choice of a single right word; criticism is conveyed in a phrase, and irony by the lift of an eyebrow. Mr. Guedalla expects less of his reader and gains his effect by colour, emphasis and repetition, rather than by selection. The continuous flow of brilliant phraseology becomes exhausting. Many of his best effects are spoilt by repetition. Let us take an example. Palmerston's early career at the War Office during the latter part of the Napoleonic wars has hitherto only been told in fragments. Mr. Guedalla rightly brings out the contrast between Palmerston's absorption in the petty squabbles of departmental business at home and the reality of the soldier's war on the Continent. He writes: "Late in the year he established the great principle that the widow of a chaplain-general should be pensioned at the rate appropriate to the widow of a colonel. Somewhere across the world Napoleon hung like a thundercloud on the edge of Russia. There was a faint tap of distant guns. The point seems established and it was worth making. But exactly the same contrast made in the same way— the contrast between Palmerston's trivial occupations and the thunder, lightning and sudden death abroad-loses its force when Mr. Guedalla makes it half a dozen times in as many pages.

In his effort to avoid breaking the flow of narrative, Mr. Guedalla has done his best, as he tells us, to conceal the apparatus of research, and he has also avoided controversial details, so that the narrative may not be interrupted by discussion of authorities. This is often an advantage to the general reader, but the historian will meet with disappointment. He will want to quote one example to know just how George IV used his influence over cabinet appointments. He will scarcely be satisfied, if he asks how Herries was made Chancellor in 1827 after the office had been offered to Palmerston, by Mr. Guedalla's transcendental explanation: "the Cottage frowned; Lord Goderich whimpered: and whilst Jove thundered, Palmerston stayed chained, like Prometheus, to his departmental rock."

With the same object, Mr. Guedalla has omitted all footnotes and has grouped his authorities together in a bibliography, citing separately the published and unpublished sources he has used for each year of Palmerston's life. It is entirely laudable to minimise the display of research in the text, but the student who wishes to follow up his sources will find the task made difficult

by the absence of direct references from the text to the bibliography. Mr. Guedalla has consulted a considerable number of unpublished authorities, including many of Palmerston's own letters. These have provided vivid personal details, some of which materially help to explain Palmerston's conduct and character. The inserted copy of an original letter of Palmerston's is exceptionally valuable. It supplies a perfect example of his attitude to foreign nations and helps to explain three wars which his policy promoted.

66

Mr. Guedalla has been more successful in concealing the machinery of research than the machinery of composition. Paragraphs begin somewhat monotonously with such phrases as ""the "the world went on," " the silence deepened," "the skein was tangled," and one year has a habit of "gliding" or "slipping quietly" into the next. Walpole is said to have believed that all men have their price; Mr. Guedalla feels that they all have their adjectives. Some of these are apt enough, but repetition makes them somewhat wearisome. Pitt is "spare," Peel is austere," and so, rather surprisingly, is Bagehot; Palmerston is often "bland" or "cheerful," Aberdeen " ladylike," and the fact that Queen Victoria was not large when she came to the throne, is mentioned nine times in three consecutive pages, as well as frequently in others. To describe Brougham as a tangential critic "has more significance. The march of Russian troops is always "heavy," and Austrian soldiers are consistently "whitecoats," trampling" the dusty roads of Italy." Would it not have sufficed to call Princess Lieven, Egeria, once? Do we really gain anything in understanding or vividness by being told that she had "a reddish nose," or being once more reminded that Queen Victoria "showed her gums " when she smiled? We begin to long for the straightforward and the simple when one paragraph after another ends with some such phrase as "France stumbled out of the white silence of 1812," when snow intermittently appears in the narrative to prepare us for a Russian event, a "red glow" to announce a French revolution and castanets in the distance " to warn us of the entry of Spain. It reminds us rather of the treble trills of a cinema orchestra which announce the entrance of the heroine, or the bass chords which put us into the proper frame of mind as the villain approaches. The cake is too full of plums; we hunger for good

plain fare. J. R. Green was a comparatively simple and unadjectival writer, but the comment of a contemporary reviewer upon his style seems to apply with special force to Mr. Guedalla. "The fault of his style," declared the EDINBURGH REVIEW," is a uniformity, sometimes almost a monotony, of picturesqueness. We sometimes feel a fatigue like that experienced in turning over the pages of a picture book."

These peculiarities of style and method make Mr. Guedalla's book delightful to begin but difficult to finish, and this is the greater pity, because it is founded on genuine scholarship, is accurate as to fact and deals with a subject which more timid historians have too long shirked. But the main defect of the book lies deeper than its style. He sets out to tell us the story of Palmerston's life without having made any consistent effort at imaginative interpretation of the period. Although obviously possessing imagination and dramatic power, he has done for literary history what the scientific research student, who often possesses neither, is usually accused of doing. He seems to think that facts are in themselves interesting without systematic selection or general interpretation. His object, as he tells us, is to place Palmerston in his historical background, "to catch something of the movement of his world." But which background, which world is the relevant one for a statesman whose public activities affected so many?

