The last book to be published upon the last Dauphin of France set me
thinking upon what seems to me the chief practical science in which
modern men should secure themselves. I mean the science of history—and
in this science almost all lies in the appreciation of evidence, for
one of the chief particular problems presented to the student of
history at the present moment is whether the Dauphin did or did not
survive his imprisonment in the Temple.
Let me first say why, to so many of us, the science of history and the
appreciation of the evidence upon which it depends is of the first
moment. It is because, short of vision or revelation, history is our
only extension of human experience. It is true that a philosophy common
to all citizens is necessary for a State if it is to live—but short of
that necessity the next most necessary factor is a knowledge of the
stuff of mankind: of how men act under certain conditions and impulses.
This knowledge may be acquired, and is in some measure, during the
experience of one wise lifetime, but it is indefinitely extended by the
accumulation of experience which history affords.
And what history so gives us is always of immediate and practical
moment.
For instance, men sometimes speak with indifference of the rival
theories as to the origin of European land tenure; they talk as though
it were a mere academic debate whether the conception of private
property in land arose comparatively late among Europeans or was native
and original in our race. But you have only to watch a big popular
discussion on that very great and at the present moment very living
issue, the moral right to the private ownership in land, to see how
heavily the historic argument weighs with every type of citizen. The
instinct that gives that argument weight is a sound one, and not less
sound in those who have least studied the matter than in those who have
most studied it; for if our race from its immemorial origins has
desired to own land as a private thing side by side with communal
tenures, then it is pretty certain that we shall not modify that
intention, however much we change our laws. If, on the other hand, it
could be shown that before the advent of a complex civilization
Europeans had no conception of private property in land, but treated
land as a thing necessarily and always communal, then you could ascribe
modern Socialist theories with regard to the land to that general
movement of harking back to the origins which Europe has been assisting
at through over a hundred years of revolution and of change.
It sounds cynical, but it is perfectly true, that much the largest
factor in the historical conception of men is assertion. It is
literally true that when men (with the exception of a very small
proportion of scholars who are also intelligent) consider the past, the
picture on which they dwell is a picture conveyed to them wholly by
authority and by unquestioned authority. There was never a time when
the original sources of history were more easily to be consulted by the
plain man; but whether because of their very number, or because the
habit is not yet formed, or because there are traditions of imaginary
difficulty surrounding such reading, original sources were perhaps
never less familiar to fairly educated opinion than they are today; and
therefore no type of book gives more pleasure when one comes across it
than those little cheap books, now becoming fairly numerous, in which
the original sources, and the original sources alone, are put before
the reader. Mr. Rait has already done such work in connection with Mary
Queen of Scots, and Mr. Archer did it admirably in connection with the
Third Crusade.
But apart from the importance of consulting original sources—which is
like hearing the very witnesses themselves in court—there is a factor
in historical judgment which by some unhappy accident is peculiarly
lacking in the professional historian. It is a factor to which no
particular name can be attached, though it may be called a department
of common sense. But it is a mental power or attitude easily
recognizable in those who possess it, and perhaps atrophied by the very
atmosphere of the study. It goes with the open air with a general
knowledge of men and with that rapid recognition of the way in which
things “fit in” which is necessarily developed by active life.
For instance, when you know the pace at which Harold marched down from
the north to Hastings you recognize, if you use that factor of historic
judgment of which I spake, that the affair was not barbaric. There must
have been fairly good roads, and there must have been a high
organization of transport. You have only to consider for a moment what
a column looks like, even if it be only a brigade, to see the truth of
that. Again, this type of judgment forbids anyone who uses it to
ascribe great popular movements (great massacres, great turmoils, and
so forth) to craft. It is a very common thing, especially in modern
history, to lay such things to the power of one or two wealthy or one
or two bloody leaders, but you have only to think for a few moments of
what a mob is to see the falsity of that. Craft can harness this sort
of explosive force, it can control it, or persuade it, or canalize it
to certain issues, but it cannot create it.
Again, this sort of sense easily recognizes in historic types the
parallels of modern experience. It avoids the error of thinking history
a mistake and making of the men and women who appear there something
remote from humanity, extreme, and either stilted or grandiose.
