Self Condemned (16 page)

“It is suggested by René Harding that the principal figures in the history book should be those heroic creators who attempt to build something, usually to be knocked down by the gang of criminals above mentioned, with the assistance, of course, of the unenlightened herd. The actual rulers are not necessarily concerned in any way with these creative individuals; it is usually left to members of the ill-disposed majority forcibly to prevent the success of the designs of the creative few, or the contemporary wielders of power, may, for some reason, do no particular mischief; may omit to stage a bloodbath, debase the currency, pillage and tax to death the community, cheat them out of their rights, push them down into new slaveries. They may be absorbed in their pleasures, or once in a way they may even possess a streak of goodness. Anyway, in such periods, the creative minds are relatively free to carry out their civilizing work. Such work is usually destroyed within a few decades by a remarkable outbreak of bestial barbarity.

“Or, of course, these circumstances may invite the historian to look at them in another way. He may prefer to project a picture more reminiscent of Alice’s adventures through the looking glass. The mad kings, queens, duchesses, hatters, and the rest are the more or less dangerous lunatics who surround the baffled hero. If this be the approach of the historian’s choice, a great deal of gaiety will accompany the tale. This might be regarded by some as unethical, or even frivolous. There is nothing really very gay about Stalin, or Hitler, or Napoleon. Menacing dummies as they might still be, in a world akin to that of Alice they would acquire a certain innocence, transformed by the alchemy of humour into a less sinister dimension. Professor René Harding admits as a possibility that history should be written as an Alicean chaos, or even as a violent burlesque. Many of the criminals in question, such as Henry VIII, might be treated as ghastly clowns, with the author of
Utopia
(in this case the murderee) attempting to advance the new humanism, but pounced on and beheaded in the end. Although he allows that this would be a quite legitimate manner of dealing with the historic material, Professor Harding prefers the tragic approach, reserving the full moral responsibility for the ogres involved.

“It is with the utmost concreteness that Professor Harding demonstrates how this new type of history would be written. Taking the twentieth century, the period best known to all of us, as his first illustration, he observes that, to begin with, the criminal in this crime story is less and less the head or heads of the state. In the modern parliamentary democracy the ostensible leader is not the real one; and so the picture is more complicated than in the case of an emperor or absolute monarch. Let us take contemporary France. The little packets of drab personalities succeeding each other with bewildering rapidity possess too little power to be accepted as the real criminals. You have to look for your criminal among the sinister background figures, and in the pressure-groups pushing the little front line puppets hither and thither, to left or right. A big rogue, like Clemenceau (“le tigre”) does emerge, for a short while, in the world war (1914–18). But there has been, in general, a monotonous mediocrity in cabinet after cabinet. This has signified, of course, that all power was behind the scenes. It has been quite otherwise in Germany, Italy, and Russia, where the front line ostensible rulers were in fact the responsible parties. In Great Britain, during the present century, few of our first ministers have qualified as criminals in our crime stories or histories. Certainly Mr. Baldwin, pipe in mouth, and quoting scripture, was a pernicious figure, but among his misdeeds there was no blood bath. Mr. Churchill, arch-militarist as he is, is merely taking advantage of a situation contrived by a great number of people of divergent interests. Even we have had Lloyd George, with his Health Insurance Act, a splendid feat which places that minister in the creative category. On the other hand, there was a fat Jewish-looking gentleman, with a lisp, a large cigar, and a homburg hat, facetiously named ‘The Peacemaker,’ who was on the sinister side. But in general the big criminal figure is absent from the limelit scene.

“Now this new history-making is productive of strange effects. According to the old method, we are shown a succession of potentates whose attainments are set forth in a favourable light even though it has sometimes to be admitted by the traditional historian that their intellectual stature was exceeded by some of their subjects. Beneath these loftiest characters in the historical plot, are shown lesser giants, for instance statesmen, cutting a great figure nevertheless, usually because of their aptitude for crime. Then, in the average history book, in what is little more than a foot hole, we have a perfunctory account of learning, the arts, and mechanical inventions.

