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PROSE MASTERPIECES
FROM
MODERN ESSAYISTS
FROUDE, FREEMAN, GLADSTONE, NEWMAN, LESLIE STEPHEN
NEW YORK & LONDON
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press
1891
The Knickerbocker Press
Electrotyped and Printed by
G. P. Putnam's Sons
CONTENTS. PAGE
THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY. By James Anthony Froude 3
RACE AND LANGUAGE. By Edward A. Freeman 55
KIN BEYOND SEA. By William Ewart Gladstone 151
PRIVATE JUDGMENT. By John Henry Newman 221
AN APOLOGY FOR PLAINSPEAKING. By Leslie Stephen 281
[Illustration]
JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE.
BORN 1818.
THE SCIENCE OF HISTORY.
A LECTURE DELIVERED BY JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION
FEBRUARY 5, 1864.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--I have undertaken to speak to you this
evening on what is called the Science of History. I fear it is a dry
subject; and there seems, indeed, something incongruous in the very
connection of such words as Science and History. It is as if we were to
talk of the color of sound, or the longitude of the Rule-of-three. Where
it is so difficult to make out the truth on the commonest disputed fact
in matters passing under our very eyes, how can we talk of a science in
things long past, which come to us only through books? It often seems to
me as if History was like a child's box of letters, with which we can
spell any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we
want, arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not
suit our purpose.
I will try to make the thing intelligible, and I will try not to weary
you; but I am doubtful of my success either way. First, however, I wish
to say a word or two about the eminent person whose name is connected
with this way of looking at History, and whose premature death struck us
all with such a sudden sorrow. Many of you, perhaps, recollect Mr.
Buckle as he stood not so long ago in this place. He spoke more than an
hour without a note,--never repeating himself, never wasting words;
laying out his matter as easily and as pleasantly as if he had been
talking to us at his own fireside. We might think what we pleased of Mr.
Buckle's views, but it was plain enough that he was a man of uncommon
power; and he had qualities also--qualities to which he, perhaps,
himself attached little value--as rare as they were admirable.
Most of us, when we have hit on something which we are pleased to think
important and original, feel as if we should burst with it. We come out
into the book-market with our wares in hand, and ask for thanks and
recognition. Mr. Buckle, at an early age, conceived the thought which
made him famous, but he took the measure of his abilities. He knew that
whenever he pleased he could command personal distinction, but he cared
more for his subject than for himself. He was contented to work with
patient reticence, unknown and unheard of, for twenty years; and then,
at middle life, he produced a work which was translated at once into
French and German, and, of all places in the world, fluttered the
dovecots of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg.
Goethe says somewhere, that as soon as a man has done any thing
remarkable, there seems to be a general conspiracy to prevent him from
doing it again. He is feasted, fêted, caressed; his time is stolen from
him by breakfasts, dinners, societies, idle businesses of a thousand
kinds. Mr. Buckle had his share of all this; but there are also more
dangerous enemies that wait upon success like his. He had scarcely won
for himself the place which he deserved, than his health was found
shattered by his labors. He had but time to show us how large a man he
was, time just to sketch the outlines of his philosophy, and he passed
away as suddenly as he appeared. He went abroad to recover strength for
his work, but his work was done with and over. He died of a fever at
Damascus, vexed only that he was compelled to leave it uncompleted.
Almost his last conscious words were: "My book, my book! I shall never
finish my book!" He went away as he had lived, nobly careless of
himself, and thinking only of the thing which he had undertaken to do.
But his labor had not been thrown away. Disagree with him as we might,
the effect which he had already produced was unmistakable, and it is not
likely to pass away. What he said was not essentially new. Some such
interpretation of human things is as early as the beginning of thought.
But Mr. Buckle, on the one hand, had the art which belongs to men of
genius: he could present his opinions with peculiar distinctness; and,
on the other hand, there is much in the mode of speculation at present
current among us for which those opinions have an unusual fascination.
They do not please us, but they excite and irritate us. We are angry
with them; and we betray, in being so, an uneasy misgiving that there
may be more truth in those opinions than we like to allow.
Mr. Buckle's general theory was something of this kind: When human
creatures began first to look about them in the world they lived in,
there seemed to be no order in any thing. Days and nights were not the
same length. The air was sometimes hot and sometimes cold. Some of the
stars rose and set like the sun; some were almost motionless in the sky;
some described circles round a central star above the north horizon. The
planets went on principles of their own; and in the elements there
seemed nothing but caprice. Sun and moon would at times go out in
eclipse. Sometimes the earth itself would shake under men's feet; and
they could only suppose that earth and air and sky and water were
inhabited and managed by creatures as wayward as themselves.
