Chapter V: Part 5

Substitute for the word 'life' the words 'organised society,' and you get a peep into Burke's mind. There was a catholicity about his gaze. He knew how the whole world lived. Everything contributed to this: his vast desultory reading; his education, neither wholly academical nor entirely professional; his long years of apprenticeship in the service of knowledge; his wanderings up and down the country; his vast conversational powers; his enormous correspondence with all sorts of people; his unfailing interest in all pursuits, trades, manufactures--all helped to keep before him, like motes dancing in a sunbeam, the huge organism of modern society, which requires for its existence and for its development the maintenance of credit and of order. Burke's imagination led him to look out over the whole land: the legislator devising new laws, the judge expounding and enforcing old ones, the merchant despatching his goods and extending his credit, the banker advancing the money of his customers upon the credit of the merchant, the frugal man slowly accumulating the store which is to support him in old age, the ancient institutions of Church and University with their seemly provisions for sound learning and true religion, the parson in his pulpit, the poet pondering his rhymes, the farmer eyeing his crops, the painter covering his canvases, the player educating the feelings. Burke saw all this with the fancy of a poet, and dwelt on it with the eye of a lover. But love is the parent of fear, and none knew better than Burke how thin is the lava layer between the costly fabric of society and the volcanic heats and destroying flames of anarchy. He trembled for the fair frame of all established things, and to his horror saw men, instead of covering the thin surface with the concrete, digging in it for abstractions, and asking fundamental questions about the origin of society, and why one man should be born rich and another poor. Burke was no prating optimist: it was his very knowledge how much could be said against society that quickened his fears for it. There is no shallower criticism than that which accuses Burke in his later years of apostasy from so-called Liberal opinions. Burke was all his life through a passionate maintainer of the established order of things, and a ferocious hater of abstractions and metaphysical politics. The same ideas that explode like bombs through his diatribes against the French Revolution are to be found shining with a mild effulgence in the comparative calm of his earlier writings. I have often been struck with a resemblance, which I hope is not wholly fanciful, between the attitude of Burke's mind towards government and that of Cardinal Newman towards religion. Both these great men belong, by virtue of their imaginations, to the poetic order, and they both are to be found dwelling with amazing eloquence, detail, and wealth of illustration on the varied elements of society. Both seem as they write to have one hand on the pulse of the world, and to be for ever alive to the throb of its action; and Burke, as he regarded humanity swarming like bees into and out of their hives of industry, is ever asking himself, How are these men to be saved from anarchy? whilst Newman puts to himself the question, How are these men to be saved from atheism? Both saw the perils of free inquiry divorced from practical affairs.

'Civil freedom,' says Burke, 'is not, as many have endeavoured to persuade you, a thing that lies hid in the depth of abstruse science. It is a blessing and a benefit, not an abstract speculation, and all the just reasoning that can be upon it is of so coarse a texture as perfectly to suit the ordinary capacities of those who are to enjoy and of those who are to defend it.'

'Tell men,' says Cardinal Newman, 'to gain notions of a Creator from His works, and if they were to set about it (which nobody does), they would be jaded and wearied by the labyrinth they were tracing; their minds would be gorged and surfeited by the logical operation. To most men argument makes the point in hand more doubtful and considerably less impressive. After all, man is not a reasoning animal, he is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, actual animal.'

Burke is fond of telling us that he is no lawyer, no antiquarian, but a plain, practical man; and the Cardinal, in like manner, is ever insisting that he is no theologian--he leaves everything of that sort to the schools, whatever they may be, and simply deals with religion on its practical side as a benefit to mankind.

If either of these great men has been guilty of intellectual excesses, those of Burke may be attributed to his dread of anarchy, those of Newman to his dread of atheism. Neither of them was prepared to rest content with a scientific frontier, an imaginary line. So much did they dread their enemy, so alive were they to the terrible strength of some of his positions, that they could not agree to dispense with the protection afforded by the huge mountains of prejudice and the ancient rivers of custom. The sincerity of either man can only be doubted by the bigot and the fool.

