Chapter L: M. Hastings (2)

Having formed this basis for the main predilection of his English studies, Henry James passed over to the Continent, and conducted a similar pilgrimage of entranced obsession through Switzerland and Italy. His wanderings, "rapturous and solitary," were, as in England, hampered by no social engagement; "I see no people to speak of," he wrote, "or for that matter to speak to." He returned to America in April, 1870, at the close of a year which proved critical in his career, and which laid its stamp on the whole of his future work. He had been kindly received in artistic and literary circles in London; he had conversed with Ruskin, with William Morris, with Aubrey de Vere, but it is plain that while he observed the peculiarities of these eminent men with the closest avidity, he made no impression whatever upon them. The time for Henry James to "make an impression" on others was not come yet; he was simply the well-bred, rather shy, young American invalid, with excellent introductions, who crossed the path of English activities, almost without casting a shadow. He had published no book; he had no distinct calling; he was a deprecating and punctilious young stranger from somewhere in Massachusetts, immature-looking for all his seven-and-twenty years.

Some further uneventful seasons, mainly spent in America but diversified by tours in Germany and Italy, bring us to 1875, when Henry James came over from Cambridge with the definite project, at last, of staying in Europe "for good." He took rooms in Paris, at 29 Rue de Luxembourg, and he penetrated easily into the very exclusive literary society which at that time revolved around Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt. This year in Paris was another highly critical period in Henry James's intellectual history. He was still, at the mature age of thirty-two, almost an amateur in literature, having been content, up to that time, to produce scarcely anything which his mature taste did not afterwards repudiate. _The Passionate Pilgrim_ (1870), of which I have spoken above, is the only waif and stray of the pre-1873 years which he has permitted to survive. The first edition of this short story is now not easy of reference, and I have not seen it; the reprint of 1908 is obviously, and is doubtless vigorously, re-handled. Enough, however, remains of what must be original to show that, in a rather crude, and indeed almost hysterical form, the qualities of Henry James's genius were, in 1869, what they continued to be in 1909. He has conquered, however, in _A Passionate Pilgrim_, no command yet over his enthusiasm, his delicate sense of beauty, his apprehension of the exquisite colour of antiquity.

From the French associates of this time he derived practical help in his profession, though without their being aware of what they gave him. He was warmly attracted to Gustave Flaubert, who had just published _La Tentation de St. Antoine_, a dazzled admiration of which was the excuse which threw the young American at the feet of the Rouen giant. This particular admiration dwindled with the passage of time, but Henry James continued faithful to the author of _Madame Bovary_. It was Turgenev who introduced him to Flaubert, from whom he passed to Guy de Maupassant, then an athlete of four-and-twenty, and still scintillating in that blaze of juvenile virility which always fascinated Henry James. In the train of Edmond de Goncourt came Zola, vociferous over his late tribulation of having _L'Assommoir_ stopped in its serial issue; Alphonse Daudet, whose recent _Jack_ was exercising over tens of thousands of readers the tyranny of tears; and François Coppée, the almost exact coeval of Henry James, and now author of a _Luthier de Cremone_, which had placed him high among French poets. That the young American, with no apparent claim to attention except the laborious perfection of his French speech, was welcomed and ultimately received on terms of intimacy in this the most exclusive of European intellectual circles is curious. Henry James was accustomed to deprecate the notion that these Frenchmen took the least interest in him: "they have never read a line of me, they have never even persuaded themselves that there was a line of me which anyone could read," he once said to me. How should they, poor charming creatures, in their self-sufficing Latin intensity, know what or whether some barbarian had remotely "written"? But this does not end the marvel, because, read or not read, there was Henry James among them, affectionately welcomed, talked to familiarly about "technique," and even about "sales," like a fellow-craftsman. There must evidently have developed by this time something modestly "impressive" about him, and I cannot doubt that these Parisian masters of language more or less dimly divined that he too was, in some medium not by them to be penetrated, a master.

After this fruitful year in Paris, the first result of which was the publication in London of his earliest surviving novel, _Roderick Hudson_, and the completion of _The American_, Henry James left his "glittering, charming, civilised Paris" and settled in London. He submitted himself, as he wrote to his brother William in 1878, "without reserve to that Londonising process of which the effect is to convince you that, having lived here, you may, if need be, abjure civilisation and bury yourself in the country, but may not, in pursuit of civilisation, live in any smaller town." He plunged deeply into the study of London, externally and socially, and into the production of literature, in which he was now as steadily active as he was elegantly proficient. These novels of his earliest period have neither the profundity nor the originality of those of his middle and final periods, but they have an exquisite freshness of their own, and a workmanship the lucidity and logic of which he owed in no small measure to his conversations with Daudet and Maupassant, and to his, at that time almost exclusive, reading of the finest French fiction. He published _The American_ in 1877, _The Europeans_ and _Daisy Miller_ in 1878, and _An International Episode_ in 1879. He might advance in stature and breadth; he might come to disdain the exiguous beauty of these comparatively juvenile books, but now at all events were clearly revealed all the qualities which were to develop later, and to make Henry James unique among writers of Anglo-Saxon race.

