THE TOUCHSTONE OF HISTORY

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16487, 28 February 1914, Page 10

THE TOUCHSTONE OF HISTORY

There are few people better qualified to judge of history, either as a mode of art or as a civic force, than is Mr George Macaulay Trevelyan, whose very name is a reminder that lie belongs to a distinguished family which descends on tile maternal side from that fine old scholar and Abolitionist, Zachary Macaulay. This grandnephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay has cast his own energies into the same channel as liis famous relative did, his book, “The Age of Wycliffe, and his chronicles of Garibaldi’s campaigns having established his reputation as an accomplished man of letters. As might be oxpected from his record, his recently published “ Clio ” contains some reflections on the trend and influence of historical study today which are extremely suggestive. From the seventeenth century, with the rambling and one-sided but sti'l impressive Clarendon, down to the middle of the nineteenth, with its brilliant galaxy of Victorian writers on men and movements of the past, tho life and thought of Britain was powerfully swayed by tho reading of history, which was presented to it with a vividness, a diligence in research, and an elevation of thought and purpose that must always command a hearing from an intelligent public. It is confessed that the people even then were swayed to a greater degree by poetry and fiction. Mr Trevelyan himself would not seek to depreciate the furore which greeted the youthful genius of Byron or the practical results of the purpose-novels of Dickens, nor resent the less enthusiastic reception given to the achievements of his own great relative. But he can assert with perfect truth that two generations ago history formed an integral part - of national literature, which it does not form to-day. in the houses of yeoman and peasant copies of Gibbon, Humo, Macaulay and Carlyle would be found upon the modest shelf, and the libraries of merchants and tho country gentry were largely stocked with the same enduring type of classic, while Rollin, Herodotus and Josephus brought a knowledge of “profane” history to a national mind steeped since tho Reformation in tho annals of Hebrew democracy and Hebrew monarchy. All this tended to buttress history as the most direct study included among the “ Humanities.” History, written as

it should be, only by men of sympathy, imagination and vision, was rightly commended as the cure for prejudice, the guide to progress, the spur of enthusiasm, and the nobler leaven of politics. A pessimist might well bo alarmed at tho change. To-day tho family cabinet, like the public bookshelf, is crowded with fiction and play-books. Tho younger generation has no time for Motley, Prescott, Macaulay and Green; it’is out for amusement or thrills with Chesterton, Pinero, G. B. Shaw, Ibsen or Galsworthy. We palpitate in the present; we are obsessed with epoch-consciousnefis when not actually stultified by tho Jnoro love if pleasure. It is easy to add tho special quota of country life to this mass of literary ferment and effervescence. The young Briton, left to himself, :'s frankly bored by historic retrospect; tho young colonial, if heaven has had no care of him, is contemptuously hostile to most that cries out of the buried past for reverence or imitation. He is wilfully blind to all but mould and rust in the gemtned fabric of a buried ago. Mr Trevelyan is not beyond the mark in declaring that we aro suffering to-day from atrophy of tho historic function.

The thoughtful man of to-day is moved to ask if this determined turning away from the storied past is wholly a symptom. of degeneration. Here, as elsewhere, optimism has a word to say. It causes intelligence no qualm to oonfe'ss that humanity generally travels along the,line of least resistance. The absorption in historic reading of a past generation was certainly a tribute to tho master minds who compiled these chronicles, but it was also a result of the prevalent social dulnoss before the train, the telegraph, the. motor and the picture show took even the yokel to the world and tho world to him. We may charitably suppose ourselves still intoxicated with these gifts of the Time Spirit and the prospect of greater gifts to come. But there is a better excuse for the real and regrettable decline in the love of history. We are making history too fast in these days to read it. Once it was made .by an oligarchy of the peerage, the church and tho college. Now it is being made by tho people, and these work-a-day builders are making it at a greater vital cost than ever before. Smail wonder that they are at once too weary for anything that savours of academic superfluity, and too fiercely interested for anything that is not immediately topical and controversial. It is a fact that against colonial men and women in particular the flattering charge is being brought that thoy are too busy effecting progressive - changes at home to give that account of themselves abroad which the older countries are so eager to use in their own onward struggle. We could well wish this national, indictment were truer, but Ne>v Zealanders may at least claim their full, share in the wider indemnity wo have just mentioned and may hope that a loss perplexed and harassed posterity will once more find its joy in the writing and reading of history.