My theme is history. It is an old subject, which has been discoursed
about since Herodotus, and I should be vain indeed if I flattered myself
that I could say aught new concerning the methods of writing it, when
this has for so long a period engaged the minds of so many gifted men.
Yet to a sympathetic audience, to people who love history, there is
always the chance that a fresh treatment may present the commonplaces in
some different combination, and augment for the moment an interest which
is perennial.
Holding a brief for history as do I your representative, let me at once
concede that it is not the highest form of intellectual endeavor; let us
at once agree that it were better that all the histories ever written
were burned than for the world to lose Homer and Shakespeare. Yet as it
is generally true that an advocate rarely admits anything without
qualification, I should not be loyal to my client did I not urge that
Shakespeare was historian as well as poet. We all prefer his Antony and
Cleopatra and Julius Caesar to the Lives in North's Plutarch which
furnished him his materials. The history is in substance as true as
Plutarch, the dramatic force greater; the language is better than that
of Sir Thomas North, who himself did a remarkable piece of work when he
gave his country a classic by Englishing a French version of the
stories of the Greek. It is true as Macaulay wrote, the historical plays
of Shakespeare have superseded history. When we think of Henry V, it is
of Prince Hal, the boon companion of Falstaff, who spent his youth in
brawl and riot, and then became a sober and duty-loving king; and our
idea of Richard III. is a deceitful, dissembling, cruel wretch who knew
no touch of pity, a bloody tyrant who knew no law of God or man.
The Achilles of Homer was a very living personage to Alexander. How
happy he was, said the great general, when he visited Troy, "in having
while he lived so faithful a friend, and when he was dead so famous a
poet to proclaim his actions"! In our century, as more in consonance
with society under the regime of contract, when force has largely given,
pay to craft, we feel in greater sympathy with Ulysses; "The one person
I would like to have met and talked with," Froude used to say, "was
Ulysses. How interesting it would be to have his opinion on universal
suffrage, and on a House of Parliament where Thersites is listened to as
patiently as the king of men!"
We may also concede that, in the realm of intellectual endeavor, the
natural and physical sciences should have the precedence of history. The
present is more important than the past, and those sciences which
contribute to our comfort, place within the reach of the laborer and
mechanic as common necessaries what would have been the highest luxury
to the Roman emperor or to the king of the Middle Ages, contribute to
health and the preservation of life, and by the development of railroads
make possible such a gathering as this,--these sciences, we cheerfully
admit, outrank our modest enterprise, which, in the words of Herodotus,
is "to preserve from decay the remembrance of what men have done." It
may be true, as a geologist once said, in extolling his study at the
expense of the humanities, "Rocks do not lie, although men do;" yet, on
the other hand, the historic sense, which during our century has
diffused itself widely, has invaded the domain of physical science. If
you are unfortunate enough to be ill, and consult a doctor, he
expatiates on the history of your disease. It was once my duty to attend
the Commencement exercises of a technical school, when one of the
graduates had a thesis on bridges. As he began by telling how they were
built in Julius Caesar's time, and tracing at some length the development
of the art during the period of the material prosperity of the Roman
Empire, he had little time and space left to consider their construction
at the present day. One of the most brilliant surgeons I ever knew, the
originator of a number of important surgical methods, who, being
physician as well, was remarkable in his expedients for saving life when
called to counsel in grave and apparently hopeless cases, desired to
write a book embodying his discoveries and devices, but said that the
feeling was strong within him that he must begin his work with an
account of medicine in Egypt, and trace its development down to our own
time. As he was a busy man in his profession, he lacked the leisure to
make the preliminary historical study, and his book was never written.
Men of affairs, who, taking "the present time by the top," are looked
upon as devoted to the physical and mechanical sciences, continually pay
tribute to our art. President Garfield, on his deathbed, asked one of
his most trusted Cabinet advisers, in words that become pathetic as one
thinks of the opportunities destroyed by the assassin's bullet, "Shall I
live in history?" A clever politician, who knew more of ward meetings,
caucuses, and the machinery of conventions than he did of history
books, and who was earnest for the renomination of President Arthur in
1884, said to me, in the way of clinching his argument, "That
administration will live in history." So it was, according to Amyot, in
the olden time. "Whensoever," he wrote, "the right sage and virtuous
Emperor of Rome, Alexander Severus, was to consult of any matter of
great importance, whether it concerned war or government, he always
called such to counsel as were reported to be well seen in histories."
