FELLOW STUDENTS--I look back today to a time before the middle of
the century, when I was reading at Edinburgh and fervently
wishing to come to this University. At three colleges I applied
for admission, and, as things then were, I was refused by all.
Here, from the first, I vainly fixed my hopes, and here, in
a happier hour, after five-and-forty years, they are at last
fulfilled.
I desire, first, to speak to you of that which I may reasonably
call the Unity of Modern History, as an easy approach to questions
necessary to be met on the threshold by any one occupying this
place, which my predecessor has made so formidable to me by the
reflected lustre of his name.
You have often heard it said that Modern History is a subject to
which neither beginning nor end can be assigned. No beginning,
because the dense web of the fortunes of man is woven without a
void; because, in society as in nature, the structure is
continuous, and we can trace things back uninterruptedly, until
we dimly descry the Declaration of Independence in the forests of
Germany. No end, because, on the same principle, history made
and history making are scientifically inseparable and separately
unmeaning.
"Politics," said Sir John Seeley, "are vulgar when they are not
liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature
when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics."
Everybody perceives the sense in which this is true. For the
science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the
stream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river;
and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by
experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action
and a power that goes to the making of the future #1. In France,
such is the weight attached to the study of our own time, that
there is an appointed course of contemporary history, with
appropriate text-books #2. That is a chair which, in the progressive
division of labour by which both science and government prosper #3,
may some day be founded in this country. Meantime, we do well to
acknowledge the points at which the two epochs diverge. For the
contemporary differs from the modern in this, that many of its
facts cannot by us be definitely ascertained. The living do not
give up their secrets with the candour of the dead; one key is
always excepted, and a generation passes before we can ensure
accuracy. Common report and outward seeming are bad copies of the
reality, as the initiated know it. Even of a thing so memorable
as the war of 1870, the true cause is still obscure; much that we
believed has been scattered to the winds in the last six months,
and further revelations by important witnesses are about to
appear. The use of history turns far more on certainty than on
abundance of acquired information.
Beyond the question of certainty is the question of detachment.
The process by which principles are discovered and appropriated
is other than that by which, in practice, they are applied; and
our most sacred and disinterested convictions ought to take shape
in the tranquil regions of the air, above the tumult and the
tempest of active life #4. For a man is justly despised who has one
opinion in history and another in politics, one for abroad and
another at home, one for opposition and another for office.
History compels us to fasten on abiding issues, and rescues us
from the temporary and transient. Politics and history are
interwoven, but are not commensurate. Ours is a domain that
reaches farther than affairs of state, and is not subject to the
jurisdiction of governments. It is our function to keep in view
and to command the movement of ideas, which are not the effect
but the cause of public events #5; and even to allow some priority
to ecclesiastical history over civil, since, by reason of the
graver issues concerned, and the vital consequences of error, it
opened the way in research, and was the first to be treated by
close reasoners and scholars of the higher rank #6.
In the same manner, there is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which
always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in history as
one consistent epic #7. Yet every student ought to know that mastery
is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the
theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term
to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of
the race from which we are sprung #8. If we are to account mind not
matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that gives dignity and
grace and intellectual value to history, and its action on the
ascending life of man, then we shall not be prone to explain the
universal by the national, and civilisation by custom #9. A speech of
Antigone, a single sentence of Socrates, a few lines that were
inscribed on an Indian rock before the Second Punic War, the footsteps
of a silent yet prophetic people who dwelt by the Dead Sea, and
perished in the fall of Jerusalem, come nearer to our lives than the
ancestral wisdom of barbarians who fed their swine on the Hercynian
acorns.
For our present purpose, then, I describe as Modern History that which
begins four hundred years ago, which is marked off by an evident and
intelligible line from the time immediately preceding, and displays in
its course specific and distinctive characteristics of its own #10.
The modern age did not proceed from the medieval by normal succession,
with outward tokens of legitimate descent. Unheralded, it founded a
new order of things, under a law of innovation, sapping the ancient
reign of continuity. In those days Columbus subverted the notions of
the world, and reversed the conditions of production, wealth, and
power; in those days Machiavelli released government from the
restraint of law; Erasmus diverted the current of ancient learning
from profane into Christian channels; Luther broke the chain of
authority and tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected
an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the
time that was to come. There is the same unbound originality and
disregard for inherited sanctions in the rare philosophers as in the
discovery of Divine Right, and the intruding Imperialism of Rome. The
like effects are visible everywhere, and one generation beheld them
all. It was an awakening of new life; the world revolved in a
different orbit, determined by influences unknown before. After many
ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution of
society #11, and governed by usage and the will of masters who were in
their graves, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried
experience, and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of
incalculable change.
That forward movement divides it broadly from the older world;
and the unity of the new is manifest in the universal spirit of
investigation and discovery which did not cease to operate, and
withstood the recurring efforts of reaction, until, by the advent
of the reign of general ideas which we call the Revolution, it at
length prevailed #12. This successive deliverance and gradual
passage, for good and evil, from subordination to independence is
a phenomenon of primary import to us, because historical science
has been one of its instruments #13. If the Past has been an obstacle
and a burden, knowledge of the Past is the safest and the surest
emancipation. And the earnest search for it is one of the signs
that distinguish the four centuries of which I speak from those
that went before. The Middle Ages, which possessed good writers
of contemporary narrative, were careless and impatient of older
fact. They became content to be deceived, to live in a twilight
of fiction, under clouds of false witness, inventing according to
convenience, and glad to welcome the forger and the cheat #14. As
time went on, the atmosphere of accredited mendacity thickened,
until, in the Renaissance, the art of exposing falsehood dawned
upon keen Italian minds. It was then that History as we
understand it began to be understood, and the illustrious dynasty
of scholars arose to whom we still look both for method and
material. Unlike the dreaming prehistoric world, ours knows the
need and the duty to make itself master of the earlier times, and
to forfeit nothing of their wisdom or their warnings #15, and has
devoted its best energy and treasure to the sovereign purpose of
detecting error and vindicating entrusted truth #16.
