I look back to-day to a time before the middle of the century, when I
was reading at Edinburgh, and fervently wishing to come to this
University. At three colleges I applied for admission, and, as things
then were, I was refused by all. Here, from the first, I vainly fixed
my hopes, and here, in a happier hour, after five-and-forty years,
they are at last fulfilled.
[Sidenote: UNITY OF MODERN HISTORY]
I desire first to speak to you of that which I may reasonably call the
Unity of Modern History, as an easy approach to questions necessary
to be met on the threshold by any one occupying this place, which my
predecessor has made so formidable to me by the reflected lustre of
his name.
You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject to which
neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning, because the
dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a void; because, in
society as in nature, the structure is continuous, and we can trace
things back uninterruptedly, until we dimly descry the Declaration of
Independence in the forests of Germany. No end, because, on the same
principle, history made and history making are scientifically
inseparable and separately unmeaning.
[Sidenote: LINK BETWEEN HISTORY AND POLITICS]
"Politics," said Sir John Seeley, "are vulgar when they are not
liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when
it loses sight of its relation to practical politics." Everybody
perceives the sense in which this is true. For the science of politics
is the one science that is deposited by the stream of history, like
grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past,
the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical,
as an instrument of action, and a power that goes to the making of the
future.[1] In France, such is the weight attached to the study of our
own time, that there is an appointed course of contemporary history,
with appropriate textbooks.[2] That is a chair which, in the
progressive division of labour by which both science and government
prosper,[3] may some day be founded in this country. Meantime, we do
well to acknowledge the points at which the two epochs diverge. For
the contemporary differs from the modern in this, that many of its
facts cannot by us be definitely ascertained. The living do not give
up their secrets with the candour of the dead; one key is always
excepted, and a generation passes before we can ensure accuracy.
Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the reality, as
the initiated know it. Even of a thing so memorable as the war of
1870, the true cause is still obscure; much that we believed has been
scattered to the winds in the last six months, and further revelations
by important witnesses are about to appear. The use of history turns
far more on certainty than on abundance of acquired information.
Beyond the question of certainty is the question of detachment. The
process by which principles are discovered and appropriated is other
than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and our most sacred
and disinterested convictions ought to take shape in the tranquil
regions of the air, above the tumult and the tempest of active
life.[4] For a man is justly despised who has one opinion in history
and another in politics, one for abroad and another at home, one for
opposition and another for office. History compels us to fasten on
abiding issues, and rescues us from the temporary and transient.
Politics and history are interwoven, but are not commensurate. Ours is
a domain that reaches farther than affairs of state, and is not
subject to the jurisdiction of governments. It is our function to keep
in view and to command the movement of ideas, which are not the
effect but the cause of public events;[5] and even to allow some
priority to ecclesiastical history over civil, since, by reason of the
graver issues concerned, and the vital consequences of error, it
opened the way in research, and was the first to be treated by close
reasoners and scholars of the higher rank.[6]
[Sidenote: NOT GOVERNED BY NATIONAL CAUSES]
In the same manner, there is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which
always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as
one consistent epic.[7] Yet every student ought to know that mastery
is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the
theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term
to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of
the race from which we are sprung.[8] If we are to account mind not
matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that gives dignity,
and grace, and intellectual value to history, and its action on the
ascending life of man, then we shall not be prone to explain the
universal by the national, and civilisation by custom.[9] A speech of
Antigone, a single sentence of Socrates, a few lines that were
inscribed on an Indian rock before the Second Punic War, the footsteps
of a silent yet prophetic people who dwelt by the Dead Sea, and
perished in the fall of Jerusalem, come nearer to our lives than the
ancestral wisdom of barbarians who fed their swine on the Hercynian
acorns.
[Sidenote: MEDIAEVAL LIMIT OF MODERN HISTORY]
For our present purpose, then, I describe as modern history that which
begins four hundred years ago, which is marked off by an evident and
intelligible line from the time immediately preceding, and displays
in its course specific and distinctive characteristics of its own.[10]
The modern age did not proceed from the mediaeval by normal succession,
with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a
new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient
reign of continuity. In those days Columbus subverted the notions of
the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth and
power; in those days, Machiavelli released government from the
restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning
from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of
authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected
an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the
time that was to come. There is the same unbound originality and
disregard for inherited sanctions in the rare philosophers as in the
discovery of Divine Right, and the intruding Imperialism of Rome. The
like effects are visible everywhere, and one generation beheld them
all. It was an awakening of new life; the world revolved in a
different orbit, determined by influences unknown before. After many
ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of
society,[11] and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in
their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried
experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of
incalculable change.