His welcome into English society was remarkable if we reflect that he seemed to have little to give in return for what it offered except his social adaptability, his pleasant and still formal amenity, and his admirable capacity for listening. It cannot be repeated too clearly that the Henry James of those early days had very little of the impressiveness of his later manner. He went everywhere, sedately, watchfully, graciously, but never prominently. In the winter of 1878-79 it is recorded that he dined out in London 107 times, but it is highly questionable whether this amazing assiduity at the best dinner-tables will be found to have impressed itself on any Greville or Crabb Robinson who was taking notes at the time. He was strenuously living up to his standard, "my charming little standard of wit, of grace, of good manners, of vivacity, of urbanity, of intelligence, of what makes an easy and natural style of intercourse." He was watching the rather gross and unironic, but honest and vigorous, English upper-middle-class of that day with mingled feelings, in which curiosity and a sort of remote sympathy took a main part. At 107 London dinners he observed the ever-shifting pieces of the general kaleidoscope with tremendous acuteness, and although he thought their reds and yellows would have been improved by a slight infusion of the Florentine harmony, on the whole he was never weary of watching their evolutions. In this way the years slipped by, while he made a thousand acquaintances and a dozen durable friendships. It is a matter of pride and happiness to me that I am able to touch on one of the latter.

It is often curiously difficult for intimate friends, who have the impression in later years that they must always have known one another, to recall the occasion and the place where they first met. That was the case with Henry James and me. Several times we languidly tried to recover those particulars, but without success. I think, however, that it was at some dinner-party that we first met, and as the incident is dubiously connected with the publication of the _Hawthorne_ in 1879, and with Mr. (now Lord) Morley, whom we both frequently saw at that epoch, I am pretty sure that the event took place early in 1880. The acquaintance, however, did not "ripen," as people say, until the summer of 1882, when in connection with an article on the drawings of George du Maurier, which I was anxious Henry James should write--having heard him express himself with high enthusiasm regarding these works of art--he invited me to go to see him and to talk over the project. I found him, one sunshiny afternoon, in his lodgings on the first floor of No. 3 Bolton Street, at the Piccadilly end of the street, where the houses look askew into Green Park. Here he had been living ever since he came over from France in 1876, and the situation was eminently characteristic of the impassioned student of London life and haunter of London society which he had now become.

Stretched on the sofa and apologising for not rising to greet me, his appearance gave me a little shock, for I had not thought of him as an invalid. He hurriedly and rather evasively declared that he was not that, but that a muscular weakness of his spine obliged him, as he said, "to assume the horizontal posture" during some hours of every day in order to bear the almost unbroken routine of evening engagements. I think that this weakness gradually passed away, but certainly for many years it handicapped his activity. I recall his appearance, seen then for the first time by daylight; there was something shadowy about it, the face framed in dark brown hair cut short in the Paris fashion, and in equally dark beard, rather loose and "fluffy." He was in deep mourning, his mother having died five or six months earlier, and he himself having but recently returned from a melancholy visit to America, where he had unwillingly left his father, who seemed far from well. His manner was grave, extremely courteous, but a little formal and frightened, which seemed strange in a man living in constant communication with the world. Our business regarding Du Maurier was soon concluded, and James talked with increasing ease, but always with a punctilious hesitancy, about Paris, where he seemed, to my dazzlement, to know even a larger number of persons of distinction than he did in London.

He promised, before I left, to return my visit, but news of the alarming illness of his father called him suddenly to America. He wrote to me from Boston in April, 1883, but he did not return to London until the autumn that year. Our intercourse was then resumed, and, immediately, on the familiar footing which it preserved, without an hour's abatement, until the sad moment of his fatal illness. When he returned to Bolton Street--this was in August, 1883--he had broken all the ties which held him to residence in America, a country which, as it turned out, he was not destined to revisit for more than twenty years. By this means Henry James became a homeless man in a peculiar sense, for he continued to be looked upon as a foreigner in London, while he seemed to have lost citizenship in the United States. It was a little later than this that that somewhat acidulated patriot, Colonel Higginson, in reply to some one who said that Henry James was a cosmopolitan, remarked, "Hardly! for a cosmopolitan is at home even in his own country!" This condition made James, although superficially gregarious, essentially isolated, and though his books were numerous and were greatly admired, they were tacitly ignored alike in summaries of English and of American current literature. There was no escape from this dilemma. Henry James was equally determined not to lay down his American birthright and not to reside in America. Every year of his exile, therefore, emphasised the fact of his separation from all other Anglo-Saxons, and he endured, in the world of letters, the singular fate of being a man without a country.

