the heavenly bodies for many a century were thought blind and without
law. Now we have advanced so far into the light as to perceive the
elaborate principles of their order, the original reason of their
appearing, the stupendous equipoise of their attraction and repulsion,
the divine artifice of their compensations, the original ground of their
apparent disorder, the enormous system of their reactions, the almost
infinite intricacy of their movements. In these very anomalies lies the
principle of their order. A curve is long in showing its elements of
fluxion; we must watch long in order to compute them; we must wait in
order to know the law of their relations and the music of the deep
mathematical principles which they obey. A piece of music, again, from
the great hand of Mozart or Beethoven, which seems a mere anarchy to the
dull, material mind, to the ear which is instructed by a deep
sensibility reveals a law of controlling power, determining its
movements, its actions and reactions, such as cannot be altogether
hidden, even when as yet it is but dimly perceived.
So it is in history, though the area of its interest is yet wider, and
the depths to which it reaches more profound; all its contradictory
phenomena move under one embracing law, and all its contraries shall
finally be solved in the clear perception of this law.
* * * * *
Reading and study ill-conducted run to waste, and all reading and study
are ill-conducted which do not plant the result as well as the fact or
date in the memory. With no form of knowledge is this more frequently
the case than with history. Such is the ill-arranged way of telling all
stories, and so perfectly without organization is the record of history,
that of what is of little significance there is much, and of what is of
deep and permanent signification there is little or nothing.
The first step in breaking ground upon this almost impracticable
subject, is--to show the student a true map of the field in which his
labours are to lie. Most people have a vague preconception, peopling the
fancy with innumerable shadows, of some vast wilderness or Bilidulgerid
of trackless time, over which are strewed the wrecks of events without
order, and persons without limit. _Omne ignotum_, says Tacitus, _pro
magnifico_; that is, everything which lies amongst the shades and
darkness of the indefinite, and everything which is in the last degree
confused, seems infinite. But the gloom of uncertainty seems far greater
than it really is.
One short distribution and circumscription of historical ages will soon
place matters in a more hopeful aspect. Fabulous history ceases, and
authentic history commences, just three-quarters of a millennium before
Jesus Christ; that is, just 750 years. Let us call this space of time,
viz., the whole interval from the year 750 B.C. up to the Incarnation of
Christ, the first chamber of history. I do not mean that precisely 750
years before our Saviour's birth, fabulous and mythological history
started like some guilty thing at the sound of a cock-crowing, and
vanished as with the sound of harpies' wings. It vanished as the natural
darkness of night vanishes. A stealthy twilight first began to divide
and give shape to the formless shadows: what previously had been one
blank mass of darkness began to break into separate forms: outlines
became perceptible, groups of figures started forward into relief; chaos
began to shape and organize its gloomy masses. Next, and by degrees,
came on the earliest dawn. This ripened imperceptibly into a rosy aurora
that gave notice of some mightier power approaching. And at length, but
not until the age of Cyrus, five centuries and a half before Christ,
precisely one century later, the golden daylight of authentic history
sprang above the horizon and was finally established. Since that time,
whatever want of light we may have to lament is due to the _loss_ of
records, not to their original _absence_; due to the victorious
destructions of time, not[20] to the error of the human mind confounding
the provinces of Fable and of History.
Let the first chamber of history therefore be that which stretches from
the year 750 B.C. to the era of His Incarnation. I say 750 for the
present, because it would be quite idle, in dealing with intervals of
time so vast, to take notice of any little excess or defect by which the
actual period differed from the ideal; strictly speaking, the period of
authentic history commences sixteen or seventeen years earlier. But for
the present let us say in round numbers that this period commenced 750
years B.C. And let the first chamber of history be of that duration.
B. Next let us take an equal space _after_ Christ. This will be the
second chamber of history. Starting from the birth of our Saviour, it
will terminate in the middle of the eighth century, or in the early
years of Charlemagne. These surely are most remarkable eras.
C. Then passing for the present without explanation to the year 1100 for
the first Crusade, let us there fix one foot of our 'golden compasses,'
and with the other mark off an equal period of 750 years. This carries
us up nearly to the reign of George III, of England. And this will be
the third great chamber of history.
D. Fourthly, there will now remain a period just equal to one-half of
such a chamber, viz.: 350 years between Charlemagne's cradle and the
first Crusade, the terminal era of the second chamber and the inaugural
era of the third. This we will call the ante-chamber of No. 3.
Now, upon reviewing these chambers and antechambers, the first important
remark for the student is, that the second chamber is nearly empty of
all incidents. Take away the migrations and invasions of the several
Northern nations who overran the Western Empire, broke it up, and laid
the foundations of the great nations of Christendom--England, France,
Spain--and take away the rise of Mahommedanism, and there would remain
scarcely anything memorable.
