I Believe and other essays

I will pass at once to Professor Oman, Commander-in-Chief of retrograde Dondom.

Much of what Oxford has to bestow of honour and distinction Professor Oman has received. Some of the rewards of the greatest University have been his. He may be called the leader of the pseudo-scientific school now publishing, and in the past has enjoyed such eminence as this confers, among a corporation whose members are not so famous for the books they have written as for the books they ought not to have written.

Professor Oman, in his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History (1906) said: “I am indignant at all the cheap satire levelled against the college tutorial system, the curriculum of the schools, the examinations and their results, which forms the staple of the irresponsible criticisms of the daily, weekly, or monthly press, of the pamphlets of a man with a grievance, and of the harangues delivered when educationalists (horrid word) assemble in conclave.”

I can well understand it. Three months before this lecture was given, I remember reading an article in the Army Service Corps Quarterly, certainly neither irresponsible nor cheap, though composed by two writers whose grievance was the inaccuracy of the Chichele Professor.

“Napoleon was so profoundly ignorant of the character of the (‘Spanish’) nation that he imagined,” wrote the Professor in his History of the Peninsular War, “that a few high-sounding proclamations and promises of liberal reforms would induce them to accept from his hands any new sovereign whom he chose to nominate.”

At the date when Napoleon is supposed by the Professor to have been behaving like a Professor, not of war but of history, he was writing to Murat (May 16, 1808): “Je vous recommande de prendre toutes les mesures nécessaires pour donner du mouvement dans l’arsenal. Ce sont là les meilleures proclamations pour se concilier l’affection des peuples.” Three days before (May 13), he had warned Murat not to “flatter the Spaniards too much… I have,” he wrote, “more experience of the Spaniards than you. When you told me that Madrid was very tranquil, I said to every one that you would soon have an insurrection.”

The article referred to utterly contradicts this statement of Professor Oman’s. Hundreds of original documents were examined, and the point was proved with entire brilliance and clarity. The pamphlet is quite unanswerable, and has never been answered. The quotation from the Professor’s lecture illustrates the temper and attitude of the typical unprogressive. Why all criticism of the Professor and his friends should be cheap and irresponsible I do not know. When Mr. Herbert Paul writes of Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England– the Bible of the pseudo-historians – that it “may be a useful book for students. Unless or until it is rewritten, it can have no existence for the general reader,” and “a novice whose mind is a blank may read whole chapters of Gardiner without discovering that any events of much significance happened in the seventeenth century” is Mr. Paul irresponsible and cheap? Mr. Paul obtained the highest honour possible in his degree examination; he was a member of Parliament for South Edinburgh, one of the most cultured constituencies in the kingdom; he is a member of the present Parliament. As historians, indeed, the relative positions of Mr. Paul and Mr. Oman, are those of banker and pawnbroker respectively.

This publicly expressed irritation of the Chichele Professor is symptomatic.

When Froude gave his inaugural lecture Mr. Oman was present, and was, he tells us —

…“carried away at the moment by his eloquent plea in favour of the view that history must be written as literature, that it is the historian’s duty to present his work in a shape that will be clearly comprehensible to as many readers as possible, that dull, pedantic, over-technical diction is an absolute crime, since by it possible converts to the cause of history may be turned back and estranged.”

Mr. Oman was not carried away very far. The works of the man who was genius and moralist, man of letters and historian, are still excluded from the “curriculum,” while the works of the Professor who was temporarily carried away are still included in it.

It is, indeed, perfectly true, as Mr. Oman very candidly admits, that “even five years spent as a Deputy-Professor have not eradicated the old tutorial virus from his system.” He suffers, and I suppose must always suffer, from the inability to write his history so that it is a pleasure to read it. The literary instinct is wanting, the artistic temperament is absent, and like all those writers of whom he is the most able and the chief, the Chichele Professor can repeat but can neither create nor recreate.

On the very page where I read “educationalists” (horrid word), I also read these melodious and polished sentences “equipped with a severely specialistic curriculum.” Quip! lis! tic! ric! how horribly these words jar and offend, what a barbarous jargon is this!

Again, “they hope to find this one rather less rebarbative than Law or Mathematics.” From what sewer of language did the writer drag “rebarbative” to grace his prose?

It is the same with everything this gentleman writes, or to be exact, in everything I have read of his.

He speaks of Cæsar’s “chequered and oragious political career.”

He tells us of himself, “I was one of those exceptionals.” You have only to open any single page of any single book Professor Oman has written to realize that he either knows nothing of or cares nothing at all for the art of writing prose. I admit that it is easy enough to find, and print, faults in the writings of any one, even, here and there, in the work of a Master. I was re-reading Oceana the other day, and noticed that Froude has written, “there was no undergrowth, no rocks or stones, only fresh green grass.” … But an error such as this is exactly like a musical discord, inadmissible in the exercise of a student of harmony, but as nothing in the composition of a Master.

I do not wish to say whether, in my opinion, Professor Oman’s views of history are generally sound or if they are not. He would not be where he is, I suppose, were he not credible and generally accurate. But what I do know, and what I have a right to say, is that his prose is turgid, clumsy and without flexibility. He can only tell us that something has happened, he cannot make that happening live and pulse within the brain. He is without the first quality of the true historian, the knowledge and mastery of the medium in which he expresses his thoughts, and lacking all kinetic power he does not even know of what wood to make a crutch.

Mr. Oman and all his school are the legitimate descendants of their Master, Stubbs – the Great Cham of the Historicides. It is a mournful fact that the incredibly vicious style of William Stubbs has had a most malign influence over that of lesser men.

The samples of it that I give here will amaze those people who have not read the learned Bishop, and who have been in the habit of regarding him as a literary man as well as a historian.