[Sidenote: INFLUENCE OF KNOWLEDGE ON MODERN HISTORY]
That forward movement divides it broadly from the older world; and the
unity of the new is manifest in the universal spirit of investigation
and discovery which did not cease to operate, and withstood the
recurring efforts of reaction, until, by the advent of the reign of
general ideas which we call the Revolution, it at length
prevailed.[12] This successive deliverance and gradual passage, for
good and evil, from subordination to independence is a phenomenon of
primary import to us, because historical science has been one of its
instruments.[13] If the Past has been an obstacle and a burden,
knowledge of the Past is the safest and the surest emancipation. And
the earnest search for it is one of the signs that distinguish the
four centuries of which I speak from those that went before. The
middle ages, which possessed good writers of contemporary narrative,
were careless and impatient of older fact. They became content to be
deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction, under clouds of false
witness, inventing according to convenience, and glad to welcome the
forger and the cheat.[14] As time went on, the atmosphere of
accredited mendacity thickened, until, in the Renaissance, the art of
exposing falsehood dawned upon keen Italian minds. It was then that
history as we understand it began to be understood, and the
illustrious dynasty of scholars arose to whom we still look both for
method and material. Unlike the dreaming prehistoric world, ours knows
the need and the duty to make itself master of the earlier times, and
to forfeit nothing of their wisdom or their warnings,[15] and has
devoted its best energy and treasure to the sovereign purpose of
detecting error and vindicating entrusted truth.[16]
[Sidenote: INTERNATIONAL IDEAS]
[Sidenote: MEMORABLE MEN]
[Sidenote: INDEPENDENT MINDS]
In this epoch of full-grown history men have not acquiesced in the
given conditions of their lives. Taking little for granted they have
sought to know the ground they stand on, and the road they travel, and
the reason why. Over them, therefore, the historian has obtained an
increasing ascendancy.[17] The law of stability was overcome by the
power of ideas, constantly varied and rapidly renewed;[18] ideas that
give life and motion, that take wing and traverse seas and frontiers,
making it futile to pursue the consecutive order of events in the
seclusion of a separate nationality.[19] They compel us to share the
existence of societies wider than our own, to be familiar with distant
and exotic types, to hold our march upon the loftier summits, along
the central range, to live in the company of heroes, and saints, and
men of genius, that no single country could produce. We cannot afford
wantonly to lose sight of great men and memorable lives, and are bound
to store up objects for admiration as far as may be;[20] for the
effect of implacable research is constantly to reduce their number. No
intellectual exercise, for instance, can be more invigorating than to
watch the working of the mind of Napoleon, the most entirely known as
well as the ablest of historic men. In another sphere, it is the
vision of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fenelon,
the cherished model of politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters,
the witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate
of the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary
power, of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues
among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom
one enemy says that his cleverness was enough to strike terror, and
another, that genius poured in torrents from his eyes. For the minds
that are greatest and best alone furnish the instructive examples. A
man of ordinary proportion or inferior metal knows not how to think
out the rounded circle of his thought, how to divest his will of its
surroundings and to rise above the pressure of time and race and
circumstance,[21] to choose the star that guides his course, to
correct, and test, and assay his convictions by the light within,[22]
and, with a resolute conscience and ideal courage, to re-model and
reconstitute the character which birth and education gave him.[23]
[Sidenote: FOREIGN CONSTITUTIONS]
For ourselves, if it were not the quest of the higher level and the
extended horizon, international history would be imposed by the
exclusive and insular reason that parliamentary reporting is younger
than parliaments. The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his
government, and no _arcanum imperii_. For him, the foundations have
been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism is
accounted for as distinctly as the works of a watch. But with our
indigenous constitution, not made with hands or written upon paper,
but claiming to develope by a law of organic growth; with our
disbelief in the virtue of definitions and general principles and our
reliance on relative truths, we can have nothing equivalent to the
vivid and prolonged debates in which other communities have displayed
the inmost secrets of political science to every man who can read.
And the discussions of constituent assemblies, at Philadelphia,
Versailles and Paris, at Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva, Frankfort and
Berlin, above nearly all, those of the most enlightened States in the
American Union, when they have recast their institutions, are
paramount in the literature of politics, and proffer treasures which
at home we have never enjoyed.
[Sidenote: RESOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY]
[Sidenote: BEGINNING OF THE DOCUMENTARY AGE]
To historians the later part of their enormous subject is precious
because it is inexhaustible. It is the best to know because it is the
best known and the most explicit. Earlier scenes stand out from a
background of obscurity. We soon reach the sphere of hopeless
ignorance and unprofitable doubt. But hundreds and even thousands of
the moderns have borne testimony against themselves, and may be
studied in their private correspondence and sentenced on their own
confession. Their deeds are done in the daylight. Every country opens
its archives and invites us to penetrate the mysteries of State. When
Hallam wrote his chapter on James II., France was the only Power whose
reports were available. Rome followed, and the Hague; and then came
the stores of the Italian States, and at last the Prussian and the
Austrian papers, and partly those of Spain. Where Hallam and Lingard
were dependent on Barillon, their successors consult the diplomacy of
ten governments. The topics indeed are few on which the resources have
been so employed that we can be content with the work done for us, and
never wish it to be done over again. Part of the lives of Luther and
Frederic, a little of the Thirty Years' War, much of the American
Revolution and the French Restoration, the early years of Richelieu
and Mazarin, and a few volumes of Mr. Gardiner, show here and there
like Pacific islands in the ocean. I should not even venture to claim
for Ranke, the real originator of the heroic study of records, and the
most prompt and fortunate of European pathfinders, that there is one
of his seventy volumes that has not been overtaken and in part
surpassed. It is through his accelerating influence mainly that our
branch of study has become progressive, so that the best master is
quickly distanced by the better pupil.[24] The Vatican archives alone,
now made accessible to the world, filled 3,239 cases when they were
sent to France; and they are not the richest. We are still at the
beginning of the documentary age, which will tend to make history
independent of historians, to develope learning at the expense of
writing, and to accomplish a revolution in other sciences as well.[25]
[Sidenote: MODERN HISTORY]
To men in general I would justify the stress I am laying on modern
history, neither by urging its varied wealth, nor the rupture with
precedent, nor the perpetuity of change and increase of pace, nor the
growing predominance of opinion over belief, and of knowledge over
opinion, but by the argument that it is a narrative told of ourselves,
the record of a life which is our own, of efforts not yet abandoned to
repose, of problems that still entangle the feet and vex the hearts of
men. Every part of it is weighty with inestimable lessons that we
must learn by experience and at a great price, if we know not how to
profit by the example and teaching of those who have gone before us,
in a society largely resembling the one we live in.[26] Its study
fulfils its purpose even if it only makes us wiser, without producing
books, and gives us the gift of historical thinking, which is better
than historical learning.[27] It is a most powerful ingredient in the
formation of character and the training of talent, and our historical
judgments have as much to do with hopes of heaven as public or private
conduct. Convictions that have been strained through the instances and
the comparisons of modern times differ immeasurably in solidity and
force from those which every new fact perturbs, and which are often
little better than illusions or unsifted prejudice.[28]
[Sidenote: A SCHOOL OF OPINION]
[Sidenote: INFLUENCE OF THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT]
The first of human concerns is religion, and it is the salient feature
of the modern centuries. They are signalised as the scene of
Protestant developments. Starting from a time of extreme indifference,
ignorance, and decline, they were at once occupied with that conflict
which was to rage so long, and of which no man could imagine the
infinite consequences. Dogmatic conviction--for I shun to speak of
faith in connection with many characters of those days--dogmatic
conviction rose to be the centre of universal interest, and remained
down to Cromwell the supreme influence and motive of public policy. A
time came when the intensity of prolonged conflict, when even the
energy of antagonistic assurance, abated somewhat, and the
controversial spirit began to make room for the scientific; and as the
storm subsided, and the area of settled questions emerged, much of
the dispute was abandoned to the serene and soothing touch of
historians, invested as they are with the prerogative of redeeming the
cause of religion from many unjust reproaches, and from the graver
evil of reproaches that are just. Ranke used to say that Church
interests prevailed in politics until the Seven Years' War, and marked
a phase of society that ended when the hosts of Brandenburg went into
action at Leuthen, chanting their Lutheran hymns.[29] That bold
proposition would be disputed even if applied to the present age.
