Transcriber’s Note: Italics are enclosed in _underscores_. Additional
notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
BOOKS BY THEODORE ROOSEVELT
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
AFRICAN GAME TRAILS. An account of the African Wanderings of an
American Hunter-Naturalist.
Illustrated. Large 8vo $4.00 _net_
OUTDOOR PASTIMES OF AN AMERICAN HUNTER.
New Edition. Illustrated. 8vo $3.00 _net_
HISTORY AS LITERATURE and Other Essays.
12mo $1.50 _net_
OLIVER CROMWELL. Illustrated. 8vo $2.00 _net_
THE ROUGH RIDERS. Illustrated. 8vo $1.50 _net_
THE ROOSEVELT BOOK. Selections from the Writings of Theodore
Roosevelt. 16mo 50 cents _net_
* * * * *
THE ELKHORN EDITION. Complete Works of Theodore Roosevelt. 26 volumes.
Illustrated. 8vo. Sold by subscription.
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1913
Copyright, 1913, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1913
Reprinted in December, 1913
[Illustration]
PREFACE
In this volume I have gathered certain addresses I made before the
American Historical Association, the University of Oxford, the
University of Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together with six
essays I wrote for _The Outlook_, and one that I wrote for _The
Century_.
In these addresses and essays I have discussed not merely literary but
also historical and scientific subjects, for my thesis is that the
domain of literature must be ever more widely extended over the domains
of history and science. There is nothing which in this preface I can
say to elaborate or emphasize what I have said on this subject in the
essays themselves.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
SAGAMORE HILL,
_July 4, 1913_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
HISTORY AS LITERATURE 1
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY 37
THE WORLD MOVEMENT 95
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 135
THE THRALDOM OF NAMES 175
PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP 195
DANTE AND THE BOWERY 217
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 231
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT 245
THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS 275
AN ART EXHIBITION 301
⁂ Three chapters, “Biological Analogies in History,” “The World
Movement,” and “Citizenship in a Republic,” were included in the
volume entitled “African and European Addresses.”
HISTORY AS LITERATURE
HISTORY AS LITERATURE[1]
There has been much discussion as to whether history should not
henceforth be treated as a branch of science rather than of literature.
As with most such discussions, much of the matter in dispute has
referred merely to terminology. Moreover, as regards part of the
discussion, the minds of the contestants have not met, the propositions
advanced by the two sides being neither mutually incompatible nor
mutually relevant. There is, however, a real basis for conflict in so
far as science claims exclusive possession of the field.
[1] Annual address of the president of the American Historical
Association delivered at Boston, December 27, 1912.
There was a time--we see it in the marvellous dawn of Hellenic
life--when history was distinguished neither from poetry, from
mythology, nor from the first dim beginnings of science. There was a
more recent time, at the opening of Rome’s brief period of literary
splendor, when poetry was accepted by a great scientific philosopher
as the appropriate vehicle for teaching the lessons of science and
philosophy. There was a more recent time still--the time of Holland’s
leadership in arms and arts--when one of the two or three greatest
world painters put his genius at the service of anatomists.
In each case the steady growth of specialization has rendered such
combination now impossible. Virgil left history to Livy; and when
Tacitus had become possible Lucan was a rather absurd anachronism. The
elder Darwin, when he endeavored to combine the functions of scientist
and poet, may have thought of Lucretius as a model; but the great
Darwin was incapable of such a mistake. The surgeons of to-day would
prefer the services of a good photographer to those of Rembrandt--even
were those of Rembrandt available. No one would now dream of combining
the history of the Trojan War with a poem on the wrath of Achilles.
Beowulf’s feats against the witch who dwelt under the water would not
now be mentioned in the same matter-of-fact way that a Frisian or
Frankish raid is mentioned. We are long past the stage when we would
accept as parts of the same epic Siegfried’s triumphs over dwarf and
dragon, and even a distorted memory of the historic Hunnish king in
whose feast-hall the Burgundian heroes held their last revel and made
their death fight. We read of the loves of the Hound of Muirthemne and
Emer the Fair without attributing to the chariot-riding heroes who
“fought over the ears of their horses” and to their fierce lady-loves
more than a symbolic reality. The Roland of the Norman trouvères, the
Roland who blew the ivory horn at Roncesvalles, is to our minds wholly
distinct from the actual Warden of the Marches who fell in a rear-guard
skirmish with the Pyrenean Basques.
