radically, from the statement of the results of original research. The
writing of history must be based upon original research and authentic
record, but it can no more be directly constructed by the piecing
together of bits of original research than by the mere reprinting
together of state documents. Individual research furnishes us, as it
were, with the private documents and intimate records without which the
public archives are incomplete and unintelligible. But by themselves
these are wholly out of perspective. It is the consolation of those
who produce them to make them so. They would lose heart were they
forbidden to regard all facts as of equal importance. It is facts they
are after, and only facts,--facts for their own sake, and without
regard to their several importance. These are their ore,--very precious
ore,--which they are concerned to get out, not to refine. They have
no direct concern with what may afterwards be done at the mint or in
the goldsmith’s shop. They will even boast that they care not for the
beauty of the ore, and are indifferent how, or in what shape, it may
become an article of commerce. Much of it is thrown away in the nice
processes of manufacture, and you shall not distinguish the product of
the several mines in the coin, or the cup, or the salver.
The historian must, indeed, himself be an investigator. He must know
good ore from bad; must distinguish fineness, quality, genuineness;
must stop to get out of the records for himself what he lacks for the
perfection of his work. But for all that, he must know and stand ready
to do every part of his task like a master workman, recognizing and
testing every bit of stuff he uses. Standing sure, a man of science as
well as an artist, he must take and use all of his equipment for the
sake of his art,--not to display his materials, but to subordinate and
transform them in his effort to make, by every touch and cunning of
hand and tool, the perfect image of what he sees, the very truth of his
seer’s vision of the world. The true historian works always for the
whole impression, the truth with unmarred proportions, unexaggerated
parts, undistorted visage. He has no favorite parts of the story which
he boasts are bits of his own, but loves only the whole of it, the full
and unspoiled image of the day of which he writes, the crowded and
yet consistent details which carry, without obtrusion of themselves,
the large features of the time. Any exaggeration of the parts makes
all the picture false, and the work is to do over. “Test every bit of
material,” runs the artist’s rule, “and then forget the material;”
forget its origin and the dross from which it has been freed, and think
only and always of the great thing you would make of it, the pattern
and form in which you would lose and merge it. That is its only high
use.
’Tis a pity to see how even the greatest minds will often lack the
broad and catholic vision with which the just historian must look upon
men and affairs. There is Carlyle, with his shrewd and seeing eye,
his unmatched capacity to assess strong men and set the scenery for
tragedy or intrigue, his breathless ardor for great events, his amazing
flashes of insight, and his unlooked-for steady light of occasional
narrative. The whole matter of what he writes is too dramatic. Surely
history was not all enacted so hotly, or with so passionate a rush of
men upon the stage. Its quiet scenes must have been longer, not mere
pauses and interludes while the tragic parts were being made up. There
is not often ordinary sunlight upon the page. The lights burn now wan,
now lurid. Men are seen disquieted and turbulent, and may be heard in
husky cries or rude, untimely jests. We do not recognize our own world,
but seem to see another such as ours might become if peopled by like
uneasy Titans. Incomparable to tell of days of storm and revolution,
speaking like an oracle and familiar of destiny and fate, searching the
hearts of statesmen and conquerors with an easy insight in every day of
action, this peasant seer cannot give us the note of piping times of
peace, or catch the tone of slow industry; watches ships come and go at
the docks, hears freight-vans thunder along the iron highways of the
modern world, and loaded trucks lumber heavily through the crowded city
streets, with a hot disdain of commerce, prices current, the haggling
of the market, the smug ease of material comfort bred in a trading
age. There is here no broad and catholic vision, no wise tolerance, no
various power to know, to sympathize, to interpret. The great seeing
imagination of the man lacks that pure radiance in which things are
seen steadily and seen whole.
It is not easy, to say truth, to find actual examples when you are
constructing the ideal historian, the man with the vision and the
faculty divine to see affairs justly and tell of them completely. If
you are not satisfied with this passionate and intolerant seer of
Chelsea, whom will you choose? Shall it be Gibbon, whom all praise,
but so few read? He, at any rate, is passionless, it would appear. But
who could write epochal history with passion? All hot humors of the
mind must, assuredly, cool when spread at large upon so vast a surface.
One must feel like a sort of minor providence in traversing that great
tract of world history, and catch in spite of one’s self the gait and
manner of a god. This stately procession of generations moves on remote
from the ordinary levels of our human sympathy. ’Tis a wide view of
nations and peoples and dynasties, and a world shaken by the travail of
new births. There is here no scale by which to measure the historian
of the sort we must look to see handle the ordinary matter of national
history. The “Decline and Fall” stands impersonal, like a monument. We
shall reverence it, but we shall not imitate it.