The historian cannot give us all the facts of nearly a century of European history in one volume, and unless he chooses some thread to guide him through the labyrinth, his pages are necessarily crowded with details, many of which will seem irrelevant. Now, the background which Mr. Guedalla has painted is principally the superficial political and diplomatic world in which Palmerston moved. His book contains many amusing remarks made by Palmerston and his friends and enemies. Mr. Guedalla is delightfully learned in the anecdotage of history. Occasional comment from persons like Mr. Creevy, Princess Lieven, Greville, Disraeli and the Queen furnish a good running commentary to Palmerston's life. The gossip of the court, the club and Almack's played an important part in it, and it would be a bad biography which did not show us the social and personal side of its hero, especially when it was so closely related to the sporting character of his public reputation and policy. But this is surely a small

part of the whole, and Mr. Guedalla seems aware of wider aspects when he tells us, as he does frequently, that Palmerston " surveyed a changed world."

He describes, however, only the changes of governments and persons, not the class or economic changes which lay beneath the political; and he does not deal at all with Palmerston's part in the movement of the ideas of his period. But the drama of history is not only a personal drama, and does not mainly lie in political and diplomatic conflict. As Bernard Shaw showed long ago on the stage, the conflict of ideas can be more exciting than the conflict of persons, and the most dramatic scene in "St. Joan" is a lengthy discussion of social theories between three people who sit and talk without action of any sort. But Mr. Guedalla, referring to twenty political events and fifty persons on a single page, must be always in a hurry: his highly-coloured pictures dance brightly before our eyes and there seems no time to consider their significance. In his anxiety not to be a bore, he hurries us on with a dramatic gesture from the hunt to the Cabinet, and from drawing-room to battle-field. It is a breathless and unreflecting adventure. Against our will we begin to see what Seeley meant by "the drowsy spell of narrative," and find ourselves crying" Stop, stop! Please, I would like after all to ask some questions and to set myself some problems. Narrative history is very interesting, and I know that was a good story, but I want, forgive me, even in the twentieth century, I want a moral ! "

III

Two conclusions about historical writing seem to emerge from an examination of Mr. Guedalla's book: first, that a direct onslaught upon the nineteenth century is unlikely to succeed; and second, that before writing a history of any sort the historian must possess some defined principles of interpretation. Without these, the innumerable loosely-related facts must overwhelm him. There is, of course, room upon library shelves for books of reference like the "Encyclopædia Britannica," "Who's Who," and the "Cambridge Modern History." There will also be a permanent demand for the purely literary and artistic treatment of historical events. But there comes a time when we want a different and additional approach. We still enjoy books of travel, in spite of the fact that some explorers to-day are trained as

anthropologists. In the same way, if history is to develop it must aim at deliberate and conscious interpretation. One important, though incidental, reason why the historian must interpret is that he wastes his capacities if he does not. Mr. Guedalla seems to be a singularly apt example. If, instead of crowding his pages with chronologically arranged incidents, more or less related to Palmerston, he had written a life of Palmerston after thinking out what he believed to be the principal significance of his career, he might have given us a great biography. Palmerston covered, as he says, an amazing span. He was born “in the candle-light" of the eighteenth century when "Reynolds was painting Mrs. Siddons," and Burke and Pitt were at their prime. He died in the Liberal England of Cobden and Gladstone. Now, what part did Palmerston play in producing or retarding the enormous changes in ideals, habits, and modes of life which took place in that period? Mr. Guedalla only tells us that he was "the last candle of the eighteenth century "-a remark which is surely the beginning, not the end, of a study of his character and of the two epochs in which he lived. If Mr. Guedalla had followed up this generalization and analysed the influence of eighteenth century ideas and persons in the nineteenth century, he might have done something to solve the complex problems which baffle the historian. Grouped round a central idea, the relevant facts would have fallen into their proper place, and Mr. Guedalla's own imagination would have rescued him from sterility.

Absorption in an idea leads to creative discovery, and this is the explanation of the fact that the most fertile historians have commonly been propagandists. Modern history was born on a wave of propaganda: it was a weapon against an absolute Church and a despotic State-a tale told by the intellectual critics of the eighteenth century to demonstrate the story of man's progress and the growth of his freedom in an age still dominated by a doctrine of retrogression and a savage intolerance of liberal thinking. In the same way an historian like Acton, infinitely more learned than the historians of the " enlightenment " and in possession of a scientific method of research, declared that “ have no thread through the enormous intricacy of modern politics except the idea of progress towards more perfect and assured freedom and the divine right of free men." By adopting the

we