BOOKS
The Decline of Grandeur
BY JAMES JOLL TN the quarter of a century since H. A. L. 'Fisher's History of Europe* first appeared, Europe itself has changed unrecognisably; and European supremacy in the world has come to a painful end. As a result, some people have talked as if European history was not worth studying any more, as if its traditional themes and dramas were played out, so that the historian must look else- where for his subject matter. 'The plain fact is,' Professor Barraclough has recently written, 'that Fisher's sort of history is, or should be, as dead as mutton.' The attack on history of the tradi- tional kind takes two forms. In the first, traditional history is criticised for being too con- cerned with politics and for leaving out of account economic and social change or the arts and the movement of ideas. Ever since Marx on the one hand and Croce on the other, we have been exhorted to write, if not 'history with the facts left out,' at least history with a different kind of fact put in. The second line of attack, which has become increasingly popular since the Second World War, is that European history does not matter any more, and that all that is Worth studying is the history of Asia or Africa, or at least of Russia and America.
The first of these attacks has undoubtedly done historical writing a great deal of good. Marx, like all great thinkers, provided historians of all kinds with a new way of looking at the World and suggested new fields of study and new types of explanation. Croce, too, by his insist- ence on the need for imagination in historical writing and on the importance of the history of ideas, represents a perennially necessary reaction against pedantic positivism. The second line of attack, however—that which complains that Europe is finished as a subject of historical study—derives from the feeling that Europe is finished as a political force; and it has perhaps been less fruitful. At its best, it has, it is true, produced vast quasi-philosophical works of great imaginative power, such as Spengler's Decline of the West or Toynbec's Study of History. At its worst, however, it can lead to leaving all the interesting facts out of history and
hand produce a woolly universalism on the one nand or a new provincialism on the other.
In fact, the history of most of the rest of the World has been bound up with that of Europe; and if the history of European influence outside the European continent is abstracted, what is left of the history of Asia or Africa or America looks thin and one-sided. As Fisher himself put 1,t, in the introduction to the History of Eitrope, It is hardly excessive to say that the material fabric of modern civilised life is the result of the intellectual daring of the European peoples.' Nor is it only in the material framework of con- temporary .life that Europe was the originator. the ideas of nationality and responsible govern- * A HISTORY OF EUROPE. By H. A. L. Fisher. tvolumes. (Collins, 9s. 6d. each.) Uniform with r,ese volumes in Collins's new series of Fontana Library reprints are Lord Acton's LECTURES ON MODERN HISTORY and Bernard Berenson's ITALIAN PAINTERS OF THE RENAISSANCE.
ment, of freedom and progress, of democracy and democratic education have passed from the West to the East with revolutionary and far- reaching consequences.' Fisher's choice of ex- amples is characteristic; the list of ideological exports could be made to look more disturbing if, instead of the irreproachable liberal com- modities he mentions, he had included Marxism and racialism.
It is, indeed, the bland tone, the conviction that everything is for the best, that, however gloomy the situation, reason is more likely to prevail than not, which are characteristic of Fisher's attitude. When he says at the end of his book, 'With science we may lay civilisation in ruins or enter into a period of plenty and well- being the like of which has never been experi- enced by mankind,' the whole tone of the work suggests that the latter alternative was the one in which he believed. Perhaps what is dead as mutton is not Fisher's history as such, but rather the liberalism of which Fisher was the last grand representative. He belongs to the great tradition of Gibbon and Macaulay—perhaps too con- sciously so—and his work is as much or as little out of date as theirs. We shall go on reading him as we go on reading them, even if Gibbon's ironical rationalism and Macaulay's smug Whig- gery seem to belong wholly to their respective centuries.
