war. In this connection, we will but quote the words so lately (Dec. 11, 1915) addressed by M. Ribot to a brilliant assembly gathered in the Palais Mazarin:

Que ce soit un des bienfaits de la guerre, et en quelque sorte le prix de nos souffrances et de nos sacrifices, d'avoir uni les cœurs et les volontés et éteint les brandons de haine entre des hommes qui luttent aujourd'hui la main dans la main pour le salut de la patrie commune! Que demain, si les divisions nées de l'antagonisme des doctrines et surtout de la diversité inévitable des conditions d'existence ne sont pas effacées, du moins il ne se mêle à ces luttes nécessaires et légitimes aucun sentiment de colère, aucun de ces mauvais ferments qui enveniment les plaies et corrompent le sang des nations les plus vigoureuses! Qu'après avoir tant sacrifié à la défense du pays, nous sacrifions encore au besoin de marcher d'accord quelques-uns de nos intérêts, et cela de grand cœur, avec la même générosité, le même oubli des préoccupations égoistes, c'est ce que nous voulons tous, ce que nous espérons dans la sincérité de notre âme.

Let us not perversely look for mysterious phenomena in connection with the splendid effort of the French, nor pretend that circumstances have called up out of chaos the phantom of a New The Edinburgh Review.

France. There has been no "miracle," even in the victory of the Marne; no intervention of supernatural powers unknown to the country of so many heroes of intellect and action. It is needless, even, although seemly and gracious, to invoke, as Péguy did, the memorial figures of Jeanne d'Arc and Ste. Geneviève. If we treat them as symbols, as faces of heroines long dead who shine down from the heavens,well and good. But let us not involve ourselves in admitting a breach of the spiritual continuity with the past. Above all, let us put far behind us the impious suggestion of a punishment brought down upon the head of France for her sins and frivolities. What we really see, and should forbid ourselves to permit to be obscured, is a natural revival of the ancient virtues characteristic of France in all her higher moods, recovering themselves after the shock of treacherous attack, and shining with unequaled brightness precisely because of the unparalleled volume and force of that attack. The unity of the nation is the expression of a store of vitality long amassed for this very purpose of defense in time of sorest need. But the resuscitation of the intelligence of France, of her activity and her probity, should be to us who stand at her side a subject of admiration, not of astonishment.

Edmund Gosse.

The War has profoundly affected our outlook in every sphere of mental as well as material activity. No body of intellectual workers is likely to feel its influence more acutely than those who occupy themselves with the study of history. The world-conflict has undoubtedly aroused a new and wider interest in the subject; and it is significant that, though the output of fiction

and general literature fell below the average in 1914, there was a considerable increase in historical books. Many readers have been seeking light upon the events and processes which have led up to the great catastrophe, since they perceive, more or less clearly, that the basis of the war is laid deep in the past. It begins to be recognized that history does somewhat closely concern the av

erage human being, who has to pay and to fight and to suffer. The war has made us all students, and it has created a demand for a kind of historical writing with which, in England at least, we have not been well supplied in recent Able and well-informed monoyears. graphs on political and historical subjects have been written, chiefly by the younger graduates of our universities. Such competent co-operative text-books as the Oxford series of essays, called Why We Are at War, the volume on the Balkans published last autumn by the Clarendon Press, another admirable series of essays on The War and Democracy, compiled for the Workers' Educational Association, and again such books as Mr. Arnold Toynbee's Nationality and the War, show how much fruitful, if belated, study is at length being devoted to the problems of politics and contemporary history.

In these works, and in much other writing of the hour, we are conscious that the War has given a new orientation to our historical studies. Now as ever the historian is subject to the influences of his environment. He cannot abstract himself from the tone and temper which prevail outside his library. And however single-minded he may be in his pursuit of what he deems undiluted truth he must necessarily be affected by the atmosphere in which he moves. Art, according to Zola's definition, is Nature seen through the medium of a temperament. The same may be said of history. It is the presentation of the past seen through the temperament of the writer; and the temperament itself is moulded by circumstances as much as personality. The sudden and appalling change which has come upon the whole world of civilization since the summer of 1914 has compelled the student of history to re-cast many of his ideas and to alter his viewpoint. We are conscious of this fact whenever we turn to such historical

essays as those mentioned. The writers are profoundly interested in things which probably would have seemed to them of secondary importance two or three years ago, and they direct the attention of their readers to subjects of which, in the pre-War era, they allowed them to remain almost ignorant. What is even more notable is that they are inclined to take a different view of the relative significance of certain historical and political phenomena. This is inevitable. It corresponds to the change which has affected all of us in our individual capacity. We cannot write in our history books, any more than we can write in our newspapers, or for that matter in our private letters, as we might have done in the days before August, 1914.