From all this we draw the following inference: that memory is, in
certain cases, connected with great effort, in others, with no effort at
all. Of one class we may say, that the facts absolutely deposit
themselves in the memory; they settle in our memories as a sediment or
deposition from a liquor settles in a glass; of another we may say that
the facts cannot maintain their place in the memory without continued
exertion, and with something like violence to natural tendencies. Now,
beyond all other facts, the facts of dates are the most severely of this
latter class. Oftentimes the very actions or sufferings of a man,
empire, army, are hard to be remembered because they are
non-significant, non-characteristic: they belong by no more natural or
intellectual right to that man, empire, army, than to any other man,
empire, army. We remember, for instance, the simple diplomacy of Greece,
when she summoned all States to the grand duty of exterminating the
barbarian from her limits, and throwing back the tides of barbarism
within its natural limits; for this appealed to what was noblest in
human nature. We forget the elaborate intrigues which preceded the
Peloponnesian war, for these appealed only to vulgar and ordinary
motives of self-aggrandisement. We remember the trumpet voice which
summoned Christendom to deliver Christ's sepulchre from Pagan insults,
for that was the great romance of religious sentiment. But we forget the
treaties by which this or that Crusading king delivered his army from
Mahometan victors, because these proceeded on the common principles of
fear and self-interest; principles having no peculiar relation to those
from which the Crusades had arisen.
Now, if even actions themselves are easily dropped from the memory,
because they stand in no logical relation to the central interest
concerned, how much more and how universally must dates be liable to
oblivion--dates which really have no more discoverable connection with
any name of man or place or event, than the letters or syllables of
that name have with the great cause or principles with which it may
happen to have been associated. Why should Themistocles or Aristides
have flourished 500 B.C., rather than 250, 120, or any other number of
years? No conceivable relation--hardly so much as any fanciful
relation--can be established between the man and his era. And in this
one (to all appearance insuperable) difficulty, in this absolute defect
of all connection between the two objects that are to be linked together
in the memory, lies the startling task of Chronology. Chronology is
required to chain together--and so that one shall inevitably recall the
other--a name and an era which with regard to each other are like two
clouds, aerial, insulated, mutually repulsive, and throwing out no
points for grappling or locking on, neither offering any natural
indications of interconnection, nor apparently by art, contrivance,[21]
or fiction, susceptible of any.
II. _Jewish as compared with other records._--Let us open our review
with the annals of Judea; and for two reasons: first, because in the
order of time it _was_ the inaugural chapter, so that the order of our
rehearsal does but conform to the order of the facts; secondly, because
on another principle of arrangement, viz., its relation to the capital
interests of human nature, it stands first in another sense by a degree
which cannot be measured.
These are two advantages, in comparison with all other history whatever,
which have crowned the Jewish History with mysterious glory, and of
these the pupil should be warned in her introductory lesson. The first
is: that the Jewish annals open by one whole millennium before all other
human records. Full a thousand years had the chronicles of the Hebrew
nation been in motion and unfolding that sublime story, fitter for the
lyre and the tumultuous organ, than for unimpassioned recitation, before
the earliest whispers of the historic muse began to stir in any other
land. Amongst Pagan nations, Greece was the very foremost to attempt
that almost impracticable object under an imperfect civilization--the
art of fixing in forms not perishable, and of transmitting to distant
generations, her social revolutions.[22] She wanted paper through her
earlier periods, she wanted typographic art, she wanted, above all,
other resources for such a purpose--the art of reading as a national
accomplishment. How could people record freely and fervently, with
Hebrew rapture, those events which must be painfully chiselled out in
marble, or expensively ploughed and furrowed into brazen tablets? What
freedom to the motions of human passion, where an _extra_ word or two of
description must be purchased by a day's labour? But, above all, what
motive could exist for the accumulation or the adequate diffusion of
records, howsoever inscribed, on slabs of marble or of bronze, on
leather, or plates of wood, whilst as yet no general machinery of
education had popularized the art of reading? Until the age of Pericles
each separate Grecian city could hardly have furnished three citizens on
an average able to read. Amongst a people so illiterate, how could
manuscripts or manu_sculpts_ excite the interest which is necessary to
their conservation? Of what value would a shipload of harps prove to a
people unacquainted with the science or the practical art of music? Too
much or too little interest alike defeat this primary purpose of the
record. Records must be _self_-conservative before they can be applied
to the conservation of events. Amongst ourselves the _black-letter_
records of English heroes by Grafton and Hollinshed, of English voyagers
by Hakluyt, of English martyrs by Fox, perished in a very unusual
proportion by excessive use through successive generations of readers:
but amongst the Greeks they would have perished by neglect. The too much
of the English usage and the too little of the Grecian would have tended
to the same result. Books and the art of reading must ever be powerful
re-agents--each upon the other: until books were multiplied, there could
be no general accomplishment of reading. Until the accomplishment was
taken up into the system of education, books insculptured by painful
elaboration upon costly substances must be too much regarded as
jewellery to obtain a domestic value for the mass.