The collection of his private letters, therefore, which is announced as immediately forthcoming under the sympathetic editorship of Mr. Percy Lubbock, will reveal the adventures of an author who, long excluded from two literatures, is now eagerly claimed by both of them, and it will display those movements of a character of great energy and singular originality which circumstances have hitherto concealed from curiosity. There was very little on the surface of his existence to bear evidence to the passionate intensity of the stream beneath. This those who have had the privilege of seeing his letters know is marvellously revealed in his private correspondence. A certain change in his life was brought about by the arrival in 1885 of his sister Alice, who, in now confirmed ill-health, was persuaded to make Bournemouth and afterwards Leamington her home. He could not share her life, but at all events he could assiduously diversify it by his visits, and Bournemouth had a second attraction for him in the presence of Robert Louis Stevenson, with whom he had by this time formed one of the closest of his friendships. Stevenson's side of the correspondence has long been known, and it is one of the main attractions which Mr. Lubbock holds out to his readers that Henry James's letters to Stevenson will now be published. No episode of the literary history of the time is more fascinating than the interchange of feeling between these two great artists. The death of Stevenson, nine years later than their first meeting, though long anticipated, fell upon Henry James with a shock which he found at first scarcely endurable. For a long time afterwards he could not bring himself to mention the name of R. L. S. without a distressing agitation.

In 1886 the publication of _The Bostonians_, a novel which showed an advance in direct or, as it was then styled, "realistic" painting of modern society, increased the cleft which now divided him from his native country, for _The Bostonians_ was angrily regarded as satirising not merely certain types, but certain recognisable figures in Massachusetts, and that with a suggestive daring which was unusual. Henry James, intent upon making a vivid picture, and already perhaps a little out of touch with American sentiment, was indignant at the reception of this book, which he ultimately, to my great disappointment, omitted from his Collected Edition, for reasons which he gave in a long letter to myself. Hence, as his works now appear, _The Princess Casamassima_, of 1886, an essentially London adventure-story, takes its place as the earliest of the novels of his second period, although preceded by admirable short tales in that manner, the most characteristic of which is doubtless _The Author of Beltraffio_ (1885). This exemplifies the custom he had now adopted of seizing an incident reported to him, often a very slight and bald affair, and weaving round it a thick and glittering web of silken fancy, just as the worm winds round the unsightly chrysalis its graceful robe of gold. I speak of _The Author of Beltraffio_, and after thirty-five years I may confess that this extraordinarily vivid story was woven around a dark incident in the private life of an eminent author known to us both, which I, having told Henry James in a moment of levity, was presently horrified and even sensibly alarmed to see thus pinnacled in the broad light of day.

After exhausting at last the not very shining amenities of his lodgings in Bolton Street, where all was old and dingy, he went westward in 1886 into Kensington, and settled in a flat which was both new and bright, at 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, where he began a novel called _The Tragic Muse_, on which he expended an immense amount of pains. He was greatly wearied by the effort, and not entirely satisfied with the result. He determined, as he said, "to do nothing but short lengths" for the future, and he devoted himself to the execution of _contes_. But even the art of the short story presently yielded to a new and, it must be confessed, a deleterious fascination, that of the stage. He was disappointed--he made no secret to his friends of his disillusion--in the commercial success of his novels, which was inadequate to his needs. I believe that he greatly over-estimated these needs, and that at no time he was really pressed by the want of money. But he thought that he was, and in his anxiety he turned to the theatre as a market in which to earn a fortune. Little has hitherto been revealed with regard to this "sawdust and orange-peel phase" (as he called it) in Henry James's career, but it cannot be ignored any longer. The memories of his intimate friends are stored with its incidents, his letters will be found to be full of it.

Henry James wrote, between 1889 and 1894, seven or eight plays, on each of which he expended an infinitude of pains and mental distress. At the end of this period, unwillingly persuaded at last that all his agony was in vain, and that he could never secure fame and fortune, or even a patient hearing from the theatre-going public by his dramatic work, he abandoned the hopeless struggle. He was by temperament little fitted to endure the disappointments and delays which must always attend the course of a dramatist who has not conquered a position which enables him to browbeat the tyrants behind the stage. Henry James was punctilious, ceremonious, and precise; it is not to be denied that he was apt to be hasty in taking offence, and not very ready to overlook an impertinence. The whole existence of the actor is lax and casual; the manager is the capricious leader of an irresponsible band of egotists. Henry James lost no occasion of dwelling, in private conversation, on this aspect of an amiable and entertaining profession. He was not prepared to accept young actresses at their own valuation, and the happy-go-lucky democracy of the "mimes," as he bracketed both sexes, irritated him to the verge of frenzy.