As regards philosophy, as distinguished from material science and from
history, the specialization has been incomplete. Poetry is still used
as a vehicle for the teaching of philosophy. Goethe was as profound
a thinker as Kant. He has influenced the thought of mankind far more
deeply than Kant because he was also a great poet. Robert Browning
was a real philosopher, and his writings have had a hundredfold the
circulation and the effect of those of any similar philosopher who
wrote in prose, just because, and only because, what he wrote was not
merely philosophy but literature. The form in which he wrote challenged
attention and provoked admiration. That part of his work which some of
us--which I myself, for instance--most care for is merely poetry. But
in that part of his work which has exercised most attraction and has
given him the widest reputation, the poetry, the form of expression,
bears to the thought expressed much the same relation that the
expression of Lucretius bears to the thought of Lucretius. As regards
this, the great mass of his product, he is primarily a philosopher,
whose writings surpass in value those of other similar philosophers
precisely because they are not only philosophy but literature. In other
words, Browning the philosopher is read by countless thousands to whom
otherwise philosophy would be a sealed book, for exactly the same
reason that Macaulay the historian is read by countless thousands to
whom otherwise history would be a sealed book; because both Browning’s
works and Macaulay’s works are material additions to the great sum
of English literature. Philosophy is a science just as history is
a science. There is need in one case as in the other for vivid and
powerful presentation of scientific matter in literary form.
This does not mean that there is the like need in the two cases.
History can never be truthfully presented if the presentation is purely
emotional. It can never be truthfully or usefully presented unless
profound research, patient, laborious, painstaking, has preceded the
presentation. No amount of self-communion and of pondering on the soul
of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of
cool, serious, widely extended study. The vision of the great historian
must be both wide and lofty. But it must be sane, clear, and based on
full knowledge of the facts and of their interrelations. Otherwise
we get merely a splendid bit of serious romance-writing, like
Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Many hard-working students, alive to the
deficiencies of this kind of romance-writing, have grown to distrust
not only all historical writing that is romantic, but all historical
writing that is vivid. They feel that complete truthfulness must never
be sacrificed to color. In this they are right. They also feel that
complete truthfulness is incompatible with color. In this they are
wrong. The immense importance of full knowledge of a mass of dry facts
and gray details has so impressed them as to make them feel that the
dryness and the grayness are in themselves meritorious.
These students have rendered invaluable service to history. They are
right in many of their contentions. They see how literature and science
have specialized. They realize that scientific methods are as necessary
to the proper study of history as to the proper study of astronomy
or zoology. They know that in many, perhaps in most, of its forms,
literary ability is divorced from the restrained devotion to the actual
fact which is as essential to the historian as to the scientist. They
know that nowadays science ostentatiously disclaims any connection with
literature. They feel that if this is essential for science, it is no
less essential for history.
There is much truth in all these contentions. Nevertheless, taking them
all together, they do not indicate what these hard-working students
believed that they indicate. Because history, science, and literature
have all become specialized, the theory now is that science is
definitely severed from literature and that history must follow suit.
Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history, but I do not
even accept it as true for science.
Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because
both of its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical
value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For a great
work of literature there is the same demand now that there always
has been; and in any great work of literature the first element is
great imaginative power. The imaginative power demanded for a great
historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is
no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with
minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real and vivid,
presentation of the past can come only from one in whom the imaginative
gift is strong. The industrious collector of dead facts bears to such
a man precisely the relation that a photographer bears to Rembrandt.
There are innumerable books, that is, innumerable volumes of printed
matter between covers, which are excellent for their own purposes, but
in which imagination would be as wholly out of place as in the blue
prints of a sewer system or in the photographs taken to illustrate a
work on comparative osteology. But the vitally necessary sewer system
does not take the place of the cathedral of Rheims or of the Parthenon;
no quantity of photographs will ever be equivalent to one Rembrandt;
and the greatest mass of data, although indispensable to the work of a
great historian, is in no shape or way a substitute for that work.
History, taught for a directly and immediately useful purpose to pupils
and the teachers of pupils, is one of the necessary features of a sound
education in democratic citizenship. A book containing such sound
teaching, even if without any literary quality, may be as useful to the
student and as creditable to the writer as a similar book on medicine.
I am not slighting such a book when I say that, once it has achieved
its worthy purpose, it can be permitted to lapse from human memory as a
good book on medicine, which has outlived its usefulness, lapses from
memory. But the historical work which does possess literary quality may
be a permanent contribution to the sum of man’s wisdom, enjoyment, and
inspiration. The writer of such a book must add wisdom to knowledge,
and the gift of expression to the gift of imagination.