After Sir Robert Peel had broken up his party, the leaders who
followed him declared that no-popery was the only basis on which it
could be reconstructed.[30] On the other side may be urged that, in
July 1870, at the outbreak of the French war, the only government
that insisted on the abolition of the temporal power was Austria; and
since then we have witnessed the fall of Castelar, because he
attempted to reconcile Spain with Rome.
[Sidenote: RELIGION]
Soon after 1850 several of the most intelligent men in France, struck
by the arrested increase of their own population and by the telling
statistics from Further Britain, foretold the coming preponderance of
the English race. They did not foretell, what none could then foresee,
the still more sudden growth of Prussia, or that the three most
important countries of the globe would, by the end of the century, be
those that chiefly belonged to the conquests of the Reformation. So
that in Religion, as in so many things, the product of these
centuries has favoured the new elements; and the centre of gravity,
moving from the Mediterranean nations to the Oceanic, from the Latin
to the Teuton, has also passed from the Catholic to the
Protestant.[31]
[Sidenote: THE CAUSE OF LIBERTY]
[Sidenote: REVOLUTION]
Out of these controversies proceeded political as well as historical
science. It was in the Puritan phase, before the restoration of the
Stuarts, that theology, blending with politics, effected a fundamental
change. The essentially English reformation of the seventeenth century
was less a struggle between churches than between sects, often
subdivided by questions of discipline and self-regulation rather than
by dogma. The sectaries cherished no purpose or prospect of prevailing
over the nations; and they were concerned with the individual more
than with the congregation, with conventicles, not with
state-churches. Their view was narrowed, but their sight was
sharpened. It appeared to them that governments and institutions are
made to pass away, like things of earth, whilst souls are immortal;
that there is no more proportion between liberty and power than
between eternity and time; that, therefore, the sphere of enforced
command ought to be restricted within fixed limits, and that which had
been done by authority, and outward discipline, and organised
violence, should be attempted by division of power, and committed to
the intellect and the conscience of free men.[32] Thus was exchanged
the dominion of will over will for the dominion of reason over reason.
The true apostles of toleration are not those who sought protection
for their own beliefs, or who had none to protect; but men to whom,
irrespective of their cause, it was a political, a moral, and a
theological dogma, a question of conscience, involving both religion
and policy.[33] Such a man was Socinus; and others arose in the
smaller sects--the Independent founder of the colony of Rhode Island,
and the Quaker patriarch of Pennsylvania. Much of the energy and zeal
which had laboured for authority of doctrine was employed for liberty
of prophesying. The air was filled with the enthusiasm of a new cry;
but the cause was still the same. It became a boast that religion was
the mother of freedom, that freedom was the lawful off spring of
religion; and this transmutation, this subversion of established forms
of political life by the development of religious thought, brings us
to the heart of my subject, to the significant and central feature of
the historic cycle before us. Beginning with the strongest religious
movement and the most refined despotism ever known, it has led to the
superiority of politics over divinity in the life of nations, and
terminates in the equal claim of every man to be unhindered by man in
the fulfilment of duty to God[34]--a doctrine laden with storm and
havoc, which is the secret essence of the Rights of Man, and the
indestructible soul of Revolution.
[Sidenote: THE MODE OF LIBERTY]
[Sidenote: PROGRESS]
[Sidenote: THE MARK OF PROVIDENCE]
When we consider what the adverse forces were, their sustained
resistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when the
struggle seemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in 1808, it is
no hyperbole to say that the progress of the world towards
self-government would have been arrested but for the strength afforded
by the religious motive in the seventeenth century. And this
constancy of progress, of progress in the direction of organised and
assured freedom, is the characteristic fact of modern history, and its
tribute to the theory, of Providence.[35] Many persons, I am well
assured, would detect that this is a very old story, and a trivial
commonplace, and would challenge proof that the world is making
progress in aught but intellect, that it is gaining in freedom, or
that increase in freedom is either a progress or a gain. Ranke, who
was my own master, rejected the view that I have stated;[36] Comte,
the master of better men, believed that we drag a lengthening chain
under the gathered weight of the dead hand;[37] and many of our recent
classics, Carlyle, Newman, Froude, were persuaded that there is no
progress justifying the ways of God to man, and that the mere
consolidation of liberty is like the motion of creatures whose advance
is in the direction of their tails. They deem that anxious precaution
against bad government is an obstruction to good, and degrades
morality and mind by placing the capable at the mercy of the
incapable, dethroning enlightened virtue for the benefit of the
average man. They hold that great and salutary things are done for
mankind by power concentrated, not by power balanced and cancelled and
dispersed, and that the whig theory, sprung from decomposing sects,
the theory that authority is legitimate only by virtue of its checks,
and that the sovereign is dependent on the subject, is rebellion
against the divine will manifested all down the stream of time.
