HISTORY 



HISTORY 



the past is nil. But in this par- 

 ticular case the value lies not so 

 much in the narrative as in the 

 commentary the commentary of 

 one of the most brilliant intellects 

 of the most brilliant epoch of Eng- 

 lish literature. Of another type al- 

 together in the historical field were 

 the researches of John Stowe, who 

 unearthed the works of those me- 

 dieval chroniclers who provide us 

 with the real groundwork of our 

 knowledge of the Plantagenet era 

 Matthew Paris, Thomas of Wal- 

 singham, the so-called Matthew of 

 Westminster, and others. 



The 17th century begins to pro- 

 vide us with what grew into an in- 

 creasing stream of literary works 

 which are not in form histories but 

 memoirs invaluable to the his- 

 torian, of which an admirable ex- 

 ample is Lucy Hutchinson's Life of 

 her husband, the Puritan colonel, 

 together with the immortal diaries 

 of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, 

 none of them works written for 

 publication. But it gives us also 

 two great works of contemporary 

 historians, The History of the 

 Great Rebellion, by Lord Claren- 

 don, and The History of My Own 

 Time, by Gilbert Burnet, who was 

 also the author of a History of the 

 Reformation in England. Claren- 

 don's work at least remains a liter- 

 ary classic. Everywhere, however, 

 the historians continued to devote 

 themselves entirely to the modern 

 era until the 18th century was far 

 advanced, whilst in France Saint- 

 Simon was writing the incompar- 

 able Memoirs, which were not pub- 

 lished till the 19th century, and 

 Voltaire was producing his brilliant 

 pictures of Charles XII and Peter 

 the Great, and of the Ages of Louis 

 XIV and Louis XV, more with an 

 eye to literary effect than to the 

 exact historic truth. 



Widening Scope of Historians 

 But with the second half of the 

 18th century a reaction was setting 

 in against the convention set in 

 France which may be said to have 

 recognized only two eras as of real 

 importance in the history of the 

 world the Augustan Age of Rome 

 and the Bourbon Age of Europe. 

 From Scotland, Hume produced 

 the first great History of England, 

 and Robertson the first great His- 

 tory of Scotland ; and in his 

 Charles V Robertson gave some- 

 thing like an appreciation of the 

 Middle Ages. 



Already in France Montesquieu, 

 not writing history in the technical 

 sense, had developed the principle 

 of examining political institutions 

 in the light of the history of their 

 growth and development, and their 

 relation to institutions in other 

 countries and other ages ; and 



Burke, as a statesman, was insist- 

 ing upon a corresponding theme. 

 Then came again from Britain 

 two monumental works Adam 

 Smith's The Wealth of Nations, 

 which developed the relation be- 

 tween the scientific studies of 

 history and of economics, and the 

 work which is perhaps the greatest 

 of all histories, Gibbon's Decline 

 and Fall of the Roman Empire. 



The Greatness of Gibbon 

 This, at least, is to be said of 

 Gibbon, that, like Thucydides, he 

 can never be superseded ; all other 

 work covering the ground will be in 

 the nature of a commentary on 

 Gibbon, however much those par- 

 ticular commentaries may compel 

 us to revise particular judgements 

 of the great man, or newly coor- 

 dinated data may correct misap- 

 prehensions of fact which it was 

 impossible for him to avoid. And 

 his achievement was the more tre- 

 mendous because, unlike Thucy- 

 dides, he wrote not of what he had 

 seen and heard with his own eyes 

 and ears in one small corner of the 

 world during a single lifetime, but 

 of the long-past history of half the 

 civilized world during. a period of a 

 thousand years. 



Gibbon, in fact, gave a new 

 meaning to the name of historian ; 

 and his work was hardly finished 

 when the cataclysm of the French 

 Revolution and the wars which fol- 

 lowed upon it gave a new import to 

 history, as again a new import has 

 been given to it by the cataclysm 

 which the German Kaiser invoked 

 in 1914. It forced upon the world 

 the consciousness, hitherto only 

 academically suggested, of the 

 unity of the present with the past, 

 of the impossibility of isolating a 

 single stage of development from 

 all that has gone before, and treat- 

 ing the present as the final con- 

 summation of a past which might 

 be ignored. 



The 19th century witnessed first 

 the further revival of that interest 

 in the past the beginnings of which 

 we have noted as preceding the 

 revolution, the interest especially 

 in medievalism which is associated 

 with the whole movement known as 

 Romanticism. Next, the labours of 

 Niebuhr gave a new vitality to the 

 story of Ancient Rome one which 

 is of the most profound interest to 

 the British race, the creators of an 

 empire to which none save that of 

 Rome offers an approximate anal- 

 ogy. On the renewed study of 

 Roman history as a subject of vivid 

 living interest followed a like re- 

 vival of the study of the States of 

 ancient Greece ; and from the 

 study of Greece the new spirit of 

 inquiry extended itself to the yet 

 more ancient empires of the East, 



the excavation and interpretation 

 of ancient monuments which at 

 last began to reveal the secrets 

 that had been hidden for more 

 than 3,000 years. Nor did the 

 movement end here, but carried it- 

 self into investigations of primitive 

 social conditions so primitive 

 that when they existed no con- 

 scious records of them were made. 

 History, in short, in one of its 

 aspects became a reconstruction of 

 the only half-realized structures of 

 the remote past, and also a de- 

 tailed examination of origins. It 

 was no longer a picturing of the 

 full-grown plant in full leaf, but an 

 inquiry into its organic life. 



Growth of Specialism 

 The value of such work is not to 

 be underrated. In the latter half 

 especially of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury it had absorbed the attention 

 of the enormous majority of his- 

 torical students, who became 

 specialists in some very narrowly 

 circumscribed patch of historical 

 inquiry, sometimes with very valu- 

 able results, though, also, not with- 

 out the disastrous consequences 

 which sometimes attend specialism, 

 from the exaggerated importance 

 attached by the individual in- 

 quirer to his own particular field 

 of inquiry. It is perhaps the side 

 on which the Germans can most 

 definitely claim to have excelled 

 others, if not in the sifting and co- 

 ordination, yet at least in the ac- 

 cumulation of data. Yet even on 

 their own ground they have not 

 surpassed such scholars as Bishop 

 Stubbs, or F. W. Maitland, or Sir 

 Paul Vinogradoff, names perhaps 

 more honoured by students than 

 by the general public. 



Nevertheless, though the disci- 

 ples of this school are perhaps 

 somewhat apt to arrogate to them- 

 selves an exclusive right to the 

 title of historian, it is not with 

 such work that history is exclu- 

 sively concerned. History is matter 

 not only for the laboratory student 

 but, as we have insisted, for all 

 citizens ; and the public is very 

 much less concerned with the data 

 than with the conclusions to be 

 drawn from them. The task of 

 exposition belongs no less to the 

 historian, though the only safe 

 exponent is he who is sure of his 

 data. The literature of the nine- 

 teenth century is crowded with the 

 names of brilliant exponents, from 

 those who have taken all historical 

 knowledge to be their province, 

 such as Buckle, whose work on 

 The History of Civilization was 

 merely conceived as an introduc- 

 tion to the subject, to men whose 

 real work was concentrated upon 

 a particular period, such as Ma- 

 caulay or Froude. 



