12 — 2
iSd the museof history.
1 literature (the italics are ours), when it loses
' sight of its relation to practical politics.' In
this grim sentence we read the dethronement of
Clio. The poor thing must forswear her father's
house, her tuneful sisters, the invocation of the
poet, the worship of the dramatist, and keep
her terms at the University, where, if she is really
studious and steady, and avoids literary com-
panions (which ought not to be difficult), she
may hope some day to be received into the
Royal Society as a second-rate science. The
people who do not usually go to the Royal
Society will miss their old playmate from her
accustomed slopes, but, even were they to
succeed in tracing her to her new home, access
would be denied them; for Professor Seeley,
that stern custodian, has his answer ready for all
such seekers. ' If you want recreation, you
' must find it in Poetry, particularly Lyrical
' Poetry. Try Shelley. We can no longer
1 allow you to disport yourselves in the Fields of
' History as if they were a mere playground.
4 Clio is enclosed.'
At present, however, this is not quite the
case ; for the old literary traditions are still
alive, and prove somewhat irritating to Professor
Seeley, who, though one of the most even-
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 1S1
tempered of writers, is to be found on p. 173
almost angry with Thackeray, a charming
person, who, as we all know, had, after his lazy
literary fashion, made an especial study of
Queen Anne's time, and who cherished the
pleasant fancy that a man might lie in the
heather with a pipe in his mouth, and yet, if he
had only an odd volume of the Spectator or the
Toiler in his hand, be learning history all the
time. 'As we read in these delightful pages,'
says the author of Esmond, 'the past age
'returns; the England of our ancestors is
' revivified ; the Maypole rises in the Strand ;
' the beaux are gathering in the coffee-houses ;'
and so on, in the style we all know and love so
well, and none better, we may rest assured, than
Professor Seeley himself, if only he were not
tortured by the thought that people were taking
this to be a specimen of the science of which
he is a Regius Professor. His comment on
this passage of Thackeray's is almost a groan.
' What is this but the old literary groove, leading
'to no trustworthy knowledge?' and certainly
no one of us, from letting his fancy gaze on the
Maypole in the Strand, could ever have foretold
the Griffin. On the same page he cries : ' Break
'the drowsy spell of narrative. Ask yourself
1 82 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
1 questions, set yourself problems ; your mind
'will at once take up a new attitude. Now,
'modern English history breaks up into two
' grand problems — the problem of the Colonies
'and the problem of India.' The Cambridge
School of History with a vengeance !
In a paper read at the South Kensington
Museum in 1884, Professor Seeley observes:
'The essential point is this, that we should
' recognise that to study history is to study not
' merely a narrative, but at the same time certain
1 theoretical studies.' He then proceeds to name
them : — Political philosophy, the comparative
study of legal institutions, political economy,
and international law.
These passages are, I think, adequate to give
a fair view of Professor Seeley 's position. His-
tory is a science, to be written scientifically and
to be studied scientifically in conjunction with
other studies. It should pursue a practical
object and be read with direct reference to
practical politics — using the latter word, no
doubt, in an enlightened sense. History is not
a narrative of all sorts of facts — biographical,
moral, political — but of such facts as a scientific
diagnosis has ascertained to be historically
interesting. In fine, history, if her study is to
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 183
be profitable and not a mere pastime, less ex-
hausting than skittles and cheaper than horse
exercise, must be dominated by some theory
capable of verification by reference to certain
ascertained facts belonging to a particular class.
Is this the right way of looking upon history ?
The dictionaries tell us that history and story
are the same word, and are derived from a
Greek source, signifying information obtained
by inquiry. The natural definition of history,
therefore, surely is trie story of man upon earth,
and the historian is he who tells us any chapter
or fragment of that story. All things that on
earth do dwell have, no doubt, their history as
well as man ; but when a member, however
humble, of the human race speaks of history
without any explanatory context, he may be
presumed to be alluding to his own family
records, to the story of humanity during its
passage across the earth's surface.
