VI.

But leaving these weaklings, let us turn rather to a point of

strength for which the modern man is famous. Let us ask the painful

question whether he has the right in virtue of his historical

"objectivity" to call himself strong and just in a higher degree than

the man of another age. Is it true that this objectivity has its

source in a heightened sense of the need for justice? Or, being

really an effect of quite other causes, does it only have the

appearance of coming from justice, and really lead to an unhealthy

prejudice in favour of the modern man? Socrates thought it near

madness to imagine one possessed a virtue without really possessing

it. Such imagination has certainly more danger in it than the

contrary madness of a positive vice. For of this there is still a

cure; but the other makes a man or a time daily worse, and therefore

more unjust.

No one has a higher claim to our reverence than the man with the

feeling and the strength for justice. For the highest and rarest

virtues unite and are lost in it, as an unfathomable sea absorbs the

streams that flow from every side. The hand of the just man, who is

called to sit in judgment, trembles no more when it holds the scales:

he piles the weights inexorably against his own side, his eyes are

not dimmed as the balance rises and falls, and his voice is neither

hard nor broken when he pronounces the sentence. Were he a cold demon

of knowledge, he would cast round him the icy atmosphere of an awful,

superhuman majesty, that we should fear, not reverence. But he is a

man, and has tried to rise from a careless doubt to a strong

certainty, from gentle tolerance to the imperative "thou must"; from

the rare virtue of magnanimity to the rarest, of justice. He has come

to be like that demon without being more than a poor mortal at the

outset; above all, he has to atone to himself for his humanity and

tragically shatter his own nature on the rock of an impossible

virtue.--All this places him on a lonely height as the most reverend

example of the human race. For truth is his aim, not in the form of

cold intellectual knowledge, but the truth of the judge who punishes

according to law; not as the selfish possession of an individual, but

the sacred authority that removes the boundary stones from all

selfish possessions; truth, in a word, as the tribunal of the world,

and not as the chance prey of a single hunter. The search for truth

is often thoughtlessly praised: but it only has anything great in it

if the seeker have the sincere unconditional will for justice. Its

roots are in justice alone: but a whole crowd of different motives

may combine in the search for it, that have nothing to do with truth

at all; curiosity, for example, or dread of ennui, envy, vanity, or

amusement. Thus the world seems to be full of men who "serve truth":

and yet the virtue of justice is seldom present, more seldom known,

and almost always mortally hated. On the other hand a throng of sham

virtues has entered in at all times with pomp and honour.

Few in truth serve truth, as only few have the pure will for justice;

and very few even of these have the strength to be just. The will

alone is not enough: the impulse to justice without the power of

judgment has been the cause of the greatest suffering to men. And

thus the common good could require nothing better than for the seed

of this power to be strewn as widely as possible, that the fanatic

may be distinguished from the true judge, and the blind desire from

the conscious power. But there are no means of planting a power of

judgment: and so when one speaks to men of truth and justice, they

will be ever troubled by the doubt whether it be the fanatic or the

judge who is speaking to them. And they must be pardoned for always

treating the "servants of truth" with special kindness, who possess

neither the will nor the power to judge and have set before them the

task of finding "pure knowledge without reference to consequences,"

knowledge, in plain terms, that comes to nothing. There are very many

truths which are unimportant; problems that require no struggle to

solve, to say nothing of sacrifice. And in this safe realm of

indifference a man may very successfully become a "cold demon of

knowledge." And yet--if we find whole regiments of learned inquirers

being turned to such demons in some age specially favourable to them,

it is always unfortunately possible that the age is lacking in a

great and strong sense of justice, the noblest spring of the

so-called impulse to truth.

Consider the historical virtuoso of the present time: is he the

justest man of his age? True, he has developed in himself such a

delicacy and sensitiveness that "nothing human is alien to him."

