A plea for the study of contemporary history

R. W. Seton-Watson (1929)

Introduction

Martyn Rady

The Creighton Lecture for 1928 was delivered by Robert W. Seton-Watson, Masaryk Professor of Central European History at the School of Slavonic (and East European) Studies, then a part of King’s College, but now, with parentheses long ago removed, in U.C.L.

While an undergraduate at New College, Oxford, Seton had been much inspired by the German historian, Leopold von Ranke. In this lecture, however, he challenges Ranke’s assumption that the recovery of the past, wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, can only be achieved after the passage of time, when the historian has access to the necessary documents and can comprehend the meaning of events by seeing the long-term consequences. First, Seton argues that in respect of contemporary history, historians have at their disposal sufficient records to permit both narrative and judgement. With regard to the events leading up to the First World War, he thus alludes to Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, 1871–1914 (53 vols., Berlin, 1922–7), and to the less cumbersome British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914 (ed. Gooch and Temperley, 11 vols., 1926–38), as well as to the flow of autobiographies and to the recently acquired ‘habit of publicity’. Second, Seton boldly turns Ranke on his head by arguing that the study of the present may serve to illumine the past and so guide the historian’s understanding of what really happened. Seton thus neatly anticipates the verdict of a later historian: ‘Separating the contemporary artificially from history diminishes both.’¹

Seton does not give in this lecture any chronological definition of contemporary history. His audience could, however, have been in no doubt that Seton was actually referring throughout to his own prodigious output on the eve, during and in the wake of the Great War. In the decade preceding 1914, Seton had examined in several big books and in a succession of essays (some penned as ‘Scotus Viator’) the politics and history of the nations of central and south-eastern Europe. He was particularly opposed to Hungarian ambitions, disliking Hungary’s policy of ‘Magyarization’ (while overlooking the ‘Anglicization’ that had taken place in his native Scotland and elsewhere on the Celtic periphery), and he regarded Hungary as a destabilizing element in Habsburg and thus European politics.² Meanwhile, he championed the cause of the South Slavs, most notably in a work that remains of value to this day, The South Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (1911), as well as pressing the claims of the Slovak nation against Hungarian hegemony. His interest in the Czechs was aroused later, during the course of the war, by the exiled T. G. Masaryk. Seton’s writing combined a thorough knowledge of the historical record and contemporary politics into which he wove personal recollections, the details of conversations with contemporary politicians and others, and the texts of important documents. Nevertheless, as one of Seton’s students was later to remark of him, ‘his inexhaustible knowledge of the seamier side of Danubian politics was combined with a serene faith in the future of his Slavonic protégés’.³

In 1916, Seton founded the weekly The New Europe which was devoted to the cause of an ‘integral peace’ that would accommodate the desire for independence of central and south-eastern Europe’s small nations. Although its circulation seldom rose above 4,000, The New Europe was feted as ‘the most instructive public organ of the day’.⁴ It was influential in stalling Lloyd George’s several bids to conclude a separate peace with Austria-Hungary and in determining for a while the putative line of the Italian-Yugoslav frontier. Although criticized as an ‘ethnological museum’,⁵ The New Europe introduced its readership to the variety of central and south-east European nations and to the complexity of their historical, ethnic and political relations. After the war, Seton attended the Paris Peace Conference on behalf of The Times, dispensing advice on the demarcation of new frontiers.

In 1920, The New Europe ceased publication and Seton assumed an academic career, but, sustained by a large private income, did not bother to draw his professorial salary. In 1931, however, he lost a considerable part of his investments. Too poor to maintain his extensive travels, he settled down to write works of ‘conventional’ history. Three of these, A History of the Roumanians (1934), Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question (1935) and A History of the Czechs and Slovaks (1943), remain among the leading accounts of these topics. Seton thus combined in his career the distinction of being a historian of both past and present as well as a publicist who contributed by his work to the reshaping of contemporary Europe in the aftermath of the First World War.

A plea for the study of contemporary history*

R. W. Seton-Watson (1929)

It is, I trust, unnecessary to remind my present audience that the study of history, though today one of the most popular subjects in most of our universities, is nonetheless a comparative newcomer, and that there are still many who view its popularity with considerable misgiving and challenge its claim to rank as the equal of the more traditional subjects. Nor is this entirely due to the fact that so many historians are either incapable of rising above the level of the mere chronicler or deliberately limit their field to ‘what really happened’, in the mistaken belief that they have no right to express any verdict upon facts or any theory of underlying causes. It is above all due to a widespread suspicion that the historian is too much at the mercy of inadequate materials and that much of the most essential evidence required for a final verdict is withheld, and always will be withheld, from him. It dates from an all too recent period when the historian tended to be either a brilliant literary amateur or a depressing pedant.