“Instead of this, what Professor Harding suggests is more like a description of the activities of two races of men, one destructive and the other creative. The destructive always wins in the end: just as we see, in this century, miraculous technical inventions, which could have set men free from senseless and wasteful toil, being seized on by the destructive race, so that, at last, things are a hundred times as bad as they were to start with, instead of a hundred times as good.

“The outline provided us by Professor Harding of how the twentieth century would look in an intelligent history, differs absolutely from the kind of history we all know (that written by Trevelyan or Green, for instance). What we have called the ‘criminals’ still play an important part, simply because the story is about something radiantly creative in humanity being invariably destroyed by something as malign as it is common and coarse; and this latter is, needless to say, the criminal in question, only no longer given first place, and properly execrated by the reader. History a la René Harding is an essentially pessimistic narrative. Man is shown as an uncivilizable animal; the inferiority and destructive character of his appetite forbids attempts by the civilized minority to establish a civilized order. In a numerically feeble group there is great inventiveness: this, however is not forbidden, because
homo stultus
takes possession of all inventions, either using them as toys or applying them to destructive ends.

“History cannot be merely an account of all that is interesting, in age after age: the
Divine Comedies
, the great religious and philosophical systems, the feats of Galileo, Newton, or Pythagoras, or the arts, and the ideologies. As an account of what has happened that would be incorrect: for certainly all those things came into being, but that is only half the story, it is not ‘history.’ For all these things are products of man, and all have a more or less functional aspect. Once the aeroplane is invented, it is what happens to it afterwards, to what uses it is put, which is as much its history as its original construction. It is the same with the radio, the internal combustion engine, and the rest: and as to books, their publication is almost meaningless by itself; ‘history’ is there to tell us who read the book and what the book did to him. Now, why Professor Harding’s history is, as we have said, pessimistic, is because man in general ignores, misuses, or misreads these various products of the creative mind, a mind not possessed by man in general. So this explains why so many uninteresting figures, and even, in the seats of power, such
criminals
must be still described, why it is impossible for the historian to escape from them. Just as the smell from the sewers must be described in a novel in which it causes the hero’s death, so the new historian is obliged to describe what is brutish and only fit for the garbage pail. To conclude, history can only be written as a tragedy, because all that is worth writing about that has come down to us has been denied its full development, has been nipped in the bud, or has been done to death. The world war (1914–18), is like a mountain range in the historic landscape. It is, at once, composed of mountains of criminal destructiveness, and a piling up of tremendous creative inventiveness. Those four years marked in fact the mass arrival of the cinema, the aeroplane, the motorcar, the telephone, the radio, etc. This is, as it were, a perpendicular wall of great height, a mountainous barrier, behind which the past world lies.

“The history of our century would not be one mainly of personalities (though, alas, they are there as ever). What we should see would be big, ideologic currents, gaudily coloured, converging, dissolving, combining, or contending. It would look like a chart of the ocean rather than a Madame Tussaud’s waxworks; though there would be faces (one with a toothbrush moustache), like labels of one or other of the big currents of ideas.Then there would be the mountainous blocks of all kinds, as though raised up by an earthquake: there would be the piling up of tremendous inventions, their instant conversion to highly unsuitable uses: the criminality of man rioting in the midst of these unnumbered gadgets. Then there would be the growth, in every society, of the huge canker of debt. In more and more insane proportions, the credit system would be apparent, developing its destructive bulk. One would sense nebulous spiders, at the heart of wider and wider webs of abstract simulacras of wealth, suspended over everything: hordes of men engaged for years in meaningless homicide: and vast social revolutions as the culmination of a century of plots, and propaganda of brotherly love at the point of a pistol, and
la haine créatrice
. So there would be arabesques of creation and of destruction, the personal factor unimportant, the incarnations of ideas, the gigantic coloured effigies of a Hitler or a Stalin, no more than the remains of monster advertisement.

