On The Writing And Teaching Of History

( Originally Published 1913 )

COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS AS CHANCELLOR OF UNION COLLEGE, SCHENECTADY, JUNE, 1911.

NOWHERE in the world is the study of history pursued with more zeal and assiduity than in the universities and colleges of the United States. There must be many hundreds of professors and instructors engaged in teaching it, and many others are occupied in various branches of research work. It seems to be that one among the so-called "humanistic" subjects which attracts the largest number of students, a number probably much greater than that of those who are occupied with Greek and Latin. The methods of teaching it and writing it have, therefore, presented themselves to me as a fitting topic on which to ad-dress to you those remarks which you expect from one whom you have honoured by choosing him to be your Chancellor.

Eighty years ago there was no teaching of the subject in American universities and practically none in British. In Cambridge and in Oxford a professor was allotted to it, but of these two one seldom lectured, and the other not at all. In Scotland the universities of St. Andrew's, Glasgow, and Aberdeen provided no historical teaching, while at Edinburgh there was a chair entitled that of Natural and Civil History, — you may smile at the title, but there is a connection between the two departments. Here in North America the old established college curriculum had no room for modern history and scarcely touched upon ancient. Now, both in British and in American universities, the study has laid a strong hold upon the interest of those who in growing numbers resort thither. Next to that educational revolution which has given to the sciences of nature their now predominant position in the University curriculum, no change has been more noteworthy. I may therefore safely assume that many of you have followed with interest the course of recent discussions as to how history should be taught and written.

Before I come to this topic, let me offer one remark. While admiring the untiring energy and patient care with which you teach American history and investigate all its details, and while desiring to express the gratitude of British scholars for what you have done and are doing for the history of England, I venture to submit that scarcely enough attention is given either here or in Britain to the history of the European Continent, and above all to ecclesiastical history, which is in a certain sense the central stream of all intellectual and social movement, from the early days of Christianity down to the eighteenth century, and which reveals to us the working of so many of the chief forces that have not only affected politics, but moulded character and conduct among Christian nations. Asking you to consider at your leisure this one suggestion, I pass on to a subject which has doubtless already presented itself to your minds, for it has been much discussed both here and in Europe. It is this : What do we mean by the scientific treatment of history ? And is history a science?

In its most elementary forms, history began in some countries, as in Egypt and among the Celtic peoples, with genealogies of chiefs and kings; in others, as among the Norsemen of Iceland, with tales of adventure describing the feats of famous men; and again in other countries, as in Europe during the Dark Ages, with entries in the rolls of monasteries of any events which appeared specially remarkable to the monk who acted as scribe. The picture records of Mexico, and the ballads in which the Pacific Islanders still recall the exploits of warriors of former days, would have been a basis for history had the art of writing been known, just as the Song of Deborah was an historical source for the early annals of Israel, and as the ballad of Chevy Chase would have been a similar source did we not possess more authentic records of the fight at Otterburn. But historical composition, as a distinct branch of literature, begins with the Greeks, and begins with two famous writers, contemporaries of the great Athenian dramatists and of the greatest among Greek lyric poets. Herodotus and Thucydides were the models for the Roman historians from the second century B.C. onwards, and have been models for the civilized world ever since.

Different as these two masters were, so different that they have been taken as representing two dissimilar types of historical writing, they were alike in possessing literary gifts of a high order. In their hands History is fascinating as well as instructive. That character, as a branch of what used to be called "polite letters," History recovered in the days of the Renaissance, and in that character it was cultivated with special diligence in the eighteenth century both on the European continent and in Britain. It was written not so much for the sake of presenting an accurate record of what had happened, as with a view to the pleasure or the moral edification of the reader. All possible pains were taken to make it attractive in style. It was embellished with rhetorical ornaments and, especially in the hands of the less skilful artists, copiously interspersed with moral reflections. For thirty years after the outbreak of the French Revolution it was treated by English writers in what might be called a homiletic spirit, being used to warn men against the excesses of democracy. Though we had in Britain no man who could rank, in respect of learning and services he rendered to learning, with the Italian Muratori, we had great writers who added to the charms of a stately and impressive style wide knowledge and vigorous thought.