If we look away from Gibbon, exclude Carlyle, and question Macaulay;
if we put the investigators on one side as not yet historians, and
the deliberately picturesque and entertaining _raconteurs_ as not yet
investigators, we naturally turn, I suppose, to such a man as John
Richard Green, at once the patient scholar,--who shall adequately say
how nobly patient?--and the rare artist, working so like a master in
the difficult stuffs of a long national history. The very life of the
man is as beautiful as the moving sentences he wrote with so subtle
a music in the cadence. We know whence the fine moral elevation of
tone came that sounds through all the text of his great narrative.
True, not everybody is satisfied with our _doctor angelicus_. Some
doubt he is too ornate. Others are troubled that he should sometimes
be inaccurate. Some are willing to use his history as a manual; while
others cannot deem him satisfactory for didactic uses, hesitate
how they shall characterize him, and quit the matter vaguely with
saying that what he wrote is “at any rate literature.” Can there be
something lacking in Green, too, notwithstanding he was impartial, and
looked with purged and open eyes upon the whole unbroken life of his
people,--notwithstanding he saw the truth and had the art and mastery
to make others see it as he did, in all its breadth and multiplicity?
Perhaps even this great master of narrative lacks variety--as who does
not? His method, whatever the topic, is ever the same. His sentences,
his paragraphs, his chapters are pitched one and all in the same key.
It is a very fine and moving key. Many an elevated strain and rich
harmony commend it alike to the ear and to the imagination. It is
employed with an easy mastery, and is made to serve to admiration a
wide range of themes. But it is always the same key, and some themes it
will not serve. An infinite variety plays through all history. Every
scene has its own air and singularity. Incidents cannot all be rightly
set in the narrative if all be set alike. As the scene shifts, the tone
of the narrative must change: the narrator’s choice of incident and his
choice of words; the speed and method of his sentence; his own thought,
even, and point of view. Surely his battle pages must resound with the
tramp of armies and the fearful din and rush of war. In peace he must
catch by turns the hum of industry, the bustle of the street, the calm
of the country-side, the tone of parliamentary debate, the fancy, the
ardor, the argument of poets and seers and quiet students. Snatches of
song run along with sober purpose and strenuous endeavor through every
nation’s story. Coarse men and refined, mobs and ordered assemblies,
science and mad impulse, storm and calm, are all alike ingredients of
the various life. It is not all epic. There is rough comedy and brutal
violence. The drama can scarce be given any strict, unbroken harmony
of incident, any close logical sequence of act or nice unity of scene.
To pitch it all in one key, therefore, is to mistake the significance
of the infinite play of varied circumstance that makes up the yearly
movement of a people’s life.
It would be less than just to say that Green’s pages do not reveal
the variety of English life the centuries through. It is his glory,
indeed, as all the world knows, to have broadened and diversified the
whole scale of English history. Nowhere else within the compass of
a single book can one find so many sides of the great English story
displayed with so deep and just an appreciation of them all, or of the
part of each in making up the whole. Green is the one man among English
historians who has restored the great fabric of the nation’s history
where its architecture was obscure, and its details were likely to be
lost or forgotten. Once more, because of him, the vast Gothic structure
stands complete, its majesty and firm grace enhanced at every point by
the fine tracery of its restored details.
Where so much is done, it is no doubt unreasonable to ask for more. But
the very architectural symmetry of this great book imposes a limitation
upon it. It is full of a certain sort of variety; but it is only the
variety of a great plan’s detail, not the variety of English life. The
noble structure obeys its own laws rather than the laws of a people’s
fortunes. It is a monument conceived and reared by a consummate
artist, and it wears upon its every line some part of the image it was
meant to bear, of a great, complex, aspiring national existence. But,
though it symbolizes, it does not contain that life. It has none of
the irregularity of the actual experiences of men and communities. It
explains, but it does not contain, their variety. The history of every
nation has certainly a plan which the historian must see and reproduce;
but he must reconstruct the people’s life, not merely expound it. The
scope of his method must be as great as the variety of his subject; it
must change with each change of mood, respond to each varying impulse
in the great process of events. No rigor of a stately style must be
suffered to exclude the lively touches of humor or the rude sallies of
strength that mark it everywhere. The plan of the telling must answer
to the plan of the fact,--must be as elastic as the topics are mobile.
The matter should rule the plan, not the plan the matter.
The ideal is infinitely difficult, if, indeed, it be possible to any
man not Shakespearean; but the difficulty of attaining it is often
unnecessarily enhanced. Ordinarily the historian’s preparation for
his task is such as to make it unlikely he will perform it naturally.