Time went on, and the disorder began to arrange itself. Certain
influences seemed beneficent to men, others malignant and destructive;
and the world was supposed to be animated by good spirits and evil
spirits, who were continually fighting against each other, in outward
nature and in human creatures themselves. Finally, as men observed more
and imagined less, these interpretations gave way also. Phenomena the
most opposite in effect were seen to be the result of the same natural
law. The fire did not burn the house down if the owners of it were
careful, but remained on the hearth and boiled the pot; nor did it seem
more inclined to burn a bad man's house down than a good man's, provided
the badness did not take the form of negligence. The phenomena of nature
were found for the most part to proceed in an orderly, regular way, and
their variations to be such as could be counted upon. From observing the
order of things, the step was easy to cause and effect. An eclipse,
instead of being a sign of the anger of Heaven, was found to be the
necessary and innocent result of the relative position of sun, moon, and
earth. The comets became bodies in space, unrelated to the beings who
had imagined that all creation was watching them and their doings. By
degrees caprice, volition, all symptoms of arbitrary action, disappeared
out of the universe; and almost every phenomenon in earth or heaven was
found attributable to some law, either understood or perceived to exist.
Thus nature was reclaimed from the imagination. The first fantastic
conception of things gave way before the moral; the moral in turn gave
way before the natural; and at last there was left but one small tract
of jungle where the theory of law had failed to penetrate,--the doings
and characters of human creatures themselves.
There, and only there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion,
conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist.
Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to
disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of
conditions the consequences necessarily followed. With man, the word
"law" changed its meaning; and instead of a fixed order, which he could
not choose but follow, it became a moral precept, which he might disobey
if he dared.
This it was which Mr. Buckle disbelieved. The economy which prevailed
throughout nature, he thought it very unlikely should admit of this
exception. He considered that human beings acted necessarily from the
impulse of outward circumstances upon their mental and bodily condition
at any given moment. Every man, he said, acted from a motive; and his
conduct was determined by the motive which affected him most powerfully.
Every man naturally desires what he supposes to be good for him; but, to
do well, he must know well. He will eat poison, so long as he does not
know that it is poison. Let him see that it will kill him, and he will
not touch it. The question was not of moral right and wrong. Once let
him be thoroughly made to feel that the thing is destructive, and he
will leave it alone by the law of his nature. His virtues are the result
of knowledge; his faults, the necessary consequence of the want of it. A
boy desires to draw. He knows nothing about it: he draws men like trees
or houses, with their centre of gravity anywhere. He makes mistakes
because he knows no better. We do not blame him. Till he is better
taught, he cannot help it. But his instruction begins. He arrives at
straight lines; then at solids; then at curves. He learns perspective,
and light and shade. He observes more accurately the forms which he
wishes to represent. He perceives effects, and he perceives the means by
which they are produced. He has learned what to do; and, in part, he has
learned how to do it. His after-progress will depend on the amount of
force which his nature possesses; but all this is as natural as the
growth of an acorn. You do not preach to the acorn that it is its duty
to become a large tree; you do not preach to the art-pupil that it is
his duty to become a Holbein. You plant your acorn in favorable soil,
where it can have light and air, and be sheltered from the wind; you
remove the superfluous branches, you train the strength into the leading
shoots. The acorn will then become as fine a tree as it has vital force
to become. The difference between men and other things is only in the
largeness and variety of man's capacities; and in this special capacity,
that he alone has the power of observing the circumstances favorable to
his own growth, and can apply them for himself, yet, again, with this
condition,--that he is not, as is commonly supposed, free to choose
whether he will make use of these appliances or not. When he knows what
is good for him, he will choose it; and he will judge what is good for
him by the circumstances which have made him what he is.
And what he would do, Mr. Buckle supposed that he always had done. His
history had been a natural growth as much as the growth of the acorn.
His improvement had followed the progress of his knowledge; and, by a
comparison of his outward circumstances with the condition of his mind,
his whole proceedings on this planet, his creeds and constitutions, his
good deeds and his bad, his arts and his sciences, his empires and his
revolutions, would be found all to arrange themselves into clear
relations of cause and effect.
If, when Mr. Buckle pressed his conclusions we objected the difficulty
of finding what the truth about past times really was, he would admit it
candidly as far as concerned individuals; but there was not the same
difficulty, he said, with masses of men. We might disagree about the
character of Julius or Tiberius Cæsar, but we could know well enough the
Romans of the Empire. We had their literature to tell us how they
thought; we had their laws to tell us how they governed; we had the
broad face of the world, the huge mountainous outline of their general
doings upon it, to tell us how they acted. He believed it was all
reducible to laws, and could be made as intelligible as the growth of
the chalk cliffs or the coal measures.
