[HUTTON] THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY , 231 
if the speaker’s name be obtruded: a merely personal note will seem 
to detract from their larger import. 
Life is full of trifles but art of dignity, and the trifles of life— 
though they be also its tragedy and comedy—are unworthy a place 
in the history, which is to go down to posterity for a book of perpetual 
reference: and therefore though the Peloponnesian War touched Greece 
closely on every side and affected every one and every thing, Thucy- 
dides has not condescended to give much more than its military 
operations and its broader diplomatic history. Only three continuous 
chapters have been given to its moral effects (one of them accounted 
spurious): apart from his account of the plague, the military and 
diplomatic history have been relieved only by those strange speeches 
so curiously blent of scientific and unscientific elements: unscientific, 
since they are frankly not Hansard reports or anything approaching 
them; ultra-scientific, since they exclude all the personal note and all 
topical allusions, and leave only a skeleton or outline of political or 
national principles—very eloquent sometimes, as in the Funeral 
Speech, and very instructive, as in the speech of Cleon, but much more 
natural in the reflections of a philosophic historian, than on the lips 
of a popular orator. It is hard to believe that the real Pericles was not 
more topical, it is impossible to believe that Cleon was not. Lord 
Bryce the other day in a service in honour of Mr. William Gladstone 
referred to the loss of young life in this war, and quoted from the Funer- 
al Speech of Pericles ‘‘the year has lost its spring’. Now the words 
are not in Thucydides’ version of that speech and perhaps he thought 
them ‘“‘tosh’’; perhaps he just forgot them: in either case it was Aris- 
totle who had sufficient sympathy with poetry to treasure up from the 
Funeral Speech this little touch of the poet: (Aristotle’s Rhetoric 
Bk 1. 7. 34) none the less poetic even if it was not original exactly on 
the lips of Pericles but a quotation from Gelo [Herodotus VII. 162] 
much improved by a nobler application. 
Thucydides could have enlightened us in a million ways about the 
daily life of Greece, the outer and the inner life, and have shown us 
the soul of its peoples. He has put aside the task as unworthy of a 
severe and scientific thinker, has left it wholly on the shoulders of Hero- 
dotus and Plutarch, and only rarely—very rarely—has let us see that 
any personal opinions or emotions were evoked in him by the course of 
the war. 
This is high art it may be said: the highest art: the historian lets 
his facts speak for themselves and thereby enables them to speak 
with tenfold force. Thucydides has so successfully concealed him- 
self that no one ever suspected personal bias even in his account of 
Sec. I & II, Sig. 8 