The prejudice against history as a serious study died hard, but that it is by now virtually moribund can best be realized by comparing its position 100, or fifty, or again twenty-five years ago, with what it is today in this country. When Stubbs delivered his inaugural lecture in 1867 he was deprecatory and on the defensive. But he was still at the height of his powers when Seeley carried the war into the enemy’s country by boldly proclaiming history as a science. The expansion of historical studies still proceeds apace, and I may be excused for noting in parenthesis that there is no place where it has made greater and more rapid strides than in our own University of London, which has been all too tardily, but at last most effectively, recognized as an ideal centre for such studies, owing to certain special advantages that London possesses as the centre of a great empire, and much the most important repository of its records. The foundation of a whole series of special chairs devoted to specific fields of history – a process which is still not complete – has already culminated in the foundation of the Institute of Historical Research, on lines which should prevent it from ever becoming the preserve of any single university.

It may well be that our descendants will in all seriousness regard the regular introduction of history into the curriculum of our schools and universities as a change no less revolutionary in its effect on education than the introduction of the classics, instead of the Schoolmen, into the educational system of the sixteenth century.

In any case we may start from the assumption that the place of history, and even ‘modern history’ so called, is now unassailable, and that despite subdued murmurs from the wings there is no longer active opposition on the stage. But an exception is still made with regard to contemporary history, which, it is plausibly contended, is not, and cannot be, a worthy subject for the true historian’s pen, still less a fit study for the younger generation whom it may be his duty to instruct. It is, we are told, incompatible with the detachment and calm of academic life. It is utterly narrow by comparison with the great studies of a classical past, and must therefore have a narrowing effect upon minds which need above all distraction from everyday issues. It is partisan because it inevitably imports the disputes of the hustings into the classroom. And above all it is fatally handicapped by ignorance of essential facts and documents, and by the knowledge that its results will at best be out of date almost as soon as they are written and can never hope to stand the test of time.

It is arguments of such nature which I wish to examine in my present lecture. And in so doing I am anxious to avoid dogmatism. I do not for a moment suggest that contemporary history is the subject of study par excellence. I am not attacking other branches of history – either modern, medieval or ancient. I am merely advancing on behalf of their younger sister, who has just attained to years of discretion, a plea for recognition and equality of treatment. In effect, I am suggesting that all of us, whether we be students, teachers or men of action, should not, in our researches, in our interests or in our demands upon our pupils’ interest, stop just at the point where historical studies acquire their most practical value, namely, at the very threshold of our own age. I yield to no one in my respect and sympathy for medieval history in particular: I am profoundly convinced that it, no less than classical history, which needs no defence, has many lessons to offer to the modern world, and that an understanding of its outlook and mental processes may serve as antidote to some of our most obvious modern failings. But I submit that contemporary history, for a number of reasons which I propose to explore, is a subject of rapidly growing importance, and will be even more important in the immediate future. Just twenty-one years ago, in this very college, Professor Tout used this phrase: ‘Time was when serious people maintained that history could not be properly taught at all’, and went on to argue that ‘experience had demonstrated the untruth of this dictum’.¹

It is not necessary to put forward any hard and fast definition of the phrase ‘contemporary history’, which changes automatically with the passage of time. It obviously does not mean the study of the current year in which we are speaking. It may perhaps suffice to call it the history of the period upon which men still at the height of their powers can look back. It is clear that there must always be overlapping between contemporary history, however defined, and the period immediately preceding it. But whether at this moment the year 1871 or 1878 or 1890 be selected as the point of departure is a matter of comparative indifference. Dates are merely the clothes pegs of history, without which even the finest linen cannot be hung out to dry, and this is as true of the more crowded canvases of our own day as it is of earlier centuries, where there is a longer perspective.

What is really essential is that the altered conditions of modern life – the great agglomeration of population, the rapid spread of democratic tendencies even in countries where autocratic systems prevail, the ease of intercourse between nations and individuals, the power of public opinion and the written word (even in its lowest form, the gutter press) and, last of all, the momentous development of wireless – all this and more have helped to project history into our everyday lives, to make the thinking public more conscious of its bearing upon problems of home and foreign policy, and to make statesmen more ready to seek in it the justification of their actions. The crowning example of this attitude is to be found in the famous covering letter which was presented to the Germans with the draft Treaty of Versailles, and which sought to anticipate the verdict of history in favour of the victors.

But already, long before the Great War, a series of brilliant writers and teachers, not content with the new interest which their efforts had evoked, had boldly proclaimed history now as a science, and now as an art, and had strengthened their position by more and more frequent raids into such subsidiary sciences as anthropology, archaeology, palaeography and philology.

