The Outlook in History

I

WHAT is History ? The thing we know; the definition baffles us. But what is Truth — or Beauty — or Poetry ? The wisest have not yet agreed on a formula for any one of them; nor is this strange: for Poetry and Beauty, History and Truth, spring from the unfathomed sources of life, from the mystery which, although it be for each of us the only vital reality, eludes all our research. But as we manage to live without solving the riddle, — indeed, the acceptance of its insolubility seems to be the only solution, — so we waive a final definition of History, and go on to consider some of its aspects.

The present time is particularly favorable for a survey, because we have apparently reached a point where historians pursuing different aims are producing side by side, in mutual tolerance, if not in mutual respect. This is a hopeful sign. Progress requires variation; orthodoxy leads to bigotry, persecution, paralysis.

The modern scientific method of studying history has now been practiced in France, England, and America for more than a generation, and in Germany for two or three decades longer. It has passed beyond the tentative stage, survived ridicule and opposition, and risen to acknowledged supremacy. In its complete triumph there was danger that it might become a fetish. But now we begin to see that every method is merely a tool, and that the product of the tool depends on the skill of its user. No refinement of mechanism can take the place of human insight and character. The results of a victory won by an army equipped with rapid - fire, long - range guns may sink into insignificance compared with what

Norman William’s crossbows achieved at Hastings, or Washington’s flintlocks won at Yorktown. So neither Justin Winsor nor Mandell Creighton, enjoying to the full the advantages of the modern method, ranks with Thucydides or Tacitus, or with many lesser men, who flourished in the “unscientific” ages. Something more than a system goes to the making of great histories. This recognition of personality as the cornerstone on which everything human rests is the beginning of wisdom.

German historical students, under Ranke’s lead, had firmly established themselves in the scientific method, when the general adoption of the doctrine of evolution forced historians everywhere to take a new point of view. To trace causes and effects had long been their purpose; now they saw that the principle of growth, or development, was itself the very rudder of causation. They proceeded to rearrange their material, and to rewrite the story of every nation, institution, art, and science according to this principle. No other formula has been so fruitful, or so universally applicable: nor do we now see how it can be superseded.

To historians especially, the doctrine of development came as a revelation, which made the work of their pre-Darwinian forerunners appear as obsolete as the ancient religions appeared to the first Christians. They felt the delight which thrills those who exercise a new faculty ; say, rather, the exaltation of those who dedicate themselves to a new crusade for Truth. As always happens in such cases, they strove by every means to magnify the difference between the New and the Old; as if the New were wholly right, and the Old wholly wrong. This is a wise instinct; for only when a novel doctrine or cult is pushed to its extreme can we measure its intrinsic value, and determine how much of its apparent, strength is due to mere reaction or contrast.

We now look back on the products of forty years of the modern historical school. Comparing them with the great works of the past, two facts strike us at once: there has been a gain in method, and a loss in literary quality. The gain in method shows itself chiefly in accuracy and in a studied impartiality: the loss in literary quality can be verified by tasting any average historical monograph. The scientific historian had formerly the same feeling toward the literary historian that the early Christians had toward the culture of Greece and Rome: believing that they themselves possessed the true gospel, they wished to show their orthodoxy by being as different as possible from the pagans. History had come to be regarded as literature, they would leave no room for doubt that they regarded it as science. In the scientific world the view prevailed— and it has not wholly disappeared — that to write intelligibly is suspicious, while to write “popularly” is suicidal; and this, despite the fact that Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Mill — the most illustrious men of science of their generation — had set a noble example in clear expression.

Historical students shared this distrust of literary form, and as their investigations followed the scientific pattern, their reports naturally took the shape of the scientific treatise. Several causes have contributed to make the scientific treatise what it is. First of all, it is usually written by an investigator or observer who has no aptitude for expression, — for the highest powers of observation do not necessarily go with even ordinary capacity for expression. Next, the immense numbers of facts and processes discovered by Science during the past half-century have required the invention of thousands of new terms, until each science has a special dialect, which is often as hopeless for literary purposes as is algebraic notation. No wonder that men whose minds swarm with awkward vocabularies,— formed, by a cruel irony, from mongrel combinations of the most beautiful of languages (as if the Apollo Belvedere were ground into powder to make stucco), — no wonder that they distrust those who show ability to use the mothertongue, which tends in a way to become foreign to them. Scientific men also scorned to suit their language to any persons except their fellow initiates, thereby illustrating that tendency to exclusiveness which appears in freemasonry, college secret societies, and sectarian mysteries.

Nor must we overlook another very powerful influence. Throughout most of the nineteenth century the Germans set the standard of scholarship. The world has never seen other diggers so tireless, so patient, so zealous. They have made their minds, as instruments of observation, almost as precise and impersonal as a microscope. They accumulate facts by the million; they would cross the ocean to certify a comma. Through their devotion to truth, through their rugged honesty, they have worthily represented the great German race, which lags, on the political side, so far behind its ideals. But to their scholarship, power of expression has been, it seems, denied. They have had to struggle against not only the difficulties inherent in the creation of new sciences and in the accumulation of knowledge, but also against the refractoriness of their speech. If a language be the expression of a nation’s habitual mental processes, German prose bears witness to a race which has had the habit of thinking widely and deeply, but not clearly. A German’s statement may be compared to a charge of birdshot, which scatters, and in scattering may hit the target, and much else besides; while a Frenchman’s statement, like the ball of the sharpshooter, goes straight to the bull’s-eye.

