THE WARP AND THE WOOF

Mr. H. G. Wells, historian himself by avocation, in bewailing the absence of glamour from modern times, is quoted as commenting recently; "there is not more history, nothing but line typed records and political economy!" The point raised by this somewhat cryptic remark is one which has divided present-day historians into two camps as widely divergent as the Big Endiaus and Little Endiaus of Lilliput. Certainly there has never been a time when the raw flux of history and romance has poured out as plentifully as today. The question is one of treatment.

How is it possible to make the events of one period live in the minds of future generations, and it all cannot be recreated what should be stressed and what discarded? Today the hue and cry is raised against any history which subordinates the economic development of a nation to the temporary piling up of events during a war. Look at a history of Norman England written in the present style. The Battle of Crecy is laid out, a decisive battle, to be sure, but as bare of any imagination stimulating incident as a scrimmage between two sandlot football team. The picturesque is gone; there is nothing of the blind king of Bohemia charging into battle among his knight, or the stand of the English archers against wave after wave of the French chivalry. All of this is unessential from the modernist point of view. The student will learn what the issue was, fought between a handful of men, and what the result. But the players in the drama are non-existent and it is the players who make the story.

Unquestionablyit is the orderly chronicling of events that underlies al history. But interwoven must be color and life or the events will lose their relative importance or fail to stand out at all. This side the modern historians neglect or ignore. The successors to Parkman or Prescott are-turning their attention to other fields. What comes in to fill the gap is historical fiction. An inspired novelist like Scott, building a "casing of romance upon a core of realism", as Brander Mathews remarked, with a historian's mind for detail, and the creative imagination of an artist; should be prescribed for reading in history as much s in literature. The actual order of events may be slightly distorted, but the picture painted of the times leaves a more accurate impression than a careful, calculated relation of history. Carlyle's "French Revolution" shows the same quality, reflecting in their true proportion currents of national feeling, manners and customs of the people. The historical romance can display the idealism and enthusiasm of the times against a background of events.

Mr. Wells meaning is not that history has ceased to exist, but that it has grown too large. Its picturesqueness and its glamour have been taken over to the province of the novelist. Both are essential just as the warp and the woof in the weaving of a carpet.