But Burke, apart from his fears, had a constitutional love for old things, simply because they were old. Anything mankind had ever worshipped, or venerated, or obeyed, was dear to him. I have already referred to his providing his Brahmins with a greenhouse for the purpose of their rites, which he watched from outside with great interest. One cannot fancy Cardinal Newman peeping through a window to see men worshipping false though ancient gods. Warren Hastings' high-handed dealings with the temples and time-honoured if scandalous customs of the Hindoos filled Burke with horror. So, too, he respected Quakers, Presbyterians, Independents, Baptists, and all those whom he called Constitutional Dissenters. He has a fine passage somewhere about Rust, for with all his passion for good government he dearly loved a little rust. In this phase of character he reminds one not a little of another great writer--whose death literature has still reason to deplore--George Eliot; who, in her love for old hedgerows and barns and crumbling moss- grown walls, was a writer after Burke's own heart, whose novels he would have sat up all night to devour; for did he not deny with warmth Gibbon's statement that he had read all five volumes of _Evelina_ in a day? 'The thing is impossible,' cried Burke; 'they took me three days doing nothing else.' Now, _Evelina_ is a good novel, but _Silas Marner_ is a better.

Wordsworth has been called the High Priest of Nature. Burke may be called the High Priest of Order--a lover of settled ways, of justice, peace, and security. His writings are a storehouse of wisdom, not the cheap shrewdness of the mere man of the world, but the noble, animating wisdom of one who has the poet's heart as well as the statesman's brain. Nobody is fit to govern this country who has not drunk deep at the springs of Burke. 'Have you read your Burke?' is at least as sensible a question to put to a parliamentary candidate, as to ask him whether he is a total abstainer or a desperate drunkard. Something there may be about Burke to regret, and more to dispute; but that he loved justice and hated iniquity is certain, as also it is that for the most part he dwelt in the paths of purity, humanity, and good sense. May we be found adhering to them!

THE MUSE OF HISTORY.

Two distinguished men of letters, each an admirable representative of his University--Mr. John Morley and Professor Seeley--have lately published opinions on the subject of history, which, though very likely to prove right, deserve to be carefully considered before assent is bestowed upon them.

Mr. Morley, when President of the Midland Institute, and speaking in the Town Hall of Birmingham, said: 'I do not in the least want to know what happened in the past, except as it enables me to see my way more clearly through what is happening to-day,' and this same indifference is professed, though certainly nowhere displayed, in other parts of Mr. Morley's writings. {178}

Professor Seeley never makes his point quite so sharp as this, and probably would hesitate to do so, but in the _Expansion of England_ he expounds a theory of history largely based upon an indifference like that which Mr. Morley professed at Birmingham. His book opens thus: 'It is a favourite maxim of mine that history, while it should be scientific in its method, should pursue a practical object--that is, it should not merely gratify the reader's curiosity about the past, but modify his view of the present and his forecast of the future. Now, if this maxim be sound, the history of England ought to end with something that might be called a moral.'

This, it must be admitted, is a large order. The task of the historian, as here explained, is not merely to tell us the story of the past, and thus gratify our curiosity, but, pursuing a practical object, to seek to modify our views of the present and help us in our forecasts of the future, and this the historian is to do, not unconsciously and incidentally, but deliberately and of set purpose. One can well understand how history, so written, will usually begin with a maxim, and invariably end with a moral.

What we are afterwards told in the same book follows in logical sequence upon our first quotation--namely, that 'history fades into _mere literature_ (the italics are ours), when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.' In this grim sentence we read the dethronement of Clio. The poor thing must forswear her father's house, her tuneful sisters, the invocation of the poet, the worship of the dramatist, and keep her terms at the University, where, if she is really studious and steady, and avoids literary companions (which ought not to be difficult), she may hope some day to be received into the Royal Society as a second- rate science. The people who do not usually go to the Royal Society will miss their old playmate from her accustomed slopes, but, even were they to succeed in tracing her to her new home, access would be denied them; for Professor Seeley, that stern custodian, has his answer ready for all such seekers. 'If you want recreation, you must find it in Poetry, particularly Lyrical Poetry. Try Shelley. We can no longer allow you to disport yourselves in the Fields of History as if they were a mere playground. Clio is enclosed.'

