If Only
If. Lapses into Imaginary History. Edited by T. C. Squire. (Longman. - 21s.) IF there were in this country a proper and traditional School of Historical Disputation, the theme " If Cleopatra's nose had been an inch shorter . . ." would be part of its recognized course of training. The opening and the following arguments on both sides would be scheduled ; we should know what assumption the disputants were allowed to make in the matter of the mutability of history, and our only concern would be to observe how brilliantly, on this assured basis, they worked out their several themes. But, alas (perhaps)! there is no such school, and when the reviewer takes up a volume like Mr. Squire's handsomely produced If, his first reflection is that the contributors are not quite agreed upon their assumptions.
Roughly, there are two possible attitudes for those who would alter the course of history. There is the attitude of the historian, led, though not in this book, by Professor G. M. Trevelyan, who evaluates the forces that were at work in the period which he knows, and then considers seriously to what extent their effect might have been changed if one of the " accidents. of history" had fallen out the other way ; and there is the attitude of the journalist, who, gloriously unhampered by consideration of the deeper forces, happily constructs a fantasia on the theme " If Mary Stuart had been a plain woman." For amusement, no doubt, the journalist scores every time Witness Father Knox, whose contribution is entitled " If the General Strike had Succeeded," the implication being that, if the General Strike had succeeded, England, in June, 1930, would have been enjoying the benefits of a complete and rigid Soviet system. Not even the most optimistic Socialist, and certainly not the historian, believes that the success of the general strike would have been followed by a Soviet regime ; but, granted his fantastical assumption, Father. Knox has produced a beautiful and touching picture of the Times adapting itself to the new conditions. The leader page, with its list of Articles, Illustrations, and Correspondence—" Distressed Mineowners " (the Mayor of Cardiff), " A Parallel from Horace " (Headmaster of Bybridge), " Naval Parity with Holland " (Admiral Binstead), " A Cow Sanctuary in Essex " (Mr. Holland Bathurst), &c. &c.—is a joy in itself. So also Mr. Guedalla, revolving the thought, " If the Moors in Spain had Won," presents a sketch of the subsequent history of Granada, including a page from Baedeker's Guide, which can he guaranteed to amuse anybody ; and if the survival of Granada seems to have involved the destruction of Italy, so that Shelley is drowned at Almeria and the Brownings reside many years in the Rue Sidi Okba, nobody minds.
The historian, however, is in a greater difficulty, as M. Maurois has found, because the deeper he looks the fewer
fields he finds for the light-hearted operations of chance Starting to consider "If Lows XVI had Shown an Atom of Firmness," M. Maurois can easily remove the French Revolu- tion from the map of history, but thereafter is left wondering.
" The celestial historian," says his Archangel, " whose task it is to compare these possibilities soon discovers that the history of human societies, viewed over a fairly long period, is always more or less the same. The facts- change ; on one hypothesis there is a little more suffering, on another a little more order, but a hundred years sooner or a hundred years later, things reach the same point.. . ."
This, I venture to suggest, is the only possible attitude for the genuine historian, which means, in effect, that in contri- buting to a symposium of this sort he must either set his imagination to work on a little-charted region of history, as
Mr. H. A. L. Fisher has done very charmingly in a dream of an escaped Napoleon dominating South America, or must con- centrate on one small event, like Mr. Milton Wardman, who argues quite convincingly that much of Lincoln's fame rests on the manner of his death. The exception, perhaps, in this book is Mr. Churchill's brilliant essay on what might haye happened if Lee had won Gettysburg.
For the rest, we have Mr. Nicolson being gratuitously
unkind to Byron, Mr. Ludwig a little heavy on the father of Wilhelm II, and Mr. Belloc speculating, as ever, on the fortunes of France without the Revolution—which seem, somewhat surprisingly, to involve the existence of four American republics. And Mr. Chesterton . . . Mr. Chesterton, uniting in matrimony Mary Queen of Scots with Don John of Austria, produces an essay so infinitely Chestertonian as to create in me the deep conviction that it is spurious, a parody from the editor's hand—the more so as Mr. Squire's own contribution is not worthy of his gifts. It begins with Adam and Eve ; it continues with Original Sin and ladies in the power of dragons ; it takes in Islam, William of Orange, Milton, the National Debt, the Wheat Corner and the Merger, with even a reference to Prohibition ; only Birth-control seems missing. And it is full of sentences like these : " The Romance of the North could really have replied to the Romance of the South, the rose crying to the laurel ; and she who had changed songs with Renard, and he who had fought side by side with Cervantes, might truly have met by the very tide and current of that time. It was as if a great wind had turned northwards, bearing a gallant ship ; and far away to the North a lady opened her lattice upon the sea."
If that is not pure and fine parody, then I have never seen parody. One complaint at the end. This is an amusing and readable book. But those of us who are old enough may remember a little yellow work with the same title, costing one shilling instead of twenty-one, and decorated by a master of mischief.
What, in this distinguished galere, has become of George
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