It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagination tends to
inaccuracy. Only a distorted imagination tends to inaccuracy. Vast and
fundamental truths can be discerned and interpreted only by one whose
imagination is as lofty as the soul of a Hebrew prophet. When we say
that the great historian must be a man of imagination, we use the word
as we use it when we say that the great statesman must be a man of
imagination. Moreover, together with imagination must go the power of
expression. The great speeches of statesmen and the great writings of
historians can live only if they possess the deathless quality that
inheres in all great literature. The greatest literary historian must
of necessity be a master of the science of history, a man who has at
his finger-tips all the accumulated facts from the treasure-houses of
the dead past. But he must also possess the power to marshal what is
dead so that before our eyes it lives again.
Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness in a
book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned people
seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting is proof that it
is shallow. This is particularly apt to be the attitude of scientific
men. Very few great scientists have written interestingly, and these
few have usually felt apologetic about it. Yet sooner or later the time
will come when the mighty sweep of modern scientific discovery will be
placed, by scientific men with the gift of expression, at the service
of intelligent and cultivated laymen. Such service will be inestimable.
Another writer of “Canterbury Tales,” another singer of “Paradise
Lost,” could not add more to the sum of literary achievement than the
man who may picture to us the phases of the age-long history of life on
this globe, or make vivid before our eyes the tremendous march of the
worlds through space.
Indeed, I believe that already science has owed more than it suspects
to the unconscious literary power of some of its representatives.
Scientific writers of note had grasped the fact of evolution long
before Darwin and Huxley; and the theories advanced by these men
to explain evolution were not much more unsatisfactory, as full
explanations, than the theory of natural selection itself. Yet, where
their predecessors had created hardly a ripple, Darwin and Huxley
succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of the age,
a revolution as great as that caused by the discovery of the truth
about the solar system. I believe that the chief explanation of the
difference was the very simple one that what Darwin and Huxley wrote
was interesting to read. Every cultivated man soon had their volumes
in his library, and they still keep their places on our book-shelves.
But Lamarck and Cope are only to be found in the libraries of a few
special students. If they had possessed a gift of expression akin to
Darwin’s, the doctrine of evolution would not in the popular mind have
been confounded with the doctrine of natural selection and a juster
estimate than at present would obtain as to the relative merits of
the explanations of evolution championed by the different scientific
schools.
Do not misunderstand me. In the field of historical research an
immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power whatever.
Moreover, the most painstaking and laborious research, covering long
periods of years, is necessary in order to accumulate the material
for any history worth writing at all. There are important by-paths of
history, moreover, which hardly admit of treatment that would make
them of interest to any but specialists. All this I fully admit. In
particular I pay high honor to the patient and truthful investigator.
He does an indispensable work. My claim is merely that such work should
not exclude the work of the great master who can use the materials
gathered, who has the gift of vision, the quality of the seer, the
power himself to see what has happened and to make what he has seen
clear to the vision of others. My only protest is against those who
believe that the extension of the activities of the most competent
mason and most energetic contractor will supply the lack of great
architects. If, as in the Middle Ages, the journeymen builders are
themselves artists, why this is the best possible solution of the
problem. But if they are not artists, then their work, however much it
represents of praiseworthy industry, and of positive usefulness, does
not take the place of the work of a great artist.
Take a concrete example. It is only of recent years that the importance
of inscriptions has been realized. To the present-day scholar they
are invaluable. Even to the layman, some of them turn the past into
the present with startling clearness. The least imaginative is moved
by the simple inscription on the Etruscan sarcophagus: “I, the great
lady”; a lady so haughty that no other human being was allowed to rest
near her; and yet now nothing remains but this proof of the pride of
the nameless one. Or the inscription in which Queen Hatshepsu recounts
her feats and her magnificence, and ends by adjuring the onlooker,
when overcome by the recital, not to say “how wonderful” but “how like
her!”--could any picture of a living queen be more intimately vivid?
With such inscriptions before us the wonder is that it took us so long
to realize their worth. Not unnaturally this realization, when it did
come, was followed by the belief that inscriptions would enable us to
dispense with the great historians of antiquity. This error is worse
than the former. Where the inscriptions give us light on what would
otherwise be darkness, we must be profoundly grateful; but we must not
confound the lesser light with the greater. We could better afford to
lose every Greek inscription that has ever been found than the chapter
in which Thucydides tells of the Athenian failure before Syracuse.