This new orientation is likely to be more marked among our native scholars than in those of the Continental countries. In France and Germany and Italy, the international and military aspects of history continued to attract a much larger share of interest than among ourselves, for the tradition of great wars, and of struggles for sheer existence, was too vivid to be extinguished. In Germany indeed, as we have been frequently reminded, the professors were working hand in hand with the politicians; and the new imperialism of Prussia found, or thought it had found, its intellectual justification in the researches of writers and teachers like Sybel, Dahlmann, Droysen, and above all Treitschke. Yet even in the land, and in the very universities, of these sabre-rattling chroniclers there were other writers who were steadily working out an entirely different conception of history, and endeavoring to make a place for it among the sciences, or the quasi-sciences, like jurisprudence, ethnology, philology, and economics.

The most influential school of historical writing in the nineteenth century

was that which attempted to find a justification for this scientific treatment. It wished to regard the development of states and peoples and institutions as manifestations of forces which could be reduced to rule and system. In consequence it was reluctant to accept the suggestion, so little in accordance with the teaching either of philosophy or of natural science, that the tremendous results recorded in the annals of the world could be due in the main to accident, to violence, or the uncertain and unforeseen play of individual character. It tried to fall back upon great natural tendencies, upon the working out of inevitable laws of genesis and growth, even upon the gradual realization of a design which might be inherent in the nature of things, if it was not indeed framed by the dictates of Eternal Wisdom. The influence of personality and incident could not be wholly ignored; but it was claimed that excessive importance had been attributed to these factors in human affairs, and that the "scientific" historian, instead of occupying himself unduly with the achievements and the failures of kings and conquerors and ambitious statesmen, would turn his attention to the working out of the great social and economic movements, and to those deep racial, psychological, and cultural tendencies which control the life and destiny of peoples.

This attempt to rationalize history is an inheritance from the eighteenthcentury thinkers who wanted to rationalize everything. The story of the vicissitudes of mankind throughout its existence could not be omitted from the synthesis. It was brought in boldly by the theistic philosophers as part of their comprehensive interpretation of the cosmic scheme. History for them was a sub-department of theology, an explanation of the divine purpose in mundane affairs. This is the theme of LeibLIVING AGE, VOL. II, No. 86.

nitz's ponderous Theodicy, as it was afterwards of Bunsen's once popular God in History. In a slightly different form it is built into the pretentious edifice erected by the masters of German idealist thought. Schelling regards history as "a continuous revelation of the Absolute gradually accomplishing itself" whatever that may mean. Kant in his Idea of a Universal History maintained that individuals and nations, while they seem to be actuated by their own desires and to be pursuing their own various and contradictory aims, are in fact "under the guidance of a great natural design," capable presumably of being explored by transcendental thinking.

Hegel elaborated Schelling's theory in his famous Philosophy of History, which is an ambitious attempt to apply his metaphysic to the adventures of humanity upon this planet. History must be made to fit in with the Hegelian system which regards the Universe as the manifestation of reason-"the impulse of the Spirit to find the Absolute." This absolute reason must eventually prevail, and the whole of human action in the past is only the record of the movement, often interrupted but never arrested, towards an ever-widening freedom and rationality. It is all vague

and nebulous enough; but out of the mist emerges the stark conception of history postulated as a rational process: not a mere chaos of unrelated occurrences, but a divinely ordered approach towards liberty, the true liberty regulated by law and religious belief, which will in the fulness of time attain its consummation in a world inhabited, it would seem, entirely by philosophers. To those people who can survey the panorama of human action from this altitude wars and treaties and alliances are merely irrelevant incidents, and statesmen and military commanders-persons as a rule imperfectly acquainted with the Abso

lute-no more than deplorable examples of that "accidental will" which has "only a formal existence," and so, as the mathematicians might say, can be "neglected."

In England our historians may have found it somewhat difficult to rise to this metaphysical plane; but the most influential among them were inspired by somewhat similar ideas. They, too, were inclined to envisage history as the result of tendencies which were bound eventually to fulfil themselves in the gradual working out of inevitable laws. They threw themselves with enthusiasm upon the speculations and researches of German scholars, and interpreted them in a characteristically British fashion. If they were inclined to pay scant regard to the writers of the Prussian imperialist sect-it is indeed only since the War that we have had any English translations of Treitschke's more important works-they were captivated by the Teutonic investigators into the origins of societies, and institutions, and accepted with effusion the whole quasi-scientific apparatus of these authorities. English scholars drew freely from the fountains of antiquarian and juristical learning opened by the Teutonic champions of the historical school like Niebuhr, Savigny, Waitz, Maurer, Gneist, and others.

