For to oratory and poetry, unless of the highest degree of eloquence, little thanks are given: but history, in whatever manner executed, is always entertaining.
History is like sacred writing, because truth is essential to it; and where there is truth, the Deity himself is present; nevertheless, there are many who think that books may be written and tossed out into the world like fritters.
Industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books that concern not story, and the like, do save and recover somewhat from the deluge of time.
In a word, we may gather out of history a policy no less wise than eternal; by the comparison and application of other men’s forepassed miseries with our own like errors and ill deservings.
| I do love these ancient ruins | |
| We never tread upon them, but we set | |
| Our foot upon some reverend history. |
All history that is not contemporary is suspicious: as the books of the Sibyls and Trismegistus, and so many others that have obtained credence in the world, are false, and will be found to be false to the end of time. It is not thus with contemporary authors.
There being others, besides the first supposed author, men not unread, nor unlearned in antiquity, who admit that for approved story which the former explode for fiction; and seeing that ofttimes relations heretofore accounted fabulous have been after found to contain in them many footsteps and reliques of something true…. I might also produce example, as Diodorus among the Greeks, Livy and others among the Latins, Polydore and Virunnius accounted among our own writers. But I intend not with controversies and quotations to delay or interrupt the smooth course of history; much less to argue and debate long who were the first inhabitants, with what probabilities, what authorities each opinion hath been upheld; but shall endeavor that which hitherto hath been needed most, with plain and lightsome brevity, to relate well and orderly things worth the noting, so as may best instruct and benefit them that read. Which, imploring divine assistance, that it may rebound to his glory, and the good of the British nation, I now begin.
The prodigious lies which have been published in this age in matters of fact, with unblushing confidence, even where thousands or multitudes of eye and ear witnesses knew all to be false, doth call men to take heed what history they believe, especially where power and violence affordeth that privilege to the reporter that no man dare answer him, or detect his fraud; or, if they do, their writings are all supprest. As long as men have liberty to examine and contradict one another, one may partly conjecture, by comparing their words, on which side the truth is like to lie. But when great men write history, or flatterers by their appointment, which no man dare contradict, believe it but as you are constrained.
It is the most agreeable talent of an historian to be able to draw up his armies and fight his battles in proper expressions, to set before our eyes the divisions, cabals, and jealousies of great men, to lead us step by step into the several actions and events of his history. We love to see the subject unfolding itself by just degrees, and breaking upon us insensibly, so that we may be kept in pleasing suspense, and have time given us to raise our expectations, and to side with one of the parties concerned in the relation. I confess this shows more the art than the veracity of the historian; but I am only to speak of him as he is qualified to please the imagination; and in this respect Livy has, perhaps, excelled all who ever went before him or have written since his time. He describes everything in so lively a manner that his whole history is an admirable picture, and touches on such proper circumstances in every story that his reader becomes a kind of spectator, and feels in himself all the variety of passions which are correspondent to the several parts of the relations.
That the study of history, far from making us wiser, and more useful citizens, as well as better men, may be of no advantage whatsoever; that it may serve to render us mere antiquaries and scholars, or that it may help to make us forward coxcombs, and prating pedants, I have already allowed. But this is not the fault of history: and to convince us that it is not, we need only contrast the true use of history with the use that is made of it by such men as these. We ought always to keep in mind, that history is philosophy teaching by examples how to conduct ourselves in all the situations of private and public life; that therefore we must apply ourselves to it in a philosophical spirit and manner; that we must rise from particular to general knowledge, and that we must fit ourselves for the society and business of mankind by accustoming our minds to reflect and meditate on the characters we find described, and the course of events we find related there.
History is only a confused heap of facts.
The philosopher has the works of omniscience to examine; and is therefore engaged in disquisitions to which finite intellects are utterly unequal. The poet trusts to his invention, and is not only in danger of those inconsistencies to which every one is exposed by departure from truth, but may be censured as well for deficiencies of matter as for irregularity of disposition or impropriety of ornament. But the happy historian has no other labour than of gathering what tradition pours down before him, or records treasure for his use…. Yet, even with these advantages, very few in any age have been able to raise themselves to reputation by writing histories.
History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
Now an historian is a person who assumes a character of great dignity, and addresses himself to a most respectable audience. He undertakes to communicate information, not to his equals only or inferiors, but to the greatest, and most learned men upon earth. He wishes them to listen to him, and to listen with pleasure, to believe his testimony, and treasure up his sayings as lessons of wisdom, to direct them in the conduct of life, and in the government of kingdoms. In so awful a presence, and with views so elevated, what style is it natural for him to assume? A style uniformly serious, and elegant, clear, orderly, and emphatical, set off with modest ornaments to render it pleasing, yet plain and simple, and such as becomes a man whose chief concern it is to know and deliver the truth.