Indeed, few inscriptions teach us as much history as certain forms of
literature that do not consciously aim at teaching history at all. The
inscriptions of Hellenistic Greece in the third century before our era
do not, all told, give us so lifelike a view of the ordinary life of
the ordinary men and women who dwelt in the great Hellenistic cities of
the time, as does the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus.
This does not mean that good history can be unscientific. So far from
ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do nothing
unless he is steeped in science. He can never equal what has been done
by the great historians of the past unless he writes not merely with
full knowledge, but with an intensely vivid consciousness, of all that
of which they were necessarily ignorant. He must accept what we now
know to be man’s place in nature. He must realize that man has been
on this earth for a period of such incalculable length that, from the
standpoint of the student of his development through time, what our
ancestors used to call “antiquity” is almost indistinguishable from the
present day. If our conception of history takes in the beast-like man
whose sole tool and weapon was the stone fist-hatchet, and his advanced
successors, the man who etched on bone pictures of the mammoth, the
reindeer, and the wild horse, in what is now France, and the man who
painted pictures of bison in the burial caves of what is now Spain;
if we also conceive in their true position our “contemporaneous
ancestors,” the savages who are now no more advanced than the
cave-dwellers of a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years
back, then we shall accept Thothmes and Cæsar, Alfred and Washington,
Timoleon and Lincoln, Homer and Shakespeare, Pythagoras and Emerson, as
all nearly contemporaneous in time and in culture.
The great historian of the future will have easy access to innumerable
facts patiently gathered by tens of thousands of investigators, whereas
the great historian of the past had very few facts, and often had to
gather most of these himself. The great historian of the future can not
be excused if he fails to draw on the vast storehouses of knowledge
that have been accumulated, if he fails to profit by the wisdom and
work of other men, which are now the common property of all intelligent
men. He must use the instruments which the historians of the past did
not have ready to hand. Yet even with these instruments he can not do
as good work as the best of the elder historians unless he has vision
and imagination, the power to grasp what is essential and to reject the
infinitely more numerous non-essentials, the power to embody ghosts, to
put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men living before our
eyes. In short, he must have the power to take the science of history
and turn it into literature.
Those who wish history to be treated as a purely utilitarian science
often decry the recital of the mighty deeds of the past, the deeds
which always have aroused, and for a long period to come are likely
to arouse, most interest. These men say that we should study not the
unusual but the usual. They say that we profit most by laborious
research into the drab monotony of the ordinary, rather than by
fixing our eyes on the purple patches that break it. Beyond all
question the great historian of the future must keep ever in mind
the relative importance of the usual and the unusual. If he is a
really great historian, if he possesses the highest imaginative and
literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of
the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting
peaks. It is even more essential to have such quality in writing of the
commonplace than in writing of the exceptional. Otherwise no profit
will come from study of the ordinary; for writings are useless unless
they are read, and they can not be read unless they are readable.
Furthermore, while doing full justice to the importance of the usual,
of the commonplace, the great historian will not lose sight of the
importance of the heroic.
It is hard to tell just what it is that is most important to know. The
wisdom of one generation may seem the folly of the next. This is just
as true of the wisdom of the dry-as-dusts as of the wisdom of those who
write interestingly. Moreover, while the value of the by-products of
knowledge does not readily yield itself to quantitative expression, it
is none the less real. A utilitarian education should undoubtedly be
the foundation of all education. But it is far from advisable, it is
far from wise, to have it the end of all education. Technical training
will more and more be accepted as the prime factor in our educational
system, a factor as essential for the farmer, the blacksmith, the
seamstress, and the cook, as for the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer,
and the stenographer. For similar reasons the purely practical and
technical lessons of history, the lessons that help us to grapple
with our immediate social and industrial problems, will also receive
greater emphasis than ever before. But if we are wise we will no
more permit this practical training to exclude knowledge of that
part of literature which is history than of that part of literature
which is poetry. Side by side with the need for the perfection of the
individual in the technic of his special calling goes the need of broad
human sympathy, and the need of lofty and generous emotion in that
individual. Only thus can the citizenship of the modern state rise
level to the complex modern social needs.
