X. B (ii) (d), ANNEX III
R. G. COLLINGWOOD'S VIEW OF THE
HISTORIAN'S RELATION TO THE OBJECTS
THAT HE STUDIES
in the passage to which this Annex attaches,1 we have quoted Colling-
wood's dictum:
'Western Civilisation expresses, and indeed achieves, its individuality,
not by distinguishing itself from Hellenic Civilisation, but by identifying
itself therewith.'*
These words can only be construed to mean that in 'the Renaissance'
of Hellenism the Western World was doing what is done by a man who
expresses and achieves his individuality, not by distinguishing himself
from Napoleon, but by identifying himself with him; and this is in fact
an accurate statement of what the makers of the Renaissance professed
to be trying to do and claimed to have accomplished. The difference
between a Humanist and a lunatic is in fact one of degree. The lunatic
has 'bet his life' on his illusion, whereas the Humanist has taken care not
to go to quite that fatal length.
For good or evil, the Modern Western Humanists were not plagued
with the lunatic's devastatingly whole-hearted sincerity; they were, as
Spengler depicts them,3 poseurs in whose activities there was a saving,
and at the same time damning, element of make-believe. Their identi-
fication of themselves with 'the Ancients' was kept within the bounds
of a few innocuous conceits. They aped the language and style of the
classical Latin and Ancient Greek writers;* they sometimes Latinized
or Graecized their own barbarophone personal names; and for the
occasion of a fancy-dress party or a pageant they would dress up in
what they imagined to be classical costume; but they reserved the per-
manent assumption of the imperator's lorica or the orator's toga for their
posthumous apotheosis in bronze or marble, and the same prudent un-
willingness to sacrifice their physical comfort on the altar of their Hel-
lenomania can be detected in their architecture. In discarding a grotesque
Gothic in favour of a classical Vitruvian canon, they never carried their
Hellenic purism to the length of renouncing fireplaces, chimneys, and
glazed windows. This judicious discrimination in the pursuit of their
1	p, 64, above,
 2	Collingwood, R. G.: The Idea of History (Oxford 1946, Clarendon Press), p. 163.
 3	In the passage quoted on pp. 65-66, above.
+ This aping of an alien idiom might, however, cease to be a conceit through becoming
a second nature; and the writer of this Study could testify from his own personal experi-
ence to the genuineness of a cultural metamorphosis in which he might otherwise have
seen nothing more than a rather tiresome pose. As a result of his good fortune in having
received a Late Medieval Italian education at the College of Saint Mary de Winton
prope Winton and at Balliol College, Oxford, in the years a.d. 1902-11, he had acquired,
and retained in after life, an articulateness in Greek and Latin of which he was destitute
in his vernacular mother tongue. Whenever his feelings were deeply moved, they used
to discharge themselves by finding expression in Greek or Latin verse which welled up
spontaneously from the subconscious depths of his psyche.