"What," demanded Cicero of Atticus, "will history say of me six hundred
years hence?"
Proper concessions being made to poetry and the physical sciences, our
place in the field remains secure. Moreover, we live in a fortunate age;
for was there ever so propitious a time for writing history as in the
last forty years? There has been a general acquisition of the historic
sense. The methods of teaching history have so improved that they may be
called scientific. Even as the chemist and physicist, we talk of
practice in the laboratory. Most biologists will accept Haeckel's
designation of "the last forty years as the age of Darwin," for the
theory of evolution is firmly established. The publication of the Origin
of Species, in 1859, converted it from a poet's dream and philosopher's
speculation to a well-demonstrated scientific theory. Evolution,
heredity, environment, have become household words, and their
application to history has influenced every one who has had to trace the
development of a people, the growth of an institution, or the
establishment of a cause. Other scientific theories and methods have
affected physical science as potently, but none has entered so vitally
into the study of man. What hitherto the eye of genius alone could
perceive may become the common property of every one who cares to read a
dozen books. But with all of our advantages, do we write better history
than was written before the year 1859, which we may call the line of
demarcation between the old and the new? If the English, German, and
American historical scholars should vote as to who were the two best
historians, I have little doubt that Thucydides and Tacitus would have a
pretty large majority. If they were asked to name a third choice, it
would undoubtedly lie between Herodotus and Gibbon. At the meeting of
this association in Cleveland, when methods of historical teaching were
under discussion, Herodotus and Thucydides, but no others, were
mentioned as proper object lessons. What are the merits of Herodotus?
Accuracy in details, as we understand it, was certainly not one of them.
Neither does he sift critically his facts, but intimates that he will
not make a positive decision in the case of conflicting testimony. "For
myself," he wrote, "my duty is to report all that is said, but I am not
obliged to believe it all alike,--a remark which may be understood to
apply to my whole history." He had none of the wholesome skepticism
which we deem necessary in the weighing of historical evidence; on the
contrary, he is frequently accused of credulity. Nevertheless, Percy
Gardner calls his narrative nobler than that of Thucydides, and Mahaffy
terms it an "incomparable history." "The truth is," wrote Macaulay in
his diary, when he was forty-nine years old, "I admire no historians
much except Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus." Sir M. E. Grant Duff
devoted his presidential address of 1895, before the Royal Historical
Society, wholly to Herodotus, ending with the conclusion, "The fame of
Herodotus, which has a little waned, will surely wax again." Whereupon
the London Times devoted a leader to the subject. "We are concerned," it
said, "to hear, on authority so eminent, that one of the most delightful
writers of antiquity has a little waned of late in favor with the
world. If this indeed be the case, so much the worse for the world....
When Homer and Dante and Shakespeare are neglected, then will Herodotus
cease to be read."
There we have the secret of his hold upon the minds of men. He knows how
to tell a story, said Professor Hart, in the discussion previously
referred to, in Cleveland. He has "an epic unity of plan," writes
Professor Jebb. Herodotus has furnished delight to all generations,
while Polybius, more accurate and painstaking, a learned historian and a
practical statesman, gathers dust on the shelf or is read as a penance.
Nevertheless, it may be demonstrated from the historical literature of
England of our century that literary style and great power of narration
alone will not give a man a niche in the temple of history. Herodotus
showed diligence and honesty, without which his other qualities would
have failed to secure him the place he holds in the estimation of
historical scholars.
From Herodotus we naturally turn to Thucydides, who in the beginning
charms historical students by his impression of the seriousness and
dignity of his business. History, he writes, will be "found profitable
by those who desire an exact knowledge of the past as a key to the
future, which in all human probability will repeat or resemble the past.
My history is an everlasting possession, not a prize composition which
is heard and forgotten." Diligence, accuracy, love of truth, and
impartiality are merits commonly ascribed to Thucydides, and the
internal evidence of the history bears out fully the general opinion.