Such were Gibbon and Robertson, such, a generation later, was Henry Hallam. These men, while they never forgot that they were literary artists, felt themselves to be also bound to the utmost care in the collection and statement of their facts, and devoted — one sees the growth of the tendency in Hallam as compared with his predecessors — more and more care to the study of original authorities. Nevertheless the popular view that literary skill rather than special capacity or painstaking investigation was the quality which the historian needed was illustrated by the fact that so many of the most successful books were written by men who were litterateurs rather than historians. Hume, Smollet, and Goldsmith, a meta-physician, a novelist, and a dramatist, were the popular historians of their day. When, in the next generation, a history of Ireland was wanted for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, it was committed to Tom Moore, the Irish poet, who brought patriotism and imagination and style, but little else, to a singularly difficult task. So even in Germany, Schiller, withdrawn from the service of poetry, wrote the history of the Thirty Years' War. The tradition that the historian must be eloquent lasted on for another half century. George Bancroft and even Motley marred the effect of their books by needless rhetoric. The thoroughness and ingenuity with which E. A. Freeman worked out the details of his Norman Conquest and his History of Sicily would have been more fully appreciated but for his tendency to grandiloquence. The case of J. A. Froude, the last of the so-called literary historians, is not quite the same. The others whom I have just named were solid, hard-working, conscientious scholars ; Froude was a brilliant stylist, who had begun his career as a writer of stories, and chose thereafter to display in the field of history his gift of picturesque narration. His ecclesiastical partisanship was usually evident enough to enable a reader to discount it. A graver fault was that superb indifference to truth which sometimes led him to regard the facts he had to deal with chiefly as so much material to be handled with a view to artistic effect, putting on them such colouring as was needed to secure the particular effect desired, and caring little for accuracy in details which did not move his curiosity.

A new spirit, however, had already been at work in France and Germany, and in the first quarter of the nineteenth century it had begun to show itself in Great Britain also. The same intellectual movement which had been producing discoveries in the field of physics and chemistry, and was soon to produce discoveries in those of geology and biology, revealed itself in the students of philology, economics, and history. The half century which covers Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley and Saussure and Cuvier and Humboldt covers also the publication of F. A. Wolf's famous Prolegomena to Homer, a period in which new critical methods began to be applied by other scholars, as by Michaelis, to the primitive literature and early records of other peoples also. Even earlier they had been applied by Beaufort to Roman history. Niebuhr in Germany and Guizot in France were in the nineteenth century among the first leaders of a new school who showed that they cared more for the substance than for the form of their historical writing, though both of them had the force and finish which belong to powerful minds, Niebuhr bold and brilliant in his suggestions, Guizot, lucid, acute, and delicate in his handling of details. The men of this school flung themselves into the investigation of the sources of history with an ardour and assiduity which in earlier days had been sometimes displayed by patient and leisurely workers like the Benedictines in France or the Magdeburg Centuriators in Germany, but seldom by persons in the front rank either of teachers or of writers known to the world at large. Strict critical methods now began to be generally applied to the original contemporaneous authorities. Public and private archives and collections of books or documents were ransacked for new materials. Manuscripts were collated, edited, published in such a series as that of the Recueil des Historiens in France or that of the Monumenta Historie Germanica in Germany. All the old views were reexamined ; many old fables or misconceptions were exploded. For the loose phrases and flowing periods of the school of "literary historians" there was substituted an exact and precise setting forth of what could be ascertained from the sources, showing how much was certain, how much doubtful, and how far different sources agreed with or contradicted one another. In the earlier stages of the movement the more daring spirits attempted to reconstruct the more distant and darker periods of history from data which we should now think too slender, and the tendency during the last thirty years has been to discourage efforts to rewrite the annals of a people in the light of any theory, however plausible, and to be content with setting out all that can be known, leaving the student to make the best of it. Ranke and Mommsen are, in respect of their immense productive power and massive learning, the most illustrious representatives of this school, but in our language, we may point to William Stubbs, to E. A. Freeman, to Francis Parkman, to Samuel R. Gardiner, and to F. W. Maitland as instances of the way in which scholars writing in English have absorbed and exemplified its methods.

