A Gift for Schoolmasters
English Historians. Selected passages compiled by Bertram Newman. (O.U.P., 18s.) THIS is a collection of short 'extracts from hist°r; ians writing in English from the beginning of tb sixteenth century to the present day. Its main les
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son, a melancholy one, is the deterioration in the r' style of English historians after reaching its Pea" in the century and a half which separate Clarea• don from Macaulay. This anthology has no ip apparent object except to illustrate changes style, so we may profitably use it to consider reasons for the deterioration. Sir Walter Ralcig, may give us a clue. 'The end and scope of all hies tory,' he wrote, is 'to teach by example of timed past such wisdom as may guide our desires an actions. . . So long as historians believed that their art had this moral purpose, there was a dignity, a Purr,se in their writing. It was not 'literature' : they wr,°' because they had something to say wh' importance was recognised. In these days insWrYit is not regarded as a source of moral maxims• sharp distinction has arisen between professional" historians, many of whom could not care less hod they slop their conclusions down on paper, an the 'literary' historians, who have nothing in P3„,r. ticular to say and say it very well. The rare exce tion is a Tout, a Tawney, a Namier—all ,,Y worthily represented here—who have a messa5 of such importance that it seems to wring a stub out of them. But the run-of-the-road Book Cs° Choice historians (here set cheek by jowl with the great masters of the past) appear pitifully banal in their thought, just because they are so concerned to write finely. It is, of course, not fair ve4 to set the twenty-eight twentieth-century histor- ians here represented against Gibbon and Froude. But even lesser eighteenth-century historians excluded from this anthology—Mrs. Macaulay, saY, or Horace Walpole—could express them- selves with a dignity and convinced seriousness of Purpose too often lacking in their successors of Comparable rank.
Many of the familiar historical legends are here. Schoolmasters will find the book an invaluable source for precis and Latin proses for many years to come.
CHRISTOPHER HILL
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