In aid of this last feature in historical judgment there is nothing of
such permanent value as a portrait. Obtain your conception (as, indeed,
most boys do) of the English early sixteenth century from a text, then
go and live with the Holbeins for a week and see what an enormously
greater thing you will possess at the end of it. It is indeed one of
the misfortunes of European history that from the fifth century to at
least the eleventh we are, so far as Western European history is
concerned, deprived of portraits. And by an interesting parallel the
writers of the dark time seemed to have had neither the desire nor the
gift of vivid description. Consider the dreariness of the
hagiographers, every one of them boasting the noble rank and the
conventional status of his hero, and you may say not one giving the
least conception of the man’s personality. You have the great
Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus running down the centuries from
the Decline of the Empire to the climax of Charlemagne. Many of those
names stand for some most powerful individuality, yet all we have is a
formula, a lineage, with symbols and names in the place of living
beings, and even that established only by careful work, picking out and
sifting relationships from various lives. The men of that time did not
even think to tell us that there was such a thing as a family
tradition, nor did it seem important to them to establish its Roman
origin and its long succession in power.
Next it must be protested that the smallness and particularity of the
questions upon which historical discussion rages are no proof either of
its general purposelessness nor of _their_ insignificance. All advance
of knowledge proceeds in this fashion. Physical science affords
innumerable examples of the way in which progress has depended upon a
curiosity directed towards apparently insignificant things, and there
is something in the mind which compels it to select a narrow field for
the exercise of its acutest powers. Moreover, special points,
discussion upon which must evidently be lengthy and may be indefinite,
are peculiarly attractive to just that kind of man who by a love of
prolonged research enlarges the bounds of knowledge and at the same
time strengthens and improves for his fellows by continual exercise all
the instruments of their common trade. Take, for instance, this case of
the little Dauphin, Louis XVII. It really does not matter to day
whether the boy got away or whether he died in prison. It does not
prolong the line of the Capetians—the heir to that is present in the
Duke of Orleans. It does not even affect our view of any other
considerable part of history—save possibly the policy of Louis
XVIII—and it is of no direct interest to our pockets or to our
affections. Yet the masses of work which have accumulated round that
one doubt have solved twenty other doubts. They have illuminated all
the close of the Terror; they are beginning to make us understand that
most difficult piece of political psychology, the reaction of
Thermidor, and with it how Europeans lose their balance and regain it
in the course of their quasi-religious wars; for all our wars have
something in them of religion.
Three elements appear to enter into the judgment of history. First,
there is the testimony of human witnesses; next, there are the
non-human boundaries wherein the action took place, boundaries which,
by all our experience, impose fixed limits to action; thirdly, there is
that indefinable thing, that mystic power, which all nations deriving
from the theology of the Western Church have agreed to call, with the
schoolman, _common sense_; a general appreciation which transcends
particular appreciations and which can integrate the differentials of
evidence. Of this last it is quite impossible to afford a test or to
construct a measure; its presence in an argument is none the less as
readily felt as fresh air in a room; without it nothing is convincing
however laboured, with it, even though it rely upon slight evidence,
one has the feeling of walking on a firm road. But it must be “common
sense”—it must be of the sort, that is, which is common to man various
and general, and it is in this perhaps that history suffers most from
the charlatanism and ritual common to all great matters.
Men will have pomp and mystery surrounding important things, and
therefore the historians must, consciously or unconsciously, tend to
strut, to quote solemn authorities in support, and to make out the
vulgar unworthy of their confidence. Hence, by the way, the plague of
footnotes.
These had their origin in two sources: the desire to show that one was
honest and to prove it by a reference; the desire to elucidate some
point which it was not easy to elucidate in the text itself without
making the sentence too elaborate and clumsy. Either use may be seen at
its best in Gibbon. With the last generation they have served mainly,
and sometimes merely, for ritual adornment and terror, not to make
clearer or more honest, but to deceive. Thus Taine in his monstrously
false history of the Revolution revels in footnotes; you have but to
examine a batch of them with care to turn them completely against his
own conclusions—they are only put there as a sort of spiked paling to
warn off trespassers. Or, again, M. Thibaut, who writes under the name
of “Anatole France,” gives footnotes by the score in his romance of
Joan of Arc, apparently not even caring to examine whether they so much
as refer to his text, let alone support it. They seem to have been done
by contract.