All these various influences — the scientific method, literary inexperience, contempt for unprofessional criticism, devotion to the new gospel, and zealous imitation of the German model — helped to establish the idea that History must be unliterary if it would guard its reputation for authority. The German practice of publishing doctors’ dissertations contributed further to encourage the belief that historical composition meant merely the pitchforking together of the results of special investigation. These results were often valuable, but who could expect that young men of twenty-four or twenty-five, who had given little or no heed to the manner of presentation, should write well ? And having found that that sort of thing sufficed, they naturally were at no pains to improve on it in their later work. Nothing is more dangerous for a young man of ability than to suppose that the standard by which he wins his first academic success is final. For a good many years, much of the historical work produced in England and America smacked of the average doctor’s dissertation. Since the study and writing of History seem to be coming more and more to be restricted to university teachers, it is most important that they should look jealously to the manner as well as to the matter of their candidates’ work: for in fifteen or twenty years these candidates will themselves be the arbiters of historic production.

The opinion which many upheld that History is a science increased their desire to make it resemble the sciences in all respects. The question, — Is History a science?—round which much controversy has raged, is not yet settled; but it apparently has reduced itself to a dispute over terms. The confusion arises from assuming that a subject becomes a science when it is studied by the scientific method. But before History can be a science, men must possess the gift of prophecy. Your chemist or physicist deals with forces and elements which are absolutely determinable at all times and places, and under all conditions. Water will be composed of two molecules of hydrogen and one of oxygen until the earth drops into the sun. But the historian has to do with a chain of causation in which the chief elements — the human Will and Chance — are absolutely incomputable. Will remains a mystery. We cannot predict when it will manifest itself in individuals or in multitudes, nor can we set any limits to its activity. And so with Chance. After the event, it may be possible to trace the steps that led to it, but until it happens, no one suspects that it is near. Five minutes before Lincoln was shot, who dreamed of the calamity which was to shatter Reconstruction and alter the course of American history ? Cavour dies, after a brief illness, and the unification of Italy is permanently turned awry. Thus Chance mocks us.

Our knowledge of all past history does not enable us to foresee what to-morrow will bring forth. We can generalize; and many a historian mistakes his generalizations for laws, but they may fit no special event. Now the special events, due to the human Will or to Chance, make up History. Although you may have studied every recorded revolution, yet you cannot foretell what peculiar turn the next outbreak in Paris may take from hour to hour: for you cannot know beforehand how the persons concerned in any affair may react on one another, or on the masses; much less can you predict what Chance may bring about. It would be idle to call arithmetic a science if twice two were three yesterday, four to-day, and possibly five or seven to-morrow. Yet similar variations are the staple of History. In human affairs, not less than in chemistry, given conditions would produce similar results, if you could get exactly the same personal ingredients. But this is impossible. Suppose Mirabeau had not died in 1791, — suppose Robespierre had been assassinated in 1792, — suppose a stray bullet had killed young Bonaparte at Toulon, — how would the course of events have been changed! Yet if the study of History were a science, it would convince us that Mirabeau’s death was inevitable, and that Robespierre and Bonaparte in the very nature of things could not die in 1792. Manifestly, historians would be clairvoyants, as familiar with the future as with the past, the chosen confidants of Fate or Providence, if they could make any such assertions. We can say that Bonaparte did not die in 1792, but to affirm that he could not possibly have died would be absurd. Yet until History can demonstrate the possible as clearly as the actual, it will never be a valid science.

This does not, however, diminish its supreme importance, nor dull its interest; on the contrary, the uncertainty enhances both. We are not to infer that life is lawless, because we lack the gift of prophecy. Will, too, has its laws, although we cannot codify them. The historian’s business is to trace the sequence of cause and effect so that every event, every deed, shall appear inevitable. If he succeed in doing that, he should rest content, and let teleology alone.

Were it not for Will, with its incomputable variations, mankind would be a sentient machine, and History would simply register the motions of automata. The consciousness of moral freedom alone gives dignity, charm, and significance to life. Although the fatalist may argue that this consciousness is a delusion we are fated to be the dupes of, the practical man will accept at its full value the most genuine of his experiences. Accordingly, the historian must write as if he were an eye-witness of the events he describes, so as to reproduce the plasticity, the uncertainty, the impression of a state of flux, which belong to the passing moment. Like the dramatist, he knows from the first scene the catastrophe of the last, but, instead of telling the secret, he lets the plot unfold itself, as if it were being lived out by the persons in the play. This quality, one of the rarest, if it be not the very crown, of the historian’s equipment, gives not merely the certitude of veracity,but of life-likeness, which is the final test in reconstructing the past.