And thus consistently Mr. Buckle cared little for individuals. He did
not believe (as some one has said) that the history of mankind is the
history of its great men. Great men with him were but larger atoms,
obeying the same impulses with the rest, only perhaps a trifle more
erratic. With them or without them, the course of things would have been
much the same.
As an illustration of the truth of his view, he would point to the new
science of Political Economy. Here already was a large area of human
activity in which natural laws were found to act unerringly. Men had
gone on for centuries trying to regulate trade on moral principles. They
would fix wages according to some imaginary rule of fairness; they would
fix prices by what they considered things ought to cost; they encouraged
one trade or discouraged another, for moral reasons. They might as well
have tried to work a steam-engine on moral reasons. The great statesmen
whose names were connected with these enterprises might have as well
legislated that water should run up-hill. There were natural laws, fixed
in the conditions of things; and to contend against them was the old
battle of the Titans against the gods.
As it was with political economy, so it was with all other forms of
human activity; and as the true laws of political economy explained the
troubles which people fell into in old times because they were ignorant
of them, so the true laws of human nature, as soon as we knew them,
would explain their mistakes in more serious matters, and enable us to
manage better for the future. Geographical position, climate, air, soil,
and the like, had their several influences. The northern nations are
hardy and industrious, because they must till the earth if they would
eat the fruits of it, and because the temperature is too low to make an
idle life enjoyable. In the south, the soil is more productive, while
less food is wanted and fewer clothes; and, in the exquisite air,
exertion is not needed to make the sense of existence delightful.
Therefore, in the south we find men lazy and indolent.
True, there are difficulties in these views; the home of the languid
Italian was the home also of the sternest race of whom the story of
mankind retains a record. And again, when we are told that the Spaniards
are superstitious because Spain is a country of earthquakes, we remember
Japan, the spot in all the world where earthquakes are most frequent,
and where at the same time there is the most serene disbelief in any
supernatural agency whatsoever.
Moreover, if men grow into what they are by natural laws, they cannot
help being what they are; and if they cannot help being what they are, a
good deal will have to be altered in our general view of human
obligations and responsibilities.
That, however, in these theories there is a great deal of truth, is
quite certain, were there but a hope that those who maintain them would
be contented with that admission. A man born in a Mahometan country
grows up a Mahometan; in a Catholic country, a Catholic; in a Protestant
country, a Protestant. His opinions are like his language: he learns to
think as he learns to speak; and it is absurd to suppose him responsible
for being what nature makes him. We take pains to educate children.
There is a good education and a bad education; there are rules well
ascertained by which characters are influenced; and, clearly enough, it
is no mere matter for a boy's free will whether he turns out well or
ill. We try to train him into good habits; we keep him out of the way of
temptations; we see that he is well taught; we mix kindness and
strictness; we surround him with every good influence we can command.
These are what are termed the advantages of a good education; and if we
fail to provide those under our care with it, and if they go wrong, the
responsibility we feel is as much ours as theirs. This is at once an
admission of the power over us of outward circumstances.
In the same way, we allow for the strength of temptations, and the like.
In general, it is perfectly obvious that men do necessarily absorb, out
of the influences in which they grow up, something which gives a
complexion to their whole after-character.
When historians have to relate great social or speculative changes, the
overthrow of a monarchy, or the establishment of a creed, they do but
half their duty if they merely relate the events. In an account, for
instance, of the rise of Mahometanism, it is not enough to describe the
character of the Prophet, the ends which he set before him, the means
which he made use of, and the effect which he produced; the historian
must show what there was in the condition of the Eastern races which
enabled Mahomet to act upon, them so powerfully; their existing beliefs,
their existing moral and political condition.
In our estimate of the past, and in our calculations of the future, in
the judgments which we pass upon one another, we measure responsibility,
not by the thing done, but by the opportunities which people have had of
knowing better or worse. In the efforts which we make to keep our
children from bad associations or friends, we admit that external
circumstances have a powerful effect in making men what they are.
But are circumstances every thing? That is the whole question. A
science of history, if it is more than a misleading name, implies that
the relation between cause and effect holds in human things as
completely as in all others; that the origin of human actions is not to
be looked for in mysterious properties of the mind, but in influences
which are palpable and ponderable.