In this epoch of full-grown history men have not acquiesced in
the given conditions of their lives. Taking little for granted
they have sought to know the ground they stand on, and the road
they travel, and the reason why. Over them, therefore, the
historian has obtained an increasing ascendancy #17. The law of
stability was overcome by the power of ideas, constantly varied
and rapidly renewed #18; ideas that give life and motion, that take
wing and traverse seas and frontiers, making it futile to pursue
the consecutive order of events in the seclusion of a separate
nationality #19. They compel us to share the existence of societies
wider than our own, to be familiar with distant and exotic types,
to hold our march upon the loftier summits, along the central
range, to live in the company of heroes, and saints, and men of
genius, that no single country could produce. We cannot afford
wantonly to lose sight of great men and memorable lives, and are
bound to store up objects for admiration as far as may be #20; for
the effect of implacable research is constantly to reduce their
number. No intellectual exercise, for instance, can be more
invigorating than to watch the working of the mind of Napoleon,
the most entirely known as well as the ablest of historic men.
In another sphere, it is the vision of a higher world to be
intimate with the character of Fenelon, the cherished model of
politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters, the witness
against one century and precursor of another, the advocate of the
poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary power,
of tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues
among men accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of
whom one enemy says that his cleverness was enough to strike
terror, and another, that genius poured in torrents from his
eyes. For the minds that are greatest and best alone furnish the
instructive examples. A man of ordinary proportion or inferior
metal knows not how to think out the rounded circle of his
thought, how to divest his will of its surroundings and to rise
above the pressure of time and race and circumstance #21, to choose
the star that guides his course, to correct, and test, and assay
his convictions by the light within #22, and, with a resolute
conscience and ideal courage, to remodel and reconstitute the
character which birth and education gave him #23.
For ourselves, if it were not the quest of the higher level and
the extended horizon, international history would be imposed by
the exclusive and insular reason that parliamentary reporting is
younger than parliaments. The foreigner has no mystic fabric in
his government, and no arcanum imperii. For him the foundations
have been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism
is accounted for as distinctly as the works of a watch. But with
our indigenous constitution, not made with hands or written upon
paper, but claiming to develop by a law of organic growth; with
our disbelief in the virtue of definitions and general principles
and our reliance on relative truths, we can have nothing
equivalent to the vivid and prolonged debates in which other
communities have displayed the inmost secrets of political
science to every man who can read. And the discussions of
constituent assemblies, at Philadelphia, Versailles and Paris, at
Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva, Frankfort and Berlin, above nearly
all, those of the most enlightened States in the American Union,
when they have recast their institutions, are paramount in the
literature of politics, and proffer treasures which at home we
have never enjoyed.
To historians the later part of their enormous subject is
precious because it is inexhaustible. It is the best to know
because it is the best known and the most explicit. Earlier
scenes stand out from a background of obscurity. We soon reach
the sphere of hopeless ignorance and unprofitable doubt. But
hundreds and even thousands of the moderns have borne testimony
against themselves, and may be studied in their private
correspondence and sentenced on their own confession. Their
deeds are done in the daylight. Every country opens its archives
and invites us to penetrate the mysteries of State. When Hallam
wrote his chapter on James II, France was the only Power whose
reports were available. Rome followed, and The Hague; and then
came the stores of the Italian States, and at last the Prussian
and the Austrian papers, and partly those of Spain. Where Hallam
and Lingard were dependent on Barillon, their successors consult
the diplomacy of ten governments. The topics indeed are few on
which the resources have been so employed that we can be content
with the work done for us and never wish it to be done over
again. Part of the lives of Luther and Frederic, a little of the
Thirty Years' War, much of the American Revolution and the French
Restoration, the early years of Richelieu and Mazarin, and a few
volumes of Mr. Gardiner, show here and there like Pacific islands
in the ocean. I should not even venture to claim for Ranke, the
real originator of the heroic study of records, and the most
prompt and fortunate of European pathfinders, that there is one
of his seventy volumes that has not been overtaken and in part
surpassed. It is through his accelerating influence mainly that
our branch of study has become progressive, so that the best
master is quickly distanced by the better pupil #24. The Vatican
archives alone, now made accessible to the world, filled 3239
cases when they were sent to France; and they are not the
richest. We are still at the beginning of the documentary age,
which will tend to make history independent of historians, to
develop learning at the expense of writing, and to accomplish a
revolution in other sciences as well.
To men in general I would justify the stress I am laying on
Modern History, neither by urging its varied wealth, nor the
rupture with precedent, nor the perpetuity of change and increase
of pace, nor the growing predominance of opinion over belief, and
of knowledge over opinion, but by the argument that it is a
narrative told of ourselves, the record of a life which is our
own, of efforts not yet abandoned to repose, of problems that
still entangle the feet and vex the hearts of men. Every part of
it is weighty with inestimable lessons that we must learn by
experience and at a great price, if we know not how to profit by
the example and teaching of those who have gone before us, in a
society largely resembling the one we live in #25. Its study fulfils
its purpose even if it only makes us wiser, without producing
books, and gives us the gift of historical thinking, which is
better than historical learning #27. It is a most powerful
ingredient in the formation of character and the training of
talent, and our historical judgments have as much to do with
hopes of heaven as public or private conduct. Convictions that
have been strained through the instances and the comparisons of
modern times differ immeasurably in solidity and force from those
which every new fact perturbs, and which are often little better
than illusions or unsifted prejudice #28.