“According to Professor Harding the Soviet leaders are mixed types. They
should
have been a new species in the history chart, but they are a species that has somehow failed, their creative impulse distorted. To parody the idea in Goethe’s
Faust
, they are the spirits who willed the good and did the evil. But in them are seen a coarsely drawn sketch, of the new ruler who will no longer be the criminal of the crime-story, but the first of the creative earth governors.

“Even Hitler, though a man of blood, has a streak of the new ethos mixed into him: a horrible paradox, but the militarist in his composition made short work of any contradictory impulse.

“Here we must note a rather curious streak of optimism in Professor Harding himself. Dreadful century as this one is showing itself to be, Professor Harding believes that it was
intended to be
really a new model: had it not been for an element which dragged it back into the past, that great mountain range, conveniently confined within the conventional limits of the year 1914, and the year 1918, has all the signs of being the giant backcloth for a new Year One. The Professor’s belief may be regarded by some as of a naïveté worthy of Cobden and the Manchester School: but it is his view that the liberal idealism of the nineteenth century would, left to itself, have eventuated in a twentieth-century rebirth, wonderfully assisted by the burst of inventive genius coinciding with the liberal climax in the second decade of this century — that so supported, this idealism could have produced a new age of social justice, had it not been for the intervention of the Marxist ideology.

“His argument is that the incitement to hatred and civil war, the doctrine of the necessity of catastrophe, and indeed everything else about Marx’s teaching stigmatizes him as belonging to the barbaric world of the wars of religion and the other things which it is our desperate wish to be finished with forever. In 1920 the sudden expansion of Marxist influence, developing into a violent fashion, was a unique misfortune, because the world foreshadowed by Lloyd George’s Health Insurance Act, and the increasing liberality on all sides, plus the revolution in industrial technique, would anyway have led, under the leadership of such men as Beveridge, to a New Deal, unattainable by means of the bloodbath of a revolution.

“But this belief of Professor Harding’s is, in reality, a revival of an earlier, generally held, belief. In the nineteenth century in England and America, and even elsewhere, it was universally thought that a new age of tolerance and intelligence, of ‘decency’ and humaneness, had begun; and just as a great number of practices belonging to the bad, old times of the unenlightened past, such as slavery, duelling, hanging and quartering, public executions, imprisonment for debt, child labour, cruel sports, ill-treatment of animals, and so forth, had been discountenanced and abolished (forever, it was supposed), so gradually all such odious survivals would disappear, and ‘The world’s great age begin anew, the golden years return.’The time when nations would recognize the wickedness and wastefulness of war was near at hand. This belief was unchallenged in the English-speaking countries at the beginning of the century, and such feeling lingered even as late as Woodrow Wilson’s Paris peacemaking, or the Kellogg Pact. But actually the world war gave the death blow to this belief, and the happenings of the last two decades have done nothing to reinstate it. The optimistic idealism of the nineteenth century, although it is not identical with, inherited something from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. The outlook of Professor René Harding may perhaps more usefully be compared with the anti-past views of the eighteenth century, than with the more sentimental aspirations of the nineteenth century.

“Professor Collingwood considers this eighteenth century contempt for the past — or at least for all the ages prior to the Tudors, when the modern world began — as anti-historical, or ‘not genuinely historical.’ He would look upon Professor René Harding’s anti-historical views in the same way.

“In order to facilitate an understanding of the work of this new, anti-historical historian, a longish passage will now be quoted from a recent lecture of Professor Collingwood’s which I have been privileged to use.

“‘A truly historical view of human history,’ says Professor Collingwood, ‘sees everything in that history as having its own
raison d’être
and coming into existence in order to serve the needs of the men whose minds have corporately created it. To think of any phase of history as altogether irrational is to look at it not as an historian but as a publicist, a polemical writer of tracts for the times. Thus the historical outlook of the Enlightenment was not genuinely historical; in its main motive it was polemical and anti-historical.’