THE VARIETY AND UNITY OF HISTORY 15 



tion may be simply enough asked, but it cannot be simply answered. 

 The matter requires elaboration. 



Let us ask ourselves, by way of preliminary test, what we should 

 be disposed to require of the ideal historian, what qualities, what 

 powers, what aptitudes, what purposes? Put the query in another 

 form, more concrete, more convenient to handle: how would you 

 critically distinguish Mommsen's History from a doctor's thesis? By 

 its scope, of course; but its scope would be ridiculous if it were not 

 for its insight, its power to reconceive forgotten states of society, to 

 put antique conceptions into life and motion again, build scattered 

 hints into systems, and see a long national history singly and as 

 a whole. Its masterly qualities it gets from the perceiving eye, the 

 conceiving mind of its great author, his divination rather than his 

 learning. The narrative impresses you as if written by one who has 

 seen records no other man ever deciphered. I do not think Mommsen 

 an ideal historian. His habit as a lawyer was too strong upon him: 

 he wrote history too much as if it were an argument. His curiosity 

 as an antiquarian was too keen: things very ancient and obscure 

 were more interesting to him than the more commonplace things, 

 which nevertheless constitute the bulk of the human story. But his 

 genius for interpretation was his patent of nobility in the peerage of 

 historians; he would not be great without it; and without it would 

 not illustrate my present thesis. 



That thesis is, that, in whatever form, upon whatever scale you 

 take it, the writing of history as distinguished from the clerical keep- 

 ing of records is a process of interpretation. No historical writer, 

 how small soever his plot of time and circumstance, ever records 

 all the facts that fall under his eye. He picks and chooses for his 

 narrative, determines which he will dwell upon as significant, which 

 put by as of no consequence. And that is a process of judgment, an 

 estimation of values, an interpretation of the matter he handles. 

 The smaller the plot of time he writes of, the more secluded from the 

 general view the matters he deals with, the more liable is he to error 

 in his interpretation; for this little part of the human story is but 

 a part; its significance lies in its relation to the whole. It requires 

 nicer skill, longer training, better art and craft to fit it to its little 

 place than would be required to adjust more bulky matters, matters 

 more obviously involved in the general structure, to their right 

 position and connections. The man with only common skill and eye- 

 sight is safer at the larger, cruder sort of work. Among little facts 

 it requires an exceeding nice judgment to pick the greater and the 

 less, prefer the significant and throw away only the negligible. The 

 specialist must needs be overseen and corrected with much more 

 vigilance and misgiving than the national historian or the historian 

 of epochs. 



