The Historian's Mind
Conflicts. By L. B. Namier. (Macmillan. 8s. tkl.) THE difference between the historian and the historiographer should be so obvious as to need no new emphasis. Yet in these times when technical ability—never better taught nor more easily ac- quired than it is today—frequently passes for the real thing, it is a distinction important to make. Important because history is not merely the chief fount of propaganda, but of knowledge, experience, and practical morality. The scholar, however exact, whose sense of his subject stops short at the mere technique of discovering, assimilating and displaying the facts, is not truly a historian. The true historian must be both philosopher and man of the world. Without worldly experience he will not know how to assess his evidence ; without philosophy he will not sec how to use it. Only by keeping the balance even between scholarship and practical knowledge, between subjective and .objective truth, can the historian save himself from being the dangerous, if unwitting, instrument of the politician and propagandist, and become an educational force in a world which stands in need of historical education above all.
Although the subjects treated in Professor Namier's collection of essays, Conflicts, are almost all political and modern, it is the quality of historical thinking which illuminates them throughout. They cover the Versailles Treaty, the fearful problem of Germany, Zionism, and the Jews, the prelude to the present war, the problems of modern government in democracy, and the party system. Judgement and perspicacity have become synonymous with Professor Namier, and he does not touch one subject without laying it bare from the inmost structure to the superficialities in which it has been clothed. He not only knows the inner reasons, the bony skeleton of every matter, but he can show why and how the accretions and superficies have been attached. He writes from within and from without. Moreover, although all that he says is free from passion, it is sustained by deep and genuine feeling. Passion, indeed, as the inactive submission to gusts of emotion, is wholly foreign to his mind; but in feeling, in the capacity to create emotion from within and for a reasoned cause, he is strong. One has only to set one of these essays against the average production of a professional political writer, to see how shoddy, ramshackle and ill-furnished are the minds of our political journalists. Genuine emotion is betrayed by faulty argument, and superficially apt modern commentary is shakily upreared on a basis of undigested facts scrambled together out of reference books. But Professor Namier has all the facts modern and ancient, the causes and the effects, clear before him, and has but to expose them to the fierce contemplation of a mind disciplined by detailed scholarship and widened by long observation and experience. This explains the by now almost legendary accuracy of his political fore- casts.
Where all are excellent it is superfluous to select. Every reader will choose his own preferences. In Symmetry and Repetition Pro- fessor Namier says all that really needs to be said on the influence of history on political action. His section on the Jews is the most lucid and yet one of the briefest expositions of this perpetually exasperated problem. In The Missing Generation he diagnoses spiritual emptiness and lassitude as thz disease of the inter-war years, rather than the physical absence of leaders. " The disen- ehantment of victory is far more paralysing than the bitterness of defeat." Only one essay dates from before the war. It is on the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and Professor Namier has done well to include it. " There can be no real peace between Germany and the Russian Revolution," he wrote in March, 1918, "and the governors of Germany know full well that if the Revolution survives in Russia it will vanquish them in the end." The note of prophecy, and of warning, is never aggressive in these calmly written essays.
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