Let me at the beginning of this short article present two facts to the
reader. Neither can be disputed, and that is why I call them facts and
put them in the forefront before I begin upon my theories.
The first fact is that the record of what men have done in the past and
how they have done it is the chief positive guide to present action.
The second fact is that most men must now receive the impression of the
past through reading.
Put these two facts together and you get the fundamental truth that
upon the right reading of history the right use of citizenship in
England today will depend. It will of course depend upon other things
as well: chiefly upon the human conscience; for if you were to pack off
to an island a hundred families as ignorant as any human families can
be of tradition, and wholly ignorant of positive history, those
families would yet be able to create a human society and the voice of
God within them would give just limits to their actions.
Still, of those factors in civic action amenable to civic direction,
conscious and positively effective, there is nothing to compare with
the right teaching and the right reading of history. Now teaching is
today ruined. The old machinery by which the whole nation could be got
to know all essential human things, has been destroyed, and the
teaching of history in particular has been not only ruined but rendered
ridiculous. There is no historical school properly so-called in modern
England; that is, there is no organization framed with the sole object
of extending and co-ordinating historical knowledge and of choosing men
for their capacity to discover upon the one hand and to teach upon the
other. There is nothing approaching to it in the two ancient
universities, because the choice of teachers there depends upon a
multitude of considerations quite separate from those mentioned, and
the capacity to discover, to know, and to teach history, though it
_may_ be present in a tutor, will only be accidentally so present:
while as for co-ordination of knowledge, there is no attempt at it.
Even where very hard work is done, and, when it concerns local history,
very useful work, history as a general study is not grasped because the
universities have not grasped it.
History is to be had by the modern Englishman from his own reading
only; and I am here concerned with the question how he shall read
history with profit.
To read history with profit, history must be true, or at any rate the
reader must have a power of discerning what is true in the midst of
much that may be false. I will bargain, for instance, that in the
summer of 1899 the great mass of men, and especially the great mass of
men who had passed through the universities, were under the impression
that armies had left England for the purpose of conquest in distant
countries with invariable success: that that success had been unique,
unsupported and always decisive, and that the wealth of the country
after each success had increased, not diminished. In other words, had
history been studied even by the tiny minority who have education today
in England, Sir William Butler would have counted more than the Joels,
and the late Mr. Barnato (as he called himself); the South African War
would not have taken place in a society which knew its past.
Again, you may pick almost any phrase referring to the Middle Ages out
of any newspaper—if you are a man read in the Middle Ages—and you will
find in it not only a definite historical falsehood with regard to the
fact referred to, or the analogy drawn, but also a false philosophy.
For instance, the other day I read this phrase with regard to the
burial of a certain gentleman of my neighbourhood in Sussex: “We are
surely past the phase of mediaeval thought in which it was imagined
that a few words spoken over the lifeless clay would determine the fate
of the soul for all eternity.” Just notice the myriad falsehoods of a
phrase like that! I will not discuss what is connoted by the words
“past the phase of mediaeval thought”—it connotes of course that the
human mind changes fundamentally with the centuries, and therefore that
whatever we think is probably wrong, and that what we are sure of we
cannot be sure of, an absurd conclusion. I will only note the
historical falsehoods. When on earth did the “Middle Ages” lay down
that a “few words over lifeless clay determined the fate of the soul
for all eternity”? On the contrary, the Middle Ages laid it down—it was
their peculiar doctrine—that it was impossible to determine the fate of
the soul; that no one could tell the fate of any one individual soul;
that it was a grievous sin, among the most grievous of sins, to affirm
positive knowledge that any individual had lost his soul. More than
this, the Middle Ages were peculiar in their insistence upon the
doctrine that a man might have been very bad and might have had all the
appearance of having lost his soul so far as human judgment went, and
yet was liable to a midway place between salvation and damnation, and
they affirmed that this midway place did not lead to either fate but
necessarily to salvation and to salvation only.
Again, whatever could help the human soul to salvation was by the most
rigorous theological definition of the Middle Ages applicable only
before death. After death the fate of the soul was sealed, and the man
once dead, the “lifeless clay” (as the journalist put it—and the Middle
Ages was the only source from which he got the idea of clay at all),
whether it were that of a Pope or of some random highwayman, had no
effect whatsoever upon the fate of the soul. The greatest saint might
have offered the most solemn sacrifice on its behalf for years, and if
the soul were damned his sacrifice would have been of no avail.
