which he has adorned another page. ‘Can Froude understand honesty?’ asks this anxious inquirer; and again, ‘Supposing Master Froude were set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write paradoxes, would he not curse his day?’ Along with such graceful compliments as ‘You’ve found that out since you wrote a book against your own father,’ ‘Give him as slave to Thirlwall,’ there may be seen the culminating assertion, ‘Froude is certainly the vilest brute that ever wrote a book.’ Yet there was ‘no kind of temper in the case,’ and ‘only a strong sense of amusement.’ I suppose it must have amused Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have been a very bad temper indeed.”
Until Mr. Herbert Paul’s Life of Froude appeared a year ago, the Historicides had been continually repeating the lie that Froude garbled documents, was untrustworthy, and wrote not history but fiction. History, of course, often imitates fiction, for good fiction always deals with realities. But these slanderers did not pause for a definition. They continued to abuse Froude, to prevent their pupils from reading him, and to refuse him a place in the recognized curriculum of historical study at the University.
From time to time a doubter or inquirer arose and was promptly suppressed. Nor was it likely that a man, whatever his private opinion of those in authority might be, was going to jeopardize his chance of a good degree by publishing it. There were awkward moments, of course, for the slanderers. A lie is like a forged promissory note. When it becomes due another must be forged in order to take up the first. But the Historicides had the whip-hand. They controlled the examinations, and they could do what they pleased.
I once wrote a little story which I will outline here, because I think it illustrates the method of these people whenever any ugly fact was discovered and some one required an explanation.
There was once a simple-minded old gentleman of a philosophic temper and an inquiring mind. Blessed with an ample fortune and untroubled by any business instincts, he devoted his life to the search for truth. On the whole his life was a happy one, because he possessed the faculty of going on. His failures were not made tragic with courage, but were minimized by persistence, and so were not very different from successes. Yet, as the years went on, he began to feel that in his time he would never achieve his end. Seeing him somewhat downcast, and becoming indifferent to his chop and Chambertin, his butler, a faithful person, came to him one day, and, after venturing a privileged remonstrance, stated that he had something to disclose. “I have lately heard, sir,” said the butler, “that truth is really hidden at the bottom of a well. It may of course, sir, be mere idle talk, but I think, as far as I remember, we have not looked there yet? There was the church, sir—we found nothing there—and then I held the lantern for you in the chapel, too. There was none behind the art wall-paper, nor did Liberty have any in stock. And it wasn’t in history, sir, because I turned over every leaf of them Oxford books myself, and shook them well, too. You did think you’d found it in science, sir, I remember, there was something that you thought was truth in the bottom of the test-tube, but then you told me it wasn’t, though I forget what you said it was after all.”
“Merely a note of a recorded fact, Thomas,” said the old gentleman sorrowfully. “But do you really think there is anything in this idea of yours?”
“I cannot be positive, sir,” the butler replied; “but I see it stated definite at the end of a leading article in the Artesian Engineer.”
“Have we a well on the premises, Thomas?” the old gentleman asked, putting on his spectacles and rubbing his hands briskly together.
“I asked the gardener this morning, sir,” Thomas answered, “and he informs me that there is an old disused well by the cucumber-frame which could be opened easily enough by a couple of men working for a week.”
“Engage some men at once,” said the old gentleman, now thoroughly interested and pleased, and that day he enjoyed his chop with all his accustomed pleasure. The faithful butler, who had all his life lived worthily and well without truth, was overjoyed at the success of his suggestion. Anticipating, however, another disappointment, he gave private instructions, received con amore by the workmen, that they were not to hurry over their task of opening the well, and for a month the old gentleman’s appetite whetted by hope, was all that his faithful retainer could desire.
At length the work was done, the well was fully opened, and the page-boy (an adventurous youth) descended in the bucket. There was a tense silence in the garden as the boy disappeared, until his hollow-sounding voice hailed them from below vibrating with excitement.