[Sidenote: CERTAINTY]
[Sidenote: DEPENDENT ON RESERVE]
I state the objection not that we may plunge into the crucial
controversy of a science that is not identical with ours, but in order
to make my drift clear by the defining aid of express contradiction.
No political dogma is as serviceable to my purpose here as the
historian's maxim to do the best he can for the other side, and to
avoid pertinacity or emphasis on his own. Like the economic precept
_Laissez-faire_[38] which the eighteenth century derived from Colbert,
it has been an important, if not a final step in the making of method.
The strongest and most impressive personalities, it is true, like
Macaulay, Thiers, and the two greatest of living writers, Mommsen and
Treitschke, project their own broad shadow upon their pages. This is a
practice proper to great men, and a great man may be worth several
immaculate historians. Otherwise there is virtue in the saying that a
historian is seen at his best when he does not appear.[39] Better for
us is the example of the Bishop of Oxford, who never lets us know what
he thinks of anything but the matter before him; and of his
illustrious French rival, Fustel de Coulanges, who said to an excited
audience: "Do not imagine you are listening to me; it is history
itself that speaks."[40] We can found no philosophy on the observation
of four hundred years, excluding three thousand. It would be an
imperfect and a fallacious induction. But I hope that even this narrow
and disedifying section of history will aid you to see that the action
of Christ who is risen on mankind whom he redeemed fails not, but
increases;[41] that the wisdom of divine rule appears not in the
perfection but in the improvement of the world;[42] and that achieved
liberty is the one ethical result that rests on the converging and
combined conditions of advancing civilisation.[43] Then you will
understand what a famous philosopher said, that History is the true
demonstration of Religion.[44]
[Sidenote: MEANING OF LIBERTY]
But what do people mean who proclaim that liberty is the palm, and the
prize, and the crown, seeing that it is an idea of which there are two
hundred definitions, and that this wealth of interpretation has caused
more bloodshed than anything, except theology? Is it Democracy as in
France, or Federalism as in America, or the national independence
which bounds the Italian view, or the reign of the fittest, which is
the ideal of Germans?[45] I know not whether it will ever fall within
my sphere of duty to trace the slow progress of that idea through the
chequered scenes of our history, and to describe how subtle
speculations touching the nature of conscience promoted a nobler and
more spiritual conception of the liberty that protects it,[46] until
the guardian of rights developed into the guardian of duties which are
the cause of rights,[47] and that which had been prized as the
material safeguard for treasures of earth became sacred as security
for things that are divine. All that we require is a workday key to
history, and our present need can be supplied without pausing to
satisfy philosophers. Without inquiring how far Sarasa or Butler, Kant
or Vinet, is right as to the infallible voice of God in man, we may
easily agree in this, that where absolutism reigned, by irresistible
arms, concentrated possessions, auxiliary churches, and inhuman laws,
it reigns no more; that commerce having risen against land, labour
against wealth, the state against the forces dominant in society,[48]
the division of power against the state, the thought of individuals
against the practice of ages, neither authorities, nor minorities, nor
majorities can command implicit obedience; and, where there has been
long and arduous experience, a rampart of tried conviction and
accumulated knowledge,[49] where there is a fair level of general
morality, education, courage, and self-restraint, there, if there
only, a society may be found that exhibits the condition of life
towards which, by elimination of failures, the world has been moving
through the allotted space.[50] You will know it by outward signs:
Representation, the extinction of slavery, the reign of opinion, and
the like; better still by less apparent evidences: the security of the
weaker groups[51] and the liberty of conscience, which, effectually
secured, secures the rest.
[Sidenote: THE GROWTH OF REVOLUTION]
[Sidenote: RENOVATION OF HISTORY BY REVOLUTION]
Here we reach a point at which my argument threatens to abut on a
contradiction. If the supreme conquests of society are won more often
by violence than by lenient arts, if the trend and drift of things is
towards convulsions and catastrophes,[52] if the world owes religious
liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the
English, federal republicanism to the American, political equality to
the French and its successors,[53] what is to become of us, docile and
attentive students of the absorbing Past? The triumph of the
Revolutionist annuls the historian.[54] By its authentic exponents,
Jefferson and Sieyes, the Revolution of the last century repudiates
history. Their followers renounced acquaintance with it, and were
ready to destroy its records and to abolish its inoffensive
professors. But the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that
this was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and
indirectly, by process of development and by process of reaction, an
impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor
of civilisation than ever before, and a movement began in the world of
minds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of ancient
learning.[55] The dispensation under which we live and labour consists
first in the recoil from the negative spirit that rejected the law of
growth, and partly in the endeavour to classify and adjust the
revolution, and to account for it by the natural working of historic
causes. The Conservative line of writers, under the name of the
Romantic or Historical School, had its seat in Germany, looked upon
the Revolution as an alien episode, the error of an age, a disease to
be treated by the investigation of its origin, and strove to unite the
broken threads and to restore the normal conditions of organic
evolution. The Liberal School, whose home was France, explained and
justified the Revolution as a true development, and the ripened fruit
of all history.[56] These are the two main arguments of the generation
to which we owe the notion and the scientific methods that make
history so unlike what it was to the survivors of the last century.
Severally, the innovators were not superior to the men of old.
Muratori was as widely read, Tillemont as accurate, Leibniz as able,
Freret as acute, Gibbon as masterly in the craft of composite
construction. Nevertheless, in the second quarter of this century, a
new era began for historians.