He goes first, with infinite and admirable labor, through all the
labyrinth of document and detail that lies up and down his subject;
collects masses of matter great and small, for substance, verification,
illustration; piles his notes volumes high; reads far and wide upon
the tracks of his matter, and makes page upon page of references; and
then, thoroughly stuffed and sophisticated, turns back and begins his
narrative. ’Tis impossible then that he should begin naturally. He sees
the end from the beginning, and all the intermediate way from beginning
to end; he has made up his mind about too many things; uses his details
with a too free and familiar mastery, not like one who tells a story
so much as like one who dissects a cadaver. Having swept his details
together beforehand, like so much scientific material, he discourses
upon them like a demonstrator,--thinks too little in subjection to
them. They no longer make a fresh impression upon him. They are his
tools, not his objects of vision.
It is not by such a process that a narrative is made vital and true.
It does not do to lose the point of view of the first listener to
the tale, or to rearrange the matter too much out of the order of
nature. You must instruct your reader as the events themselves would
have instructed him, had he been able to note them as they passed. The
historian must not lose his own fresh view of the scene as it passed
and changed more and more from year to year and from age to age. He
must keep with the generation of which he writes, not be too quick to
be wiser than they were or look back upon them in his narrative with
head over shoulder. He must write of them always in the atmosphere they
themselves breathed, not hastening to judge them, but striving only to
realize them at every turn of the story, to make their thoughts his
own, and call their lives back again, rebuilding the very stage upon
which they played their parts. Bring the end of your story to mind
while you set about telling its beginning, and it seems to have no
parts: beginning, middle, end, are all as one,--are merely like parts
of a pattern which you see as a single thing stamped upon the stuff
under your hand.
Try the method with the history of our own land and people. How
will you begin? Will you start with a modern map and a careful
topographical description of the continent? And then, having made
your nineteenth-century framework for the narrative, will you ask
your reader to turn back and see the seventeenth century, and those
lonely ships coming in at the capes of the Chesapeake? He will never
see them so long as you compel him to stand here at the end of the
nineteenth century and look at them as if through a long retrospect.
The attention both of the narrator and of the reader, if history is
to be seen aright, must look forward, not backward. It must see with
a contemporaneous eye. Let the historian, if he be wise, know no more
of the history as he writes than might have been known in the age and
day of which he is writing. A trifle too much knowledge will undo him.
It will break the spell for his imagination. It will spoil the magic
by which he may raise again the image of days that are gone. He must
of course know the large lines of his story; it must lie as a whole
in his mind. His very art demands that, in order that he may know and
keep its proportions. But the details, the passing incidents of day and
year, must come fresh into his mind, unreasoned upon as yet, untouched
by theory, with their first look upon them. It is here that original
documents and fresh research will serve him. He must look far and wide
upon every detail of the time, see it at first hand, and paint as he
looks; selecting, as the artist must, but selecting while the vision
is fresh, and not from old sketches laid away in his notes,--selecting
from the life itself.
Let him remember that his task is radically different from the task of
the investigator. The investigator must display his materials, but the
historian must convey his impressions. He must stand in the presence
of life, and reproduce it in his narrative; must recover a past age;
make dead generations live again and breathe their own air; show them
native and at home upon his page. To do this, his own impressions must
be as fresh as those of an unlearned reader, his own curiosity as keen
and young at every stage. It may easily be so as his reading thickens,
and the atmosphere of the age comes stealthily into his thought, if
only he take care to push forward the actual writing of his narrative
at an equal pace with his reading, painting thus always direct from
the image itself. His knowledge of the great outlines and bulks of the
picture will be his sufficient guide and restraint the while, will give
proportion to the individual strokes of his work. But it will not check
his zest, or sophisticate his fresh recovery of the life that is in the
crowding colors of the canvas.
A nineteenth-century plan laid like a standard and measure upon a
seventeenth-century narrative will infallibly twist it and make it
false. Lay a modern map before the first settlers at Jamestown and
Plymouth, and then bid them discover and occupy the continent. With how
superior a nineteenth-century wonder and pity will you see them grope,
and stumble, and falter! How like children they will seem to you, and
how simple their age, and ignorant! As stalwart men as you they were
in fact; mayhap wiser and braver too; as fit to occupy a continent as
you are to draw it upon paper. If you would know them, go back to their
age; breed yourself a pioneer and woodsman; look to find the South Sea
up the nearest northwest branch of the spreading river at your feet;
discover and occupy the wilderness with them; dream what may be beyond
the near hills, and long all day to see a sail upon the silent sea; go
back to them and see them in their habit as they lived.