When natural causes are liable to be set aside and neutralized by what
is called volition, the word Science is out of place. If it is free to
man to choose what he will do or not do, there is no adequate science of
him. If there is a science of him, there is no free choice, and the
praise or blame with which we regard one another are impertinent and out
of place.
I am trespassing upon these ethical grounds because, unless I do, the
subject cannot be made intelligible. Mankind are but an aggregate of
individuals; History is but the record of individual action: and what is
true of the part is true of the whole.
We feel keenly about such things, and, when the logic becomes
perplexing, we are apt to grow rhetorical about them. But rhetoric is
only misleading. Whatever the truth may be, it is best that we should
know it; and for truth of any kind we should keep our heads and hearts
as cool as we can.
I will say at once, that, if we had the whole case before us; if we were
taken, like Leibnitz's Tarquin, into the council-chamber of Nature, and
were shown what we really were, where we came from, and where we were
going, however unpleasant it might be for some of us to find ourselves,
like Tarquin, made into villains, from the subtle necessities of "the
best of all possible worlds,"--nevertheless, some such theory as Mr.
Buckle's might possibly turn out to be true. Likely enough, there is
some great "equation of the universe" where the value of the unknown
quantities can be determined. But we must treat things in relation to
our own powers and positions, and the question is, whether the sweep of
those vast curves can be measured by the intellect of creatures of a day
like ourselves.
The "Faust" of Goethe, tired of the barren round of earthly knowledge,
calls magic to his aid. He desires, first, to see the spirit of the
Macrocosmos, but his heart fails him before he ventures that tremendous
experiment, and he summons before him, instead, the spirit of his own
race. There he feels himself at home. The stream of life and the storm
of action, the everlasting ocean of existence, the web and the woof,
and the roaring loom of Time,--he gazes upon them all, and in passionate
exultation claims fellowship with the awful thing before him. But the
majestic vision fades, and a voice comes to him,--"Thou art fellow with
the spirits which thy mind can grasp, not with me."
Had Mr. Buckle tried to follow his principles into detail, it might have
fared no better with him than with "Faust."
What are the conditions of a science? and when may any subject be said
to enter the scientific stage? I suppose when the facts begin to resolve
themselves into groups; when phenomena are no longer isolated
experiences, but appear in connection and order; when, after certain
antecedents, certain consequences are uniformly seen to follow; when
facts enough have been collected to furnish a basis for conjectural
explanation; and when conjectures have so far ceased to be utterly vague
that it is possible in some degree to foresee the future by the help of
them.
Till a subject has advanced as far as this, to speak of a science of it
is an abuse of language. It is not enough to say that there must be a
science of human things because there is a science of all other things.
This is like saying the planets must be inhabited because the only
planet of which we have any experience is inhabited. It may or may not
be true, but it is not a practical question; it does not affect the
practical treatment of the matter in hand.
Let us look at the history of Astronomy.
So long as sun, moon, and planets were supposed to be gods or angels; so
long as the sword of Orion was not a metaphor, but a fact; and the
groups of stars which inlaid the floor of heaven were the glittering
trophies of the loves and wars of the Pantheon,--so long there was no
science of Astronomy. There was fancy, imagination, poetry, perhaps
reverence, but no science. As soon, however, as it was observed that the
stars retained their relative places; that the times of their rising and
setting varied with the seasons; that sun, moon, and planets moved among
them in a plane, and the belt of the Zodiac was marked out and
divided,--then a new order of things began. Traces of the earlier stage
remained in the names of the signs and constellations, just as the
Scandinavian mythology survives now in the names of the days of the
week; but, for all that, the understanding was now at work on the thing;
science had begun, and the first triumph of it was the power of
foretelling the future. Eclipses were perceived to recur in cycles of
nineteen years, and philosophers were able to say when an eclipse was to
be looked for. The periods of the planets were determined. Theories were
invented to account for their eccentricities; and, false as those
theories might be, the position of the planets could be calculated with
moderate certainty by them. The very first result of the science, in its
most imperfect stage, was a power of foresight; and this was possible
before any one true astronomical law had been discovered.
We should not therefore question the possibility of a science of history
because the explanations of its phenomena were rudimentary or imperfect:
that they might be, and long continue to be, and yet enough might be
done to show that there was such a thing, and that it was not entirely
without use. But how was it that in those rude days, with small
knowledge of mathematics, and with no better instruments than flat walls
and dial-plates, those first astronomers made progress so considerable?
Because, I suppose, the phenomena which they were observing recurred,
for the most part, within moderate intervals; so that they could
collect large experience within the compass of their natural lives;
because days and months and years were measurable periods, and within
them the more simple phenomena perpetually repeated themselves.