The first of human concerns is religion, and it is the salient
feature of the modern centuries. They are signalised as the
scene of Protestant developments. Starting from a time of
extreme indifference, ignorance, and decline, they were at once
occupied with that conflict which was to rage so long, and of
which no man could imagine the infinite consequences. Dogmatic
conviction--for I shun to speak of faith in connection with many
characters of those days--dogmatic conviction rose to be the
centre of universal interest, and remained down to Cromwell the
supreme influence and motive of public policy. A time came when
the intensity of prolonged conflict, when even the energy of
antagonistic assurance abated somewhat, and the controversial
spirit began to make room for the scientific; and as the storm
subsided, and the area of settled questions emerged, much of the
dispute was abandoned to the serene and soothing touch of
historians, invested as they are with the prerogative of
redeeming the cause of religion from many unjust reproaches, and
from the graver evils of reproaches that are just. Ranke used to
say that Church interests prevailed in politics until the Seven
Years' War, and marked a phase of society that ended when the
hosts of Brandenburg went into action at Leuthen, chaunting their
Lutheran hymns #29. That bold proposition would be disputed even if
applied to the present age. After Sir Robert Peel had broken up
his party, the leaders who followed him declared that no popery
was the only basis on which it could be reconstructed #30. On the
other side may be urged that, in July 1870, at the outbreak of
the French war, the only government that insisted on the
abolition of the temporal power was Austria; and since then we
have witnessed the fall of Castelar, because he attempted to
reconcile Spain with Rome.
Soon after 1850 several of the most intelligent men in France,
struck by the arrested increase of their own population and by
the telling statistics from Further Britain, foretold the coming
preponderance of the English race. They did not foretell, what
none could then foresee, the still more sudden growth of Prussia,
or that the three most important countries of the globe would, by
the end of the century, be those that chiefly belonged to the
conquests of the Reformation. So that in Religion, as in so many
things, the product of these centuries has favoured the new
elements; and the centre of gravity, moving from the Mediterranean
nations to the Oceanic, from the Latin to the Teuton, has also
passed from the Catholic to the Protestant #31.
Out of these controversies proceeded political as well as
historical science. It was in the Puritan phase, before the
restoration of the Stuarts, that theology, blending with
politics, effected a fundamental change. The essentially English
reformation of the seventeenth century was less a struggle
between churches than between sects, often subdivided by
questions of discipline and self-regulation rather than by dogma.
The sectaries cherished no purpose or prospect of prevailing over
the nations; and they were concerned with the individual more
than with the congregation, with conventicles, not with State
churches. Their view was narrowed, but their sight was
sharpened. It appeared to them that governments and institutions
are made to pass away, like things of earth, whilst souls are
immortal; that there is no more proportion between liberty and
power than between eternity and time; that, therefore, the sphere
of enforced command ought to be restricted within fixed limits,
and that which had been done by authority, and outward discipline,
and organised violence, should be attempted by division of power,
and committed to the intellect and the conscience of free men #32.
Thus was exchanged the dominion of will over will for the dominion
of reason over reason. The true apostles of toleration are not
those who sought protection for their own beliefs, or who had none
to protect; but men to whom, irrespective of their cause, it was
a political, a moral, and a theological dogma, a question of
conscience involving both religion and policy #33. Such a man was
Socinus; and others arose in the smaller sects--the Independent
founder of the colony of Rhode Island, and the Quaker patriarch
of Pennsylvania. Much of the energy and zeal which had laboured
for authority of doctrine was employed for liberty of prophesying.
The air was filled with the enthusiasm of a new cry; but the cause
was still the same. It became a boast that religion was the
mother of freedom, that freedom was the lawful offspring of religion;
and this transmutation, this subversion of established forms of
political life by the development of religious thought, brings us
to the heart of my subject, to the significant and central feature of
the historic cycles before us. Beginning with the strongest
religious movement and the most refined despotism ever known, it
has led to the superiority of politics over divinity in the life
of nations, and terminates in the equal claim of every man to be
unhindered by man in the fulfilment of duty to God #34--a doctrine
laden with storm and havoc, which is the secret essence of the
Rights of Man, and the indestructible soul of Revolution.
When we consider what the adverse forces were, their sustained
resistance, their frequent recovery, the critical moments when
the struggle seemed for ever desperate, in 1685, in 1772, in
1808, it is no hyperbole to say that the progress of the world
towards self-government would have been arrested but for the
strength afforded by the religious motive in the seventeenth
century. And this constancy of progress, of progress in the
direction of organised and assured freedom, is the characteristic
fact of Modern History, and its tribute to the theory of
Providence #35. Many persons, I am well assured, would detect that
this is a very old story, and a trivial commonplace, and would
challenge proof that the world is making progress in aught but
intellect, that it is gaining in freedom, or that increase in
freedom is either a progress or a gain. Ranke, who was my own
master, rejected the view that I have stated #36; Comte, the master
of better men, believed that we drag a lengthening chain under
the gathered weight of the dead hand #37; and many of our recent
classics--Carlyle, Newman, Froude--were persuaded that there is
no progress justifying the ways of God to man, and that the mere
consolidation of liberty is like the motion of creatures whose
advance is in the direction of their tails. They deem that
anxious precaution against bad government is an obstruction to
good, and degrades morality and mind by placing the capable at
the mercy of the incapable, dethroning enlightened virtue for the
benefit of the average man. They hold that great and salutary
things are done for mankind by power concentrated, not by power
balanced and cancelled and dispersed, and that the whig theory,
sprung from decomposing sects, the theory that authority is
legitimate only by virtue of its checks, and that the sovereign
is dependent on the subject, is rebellion against the divine will
manifested all down the stream of time.
