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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 80

VII

VII

I have spent as much time as this, upon the relations between History and Geography, for two particular reasons. The first is that so far as it is possible to look ahead, it seems likely that this application of geographical criticism to historical problems—this insistence on the question 'Why did what happened thus and then, happen also precisely here, and here, and not there'?—may in the near future become a popular aspect of historical study, perhaps even a dangerously popular one. It is, however, one of the rare privileges of the historian, as of the poet, and the painter, to be always interpreting old facts, old problems, and old situations, to new minds; page 32 and to be interpreting them always, too, in the light of new knowledge, cast upon them from a fresh point of view. It is our duty, therefore, as well as our temptation, to take full toll of current knowledge, and the fresh discoveries of our time. At one moment they will be coming from literary criticism; at another, from material remains; at a third, from the comparison of institutions or social habits. Each wave of experience casts up its treasures at our feet; the pearls are to be worn, not trampled on; provided we gather them, what mattes their order upon the string? But it is our temptation as well as our duty; and if so, it is well to be fore-warned, and to know what we are doing. Geography is not history, and cannot be confused with it; but geographical facts are among the first materials for history, and in the equipment of a historian geographical experience is indispensable.

In the second place, the special conditions under which Ancient History is studied in Oxford seem to me to justify some insistence on a geographical point of view. I have already assumed the liberty of criticising a system of knowledge, and of education, which includes the History of the Ancient World in a composite group of Classical Studies, and still tends sometimes to treat it as if it were merely a branch of Ancient Literature. The system, however, has gain as well as loss. On the one hand, it tolerates a popular conception of history which is in any case narrow and specific, and seems also a low one. On the other, from the beginner's point view there is gain. No man, it has been truly said, can be a historian merely; in proportion as anyone has attempted this, he has merely failed to be a historian at all. Considered, therefore, as a preliminary course for a man who intends hereafter to devote himself to History, a mixed course like that of 'Greats' has obvious peculiar advantages.

Not least among these advantages is the opportunity which it offers for the treatment of selected periods of page 33 History on broad regional lines; for the treatment of Greek and Roman History, that is, as the history of Man in the Mediterranean region.

The conception of a regional treatment of a subject, though familiar now to historians as to naturalists, comes in the first instance from the geographers; but I do not think that I shall be trespassing appreciably if I explain quite briefly what I mean.

In geography as in other branches of learning, it is possible, of course, to treat the whole subject-matter in order analytically, taking our examples of the interaction of natural forces indifferently from all portions of the planet. But modern geographical teaching proceeds increasingly, and I think, inevitably, on a regional basis. Brief introduction to the main classes of geographical facts, and to the main features of their planetary distribution, qualifies an intelligent person to watch and disentangle the principal geographical factors in a given geographical region; experience thus gained, whether of theory or of method, though acquired almost wholly in a limited region, is found to be clear, coherent, and applicable easily to enquiries elsewhere; and current geographical teaching inclines steadily towards this regional method of study as the most efficient, as well as the most economical in respect of time. The method, as we see at once, presents close analogies with the use of 'set books 'in teaching a language; after brief analytical study of the forms, we confront even beginners with the 'fine confused feeding' of grammatical constructions as they flow from the pen of Xenophon or Caesar.

Look now at the regional method as we apply it to the study of History. The historian's business is to describe Man's experiences and achievements, so far as these are of historical interest; that is, so far as they serve to explain how Man has reached the present stage of his struggle to live well. Now it cannot be too strongly insisted that in dealing with the civilisations page 34 of the Ancient East, and no less with the civilisation of Greece and Rome, we are dealing with civilisations which are correlated in a strict and intimate way with particular geographical regions; and that the reason why classical studies in particular have been regarded so widely as having parted company with reality and practice is that they have been pursued far too regardless of this regional geographical control.

