THE USE OF HISTORY
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By A. L. ROWSE
WHAT is the, use 9f history, say the unintelligent, the ultra- utilitarian, and do not pause for an answer. Yet there is an
answer, _ a pretty direct and effective one, which they knew very well in the sixteenth century. Machiavelli and Erasmus, Montaigne and Bacon, all the supetior spirits were agreed that history was the sovereign study for the prince, the statesman, the politician. History played, and has always played, a large part in the education of rulers. (One gathers from the picture papers that it is going to do, quite rightly, in the educa- tion of the Princess Elizabeth.) It was the favourite reading of Napoleon, as it is of Mr. Lloyd George. The proper study of history—or rather remembering its lessons in time— would have saved innumerable disastrous errors and blunders in affairs. Everyone needs, if he is to understand politics and not just take part in them, a historical background. Indeed we might go further to say with Sir Walter Ralegh, that a knowledge of history is necessary to a fully intelligent life, "the end and scope of all history being," he says, "to teach us by example of times past such wisdom as may guide our desires and actions."
If people of recent years, in schools and places where they teach, have been inclined to give history the go-by, it is to some extent the fault of the historian, who has not been con- fident enough, indeed not arrogant enough. He should make his proper, and so much better authenticated, claims heard against the clamorous demands of chemistry, physics—and for all I know accountancy, shorthand and typewriting. The use of chemistry was so much more obvious to the stupid, thougheactually it is far less : it produced something, if only a smell.
There will be the less reason for such diffidence after Pro- fessor Williams' book. He has had the excellent idea of collecting from contemporary historians, or rather those of the twentieth century, passages showing how they think of their subject and its difficulties, what they mean by history and its place among social studies, and illustrating them by others which reveal the historian. at work : the tradesman at his trade. What emerges from the book is that these historians he quotes from have a far more large-minded and compre- hensive conception of history than they are usually given credit for. In this respect they are not unworthy successors of Gibbon, Macaulay, Froude. (Of course, Mr. Williams' bias is with these, the humanist historians rather than with the technical, the unliterary, one might almost say, the illiterate, for there are such.) Yet why were the public in the earlier years of this century less inclined to lend ear to the claims of history than they were in the nineteenth century?
Increasing specialisation among the historians is one answer. Not that that made them necessarily unreadable ; Maitland was one of the most specialist of historians, yet he is very " readable." This specialisation was part of a tendency at work in every sphere. Poetry, it seemed, was being written for poets, music for musicians, economics for the economists, and history, it might be said, for historians. Mr. G. M. Trevelyan in these years was a notable exception to this, a self-conscious upholder of an older tradition : hence his reclame with the general public and 'perhaps (at any rate till recently) a lack of comparable appreciation among his brother historians.
But I am inclined to think that the answer has even more to do with the public than with the historians. Professor Powicke notices that the War gave an impetus to the interest in history—. in itself a most interesting observation like so much that Mr.
The Modern Historian. By C. H. Williams. (Nelson. 7s. 6d.) Williams quotes from him. And it seems certain that the pre- occupation of a younger generation with problems of the social and economic order is sustaining and will increase the general interest in history, the necessary background and the proper training for understanding the political problems that threaten to overwhelm us if we do not understand them. It is this that is reflected in the concern of the younger historians with the complex of questions and with the general attitude to them that goes by the name of Marxism : the relation of the various factors, intellectual, cultural, spiritual to the economic an social structure, the subtle and various ways in which one is linked up with the other and is often expressed through another. It is here that Mr. Williams' book is less adequate, is already even a little out of date. He seems to think that, the chief controversy of the early twentieth century over—that whether history is a science or no—there is much less division of opinion now than then. Actually there is a more significant division between those affected by the influence of Marxism and those who are not. This it is that makes the work of R. H. Tawney and G. N. Clark so significant to the younger school, and they are followed by quite a long tail of still younger men who are prepared to go further.
The whole balance of this book might then be shifted with advantage to the left ; it would bring it' more up to date and more into conformity with its title. Mr. Williams intends to illustrate the attitude and work of the twentieth-century historian. From that point of view it was a mistake to make Acton the starting point, unless by way of contrast : nothing more perfectly nineteenth century than his pre-occupation- for a historian, too !—with ethical issues. The Gladstonian Liberal ! It is surprising to find the two Oxford Professors, York Powell and Firth, much nearer giving the keynote of the modern attitude. " The New History," says the one, " deals with the condition of masses of mankind living in a social state. It seeks to discover the laws that govern those conditions and bring about the changes we call Progress and Decay, and Development and Degeneracy." And Firth says, even better : " It seems to me to mean the record of the life of societies of men, of the changes which those societies have gone through, of the ideas which have determined the actions of those societies, and of the material conditions which have helped or 'hindered their development." Excellent. Any Marxist might practically subscribe to that. Firth was a great man, though his greatness was not appreciated by the general public. He was essentially a historian's historian, as some poets are the choice of their brother poets. If one O.M. were reserved for historians, no doubt in his lifetime he would have been the choice of his confreres, as Yeats would be of the poets. For all that, the real patron saint of the modern English historian is not an Oxford, but a Cambridge man, Maitland ; and Mr. Williams' book should have begun with him. For it is his work that is so characteristic of the modern age, with its emphasis on the specialist, the technical ; and he was concerned—who more profoundly, or with more originality and genius ?—with the analysis and description of a whole society.
The selection in Mr. Williams' third section might well have been bettered, too ; we could easily have spared Belloc, Guedalla, Walter Raleigh, Fortescue and some others for more Tawney, and something from Edward Armstrong, J. L. Myres, Stenton, £ollingwoad, the Webbs, not to mention some representative passages from younger writers. But no doubt every reader of an anthology is convinced that he could have improved on the anthologist.
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