No technical training, no narrowly utilitarian study of any kind will
meet this second class of needs. In part they can best be met by a
training that will fit men and women to appreciate, and therefore to
profit by, great poetry and those great expressions of the historian
and the statesman which rivet our interest and stir our souls. Great
thoughts match and inspire heroic deeds. The same reasons that make the
Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural impress themselves on men’s
minds far more deeply than technical treatises on the constitutional
justification of slavery or of secession, apply to fitting descriptions
of the great battle and the great contest which occasioned the two
speeches. The tense epic of the Gettysburg fight, the larger epic of
the whole Civil War, when truthfully and vividly portrayed, will always
have, and ought always to have, an attraction, an interest, that can
not be roused by the description of the same number of hours or years
of ordinary existence. There are supreme moments in which intensity
and not duration is the all-important element. History which is not
professedly utilitarian, history which is didactic only as great
poetry is unconsciously didactic, may yet possess that highest form
of usefulness, the power to thrill the souls of men with stories of
strength and craft and daring, and to lift them out of their common
selves to the heights of high endeavor.
The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no
proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness as on the
same level. But of course the obsession of purposeful moral teaching
may utterly defeat its own aim. Moreover, unfortunately, the avowed
teacher of morality, when he writes history, sometimes goes very far
wrong indeed. It often happens that the man who can be of real help in
inspiring others by his utterances on abstract principles is wholly
unable to apply his own principles to concrete cases. Carlyle offers
an instance in point. Very few men have ever been a greater source of
inspiration to other ardent souls than was Carlyle when he confined
himself to preaching morality in the abstract. Moreover, his theory
bade him treat history as offering material to support that theory.
But not only was he utterly unable to distinguish either great virtues
or great vices when he looked abroad on contemporary life--as witness
his attitude toward our own Civil War--but he was utterly unable to
apply his own principles concretely in history. His “Frederick the
Great” is literature of a high order. It may, with reservations, even
be accepted as history. But the “morality” therein jubilantly upheld
is shocking to any man who takes seriously Carlyle’s other writings
in which he lays down principles of conduct. In his “Frederick the
Great” he was not content to tell the facts. He was not content to
announce his admiration. He wished to square himself with his theories,
and to reconcile what he admired, both with the actual fact and with
his previously expressed convictions on morality. He could only do so
by refusing to face the facts and by using words with meanings that
shifted to meet his own mental emergencies. He pretended to discern
morality where no vestige of it existed. He tortured the facts to
support his views. The “morality” he praised had no connection with
morality as understood in the New Testament. It was the kind of archaic
morality observed by the Danites in their dealings with the people of
Laish. The sermon of the Mormon bishop in Owen Wister’s “Pilgrim on
the Gila” sets forth the only moral lessons which it was possible for
Carlyle truthfully to draw from the successes he described.
History must not be treated as something set off by itself. It should
not be treated as a branch of learning bound to the past by the
shackles of an iron conservatism. It is neither necessary rigidly to
mark the limits of the province of history, nor to treat of all that is
within that province, nor to exclude any subject within that province
from treatment, nor yet to treat different methods of dealing with the
same subject as mutually exclusive. Every writer and every reader has
his own needs, to meet himself or to be met by others. Among a great
multitude of thoughtful people there is room for the widest possible
variety of appeals. Let each man fearlessly choose what is of real
importance and interest to him personally, reverencing authority, but
not in a superstitious spirit, because he must needs reverence liberty
even more.
There is an infinite variety of subjects to treat, and no need to
estimate their relative importance. Because one man is interested in
the history of finance, it does not mean that another is wrong in being
interested in the history of war. One man’s need is met by exhaustive
tables of statistics; another’s by the study of the influence exerted
on national life by the great orators, the Websters and Burkes, or
by the poets, the Tyrtæuses and Körners, who in crises utter what is
in the nation’s heart. There is need of the study of the historical
workings of representative government. There is no less need of the
study of the economic changes produced by the factory system. Because
we study with profit what Thorold Rogers wrote of prices we are not
debarred from also profiting by Mahan’s studies of naval strategy.
One man finds what is of most importance to his own mind and heart
in tracing the effect upon humanity of the spread of malaria along
the shores of the Ægean; or the effect of the Black Death on the
labor-market of mediæval Europe; or the profound influence upon the
development of the African continent of the fatal diseases borne by
the bites of insects, which close some districts to human life and
others to the beasts without which humanity rests at the lowest stage
of savagery. One man sees the events from one view-point, one from
another. Yet another can combine both. We can be stirred by Thayer’s
study of Cavour without abating our pleasure in the younger Trevelyan’s
volumes on Garibaldi. Because we revel in Froissart, or Joinville, or
Villehardouin, there is no need that we should lack interest in the
books that attempt the more difficult task of tracing the economic
changes in the status of peasant, mechanic, and burgher during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
History must welcome the entrance upon its domain of every science. As
James Harvey Robinson in his “New History” has said:
“The bounds of all departments of human research and speculation
are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating; moreover,
the lines of demarcation are hopelessly interlaced, for real men
and the real universe in which they live are so intricate as to
defy all attempts even of the most patient and subtle German to
establish satisfactorily and permanently the _Begriff und Wesen_ of
any artificially delimited set of natural phenomena, whether words,
thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, plants, or stars. Each so-called
science or discipline is ever and always dependent on other sciences
and disciplines. It draws its life from them, and to them it owes,
consciously or unconsciously, a great part of its chances of progress.”
