I have read all the famous histories, and, I believe, some history of every
country and nation that is, or ever existed; but I never did so for the
story itself as a story. The only thing interesting to me was the
principles to be evolved from, and illustrated by, the facts.[1] After I
had gotten my principles, I pretty generally left the facts to take care of
themselves. I never could remember any passages in books, or the
particulars of events, except in the gross. I can refer to them. To be
sure, I must be a different sort of man from Herder, who once was seriously
annoyed with himself, because, in recounting the pedigree of some German
royal or electoral family, he missed some one of those worthies and could
not recall the name.
[Footnote 1:
"The true origin of human events is so little susceptible of that kind of
evidence which can _compel_ our belief; so many are the disturbing forces
which, in every cycle or ellipse of changes, modify the motion given by the
first projection; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own
circumstances, which render past experience no longer applicable to the
present case; that there will never be wanting answers, and explanations,
and specious flatteries of hope, to persuade and perplex its government,
that the history of the past is inapplicable to _their_ case. And no
wonder, if we read history for the facts, instead of reading it for the
sake of the general principles, which are to the facts as the root and sap
of a tree to its leaves: and no wonder if history so read should find a
dangerous rival in novels; nay, if the latter should be preferred to the
former, on the score even of probability. I well remember that, when the
examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, Cromwell, and the like, were
adduced in France and England, at the commencement of the French consulate,
it was ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repetition
of usurpation and military despotism at the close of the _enlightened
eighteenth century_! Even so, in the very dawn of the late tempestuous day,
when the revolutions of Corcyra, the proscriptions of the reformers Marius,
Cæsar, &c., and the direful effects of the levelling tenets in the
peasants' war in Germany (differenced from the tenets of the first French
constitution only by the mode of wording them, the figures of speech being
borrowed in the one instance from theology, and in the other from modern
metaphysics), were urged on the convention and its vindicators; the magi of
the day, the true citizens of the world, the _plusquam perfecti_ of
patriotism, gave us set proofs that similar results were impossible, and
that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, to so enlightened a
nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them as to lights of
warning."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 14.]
* * * * *
Schmidt[1] was a Romanist; but I have generally found him candid, as indeed
almost all the Austrians are. They are what is called _good Catholics_;
but, like our Charles the Second, they never let their religious bigotry
interfere with their political well-doing. Kaiser is a most pious son of
the church, yet he always keeps his papa in good order.
[Footnote 1:
Michael Ignatius Schmidt, the author of the History of the Germans. He
died in the latter end of the last century.--ED.]
_July_ 20. 1832.