There is of course historical reason for their neglect. In the early days of the Renascence the scholars themselves were mainly of Mediterranean origin, or at least had made pilgrim's acquaintance with Mediterranean conditions. There was therefore little need for the interpreters of the classics to dwell on the physical surroundings of the ancient world; in essentials they were the same as those of the Revival of Learning. But as the centres of humanist activity shifted beyond the Alps, and the Turk laid more jealous hold on Greet lands, empirical knowledge faded, and classical weather, classical allusions to flowers and herbs, still more to those classical customs and institutions, such as seasonal warfare, a national drama, and democracy itself, which depended on Mediterranean conditions for their realisation, passed, with much else that was admittedly in-capable of realisation on the Atlantic sea-board, into the common heritage of scholarship.

No wonder if, with this inherent defect and omission in the classical tradition as it reached these northern lands, and in the equipment of the scholars themselves, the idea went abroad among the larger world which only heard of scholarship from its school-children, that the 'ancient world' of Greece and Rome lies in some mysterious way on the other side of a great gulf.

No wonder, either, if, even now, many who are attracted by the beauty or the truth of classical literature or art, and are convinced that these things are indeed real page 35 and living and useful to the modern world, yet feel themselves held aloof, if they try to come nearer, by something of this same unfamiliarity, this queerness and unearthliness of outlook, and are baffled, they know not why.

I am prepared for the objection that, to many of us, Greek and Roman life does not seem queer at all; any more, you will admit, than the behaviour of the beasts in Aesop's fables, or a large part of early Jewish History. But that is because in all these cases our whole upbringing has been among heirlooms; it does not alter the queerness of the things which we accept so dully as part of the furniture of our world. But make the experiment for yourselves. Try Aesop's Fables upon a slum child; try Homer or Herodotus, or even Plutarch, upon the hard-headed student who has come straight up the 'ladder,' from the primary school of an industrial town, into this beans talk-country of the humanities, and I think you will see what I mean when I describe the old world and its civilisation as queer. Try another experiment, too. Go, in travel-books, if not in steamers, to the modern East, or even to the remoter parts of the modern Mediterranean; go to Egypt, if you can, in the spirit in which Herodotus went, or to any pagan country, in the spirit in which he went to Scythia, searching out ˝ργα μ∊γάλα τ∊ καì θωμαστά, and I think you will get glimpses—certainly that is how I began to get them—of the realities which give rise to this strangeness. It was one of the best moments in the course of my teaching in Oxford, when I asked an old pupil, newly back from India, some commonplace question, how he liked the East; 'Oh, India is fine,' he said, 'it's just like Herodotus.'

Now it seems to me that one chief reason why ancient history is valued as it is, in our scheme of education, as well as in our scheme of knowledge, is precisely this strangeness and aloofness—and at the same time that the reason why so many people go through the page 36 ordinary classical course without much profit is precisely because they have let themselves take this feature of it for granted, instead of letting it wake them up, and search out the reasons for it. Let me say frankly on the other hand that it is from students of tie type I have described, who have come to these things later and unhardened, or who have succeeded in retaining till they came up to the University something of their first child's wonder at the ancient world, that I am indebted for some of the best side-lights on ancient life.

Now I believe that it is possible to bring home to such students as these—and the type will be recognised, I think, as a more and more familiar one—this vital fact, that it is precisely because Greeks and Romans were in all essential points human with our humanity, and rational as we count reason, that they wove about themselves in their daily walk with nature in a Mediterranean—not a North Atlantic—world, a civilisation which appears to us in so many ways incomprehensible. The very reason, in fact, why the ancient world seemed to us all, at first sight, so remote, is not that the men were different; least of all that they belong, in any sense, to any curiously gifted branch of the human race to begin with. It is rather this, above all, that in the Mediterranean region nature herself was, and is, different from the nature that we know in these islands of the Atlantic sea-board; and that the problem, not merely of living well, but of maintaining human life at all, present different aspects and demanded a different solution in the geographical circumstances of Greece or Italy, from that which our no less human intellect and experience have discovered and instituted here.