15 DECEMBER 1894, Page 11

THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY.

WHAT is the true romance of history P A writer whose book* is published this week, seems to think it consists • mainly in the lives of a few adventurous men, of whom only one (Masaniello) can be classed among history-makers at all, while the remainder are either, like Marino Faliero, only romantic personages, or like Vidocq the thief-taker and CasenO■ia the blackguard, are persons about whom romances have been written. Other writers, again, with a more acute sense ef the dignity of history, have found its romance in its dranaatic scenes, and dwell lovingly on incidents like the death of Marius ; the Triumph in which Caractacus played a part ; the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots ; or the trial ef Marie Antoinette,—all subjects, no doubt, well fitted for the painter or the dramatist who seeks sudden effects from magnificently coloured contrasts. Gibbon found, we think, a romance which delighted him in splendid or lurid events, the sack of Rome or the fall of Constantinople, and Macaulay, whenever he let himself go, in the careers of individuals like Clive, or Pitt, or Frederick the Great, or, before all others, the Earl of Peterborough. For ourselves, we cannot but think that we should seek romance rather in those beginnings of things which have had mighty endings, beginnings which, it often may be, we can only imagine and not describe. If we had, for instance, histories instead of painful guessings to bring before us those early movements of the White Race, when, three times it would seem in succession, they, spurred by some unendurable famine or some governing idea, or some mighty leader, rose from their ancient seats to wander forth to the conquest of the unknown world, and so made, first the Mongol, then the Indian, and then the European, what true romances we should have before us ! Whether the early Whites rose to their work, as we believe with the older thinkers on the subject, from the great sloping prairies which roll down northwards from the Hindoo Koosh to the Arctic Sea, or, as some modern inquirers think, from the over-crowded and infertile valleys of Scandi- navia and Northern Russia, the fate of the world must have hung on the decisions of a few men, not one of whom can have known on what he was deciding. Did the tribes swarm out to make history under some irresistible pressure which hardly left them freedom of the will, or did they obey some leader who had insight greater than theirs, vast ambition, and the callousness which cared not for human suffering, if only his hardly developed yet magnificent purpose might be attained ? Either account may be the true one, for when, ages after the last rush occurred, and the " bar- barians " submerged Rome, their march of centuries seems to have been inspired by no single man's thought, but to have been driven on by Providence or some blind force— pressure from the eastward, historians say—which urged them ever south till they were stopped by the endless multi- tudes or the pathless forests of Asia and Central Africa. And yet the leader may, in the very earliest rising, have been there, for when ages later still the Mongol outpouring from Northern Asia began, the tribes found a chieftain in Jenghiz Khan, and though they ultimately ruled from the Baltic to the Sea of Okhotsk, from the mouth of the Obi to Travancore, they still left dreams which must have haunted the brain of • The Romance of History. London; George Neville% that wonderful ancestor of Princes, more than half unfulfilled. He meant to have ruled all. Surely in these early upheavals of mankind there is true romance. There is true romance, also, grand romance, as Livy must have felt, when he invented, or coloured, or it may be only repeated, his legends of the found- ing of Rome, the little city of sternly disciplined brigands, who so soon awoke to their marvellous destiny, and set them- selves unflinchingly to the conquest of what they believed to be "the world." And there was romance, too, in that strange pause when Hadrian, by arresting further conquest, changed the history of mankind. His only idea was to make Rome safer ; but suppose he had been an Alexander, had reconciled the " German " tribes to service in the Roman legions, and had bidden her, safe on her northern frontiers, maintain the principles of her polity until the world, the real world, lay at her feet. A successor might have been told by some brigand from the farthest East of a world across Behring Straits, as Ivan the Terrible was told of a world beyond the Ural, and might have stretched the sway of Rome even over the Continent of America. Or can men even think of anything more romantic ihi history than that strange flash like a gleam of light which for a few generations illumined the brains of a few Hellenic soldiers, sailors, and slave-holders—never a million of them in all—and then as suddenly as it had blazed out, passed away, yet left a reflec- tion which still to this hour illuminates mankind P First in thought, in literature, in art, in fighting, and in physical grace, the minute aristocracy which we call "the Greeks" passes across the broad disk of history as the lightning passes across the clouds in a great storm, revealing yet not increasing the potencies which lie in the human brain. There is mad romance such as fiction never dreamed of, in the career of Alexander, who dared march with a few thousand Greeks to the conquest of Western Asia, and who began in India without knowing where India was, the conquest which from the other end we are just completing. There is romance, lofty romance, in that short-lived effort of one great man, the greatest probably who ever lived, except Alexander, who, ages after its death, strove to renew the Roman Empire, and make Europe Christian; more romance and higher yet, in the effort of a succession of powerless priests, girt about by a disobedient world of warriors, to build above them all a purely mental power before which they should crouch almost like slaves, and so become what the Prince of Peace would have them. It is in these things, could they only be well told, that the true romance of history seems to us to lie.

Or else it lies in the careers of the few men who have succeeded in moulding the inmost thoughts and aspirations of mankind. Can man even think of wilder romance than the going forth of the poor preacher by the Lake of Galilee to tell to the people of a rotting and yet swelling world, that their faiths were false, their ideals corrupt, their acts impure, and that to be anything they must become meek and lowly and virtuous as children ; and so telling his tale, that at this hour the masters and moralisers of the world know of no higher justification for an enterprise or a deed than to say that it is Christian ? What is the romance of any adventurers compared with the romance of the Twelve, did we but fully know it, who started forth to purify a world of which they knew nothing, by ideas which that world held contemptible, and who, despised, scourged, or killed, did so sow their seed, that to-day their thought is regulating the acts and the laws of the guides of all mankind? Is there no romance in the spectacle of the half-naked ascetic sitting under his banyan and giving out to brown men, ignorant as fishes, thoughts which to-day form the only antiseptic in the minds of a third of the human race ; or in the deep cogitations of the epileptic camel-driver who wandered for months among the mountains of Arabia, to descend with thoughts which, bad or good, were so powerful that they bound the very tribes of the desert into an indissoluble brotherhood, and hurled them out, a nation of warriors, to tread down the highest existing organisations of the world P The most inspired poets, the greatest masters of fiction, the loftiest dreamers, have never imagined figures so completely centres of romance as those of Christ, or Gautama, or Mahommed. And, though at a far distance, still there is romance in that company of figures whom we describe as men of science, discoverers, inventors, men who sent on the thought of mankind upon its present career, often without the smallest consciousness that they were doing aught beyond indulging a lofty curiosity, or at moat giving to a few something more of wisdom than they previously possessed. We wonder if their history will ever be worthily written as "the history of thought ;" as indeed we wonder vainly whether our descendants will ever habitually read, as lads and maidens, a history of the world so adequately written that it shall be to them as full of entrancing interest as, say, the history of Israel was to our Puritan forefathers, or as the history of their rebellion is to some Americans. It does not look like it just at present ; for we are all studying "periods," which, without a past with which to link them, and a subsequent—there should he that word—for them to illuminate, fail to teach us much. And yet it may he. The curious misdirection of modern teaching energy cannot last for ever, one would think, and we are assuming no miracle when we deem it possible that when research has advanced a little farther, and the conflict as to authorities has growled itself to a temporary rest, a Gibbon may present himself with a history of mankind in his hand which men can read, and reading fairly remember. The generation which receives that book will be wiser than this, for though history must always be an imperfect guide till we know more of the endless problem which we call the mind, still the collective experience of men, could a whole people but be conscious of it, would save us from many errors and from much of the grand modern temptation, the dissipation of energy in the pursuit of what is hopeless or not worth having.