540
PARTISAN REVIEW
which may be· felt about the resolution of the problem of the book. And
perhaps the two ambiguities are not unrelated to each other.
I do not wish to conclude this comment on
The Company She Keeps
without saying that I admired and enjoyed the book.
If
I have been in·
clined to ask questions of the book, I wish this fact to be taken as an
index to the basic seriousness and value which I believe is in Miss
McCarthy's work. And I hope that the questions have been worthy of the
book.
RoBERT PENN WARREN
MISS RUKEYSER'S MARINE POEM
Wake Island. By Muriel Rukeyser. Doubleday, Doran. $1.00.
There's one thing you can say about Muriel: she's not lazy.
WELDON KEES
PORTRAIT OF AN HISTORIAN
As Lord Acton Says. By F. E. Lally. Remington Ward, $3.00.
What makes a great Historian? Readers and writers of history
would probably agree that the qualities of greatness embrace (1) style,
(2) scholarship, (3) thesis. Certainly it is style which has put the stamp
of a classic on Edward Gibbon's celebrated
Decline and Fall;
his research
was eclectic, his argument overwhelmingly rationalistic in bias; but having
"shrunk with terror from the modern history of England", as he confessed,
Gibbon embraced "a safer theme", and found that "middle tone, the genu·
ine style" which he somehow knew would give him historic importance.
Again, of a work like Charles Beard's memorable
Economic Interpretation
of the Constitution
it is undeniably its sharp and provocative thesis which
has made it an intellectual monument; its writing is plain, matter-of-fact,
its scholarship consisted
l~rgely
of the glossing of known texts (aided
by lucky discoveries among Washington garbage of original Founding
Father papers). And what gives distinction to a performance like M. I.
Rostovtzev's formidable study of
The Roman Empire
is not its style or
thesis (it can hardly be said to have much of either), but its simply
remarkable reconstruction of the past in all its vital detail from hitherto
mute historical sources, sticks and stones and bones.
The case of Lord Acton is something else again. Here is a strange
and brilliant man, with a still stranger career-for hert is an indisputably
great historian who never wrote a book! When, after Acton's death
in
1902 (which cut short his editing of the
Cambridge Modern History),
a
critic wandered into his amazing library, now a kind of museum piece
in Cambridge, he found hundreds of shelves of English, Irish, Scottish,
German, French and Russian history, Italian manuscripts, Greek and Latin
classics, Church documents and Pipe Rolls, all with annotations indicating
a colossal industry, and for him it was "the most pathetic sight of wasted
labour that ever met human eyes", a monument to lost learning. Acton,