“I’ve got un, sir,” ascended in a triumphant pipe; “he be here, sir, sure ’nuff!”
In a moment more the young fellow came to the surface, holding a large and speckled toad in his hand. On the back of the reptile an arrangement of orange-coloured spots spelt out the word TRUTH.
The old gentleman saw it, fell into uncontrollable rage, snatched the wondering reptile from the page-boy’s hand and stamped out its life upon the ground.
“To the house all of you,” he cried; “and never let me hear the name of truth again!” With that he forswore all his former theories, and in bitter irony started a society paper. However, the gardener, a wise, silent, and pawky person, came along later, and, picking a diamond from the crushed débris of the toad took it home and hid it away for the rest of his life, fearing discovery. When the gardener died, his relatives discovered the jewel, and knowing nothing of its value threw it away.
The old gentleman made an enormous fortune out of the society paper.
Forgive the digression. This, or something like it, was what the Historicides of Oxford did before the publication of Mr. Paul’s book. Whenever any one showed them the truth they snatched it from him, and ordered him back into Stubbs’s Charters.
I have already said something of the terror the Life of Froude excited. In a swift moment pretensions were exposed, lies were shown to be lies, and people began to read Froude. Mr. Paul made it quite plain that the accusations of dishonesty against Froude were utter fabrications. Mr. Paul, himself a learned historian, an artist and a man of letters, has gone into the charges seriatim, and triumphantly disproved them. No one can ever make them again. They are lies, they have been proved once and for ever to be lies. I cannot quote here the mass of refutation which has brought about the complete vindication of the accused historian. This is a summary and nothing more. It stands for all to read in Mr. Paul’s book, a volume which should be in the hands of every man who is reading, and means to read history at Oxford.
This memorable book is a protest against the charlatanry of the pseudo-scientific school of history. The acts and intentions of people in the past cannot be known better than the intentions and acts of people in the present. No one man can possibly sift all, or anything like all the evidence for any period. Much of the important evidence is missing. No one can be examined or cross-examined, and for an historian to write as if he were a judge delivering a decision is a piece of impertinence. The abler man, assuming his honesty, will make the abler historian, and the mere bookworm is not the best judge of what probably happened. It is the dull and incompetent who formerly invented the fable that brilliant writers are superficial. This is the lie behind which the “dry as dusts” have lurked for years; it was their last line of defence, and Mr. Paul has destroyed it.
The historian must be able to write distinguished English, and he must understand the enormous possibilities of his medium. He must add a sense of artistry to his scholarship. He must be a man of experience in human event, a man who has done and suffered; must have been in crowds and seen “how madly men can care about nothings,” and he must disabuse his mind of formula and theory before he begins to write. Sir Arthur Helps said this years ago:—
“To make themselves historians, they should also have considered the combinations among men and the laws that govern such things; for there are laws. Moreover our historians, like most men who do great things, must combine in themselves qualities which are held to belong to opposite natures; must at the same time be patient in research and vigorous in imagination, energetic and calm, cautious and enterprising.”
History, in short, is the complement of poetry, and with this definition as a basis let us proceed to examine some of the Oxford historians of to-day. But first let me recapitulate the points at which we have so far arrived.
I have endeavoured to make plain, that—
(a) The Oxford historians of the moment enjoy an unjust monopoly, and exercise a disastrous power of veto.
(b) That the power to stop all this, to force these people to their duty or to send them about their business lies with the majority.
(c) That the majority is composed of those who pay for the education of their sons, and of those who proceed to the University for an education.
(d) That the historian must be not only a scholar, but an artist and man of letters also.
(e) That the fear of Froude provoked the attack on him in the past, and has maintained it until a year ago.
(f) That Mr. Paul’s Life of Froude has silenced the misstatements of mediocrity and incompetence for ever.
