WHY do people study History? The present writer’s personal answer would be that an historian, like anyone else who has had the happiness of having an aim in life, has found his vocation in a call from God to ‘feel after Him and find Him’. Among innumerable angles of vision the historian’s is only one. Its distinctive contribution is to give us a vision of God’s creative activity on the move in a frame which, in our human experience of it, displays six dimensions. The historical angle of vision shows us the physical cosmos moving centrifugally in a four-dimensional frame of Space-Time; it shows us Life on our planet moving evolutionarily in a five-dimensional frame of Life-Time -Space; and it shows us human souls, raised to a sixth dimension by a gift of the Spirit, moving, through a fateful exercise of their spiritual freedom, either towards their Creator or away from Him.
If we are right in seeing in History a vision of God’s creation on the move, we shall not be surprised to find that, in human minds whose innate receptivity to the impress of History is presumably always much the same on the average, the actual strength of the impression varies in accordance with the recipient’s historical circumstances. Mere receptivity has to be reinforced by curiosity, and curiosity will be stimulated only when the process of social change is vividly and violently apparent. A primitive peasantry had never been historical-minded, because their social milieu had always spoken to them, not of History, but of Nature. Their festivals had not been a Fourth of July, a Guy Fawkes’ Day, or an Armistice Day, but the unhistorical red- and black-letter days of the annually recurrent agricultural year.
Even, however, for the minority whose social milieu spoke to them of History, this exposure to the radiation of an historical social environment was not in itself enough to inspire an historian. Without a creative stirring of curiosity, the most familiar and impressive monuments of History will perform their eloquent dumb-show to no effect, because the eyes to which they will be addressing themselves will be eyes that see not. This truth that a creative spark cannot be struck without a response as well as a challenge was borne in upon the Modern Western philosopher-pilgrim Volney when he visited the Islamic world in A.D. 1783–5. Volney came from a country which had been drawn into the current of the histories of civilizations as recently as the time of the Hannibalic War, whereas the region that he was visiting had been a theatre of History for some three or four thousand years longer than Gaul and was proportionately well stocked with visible relics of the past. Yet, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, the living generation in the Middle East were squatting among the amazing ruins of extinct civilizations without being moved to inquire what these monuments were, whereas this same question drew Volney from his native France to Egypt, and, in his wake, the goodly company of French savants who seized the opportunity offered to them by Bonaparte’s military expedition fifteen years later. Napoleon knew that he was striking a note to which even the uneducated rank and file of his army would respond when he reminded them, before going into action on the decisive battlefield of Imbabah, that forty centuries of History were looking down on them from the Pyramids. We may be sure that Murad Bey, the commander of the opposing Mamlūk force, never thought of wasting his breath by addressing any similar exhortation to his own incurious comrades.
The French savants who visited Egypt in Napoleon’s train distinguished themselves by finding a new dimension of History for a Modern Western society’s insatiable curiosity to conquer; and, since that date, no fewer than eleven lost and forgotten civilizations —the Egyptiac, the Babylonic, the Sumeric, the Minoan, and the Hittite, together with the Indus culture and the Shang culture, in the Old World, and the Mayan, Yucatec, Mexic, and Andean civilizations in the New World—had been brought to life again.
Without the inspiration of curiosity no one can be an historian; but this is not enough by itself; for, if it is undirected, it can issue only in the pursuit of an aimless omniscience. The curiosity of each of the great historians had always been canalized into the task of answering some question of practical significance to his generation which could be formulated, in general terms, as ‘How has this come out of that?’ If we survey the intellectual histories of the great historians, we find that in the majority of cases some momentous, and usually also shocking, public event had been the challenge that had inspired a response in the form of an historical diagnosis. This event might be one that they themselves had witnessed, or in which they had even played an active part, as Thucydides had in the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War and Clarendon in the Great Rebellion; or it might be an event long past, the repercussions of which could still arouse a response in a sensitively historical mind, as the intellectual and emotional challenge of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire stimulated Gibbon when he was musing among the ruins of the Capitol centuries later. The creative stimulus might be a momentous event which seemed to provide cause for satisfaction, such, for example, as the mental challenge which Herodotus received from the Persian War. But, for the most part, it is the great catastrophes of history which, in challenging Man’s natural optimism, call out the historian’s finest efforts.
An historian born, as was the present writer, in A.D. 1889, who was still alive in A.D. 1955, had indeed already heard a long peal of changes rung on the historian’s elemental question: ‘How has this come out of that?’ How, first and foremost, had it happened that he had lived to see the immediately preceding generation’s apparently reasonable expectations so rudely disappointed? In liberal-minded middle-class circles in democratic Western countries in a generation born round about A.D. 1860, it had seemed evident, by the close of the nineteenth century, that a triumphantly advancing Western civilization had now carried human progress to a point at which it could count on finding the Earthly Paradise just round the next corner. How was it that this generation had been so grievously disappointed? What, exactly, had gone wrong? How, through the welter of war and wickedness which the new century had brought in its train, had the political map come to be changed out of all recognition, and a goodly fellowship of eight Great Powers come to be reduced to two, both of them located outside Western Europe?