Times and persons most widely separated come together in the concords

of his lyre. He has become a passive instrument, whose tones find an

echo in similar instruments: until the whole atmosphere of a time is

filled with such echoes, all buzzing in one soft chord. Yet I think

one only hears the overtones of the original historical note: its

rough powerful quality can be no longer guessed from these thin and

shrill vibrations. The original note sang of action, need, and

terror; the overtone lulls us into a soft dilettante sleep. It is as

though the heroic symphony had been arranged for two flutes for the

use of dreaming opium-smokers. We can now judge how these virtuosi

stand towards the claim of the modern man to a higher and purer

conception of justice. This virtue has never a pleasing quality; it

never charms; it is harsh and strident. Generosity stands very low on

the ladder of the virtues in comparison; and generosity is the mark

of a few rare historians! Most of them only get as far as tolerance,

in other words they leave what cannot be explained away, they correct

it and touch it up condescendingly, on the tacit assumption that the

novice will count it as justice if the past be narrated without

harshness or open expressions of hatred. But only superior strength

can really judge; weakness must tolerate, if it do not pretend to be

strength and turn justice to a play-actress. There is still a

dreadful class of historians remaining--clever, stern and honest, but

narrow-minded: who have the "good will" to be just with a pathetic

belief in their actual judgments, which are all false; for the same

reason, almost, as the verdicts of the usual juries are false. How

difficult it is to find a real historical talent, if we exclude all

the disguised egoists, and the partisans who pretend to take up an

impartial attitude for the sake of their own unholy game! And we also

exclude the thoughtless folk who write history in the naïve faith

that justice resides in the popular view of their time, and that to

write in the spirit of the time is to be just; a faith that is found

in all religions, and which, in religion, serves very well. The

measurement of the opinions and deeds of the past by the universal

opinions of the present is called "objectivity" by these simple

people: they find the canon of all truth here: their work is to adapt

the past to the present triviality. And they call all historical

writing "subjective" that does not regard these popular opinions as

canonical.

Might not an illusion lurk in the highest interpretation of the word

objectivity? We understand by it a certain standpoint in the

historian, who sees the procession of motive and consequence too

clearly for it to have an effect on his own personality. We think of

the æsthetic phenomenon of the detachment from all personal concern

with which the painter sees the picture and forgets himself, in a

stormy landscape, amid thunder and lightning, or on a rough sea: and

we require the same artistic vision and absorption in his object from

the historian. But it is only a superstition to say that the picture

given to such a man by the object really shows the truth of things.

Unless it be that objects are expected in such moments to paint or

photograph themselves by their own activity on a purely passive

medium!

But this would be a myth, and a bad one at that. One forgets that

this moment is actually the powerful and spontaneous moment of

creation in the artist, of "composition" in its highest form, of

which the result will be an artistically, but not an historically,

true picture. To think objectively, in this sense, of history is the

work of the dramatist: to think one thing with another, and weave the

elements into a single whole; with the presumption that the unity of

plan must be put into the objects if it be not already there. So man

veils and subdues the past, and expresses his impulse to art--but not

his impulse to truth or justice. Objectivity and justice have nothing

to do with each other. There could be a kind of historical writing

that had no drop of common fact in it and yet could claim to be

called in the highest degree objective. Grillparzer goes so far as to

say that "history is nothing but the manner in which the spirit of

man apprehends facts that are obscure to him, links things together

whose connection heaven only knows, replaces the unintelligible by

something intelligible, puts his own ideas of causation into the

external world, which can perhaps be explained only from within: and

assumes the existence of chance, where thousands of small causes may

be really at work. Each man has his own individual needs, and so

millions of tendencies are running together, straight or crooked,

parallel or across, forward or backward, helping or hindering each

other. They have all the appearance of chance, and make it

impossible, quite apart from all natural influences, to establish any

universal lines on which past events must have run." But as a result

of this so-called "objective" way of looking at things, such a "must"

ought to be made clear. It is a presumption that takes a curious form

if adopted by the historian as a dogma. Schiller is quite clear about

its truly subjective nature when he says of the historian, "one event

after the other begins to draw away from blind chance and lawless

freedom, and take its place as the member of an harmonious

whole--_which is of course only apparent in its presentation_." But

what is one to think of the innocent statement, wavering between

tautology and nonsense, of a famous historical virtuoso? "It seems

that all human actions and impulses are subordinate to the process of

the material world, that works unnoticed, powerfully and

irresistibly." In such a sentence one no longer finds obscure wisdom

in the form of obvious folly; as in the saying of Goethe's gardener,

"Nature may be forced but not compelled," or in the notice on the

side-show at a fair, in Swift: "The largest elephant in the world,

except himself, to be seen here." For what opposition is there

between human action and the process of the world? It seems to me

that such historians cease to be instructive as soon as they begin to

generalise; their weakness is shown by their obscurity. In other

sciences the generalisations are the most important things, as they

contain the laws. But if such generalisations as these are to stand

as laws, the historian's labour is lost; for the residue of truth,

after the obscure and insoluble part is removed, is nothing but the

commonest knowledge. The smallest range of experience will teach it.