I state the objection not that we may plunge into the crucial
controversy of a science that is not identical with ours, but in order
to make my drift clear by the defining aid of express contradiction.
No political dogma is as serviceable to my purpose here as the
historian's maxim to do the best he can for the other side, and to
avoid pertinacity or emphasis on his own. Like the economic precept
laissez faire #38, which the eighteenth century derived from Colbert,
it has been an important, if not a final step in the making of method.
The strongest and most impressive personalities, it is true, like
Macaulay, Thiers, and the two greatest of living writers, Mommsen and
Treitschke, project their own broad shadow upon their pages. This is
a practice proper to great men, and a great man may be worth several
immaculate historians. Otherwise there is virtue in the saying that a
historian is seen at his best when he does not appear #39. Better for
us is the example of the Bishop of Oxford, who never lets us know what
he thinks of anything but the matter before him; and of his
illustrious French rival, Fustel de Coulanges, who said to an excited
audience: "Do not imagine you are listening to me; it is history
itself that speaks." #40 We can found no philosophy on the observation
of four hundred years, excluding three thousand. It would be an
imperfect and a fallacious induction. But I hope that even this
narrow and dis-edifying section of history will aid you to see that
the action of Christ who is risen on mankind whom he redeemed fails
not, but increases #41; that the wisdom of divine rule appears not in
the perfection but in the improvement of the world #42; and that
achieved liberty is the one ethical result that rests on the
converging and combined conditions of advancing civilisation #43. Then
you will understand what a famous philosopher said, that History is
the true demonstration of Religion #44.
But what do people mean who proclaim that liberty is the palm,
and the prize, and the crown, seeing that it is an idea of which
there are two hundred definitions, and that this wealth of
interpretation has caused more bloodshed than anything, except
theology? Is it Democracy as in France, or Federalism as in
America, or the national independence which bounds the Italian
view, or the reign of the fittest, which is the ideal of Germans #45?
I know not whether it will ever fall within my sphere of duty to
trace the slow progress of that idea through the chequered scenes
of our history, and to describe how subtle speculations touching
the nature of conscience promoted a nobler and more spiritual
conception of the liberty that protects it #46, until the guardian of
rights developed into the guardian of duties which are the cause
of rights #47, and that which had been prized as the material
safeguard for treasures of earth became sacred as security for
things that are divine. All that we require is a workday key to
history, and our present need can be supplied without pausing to
satisfy philosophers. Without inquiring how far Sarasa or
Butler, Kant or Vinet, is right as to the infallible voice of God
in man, we may easily agree in this, that where absolutism
reigned, by irresistible arms, concentrated possessions,
auxiliary churches, and inhuman laws, it reigns no more; that
commerce having risen against land, labour against wealth, the
State against the forces dominant in society #48, the division of
power against the State, the thought of individuals against the
practice of ages, neither authorities, nor minorities, nor
majorities can command implicit obedience; and, where there has
been long and arduous experience, a rampart of tried conviction
and accumulated knowledge, where there is a fair level of general
morality, education, courage, and self-restraint, there, if there
only, a society may be found that exhibits the condition of life
towards which, by elimination of failures, the world has been
moving through the allotted space #50. You will know it by outward
signs: Representation, the extinction of slavery, the reign of
opinion, and the like; better still by less apparent evidences:
the security of the weaker groups #51 and the liberty of conscience,
which, effectually secured, secures the rest.
Here we reach a point at which my argument threatens to abut on a
contradiction. If the supreme conquests of society are won more often
by violence than by lenient arts, if the trend and drift of things is
towards convulsions and catastrophes #52, if the world owes religious
liberty to the Dutch Revolution, constitutional government to the
English, federal republicanism to the American, political equality to
the French and its successors #53, what is to become of us, docile and
attentive students of the absorbing Past? The triumph of the
Revolutionist annuls the historian #54. By its authentic exponents,
Jefferson and Sieyes, the Revolution of the last century repudiates
history. Their followers renounced acquaintance with it, and were
ready to destroy its records and to abolish its inoffensive
professors. But the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that
this was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and
indirectly, by process of development and by process of reaction, an
impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor
of civilisation than ever before, and a movement began in the world of
minds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of ancient
learning #55. The dispensation under which we live and labour consists
first in the recoil from the negative spirit that rejected the law of
growth, and partly in the endeavour to classify and adjust the
Revolution, and to account for it by the natural working of historic
causes. The Conservative line of writers, under the name of the
Romantic or Historical School, had its seat in Germany, looked upon
the Revolution as an alien episode, the error of an age, a disease to
be treated by the investigation of its origin, and strove to unite the
broken threads and to restore the normal conditions of organic
evolution. The Liberal School, whose home was France, explained and
justified the Revolution as a true development, and the ripened fruit
of all history #56. These are the two main arguments of the generation to
which we owe the notion and the scientific methods that make history
so unlike what it was to the survivors of the last century.
Severally, the innovators were not superior to the men of old.
Muratori was as widely read, Tillemont as accurate, Liebnitz as able,
Freret as acute, Gibbon as masterly in the craft of composite
construction. Nevertheless, in the second quarter of this century, a
new era began for historians.
