Two distinguished men of letters, each an admirable representative of his
University--Mr. John Morley and Professor Seeley--have lately published
opinions on the subject of history, which, though very likely to prove
right, deserve to be carefully considered before assent is bestowed upon
them.
Mr. Morley, when President of the Midland Institute, and speaking in the
Town Hall of Birmingham, said: 'I do not in the least want to know what
happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly
through what is happening to-day,' and this same indifference is
professed, though certainly nowhere displayed, in other parts of Mr.
Morley's writings. {178}
Professor Seeley never makes his point quite so sharp as this, and
probably would hesitate to do so, but in the _Expansion of England_ he
expounds a theory of history largely based upon an indifference like that
which Mr. Morley professed at Birmingham. His book opens thus: 'It is a
favourite maxim of mine that history, while it should be scientific in
its method, should pursue a practical object--that is, it should not
merely gratify the reader's curiosity about the past, but modify his view
of the present and his forecast of the future. Now, if this maxim be
sound, the history of England ought to end with something that might be
called a moral.'
This, it must be admitted, is a large order. The task of the historian,
as here explained, is not merely to tell us the story of the past, and
thus gratify our curiosity, but, pursuing a practical object, to seek to
modify our views of the present and help us in our forecasts of the
future, and this the historian is to do, not unconsciously and
incidentally, but deliberately and of set purpose. One can well
understand how history, so written, will usually begin with a maxim, and
invariably end with a moral.
What we are afterwards told in the same book follows in logical sequence
upon our first quotation--namely, that 'history fades into _mere
literature_ (the italics are ours), when it loses sight of its relation
to practical politics.' In this grim sentence we read the dethronement
of Clio. The poor thing must forswear her father's house, her tuneful
sisters, the invocation of the poet, the worship of the dramatist, and
keep her terms at the University, where, if she is really studious and
steady, and avoids literary companions (which ought not to be difficult),
she may hope some day to be received into the Royal Society as a second-
rate science. The people who do not usually go to the Royal Society will
miss their old playmate from her accustomed slopes, but, even were they
to succeed in tracing her to her new home, access would be denied them;
for Professor Seeley, that stern custodian, has his answer ready for all
such seekers. 'If you want recreation, you must find it in Poetry,
particularly Lyrical Poetry. Try Shelley. We can no longer allow you to
disport yourselves in the Fields of History as if they were a mere
playground. Clio is enclosed.'
At present, however, this is not quite the case; for the old literary
traditions are still alive, and prove somewhat irritating to Professor
Seeley, who, though one of the most even-tempered of writers, is to be
found on p. 173 almost angry with Thackeray, a charming person, who, as
we all know, had, after his lazy literary fashion, made an especial study
of Queen Anne's time, and who cherished the pleasant fancy that a man
might lie in the heather with a pipe in his mouth, and yet, if he had
only an odd volume of the _Spectator_ or the _Tatler_ in his hand, be
learning history all the time. 'As we read in these delightful pages,'
says the author of _Esmond_, 'the past age returns; the England of our
ancestors is revivified; the Maypole rises in the Strand; the beaux are
gathering in the coffee-houses;' and so on, in the style we all know and
love so well, and none better, we may rest assured, than Professor Seeley
himself, if only he were not tortured by the thought that people were
taking this to be a specimen of the science of which he is a Regius
Professor. His comment on this passage of Thackeray's is almost a groan.
'What is this but the old literary groove, leading to no trustworthy
knowledge?' and certainly no one of us, from letting his fancy gaze on
the Maypole in the Strand, could ever have foretold the Griffin. On the
same page he cries: 'Break the drowsy spell of narrative. Ask yourself
questions, set yourself problems; your mind will at once take up a new
attitude. Now, modern English history breaks up into two grand
problems--the problem of the Colonies and the problem of India.' The
Cambridge School of History with a vengeance!