It is sometimes said that this change in the way of handling history is due to the influence of the sciences of nature upon the minds of all classes of educated men. Doubtless the rapid advance of those sciences through the application of their exact experimental methods has helped to strengthen among all kinds of investigators a sense of the importance of precision, accuracy, and caution in inference. Nevertheless it will be seen, if the progress of the humanistic studies is carefully examined, that the new tendencies which have come to pervade the latter are not a result of the advance of the physical sciences, but rather part of a parallel and independent though cognate change in the intellectual tendencies and habits of mankind. The beginning of a critical examination of ancient documents may be found in Spinoza, who was a con-temporary of the group of Englishmen that founded the Royal Society. The employment of exact methods in historical investigation was visible in modern Europe almost as soon as was the adoption of experimental methods in physical science. Nor was this critically exact spirit a wholly new thing. One sees it emerging from time to time in superior minds as far back as Thucydides and Aristotle.

Not only in Germany, France, and Italy, but also in Britain and the United States the best men had been writing history in a genuinely scientific way before the term "scientific history" began to be used as a technical expression somewhere about the year 1880. If that term be taken to denote the systematic application of strict tests to evidence and a single-minded devotion to the ascertainment and the statement of truth, and nothing but the truth, then all will agree that it is an entirely laudable ideal, and that whoever gives us a history which is scientific in this sense, whatever else he gives or fails to give, renders a real service.

The term seems, however, to be taken as connoting some negative as well as some positive qualities. The "scientific" historian must, it seems to be supposed, renounce all literary graces and aim at dryness. His style is to be plain and bald. Not only ornament, but anything which can rouse emotion or appeal to imagination is to be eschewed, for that way danger lies. Romantic incidents and dramatic scenes are to be excluded, or told in a business-like or even prosaic way, lest the reader be diverted from the succession of more important events; nor are any moral judgments to be pronounced.

Our distinguished English authority, the late Professor Seeley, himself a writer of singular force, with a power of making his points tell which the most accomplished forensic advocate might have envied, went so far as to declare that in order to be scientifically valuable, history must be dull or dry.

Considered as a reaction against the habit of treating history as a part of polite letters, against the superabundant rhetoric of Bancroft and the picturesque carelessness of Froude, this view was a legitimate reaction. It suited the practical and business-like spirit of our time, and has been generally accepted by the present generation. The truth of the facts is no doubt far more important than any of the embellishments which literary skill can add to a narrative, and if the embellishments begin to be seductive, cast them away. Excellent opportunities for working on these lines were afforded by such large cooperative under-takings as the Dictionary of National Biography and the Cambridge Modern History, for as in these compression was of the first importance, ornament was very properly discarded. I remember how at a public dinner given to celebrate the completion of the former book, one speaker, deservedly popular among the literary figures of London, delighted the audience by observing that the maxim of the editors of that stupendous work had been, "No flowers, by request."

The precept that style need not be regarded has the advantage of being easy to follow, easier than most of the counsels of asceticism. If the road into the gardens of historic truth leads through the realm of dulness, all may traverse the first part of it. We can all of us be heavy, or slipshod, or merely level and monotonous. And doubtless it is better to be tedious and monotonous and dreary almost up to the verge of unreadability than that our facts should be wrong or that such of them as are right should be smothered under festoons of florid verbiage. A somewhat tedious history like Guicciardini's, or a level and rather arid one like Lingard's, is serviceable in spite of its tameness. But aridity raises no presumption of accuracy. There is no necessary or natural connection between the two things, and accuracy may be just as well combined with animation. The things that have actually happened are as interesting as the things that might have happened, but did not, just as picturesque, just as well fitted to touch imagination and appeal to sentiment. That some writers have, in their desire to produce literary effect, forgotten that their first devotion was due to truth, is a reason not for despising literary effect, but for relegating it to the second place.

