Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/101



PRESENT-DAY HISTORY AND HISTORIANS

I have been privileged to witness many far-reaching changes in the historiography of our times, so let me ask that my long experience should serve as an explanation and, if necessary, as an excuse for the methods I myself pursue in the writing of history.

In the now remote days of my youth I was a pupil at the small Roumanian university of Jassy of a man who has left some trace on the European thought of his period, Alexander D. Xenopol. A former student in Berlin, first and foremost preoccupied by questions of Roman institutions, a man of philosophical rather than historical tendencies, an economist and seeker after definite laws in the complicated field of history, he was later attracted towards historical studies, but he studied in his early years the now unjustly despised doctrine of Buckle, and his six-volume history of the Roumanians, no mean achievement, shows this early familiarity with eading abstract ideas. It is, in spite of many errors of fact, a solid mass of work in which the chaos of the pragmatical is always dominated by superior conceptions.

Something of the Buckleian era remained in the minds of his generation and, by means of his teaching, passed into my own being too. For them history was not an immense chaos of bygone deeds culled from different sources, critically analysed and held together only by the loose ties of territorial unity and chronological sequence.