Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/284

274 every factor of doubt but the personal equation of the subject. The giver of information has few rules based on experience for his guidance, and has a double personal equation to meet—that of his subject and that of his questioner. No wonder the failures are many.

The art is comparatively new, for it arose out of myth and fable and is still painfully groping towards truth. Evolutionists tell us that the development of moral concepts has been as gradual and certain as the development of physical characteristics, and some would lay down a rule of thumb to show how the ideas of truth, right, and justice have been evolved from moral nescience. What would the writer of history not give for such a standard or measure! The pleasure and the relief of being able to determine thus almost mechanically the degree of faith to be given to this or that relator; the delight of placing him in his proper stage of development and the mastery of purpose which would follow—what boons to the plodding reader who must rest his story upon what others, of another time and place, have related. The strata of dependence thus defined would mean a scientific test for reliability, something far beyond the existing method of setting relator against relator and accepting the mean as truth.

Three centuries ago, before there was a wide public to be gulled, the little circle of readers was given on the death of a great man a volume of his testament or parting advice. The contents had just enough verisimilitude to be accepted in part, and the advice was wholly interested. The practice common in its day on the Continent of Europe easily slipped into the later form of memoirs, and from the memoirs came biography. To pass upon the career of a public man immediately after his death involves no light task. The secretarial writer, of which Boswell is such a shining example, may be truthful and interesting; but if he is sincere and loyal he will not lightly relate what may tell against his employer. That appeal to prurient curiosity which finds a market in sensation, has been framed in many ways, and still attracts support. A Pepys holds up a personal mirror with the reflecting surface towards himself, and unconsciously gives material for judging others and his own times such as no serious-minded historian could give and such as no writer on Pepys's period can neglect. The little has become the important.

The United States has not been rich in self-written history, nor is the little it possesses, of startling moment. An explanation offered by some declares the lack of real interest in American history. However rich in pictures and incidents it does not present