HISTORY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 27 



his logic is after all felt to be futile and his conclusions antiquated. 

 Like the other historians of his epoch, though the movement of his 

 style is like that of the Roman triumph, he has not left to the world 

 a "possession forever." Scholars can find all his information else- 

 where, the use he makes of it they neither admire nor approve. 

 Readers of discrimination have better use for their time than to pe- 

 ruse the pages of an unsympathetic formalist, the eulogist of heathen 

 effeminacy, an apologist for pagan morality. 



In truth, the eighteenth century is very remote from the nine- 

 teenth. The same facts no longer wear the same faces, and another 

 method has gradually supplanted that which, though respectable, 

 was nevertheless outworn. A restless evolution renews during every 

 few generations all history in all its aspects, and never halts in the 

 process. It is the fiat that history must be rewritten as knowledge 

 grows, as epoch succeeds epoch. This is because readers have lived; 

 have lived themselves into a world that is new scientifically and 

 psychologically, and which has perspectives of which the past knew 

 nothing. Viewed from the heights of our modern achievements in 

 learning, the vaunted historical science of the eighteenth century, 

 method and all, seems little better than a dangerous pseudo-science 

 like phrenology or astrology. 



The first reaction against what was after all a phantom, stately 

 though it were, sprang rather from feeling than from knowledge; 

 it was a rebound of logic and not of reason. This premature revolt 

 is probably best illustrated in the case of Niebuhr. Though powerful, 

 the mind of the great Danish diplomat was dry and disdainful: 

 contemptuous of the practical and judicial. In his field of ancient 

 history he substituted for painstaking research and for concrete 

 reasoning a method based on gratuitous assumptions, a method 

 which destroyed traditional reality, to erect in its place a baseless 

 fabric of credulous negations. It has been the task of his successors, 

 beginning with Mommsen and ending with Taine's fine treatise on 

 Livy, to dissipate his airy structure of so-called analytic criticism. 

 Considerate as they have been, they have left upright only a very few 

 of his original contentions, and these the least important, wherewith 

 to uphold, for shame's sake, the vanishing renown of his name. The 

 indications of archa3ological discovery at this hour all point to the 

 ultimate annihilation of every principle and position which he enun- 

 ciated. Could his shade be seen strolling to<lay across the exca- 

 vated Roman Forum, and its crowding reflections be recorded for 

 our benefit, the muttered syllables of its vanitas vanitatum would 

 instruct our generation how superior is even the older notion of 

 history as a compound of poetry and philosophy to the substitute, 

 which merely dissects and compares abstractions, which begets 

 negations and brings forth only specious presumptions. 