But how would it have been if, instead of turning on its axis once in
twenty-four hours, the earth had taken a year about it; if the year had
been nearly four hundred years; if man's life had been no longer than it
is, and for the initial steps of astronomy there had been nothing to
depend upon except observations recorded in history? How many ages would
have passed, had this been our condition, before it would have occurred
to any one, that, in what they saw night after night, there was any kind
of order at all?
We can see to some extent how it would have been, by the present state
of those parts of the science which in fact depend on remote recorded
observations. The movements of the comets are still extremely uncertain.
The times of their return can be calculated only with the greatest
vagueness.
And yet such a hypothesis as I have suggested would but inadequately
express the position in which we are in fact placed toward history.
There the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent
wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which
never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is
possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our
conjectures. It has been suggested fancifully, that, if we consider the
universe to be infinite, time is the same as eternity, and the past is
perpetually present. Light takes nine years to come to us from Sirius:
those rays which we may see to-night, when we leave this place, left
Sirius nine years ago; and could the inhabitants of Sirius see the earth
at this moment, they would see the English army in the trenches before
Sebastopol, Florence Nightingale watching at Scutari over the wounded at
Inkermann, and the peace of England undisturbed by "Essays and Reviews."
As the stars recede into distance, so time recedes with them; and there
may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might be seen stepping
into the ark, Eve listening to the temptation of the serpent, or that
older race, eating the oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them,
when the Baltic was an open sea.
Could we but compare notes, something might be done; but of this there
is no present hope, and without it there will be no science of history.
Eclipses, recorded in ancient books, can be verified by calculations,
and lost dates can be recovered by them; and we can foresee, by the laws
which they follow, when there will be eclipses again. Will a time ever
be when the lost secret of the foundation of Rome can be recovered by
historic laws? If not, where is our science? It may be said that this is
a particular fact, that we can deal satisfactorily with general
phenomena affecting eras and cycles. Well, then, let us take some
general phenomenon; Mahometanism, for instance, or Buddhism. Those are
large enough. Can you imagine a science which would have[1] _foretold_
such movements as those? The state of things out of which they rose is
obscure; but, suppose it not obscure, can you conceive that, with any
amount of historical insight into the old Oriental beliefs, you could
have seen that they were about to transform themselves into those
particular forms and no other?
It is not enough to say, that, after the fact, you can understand
partially how Mahometanism came to be. All historians worth the name
have told us something about that. But when we talk of science, we mean
something with more ambitious pretences, we mean something which can
foresee as well as explain; and, thus looked at, to state the problem is
to show its absurdity. As little could the wisest man have foreseen this
mighty revolution, as thirty years ago such a thing as Mormonism could
have been anticipated in America; as little as it could have been
foreseen that table-turning and spirit-rapping would have been an
outcome of the scientific culture of England in the nineteenth century.
The greatest of Roman thinkers, gazing mournfully at the seething mass
of moral putrefaction round him, detected and deigned to notice among
its elements a certain detestable superstition, so he called it, rising
up amidst the offscouring of the Jews, which was named Christianity.
Could Tacitus have looked forward nine centuries to the Rome of Gregory
VII, could he have beheld the representative of the majesty of the
Cæsars holding the stirrup of the Pontiff of that vile and execrated
sect, the spectacle would scarcely have appeared to him the fulfilment
of a national expectation, or an intelligible result of the causes in
operation round him. Tacitus, indeed, was born before the science of
history; but would M. Comte have seen any more clearly?
Nor is the case much better if we are less hard upon our philosophy; if
we content ourselves with the past, and require only a scientific
explanation of that.
First, for the facts themselves. They come to us through the minds of
those who recorded them, neither machines nor angels, but fallible
creatures, with human passions and prejudices. Tacitus and Thucydides
were perhaps the ablest men who ever gave themselves to writing history;
the ablest, and also the most incapable of conscious falsehood. Yet even
now, after all these centuries, the truth of what they relate is called
in question. Good reasons can be given to show that neither of them can
be confidently trusted. If we doubt with these, whom are we to believe?
Or, again, let the facts be granted. To revert to my simile of the box
of letters, you have but to select such facts as suit you, you have but
to leave alone those which do not suit you, and, let your theory of
history be what it will, you can find no difficulty in providing facts
to prove it.
You may have your Hegel's philosophy of history, or you may have your
Schlegel's philosophy of history; you may prove from history that the
world is governed in detail by a special Providence; you may prove that
there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may
believe, if you like it, in the old theory of the wisdom of antiquity;
you may speak, as was the fashion in the fifteenth century, of "our
fathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we"; or you may talk of "our
barbarian ancestors," and describe their wars as the scuffling of kites
and crows.