So far as the historian treats his subject in this fashion, he allows full scope to the free play of will; yet, as he really is not a contemporary, but a retrospective observer, he can also trace each link in the chain of causation and show its fatal or inevitable nature. In other words, he treats the Past as if it were Present, in his efforts to bring it to life, and he treats it as Past, in his efforts to rationalize and interpret it. So he is at once a Dramatist and a Philosopher. Needless to say, few historians possess these gifts in equal proportion, while many rouse in us the suspicion that they have never conceived of the Past as having been once Present and alive. They regard human beings as abstractions, or as dummies on which to drape their theories. In striving to eliminate the personal equation, which has an inconvenient habit of upsetting theories, they become impersonal: but as Personality is the very stuff out of which human life and history are made, the more they get rid of it, the farther they remove from reality. In a perfect history we should have, as in Hamlet or Othello,the motives, the strokes of chance, and the resultant action, so revealed that one might read it for its plot, another for its information, a third for its philosophical bearing; for it would mirror the universality of human experience.

An immediate result of the acceptance of evolution was the spread of fatalism. Science could finally demonstrate that rigid laws govern the material universe, including the bodies of men. By implication, man’s will and spirit were equally fate-bound. Historians, imbued with this conviction, naturally ignored the individual, and devoted themselves to tracing the operation of laws in the development of nations and institutions. Great men seemed to them “negligible” quantities. Slowly, however, a change has come about. Recognition of the omnipresence of law has not lessened, but there has grown up what I may call a commonsense view of human freedom. The will is recognized as a force so mysterious and unpredictable that, though it doubtless obeys laws which we have not yet defined, still, for practical purposes, we must regard it as free. Thus Personality is coming again into the foreground of History. This involves a radical change in treatment, for persons must be described as alive and concrete, with individual flavor, and surprises, and not as abstract and mechanical.

By another natural process, History has come back to literature. The assumption that the historical monograph, being a “scientific” product, might be put together regardless of form, has been fully tested, and has broken down. The analogy between the historical and the scientific monograph proves to be illusory. The biologist, or other pure scientist, must use the dialect of his science in order to be understood by his special tribe; nay, he may dispense with language altogether, and employ diagrams, symbols, and formulas. But the historian’s theme is intensely human, and demands to be expressed in human terms. He is concerned with narration, exposition, description, argument, all of which are governed by literary laws to which he must conform. He may protest that he is “scientific,” and refuse to be bound by the canons of literature, but he might as well refuse to be bound by the law of gravity; willy-nilly, he must master the art of literary expression, if he would make his historical attainments effective.

In the first flush of the scientific dispensation, workers in every branch of history seemed equally inspired; and of a truth, their labors were equally useful. But gradually they have classified themselves according to the nature of their work and the talents required for it, in one class the Men of the Letter, in the other, the Men of the Spirit. The master is always a revealer of significances: facts are not ideas. During the midperiod, when they seemed to be on the same level, there were inevitable misunderstandings: the man who dumped an immense amount of original research into an unreadable monograph felt aggrieved that the books of Fiske and Green had a large sale; while some “literary” historians, on the other hand, did scant justice to the patience and devotion of the delvers. Now, happily, as all realize that they are not competitors and that the work of each is honorable and necessary, the sense of unjust distinctions is dying out. But the Men of the Letter always far outnumber the Men of the Spirit, and there is ever present the danger that they will force their methods and their standards on the Men of the Spirit. So, to-day, Philology smothers Literature.

It does not follow that all historical works should be composed after a single plan. There are episodes which call for special treatment, aspects which require that attention should be focused on them, to the exclusion of a complete or general survey. The immense expansion of knowledge in modern times has provided History with material as abundant as life itself. One science after another has encroached on its domain and tried to usurp its sovereign rights. Political Economy, Government, Sociology, Philosophy, Psychology, Comparative Religion, each has insisted that it alone can interpret the evolution of nations and of mankind, because, it pleads, the spring of human action lies in its field. The economist sees taxation and the supply and demand of commodities dominating men’s collective action ; the sociologist shows that the relations between classes and between capital and labor are of vital importance; and so with each specialist. But History has not been dethroned; far from it: the abler the attempt of the specialist to prove that his science includes History, the clearer the conclusion that History cannot be thus hemmed in. But all these efforts, and the flood of new knowledge which has been pouring in from every side during the past half century, have immensely enriched the province of History. The historian can never know too much of any of these or other sciences. He will often appeal to them to explain special events: but he must beware against surrendering his human point of view for that of any specialist. Whatever branch of his art he may practice, let him never forget to be human.

By these stages, historical study has risen above polemics and technicalities. We seem to be approaching the happy moment when historical writers are to enjoy the fullest freedom. They have at command inexhaustible stores of material. As the gathering and sorting of documents draws to completion, the demand increases for those who can write; and, since absolutely no period or episode has been exhausted, historians have a limitless field to work in. There is a recognized division of labor among them. They need no longer waste time trying to persuade a doubting generation that the scientific method is the best, or that, since the life of individuals, nations, society, and the human race is a development, so the historian must be an evolutionist: everybody now assents to both propositions. What the world awaits is results. For after all, the world, which bothers itself very little about abstruse theories, judges bv the concrete product.

