Lectures on Modern history | Page 8

from unpublished
papers, they must be traced, and when the fountain-head is reached, or
the track disappears, the question of veracity arises. The responsible
writer's character, his position, antecedents, and probable motives have
to be examined into; and this is what, in a different and adapted sense
of the word, may be called the higher criticism, in comparison with the
servile and often mechanical work of pursuing statements to their root.
For a historian has to be treated as a witness, and not believed unless
his sincerity is established #61. The maxim that a man must be
presumed to be innocent until his guilt is proved, was not made for
him.
For us, then, the estimate of authorities, the weighing of testimony, is
more meritorious than the potential discovery of new matter #62. And
modern history, which is the widest field of application, is not the best
to learn our business in; for it is too wide, and the harvest has not been
winnowed as in antiquity, and further on to the Crusades. It is better to
examine what has been done for questions that are compact and
circumscribed, such as the sources of Plutarch's Pericles, the two tracts
on Athenian government, the origin of the epistle to Diognetus, the date
of the life of St. Antony; and to learn from Schwegler how this

analytical work began. More satisfying because more decisive has been
the critical treatment of the medieval writers, parallel with the new
editions, on which incredible labour has been lavished, and of which
we have no better examples than the prefaces of Bishop Stubbs. An
important event in this series was the attack on Dino Compagni, which,
for the sake of Dante, roused the best Italian scholars to a not unequal
contest. When we are told that England is behind the Continent in
critical faculty, we must admit that this is true as to quantity, not as to
quality of work. As they are no longer living, I will say of two
Cambridge professors, Lightfoot and Hort, that they were critical
scholars whom neither Frenchman nor German has surpassed.
The third distinctive note of the generation of writers who dug so deep
a trench between history as known to our grandfathers and as it appears
to us, is their dogma of impartiality. To an ordinary man the word
means no more than justice. He considers that he may proclaim the
merits of his own religion, of his prosperous and enlightened country,
of his political persuasion, whether democracy, or liberal monarchy, or
historic conservatism, without transgression or offence, so long as he is
fair to the relative, though inferior, merits of others, and never treats
men as saints or as rogues for the side they take. There is no
impartiality, he would say, like that of a hanging judge. The men, who,
with the compass of criticism in their hands, sailed the uncharted sea of
original research proposed a different view. History, to be above
evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions. They
had their own notion of truthfulness, based on the exceeding difficulty
of finding truth, and the still greater difficulty of impressing it when
found. They thought it possible to write, with so much scruple, and
simplicity, and insight, as to carry along with them every man of good
will, and, whatever his feelings, to compel its assent. Ideas which, in
religion and in politics, are truths, in history are forces. They must be
respected; they must not be affirmed. By dint of a supreme reserve, by
much self-control, by a timely and discreet indifference, by secrecy in
the matter of the black cap, history might be lifted above contention,
and made an accepted tribunal, and the same for all #63. If men were
truly sincere, and delivered judgment by no canons but those of evident
morality, then Julian would be described in the same terms by Christian

and pagan, Luther by Catholic and Protestant, Washington by Whig
and Tory, Napoleon by patriotic Frenchman and patriotic German #64.
I speak of this school with reverence, for the good it has done, by the
assertion of historic truth and of its legitimate authority over the minds
of men. It provides a discipline which every one of us does well to
undergo, and perhaps also well to relinquish. For it is not the whole
truth. Lanfrey's essay on Carnot, Chuquet's wars of the Revolution,
Ropes's military histories, Roget's Geneva in the time of Calvin, will
supply you with examples of a more robust impartiality than I have
described. Renan calls it the luxury of an opulent and aristocratic
society, doomed to vanish in an age of fierce and sordid striving. In our
universities it has a magnificent and appointed refuge; and to serve its
cause, which is