128 MEDIEVAL HISTORY 



in our study of the first half of the Middle Ages when we should 

 expect and encourage, as the next step in advance, constructive 

 rather than analytical work? 



Now I believe there is no student of history who will assert that 

 the establishment of the fact as the result of a special investigation 

 is the ultimate object of historical study. However great may be the 

 intellectual pleasure of the discovery of the hitherto unknown fact 

 by a truly scientific process and there are few greater and 

 however great the consequent temptation to regard the process and 

 its immediate result as of supreme importance, we all know that to 

 find out what really was, or what really happened, at a given time 

 or place is only a means to a further end. And whether or not we 

 quite believe that, as has been said, the only really permanent work 

 is the artistic embodiment of truth in forms of beauty, it is true 

 that the ultimate purpose of all historical activity should be the 

 construction of a continuous narrative account of the life of man- 

 kind, or of a nation, through a given epoch or through the whole 

 course of time. Such a narrative must be based, of course, upon 

 a great body of strictly scientific investigation which must go 

 before it. It must leave nothing to conjecture or theory that is 

 capable of proof, but it is not necessary that it should make 

 mention of every minute fact which has been discovered. Its object 

 should rather be to display in proper proportion and sequence the 

 sum total of influences, both facts and forces, which have really 

 determined the current of events with their results, destined in their 

 turn to become the causes and conditions of a new era. Whether 

 such a comprehensive picture in the life of the race will be a work 

 of art, like the ideal which some earlier historians have had in mind, 

 whether it will teach mankind lessons of morality, or of economic 

 advantage, or of practical statesmanship, it is not the business of the 

 historian to inquire. But it is his business to determine when the 

 work of special investigation in any period has gone so far that the 

 work of broad construction is possible, correctly inclusive and exclu- 

 sive, with proper perspective, and with such a sound foundation 

 of knowledge that future investigation is not likely to overturn any 

 really essential portion of it. We shall all agree upon this, I think. 

 Nor do I think there will be many to deny that one of the surest 

 signs that a science like ours is passing into a condition of mere 

 scholasticism is that such a stage of approaching completeness in 

 the history of investigation should be reached and not naturally 

 arouse the spirit and power of constructive work on a broad scale. 

 That the workers in such a field should be content to spend their 

 best efforts in determining slight details, whose influence on what 

 the age was really doing was without significance, would be a most 

 deplorable and hopeless condition of things. That investigation has 