II

Recent publications give a fair idea of the change which has been taking place. The controversial temper has softened. Even the strictest of the scientific school can mention Macaulay without foaming; the more progressive, imbued with the new spirit, freely acknowledge his genius in narration and in the architectonics of historical construction. This does not mean that they are blind to his defects, — those defects which every candidate for college honors used to know by heart, although he had no inkling of the merits which more than offset them. So, too, Carlyle, having ceased to be regarded as a false prophet, whom the faithful must demolish, is coming to be judged on his merits. Men who differ from him totally now dare to recommend him, not as a guide to be followed everywhere, but as a marvelous revivifier of the Past. Of course, not every critic has reached this plane of open-mindedness. Not long ago a writer in The Nation, reviewing the French Revolution, said that Carlyle had “three traits which are almost incompatible with the successful discharge of the functions of an historian. He was a dramatist; he was a sentimentalist; he was a preacher.” ¹ Let us notice only the first of these heinous charges,—“he was a dramatist.” If our previous analysis was correct, the historian must above all things so project himself into the Past as to be a contemporary of the events he describes, that is, be a dramatist; therefore our anonymous critic in branding Carlyle as a “dramatist,” has unwittingly given him the highest praise. History not dramatic ? Then what is it ? Commonplace men do not see the dramatic in life, literalists miss its humor or its pathos ; but surely we do not frame our standard from the opinions of defectives. A critic who writes in that vein advertises himself as obsolescent by his narrowness; by his attitude toward the dramatic, he proves that whether under a Romantic or a Scientific dispensation he could never look far or deep.

Very different is the verdict of Mr. Goldwin Smith, who, after referring to some of Carlyle’s limitations, says: “At the same time let me emphatically acknowledge Carlyle’s greatness as a teacher of history. In picturesqueness he has hardly a peer. Still more strikingly unique and a greater mark of genius are the breadth and boldness with which he presents the whole of humanity with all its weaknesses and absurdities, with its comic as well as its tragic and pathetic side. This is an invaluable feature of his History of the French Revolution, a work which, though perhaps not strictly accurate in all its details, is in depth of insight, in breadth of treatment, as well as in picturesqueness and vividness, still without a rival. I would venture to commend it as a valuable training, in its way, for the historic sense.”

This opinion is not only sound in so far as it concerns Carlyle, but it typifies the attitude of the best minds now engaged in historical work. The time has passed for dogmatizing, for asserting that there is only one orthodox treatment. Study of history can never be fruitful until it teaches the truth, which we all learn so unwillingly,that five eye-witnesses may describe an event in five conflicting ways, each of which may be correct. Final verdicts, ultimate facts, cannot always be reached: the greater the mass of evidence, the smaller the probability of finding a single clue, is usually the rule.

But what is History? Freeman, in an epigram which has helped to dessicate many of his disciples, declared that it is only “past politics,” and that present politics will be future history. His dogmatic tone jars on us. Unless “politics” be defined so broadly as to lose all meaning, it does not cover the field: for we see that political action is usually not a cause, but an effect, and we have grown hungry to know causes. Thus, fluctuations in rainfall may lead to poor crops; poor crops bring on hard times; hard times precipitate strikes; strikes induce wild economic agitation; and this, finally, results in political action. The publication of Tom Paine’s Common Sense, or of Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, would not fall within Freeman’s definition of “political,” and yet the historian who should ignore such symptoms as those books might himself be ignored. The true historian will ignore nothing, not even rainfall; but he will steadily bear in mind that he must treat all the evidence from the human standpoint. In other words, no matter how great the apparent influence of rainfall on national events, he will not allow History to be swallowed up in meteorology. In view of the repeated attempts of specialists to subdue History to their specialty, this warning is not superfluous.

Professor Lamprecht, for instance, confidently asserts that History is only psychology.² Such an assertion was bound to come, because scholars are busying themselves in restating old facts in terms of psychology, which has now the greatest vogue among the sciences, and seems to promise a rich reward to explorers. Professor Lamprecht believes that the process by which the psychology of the individual can be measured will serve also for nations and races, and even for mankind. He imagines a “folk-soul,” or “psychic core,” or “mass-pyche,” as existent at all times, and containing whatever has been transmitted from the past and whatever auto-suggestion or external stimuli may contribute to it at any given moment. To solve an epoch, you need only discover its mass-psyche, which has, further, its own laws of growth and decay.