It was, however, with a determination to curb his impatience, and with a conviction that he could submit his idiosyncrasies to what he called the "passionate economy" of play-writing, that he began, in 1889, to dedicate himself to the drama, excluding for the time being all other considerations. He went over to Paris in the winter of that year, largely to talk over the stage with Alphonse Daudet and Edmond de Goncourt, and he returned to put the finishing-touches on _The American_, a dramatic version of one of his earliest novels. He finished this play at the Palazzo Barbaro, the beautiful home of his friends, the Daniel Curtises, in Venice, in June, 1890, thereupon taking a long holiday, one of the latest of his extended Italian tours, through Venetia and Tuscany. Edward Compton had by this time accepted _The American_, being attracted by his own chances in the part of Christopher Newman. When Henry James reappeared in London, and particularly when the rehearsals began, we all noticed how deeply the theatrical virus had penetrated his nature. His excitement swelled until the evening of January 3rd, 1891, when _The American_ was acted at Southport by Compton's company in anticipation of its appearance in London. Henry James was kind enough to wish me to go down on this occasion with him to Southport, but it was not possible. On the afternoon of the ordeal he wrote to me from the local hotel: "After eleven o'clock to-night I _may_ be the world's--you know--and I may be the undertaker's. I count upon you and your wife both to spend this evening in fasting, silence, and supplication. I will send you a word in the morning, a wire if I can." He was "so nervous that I miswrite and misspell."

The result, in the provinces, of this first experiment was not decisive. It is true that he told Robert Louis Stevenson that he was enjoying a success which made him blush. But the final result in London, where _The American_ was not played until September, 1891, was only partly encouraging. Henry James was now cast down as unreasonably as he had been uplifted. He told me that "the strain, the anxiety, the peculiar form and colour of the ordeal (not to be divined in the least in advance)" had "sickened him to _death_." He used language of the most picturesque extravagance about the "purgatory" of the performances, which ran at the Opera Comique for two months. There was nothing in the mediocre fortunes of this play to decide the questions whether Henry James was or was not justified in abandoning all other forms of art for the drama. We endeavoured to persuade him that, on the whole, he was not justified, but he swept our arguments aside, and he devoted himself wholly to the infatuation of his sterile task.

_The American_ had been dramatised from a published novel. Henry James now thought that he should do better with original plots, and he wrote two comedies, the one named _Tenants_ and the other _Disengaged_, of each of which he formed high expectations. But, although they were submitted to several managers, who gave them their customary loitering and fluctuating attention, they were in every case ultimately refused. Each refusal plunged the dramatist into the lowest pit of furious depression, from which he presently emerged with freshly-kindled hopes. Like the moralist, he never was but always to be blest. _The Album_ and _The Reprobate_--there is a melancholy satisfaction in giving life to the mere names of these stillborn children of his brain--started with wild hopes and suffered from the same complete failure to satisfy the caprice of the managers. At the close of 1893, after one of these "sordid developments," he made up his mind to abandon the struggle. But George Alexander promised that, if he would but persevere, he really and truly would produce him infallibly at no distant date, and poor Henry James could not but persevere. "I mean to wage this war ferociously for one year more," and he composed, with infinite agony and deliberation the comedy of _Guy Domvile_.

The night of January 5th, 1895, was the most tragical in Henry James's career. His hopes and fears had been strung up to the most excruciating point, and I think that I have never witnessed such agonies of parturition. _Guy Domvile_--which has never been printed--was a delicate and picturesque play, of which the only disadvantage that I could discover was that instead of having a last scene which tied up all the threads in a neat conclusion, it left all those threads loose as they would be in life. George Alexander was sanguine of success, and to do Henry James honour such a galaxy of artistic, literary, and scientific celebrity gathered in the stalls of the St. James's Theatre as perhaps were never seen in a playhouse before or since. Henry James was positively storm-ridden with emotion before the fatal night, and full of fantastic plans. I recall that one was that he should hide in the bar of a little public-house down an alley close to the theatre, whither I should slip forth at the end of the second act and report "how it was going." This was not carried out, and fortunately Henry James resisted the temptation of being present in the theatre during the performance. All seemed to be going fairly well until the close, when Henry James appeared and was called before the curtain only to be subjected--to our unspeakable horror and shame--to a storm of hoots and jeers and catcalls from the gallery, answered by loud and sustained applause from the stalls, the whole producing an effect of hell broke loose, in the midst of which the author, as white as chalk, bowed and spread forth deprecating hands and finally vanished. It was said at the time, and confirmed later, that this horrible performance was not intended to humiliate Henry James, but was the result of a cabal against George Alexander.

Early next morning I called at 34 De Vere Gardens, hardly daring to press the bell for fear of the worst of news, so shattered with excitement had the playwright been on the previous evening. I was astonished to find him perfectly calm; he had slept well and was breakfasting with appetite. The theatrical bubble in which he had lived a tormented existence for five years was wholly and finally broken, and he returned, even in that earliest conversation, to the discussion of the work which he had so long and so sadly neglected, the art of direct prose narrative. And now a remarkable thing happened. The discipline of toiling for the caprices of the theatre had amounted, for so redundant an imaginative writer, to the putting on of a mental strait-jacket. He saw now that he need stoop no longer to what he called "a meek and lowly review of the right ways to keep on the right side of a body of people who have paid money to be amused at a particular hour and place." Henry James was not released from this system of vigorous renunciation without a very singular result. To write for the theatre the qualities of brevity and directness, of an elaborate plainness, had been perceived by him to be absolutely necessary, and he had tried to cultivate them with dogged patience for five years. But when he broke with the theatre, the rebound was excessive. I recall his saying to me, after the fiasco of _Guy Domvile_, "At all events, I have escaped for ever from the foul fiend Excision!" He vibrated with the sense of liberation, and he began to enjoy, physically and intellectually, a freedom which had hitherto been foreign to his nature.