1 A talent for history ' — I am quoting from an
author whose style, let those mock at it who
may, will reveal him — ' may be said to be born
' with us as our chief inheritance. History has
4 been written with quipo-threads, with feather
'pictures, with wampum belts, still oftener with
'earth-mounds and monumental stone-heaps,
1 84 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
' whether as pyramid or cairn ; for the c elt and
'the Copt, the red man as well as th^ white,
'lives between two eternities, and warring
'against oblinon, he would fain unite himself
' in clear, conscious relation, as in dim, uncon-
'scious relation he is already united, with the
1 whole future and the whole past.'
To keep the past alive for us is the pious
function of the historian. Our curiosity is end-
less, his the task of gratifying it. We want to
know what happened long ago. Performance
of this task is only proximately possible; but
none the less it must be attempted, for the
demand for it is born afresh with every infant's
cry. History is a pageant, and not a philo-
sophy.
Poets, no less than professors, occasionally
say good things even in prose, and the follow-
ing oracular utterance of Shelley is not pure
nonsense : — ' History is the cyclic poem written
'by Time upon the memories of men. The
'past, like an inspired rhapsodist^ fills the
'theatre of everlasting generations with her
'harmony.'
If this be thought a little too fanciful, let
me adorn these pages with a passage from one
of the great masters of English prose — Walter
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 185
Savage Landor. Would that the pious labour
of transcription could confer the tiniest measure
of the gift ! In that bundle of imaginary
letters Landor called Pericles and Aspasia, we
find Aspasia writing to her friend Cleone as
follows :
' To-day there came to visit us a writer who is
'not yet an author; his name is Thucydides.
' We understand that he has been these several
'years engaged in preparation for a history.
' Pericles invited him to meet Herodotus, when
'that wonderful man had returned to our
' country, and was about to sail from Athens.
'Until then it was believed by the intimate
' friends of Thucydides that he would devote his
1 life to poetry, and, such is his vigour both of
' thought and expression, that he would have
' been the rival of Pindar. Even now he is
4 fonder of talking on poetry than any other
'subject, and blushed when history was men-
' tioned. By degrees, however, he warmed, and
' listened with deep interest to the discourse of
1 Pericles on the duties of a historian.
1 " May our first Athenian historian not be
'"the greatest," said he, "as the first of our
' " dramatists has been, in the opinion of many.
' " We are growing too loquacious, both on the
[86 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
' stage and off. We make disquisitions which
' render us only more and more dim-sighted,
' and excursions that only consume our stores.
' If some among us who have acquired
' celebrity by their compositions, calm, candid,
1 contemplative men, were to undertake the
1 history of Athens from the invasion of
'Xerxes, I should expect a fair and full
1 criticism on the orations of Antiphon, and
' experience no disappointment at their for-
' getting the battle of Salamis. History,
' when she has lost her Muse, will lose her
' dignity, her occupation, her character, her
' name. She will wander about the Agora ;
' she will start, she will stop, she will look
' wild, she will lcok stupid, she will take
'languidly to her bosom doubts, queries,
' essays, dissertations, some of which ought to
go before her, some to follow, and all to stand
1 apart. The field of history should not merely
' be well tilled, but well peopled. None is
' delightful to me or interesting in which I find
' not as many illustrious names as have a right
' to enter it. We might as well in a drama
' place the actors behind the scenes, and listen
' to the dialogue there, as in a history push
' valiant men back and protrude ourselves with
THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
1S7
11 husky disputations. Show me rather how
" great projects were executed, great advan-
" tages gained, and great calamities averted.
