The Miracle of England
by
[Harpers, $3.75]
WHY the substantial volume published in London as A History of England should, in crossing the Atlantic, become The Miracle of England, it is not given us to know. Possibly the book-supporting classes in America are deemed to be peculiarly susceptible to the essay in interpretation, as against the chronicle of fact. Our latter-day reception of the more imaginative sort of biography, as written by M. Maurois among others, certainly gives color of plausibility to the notion. In any event it is the American title that more aptly tells the truth about these nearly 200,000 words, for in the upshot they are more interpretation than chronicle. The proportion of exegesis to fact is, indeed, higher than one can easily remember finding it in any comparable work by an author as frankly assuming the obligation of the historian; and by the old-fashioned measure of, say. Green’s Short History of the English People the proportion is positively fantastic. A fair and even an inescapable inference is that M. Maurois takes the historian’s function, as he has taken the biographer’s, to be interpretation before all else.
The author of Ariel approaches the history of England as a challenging mystery, a dramatic conundrum. The great question he undertakes to answer is ‘how certain Saxon and Danish tribes, isolated on an island on the outer rim of Europe, merging with the Celtic and Roman survivors and organized by adventurers from Normandy, became with the passing centuries the masters of one third of this planet.‘ It is, he says, ‘instructive to probe the secret of a destiny as fortunate and impressive as that of ancient Rome.‘ The answer and the secret he deciphers from the inveterate paradox of the British character, which is its union of continuity with flexibility. The story he tells, or rather digests, — he disposes of the World War in five pages and of the late abdication in one and a half, — is given the shape and focus of art by his insistence throughout on the continuity as a framework for the flexibility and on the flexibility as an animating principle of the continuity. This is the thesis he undertakes to illustrate and dramatize at every turning point of the English annals.
For example, the stiffness that, lost Britain her North American colonies he represents as a causative factor in the moderation that has solidified her other possessions into an Empire; and likewise he takes the enforced abdication of Edward VIII as proving that ‘the strength of the roots was all the more manifest for the violence of the storm that shook the tree,’ and that drastic changes could be ‘carried out with dignity, order, and sound sense.’
To this system of finding in immense segments of human affairs the unity and the lucidity of high art there are patent advantages, and there are also as patent drawbacks. One of the greatest advantages is the freedom left the author to propound those arresting and luminous generalizations that lift a thousand facts to a plane transcending the factual; e.g., the calm statement, ‘There has never been a real revolution in England.’ One of the greatest drawbacks is the bland arrogance with which the merely human historian has to involve himself in the godlike business of telling us at every juncture what would certainly have happened if what did happen had not, and thus of exposing himself wholesale to the post-hoc-ergopropter-hoc fallacy. M. Maurois says that it is the province of the good historian ‘to describe the past, not to forecast the future’; but the truth is that his whole fashion of chronicling events is a species of prediction, almost of soothsaying. That is to say, he depicts every occurrence as already laden with the significance of its apparent consequences— a significance that it could not possibly have save by hindsight. That method of analysis is defiant of disproof when you have the known outcome to give you the hint. But can it, realistically speaking, be called describing the past?
The translation, by Mr. Hamish Miles, has pedestrian competence rather than grace. The volume is illustrated with portraits and adequately supplied with sketch maps. The index, as far as I have tested it, is accurate, but — no venial sin in a volume of this kind — noticeably incomplete.
WILSON FOLLETT