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HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
by
WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY
Longmans, Green, and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London
New York, Bombay, and Calcutta
1908
All rights reserved
CONTENTS
PAGE
THOUGHTS ON HISTORY 1
THE POLITICAL VALUE OF HISTORY 21
THE EMPIRE: ITS VALUE AND ITS GROWTH 43
IRELAND IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY 68
FORMATIVE INFLUENCES 90
CARLYLE'S MESSAGE TO HIS AGE 104
ISRAEL AMONG THE NATIONS 116
MADAME DE STAËL 131
THE PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE OF SIR ROBERT PEEL 151
THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF DERBY 200
MR. HENRY REEVE 242
DEAN MILMAN 249
QUEEN VICTORIA AS A MORAL FORCE 275
OLD-AGE PENSIONS 298
INDEX 319
The Essays 'Thoughts on History,' 'Formative Influences,'
'Madame de Staël,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age
Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the
_Forum_--the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing
History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in the _North
American Review_. Those on Sir Robert Peel, Mr. Henry Reeve,
and Dean Milman were written for the _Edinburgh Review_. The
Essay on 'Queen Victoria as a Moral Force' appeared first in
the _Pall Mall Magazine_; 'Carlyle's Message to His Age' in
the _Contemporary Review_. 'The Political Value of History'
was a presidential address delivered before the Birmingham and
Midland Institute; 'The Empire,' an inaugural address
delivered at the Imperial Institute; and the 'Memoir of the
Fifteenth Earl of Derby' was originally prefixed to the
volumes of his speeches and addresses.
HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL ESSAYS
THOUGHTS ON HISTORY
I do not propose in this paper to enter into any general inquiry about
the best method of writing history. Such inquiries appear to me to be
of no real value, for there are many different kinds of history which
should be written in many different ways. A diplomatic, a military, or
a parliamentary history, dealing with a short period or a particular
episode, must evidently be treated in a very different spirit from an
extended history where the object of the historian should be to
describe the various aspects of the national life, and to trace
through long periods of time the ultimate causes of national progress
and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social
and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their
different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that
has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for
the most important part of his task is to explain the long course of
events that prepared and produced the catastrophe; while a writer who
treats of more normal times will do well to plunge rapidly into his
theme.
Historians, too, differ widely in their special talents, and these
talents are never altogether combined. The power of vividly realising
and portraying men, or societies or modes of thought that have long
since passed away; the power of arranging and combining great
multitudes of various facts; the power of judging with discrimination,
accuracy, and impartiality conflicting arguments or evidence; the
power of tracing through the long course of events the true chain of
cause and effect, selecting the facts that are most valuable and
significant and explaining the relation between general causes and
particular effects, are all very different and belong to different
types of mind. It is idle to expect a writer with the gifts of a
Clarendon, a Kinglake, or a Froude to write history in the spirit of a
Hallam or a Grote. Writers who are eminently distinguished for wide,
patient, and accurate research have sometimes little power either of
describing or interpreting the facts which they collect. All that can
be said with any profit is that each writer will do best if he follows
the natural bent of his genius, and that he should select those kinds
or periods of history in which his special gifts have most scope and
the qualities in which he is deficient are least needed.
It is the fashion of a modern school of historical writers to deplore
what they call the intrusion of literature into history. History, in
their judgment, should be treated as science and not as literature,
and the kind of intellect they most value is not unlike that of a
skilful and well-trained attorney. To collect documents with industry;
to compare, classify, interpret and estimate them is the main work of
the historian. It is no doubt true that there are some fields of
history where the primary facts are so little known, so much contested
or so largely derived from recondite manuscript sources, that a
faithful historian will be obliged in justice to his readers to
sacrifice both proportion and artistic charm to the supreme importance
of analysing evidence, reproducing documents and accumulating proofs;
but in general the depreciation of the literary element in history
seems to me essentially wrong. It is only necessary to recall the
names of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Livy and Tacitus, of Gibbon and
Macaulay, and of the long line of great masters of style who have
related the annals of France. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted
that there is no subject in which rarer literary qualities are more
demanded than in the higher forms of history. The art of portraying
characters; of describing events; of compressing, arranging, and
selecting great masses of heterogeneous facts, of conducting many
different chains of narrative without confusion or obscurity; of
preserving in a vast and complicated subject the true proportion and
relief, will tax the highest literary skill, and no one who does not
possess some, at least, of these gifts in an unusual measure is likely
to attain a permanent place among the great masters of history. It is
a misfortune when some stirring and momentous period falls into the
hands of the mere compiler, for he occupies the ground and a really
great writer will hesitate to appropriate and plagiarise the materials
his predecessor has collected. There are books of great research and
erudition which one would have wished to have been all re-written by
some writer of real genius who could have given order, meaning and
vividness to a mere chaos of accurate and laboriously sifted learning.
