Page:Once a Week NS Volume 7.djvu/189

 ONCE A WEEK

NEW SERIES

No, 164. February 18, 1871. Price 2d.

THE GRAND STYLE.—AND THE OTHER.

HISTORY, to   ordi- nary readers those  who   get   it from   authors   who have studied what they call the "dig- nity of  history," and   wnte   in   the "grand   style"-is a splendid   specta- cular drama, in in- numerable ta- bleaux,    and    with no  plot,    or   none discoverable. The tableaux are all ex- actly alike, only the actors change their clothes, and perform to different music. But the incidents are the same, and the grouping. A Drury Lane playbill, advertising some great  spectacle, pretty well represents the course of history in every one of its acts. Here we have, in big letters-"The Assembling of the Tribes -Martial Preparations-Terrific Battle- Siege of the City-Heroism of  Besieged -Great Triumphal Procession." Glory, of course, crowns the victors; and their deeds are narrated a few years after, and before the next act begins-the last book of He- rodotus, for instance, gives us the Battle of Plataea-by the historian,who sheds undying lustre on the actors. The lustre somehow dies out ; new great victories dim the glories of the old ; and what was once a perfect lime-light ofsplendour, on deeds engraven in gold, becomes a feeble glimmer over a tar- nished gilding. Pray, who remembers great heroes? They survive to be read by the schoolboy ; or their names, where school- boys do not read of them, remain only to point a moraI and adorn a Ieading article. Take,  for   example,  the   great,   the   illustri ous Belisarius-who conquered the Vandals and the Goths-the master of Sicily and of Rome. What Civil Service candidate can now detail his achievements? And who re- members of him aught but the lying fable that he begged his bread, blind and desti- tute? Glory nieans honourable mention by the  historians. But what if no one reads theirhistories? Lucky, however, in turbulent times, are the men who get through without leaving behind them names destined to de- scend to posterity laden with the reproach of crimes never committed, and atrocities never imagined. And while the great villains ofhistory-such as Nero, Richard the Third, or Robespierre-find no dificulty in getting rehabities, the lesser scoundrels-who, per- haps, were tolerably honest and upright men, as honesty then went ; who but a poor half-page in the scroll of Clio, and that an ignoble one-find none to plead their cause. My own sympathy has always been with these helpless victims of a spasmodic public virtue, doomed to live on, their fair names straggled in the dust by a disgraceful agnomen -such as Caius the Traitor, Balbus the Con- spirator, Manlius the Murdercr, and so on. It is all useless pity, because nothing can be done for them. They went in for public affairs, and tossed up, so to speak-heads or tails, glory or reprobation. It came down tails-reprobation. Only one cannot help fancying that Messrs. Gibbon, Hume, and Rollin must be having a bad  time  of it aniong the indignant shades of those whom they have immortalized with what the news- papers call an unenviable notoriety. Happily, in these days,we have a new kind of writers, who give us other, if not juster, notions of glory. They do not, it is true, write history-because we know that, without the grand style, history is a thing of nought ; but  they  wnte  memoirs,   Chroniqes Scan- daleuses, anecdotes, and gossip. They peep