Ernst Gombrich's A Little History of the World is a posthumous and charming addition to the works of one of the greatest art historians of the 20th century. It was originally published in German in 1936, when its young author was an unemployed postgraduate in Vienna: he wrote Eine kurze Weltgeschichte fur junge Leser in six weeks, at the instigation of the legendary publisher Walter Neurath (who later founded Thames & Hudson). The little volume was very well received at the time, but this is the first translation into English, and it is accompanied by useful maps and new but timelessly calming illustrations by Clifford Harper.
Unlike its successor, the immensely successful Story of Art (which since 1950 has remained in print in many languages), A Little History was written specifically for young children, in an easy and intimate style that has survived translation very well. Gombrich has a natural gift for simplicity of exposition, and a friendly, good-natured storytelling manner that reminds one of the Kipling of the Just So Stories - although, as Gombrich points out, his stories are all the more interesting because they are true. He begins his narrative with "once upon a time", but he assures us that this is not "just a story": it is "our story". He takes us very rapidly from the gaseous birth of the universe, through dinosaurs, prehistory and the Neanderthals, and then settles down to summarise Egypt, Greece, Rome, Judaism, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Renaissance, the Hundred Years War, and so on, right up to his own boyhood memory of glimpsing the Emperor Franz Josef crossing the park at the Schonbrunn Palace, when he found himself to be part of history.
The original volume ended with the horrors of the First World War and its immediate aftermath, but the version we now have features a chapter, written many years later, in which Gombrich reconsiders some of his earlier judgements. History had turned out to be darker than he had imagined, and progress less certain. In the years after 1937, when he left Austria as a refugee for England to make his home in north London and work at the exiled Warburg Institute, he had found time enough to reflect on the wreckage observed by Walter Benjamin's "angel of history", who faced the past but was hurtled helplessly backwards on a terrible storm towards the future. Gombrich knew the angel and had observed the wreckage: he did not fall for the misplaced optimism of Hendrik van Loon's earlier children's bestseller, The Story of Mankind (1921), which had confidently predicted that the First World War "brought about the coming of a new day".
Yet the main body of the book retains an irresistible, boyish energy and enthusiasm. In later years, Gombrich notably preferred the Great Man theory of history to the Zeitgeist model, and saw a clear line of descent from gifted individual to individual: he had little truck with vague notions of national or class characteristics and the collective mind. He preferred the naturalistic to the abstract, and liked to see ideas expressed in solid, concrete forms. This brings a vivid immediacy to his narration, in which larger-than-life characters emerge from the tapestry with compelling force. Peter the Great, for example, is condemned as "not a nice man", while his rival Charles XII of Sweden is "one of the most extraordinary adventurers the world has ever known". The "intelligent, attractive, likeable" and much-misunderstood Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, grandson of the colourful Barbarossa, is also selected for high praise, for reasons that are intriguing but not immediately apparent.
This is a Eurocentric version of world history, but its roots in German culture and language greatly increase its utility for adult readers more accustomed to dull lists of English kings and queens. Here is your opportunity to sort out the Holy Roman Empire from the Franks, the Habsburgs from the Hohenzollerns. I never knew that Habsburg meant "hawk's castle": nobody ever thought to tell me. Once, while listening to a tour guide on a Greek island talking fluently about the Franks, I had the temerity to ask who the Franks were, a question to which nobody present seemed to know the answer. Here, in this little book, are answers to many of the questions you never dared to ask. As fewer and fewer of us learn German, this story becomes less and less current, and for this reason alone it is worth reading.
The racial attitudes of van Loon's book now look dated, and it is fair to say that even the tolerant Gombrich is hard on the Huns: the Visigoths get off lightly, but the Asiatic hordes of "small, yellow men with narrow slit eyes and terrifying scars on their faces" are described as cunning, bloodthirsty and entirely destructive. On the whole, Gombrich eschews nationalism and patriotism. Europeans do not escape judgement: the confrontation in Mexico between the greedy Hernando Cortes and the innocent Montezuma is described vividly, and summed up as a chapter "so shaming to us Europeans that I would rather not say anything more about it". Gombrich also strongly condemns the destruction by the British and French of the Summer Palace in Peking, as he does the ignorant cultural arrogance of white envoys to Japan. He makes several allusions to the cyclical and repetitive nature of history, and to the criminal folly of burning books, be it in China, in Alexandria, or in Europe.
The last, new chapter of the work, written after the Holocaust, takes up the theme of genocide, referring back to the Spanish conquistadores and the extermination of the "ancient, cultivated Indian people". Even more interesting than this ghastly footnote, however, is Gombrich's admission that, in his first narrative, he had misrepresented the end of the First World War and President Woodrow Wilson's alleged double-dealing: he had been telling history as he, a boy in Austria, had learned it, but he had failed in impartiality. Are objectivity and impartiality possible? He raises the question and lets it float.
On matters of religion, Gombrich displays an admirable scepticism. He is an Enlightenment man. There is no creationism here, no Book of Genesis, though there are accounts of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism (expanded by his son Richard, the distinguished Sanskrit scholar) and Confucianism. And there is an account of Islam, in which we read of the destruction of the 700,000 scrolls in the library at Alexandria, allegedly on the grounds that "if what is in them is already contained in the Koran, they are not needed. And if what is in them is not contained in the Koran, then they are harmful." Gombrich goes on to speculate about the world we might have lived in had Charles Martel ("the Hammer") and his Frankish army not defeated the Muslims near Tours in 732, a hundred years after Muhammad's death. "We might then all be Muslims, like so many peoples of the world today." We owe a great deal to the Arabs, he concludes: chemistry, algebra, Arabic numerals and mathematics, art, great literature.
Gombrich died in 2001, at the age of 92. When he first wrote A Little History, he did not foresee the rise of Hitler and the atom bomb, though he lived to witness the fall of the Berlin Wall. Did he foresee the rise of militant Islam, and the rise of fundamentalist faith in the White House? Both movements seem, in his pages, to be part of a distant, contained and superseded past. But here they are with us again, for we have not yet reached the end of history.
Margaret Drabble's latest novel, The Red Queen, is published in paperback by Penguin
