Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/31

21 HISTORY 21 striking compositions with grand outline and rich tints which were attractive and beautiful for their own sake. When to this conception of their art we add their general apathy in research, the measure of their sins appears to be filled up in the eyes of a generation like ours, which has brought historical evidence under conditions nearly as stringent as those which regulate the depositions of a court of justice. Still it may occur to some persons that there is another side to this matter, and that the great men of old are not wholly without defence. They were indolent in research no doubt, or rather they did not attach the value that we do to it (if they had, they were not men to have spared their pains), but they were large, sympathetic, and humane. They wrote for a public composed of men of the world and not of specialists. Their manner is somewhat off-hand, but they are neither prigs nor pedants. After all, the most important facts of history, as Auguste Comte has weightily remarked, are the best known and the least dependent on minute rectification for their true appreciation. History has an ethical and psychological side as well as a documentary side supported by elaborate citation of chapter and verse for every statement. Chapter and verse, import ant as they are, are sometimes a little oppressive and over bearing. The most exhaustive knowledge of authorities will not give a dull man insight into character, or enable him to realize and paint a great historic scene, or teach him to use with skill the mass of erudition under which he staggers. It may be said generally, exceptions of course excepted, that the old historians were strong where their successors are weak, and the converse. Aiming chiefly at portraiture, they succeeded in it, as was only natural. Amid a crowd of errors on smaller matters, they often catch the true expres sion of a physiognomy, and hit off the salient points of a character with an insight and success which subsequent inquiry is often unable to modify. Bacon s portrait of Henry VII. remains substantially correct, though he wrote his book in four months, remote from the means of knowledge accessible even in his day, which did not represent a tithe of the knowledge accessible now. Even down to the practice of introducing fictitious speeches into their histories, the old writers are not without defence. Nothing more than these speeches has moved the contempt and indignation of modern critics. Macaulay says the practic3 was absurd, and that if an English writer were to attempt it now he would be laughed to scorn. Yet men of the calibre of Macchiavelli, ^Grotius, and Bacon resorted to it. It is more a question of form and less of substance than at first glance appears. It amounts to this How are we to render our impression of a past epoch ? We may give it in broad statement, in carefully reasoned argu ment, supported by apt quotation and appropriate footnotes. This is the modern plan, and, to speak frankly, unquestion ably the best. But it is well to listen without impatience to what can be said for the old plan by the other side. Mr Spedding, referring to the speeches which Bacon intro duced into his history of Henry VII., says: &quot;My own opinion is that the reader is less liable to be deceived by history written on this principle than upon the modern plan, though the modern be apparently the more scrupulous. The records of the past are not completo enough to enable the most diligent historian to give a connected narrative in which there shall not be many parts resting on guesses or inferences or unauthenticated rumours. He may guess for himself, or he may report other people s guesses ; but guesses there must be. The advantage of the old practice is that the invention appears in the undisguised form of invention; whereas the modern practice, by scrupulously eschewing everything like avowed and deliberate invention, leaves it to be supposed that what remains is all fact, whereas in most cases of the kind the writer is but report ing his own or another man s conjecture, just as much as if he had sat down deliberately to compose a soliloquy or a speech in the first person &quot; (Spedding s Bacon, vol vi. p. 76). Every one must be glad to see even plausible reasons suggested for not regarding the funeral oration of Pericles or the speech of Galgacus as &quot; absurdities.&quot; Per haps the truest view of this introduction of speeches into their histories by the ancients and their modern imitators is that it was their mode of offering generalizations. They adopted the concrete and dramatic form when we should use the abstract and impersonal, and perhaps, as Mr Spedding remarks, this practice was not necessarily exposed to more error than ours. W T e have now to advert to the causes which led to the transformation of history from the old to the new type. The inferior quality of history in the 17th century and the first half of the 18th is the more remarkable from the contrast presented by the brilliancy of contemporary litera ture in other departments. The age of Louis XIV. in France, as already remarked, and the age of Anne in England produced no histories of superior merit. Bossuet s famous discourse on universal history is no exception, being much more an eloquent sermon than a history in the true sense of the word. Written by inferior men from a low point of view, or no point of view at all, history at last sank to such a degree in the public esteem as to be spoken of in a tone of contempt. Dr Johnson openly despised it, and D Alembert did nearly the same. And yet the time pro duced great antiquaries Madox and Ilymer in England, D Achery and Mabillon in France, Maratori in Italy, Leibnitz in Germany. But history had no stamina or muscle. It was also from our point of view blind and utterly stupid : it could not see the plainest facts, and it perverted the facts it did see. Not only the inferior men whose names are barely remembered and whose works are entirely forgotten, the Daniels, the Vellys, the Creviers, the Hooks, the Eckards, but men of such magnitude as Hume and llobertson, Gibbon and Voltaire, often show such an unintelligence as to the past that this unintelligence itself becomes an interesting historical phenomenon, casting no slur on the great writers who displayed it, but deserving consideration for its own sake. When 18th century writers are arraigned for their defec tive appreciation of the Middle Ages (the great stumbling- block) and remote periods generally, their critics forget the historical positions of the men they criticize. To write history in- the 18th century was something very different from what it had been before, and this in several ways. First of all, the mere lengthening of the historic retrospect had enormously increased the field of historical survey. A writer of the 18th century looked back on nearly as much as we do ; he had behind him the recent modern period, the long Middle Age, the barbarian epoch, those of Greece and Home. And it was honourable to the men of the 18th century that they did not shrink from the task of writing on this immense expanse of history, imperfectly as they were prepared for it. It seems to be sometimes forgotten that most of the historical writing of the ancients, and a good part of that of the moderns up to the 18th century, had been the writing of contemporary history, or history of a quite recent past. This is true of Herodotus (when he is not merely a traveller telling travellers stories), of Thucydides, of Polybius, of Sallust, of Tacitus, of Guic- ciardini, of Fra Paolo, of Davila, of Grotius, of Clarendon. Contemporaneous history may bring out some of the highest qualities of an historian perspicacity, weightiness of judg ment and language, skill in narrative, and so forth. But one quality it does not need and cannot display, insight into a remote age differing in culture,&amp;lt;politics, and religion from those amid which the historian lives. Yet it was