In a paper read at the South Kensington Museum in 1884, Professor Seeley
observes: 'The essential point is this, that we should recognise that to
study history is to study not merely a narrative, but _at the same time_
certain theoretical studies.' He then proceeds to name them:--Political
philosophy, the comparative study of legal institutions, political
economy, and international law.
These passages are, I think, adequate to give a fair view of Professor
Seeley's position. History is a science, to be written scientifically
and to be studied scientifically in conjunction with other studies. It
should pursue a practical object and be read with direct reference to
practical politics--using the latter word, no doubt, in an enlightened
sense. History is not a narrative of all sorts of facts--biographical,
moral, political--but of such facts as a scientific diagnosis has
ascertained to be historically interesting. In fine, history, if her
study is to be profitable and not a mere pastime, less exhausting than
skittles and cheaper than horse exercise, must be dominated by some
theory capable of verification by reference to certain ascertained facts
belonging to a particular class. Is this the right way of looking upon
history? The dictionaries tell us that history and story are the same
word, and are derived from a Greek source, signifying information
obtained by inquiry. The natural definition of history, therefore,
surely is the story of man upon earth, and the historian is he who tells
us any chapter or fragment of that story. All things that on earth do
dwell have, no doubt, their history as well as man; but when a member,
however humble, of the human race speaks of history without any
explanatory context, he may be presumed to be alluding to his own family
records, to the story of humanity during its passage across the earth's
surface.
'A talent for history'--I am quoting from an author whose style, let
those mock at it who may, will reveal him--'may be said to be born with
us as our chief inheritance. History has been written with
quipo-threads, with feather pictures, with wampum belts, still oftener
with earth-mounds and monumental stone-heaps, whether as pyramid or
cairn; for the Celt and the Copt, the red man as well as the white, lives
between two eternities, and warring against oblivion, he would fain unite
himself in clear, conscious relation, as in dim, unconscious relation he
is already united, with the whole future and the whole past.'
To keep the past alive for us is the pious function of the historian. Our
curiosity is endless, his the task of gratifying it. We want to know
what happened long ago. Performance of this task is only proximately
possible; but none the less it must be attempted, for the demand for it
is born afresh with every infant's cry. History is a pageant, and not a
philosophy.
Poets, no less than professors, occasionally say good things even in
prose, and the following oracular utterance of Shelley is not pure
nonsense:--'History is the cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories
of men. The past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of
everlasting generations with her harmony.'
If this be thought a little too fanciful, let me adorn these pages with a
passage from one of the great masters of English prose--Walter Savage
Landor. Would that the pious labour of transcription could confer the
tiniest measure of the gift! In that bundle of imaginary letters Landor
called _Pericles and Aspasia_, we find Aspasia writing to her friend
Cleone as follows:
'To-day there came to visit us a writer who is not yet an author; his
name is Thucydides. We understand that he has been these several
years engaged in preparation for a history. Pericles invited him to
meet Herodotus, when that wonderful man had returned to our country,
and was about to sail from Athens. Until then it was believed by the
intimate friends of Thucydides that he would devote his life to
poetry, and, such is his vigour both of thought and expression, that
he would have been the rival of Pindar. Even now he is fonder of
talking on poetry than any other subject, and blushed when history was
mentioned. By degrees, however, he warmed, and listened with deep
interest to the discourse of Pericles on the duties of a historian.
'"May our first Athenian historian not be the greatest," said he, "as
the first of our dramatists has been, in the opinion of many. We are
growing too loquacious, both on the stage and off. We make
disquisitions which render us only more and more dim-sighted, and
excursions that only consume our stores. If some among us who have
acquired celebrity by their compositions, calm, candid, contemplative
men, were to undertake the history of Athens from the invasion of
Xerxes, I should expect a fair and full criticism on the orations of
Antiphon, and experience no disappointment at their forgetting the
battle of Salamis. History, when she has lost her Muse, will lose her
dignity, her occupation, her character, her name. She will wander
about the Agora; she will start, she will stop, she will look wild,
she will look stupid, she will take languidly to her bosom doubts,
queries, essays, dissertations, some of which ought to go before her,
some to follow, and all to stand apart. The field of history should
not merely be well tilled, but well peopled. None is delightful to me
or interesting in which I find not as many illustrious names as have a
right to enter it. We might as well in a drama place the actors
behind the scenes, and listen to the dialogue there, as in a history
push valiant men back and protrude ourselves with husky disputations.