In so far as Professor Lamprecht insists on the necessity of knowing all the compounds — religious, economic, political, literary, artistic, commercial — in order to understand a period in its totality, he deserves to be carefully heeded; but when he proceeds to apply his theories, we must be on our guard. No age is so simple as he assumes. His mass-psyche, which we take to be the daughter of the Zeitgeist, if he be not our dear old friend himself under a new name, rarely has a single dominant. In fact, your definition of the dominant often depends on whether you look forward or back. To the Old Regime, the dominant of the Revolution seemed destruction; to the Girondist, it seemed progress. The same person or event may be both an end and a beginning. Was Dante the last of the medisevals, or the first of the moderns ? It may be true that nations, like individuals, pass from infancy to youth, from youth to prime, and from prime to old age; but the classification of those stages is vague. To say that a man is old scarcely defines him: old men may be irascible or urbane, vigorous or feeble, wise or foolish, selfish or self-denying, just like young men. And so of nations. Three hundred years ago Bacon thought that England had passed the zenith; to-day Professor Lamprecht appears to be uncertain whether Germany has not begun to decline. But what, we ask, is the value of a “law,” if, after claiming to explain everything, it cannot tell whether a nation is waxing or waning? What should we think of a law in physics which could not determine whether an object were going uphill or down ? Like all Tendenz philosophers, Herr Lamprecht too often creates the impression of making events fit his theory. Many strange pranks are played in the name of evolution, and nothing is more popular than a superficial tracing of political or literary development. Our spurious evolutionists remind one of the great machines on Western farms: at one end, a reaper cuts the grain, which is passed through various compartments, and comes out alternately a loaf of bread or a straw hat at the other. You get what you put in. So with much of Herr Lamprecht’s method; it is too sure, too rigid. Only in the brain of a doctrinaire do the wheels of fate grind so regularly.

A single quotation will illustrate how far Professor Lamprecht’s theories have removed him from the historian’s point of view. After asserting that “the course of universal history has taken the direction in which the transmission of the higher elements of culture was easiest,” he says: “Only a full and broad experience will enable us to see clearly the essentials of the problem, and then only a very simple and elementary survey of the process of transmission may, as I suppose, be gained. . . . The way of mediation may lead either through space or time, and in the first case we might speak of receptivity, in the second of renaissance. The means of mediation may be single or manifold, intermittent, continuous, one-sided, lying open only to the one community in question, or two-sided,— distinctions which occasionally may be traced to special climatic and geographic conditions as well as special culture-differences. And according to this we shall be able, when using the picture of a wellknown physic process, to speak with reference to these processes of osmotic phenomena of diosmosis, endosmosis, and exosmosis.”

A man who thinks in these terms, who sees such pictures as that in the passage here italicized, has abandoned History for abstract science. No true historian ever conceived of the spread of French Republican ideas through Europe as a case of osmosis. The moment you begin to measure human actions and passions and ideals according to the formulas of physical chemistry, you quit the province of history. Herr Lamprecht would, we fear, be capable of reducing Romeo and Juliet to a physiological equation, or of working out the relations of Caesar and Pompey by the binomial theorem. Let the historian get what help he can from psychology, but let him shun the Lamprecht dogmatizing.

The essential truth in Herr Lamprecht’s doctrines was discovered long ago, — the truth, that is, that History must seek its material in every department of human activity. Yet even so, not every history need be a history of civilization, which is, after all, what our German professor aims at. To write a complete biography of General Grant, you ought to know many unrecorded physical and psychological facts: but, even without these, you can undertake to describe his military career. Each writer must map out his own field, and make excursions into the neighboring fields only when by so doing he can draw from them indispensable material.

With relief we turn from Professor Lamprecht’s Teutonic abstractions to Mr. James Ford Rhodes’s concrete performance.³ Mr. Rhodes has no pet dogmatisms. He treats his reader as a human being of intelligence, who desires to learn what certain other human beings did in the United States during and after the Civil War. He does not let you suspect that osmosis, necrosis, or dentition is really his theme. He carries the judge’s function almost to the limit, preferring that you should decide for yourself from the evidence presented. In selecting and presenting evidence, he is conspicuously fair; and his plain style reassures those who fear that brilliance means untrustworthiness. He feels the intrinsic interest of American political development so strongly, that in passing from the Civil War to Reconstruction he leaves on the reader no impression of an anti-climax.

Very different in temper is Mr. Andrew Lang,⁴ who makes no pretense to impartiality. Good is good and bad is bad with him ; lest you should have any doubts, he usually informs you; and since the Scotch whom he describes were mostly either cruel fanatics or half-savage border ruffians, or knaves,he has comparatively little use for flattering epithets. For a Scotchman, he is remarkably candid in admitting the unloveliness and barbarism of his people in the seventeenth century. But when the chance comes to praise, he seizes it eagerly, as in the case of Montrose, whom he paints a hero of the noblest type. I like enthusiasms in historians. Impartiality may be attained at too great a sacrifice; and it requires little experience to discount personal bias where it exists. I suspect a little those who parade their impartiality, which is a quality that cannot be counterfeited. If they have it, we shall soon find out. Others before sitting down to write seem to put on an asbestos shirt, to prevent any glow from passing from themselves to their manuscript, unaware that they have no glow to communicate. The human pumice stone is not a genial companion, nor is his book. So, to hear Mr. Lang call a scoundrel a scoundrel does not lessen my faith in his qualification to write history; but he has two defects which detract from the wit and vigor of his work. He is controversial, now hammering at the assertions of previous writers, now parrying in advance the thrusts of critics, who, he suspects, are lying in wait for him. Again, he is allusive, taking for granted that the reader knows all the petty squabbles of every clan, and the personal fortunes of every Tam, Sandy, and Rab from Pentland Frith to Tweed. Outside of China, ancestor-worship flourishes nowhere so luxuriantly as in Scotland; but after all, the affairs of the Mackenzies and Macleods and Mackays, in 1610, or 1627, do not necessarily, any more than the forgotten feuds of Choctaws and Cherokees, form the intellectual baggage of an educated man to-day. So Mr. Lang’s reader sometimes feels like a stranger at a family party, where all the conversation is about matters and persons he has never heard of. This is provincial.