You may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been an unbroken
progress toward perfection; you may maintain that there has been no
progress at all, and that man remains the same poor creature that he
ever was; or, lastly, you may say, with the author of the "Contract
Social," that men were purest and best in primeval simplicity,--
"When wild in woods the noble savage ran."
In all or any of these views, history will stand your friend. History,
in its passive irony, will make no objection. Like Jarno, in Goethe's
novel, it will not condescend to argue with you, and will provide you
with abundant illustrations of any thing which you may wish to believe.
"What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fiction agreed upon?" "My
friend," said Faust to the student, who was growing enthusiastic about
the spirit of past ages,--"my friend, the times which are gone are a
book with seven seals; and what you call the spirit of past ages is but
the spirit of this or that worthy gentleman in whose mind those ages are
reflected."
One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with
distinctness: that the world is built somehow on moral foundations;
that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is
ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old
doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M.
Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the
trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are
at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the
conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man's doings are
concerned, which neither have, nor need have, any thing moral about
them, so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his
digestion, and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are
supplied with matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world
where it would be as easy to calculate men's actions by laws like those
of positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot
rule, or weigh Sirius in a grocer's scale.
And it is not difficult to see why this should be. The first principle,
on which the theory of a science of history can be plausibly argued, is
that all actions whatsoever arise from self-interest. It may be
enlightened self-interest, it may be unenlightened; but it is assumed as
an axiom, that every man, in whatever he does, is aiming at something
which he considers will promote his happiness. His conduct is not
determined by his will; it is determined by the object of his desire.
Adam Smith, in laying the foundations of political economy, expressly
eliminates every other motive. He does not say that men never act on
other motives; still less, that they never ought to act on other
motives. He asserts merely that, as far as the arts of production are
concerned, and of buying and selling, the action of self-interest may
be counted upon as uniform. What Adam Smith says of political economy,
Mr. Buckle would extend over the whole circle of human activity.
Now, that which especially distinguishes a high order of man from a low
order of man--that which constitutes human goodness, human greatness,
human nobleness--is surely not the degree of enlightenment with which
men pursue their own advantage: but it is self-forgetfulness, it is
self-sacrifice; it is the disregard of personal pleasure, personal
indulgence, personal advantages remote or present, because some other
line of conduct is more right.
We are sometimes told that this is but another way of expressing the
same thing; that, when a man prefers doing what is right, it is only
because to do right gives him a higher satisfaction. It appears to me,
on the contrary, to be a difference in the very heart and nature of
things. The martyr goes to the stake, the patriot to the scaffold, not
with a view to any future reward, to themselves, but because it is a
glory to fling away their lives for truth and freedom. And so through
all phases of existence, to the smallest details of common life, the
beautiful character is the unselfish character. Those whom we most love
and admire are those to whom the thought of self seems never to occur;
who do simply and with no ulterior aim--with no thought whether it will
be pleasant to themselves or unpleasant--that which is good and right
and generous.
Is this still selfishness, only more enlightened? I do not think so. The
essence of true nobility, is neglect of self. Let the thought of self
pass in, and the beauty of a great action is gone, like the bloom from a
soiled flower. Surely it is a paradox to speak of the self-interest of a
martyr who dies for a cause, the triumph of which he will never enjoy;
and the greatest of that great company in all ages would have done what
they did, had their personal prospects closed with the grave. Nay, there
have been those so zealous for some glorious principle as to wish
themselves blotted out of the book of Heaven if the cause of Heaven
could succeed.
And out of this mysterious quality, whatever it be, arise the higher
relations of human life, the higher modes of human obligation. Kant, the
philosopher, used to say that there were two things which overwhelmed
him with awe as he thought of them. One was the star-sown deep of
space, without limit and without end; the other was, right and wrong.
Right, the sacrifice of self to good; wrong, the sacrifice of good to
self,--not graduated objects of desire, to which we are determined by
the degrees of our knowledge, but wide asunder as pole and pole, as
light and darkness: one the object of infinite love; the other, the
object of infinite detestation and scorn. It is in this marvellous power
in men to do wrong (it is an old story, but none the less true for
that),--it is in this power to do wrong--wrong or right, as it lies
somehow with ourselves to choose--that the impossibility stands of
forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, or
scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact. If men
were consistently selfish, you might analyze their motives; if they were
consistently noble they would express in their conduct the laws of the
highest perfection. But so long as two natures are mixed together, and
the strange creature which results from the combination is now under one
influence and now under another, so long you will make nothing of him
except from the old-fashioned moral--or, if you please,
imaginative--point of view.