Show me rather how great projects were executed, great advantages
gained, and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and the
statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend to them in reverence;
tell me their names, that I may repeat them to my children. Teach me
whence laws were introduced, upon what foundation laid, by what
custody guarded, in what inner keep preserved. Let the books of the
treasury lie closed as religiously as the Sibyl's; leave weights and
measures in the market-place, Commerce in the harbour, the Arts in the
light they love, Philosophy in the shade; place History on her
rightful throne, and at the sides of her Eloquence and War."'
This is, doubtless, a somewhat full-dress view of history. Landor was
not one of our modern dressing-gown-and-slippers kind of authors. He
always took pains to be splendid, and preferred stately magnificence to
chatty familiarity. But, after allowing for this, is not the passage I
have quoted infused with a great deal of the true spirit which should
animate the historian, and does it not seem to take us by the hand and
lead us very far away from Professor Seeley's maxims and morals, his
theoretical studies, his political philosophy, his political economy, and
his desire to break the drowsy spell of narrative, and to set us all
problems? I ask this question in no spirit of enmity towards these
theoretical studies, nor do I doubt for one moment that the student of
history proper, who has a turn in their directions, will find his pursuit
made only the more fascinating the more he studies them--just as a little
botany is said to add to the charm of a country walk; but--and surely the
assertion is not necessarily paradoxical--these studies ought not to be
allowed to disfigure the free-flowing outline of the historical Muse, or
to thicken her clear utterance, which in her higher moods chants an epic,
and in her ordinary moods recites a narrative which need not be drowsy.
As for maxims, we all of us have our 'little hoard of maxims' wherewith
to preach down our hearts and justify anything shabby we may have done;
but the less we import their cheap wisdom into history the better. The
author of the _Expansion of England_ will probably agree with Burke in
thinking that 'a great empire and little minds go ill together,' and so,
surely, _a fortiori_, must a mighty universe and any possible maxim.
There have been plenty of brave historical maxims before Professor
Seeley's, though only Lord Bolingbroke's has had the good luck to become
itself historical. {189} And as for theories, Professor Flint, a very
learned writer, has been at the pains to enumerate fourteen French and
thirteen German philosophies of history current (though some, I expect,
never ran either fast or far) since the revival of learning.
We are (are we not?) in these days in no little danger of being
philosophy-ridden, and of losing our love for facts simply as facts. So
long as Carlyle lived the concrete had a representative, the strength of
whose epithets sufficed, if not to keep the philosophers in awe, at least
to supply their opponents with stones. But now it is different. Carlyle
is no more a model historian than is Shakspeare a model dramatist. The
merest tyro can count the faults of either on his clumsy fingers. That
born critic, the late Sir George Lewis, had barely completed his tenth
year before he was able, in a letter to his mother, to point out to her
the essentially faulty structure of _Hamlet_, and many a duller wit, a
decade or two later in his existence, has come to the conclusion that
_Frederick the Great_ is far too long. But whatever were Carlyle's
faults, his historical method was superbly naturalistic. Have we a
historian left us so honestly possessed as he was with the genuine
historical instinct, the true enthusiasm to know what happened; or one
half so fond of a story for its own sake, or so in love with things, not
for what they were, but simply because they were? 'What wonderful things
are events!' wrote Lord Beaconsfield in _Coningsby_; 'the least are of
greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive speculations.'
