6 HISTORICAL SCIENCE 



the state itself in another guise. Literature concerned them only as 

 it became the wind of opinion beating upon the laboring ship of 

 state, or when some sudden burst of song gave a touch of imaginative 

 glory to the domestic annals of the nation which was their theme. 

 Art came within their view only when it was part of the public work 

 of some Pericles or became itself part of the intricate web of politics, 

 as in the Italian states of the Renaissance. Language concerned 

 them not at all, except as its phrases once and again spoke the tem- 

 per of an epoch or its greater variations betokened the birth of 

 new nations. 



And all this because their interest was in affairs of state, in the 

 organized and coordinated efforts of the body politic, in opinions 

 and influences which moved men in the mass and governed the actions 

 of kings and their ministers of state at home and abroad. In brief, 

 their interest was in " events." It is curious and instructive to examine 

 what we mean by that much-used word. We mean always, I take it, 

 some occurrence of large circumstance, no private affair transacted 

 in a corner, but something observed and open to the public view, 

 noticeable and known, and not fortuitous, either, but planned, 

 concerted. There can, properly speaking, be no " event " without 

 organized effort: it is not a thing of the individual. Literature is 

 excluded, by definition, and art, and language, and much of religion 

 that is grounded in unobserved belief, and all the obscure pressure 

 of economic want. A history of "events " cannot be a history of the 

 people; it can only be a history of the life of the body politic, of 

 the things which statesmen observe and act upon. 



The specialist has taught us that the deepest things are often those 

 which never spring to light in events, and that the breeding-ground 

 of events themselves lies where the historian of the state seldom 

 extends his explorations. It is not true that a community is merely 

 the aggregate of those who compose it. The parts are so disposed 

 among us that the minority governs more often than the majority. 

 But influence and mastery are subtle things. They proceed from 

 forces which come to the individual out of the very air he breathes: 

 his life is compounded as the lives of those about him are. Their lives 

 play upon his, he knows not how, and the opinion he enforces upon 

 them is already more than half their own. And so the analysis of the 

 life of the many becomes part of the analysis of the power of the few 

 - an indispensable part. It is this that the specialist sees. He sees 

 more. He sees that individual effort as well as aggregate must be 

 studied, the force that is in the man as well as the air that is in the 

 community. The men who give voice to their age are witnesses to 

 more things than they wot of. 



Mr. Ruskin, in the preface to the little volume on Venetian art 

 to which he has given the name St. Mark's Rest, propounds a theory 