Even the laws of political economy itself cease to guide us when they
touch moral government. So long as labor is a chattel to be bought and
sold, so long, like other commodities, it follows the condition of
supply and demand. But if, for his misfortune, an employer considers
that he stands in human relations toward his workmen; if he believes,
rightly or wrongly, that he is responsible for them; that in return for
their labor he is bound to see that their children are decently taught,
and they and their families decently fed and clothed and lodged; that he
ought to care for them in sickness and in old age,--then political
economy will no longer direct him, and the relations between himself and
his dependents will have to be arranged on quite other principles.
So long as he considers only his own material profit, so long supply and
demand will settle every difficulty; but the introduction of a new
factor spoils the equation.
And it is precisely in this debatable ground of low motives and noble
emotions; in the struggle, ever failing yet ever renewed, to carry truth
and justice into the administration of human society; in the
establishment of states and in the overthrow of tyrannies; in the rise
and fall of creeds; in the world of ideas; in the character and deeds of
the great actors in the drama of life, where good and evil fight out
their everlasting battle, now ranged in opposite camps, now and more
often in the heart, both of them, of each living man,--that the true
human interest of history resides. The progress of industries, the
growth of material and mechanical civilization, are interesting; but
they are not the most interesting. They have their reward in the
increase of material comforts; but, unless we are mistaken about our
nature, they do not highly concern us after all.
Once more: not only is there in men this baffling duality of principle,
but there is something else in us which still more defies scientific
analysis.
Mr. Buckle would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and
that individual by a doctrine of averages. Though he cannot tell whether
A, B, or C will cut his throat, he may assure himself that one man in
every fifty thousand, or thereabout (I forget the exact proportion),
will cut his throat, and with this he consoles himself. No doubt it is a
comforting discovery. Unfortunately, the average of one generation need
not be the average of the next. We may be converted by the Japanese,
for all that we know, and the Japanese methods of taking leave of life
may become fashionable among us. Nay, did not Novalis suggest that the
whole race of men would at last become so disgusted with their
impotence, that they would extinguish themselves by a simultaneous act
of suicide, and make room for a better order of beings? Anyhow, the
fountain out of which the race is flowing perpetually changes; no two
generations are alike. Whether there is a change in the organization
itself we cannot tell; but this is certain,--that, as the planet varies
with the atmosphere which surrounds it, so each new generation varies
from the last, because it inhales as its atmosphere the accumulated
experience and knowledge of the whole past of the world. These things
form the spiritual air which we breathe as we grow; and, in the infinite
multiplicity of elements of which that air is now composed, it is
forever a matter of conjecture what the minds will be like which expand
under its influence.
From the England of Fielding and Richardson to the England of Miss
Austen, from the England of Miss Austen to the England of Railways and
Free Trade, how vast the change! Yet perhaps Sir Charles Grandison
would not seem so strange to us now as one of ourselves will seem to our
great-grandchildren. The world moves faster and faster; and the
difference will probably be considerably greater.
The temper of each new generation is a continual surprise. The Fates
delight to contradict our most confident expectations. Gibbon believed
that the era of conquerors was at an end. Had he lived out the full life
of man, he would have seen Europe at the feet of Napoleon. But a few
years ago we believed the world had grown too civilized for war, and the
Crystal Palace in Hyde Park was to be the inauguration of a new era.
Battles bloody as Napoleon's are now the familiar tale of every day; and
the arts which have made greatest progress are the arts of destruction.
What next? We may strain our eyes into the future which lies beyond this
waning century; but never was conjecture more at fault. It is blank
darkness, which even the imagination fails to people.
What, then, is the use of History, and what are its lessons? If it can
tell us little of the past, and nothing of the future, why waste our
time over so barren a study?
First, it is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of
right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall,
but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity. For every false
word or unrighteous deed, for cruelty and oppression, for lust or
vanity, the price has to be paid at last; not always by the chief
offenders, but paid by some one. Justice and truth alone endure and
live. Injustice and falsehood may be long-lived, but doomsday comes at
last to them, in French revolutions and other terrible ways.
That is one lesson of history. Another is, that we should draw no
horoscopes; that we should expect little, for what we expect will not
come to pass. Revolutions, reformations,--those vast movements into
which heroes and saints have flung themselves, in the belief that they
were the dawn of the millennium,--have not borne the fruit which they
looked for. Millenniums are still far away. These great convulsions
leave the world changed,--perhaps improved, but not improved as the
actors in them hoped it would be. Luther would have gone to work with
less heart, could he have foreseen the Thirty Years' War, and in the
distance the theology of Tubingen. Washington might have hesitated to
draw the sword against England, could he have seen the country which he
made as we see it now.[2]
The most reasonable anticipations fail us, antecedents the most apposite
mislead us, because the conditions of human problems never repeat
themselves. Some new feature alters every thing,--some element which we
detect only in its after-operation.
