I Believe and other essays

History, in short, is the complement of poetry, and with this definition as a basis let us proceed to examine some of the Oxford historians of to-day. But first let me recapitulate the points at which we have so far arrived.

I have endeavoured to make plain, that —

(a) The Oxford historians of the moment enjoy an unjust monopoly, and exercise a disastrous power of veto.

(b) That the power to stop all this, to force these people to their duty or to send them about their business lies with the majority.

(c) That the majority is composed of those who pay for the education of their sons, and of those who proceed to the University for an education.

(d) That the historian must be not only a scholar, but an artist and man of letters also.

(e) That the fear of Froude provoked the attack on him in the past, and has maintained it until a year ago.

(f) That Mr. Paul’s Life of Froude has silenced the misstatements of mediocrity and incompetence for ever.

The whole business of Froude has provided one with a lens in which to focus the question upon the page, and no one was ever provided with a better text than I have been. Excuse me, however, if I make a brief personal explanation. While engaged upon this piece of work an Oxford man, an old-fashioned High Churchman of the Freeman type, has been staying with me. It is forty years since he was in residence, and he did not see with me at all in this matter when we discussed it.

“I cannot understand,” he said, “how you are going to champion Froude and Mr. Paul against Freeman, who was perfectly sound on Church matters, as I believe you to be. All you have ever published has been in support of Catholic Truth, and yet you are earnestly advocating a historian who was the incarnation of Protestantism.”

It was, in the first place, difficult to make my interlocutor see that I was writing of the art of the historian, and not the trend of his opinions. In the second place, I do not agree with him as to the essential Protestantism of Froude. Froude’s religious attitude has been summed up once and for all by one of the most brilliant writers of our time, an historian, artist, and scholar, whom Oxford dons rejected, but for whom Oxford calls aloud, and for whom St. Stephen’s has naturally a greater attraction – much as one deplores it.

Mr. Belloc writes: —

“See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the sentences in which Froude asserts that Christianity is Catholic or nothing: —

“‘… This was the body of death which philosophy detected but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

“‘The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics, has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable, without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless organization could begin again from a new original, no pure material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a material body grew again of the substance of His mother, pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things.’

“Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity, where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called a thing ‘worn and old’ even in Luther’s time, and he definitely prophesies a period when ‘our posterity’ shall learn to ‘despise the miserable fabric which Luther stitched together out of its tatters.’”

I can add nothing to Mr. Belloc’s criticism or his quotations.

Let us now take a survey of the history which the powers that be in Oxford have substituted for the work of Froude. Let us shake the upas-trees which shadow the quadrangle of the Schools and wonder how these astonishing vegetables have managed to produce such fruit as that of which I have to set samples before you.

The Examination Statutes in the section containing the regulations for the Honour School of Modern History recommend, among other books, that candidates who take the period 1559-1715 should study Gustavus Adolphus, by Mr. C. R. L. Fletcher, M.A., late Fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford. The gentlemen who compile the Examination Statutes would “recommend” almost anything, but I imagine that I am about to astonish the general reader.

I will begin with Mr. Fletcher’s preface. He himself says in the very first line that his book “demands little preface.” It would have been perhaps better for him had he been guided by his own pious opinion and resisted the temptation to print his confessions in nine closely-printed pages. I say “confessions” advisedly, for rarely in the course of a wide experience of books have I set eyes upon a more candid and almost disarming statement than the one before me here.

In his preface Mr. Fletcher asserts that his book —

(1) “Makes no pretensions to be based upon original research,” and he follows up this curious admission with …

(2) “And I cannot claim to have read even all the modern authorities on the subject.”

And (3) “My knowledge of the Swedish language is by no means independent of the assistance of a dictionary, nor can I hope to have escaped that tendency to partiality for which the natural fascination of such a subject is the only excuse.”

