EXTRACTS FROM TWO VOLUMES OF A CURATED LIBRARY

DEBATES WITH HISTORIANS

Peter Geyl, 1955

B T Batsford, London, 1955; rebound with orange boards in navy slip case.

The Dutch have earned a reputation for tolerance and enlightenment.  In the 17^th century, they offered sanctuary to great European thinkers like Spinoza and Locke – Spinoza died there; Descartes also sought protection there. 

Holland has also produced great historians.  One of them was the late Pieter Geyl (1887-1966).  Don’t just take my word for it.  A J P Taylor said: ‘If I were asked to name the historian whom I have most venerated in my lifetime, I should not hesitate for an answer.  I should name Pieter Geyl.’

Every now and then – it is not very often – you come across a writer who soon puts you at your ease.  There is a breadth and depth of learning; there is an absence of arrogance or waspishness; and there is some compassion, some generosity of spirit, too.  We may not be able to call someone ‘wise’ unless we can see something on top of a very fine mind – something like humanity, for the want of a better word. 

The late Professor Geyl qualifies on all counts, in spades.  He was trained in Holland, but he spent a lot of time teaching and writing in England and in the States; he also spent some time in Germany, something that I will come back to. 

The first essay in Debates with Historians comes from about 1952 and is called ‘Ranke in the Light of the Catastrophe.’  A Times Literary Supplement piece had in the eye of Geyl suggested that Ranke had by his ‘political quietism’ been a pioneer of National Socialism – the ‘Catastrophe’ of the title.  (In the fashion of the time, the article was unsigned.  Geyl referred to its ‘vehement one-sidedness’ and had said that in ‘this case it is not difficult to guess who is the writer’.)  Geyl was intent on defending the German historian against this charge, a very decent undertaking for a Dutchman so soon after that war, you might think. 

There are two things.  One is the great insight of Ranke that ‘Every period is immediate to God, and its value does not in the least consist in what springs from it, but in its own existence, in its own self.’  This to me sounds like Bonhoeffer.  It is to preach humility to historians – and some of them could do with the sermon. 

Then there is the magisterial closure to the refutation of the charge that Ranke had prefigured National Socialism.  It contains the following.

If we are tempted by our horror at the culmination of evil that we have just experienced or witnessed to pick out in the past of Germany all the evil potentialities, we may construct an impressively cogent concatenation of causes and effects leading straight up to that crisis.  But the impressiveness and straightness will be of our own constructing.  What we are really doing is to interpret the past in the terms of our own fleeting moment.  We can learn a truer wisdom from Ranke’s phrase that it should be viewed ‘immediate to God’, and he himself, too, has a right to be so considered…..Comprehension, a disinterested understanding of what is alien to you – this is not the function of the mind which will supply the most trenchant weapons for the political rough-and-tumble….To understand is a function of the mind which not only enriches the life of the individual; it is the very breath of the civilization which we are called to defend.

God send us more people who can think and write with that largeness of spirit – and consign our mediocrities to the dustbin that they deserve.

There is an essay on Carlyle, and ‘the spirit of the Old Testament that seems to be present, coupling anathematization with adoration.’  It is about Carlyle’s ‘impatience with baseness and cowardice, his feeling of being out of place in a world of superficial sentiment and mediocre living……the babbling of lifeless religiosity or the sham assurance of modern idealism.  Instinct, intuition, the myth, these were his challenge to the rationalists and glorifiers of science who (unappeasable grievance) had made the Christian certitude of his childhood untenable for him’.  Carlyle was impatient with those in thrall to logic.

Geyl, as it seems to me, gets the sadness in Carlyle exactly right: ‘the sentimental tie to a spiritual heritage which his intellect rejected, the painful reaction against the false teachers who gave him nothing in exchange for what they had robbed him of.’ 

That condition is very common now – it may define our time, as the time of the claimed death of God, but the author concludes on Carlyle: ‘and the perception of that tragic quality makes it possible to accept gratefully that which is vivifying in his work and serenely to enjoy its beauties.’  Would that other professional historians might be so generous with this poetic and prophetic lightning-conductor from the north.

Then follows an essay on Michelet, the first great historian of the French Revolution.  I have read Michelet, mostly in translation, the better to understand the loathing of the French for the church and, for many of them at one time or another, the English.  His father was an unsuccessful printer – as Professor Burrow reminds us, ‘exactly from the stratum from which the revolutionary crowds were chiefly recruited.’  But, Professor Geyl instructs us, business was bad under Napoleon, and ‘the memory of the Revolution was thus, in that poverty-stricken family, allied to detestation of the Corsican despot.’  It helps to have the inside running on the local knowledge of some historians. 

Michelet talks of the ‘people’ – le bon peuple – while Carlyle speaks of the ‘mob’.  Or, rather, as Geyl tells us, it is the people when it is good – the storming of the bastille; but when they are bad – massacring the inmates of prisons until the streets ran with blood – it is not ‘the people’ but ‘three or four hundred drunks.’  If the awful Terror was an awful weapon, it only had to be employed because of the evil English without, and the traitors within – ‘the people’ and France were guiltless.  (Do you recall Francois Mitterrand saying of Vichy France that ‘The French nation was not involved in that; nor was the Republic’?  Did they all come from Mars?  Have you heard a Russian say that it was not Russia that invaded Afghanistan – it was the Soviet Union?) 

On the one hand, Michelet dislikes Robespierre for the lack of that ‘kindness which befits heroes’; on the other hand, the moderates, who literally lost their heads, lacked ‘that relentless severity which it seemed that the hour required.’  Only seemed, Professor?  When people walk on egg-shells like that, they are protecting someone. 

