"What is History," said Napoleon, "but a fiction agreed upon?" "My
friend," said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
the spirit of past ages,--"my friend, the times which are gone are a
book with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is
but the spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those
ages are reflected."
[Footnote 32: From the first chapter in Volume I of the "Short Studies
on Great Subjects," the same being a lecture delivered at the Royal
Institution in London, November 5, 1864.]
One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
distinctness; that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run it is
ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the
old doctrine taught long-ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of
M. Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond
the trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they
are at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to
the conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
concerned, which neither have, nor need have, anything moral about
them, so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his
digestion, and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are
supplied with matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a
world where it would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws
like those of positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune
with a foot rule, or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.
And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first
principle, on which the theory of a science of history can be
plausibly argued, is that all actions whatsoever arise from
self-interest. It may be enlightened self-interest, it may be
unenlightened; but it is assumed as an axiom that every man, in
whatever he does, is aiming at something which he considers will
promote his happiness. His conduct is not determined by his will; it
is determined by the object of his desire. Adam Smith, in laying the
foundations of political economy, expressly eliminates every other
motive. He does not say that men never act on other motives; still
less, that they never ought to act on other motives. He asserts merely
that, as far as the arts of production are concerned and of buying and
selling, the action of self-interest may be counted upon as uniform.
What Adam Smith says of political economy, Mr. Buckle[33] would extend
over the whole circle of human activity.
[Footnote 33: In his "History of Civilization in England."]
Now, that which especially distinguishes a high, order of man from a low
order of man--that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,
human nobleness--is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which
men pursue their own advantage; but it is self-forgetfulness; it is
self-sacrifice; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal
indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other
line of conduct is more right.
We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the
same thing; that, when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only
because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,
on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of
things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not
with a view to any future reward to themselves, but because it is a
glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through
all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the
beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most
love and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to
occur; who do simply and with no ulterior aim--with no thought whether
it will be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant--that which is good
and right and generous.
Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so.
The essence of true nobility is neglect of self. Let the thought of
self pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom
from a soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the
self-interest of a martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which
he will never enjoy; and the greatest of that great company in all
ages would have done what they did, had their personal prospects'
closed with the grave. Nay, there have been those so zealous for some
glorious principle as to wish themselves blotted out of the book of
Heaven if the cause of Heaven could succeed.
And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant,
the philosopher, used to say that there were two things which
overwhelmed him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown
deep of space, without limit and without end; the other was right and
wrong. Right, the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of
good to self,--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are
determined by the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole
and pole, as light and darkness; one, the object of infinite love; the
other, the object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this
marvelous power in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the
less true for that),--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right,
as it lies somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility
stands of forming scientific calculations of what men will do before
the fact, or scientific explanations of what they have done after the
fact. If men were consistently selfish, you might analyze their
motives; if they were consistently noble, they would express in their
conduct the laws of the highest perfection. But so long as two natures
are mixt together, and the strange creature which results from the
combinations is now under one influence and now under another, so long
you will make nothing of him except from the old-fashioned moral--or,
if you please, imaginative--point of view.
Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
touch moral government. So long as labor is a chattel to be bought and
sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
that he stands in human relations to his workmen; if he believes
rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return
for their labor he is bound to see that their children are decently
taught, and they and their families decently fed and clothed and
lodged; that he ought to care for them in sickness and in old
age,--then political economy will no longer direct him, and the
relations between himself and his dependents will have to be arranged
on quite other principles.
So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply
and demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
factor spoils the equation.
And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
emotions; in the struggle, ever failing yet ever renewed, to carry
truth and justice into the administration of human society; in the
establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the
rise and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and
deeds of the great actors in the drama of life, where good and evil
fight out their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now
and more often in the heart, both of them, of each living man,--that
the true human interest of history resides. The progress of
industries, the growth of material and mechanical civilization, are
interesting; but they are not the most interesting. They have their
reward in the increase of material comforts; but, unless we are
mistaken about our nature, they do not highly concern us after all.