[Sidenote: USE OF UNPUBLISHED SOURCES]
[Sidenote: INSUFFICIENCY OF BOOKS]
I would point to three things in particular, out of many, which
constitute the amended order. Of the incessant deluge of new and
unsuspected matter I need say little. For some years, the secret
archives of the papacy were accessible at Paris; but the time was not
ripe, and almost the only man whom they availed was the archivist
himself.[57] Towards 1830 the documentary studies began on a large
scale, Austria leading the way. Michelet, who claims, towards 1836,
to have been the pioneer,[58] was preceded by such rivals as
Mackintosh, Bucholtz, and Mignet. A new and more productive period
began thirty years later, when the war of 1859 laid open the spoils of
Italy. Every country in succession has now allowed the exploration of
its records, and there is more fear of drowning than of drought. The
result has been that a lifetime spent in the largest collection of
printed books would not suffice to train a real master of modern
history. After he had turned from literature to sources, from Burnet
to Pocock, from Macaulay to Madame Campana, from Thiers to the
interminable correspondence of the Bonapartes, he would still feel
instant need of inquiry at Venice or Naples, in the Ossuna library or
at the Hermitage.[59]
[Sidenote: HISTORY RENEWED BY CRITICISM]
These matters do not now concern us. For our purpose, the main thing
to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art
of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood, and certainty
from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude
of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens,
and extends the mind.[60] And the accession of the critic in the place
of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative,
the skilled limner of character, the persuasive advocate of good, or
other, causes, amounts to a transfer of government, to a change of
dynasty, in the historic realm. For the critic is one who, when he
lights on an interesting statement, begins by suspecting it. He
remains in suspense until he has subjected his authority to three
operations. First, he asks whether he has read the passage as the
author wrote it. For the transcriber, and the editor, and the official
or officious censor on the top of the editor, have played strange
tricks, and have much to answer for. And if they are not to blame, it
may turn out that the author wrote his book twice over, that you can
discover the first jet, the progressive variations, things added, and
things struck out. Next is the question where the writer got his
information. If from a previous writer, it can be ascertained, and the
inquiry has to be repeated. If from unpublished papers, they must be
traced, and when the fountain head is reached, or the track
disappears, the question of veracity arises. The responsible writer's
character, his position, antecedents, and probable motives have to be
examined into; and this is what, in a different and adapted sense of
the word, may be called the higher criticism, in comparison with the
servile and often mechanical work of pursuing statements to their
root. For a historian has to be treated as a witness, and not believed
unless his sincerity is established.[61] The maxim that a man must be
presumed to be innocent until his guilt is proved, was not made for
him.
[Sidenote: CRITICAL STUDY OF EARLIER TIMES]
For us then the estimate of authorities, the weighing of testimony, is
more meritorious than the potential discovery of new matter.[62] And
modern history, which is the widest field of application, is not the
best to learn our business in; for it is too wide, and the harvest has
not been winnowed as in antiquity, and further on to the Crusades. It
is better to examine what has been done for questions that are
compact and circumscribed, such as the sources of Plutarch's
_Pericles_, the two tracts on Athenian government, the origin of the
epistle to Diognetus, the date of the life of St. Antony; and to learn
from Schwegler how this analytical work began. More satisfying because
more decisive has been the critical treatment of the mediaeval writers,
parallel with the new editions, on which incredible labour has been
lavished, and of which we have no better examples than the prefaces of
Bishop Stubbs. An important event in this series was the attack on
Dino Compagni, which, for the sake of Dante, roused the best Italian
scholars to a not unequal contest. When we are told that England is
behind the Continent in critical faculty, we must admit that this is
true as to quantity, not as to quality of work. As they are no longer
living, I will say of two Cambridge professors, Lightfoot and Hort,
that they were critical scholars whom neither Frenchman nor German has
surpassed.
[Sidenote: DEGREES OF IMPARTIALITY]
The third distinctive note of the generation of writers who dug so
deep a trench between history as known to our grandfathers and as it
appears to us, is their dogma of impartiality. To an ordinary man the
word means no more than justice. He considers that he may proclaim the
merits of his own religion, of his prosperous and enlightened country,
of his political persuasion, whether democracy, or liberal monarchy,
or historic conservatism, without transgression or offence, so long as
he is fair to the relative, though inferior merits of others, and
never treats men as saints or as rogues for the side they take. There
is no impartiality, he would say, like that of a hanging judge. The
men who, with the compass of criticism in their hands, sailed the
uncharted sea of original research, proposed a different view.
History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not
on opinions. They had their own notion of truthfulness, based on the
exceeding difficulty of finding truth, and the still greater
difficulty of impressing it when found. They thought it possible to
write, with so much scruple, and simplicity, and insight, as to carry
along with them every man of good will, and, whatever his feelings, to
compel his assent. Ideas which, in religion and in politics, are
truths, in history are forces. They must be respected; they must not
be affirmed. By dint of a supreme reserve, by much self-control, by a
timely and discreet indifference, by secrecy in the matter of the
black cap, history might be lifted above contention, and made an
accepted tribunal, and the same for all.[63] If men were truly
sincere, and delivered judgment by no canons but those of evident
morality, then Julian would be described in the same terms by
Christian and pagan, Luther by Catholic and Protestant, Washington by
Whig and Tory, Napoleon by patriotic Frenchman and patriotic
German.[64]
[Sidenote: MORALITY THE SOLE RULE OF JUDGMENT]
I speak of this school with reverence, for the good it has done, by
the assertion of historic truth and of its legitimate authority over
the minds of men. It provides a discipline which every one of us does
well to undergo, and perhaps also well to relinquish. For it is not
the whole truth. Lanfrey's essay on Carnot, Chuquet's wars of the
Revolution, Ropes's military histories, Roget's Geneva in the time of
Calvin, will supply you with examples of a more robust impartiality
than I have described. Renan calls it the luxury of an opulent and
aristocratic society, doomed to vanish in an age of fierce and sordid
striving. In our universities it has a magnificent and appointed
refuge; and to serve its cause, which is sacred, because it is the
cause of truth and honour, we may import a profitable lesson from the
highly unscientific region of public life. There a man does not take
long to find out that he is opposed by some who are abler and better
than himself. And, in order to understand the cosmic force and the
true connection of ideas, it is a source of power, and an excellent
school of principle, not to rest until, by excluding the fallacies,
the prejudices, the exaggerations which perpetual contention and the
consequent precautions breed, we have made out for our opponents a
stronger and more impressive case than they present themselves.[65]
Excepting one to which we are coming before I release you, there is no
precept less faithfully observed by historians.