At present, however, this is not quite the case; for the old literary traditions are still alive, and prove somewhat irritating to Professor Seeley, who, though one of the most even-tempered of writers, is to be found on p. 173 almost angry with Thackeray, a charming person, who, as we all know, had, after his lazy literary fashion, made an especial study of Queen Anne's time, and who cherished the pleasant fancy that a man might lie in the heather with a pipe in his mouth, and yet, if he had only an odd volume of the _Spectator_ or the _Tatler_ in his hand, be learning history all the time. 'As we read in these delightful pages,' says the author of _Esmond_, 'the past age returns; the England of our ancestors is revivified; the Maypole rises in the Strand; the beaux are gathering in the coffee-houses;' and so on, in the style we all know and love so well, and none better, we may rest assured, than Professor Seeley himself, if only he were not tortured by the thought that people were taking this to be a specimen of the science of which he is a Regius Professor. His comment on this passage of Thackeray's is almost a groan. 'What is this but the old literary groove, leading to no trustworthy knowledge?' and certainly no one of us, from letting his fancy gaze on the Maypole in the Strand, could ever have foretold the Griffin. On the same page he cries: 'Break the drowsy spell of narrative. Ask yourself questions, set yourself problems; your mind will at once take up a new attitude. Now, modern English history breaks up into two grand problems--the problem of the Colonies and the problem of India.' The Cambridge School of History with a vengeance!

In a paper read at the South Kensington Museum in 1884, Professor Seeley observes: 'The essential point is this, that we should recognise that to study history is to study not merely a narrative, but _at the same time_ certain theoretical studies.' He then proceeds to name them:--Political philosophy, the comparative study of legal institutions, political economy, and international law.

These passages are, I think, adequate to give a fair view of Professor Seeley's position. History is a science, to be written scientifically and to be studied scientifically in conjunction with other studies. It should pursue a practical object and be read with direct reference to practical politics--using the latter word, no doubt, in an enlightened sense. History is not a narrative of all sorts of facts--biographical, moral, political--but of such facts as a scientific diagnosis has ascertained to be historically interesting. In fine, history, if her study is to be profitable and not a mere pastime, less exhausting than skittles and cheaper than horse exercise, must be dominated by some theory capable of verification by reference to certain ascertained facts belonging to a particular class. Is this the right way of looking upon history? The dictionaries tell us that history and story are the same word, and are derived from a Greek source, signifying information obtained by inquiry. The natural definition of history, therefore, surely is the story of man upon earth, and the historian is he who tells us any chapter or fragment of that story. All things that on earth do dwell have, no doubt, their history as well as man; but when a member, however humble, of the human race speaks of history without any explanatory context, he may be presumed to be alluding to his own family records, to the story of humanity during its passage across the earth's surface.

'A talent for history'--I am quoting from an author whose style, let those mock at it who may, will reveal him--'may be said to be born with us as our chief inheritance. History has been written with quipo-threads, with feather pictures, with wampum belts, still oftener with earth-mounds and monumental stone-heaps, whether as pyramid or cairn; for the Celt and the Copt, the red man as well as the white, lives between two eternities, and warring against oblivion, he would fain unite himself in clear, conscious relation, as in dim, unconscious relation he is already united, with the whole future and the whole past.'

To keep the past alive for us is the pious function of the historian. Our curiosity is endless, his the task of gratifying it. We want to know what happened long ago. Performance of this task is only proximately possible; but none the less it must be attempted, for the demand for it is born afresh with every infant's cry. History is a pageant, and not a philosophy.

Poets, no less than professors, occasionally say good things even in prose, and the following oracular utterance of Shelley is not pure nonsense:--'History is the cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of men. The past, like an inspired rhapsodist, fills the theatre of everlasting generations with her harmony.'

If this be thought a little too fanciful, let me adorn these pages with a passage from one of the great masters of English prose--Walter Savage Landor. Would that the pious labour of transcription could confer the tiniest measure of the gift! In that bundle of imaginary letters Landor called _Pericles and Aspasia_, we find Aspasia writing to her friend Cleone as follows:

'To-day there came to visit us a writer who is not yet an author; his
name is Thucydides. We understand that he has been these several
years engaged in preparation for a history. Pericles invited him to
meet Herodotus, when that wonderful man had returned to our country,
and was about to sail from Athens. Until then it was believed by the
intimate friends of Thucydides that he would devote his life to
poetry, and, such is his vigour both of thought and expression, that
he would have been the rival of Pindar. Even now he is fonder of
talking on poetry than any other subject, and blushed when history was
mentioned. By degrees, however, he warmed, and listened with deep
interest to the discourse of Pericles on the duties of a historian.