The great prominence which it is now the fashion to ascribe to the
study of diplomatic documents, is very apt to destroy the true value
and perspective of history. It is always the temptation of those who
are dealing with manuscript materials to overrate the small personal
details which they bring to light, and to give them much more than
their due space in their narrative. This tendency the new school
powerfully encourages. It is quite right that the treasure-houses of
diplomatic correspondence which have of late years been thrown open
should be explored and sifted, but history written chiefly from these
materials, though it has its own importance, is not likely to be
distinguished either by artistic form or by philosophical value. Those
who are immersed in these studies are very apt to overrate their
importance and the part which diplomacy and statesmanship have borne
in the great movement of human affairs.
A true and comprehensive history should be the life of a nation. It
should describe it in its larger and more various aspects. It should
be a study of causes and effects, of distant as well as proximate
causes, and of the large, slow and permanent evolution of things. It
should include, as Buckle and Macaulay saw, the social, the
industrial, the intellectual life of the nation as well as mere
political changes, and it should be pre-eminently marked by a true
perspective dealing with subjects at a length proportioned to their
real importance. All this requires a powerful and original intellect
quite different from that of a mere compiler. It requires too, in a
high degree, the kind of imagination which enables a man to reproduce
not only the acts but the feelings, the ideals, the modes of thought
and life of a distant past, and pierce through the actions and
professions of men to their real characters. Insight into character is
one of the first requisites of a historian. It is therefore, much to
be desired that he should possess a wide knowledge of the world, the
knowledge of different types of character, foreign as well as English,
which travel and society and practical experience of business can
give, and it will also be of no small advantage to him if he has
passed through more than one intellectual or religious phase, widening
the area of his appreciation and realisations. He should also have
enough of the dramatic element to enable him to throw himself into
ways of reasoning or feeling very different from his own. One of the
most valuable of all forms of historical imagination is that which
enables a writer to place himself in the point of view of the best men
on different sides, and to bring out the full sense of opposing
arguments. All these gifts or qualities are never in a high degree
united, but they are all essential to a great historian, and a true
school of history should widen instead of narrowing our conception of
it.
The supreme virtue of the historian is truthfulness, and it may be
violated in many different degrees. The worst form is when a writer
deliberately falsifies facts or deliberately excludes from his picture
qualifying circumstances. But there are other and much more subtle
ways in which party spirit continually and often quite unconsciously
distorts history. All history is necessarily a selection of facts, and
a writer who is animated by a strong sympathy with one side of a
question or a strong desire to prove some special point will be much
tempted in his selection to give an undue prominence to those that
support his view, or, even where neither facts nor arguments are
suppressed, to give a party character to his work by an unfair
distribution of lights and shades. The strong and vivid epithets are
chiefly reserved for the good or bad deeds on one side, the vague,
general and comparatively colourless epithets for the corresponding
deeds on the other side; and in this way very similar facts are
brought before the reader with such different degrees of illumination
and relief that they make a wholly different impression on his mind.
In the history of Macaulay this defect may, I think, be especially
traced. The characteristic defect of that great and in most respects
admirable writer, both as historian and artist, was the singular
absence of graduation in his mind. The neutral tints which are
essential to the accurate shading of character seemed almost wanting,
and a love of strong contrasted lights and shades, coupled with his
supreme command of powerful epithets, continually misled him. But no
attentive reader can fail to observe how unequally those epithets are
distributed and how clearly this inequality discloses the strong bias
under which he wrote.
The truth of an historical picture lies mainly in its judicious and
accurate shading, and it is this art which the historian should
especially cultivate. He will scarcely do so with success unless it
becomes to him not merely a matter of duty, but also a pleasure and a
pride. The kind of interest which he takes in his narrative should be
much less that of a politician and an advocate than of a painter, who,
now darkening and now lightening the picture, seeks by many delicate
touches to catch with exact fidelity the tone and hue of the object he
represents.
