Coöperative Historical Writing: The Cambridge Modern History

THE eager historical activity of the half-century just past has been applied chiefly in two directions : first, in bringing to light and presenting in usable form the documentary material on which, in the last analysis, all history must rest, and then in telling with much detail the story of many small sections cut out of the vast record of human progress. The historical monograph in all dimensions, from the pamphlet to the stately volume, has been the ideal of the modern historian. He has set that ideal over against another earlier one to which he alludes with a fine contempt as the “literary,” and has been proud to rank himself with that great company of investigators in natural science to whom also anything savoring of “literature ” has been an unpardonable offense. It has been a splendid service on the one side and on the other. The spirit of accuracy, of honesty, and of thoroughness it has engendered has been a contribution of inestimable value to our modern world. Some, indeed, have even fancied that with this change of method the last word in historical as well as in physical science had been spoken, and that we were to go on indefinitely piling up the record of observation and experiment before a world of men who have long since passed the limit of possible first-hand comprehension of what is offered them.

But now, as was to have been expected, a reaction is beginning. Our world is asking itself, where, after all, is its share in this genial activity, and it is demanding that somehow the meaning of it all shall be made plain to its unprofessional understanding. And here it is that we touch once again the function of literature. Every science must find its art, whereby the crude material in which it works, which it observes and classifies and tries to understand, shall be transmuted into a something finer and more subtle. It is this finer perception, this subtler gift of expression, that makes the artist, and that brings him into closer sympathy with the mass of listeners, seers, or readers, and, so far as the world has gone, nothing but this art will do that. The science of the musician is impotent until the art of the composer finds its way to the heart of the listener. The science of line and color, with all the added lore of harmony, rhythm, and what not, is lost until the incommunicable sense of form and shade that makes the painter compels the wonder and the interest of every one who has eyes to see. So the science of the historian — for his is a true science — can never find its response in the world until it too discovers its own form of artistic expression. We may fairly say, too, that as artistic form varies with the time, no prediction, certainly no prescription, can be made as to precisely what form shall come to meet the evident demand. It is not likely that we are to be called upon again to admire the tiresome magnificence of Gibbon, or the fervid partisanship of Macaulay, or the dramatic pose of Michelet. The new science must bring its own art; the only thing that concerns us here is that there shall be an historical art. The only medium for its expression is literature.

These reflections have taken form in view of the latest attempt to solve the problem of historical presentation to English readers. The Cambridge Modern History ¹ is a vast coöperative undertaking, said to have been planned by the late Lord Acton, and now carried on under the auspices of the University of Cambridge and the editorship of three members of the University staff. The work is planned for twelve large octavo volumes, each to be devoted to some phase of modern life. According to the editors’ preface to the first volume, now before us, the present plan was chosen mainly because the time seemed to have come when the vast results of individual research in the field of modern history ought to be put into shape for the general reader, and yet this was a task too great for any one mind to undertake. No one, it was said, could be expected to know enough of the various and widely divergent currents of life in the modern world to furnish even the necessary material. Still less could any one, even if he were possessed of superhuman erudition, be equal to the task of combining it all into one comprehensive presentation. The obvious alternative was coöperation.

Already we can point to great cooperative undertakings — the editors name the Monumenta Germaniæ Historica, the Rolls Series, and the Dictionary of National Biography — which have been successful, and have no doubt immensely advanced the cause of historical learning. The inference which the editors plainly wish us to draw is that the same method is equally well adapted to narrative history. But is this a sound inference? It would be a stretch of language to describe any one of these great encyclopaedic undertakings as a work of literary art. Those ponderous volumes were never written to be read; they were made to serve as quarries for the historical student, and furnish therefore but the slightest analogy to the present venture. The artistic element, which in an encyclopædic work would be out of place, must, in a book intended to find readers, be the dominating principle. As in the encyclopaedia inclusiveness is the natural aim, so in a presentation of results to the general reader it is only by the method of exclusion that any approach to satisfaction can be made. To select the thing that tells, to reject everything else, to set the telling thing against a background of detail, enough and not too much, to lead the reader on from the familiar to the less familiar, to keep up the sequence of ideas, to make the reader feel the spirit of the time he is studying, to excite his interest without appealing to the baser motives of partisanship, above all to touch him with sympathy for every phase of honest human effort, — this is the function of literary art as applied to history.

