Reviews of the Week
The Function of a Historian
History and Human Relations. By Herbert Butterfield. (Col- lins. ios. 6d.)
THE " schools" of history in this island during the last half-century, blended though they are by much fertilisation, still retain much of their original character. The " Oxford " and the " Manchester," it might be argued, have sometimes advanced knowledge on the margins, sometimes under-pinned its foundations with a concrete raft, while the " Cambridge " school has maintained the royal tradi- tion of applying and harnessing knowledge to the service of man- kind. Acton, Seeley, Figgis, Bury, Maitland, Trevelyan-
" Of the three hundred grant but three To make a new Thermopylae."
There is something in this half-truth and this impertinence. For, having the great age in mind of Macaulay and Fronde and Green, one finds it sometimes difficult to avoid depression at the flood of writers who know more and more about less and less, or in numbering on the fingers of one hand the names of those whom history approves and who simultaneously get across to the larger public, or make any mark on the nation's mind. On that ground in particular there will be a welcome for this collection of essays. Few men of the present day are doing more than Professor Butter- field to restore history to its proper place as a discipline, a conciliator, a reservoir of wisdom and a well of hope. Considered as a book, it does not altogether cohere nor entirely correspond to its title, the two last essays at least on " Official History " and on " History as a Branch of Literature " really dealing With distinct themes and to be taken on their own, very considerable, contributions. I think, incidentally, that some of the remarks on " Official History " bear rather hardly both on those responsible for national security and on those responsible for the compilation of such history. It is perfectly true that the framework or " reference," within which any official world wishes history to be set, may be a snare and a delusion ; true, also, that the stages of discussion by which any particular policy has been reached are as vitally important to historical honesty as the policy itself. Yet can it be supposed that all the making of policy can be conducted on the assumption that it must be fit and prepared for immediate publication ?
The main body of this work falls into two groups—of essays specifically concerned with Christianity in relation to human society and history, and those which treat of such fundamental questions, in history as it stands today, as international conflict, moral judge- ments, Marxist historiography and " The Dangers of History." And if the first group were read in conjunction with Sir Maurice Powicke's memorable paper on The Christian Life and some of the Bishop of Durham's writings, they would be enough reply to those, greatly daring, who imagine they can write truly of, let us say, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while ignoring the religious motive.
Some of us may feel that Professor Butterfield carries Christian charity almost to excess, for the power of bad men, as Burke some- where says, is never negligible. " The tragic element " he finds in modern international conflict, the predicament of deadlock between two peoples equally well-disposed at heart, must surely somewhere have a turning point at which history may claim into right of judge- ment ; some decision when self-defence passed nto crime, some weakness when second-rate character allowed itself to be scythed away as by some Schlieffen plan. When therefore we read here that the historian has no right to be a moral arbiter, or that " moral Indignation corrupts," we know what Professor Butterfield means yet need not accept it without reservation. Is God alone to pass judgement on Belsen ?
If that qualification may be made, there is a core of stern truth in these essays which every historian and every citizen of the English- speaking world could weigh with advantage. We live not so much in a moral void as in a space half-lighted and half-filled, under a vault compounded of disillusioned materialism, democratic senti- ment and ideological history. " The besetting disease of modern historians," these essays say, is intellectual arrogance ; a principal ailment of the Western world is' a self-righteousness which, by array- ing mankind into sheep and goats, itself perpetuates the hostile Ideology. Our author, holds that all peoples have been sinners and that all in turn, from Spain of the ConquistadOres, Holland, Great Britain, France and the United States, have been aggressors, no less
than Germany and Soviet Russia. Both as Christian and historian, he insists that charity is the first historical virtue.
Translated into intellectual terms, this becomes a plea for an infinitely greater flexibility of mind than democracy has yet shown itself to possess. And the criticism implied of our foreign policy for a whole generation makes grim reading. " What you have to avoid in 1919 are not the mistakes of 1815 but the mistakes of 1919 " ; what democracy is wont to absorb is the diplomatic legend of yesterday, not that of tomorrow. In short, the only remedy for bad or short-sighted history is better and long-term history ; avoiding, for instance, the mental idleness which has saluted the successive destruction of the empires of Austro-Hungary, Turkey and Germany, without considering the inevitable political effect. It is not in the least cynical to remind us of the inordinate harm done by the most virtuous of men, for it is painfully near the truth that the unreasonableness and fears of democracy-have caused more suffer- ing than all the eighteenth-century despots rolled together.
In this sort of catharsis Professor Butterfield excels, for he never speaks without reason and always with modesty. And that comes out well in his remarks on Marxist history. We are so easily and so justly irritated by its pretentions that we are probably apt to under-estimate the degree of trutfi that it conveys. True enough, " nothing less than the whole of the past is necessary to explain the whole of the present "—much more, let us say, than a few hundred " Diggers " to explain the Commonwealth. None the less, the Marxists do bring out the harsh necessities by which even saints must be conditioned, and show a major historical merit, that they bring us down to earth. And though they over-simplified, they insisted on social analysis, and did not make the mistake of seeing history as " a field for the activity of disembodied ideas."
There is something of the first Franciscans in these essays, which repeat and re-echo that the true function of the historian is to explain and to enquire. " Happy seeker," as Cromwell said ;
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