ARGUMENTS
427
My own experience with students, however, has been quite the opposite,
and I have come to feel that the one sure way to put a modern student
to sleep, and the brighter he is' the sooner he will begin to snore, is to
begin talking about "the Western tradition" or the "Idea of Freedom."
Students hate large abstractions with the passion of characters in a
Hemingway novel, and, correspondingly, they hunger, whether they know
it or not, for the real, the tangible, the concrete complexity or the
complex concretion. Nor are they alone in this, for it is in the air of the
times, among historians themselves, for example. The two most interest–
ing and influential, from my point of view, of modern historians have
not been Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee but Sir Lewis Namier
and Marc Bloch and his associates. What Namier and Bloch had in
common was a passion for the detailed complexities, the tangible, the
real, the "touchable" of historical man.
If
Namier "freudianized" his–
tory and showed that labels, political or otherwise, do not explain or
cover individuals, Bloch brought it back to earth with his insistence on
the evidence of archaeology, folklore, language and other concretions:
"What is' most profound in history may also be the most certain." In
our time there is no such thing as "the idea of man" ; there are only con–
crete men, body and soul (psyche), in concrete situations. "Is not man
himself the greatest variable in nature?" A whole new generation of
"hard" historians has come into being, and the standard historical
cliches are being either modified or shattered right and left. That old
fable, "the rise of the middle class," which has been "rising" it seems
from the beginning of time, turns out to be as much an abstraction as
the Marxist view of history. Did industrialism lead to "broken" homes?
Perhaps, but in Stuart times one quarter of the families in parishes for
which there is evidence were "broken," usually by death. This sort of
thing is all very exciting, and
if
it is brought into the classroom, as it
now is, there will be no difficulty in interesting the student in the past.
In fact the passion for concretion pervades the whole life of the
mind in the present day. The moS't powerful, and beneficial, movement
in
literary criticism in the twentieth century haS' been the New Criticism
-it is now over and like all revolutions it got tired-with its insistence
on minutely studying the text in order to ascertain exactly what it meant,
every word of it. One of the most interesting new developments in liter–
ary criticism, as exemplified by Frederick Crews's book on Hawthorne
and Normand Holland's on Shakespeare, is the S'crupulous, subtle, hard–
headed and knowledgeable investigation of the latent psychic patterns
underlying the manifest content of works of literature. Nor is it only a