It is too much the fashion nowadays to scoff at that gallant pioneer, Thomas Arnold; for though as a historian he was the veriest amateur, he was perhaps unequalled as one who knew how to draw inspiration from the dead facts of history and impart new inspirations to the next generation. But Arnold’s successors soon left him far behind, both in their scholarship and their pretensions. Freeman contended that it was the right and duty of the historian to range over the whole period from the call of Abraham to the Russo-Turkish war (which was to him as he spoke as recent an event as the Kellogg pact to ourselves). He coined the famous epigram: ‘History is past politics, and politics are present history’ – a phrase which a well-known American university in its first fine careless rapture of dogmatic faith inscribed over the entrance to its new history department. Seeley restated the same idea in the new form, ‘Without history politics has no root, without politics history has no fruit’. Indeed Seeley’s whole life’s work rested upon the claim that history is the school of statesmanship, or that ‘Politics and history are only different aspects of the same study’. Or, again, ‘Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature [how characteristic this is of Seeley!] when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics’.²

The assumption that contemporary history cannot ever be written, much less taught, is, I strongly suspect, nothing more than an unproved theory handed down by an older generation whose own historical education was shockingly neglected and at best stopped abruptly at the Reform Bill of 1832. It is in glaring conflict with past experience. For, indeed, if we pass in survey the historians of past ages – let us say up to the year 1850, for it is perhaps still too soon to decide the eventual fate of later writers – we shall find that almost all who have achieved full immortality were essentially writers of contemporary history. Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Tacitus, or, in later times, Matthew Paris, Froissart, Villani, Comines, Guicciardini, Machiavelli, De Thou, Clarendon, Burnet are but a few names selected at random, but not, I think, unfairly. Of all the historians whom the eigh-teenth century produced, is there any, save the incomparable Gibbon, who dealt solely with times other than his own and who has survived to our own day as a recognized and readable classic? Even Hume and Smollett as historians are utterly extinct.

The commonest of all the arguments used against the contemporary historian is that the verdict of contemporaries is never the verdict of posterity, and that nothing approaching the full truth regarding our own times can be told during the lifetime of the principal actors, for the simple reason that the main evidence is not available. Let us consider how far these two arguments are well grounded.

The obvious answer to the first is that every generation revises the verdict of its predecessor not merely upon the events of yesterday, but also upon those of all previous ages. The criticism, if once admitted, would be fatal to the writing of any history at all. There has been a constant fluctuation of opinion in successive eras, not merely with regard to notable historical figures – let me instance Caesar, Cromwell, Napoleon, Marx – but, above all, with regard to such great historical landmarks as the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, the Civil War, the French and American Revolutions, the Oxford Movement, the Victorian era. ‘Every generation’, said Treitschke, ‘has the right to portray the past as it appears to his own eyes’. This is a rather dangerous way of expressing the truth formulated by Niebuhr half a century earlier (1814): ‘There have never been immovable political laws: where an attempt has been made to maintain them as such, the nation has been stifled’. The word portraits of historical characters, like their counterparts in the realm of art, will always tend to vary, because every writer, as every artist, however mediocre his quality may be, is yet human enough to put something of himself into his finished work. The pedant may frown and regard this as a violation of historical impartiality. Personally, I remain impenitent and agree with Professor A. F. Pollard that ‘imagination’ stands in the forefront of those qualities which we demand from the ideal historian. Eliminate personality and you eliminate human nature, and what is history then but a wretched husk? The historian, like workers in other trades, must take his risks and steer between the two extremes of which no other than Macaulay was thinking when he regretted that history is ‘sometimes fiction and sometimes theory’.³

That historical verdicts fluctuate and require to be perpetually recast – sometimes in the light of new documentary evidence, but quite as often because moral or social standards have changed with the passage of time – tells equally against all history, but is not really a reason for ceasing to write it, but merely an admission that there is seldom finality in human verdicts. All that can fairly be said about contemporary history, in this connection, is that with the heightened pace of modern life these fluctuations of opinion are even more frequent than formerly. The outlook of our contemporaries towards the Victorian era has changed more than once since the Great War, and the changing outlook towards the Great War itself, and towards both Woodrow Wilson the man and Wilsonian principles, reads like one of those weather charts that register the English climate.

It is not necessary to go so far as Freeman, who in his Inaugural praised Thomas Arnold for ‘standing forth as the righteous judge’, or to endorse the sentiment of an Austrian essayist who declared that ‘it is the duty of history not only to crown with glory him to whom glory is due, but also, when necessary, to use the branding iron’.⁴ But it is most necessary to bear in mind the words with which Lord Acton closed his memorable Inaugural in 1895: ‘If we lower our standard in history we cannot uphold it in Church or State.’ Historians must accept as an axiom the constant fluctuation of standards and must boldly set theirs as high as possible: more than that they cannot do. But they can take courage when they remember that some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the eighteenth century idolized rulers who were then known as enlightened, but who were the very reverse of moral on any modern showing, and that this type of idolatry finds no exponents today, save in the columns of a Yellow Press or in countries where liberty of the press no longer exists. They can also take courage from the thought that though the idea of human progress has only in quite recent times asserted itself as a dogma of civilized mankind, it rests on the essentially Christian belief in the perfectibility of human nature and has slowly been permeating the consciousness of the world.