But, in my judgment, there is a tendency to rate, in the comparative
estimates, the Athenian too high, for the possession of these qualities;
for certainly some modern writers have possessed all of these merits in
an eminent degree. When Jowett wrote in the preface to his translation,
Thucydides "stands absolutely alone among the historians, not only of
Hellas, but of the world, in his impartiality and love of truth," he was
unaware that a son of his own university was writing the history of a
momentous period of his own country, in a manner to impugn the
correctness of that statement. When the Jowett Thucydides appeared,
Samuel R. Gardiner had published eight volumes of his history, though he
had not reached the great Civil War, and his reputation, which has since
grown with a cumulative force, was not fully established; but I have now
no hesitation in saying that the internal evidence demonstrates that in
impartiality and love of truth Gardiner is the peer of Thucydides. From
the point of view of external evidence, the case is even stronger for
Gardiner; he submits to a harder test. That he has been able to treat so
stormy, so controverted, and so well known a period as the seventeenth
century in England, with hardly a question of his impartiality, is a
wonderful tribute. In fact, in an excellent review of his work I have
seen him criticised for being too impartial. On the other hand, Grote
thinks that he has found Thucydides in error,--in the long dialogue
between the Athenian representatives and the Melians. "This dialogue,"
Grote writes, "can hardly represent what actually passed, except as to a
few general points which the historian has followed out into deductions
and illustrations, thus dramatizing the given situation in a powerful
and characteristic manner." Those very words might characterize
Shakespeare's account of the assassination of Julius Caesar, and his
reproduction of the speeches of Brutus and Mark Antony. Compare the
relation in Plutarch with the third act of the tragedy, and see how, in
his amplification of the story, Shakespeare has remained true to the
essential facts of the time. Plutarch gives no account of the speeches
of Brutus and Mark Antony, confining himself, to an allusion to the
one, and a reference to the other; but Appian of Alexandria, in his
history, has reported them. The speeches in Appian lack the force which
they have in Shakespeare, nor do they seemingly fit into the situation
as well. I have adverted to this criticism of Grote, not that I love
Thucydides less, but that I love Shakespeare more. For my part, the
historian's candid acknowledgment in the beginning has convinced me of
the essential--not the literal--truth of his accounts of speeches and
dialogues. "As to the speeches," wrote the Athenian, "which were made
either before or during the war, it was hard for me, and for others who
reported them to me, to recollect the exact words. I have therefore put
into the mouth of each speaker the sentiments proper to the occasion,
expressed as I thought he would be likely to express them; while at the
same time I endeavored, as nearly as I could, to give the general
purport of what was actually said." That is the very essence of candor.
But be the historian as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, he shall not
escape calumny. Mahaffy declares that, "although all modern historians
quote Thucydides with more confidence than they would quote the
Gospels," the Athenian has exaggerated; he is one-sided, partial,
misleading, dry, and surly. Other critics agree with Mahaffy that he has
been unjust to Cleon, and has screened Nicias from blame that was his
due for defective generalship.
We approach Tacitus with respect. We rise from reading his Annals, his
History, and his Germany with reverence. We know that we have been in
the society of a gentleman who had a high standard of morality and
honor. We feel that our guide was a serious student, a solid thinker,
and a man of the world; that he expressed his opinions and delivered his
judgments with a remarkable freedom from prejudice. He draws us to him
with sympathy. He sounds the same mournful note which we detect in
Thucydides. Tacitus deplores the folly and dissoluteness of the rulers
of his nation; he bewails the misfortunes of his country. The merits we
ascribe to Thucydides, diligence, accuracy, love of truth, impartiality,
are his. The desire to quote from Tacitus is irresistible. "The more I
meditate," he writes, "on the events of ancient and modern times, the
more I am struck with the capricious uncertainty which mocks the
calculations of men in all their transactions." Again: "Possibly there
is in all things a kind of cycle, and there may be moral revolutions
just as there are changes of seasons." "Commonplaces!" sneer the
scientific historians. True enough, but they might not have been
commonplaces if Tacitus had not uttered them, and his works had not been
read and re-read until they have become a common possession of
historical students. From a thinker who deemed the time "out of joint,"
as Tacitus obviously did, and who, had he not possessed great strength
of mind and character, might have lapsed into a gloomy pessimism, what
noble words are these: "This I regard as history's highest function: to
let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation
of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds." The modesty of the
Roman is fascinating. "Much of what I have related," he says, "and shall
have to relate, may perhaps, I am aware, seem petty trifles to
record.... My labors are circumscribed and unproductive of renown to the
author." How agreeable to place in contrast with this the prophecy of
his friend, the younger Pliny, in a letter to the historian: "I
augur--nor does my augury deceive me--that your histories will be
immortal: hence all the more do I desire to find a place in them."
