320 The Bight Bev. The Lord Bishop of London [Feb. 5, 



see their importance, but we cannot hope to reproduce them by mere 

 exercise of imagination. Picturesqueness must come from adequate 

 materials, and every touch must be real. Imagination, after all, is 

 only an arrangement of experience. You cannot really create ; you 

 are only borrowing and adjusting odds and ends according to some 

 dominant conception. It is useless in history to read a man about 

 whom little is known into the likeness of another about whom you 

 may know much. It is useless to reproduce an obscure period in 

 the terms of a period with which you are more familiar. Where we 

 do not know we cannot safely invent. Now picturesqueness in 

 history must depend on the material available for intimate knowledge. 

 It is only at times when men were keenly interested in life and 

 character that such records were produced. We cannot make the 

 life of Byzantium live again, for the records are formal and official. 

 Outside accounts of magnificence suggest little ; we need the touch 

 of intimacy to give life. In short, picturesqueness is only possible in 

 dealing with periods when literature was vigorous and contemporary 

 memoirs were plentiful. 



I should not like to say whether the demand created the supply, 

 or the supply created the demand. It is enough that men were 

 interested in themselves and in one another, and have left us the 

 result of their interest. That interest arose from a belief in the 

 importance of what was happening, and a power of tracing it to 

 individual action. Hence prominent individuals were closely 

 scanned, their motives were analysed, and the influences which 

 weighed with them were carefully observed. In some cases the men 

 themselves were worthy of study : in other cases their importance 

 was entirely due to their position. But anyhow they were represen- 

 tatives of their times, of the habits, manners and ideas which were 

 current. The picture which we wish to have in our own minds is 

 not merely that of the man, or of the events in which he took part, 

 but of the life and the society which lay behind him. 



The picturesqueness of history, therefore, is largely due to 

 memoirs ; and the countries and epochs which have produced them 

 are especially picturesque. Now it is great crises, periods of 

 disruption, great emergencies, which as a rule impress contemporaries 

 and furnish matter for close observation. The production of crises 

 is, of course, not the highest sign of human intelligence. In fact, 

 a crisis is due to blundering and incapacity. But when a crisis 

 occurs it is a revelation of character. This is obvious in the drama. 

 It is impossible to represent an ordinary man engaged in his ordinary 

 pursuits. To show what sort of man he is, it is necessary to place 

 him in an extraordinary and unexpected position; then all his 

 hidden strength or weakness comes to light. A man can only be 

 defined by his limitations ; and these are only obvious when he has 

 to act on his own initiative, robbed of his ordinary props, and forced 

 to draw upon his own intellectual and moral resources. Hence it 

 comes that we feel the attraction of troublous times in history, and 