[Sidenote: EXAMPLE OF RANKE]
Ranke is the representative of the age which instituted the modern
study of history. He taught it to be critical, to be colourless, and
to be new. We meet him at every step, and he has done more for us than
any other man. There are stronger books than any one of his, and some
may have surpassed him in political, religious, philosophic insight,
in vividness of the creative imagination, in originality, elevation,
and depth of thought; but by the extent of important work well
executed, by his influence on able men, and by the amount of knowledge
which mankind receives and employs with the stamp of his mind upon it,
he stands without a rival. I saw him last in 1877, when he was feeble,
sunken, and almost blind, and scarcely able to read or write. He
uttered his farewell with kindly emotion, and I feared that the next I
should hear of him would be the news of his death. Two years later he
began a Universal History which is not without traces of weakness, but
which, composed after the age of eighty-three, and carried, in
seventeen volumes, far into the Middle Ages, brings to a close the
most astonishing career in literature.
[Sidenote: SUPPRESSION OF OPINION]
His course had been determined, in early life, by _Quentin Durward_.
The shock of the discovery that Scott's Lewis the Eleventh was
inconsistent with the original in Commynes made him resolve that his
object thenceforth should be above all things to follow, without
swerving, and in stern subordination and surrender, the lead of his
authorities. He decided effectually to repress the poet, the patriot,
the religious or political partisan, to sustain no cause, to banish
himself from his books, and to write nothing that would gratify his
own feelings or disclose his private convictions.[66] When a strenuous
divine who, like him, had written on the Reformation, hailed him as a
comrade, Ranke repelled his advances. "You," he said, "are in the
first place a Christian: I am in the first place a historian. There is
a gulf between us."[67] He was the first eminent writer who exhibited
what Michelet calls _le desinteressement des morts_. It was a moral
triumph for him when he could refrain from judging, show that much
might be said on both sides, and leave the rest to Providence.[68] He
would have felt sympathy with the two famous London physicians of our
day, of whom it is told that they could not make up their minds on a
case and reported dubiously. The head of the family insisted on a
positive opinion. They answered that they were unable to give one, but
he might easily find fifty doctors who could.
[Sidenote: CRITICISM OF MODERN SOURCES]
Niebuhr had pointed out that chroniclers who wrote before the
invention of printing generally copied one predecessor at a time, and
knew little about sifting or combining authorities. The suggestion
became luminous in Ranke's hands, and with his light and dexterous
touch he scrutinised and dissected the principal historians, from
Machiavelli to the _Memoires d'un Homme d'Etat_, with a rigour never
before applied to moderns. But whilst Niebuhr dismissed the
traditional story, replacing it with a construction of his own, it was
Ranke's mission to preserve, not to undermine, and to set up masters
whom, in their proper sphere, he could obey. The many excellent
dissertations in which he displayed this art, though his successors in
the next generation matched his skill and did still more thorough
work, are the best introduction from which we can learn the technical
process by which within living memory the study of modern history has
been renewed. Ranke's contemporaries, weary of his neutrality and
suspense, and of the useful but subordinate work that was done by
beginners who borrowed his wand, thought that too much was made of
these obscure preliminaries which a man may accomplish for himself, in
the silence of his chamber, with less demand on the attention of the
public.[69] That may be reasonable in men who are practised in these
fundamental technicalities. We who have to learn them, must immerse
ourselves in the study of the great examples.
[Sidenote: METHOD TO BE LEARNT FROM SCIENCES]
Apart from what is technical, method is only the reduplication of
common sense, and is best acquired by observing its use by the ablest
men in every variety of intellectual employment.[70] Bentham
acknowledged that he learned less from his own profession than from
writers like Linnaeus and Cullen; and Brougham advised the student of
Law to begin with Dante. Liebig described his _Organic Chemistry_ as
an application of ideas found in Mill's _Logic_, and a distinguished
physician, not to be named lest he should overhear me, read three
books to enlarge his medical mind; and they were Gibbon, Grote, and
Mill. He goes on to say, "An educated man cannot become so on one
study alone, but must be brought under the influence of natural,
civil, and moral modes of thought."[71] I quote my colleague's golden
words in order to reciprocate them. If men of science owe anything to
us, we may learn much from them that is essential.[72] For they can
show how to test proof, how to secure fulness and soundness in
induction, how to restrain and to employ with safety hypothesis and
analogy. It is they who hold the secret of the mysterious property of
the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but
irrevocably prevails.[73] Theirs is the logic of discovery,[74] the
demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of
ideas, which as the earthly wants and passions of men remain almost
unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark in
history. And they often give us invaluable counsel when they attend to
their own subjects and address their own people. Remember Darwin,
taking note only of those passages that raised difficulties in his
way; the French philosopher complaining that his work stood still,
because he found no more contradicting facts; Baer, who thinks error
treated thoroughly, nearly as remunerative as truth, by the discovery
of new objections; for, as Sir Robert Ball warns us, it is by
considering objections that we often learn.[75] Faraday declares that
"in knowledge, that man only is to be condemned and despised who is
not in a state of transition." And John Hunter spoke for all of us,
when he said: "Never ask me what I have said or what I have written;
but if you will ask me what my present opinions are, I will tell you."