Another ailment in this department is the negative one, whereby an
historian will leave out some aspect which to him, cramped in a study,
seems unimportant, but which any plain man moving in the world would
have told him to be the essential aspect of the whole matter. For
instance, when Napoleon left Madrid on his forced march to intercept
Sir John Moore before that general should have reached Benevente, he
thought Moore was at Valladolid, when as a fact he was at Sahagun. In
Mr. Oman’s history of the Peninsular War the error is put thus:
“Napoleon had not the comparatively easy task of cutting the road
between Valladolid and Astorga, but the much harder one of intercepting
that between Sahagun and Astorga.”
Why is this egregious nonsense? The facts are right and so are the
dates and the names, yet it makes one blush for Oxford history. Why?
Because the all-important element of _distance_ is omitted. The very
first question a plain man would ask about the case would be, “What
were the distances involved?” The academic historian doesn’t know, or,
at least, doesn’t say; yet without an appreciation of the distances the
statement has no value. As a fact the distances were such that in the
first case (supposing Moore had been at Valladolid) Napoleon would have
had to cover nearly three miles to Moore’s one to intercept him—an
almost superhuman task. In the second case (Moore being as a fact at
Sahagun) he would have had to go over _four miles_ to his opponent’s
one—an absolutely impossible feat.
To march _three_ miles to the enemy’s _one_ is what Mr. Oman calls “a
comparatively easy task”; to march four to his one is what Mr. Oman
calls a “much harder” task; and to write like that is what an informed
critic calls bad history.
The other two factors in an historical judgment can be more easily
measured.
The non-human elements which, as I have said, are irremovable (save to
miracle), are topography, climate, season, local physical conditions,
and so forth. They have two valuable characters in aid of history; the
first is that they correct the errors of human memory and support the
accuracy of details; the second is that they enable us to complete a
picture. We can by their aid “see” the physical framework in which an
action took place, and such a landscape helps the judgment of things
past as it does of things contemporary. Thus the map, the date, the
soil, the contours of Crécy field make the traditional spot at which
the King of Bohemia fell doubtful; the same factors make it certain
that Drouet did not plunge haphazard through Argonne on the night of
June 21, 1791, but that he must have gone by one path—which can be
determined.
Or, again, take that prime question, why the Prussians did not charge
at Valmy. On their failure to do so all the success of the Revolution
turned. A man may read Dumouriez, Kellermann, Pully, Botidoux,
Massenback, Goethe—there are fifty eye-witnesses at least whose
evidence we can collect, and I defy anyone to decide. (Brunswick
himself never knew.) But go to that roll of land between Valmy and the
high road; go after three days’ rain as the allies did, and you will
immediately learn. That field between the heights of “The Moon” and the
site of old Valmy mill, which is as hard as a brick in summer (when the
experts visit it), is a marsh of the worst under an autumn drizzle; no
one could have charged.
As for human testimony, three things appear: first, that the witness is
not, as in a law court, circumscribed. His relation may vary infinitely
in degree of proximity of time or space to the action, from that of an
eye-witness writing within the hour to that of a partisan writing at
tenth hand a lifetime after. That question of proximity comes first,
from the known action of the human mind whereby it transforms colours
and changes remembered things. Next there is the character of the
witness _for the purposes of his testimony_. Historians write, too
often, as though virtue—or wealth (with which they often confound
it)—were the test. It is not, short of a known motive for lying; a
murderer or a thief casually witnessing to a thing with which he is
familiar is worth more than the best man witnessing in a matter which
he understands ill. It was this error which ruined Croker’s essay on
Charlotte Robespierre’s Memoirs. Croker thought, perhaps wisely, that
all radicals were scoundrels; he could not accept her editor’s
evidence, and (by the way) the view of this amateur collector without a
tincture of historical scholarship actually imposed itself on Europe
for nearly seventy years!
And the third character in the witness is support: the support upon
converging lines of other human testimony, most of it indifferent, some
(this is essential) casual and by the way—deprived therefore of motive.
When I shall find these canons satisfied to oppose the strong
probability and tradition of the Dauphin’s death in prison I shall
doubt that death, but not before.