H. A. L. Fisher was a blend of eighteenth- century rationalism and nineteenth-century lib- eralism. From the one he derived a distaste for obscurantism and violence; from the other a cer- tain hollow sanctimoniousness which occasion- ally makes his prose read like that of the pro- fessional politician he sometimes affected to regret he had not become. The two trends can be observed clearly in his somewhat equivocal attitude to Christianity throughout the History of Europe. While paying conventional tribute to its influence on morals and behaviour he is extremely conscious of the harm done in the name of religion. 'The influence of the Old Testament,' he writes, 'has not been wholly good. If it has given courage and consolation to the saint, it has too often nerved the arm of the perse- cutor.' The adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome 'cleansed away many foul impurities, but also obliterated in its pas- sionate course much that in ancient ideals of conduct and expression was noble, temperate and wise.' Similarly, the passions of the Reforma- tion also did as much harm as good. 'It is not from Luther, a savage anti-Semite, that the liberal and rationalising elements of European
thought derive their origin.' Above all, Christi- anity has bedevilled the history of Europe by creating a dual structure of loyalties and by pro- viding, in the problem of the relation between Church and State, the greatest obstacle to the unification of Europe. 'To the friends of insti- tutional religion, the sovereign who brought the Roman Empire over to Christianity is one of the greatest benefactors of mankind,' Fisher writes of Constantine. 'Others see in that close asso- ciation of church and state a principal source of the secular pride and ambition which for so many centuries has obscured the original candour of the Christian life.' As so often when Fisher scrupulously states alternative views, it is quite clear where his own sympathies lie.
Church and State, Reason and Superstition, Toleration and Persecution, these are the great themes with which the Liberal movement all over Europe was concerned during the last century, and these are the categories in which Fisher in- terpreted European history. He was himself closely involved with some of the great causes of the early twentieth century, and his views about these colour his picture of the past. He was a friend of Lloyd George and he shared his enthusiasm for the small states which emerged in 1919. And so he writes about the fifteenth century in the same terms : 'The quarrel of Bohemia will not be understood unless we can enter into the emotions of a small people struggling to preserve its soul against a race more numerous and more advanced than itself.' He served for a time as British delegate at the League of Nations and thus he singles out for mention the comparatively insignificant league established in 1658 by the Archbishop of Mainz, 'the member states of which bound themselves to settle their quarrels by the method of concilia- tion.' He was Warden of New College, Oxford; and the community of European universities and the constant interchange of ideas is one of his recurrent themes.
Yet if the History of Europe were just a monu- ment to the beliefs of English Liberals in the early twentieth century, it would hardly be worth reprinting, nor could it be mentioned in the same breath as Gibbon and Macaulay. Fisher's occa- sional priggishness is not important; nor is it even his more attractive qualities—the wintry wit, the deep feeling for literature and art—which make the book worth rereading. What makes the History of Europe a great piece of historical writing is Fisher's mastery of the grand manner. He combines the ability to impart a great deal of information with the power to convey the splen- dour of a scene or the power of a move- ment. He had an extraordinary clarity of mind; Gilbert Murray remembered the time when they were both undergraduates attending lectures, and recalled : 'While I struggled confusedly to get down as much as I could, Fisher sat calmly back and jotted down a series of short phrases labelled 1, 2, 3.' It was a gift that enabled Fisher to organise a historical work on a very large scale. And his clear-headedness was combined with a certainty of judgment that enabled him to sum up a character in a phrase or an age in an epi- gram. If it had not been for Fisher's confidence
in the values by which he judged the world, his style would have lacked the finality, the sculp- tural quality which conies from having no second thoughts, from not wanting to change a word. Fisher had no doubts about the moral and political viewpoint from which he looked at history. He had no doubts either about the pro- priety of writing a history of Europe. While this Olympian confidence is occasionally irritating, it is also refreshing. As we are carried along by Fisher's narrative, we cease to wonder whether we should not rather be studying the Manchus or the Incas; we forget the innumerable articles we have read about 'culture and the crisis of our time'; we are in an orderly world where facts are interesting for themselves and judgments carry their own conviction. Nor is this just escap- ism. For if there is one lesson to be learnt from Fisher, it is that British history is a part of European history, and that, as most politicians of both parties have so oddly forgotten, Britain is part of Europe.
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