[Sidenote: ALL ADOPT THE HISTORIC METHOD]
From the first years of the century we have been quickened and
enriched by contributors from every quarter. The jurists brought us
that law of continuous growth which has transformed history from a
chronicle of casual occurrences into the likeness of something
organic.[76] Towards 1820 divines began to recast their doctrines on
the lines of development, of which Newman said, long after, that
evolution had come to confirm it.[77] Even the Economists, who were
practical men, dissolved their science into liquid history, affirming
that it is not an auxiliary, but the actual subject-matter of their
inquiry.[78] Philosophers claim that, as early as 1804, they began to
bow the metaphysical neck beneath the historical yoke. They taught
that philosophy is only the amended sum of all philosophies, that
systems pass with the age whose impress they bear,[79] that the
problem is to focus the rays of wandering but extant truth, and that
history is the source of philosophy, if not quite a substitute for
it.[80] Comte begins a volume with the words that the preponderance of
history over philosophy was the characteristic of the time he lived
in.[81] Since Cuvier first recognised the conjunction between the
course of inductive discovery and the course of civilization,[82]
science had its share in saturating the age with historic ways of
thought, and subjecting all things to that influence for which the
depressing names historicism and historical-mindedness have been
devised.
[Sidenote: DANGER OF OBLIVION]
[Sidenote: PROPHECY OF PITT]
There are certain faults which are corrigible mental defects on which
I ought to say a few denouncing words, because they are common to us
all. First: the want of an energetic understanding of the sequence and
real significance of events, which would be fatal to a practical
politician, is ruin to a student of history who is the politician with
his face turned backwards.[83] It is playing at study, to see nothing
but the unmeaning and unsuggestive surface, as we generally do. Then
we have a curious proclivity to neglect, and by degrees to forget,
what has been certainly known. An instance or two will explain my
idea. The most popular English writer relates how it happened in his
presence that the title of Tory was conferred upon the Conservative
party. For it was an opprobrious name at the time, applied to men for
whom the Irish Government offered head-money; so that if I have made
too sure of progress, I may at least complacently point to this
instance of our mended manners. One day, Titus Oates lost his temper
with the men who refused to believe him, and after looking about for a
scorching imprecation, he began to call them Tories.[84] The name
remained; but its origin, attested by Defoe, dropped out of common
memory, as if one party were ashamed of their godfather, and the other
did not care to be identified with his cause and character. You all
know, I am sure, the story of the news of Trafalgar, and how, two
days after it had arrived, Mr. Pitt, drawn by an enthusiastic crowd,
went to dine in the city. When they drank the health of the minister
who had saved his country, he declined the praise. "England," he said,
"has saved herself by her own energy; and I hope that after having
saved herself by her energy, she will save Europe by her example." In
1814, when this hope had been realised, the last speech of the great
orator was remembered, and a medal was struck upon which the whole
sentence was engraved, in four words of compressed Latin: "_Seipsam
virtute, Europam exemplo._" Now it was just at the time of his last
appearance in public that Mr. Pitt heard of the overwhelming success
of the French in Germany, and of the Austrian surrender at Ulm. His
friends concluded that the contest on land was hopeless, and that it
was time to abandon the Continent to the conqueror, and to fall back
upon our new empire of the sea. Pitt did not agree with them. He said
that Napoleon would meet with a check whenever he encountered a
national resistance; and he declared that Spain was the place for it,
and that then England would intervene.[85] General Wellesley, fresh
from India, was present. Ten years later, when he had accomplished
that which Pitt had seen in the lucid prescience of his last days, he
related at Paris what I scarcely hesitate to call the most astounding
and profound prediction in all political history, where such things
have not been rare.
[Sidenote: RULES FOR THE STUDY OF HISTORY]
I shall never again enjoy the opportunity of speaking my thoughts to
such an audience as this, and on so privileged an occasion a lecturer
may well be tempted to bethink himself whether he knows of any
neglected truth, any cardinal proposition, that might serve as his
selected epigraph, as a last signal, perhaps even as a target. I am
not thinking of those shining precepts which are the registered
property of every school; that is to say--Learn as much by writing as
by reading; be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from
the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard
against the prestige of great names;[86] see that your judgments are
your own, and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without
testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions;[87] do not overlook
the strength of the bad cause or the weakness of the good;[88] never
be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a
skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect
power more than vice,[89] and study problems in preference to periods;
for instance: the derivation of Luther, the scientific influence of
Bacon, the predecessors of Adam Smith, the mediaeval masters of
Rousseau, the consistency of Burke, the identity of the first Whig.
Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement.
But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to
debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but
to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to
suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history
has the power to inflict on wrong.[90] The plea in extenuation of
guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. At every step we are
met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right
and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate. The
men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made
history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a
foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the
Past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the Past with the ideas of
the Present.[91]
[Sidenote: JUSTIFICATION OF THE PAST]
The mission of that school was to make distant times, and especially
the middle ages, then most distant of all, intelligible and acceptable
to a society issuing from the eighteenth century. There were
difficulties in the way; and among others this, that, in the first
fervour of the Crusades, the men who took the Cross, after receiving
communion, heartily devoted the day to the extermination of Jews. To
judge them by a fixed standard, to call them sacrilegious fanatics or
furious hypocrites, was to yield a gratuitous victory to Voltaire. It
became a rule of policy to praise the spirit when you could not defend
the deed. So that we have no common code; our moral notions are always
fluid; and you must consider the times, the class from which men
sprang, the surrounding influences, the masters in their schools, the
preachers in their pulpits, the movement they obscurely obeyed, and so
on, until responsibility is merged in numbers, and not a culprit is
left for execution.[92] A murderer was no criminal if he followed
local custom, if neighbours approved, if he was encouraged by
official advisers or prompted by just authority, if he acted for the
reason of state or the pure love of religion, or if he sheltered
himself behind the complicity of the Law. The depression of morality
was flagrant; but the motives were those which have enabled us to
contemplate with distressing complacency the secret of unhallowed
lives. The code that is greatly modified by time and place, will vary
according to the cause. The amnesty is an artifice that enables us to
make exceptions, to tamper with weights and measures, to deal unequal
justice to friends and enemies.