There are instances enough more recent than those of Gibbon and Robertson, already noted, not to speak of Thomas Carlyle, to show that there is no incompatibility between scientific and literary treatment. Macaulay's amazing force and brilliance have drawn, and continue to draw, thousands of people to his pages who would have been attracted by no one with a less fascinating style. But though his eminence and pronounced political views exposed him in his lifetime to a captiously minute and rather niggling criticism, his work has, take it all in all, stood the test of time as an authority. Lord Acton, one of the most accurate as well as the most learned of recent English historians, though sometimes obscure from the very pregnancy of his thought, lit up his narrative with epigrammatic wisdom, and, more rarely, with descriptions of concentrated glow. The style of Henry C. Lea, the most learned as well as among the most accurate of recent American historical writers, though no doubt always plain and level, is always agreeable, because he knew how to select from the vast material at his command what was most illuminative. He has always something interesting to tell, and he tells it with lucid simplicity. Francis Parkman's laborious researches did not wither the freshness of his mind. John Richard Green, though sometimes heedless in small things, was in essential matters a sound and trustworthy writer, against whom few serious errors have ever been proved, yet his Short History of England is confessedly as fascinating as any novel.

Thucydides himself, the greatest of them all, the model of exactness and thoroughness in his treatment of the events of his time, Thucydides has given us narrative passages like that describing the retreat of the Athenian army from Syracuse, where every sentence is charged with dramatic force, and reflective passages which stir the depths of thought now as they did twenty-four centuries ago. There is no ornament in his writing, but there is not a dull page.

May not our friends of the neo-scientific school—those whom Walter Scott and after him Carlyle would have called the Dryasdusts — sometimes forget that history has to be written not only for historical students who bring their interest with them, so that the dry bones are all they need, but also for those who bring no such special interest, and who will be repelled by an unattractive treatment of the theme ? That a knowledge of the past should be more generally diffused through the whole community, that the past should be made to live as something real in their minds, that it should help to form their tastes and enlarge their horizons, is an object worth working for. Anything can be made dull or lively by the way in which it is told, and history more easily than most subjects, because there are no difficulties of technical terminology to overcome.

When we pronounce a book of history dull, why do we find it so ? Is it not because the leading characters are not individualized, because the salient facts are not brought into due relief, because the dramatic situations are missed, because the style does not rise or fall in sympathy with the significance of the events and their emotions they evoke ? The avoidance of these defects, so far from injuring the truth and precision of a record, will make it more vivid and more readily remembered by the special student as well as the lay reader.

Another school has arisen of late years which also claims the name of Scientific, and its pretensions have made so much noise both in Europe and here as to require some consideration. This school seeks to raise, or reduce, history to the level of an exact science like those which deal with various departments of physical enquiry. Conceiving that only through attaining an exactitude like theirs can history have any real value, it ignores the individual, it regards the course of human affairs as determined by general laws which govern the action of men associated in communities, much as the so-called "laws of nature" govern the in-animate and animate external world. From a study of racial characteristics, intellectual tendencies, and the play of economic interests, this school believes itself able to discover such laws, and it expounds them in elaborate formule, purporting to sum up the past, to explain the present, to predict (perhaps less positively) the future.

The objection to this method and procedure as we see it practised by the votaries of this school is that it is not scientific. Nothing accords less with scientific principles than to treat as similar things essentially dissimilar. Now the phenomena of human society which history deals with are altogether unlike the phenomena of external nature, indeed, so unlike as to suggest that the methods fit for the one can hardly be fit for the other, or at any rate cannot promise like results. Oxygen and hydrogen behave in the same way in all countries. Their properties were, so far as we know, the same ten thousand years ago as they are now, and are apparently the same here on our earth as they are in the sun and the other stars. But the features of human society are wholly different in different races and different countries. Even in the same countries they were a thousand years ago unlike what they are now. Their study is for this and other reasons incomparably more difficult than is the study of natural phenomena. No scrutiny we can apply to them can possibly be exhaustive, nor can those methods of counting, measuring and weighing by which exactitude is secured in chemistry and physics be employed. Most observers are prone, since they cannot possibly exhaust the facts, to fix their attention on, and give prominence to, those facts which happen to fit in with their preconceived notions, and use them to support the broad generalizations they seek to draw. Many a man, when he has gone a little way into a subject, thinks it easy to sum up in a generalization the facts he sees. No habit is more seductive. But it is a dangerous habit, because ample knowledge and an experience that engenders caution are needed to recognize the pitfalls that lie round the enquirer's path. So one may say that the longer a man studies either a given country or a given period, the fewer, the more cautious, and the more carefully limited and guarded in statement will his generalizations be.