The degree of certainty that it is possible to attain in history
varies greatly in different departments. The growth of institutions
and laws, military events, changes in manners and in creeds, can be
described with much confidence, and although it is more difficult to
depict the inner moral life of nations, the influences that form their
characters and prepare them for greatness or decay, yet when the
materials for our induction are sufficiently large this field of
history may be studied with great profit. Diplomatic history and the
more secret springs of political history can only be fully disclosed
when the archives relating to them have been explored and when the
confidential correspondence of the chief actors in them has been
published. The biographical element in history is always the most
uncertain. Even among contemporaries the judgment of character and
motives depends largely on indications so slight and subtle that they
rarely pass into books and are only fully felt by direct personal
contact, and the smallest knowledge of life shows how quickly
anecdotes and sayings are distorted, coloured, and misplaced when they
pass from lip to lip. Most of the 'good sayings' of history are
invention, and most of them have been attributed to different persons.
A history which is plainly written under the influence of party bias
has the value of an advocate's speech giving one side of the question.
When our only materials for the knowledge of a period are derived from
such histories, the saying of Voltaire should be remembered--that we
can confidently believe only the evil which a party writer tells of
his own side and the good which he recognises in his opponents. In
judging the historian we must consider his nearness to the events he
relates, his probable means of information and the internal evidence
in his narrative of accuracy, honesty, and judgment, and we must also
consider the standard of proof and the methods of historical writing
prevailing in his time. A modern writer who placed in the mouths of
his personages speeches which he himself invented would be justly
discredited, but in antiquity it was a recognised custom for a
historian to embody in fictitious speeches the reflections suggested
by his narrative and the motives which he believed to have actuated
his heroes.
Different ages differ enormously in the severity of proof which they
exact, in the degree of accuracy which they attain. The credibility of
a statement also depends not only on the amount of its evidence, but
also on its own inherent probability. Everyone will feel that an
amount of testimony that would be quite sufficient to persuade him
that a butcher's boy had been seen driving along a highway is wholly
different from that which would be required to persuade him that a
ghost had been met there. The same rule applies to the history of the
past, and it is complicated by the great difference in different ages
of the measure of probability, or, in other words, by the strong
predisposition in certain stages of knowledge to accept statements or
explanations of facts which in later stages we know to be incredible
or in a high degree improbable. Few subjects in history are more
difficult than the laws of evidence in dealing with the supernatural
and the extent to which the authority of historians in relating
credible and probable facts is invalidated by the presence of a
mythical element in their narratives.
Connected with this subject is also the question how far it is
possible by merely internal evidence to decompose an ancient document,
resolving it into its separate elements, distinguishing its different
dates and its different degrees of credibility. The reader is no doubt
aware with what a rare skill this method of inquiry has been pursued
in the present century, chiefly by great German and Dutch scholars, in
dealing with the early Jewish writings. At the same time, without
disputing the value of their work or the importance of many of the
results at which they have arrived, I may be pardoned for expressing
my belief that this kind of investigation is often pursued with an
exaggerated confidence. Plausible conjecture is too frequently
mistaken for positive proof. Undue significance is attached to what
may be mere casual coincidences, and a minuteness of accuracy is
professed in discriminating between the different elements in a
narrative which cannot be attained by mere internal evidence. In all
writings, but especially in the writings of an age when criticism was
unknown, there will be repetitions, contradictions, inconsistencies
and diversities of style which do not necessarily indicate different
authorship or dates.
I have spoken of the uncertainty of the biographical element in
history. It must, however, be said that when a historian is dealing
with men who have played a very prominent part on the stage of life,
the general acceptance of his judgment is a strong corroboration of
its truth. It may be added that the later judgment of men is not
unfrequently more true than the contemporary judgment. The wisdom of a
teaching or of a policy is shown by its results, and these results are
in most cases very gradually disclosed. Great men are like great
mountains which are surrounded by lower peaks that often obscure their
grandeur and seem to a near observer to equal or even to overtop them.
It is only when seen from far off that their true dimensions are fully
realised and they soar to heaven above all rivals. In the page of
history men are judged mainly by the net result of their lives, by the
broad lines of their characters and achievements. Many injudicious
words, many minor weaknesses of conduct, are forgotten. Faults of
manner, deficiencies of tact, awkwardnesses of appearance, which tell
so largely upon the judgments of contemporaries, are no longer seen.
The conversational nimbleness and versatility of intellect, the charm
or assurance or magnetism of manner, the weight of social position,
all of which tend to secure to an inferior man a pre-eminence in the
circle in which he moves, are equally evanescent, and the shy, rugged,
and tactless recluse often emerges on the strength of his genuine and
abiding performances to a position in the eyes of the world which he
never attained during his lifetime.
