Renaissance, Reformation, Reason

By A. F. POLLARD

Mn. RIMER was once, . I believe, :urged .by his fellow-editors of the "Home University Library" to write for that series a history of the world compressed into one of its volumes

, of fifty thousand words. He, if any one, might have survived „. that test of capacity ; but we are glad he reserved himself for . these second thoughts confined to Europe but running

,.. into three fairly . substantial volumes ; and the welcome extended to the first of them loses none of its warmth. on a ,perusal of the second. In the third,. which is announced , for publication in November, Mr. Fisher will be treading his

_own, particular , ground, where he will combine the results

, of historical research with the lessons of praetical experience ,.i.n. public affairs ; it Will cover but a .century and a half corn- Pared with the three centuries surveyed in this volume and

.., the score sketched in the first ; and it will doubtless form a fitting climax to what Mr. Baldwin has prolcptically called a great work."

The climax might seem from its title to fall within this ' second volume on "Renaissance, Reformation, Reason "—

• • • parfur.'unt monks ; at that of the third " The Liberal Experi-

• ment," the Ultramontane may murmur, and the Fascist

• hiss, nascc:ur ridiculus mus. But Mr. Fisher's title is well chosen : Liberalism is an epitome of, and an experiment in, renaissance, reformation, and reason ; an experiment is seldom final and not always successful, and Mr. Fisher promises to discuss its prospects in his .final volume. His attitude here is sufficiently detached ; and if his reference (p. 472) to the hideous period of assassination, judicial murder, and , battle which disgraces the last age of Catholic England" is a retort to recent descriptions of "spiritual disunities • begotten in the name of reform," which "broke up the frame- work of Christendom and promoted the political and social disintegration of each nation within itself," Mr. Fisher is

• ready enough to admit (p. 455) that "the humanism of the • Renaissance, unlike those mediaeval types of piety or heroism

• which are embodied in the Gothic cathedrals or the Chansons de Geste, was not popular but aristocratic" ; for "the soul of a people will never be greatly stirred by the religion of the artist or the savant," and the Renaissance, "like most great movements of the human spirit, was the achievement of a .eomparatively .small minority of gifted and creative men ;working in a sensitive and intelligent society."

• Yet, Mr. Fisher 'remarks (p. 503), "The wheels of history are seldom mo'Ved.'..by the poor," and it may be doubted whether 'the artist's and savants of the Renaissance were ;much richer than the Protestant reformers, some of whom, certain divine s in'the East Anglian University of Cambridge, derived [frail .Wittenberg] the evangelical doctrines which :helped to m'''ake. England :a Protestant -country, and gave to an obscure fenland' seminary a new and Ridden pre-eminence 'in the intellectifal life Of tile Eriglish:people ".(p. 505). There is a spice' otthe inis'ehief of Flick' in the magic girdle which Mr. Fisher pits round the ea-1th, sometinies in less than forty minutes"; and the' obscurity of mediaeval Cambridge owes son:le-thine perhaps, to its rernetiness from Oxford. -.But its supremacy, aided by the -.catholic benefactions of .Margaret Beaufort, was obvious in- Evangelical England, with Cambridge men guiding, the Cecils the State and Craniner and Parker and Whitgift the Chtfich ; and Mr. Fisher might have pursued this alternating thread of history through the changes which brought Oxford to the front again with Laud and the Caroline divines, Cambridge once more with .A History of Europe. By the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. Fisher, D.C.L.,

• F.B.A., F.R.S. Vol. II. Renaissance, Reformation, Reason. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 18s.) the Revolution of 1688, and Oxford with the ' Romantic reaction and the Oxford Movement.

But Mr. Fisher excels in what Lord Morley Calls' "true history, the art of rapprochement—bridging distances 'Of Place and circumstance." • Isolation sterilizes every fact, aim the fertility of Mr. Fisher's work consists in its constantireminder that past facts are living factors : he alludes, even'in this volume, to events as recent as 1014, 1919 and 1922, in 'Order to show the significance of what happened in Alsace-Lorraine, Poland, the Balkans, and elsewhere three and four Centuries ago. Mr. Fisher's book is not So much a chronological history as an elucidation of its meaning. It has also a dramatic unity. It is not a history of European States, but a-history of Europe. Individual States only appear on the stage when they impinge on the consciousness of Europe. The actors may, indeed, when they appear, explain in a few retrospective words who and what they are and how they come to appear at all ; • but their isolation is their own affair, a matter c f the dressing-mom and not the stage. To this must be added the fact that the book takes account not only of Europe but of its expansion into America; Asia, and Africa, because that expansion Vitally affects the history of Europe itself.

Only a gift of epigram and swift generalization could Make so vast a survey in so small a compass readable, and Mr. Fisher possesses these qualities in an eminent degree. Like all good writers, he knows that language is primarily a thing that is heard, not Seen; he hears what he writes as he writes

• it, and he punctuates accordingly. The book is packed with . high intelligence applied to matter of fact. " Two fateful marriages and five unexpected deaths changed, the face of European polities" (p. 485) : so, we might add, unexpected deaths rather than the forethought of Henry VII made James VI of Scotland James I of •England.. " It has been one of the standing misfortunes of Europe that the Poles, the Czechs and the Magyars have never been able to devise any durable form of political co-operation" (p.- 494)1- hence- our trouble about Eastern and Danubian pacts. #:1.tirtheranism..' . . conquered and still retains the three Scandinavian kingdoms : a low-temperature religion, agreeable to Erastian kings, and 'adapted to the long winters of the rigorous •north " (p. 507). Archbishop Laud was "the one second-rate Englishman who has exercised a wide influence upon the history of the world" (p. 650). ".So little may the policy of a State be deduced from the religious , convictions of its citizens that the 'continued independence of the Dutch republic, the partition of the vast Spanish inheritance, and the successful establishment t of the Protestant succession in England may, to no small degree, be ascribed to the spirited exertions of the old Jesuit-ridden Austrian State, which received its quietus by the Treaties of

St. Germain and the Trianon" (p. 736). • . •

• A few errors slip in among the crowd of epigrams. The Emperor Charles V was Ferdinand of Aragon's grandson, not his son-in-law (p. 488) ; on p. 554 the reference to .1534 as the year in which Henry VIII broke with Rome, Thomas More was executed,. and Jacques Cartier planted the .cross on the shores of the St. Lawrence should be .modified by the facts that More was executed in 1535 and Cartier did not .enter the St. Lawrence 6111586: The remark (p. 086) that the Austrian hegemony in Italy, dating from the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) "was not shaken until the days of Cavour and Garibaldi" is hardly reconcilable with what Mr. Fisher himself says (pp; 740, 754) about its loss of the kingdom of Naples and the duchy of Parma. " Campden " (p. 602) is correct enough for the hill but not for the historian ; , and Vol. V of Longmans' Political Ilistory of England, which Mr. Fisher kindly .attributes (P. 599) to the present reviewer, is really by Mr. Fisher himself,