The whole business of Froude has provided one with a lens in which to focus the question upon the page, and no one was ever provided with a better text than I have been. Excuse me, however, if I make a brief personal explanation. While engaged upon this piece of work an Oxford man, an old-fashioned High Churchman of the Freeman type, has been staying with me. It is forty years since he was in residence, and he did not see with me at all in this matter when we discussed it.
“I cannot understand,” he said, “how you are going to champion Froude and Mr. Paul against Freeman, who was perfectly sound on Church matters, as I believe you to be. All you have ever published has been in support of Catholic Truth, and yet you are earnestly advocating a historian who was the incarnation of Protestantism.”
It was, in the first place, difficult to make my interlocutor see that I was writing of the art of the historian, and not the trend of his opinions. In the second place, I do not agree with him as to the essential Protestantism of Froude. Froude’s religious attitude has been summed up once and for all by one of the most brilliant writers of our time, an historian, artist, and scholar, whom Oxford dons rejected, but for whom Oxford calls aloud, and for whom St. Stephen’s has naturally a greater attraction—much as one deplores it.
Mr. Belloc writes:—
“See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the sentences in which Froude asserts that Christianity is Catholic or nothing:—
“‘... This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.
“‘The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of His mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things.’
“Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity, where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called a thing ‘worn and old’ even in Luther’s time, and he definitely prophesies a period when ‘our posterity’ shall learn to ‘despise the miserable fabric which Luther stitched together out of its tatters.’”
I can add nothing to Mr. Belloc’s criticism or his quotations.
Let us now take a survey of the history which the powers that be in Oxford have substituted for the work of Froude. Let us shake the upas-trees which shadow the quadrangle of the Schools and wonder how these astonishing vegetables have managed to produce such fruit as that of which I have to set samples before you.
The Examination Statutes in the section containing the regulations for the Honour School of Modern History recommend, among other books, that candidates who take the period 1559-1715 should study Gustavus Adolphus, by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford. The gentlemen who compile the Examination Statutes would “recommend” almost anything, but I imagine that I am about to astonish the general reader.
I will begin with Mr. Fletcher’s preface. He himself says in the very first line that his book “demands little preface.” It would have been perhaps better for him had he been guided by his own pious opinion and resisted the temptation to print his confessions in nine closely-printed pages. I say “confessions” advisedly, for rarely in the course of a wide experience of books have I set eyes upon a more candid and almost disarming statement than the one before me here.
In his preface Mr. Fletcher asserts that his book—
(1) “Makes no pretensions to be based upon original research,” and he follows up this curious admission with ...
(2) “And I cannot claim to have read even all the modern authorities on the subject.”
And (3) “My knowledge of the Swedish language is by no means independent of the assistance of a dictionary, nor can I hope to have escaped that tendency to partiality for which the natural fascination of such a subject is the only excuse.”
Mr. Fletcher then proceeds to tell us that he was
(4) “Obliged to include accounts of many things of which I had made no special study. The military history of the Thirty Years’ War is in itself a case in point. No satisfactory monograph on the subject exists, and I have often been obliged to confess myself at fault in grasping the exact meaning of military terms, and the exact effect of manœuvres, in an art of which even in its modern shape I know nothing.
(5) “But the times have so far changed,” he continues, “that I am able to plead that I am probably not much more ignorant of the art of war than the majority of my readers are likely to be.
(6) “In those archives” (the archives of Stockholm), “if anywhere, it is probable that the true Gustavus Adolphus is to be found.” But
(7) He, Mr. Fletcher, “is a man who has no pretension to be a student of archives.”
Here, then, we have an historian who admits that even the little he has to offer is borrowed from the books of other people. He has not taken the trouble to search and inquire for himself, and, content with profiting by the labours of others more conscientious, he has of course been unable to verify the accuracy of such labours. Nor has he even taken the trouble to borrow from the latest sources, for he informs us, “and I cannot claim to have read even all the modern authorities on the subject.”