But to worry whole peoples for the purpose, and spend many hard years

of work on it, is like crowding one scientific experiment on another

long after the law can be deduced from the results already obtained:

and this absurd excess of experiment has been the bane of all natural

science since Zollner. If the value of a drama lay merely in its

final scene, the drama itself would be a very long, crooked and

laborious road to the goal: and I hope history will not find its

whole significance in general propositions, and regard them as its

blossom and fruit. On the contrary, its real value lies in inventing

ingenious variations on a probably commonplace theme, in raising the

popular melody to a universal symbol and showing what a world of

depth, power and beauty exists in it.

But this requires above all a great artistic faculty, a creative

vision from a height, the loving study of the data of experience, the

free elaborating of a given type,--objectivity in fact, though this

time as a positive quality. Objectivity is so often merely a phrase.

Instead of the quiet gaze of the artist that is lit by an inward

flame, we have an affectation of tranquillity; just as a cold

detachment may mask a lack of moral feeling. In some cases a

triviality of thought, the everyday wisdom that is too dull not to

seem calm and disinterested, comes to represent the artistic

condition in which the subjective side has quite sunk out of sight.

Everything is favoured that does not rouse emotion, and the driest

phrase is the correct one. They go so far as to accept a man who is

_not affected at all_ by some particular moment in the past as the

right man to describe it. This is the usual relation of the Greeks

and the classical scholars. They have nothing to do with each

other--and this is called "objectivity"! The intentional air of

detachment that is assumed for effect, the sober art of the

superficial motive-hunter is most exasperating when the highest and

rarest things are in question; and it is the _vanity_ of the

historian that drives him to this attitude of indifference. He goes

to justify the axiom that a man's vanity corresponds to his lack of

wit. No, be honest at any rate! Do not pretend to the artist's

strength, that is the real objectivity; do not try to be just, if you

are not born to that dread vocation. As if it were the task of every

time to be just to everything before it! Ages and generations have

never the right to be the judges of all previous ages and

generations: only to the rarest men in them can that difficult

mission fall. Who compels you to judge? If it is your wish--you must

prove first that you are capable of justice. As judges, you must

stand higher than that which is to be judged: as it is, you have only

come later. The guests that come last to the table should rightly

take the last places: and will you take the first? Then do some great

and mighty deed: the place may be prepared for you then, even though

you do come last.

_You can only explain the past by what is highest in the present._

Only by straining the noblest qualities you have to their highest

power will you find out what is greatest in the past, most worth

knowing and preserving. Like by like! otherwise you will draw the

past to your own level. Do not believe any history that does not

spring from the mind of a rare spirit. You will know the quality of

the spirit, by its being forced to say something universal, or to

repeat something that is known already; the fine historian must have

the power of coining the known into a thing never heard before and

proclaiming the universal so simply and profoundly that the simple is

lost in the profound, and the profound in the simple. No one can be a

great historian and artist, and a shallowpate at the same time. But

one must not despise the workers who sift and cast together the

material because they can never become great historians. They must,

still less, be confounded with them, for they are the necessary

bricklayers and apprentices in the service of the master: just as the

French used to speak, more naïvely than a German would, of the

"historiens de M. Thiers." These workmen should gradually become

extremely learned, but never, for that reason, turn to be masters.

Great learning and great shallowness go together very well under one

hat.

Thus, history is to be written by the man of experience and

character. He who has not lived through something greater and nobler

than others, will not be able to explain anything great and noble in

the past. The language of the past is always oracular: you will only

understand it as builders of the future who know the present. We can

only explain the extraordinarily wide influence of Delphi by the fact

that the Delphic priests had an exact knowledge of the past: and,

similarly, only he who is building up the future has a right to judge

the past. If you set a great aim before your eyes, you control at the

same time the itch for analysis that makes the present into a desert

for you, and all rest, all peaceful growth and ripening, impossible.

Hedge yourselves with a great, all-embracing hope, and strive on.

Make of yourselves a mirror where the future may see itself, and

forget the superstition that you are Epigoni. You have enough to

ponder and find out, in pondering the life of the future: but do not

ask history to show you the means and the instrument to it. If you

live yourselves back into the history of great men, you will find in

it the high command to come to maturity and leave that blighting

system of cultivation offered by your time: which sees its own profit

in not allowing you to become ripe, that it may use and dominate you

while you are yet unripe. And if you want biographies, do not look

for those with the legend "Mr. So-and-so and his times," but for one

whose title-page might be inscribed "a fighter against his time."

Feast your souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when

you believe in his heroes. A hundred such men--educated against the

fashion of to-day, made familiar with the heroic, and come to

maturity--are enough to give an eternal quietus to the noisy sham

education of this time.