MODERN HISTORIC METHOD

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 36, 11 August 1923, Page 14

MODERN HISTORIC METHOD

GREAT MEN LESS REGARDED.

In popular conceptions of English history the chief role of the Northmen is to afford a sombre background to the shining biography of Alfred the Great. But here, says Mr. Reginald Lennard in the "Quarterly," the perspective of the schoolbooks ia singularly at. fault. Even in the story of Wessex, Alfred was only one, though no doubt the most distinguished, of a long line of heroic warrior kings. ■ The brilliance of his achievements in the arts of peace and the no-' bihty of his-aims have dazzled many generations of historians, and some of the most authoritative of them are still inclined to make Alfred "as pre-eminent jp the military and political history of his age as he undoubtedly -was in the history of learning and education." Though the biographers are wrongeven in their biography, modern views are the result of a change more .fundamental than any readjustment of biographical values. History, says Mr. Lennard, is assuming a more sociological aspect.' We may still look upon; individual great men as moulders of history, but the history thus moulded does not consust of the actions of the great. It is mr.de up of the lives of commor. people, which are affected by the conduct of great men, just as they are affected by climate and pestilence, by the growth of Knowledge,' and the development of legal and moral ideas, or by any of the other factors in historical causation. If history is "the essence of. innumerable biographies, ' it is from the biographies of multitudes of unnamed common people that it must be distilled. As a factor m historical causation a great general or a great moral teacher may be worth a million men. but as a part of history in this further sense of the word ne counts only for one. As moulders of English history in th« ninth ?? '■£<■ J? el\ tuvie3 the warrior kings of we west Saxons remain enormously lm- ?, 01tw' b, ut'heir P art no longer agpcars as that of the protagonists. The real protagonists m this period were the whose intrusion into AngloSaxon England changed the fabric of so-