What then of the other great argument against contemporary history – that in the nature of things so much essential material is withheld from the historian that what he writes of his own day is a mere parody? In the first place, I would remind you how utterly illogical the theory I desire to refute really is; for, once accept it, and we must reject as valueless the great mass of existing historical writings, since for many periods of prime importance we depend mainly on contemporary accounts and lack any documentary background. It is quite true that the older historian was gravely handicapped by the secrecy which long surrounded documents of state and by the pressure by which sovereigns could ensure a flattering estimate of their activities. But, on the other hand, historians were then still in the main drawn from a class which enjoyed contact with affairs and were able to glean some information behind the scenes, while events were far less complicated and were decided by a relatively small number of people, all more or less known personally to each other.

Today this has all changed. The historian is no longer drawn from any one class of the community, and he probably does not spend much time in antechambers. But he has 100 sources which were denied to his forerunners. The harvest has not been winnowed, as in antiquity: the gleaners will always be too few. If already in 1895 Lord Acton himself, whose mastery of written material was simply fabulous, could complain that there was ‘more fear of drowning than of drought’, what would he say today, when the mass of material has had another whole generation in which to swell? Not the least merit of the nineteenth century was the zeal with which, under the spur of the nationalist and romantic movements, it set itself to rescue, sift and make accessible whatever had survived of the records of past ages. This process, which incidentally gave birth, or a new lease of life, to quite a number of subsidiary sciences, and enlisted the help of experts from quite unexpected fields, is not, of course, complete even today; but the vast and varied collections of state papers and diplomatic documents, of parliamentary and other records, which now adorn the shelves of our great libraries, prove that the heaviest spadework has already been accomplished and that the main task of the twentieth century will be to put flesh upon the dry bones and make them live again. Seventy years ago, the mentality of those in authority being what it then was, the opening of the archives of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was already regarded as a great concession: the secrets of Philip II, Charles II, Louis XIV, even Frederick the Great or Joseph II, were allowed to trickle out, but a strict veto was still upheld for a period corresponding very roughly to the three last generations. But in proportion as the arrears relating to earlier centuries were disposed of, the date at which records were made available tended to advance by slow stages nearer to the present time; and even in the first half of the nineteenth century the habit of Blue Books and similar publications firmly established itself. At first, of course, they contained more sins of omission than of commission, and were doubtless often issued for the same motive as prompts the occupants of a sledge to throw out provisions to a pursuing pack of wolves. But gradually the habit of indiscretion forced its way even into these much-expurgated collections: a famous early example is the publication of dispatches from our ambassador in St. Petersburg, Sir Hamilton Seymour, containing the highly confidential proposals of Tsar Nicholas for joint Russo-British action in the Eastern Question. The sensation which these documents caused was an important factor in inflaming British suspicions of Russia during the Crimean War. It is probably true to assert that public opinion in our own country has never been more chaotic, more gullible and more unbalanced than in the Crimean period; and not the least reason was the secrecy which still veiled so much that was most essential in the situation.

In the half century that followed, the habit of publicity grew apace; the press, with all its faults, became more and more the repository of information that in any former age would have perished out of sight. New generations arose, less reticent and less wedded to discretion, and while with every decade the press grew more outspoken in its language and more relentless in its pursuit of the secrets of the recent past, revelation through the medium of biographies, memoirs and correspondence came to be practised on a large scale, until today there is scarcely a public man not only of the first, but even of the second or third rank, in the last century of British history, who is not commemorated by at least two stately volumes, and we have now got to four- or even six-volume ‘Lives’. The revolution wrought by improved communications and multiplied records, in the era of cheap travelling and good roads, of the motor car, the telephone, the typewriter (and, let us not forget, the carbon copy), may be described almost equally as cause and as effect of this steady triumph of publicity. Moreover, scientific methods applied to bibliography and the improved conditions in the great libraries and archives have contributed to the general result.

Already in the first decade of the twentieth century publicity was invading the old methods of government at every turn, and more and more material became available at an earlier date than ever in the past. On the eve of the Great War the old diplomacy still upheld the traditional methods of secrecy, and the success with which the text of the Triple Alliance and its supplementary conventions, or again of the Franco-Russian Alliance, was kept inviolate, is a measure of the transformation wrought by the Great War. It is true that even in those days there were occasional revelations proceeding from the very fountainhead – such, for instance, as Bismarck’s celebrated publication of the Russo-German re-insurance treaty. It is probable that the system of secrecy was already crumbling before the supreme crisis of the Great War: a notable example (of which the Western public had scarcely time to take note before the World War absorbed its attention) was the way in which the extremely secret pacts concluded between the Balkan States in 1912 became known almost instantly. Within eighteen months of their first signature their texts were published by the Matin, and this was followed by a whole crop of sensational revelations of military and political documents in Sofia and other Balkan capitals.