Between Mr. Rhodes, who keeps himself in the background, and supplies you with the material for forming a judgment, and Mr. Lang, who makes history his story, which you are to believe on his word, and to enjoy or not according as you are attracted or repelled by his personality, recent historical writers vibrate. To the Rhodes class belongs Sir Spencer Walpole,⁵ the first two volumes of whose history, covering the period from 1856 to 1870, contain by far the best summary accounts in English of the Unification of Italy, of the Mexican Empire, of the rise of Prussia, and the downfall of Napoleon III. Walpole has the gift, rare among Englishmen, of understanding foreigners. He writes forcibly, clearly, with a certain finality of tone and amplitude of view, which raise him above Mr. Herbert Paul, who has undertaken to cover nearly the same ground.⁶ Mr. Paul is likely to be more popular, Sir Spencer to be more lasting. For Mr. Paul writes as a journalist, — not, be it said, an average American journalist, but the English variety, — bred at the university, with a social and intellectual background, and that capacity for hurling toy thunderbolts in the London Times and the other dailies, and for writing omniscient reviews in the weeklies, which is as peculiarly English as is devotion to cricket or marmalade. One never meets these paragons in the flesh, one never reads books to match their omniscience.

The irruption of the journalist into literature was one of the most far-reaching events of the nineteenth century. His encroachment upon the domain of history has been not wholly unbeneficial: indeed, a journalist may be called a historian in the making. He must possess an aptitude for seeing salient points, and for swift and pithy statement. But he has no time to verify. He is a man without yesterdays, and without to-morrows. The historian seeks for causes; he weighs patiently; he knows that truth does not always live on the surface, and that it often has several facets. The journalist feels no responsibility to be right; instead of principles, which ought to be as much a part of us as the sap is of the tree, he has opinions, which are like the wisps of wool the bushes catch when the sheep rub by, — a whiff may blow them away. Shame does not keep him from changing sides, nor conscience from sowing inaccuracies. Sufficient unto the day is the sensation thereof: if he succeeds in that, he has no fear that some one will confront him with last week’s inconsistencies, for he counts on the world’s forgetting what he said last week. If life were only surface, — no depths, no memory, — journalism would suffice; certainly History, which tries to see events in their true proportions and significance, could not exist.

Mr. Herbert, Paul’s work is an excellent specimen of what a man whose bent is journalistic rather than historical can accomplish. He writes with a ready pen. His narrative flows along like a stream in March. He tackles all subjects with equal assurance: yet in the main he conveys a correct impression of the course of events. He has formed his style on Macaulay, the best of models for those whose permanent attitude toward History is that of the journalist, although Macaulay himself was truly a historian. Read Paul, and then turn to Walpole’s treatment of the same episode, if you would test whether your own temper is journalistic or historical.

To define the character of individual historians is easy; not so the attempt to judge a collective work like the Cambridge Modern History ,⁷ which is neither homogeneous nor unified. It may serve many purposes; so that to confess that it is often hard reading might do scant justice to its worth as a book of reference. The value of its contributions varies unduly. Lord Acton, who planned it, was such an undismayed devourer of treatises — witness his list of the Hundred Best Books — that he probably overestimated the appetite of the average intelligent person. The editors who have succeeded him lack the power to weld and harmonize the material: perhaps, indeed, they wished to do neither, preferring to let monographs overlap in time and topics, and to give advocates of conflicting causes an opportunity to confound each other. The proposition that each topic shall be dealt with by the best authority sounds very attractive; in practice, however, the “best authority” may be a poor writer or a lumbering thinker, so that in any given volume you will encounter several desert stretches. The Cambridge History would have been better had the editors decided more clearly whether it was to serve mainly for reading or for reference.

To criticise it in detail would require the knowledge of more than a single specialist. When an English work, intended for English readers, tells us, almost on the first page of its first volume, that America was discovered by “ Cristoforo Colombo,” we can have no further surprises at any fantasticality the British mind may evolve in its losing struggle with foreign proper names. If “ Columbus ” be not English by this time, then “ William the Conqueror ” is not. A more important defect is the failure to provide marginal titles or to subdivide the monographs: while as an example of waste of time and money nothing can surpass the hundred or more pages of bibliography appended to each volume. The entire work will contain perhaps fourteen hundred pages of book lists, not one of which is complete, and most of which will be soon outgrown. Just when scholars of other nations have seen the advisability of relegating bibliography to special works, English scholars have waked up to its importance. In all likelihood the next ten years will witness the publication of standard lists in all topics, and historians outside of England will no more attempt to make their own exhaustive bibliography than their own paper and ink.

