At the present moment, history must either be graphic or scientific. The old bad history is abolished. The old bad history consisted of a register of facts. It drew up a chart of human events, as one might draw up a chart of the currants in a plum-pudding, merely because they happen promiscuously to be there. No more of this.
The new history is different. It is, we repeat, either graphic or scientific. Graphic history consists of stories about men and women who appear in the old records, stories as vivid and as personal as may be. And this is very nice for little children: the only trouble being that with so much personal element there can be very little historic. No doubt the great people of the past were personages, and quite as personal as we are. Unfortunately, nothing is more difficult than to re-create the personal reality of a bygone age. Personality is local and temporal. Each age has its own. And each age proceeds to interpret every other age in terms of the current personality. So that Shakespeare’s Caesar is an Elizabethan, and Bernard Shaw’s is a Victorian, and neither of them is Caesar. The personal Caesar we shall never know. But there is some eternal, impersonal Caesar whom we can know, historically. And for this reason, let us beware of too much of the personal element, even for little children. It tends to shut out the strange, vast, terrifying reality of the past, even as the charming cosiness of a garden shuts out the great terror and wonder of the world. And even for tiny children, if we proceed to speak at all of the past, we must not shut out the space and fear and greatness. We must not make it too personal and familiar. We must leave in the impersonal, terrific element, the sense of the unknown, even as it is left in Red Riding Hood or any true nursery tale. It is wrong to envelop our children in so much cosiness and familiar circumstance. It is wrong to feed their souls on so many personal tit-bits. It is an insult to the past, which was not personal as we are personal, and it is a ridiculous exaggeration of the present. We are not the consummation of all life and time. Yet we put our sentiments and our personal feelings upon Caesar, as if Caesar were no more than a dummy figure whom we have to dress up to our own personal mode. Then we call it history — graphic history.
No wonder the scientific school protests. But if graphic history is all heart, scientific history is all head. Having picked out all the currants and raisins of events for our little children, we go to the university and proceed to masticate the dough. We must analyse the mixture and determine the ingredients. Each fact must be established, and put into relation with every other fact. This is the business of scientific history: the forging of a great chain of logically sequential events, cause and effect demonstrated down the whole range of time. Now this is all very well, if we will remember that we are not discovering any sequence of events, we are only abstracting. The logical sequence does not exist until we have made it, and then it exists as a new piece of furniture of the human, mind.
The present small book is intended for adolescents, for those who have had almost enough of stories and anecdotes and personalities, and who have not yet reached the stage of intellectual pride in abstraction.
It is an attempt to give some impression of the great, surging movements which rose in the hearts of men in Europe, sweeping human beings together into one great concerted action, or sweeping them apart for ever on the tides of opposition. These are movements which have no deducible origin. They have no reasonable cause, though they are so great that we must call them impersonal.
There is no earthly reason for such a vast madness as that of the Crusades. Given every circumstance of the year 800 A.D. in Europe, could the First and Second Crusades be deduced? Logical sequence does not exist until it is abstracted by the human mind. In the same way, there is no more reason for the Renaissance than there is reason for the singing of a blackbird. A rook is a black bird which makes a nest in spring. And yet it does not sing.
And so, we must not be so assured when we regard the historic faculty as a faculty for the ascertaining and verifying of facts, and the ascribing of certain sequence and order to such facts. This is only the hack-work of history — science, it may be. But history proper is a true art, not fictional, but nakedly veracious.
Inside the hearts, or souls, of men in Europe there has happened at times some strange surging, some welling-up of unknown powers. These powers that well up inside the hearts of men, these are the fountains and origins of human history. And the welling-up has no ascribable cause. It is naked cause itself.
Thus the Crusades, or the Renaissance, these are great motions from within the soul of mankind. They are the sheer utterance of life itself, the logic only appearing afterwards. Logic cannot hold good beforehand, even in the inorganic world. Earthquakes are disasters from without. They should be predictable. Yet no one can predict them, because the mysterious and untellable motion within the hearts of men is in some way related to the motion within the earth, so that even earthquakes are unaccountably related to man’s psychic being, and dependent upon it.
Therefore this little history is an attempt to count some of the great pulsations that have shaken the hearts of men in Europe, and made their history. Events are details swirling in the strange stream. Great motions surge up, men sweep away upon a tide. Some are flung back. The same passional motive that carried the north of Europe into Protestantism caused the Spaniards to flood to America and to react in the Inquisition. It is all beyond reasonable cause and effect, though these may be deduced later. It is all outside personality, though it makes personality. It is greater than any one man, though in individual men the power is at its greatest.
We cannot say, for example, that the Reformation arose because the Pope sold Indulgences. It arose because a new craving awoke in the hearts of men, a craving which expressed itself later as a passion for immediate, individual relationship of a man with God. There is no reason why such a passion, such a craving should arise. All that the reason can do, in discovering the logical consequence of such passion and its effects, afterwards, is to realise that life was so, mysteriously, creatively, and beyond cavil.
All that real history can do is to note with wonder and reverence the tides which have surged out from the innermost heart of man, watch the incalculable flood and ebb of such tides. Afterwards, there is a deducible sequence. Beforehand there is none.
Life makes its own great gestures, of which men are the substance. History repeats the gesture, so we live it once more, and are fulfilled in the past. Whoever misses his education in history misses his fulfilment in the past.