The Genesis of Europe
By PROFESSOR J. L. MYRES
HERE is a history for historians, as well as entrancing narrative for the general reader. It ,takes us, in the volume published now, from the prehistoric threshold of European history to the
new perspectives" opened by oceanic exploration, itself enforced in a historical emergency by the rivalry of Genoa with Venice and by the Turkish capture of Constantinople. And this is to be followed by two more, with pause at the French Revolution, though the preface suggests that eventu ally the "great divide" may seem to have been reached with the applications of steam and electricity, or (more compre- hensively) with the philanthropy and science" of the nine- teenth century.
This, however, is no panegyric of" our boasted civilization " ; still less is it an evolutionary sketch of the "ascent of man." Progress there has been, but "progress is not a law of nature." Like Gibbon, inspired by the ruinous Forum to write of a "Decline and Fall," and like Herodotus, aware that "man's well-being nowise stays at the same point," Dr. Fisher's philosophy of history accepts as the "one safe rule for the historian" the "play of the contingent and the unforeseen" in the development of human destinies. On the cosmical or geographical side, he might have elaborated this notion further. What has been characterized in a recent instance as the "per- sonality of Britain" hardly emerges among the disastrous or remedial personalities of Europe's great men, or the vivid regional types ; Mediterranean man "athirst for colour, imagery and consolation" (p. 90), the "Teutonic world" (p.110) and the Norseman (p. 177). In the graphic comparison between monarchy in France and in England there is hardly a hint how the physical configuration of either country favoured or retarded it. "Nature had placed Venice in a key position between east and west " ; but how ? Even London's situation is taken for granted, and that of Paris, too, except for a couple of lines on p. 209. The sketch inaps—even those of Switzerland and of Spain—are at once historical dis- tributions and geographical riddles.
Econamic and social factors, too, though they are indicated parcn t'aetically in vivid phrases, remain, only less literally than geographical, in the background ; except where the play of the contingent and the unforeseen "—for example, in the Black Death—detonates explosive elements and makes England's education vernacular, its architecture perpendicular, and its farm hands wage-earners (p. 320).
On the other hand, among " the contingent and the un- foreseen" stand eminent the great men of Europe ; in the list (for example) of thaw who have taken hand in the fight between Christianity and Islam, from Saladin to Mustapha Kemal, from Urban II to Venizelos. After a necessary and salutary phase of generalizations, political, social, and ethno- graphic, history has indeed returned to refresh itself in bio- graphy, more liberally applied to interpret the momentum remit, the " trigger-effect " of drastic exceptional individuals. And it is their frequency which Characterizes European peoples, whose "intellectual daring and tenacity is no racial or regional phenomenon, but a fundamental attribute of man, which only man-made inhibitions have enfettered where it has failed to emerge." Man, otherwise, "born free but everywhere in chains " has found among the " children of Hellas " through t he centuries the persona! liberty of self-expression, of which the complement, the "golden rule" of Hellene and Hebrew alike, is respect for the self-expression of" my neighbour " ; "the invisible ties of goodwill and good humour," as Dr.
A History of Europe. By the Rt. Hon. H. A. L. Fisher, P.C., D.C.L., F.B.A., F.R.S. Vol. I: Ancient and Mediaeval. (Eyre and Spottiswoode. 188.)
Fisher puts it (p. 86)—in the prosecution of common ends, on terms of loyalty to a leader, and mutual help to achieve his ends, and our own. No other continent or culture teems so with leadership and fellowships The portraits, here, of Caesar, of Charlemagne, of the greater Popes, are vivid examples of this outlook and its technique ; and a glance at Dr. Fisher's index (though it is not quite complete) shows the range or what one ever feels to be his own historical acquaint- ance. His personages are in the full sense characters in the pageant (he will hardly let us call it the drama) of history.
If it be a prime function of historians to present that pageant and stage its cardinal tableaux, here indeed is history, intensive and memorable. Out of long teaching experience, the literary discipline imposed on, as well as by, an editor of the Home University Library, and intercourse, administrative and confidential, with men of his own time who have "made history," Dr. Fisher emerges an alert and critical spectator of the long sequence of emergencies and extemporizations, which are the history of Europe ; Olympian occasionally in his detachment from the follies and weakness of important persons, and here and there almost provoked to say "look what they've gone and done," of squanderers, homicides, and persecutors. Not infrequently we are presented with a glimpse of what might have been, if Gothic rule had not been destroyed in Italy (p. 131) ; if Leo the Isaurian had failed to hold Constantinople against the Moslem (p. 143); if the Maid of Norway had not died at sea (p. 310).
, Skilful comparisons save space, while they signalize contrasts and alternatives. Such chapter-headings are frequent. Sometimes, however, the main narrative runs homogeneous and direct, in the "Dawn of Hellas," "The Germanic Invas- ions," "The Foundations of English Government," and the remarkable estimate of the Catholic Mind," incarnate in minds so different as those of Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante. Occasionally a chapter-heading covers more than it says : the commercial incentives to exploration, for example, fall under "Municipal Growth " ; the Friars under "Innocent III." Some of the greatest moments need fewest words : " Islam " hardly occupies eight pages, the Roman Church" less than seven ; the twelfth-century renaissance, Universities and all, only five.
To write the history of Europe at all, within such limits as these, is a marvel of compression. Yet there is an amplitude of scale and freedom of movement here, which comes from strict selection, skilful arrangement, and a sure sense of proportion. The stage is never crowded ; noises of battle and debate are "heard off " ; quotations, even the most laconic, are rare enough to be notable.
It is naturally to the treatment of topics which are still burning questions that we turn for test-pieces of a historian's work. Race, for Dr. Fisher, "has never entered as a unifying factor into European history," but rather, a "continent of energetic mongrels" has "an inheritance of thought and achievement and religious aspirations." Christianity offered " a new test, a new principle of organization for European society " : do we not still pray, some of us, for deliverance from "Jews, Turks, infidels and (alas I) heretics," the pagani of a social order which we regard as urbane? But ft was the power, rather than the goodness, of Christ, on which early Christians leaned, when the world seemed ruinous, and the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Europe, however, has not foundered, and it has "refused to be unified," though "every race has made its distinct and specific contribution." And " that is why Europe is interesting."
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