Elsewhere this writer dwells on the need of understanding the genetic
side of history, if we are to grasp the real meaning of, and grapple
most effectively with, the phenomena of our present-day lives; for that
which is can be dealt with best if we realize at least in part from
what a tangled web of causation it has sprung.
The work of the archæologist, the work of the anthropologist, the work
of the palæo-ethnologist--out of all these a great literary historian
may gather material indispensable for his use. He, and we, ought fully
to acknowledge our debt to the collectors of these indispensable
facts. The investigator in any line may do work which puts us all
under lasting obligations to him, even though he be totally deficient
in the art of literary expression, that is, totally deficient in the
ability to convey vivid and lifelike pictures to others of the past
whose secrets he has laid bare. I would give no scanty or grudging
acknowledgment to the deeds of such a man. He does a lasting service;
whereas the man who tries to make literary expression cover his
ignorance or misreading of facts renders less than no service. But the
service done is immeasurably increased in value when the man arises who
from his study of a myriad dead fragments is able to paint some living
picture of the past.
This is why the record as great writers preserve it has a value
immeasurably beyond what is merely lifeless. Such a record pulses with
immortal life. It may recount the deed or the thought of a hero at some
supreme moment. It may be merely the portrayal of homely every-day
life. This matters not, so long as in either event the genius of the
historian enables him to paint in colors that do not fade. The cry of
the Ten Thousand when they first saw the sea still stirs the hearts
of men. The ruthless death scene between Jehu and Jezebel; wicked
Ahab, smitten by the chance arrow, and propped in his chariot until
he died at sundown; Josiah, losing his life because he would not heed
the Pharaoh’s solemn warning, and mourned by all the singing men and
all the singing women--the fates of these kings and of this king’s
daughter, are part of the common stock of knowledge of mankind. They
were petty rulers of petty principalities; yet, compared with them,
mighty conquerors, who added empire to empire, Shalmaneser and Sargon,
Amenhotep and Rameses, are but shadows; for the deeds and the deaths
of the kings of Judah and Israel are written in words that, once read,
can not be forgotten. The Peloponnesian War bulks of unreal size to-day
because it once seemed thus to bulk to a master mind. Only a great
historian can fittingly deal with a very great subject; yet because the
qualities of chief interest in human history can be shown on a small
field no less than on a large one, some of the greatest historians have
treated subjects that only their own genius rendered great.
So true is this that if great events lack a great historian, and a
great poet writes about them, it is the poet who fixes them in the mind
of mankind, so that in after-time importance the real has become the
shadow and the shadow the reality. Shakespeare has definitely fixed
the character of the Richard III of whom ordinary men think and speak.
Keats forgot even the right name of the man who first saw the Pacific
Ocean; yet it is his lines which leap to our minds when we think of the
“wild surmise” felt by the indomitable explorer-conqueror from Spain
when the vast new sea burst on his vision.
When, however, the great historian has spoken, his work will never be
undone. No poet can ever supersede what Napier wrote of the storming
of Badajoz, of the British infantry at Albuera, and of the light
artillery at Fuentes d’Oñoro. After Parkman had written of Montcalm and
Wolfe there was left for other writers only what Fitzgerald left for
other translators of Omar Khayyam. Much new light has been thrown on
the history of the Byzantine Empire by the many men who have studied
it of recent years; we read each new writer with pleasure and profit;
and after reading each we take down a volume of Gibbon, with renewed
thankfulness that a great writer was moved to do a great task.
