Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/589

Rh occupations worthy of a gentleman are war and politics. But even Voltaire believed that a state of war was more conformable to the nature of man than one of peace.

The belief that a history should appeal more to the feelings of the reader than to his judgment is now held by few persons. As the drama is the most moving of literary compositions history should be dramatic, that is, it should be a work of art, not la collection of documents. Voltaire maintained that a history like a tragedy should have an exposition, a development of the action, and a catastrophe. He maintained that the historian should not only have an extensive acquaintance with the affairs of the world, but should also be endowed with the capacity for dramatic representation. He calls the citation of documents foolishness, and appeals to the example of the ancients as proof of his contention. Documents he considered nothing more than the scaffolding which is taken away when a structure is completed. Frederic Schiller, who was a skilfulskillful [sic] dramatist and a writer of the first rank, composed histories without knowing much history. Moreover, he did not pretend to know much. He once wrote to a friend that history was a sort of storehouse for his imagination, the contents of which had to submit to whatever use he wished to make of them, and that he would always be a poor authority for any future writer who should be so unfortunate as to turn to him. The belief that the value of a history depends more upon the style in which it is written than upon the matter which it contains prevailed almost universally until comparatively recent times. Oliver Goldsmith wrote a "History of the Earth and Animated Nature," the title of which he probably borrowed along with a great deal of the matter from Buffon's "Histoire Naturelle." Albeit, more than one of his readers has ventured to doubt whether he could have told a duck from a goose. Yet he produced an interesting work, as I can testify from the impression it made upon me when I first (and last) read it many years ago. Both the Irishman and the Frenchman looked at the world through the medium of their imagination, and consequently saw many things that had no objective existence. In 1877 Professor Du Bois-Reymond delivered an address in Cologne in which he endeavored to prove that the history of mankind is virtually the history of the natural sciences. Although he defended his position with much skill and eloquence, he probably carried conviction to the minds of but few of his hearers and readers. Others have maintained that history is embodied in the efforts of men to invent better tools. It is not easy to see how, viewed from either of these positions, there could be any history for more than a thousand years beginning with the Christian era. There is a great deal of movement and at times a great deal of intellectual activity, but the result was fruitless. In the penal system of former days the treadmill was a common mode of punishment. The exercise