I would point to three things in particular, out of many, which
constitute the amended order. Of the incessant deluge of new and
unsuspected matter I need say little. For some years, the secret
archives of the papacy were accessible at Paris; but the time was
not ripe, and almost the only man whom they availed was the
archivist himself #57. Towards 1830 the documentary studies began on
a large scale, Austria leading the way. Michelet, who claims,
towards 1836, to have been the pioneer #58, was preceded by such
rivals as Mackintosh, Bucholtz, and Mignet. A new and more
productive period began thirty years later, when the war of 1859
laid open the spoils of Italy. Every country in succession has
now been allowed the exploration of its records, and there is
more fear of drowning than of drought. The result has been that
a lifetime spent in the largest collection of printed books would
not suffice to train a real master of modern history. After he
had turned from literature to sources, from Burner to Pocock,
from Macaulay to Madame Campana, from Thiers to the interminable
correspondence of the Bonapartes, he would still feel instant
need of inquiry at Venice or Naples, in the Ossuna library or at
the Hermitage #59.
These matters do not now concern us. For our purpose, the main thing
to learn is not the art of accumulating material, but the sublimer art
of investigating it, of discerning truth from falsehood and certainty
from doubt. It is by solidity of criticism more than by the plenitude
of erudition, that the study of history strengthens, and straightens,
and extends the mind #60. And the accession of the critic in the place
of the indefatigable compiler, of the artist in coloured narrative,
the skilled limner of character, the persuasive advocate of good, or
other, causes, amounts to a transfer of government, to a change of
dynasty, in the historic realm. For the critic is one who, when he
lights on an interesting statement, begins by suspecting it. He
remains in suspense until he has subjected his authority to three
operations. First, he asks whether he has read the passage as the
author wrote it. For the transcriber, and the editor, and the
official or officious censor on the top of the editor, have played
strange tricks, and have much to answer for. And if they are not to
blame, it may turn out that the author wrote his book twice over, that
you can discover the first jet, the progressive variations, things
added, and things struck out. Next is the question where the writer
got his information. If from a previous writer, it can be
ascertained, and the inquiry has to be repeated. If from unpublished
papers, they must be traced, and when the fountain-head is reached, or
the track disappears, the question of veracity arises. The
responsible writer's character, his position, antecedents, and
probable motives have to be examined into; and this is what, in a
different and adapted sense of the word, may be called the higher
criticism, in comparison with the servile and often mechanical work of
pursuing statements to their root. For a historian has to be treated
as a witness, and not believed unless his sincerity is established #61.
The maxim that a man must be presumed to be innocent until his guilt
is proved, was not made for him.
For us, then, the estimate of authorities, the weighing of
testimony, is more meritorious than the potential discovery of
new matter #62. And modern history, which is the widest field of
application, is not the best to learn our business in; for it is
too wide, and the harvest has not been winnowed as in antiquity,
and further on to the Crusades. It is better to examine what has
been done for questions that are compact and circumscribed, such
as the sources of Plutarch's Pericles, the two tracts on Athenian
government, the origin of the epistle to Diognetus, the date of
the life of St. Antony; and to learn from Schwegler how this
analytical work began. More satisfying because more decisive has
been the critical treatment of the medieval writers, parallel
with the new editions, on which incredible labour has been
lavished, and of which we have no better examples than the
prefaces of Bishop Stubbs. An important event in this series was
the attack on Dino Compagni, which, for the sake of Dante, roused
the best Italian scholars to a not unequal contest. When we are
told that England is behind the Continent in critical faculty, we
must admit that this is true as to quantity, not as to quality of
work. As they are no longer living, I will say of two Cambridge
professors, Lightfoot and Hort, that they were critical scholars
whom neither Frenchman nor German has surpassed.
The third distinctive note of the generation of writers who dug
so deep a trench between history as known to our grandfathers and
as it appears to us, is their dogma of impartiality. To an
ordinary man the word means no more than justice. He considers
that he may proclaim the merits of his own religion, of his
prosperous and enlightened country, of his political persuasion,
whether democracy, or liberal monarchy, or historic conservatism,
without transgression or offence, so long as he is fair to the
relative, though inferior, merits of others, and never treats men
as saints or as rogues for the side they take. There is no
impartiality, he would say, like that of a hanging judge. The
men, who, with the compass of criticism in their hands, sailed
the uncharted sea of original research proposed a different view.
History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents,
not on opinions. They had their own notion of truthfulness,
based on the exceeding difficulty of finding truth, and the still
greater difficulty of impressing it when found. They thought it
possible to write, with so much scruple, and simplicity, and
insight, as to carry along with them every man of good will, and,
whatever his feelings, to compel its assent. Ideas which, in
religion and in politics, are truths, in history are forces. They
must be respected; they must not be affirmed. By dint of a
supreme reserve, by much self-control, by a timely and discreet
indifference, by secrecy in the matter of the black cap, history
might be lifted above contention, and made an accepted tribunal,
and the same for all #63. If men were truly sincere, and delivered
judgment by no canons but those of evident morality, then Julian
would be described in the same terms by Christian and pagan,
Luther by Catholic and Protestant, Washington by Whig and Tory,
Napoleon by patriotic Frenchman and patriotic German #64.