The greatest of future archæologists will be the great historian who
instead of being a mere antiquarian delver in dust-heaps has the genius
to reconstruct for us the immense panorama of the past. He must possess
knowledge. He must possess that without which knowledge is of so little
use, wisdom. What he brings from the charnel-house he must use with
such potent wizardry that we shall see the life that was and not the
death that is. For remember that the past was life just as much as the
present is life. Whether it be Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or Scandinavia
with which he deals, the great historian, if the facts permit him,
will put before us the men and women as they actually lived so that
we shall recognize them for what they were, living beings. Men like
Maspero, Breasted, and Weigall have already begun this work for the
countries of the Nile and the Euphrates. For Scandinavia the groundwork
was laid long ago in the “Heimskringla” and in such sagas as those of
Burnt Njal and Gisli Soursop. Minute descriptions of mummies and of
the furniture of tombs help us as little to understand the Egypt of
the mighty days, as to sit inside the tomb of Mount Vernon would help
us to see Washington the soldier leading to battle his scarred and
tattered veterans, or Washington the statesman, by his serene strength
of character, rendering it possible for his countrymen to establish
themselves as one great nation.
The great historian must be able to paint for us the life of the plain
people, the ordinary men and women, of the time of which he writes.
He can do this only if he possesses the highest kind of imagination.
Collections of figures no more give us a picture of the past than the
reading of a tariff report on hides or woollens gives us an idea of
the actual lives of the men and women who live on ranches or work in
factories. The great historian will in as full measure as possible
present to us the every-day life of the men and women of the age which
he describes. Nothing that tells of this life will come amiss to him.
The instruments of their labor and the weapons of their warfare, the
wills that they wrote, the bargains that they made, and the songs that
they sang when they feasted and made love: he must use them all. He
must tell us of the toil of the ordinary man in ordinary times, and of
the play by which that ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget
that no event stands out entirely isolated. He must trace from its
obscure and humble beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of
triumph has shaken the world.
Yet he must not forget that the times that are extraordinary
need especial portrayal. In the revolt against the old tendency
of historians to deal exclusively with the spectacular and the
exceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and government, many
modern writers have gone to the opposite extreme. They fail to realize
that in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there are hours so
fraught with weighty achievement, with triumph or defeat, with joy or
sorrow, that each such hour may determine all the years that are to
come thereafter, or may outweigh all the years that have gone before.
In the writings of our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary
citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it is the ordinary
every-day life which counts most; nor yet that seasons come when
ordinary qualities count for but little in the face of great contending
forces of good and of evil, the outcome of whose strife determines
whether the nation shall walk in the glory of the morning or in the
gloom of spiritual death.
The historian must deal with the days of common things, and deal with
them so that they shall interest us in reading of them as our own
common things interest us as we live among them. He must trace the
changes that come almost unseen, the slow and gradual growth that
transforms for good or for evil the children and grandchildren so that
they stand high above or far below the level on which their forefathers
stood. He must also trace the great cataclysms that interrupt and
divert this gradual development. He can no more afford to be blind to
one class of phenomena than to the other. He must ever remember that
while the worst offence of which he can be guilty is to write vividly
and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he can not write
truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as
the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.
There can be no better illustration of what I mean than is afforded by
the history of Russia during the last thousand years. The historian
must trace the growth of the earliest Slav communities of the forest
and the steppe, the infiltration of Scandinavian invaders who gave them
their first power of mass action, and the slow, chaotic development
of the little communes into barbarous cities and savage princedoms.
In later Russian history he must show us priest and noble, merchant
and serf, changing slowly from the days when Ivan the Terrible warred
against Bátory, the Magyar king of Poland, until the present moment,
when with half-suspicious eyes the people of the Czar watch their
remote Bulgarian kinsmen standing before the last European stronghold
of the Turk. During all these centuries there were multitudes of
wars, foreign and domestic, any or all of which were of little moment
compared to the slow working of the various forces that wrought in
the times of peace. But there was one period of storm and overthrow
so terrible that it affected profoundly for all time the whole growth
of the Russian people, in inmost character no less than in external
dominion. Early in the thirteenth century the genius of Jenghiz Khan
stirred the Mongol horsemen of the mid-Asian pastures to a movement as
terrible to civilization as the lava flow of a volcano to the lands
around the volcano’s foot. When that century opened, the Mongols were
of no more weight in the world than the Touaregs of the Sahara are
to-day. Long before the century had closed they had ridden from the
Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. They had crushed
Christian and Moslem and Buddhist alike beneath the iron cruelty of
their sway. They had conquered China as their successors conquered
India. They sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In mid-Europe their
presence for a moment caused the same horror to fall on the warring
adherents of the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they were a scourge so
frightful, so irresistible, that the people cowered before them as if
they had been demons. No European army of that day, of any nation, was
able to look them in the face on a stricken field. Bestial in their
lives, irresistible in battle, merciless in victory, they trampled the
lands over which they rode into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their
horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny horse-bowmen drew a red furrow
across Hungary, devastated Poland, and in Silesia overthrew the banded
chivalry of Germany. But it was in Russia that they did their worst.