But this, it may be said, is but a meagre outcome. Can the long records
of humanity, with all its joys and sorrows, its sufferings and its
conquests, teach us more than this? Let us approach the subject from
another side.
If you were asked to point out the special features in which
Shakespeare's plays are so transcendently excellent, you would mention
perhaps, among others, this--that his stories are not put together, and
his characters are not conceived, to illustrate any particular law or
principle. They teach many lessons, but not any one prominent above
another; and when we have drawn from them all the direct instruction
which they contain, there remains still something unresolved,--something
which the artist gives, and which the philosopher cannot give.
It is in this characteristic that we are accustomed to say Shakespeare's
supreme _truth_ lies. He represents real life. His drama teaches as life
teaches,--neither less nor more. He builds his fabrics, as Nature does,
on right and wrong; but he does not struggle to make Nature more
systematic than she is. In the subtle interflow of good and evil; in the
unmerited sufferings of innocence; in the disproportion of penalties to
desert; in the seeming blindness with which justice, in attempting to
assert itself, overwhelms innocent and guilty in a common
ruin,--Shakespeare is true to real experience. The mystery of
life he leaves as he finds it; and, in his most tremendous
positions, he is addressing rather the intellectual emotions than the
understanding,--knowing well that the understanding in such things is at
fault, and the sage as ignorant as the child.
Only the highest order of genius can represent Nature thus. An inferior
artist produces either something entirely immoral, where good and evil
are names, and nobility of disposition is supposed to show itself in the
absolute disregard of them, or else, if he is a better kind of man, he
will force on Nature a didactic purpose; he composes what are called
moral tales, which may edify the conscience, but only mislead the
intellect.
The finest work of this kind produced in modern times is Lessing's play
of "Nathan the Wise." The object of it is to teach religious toleration.
The doctrine is admirable, the mode in which it is enforced is
interesting; but it has the fatal fault that it is not true. Nature does
not teach religious toleration by any such direct method; and the result
is--no one knew it better than Lessing himself--that the play is not
poetry, but only splendid manufacture. Shakespeare is eternal; Lessing's
"Nathan" will pass away with the mode of thought which gave it birth.
One is based on fact; the other, on human theory about fact. The theory
seems at first sight to contain the most immediate instruction; but it
is not really so.
Cibber and others, as you know, wanted to alter Shakespeare. The French
king, in "Lear," was to be got rid of; Cordelia was to marry Edgar, and
Lear himself was to be rewarded for his sufferings by a golden old age.
They could not bear that Hamlet should suffer for the sins of Claudius.
The wicked king was to die, and the wicked mother; and Hamlet and
Ophelia were to make a match of it, and live happily ever after. A
common novelist would have arranged it thus; and you would have had your
comfortable moral that wickedness was fitly punished, and virtue had its
due reward, and all would have been well. But Shakespeare would not have
it so. Shakespeare knew that crime was not so simple in its
consequences, or Providence so paternal. He was contented to take the
truth from life; and the effect upon the mind of the most correct theory
of what life ought to be, compared to the effect of the life itself, is
infinitesimal in comparison.
Again, let us compare the popular historical treatment of remarkable
incidents with Shakespeare's treatment of them. Look at "Macbeth." You
may derive abundant instruction from it,--instruction of many kinds.
There is a moral lesson of profound interest in the steps by which a
noble nature glides to perdition. In more modern fashion you may
speculate, if you like, on the political conditions represented there,
and the temptation presented in absolute monarchies to unscrupulous
ambition; you may say, like Doctor Slop, these things could not have
happened under a constitutional government: or, again, you may take up
your parable against superstition; you may dilate on the frightful
consequences of a belief in witches, and reflect on the superior
advantages of an age of schools and newspapers. If the bare facts of the
story had come down to us from a chronicler, and an ordinary writer of
the nineteenth century had undertaken to relate them, his account, we
may depend upon it, would have been put together upon one or other of
these principles. Yet, by the side of that unfolding of the secrets of
the prison-house of the soul, what lean and shrivelled anatomies the
best of such descriptions would seem!
Shakespeare himself, I suppose, could not have given us a theory of what
he meant; he gave us the thing itself, on which we might make whatever
theories we pleased.
Or, again, look at Homer.