To say this is to go perhaps too far; certainly it is to go farther than
Carlyle, who none the less was in sympathy with the remark; for he also
worshipped events, believing as he did that but for the breath of God's
mouth they never would have been events at all. We thus find him always
treating even comparatively insignificant facts with a measure of
reverence, and handling them lovingly, as does a book-hunter the
shabbiest pamphlet in his collection. We have only to think of Carlyle's
essay on the _Diamond Necklace_ to fill our minds with his qualifications
for the proud office of the historian. Were that inimitable piece of
workmanship to be submitted to the criticisms of the new scientific
school, we doubt whether it would be so much as classed, whilst the
celebrated description of the night before the battle of Dunbar in
_Cromwell_, or any hundred scenes from the _French Revolution_, would, we
expect, be catalogued as good examples of that degrading process whereby
history fades into mere literature.
This is not a question, be it observed, of style. What is called a
picturesque style is generally a great trial. Who was it who called
Professor Masson's style Carlyle on wooden legs? What can be drearier
than when a plain matter-of-fact writer attempts to be animated, and
tries to make his characters live by the easy but futile expedient of
writing about them in the present tense? What is wanted is a passion for
facts; the style may be left to take care of itself. Let me name a
historian who detested fine writing, and who never said to himself, 'Go
to, I will make a description,' and who yet was dominated by a love for
facts, whose one desire always was to know what happened, to dispel
illusion, and establish the true account--Dr. S. R. Maitland, of the
Lambeth Library, whose volumes entitled _The Dark Ages_ and _The
Reformation_ are to history what Milton's _Lycidas_ is said to be to
poetry: if they do not interest you, your tastes are not historical.
The difference, we repeat, is not of style, but of aim. Is history a
pageant or a philosophy? That eminent historian, Lord Macaulay, whose
passion for letters and for 'mere literature' ennobled his whole life,
has expressed himself in some places, I need scarcely add in a most
forcible manner, in the same sense as Mr. Morley. In his well-known
essay on history, contributed to the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1828, we find
him writing as follows: 'Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from
the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent amongst
them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value.' And
again: 'No past event has any intrinsic importance. The knowledge of it
is valuable only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to
the future.' These are strong passages; but Lord Macaulay was a royal
eclectic, and was quite out of sympathy with the majority of that
brotherhood who are content to tone down their contradictories to the
dull level of ineptitudes. Macaulay never toned down his
contradictories, but, heightening everything all round, went on his
sublime way, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, and well knowing
that he could give anybody five yards in fifty and win easily. It is,
therefore, no surprise to find him, in the very essay in which he speaks
so contemptuously of facts, laying on with his vigorous brush a
celebrated purple patch I would gladly transfer to my own dull page were
it not too long and too well known. A line or two taken at random will
give its purport:
'A truly great historian would reclaim those materials the novelist has
appropriated. We should not then have to look for the wars and votes of
the Puritans in Clarendon and for their phraseology in _Old Mortality_,
for one half of King James in Hume and for the other half in the
_Fortunes of Nigel_. . . . Society would be shown from the highest to the
lowest, from the royal cloth of state to the den of the outlaw, from the
throne of the legate to the chimney-corner where the begging friar
regaled himself. Palmers, minstrels, crusaders, the stately monastery
with the good cheer in its refectory, and the tournament with the heralds
and ladies, the trumpets and the cloth of gold, would give truth and life
to the representation.' It is difficult to see what abstract truth
interpenetrates the cheer of the refectory, or what just calculations
with respect to the future even an upholsterer could draw from a cloth,
either of state or of gold; whilst most people will admit that, when the
brilliant essayist a few years later set himself to compose his own
magnificent history, so far as he interpenetrated it with the abstract
truths of Whiggism, and calculated that the future would be satisfied
with the first Reform Bill, he did ill and guessed wrong.