But after every deduction has been made, the Cambridge History remains a work of great value. It may justly claim to have no rival in English. Some of its monographs are fine specimens of epitomized learning. Mr. Henry C. Lea’s survey of “ The Eve of the Reformation,” Mr. L. A. Burd’s remarkable analysis of Machiavelli, Mr. J. H. Rose’s papers on Napoleon, Principal Fairbairn’s chapters on theological development, Professor William Cunningham’s description of economic change, stand out, each in its way, as excellent.

The collection has the further present merit of enabling us to appraise the contemporary English school of historical writers. One perceives at a glance how far they have emerged from the polemic stage, and how much German lore they have absorbed. They have begun to imitate the zeal of Freeman without his pugnacity, and the accuracy of Stubbs without his dryness. True to the sane AngloSaxon instinct, they never quite divorce History from actual life: but regard it rather as the school wherein the Present should get its wisest instruction. One still feels, perhaps, that university posts at Oxford and Cambridge are not the best training ground for that candor and perfect freedom without which no historian can be first class. There still cling, and long must cling, to those universities the prejudices and traditions of ecclesiastical and political Toryism. The naturalness with which English historians gravitate into bishops’ sees is itself suspicious. There is something almost comic in the persistence with which Bishop Stubbs asserted year after year that your theologian is the best qualified historian, —ignoring, with characteristic English stolidity, the fact that, in pledging himself to the Establishment, he vitiated his judgment on the pivotal controversy in English history.

Stubbs used to tell with the greatest satisfaction the following story, not realizing how damning it is to his contention that men who have mortgaged themselves to an ecclesiastical system make the best historians. In a railway train, in 1863, he fell into conversation with a remarkable young man, — John Richard Green, — who was “holding in his hand a volume of Renan. I said to myself, ‘if I can hinder, he shall notread that book. ’ . . . (Green) came to me at Navestock afterwards, and that volume of Renan found its way uncut into my waste-paper basket!”⁸ So Stubbs, who prided himself on his historical veracity, confesses that he was afraid to have another historian read Renan’s Life of Jesus. In other words, Stubbs, in the most important question in history, plotted to have Green come to a decision without examining all the evidence! After that, the less we hear about the peculiar fitness of ecclesiastics for writing history, the better. The English universities are doubtless becoming fumigated of such clerical cant; but their traditional relations with the Establishment create an atmosphere in which the Stubbsian disingenuousness is too likely to be condoned.

The Cambridge Modern History may well be compared with The American Nation,⁹ a similar cooperative work, edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart. He divides his subject into twenty - six sections, each of which is treated in a separate volume by a specialist: but the total bulk will fall considerably short of the dozen ponderous English volumes. In make-up, at least, he has clearly the advantage. But the point of real interest is, How does American historical scholarship compare with the English ? Only a careful examination of both works, which are not yet complete, would warrant one in forming a final judgment; nevertheless, several characteristics may already be noted. The American writes more as a specialist, the Englishman from a more general culture. The American has less literary sense; but he has a keen eye for the main points, and he resembles a lawyer drawing up a brief: the Englishman seems to be addressing a university audience, and still quotes Latin with the air of one who expects to be understood. The American is more readable, the Englishman weightier.

A still more instructive comparison could be made between either of these collective histories, and that which MM. Lavisse and Rambaud edited in France. It would show that French historical writers are to-day in the lead: in investigation they fall nowhere behind the Germans and Anglo-Saxons, in exposition they easily surpass both. German erudition may be said to come to us mostly in the form of “pay-dirt,” which we must sift for ourselves in order to get its modicum of gold dust; the Englishman or the American presents us the crude ore, or at best, ingots of refined metal; the Frenchman brings the finished object, artistic, symmetrical, complete. And the Frenchman has his reward in a public which appreciates him. Forty - six editions of M. Henri Houssaye’s history of the year 1815 are sold in a short time. In America, publishers, critics, and the public think that only ephemeral fiction counts. In France they know better. Perhaps if our serious writers were to imitate French lucidity, — the highest quality of the Gallic genius, — they, too, might address a larger audience.

These vast cooperative enterprises, based on the assumption that the immense amount of material now prohibits a historian from knowing thoroughly more than a small field, has not deterred several individuals from undertaking to cover an entire epoch. President Woodrow Wilson’s history of the United States has hardly made a place for itself before the forerunners appear of Mr. Elroy M. Avery’s work in twelve volumes, of Chancellor and Hewes’s work in eight volumes, and of Professor Edward Channing’s work in eight volumes.¹⁰ Messrs. Avery and Chancellor aim at popularity, and the former offers as a special attraction profuse illustrations. Mr. Chancellor pursues a novel method of classification, and in Mr. Hewes he has a coadjutor who furnishes chapters of statistical information. Popular works must be seen as a whole before their worth can be estimated; but from Professor Channing’s beginning, it is evident that his will be a standard history. He writes with perfect independence, after weighing all the testimony. He is very sober-minded, with a preference for moderate statement, and for reducing legends to their lowest terms. He leans to the critical rather than to the narrative side. As there is in America no historian more careful and thorough than he, and none more loyal to the scientific method, so it is noteworthy that he has given great attention to the literary form of his history. From the promise of his first volume one may predict that he will hold for years to come a position similar to that held by Bancroft in an earlier generation.