To my mind, one of the most charming things in historical literature is
the praise which one great historian bestows upon another. Gibbon
speaks of "the discerning eye" and "masterly pencil of Tacitus,--the
first of historians who applied the science of philosophy to the study
of facts," "whose writings will instruct the last generations of
mankind." He has produced an immortal work, "every sentence of which is
pregnant with the deepest observations and most lively images." I
mention Gibbon, for it is more than a strong probability that in
diligence, accuracy, and love of truth he is the equal of Tacitus. A
common edition of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire is that with notes by Dean Milman, Guizot, and Dr. Smith.
Niebuhr, Villemain, and Sir James Mackintosh are each drawn upon for
criticism. Did ever such a fierce light beat upon a history? With what
keen relish do the annotators pounce upon mistakes or inaccuracies, and
in that portion of the work which ends with the fall of the Western
Empire how few do they find! Would Tacitus stand the supreme test
better? There is, so far as I know, only one case in which we may
compare his Annals with an original record. On bronze tablets found at
Lyons in the sixteenth century is engraved the same speech made by the
Emperor Claudius to the Senate that Tacitus reports. "Tacitus and the
tablets," writes Professor Jebb, "disagree hopelessly in language and in
nearly all the detail, but agree in the general line of argument."
Gibbon's work has richly deserved its life of more than one hundred
years, a period which I believe no other modern history has endured.
Niebuhr, in a course of lectures at Bonn, in 1829, said that Gibbon's
"work will never be excelled." At the Gibbon Centenary Commemoration in
London, in 1894, many distinguished men, among whom the Church had a
distinct representation, gathered together to pay honor to him who, in
the words of Frederic Harrison, had written "the most perfect book that
English prose (outside its fiction) possesses." Mommsen, prevented by
age and work from being present, sent his tribute. No one, he said,
would in the future be able to read the history of the Roman Empire
unless he read Edward Gibbon. The Times, in a leader devoted to the
subject, apparently expressed the general voice: "'Back to Gibbon' is
already, both here and among the scholars of Germany and France, the
watchword of the younger historians."
I have now set forth certain general propositions which, with time for
adducing the evidence in detail, might, I think, be established: that,
in the consensus of learned people, Thucydides and Tacitus stand at the
head of historians; and that it is not alone their accuracy, love of
truth, and impartiality which entitle them to this preeminence since
Gibbon and Gardiner among the moderns possess equally the same
qualities. What is it, then, that makes these men supreme? In venturing
a solution of this question, I confine myself necessarily to the English
translations of the Greek and Latin authors. We have thus a common
denominator of language, and need not take into account the unrivaled
precision and terseness of the Greek and the force and clearness of the
Latin. It seems to me that one special merit of Thucydides and Tacitus
is their compressed narrative,--that they have related so many events
and put so much meaning in so few words. Our manner of writing history
is really curious. The histories which cover long periods of time are
brief; those which have to do with but a few years are long. The works
of Thucydides and Tacitus are not like our compendiums of history, which
merely touch on great affairs, since want of space precludes any
elaboration. Tacitus treats of a comparatively short epoch, Thucydides
of a much shorter one: both histories are brief. Thucydides and Macaulay
are examples of extremes. The Athenian tells the story of twenty-four
years in one volume; the Englishman takes nearly five volumes of equal
size for his account of seventeen years. But it is safe to say that
Thucydides tells us as much that is worth knowing as Macaulay. One is
concise, the other is not. It is impossible to paraphrase the fine parts
of Thucydides, but Macaulay lends himself readily to such an exercise.
