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Let me begin by making concessions to every school. History is an art, and it is also a science; we may say that it is an art which is always trying to become more of a science. As a science it is concerned with causation. The past, if it is to satisfy intelligent minds, must be presented as a sequence of effects and causes. History is not content with an accumulation of facts; it seeks to establish relations between facts. Like every other science, it is a form of thought, and, like every other science, it aims at the attainment of truth. The past cannot be regarded as a mere pageant. Events do not follow each other only in succession of time. Even from the point of view of art, history must have its own inevitableness; and, from the point of view of science, it must aim at representing the whole complex of the past as a chain, each link riveted to the other by a causal necessity.

That is an ideal which we may well admire. It represents an instinct at which we dare not cavil—one of the oldest of human instincts, the instinct to rationalise. For some time there has been a movement on foot towards what is called the ‘rationalising’ of industry, and there is no reason why the modest labours of Clio’s domain should be exempt from the impulse. History must be more than a chronicle; it must be synoptic and interpretative.

In practice, rationalisation may take many forms. To begin with, there are the high philosophers, the professional metaphysicians. If Bolingbroke was right, and history is philosophy teaching by examples, it is clearly most important to get at the philosophy. Then there are those who fix their eyes upon scientific method, and, like Taine, believe that by means of a number of categories of determinable causes every historical event can be mathematically explained. Others are content to seek a formula, and there are many kinds of formulas. There is the formula derived from metaphysics—the Hegelian dialectic, for example, with its sequence of thesis and antithesis and synthesis; or, in a simpler form, Louis Blanc’s succession of authority, individualism and fraternity; or, simpler still, the mysticism which finds the key in a single aspect, like Karl Marx’s economic interpretation. Or you may have the unifying notion in the shape of a metaphor, a pictorial conception, such as the idea of the past as a cyclic or a spiral process. You may get a loose interpretative principle in something akin to biological evolution, or you may find it in an ethical or theological purpose. Lord Acton saw in history the working of the moral law, and Bishop Stubbs the revelation of the ‘Almighty Ruler of the world’ busied with ‘leading the world on to the better, but never forcing, and out of the evil of man’s working bringing continually that which is good.’

There is no word to be said against the ambition of philosophers and scientists and even theologians to bring light and order into the dark places of the past. Every historian must have a thesis, some principle of illumination to guide him, and the value of his work will largely depend upon the sanity and profundity of that thesis. But I would suggest that, the subject-matter of history being what it is, we should be chary of becoming too dogmatic about any principle of interpretation which we put forward. For history works under conditions wholly unlike those of the natural sciences, and historic truth must be something very different from mathematical truth, or even from biological truth.

The philosophers need not trouble us. The awful gambols of a metaphysical doctrine are apt now and then to make nonsense of history, as when Hegel contemplated the stately process of the Absolute Will, and found its final expression in Germany before 1840—a view more flattering to Germany than to the Absolute Will. But if the metaphysician likes to explain everything by some such process, he is welcome to try, so long as he admits that he cannot expound its precise working.

The scientific historian is more dangerous. The older school, of the type of Buckle and Guizot, believed that they had established historical laws of universal validity, and provided a clockwork uniformity of effects and causes. It would appear that they misunderstood the kind of material with which they had to deal. M. Bergson has shown us that half the blunders of philosophy are due to the application of the methods and ideals of physical science to spheres of thought where they are strictly inapplicable. In the kaleidoscope of the past we cannot, as a rule, sort out effects and causes with any precision, nor can we weigh events in the meticulous scales which science demands. Even when causes are reasonably plain, their classification eludes us. We cannot tell which is the causa causans, which are proximate, or efficient, or final. We must be content with generalisations which are only generalisations and not laws, with broad effects and massed colours. The weakness of the scientific historian is that he underrates the complexity of human nature. He would turn mankind into automata, motives into a few elementary emotions, and the infinitely varied web of life into a simple geometrical pattern. Order and simplicity are great things, but they must be natural to the subject and not due to the blindness of the historian. You remember Sainte-Beuve’s comment on Guizot:

‘I am one of those who doubt if it is given to man to embrace the causes and sources of his history with this completeness and certitude. It is as much as he can do to reach an imperfect understanding of the present.... History seen from a distance undergoes a strange metamorphosis; it produces the illusion—most dangerous of all—that it is rational. The perversities, the follies, the ambitions, the thousand queer accidents which compose it, all these disappear. Every accident becomes a necessity. ... Such history is far too logical to be true.’

On this point we are perhaps a little more modest to-day than our fathers were. But we are always apt to forget that history cannot give us the precise and continuous causal connections which we look for in the physical sciences. All that we get are a number of causal suggestions, with a good many gaps in them, and if we try to get more we shall do violence to historical truth. We shall be in danger of writing history in order to prove something, and thereby missing that disinterested intellectual curiosity which is the only avenue to truth. We shall try to make the accidental the inevitable, and to explain the inexplicable. We shall refuse to recognise the fundamental irrationality of a large part of Clio’s domain.