Some fifty years ago the late Mr. H. T. Buckle published a book entitled a History of Civilization. Its vigorous style and bold generalizations gave it popularity at the time. But though Buckle had read widely and done a good deal of thinking, his knowledge was altogether insufficient to qualify him for the task he was attempting, and he had not been trained to apply adequate criticism to the authorities he used. There were in the book some true things forcibly stated and fitted to stimulate reflection, but it made no really important contribution to knowledge; and some of his generalizations, as for instance the well-known parallel between Scotland and Spain, were ludicrous. Of most of the other writers who have followed in the same path much the same may be said. The foundations have been weak, so the structures of ambitious theory raised upon them have been flimsy and unstable. These writers have seldom realized the extreme complexity of the data to be dealt with, the number of the hidden forces at work, the variability of human beings under different conditions, the important part played by individual men whose appearance has disturbed all calculations and overthrown all predictions.

Suppose that a philosopher had in the middle of the second century of our era addressed himself to the task of writing a history of civilization and moral progress. He would have had nearly nine centuries of tolerably authentic history behind him, a period as long as that which separates us from Pope Gregory the Seventh and William the Conqueror, and he might have pleased himself by drawing out and dedicating to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, as a monarch of philosophic tastes, a generalized statement of the laws governing human development which, being proved from an observation of the past, would evidently continue to determine human progress in the centuries to come. The materials might have seemed abundant, and the interpretation of the causes of progress a simple matter. But our philosopher would have left out of account the two factors which were destined to have most influence on that progress, — Christianity, which the Emperor was trying to repress as a dangerous secret society, and the barbarian foes of civilization with whom he was warring on the Danube.

The more recent writers of this school — its Coryphæus was the late Mr. Herbert Spencer, but it has representatives in Continental Europe also — have not (so far as I know) contributed to history either any sound theories, or any illuminative suggestions which competent historians did not know already, and did not know better, because they were known as the result of a wide and critical mastery of details. What the school has given is a mass of general propositions couched in what sounds like scientific language, but the contents and substance of which are either threadbare truths so dressed up in solemn phraseology as to appear to be novelties, or theories too vague and abstract to be serviceable either as interpretations or as summaries of the facts. Some-times the propositions are not true as stated, i.e. they contain a germ of truth, but are misleading unless many qualifications be added. This faith in phrases and formule is an instance of that recurring propensity of the human mind to impose upon facts in general its own notions drawn from a few facts hastily gathered, — notions which gain authority from being clothed in elaborate pseudo-technical terminology. It was a like propensity which in the Middle Ages retarded the progress of the sciences of nature by embodying crude conceptions of phenomena in terms and theories to which there was nothing corresponding in reality, as when men talked about "phlogiston" and "animal spirits" and thought they had explained things by saying that "nature abhors a vacuum."

Mr. Spencer was a most painstaking and earnest thinker, and the efforts of his school to impress upon their contemporaries the value of an arrangement and synthesis of knowledge deserve all recognition. Of what services the school has rendered to subjects other than history I will not venture to speak, but as respects the results attained in history and subjects cognate thereto, the view I have tried to convey to you is, I believe, that pretty generally held by historical students both here and in England. Perhaps the disappointment one feels in perusing books where one seeks for bread and seems to receive only stones may perhaps bias those of us who were trained in another school. Judge therefore for your-selves and see if you can extract new, and profit-able truths where we have not been able to discover them.

Needless to say that every historical scholar recognizes that there are certain general principles to be applied to the investigation of human society and to the elucidation of the forces by which the institutions and arts of life have advanced, and recognizes also that though the movement which has made history more scientific had an independent origin, the historian may profit by a knowledge of the methods employed in the sciences of nature. In the first place there is to be studied Human Nature itself, which presents certain fundamental qualities and habits present in all more or less civilized communities, qualities whose existence we may everywhere assume as social factors. These factors are in their outlines familiar to us all. They have been dwelt upon by philosophers and historians from Plato downwards. They do furnish a basis for what may be called a general treatment of political and social institutions, but it is only a basis, because the phenomena differ so much according to race and environment that the general propositions we can lay down as positive and practically certain are but few.