The thought of the Athenian is so close that he has got rid of all
redundancies of expression: hence the effort to reproduce his ideas in
other words fails. The account of the plague in Athens has been studied
and imitated, and every imitation falls short of the original not only
in vividness but in brevity. It is the triumph of art that in this and
in other splendid portions we wish more had been told. As the French
say, "the secret of wearying is to say all," and this the Athenian
thoroughly understood. Between our compendiums, which tell too little,
and our long general histories, which tell too much, are Thucydides and
Tacitus.
Again, it is a common opinion that our condensed histories lack life and
movement. This is due in part to their being written generally from a
study of second-hand--not original--materials. Those of the Athenian and
the Roman are mainly the original.
I do not think, however, that we may infer that we have a much greater
mass of materials, and thereby excuse our modern prolixity. In written
documents, of course, we exceed the ancients, for we have been flooded
with these by the art of printing. Yet any one who has investigated any
period knows how the same facts are told over and over again, in
different ways, by various writers; and if one can get beyond the mass
of verbiage and down to the really significant original material, what a
simplification of ideas there is, what a lightening of the load! I own
that this process of reduction is painful, and thereby our work is made
more difficult than that of the ancients. A historian will adapt himself
naturally to the age in which he lives, and Thucydides made use of the
matter that was at his hand. "Of the events of the war," he wrote, "I
have not ventured to speak from any chance information, nor according to
any notion of my own; I have described nothing but what I either saw
myself, or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and
particular inquiry. The task was a laborious one, because eye-witnesses
of the same occurrences gave different accounts of them, as they
remembered or were interested in the actions of one side or the other."
His materials, then, were what he saw and heard. His books and his
manuscripts were living men. Our distinguished military historian, John
C. Ropes, whose untimely death we deplore, might have written his
history from the same sort of materials; for he was contemporary with
our Civil War, and followed the daily events with intense interest. A
brother of his was killed at Gettysburg, and he had many friends in the
army. He paid at least one memorable visit to Meade's headquarters in
the field, and at the end of the war had a mass of memories and
impressions of the great conflict. He never ceased his inquiries; he
never lost a chance to get a particular account from those who took part
in battles or campaigns; and before he began his Story of the Civil War,
he too could have said, "I made the most careful and particular inquiry"
of generals and officers on both sides, and of men in civil office privy
to the great transactions. His knowledge drawn from living lips was
marvelous, and his conversation, when he poured this knowledge forth,
often took the form of a flowing narrative in an animated style. While
there are not, so far as I remember, any direct references in his two
volumes to these memories, or to memoranda of conversations which he
had with living actors after the close of the war drama, and while his
main authority is the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies,--which, no one appreciated better than he, were unique
historical materials,--nevertheless this personal knowledge trained his
judgment and gave color to his narrative.
It is pretty clear that Thucydides spent a large part of a life of about
threescore years and ten in gathering materials and writing his history.
The mass of facts which he set down or stored away in his memory must
have been enormous. He was a man of business, and had a home in Thrace
as well as in Athens, traveling probably at fairly frequent intervals
between the two places; but the main portion of the first forty years of
his life was undoubtedly spent in Athens, where, during those glorious
years of peace and the process of beautifying the city, he received the
best education a man could get. To walk about the city and view the
buildings and statues was both directly and insensibly a refining
influence. As Thucydides himself, in the funeral oration of Pericles,
said of the works which the Athenian saw around him, "the daily delight
of them banishes gloom." There was the opportunity to talk with as good
conversers as the world has ever known; and he undoubtedly saw much of
the men who were making history. There was the great theater and the
sublime poetry. In a word, the life of Thucydides was adapted to the
gathering of a mass of historical materials of the best sort; and his
daily walk, his reading, his intense thought, gave him an intellectual
grasp of the facts he has so ably handled. Of course he was a genius,
and he wrote in an effective literary style; but seemingly his natural
parts and acquired talents are directed to this: a digestion of his
materials, and a compression of his narrative without taking the vigor
out of his story in a manner I believe to be without parallel. He
devoted a life to writing a volume. His years after the peace was
broken, his career as a general, his banishment and enforced residence
in Thrace, his visit to the countries of the Peloponnesian allies with
whom Athens was at war,--all these gave him a signal opportunity to
gather materials, and to assimilate them in the gathering. We may fancy
him looking at an alleged fact on all sides, and turning it over and
over in his mind; we know that he must have meditated long on ideas,
opinions, and events; and the result is a brief, pithy narrative.