They not merely conquered Russia, but held the Russians as cowering
and abject serfs for two centuries. Every feeble effort at resistance
was visited with such bloodthirsty vengeance that finally no Russian
ventured ever to oppose them at all. But the princes of the cities soon
found that the beast-like fury of the conquerors when their own desires
were thwarted, was only equalled by their beast-like indifference to
all that was done among the conquered people themselves, and that they
were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid each Russian against his
brother. Under this régime the Russian who rose was the Russian who
with cringing servility to his Tartar overlords combined ferocious and
conscienceless greed in the treatment of his fellow Russians. Moscow
came to the front by using the Tartar to help conquer the other Russian
cities, paying as a price abject obedience to all Tartar demands. In
the long run the fierce and pliant cunning of the conquered people
proved too much for the short-sighted and arrogant brutality of the
conquerors. The Tartar power, the Mongolian power, waned. Russia became
united, threw off the yoke, and herself began a career of aggression
at the expense of her former conquerors. But the reconquest of racial
independence, vitally necessary though it was to Russia, had been paid
for by the establishment of a despotism Asiatic rather than European in
its spirit and working.
The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were
the present. He will make us see as living men the hard-faced archers
of Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who followed Alexander down
beyond the rim of the known world. We shall hear grate on the coast
of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves whose children’s
children were to inherit unknown continents. We shall thrill to the
triumphs of Hannibal. Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor
of dead cities, and the might of the elder empires of which the very
ruins crumbled to dust ages ago. Along ancient trade-routes, across
the world’s waste spaces, the caravans shall move; and the admirals of
uncharted seas shall furrow the oceans with their lonely prows. Beyond
the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We
shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the
course of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of forgotten seers.
Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly, who saw in
their vision peaks so lofty that never yet have they been reached by
the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds
of men of might and the love and the beauty of women. We shall see
the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of the flowers in the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon will be heavy to our senses. We shall sit at feast
with the kings of Nineveh when they drink from ivory and gold. With
Queen Maeve in her sun-parlor we shall watch the nearing chariots of
the champions. For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the
flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The
frowning strongholds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and
the white palace-castles from whose windows Syrian princes once looked
across the blue Ægean. We shall know the valor of the two-sworded
Samurai. Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and the strange, crooked folly
of the immemorial civilizations which tottered to a living death in
India and in China. We shall see the terrible horsemen of Timur the
Lame ride over the roof of the world; we shall hear the drums beat as
the armies of Gustavus and Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to
victory. Ours shall be the woe of burgher and peasant, and ours the
stern joy when freemen triumph and justice comes to her own. The agony
of the galley-slaves shall be ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked
are brought low and the men of evil days have their reward. We shall
see the glory of triumphant violence, and the revel of those who do
wrong in high places; and the broken-hearted despair that lies beneath
the glory and the revel. We shall also see the supreme righteousness
of the wars for freedom and justice, and know that the men who fell in
these wars made all mankind their debtors.
Some day the historians will tell us of these things. Some day, too,
they will tell our children of the age and the land in which we now
live. They will portray the conquest of the continent. They will show
the slow beginnings of settlement, the growth of the fishing and
trading towns on the seacoast, the hesitating early ventures into the
Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show the backwoodsmen, with their
long rifles and their light axes, making their way with labor and peril
through the wooded wilderness to the Mississippi; and then the endless
march of the white-topped wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the
coast of the greatest of the five great oceans. They will show how the
land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was
filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western
and central Europe. The portentous growth of the cities will be shown,
and the change from a nation of farmers to a nation of business men and
artisans, and all the far-reaching consequences of the rise of the new
industrialism. The formation of a new ethnic type in this melting-pot
of the nations will be told. The hard materialism of our age will
appear, and also the strange capacity for lofty idealism which must
be reckoned with by all who would understand the American character.
A people whose heroes are Washington and Lincoln, a peaceful people
who fought to a finish one of the bloodiest of wars, waged solely for
the sake of a great principle and a noble idea, surely possess an
emergency-standard far above mere money-getting.
Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of
to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much that is
unpleasant. This is but saying that they will describe the arch-typical
civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is finally told,
I believe that it will show that the forces working for good in our
national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that, with many
blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and turning aside from the
path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in
our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation.
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[2]