Mr. Fletcher does not thoroughly know the language of the country of which he writes; he has included accounts of many things “of which I had made no special study” in this precious book; and finally, the historian of the Victor of Breitenfeld and Lützen knows absolutely nothing of military history, the art of war, or the meaning of military terms, in spite of which, at page 119, he declares (a) that Gustavus was “certainly a greater master of tactics than Wallenstein,” but “not a greater cavalry captain than Pappenheim;” and (b) “that Pappenheim had not the coup d’œil which enables a man to grasp a whole battle at once.”
How a man can dare to print such a cataract of admissions I do not understand. At any rate, tested by the lowest standard, treated with the utmost leniency, his book stands self-confessed as worthless. However modest the author’s estimate of his work and the humility of Heep was as nothing to the assumption of this preface, the book cannot under any conceivable circumstances be of the least use to the student. It outrages every canon by which the most amateur of historians should guide himself to write.
Yet this book is recommended in the Examination Statutes to be read by men wishing to take Honours in History while the works of James Anthony Froude are rigidly excluded.
I would fain linger a little longer with Mr. Fletcher, possibly one of the richest unconscious humourists who have ever written history. He deserves to be known to a wider circle than the mere academic. In these drab, hurried days, anything that makes for innocent gaiety is to be welcomed. I think it was Ruskin who said that Edwin Lear’s Book of Nonsense was one of the most valuable books ever written. It is a pity that Mr. Ruskin did not live to read Mr. Fletcher’s other work, An Introductory History of England.
Gustavus Adolphus was published in 1900, and Mr. Fletcher was then described as “Late Fellow of All Souls’ College.” The later and more mature work was published in 1904, and we then see Mr. Fletcher as a Fellow of Magdalen.
In An Introductory History of England we have, of course, the usual preface, from which I wish I had space to quote largely. I have not, but in turning the leaves, the eye at once falls on another apologia:—
“I have no pretensions to be a scholar in the original document sense;” and, “I fear it will be very easy for those who are such scholars to find many mistakes in detail, as well as to question my conclusions.”
Further, he speaks of the Honour School of Modern History in language which I, for one, heartily endorse. “I do not consider,” he says (p. vi.), “that the immense growth of the History School at Oxford ... is at all a healthy sign for English education.”
I do not intend to do more than give one specimen of Mr. Fletcher’s style in this book, though I have read the whole of it with pleasure and amusement. The paragraph I am about to quote should live in the annals of the Oxford Historicides for ever. I imagine that in writing it, Mr. Fletcher had been slyly reading Oceana in secret, and longed to emulate the vividness of that august prose. The volume of Froude was obviously out of the way when the purple passage was produced, but if it loses in style owing to this circumstance, it gains in interest as the unconnected revelation of a truly extraordinary mind.
“As the ice-sheet advanced, the wild animals gradually moved southwards; the primitive Briton, unhindered by English Channel or Mediterranean Sea, walked after the mammoth and the hippopotamus, shooting at them with wooden arrows tipped with flints. And the grizzly bear and the sabre-toothed tiger walked after the primitive Briton.”
We must bid farewell to Mr. Fletcher, the historian preferred to Froude by certain people! I do not wish to give pain to any one in the world, much less to one who has given me so much pleasure. But even at the cost of that, I would ask gentlemen who are reading history at Oxford, and gentlemen who are sending their sons to read history at Oxford, to pause and reflect before they entrust grave interests and momentous personal issues to the mercies of such writers as Mr. Fletcher, to the direction of the historian manqué.
Let us leave the mala gaudia mentis provided by Mr. Fletcher, and proceed to more considerable men.
In his case we have a person, though ill-equipped by nature or temperament, engaged in an honest endeavour to write with vigour and picturesqueness. Grotesque as it may seem to us, the “Primitive Briton walking after the hippopotamus, and the sabre-toothed tiger walking after the primitive Briton” shows a genuine attempt at style. It is from the rude carvings of savage races that the Venus of Milo has been evolved, and from the mural decoration of the cave-dwellers has the perfected art of Velasquez or Murillo come.