11 Show me the generals and the statesmen who
" stood foremost, that I may bend to them in
" reverence ; tell me their names, that I may
"repeat them to my children. Teach me
" whence laws were introduced, upon what
" foundation laid, by what custody guarded, in
" what inner keep preserved. Let the books
" of the treasury lie closed as religiously as the
" Sibyl's ; leave weights and measures in the
" market-place, Commerce in the harbour, the
" Arts in the light they love, Philosophy in the
" shade ; place History on her rightful throne,
" and at the sides of her Eloquence and
" War." '
This is, doubtless, a somewhat full-dress view
of history. Landor was not one of our modern
dressing-gown -and-slippers kind of authors. He
always took pains to be splendid, and preferred
stately magnificence to chatty familiarity. But,
after allowing for this, is not the passage I have
quoted infused with a great deal of the true
spirit which should animate the historian, and
does it not seem to take us by the hand and
lead us very far away from Professor Seeley's
1 88 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
naxims and morals, his theoretical studies, his
)olitical philosophy, his political economy, and
his desire to break the drowsy spell of narrative,
and to set us all problems ? I ask this question
in no spirit of enmity towards these theoretical
studies, nor do I doubt for one moment that
the student of history proper, who has a turn in
their directions, will find his pursuit made only
the more fascinating the more he studies them —
just as a little botany is said to add to the charm
of £ country walk ; but — and surely the assertion
is net necessarily paradoxical — these studies
ought not to be allowed to disfigure the free-
flowing outline of the historical Muse, or to
thicken her clear utterance, which in her higher
moods chants aD epic, and in her ordinary
moods recites a narrative which need not be
drowsy.
As for maxims, we all of us have our * little
' hoard of maxims ' wherewith to preach down
our hearts and justify anything shabby we may
have done ; but the less we import their cheap
wisdom into history the better. The author
of the Expansion of England will probably agree
with Burke in thinking that 'a great empire and
' little minds go ill together,' and so, surely, a-
fortiori^ must a mighty universe and any possible
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 189
maxim. There have been plenty of brave
historical maxims before Professor Seeley's,
though only Lord Bolingbroke's has had the
good luck to become itself historical* And as
for theories, Professor Flint, a very learned
writer, has been at the pains to enumerate four-
teen French and thirteen German philosophies
of history current (though some, I expect, never
ran either fast or far) since the revival of
learning.
We are (are we not ?) in these days in no little
danger of being philosophy-ridden, and of losing
our love for facts simply as facts. So long as
Carlyle lived the concrete had a representative,
the strength of whose epithets sufficed, if not to
keep the philosophers in awe, at least to supply
their opponents with stones. But now it is
different. Carlyle is no more a model historian
than is Shakspeare a model dramatist. The
merest tyro can count the faults of either on his
clumsy fingers. That born critic, the late Sir
George Lewis, had barely completed his tenth
year before he was able, in a letter to his
* ' I will answer you by qtoting what I have read
somewhere or other, in Dionysius Halicarnassensis I think,
'that history is philosophy teaching by examples.' See
Lord Bolingbroke's Second Letter on the Study *nd Useoj
History.
190 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
mother, to point out to her the essentially faulty
structure of Ha??ilet, and many a duller wit, a
decade or two later in his existence, has come to
the conclusion that Frederick the Great is far too
long. But whatever were Carlyle's faults, his
historical method was superbly naturalistic.
Have we a historian left us so honestly
possessed as he was with the genuine historical
instinct, the true enthusiasm to know what
happened ; or one half so fond of a story for its
own sake, or so in love with things, not for what
they were, but simply because they were?
1 What wonderful things are events !' wrote Lord
Beaconsfield in Coningsby ; 'the least are of
1 greater importance than the most sublime and
1 comprehensive speculations.' To say this is
to go perhaps too far ; certainly it is to go farther
than Carlyle, who none the less was in sympathy
with the remark ; for he also worshipped events,
believing as he did that but for the breath of
God's mouth they never would have been events
at all. We thus find him always treating even
comparatively insignificant facts with a measure
of reverence, and handling them lovingly, as
does a book-hunter the shabbiest pamphlet in
his collection. We have only to think of
Carlyle's essay on the Diamond Necklace to fill
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 191
our minds with his qualifications for the proud
office of the historian. Were that inimitable
piece of workmanship to be submitted to the
criticisms of the new scientific school, we doubt
whether it would be so much as classed, whilst
the celebrated description of the night before
the battle of Dunbar in Cromwell, or any
hundred scenes from the French Revolution,
would, we expect, be catalogued as good ex-
amples of that degrading process whereby history
fades into mere literature.
This is not a a x uestion, be it observed, of style.