The list of such questions might be indefinitely elaborated, and they furnished themes for an equally large number of historical inquiries. Thanks to his professional good fortune in being born into a Time of Troubles that was, by definition, an historian’s paradise, the present writer was, in fact, moved to interest himself in each of the historical conundrums flung at him by current events. But his professional good fortune did not end here. He had been born just in time to receive a still undiluted Early Modern Western ‘Renaissance’ education in Hellenism. By the summer of A.D. 1911 he had been studying Latin for fifteen years and Greek for twelve; and this traditional education had the wholesome effect of rendering its recipients immune against the malady of cultural chauvinism. An Hellenically educated Westerner could not easily fall into the error of seeing in Western Christendom the best of all possible worlds, nor could he consider the historical questions that his own contemporary Western social milieu was putting to him without referring them to the oracles of a Hellas in which he had found his spiritual home.
He was, for example, unable to observe the disappointment of his liberal-minded elders’ expectations without being reminded of Plato’s disillusionment with a Periclean Attic democracy. He could not live through the experience of the outbreak of war in A.D. 1914 without realizing that the outbreak of war in 431 B.C. had brought the same experience to Thucydides. As he found his own experience revealing to him, for the first time, the inwardness of Thucydidean words and phrases that had meant little or nothing to him before, he realized that a book written in another world more than 2,300 years ago might be the depository of experiences which, in the reader’s world, were only just beginning to overtake the reader’s own generation. There was a sense in which the two dates A.D. 1914 and 431 B.C. were philosophically contemporaneous.
It will be seen that in the present writer’s social milieu there were two factors, neither of them personal to himself, which had a decisive influence on his approach to a study of History. The first was the current history of his own Western world and the second was his Hellenic education. By perpetually interacting with one another, they made the writer’s view of History binocular. When the historian’s elemental question ‘How has this come out of that?’ was put to the writer by some current catastrophic event, the form that the question was apt to assume in his mind was: ‘How has this come out of that in Western as well as in Hellenic history?’ He thus came to look upon History as a comparison in two terms.
This binocular view of History might have been appreciated and approved by Far Eastern contemporaries in whose then likewise still traditional education the classical language and literature of an antecedent civilization had played a no less predominant part. A Confucian literatus would, like the present writer, have found himself unable to encounter any passing event without being reminded by it of some classical parallel that would have, for him, a greater value, and even perhaps a more vivid reality, than the post-classical occurrence that had set his mind working on its congenial task of chewing the cud of a familiar classical Sinic lore. The principal difference in mental outlook between this Late Ch’ing Confucian-minded Chinese scholar and his Late Victorian Hellenic-minded English contemporary might prove to be that the Chinese student of human affairs could still remain content to make his historical comparisons in two terms only, whereas the Late Victorian Englishman, when once he had begun to think historically in two terms, could no longer rest till he had extended his cultural gamut to a wider range.
For a Chinese student receiving his traditional classical education towards the end of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, it would still be a novel idea that any civilization other than the Sinic and its Far Eastern successor could be deserving of any serious consideration; but a similarly blinkered vision was impossible for any Westerner of the same generation.
It was impossible because, within the preceding four hundred years, the Western society to which he belonged had thrust itself into contact with no less than eight other representatives of its own species in the Old World and the New; and it had since become doubly impossible for Western minds to ignore the existence, or to deny the significance, of other civilizations besides its own and the Hellenic, because, within the last century, these insatiably questing Westerners, who had already conquered a previously virgin Ocean in the wake of Columbus and da Gama, had gone on to unearth a previously buried past. In a generation which had acquired this wide historical horizon, a Western historian who had been led by his Hellenic education to make historical comparisons in two terms, could not be content until he had collected, for comparative study, as many specimens as he could find of the species of Society of which the Hellenic and the Western were merely two representatives.
When he had succeeded in multiplying his terms of comparison more than tenfold, he could no longer ignore the supreme question which his original comparison in two terms had already threatened to raise. The most portentous single fact in the Hellenic civilization’s history was the eventual dissolution of a society whose breakdown had been registered in 431 B.C. by the outbreak of the Great Atheno-Peloponnesian War. If there was any validity in the writer’s procedure of drawing comparisons between Hellenic history and Western, it would seem to follow that the Western society must, at any rate, be not immune from the possibility of a similar fate; and, when the writer, on passing to his wider studies, found that a clear majority of his assemblage of civilizations were already dead, he was bound to infer that death was indeed a possibility confronting every civilization, including his own.
What was this ‘Door of Death’ through which so many once flourishing civilizations had already disappeared? This question led the writer into a study of the breakdowns and disintegrations of civilizations; and thence he was led on into a complementary study of their geneses and growths. And so this Study of History came to be written.