Historical and Political Essays | Page 2

in their judgment, should be treated as science and not as literature, and the kind of intellect they most value is not unlike that of a skilful and well-trained attorney. To collect documents with industry; to compare, classify, interpret and estimate them is the main work of the historian. It is no doubt true that there are some fields of history where the primary facts are so little known, so much contested or so largely derived from recondite manuscript sources, that a faithful historian will be obliged in justice to his readers to sacrifice both proportion and artistic charm to the supreme importance of analysing evidence, reproducing documents and accumulating proofs; but in general the depreciation of the literary element in history seems to me essentially wrong. It is only necessary to recall the names of Herodotus and Thucydides, of Livy and Tacitus, of Gibbon and Macaulay, and of the long line of great masters of style who have related the annals of France. It may, indeed, be confidently asserted that there is no subject in which rarer literary qualities are more demanded than in the higher forms of history. The art of portraying characters; of describing events; of compressing, arranging, and selecting great masses of heterogeneous facts, of conducting many different chains of narrative without confusion or obscurity; of preserving in a vast and complicated subject the true proportion and relief, will tax the highest literary skill, and no one who does not possess some, at least, of these gifts in an unusual measure is likely to attain a permanent place among the great masters of history. It is a misfortune when some stirring and momentous period falls into the hands of the mere compiler, for he occupies the ground and a really great writer will hesitate to appropriate and plagiarise the materials his predecessor has collected. There are books of great research and erudition which one would have wished to have been all re-written by some writer of real genius who could have given order, meaning and vividness to a mere chaos of accurate and laboriously sifted learning. The great prominence which it is now the fashion to ascribe to the study of diplomatic documents, is very apt to destroy the true value and perspective of history. It is always the temptation of those who are dealing with manuscript materials to overrate the small personal details which they bring to light, and to give them much more than their due space in their narrative. This tendency the new school powerfully encourages. It is quite right that the treasure-houses of diplomatic correspondence which have of late years been thrown open should be explored and sifted, but history written chiefly from these materials, though it has its own importance, is not likely to be distinguished either by artistic form or by philosophical value. Those who are immersed in these studies are very apt to overrate their importance and the part which diplomacy and statesmanship have borne in the great movement of human affairs.
A true and comprehensive history should be the life of a nation. It should describe it in its larger and more various aspects. It should be a study of causes and effects, of distant as well as proximate causes, and of the large, slow and permanent evolution of things. It should include, as Buckle and Macaulay saw, the social, the industrial, the intellectual life of the nation as well as mere political changes, and it should be pre-eminently marked by a true perspective dealing with subjects at a length proportioned to their real importance. All this requires a powerful and original intellect quite different from that of a mere compiler. It requires too, in a high degree, the kind of imagination which enables a man to reproduce not only the acts but the feelings, the ideals, the modes of thought and life of a distant past, and pierce through the actions and professions of men to their real characters. Insight into character is one of the first requisites of a historian. It is therefore, much to be desired that he should possess a wide knowledge of the world, the knowledge of different types of character, foreign as well as English, which travel and society and practical experience of business can give, and it will also be of no small advantage to him if he has passed through more than one intellectual or religious phase, widening the area of his appreciation and realisations. He should also have enough of the dramatic element to enable him to throw himself into ways of reasoning or feeling very different from his own. One of the most valuable of all forms of historical imagination is that which enables a writer to place himself in the point of view of the best men on