That fine saying of Cardan, 'Tempus mea possessio, tempus ager meus,'
might be the motto of the historian. Time is the field which he
cultivates, and a true sense of space and distance should be one of
the chief characteristics of his work. Few things are more difficult
to attain than a just perspective in history. The most dramatic
incidents are not the most important, and in weighing the joys and
sorrows of the past our measures of judgment are almost hopelessly
false. The most humane man cannot emancipate himself from the law of
his nature, according to which he is more affected by some tragic
circumstance which has taken place in his own house or in his own
street than by a catastrophe which has carried anguish and desolation
over enormous areas in a distant continent. In history, too, there are
vast tracts which are almost necessarily unrealised. We judge a period
mainly by its great men, by its brilliant or salient incidents, by the
fortunes of a small class; and the great mass of obscure, suffering,
inarticulate humanity, whose happiness is often so profoundly affected
by political and military events, almost escapes our notice. It should
be the object of history to bring before us past events in their true
proportion and significance, and one of the greatest improvements in
modern history is the increased attention which is paid to the
social, industrial, and moral history of the poor. The paucity of our
information and the difficulty of realising the conditions of obscure
multitudes will always make this branch of history very imperfect, but
it is one of the most essential to the just judgment of the past.
Another task which lies before the historian is that of distinguishing
proximate from ultimate causes. Our first natural impulse is to
attribute a great change to the men who effected it and to the period
in which it took place, and to neglect or underrate the long train of
causes which had been, often through many generations, preparing its
advent. A faithful historian must especially guard against this error.
He must study the slow process of growth as well as the moment of
efflorescence, the long progress of decay as well as the final
catastrophe. He will probably find that the part played by statesmen
and legislatures is less than he had imagined, and that the causes of
the movements he relates must be sought over a wider area and through
a longer period.
Moral, intellectual, or economical movements very slightly connected
with political life are often those which have most largely
contributed to the good or evil fortunes of a nation; and even in the
sphere of politics it is not the events which attract the most vivid
contemporary interest that have the most enduring influence. Few
things contribute so much to the formation of the social type as the
laws regulating the succession of property and especially the
agglomeration or division of landed property. The growth of militarism
in a nation, besides its direct and obvious consequences, forms a type
of character which will sooner or later show itself in almost every
department of legislation, and the tendency of politics to enlarge or
narrow the sphere of individual liberty or of government control, will
affect most deeply the habits of the people. Laws regulating private
enterprises, substituting State control or initiative for individual
action, encouraging or discouraging thrift, and above all interfering
with free contracts, have much more than an immediate influence, for
they become the prolific parents of many further extensions. In the
words of an excellent observer, it will be found 'that our legislative
interference is but the first link of a long chain of repetitions,
every subsequent interference being naturally produced by the effects
of the preceding.' It is by studying such tendencies through long
periods of time that their good or evil influences may be best
discovered, and this should be one of the great tasks of the
historian.
But, however large a part may be given to the impersonal influences in
history, he will still be largely concerned with the record of
individual achievements, and the great men of the past will form the
most conspicuous landmarks of his narrative. I have often thought,
however, that nations are judged too much by the great men they have
produced and not sufficiently by the way in which they have
discriminated among them and appreciated them. Genius is like the wind
that bloweth where it listeth, and it often appears in strangely
uncongenial quarters. The true nobility of a nation is shown by the
men they choose, by the men they follow, by the men they admire, by
the ideals of character and conduct they place before them. Tried by
such tests, there is often much that is profoundly saddening in the
history of countries that have been far from poor in the number of
their great men.
In the judgment of historical characters there are two cautions on
which it may not be useless to dwell. There is a large class of public
men who show little capacity in dealing with or directing the present
conditions of their time, but who see clearly the bourne to which
existing forces or tendencies are moving and who, judged by their
distant forecasts, will appear much wiser than their contemporaries.
It is the natural bias of the historian to place them perhaps higher
than they deserve. This power of just speculative foresight is no very
rare gift, and in public affairs it is often as much a hindrance as a
help. Forms of government and other great religious or political
institutions, like the products of nature, have their times of
immaturity, of growth, of ripeness and of decay, and it by no means
follows because they at last become indefensible, that they have not
during many generations discharged useful functions and that those who
first assailed and condemned them are deserving of praise. Not
unfrequently, indeed, a public man must take his choice whether by
fully identifying himself with the existing conditions around him and
employing them to the best advantages he will lead a useful and
practical life, or whether as an advanced thinker he will associate
himself with the cause that is one day to conquer, place himself in
the van of progress and at the sacrifice of much present influence
deserve the credit of foresight.