Tradition hath it that Demosthenes copied out this history eight times,
or even learned it by heart. Chatham, urging the removal of the forces
from Boston, had reason to refer to the history of Greece, and, that he
might impress it upon the lords that he knew whereof he spoke, declared,
"I have read Thucydides."
Of Tacitus likewise is conciseness a well-known merit. Living in an age
of books and libraries, he drew more from the written word than did
Thucydides; and his method of working, therefore, resembled more our
own. These are common expressions of his: "It is related by most of the
writers of those times;" I adopt the account "in which the authors are
agreed;" this account "agrees with those of the other writers." Relating
a case of recklessness of vice in Messalina, he acknowledges that it
will appear fabulous, and asserts his truthfulness thus: "But I would
not dress up my narrative with fictions, to give it an air of marvel,
rather than relate what has been stated to me or written by my seniors."
He also speaks of the authority of tradition, and tells what he
remembers "to have heard from aged men." He will not paraphrase the
eloquence of Seneca after he had his veins opened, because the very
words of the philosopher had been published; but when, a little later,
Flavius the tribune came to die, the historian gives this report of his
defiance of Nero. "I hated you," the tribune said to the emperor; "nor
had you a soldier more true to you while you deserved to be loved. I
began to hate you from the time you showed yourself the impious murderer
of your mother and your wife, a charioteer, a stage-player, an
incendiary." "I have given the very words," Tacitus adds, "because they
were not, like those of Seneca, published, though the rough and vigorous
sentiments of a soldier ought to be no less known." Everywhere we see in
Tacitus, as in Thucydides, a dislike of superfluous detail, a closeness
of thought, a compression of language. He was likewise a man of affairs,
but his life work was his historical writings, which, had we all of
them, would fill probably four moderate-sized octavo volumes.
To sum up, then: Thucydides and Tacitus are superior to the historians
who have written in our century, because, by long reflection and
studious method, they have better digested their materials and
compressed their narrative. Unity in narration has been adhered to more
rigidly. They stick closer to their subject. They are not allured into
the fascinating bypaths of narration, which are so tempting to men who
have accumulated a mass of facts, incidents, and opinions. One reason
why Macaulay is so prolix is because he could not resist the temptation
to treat events which had a picturesque side and which were suited to
his literary style; so that, as John Morley says, "in many portions of
his too elaborated history of William III. he describes a large number
of events about which, I think, no sensible man can in the least care
either how they happened, or whether indeed they happened at all or
not." If I am right in my supposition that Thucydides and Tacitus had a
mass of materials, they showed reserve and discretion in throwing a
large part of them away, as not being necessary or important to the
posterity for which they were writing. This could only be the result of
a careful comparison of their materials, and of long meditation on their
relative value. I suspect that they cared little whether a set daily
task was accomplished or not; for if you propose to write only one large
volume or four moderate-sized volumes in a lifetime, art is not too long
nor is life too short.
Another superiority of the classical historians, as I reckon, arose from
the fact that they wrote what was practically contemporaneous history.
