Gesta Dei per Anglos
MR. BRYANT'S book is the first of two volumes on the history and achievements of the English people during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. This first volume brings the story to the treaty of Amiens. (It is, by the way, an interesting fact that the London publishers, normally a shrewd race of men; believed that this peace would last long enough for them to sell large numbers of new Continental guide-books.) Mr. Bryant has written his book for two reasons: (1) his own historical studies in the nineteenth century have led him back to the critical years between 1793 and 18x5, and (2) he has been impressed, as every one who knows the facts must be impressed, by the similarity between the general pattern of events during these years, and the pattern of events of which we have been and are eyewitnesses.
This combination of the motive of scientific enquiry with that of practical patriotism is not new ; Halcluyt is a case in point. In the work chosen as the motto of the great documentary collection Mon umenta Germaniae historica, sanctus amor patriae dat animum. The motto was, however, a dangerous one for German historians ; the emotional and patriotic motive soon began to distort the scientific motive. It may, indeed, be said that a historian cannot write dispassionately about the past until he has trained himself to think dispassionately about the present. Dispassionate thought about the present need not mean indifference to present moral or political issues, but it must mean a scientific approach to these issues.
Mr. Bryant, at his best, • has this scientific detachment without losing his sanctus amor patriae. He is most interesting, and, at
times, brilliant in his account of sea-fights and of the officers and men who took part in them. Although he is less sure in dealing with continental land warfare, and relies too much upon the judge- ments of the late Sir J. Fortescue, his accounts of campaigns in which British troops took part are well above the average of the narratives in historical textbooks. The general treatment of politics and politicians is vivid and interesting, and the planning of the book is good. In spite of these merits, the book is a little disappointing. The reason for this disappointment may be that Mr. Bryant has- been in too much of a hurry. His style is affected by a certain feverish- ness and straining after "good copy." Thus: "A self-appointed committee of ignorant journeymen, passing omniscient resolutions on far-reaching issues . . ." Or, "He saw with the perception of genius that the corrupt, pleasure-loving capital was not yet ready for his sway. . . terror-purged Paris could not yet brook the yoke of the Caesars."
Such faults of writing disappear in those pages where Mr. Bryant is master of his material. The trouble is that he has not absorbed all this material. He is not strong on the European side of the period • his account of the French revolution is too highly coloured. He tends to leave out tough and difficult questions, and to -con- centrate on minor picturesqueness. There are times when his vision of Merrie England reads too much like one of Lord John Manners' dreams of "our old nobility." Mr. Bryant, indeed, exaggerates the culture of the English upper classes of the last two decades of the eighteenth century, just as he overdraws the picture of a French absentee nobility. He is also too happy about the life of the English agricultural poor in the years before 1760. Rural and "unenclosed " England was not wholly composed of snug cottages, each with a garden "warm with peonies and rambler roses." (Incidentally, Mr. Bryant must mean briar roses ; rambler roses, as such, are surely not found in England before the nineteenth century.)
A short review of Mr. Bryanes book may seem to dwell overmuch on these faults of execution, but excellences of the book speak for themselves, and will be obvious to many readers.. Nevertheless, the cult of " Old and Tine" is not without risks foi a historian.
E. L. WOOD WARD.
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