What is called a picturesque style is generally a
great trial. Who was it who called Professor
Masson's style Carlyle on wooden legs ? What
can be drearier than when a plain matter-of-fact
writer attempts to be animated, and tries to
make his characters live by the easy but futile
expedient of writing about them in the present
tense ? What is wanted is a passion for facts ;
the style may be left to take care of itself. Let
me name a historian who detested fine writing,
and who never said to himself, ' Go to, I will
1 make a description,' and who yet was dominated
by a love for facts, whose one desire always was
to know what happened, to dispel illusion, and
establish the true account — Dr. S. R. Maitland,
192 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
of the Lambeth Library, whose volumes entitled
The Dark Ages and The Reformation are to
history what Milton's Lycidas is said to be to
poetry : if they do not interest you, your tastes
are not historical
The difference, we repeat, is not of style, but
of aim. Is history a pageant or a philosophy ?
That eminent historian, Lord Macaulay, whose
passion for letters and for ' mere literature ' en-
nobled his whole life, has expressed himself
in some places, I need scarcely add in a most
forcible manner, in the same sense as Mr.
Morley. In his well-known essay on history,
contributed to the Edinburgh Review in 1828,
we find him writing as follows : ' Facts are the
'â– mere dross of history. It is from the abstract
'truth which interpenetrates them, and lies
1 latent amongst them like gold in the ore, that
' the mass derives its whole value.' And again :
1 No past event has any intrinsic importance.
' The knowledge of it is valuable only as it leads
1 us to form just calculations with respect to the
'future.' These are strong passages ; but Lord
Macaulay was a royal eclectic, and was quite
out of sympathy with the majority of that
brotherhood who are content to tone down their
contradictories to the dull level of ineptitudes.
THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
193
Macaulay never toned down his contradictories,
but, heightening everything all round, went on
his sublime way, rejoicing like a strong man to
run a race, and well knowing that he could give
anybody five yards in fifty and win easily. It is,
therefore, no surprise to find him, in the very
essay in which he speaks so contemptuously of
facts, laying on with his vigorous brush a cele-
brated purple patch I would gladly transfer to
my own dull page were it not too long and too
well known. A line or two taken at random
will give its purport :
1 A truly great historian would reclaim those
* materials the novelist has appropriated. We
' should not then have to look for the wars and
' votes of the Puritans in Clarendon and for their
' phraseology in Old Mortality, for one half of
* King James in Hume and for the other half in
1 the Fortunes of Nigel. . . . Society would be
' shown from the highest to the lowest, from the
' royal cloth of state to the den of the outlaw,
4 from the throne of the legate to the chimney-
' corner where the begging friar regaled himself.
1 Palmers, minstrels, crusaders, the stately monas-
tery with the good cheer in its refectory, and
' the tournament with the heralds and ladies,
4 the trumpets and the cloth of gold, would give
*3
194 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
1 truth and life to the representation.' It is
difficult to see what abstract truth interpene-
trates the cheer of the refectory, or what just
calculations with respect to the future even an
upholsterer could draw from a cloth, either of
state or of gold ; whilst most people will admit
that, when the brilliant essayist a few years later
set himself to compose his own magnificent
history, so far as he interpenetrated it with the
abstract truths of Whiggism, and calculated that
the future would be satisfied with the first
Reform Bill, he did ill and guessed wrong.
To reconcile Macaulay's utterances on this
subject is beyond my powers, but of two things
I am satisfied : the first is that, were he to come
to life again, a good many of us would be more
careful than we are how we write about him;
and the second is that, on the happening of
the same event, he would be found protesting
against the threatened domination of all things
by scientific theory. A Western American, who
was once compelled to spend some days in
Boston, was accustomed in after-life to describe
that seat of polite learning to his horrified com-
panions in California as a city in whose streets
Respectability stalked unchecked. This is just
what philosophical theories are doing amongst
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 1.95
us, and a decent person can hardly venture
abroad without one, though it does not much
matter which one. Everybody is expected to
have 'a system of philosophy with principles
'coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and
' derivative,' and to be able to account for
everything, even for things it used not to be
thought sensible to believe in, like ghosts and
haunted houses. Keats remarks in one of his
letters with great admiration upon what he
christens Shakspeare's ' negative capability,'
meaning thereby Shakspeare's habit of com-
plaisant observation from outside of theory, and
his keen enjoyment of the unexplained facts of
life. He did not pour himself out in every
strife. We have but little of this negative
capability. The ruddy qualities of delightful-
ness, of pleasantness, are all ' sicklied o'er with
* the pale cast of thought.' The varied elements
of life — the
• Murmur of living,
Stir of existence,
Soul of the world !*
seem to be fading from literature. Pure literary
enthusiasm sheds but few rays. To be lively is
to be flippant, and epigram is dubbed paradox.
