What is History ?
IIv BONAMY BOBiwv.
CLIO is a muse, and most of us probably regard history as an art. It is, indeed, difficult to conceive it as being anything else. For you cannot, as a historian, isolate certain fractions of the universe, repeat experiments so as to ensure accurate observation, as the laboratory scientist can do ; nor even, as the zoologist has, have you got hundreds of the same kind of thing to observe, even if you may have a number of things of the same name. The republic of Sparta bears only a faint resemblance to that of Liberia. History never repeats itself exactly. Science, moreover, takes account of all relevant factors, but this history cannot do ; its material is both too vast and too complex, and the historian is bound to select. Once you have selection you have art. And further, once you have selected, you have to present your objects from a certain point of view, for merely to huddle together a collection of objects, is, as Lytton Strachey remarked, to present n heap of sawdust—and then nobody will read you. The moralist, however, need not despair; there is truth in art, though no work of art can tell the whole truth ; the shy lady is seen from one aspect only, and we can learn what she looks like by seeing her from several points of view. At the same time she wears a veil—perhaps, like Isis, many veils—so which she clings so pertinaciously that we can never be sure we see her plain ; in other words, we can never be certain we have all the facts.
Nevertheless there is ,a great deal to be said for trying to regard history as a science. It may be possible to draw certain conclusions how things usually happen : " history teaches " may not, after all, be such a hollow phrase ; but, it is Mr. Taylor's contention, few historians have written honestly; they have been too much concerned to show that'history teaches what they would like her to teach, and have often falsified facts, sometimes deliberately. They have, for instance, set out with the idea that liberty is the supreme good ; but " Inductive observation shows that to manifest exaggerated concern for the liberty of the individual is a certain method of ensuring defeat . . . '
and war is the natural condition of affairs between States. (This last is an unpalatable truth, though it is to be feared that no unprejudiced person can deny it.) But it is almost impossible not to have some sort of idea of what history teaches before you begin to say what tlie instruction is :
" History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, ' Guides us by vanities ..."
ConSider, for instance, the events in England between, say, 1630 and 1688. They can be regarded as a religious conflict, or as a struggle fought by the middle classes for commercial supremacy, or as a wrestling match between two metaphysical entities known as Constitutional Government and Absolutism, or as a fight for power among individuals ; which you regard it as will depend upon your temperament.
Or take Mr. Taylor himself as a historian of historians, in this extremely stimulating book,* stimulating because though one would wish to agree with him, and perhaps in the main does, one wishes on almost every page to raise an objection. His thesis is that historians in their desire to be "educative," to show man as he ought to be rather than as he is, have twisted truth so that the somewhat repulsive jade (beauty is truth, indeed !) appears lovely. But, it is to be feared, Mr. Taylor has selected as flagrantly as any of his bugbears.
* History as a Science. By Hugh Taylor. (Methuen. 7s. 6d.) Sociology, he tells us, has been as false as history, as " educa- tive," and has been led astray by the analogy of the " organ- ism." But among sociologists he mentions only Spencer and Comte ; it is true be gives a good word to Maitland, but there is no reference to Maine, while the recent ones are ignored— Rend Worms, Durldmiln, Gumplowicz and the Hammonds, to light on only a few of the growing number who approximate history to science, examining facts in as detached a way as possible. And then Mr. Taylor points to Macchiavelli as the one inductive historian who faced facts unafraid ; but then, as Sir Richard Lodge made plain in his Presidential address, if ever there was an " educative " historian it was Macchiavelli ; he wanted to educate Lorenzo to a very definite end ; and besides, he too was wrong ; he completely ignored the spiritual aspect of the Papacy. And is it not a little strange in a book which deplores the absence of the inductive historian to And no single mention of the name of Karl Marx ?—or even Buckle ? Nor, possibly, is Mr. Taylor quite fair to the people whom he attacks. After all, when Dr. Gooch says that " the key to the study of history is the unity of civilization," is not this precisely what Mr. Taylor himself is saying, namely that similarities enable us to draw conclusions ? But no ; Mr. Taylor says this is merely " educational " ; and when he protests against Professor Trevelyan's admission that " the imaginative guess at the most likely generalizations " is the utmost history can hope for, is it not after all Professor Trevelyan who exhibits the more scientific spirit—a skepsis
Nor is it by any means clear that Mr. Taylor himself is not " educative," and the sub-title of his book might be " or how to crush or defeat revolution." Certainly there is a great deal of wholesome if disagreeable truth in what he says, notably when he claims that atrocities in a revolution have nothing to do with the previous oppression. As a pioneer in crowd-psychology he knows that the human being let loose under mob conditions is a very inhuman beast, and that, like Dryden's type-hero, he " looks back amazed at what he under- went," or made other people undergo. But when he claims, following Mrs. Webster (he has, of course, no difficulty in destroying Carlyle's smoky if impressive work of art on the French Revolution), that the revolution was largely the work of " agitators " (blessed word !), he forgets Burke's dictum that agitators are not a cause but a symptom. He is right again in suggesting that revolutions do not take place when the people are most abased, but when they are beginning to feel their power, an observation made by Thorold Rogers.
Nor is it uncertain what it is that Mr. Taylor wants to " educate " us to do ; he calls for action by the order-loving middle classes to check revolution if the government will not do it for them. Not that he is an impenitent die-hard. He welcomes an admixture of Socialism in the modern State, and his teaching is by no means that what has always been must always be. Some of the so-called laws of nature are modifi- able, he rightly says ; man's mind, man's desires, are also part of nature ; in fact, as Huxley showed in his famous Romans lecture, the ethical process and the cosmic process are opposed to one another. And Mr. Taylor's main plea is incontro- vertible: "A rich and promising harvest awaits the use of the inductive method in history." It is also true that most historians, at all events the most read of them, are educative, witness Macaulay. Certainly the book should be read and pondered.
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