There are, however, other writers in Oxford to-day who merely chronicle facts. This is not writing history, of course, but a careful chronicle of accurate fact is certainly valuable to the student, and may serve as a ladder by which he may mount into the realms of true history. Some one must do the spade work, dull and uninteresting as it may be, and all we ask of the gardener’s labourer is that his toil should be accomplished thoroughly and well.
One of the books that is put into the hands of history students at Oxford as a useful work of reference is European History 470-1871, by Mr. Arthur Hassall, a student and tutor of Christ Church, Oxford. Let me here explain for the general public that “a Student” of Christ Church is in the same position as the “Fellow” of another college.
The book at first sight does certainly seem to supply a need. It is a chronicle, in parallel columns, of the events which occurred in every country between the dates named. A man who is preparing an essay for his tutor might well be at a momentary loss for a date. “What was the exact year in which so-and-so succeeded, or the battle of such-and-such a place occurred?” he might ask himself, and turn to Mr. Hassall’s book for answers.
Let us take a particular instance. When was Napoleon III. proclaimed Emperor? According to Mr. Hassall he was proclaimed twice; in 1852 and again in 1853. Under 1852 I read: “The French nation, by a large majority, sanction the restoration of the Empire (November), and Napoleon is proclaimed Emperor (December 2).” Lower down, on the same page, under 1853, I am told that “Napoleon consults the people on the subject of the restoration of the Empire, and secures a large majority in its favour (November 21).... Napoleon is declared Emperor of the French as Napoleon III. (December 2).”
The right date is 1852. These strange contradictions occur in the second as well as the first edition of Mr. Hassall’s book, for which minute accuracy is the only raison d’être.
Another “handbook,” this time purporting to be an outline of the Political History of England, and much in use by the long-suffering student of to-day is published by the Right Honourable Arthur H. Dyke Acland, M.P., and Cyril Ransome, M.A., Merton College, Oxford. This book also makes no pretensions to style and any one who buys it has a right to require that its statements should be minutely accurate. Nevertheless, in it I find the following conflicting statements. “1792, April 23. Warren Hastings is acquitted,” and “1795, Acquittal of Warren Hastings.” Which is right? A later edition of the handbook tells me that 1795 is. Yet it is odd, to say the least of it, that in the seventh edition the wrong date was impressed on the student by the words, “Warren Hastings is acquitted” being printed in larger type than they were under 1795.
I am not going to multiply instances of this sort of thing. When it is necessary to produce a completer indictment of the pseudo-scientific historians I am able to assure them that it will be done. A great awakening has come to the University, and a hundred keen, hostile eyes are focussed upon its chief anachronism. There are many men in Oxford to-day who can say in their hearts: “So will I break down the wall that ye have daubed with untempered mortar and bring it down to the ground.”
I will pass at once to Professor Oman, Commander-in-Chief of retrograde Dondom.
Much of what Oxford has to bestow of honour and distinction Professor Oman has received. Some of the rewards of the greatest University have been his. He may be called the leader of the pseudo-scientific school now publishing, and in the past has enjoyed such eminence as this confers, among a corporation whose members are not so famous for the books they have written as for the books they ought not to have written.
Professor Oman, in his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History (1906) said: “I am indignant at all the cheap satire levelled against the college tutorial system, the curriculum of the schools, the examinations and their results, which forms the staple of the irresponsible criticisms of the daily, weekly, or monthly press, of the pamphlets of a man with a grievance, and of the harangues delivered when educationalists (horrid word) assemble in conclave.”
I can well understand it. Three months before this lecture was given, I remember reading an article in the Army Service Corps Quarterly, certainly neither irresponsible nor cheap, though composed by two writers whose grievance was the inaccuracy of the Chichele Professor.