'"May our first Athenian historian not be the greatest," said he, "as
the first of our dramatists has been, in the opinion of many. We are
growing too loquacious, both on the stage and off. We make
disquisitions which render us only more and more dim-sighted, and
excursions that only consume our stores. If some among us who have
acquired celebrity by their compositions, calm, candid, contemplative
men, were to undertake the history of Athens from the invasion of
Xerxes, I should expect a fair and full criticism on the orations of
Antiphon, and experience no disappointment at their forgetting the
battle of Salamis. History, when she has lost her Muse, will lose her
dignity, her occupation, her character, her name. She will wander
about the Agora; she will start, she will stop, she will look wild,
she will look stupid, she will take languidly to her bosom doubts,
queries, essays, dissertations, some of which ought to go before her,
some to follow, and all to stand apart. The field of history should
not merely be well tilled, but well peopled. None is delightful to me
or interesting in which I find not as many illustrious names as have a
right to enter it. We might as well in a drama place the actors
behind the scenes, and listen to the dialogue there, as in a history
push valiant men back and protrude ourselves with husky disputations.
Show me rather how great projects were executed, great advantages
gained, and great calamities averted. Show me the generals and the
statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend to them in reverence;
tell me their names, that I may repeat them to my children. Teach me
whence laws were introduced, upon what foundation laid, by what
custody guarded, in what inner keep preserved. Let the books of the
treasury lie closed as religiously as the Sibyl's; leave weights and
measures in the market-place, Commerce in the harbour, the Arts in the
light they love, Philosophy in the shade; place History on her
rightful throne, and at the sides of her Eloquence and War."'

This is, doubtless, a somewhat full-dress view of history. Landor was not one of our modern dressing-gown-and-slippers kind of authors. He always took pains to be splendid, and preferred stately magnificence to chatty familiarity. But, after allowing for this, is not the passage I have quoted infused with a great deal of the true spirit which should animate the historian, and does it not seem to take us by the hand and lead us very far away from Professor Seeley's maxims and morals, his theoretical studies, his political philosophy, his political economy, and his desire to break the drowsy spell of narrative, and to set us all problems? I ask this question in no spirit of enmity towards these theoretical studies, nor do I doubt for one moment that the student of history proper, who has a turn in their directions, will find his pursuit made only the more fascinating the more he studies them--just as a little botany is said to add to the charm of a country walk; but--and surely the assertion is not necessarily paradoxical--these studies ought not to be allowed to disfigure the free-flowing outline of the historical Muse, or to thicken her clear utterance, which in her higher moods chants an epic, and in her ordinary moods recites a narrative which need not be drowsy.

As for maxims, we all of us have our 'little hoard of maxims' wherewith to preach down our hearts and justify anything shabby we may have done; but the less we import their cheap wisdom into history the better. The author of the _Expansion of England_ will probably agree with Burke in thinking that 'a great empire and little minds go ill together,' and so, surely, _a fortiori_, must a mighty universe and any possible maxim. There have been plenty of brave historical maxims before Professor Seeley's, though only Lord Bolingbroke's has had the good luck to become itself historical. {189} And as for theories, Professor Flint, a very learned writer, has been at the pains to enumerate fourteen French and thirteen German philosophies of history current (though some, I expect, never ran either fast or far) since the revival of learning.