“The steam plough,” Stubbs writes at p. 636, vol. iii. of The Constitutional History of England, “and the sewing machine are less picturesque, and call for a less educated eye than that of the plough-man and the seamstress, but they produce more work with less waste of energy; they give more leisure and greater comfort; they call out, in the production and improvement of their mechanism, a higher and more widespread culture. And all these things are growing instead of decaying.” With what is the historian comparing the steam plough and sewing machine? And does a sewing machine “call out” a higher culture? and do the things that are “growing instead of decaying” include a steam plough?

We are also told on page 634, that religion … “has sunk on the one hand into a dogma fenced about with walls which its defenders cannot pass either inward or outward, on the other hand into a mere war-cry… Between the two lies a narrow borderland.” Religion, therefore, “sinks into a war-cry.” Between the war-cry and the dogma is a narrow borderland. The dogma is “fenced about with walls.”

The recurring word is a constant phenomenon. In paragraph 498, for instance, we find the sequence “evil,” “debased,” “noble,” “beautiful,” “good,” “noble,” “beautiful,” “evil,” “debased,” “evil,” “good,” “good,” “great,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “noble,” “greatness,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “evil,” “good,” “evil,” “good,” “evil,” “evil,” “good,” “good,” “evil,” “good,” “good.”

It is true that the devoted and determined fellowship of Oxford men who are destroying the last position of the Historicides have long known that Bishop Stubbs was nothing more than a writer of slovenly text-books. But the general public has not known, and, occupied with wider interests, has been forced to take the statements of the pedants on trust.

Yet, if Oxford is to continue to be the chief University of the world, it will only be by permission of the public. This is a truth which the pedants will only realize when it is too late. If every father who has a son whom he hopes will proceed to the University reads what I have set down here – reads it, and trusting nothing to the assertions of one man’s pen, makes further and more exhaustive inquiries – we shall very soon see the frantic capitulation of the Old Guard. I believe the dons and pedants of whom I have been writing to be honest men enough. They are sincere in their attitude, no doubt. It is comfortable to think that everything is for the best in the best of all possible Universities, but the obstinacy of a dozen mules in a mountain pass impedes the progress of an army, and because his stupidity is not the hybrid’s fault is no argument against his removal.

A certain number of Oxford dons are convinced that the Oxford system is without flaw.

The Historicides are the worst offenders, though some of their brethren who control the study of Pagan Theology and Philosophy are not far behind them. Both classes alike are convinced of their infallibility.

Yet let the educated public realize that —

No one who wishes to become a B.A. and M.A. of Oxford is forced to study

(a) English Composition or Literature;

(b) The History of the British Empire;

(c) The geography of the globe we inhabit;

(d) The scientific discoveries and inventions which have profoundly altered the conditions of modern life;

(e) Any of the Fine Arts;

(f) Any of the Laws of England;

(g) The rules which guide the Law Courts in estimating the value of human testimony;

(h) The Art of Government and Economics;

(i) The Art of War;

(j) French, German or any Modern Language.

In my discredited trade of a novelist – that is to say, the trade of people who create out of their own brains new things – we have a technique of phrase. Unimportant to the pedant, as are the methods by which we are sometimes able to secure a great, and even grateful public, we still have our little catchwords and there is a certain freemasonry of craft.

One finishes up, it is generally understood, with “a canter down the straight.” Bursting away from the restrictions of the Essay, glad to have finished with an academic convention which says one must write this way and so, let me attempt to crystallize just what this paper means, from my own, and doubtless limited, point of view. It means this.

Upon the sturdy oak, generations old, in which the University may be typified in allegory, a dusty parasite of ivy has been clinging. This parasite, which has clogged the newer shoots from the old tree, is a parasite of the classical and especially of the history don and pedant. Law, Science and Mathematics have entered Oxford as a bright light comes into the dark. Here, all is well. And in regard to the older arts, I think, and many other people who are in the centre of the ferment of change think with me, all is about to be reconstituted in a freer air. It remains as a wonder that past and present undergraduates, the guests of the hotel, remain so individually and cumulatively distinct from the obstructionist section of its managers and landlords.

In the darkest days it is astonishing to see how many men reading history have been able to educate themselves brilliantly in spite of all opposition. And if Oxford can send out into the world such men as she is giving to the community now, in spite of the influences which have checked and hampered them, what may she not do in the days which are at hand, when the parasite shall be cut down from the old tree and growth shall be unhampered by the incompetent?

Those days, I am convinced, are at hand, and, curiously enough, it is the influence of James Anthony Froude which is precipitating the revolution. What the great historian could not do in his life, the immortality of his writings is accomplishing. Under Froude’s banner a devoted and influential band is enlisted. The work of change is proceeding with wonderful vigour and rapidity.

Let us gird up our loins to push and elbow out the discredited and effete, and if necessary pay hirelings, and employ executioners to end the unfortunate history of the immediate past, to destroy the Obstructionists, the Historicides, and those whom only annihilation will convince of error.

In conclusion I submit that I have neither been conjecturing what I cannot find, nor insinuating what I dare not assert; and if a sincere conviction and a prolonged scrutiny give one title to a part in the growing condemnation of the Historicides I shall be proud to think that I have taken a very humble place in the coming renaissance.

IV

THE BROWN AND YELLOW PERILA FEW FACTS

This essay, which is a logical conclusion of the last, requires neither rhetoric nor adornment, were I able to decorate it with them. It is a statement of plain fact, and I make no apology for writing it as simply as possible.

The paper is to be regarded in the light of an appendix to the article on the Oxford Historicides rather than a separate excursus in line with the others in the volume.