Page:American Historical Review vol. 6.djvu/224

214 successor found occasion for fifty-two. As to the opponent of that civilian successor, he sets computation at defiance. Indeed, speaking of Mr. Bryan purely from the historical standpoint, I seriously doubt whether, in all human experience, any man ever before gave utterance to an equal number of words in the same space of time.

Leaving illustration, however, and returning to my theme, I will now say that in the whole long and memorable list of distinctively American literary men,—authors, orators, poets and story-tellers,—I recall but three who seem to me to have been endowed with a sense of form, at once innate and Greek; those three were Daniel Webster, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yet, unless moulded by that instinctive sense of form, nothing can be permanent in literature any more than in sculpture, in painting or in architecture. Not size, nor solidity, nor fidelity of work, nor knowledge of detail will preserve the printed volume any more than they will preserve the canvass or the edifice; and this I hold to be just as true of history as of the oration, the poem or the drama.

Surely, then, our histories need not all, of necessity, be designed for students and scholars exclusively; and yet it is a note-worthy fact that even to-day, after scholars and story-tellers have been steadily at work upon it for nearly a century and a half,—ever since David Hume and Oliver Goldsmith brought forth their classic renderings,—the chief popular knowledge of over three centuries of English history between John Plantagenet (1200) and Elizabeth Tudor (1536) is derived from the pages of Shakespeare. There is also a curious theory now apparently in vogue in our university circles, that, in some inscrutable way, accuracy as to fact and a judicial temperament are inconsistent with a highly developed literary sense. Erudition and fairness are the qualities in vogue, while form and brilliancy are viewed askance. Addressing now an assembly made up, to an unusual extent, of those engaged in the work of instruction in history, I wish to suggest that this marked tendency of the day is in itself a passing fashion, and merely a reactionary movement against the influence of two great literary masters of the last generation,—Macaulay and Carlyle. That the reaction had reason, I would by no means deny; but, like most decided reactions, has it not gone too far? Because men weary of brilliant colors, and mere imitators try to wield the master's brush, it by no means follows that art does not find its highest expression in Titian and Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Claude and Turner. It is the same with history. Profound scholars, patient investigators, men of a judicial turn of mind, subtile philosophers and accurate annalists empty forth upon a patient, because somewhat indifferent,