The cooperative history will not, it is clear, displace the work of the single historian. Grant that twenty men can know a long period in greater detail than one man can, yet there is much besides detail to be desired. A sense of continuity cannot be had by tacking together a score of independent monographs. Wholeness of tissue, consistency in point of view, have their claims. Mastery of ideas — imagination — is to be preferred to accumulation of facts, — industry. In reading Gibbon, you are conversing with a firstrate mind; by no process known to arithmetic can three third-rate minds produce the effect of one Gibbon. Cooperation may create invaluable works of reference, but it can never close the field to individual genius. After trying to read consecutively much collaborated history, one is reminded of the traveler who, on being asked what he remembered best of his journey through the Sahara, replied, “The oases.”

Our survey, cursory though it is, should not close without mention of books on special topics, like Mr. F. A. Ogg’s O pening of the Mississippi, or Major W. Wood’s The Fight for Canada,¹¹ which are excellent examples of painstaking historical study. Sir G. O. Trevelyan’s American Revolution is already too well known to be discussed as a new work. It illustrates one very desirable tendency, which ought to grow into a custom. Although the American Revolution concerned England not less than the Colonies, yet it has never before been so sympathetically treated by an Englishman. Foreigners often make the best historians,because race traditions and party prejudices do not hamper them: but in order to succeed, they must enter as sympathetically as a native into the aims of the people they would describe. They must feel the traditions and prejudices dramatically, without being swayed by them in judgment. This Trevelyan has done.¹²

At this point stands the writing of history to-day. A decade which has seen published Goldwin Smith’s United Kingdom, John Morley’s Gladstone, and Mr. Rhodes’s History of the United. States, need not hold itself cheap. The actual product is valuable: the outlook is toward a still richer harvest. In historical writing there are required, first, the accumulation of facts; then, the synthetic mind, to understand and interpret them. Facts in themselves are as worthless as pebbles on a beach; but in a master mind a single fact may become as potent as the pebble in David’s sling. We have reached the synthetic stage. History is going to be more and more a civilizing agent, for it will keep ever present the collective experience of mankind. Many false steps are now taken, many crazes distract the people, many wicked policies are ventured on by rulers, through ignorance or forgetfulness of the results of similar action in the past. History will serve not less as a corrective than as a discipline and as an inspiration.

But in order to do this, History must be human, making its final appeal not as a monument of erudition, but as a masterpiece of art, in which the collective deeds and passions of men shall be not merely pictured with photographic accuracy, but vitalized and interpreted. Let us not suppose that this is a new aim. The great historians have always held it. The idea that Thucydides and Tacitus neglected to consult all the material available in their time is ludicrous. Gibbon knew his “sources” as profoundly as the impeccably correct Gardiner. Mommsen, we may be sure, had not, like Stubbs, a body of evidence which he dared not explore. The master historians in the future, by whatever method they may work, will prove themselves to be akin to these in insight, in power, and in art.

In conclusion, as a reminder that we are not the first to hold true views as to the proper qualifications of the writer of history, let me quote this passage, rich in phrase and wisdom, from an unknown author of two centuries ago. The historian, he says, “is required to be a Man born with all the Felicities of a lively penetrating Wit, and unbounded Genius: Form’d by great Study, Experience and Practice in the World; one that is both a Scholar and a Man of Business; a good Geographer, Chronologist, Antiquary, Linguist; conversant in Courts, Councils, Treaties, in Affairs Military as well as Civil, and in short every thing that is the Subject of History; furnished with all proper Materials and Records, and a perfect Master of all the Graces of the Language he writes in. This is a great deal, but not enough; for what is yet more extraordinary he must have no Passion or Prejudices, but be a kind of Deity that from a Superior Orb looks unmov’d on Parties, Changes of State, and grand Revolutions. And you are to suppose him bless’d with Health, Leisure, and easie fortune, and a stedfast Application to his subject. After which the Perfections requisite in his Performance are almost innumerable; a judicious Proportion of all the Parts of his Story; a beautiful simplicity of Narration; a noble, yet unaffected Stile; few and Significant Epithets; Descriptions lively, but not Poetical; Reflections short and proper; and lastly, beside a multitude of Particulars which cannot be mentioned here, a good Conduct thro’ the whole, and an animating Spirit that may engage the Reader in every action as if personally concern’d, and give him the firm Assurance that he sees things in their own Light and Colours and not in those which the Art or Mistake of the Writer has brought upon ’em.” ¹³