Mr. Fletcher then proceeds to tell us that he was

(4) “Obliged to include accounts of many things of which I had made no special study. The military history of the Thirty Years’ War is in itself a case in point. No satisfactory monograph on the subject exists, and I have often been obliged to confess myself at fault in grasping the exact meaning of military terms, and the exact effect of manœuvres, in an art of which even in its modern shape I know nothing.

(5) “But the times have so far changed,” he continues, “that I am able to plead that I am probably not much more ignorant of the art of war than the majority of my readers are likely to be.

(6) “In those archives” (the archives of Stockholm), “if anywhere, it is probable that the true Gustavus Adolphus is to be found.” But

(7) He, Mr. Fletcher, “is a man who has no pretension to be a student of archives.”

Here, then, we have an historian who admits that even the little he has to offer is borrowed from the books of other people. He has not taken the trouble to search and inquire for himself, and, content with profiting by the labours of others more conscientious, he has of course been unable to verify the accuracy of such labours. Nor has he even taken the trouble to borrow from the latest sources, for he informs us, “and I cannot claim to have read even all the modern authorities on the subject.”

Mr. Fletcher does not thoroughly know the language of the country of which he writes; he has included accounts of many things “of which I had made no special study” in this precious book; and finally, the historian of the Victor of Breitenfeld and Lützen knows absolutely nothing of military history, the art of war, or the meaning of military terms, in spite of which, at page 119, he declares (a) that Gustavus was “certainly a greater master of tactics than Wallenstein,” but “not a greater cavalry captain than Pappenheim;” and (b) “that Pappenheim had not the coup d’œil which enables a man to grasp a whole battle at once.”

How a man can dare to print such a cataract of admissions I do not understand. At any rate, tested by the lowest standard, treated with the utmost leniency, his book stands self-confessed as worthless. However modest the author’s estimate of his work and the humility of Heep was as nothing to the assumption of this preface, the book cannot under any conceivable circumstances be of the least use to the student. It outrages every canon by which the most amateur of historians should guide himself to write.

Yet this book is recommended in the Examination Statutes to be read by men wishing to take Honours in History while the works of James Anthony Froude are rigidly excluded.

I would fain linger a little longer with Mr. Fletcher, possibly one of the richest unconscious humourists who have ever written history. He deserves to be known to a wider circle than the mere academic. In these drab, hurried days, anything that makes for innocent gaiety is to be welcomed. I think it was Ruskin who said that Edwin Lear’s Book of Nonsense was one of the most valuable books ever written. It is a pity that Mr. Ruskin did not live to read Mr. Fletcher’s other work, An Introductory History of England.

Gustavus Adolphus was published in 1900, and Mr. Fletcher was then described as “Late Fellow of All Souls’ College.” The later and more mature work was published in 1904, and we then see Mr. Fletcher as a Fellow of Magdalen.

In An Introductory History of England we have, of course, the usual preface, from which I wish I had space to quote largely. I have not, but in turning the leaves, the eye at once falls on another apologia: —

“I have no pretensions to be a scholar in the original document sense;” and, “I fear it will be very easy for those who are such scholars to find many mistakes in detail, as well as to question my conclusions.”

Further, he speaks of the Honour School of Modern History in language which I, for one, heartily endorse. “I do not consider,” he says (p. vi.), “that the immense growth of the History School at Oxford … is at all a healthy sign for English education.”

I do not intend to do more than give one specimen of Mr. Fletcher’s style in this book, though I have read the whole of it with pleasure and amusement. The paragraph I am about to quote should live in the annals of the Oxford Historicides for ever. I imagine that in writing it, Mr. Fletcher had been slyly reading Oceana in secret, and longed to emulate the vividness of that august prose. The volume of Froude was obviously out of the way when the purple passage was produced, but if it loses in style owing to this circumstance, it gains in interest as the unconnected revelation of a truly extraordinary mind.