We are (are we not?) in these days in no little danger of being philosophy-ridden, and of losing our love for facts simply as facts. So long as Carlyle lived the concrete had a representative, the strength of whose epithets sufficed, if not to keep the philosophers in awe, at least to supply their opponents with stones. But now it is different. Carlyle is no more a model historian than is Shakspeare a model dramatist. The merest tyro can count the faults of either on his clumsy fingers. That born critic, the late Sir George Lewis, had barely completed his tenth year before he was able, in a letter to his mother, to point out to her the essentially faulty structure of _Hamlet_, and many a duller wit, a decade or two later in his existence, has come to the conclusion that _Frederick the Great_ is far too long. But whatever were Carlyle's faults, his historical method was superbly naturalistic. Have we a historian left us so honestly possessed as he was with the genuine historical instinct, the true enthusiasm to know what happened; or one half so fond of a story for its own sake, or so in love with things, not for what they were, but simply because they were? 'What wonderful things are events!' wrote Lord Beaconsfield in _Coningsby_; 'the least are of greater importance than the most sublime and comprehensive speculations.' To say this is to go perhaps too far; certainly it is to go farther than Carlyle, who none the less was in sympathy with the remark; for he also worshipped events, believing as he did that but for the breath of God's mouth they never would have been events at all. We thus find him always treating even comparatively insignificant facts with a measure of reverence, and handling them lovingly, as does a book-hunter the shabbiest pamphlet in his collection. We have only to think of Carlyle's essay on the _Diamond Necklace_ to fill our minds with his qualifications for the proud office of the historian. Were that inimitable piece of workmanship to be submitted to the criticisms of the new scientific school, we doubt whether it would be so much as classed, whilst the celebrated description of the night before the battle of Dunbar in _Cromwell_, or any hundred scenes from the _French Revolution_, would, we expect, be catalogued as good examples of that degrading process whereby history fades into mere literature.

This is not a question, be it observed, of style. What is called a picturesque style is generally a great trial. Who was it who called Professor Masson's style Carlyle on wooden legs? What can be drearier than when a plain matter-of-fact writer attempts to be animated, and tries to make his characters live by the easy but futile expedient of writing about them in the present tense? What is wanted is a passion for facts; the style may be left to take care of itself. Let me name a historian who detested fine writing, and who never said to himself, 'Go to, I will make a description,' and who yet was dominated by a love for facts, whose one desire always was to know what happened, to dispel illusion, and establish the true account--Dr. S. R. Maitland, of the Lambeth Library, whose volumes entitled _The Dark Ages_ and _The Reformation_ are to history what Milton's _Lycidas_ is said to be to poetry: if they do not interest you, your tastes are not historical.

The difference, we repeat, is not of style, but of aim. Is history a pageant or a philosophy? That eminent historian, Lord Macaulay, whose passion for letters and for 'mere literature' ennobled his whole life, has expressed himself in some places, I need scarcely add in a most forcible manner, in the same sense as Mr. Morley. In his well-known essay on history, contributed to the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1828, we find him writing as follows: 'Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent amongst them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value.' And again: 'No past event has any intrinsic importance. The knowledge of it is valuable only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to the future.' These are strong passages; but Lord Macaulay was a royal eclectic, and was quite out of sympathy with the majority of that brotherhood who are content to tone down their contradictories to the dull level of ineptitudes. Macaulay never toned down his contradictories, but, heightening everything all round, went on his sublime way, rejoicing like a strong man to run a race, and well knowing that he could give anybody five yards in fifty and win easily. It is, therefore, no surprise to find him, in the very essay in which he speaks so contemptuously of facts, laying on with his vigorous brush a celebrated purple patch I would gladly transfer to my own dull page were it not too long and too well known. A line or two taken at random will give its purport:

'A truly great historian would reclaim those materials the novelist has appropriated. We should not then have to look for the wars and votes of the Puritans in Clarendon and for their phraseology in _Old Mortality_, for one half of King James in Hume and for the other half in the _Fortunes of Nigel_. . . . Society would be shown from the highest to the lowest, from the royal cloth of state to the den of the outlaw, from the throne of the legate to the chimney-corner where the begging friar regaled himself. Palmers, minstrels, crusaders, the stately monastery with the good cheer in its refectory, and the tournament with the heralds and ladies, the trumpets and the cloth of gold, would give truth and life to the representation.' It is difficult to see what abstract truth interpenetrates the cheer of the refectory, or what just calculations with respect to the future even an upholsterer could draw from a cloth, either of state or of gold; whilst most people will admit that, when the brilliant essayist a few years later set himself to compose his own magnificent history, so far as he interpenetrated it with the abstract truths of Whiggism, and calculated that the future would be satisfied with the first Reform Bill, he did ill and guessed wrong.