(_To be concluded_)

A CASE FOR RECORDS

By HILARY JENKINSON

It has long been a commonplace of depreciation to say that England possesses more valuable collections of historical documents than any other country, and displays more indifference to them. "_En Angleterre tout est en désordre_," says an eminent French critic: and the _Times Literary Supplement_ quotes him.[32] Since the middle of last century the declared classes of public records in this country (those of the Central Government) have, it is true, had a settled habitation, a staff to look after them, and a good deal of attention from a small section of the public; also a considerable, though relatively small, number of publications has been devoted to them and some of the clamorous interests, the genealogist's, for example, fed if not sated. The same amount of good fortune, except by the hazard of their coming into the hands of an enthusiast, has not in many cases befallen the records belonging to local bodies; still less has it come to the enormous private collections originally accumulated in connection with the descent of real property, and now, since the invention of "short title," no longer in any demand for their primary purpose. If the public records of the past may in our day be considered to have found safety, it is still possible to witness in this country the unedifying spectacle of the museum or the rich collector buying up the pretty specimen from a collection of manorial records, while the remainder, of which it should form an integral part, after the lesser lights of the collecting world have taken gradual toll of it, goes without protest from any one to the tambourine-maker or the glue merchant. It is as though an anatomist, having exhumed his great-grandfather, should add to that injury the insult of preserving an interesting metacarpal in his cabinet, while he distributes the rest of the body to various colleagues, with remainder to the manufacturer of fertilisers: one is tempted to send science to blazes and wish the poor old gentleman might have been left intact, if useless, underground.

[32] November 27th, 1919.

I have spoken in this first paragraph of the unhappy state of the small collections in England because that state is an obvious and striking result of the same cause which has produced most of our mistakes in the preservation, sorting and editing of documents in the past; because the distinction at present existing between the public and the private collections is so symptomatic of our worst failure in this field: in effect, in all these years during which historical documents have met with a certain amount of appreciation, it has apparently never occurred to us to make definite search for the essential features common to all records, high or low, and to apply to all records a treatment based on the examination of those features. But the most interesting archive question of the present time seems to me to be the question of the records we ourselves are producing. If our shortcomings as owners of archives have affected adversely our treatment of what the past has left to us, are they not capable of doing quite as much harm to that which we ourselves are to bequeath to the future? And, further, if England, owing to its wealth of records, provides a particularly large number of examples of things to be avoided, is it not possible that the application of the warning derived from these may prove to be common to other countries? It is, indeed, no new criticism of the French School, the acknowledged leader of the world in this matter, to say that the circumstances under which the French national collections were put together have led it sometimes to consider the isolated _document_ rather to the exclusion of that _record_ which forms only a single link in a long chain.

We are led, therefore, to inquire how far certain generalisations, based on the character of our existing English records, maybe applied as criteria to the treatment of those records which are accumulating in our own time in England and perhaps in other countries.

A record, if we may venture here to give definition to a loosely-used word, is a document drawn up, or at any rate made use of, in the course of an administrative process, of which itself forms a part, and subsequently preserved in his own custody for his own reference by the administrator concerned or his successors. The process and the administration may be as important or unimportant as you please; the result may be the Rolls of Chancery or the deed-box of a manor: the essential features are the same in both cases--the administrative origin, the administrative reason for preservation, the preservation in administrative custody: so also are the results the same from the point of view of the subsequent 'ologist--the two priceless qualities of authenticity and impartiality; the first proceeding from the fact that the records have been always in custody,[33] and in a certain relationship one with another, the second derived from the fact that they were not drawn up for the information of posterity,[34] and, therefore, have no bias to one side or the other of posterity's problems. Any number of interesting instances[35] might be adduced from the records of the past, both of the value of these qualities and of the ease with which they may be flawed; but let us here leave for the time consideration of the records the past has bequeathed to us and inquire how far the qualities which, with all its historical faults, it gave us in most of its documents are going to be found by our descendants in those we leave to them. The unprecedented mass of documents which the various executive departments must have accumulated during the war may well frighten us into a serious consideration of this subject at the present moment.

[33] The licence of high officials has sometimes violated
this, a practice much to be deprecated. I refer to
this again below.

[34] This fact may, of course, lead in ignorant times, such
as was the early nineteenth century, to destruction.