[Sidenote: PHILOSOPHIES OF HISTORY]
It is associated with that philosophy which Cato attributes to the
gods. For we have a theory which justifies Providence by the event,
and holds nothing so deserving as success, to which there can be no
victory in a bad cause, prescription and duration legitimate,[93] and
whatever exists is right and reasonable; and as God manifests His will
by that which He tolerates, we must conform to the divine decree by
living to shape the Future after the ratified image of the Past.[94]
Another theory, less confidently urged, regards History as our guide,
as much by showing errors to evade as examples to pursue. It is
suspicious of illusions in success, and, though there may be hope of
ultimate triumph for what is true, if not by its own attraction, by
the gradual exhaustion of error, it admits no corresponding promise
for what is ethically right. It deems the canonisation of the historic
Past more perilous than ignorance or denial, because it would
perpetuate the reign of sin and acknowledge the sovereignty of wrong,
and conceives it the part of real greatness to know how to stand and
fall alone, stemming, for a lifetime, the contemporary flood.[95]
[Sidenote: DEBASING THE CURRENCY]
Ranke relates, without adornment, that William III. ordered the
extirpation of a Catholic clan, and scouts the faltering excuse of his
defenders. But when he comes to the death and character of the
international deliverer, Glencoe is forgotten, the imputation of
murder drops, like a thing unworthy of notice.[96] Johannes Mueller, a
great Swiss celebrity, writes that the British Constitution occurred
to somebody, perhaps to Halifax. This artless statement might not be
approved by rigid lawyers as a faithful and felicitous indication of
the manner of that mysterious growth of ages, from occult beginnings,
that was never profaned by the invading wit of man;[97] but it is
less grotesque than it appears. Lord Halifax was the most original
writer of political tracts in the pamphleteering crowd between
Harrington and Bolingbroke; and in the Exclusion struggle he produced
a scheme of limitations which, in substance, if not in form,
foreshadowed the position of the monarchy in the later Hanoverian
reigns. Although Halifax did not believe in the Plot,[98] he insisted
that innocent victims should be sacrificed to content the multitude.
Sir William Temple writes:--"We only disagreed in one point, which was
the leaving some priests to the law upon the accusation of being
priests only, as the House of Commons had desired; which I thought
wholly unjust. Upon this point Lord Halifax and I had so sharp a
debate at Lord Sunderland's lodgings, that he told me, if I would not
concur in points which were so necessary for the people's
satisfaction, he would tell everybody I was a Papist. And upon his
affirming that the plot must be handled as if it were true, whether it
were so or no, in those points that were so generally believed." In
spite of this accusing passage Macaulay, who prefers Halifax to all
the statesmen of his age, praises him for his mercy: "His dislike of
extremes, and a forgiving and compassionate temper which seems to have
been natural to him, preserved him from all participation in the worst
crimes of his time."
[Sidenote: SINFULNESS OF HISTORY]
[Sidenote: SOVEREIGNTY OF THE MORAL CODE]
If, in our uncertainty, we must often err, it may be sometimes better
to risk excess in rigour than in indulgence, for then at least we do
no injury by loss of principle. As Bayle has said, it is more probable
that the secret motives of an indifferent action are bad than
good;[99] and this discouraging conclusion does not depend upon
theology, for James Mozley supports the sceptic from the other flank,
with all the artillery of Tractarian Oxford. "A Christian," he says,
"is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release
himself.... He sees it where others do not; his instinct is divinely
strengthened; his eye is supernaturally keen; he has a spiritual
insight, and senses exercised to discern.... He owns the doctrine of
original sin; that doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against
appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares
him for recognising anywhere what he knows to be everywhere."[100]
There is a popular saying of Madame de Stael, that we forgive whatever
we really understand. The paradox has been judiciously pruned by her
descendant, the Duke de Broglie, in the words: "Beware of too much
explaining, lest we end by too much excusing."[101] History, says
Froude, does teach that right and wrong are real distinctions.
Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral
law is written on the tablets of eternity.[102] And if there are
moments when we may resist the teaching of Froude, we have seldom the
chance of resisting when he is supported by Mr. Goldwin Smith: "A
sound historical morality will sanction strong measures in evil times;
selfish ambition, treachery, murder, perjury, it will never sanction
in the worst of times, for these are the things that make times
evil.--Justice has been justice, mercy has been mercy, honour has been
honour, good faith has been good faith, truthfulness has been
truthfulness from the beginning." The doctrine that, as Sir Thomas
Browne says, morality is not ambulatory,[103] is expressed as follows
by Burke, who, when true to himself, is the most intelligent of our
instructors: "My principles enable me to form my judgment upon men and
actions in history, just as they do in common life; and are not formed
out of events and characters, either present or past. History is a
preceptor of prudence, not of principles. The principles of true
politics are those of morality enlarged; and I neither now do, nor
ever will admit of any other."[104]
[Sidenote: HISTORY AND CHARACTER]
Whatever a man's notions of these later centuries are, such, in the
main, the man himself will be. Under the name of History, they cover
the articles of his philosophic, his religious, and his political
creed.[105] They give his measure; they denote his character: and, as
praise is the shipwreck of historians, his preferences betray him more
than his aversions. Modern history touches us so nearly, it is so deep
a question of life and death, that we are bound to find our own way
through it, and to owe our insight to ourselves. The historians of
former ages, unapproachable for us in knowledge and in talent, cannot
be our limit. We have the power to be more rigidly impersonal,
disinterested and just than they; and to learn from undisguised and
genuine records to look with remorse upon the past, and to the future
with assured hope of better things; bearing this in mind, that if we
lower our standard in history, we cannot uphold it in Church or
State.