The real problem, then, raised by this new venture is whether such a work of art can be done by the combined labor of many hands. It would evidently be unfair to prejudge any work before its completion. The most we can fairly do is to form some anticipation of the whole from the specimen offered in this first volume on the period of the Renaissance. A short apologetic introduction to the whole work by the late Bishop Creighton defends the principles which have governed the editors in their labors. There follow nineteen chapters by eighteen authors. Each chapter treats of some aspect of the period as a whole, or of some incident characteristic of one or another phase in its development. For example, Dr. William Cunningham gives a chapter on Economic Change, Professor Jebb on the Classical Renaissance, Dr. Henry C. Lea, the only American contributor, on the Eve of the Reformation. Savonarola is treated by Mr. E. Armstrong, and Machiavelli, by Mr. L. A. Burd, these two chapters being intended to show the position of Florence in the movement of Italian politics. Dr. Richard Garnett writes upon Rome and the Temporal Power, Dr. Horatio Brown upon Venice, and Professor Bury on the Ottoman Conquest; Dr. A. W. Ward on the Netherlands, and James Gairdner on the Early Tudors. Surely no better names to conjure with could have been found in the whole range of English historical scholarship. If the coöperative method can ever succeed, it ought to be with such an array of specially equipped talent as this, guided by intelligent editorship toward a wellconceived aim.

Certain characteristics of this volume are at once noticeable. First, as was to have been expected, the treatment is very uneven. Some chapters, as for instance that on Economic Change, are well-considered essays, with a definite point, and leaving, therefore, a fairly distinct impression on the reader. Others appear to have been written under pressure, as a man learned in a large way throws together an article for an encyclopædia, trying to get in as much as possible, and by the way to do full justice to his own hobbies. It is interesting to note that almost every attempt here to compress into a chapter the narrative of a considerable period or of a phase of culture has resulted in the rather dull, more or less mechanical presentation that has become characteristic of modern English historical writing. Then we find a good deal of repetition. It is true that repetition in the hands of a master is an effective and altogether justifiable method of enforcing an idea; but that is not the kind of repetition we meet here. It is the mere accidental repeated allusion to things that do not need reinforcement. Whether each contributor was permitted to see the manuscript of every other before finishing his own is not clear, but without such comparison, how could we look for a unity of result? For example, Erasmus of Rotterdam is naturally referred to in several chapters; twice an attempt is made to give a sketch of his career and an estimate of his value; this was perhaps inevitable, but nowhere can the reader find such a comprehensive treatment of Erasmus as would be expected in a volume on the Renaissance. This same evil of repetition appears also in the fairly extensive but uncritical bibliography, which is placed at the end of the book, but is arranged according to the several chapters. Here, too, one might easily miss an important work, or find it where it would least be looked for.

In short, to return once more to our main theme, it may fairly be said that our satisfaction in reading these somewhat disjointed chapters will be in proportion to the opportunity given in each for the use of literary art, so that we are left at the close still occupied with the problem whether a better effect could have been produced if the right man could have been found to study the special contributions already made by these several writers to the history of the Renaissance, and then, fixing them on a background of personal knowledge and personal insight, to weave them into a consistent narrative that should carry the reader along by a rational process. Such a writer would have known how to give its due proportion to each event and to each phase of progress. We should have had the best of the specialists, who in these days of great things are after all mainly compilers of other men’s results, and all this would have been interpreted to us by the convincing art of one man. Such a gift is indeed rare: Mr. John Fiske had it; Mr. Parkman had it; Mr. Froude had it and abused it. If it be said that this power of presentation is a thing of the past, that is only saying that literary art is no more to concern itself with history. It is only the confession that for a generation past we have deliberately discouraged this whole side of the historical field. We have been captured by “ Geschichte, ” — that which has happened, and have slighted “historia, ”— the telling of what has happened. So, on the other side, literature has left history out of sight as a subject for its interest. Signs are not wanting that an approach between these two things, literature and history, is being effected from both sides, and that the day of great historical writing is once more to dawn. When it is demanded it will come.

Ephraim Emerton.