Herodotus was born 484 B.C., and the most important and accurate part of
his history is the account of the Persian invasion which took place four
years later. The case of Thucydides is more remarkable. Born in
471 B.C., he relates the events which happened between 435 and 411, when
he was between the ages of thirty-six and sixty. Tacitus, born in
52 A.D., covered with his Annals and History the years between 14 and
96. "Herodotus and Thucydides belong to an age in which the historian
draws from life and for life," writes Professor Jebb. It is manifestly
easier to describe a life you know than one you must imagine, which is
what you must do if you aim to relate events which took place before
your own and your father's time. In many treatises which have been
written demanding an extraordinary equipment for the historian, it is
generally insisted that he shall have a fine constructive imagination;
for how can he re-create his historic period unless he live in it? In
the same treatises it is asserted that contemporary history cannot be
written correctly, for impartiality in the treatment of events near at
hand is impossible. Therefore the canon requires the quality of a great
poet, and denies that there may be had the merit of a judge in a country
where there are no great poets, but where candid judges abound. Does
not the common rating of Thucydides and Tacitus refute the dictum that
history within the memory of men living cannot be written truthfully and
fairly? Given, then, the judicial mind, how much easier to write it! The
rare quality of a poet's imagination is no longer necessary, for your
boyhood recollections, your youthful experiences, your successes and
failures of manhood, the grandfather's tales, the parent's
recollections, the conversation in society,--all these put you in vital
touch with the life you seek to describe. These not only give color and
freshness to the vivifying of the facts you must find in the record, but
they are in a way materials themselves, not strictly authentic, but of
the kind that direct you in search and verification. Not only is no
extraordinary ability required to write contemporary history, but the
labor of the historian is lightened, and Dryasdust is no longer his sole
guide. The funeral oration of Pericles is pretty nearly what was
actually spoken, or else it is the substance of the speech written out
in the historian's own words. Its intensity of feeling and the fitting
of it so well into the situation indicate it to be a living
contemporaneous document, and at the same time it has that universal
application which we note in so many speeches of Shakespeare. A few
years after our Civil War, a lawyer in a city of the middle West, who
had been selected to deliver the Memorial Day oration, came to a friend
of his in despair because he could write nothing but the commonplaces
about those who had died for the Union and for the freedom of a race
which had been uttered many times before, and he asked for advice. "Take
the funeral oration of Pericles for a model," was the reply. "Use his
words where they will fit, and dress up the rest to suit our day." The
orator was surprised to find how much of the oration could be used
bodily, and how much, with adaptation, was germane to his subject. But
slight alterations are necessary to make the opening sentence this:
"Most of those who have spoken here have commended the law-giver who
added this oration to our other customs; it seemed to them a worthy
thing that such an honor should be given to the dead who have fallen on
the field of battle." In many places you may let the speech run on with
hardly a change. "In the face of death [these men] resolved to rely upon
themselves alone. And when the moment came they were minded to resist
and suffer rather than to fly and save their lives; they ran away from
the word of dishonor, but on the battlefield their feet stood fast; and
while for a moment they were in the hands of fortune, at the height, not
of terror, but of glory, they passed away. Such was the end of these
men; they were worthy of their country."
Consider for a moment, as the work of a contemporary, the book which
continues the account of the Sicilian expedition, and ends with the
disaster at Syracuse. "In the describing and reporting whereof,"
Plutarch writes, "Thucydides hath gone beyond himself, both for variety
and liveliness of narration, as also in choice and excellent words."
"There is no prose composition in the world," wrote Macaulay, "which I
place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides.... I was delighted to
find in Gray's letters, the other day, this query to Wharton: 'The
retreat from Syracuse,--is it or is it not the finest thing you ever
read in your life?'" In the Annals of Tacitus we have an account of part
of the reign of Emperor Nero, which is intense in its interest as the
picture of a state of society that would be incredible, did we not know
that our guide was a truthful man. One rises from a perusal of this with
the trite expression, "Truth is stranger than fiction;" and one need
only compare the account of Tacitus with the romance of Quo Vadis to be
convinced that true history is more interesting than a novel. One of
the most vivid impressions I ever had came immediately after reading the
story of Nero and Agrippina in Tacitus, from a view of the statue of
Agrippina in the National Museum at Naples.[2]
It will be worth our while now to sum up what I think may be established
with sufficient time and care. Natural ability being presupposed, the
qualities necessary for a historian are diligence, accuracy, love of
truth, impartiality, the thorough digestion of his materials by careful
selection and long meditating, and the compression of his narrative into
the smallest compass consistent with the life of his story. He must also
have a power of expression suitable for his purpose. All these
qualities, we have seen, were possessed by Thucydides and Tacitus; and