An example of this fallacy is the attitude of the would-be scientific historian towards great men. The hero in history is a terrible nuisance to the lover of dapper generalities. He breaks the symmetry and spoils the syllogism. What is to be done with him? The scientific mind likes to deal with human nature in the lump, for it is aware that you can generalise with reasonable accuracy about the behaviour of masses of people, when you cannot dogmatise about any single one of them. But what about the daimonic figures who obstinately refuse to be merged in the mass? The embarrassed scientist is driven to one of two courses. Either he declares that the great people had but little influence on the course of events, that the real motive force was this or that intellectual movement or economic grouping. But in many cases this is simply not the truth. The great individuals—Alexander, Caesar, Mohammed, Charlemagne, Luther, Calvin, Peter the Great, Napoleon,—cannot be explained in the terms of any contemporary movement. They are in a sense the children of their age, but they bring to their age more than they draw from it; they seem to be, like Melchizedek, without recognisable ancestry, and by the sheer force of personality and mind they lift the world to a new plane.... Or he will try to submerge them in the mass by arguing that they were not so great after all. This necessity may partly account for the sans-culottism of a certain type of historian, who is always attempting to deflate the majestic reputations of history, and to reduce the great figures of the past to a drab level of mediocrity. Partly, no doubt, these essays in belittlement are the result of what is called in the jargon of to-day an ‘inferiority complex,’ the jealousy of small minds perturbed by the spectacle of something beyond their compass. They see a chance of winning an easy notoriety. An old Cambridge friend of mine had a simile for such people; he said that they were like some Greek of the decadence who broke the nose of an Apollo of Pheidias in order to make the Goths laugh. But, for the honour of human nature, I like to think it is partly the desire of the embarrassed scientist to have less truculent material to work with. Once again, the trouble is that the result is not the truth. Such denigratory efforts may explain many things in a great man, but not his greatness.

The fault, of course, is that of undue simplification. It is the application by a false analogy of the ideals and methods of certain physical sciences to a domain where they are not relevant. In physics we reduce a complex to the operations of constant and measurable forces, but no such mechanical simplification is possible with the inconstants of human history. The movement of mankind is not by a single-gauge track; there is a network of tracks, and the one actually taken may owe its choice to the blindest chance. Rationalise the facts as much as you please—and you can often carry the process a long way—there will remain things which you cannot rationalise, things which you can only call accidents, and which cannot be explained in any logical terms. Instead of the causal we find the casual. I do not for one moment argue that these incomprehensible factors are incapable of rationalisation by some higher intelligence than our own; I only say that we cannot fit them into any mortal scheme of effects and causes. The President of the Immortals has not chosen to take us into his confidence.

Explanation and interpretation, let me repeat, are the essence of history. An historical event can be partially explained by many causes, but there may be some little thing without which it could not have happened, and that little thing may come out of the void, without any apparent justification for its existence. Nevertheless, but for it the history of a decade or a century would have gone differently. Everywhere in the record of the past we find those sparks which fire the powder mines, and in the absence of which the powder might have become useless and never have exploded at all. Let us be a little chary about accepting the so-called ‘streams of inevitable tendency’ which are the delight in each generation of simple souls, and give them the opportunity of posing as minor prophets and announcing the ‘decline of the West’ or the ‘recrudescence of barbarism,’ or some such journalistic slogan. The historian is wise if, like the Romans of the early Empire, he admits Fortuna and even Sors to a place in his Pantheon, and concedes the eternal presence of the irrational and the inexplicable.

It is a recognition which encourages intellectual humility. I venture to think, too, that our sense of the mystery and variousness of life is enlarged, when we realise that the very great may spring from the very small. How does Edmund Burke put it? ‘A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.’ History is full of these momentous trifles—the accident which kills or preserves in life some figure of destiny; the weather on some critical battlefield, like the fog at Lützen or the snow at Towton; the change of wind which brings two fleets to a decisive action; the severe winter of 1788 which produces the famine of 1789, and thereby perhaps the French Revolution; the birth or the death of a child; a sudden idea which results in some potent invention. Let me give you an instance from recent history. The success of Turkish Nationalism under Kemal was due to the complete rout of the Greek armies in 1922 in Asia Minor. That ill-omened Greek campaign was largely due to the restoration in 1920 of King Constantine, which led to the Western Allies dissociating themselves from Greek policy and leaving Greece to her own devices. King Constantine was recalled as a consequence of a general election when M. Venizelos was defeated, and that election was held because young King Alexander, the protégé of the Allies, died early in the autumn of 1920. The cause of his death was blood-poisoning due to the bite of a pet monkey in the palace gardens. I cannot better Mr. Churchill’s comment: ‘A quarter of a million persons died of that monkey’s bite.’

To look for such pregnant trifles is an instructive game, very suitable for academic circles in the winter season. But it must be played according to the rules. The business is to find the momentous accident, and obviously the smaller you make the accident, the more you reduce it to its ultimate elements, the more startling will be the disproportion between the vast consequence and the minute cause. The accident must be small, and it must be a true parent of consequences. Not every one will serve our purpose. Take Pascal’s query—as to what would have happened to the world had Cleopatra’s nose been a little shorter? The answer, I think, is—Not very much. Egypt, as the granary of the Roman world, was obviously a trump card for ambition to seize, and its importance did not depend upon the profile of its queen. Take another familiar speculation—what difference would it have made if Clive’s pistol had not missed fire when, as a young man, he attempted suicide? Again, I think, the right answer is—Not a great deal. India was ripe for British conquest; if Clive had not led the way, some other would. In the middle decades of the sixteenth century a great deal seemed to depend upon the appearance of royal heirs, and historians have speculated as to what would have happened if Anne Boleyn had borne a male child, or Mary Tudor, or Mary of Scotland when she was the wife of the Dauphin of France. I doubt if there would have been any substantial change. The main lines of the future had been already determined by the complex of economic and intellectual forces which were responsible for the Reformation.

But let me offer to you—in the spirit of the game which I have suggested—one or two cases where destiny does seem for one moment to have trembled in the balance.