How to Read History.
Whately pertinently observes, in his annotations upon Lord Bacon’s “Essay
on Studies:” “In reference to the study of history I have elsewhere
remarked upon the importance, among the intellectual qualifications for
such a study, of a vivid imagination. The practical importance of such an
exercise of imagination to a full and clear, and consequently, profitable
view of the transactions related in history can hardly be over-estimated.”
To stimulate and aid the imagination in its efforts to reproduce the
past, historical plays and poems, and, more recently, historical novels
have been abundantly employed. Their usefulness has been the subject of
frequent discussion, and of various opinions. It has been forcibly, and
perhaps not untruly said, that the majority of the present generation
of English readers have learned more of English history from Shakspere
and Walter Scott than from the entire library of professed historians.
Of course no man would contend that either Shakspere or Scott could be
substituted for the usual historical authorities, but only that they may
supplement them in certain important particulars. Many other historical
plays and novels are invaluable as enabling the reader to enter more
fully into the spirit of past times. They are of especial service
in helping him to appreciate the feelings and motives of prominent
personages, and vividly to reproduce the manners and institutions of
another age. It is not often that an historical writer is endowed with
the painstaking zeal of the antiquarian, and the creative power of the
poet. If we can not have the two gifts in a single writer, we must seek
for them apart in the historian and the novelist.
Thackeray’s “Henry Esmond” is an admirable example of a good historical
novel, when carefully and conscientiously written by a man of rare gifts
and of a rarer honesty. No reader of this tale of the times of Queen
Anne could fail to derive from it such impressions of the state of
manners and of morals in the higher circles, as well as of the political
jealousies and the religious feuds which divided men of all classes, as
no formal history could possibly convey—such as even the most abundant
and painstaking research into the less accessible resources of historical
knowledge would fail to impart to a man of feeble capacity to picture
and recombine. The service is not a slight one which is rendered to the
world when such a painstaking explorer of historical truth as Thackeray
gathers his materials with faithful and laborious research, and weaves
them together into so fascinating and instructive a story. But this
tale, marvelous as it is for its elaborated truthfulness and picturesque
effects, strikingly illustrates the possible dangers and disadvantages to
which the historical novel may be abused. Thackeray was not without his
prejudices. These, with his desire for producing striking effects, are
manifest in the occasional _overdrawing_ of this generally well-balanced
representation of one of the most interesting periods of English history.
It is notorious that Walter Scott gave very serious offense to multitudes
of his admiring readers by some of his portraitures of the representative
characters of the great historical parties of Scotland and England. With
all the good sense and candor which he had at command, his sympathies
were too intense and his prejudices too tenacious to allow him to write
otherwise than he did, though he know he should excite the indignation of
thousands of his fervid countrymen. Mrs. H. B. Stowe says in the preface
to her recent historical romance, “Oldtown Folks:” “I have tried to make
my mind as still as a looking-glass or a mountain lake, and thus to give
you merely the images reflected therein.” But a fervid and sympathetic
nature like hers can no more free itself from a theological or personal
bias in representing the New England of the past, over which she has
laughed, and wept, and speculated, and struggled all her life, than the
“mountain lake” can hold itself in glassy smoothness against the gusts
and breezes that sweep upon it from the heights above.
The fact deserves notice that of late professed historians have indulged
somewhat freely in romancing, and so in a sense turned their histories
into quasi-historical novels, especially when they attempt to give
elaborate and eloquent portraitures of the leading personages, in which
the most lavish use is made of effective epithets and pointed antitheses.
Macaulay, among recent historians, has set the fashion very decidedly
in this direction. In his efforts to make history minute, vivid, and
effective, he has often described like an impassioned advocate, and
painted, like a retained attorney, with the most unsparing expenditure of
contrasts and epithets. Carlyle gives sketches, alternately in chalk and
charcoal, that exhibit his saints and demons, now in ghastliest white,
and then in the most appalling blackness. But though he draws caricatures
he draws them with the hand of an artist. Froude, by research, eloquence
and audacity combined, attempts to reverse the settled historic
judgments of all mankind in respect to characters that had been “damned
to everlasting fame.” Bancroft and Motley abound in examples of this
tendency to paint historical characters so much to the life that the
impression is made that the result is only a painting to which there
never was reality.