We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our minds and destroy our happiness. In history a great volume is moulded for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine furnishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in Church and State, and supply the means of keeping alive, or reviving dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same
| “troublous storms that toss | |
| The private state, and render life unsweet.” |
As the epic poem and romance may be made to contain the floating materials of all knowledge, their mother, history, may still more easily be made into the firm pulpit of every moral and religious opinion; and every department of morality, moral theology, moral philosophy and casuistry finds its leader in ancient history.
Past times are to us a book with seven seals. What you call the spirit of the times is at bottom your own spirit, in which the times are mirrored.
| What want these outlaws conquerors should have | |
| But History’s purchased page to call them great? | |
| A wider space, an ornamented grave? | |
| Their hopes were not less warm, their souls were full as brave. |
Some historians, like Tacitus, Burnet, and the Abbé Raynal, are never satisfied without adding to their detail of events the secret springs and causes that have produced them. But both heroes and statesmen, amid the din of arms, and the hurry of business, are too often necessitated to invert the natural order of things; to fight before they deliberate, and to decide before they consult. A statesman may regulate himself by events; but it is seldom that he can cause events to regulate themselves by him. It often happens, too, both in courts and in cabinets, that there are two things going on together, a main plot and an under plot; and he that understands only one of them will, in all probability, be the dupe of both.
History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples. Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mold of his hypothesis. Those who can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative or in the speculative department of history.
To study man from the past is to suppose that man is ever the same animal. Those who studied the career of Napoleon had ever a dog-eared analyst to refer to.
History casts its shadow far into the land of song.
The historian has a noble and great mission; but it is not by making us weep over all that fails; it is not by placing before us, fragment by fragment, detail by detail, the mere material fact, the succession of crises by which this world of the dead with their immediate effects, have passed away;—above all, it is not by dragging forth at every instant, from the midst of this collective and complex world, the single wretched and feeble individual, and setting him in presence of the profound “Mystery of time” before “unfathomable darkness;” to terrify him with the enigma of existence—it is not so that this mission can be fulfilled.
History itself is nothing more than legend and romance.
The world’s history is a divine poem of which the history of every nation is a canto and of every man a word. Its strains have been pealing along down the centuries, and, though there have been mingled the discords of roaring cannon and dying men, yet to the Christian philosopher and historian—the humble listener—there has been a divine melody running through the song which speaks of hope and halcyon days to come.
All persons, taken one by one, are but elements of a great social organism, to whose laws of providential growth they must be held subordinate. History cannot be resolved into a mere series of biographies; nor can the individual be justly estimated in his insulation, and tried by the mere inner law of his own particular nature.
If they wished to understand history they must try to understand men and women. For History is the history of men and women, and of nothing else…. If, therefore, any of you should ask me how to study history I should answer, Take by all means biographies, wheresoever possible autobiographies, and study them. Fill your minds with live human figures…. Without doubt History obeys, and always has obeyed, in the long run, certain laws. But those laws assert themselves, and are to be discovered, not in things, but in persons; in the actions of human beings; and just in proportion as we understand human beings, shall we understand the laws which they have obeyed, or which have avenged themselves on their disobedience. This may seem a truism; if it be such, it is one which we cannot too often repeat to ourselves just now, when the rapid progress of science is tempting us to look at human beings rather as things than as persons, and at abstractions (under the name of laws) rather as persons than as things.
History travels by the high road which has no end, and whose branches knit kingdom with kingdom; but is not the historian sometimes tempted into an impasse, whence he must make his way back again, but where, for all that, he may have come upon something that more than paid him for losing his way! I have found it so sometimes when I was meandering about an old Italian town, and stumbled on the tomb of some stock actor in our great tragi-comedy in which I had an interest.
One lesson, and only one, history may be said to repeat with distinctness: that the world is built somehow on moral foundations; that, in the long run, it is well with the good; in the long run, it is ill with the wicked. But this is no science; it is no more than the old doctrine taught long ago by the Hebrew prophets. The theories of M. Comte and his disciples advance us, after all, not a step beyond the trodden and familiar ground. If men are not entirely animals, they are at least half animals, and are subject in this aspect of them to the conditions of animals. So far as those parts of man’s doings are concerned, which neither have, nor need have, any thing moral about them, so far the laws of him are calculable. There are laws for his digestion, and laws of the means by which his digestive organs are supplied with matter. But pass beyond them, and where are we? In a world where it would be as easy to calculate men’s actions by laws like those of positive philosophy as to measure the orbit of Neptune with a foot-rule, or weigh Sirius in a grocer’s scale.