The problem, therefore, was a hard one for Greece--to devise any art,
power or machinery for fixing and propagating the great memorials of
things and persons. Each generation as it succeeded would more and more
furnish subjects for the recording pen of History, yet each in turn was
compelled to see them slipping away like pearls from a fractured
necklace. It seems easy, but in practice it must be nearly impossible,
to take aim, as it were, at a remote generation--to send a sealed letter
down to a posterity two centuries removed--or by any human resources,
under the Grecian conditions of the case, to have a chance of clearing
that vast bridgeless gulf which separates the present from the far-off
ages of perfect civilization. Maddening it must have been to know by
their own experience, derived from the far-off past, that no monuments
had much chance of duration, except precisely those small ones of medals
and sculptured gems, which, if durable by metallic substance and
interesting by intrinsic value, were in the same degree more liable to
loss by shipwreck, fire, or other accidents applying to portable things,
but above all furnished no field for more than an intense
abstractiveness. The Iliad arose, as we shall say, a thousand years
before Christ, consequently it bisected precisely the Hebrew history
which arose two thousand years before the same era. Now the Iliad was
the very first historic record of the Greeks, and it was followed at
intervals by many other such sections of history, in the shape of
_Nostoi_, poems on the homeward adventures of the Greek heroes returning
from Troy, or of Cyclical Poems taking a more comprehensive range of
action from the same times, filling up the interspace of 555 years
between this memorable record of the one great Pagan Crusade[23] at the
one limit, and the first Greek prose history--that of Herodotus--at the
lower limit. Even through a space of 555 years _subsequent_ to the
Iliad, which has the triple honour of being the earliest Greek book, the
earliest Greek poem, the earliest Greek history, we see the Grecian
annals but imperfectly sustained; legends treated with a legendary
variety; romances embroidered with romantic embellishments; poems,
which, if Greek narrative poetry allowed of but little fiction and
sternly rejected all pure invention, yet originally rested upon
semi-fabulous and mythological marvels, and were thus far poetic in the
basis, that when they durst not invent they could still garble by
poetical selection where they chose; and thus far lying--that if they
were compelled to conform themselves to the popular traditions which
must naturally rest upon a pedestal of fact, it was fact as seen through
an atmosphere of superstition, and imperceptibly modified by priestly
arts.
The sum, therefore, of our review is, that one thousand [1,000] years
B.C. did the earliest Grecian record appear, being also the earliest
Greek poem, and this poem being the earliest Greek book; secondly, that
for the five-hundred-and-fifty-five [555] years subsequent to the
earliest record, did the same legendary form of historic composition
continue to subsist. On the other hand, as a striking antithesis to this
Grecian condition of history, we find amongst the Hebrews a
circumstantial deduction of their annals from the very nativity of their
nation--that is, from the birth of the Patriarch Isaac, or, more
strictly, of his son the Patriarch Jacob--down to the captivity of the
two tribes, their restoration by Cyrus, and the dedication of the Second
Temple. This Second Temple brings us abreast of Herodotus, the first
Greek historian. Fable with the Greeks is not yet distinguished from
fact, but a sense of the distinction is becoming clearer.
The privileged use of the word Crusade, which we have ventured to make
with reference to the first great outburst of Greek enthusiasm, suggests
a grand distinction, which may not unreasonably claim some illustration,
so deep does it reach in exhibiting the contrast between the character
of the early annals of the Hebrews and those of every other early
nation.
Galilee and Joppa, and Nazareth, Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives--what
a host of phantoms, what a resurrection from the graves of twelve and
thirteen centuries for the least reflecting of the army, had his mission
connected him no further with these objects than as a traveller passing
amongst them. But when the nature of his service was considered, the
purposes with which he allied himself, and the vindicating which he
supported, many times as a volunteer--the dullest natures must have been
penetrated, the lowest exalted.[24]
To this grand passion of religious enthusiasm stands opposed, according
to the general persuasion, the passion, equally exalted, or equally open
to exaltation, of love. 'So the whole ear of Denmark is abused.' Love,
chivalrous love, love in its noblest forms, was a passion unknown to the
Greeks; as we may well suppose in a country where woman was not
honoured, not esteemed, not treated with the confidence which is the
basis of all female dignity. However, this subject I shall leave
untouched: simply reminding the reader that even conceding for a moment
so monstrous an impossibility as that pure chivalrous love, as it exists
under Christian institutions, could have had an existence in the Greece
of 1000 B.C.; the more elevated, the more tender it was, the less fitted
it could be for the coarse air of a camp. The holy sepulchre would
command reverence, and the expression of reverence, from the lowest
sutler of the camp; but we may easily imagine what coarse jests would
eternally surround the name of Helen amongst the Greek soldiery, and
everything connected with the cause which drew them into the field.