Historians will probably always judge men and policies by their net
results, by their final consequences, and this judgment is on the
whole the most sure that we can attain. It is not, however, altogether
infallible. Apart from the question of the moral character of the
methods employed which a good historian should never omit from his
consideration, success is not always a decisive proof of sagacity.
Chance and the unexpected play a great part in human affairs, and a
judgment founded on a perfectly just estimate of probabilities will
often prove wrong. The result which was the least probable will come
true, some wholly unforeseen and unforeseeable occurrence will scatter
dangers that were very real and give a new complexion to events. The
rise of some pre-eminently great or of some pre-eminently mischievous
personage among the guiding influences of a nation will derange the
most sagacious calculations, and the reckless gambler or the obtuse
obstructionist may prove more right than the most cautious, the most
skilful, the most farseeing statesman.
A fatal and very common error is that of judging the actions of the
past by the moral standard of our own age. This is especially the
error of novices in history and of those who without any wide and
general culture devote themselves exclusively to a single period.
While the primary and essential elements of right and wrong remain
unchanged, nothing is more certain than that the standard or ideal of
duty is continually altering. A very humane man in another age may
have done things which would now be regarded as atrociously barbarous.
A very virtuous man may have done things which would now indicate
extreme profligacy. We seldom indeed make sufficient allowance for the
degree in which the judgments and dispositions of even the best man
are coloured by the moral tone of the time or society in which they
live. And what is true of individuals is equally true of nations. In
order to judge equitably the legislation of any people, we must always
consider corresponding contemporary legislations and ideas. When this
is neglected our judgments of the past become wholly false. How often,
for example, has such a subject as the history of the penal laws
against Irish Catholics been treated without the smallest reference to
the contemporary laws against Protestants that existed in every
Catholic nation and the contemporary laws against Catholics that
existed in almost every Protestant country in Europe. How often have
the English commercial restrictions on the American colonies been
treated as if they were instances of extreme and exceptional tyranny,
while a more extended knowledge would show that they were simply the
expression of ideas of commercial policy and about the relation of
dependencies to the mother-country which then almost universally
prevailed.
It is not merely the moral standard that changes. A corresponding
change takes place in the moral type, or, in other words, in the class
of virtues which is especially cultivated and especially valued. To
know an age aright we should above all things seek to understand its
ideal, the direction in which the stream of its self-sacrifice and
moral energy naturally flowed. Few things in history are more
interesting and more valuable than a study of the causes that produced
and modified these successive ideals. Thus in the moral type of pagan
antiquity the civic virtues occupied incomparably the foremost place.
The idea of a supremely good man was essentially that of a man of
action, of a man whose whole life was devoted to the service of his
country. The life and death of Cato were for generations the favourite
model. He was deemed, in the words of an old Latin historian, to be of
all men the one 'most like to virtue.' This pattern retained its force
till the softening influence of the Greek spirit, permeating Roman
life, made the stoical ideal seem too hard and unsympathising; till
the corruption and despotism of the Empire had withdrawn the best men
from political life and attached a certain taint or stigma to public
employment; till new religions arose in the East, bringing with them
new ideals to govern the world. Gradually we may trace the
contemplative virtues rising to the foremost place until, about the
fifth century, the ideal had totally changed. The heroic type was
replaced by the saintly type. The supremely good man was now the
ascetic. The first condition of sanctity was a complete abandonment of
secular duties and cares and a complete subjugation of the body. A
vast literature of legends arose reflecting and glorifying the
prevailing ideal and holding up the hermit life as the supreme pattern
of perfection, and this literature occupies a place in mediævalism
very similar to that held by the 'Lives' of Plutarch in antiquity.
Ancient art was essentially the glorification of the body, a
representation of the full strength and beauty of developed manhood.
The saint of the mediæval mosaic represents the body in its extreme
maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a
somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato,
found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he
places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy
Hellespont,' never makes them eat fish, but always flesh and the flesh
of oxen, for this, as he says, is 'strength-producing food' and is
therefore suited for the formation of heroes and the proper diet for
men of virtue. Compare this judgment with the protracted, and indeed
incredible, fasts which the monkish writers delighted in attributing
to the saints of the desert, and we have a vivid picture of the change
that had passed over the ideal.