[35] A well-known case is the volume, belonging to the
records of the Master of the Revels, which, if
it is genuine, dates one of Shakespeare's plays:
unfortunately it was for a considerable time out of
official custody, and doubts have been cast on the
authenticity of the most important page.

Now, the rules for safe preservation and custody are simple things, matters of proved experience, a number of which are set out in a small book recently published in England, and at more length in the well-known Continental treatise;[36] and though the standard of archive-keeping by local authorities is at present very uneven, we may, for the shortening of this article, dismiss that side of the question with pious hopes. Assuming, then, that the documents of our own time, when they come to the state of archives, will be preserved in suitable places and under proper rules of custody, assuming further that we are able to drill archivists into leaving their charges as far as possible in the physical order and state in which they find them (so as to preserve the old association of document with document), we have to face as our chief danger a threat not so much to the authenticity of the record as to its impartiality--the most important of all its qualities and one which, once damaged, cannot be restored. Interference with impartiality may occur at two points: in the first place it may occur, as indeed it has sometimes done in the past, at or near the time of the document's making; the administrator who makes it may himself have an eye on posterity. We shall have to recur to this again, but for the moment let us turn to the second, which is the more serious because it brings us up against the great modern record problem, bulk: impartiality may be--rather, is--impugned when we come to the selection of documents for preservation.

[36] C. Johnson: _The Care of Documents_ (S.P.C.K. Helps
for Students of History); and Muller, Feith, and
Fruin: _Manuel pour le Classement des Archives_.

The obvious remedy for this is not to select--to preserve everything; but this is in practice an equally obvious impossibility: the instance already quoted of the accumulation of our war records[37] would no doubt supply apt illustration, but the custodian of county records is faced on his small scale with exactly the same difficulty: we are all confronted, in fact, with this main problem--how are we to reconcile our desire to preserve in our records certain qualities which have accompanied in the past an uncontrolled accumulation with the necessity of our own day for restriction? Up to now, in face of this problem, and in face of the system of selection, or destruction, which is actually in use, no one (not even the Royal Commission, which has obviously devoted much attention to the subject) has really gone further than to tell the selectors that they must be very careful. But can they? Let us take a case of public records, an imaginary class of, say, 200,000 pieces to be dealt with in a limited space of time by a limited number of people who have probably other work waiting to be done: how can they possibly say (since they have not the time to make a detailed comparison) that all the information contained in certain documents which they propose to condemn is to be found elsewhere? Or, taking another criterion, how can they say that certain documents are going to be without interest for the future? There are classes of documents in the Public Record Office now frequently used and highly valued which little more than fifty years ago might well have been destroyed as having no interest for any branch of human study then known.

[37] Records so vast that in its last report (1919) the
Royal Commission has found it necessary to alter
its original (1914) recommendations regarding the
provision of new repository accommodation.

At this point the natural thing is to seek the advice of the historian, who is indeed, being an enthusiast, anxious to give it. Now, the historian may fairly claim to have done much for records in the past. He is mainly responsible for the recognition of public records as things valuable and to be kept carefully for other reasons than that of mere antiquity; and he has done something in England (one always hopes that he will do more presently) for local and private collections. But he cannot predict the needs of future research workers (who may not be historians at all) any more than he was able to predict in the time of the old Record Commission the needs of our own day: witness the indexes, quite useless to an economic historian, of the very important Chancery Rolls of King John, published about 1830. Even if we grant that he may make a better guess than other men, we are met by a still graver objection in the fact that we cannot rule out at least the possibility (since he is human and an historian) of his having a predilection for the evidence which will establish a certain view or emphasise a certain line of inquiry. The use of an historian, or of any other person who uses records for research purposes, as a selector seems to me incompatible with the preservation of their characteristic impartiality: there will be a possibility--and the mere possibility is enough--of _suppressio veri_, if not of _suggestio falsi_; and what should have been a record, preserved by circumstances which do not affect its value as evidence, will become no more than the narrative or at most the _pièce justificative_ of a specialist; you might as well allow a botanist to produce a hybrid in order to prove not its possibility but its existence as a natural form.

But if we cannot use the historian for our purposes we may perhaps call in the trained archivist. I am afraid that here again we shall find no help. The archivist may take an interest in any of the subjects upon which his collections furnish evidence; but such interests have nothing to do with (indeed they sometimes impede) the duties that are his of safeguarding, arranging, and making accessible and of basing himself for all these duties on the internal structure of the classes of documents in his charge: with the possible exception of the last there is nothing in these qualifications to make him more fit than the historian for the work of selection--and destruction.

Is there, then, no possible way--we will not say of dealing with our present accumulations; they, it may be, on account of their sheer bulk must be dealt with by such _ad hoc_ methods as the circumstances admit of; and into those methods it is not our province here to enter--but merely for our guidance in the future, is there no chance of reconciling the requirements of ourselves and posterity (so far as these can be foreseen) with the intrinsic interests of the records themselves--the external with the internal--or rather perhaps of finding some method of treatment which will give to our records a reasonable bulk while preserving their important characteristics, and at the same time will at least not sacrifice unduly the interests of the research-worker? Perhaps an indication of such a possibility is to be found in the words "our present accumulations" which we used above. How would it be if we set ourselves in the future to prevent accumulations?

