BOOKS AND WRITERS
IN the preface to his new History of England* the Chichele 'Professor of Modern History at Oxford refers to J. R. Green's Short History of the English People, which • first appeared just over three-quarters of a century ago. The book, Mr. Feiling reminds us, is a narrative ; and no narrative, he suggests, has ever taken its place. The title
was chosen deliberately. Green's object was to show the progress of popular life in its great developments. He is generally regarded as our first social historian, the first to bring together, in pictures full of life, subjects which hitherto had been treated independently. He lived spaciously, thinking and dreaming about the past. " It was from him,'; his friend Freeman wrote, " that I first learned to look on a town as a whole, with a kind of personal history." He was an Oxford boy who loved the city better than the university.
He was sure that he was born a Mercian. Freeman used to say that if he had been born in Abingdon many pages of his history would have been written in a different spirit.
And yet how wide Green's interests really were and how eagerly, in those infant days of academic historical teaching and writing, he looked forward to developments in Oxford, " the fittest spot for the foundation of a sound school of historical inquiry." So he had written in 1867 in a long critical appreciation of Stubbs's inaugural lecture And we have Bishop Creighton's testimony to the part which he took in the foundation, not only of the Oxford Historical Society, but also of the English Historical Review. " Both owe their existence to his suggestion."
Green closed his history, as most of us fifty years ago ended our reading, at the year 1815. Mr. Feiling thinks that his pen faltered after he had reached the revolution of 1688. In Mr. Feiling's book the emphasis is different, " on the period within which Britain became a great Power." He has " tried to indicate the changed outlook of modern scholarship." His book is a narrative, not a commentary. It is very long-1,120 pages of continuous text with- out a single footnote—and it costs thirty shillings It contains maps, genealogical tables, lists of books for further reading, arranged according to its chapters (pp. 1,121-35) and a full index which comprises nearly one hundred pages in smaller type. It is not a text- book, nor a hand-book, nor, a class-book, but a book, a mental and spiritual achievement, the work of a teacher who has won the affection and esteem of many generations of undergraduates, includ- ing many who have risen high in various kinds of careers, and of a writer and scholar of distinction. Receptive of what is new, his narrative gives us history as he has come to see it.
Mr. Feiling reveals astonishing powers of endurance. A book written at intervals during many years, with no immediate centre_of absorbing interest, about the history of a country from beginning to end, puts the writer to a greater strain than he undergoes in the critical examination of a limited theme. Parts of this History read less smoothly than the rest, but on the whole the effort is sustained, the tension of the style is rarely relaxed. " Tension," I think, is the right word for the impression which this concentrated exercise in a high-Spirited endeavour makes upon the reader. As the story becomes more intricate, every paragraph conveys a closely-knit series of facts and ideas, nearly every adjective is charged with
deliberate meaning. The two short chapters on Henry VIII, for example, as full of vigour and colour as a moving picture of tapestries, read like the distillation of a treatise. All is movement and incident, with little pause for explanation. Effects, not causes, results rather than the hidden processes, are the staple of a narrative in which every aspect of social and political life is represented in the same single dimension. Such is the general impression, but some chapters and etages here and there allow us to relax and look around over a landscape which is luminous rather than bright. In 1857, when Freeman was one of the examiners in the new school of law and modern history at Oxford, the examination statute neither defined the periods of history to be chosen nor prescribed
• A History of England. By Keith Felling. (Macmillan. 30s.) any particular books. The examiners issued a notice intended to remedy this omission The Vice-Chancellor and Proctors objected.
An association called the Protestant Alliance protested because Lingard was recommended in preference to Hume for the study of English history, a fact it described as " one of painful importance."
Whether painful or not, it is memorable. Lingard was a con- scientious scholar. The fifth edition of his history, which he had supervised shortly before his death in 1851, runs to ten volumes. The appearance of Mr. Feiling's book invites comparison between the state of things in 1857 and in 1950. Nowadays parts of a comprehensive history of England are allotted to various authors. The volumes are studied separately in academic circles and are read outside them, but rarely as a whole. Some last longer than others. Lingard's book, however, had many -substantial pre- decessors, from the days when Sir Richard Baker's big Chronicles (first published in 1643) lay in manor houses and flattered the family susceptibilities of the great. I have one called Raymond's New Universal and Impartial History of . England, a folio of 600 pages or 1,200 columns, ending abruptly with the year 1785. There must have been a demand for these big books. They were written to satisfy the curiosity of the politically minded, such as those who found a genuine inspiration in the anonymous Historical Essay on the English Constitution (1771).
From the earliest times the English have been historically minded, and by the end of the sixteenth century the historical interests of the practical man of affairs,'the squires and lawyers and merchants, acquired intensity. These men wished to satisfy their instincts with something better than legend, something more truly based than the history in drama and poetry. They wished to justify their social and political opinions and prejudices, but, especially as local patriots, they wished also to know more about their past. The foundations of English historical scholarship were laid when, between 1586 and 1607, Camden and his cronies met in their society of antiquaries " at Darby House, where the Herald's office is kept," to study English history and institutions and antiquities. And we can learn from the correspondence of Sir William Dugdale, who had his tentacles out in nearly every shire, how wide and deep the feeling for local history was in seventeenth-century England. This was the great age, but the tradition has never died. L R. .Green's boyish passion for the city of Oxford was one of its finer blossoms, but it still flowers, often in the most unlikely places.
Indeed, we might do well to elicit what is already in our children before we try to inject historical knowledge into them, to begin with their interest in their own surroundings, however grim or drab these may be, and then try to help them to appreciate a wider life on which they dimly realise that they depend. Unhappily, since Green's time, the barrier between the modern electorate and the historians has stiffened. It is hard to say why this should be, for never have people on both sides tried so hard to break the barrier down, and interest in our history from the earliest earthworks to the social implications of total warfare is widely diffused. I can merely suggest three or four reasons. The loss of a conscious sense of historical continuity in so many is the most important ; but there are others. One is the professionalism of history, in some ways necessary, though historians need not be so proud of it as they sometimes seem to be. Another is the misguided idea that one of the noblest and most inscrutable of humane studies can be prescribed as a sort of social medicine. A third is that the teachers in schools are driven so hard. The ordinary well-meaning teacher is confronted by a mass of learning which he has no time to touch and a social duty to which he cannot pin his faith. He is also distracted by a complicated scholastic mechanism.
In the meanwhile, Mr. Feiling has placed at his disposal in one volume a full and most carefully wrought story of the whole of English history. It demands close attention from its readers, and I have no doubt that it will find many readers It will arouse much
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