But as time moved on the ascetic ideal gradually declined and was
replaced by the very different ideal of chivalry. It consisted chiefly
of three new elements. The first element was a spirit of gallantry
which gave women a wholly new place in the imaginations of men. It was
in part a reaction against the extreme austerity of the saints, and
this reaction was much intensified after the cessation of the panic
which had risen at the close of the tenth century about the
approaching end of the world. It was in part produced by the softer
and more epicurean civilisation which grew up in the country bordering
on the Pyrenees. It was especially represented in the romances and
poems of the Troubadours, and the new tendency even received some
assistance from the Church when the Council of Clermont, which
originated the Crusades, imposed on the knight the religious
obligation of defending all widows and orphans.
The second element was an increased reverence for secular rank, which
grew out of the feudal system, when a great hereditary aristocracy
arose and all European society was moulded into a compact hierarchy,
of which the serf was the basis and the emperor the apex. The
principle of subordination and obedience ran through the whole
edifice, and a respect for rank was universally diffused. Men came to
associate their ideal of greatness with regal or noble authority, and
they were therefore prepared to idealise any great sovereign who might
arise. Such a sovereign appeared in Charlemagne, who exercised upon
Christendom a fascination not less powerful than that which Alexander
had once exercised upon Greece, and he accordingly soon became the
centre of a whole literature of romance.
The third element was the fusion of religious enthusiasm with the
military spirit. Christianity in its first phases was utterly opposed
to the military spirit; but this opposition was naturally mitigated
when the Church triumphed under Constantine and became associated with
governments and armies. The hostility was still further qualified when
many tribes of warlike barbarians embraced the faith, and the military
obligation which was an essential element of feudalism acted in the
same direction. But, above all, the rise and conquests of
Mohammedanism awoke the military energies of Christendom and
determined the direction it should take. In the Crusades the two great
streams of military enthusiasm and of religious enthusiasm met, and
the result was the formation of a new ideal which for a long period
mainly governed the imagination of Christendom.
It for a time absorbed, eclipsed, and transformed all purely national
ideals. No poet was ever more intensely English in his character and
sympathies than Chaucer, and he wrote when the dazzling glories of
Crécy and Poitiers were still very recent. Yet it is not on these
fields, but in the long wars with the Moslems, that his pattern knight
had won his renown. The military expeditions of Charlemagne were
directed almost exclusively against the Saxons and against Slavonic
tribes. With the Spanish Mohammedans he came but very slightly in
contact. He made in person but one expedition against them, and that
expedition was both insignificant and unsuccessful. But in the
Karlovingian romances, which were written when the crusading
enthusiasm was at its height, the figure of the great emperor
underwent a strange and most significant transformation. The German
wars were scarcely noticed. Charlemagne is surrounded with the special
glory that ought to have belonged to Charles Martel. He is represented
as having passed his entire life in a victorious struggle with the
Mohammedans of Europe, and is even gravely credited with a triumphant
expedition to Jerusalem. The three romances of the Crusades which are
believed to be the oldest were all written by monks, and they all make
Charlemagne their hero. Even geography was transformed by the new
enthusiasm, and old maps sometimes represent Jerusalem as the centre
of the world.
In few periods has there been so great a difference between the ideals
created by the popular imagination and the realities that are
recognised by history. Few wars have been accompanied by more cruelty,
more outrage, and more licentiousness than the Crusades or have
brought a blacker cloud of disasters in their train. Yet the idea that
inspired them was a lofty one, and they were so speedily transfigured
by the imaginations of men that in combination with the other
influences I have mentioned they created an ideal which is one of the
most beautiful in the history of the world. We may trace it clearly in
the romances of Arthur and Charlemagne and of the "Cid;" in the
"Red-Cross Knight" of Tasso and Spenser; in the old ballads which
paint so vividly the hero of chivalry, ever ready to draw his sword
for his faith and his lady-love and in the cause of the feeble and the
oppressed. The glorification of military courage and self-sacrifice
which had been so prominent in antiquity was again in the ascendant,
but it was combined with a new kind of honour and with a new vein of
courtesy, modesty, and gentleness. When we apply the epithet
'chivalrous' to a modern gentleman, this is no unmeaning term. There
is even now an element in that character which may be distinctly
traced to the ideal of chivalry which the Crusades made dominant in
Europe.