A certain amount of contemporary destruction of the more obviously ephemeral papers--notes from one department of an office to another saying, "Passed to you, please," and perhaps documents of a more advanced type--does, of course, in our own days sometimes take place in large offices. And there are not wanting indications that a perception of the need of something more, especially in regard to public offices, has been growing since the Act of 1877, provided that the Master of the Rolls might make rules respecting the disposal by destruction or otherwise of documents which are deposited in or can be removed to the Public Record Office (note the lack of any distinction between the two classes) and which are not of sufficient public value to justify their preservation in the Public Record Office. Such an indication is seen in the desire expressed by the late Royal Commission on Public Records[38] for the substitution in Government offices of destruction and preservation of documents according to well-considered principles for destruction founded on arbitrary, varying opinions; and for the relief of the Public Record Office Repository from a cumbersome mass of useless or unnecessary documents. But no one, so far as I am aware, has yet summed up and balanced, for the benefit of all records and record-keepers, whether public or private, the merits and demerits of the various systems of destruction, either in the light of the intrinsic character of records themselves or in that of the experience gained from a study of our ancestors' methods. And the accumulations of documents, many of which are subsequently judged not to be material, continue.

[38] First report, p. 41; cp.: second report, p. 71, etc.

Now we may assume, indeed we know, that from the earliest times not only selections of subjects for representation in permanent records but also actual destruction of documents has been practised by the administrators who have left us their collections. Only--and here is the distinction--since the question of bulk did not trouble them as it does us, they were able to act solely on the ground that the record in question was not required for their current administrative purposes. Note that in this their impartiality was not affected by the external considerations of either this world or the next, neither by any interest in the history-writing of the future, nor by the exigencies of floor-space in the present. Any subsequent destruction, direct or indirect, by our ancestors was quite a different matter: such destruction has invariably been the subject ultimately of adverse criticism, though no doubt the person responsible saw no particular harm in it. For example, take the case of the burning of the Exchequer tallies in 1834. The position of contemporaries is probably represented tolerably by that of Charles Dickens, who criticised the proceeding on the ground not only that it burned down the Houses of Parliament, but also that it was a wanton waste of firewood which might have been given to the poor: yet already we, not a hundred years after, are regretting it. On the other hand, though historians are in the habit of saying vaguely that much which was of incalculable value must have been lost, they refer always to the losses due to various forms of carelessness. I have never heard anyone venture to criticise the Chancery, for example, because it did not preserve full copies of non-returnable writs or the Exchequer because certain draft accounts were destroyed.

What, in fact, are the principal gaps in old records which affect us moderns? If we take two of the documents which have thrown light on the personal history of Shakespeare (not a matter of much moment to his contemporaries) we shall arrive at a clear distinction between two different kinds of destruction, or shall we say failure to preserve? On the one hand, we have a document signed by Shakespeare as a witness: all that mattered to the court here was that certain evidence had been given by some indifferent person and accepted. Could we have blamed it if it had failed to preserve this signature which we find so intriguing, or had allowed it (as was sometimes done) to be written in by the scribe who took down the deposition? Or if it had preserved the whole document only in the form of a summary? Most certainly we could not: how was the court to know that we should be interested in Shakespeare's life and handwriting? On the other hand, take the case where Shakespeare himself was party to a fine: had the court of Common Pleas failed to preserve the "foot" of that fine, which was a recognised form of evidence of its own transactions, we should legitimately criticise its carelessness.

It appears, therefore, that the only criticism posterity will be able to pass on us, if we adhere to the practice of our ancestors, will be one based on the extent to which we leave record behind us of the work of the various administrations; and our further queries then resolve themselves into two:

(1) Can we train our administrator so to keep his records _at the time they are made_ that they will give a fair picture of the activities of his office, and this without desiring him to do it for the benefit of posterity, without making an historian of him?

(2) Can this be done so economically as to get rid of the bulk difficulty in connection with preservation?

If the answer to each of these questions is "Yes," then our problem is solved.

It is not, of course, possible to answer them in detail here, because to do so would involve inserting a detailed scheme for the keeping of archives in a modern office; it would also involve going into such highly technical, and in some cases controversial, matters as the use and abuse of flimsies, the whole position of the typewriter in record-making (with an excursus on carbons and inks), the comparative merits of various filing systems, and, as regards this country at least, liaison between Government departments. But we may perhaps try in the most general terms to lay down a few first principles and see how far they indicate the possibility of an answer. We may premise that while no two accountants differ radically in their methods, the name of the various filing systems and practices is legion; while we have had double-entry for three or four hundred years, no one has yet hit on a system of filing correspondence and the like which commands general approval; from which we may draw the corollary that almost everywhere there are large redundancies.