13—2
196 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
That many people appear to like a drab-
coloured world hung round with dusky shreds
of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These
persons find any relaxation they may require
from a too severe course of theories, religious,
political, social, or now, alas ! historical, in the
novels of Mr. W. D. Ho wells, an American
gentleman who has not been allowed to forget
that he once asserted of fiction what Professor
Seeley would be glad to be able to assert of
history, that the drowsy spell of narrative has
been broken. We are to look for no more Sir
Walters, no more Thackerays, no more Dickens.
The stories have all been told. Plots are
exploded. Incident is over. In moods of de-
jection these dark sayings seemed only too true.
Shakspeare's saddest of sad lines rose to one's
lips :
1 My grief lies onward and my joy behind.'
Behind us are Ivanhoe and Guy Manuring,
Pendennis and The Virginians, Pecksniff and
Micawber. In front of us stretch a never-end-
ing series, a dreary vista of Foregone Conclu-
sions, Counterfeit Presentments, and Undiscovered
Countries. But the darkest watch of the night
is the one before the dawn, and relief is often
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 197
nearest us when we least expect it. All this
gloomy nonsense was suddenly dispelled, and
the fact that really and truly, and behind this
philosophical arras, we were all inwardly raven-
ing for stories was most satisfactorily established
by the incontinent manner in which we flung
ourselves into the arms of Mr. Robert Louis
Stevenson, to whom we could almost have raised
a statue in the market-place for having written
Treasure Island.
But to return to history. The interests of
our poor human life, which seems to become
duller every day, require that the fields of
history should be kept for ever unenclosed,
and be a free breathing-place for a pallid
population well-nigh stifled with the fumes of
philosophy.
Were we, imaginatively, to propel ourselves
forward to the middle of the next century, and
to fancy a well-equipped historian armed with
the digested learning of Gibbon, endowed with
the eye of Carlyle, and say one-fifteenth of his
humour (even then a dangerous allotment in a
dull world), the moral gravity of Dr. Arnold, the
critical sympathy of Sainte-Beuve,and the style of
Dr. Newman, approaching the period through
which we have lived, should we desire thii
i 9 8 THE MUSE OF HISTORY.
talented mortal to encumber himself with a
theory into which to thrust all our doings as wf
toss clothes into a portmanteau ; to set himself
to extract the essence of some new political
philosophy, capable of being applied to the
practical politics of his own day, or to busy
himself with problems or economics ? To us
personally, of course, it is a matter of indifference
how the historians of the twentieth century con-
duct themselves ; but ought not our altruism to
bear the strain of a hope that at least one of the
band may avoid all these things, and, leaving
political philosophy to the political philosopher
and political economy to the political economist,
remember that the first, if not the last, duty of
the historian is to narrate, to supply the text not
the comment, the subject not the sermon, and
proceed to tell our grandchildren and remoter
issue the story of our lives ? The clash of arms
will resound through his pages as musically as
ever it does through those of the elder historians
as he tells of the encounter between the Northern
and Southern States of America, in which Right
and Might, those great twin-brethren, fought
side by side ; but Romance, that ancient para-
site, clung affectionately with her tendril-hands
to the mouldering walls of an ancient wrong,
THE MUSE OF HISTORY. 199
thus enabling the historian, whilst awarding the
victor's palm to General Grant, to write kindly
of the lost cause, dear to the heart of a nobler
and more chivalrous man, General Lee, of the
Virginian army. And again, is it not almost
possible to envy the historian to whom will
belong the task of writing with full information,
and all the advantage of the true historic
distance, the history of that series of struggles
and heroisms, of plots and counter-plots, of
crimes and counter-crimes, resulting in the
freedom of Italy, and of telling to a world,