I speak of this school with reverence, for the good it has done, by
the assertion of historic truth and of its legitimate authority over
the minds of men. It provides a discipline which every one of us does
well to undergo, and perhaps also well to relinquish. For it is not
the whole truth. Lanfrey's essay on Carnot, Chuquet's wars of the
Revolution, Ropes's military histories, Roget's Geneva in the time of
Calvin, will supply you with examples of a more robust impartiality
than I have described. Renan calls it the luxury of an opulent and
aristocratic society, doomed to vanish in an age of fierce and sordid
striving. In our universities it has a magnificent and appointed
refuge; and to serve its cause, which is sacred, because it is the
cause of truth and honour, we may import a profitable lesson from the
highly unscientific region of public life. There a man does not take
long to find out that he is opposed by some who are abler and better
than himself. And, in order to understand the cosmic force and the
true connection of ideas, it is a source of power, and an excellent
school of principle, not to rest until, by excluding the fallacies,
the prejudices, the exaggerations which perpetual contention and the
consequent precautions breed, we have made out for our opponents a
stronger and more impressive case than they present themselves #65.
Excepting one to which we are coming before I release you, there is
no precept less faithfully observed by historians.
Ranke is the representative of the age which instituted the
modern study of History. He taught it to be critical, to be
colourless, and to be new. We meet him at every step, and he
has done more for us than any other man. There are stronger
books than any one of his, and some may have surpassed him in
political, religious, philosophic insight, in vividness of the
creative imagination, in originality, elevation, and depth of
thought; but by the extent of important work well executed, by
his influence on able men, and by the amount of knowledge which
mankind receives and employs with the stamp of his mind upon it,
he stands without a rival. I saw him last in 1877, when he was
feeble, sunken, and almost blind, and scarcely able to read or
write. He uttered his farewell with kindly emotion, and I feared
that the next I should hear of him would be the news of his
death. Two years later he began a Universal History, which is
not without traces of weakness, but which, composed after the age
of 83, and carried, in seventeen volumes, far into the Middle
Ages, brings to a close the most astonishing career in literature.
His course had been determined, in early life, by Quentin
Durward. The shock of the discovery that Scott's Lewis the
Eleventh was inconsistent with the original in Commynes made him
resolve that his object thenceforth should be above all things to
follow, without swerving, and in stern subordination and
surrender, the lead of his authorities. He decided effectually
to repress the poet, the patriot, the religious or political
partisan, to sustain no cause, to banish himself from his books,
and to write nothing that would gratify his own feelings or
disclose his private convictions #66. When a strenuous divine, who,
like him, had written on the Reformation, hailed him as a
comrade, Ranke repelled his advances. "You," he said, "are in the
first place a Christian: I am in the first place a historian.
There is a gulf between us." #67 He was the first eminent writer who
exhibited what Michelet calls _le desinteressement des morts_. It
was a moral triumph for him when he could refrain from judging,
show that much might be said on both sides, and leave the rest to
Providence #68. He would have felt sympathy with the two famous
London physicians of our day, of whom it is told that they could
not make up their minds on a case and reported dubiously. The
head of the family insisted on a positive opinion. They answered
that they were unable to give one, but he might easily find fifty
doctors who could.
Niebuhr had pointed out that chroniclers who wrote before the
invention of printing generally copied one predecessor at a time,
and knew little about sifting or combining authorities. The
suggestion became luminous in Ranke's hands, and with his light
and dexterous touch he scrutinised and dissected the principal
historians, from Machiavelli to the _Memoires d'un Homme d'Etat_,
with a rigour never before applied to moderns. But whilst
Niebuhr dismissed the traditional story, replacing it with a
construction of his own, it was Ranke's mission to preserve, not
to undermine, and to set up masters whom, in their proper sphere,
he could obey. The many excellent dissertations in which he
displayed this art, though his successors in the next generation
matched his skill and did still more thorough work, are the best
introduction from which we can learn the technical process by
which within living memory the study of modern history has been
renewed. Ranke's contemporaries, weary of his neutrality and
suspense, and of the useful but subordinate work that was done by
beginners who borrowed his wand, thought that too much was made
of these obscure preliminaries which a man may accomplish for
himself, in the silence of his chamber, with less demand on the
attention of the public #69. That may be reasonable in men who are
practised in these fundamental technicalities. We, who have to
learn them, must immerse ourselves in the study of the great
examples.
Apart from what is technical, method is only the reduplication of
common sense, and is best acquired by observing its use by the
ablest men in every variety of intellectual employment #70. Bentham
acknowledged that he learned less from his own profession than
from writers like Linnaeus and Cullen; and Brougham advised the
student of Law to begin with Dante. Liebig described his Organic
Chemistry as an application of ideas found in Mill's Logic, and a
distinguished physician, not to be named lest he should overhear
me, read three books to enlarge his medical mind; and they were
Gibbon, Grote, and Mill. He goes on to say, "An educated man
cannot become so on one study alone, but must be brought under
the influence of natural, civil, and moral modes of thought." #71
I quote my colleague's golden words in order to reciprocate them.
If men of science owe anything to us, we may learn much from them
that is essential #72. For they can show how to test proof, how to
secure fulness and soundness in induction, how to restrain and to
employ with safety hypothesis and analogy. It is they who hold
the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error
ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails #73.
Theirs is the logic of discovery #74, the demonstration of the
advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which as the
earthly wants and passions of men remain almost unchanged, are
the charter of progress and the vital spark in history. And they
often give us invaluable counsel when they attend to their own
subjects and address their own people. Remember Darwin taking
note only of those passages that raised difficulties in his way;
the French philosopher complaining that his work stood still,
because he found no more contradicting facts; Baer, who thinks
error treated thoroughly nearly as remunerative as truth, by the
discovery of new objections; for, as Sir Robert Ball warns us, it
is by considering objections that we often learn #75. Faraday
declares that "in knowledge, that man only is to be condemned and
despised who is not in a state of transition." And John Hunter
spoke for all of us when he said: "Never ask me what I have said
or what I have written; but if you will ask me what my present
opinions are, I will tell you."
