The greatest saint might have offered the most solemn sacrifice on its behalf for years, and if the soul were damned his sacrifice would have been of no avail.
I have taken this example absolutely at random. But the modern reader, apart from sentences as clearly provocative of criticism as this, is perpetually coming across references, allusions, and parallels which take a certain course of human European and English history for granted. How is he to distinguish when that course is rightly drawn from when it is wrongly drawn?
Thus in some newspaper article written by an able man, and dealing, let us say, with the territorial army, one might come across a sentence like this: "Napoleon himself used troops so raw that they were actually drilled on the march to the battlefield." That would be a perfectly true statement. Any amount of criticism of it lies in connexion with Mr. Haldane's scheme, but still it is a true piece of history. Napoleon did get raw recruits into his battalions just before any one of his famous marches began, and drill them on the way to victory. In the next column of the newspaper the reader may be presented with a sentence like this: "The captures of English by privateers in the Revolutionary War should teach us what foreign cruisers can do."
There were plenty of captures by privateers in the Revolutionary Wars; if I remember rightly, many many hundreds, all discreetly hidden from the common or garden reader until party politics necessitated their resurrection a hundred years after the event, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with modern circumstances.
Both statements are true then, and yet one can be truthfully applied today, while the other cannot.
How is the plain reader to distinguish between two historical truths, one of which is a useful modern analogy, the other of which is a ludicrously misleading one?
The reader, it would seem, has no criterion by which to distinguish what has been withheld from him and what has been emphasized; he may, from his knowledge of the historian's character or bias, stand upon his guard, but he can do little more.
There is another difficulty. It is less subtle and less common, but it exists. I mean brute lying. You do not often get the lie direct in official history; it would be too dangerous a game to play in the face of the critics, though some historians, and notably the French historian Taine, have played it boldly enough, and have stated dogmatically, as historical happenings, things that never happened and that they knew never happened. But the plain or brute historical lie is more commonly found in the pages of ephemeral journalism. Thus the other day, with regard to the Budget, I saw some financial operation alluded to as comparable with "the pulling out of Jews' teeth for money in the Middle Ages." When did anyone in the Middle Ages pull out a Jew's teeth for money? There is just one very doubtful story told about King John, and that story is told without proof by one of John's worst enemies, in a mass of other accusations many of which can be proved to be false.
Again, I turn to an Oxford History of the French Revolution, and I find the remark that the massacres of September were organized by the men from Marseilles. They were not organized by the men from Marseilles. The men from Marseilles had nothing to do with them, and the fact has been public property since the publication of Pollio and Marcel's monograph twenty years ago.
What criterion can the ordinary reader choose when he is confronted by difficulties of this sort? I will suggest to him one which seems to me by far the most valuable. It is the reading of firsthand authorities. It is all a matter of habit. When the original authorities upon which history is based were difficult to get at, when few of those in foreign tongues had been translated, and when those that had been published were published in the most expensive form, the ordinary reader had to depend upon an historian who would summarize for him the reading of another. The ordinary reader was compelled to read secondary history or none. Now secondary history is among the most valuable of literary efforts; where evidence is slight, the judgment of an historian who knows from other reading the general character of the period, is most valuable. Where evidence is abundant, and therefore confusing, the historian used to the selection and weighing of it performs a most valuable function. Still, the reader who is not acquainted with original authorities does not really know history and is at the mercy of whatever myth or tradition may be handed to him in print.
We should remember that today, even in England, original authorities are quite easy to get at. Two little books, for instance, occur to me out of hundreds: Mr. Rait's book on Mary Stuart and Mr. Archer's on the Third Crusade. In each of these the reader gets in a cheap form, in modern and readable English, the kind of evidence upon which historians base their history, and he can use that evidence in the light of his own knowledge of human nature and his own judgment of human life.
Or again, if he wants to know what the Romans really knew or said they knew about the German tribes who, as pirates, so greatly influenced the history of England, let him get Mr. Rouse's edition of Grenewey's translation of the Germania in Blackie's series of English texts; it will only cost sixpence, and for that money he will get a bit of Caesar's Gallic War and the Agricola as well. But the list nowadays is a very long one, luckily, and the lay reader has only to choose what period he would like to read up, and he will find for nearly every one first-hand evidence ready, cheap and published in a readable modern form. That he should take such first-hand evidence is the very best advice that any honest historian can give.
The study of history, like the exploration, the thorough exploration, of any other field, leads one to perpetual novelties, miracles, and unexpected things; and I, in the study of the revolutionary wars, came across the story of a battle which completely possessed my spirit.
It would not be to my purpose here to give its name. It is not among the most famous; it is not Waterloo, nor Leipsic, nor Austerlitz, nor even Jemappes. The more I read into the night the more I perceived that upon the issue of that struggle depended the fate of the modern world.
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