THE VARIETY AND UNITY OF HISTORY 7 



which will illuminate my meaning. "Great nations/' he says, "write 

 their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their 

 deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of 

 these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but 

 of the three the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a 

 nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty 

 by the genius of a few of its children; but its art only by the general 

 gifts and common sympathies of the race. Again, the policy of a 

 nation may be compelled, and, therefore, not indicative of its true 

 character. Its words may be false, while yet the race remains uncon- 

 scious of their falsehood; and no historian can assuredly detect the 

 hypocrisy. But art is always instinctive; and the honesty or pre- 

 tense of it are therefore open to the day. The Delphic oracle may 

 or may not have been spoken by an honest priestess, we cannot 

 tell by the words of it; a liar may rationally believe them a lie, such 

 as he would himself have spoken; and a true man, with equal reason, 

 may believe them spoken in truth. But there is no question possible 

 in art: at a glance (when we have learned to read), we know the 

 religion of Angelico to be sincere, and of Titian, assumed." 



Whether we agree with all the dicta of this interesting passage 

 or not, the main truth of it is plain. It is to be doubted whether the 

 "genius of a few of its children" suffices to give a nation place in 

 the great annals of literature, and literary critics would doubtless 

 maintain that the book of a nation's words is as nai'f and instinctive 

 as the book of its art. Here, too, the sincere and natural is easily 

 to be distinguished ("when we have learned to read") from the 

 sophisticated and the artificial. Plainly the autobiography of Ben- 

 jamin Franklin is separated by a long age from the autobiography of 

 Benvenuto Cellini, and the one is as perfect a mirror of the faith of 

 the man and the manner of the age as the other. But these questions 

 are not of the present point. Undoubtedly the book of a nation's art 

 and the book of its words must be read along with the book of its 

 deeds if its life and character are to be comprehended as a whole; 

 and another book, besides, the book of its material life, its foods, 

 its fashions, its manufactures, its temperatures and seasons. In each 

 of these great books the historian looks for the same thing: the life 

 of the day, the impulses that underlie government and all achieve- 

 ment, all art and all literature, as well as all statesmanship. 



I do not say that the specialists who have so magnified their office 

 in our day have been conscious of this ultimate synthesis. Few of 

 them have cared for it or believed in it. They have diligently spent 

 their intensive labor upon a few acres of ground, with an exemplary 

 singleness of mind, and have displayed, the while, very naively, the 

 provincial spirit of small farmers. But a nation is as rich as its sub- 

 jects, and this intensive farming has accumulated a vast store of 