It is surely superfluous to insist that the general process thus briefly indicated received a gigantic impetus from the Great War and the series of revolutions in which it culminated. Joseph de Maistre, writing to a friend at the height of the French Revolution, argued that ‘the project of putting the Lake of Geneva into bottles is much less mad than that of re-establishing matters on the same footing as before the Revolution’;⁵ and it may be contended that the Great War has had the same revolutionary effect upon historical studies, and, above all, the study of contemporary history. The war has not merely given rise to a vast amount of ephemeral literature which, partisan though it be, is of the first importance to an understanding of its causes and results, and which will tax the selective powers of the most ardent student; it has led to the most far-reaching revelations of all the secret understandings upon which the old diplomacy rested: the advent of revolutionary governments to power in Russia, Germany and Austria resulted in an opening of the archives on a scale never hitherto dreamt of. The tremendous series of ‘Die Grosse Politik’ with its fifty-three volumes and its 15,800 documents, and, to a lesser degree, the Bolshevik collection of ‘Krasny Arkhiv’, have provided the student of contemporary history with an almost inexhaustible mine. It was obvious that the precedent thus set was bound to be followed even by those governments which had escaped a revolution, as their refusal to publish would not merely be exploited by their critics as a proof of guilty conscience, but would be the gravest possible handicap to themselves, since even the most impartial writers would draw more from the one set of sources so long as the others were withheld from them. And thus, to the satisfaction not only of historians but of all true believers in the new European order, the German series of documents has been followed by the British, and the French are about to follow upon an even larger scale. It only remains to remove the scandalous embargo imposed by the Allied Powers upon the Austrian archives for the period between 1894 and 1914, and we shall soon be in possession of all the most essential archive material for a history of our own times. Meanwhile it may safely be contended that with regard to the immediate origins of the war – in other words, the period from 28 June to 4 August, 1914 – we already have as complete a chain of relevant diplomatic documents as exists for any similar crisis in all history, and that there are very few unexhausted sources from which we may hope to supplement our knowledge.⁶

But this rich crop of diplomatic collections is but a fragment of the first-hand material available. On the one hand, genuinely democratic tendencies, the demand for more open methods of diplomacy and the growing need for statesmen and even soldiers to justify their actions before public opinion, and again the habit of indiscretion, the temptations of publicity and material profit and the competition in revelations which after a certain stage becomes almost automatic – these and other motives besides have in the last ten years provided us with a vast mass of autobiography, memoirs, correspondence and documentary evidence of the very first importance, from which we can study and compare the policy and achievements of almost all the leading actors in the Great War and many of their subordinates. The extent and importance of this new literature may be best gathered by a perusal of Dr. G. P. Gooch’s lucid survey entitled Recent Revelations of European Diplomacy. A situation has been reached in which the foremost makers of history vie with each other in making a story public, and if one holds back a little, for whatever reason, another very speedily fills up the gaps. Whether we like it or not, the whole trend is against discretion and reticence.

Suffice it, then, to say that never before in the history of the world has so much material become so soon available, and that today the chief problem which faces the contemporary historian is the bulk and fullness, not the paucity, of his sources. The publication of such books as Colonel House’s papers on the one hand and the twin memoirs of President Masaryk and Dr. Benes on the other (to take only two classical instances) are, it may be fairly argued, in themselves striking proof that the whole outlook of the world upon the history of the recent past has been radically altered by the Great War. Moreover, this habit of publicity, which is spreading upwards and infecting even the most responsible circles, carries with it increased opportunities for the historian to check from the mouths of contemporary actors the details of what he has already gleaned from documentary sources. And here it is superfluous to point out the advantage which he enjoys both as against previous historical students of all periods and as against present-day students of earlier periods.

Without venturing upon prophecy, I find it difficult to believe that the process I have tried to describe can now be arrested, and if so contemporary history, in its most modern form, is bound to assert itself as one of the first importance.

Let me turn to another criticism. It may very reasonably be argued that the dangers of political partisanship weigh more heavily upon the contemporary historian than upon his colleagues in other fields. But I venture to maintain that it is every whit as easy to import party passion into the portrayal of past ages as into contemporary narrative. Alison’s massive history was a mere tract in disproof of democracy, and the opening of the archives has long since robbed it of its value. But did he import a greater measure of modern party spirit than Mitford working on Greece, or, dare I add, the giant Mommsen writing upon Rome, to quote only two examples? The fact is that certain writers will import political passion into any period which they touch, whereas others will cast an icy spell over the most lively and stirring scene. Moreover, there has always been a certain salutary check upon the contemporary historian, and one which is stronger than ever in these days of heightened publicity and intercourse. I venture to suggest that today it is impossible for any reputable historian to risk such a travesty of character – shall we say, for the sake of argument, of President Wilson or Mr. Lloyd George – as that which a great historian of last century perpetrated upon Henry VIII or Mary Queen of Scots. But Henry and Mary and all who knew them had long been in their graves when Mr. Froude wrote his ‘History’. Today those who, encouraged by the wealth of first-hand material already at their disposal, attempt to pass no less summary a judgement on the statesmen of 1918 are at once confronted by a crowd of contemporaries ready to brand them as mere caricaturists.⁷