If, then, we are to educate our administrator we should begin

(1) By explaining the trouble that has been caused by accumulations of records in the past and the impossibility of dealing with them reliably and satisfactorily in the present. This trouble we require him to prevent in the future by a system of personal attention and studied economy. (He would, of course, say at once that this could not be done; the reply is "Have you tried?")

(2) The next point is concerned also with authenticity, but it is in every way of primary importance.[39]

[39] How important may be judged from the perusal of
more than one modern volume of more than one great
statesman's "Private Papers"--many of them public
records which have been taken out of custody. Perhaps
the new diplomacy may do something to remedy this evil.

Every office, no matter how small, must have a registry;[40] _i.e._, must be divided up, _qua_ records, into two branches, administrative and executive; it must have a small branch which keeps and controls, distinct from the large which makes and uses, documents. Registry, the keeper and controller of office papers, is to lay down the way in which letters are to be written and whether copies are to be made. When they are made (or received, if they come from without) all office documents are the property of registry, which is responsible for destruction or preservation (with, of course, the advantage of advice from the executive side in a large office) and for safeguarding and methods of arrangement.

[40] I hope I shall not be accused of ignorance of the fact
that registries do exist in some offices. The point
is, first, that their existence is not universal;
second, that they have not yet been turned towards
those functions which it is here suggested they should
fulfil.

(3) The golden rule for administrators is: in preserving and arranging documents keep in view a single purpose, that of enabling an ignorant successor by their means to carry on if you and the whole of your staff were blotted out. We depend largely on this rule for an answer to the historian's objection that the administrator if left to himself will destroy all the valuable things--lose the Shakespeare fine, in fact. It is not, however, inserted here for that purpose, but because it is obviously sound.

(4) Apart from this rule the first principle should be economy; and economy, if registry is not to be overburdened with work, must consist largely in rules carefully thought out concerning not the documents which are to be destroyed, but the documents which are never to be made: for example, probably at least 50 per cent. of the copies of out-letters which are preserved in a big office record nothing more than despatch, which could be done in two words or less in a general register.

(5) The ideal subject index, it has been said, would have only one entry and any quantity of cross-references; similarly there is an ideal of a single master series in records: being an ideal, neither of these things is realisable, but it is possible to get near to them. For example, registry can and should have a record of its own, a single general register, and a properly made entry in this would be amply sufficient record of many transactions which are at present dignified with a _dossier_.

(6) In this connection we may refer to the necessity for the intelligent use of mechanical devices: many duplicates and unnecessary documents are habitually kept owing to a failure to appreciate the merits as distinguishing features of a red pencil and a blue, the opposition of left to right, the possibilities of the first and the second column, not to mention the third, fourth, and fifth....

(7) Registry should have a clear conception of the nature of records--that there are only three kinds: In-letters, out-letters, and memoranda (including accounts). A realisation of this and of the way in which records work into each other means economy in internal arrangement, and in the case of Government offices might, if liaison were close and a single system of record-keeping in general use, make new economies possible as between departments.

(8) So far we have been considering the possibilities of an economy which consists in not making documents; but we have, of course, to consider also actual destruction, of which there are three kinds: (_a_) First, there is what we may call _posthumous destruction_, the kind which is now most in vogue, and which we want to stop altogether: that is the destruction which deals with an accumulation formed perhaps years before--destruction for its own sake, because of over-great bulk. Then (_b_) there is _immediate destruction_, which gives effect to the judgment passed at the earliest possible moment on a document: you wait only until a letter (let us say perhaps a letter making an appointment) is acknowledged, and then, since its actual terms concern only the person addressed, and for your office's purposes you have sufficient evidence in your registry, you destroy. (_c_) Finally, there is _deferred destruction_, the kind which comes into operation where a document, already condemned, so far as concerns the purposes of the office, is temporarily preserved for some purely external reason; for example, in connection with the provisions of the Statute of Limitations.

(9) A primary rule of destruction is that no letter-in, copy of letter-out, or draft of office memoranda shall be kept which does not mean a stage in advance for the office's business. But it is particularly necessary that this destruction should take place at the earliest possible moment, while the business is fresh in the minds of those concerned; because there are documents which, though they have no direct result themselves, yet by that very fact mark an advance in the policy (let us say) of a department, and delay in the consideration of these might conceivably be dangerous.

(10) For the purposes of _deferred destruction_ some system of automatic working will be necessary; for instance, if large masses of papers, valueless otherwise to the office, have to be kept, say, for six years for legal reasons, there should be a regular system by which every day the register of six years back should be examined and the papers there marked (let us say) D.D., for deferred destruction, should be at once drawn, disposed of, and marked off. It is possible that some system might be introduced to cover doubtful cases, which could be given a short lease of life--some statutory number of months, pending a decision by circumstances upon their value. This would be a good safeguard against careless destruction, though that should never occur.