Why do I give so much of my time to the reading of history? Is it in any
sense profitable to me? What new light can I hope for on the nature of
man? What new guidance for the direction of my own life through the few
years that may remain to me? But it is with no such purpose that I read
these voluminous books; they gratify--or seem to gratify--a mere
curiosity; and scarcely have I closed a volume, when the greater part of
what I have read in it is forgotten.
Heaven forbid that I should remember all! Many a time I have said to
myself that I would close the dreadful record of human life, lay it for
ever aside, and try to forget it. Somebody declares that history is a
manifestation of the triumph of good over evil. The good prevails now
and then, no doubt, but how local and transitory is such triumph. If
historic tomes had a voice, it would sound as one long moan of anguish.
Think steadfastly of the past, and one sees that only by defect of
imaginative power can any man endure to dwell with it. History is a
nightmare of horrors; we relish it, because we love pictures, and because
all that man has suffered is to man rich in interest. But make real to
yourself the vision of every blood-stained page--stand in the presence of
the ravening conqueror, the savage tyrant--tread the stones of the
dungeon and of the torture-room--feel the fire of the stake--hear the
cries of that multitude which no man can number, the victims of calamity,
of oppression, of fierce injustice in its myriad forms, in every land, in
every age--and what joy have you of your historic reading? One would
need to be a devil to understand it thus, and yet to delight in it.
Injustice--there is the loathed crime which curses the memory of the
world. The slave doomed by his lord's caprice to perish under
tortures--one feels it a dreadful and intolerable thing; but it is merely
the crude presentment of what has been done and endured a million times
in every stage of civilization. Oh, the last thoughts of those who have
agonized unto death amid wrongs to which no man would give ear! That
appeal of innocence in anguish to the hard, mute heavens! Were there
only one such instance in all the chronicles of time, it should doom the
past to abhorred oblivion. Yet injustice, the basest, the most
ferocious, is inextricable from warp and woof in the tissue of things
gone by. And if anyone soothes himself with the reflection that such
outrages can happen no more, that mankind has passed beyond such hideous
possibility, he is better acquainted with books than with human nature.
It were wiser to spend my hours with the books which bring no aftertaste
of bitterness--with the great poets whom I love, with the thinkers, with
the gentle writers of pages that soothe and tranquillize. Many a volume
regards me from the shelf as though reproachfully; shall I never again
take it in my hands? Yet the words are golden, and I would fain treasure
them all in my heart's memory. Perhaps the last fault of which I shall
cure myself is that habit of mind which urges me to seek knowledge. Was
I not yesterday on the point of ordering a huge work of erudition, which
I should certainly never have read through, and which would only have
served to waste precious days? It is the Puritan in my blood, I suppose,
which forbids me to recognise frankly that all I have now to do is to
_enjoy_. This is wisdom. The time for acquisition has gone by. I am
not foolish enough to set myself learning a new language; why should I
try to store my memory with useless knowledge of the past?
Come, once more before I die I will read _Don Quixote_.