STUDIES ON THE NAPOLEONIC WARS 002
Man's Outlook on History
1. Historical Perspective: Man’s Outlook on History
The moment that man begins to think about something more than the passing trifles and troubles of his daily life, and starts, consciously or unconsciously, to make generalizations about himself and his neighbours, their ends and objects, their past and future, he has begun to look at things in perspective. And when he extends his survey so as to draw deductions from all that he knows about the past records of mankind, he is trying to look at the world in historical perspective. It may be that his survey extends over no greater space of time than a generation or two—“Tales of a Grandfather” may be the limit of his knowledge. Or, on the other hand, he may know—or may think that he knows—the whole history of mankind since the Creation—if he ties himself down to the idea of a Creation—down to the all-important present day. Such was the happy conviction of Orosius in A.D. 417, and of Mr. H. G. Wells in A.D. 1925. But whether his horizon of knowledge be long or short, whether it be a hundred years or a hundred aeons, the man who has started to generalize about his own position in universal history is constructing for himself an historical perspective.
What are the things that determine a man’s outlook on the past and the future? I do not mean only the outlook that the historian (or would-be historian) takes, but the conceptions that governed the mind of the average man of various epochs down to our own day. It must be remembered that there are sharp breaks in the history of human thought concerning the past and the future, consequent on outward happenings in some cases, and on mental and spiritual changes in others. The conception of world-history was wholly different for a Roman of the reign of Augustus and a Roman of the reign of Honorius—but was the change more due to the collapse of the Empire under the Barbarian Invasions, or to the triumph of the Christian over the old official Pagan ideal? Or again, the outlook of an ordinarily intelligent Frenchman, Englishman, or German in 1450 was completely different from that of his great-grandson in 1600—but was that the result of the complex cultural changes which (for want of a better word) we call the Renaissance, and of the discovery of America and the Indies, and of countless advances in science? Or was it, in the main, the result of that great spiritual phenomenon which (again for want of a better word) we call the Reformation?
It is well worth while to take into consideration what are the main things that have governed man’s conception of the progress of events, and the way that such conception governs his conduct in his own day. The beginnings of unconscious historical perspective came early; we may trace them in Homer and Hesiod and the Pentateuch, even in the surviving scraps of Assyrian and Egyptian records. A hint that an impious and tyrannical king “who does not that which is right in the sight of the Lord” means a ruined people, or that civil wars are deplorable, or that a corrupt oligarchy ends in a revolution, may be “glimpses of the obvious”; but historical perspective is beginning when the poet or the scribe or the annalist sets down such things as accepted facts, and applies them as warnings to the polities of his own day. Presently we reach the stage when the scribe works these observed phenomena into a little constitutional essay, as does Herodotus when—under the easy fiction of a debate among seven Persian nobles on forms of government—he discusses the advantages and disadvantages of oligarchy, democracy, and monarchy. Here historical perspective has ripened into definite promulgation of doctrine. And Herodotus is only a hundred years distant from Aristotle, who was able to set forth the doctrine of the rise, progress, and decay of states (of all kinds) with a perfection of judgement that none of his successors in the sphere of political philosophy has ever surpassed. Though moderns like Montesquieu or Lord Bryce have had the advantage of a survey of two thousand more years of history than was granted to the ancient Stagirite, it cannot be said that they have added very much to his theory, or refuted any of the more important of his generalizations. And it astonishes us when we reflect that between his thought and ours there lie many centuries of the Roman Empire, in which the problems of democracy, on which he pondered so much, had become out of date, and still more centuries of the Dark Ages, in which constitutional history had harked back to that primitive contest between aristocracy and monarchy which recalled struggles that had ended in Greece three hundred years before Aristotle’s day.
But we are concerned not so much with the outlook on the records of mankind that is found in the works of Aristotle, or Dante, or Bacon, or Montesquieu, or Lord Bryce, or any other master mind, as with the generalizations of the man in the street—the average intelligent member of society in one age or another. Herodotus, Livy, Orosius, the authors of the Nuremberg Chronicle, Lamartine, or Sir Archibald Alison are the sort of people who give the best evidence as to the historical perspective of their own day.
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