History may be written in many ways. The best, the only true way, consists in the minute examination of documents and of facts, and in a complete and conscientious exposition of them. The historian forgets himself in the presence of his work, and has no care except for truth. He imposes nothing, he proposes; and although it is impossible that the long sojourn in the midst of doctrines, and of the strife of systems, should have left his thoughts indifferent, he would aim at the appearance of impassiveness, in consequence of the impartiality of his judgment, and the sincerity of his studies.
Above all things, in our historical investigations let us be exact. Here there is no justification of haste and lack of precision. So far as practicable, let us go to original sources of information. If we are obliged to receive information at second-hand, let us insist on knowing where our informant received his knowledge and his impressions. This process involves, of course, the study or the examination of many books, rather than the reading of a few. But it is the application to systematic research of those methods which alone are fruitful of success in the affairs of business as well as in the affairs of study. For, however broad and however comprehensive our general knowledge, it is, in the last analysis, only the application of our knowledge to minute details that accomplishes results and brings reward. Even in the practical work of our daily life, the chief advantage, perhaps the only advantage, of large general knowledge is the ability it gives the better to command and manage the details of special and minute affairs…. There is no atonement for carelessness. If the historical student is unwilling to seek for the truth, even in the remotest recesses of darkness, he will have to be content to see his work lightly esteemed.
What have we a right to demand of an historian? First, surely, stern veracity which implies not merely knowledge but honesty. An historian stands in a fiduciary position towards his readers, and if he withholds from them important facts like to influence their judgment, he is guilty of fraud, and, when justice is done in this world, will be condemned to refund all the moneys he has made by his false professions, with compound interest. This sort of fraud is unknown to the law, but to nobody else. “Let me know the facts!” may well be the agonized cry of the student who finds himself floating down what Arnold has called “the vast Mississippi of falsehood, History.” Secondly, comes a catholic temper and way of looking at things. The historian should be a gentleman, and possess a moral breadth of temperament. There should be no bitter protesting spirit about him. He should remember the world he has taken upon himself to write about is a large place, and that nobody set him up over us. Thirdly, he must be a born story-teller. If he is not this, he has mistaken his vocation. He may be a great philosopher, a useful editor, a profound scholar, and anything else his friends like to call him, except a great historian.
And they call this history. This serving up in spiced dishes of the clean and the unclean, the wholesome and the noxious; this plunging down into the charnel-house of the great graveyard of the past, and stirring up the decaying carcasses of the outcasts and malefactors of the race. No good can come of such work: without plan, without purpose, without breadth of view, and without method; with nothing but a vague desire to amuse, and a morbid craving for novelty. If there is one common purpose running through the whole history of the past, if that history is the story of man’s growth in dignity, and power, and goodness, if the gathered knowledge and the gathered conscience of past ages does control us, support us, inspire us, then is this commemorating these parasites and off-scourings of the human race worse than pedantry or folly. It is filling us with an unnatural contempt for the greatness of the past—nay, it is committing towards our spiritual forefathers the same crime which Ham committed against his father Noah. It is a kind of sacrilege to the memory of the great men to whom we owe all we prize, if we waste our lives in poring over the acts of the puny creatures who only encumbered their path.
History is not only a science. It is also an art. To be a great historian one must be a great artist. That incommunicable attribute of genius, creative of poetic power, is necessary to any one who would make the past live before us…. I suppose that in the present day we are not likely to lose sight of this truth. Our danger rather is to forget that without learning, accuracy, critical power, good sense, candour, no literary gifts, however brilliant, will enable any one to write anything worthy of the name of history. The man who does not possess these endowments is absolutely disqualified for the work of the historian.
The function of history in education is perhaps not yet clearly apparent to all those who teach it. But all those who reflect are agreed to regard it as being principally an instrument of social culture. The study of the societies of the past causes the pupil to understand, by the help of actual instances, what a society is; it familiarises him with the principal social phenomena and the different species of usages, their variety and their resemblances. The study of events and evolutions familiarises him with the idea of the continual transformation which human affairs undergo, it secures him against an unreasoning dread of social changes; it rectifies his notion of progress. All these acquisitions render the pupil fitter for the public life; history thus appears as an indispensable branch of instruction in a democratic society.