“Napoleon was so profoundly ignorant of the character of the (‘Spanish’) nation that he imagined,” wrote the Professor in his History of the Peninsular War, “that a few high-sounding proclamations and promises of liberal reforms would induce them to accept from his hands any new sovereign whom he chose to nominate.”
At the date when Napoleon is supposed by the Professor to have been behaving like a Professor, not of war but of history, he was writing to Murat (May 16, 1808): “Je vous recommande de prendre toutes les mesures nécessaires pour donner du mouvement dans l’arsenal. Ce sont là les meilleures proclamations pour se concilier l’affection des peuples.” Three days before (May 13), he had warned Murat not to “flatter the Spaniards too much.... I have,” he wrote, “more experience of the Spaniards than you. When you told me that Madrid was very tranquil, I said to every one that you would soon have an insurrection.”
The article referred to utterly contradicts this statement of Professor Oman’s. Hundreds of original documents were examined, and the point was proved with entire brilliance and clarity. The pamphlet is quite unanswerable, and has never been answered. The quotation from the Professor’s lecture illustrates the temper and attitude of the typical unprogressive. Why all criticism of the Professor and his friends should be cheap and irresponsible I do not know. When Mr. Herbert Paul writes of Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England—the Bible of the pseudo-historians—that it “may be a useful book for students. Unless or until it is rewritten, it can have no existence for the general reader,” and “a novice whose mind is a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century” is Mr. Paul irresponsible and cheap? Mr. Paul obtained the highest honour possible in his degree examination; he was a member of Parliament for South Edinburgh, one of the most cultured constituencies in the kingdom; he is a member of the present Parliament. As historians, indeed, the relative positions of Mr. Paul and Mr. Oman, are those of banker and pawnbroker respectively.
This publicly expressed irritation of the Chichele Professor is symptomatic.
When Froude gave his inaugural lecture Mr. Oman was present, and was, he tells us—
...“carried away at the moment by his eloquent plea in favour of the view that history must be written as literature, that it is the historian’s duty to present his work in a shape that will be clearly comprehensible to as many readers as possible, that dull, pedantic, over-technical diction is an absolute crime, since by it possible converts to the cause of history may be turned back and estranged.”
Mr. Oman was not carried away very far. The works of the man who was genius and moralist, man of letters and historian, are still excluded from the “curriculum,” while the works of the Professor who was temporarily carried away are still included in it.
It is, indeed, perfectly true, as Mr. Oman very candidly admits, that “even five years spent as a Deputy-Professor have not eradicated the old tutorial virus from his system.” He suffers, and I suppose must always suffer, from the inability to write his history so that it is a pleasure to read it. The literary instinct is wanting, the artistic temperament is absent, and like all those writers of whom he is the most able and the chief, the Chichele Professor can repeat but can neither create nor recreate.
On the very page where I read “educationalists” (horrid word), I also read these melodious and polished sentences “equipped with a severely specialistic curriculum.” Quip! lis! tic! ric! how horribly these words jar and offend, what a barbarous jargon is this!
Again, “they hope to find this one rather less rebarbative than Law or Mathematics.” From what sewer of language did the writer drag “rebarbative” to grace his prose?
It is the same with everything this gentleman writes, or to be exact, in everything I have read of his.
He speaks of Cæsar’s “chequered and oragious political career.”
He tells us of himself, “I was one of those exceptionals.” You have only to open any single page of any single book Professor Oman has written to realize that he either knows nothing of or cares nothing at all for the art of writing prose. I admit that it is easy enough to find, and print, faults in the writings of any one, even, here and there, in the work of a Master. I was re-reading Oceana the other day, and noticed that Froude has written, “there was no undergrowth, no rocks or stones, only fresh green grass.” ... But an error such as this is exactly like a musical discord, inadmissible in the exercise of a student of harmony, but as nothing in the composition of a Master.