From the first years of the century we have been quickened and
enriched by contributors from every quarter. The jurists brought
us that law of continuous growth which has transformed history
from a chronicle of casual occurrences into the likeness of
something organic #76. Towards 1820 divines began to recast their
doctrines on the lines of development, of which Newman said, long
after, that evolution had come to confirm it #77. Even the
Economists, who were practical men, dissolved their science into
liquid history, affirming that it is not an auxiliary, but the
actual subject-matter of their inquiry #78. Philosophers claim that,
as early as 1804, they began to bow the metaphysical neck beneath
the historical yoke. They taught that philosophy is only the
amended sum of all philosophies, that systems pass with the age
whose impress they bear #79, that the problem is to focus the rays of
wandering but extant truth, and that history is the source of
philosophy, if not quite a substitute for it #80. Comte begins a
volume with the words that the preponderance of history over
philosophy was the characteristic of the time he lived in. Since
Cuvier first recognised the conjunction between the course of
inductive discovery and the course of civilisation #82, science had
its share in saturating the age with historic ways of thought,
and subjecting all things to that influence for which the
depressing names historicism and historical-mindedness have been
devised.
There are certain faults which are corrigible mental defects on
which I ought to say a few denouncing words, because they are
common to us all. First: the want of an energetic understanding
of the sequence and real significance of events, which would be
fatal to a practical politician, is ruin to a student of history,
who is the politician with his face turned backwards #83. It is
playing at study, to see nothing but the unmeaning and unsuggestive
surface, as we generally do. Then we have a curious proclivity
to neglect, and by degrees to forget, what has been certainly known.
An instance or two will explain my idea. The most popular English
writer relates how it happened in his presence that the title of
Tory was conferred upon the Conservative party. For it was an
opprobrious name at the time, applied to men for whom the Irish
Government offered head-money; so that if I have made too sure
of progress, I may at least complacently point to this instance
of our mended manners. One day, Titus Oates lost his temper
with the men who refused to believe him, and, after looking
about for a scorching imprecation, he began to call them Tories
#84. The name remained; but its origin, attested by Defoe,
dropped out of common memory, as if one party were ashamed of
their godfather, and the other did not care to be identified
with his cause and character. You all know, I am sure,
the story of the news of Trafalgar, and how, two days after it
had arrived, Mr. Pitt, drawn by an enthusiastic crowd, went
to dine in the city. When they drank the health of the minister
who had saved his country, he declined the praise. "England,"
he said, "has saved herself by her own energy; and I hope that
after having saved herself by her energy, she will save Europe
by her example." In 1814, when this hope had been realised,
the last speech of the great orator was remembered, and a medal
was struck upon which the whole sentence was engraved, in four
words of compressed Latin: _Seipsam virtute, Europam exemplo_.
Now it was just at the time of his last appearance in public that
Mr. Pitt heard of the overwhelming success of the French in
Germany, and of the Austrian surrender at Ulm. His friends
concluded that the contest on land was hopeless, and that it was
time to abandon the Continent to the conqueror, and to fall back
upon our new empire of the sea. Pitt did not agree with them.
He said that Napoleon would meet with a check whenever he
encountered a national resistance; and he declared that Spain was
the place for it, and that then England would intervene #85. General
Wellesley, fresh from India, was present. Ten years later, when
he had accomplished that which Pitt had seen in the lucid
prescience of his last days, he related at Paris what I scarcely
hesitate to call the most astounding and profound prediction in
all political history, where such things have not been rare.
I shall never again enjoy the opportunity of speaking my thoughts
to such an audience as this, and on so privileged an occasion a
lecturer may well be tempted to bethink himself whether he knows
of any neglected truth, any cardinal proposition, that might
serve as his selected epigraph, as a last signal, perhaps even as
a target. I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are
the registered property of every school; that is to say--Learn as
much by writing as by reading; be not content with the best book;
seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and
things apart; guard against the prestige of great names #86; see that
your judgments are your own, and do not shrink from disagreement;
no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to
actions #87; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause or the
weakness of the good #88; never be surprised by the crumbling of an
idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best
and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice #89, and
study problems in preference to periods; for instance: the
derivation of Luther, the scientific influence of Bacon, the
predecessors of Adam Smith, the medieval masters of Rousseau, the
consistency of Burke, the identity of the first Whig. Most of
this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement.
But the weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never
to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of
rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your
own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the
undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong #90.
The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is
perpetual. At every step we are met by arguments which go to
excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the
just man to the level of the reprobate. The men who plot to
baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history
what it has become. They set up the principle that only a
foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of
the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the
ideas of the present #91.
The mission of that school was to make distant times, and
especially the Middle Ages, then most distant of all, intelligible
and acceptable to a society issuing from the eighteenth century.
There were difficulties in the way; and among others this, that,
in the first fervour of the Crusades, the men who took the Cross,
after receiving communion, heartily devoted the day to the
extermination of Jews. To judge them by a fixed standard, to call
them sacrilegious fanatics or furious hypocrites, was to yield
a gratuitous victory to Voltaire. It became a rule of policy
to praise the spirit when you could not defend the deed. So that
we have no common code; our moral notions are always fluid;
and you must consider the times, the class from which men sprang,
the surrounding influences, the masters in their schools,
the preachers in their pulpits, the movement they obscurely obeyed,
and so on, until responsibility is merged in numbers, and not
a culprit is left for execution #92. A murderer was no criminal
if he followed local custom, if neighbours approved, if he was
encouraged by official advisers or prompted by just authority,
if he acted for the reason of state or the pure love of religion,
or if he sheltered himself behind the complicity of the Law.
