The unification of Germany after fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to their fellow-countrymen in the national and international problems of the time. In his gigantic work on the History of Prussian Foreign Policy, Droysen, the eldest of the Triumvirate, calls four centuries to witness that the Hohenzollerns alone, from their unswerving fidelity to German interests as a whole, were fitted to restore the Empire. He worked exclusively from Prussian archives, and history seen exclusively through Prussian spectacles was bound to be one-sided. No student of European history would contest the value of his researches; but his interpretation of Prussian policy in terms of German nationalism was at once recognized as a fundamental error, and has long been abandoned. The second member of the group, Sybel, himself one of the three favourite pupils of Ranke, revolted in middle life, and in his two great treatises on the era of the French Revolution and the foundation of the German Empire championed the policy of the Hohenzollerns and delivered slashing attacks on France and Austria, their rivals and antagonists.
The last and greatest of the triumvirate, Treitschke, the Bismarck of the Chair, devoted his life to a history of Germany in the nineteenth century which occupies the same unique place in the affections of German readers as Macaulay's unfinished masterpiece enjoys throughout the English-speaking world. Unlike the works of Droysen and Sybel, the German History was far more than a political narrative, and presented an encyclopaedic picture of national development. His theme was the conflict of the forces which were promoting and opposing the transformation of his country into a powerful Empire, and he judges men and states by the measure in which they promoted or obstructed that purpose. On the one side stands Prussia, feeling her way to the realization of her historic task, on the other the middle and smaller states, aided and abetted by the arch-enemy Austria and deeply infected with the doctrinaire liberalism of France. Treitschke's stage is a battlefield, with the historian looking down and encouraging his friends with loud cries of applause. Such methods could not survive the realization of the aim which they had done so much to assist, and with Treitschke's death in 1896 the Prussian School disappeared. Its members were the political schoolmasters of Germany at a time of uncertainty and discouragement, and they braced their countrymen to the efforts which culminated in the creation of a mighty Empire. If the purpose of history is to stir a nation to action, Droysen, Sybel, and Treitschke are among the greatest masters of the craft. If its supreme aim is to discover truth and to interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim to a place in the first class. The stream, temporarily deflected by their powerful influence, began to return to the channel which Ranke had marked out for it. Such works as Moriz Ritter's narrative of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Koser's biography of Frederick the Great, Max Lehmann's biographies of Scharnhorst and Stein, and Erich Marcks' studies of Bismarck and his master are as notable for their judgement as for their erudition.
The cooling process noted in the Old World has also occurred in the New, and America of the twentieth century smiles at Bancroft's complacent idealization of the Puritan colonies. Even the slavery struggle, the ashes of which are scarcely yet cold, has found in James Ford Rhodes a historian who can do justice to Jefferson Davis and Lee no less than to Lincoln and Grant. But no American scholar compares in world-wide influence with Mahan, whose study of Sea-Power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, published in 1889, not only founded a school of naval history but was inwardly digested by distinguished pupils in both hemispheres, among them the Emperor William II and Theodore Roosevelt. The Admiral's writings owe their importance not to research, for few new facts are brought to light, but to the new angle from which familiar events are envisaged. Occasionally, perhaps, the element of sea-power in the determination of a particular result is over-emphasized at the expense of other factors; but he was the first to seize the wider bearings of naval history and to make the general reader aware of its momentous significance.
The scope of history has gradually widened till it has come to include every aspect of the life of humanity. No one would now dare to maintain with my old master Seeley that history was the biography of States or with Freeman that it was merely past politics. The growth of nations, the achievements of men of action, the rise and fall of parties remain among the most engrossing themes of the historian; but he now casts his net wider and embraces the whole opulent record of civilization. The influence of nature, the pressure of economic factors, the origin and transformation of ideas, the contribution of science and art, religion and philosophy, literature and law, the material conditions of life, the fortunes of the masses—such problems now claim his attention in no less degree. He must see life steadily and see it whole. We must master such revealing works as Lecky's histories of Rationalism and Morals, Burckhardt's and Symonds' interpretations of the Italian Renaissance, Sainte-Beuve's full-length portrait of the Jansenists, Morley's studies of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists, Dean Church's sketch of the Oxford Movement, and Merz's survey of European Thought in the nineteenth century, if we are to understand the throbbing life of the human spirit. We must measure the operation of economic factors and forces and profit by the faithful labours of Schmoller and Thorold Rogers, Cunningham and Kovalevsky, the Webbs and the Hammonds, if we are to visualize the life of the unnumbered and the unknown who have done the routine work of the world.
The fifty years roughly sketched in this lecture witnessed an immense and almost immeasurable advance in historical studies. The technique needed to turn raw materials into the finished article kept pace with the supply, and men learned to write the history of their own country, their own party, and their own beliefs, as impartially as that of other lands and other creeds. But the Great War has ravaged the placid pastures of scholarship no less than the fields of France and Belgium. Too many historians in every belligerent country have lost their heads and degenerated into shrieking partisans. International co-operation in the pursuit of truth, which is the condition of progress in history no less than in science, has been rudely shattered by the clash of arms. With all but the calmest minds, national self-consciousness and national self-righteousness have rendered frankness in dealing with the record of our late allies and fairness in dealing with our late enemies difficult if not impossible. Many years will elapse before the European atmosphere regains the tranquillity in which alone the disinterested pursuit of truth can nourish. Meanwhile it is a source of legitimate satisfaction that while the world was rocking to its foundations two English historians, Sir Adolphus Ward and Mr. William Harbutt Dawson, were narrating the development of Germany in the nineteenth century with a steadiness of pulse unsurpassed in the piping times of peace. The historian is a man of flesh and blood and may love his country as ardently as other men; but, if he is to be worthy of his high calling, he must trample passion and prejudice under his feet and walk humbly and reverently in the temple of the Goddess of Truth.
FOR REFERENCE
Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (Longmans).
VI
POLITICAL THEORY