As a matter of fact, as Mr. Baldwin reminded us at King’s College some two years ago,⁸ a frank expression of opinions is not such a desperate failing from the general reader’s point of view. For overstatement of the kind to which I have just alluded is a timely warning to most readers of any intelligence, who will take note of the facts and draw suitable conclusions of their own. I must confess that in my own experience I am far more frightened of authors who make loud professions of impartiality and are all the time leaving all the light or all the shadow out of their picture. And so far as contemporary history is concerned, I have often drawn more profit and even more information from a book of inferior workmanship and open bias, where I was forewarned by the author’s own prejudice, than from some colourless narrative which gave no clue to the author’s party allegiance or ulterior motive.

Meanwhile, there is an even more disastrous, if nobler, partisanship than that of mere ephemeral parties; for no man, and certainly no historian who is worth his salt, can altogether avoid taking sides in the tremendous controversies of Authority and Reason, of Tradition and Liberty, of unquestioning faith and sceptical inquiry. Must we, in order to write good history, abjure every doctrine alike of Bolshevism or fascism, of democracy or representative government? If so, is it not even more essential that we should avoid the bias imparted by religious belief, and forswear Christianity or Islam, Judaism or Buddhism alike? And if we push the argument to its logical conclusion, must we not fill our veins with milk instead of blood and abjure our human origin?

In any case, that ‘distortion of facts to suit general principles’ which Macaulay so strongly condemns, and of which he may not have been altogether innocent himself, has never been a monopoly of contemporary writers: it is the besetting sin of all historians. If, then, the writer of contemporary history is especially liable to the temptation of partisanship, he is held in leash by the increased opportunities for challenging false doctrine. Meanwhile, as biography and autobiography tend more and more with every year to overflow the banks of history, he finds it necessary, to a degree never before equalled, to devote himself to the study of psychology. Biography is only too often uncritical and adulatory; autobiography is sometimes deliberately employed to perpetuate a false theory. Fortunately it is a two-edged sword which most men use at their peril, for to the critical eye its revelations are not by any means those of which its author was conscious.⁹ ‘L’historien doit être psychologue’, said M. Maurice Donnay, speaking, at his reception to the French Academy, of his great predecessor Albert Sorel; and of none is this so true as of the contemporary historian. But how can he be a psychologist and read the motives and characters of men of action if his whole time is spent among his books, and in communing with the past? He must meet and study live men at least as much as dead documents. The motives of statesmen are as infinite, as complex, as variable as human nature itself: it is not so much that they vary from age to age, as that altered circumstances lay a new emphasis on this or that tendency and give play to new temptations. It is a commonplace that the present is inexplicable without a knowledge of the past. But this is only half the truth, and I boldly contend that the best way to understand the past is very often to study the present. Let me draw a practical illustration from my own special subject. Most of the misconceptions prevalent in the West today with regard to the so-called ‘Succession States’ of Austria-Hungary are due to ignorance of fundamental facts in the history of the Habsburg dynasty, of the Dual System, or of the complicated question of nationalities – all of which still provide the key to what is happening before our eyes under radically changed conditions. But, once more, that is only half the truth; and I contend that a close study of (supplemented if possible by personal acquaintance with) the political, intellectual and industrial leaders of today is one of the most effective means of testing theories evolved from a documentary study of the age of Metternich and Francis, of Kossuth and Deak. I am not, of course, advocating the dire heresy of judging the present by the past or the past by the present:¹⁰ I am only suggesting that the method of constant comparison between the two, of frequent but vigilant reference from one to the other, is likely to sharpen and humanize the historian’s judgements upon men and affairs. It is one very practical side of the comparative method, which to my mind is one of the most profitable of all historical methods, when kept within due limits.

It does not by any means follow from what has been said that the historian must be an active politician. At the same time it is significant of the growing interaction of history and politics during the past 100 years, that throughout central and south-eastern Europe historians and historical writings have played a very notable part in the actual shaping of political events. This is a development of which I attempted a brief survey in my own inaugural lecture in 1922, entitled ‘The historian as a political force in central Europe’, and I shall not, therefore, dwell upon it further now, except to remark that it has not yet received the attention which it deserves in this country, though certain aspects of it can be studied in Dr. Gooch’s Historians in the Nineteenth Century.