To reconcile Macaulay's utterances on this subject is beyond my powers,
but of two things I am satisfied: the first is that, were he to come to
life again, a good many of us would be more careful than we are how we
write about him; and the second is that, on the happening of the same
event, he would be found protesting against the threatened domination of
all things by scientific theory. A Western American, who was once
compelled to spend some days in Boston, was accustomed in after-life to
describe that seat of polite learning to his horrified companions in
California as a city in whose streets Respectability stalked unchecked.
This is just what philosophical theories are doing amongst us, and a
decent person can hardly venture abroad without one, though it does not
much matter which one. Everybody is expected to have 'a system of
philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and
derivative,' and to be able to account for everything, even for things it
used not to be thought sensible to believe in, like ghosts and haunted
houses. Keats remarks in one of his letters with great admiration upon
what he christens Shakspeare's 'negative capability,' meaning thereby
Shakspeare's habit of complaisant observation from outside of theory, and
his keen enjoyment of the unexplained facts of life. He did not pour
himself out in every strife. We have but little of this negative
capability. The ruddy qualities of delightfulness, of pleasantness, are
all 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' The varied elements
of life--the
'Murmur of living,
Stir of existence,
Soul of the world!'
seem to be fading from literature. Pure literary enthusiasm sheds but
few rays. To be lively is to be flippant, and epigram is dubbed paradox.
That many people appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with
dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find
any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories,
religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of
Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman who has not been allowed to
forget that he once asserted of fiction what Professor Seeley would be
glad to be able to assert of history, that the drowsy spell of narrative
has been broken. We are to look for no more Sir Walters, no more
Thackerays, no more Dickens. The stories have all been told. Plots are
exploded. Incident is over. In moods of dejection these dark sayings
seemed only too true. Shakspeare's saddest of sad lines rose to one's
lips:
'My grief lies onward and my joy behind.'
Behind us are _Ivanhoe_ and _Guy Mannering_, _Pendennis_ and _The
Virginians_, Pecksniff and Micawber. In front of us stretch a
never-ending series, a dreary vista of _Foregone Conclusions_,
_Counterfeit Presentments_, and _Undiscovered Countries_. But the
darkest watch of the night is the one before the dawn, and relief is
often nearest us when we least expect it. All this gloomy nonsense was
suddenly dispelled, and the fact that really and truly, and behind this
philosophical arras, we were all inwardly ravening for stories was most
satisfactorily established by the incontinent manner in which we flung
ourselves into the arms of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom we could
almost have raised a statue in the market-place for having written
_Treasure Island_.
But to return to history. The interests of our poor human life, which
seems to become duller every day, require that the fields of history
should be kept for ever unenclosed, and be a free breathing-place for a
pallid population well-nigh stifled with the fumes of philosophy.
Were we, imaginatively, to propel ourselves forward to the middle of the
next century, and to fancy a well-equipped historian armed with the
digested learning of Gibbon, endowed with the eye of Carlyle, and say one-
fifteenth of his humour (even then a dangerous allotment in a dull
world), the moral gravity of Dr. Arnold, the critical sympathy of Sainte-
Beuve, and the style of Dr. Newman, approaching the period through which
we have lived, should we desire this talented mortal to encumber himself
with a theory into which to thrust all our doings as we toss clothes into
a portmanteau; to set himself to extract the essence of some new
political philosophy, capable of being applied to the practical politics
of his own day, or to busy himself with problems or economics? To us
personally, of course, it is a matter of indifference how the historians
of the twentieth century conduct themselves; but ought not our altruism
to bear the strain of a hope that at least one of the band may avoid all
these things, and, leaving political philosophy to the political
philosopher and political economy to the political economist, remember
that the first, if not the last, duty of the historian is to narrate, to
supply the text not the comment, the subject not the sermon, and proceed
to tell our grandchildren and remoter issue the story of our lives? The
clash of arms will resound through his pages as musically as ever it does
through those of the elder historians as he tells of the encounter
between the Northern and Southern States of America, in which Right and
Might, those great twin-brethren, fought side by side; but Romance, that
ancient parasite, clung affectionately with her tendril-hands to the
mouldering walls of an ancient wrong, thus enabling the historian, whilst
awarding the victor's palm to General Grant, to write kindly of the lost
cause, dear to the heart of a nobler and more chivalrous man, General
Lee, of the Virginian army. And again, is it not almost possible to envy
the historian to whom will belong the task of writing with full
information, and all the advantage of the true historic distance, the
history of that series of struggles and heroisms, of plots and counter-
plots, of crimes and counter-crimes, resulting in the freedom of Italy,
and of telling to a world, eager to listen, the life-story of Joseph
Mazzini?
