320 HISTORY OF LITERATURE 



from one generation to another, must be mute, still, speechless, dead : 

 there is no life in it. 



II 



In a recently printed essay, equally characterized by brilliant 

 gifts of exposition and sound common sense, the lamented John Fiske 

 points out suggestively the differences between the old and the 

 new method of writing history. He passes in review a number of cele- 

 brated names Herodotus and Thucydides, Curtius and Mommsen. 

 Hume and Gibbon, John Richard Green and Freeman and touches 

 graphically on the methods, the environment, the capabilities of 

 each Herodotus the historian, traveler, geographer, kindled with 

 the poetic sense that an Orientalized Greek could hardly escape, 

 anticipating Gibbon and Freeman in studying on the spot the scenes 

 he was depicting; Thucydides, the historian of institutions, filling 

 the mouths of Pericles and the Athenian generals with golden sen- 

 tences such as Shakespeare ventured upon in his psychological 

 dramas; Curtius and Mommsen, born and reared in an environment 

 unsympathetic to the perfect mastery of such subjects as Athenian 

 democracy and Roman institutions; Hume, the narrow, though 

 luminous Scotch specialist, viewing history from the heights of 

 Edinburgh Castle; Gibbon, the all-grasping, the all-comprehending, 

 hyphening together the new and the old method with hooks of steel ; 

 Freeman, with his vast sweep yet limited vision, utterly unmindful 

 of anything but geography and politics; Green, the masterful, the 

 many-sided, instinct with life, and viewing History as Life itself in 

 all its phases and mazes and colors and complexities, dwelling as 

 lovingly on a literary or a social episode, a bit of landscape, the 

 discussions of a club, the effects of a great Whig or Tory dinner- 

 party, or the architecture of a quaint old English town, as on a great 

 election, a burning political question, a night in the House of Com- 

 mons, or the fatal obstinacy of George III: all drawn within his 

 encyclopedic gaze as parts of an organic whole no part of which he 

 could afford to neglect. 



Needless to say to which of these men Fiske awards the palm: 

 Gibbon and Green are the men whom he reverences with fondest 

 admiration, the men whom he sets up before the new historical 

 student as his exemplars. 



The methods of the New History are those of the New Literature. 



Georg Brandes, the Scandinavian critic, in his remarkable work 

 on Literary Tendencies in the Nineteenth Century, has philosophically 

 grasped one side of the subject: the angler after "tendencies," 

 fishing in the muddy and obscure waters of many contemporaneous 

 European literatures, finds interesting "drifts," "currents," "eddies," 

 setting in here and there, slowly drawing the intellectual forces of con- 



