LVIII THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Allowance must be made for changing times and the varying tempers 

 and capacities of different writers. The bow of a Thucydides could 

 not be bent by a Xenophon, nor yet by a Livy. Each man exercises 

 by preference his own special gifts; and Livy, with his lactea ubertas, 

 aimed rather at literary effect and at flattering the national pride of 

 his countrymen than at analysing political situations. Thucydides ab- 

 stained from flattering the Athenians, though he shows a desire to en- 

 able them to understand and duly value their best national qualities. 

 With the break up of the Roman civilisation and the advent of a new 

 order of things marked l)y the predominance of supra-mundane con- 

 ceptions and interests, history sank to a far inferior level, from which 

 it had gradually to rise, partly through the revival of letters in the 

 Renaissance, and partly through the later development of the scientific 

 spirit. 



The idea we all have to-day is that history is a narrative — a true nar- 

 rative — of past events. When a definition is given it is assumed 

 that the terms of the definition are perfectly understood; but sometimes, 

 upon looking into those terms, we find that they give us a good deal to 

 think about. The word "narrative" gives us something to think about, 

 and so does the word "events." If a man is to give us a narrative he 

 must connect his events, as a string of disconnected events is not a nar- 

 rative. Life flows like a stream; it is continuous, not discontinuous, 

 and history must aim at showing us its continuity. When we say his- 

 tory we mean the historian, and it is upon the historian, the man, there- 

 fore, that we must depend to make history intelligible to us. Yet no 

 one man can take a universal point of view. He can only see with his 

 own eyes, measure by his own judgment, and understand with his own 

 heart. Does the heart seem a strange thing to understand with? I 

 seem to remember the phrase "an understanding heart," used in a book 

 in which words are seldom misapplied. There must, therefore, always 

 be a subjective element in anything that can be called history. Each 

 man consciously or unconsciously has his own fundamental philosophy, 

 his own insight into human nature, his own standards of the credible 

 and the incredible. Would we strip him of all philosophy, of all canons 

 of judgment? In that case what could he do but stare like an infant at 

 whatever phenomenon happened to be before his eyes? He certainly 

 could not, in any true sense, understand it or make others understand it. 



But if the narrator is influenced in the presence of events by his own 

 subjectivity, there is more than a possibility that he will also be influ- 

 enced in some degree by his social, political or national environment, or 

 by all three at once. It is now very generally acknow' edged that the 

 histories written in the United States for nearly a hundred years after 

 the conclusion of the struggle with the Mother Country, gave, with few 