'Of God nor man was ever this thing said,
That he could give
Life back to her who gave him, whence his dead
Mother might live.
But this man found his mother dead and slain,
With fast sealed eyes,
And bade the dead rise up and live again,
And she did rise.'
Nor will our imaginary historian be unmindful of Cavour, or fail to
thrill his readers by telling them how, when the great Italian statesman,
with many sins upon his conscience, lay in the very grasp of death, he
interrupted the priests, busy at their work of intercession, almost
roughly, with the exclamation, 'Pray not for me.' 'Pray for Italy!'
whilst if he be one who has a turn for that ironical pastime, the
dissection of a king, the curious character, and muddle of motives,
calling itself Carlo Alberto, will afford him material for at least two
paragraphs of subtle interest. Lastly, if our historian is ambitious of
a larger canvas and of deeper colours, what is there to prevent him,
bracing himself to the task,--
'As when some mighty painter dips
His pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse,'
from writing the epitaph of the Napoleonic legend?
But all this time I hear Professor Seeley whispering in my ear, 'What is
this but the old literary groove leading to no trustworthy knowledge?' If
by trustworthy knowledge is meant demonstrable conclusions, capable of
being expressed in terms at once exact and final, trustworthy knowledge
is not to be gained from the witness of history, whose testimony none the
less must be received, weighed, and taken into account. Truly observes
Carlyle: 'If history is philosophy teaching by examples, the writer
fitted to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. Better were it
that mere earthly historians should lower such pretensions, and, aiming
only at some picture of the thing acted, which picture itself will be but
a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an
acknowledged secret.' 'Some picture of the thing acted.' Here we behold
the task of the historian; nor is it an idle, fruitless task. Science is
not the only, or the chief source of knowledge. The _Iliad_,
Shakspeare's plays, have taught the world more than the _Politics_ of
Aristotle or the _Novum Organum_ of Bacon.
Facts are not the dross of history, but the true metal, and the historian
is a worker in that metal. He has nothing to do with abstract truth, or
with practical politics, or with forecasts of the future. A worker in
metal he is, and has certainly plenty of what Lord Bacon used to call
'stuff' to work upon; but if he is to be a great historian, and not a
mere chronicler, he must be an artist as well as an artisan, and have
something of the spirit which animated such a man as Francesco Francia of
Bologna, now only famous as a painter, but in his own day equally
celebrated as a worker in gold, and whose practice it was to sign his
pictures with the word Goldsmith after his name, whilst he engraved
Painter on his golden crucifixes.
The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the
thing acted, must collect facts, select facts, and combine facts. Methods
will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything exactly like
anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the
historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is
wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will
need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.
The stream of narrative flowing swiftly, as it does, over the jagged
rocks of human destiny, must often be turbulent and tossed; it is,
therefore, all the more the duty of every good citizen to keep it as
undefiled as possible, and to do what in him lies to prevent peripatetic
philosophers on the banks from throwing their theories into it, either
dead ones to decay, or living ones to drown. Let the philosophers
ventilate their theories, construct their blow-holes, extract their
essences, discuss their maxims, and point their morals as much as they
will; but let them do so apart. History must not lose her Muse, or 'take
to her bosom doubts, queries, essays, dissertations, some of which ought
to go before her, some to follow, and all to stand apart.' Let us at all
events secure our narrative first--sermons and philosophy the day after.