Secondly, there are certain general tendencies which can be traced through the annals of mankind, certain lines along which human progress has moved. To discover and trace and illustrate these is the province of what is usually called the Philosophy of History, a subject with which some famous writers have dealt, beginning with the Arab Ibn Khaldun, and coming down through the Italian Vico to the German Hegel. There is no branch of historical enquiry that better deserves your thoughts. But it is more modest in its pretensions than is the school of Buckle and Spencer, for it does not attempt to lay down general propositions about all men and all communities, but only to explain the past by showing what were the most potent forces and tendencies at work, and how the growth of the human mind expressed itself in the moulding and perfecting of institutions.

The facts which History presents chronologically may also be treated as materials for a systematic study of any special branch of human activity, just as the events in the annals of the Greeks recorded by Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and others may be used for a treatise, like that of Aristotle, concerning Greek politics. History may hand over the phenomena she records to be made the basis of books on political science, or economic science, or what is called Sociology, in which the phenomena are arranged and analyzed, and are so correlated and explained as to enable us to draw from them general conclusions. But the materials belong to History. It is she that has gathered them. It is to her that he who would handle them systematically must go in order to know the authenticity and the value of each part of them.

Let me try to sum up as follows what I have sought to convey to you.

There is no incompatibility between the scientific treatment and the literary treatment of history. Undue attention to the latter will tend to make a writer less accurate and thorough in investigation, just as complete absorption in the investigation of facts will tend to make his presentation of the facts less attractive. But there is nothing to-day, any more than in bygone days, to prevent him from being both a careful investigator and an agreeable writer. As between Lingard and Froude, choose Lingard, but the combination of qualities which you have in Macaulay or Green or Parkman or Lea is better than either. No historians were more accurate and exact than Ranke and Mommsen, but every page in the writings of both has a literary quality.

There is no incompatibility between the use of critical methods and a careful study of details on the one hand and a grasp of broad general principles on the other. Rather is it true that the man who knows the details best is also the fittest to educe and explain the general principles. Many a student can master the details who cannot expound the principles, but the man of wide grasp is always the better for knowing the details also, for in them lies Reality.

That which is misleading and unfruitful is the tendency to disjoin the mastery of details from the so-called " sociological " study of general principles, i.e. to think you can have the latter without the former. To re-create any period of the Past for our own minds, to understand it as it was, unlike what went before it, unlike what came after it, — this is the chief aim of history, and for this purpose one must study not only the masses of men but also individual men, their ideas and beliefs, their enjoyments and aspirations. Especially important is it for any one who would explain the course of events that he should understand those individuals who by force of thought or will dominated their own time and turned the course of events. Not only has the study of striking figures the greatest fascination for the ordinary reader as well as the student, it has also an importance for the comprehension of events which the Buckle and Spencer school do not seem to realize. The individual doubt-less counts for less to-day in most countries than he did in either the republics or the monarchies of the past. But if you wish to realize how much he still counts for, think of how different Europe would have been to-day had there been no Napoleon Bonaparte, no Mazzini, no Cavour, no Bismarck ; or what it would have meant in your Revolutionary War if Clive, who died in 1774, had lived to lead the troops of George the Third and there had been no Washington to oppose him, or how different the course of events in the Civil War if Seward instead of Lincoln had been nominated at Chicago for the Presidency.

The writer or teacher of history begins by a critical investigation of the facts. This is science, and one of the most difficult branches of science. When you have ascertained the facts so far as ascertainable, try to connect them and arrange them in the order of their importance and educe general conclusions from them. This also is science. Then set them forth in the best order and the best words you can find. This is literature. Literary skill crowns the work, and makes it more useful because it makes the work spread farther, and better accomplish its end. But it is worthless if the two other processes have not gone before.

For the highest kind of historical work four gifts are needed; unwearied diligence in investigation, a penetrating judgment which can fasten on the more essential points, an imagination which can vivify the past, and that power over language which we call Style. So the greatest historians have been those who combined a wide sweep of vision with a thorough mastery of details, and who have known how to set forth both the details and the principles in a way which makes them enrich the reader's thought, touch his emotions, and live in his memory.