The picturesque writers of history have all along been right in
theory: they have been wrong only in practice. It is a picture of the
past we want--its express image and feature; but we want the true
picture and not simply the theatrical matter,--the manner of Rembrandt
rather than of Rubens. All life may be pictured, but not all of
life is picturesque. No great, no true historian would put false or
adventitious colors into his narrative, or let a glamour rest where in
fact it never was. The writers who select an incident merely because
it is striking or dramatic are shallow fellows. They see only with the
eye’s retina, not with that deep vision whose images lie where thought
and reason sit. The real drama of life is disclosed only with the whole
picture; and that only the deep and fervid student will see, whose mind
goes daily fresh to the details, whose narrative runs always in the
authentic colors of nature, whose art it is to see, and to paint what
he sees.
It is thus and only thus we shall have the truth of the matter: by
art,--by the most difficult of all arts; by fresh study and first-hand
vision; at the mouths of men who stand in the midst of old letters and
dusty documents and neglected records, not like antiquarians, but like
those who see a distant country and a far-away people before their very
eyes, as real, as full of life and hope and incident, as the day in
which they themselves live. Let us have done with humbug and come to
plain speech. The historian needs an imagination quite as much as he
needs scholarship, and consummate literary art as much as candor and
common honesty. Histories are written in order that the bulk of men may
read and realize; and it is as bad to bungle the telling of the story
as to lie, as fatal to lack a vocabulary as to lack knowledge. In no
case can you do more than convey an impression, so various and complex
is the matter. If you convey a false impression, what difference
does it make how you convey it? In the whole process there is a nice
adjustment of means to ends which only the artist can manage. There
is an art of lying;--there is equally an art,--an infinitely more
difficult art,--of telling the truth.
VII.
A CALENDAR OF GREAT AMERICANS.
Before a calendar of great Americans can be made out, a valid canon
of Americanism must first be established. Not every great man born
and bred in America was a great “American.” Some of the notable men
born among us were simply great Englishmen; others had in all the
habits of their thought and life the strong flavor of a peculiar
region, and were great New Englanders or great Southerners; others,
masters in the fields of science or of pure thought, showed nothing
either distinctively national or characteristically provincial, and
were simply great men; while a few displayed odd cross-strains of
blood or breeding. The great Englishmen bred in America, like Hamilton
and Madison; the great provincials, like John Adams and Calhoun; the
authors of such thought as might have been native to any clime, like
Asa Gray and Emerson; and the men of mixed breed, like Jefferson and
Benton,--must be excluded from our present list. We must pick out men
who have created or exemplified a distinctively American standard and
type of greatness.
To make such a selection is not to create an artificial standard of
greatness, or to claim that greatness is in any case hallowed or
exalted merely because it is American. It is simply to recognize a
peculiar stamp of character, a special make-up of mind and faculties,
as the specific product of our national life, not displacing or
eclipsing talents of a different kind, but supplementing them, and
so adding to the world’s variety. There is an American type of man,
and those who have exhibited this type with a certain unmistakable
distinction and perfection have been great “Americans.” It has required
the utmost variety of character and energy to establish a great nation,
with a polity at once free and firm, upon this continent, and no sound
type of manliness could have been dispensed with in the effort. We
could no more have done without our great Englishmen, to keep the past
steadily in mind and make every change conservative of principle, than
we could have done without the men whose whole impulse was forward,
whose whole genius was for origination, natural masters of the art of
subduing a wilderness.
Certainly one of the greatest figures in our history is the figure of
Alexander Hamilton. American historians, though compelled always to
admire him, often in spite of themselves, have been inclined, like the
mass of men in his own day, to look at him askance. They hint, when
they do not plainly say, that he was not “American.” He rejected, if
he did not despise, democratic principles; advocated a government as
strong, almost, as a monarchy; and defended the government which was
actually set up, like the skilled advocate he was, only because it was
the strongest that could be had under the circumstances. He believed
in authority, and he had no faith in the aggregate wisdom of masses of
men. He had, it is true, that deep and passionate love of liberty, and
that steadfast purpose in the maintenance of it, that mark the best
Englishmen everywhere; but his ideas of government stuck fast in the
old-world politics, and his statesmanship was of Europe rather than of
America. And yet the genius and the steadfast spirit of this man were
absolutely indispensable to us. No one less masterful, no one less
resolute than he to drill the minority, if necessary, to have their way
against the majority, could have done the great work of organization by
which he established the national credit, and with the national credit
the national government itself. A pliant, popular, optimistic man would
have failed utterly in the task. A great radical mind in his place
would have brought disaster upon us: only a great conservative genius
could have succeeded. It is safe to say that, without men of Hamilton’s
cast of mind, building the past into the future with a deep passion
for order and old wisdom, our national life would have miscarried at
the very first. This tried English talent for conservation gave to our
fibre at the very outset the stiffness of maturity.