I do not wish to say whether, in my opinion, Professor Oman’s views of history are generally sound or if they are not. He would not be where he is, I suppose, were he not credible and generally accurate. But what I do know, and what I have a right to say, is that his prose is turgid, clumsy and without flexibility. He can only tell us that something has happened, he cannot make that happening live and pulse within the brain. He is without the first quality of the true historian, the knowledge and mastery of the medium in which he expresses his thoughts, and lacking all kinetic power he does not even know of what wood to make a crutch.
Mr. Oman and all his school are the legitimate descendants of their Master, Stubbs—the Great Cham of the Historicides. It is a mournful fact that the incredibly vicious style of William Stubbs has had a most malign influence over that of lesser men.
The samples of it that I give here will amaze those people who have not read the learned Bishop, and who have been in the habit of regarding him as a literary man as well as a historian.
“The steam plough,” Stubbs writes at p. 636, vol. iii. of The Constitutional History of England, “and the sewing machine are less picturesque, and call for a less educated eye than that of the plough-man and the seamstress, but they produce more work with less waste of energy; they give more leisure and greater comfort; they call out, in the production and improvement of their mechanism, a higher and more widespread culture. And all these things are growing instead of decaying.” With what is the historian comparing the steam plough and sewing machine? And does a sewing machine “call out” a higher culture? and do the things that are “growing instead of decaying” include a steam plough?
We are also told on page 634, that religion ... “has sunk on the one hand into a dogma fenced about with walls which its defenders cannot pass either inward or outward, on the other hand into a mere war-cry.... Between the two lies a narrow borderland.” Religion, therefore, “sinks into a war-cry.” Between the war-cry and the dogma is a narrow borderland. The dogma is “fenced about with walls.”
The recurring word is a constant phenomenon. In paragraph 498, for instance, we find the sequence “evil,” “debased,” “noble,” “beautiful,” “good,” “noble,” “beautiful,” “evil,” “debased,” “evil,” “good,” “good,” “great,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “noble,” “greatness,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “evil,” “good,” “evil,” “good,” “evil,” “evil,” “good,” “good,” “evil,” “good,” “good.”
It is true that the devoted and determined fellowship of Oxford men who are destroying the last position of the Historicides have long known that Bishop Stubbs was nothing more than a writer of slovenly text-books. But the general public has not known, and, occupied with wider interests, has been forced to take the statements of the pedants on trust.
Yet, if Oxford is to continue to be the chief University of the world, it will only be by permission of the public. This is a truth which the pedants will only realize when it is too late. If every father who has a son whom he hopes will proceed to the University reads what I have set down here—reads it, and trusting nothing to the assertions of one man’s pen, makes further and more exhaustive inquiries—we shall very soon see the frantic capitulation of the Old Guard. I believe the dons and pedants of whom I have been writing to be honest men enough. They are sincere in their attitude, no doubt. It is comfortable to think that everything is for the best in the best of all possible Universities, but the obstinacy of a dozen mules in a mountain pass impedes the progress of an army, and because his stupidity is not the hybrid’s fault is no argument against his removal.
A certain number of Oxford dons are convinced that the Oxford system is without flaw.
The Historicides are the worst offenders, though some of their brethren who control the study of Pagan Theology and Philosophy are not far behind them. Both classes alike are convinced of their infallibility.
Yet let the educated public realize that—
No one who wishes to become a B.A. and M.A. of Oxford is forced to study
(a) English Composition or Literature;
(b) The History of the British Empire;
(c) The geography of the globe we inhabit;
(d) The scientific discoveries and inventions which have profoundly altered the conditions of modern life;
(e) Any of the Fine Arts;
(f) Any of the Laws of England;
(g) The rules which guide the Law Courts in estimating the value of human testimony;
(h) The Art of Government and Economics;
(i) The Art of War;
(j) French, German or any Modern Language.
