Chapter III: The Writer

The historian of the Dutch Republic writes as one who thinks nobly, admires with enthusiasm, and hates without pettiness. ‘His thoughts are masculine, full of argumentation,’ and as are his thoughts so is his style. Often the language seems charged with his own energy and chivalric impulsiveness. At such times the style is eager, mettlesome, impetuous, it glows with intensity of feeling.

Motley was not a ‘fine’ writer in the sense of being visibly scrupulous about the choice of words and the balance of sentences. He impresses one as of the opinion that a man can ill afford to give too much time to the problem of expression. But he is far from being indifferent to the reader. He is not merely willing, he prefers to please, provided that in so doing he is not diverted from his main purpose. The prevailing characteristics of his style are a natural dignity and a manly negligence.

He imparts vividness by means of detailed conversations among the actors of the historic drama. These colloquies have at times the air of being inventions of the historian, like the speeches in Xenophon. Conscious that a device intended to give reality might affect the sceptical mind quite otherwise, Motley more than once explained that ‘no historical personage is ever made, in the text, to say or write anything, save what, on ample evidence, he is known to have said or written.’

The reader who turns from Prescott to Motley at once discovers that the younger historian weaves a dense, firm web. Appropriating an admirable figure invented by Henry James and used with respect to Balzac’s style, it may be said that if Motley’s work is not at every point cloth of gold, it has at least a metallic rigidity.