I have taken this example absolutely at random. But the modern reader,
apart from sentences as clearly provocative of criticism as this, is
perpetually coming across references, allusions, and parallels which
take a certain course of human European and English history for
granted. How is he to distinguish when that course is rightly drawn
from when it is wrongly drawn?
Thus in some newspaper article written by an able man, and dealing, let
us say, with the territorial army, one might come across a sentence
like this: “Napoleon himself used troops so raw that they were actually
drilled on the march to the battlefield.” That would be a perfectly
true statement. Any amount of criticism of it lies in connexion with
Mr. Haldane’s scheme, but still it is a true piece of history. Napoleon
did get raw recruits into his battalions just before any one of his
famous marches began, and drill them on the way to victory. In the next
column of the newspaper the reader may be presented with a sentence
like this: “The captures of English by privateers in the Revolutionary
War should teach us what foreign cruisers can do.”
There were plenty of captures by privateers in the Revolutionary Wars;
if I remember rightly, many many hundreds, all discreetly hidden from
the common or garden reader until party politics necessitated their
resurrection a hundred years after the event, but they have nothing
whatsoever to do with modern circumstances.
Both statements are true then, and yet one can be truthfully applied
today, while the other cannot.
How is the plain reader to distinguish between two historical truths,
one of which is a useful modern analogy, the other of which is a
ludicrously misleading one?
The reader, it would seem, has no criterion by which to distinguish
what has been withheld from him and what has been emphasized; he may,
from his knowledge of the historian’s character or bias, stand upon his
guard, but he can do little more.
There is another difficulty. It is less subtle and less common, but it
exists. I mean brute lying. You do not often get the lie direct in
official history; it would be too dangerous a game to play in the face
of the critics, though some historians, and notably the French
historian Taine, have played it boldly enough, and have stated
dogmatically, as historical happenings, things that never happened and
that they knew never happened. But the plain or brute historical lie is
more commonly found in the pages of ephemeral journalism. Thus the
other day, with regard to the Budget, I saw some financial operation
alluded to as comparable with “the pulling out of Jews’ teeth for money
in the Middle Ages.” When did anyone in the Middle Ages pull out a
Jew’s teeth for money? There is just one very doubtful story told about
King John, and that story is told without proof by one of John’s worst
enemies, in a mass of other accusations many of which can be proved to
be false.
Again, I turn to an Oxford History of the French Revolution, and I find
the remark that the massacres of September were organized by the men
from Marseilles. They were not organized by the men from Marseilles.
The men from Marseilles had nothing to do with them, and the fact has
been public property since the publication of Pollio and Marcel’s
monograph twenty years ago.
What criterion can the ordinary reader choose when he is confronted by
difficulties of this sort? I will suggest to him one which seems to me
by far the most valuable. It is the reading of firsthand authorities.
It is all a matter of habit. When the original authorities upon which
history is based were difficult to get at, when few of those in foreign
tongues had been translated, and when those that had been published
were published in the most expensive form, the ordinary reader had to
depend upon an historian who would summarize for him the reading of
another. The ordinary reader was compelled to read secondary history or
none. Now secondary history is among the most valuable of literary
efforts; where evidence is slight, the judgment of an historian who
knows from other reading the general character of the period, is most
valuable. Where evidence is abundant, and therefore confusing, the
historian used to the selection and weighing of it performs a most
valuable function. Still, the reader who is not acquainted with
original authorities does not really know history and is at the mercy
of whatever myth or tradition may be handed to him in print.
We should remember that today, even in England, original authorities
are quite easy to get at. Two little books, for instance, occur to me
out of hundreds: Mr. Rait’s book on Mary Stuart and Mr. Archer’s on the
Third Crusade. In each of these the reader gets in a cheap form, in
modern and readable English, the kind of evidence upon which historians
base their history, and he can use that evidence in the light of his
own knowledge of human nature and his own judgment of human life.
Or again, if he wants to know what the Romans really knew or said they
knew about the German tribes who, as pirates, so greatly influenced the
history of England, let him get Mr. Rouse’s edition of Grenewey’s
translation of the Germania in Blackie’s series of English texts; it
will only cost sixpence, and for that money he will get a bit of
Caesar’s Gallic War and the Agricola as well. But the list nowadays is
a very long one, luckily, and the lay reader has only to choose what
period he would like to read up, and he will find for nearly every one
first-hand evidence ready, cheap and published in a readable modern
form. That he should take such first-hand evidence is the very best
advice that any honest historian can give.