The depression of morality was flagrant; but the motives were
those which have enabled us to contemplate with distressing
complacency the secret of unhallowed lives. The code that is
greatly modified by time and place, will vary according to the
cause. The amnesty is an artifice that enables us to make
exceptions, to tamper with weights and measures, to deal unequal
justice to friends and enemies.
It is associated with that philosophy which Cato attributes to
the gods. For we have a theory which justifies Providence by the
event, and holds nothing so deserving as success, to which there
can be no victory in a bad cause; prescription and duration
legitimate #93; and whatever exists is right and reasonable; and as
God manifests His will by that which He tolerates, we must
conform to the divine decree by living to shape the future after
the ratified image of the past #94. Another theory, less confidently
urged, regards History as our guide, as much by showing errors to
evade as examples to pursue. It is suspicious of illusions in
success, and, though there may be hope of ultimate triumph for
what is true, if not by its own attraction, by the gradual
exhaustion of error, it admits no corresponding promise for what
is ethically right. It deems the canonisation of the historic
past more perilous than ignorance or denial, because it would
perpetuate the reign of sin and acknowledge the sovereignty of
wrong, and conceives it the part of real greatness to know how to
stand and fall alone, stemming, for a lifetime, the contemporary
flood #95.
Ranke relates, without adornment, that William III ordered the
extirpation of a Catholic clan, and scouts the faltering excuse
of his defenders. But when he comes to the death and character
of the international deliverer, Glencoe is forgotten, the
imputation of murder drops, like a thing unworthy of notice #96.
Johannes Mueller, a great Swiss celebrity, writes that the
British Constitution occurred to somebody, perhaps to Halifax.
This artless statement might not be approved by rigid lawyers as
a faithful and felicitous indication of the manner of that
mysterious growth of ages, from occult beginnings, that was never
profaned by the invading wit of man #97; but it is less grotesque
than it appears. Lord Halifax was the most original writer of
political tracts in the pamphleteering crowd between Harrington
and Bolingbroke; and in the Exclusion struggle he produced a
scheme of limitations which, in substance, if not in form,
foreshadowed the position of the monarchy in the later Hanoverian
reigns. Although Halifax did not believe in the plot #98, he
insisted that innocent victims should be sacrificed to content
the multitude. Sir William Temple writes: "We only disagreed in
one point, which was the leaving some priests to the law upon the
accusation of being priests only, as the House of Commons had
desired; which I thought wholly unjust. Upon this point Lord
Halifax and I had so sharp a debate at Lord Sunderland's
lodgings, that he told me, if I would not concur in points which
were so necessary for the people's satisfaction, he would tell
everybody I was a Papist. And upon his affirming that the plot
must be handled as if it were true, whether it were so or no, in
those points that were so generally believed." In spite of this
accusing passage, Macaulay, who prefers Halifax to all the
statesmen of his age, praises him for his mercy: "His dislike of
extremes, and a forgiving and compassionate temper which seems to
have been natural to him, preserved him from all participation in
the worst crimes of his time."
If, in our uncertainty, we must often err, it may be sometimes
better to risk excess in rigour than in indulgence, for then at
least we do no injury by loss of principle. As Bayle has said,
it is more probable that the secret motives of an indifferent
action are bad than good #99; and this discouraging conclusion does
not depend upon theology, for James Mozley supports the sceptic
from the other flank, with all the artillery of the Tractarian
Oxford. "A Christian," he says, "is bound by his very creed to
suspect evil, and cannot release himself.... He sees it where
others do not; his instinct is divinely strengthened; his eye is
supernaturally keen; he has a spiritual insight, and senses
exercised to discern.... He owns the doctrine of original sin;
that doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against
appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and
prepares him for recognising anywhere what he knows to be
everywhere." #100 There is a popular saying of Madame de Stael, that
we forgive whatever we really understand. The paradox has been
judiciously pruned by her descendant, the Duke de Broglie, in the
words: "Beware of too much explaining, lest we end by too much
excusing." #101 History, says Froude, does teach that right and wrong
are real distinctions. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds
rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of
eternity #102. And if there are moments when we may resist the
teaching of Froude, we have seldom the chance of resisting when
he is supported by Mr. Goldwin Smith: "A sound historical
morality will sanction strong measures in evil times; selfish
ambition, treachery, murder, perjury, it will never sanction in
the worst of times, for these are the things that make times
evil--Justice has been justice, mercy has been mercy, honour has
been honour, good faith has been good faith, truthfulness has
been truthfulness from the beginning." The doctrine that, as Sir
Thomas Browne says, morality is not ambulatory #103, is expressed as
follows by Burke, who, when true to himself, is the most
intelligent of our instructors: "My principles enable me to form
my judgment upon men and actions in history, just as they do in
common life; and not formed out of events and characters, either
present or past. History is a preceptor of prudence, not of
principles. The principles of true politics are those of
morality enlarged; and I neither now do, nor ever will admit of
any other." #104
Whatever a man's notions of these later centuries are, such, in
the main, the man himself will be. Under the name of History,
they cover the articles of his philosophic, his religious, and
his political creed #105. They give his measure; they denote his
character: and, as praise is the shipwreck of historians, his
preferences betray him more than his aversions. Modern History
touches us so nearly, it is so deep a question of life and death,
that we are bound to find our own way through it, and to owe our
insight to ourselves. The historians of former ages, unapproachable
for us in knowledge and in talent, cannot be our limit. We have
the power to be more rigidly impersonal, disinterested and just
than they; and to learn from undisguised and genuine records to
look with remorse upon the past, and to the future with assured
hope of better things; bearing this in mind, that if we lower
our standard in History, we cannot uphold it in Church or State.