we have seen furthermore that, by bringing to bear these endowments and
acquirements upon contemporary history, their success has been greater
than it would have been had they treated a more distant period. Applying
these considerations to the writing of history in America, it would seem
that all we have to gain in method, in order that when the genius
appears he shall rival the great Greek and the great Roman, is thorough
assimilation of materials and rigorous conciseness in relation. I admit
that the two things we lack are difficult to get as our own. In the
collection of materials, in criticism and detailed analysis, in the
study of cause and effect, in applying the principle of growth, of
evolution, we certainly surpass the ancients. But if we live in the age
of Darwin, we also live in an age of newspapers and magazines, when, as
Lowell said, not only great events, but a vast "number of trivial
incidents, are now recorded, and this dust of time gets in our eyes";
when distractions are manifold; when the desire "to see one's name in
print" and make books takes possession of us all. If one has something
like an original idea or a fresh combination of truisms, one obtains
easily a hearing. The hearing once had, something of a success being
made, the writer is urged by magazine editors and by publishers for
more. The good side of this is apparent. It is certainly a wholesome
indication that a demand exists for many serious books, but the evil is
that one is pressed to publish his thoughts before he has them fully
matured. The periods of fruitful meditation out of which emerged the
works of Thucydides and Tacitus seem not to be a natural incident of our
time. To change slightly the meaning of Lowell, "the bustle of our lives
keeps breaking the thread of that attention which is the material of
memory, till no one has patience to spin from it a continuous thread of
thought." We have the defects of our qualities. Nevertheless, I am
struck with the likeness between a common attribute of the Greeks and
Matthew Arnold's characterization of the Americans. Greek thought, it is
said, goes straight to the mark, and penetrates like an arrow. The
Americans, Arnold wrote, "think straight and see clear." Greek life was
adapted to meditation. American quickness and habit of taking the short
cut to the goal make us averse to the patient and elaborate method of
the ancients. In manner of expression, however, we have improved. The
Fourth of July spread-eagle oration, not uncommon even in New England in
former days, would now be listened to hardly anywhere without merriment.
In a Lowell Institute lecture in 1855 Lowell said, "In modern times, the
desire for startling expression is so strong that people hardly think a
thought is good for anything unless it goes off with a _pop_, like a
ginger-beer cork." No one would thus characterize our present writing.
Between reserve in expression and reserve in thought there must be
interaction. We may hope, therefore, that the trend in the one will
become the trend in the other, and that we may look for as great
historians in the future as in the past. The Thucydides or Tacitus of
the future will write his history from the original materials, knowing
that there only will he find the living spirit; but he will have the
helps of the modern world. He will have at his hand monographs of
students whom the professors of history in our colleges are teaching
with diligence and wisdom, and he will accept these aids with
thankfulness in his laborious search. He will have grasped the
generalizations and methods of physical science, but he must know to the
bottom his Thucydides and Tacitus. He will recognize in Homer and
Shakespeare the great historians of human nature, and he will ever
attempt, although feeling that failure is certain, to wrest from them
their secret of narration, to acquire their art of portrayal of
character. He must be a man of the world, but equally well a man of the
academy. If, like Thucydides and Tacitus, the American historian chooses
the history of his own country as his field, he may infuse his
patriotism into his narrative. He will speak of the broad acres and
their products, the splendid industrial development due to the capacity
and energy of the captains of industry; but he will like to dwell on the
universities and colleges, on the great numbers seeking a higher
education, on the morality of the people, their purity of life, their
domestic happiness. He will never be weary of referring to Washington
and Lincoln, feeling that a country with such exemplars is indeed one to
awaken envy, and he will not forget the brave souls who followed where
they led. I like to think of the Memorial Day orator, speaking thirty
years ago with his mind full of the Civil War and our Revolution, giving
utterance to these noble words of Pericles: "I would have you day by
day fix your eyes upon the greatness of your country, until you become
filled with love of her; and when you are impressed by the spectacle of
her glory, reflect that this empire has been acquired by men who knew
their duty and had the courage to do it; who in the hour of conflict had
the fear of dishonor always present to them; and who, if ever they
failed in an enterprise, would not allow their virtues to be lost to
their country, but freely gave their lives to her as the fairest
offering which they could present at her feast. They received each one
for himself a praise which grows not old, and the noblest of all
sepulchers. For the whole earth is the sepulcher of illustrious men; not
only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions in their own
country, but in foreign lands there dwells also an unwritten memorial of
them, graven not on stone, but in the hearts of men."
[1] President's Inaugural Address, American Historical Association,
Boston, December 27, 1899; printed in the Atlantic Monthly of
February, 1900.
[2] Since this essay was first printed I have seen the authenticity
of this portrait statue questioned.