Apart from close attention to psychology and direct contact with the present-day life of the peoples whom he is studying, there are other tests which our ideal historian should be able, or should endeavour, to pass. But in essence they are the same for the writer of contemporary or of earlier history: they differ not in quality, but in degree. Even those thorough linguistic qualifications which earlier writers too often lacked are now very properly exacted from all alike. For it is at last generally recognized that ignorance of German is at least a serious blemish even in a writer upon purely English history, and that the biographer of, let us say, a British statesman, who has not studied the foreign as well as the British literature upon that statesman and has not tried to measure him against his foreign contemporaries, is only an amateur at the trade of biography and has neglected essential canons of criticism. It is worth adding that a knowledge of languages will in the future be more and more incumbent upon all historians, if they are to cultivate closer intercourse with fellow craftsmen of all countries and thereby fulfil their proper function as interpreters, by toning down rather than accentuating national prejudices.

There remains a problem which to my mind is of capital importance and which may conveniently be introduced by quoting certain phrases of Niebuhr, who has not unjustly been regarded as a pioneer of modern historical criticism. In his introduction to a course of lectures on the history of the revolutionary era, he asks his listeners to trust his ‘love of truth’, and then continues:

I shall not go into detail on all subjects: what must be painful to myself and to every German, what I should wish to delete from the history of the age with my own blood, I shall only touch upon shortly: where exposure of mistakes which have wounded me too deeply is not necessary for further comprehension of the whole matter, I prefer to pass them over.

This seems to me a most dangerous doctrine. The true test of the historian, and above all of the contemporary historian, is surely not a resolve to weigh good and evil in the balance until the reader is in doubt as to which of the two either reader or writer prefers, but a constant effort to omit nothing that is essential to a comprehension of rival points of view. The unpardonable sin is not bias, which the discerning reader can always detect and guard against, but deliberate suppression, which may only too often deceive all save the expert. And this problem is one of ever growing importance as the volume of material swells and threatens to overwhelm even the most omnivorous student. Selection has always been a fine art, and in our day it makes heavy demands upon our powers of judgement and upon our honesty. In this situation the gentle art of omission or suppression is a temptation against which it is constantly necessary to struggle, and which must often seem venial, if not altogether justifiable.

There must always be a marshalling and selection of the facts, but to delay judgement till all the facts are before us would simply be to abandon all idea of any judgement at all, since we never can have all the facts. It would also be to forget that it is sometimes possible to reach the heart of a matter without a knowledge of anything like all the facts – for the simple reason that all facts are not essential. ‘It perpetually happens’, said Macaulay, ‘that one writer tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths’.¹¹

These truisms are worth stressing at a moment when all historians have their appetite whetted for hitherto unpublished documents, and when some people are apt to forget that a document is not necessarily either valuable or interesting merely because it has remained unprinted. But for the student it may be affirmed that those altered conditions of study in the post-war period, to which allusion has been made, make of contemporary history a very valuable training ground, that in this field there is, so to speak, more building material available than in any other, better means of testing and controlling it than ever before, and hence abundant opportunity for exercising the critical and artistic faculties.

These altered conditions are creating a new hybrid type of historian – one who has lived through many of the events which he describes and has perhaps been in close contact with some of the chief actors, but who supplements this element of ‘Erlebtes’ – of life and atmosphere, shall I say? – by a conscientious study of the press, of diplomatic documents printed and unprinted, of biography and letters, of propagandist and ephemeral literature. This man can hardly be called a contemporary historian pur et simple. But his very existence is a proof of the extent to which changing conditions of life since the turn of the century have transformed historical studies with the rest, and have brought the historian into closer contact with political life. The fact that specialization is more than ever necessary in history, as in every other branch of study, makes this close contact all the more important, as a guarantee of realism.

In this connection it is necessary to allude briefly to a problem which the Great War raised in an acute form – the relation of the historian to the state. The course which higher education has followed in this island has fortunately made our historians much freer from state control than those of the Continent. When Sybel in his Inaugural at Marburg in 1856 proclaimed the need for ‘an alliance between history and politics’, he was only putting forward the same theory as Seeley a generation later at Cambridge. But he failed to foresee that the very process of which he was a foremost exponent was undermining that independence which was once the glory of the German historical school. It is only necessary to think of the position of the great Ranke, who was consulted by monarchs and publicly thanked by statesmen, but preserved to the very end a serene and Spartan impartiality, and then to contrast it with the Byzantinism of a later generation. This evolution towards subservience to a state or a dynasty was only one phase of the doctrine of force which pervaded the contemporaries of Bismarck. Since the Great War there has been a considerable rebound from this doctrine in all countries save Russia and Italy, and there are fewer people than before who uphold the essentially un-Christian quip (I will not call it a theory) that nothing succeeds like success. The historian, too, after a bout of propagandist activity during the Great War – a disease common to all nations – has on the whole shaken off state control more successfully than his predecessors. It is of the utmost importance that this state of affairs should continue, and there is reason to hope that it may. For events have shown that governments are dependent upon historians and need their help if the documents which they lay before the world are to command the confidence of the public. Those upon whom the choice has fallen, first in Germany, then in our own country, and now in France, have set a high standard of independence, and the precedents created in connection with the editing of documents concerning the origins of the war may exercise a noticeable influence, not only on historical studies, but even on political and diplomatic development.

