Sharon Turner, a man of sound, practical sense, as well as a reverential
and reflective writer of history, has these pertinent remarks upon the
tendency of historians to magnify the Present at the expense of the
Past:
Nothing is a greater reproach, to the reasoning intellect of any age
than a splenetic censoriousness on the manners and characters of our
ancestors. It is but common justice for us to bear in mind that in
those times we should have been as they were, as they in ours would
have resembled ourselves. Both are but the same men, acting under
different circumstances, wearing different dresses, and pursuing
different objects; but neither inferior to the other in talent,
industry, or intellectual worth. The more we study biography, we
shall perceive more evidence of this truth.
Disregarding what satire might, without being cynical, lash in our
own costumes, we are apt to look proudly back on those who have gone
before us, and to regale our self-complacency with comparisons of
their deficiencies, and of our greater merit. The retrospect is
pleasing, but it offers no ground for exultation. We are superior,
and we have in many things better taste and sounder judgment and
wiser habits than they possessed. And why? Because we have had means
of superiority by which they were not assisted. But a merit which
owes its origin merely to our having followed, instead of preceding,
in existence, gives us no right to depreciate those over whom our
only advantage has been the better fortune of a later chronology. We
may therefore allow those who have gone before us to have been
amused with what would weary or dissatisfy us, without either
sarcasms on their absurdities, or contemptuous wonder at their
stately childishness and pompous inanities.
One of our most popular historians indulges to excess in these brilliant
antitheses, which in his pages remind one of poppies in corn.
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