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which, while ludicrously failing to promote social contentment, imposes a grievous burden upon productive industry, and offers to all political parties a terrible temptation to wholesale bribery of the electorate.

The Commissioners under the Act of 1834 earned no popularity; not being politicians, they could afford to dispense with it; they had, however, the satisfaction of knowing that by courageous persistence in well-doing they restored to the agricultural workers of southern England not only their moral dignity, but their economic independence.

To us, their work might well be an example and an inspiration; but before we can apply an appropriate remedy, we must make sure, as they did, that our diagnosis of the disease is correct. To that end the facts must not merely be ascertained, but must be subjected to scientific analysis, and no other body than a Royal Commission can accomplish that task.*

J. A. R. MARRIOTT

*The author of this article has deliberately abstained from complicating his argument, by any reference to the events of the past year.

THE WRITING OF NINETEENTH CENTURY

HISTORY

Palmerston. By PHILIP GUEDALLA. Benn. 1926.

IN

recent years there has been a welcome tendency for those who study history professionally to write English which the unacademic may enjoy, and for those who regard history as an art to pay more careful attention to the results of research. But the old quarrel between literary and scientific history is not dead, and a book like Mr. Guedalla's "Palmerston " warns us that it may be opportune once again to consider the current tendencies of historical writing. Mr. Guedalla is the first modern historian to attempt a full-length portrait of Palmerston. His life, as Mr. Guedalla says, "was the life of England and, to a large extent, of Europe in the last sixteen years of the eighteenth and the first sixty-five of the nineteenth centuries." In attempting, therefore, to write a life of Palmerston "in perspective," Mr. Guedalla has written an elaborate political history of almost a century of change, and it may be worth while to consider his methods and to appraise his idea of the function of history.

I

The historical controversy may not be familiar to a wider public. In England it began with Seeley who, like Freeman, his contemporary professor at Oxford, regarded history mainly as material for political science. "While scientific in its method, history should pursue a practical object," he wrote, “it should not merely gratify the reader's curiosity about the past, but modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future. Now, if this maxim be sound, the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral." With this purpose in view he bade us "break the drowsy spell of narrative: set yourself problems, ask yourself questions." "History," he declared, "fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics." These remarks roused Augustine Birrell to a delicious fury. "In this grim sentence," he wrote in " Obiter Dicta,' we read the dethronement of Clio. The poor thing must forswear her father's house, her tuneful sisters, the invocation of the past, the worship of the dramatist, and keep her

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terms at the University, where, if she is studious and steady, and avoids literary companions (which ought not to be difficult) she may hope some day to be received into the Royal Society as a second-rate science."

Undeterred by this, Professor Bury went one better than his predecessor. In his inaugural address at Cambridge, he argued that history was not "the handmaid of social science," but was to be itself a science "neither more nor less." His whole conception was a larger one than Seeley's. He never made the mistake of thinking that State activity was alone important, or that history was only concerned with the external actions of government. He looked forward to the time when historical laws might be deduced from the record of every part of human history. He had none of that limitation of outlook which, Mr. Gooch tells us, Bryce noted in the work of Freeman, who "regarded history as not only primarily but almost exclusively a record of political events. Past politics, he used to say, were present history. He was not interested in religion, philosophy, social or economic conditions, and he thought it strange that anyone should be." History, then, to Bury was not a guide to politicians but a future science with fully established laws deduced from material laboriously collected "in the faith that a complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end.” So Bury could talk without a smile of the time when the "ultimate history comes to be written," and prophesy the day when "there will no longer be diverse schools of history," but a single science.

Mr. G. M. Trevelyan was provoked to reply in “Clio, a Muse." History, Mr. Trevelyan argued, could never be a science, not only because the evidence was too fragmentary and incomplete, but because with human beings as material there can be no laws of general application. "You cannot," he declared, "dissect a mind and if you could, you could not argue thence about other minds. You can know nothing scientifically of the twenty million minds of a nation. The few facts we know may or may not be typical of the rest. Therefore, in the most important part of its business, history is not a scientific deduction, but an imaginative guess at the most likely generalizations." History, unlike the historian, never repeats itself and even if we could discover any authentic sequences of cause and effect in the past, they would not necessarily have any relevance to future situations

It is probable that Professor Bury, who has himself in fact sometimes ventured upon excellent, even if unscientific, generalizations, would put his case with rather less certainty to-day and that Mr. Trevelyan would also modify his objections in view of the modern efforts to "dissect a mind " and discover the laws of human behaviour in many fields. His argument, indeed, would deny the name of science to all but the most "exact," and the number of exact sciences is perhaps not so numerous as we used to think. But the positive side of Mr. Trevelyan's argument was more effective. The historian, he said, had an educational function, not in the sense of offering solutions for social and political problems, but in creating a capability for understanding these problems by extending knowledge of human behaviour, widening social sympathy, and awakening an idealism which is not sentimental or falsely based. A main part of the historian's task, therefore, was to learn to write so that an unacademic public would understand his teaching. The world, he believed, would be incomparably poorer if historians ceased to consider the art of narrative essential to their task, and failed in each generation so to look afresh at the familiar tale of the past that it again kindled the imagination and fired the spirit to new endeavour.

Many things have combined to bring back the literary history whose demise Mr. Trevelyan mourned. To-day England has not only the research-workers who lay the foundations of scholarship, but also a number of historians, still small perhaps, among whom Mr. Trevelyan himself ranks high, who offer to a wider public history which has literary merit and does not fear to hazard imaginative generalization. And just as there was a middle-class public, interested in history and public affairs, ready to enjoy Macaulay on the seventeenth century and Thackeray on the eighteenth, so to-day there is a more extended public awaiting the historian of the nineteenth century.

There are naturally many ways of attempting to meet this demand. The task of writing the history of the nineteenth century is the most formidable one the historian has ever attempted. Mr. Strachey goes so far as to say that:

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historianignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with

a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity. Guided by these considerations, he has attempted" to illustrate rather than to explain," and through the medium of biography to illuminate a single movement or to preserve for us the artistic value of a human character. In this task he is likely to find many imitators, but few rivals.

II

Mr. Guedalla's methods and objects are altogether different, and there seems to be no truth in the suggestion that he is in any way either a pupil or an imitator of Mr. Strachey. On the contrary, he has adopted the direct method of scrupulous narration against which Mr. Strachey warns us. He explains the objects of his book as follows: "I have always felt that there is a muse, no less than a method, of history; and using (though I hope concealing) the full apparatus of research and documents, I have done my best to paint his portrait, to catch something of the movement of his world, and to bring back the dead without sacrifice either of accuracy or vividness." The magnitude of the task of presenting Palmerston as the main figure in a political history of England and Europe, and at the same time painting his personal portrait is, as he says, so great that no modern historian has ever before dared to undertake it. If the attempt is not successful, the primary reason is probably that Mr. Strachey is right when he declares that no historian, however gifted, can comprehend such an epoch in a single narrative.

Mr. Guedalla has added to his difficulties by a lack of selective capacity both in style and in matter. The essence of Mr. Strachey's style is its economy: his adjectives are rare, the machinery of writing moves silently, the effect is gained by the VOL. 245. NO. 499.

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