I have left till last the utilitarian side of the problem: it is not one that I desire to stress unduly, but there are two aspects of it which ought not to be ignored. In history, as in other studies, the false doctrine of ‘Art for Art’s sake’ is always cropping up, though most of the historical writers who act upon it are sadly lacking in the artistic sense. I submit that it is today increasingly important that both teachers and writers of history should in their selection of subjects and material preserve a sense of proportion and perspective and give a preference to those which have some direct bearing upon the life and thought of our own age. Those who have real talent should be encouraged to choose a noble theme, and then every age stands open to them, from Egypt, Nineveh and Rome to the medieval empire, scholastic philosophy and the dawn of constitutional government, and so down to the history of our own age. But the learned buffaloes of our art, who merely wallow in facts and have a talent for collecting rather than for interpreting, should be reminded that contemporary history contains endless unsolved problems on which there is already material at least as ample as that of former centuries, and whose adequate, even uninspired, treatment may be a valuable contribution to contemporary progress, by checking the errors of public opinion and providing a necessary groundwork for politicians and administrators.

My other point in this connection is that a close study of recent history is an essential corollary of the new international peace movement which centres round the League of Nations, and on which the avoidance of fresh upheavals must so largely depend. I am not so foolish as to plead for the enlistment of historians as mere propagandists of this or that campaign of pacifism or disarmament; but it is self evident that they have a very special function to perform in promoting that scientific study of recent times which is one of the essential foundations on which a new world and a new mentality must be constructed. It is often said that every generation must learn its own lessons and make its own mistakes, and that no amount of historical knowledge will prevent them. This, I venture to maintain, is one of the most mischievous of half truths. Of course we shall all, both collectively and individually, continue to make mistakes and disregard sound advice; but to say that a man who knows the facts has no better chance of success than a man who does not know them is simply nonsense, and while there are many situations in history where events were too big for the biggest man, there are countless others where it can be proved up to the hilt that if this or that statesman had been properly informed on this or that question he (and so perhaps his country with him) would have avoided this or that mistake.

It is high time to conclude a survey which makes no pretence whatever to being systematic, but is merely an attempt to place certain problems of historical study in a new perspective. Indeed my main contention is that the Age of Industry, Science and Democracy, which has so completely revolutionized transport and communication, and with them the daily life of every human being, has also altered the focus both of the historian and of the general public towards history. It has established closer contact between past and present history, it has led both the official world and the average thinking man to attach a new importance to the verdict of the past, and it is placing at the disposal of both a rich material such as no previous age ever possessed, at an increasingly early date. I trust that I have said enough to prove that recent or contemporary history has thus been placed on an entirely new footing, and that it is entitled to claim a position of equality with the history of earlier centuries.

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¹ P. Catterall, ‘What (if anything) is distinctive about contemporary history’, Jour. Contemporary Hist., xxxii (1997), 441–52, at p. 449.

² See here L. Péter, ‘R. W. Seton-Watson’s changing views on the national question of the Habsburg monarchy and the European balance of power’, Slavonic and East European Rev., lxxxii (2004), 655–79

³ W. N. Medlicott, ‘The scope and study of international history’, International Affairs, xxxi (1955), 413–26, at p. 413.

⁴ H. Seton-Watson and C. Seton-Watson, The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary (1981), p. 195.

⁵ Seton-Watson and Seton-Watson, p. 283.

* The Creighton Lecture, delivered in the University of London on 13 Dec. 1928, at University College.

This article was first published in History, new ser., xiv (1929), 1–18. The editors would like to thank Wiley-Blackwell for permission to reproduce it here.

¹ Outlines versus Periods (Historical Assoc., 1907), p. 3.

² The Expansion of England: second course, lecture i: ‘History and politics’.

³ T. B. Macaulay, Works (1879 edn.), v. 22, in the essay entitled ‘History’.

⁴ Baron Alfred Berger, Buch der Heimat, i. 66.

⁵ To Vignet, 1793.

⁶ With minor qualifications to this claim I need not concern myself here.

⁷ A possible exception to this is the caricature of Sir Henry Wilson by Sir Andrew Macphail in the Quarterly Review of Aug. 1928. The dead general’s friends appear, perhaps mistakenly, to have considered that its crudity rendered any answer superfluous: but when it appeared in book form, the reviewers were deservedly severe.

⁸ In an address to the Anglo-American Conference of Historians; reported verbatim in The Times, 14 July 1926.

⁹ Cf. Lord Acton’s inaugural lecture, p. 17.

¹⁰ Cf. Macaulay’s History (1879 edn.), ii. 60.

¹¹ Essay on ‘History’, in Macaulay, Works, v. 130.