Yet even this coarse travesty of a noble passion was a higher motive
than the Greeks really obeyed in the war with Troy. England, it has been
sometimes said, went to war with Spain, during George II.'s reign, on
account of Capt. Jenkins's ears, which a brutal Spanish officer, in the
cowardly abuse of his power, had nailed to the mast. And if she did, the
cause was a noble one, however unsuitably expounded by its outward
heraldry. There the cause was noble, though the outward sign was below
its dignity. But in the Iliad, if we may give that name to the total
expedition against Troy and the Troad, the relations were precisely
inverted. Its outward sign, its ostensible purpose, was noble: for it
was woman. _But the real and sincere motive which collected fifty
thousand Grecians under one common banner, was_ (I am well assured upon
meditation) _money--money, and money's worth_. No less motive in that
age was adequate to the effect. Helen was, assuredly, no such prize
considering her damaged reputation and other circumstances. Revenge
might intermingle in a very small proportion with the general principle
of the war; as to the oath and its obligation, which is supposed to have
bound over the princes of Greece: that I suppose to be mere cant; for
how many princes were present in the field that never could have been
suitors to Helen, nor parties to the oath? Do we suppose old Nestor to
have been one? A young gentleman 'rising' 99, as the horse-jockeys say;
or by some reckonings, 113! No, plunder was the object.
The truth was this--the plain historic truth for any man not wilfully
blind--Greece was miserably poor; that we know by what we find five
centuries after, when she must, like other people who find little else
to do, have somewhat bettered her condition. Troy and the Troad were
redundantly rich; it was their great crime to be so. Already the western
coast of Asia Minor was probably studded with Greek colonies, standing
in close connection with the great capitals on the Euphrates or the
Tigris, and sharing in the luxurious wealth of the great capitals on the
Euphrates or the Tigris. Mitford most justly explained the secret
history of Cæsar's expedition to England out of his wish to find a new
slave country.[25] And after all the romantic views of the Grecian
expedition to the Troad, I am satisfied we should look for its true
solution in the Greek poverty and the wealth--both _locally
concentrated_ and _portable_--of the Trojans. Land or cities were things
too much diffused: and even the son of Peleus or of Telamon could not
put them into his pocket. But golden tripods, purple hangings or robes,
fine horses, and beautiful female slaves could be found over the
Hellespont. Helen, the _materia litis_, the subject of quarrel on its
earliest pretence, could not be much improved by a ten years' blockade.
But thousands of more youthful Helens were doubtless carried back to
Greece. And in this prospect of booty most assuredly lay the unromantic
motive of the sole romantic expedition amongst the Greeks.
III. _Oriental History._--We here set aside the earlier tangle of legend
and fact which is called Oriental History, and for these reasons: (1)
instead of promoting the solution of chronological problems, Oriental
history is itself the most perplexing of those problems; (2) the
perpetual straining after a high fabulous antiquity amongst the nations
of the east, vitiates all the records; (3) the vast empires into which
the plains of Asia moulded the eastern nations, allowed of no such
rivalship as could serve to check their legends by collateral
statements; and (4) were all this otherwise, still the great permanent
schism of religion and manners has so effectually barred all coalition
between Europe and Asia, from the oldest times, that of necessity their
histories have flowed apart with little more reciprocal reference or
relationship, than exists between the Rhine and the Danube--rivers,
which almost meeting in their sources, ever after are continually
widening their distance until they fall into different seas two thousand
miles apart. Asia never, at any time, much acted upon Europe; and when
later ages had forced them into artificial connections, it was always
Europe that acted upon Asia; never Asia, upon any commensurate scale,
that acted upon Europe.[26]
Not, therefore, in Asia can the first footsteps of chronology be sought;
not in Africa, because, _first_, the records of Egypt, so far as any
have survived, are intensely Asiatic; liable to the same charge of
hieroglyphic ambiguity combined with the exaggerations of outrageous
nationality; because, _secondly_, the separate records of the adjacent
State of Cyrene have perished; because, _thirdly_, the separate records
of the next State, Carthage, have perished; because, _fourthly_, the
learned labours of Mauritania[27] have also perished.