Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/32

 The very best of our own English work has always been done in that fashion, and I think that it will continue so to be done. The sanity and energy and ingenuity of the researcher is the main thing that matters. If he is worth his salt, he will teach himself 'method' in a very short time. Nothing astonishes me more than the way in which the real born historian learns to get to the heart of a matter within a year or so of starting work—and as to the man who is not born to the trade, it is mistaken kindness to encourage him to turn to a career for which he is not mentally equipped.

But it being granted that we have obtained the right man, with the requisite energy, zeal, and preliminary education, there are still two notes of caution which have to be struck if we are to get really fruitful work out of him. The one is obvious, the other much less so. The first is that the would-be historian must avoid vague sporadic and ill-defined aims, which enable him to wander over vast and miscellaneous fields of research, absorbing masses of material of such heterogeneous kinds that they never get digested, and never arrive at the dignity of print. If any work is ever really wasted in the world, it is that of the man who makes himself a sort of walking encyclopaedia, and then dies without having produced a single book. His knowledge perishes with him, and the facts which he has collected have to be reconquered by some successor, because he has never deigned to commit them to paper. Every one of us has known such men—but perhaps I may be permitted to speak for a moment of the king of them all. I name him with infinite respect: he was in some ways a great man, and he might have been a great historian. He started to read history early, he was