I do not propose to follow the history of other ideals that have in
turn prevailed. What I have written will, I trust, be sufficient to
illustrate a kind of history which appears to me to possess much
interest and value. It will show, too, that a faithful historian is
very largely concerned with the fictions as well as with the facts of
the past. Legends which have no firm historical basis are often of the
highest historical value as reflecting the moral sentiments of their
time. Nor do they merely reflect them. In some periods they contribute
perhaps more than any other influence to mould and colour them and to
give them an enduring strength. The facts of history have been largely
governed by its fictions. Great events often acquire their full power
over the human mind only when they have passed through the
transfiguring medium of the imagination, and men as they were supposed
to be have even sometimes exercised a wider influence than men as they
actually were. Ideals ultimately rule the world, and each before it
loses its ascendancy bequeaths some moral truth as an abiding legacy
to the human race.
THE POLITICAL VALUE OF HISTORY
When, shortly after I had accepted the honourable task which I am
endeavouring to fulfil to-night, I received from your Secretary a
report of the annual proceedings of the Birmingham and Midland
Institute,--when I observed the immense range and variety of subjects
included within your programme, illustrating so strikingly the intense
intellectual activity of this great town,--my first feeling was one of
some bewilderment and dismay. What, I asked myself, could I say that
would be of much real value, addressing an unknown audience, and
relating to fields of knowledge so vast, so multifarious, and in many
of their parts so far beyond the range of my own studies? On
reflection, however, it appeared to me that in this, as in most other
cases, the proverb was a wise one which bids the cobbler stick to his
last, and that a writer who, during many years of his life, has been
engaged in the study of English history could hardly do better than
devote the time at his disposal to-night to a few reflections on the
political value of history, and on the branches and methods of
historical study that are most fitted to form a sound political
judgment.
Is history a study of real use in practical, and especially in
political, life? The question, as you know, has been by no means
always answered in the same way. In its earlier stages history was
regarded chiefly as a form of poetry recording the more dramatic
actions of kings, warriors, and statesmen. Homer and the early
ballads are indeed the first historians of their countries, and long
after Homer one of the most illustrious of the critics of antiquity
described history as merely 'poetry free from the incumbrance of
verse.' The portraits that adorned it gave some insight into human
character; it breathed noble sentiments, rewarded and stimulated noble
actions, and kindled by its strong appeals to the imagination high
patriotic feeling; but its end was rather to paint than to guide, to
consecrate a noble past than to furnish a key for the future; and the
artist in selecting his facts looked mainly for those which could
throw the richest colour upon his canvas. Most experience was in his
eyes (to adopt an image of Coleridge) like the stern light of a ship,
which illuminates only the path we have already traversed; and a large
proportion of the subjects which are most significant as illustrating
the true welfare and development of nations were deliberately rejected
as below the dignity of history. The old conception of history can
hardly be better illustrated than in the words of Savage Landor. 'Show
me,' he makes one of his heroes say, 'how great projects were
executed, great advantages gained, and great calamities averted. Show
me the generals and the statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend
to them in reverence.... Let the books of the Treasury lie closed as
religiously as the Sibyl's. Leave weights and measures in the
market-place; Commerce in the harbour; the Arts in the light they
love; Philosophy in the shade. Place History on her rightful throne,
and at the sides of her Eloquence and War.'[1]
It was chiefly in the eighteenth century that a very different
conception of history grew up. Historians then came to believe that
their task was not so much to paint a picture as to solve a problem;
to explain or illustrate the successive phases of national growth,
prosperity, and adversity. The history of morals, of industry, of
intellect, and of art; the changes that take place in manners or
beliefs; the dominant ideas that prevailed in successive periods; the
rise, fall, and modification of political constitutions; in a word,
all the conditions of national well-being became the subjects of their
works. They sought rather to write a history of peoples than a history
of kings. They looked specially in history for the chain of causes and
effects. They undertook to study in the past the physiology of
nations, and hoped by applying the experimental method on a large
scale to deduce some lessons of real value about the conditions on
which the well-being of society mainly depends.
How far have they succeeded in their attempt, and furnished us with a
real compass for political guidance? Let me in the first place frankly
express my own belief that to many readers of history the study is not
only useless, but even positively misleading. An unintelligent, a
superficial, a pedantic or an inaccurate use of history is the source
of very many errors in practical judgment. Human affairs are so
infinitely complex that it is vain to expect that they will ever
exactly reproduce themselves, or that any study of the past can enable
us to predict the future with the minuteness and the completeness that
can be attained in the exact sciences. Nor will any wise man judge the
merits of existing institutions solely on historic grounds. Do not
persuade yourself that any institution, however great may be its
antiquity, however transcendent may have been its uses in a remote
past, can permanently justify its existence, unless it can be shown
to exercise a really beneficial influence over our own society and our
own age. It is equally true that no institution which is exercising
such a beneficial influence should be condemned, because it can be
shown from history that under other conditions and in other times its
influence was rather for evil than for good.