Once more; not only is there in men this baffling duality of
principle, but there is something else in us which still more defies
scientific analysis.
Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
that individual by a doctrine of averages. Tho he can not tell whether
A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in
every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),
will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is
a comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation
need not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the
Japanese, for all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking
leave of life may become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis
suggest that the whole race of men would at last become so disgusted
with their impotence, that they would extinguish themselves by a
simultaneous act of suicide, and make room for a better order of
things? Anyhow, the fountain out of which the race is flowing
perpetually changes; no two generations are alike. Whether there is a
change in the organization itself we can not tell; but this is
certain,--that, as the planet varies with the atmosphere which
surrounds it, so each new generation varies from the last, because it
inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated experience and knowledge of
the whole past of the world. These things form the spiritual air which
we breathe as we grow; and, in the infinite multiplicity of elements
of which that air is now composed, it is forever matter of conjecture
what the minds will be like which expand under its influence.
From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss
Austen, from the England of Miss Austen to the England of railways and
free trade, how vast the change! Yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison
would not seem so strange to us now as one of ourselves will seem to
our great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the
difference will probably be considerably greater.
The temper of each new generation is a continual surprize. The Fates
delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed
that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full
life of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a
few years ago we believed the world had grown too civilized for war,
and the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a
new era. Battles bloody as Napoleon's are now the familiar tale of
every day; and the arts which have made greatest progress are the
arts of destruction. What next? We may strain our eyes into the future
which lies beyond this waning century; but never was conjecture more
at fault. It is blank darkness, which even the imagination fails to
people.
What, then, is the use of history, and what are its lessons? If it can
tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
time over so barren a study?
First, it is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of
right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every
false word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust
or vanity, the price has to be paid at last, not always by the chief
offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.
That is one lesson of history. Another is, that we should draw no
horoscope; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
come to pass. Revolutions, reformations,--those vast movements into
which heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they
were the dawn of the millennium,--have not borne the fruit which they
looked for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions
leave the world changed,--perhaps improved, but not improved as the
actors in them hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with
less heart could he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the
distance the theology of Tübingen. Washington might have hesitated to
draw the sword against England, could he have seen the country which
he made as we see it now.[34]
[Footnote 34: This is a reference to the condition of this country
during the Civil War.]
The most reasonable anticipations fail us, antecedents the most
opposite mislead us, because the conditions of human problems never
repeat themselves. Some new feature alters everything--some element
which we detect only in its after-operation.
Bishop Butler says somewhere that the best book which could be written
would be a book consisting only of premises, from which the readers
should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest poetry is the very
thing which Butler requires, and the highest history ought to be. We
should no more ask for a theory of this or that period of history,
than we should ask for a theory of "Macbeth" or "Hamlet." Philosophies
of history, sciences of history,--all these there will continue to be;
the fashions of them will change, as our habits of thought will
change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment in showing
that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of history
is imperishable, and the lessons of it will be like what we learn from
Homer or Shakespeare,--lessons for which we have no words.
The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher
emotions. We learn in it to sympathize with what is great and good; we
learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the
mystery of our mortal existence; and in the companionship of the
illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we
escape from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life,
and our minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.
For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and
none can tell what will be after us. What opinions, what convictions,
the infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it
live out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold
man would undertake to conjecture. "The time will come," said
Lichtenberg, in scorn at the materializing tendencies of modern
thought,--"the time will come when the belief in God will be as the
tales with which old women frighten children; when the world will be a
machine, the ether a gas, and God will be a force." Mankind, if they
last long enough on the earth, may develop strange things out of
themselves; and the growth of what is called the Positive Philosophy
is a curious commentary on Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end
be seventy years hence, or seven hundred,--be the close of the mortal
history of humanity as far distant in the future as its shadowy
beginnings seem now to lie behind us,--this only we may foretell with
confidence,--that the riddle of man's nature will remain unsolved.
There will be that in him yet which physical laws will fail to
explain,--that something, whatever it be, in himself and in the world,
which science can not fathom, and which suggests the unknown
possibilities of his origin and his destiny.