In my discredited trade of a novelist—that is to say, the trade of people who create out of their own brains new things—we have a technique of phrase. Unimportant to the pedant, as are the methods by which we are sometimes able to secure a great, and even grateful public, we still have our little catchwords and there is a certain freemasonry of craft.
One finishes up, it is generally understood, with “a canter down the straight.” Bursting away from the restrictions of the Essay, glad to have finished with an academic convention which says one must write this way and so, let me attempt to crystallize just what this paper means, from my own, and doubtless limited, point of view. It means this.
Upon the sturdy oak, generations old, in which the University may be typified in allegory, a dusty parasite of ivy has been clinging. This parasite, which has clogged the newer shoots from the old tree, is a parasite of the classical and especially of the history don and pedant. Law, Science and Mathematics have entered Oxford as a bright light comes into the dark. Here, all is well. And in regard to the older arts, I think, and many other people who are in the centre of the ferment of change think with me, all is about to be reconstituted in a freer air. It remains as a wonder that past and present undergraduates, the guests of the hotel, remain so individually and cumulatively distinct from the obstructionist section of its managers and landlords.
In the darkest days it is astonishing to see how many men reading history have been able to educate themselves brilliantly in spite of all opposition. And if Oxford can send out into the world such men as she is giving to the community now, in spite of the influences which have checked and hampered them, what may she not do in the days which are at hand, when the parasite shall be cut down from the old tree and growth shall be unhampered by the incompetent?
Those days, I am convinced, are at hand, and, curiously enough, it is the influence of James Anthony Froude which is precipitating the revolution. What the great historian could not do in his life, the immortality of his writings is accomplishing. Under Froude’s banner a devoted and influential band is enlisted. The work of change is proceeding with wonderful vigour and rapidity.
Let us gird up our loins to push and elbow out the discredited and effete, and if necessary pay hirelings, and employ executioners to end the unfortunate history of the immediate past, to destroy the Obstructionists, the Historicides, and those whom only annihilation will convince of error.
In conclusion I submit that I have neither been conjecturing what I cannot find, nor insinuating what I dare not assert; and if a sincere conviction and a prolonged scrutiny give one title to a part in the growing condemnation of the Historicides I shall be proud to think that I have taken a very humble place in the coming renaissance.
THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERIL
This essay, which is a logical conclusion of the last, requires neither rhetoric nor adornment, were I able to decorate it with them. It is a statement of plain fact, and I make no apology for writing it as simply as possible.
The paper is to be regarded in the light of an appendix to the article on the Oxford Historicides rather than a separate excursus in line with the others in the volume.
The facts are accurate, and if I could turn them into an easily-understood diagram and post it up on every hoarding in the kingdom, I believe that I should be doing a public service.
In 1885—the year when we failed to rescue Gordon—Mr. W. S. Gilbert produced his “Mikado.”
Which nation or government were, in 1885, the more fitting themes for satire—the English or the Japanese? The scandals of the Crimean and Boer Wars; the uniform successes by sea and land of the Japanese in their struggles with China and Russia, supply us with no uncertain answer. The Itos, Togos, Oyamas and Kurokis, whom our librettist represented to us as Ko-Ko, and so on, have taught us—and even the disciples of Moltke—that the supreme artists of war are at Tokyo and Osaka, not in London, Washington, Berlin, Moscow or Vienna. The thirty millions of Japanese who, in the sixties of the last century, were at the mercy of the white powers, are to-day engaged—politely enough—in ushering out of China the trades of Europe and North America.
During the last half century a yellow race, a non-Christian people, has caught up the white races and, so far as the ultima ratio regum populorumque is concerned—in the bloody tournament of war—has even surpassed them. Like every one else, I have been alarmed at the sudden transformation scene. The Mikado who stage-managed the Chino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese Wars, is very unlike that Mikado who danced for us on the boards of the Savoy Theatre.