Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/93

 as an undesigned coincidence, an important element in a discussion yet in its elementary stages. How great is the debt that History owes to the ant-like instincts of collectors of memoranda, the recorders of births, deaths, and marriages, the savers of old letters and old newspapers, of the very things that seemed most useless. If there is any useless knowledge in History, we may say,—as Dr. Maitland said, when people talked of the Dark Ages, they meant the ages that were dark to them,—the uselessness of the knowledge is generally the fault of those who do not know how to use it.

It would be doing great injustice, however, to my subject if I were to lead you to suppose that I regard the great benefit arising from the study of original materials to lie in the gratification of our natural instinctive desire to get to the bottom of a thing. I suppose that such an instinct is given us for some good end, and that that which lies at the bottom of the historical well is historical truth: Truth that defies the all-dissolving processes of criticism, or at least such an approach to truth as may be credited to a record incapable of further analysis. The results of such minute study are the little pebbles of the concrete in which the foundations of the historic superstructure are laid. Every great historian has been his own Dry-as-dust, however much he may, as Carlyle does, point the moral of the lesson of labour with small type and inverted commas; for, I take it, the prophet does not adopt this plan as a means of disguise, but rather to show that to a great extent historical genius consists in an unlimited capacity for taking pains. The man who has, out of independent study, produced such results, has made a contribution, small or great as the case may be, to the great stock of sound material which constitutes real knowledge.

This consciousness may be its own reward; but, as I said before, if the love of history for its own sake goes no further, such ambition ranks among the lowest forms of the historical spirit. We take a real pleasure not only in cutting out our sound and perfect stone, but in fitting it into its place in the building: we wish to increase the sum of human knowledge not only by the accumulation of facts but by