One result of this was a wide popularization of the Germanic idea of racial superiority. Our writers, having adopted the Teutonic methods, were easily enough impregnated with the Teutonic prejudices, more particularly since these chimed in conveniently with their own prepossessions. They started, it must be remembered, with a certain national revulsion against the culture of the Latin and other extra-Germanic peoples. The hundred-years' contest with France had left its traces everywhere; and the writers who came to maturity by the middle of the nineteenth century in England lived through a period still

colored by the old distrust and jealousy. They inherited the traditions of an era in which a patriotic Briton could feel it his duty, like Nelson, to hate a Frenchman as he hated the devil; and if that sentiment had waned during the forty years of peace it was revived by what seemed the resurgence of Napoleonic imperialism under the Second Empire. Political feeling, and what was regarded as the results of the latest scientific scholarship, worked together to exaggerate the influence of the Teutonic element in European civilization. The new philology and the new ethnology tended in the same direction. The German Max Müller, enthroned at Oxford, held sway over the opinions of a whole generation of Englishmen, and in his Chips from a German Workshop, and other popular works, he reached a public that extended far beyond the walls of the professorial class-rooms. His Indo-European or Indo-Germanic theory of race and language was the orthodox belief until it was itself shaken by later and more comprehensive research.

Popular literature and learned treatises alike impressed upon the English people that they were essentially a Teutonic race and that they owed everything worth having to their "AngloSaxon" ancestry. While the most widely read poet of his age was denouncing the wild hysterics of the Celt the philologists were exalting the Aryan strain, which, it appeared, was only to be found in its purity among the peoples of Northwestern Europe, and the historians were systematically tracing out the development of our institutions from their origins among the forests of Thuringia and the plains of Schleswig. The part which Rome had played in the development of Britain was minimized, and the constitution was represented as the natural and logical extension of the institutions of our Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestors. It must be diffi

cult, I should imagine, for the younger generation among us to realize the kind of contempt for the Latin and Celtic culture and character which were fashionable in mid-Victorian England. French literature, though as a matter of fact it was the only foreign literature with which Englishmen outside learned circles were acquainted, was waved aside with a kind of lofty superiority. Carlyle gave the most emphatic expression to this view, but it was not Carlyle alone who treated such writers as Voltaire and Rousseau, Pascal and Diderot, Corneille and Racine with the scornful patronage transmitted from Herder and Lessing and the Schlegels to Coleridge and his disciples. Even the Latin and French elements in the texture of our language were held up to a sort of obloquy, and it was regarded as a merit to write in what was called "plain blunt Saxon"; so that it was contended in utter defiance of the facts, that the great masters of our literature had been conspicuous for their preference of the words derived from this source-as if Milton were not a finer writer than Swift, or as if such lines as "The multitudinous seas incarnadine" and "Armory of the invincible knights of old" were to be condemned as un-English!

We

The result was the exhibition of a curious kind of racial self-conceit. are horrified at the revelations of this diseased egoism among our present enemies. But we ought to remember that the extravagances of the Teutonic hypothesis were fostered and cherished in Britain; and, when we turn with disgust from Houston Stewart Chamberlain's inflated panegyric on Germanism, we may do well to reflect that his wild fantasies are little more than an exaggeration of the teaching of English scholars and writers forty or fifty years earlier. The haughty nationalism of modern Prussia is only a more insolent version of the supercilious racial pride once prevalent in Britain.

The War has gone far to complete the reaction against this current of opinion. It is improbable that the "AngloSaxon" theory will ever be pressed so far again. We now recognize, and gladly recognize, that alike in our blood and in our culture we are extremely mixed. We are very unlikely to restore Germanism to that pedestal of superiority from which it has been roughly overthrown. Nor shall we be inclined to diminish the value of the Roman, Latin, and Celtic influences in our history, our literature, and our political growth. The echoes of the great conflict have penetrated to the class-rooms and the libraries, and we are willing to admit that our dispraise of our present allies and former rivals was based, not upon exact scholarship, but upon prejudice and misapprehension.

Our historical outlook is changing in other ways. It is seeking wider horizons and losing at the same time something of its dogmatic certainty, its definiteness, its symmetrical limitation. Our nineteenth-century historians 'were chiefly concerned with the history of Great Britain, or of that part of it called England; and no doubt that history has an appearance of orderly development on the political and constitutional side which seems to harmonize with the scientific doctrine then exercising so potent a sway over English thought. It does, indeed, bear the aspect of an evolutionary process, a gradual unfolding and steady working out from age to age of tendencies innate from the beginning and enshrined in the earliest institutions of the race. Intense, one might almost say inordinate, attention is bestowed upon this part of the subject. Even Stubbs with all his learning was intolerant of things that did not fit in with his special themes. He could devote infinite research to the minute details of ecclesiastical or medieval history, while he regarded the extraEuropean civilizations as scarcely worth