“As the ice-sheet advanced, the wild animals gradually moved southwards; the primitive Briton, unhindered by English Channel or Mediterranean Sea, walked after the mammoth and the hippopotamus, shooting at them with wooden arrows tipped with flints. And the grizzly bear and the sabre-toothed tiger walked after the primitive Briton.”

We must bid farewell to Mr. Fletcher, the historian preferred to Froude by certain people! I do not wish to give pain to any one in the world, much less to one who has given me so much pleasure. But even at the cost of that, I would ask gentlemen who are reading history at Oxford, and gentlemen who are sending their sons to read history at Oxford, to pause and reflect before they entrust grave interests and momentous personal issues to the mercies of such writers as Mr. Fletcher, to the direction of the historian manqué.

Let us leave the mala gaudia mentis provided by Mr. Fletcher, and proceed to more considerable men.

In his case we have a person, though ill-equipped by nature or temperament, engaged in an honest endeavour to write with vigour and picturesqueness. Grotesque as it may seem to us, the “Primitive Briton walking after the hippopotamus, and the sabre-toothed tiger walking after the primitive Briton” shows a genuine attempt at style. It is from the rude carvings of savage races that the Venus of Milo has been evolved, and from the mural decoration of the cave-dwellers has the perfected art of Velasquez or Murillo come.

There are, however, other writers in Oxford to-day who merely chronicle facts. This is not writing history, of course, but a careful chronicle of accurate fact is certainly valuable to the student, and may serve as a ladder by which he may mount into the realms of true history. Some one must do the spade work, dull and uninteresting as it may be, and all we ask of the gardener’s labourer is that his toil should be accomplished thoroughly and well.

One of the books that is put into the hands of history students at Oxford as a useful work of reference is European History 470-1871, by Mr. Arthur Hassall, a student and tutor of Christ Church, Oxford. Let me here explain for the general public that “a Student” of Christ Church is in the same position as the “Fellow” of another college.

The book at first sight does certainly seem to supply a need. It is a chronicle, in parallel columns, of the events which occurred in every country between the dates named. A man who is preparing an essay for his tutor might well be at a momentary loss for a date. “What was the exact year in which so-and-so succeeded, or the battle of such-and-such a place occurred?” he might ask himself, and turn to Mr. Hassall’s book for answers.

Let us take a particular instance. When was Napoleon III. proclaimed Emperor? According to Mr. Hassall he was proclaimed twice; in 1852 and again in 1853. Under 1852 I read: “The French nation, by a large majority, sanction the restoration of the Empire (November), and Napoleon is proclaimed Emperor (December 2).” Lower down, on the same page, under 1853, I am told that “Napoleon consults the people on the subject of the restoration of the Empire, and secures a large majority in its favour (November 21)… Napoleon is declared Emperor of the French as Napoleon III. (December 2).”

The right date is 1852. These strange contradictions occur in the second as well as the first edition of Mr. Hassall’s book, for which minute accuracy is the only raison d’être.

Another “handbook,” this time purporting to be an outline of the Political History of England, and much in use by the long-suffering student of to-day is published by the Right Honourable Arthur H. Dyke Acland, M.P., and Cyril Ransome, M.A., Merton College, Oxford. This book also makes no pretensions to style and any one who buys it has a right to require that its statements should be minutely accurate. Nevertheless, in it I find the following conflicting statements. “1792, April 23. Warren Hastings is acquitted,” and “1795, Acquittal of Warren Hastings.” Which is right? A later edition of the handbook tells me that 1795 is. Yet it is odd, to say the least of it, that in the seventh edition the wrong date was impressed on the student by the words, “Warren Hastings is acquitted” being printed in larger type than they were under 1795.

I am not going to multiply instances of this sort of thing. When it is necessary to produce a completer indictment of the pseudo-scientific historians I am able to assure them that it will be done. A great awakening has come to the University, and a hundred keen, hostile eyes are focussed upon its chief anachronism. There are many men in Oxford to-day who can say in their hearts: “So will I break down the wall that ye have daubed with untempered mortar and bring it down to the ground.”