These propositions may seem like truisms; yet how often do we hear a
kind of reasoning that is inconsistent with them! How often, for
example, in the discussions on the Continent on the advantages and
disadvantages of monastic institutions has the chief stress of the
argument been laid upon the great benefits which those institutions
produced in ages that were utterly different from our own,--in the
dark period of the barbarian invasions, when they were the only
refuges of a pacific civilisation, the only libraries, the only
schools, the only centres of art, the only refuge for gentle and
intellectual natures; the chief barrier against violence and rapine;
the chief promoters of agriculture and industry! How often in
discussions on the merits and demerits of an Established Church in
England have we heard arguments drawn from the hostility which the
Church of England showed towards English liberty in the time of the
Stuarts; although it is abundantly evident that the dangers of a royal
despotism, which were then so serious, have utterly disappeared, and
that the political action of the Church of England at that period was
mainly governed by a doctrine of the Divine right of kings, and of the
duty of passive obedience, which is now as dead as the old belief that
the king's touch could cure scrofula! How often have the champions of
modern democracy appealed in support of their views to the glories of
the democracies of ancient Greece, without ever reminding their
hearers that these small municipal republics rested on the basis of
slavery, and that the bulk of those who would exercise the chief
controlling influence over affairs in a pure democracy of the modern
type were absolutely excluded from political power! How often in
discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of Home Rule in
Ireland do we find arguments drawn from the merits or demerits of the
Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century, with a complete
forgetfulness of the fact that this Parliament consisted exclusively
of a Protestant gentry; that it represented in the highest degree the
property of the country, and the classes who are most closely attached
to English rule; that it was constituted in such a manner that the
English Government could exercise a complete control over its
deliberations, and that for good or for ill it was utterly unlike any
body that could now be constituted in Ireland!
Or again, to turn to another field: it is quite certain that every age
has special dangers to guard against, and that as time moves on these
dangers not only change, but are sometimes even reversed. There have
been periods in English history when the great dangers to be
encountered sprang from the excessive and encroaching power of a
monarchy or of an aristocracy. The battle to be then fought was for
the free exercise of religious worship and expression of religious
opinion, for a free parliament, for a free press, for a free platform,
for an independent jury-box. All the best patriotism, all the most
heroic self-sacrifice of the nation, was thrown into defence of these
causes; and the wisest statesmen of the time made it the main object
of their legislation to protect and consolidate them.
These things are now as valuable as they ever were, but no reasonable
man will maintain that they are in the smallest danger. The battles of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been definitely won. A
kind of language which at one period of English history implied the
noblest heroism is now the idlest and cheapest of clap-trap. The
sycophant and the self-seeker bow before quite other idols than of
old. The dangers of the time come from other quarters; other
tendencies prevail, other tasks remain to be accomplished; and a
public man who in framing his course followed blindly in the steps of
the heroes or reformers of the past would be like a mariner who set
his sails to the winds of yesterday.
It is difficult, I think, to doubt that the judgments of all of us are
more or less affected by causes of this kind. It is, I imagine, true
of the great majority of educated men that their first political
impression or bias is formed much less by the events of their own time
than by childish recollections of the more dramatic conflicts of the
past. We are Cavaliers or Roundheads before we are Conservatives or
Liberals; and although we gradually learn to realise how profoundly
the condition of affairs and the balance of forces have altered, yet
no wise man can doubt the power which the first bias of the
imagination exercises in very many cases through a whole life.
Language which grew out of bygone conflicts continues to be used long
after those conflicts and their causes have ended; but that which was
once a very genuine voice comes at last to be little more than an
insincere echo.
The best corrective for this kind of evil is a really intelligent
study of history. One of the first tasks that every sincere student
should set before himself is to endeavour to understand what is the
dominant idea or characteristic of the period with which he is
occupied; what forces chiefly ruled it, what forces were then rising
into a dangerous ascendancy, and what forces were on the decline; what
illusions, what exaggerations, what false hopes and unworthy
influences chiefly prevailed. It is only when studied in this spirit
that the true significance of history is disclosed, and the same
method which furnishes a key to the past forms also an admirable
discipline for the judgment of the present. He who has learnt to
understand the true character and tendencies of many succeeding ages
is not likely to go very far wrong in estimating his own.