HISTORY AND LIFE.
"HISTORY," said Lord Acton in his weighty epigram- matic way, "is the conscience of mankind"; and again, "Ethics are the marrow of history." The words may be taken as the confession of faith of a great, perhaps the greatest, school of historical writing. History, as they understand it, is the elucidation of past ages. For this purpose the facts must be got clear, truth sifted from falsehood, causes placed in relation to effects, lines of development disentangled. The data of judgment must be set out in an organised form. But the historian is more than the compiler: his business is to elucidate as well as to chronicle. Therefore he must pass judgment on his characters and their doings, settle their place in the hierarchy of merit or infamy, and find out wherein they failed or whereby they succeeded. There need be no moral explicitly pointed, but the whole history must have a moral behind it. Morality is the only common ground of ageeement, and the test of condemnation or approval must be ethical. This is the high dogmatic statement of the creed, which may be found admirably put in Lord Acton's famous review of Creighton's "History of the Papacy." But it is possible to regard the moralist and the historian as being complementary without limiting the test to too narrow a basis. Ethics, after all, are not an unprogressive science, and the standard for the good man in one generation is not the standard in another. Five hundred years ago a kind and upright man might in all honesty condone slavery and persecution, and we should be wrong in thinking his spiritual level necessarily lower than that of the tolerant abolitionist of to-day. The historical imagination is important even in the writing of history, and it is an historian's business to separate its petite morale from /a grancle, to consider what moral standards are ultimate and universal, and what are local and transient. Or, as Bishop Creighton put it, "we must show as much casuistry in history as will serve to distinguish between venial and mortal sins." It is absurd to judge all misdeeds by the standard of to-day. If the guilty mind be the beak: of guilt, then many acts which to-day would be heinous would in other ages be venial, and, contrariwise, doings at which we should scarcely raise our brows might in earlier times have been the infallible sign of a black heart, Perspective is wanted in morals as much as in other branches of thought. But the difference is only one of metbod,—for both schools are agreed on the primary importance of a moral judgment. The historian has not only to provide the data for judgment, he has to pass judgment, otherwise lie shirks his main duty. He writes, he must write, with a purpose. He has to reproduce
• the past, but to do this he must bring it into line with the • present. He must show the relation of our existing standards to earlier doings, and the only standard which is of universal application must be the moral criterion. It follows from such a doctrine that history is as much art as science. If the historian would teach, he must attract. A moral is of small use unless the reader be made to feel that the characters to which it applies were living people. Hence the moralistic school of history must perforce be also literary. Style and imagination are as indispensable as accuracy and logic.
• We have had few exponents of the opposite creed in England. One was the late Regius Professor of History at Oxford, a man from whom few would have expected any devotion to an arid scientific ideaL Professor Elton in his recent delightful Life of York Powell has shown very clearly by quotations from his lectures how earnestly he held a faith which was foreign to much in his nature. To him the historian was the juror, not the judge: the man who had to settle a question of fact, not pass a verdict in accordance with some abstract law. He should be, as he said, the observer, not the preacher : the biologist, not the physician. To quote from an address
Unfortunately, history is frequently written as a party pam- phlet or as a treatise on morality; but the proper view is to treat history as an accumulation or assemblage of facts respecting humanity en masse, and not respecting single individuals. Literature, on the other hand, is concerned with the expression of human emotions in an artistic manner. A history may, of course, be a model of exposition, but that is not its true raison d'être."
.Both schools, it is clear, go a certain way together. The man who believes in style and ethical judgments will not deny that the first duty is to be perfectly certain about the facts. The other stops short there. Facts, he argues, are a sufficiently complicated business without cumbering oneself with experi- ments in quite different spheres. History should be treated as • an exact science, like botany, and when the data are secured and arranged the historian's work is over. The botanist does not load his pages with Tennysonian speculations about what the flower in the crannied wall may or may not mean. So, too, the historian need not trouble to call Caesar Borgia a blackguard; it is sufficient if lie sets out carefully and scientifically what he did. He is not concerned with the moral purpose of the universe, and if he deals with theories and creeds, he must treat them objectively, like specimens in a museum. He has no fault to find with the philosopher or the moralist. They can begin their labours where the historian has finished his, for he gives them the data to work upon. He must assume, as Professor Elton acutely points out, the Hegelian doctrine of history as a working hypothesis, though in a form of which Hegel would have denied the parentage. Things, according to the Hegelian, have worked out as the Divine Will intended them. What Providence has meant to succeed in the past has succeeded, and the "judgment of history is the judgment of Heaven." Properly speaking, there is no absolute progress, for reaction may be one of the ways in which the Divine Idea is working 'towards its realisation. To the impassive historian, as to a .type of German metaphysician, "good and evil are not to be sharply distinguished.
The answer to the doctrine is twofold. In the first place, the two schools are talking about different things. The chronicler who gets his data, tabulates them, and leaves them is a useful person ; but he is not the historian, as the word is commonly defined, and to identify the two is to ignore a fundamental and useful distinction. The historian's business is to reproduce the past and to elucidate it, and this can only be done by means of a kind of imagination which involves some portion of the literary graces, and the exercise of a judgment which must be partly ethical. If we limit history to the first work, then we must find a new name for the second, and there seems little reason to get rid of a term which has been used to include so great a roll of names from Herodotus to Mr. Gardiner. The other objection is that the austere scientific ideal is impossible to apply to a subject-matter which touches so closely the hopes and desires of men. If we were dealing with plant forms or gases the case might be different ; but we are dealing with human nature and circumstances which are not without a resemblance to our own. York Powell was no exception. When he wrote history he made moral judgments, which differed from those of Lord Acton only in being more tolerant. There is, after all, no final distinction between pure and applied science, least of all in history, and the man does not live who can maintain a godlike aloofness in the face of characters and deeds which appeal to his emotions as well as to his reason. A glib moralising trick in history is an intolerable blemish. We do not want to be constantly told that this or that event shows bow much wiser it is to be good than clever. But equally tiresome is the pose of complete freedom from moral bias; for we may be very certain that we are not therefore rid of moral judgments, but only get caprice and paradox in place of sound reason.
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