There are four papers on Arnold Toynbee – but we have seen enough to gauge the quality of this fine book.  Professor Geyl represents something very, very fine about the European tradition.  He came from a nation that holds some of the title deeds of western civilization, to adopt a phrase of Churchill’s, a nation renowned for its tolerance.  His was a Europe that had just been convulsed in an appalling war, for the second time in a little more than a generation, but this historian is able to analyse its history in a way that does great honour to his calling.  In those essays, he had defended one German historian charged with being a step-ladder for the Nazis, and he had sought to understand what he saw as the ‘catastrophes’ that had befallen both France and Germany in different centuries and with different dictators.

I mentioned that Geyl had spent some time in Germany and that he wrote the Dutch version of the Talleyrand essay during the German occupation of Holland.  For thirteen months, Pieter Geyl, even then a most distinguished Dutch historian, had been kept at a place that Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Barack Obama visited a couple of years ago.  Its emblem was Jedem das Seine, ‘To Each his Own’.  We know it under a name of unspeakable horror – Buchenwald. 

On his release from Buchenwald, Geyl was kept in a Dutch prison by the Germans until the end of the war.  And, yet, in the period following that war, he was able to write about Europe, and the world at large, in the terms that I have indicated.  This, surely, was a colossal achievement, and one that humbles us. 

Professor Geyl has produced work that helps us come to terms with our humanity, and that is I think the proper purpose of the world of learning, or, as I would prefer to say, men and women of letters.  Or as A J P Taylor is quoted as saying in the blurb on this book, ‘Geyl is one of the few living men whose writings make us feel that Western civilisation still exists.’

MEN AND IDEAS

Johan Huizinga

Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1960; translated by J S Holmes and H van Marle.  Rebound in red and white fancy paper with matching slip.

The Dutch have long enjoyed a reputation for tolerance and for being a refuge for dissident intellectuals – like Descartes and Spinoza.  Johan Huizinga is a model of the European intellectual.  He has a lot in common with Pieter Geyl (whom we looked at in the second volume).  Both were Dutch historians arrested and held by the Germans.  Both were gracious and humane scholars with an open European world view. 

In The Waning of the Middle Ages, Huizinga spoke of the ‘vehement pathos of medieval life’ and the ‘extreme excitability of the medieval soul’.  Incidents were ‘by the sacredness of the sacrament raised to the rank of mysteries’.

Calamities and indigence were more afflicting than at present; it was more difficult to guard against them, and to find solace.  Illness and health presented a more striking contrast; the cold and darkness of the winter were more real evils.  Honours and riches were honoured with greater avidity and contrasted more vividly with surrounding misery.  We, at the present day [1925], can hardly understand the keenness with which a fur coat, a good fire on the hearth, a soft bed, a glass of wine, were formerly enjoyed…. The modern reader of newspapers can no longer conceive the violence of impression caused by the spoken word on an ignorant mind lacking mental food.

Monkeys abounded as pets.  Beggars were everywhere, many disfigured – in fact or fiction.  The legless dragged themselves around by wooden stumps.  The Church put a woman in the Godhead, and persecuted all her daughters on earth as the source of evil, according to a myth that everyone had to believe.  The Church also said that the Mother of God was a virgin, and the cult of the Virgin arose out of the failure of the Church to come to grips with the facts of life – we like sex, and were meant to, because otherwise the human race would just fade and pass away.  Doctors, as some were called, did not know what they were doing, but were admired.  Everyone loathed lawyers, and very few trusted any monk or friar.

Let us see how the commentary of this remarkable historian is so relevant to us right now.

…. the general evolution of the dominant groups – the democratisation of society – constitutes a danger.  Professional scholarship can never be more than for a few: it is aristocratic.  Literature (and with it popular scholarship) is for the many, must be for the many.  Modern culture must be democratic if it is to be at all.  …. The ultimate problem remains like a ghost, ever present and unlaid: Is it possible to extend a higher civilisation to the lower classes without debasing its standard and diluting its quality to the vanishing point?  Is not every civilisation bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate the masses?

That question may have been unfashionable, but the crash of all decency and fineness around populists like Trump makes it very urgent.

What about that other accursed ‘–ism’, nationalism?

Whether the relationship was large or small, the basis for the emotion embodied in ‘natio’ was the same everywhere: the primitive in-group that felt passionately united as soon as the others, outsiders in whatever way, seemed to threaten them or to rival them.  This feeling usually manifested itself as hostility and rarely as concord.  The closer the contacts the fiercer the hate. 

Does not what Huizinga called this ‘great ethnic antithesis’ underlie the rise of people like Farage, Hansen and Trump?

The Crusades, far from uniting the faith that was divided by language dissent and allegiance, reinforced the national enmities of Latin Christendom by bringing those peoples together again and again in martial equipment, battle array and a more or less sanctified rivalry…. A Frenchman remarkably observed that the French tend to behave themselves intractably among foreigners if they are not kept well in hand.

And as France, Russia and Germany showed, a revolution just makes things worse.

Then came the Revolution, when the mouth still called out for the universal good of virtue and love of mankind, but the mailed fist struck for the fatherland and the nation, and the heart was with the fist.  The factors ‘patrie’ and ‘nation’ had never before had such an intense influence as in the years from 1789 to 1796.  That fact merely confirms that nature constantly proves stronger than theory.  …. But as soon as one sets out to formulate the rights of man, the state appears to be required as the framework for his society.

That process reached frightful apotheoses under Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Franco and Mao.  But the author goes on:

Since Montesquieu, it had become a doctrine that liberty was born in the forests of Tacitus’ Germania, and that England’s political institutions had developed from that soil of that Old Germanic freedom.  France too had accepted the doctrine.

So had F W Maitland, but are we talking of doctrine or myth?  Whatever the answer may be to that question, this book seethes with insights like these.  This is not just learning or scholarship – this is wisdom of a kind that we so rarely see now.