To reconcile Macaulay's utterances on this subject is beyond my powers, but of two things I am satisfied: the first is that, were he to come to life again, a good many of us would be more careful than we are how we write about him; and the second is that, on the happening of the same event, he would be found protesting against the threatened domination of all things by scientific theory. A Western American, who was once compelled to spend some days in Boston, was accustomed in after-life to describe that seat of polite learning to his horrified companions in California as a city in whose streets Respectability stalked unchecked. This is just what philosophical theories are doing amongst us, and a decent person can hardly venture abroad without one, though it does not much matter which one. Everybody is expected to have 'a system of philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and derivative,' and to be able to account for everything, even for things it used not to be thought sensible to believe in, like ghosts and haunted houses. Keats remarks in one of his letters with great admiration upon what he christens Shakspeare's 'negative capability,' meaning thereby Shakspeare's habit of complaisant observation from outside of theory, and his keen enjoyment of the unexplained facts of life. He did not pour himself out in every strife. We have but little of this negative capability. The ruddy qualities of delightfulness, of pleasantness, are all 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' The varied elements of life--the

'Murmur of living,
Stir of existence,
Soul of the world!'

seem to be fading from literature. Pure literary enthusiasm sheds but few rays. To be lively is to be flippant, and epigram is dubbed paradox.

That many people appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. D. Howells, an American gentleman who has not been allowed to forget that he once asserted of fiction what Professor Seeley would be glad to be able to assert of history, that the drowsy spell of narrative has been broken. We are to look for no more Sir Walters, no more Thackerays, no more Dickens. The stories have all been told. Plots are exploded. Incident is over. In moods of dejection these dark sayings seemed only too true. Shakspeare's saddest of sad lines rose to one's lips:

'My grief lies onward and my joy behind.'

Behind us are _Ivanhoe_ and _Guy Mannering_, _Pendennis_ and _The Virginians_, Pecksniff and Micawber. In front of us stretch a never-ending series, a dreary vista of _Foregone Conclusions_, _Counterfeit Presentments_, and _Undiscovered Countries_. But the darkest watch of the night is the one before the dawn, and relief is often nearest us when we least expect it. All this gloomy nonsense was suddenly dispelled, and the fact that really and truly, and behind this philosophical arras, we were all inwardly ravening for stories was most satisfactorily established by the incontinent manner in which we flung ourselves into the arms of Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom we could almost have raised a statue in the market-place for having written _Treasure Island_.

But to return to history. The interests of our poor human life, which seems to become duller every day, require that the fields of history should be kept for ever unenclosed, and be a free breathing-place for a pallid population well-nigh stifled with the fumes of philosophy.

Were we, imaginatively, to propel ourselves forward to the middle of the next century, and to fancy a well-equipped historian armed with the digested learning of Gibbon, endowed with the eye of Carlyle, and say one- fifteenth of his humour (even then a dangerous allotment in a dull world), the moral gravity of Dr. Arnold, the critical sympathy of Sainte- Beuve, and the style of Dr. Newman, approaching the period through which we have lived, should we desire this talented mortal to encumber himself with a theory into which to thrust all our doings as we toss clothes into a portmanteau; to set himself to extract the essence of some new political philosophy, capable of being applied to the practical politics of his own day, or to busy himself with problems or economics? To us personally, of course, it is a matter of indifference how the historians of the twentieth century conduct themselves; but ought not our altruism to bear the strain of a hope that at least one of the band may avoid all these things, and, leaving political philosophy to the political philosopher and political economy to the political economist, remember that the first, if not the last, duty of the historian is to narrate, to supply the text not the comment, the subject not the sermon, and proceed to tell our grandchildren and remoter issue the story of our lives? The clash of arms will resound through his pages as musically as ever it does through those of the elder historians as he tells of the encounter between the Northern and Southern States of America, in which Right and Might, those great twin-brethren, fought side by side; but Romance, that ancient parasite, clung affectionately with her tendril-hands to the mouldering walls of an ancient wrong, thus enabling the historian, whilst awarding the victor's palm to General Grant, to write kindly of the lost cause, dear to the heart of a nobler and more chivalrous man, General Lee, of the Virginian army. And again, is it not almost possible to envy the historian to whom will belong the task of writing with full information, and all the advantage of the true historic distance, the history of that series of struggles and heroisms, of plots and counter- plots, of crimes and counter-crimes, resulting in the freedom of Italy, and of telling to a world, eager to listen, the life-story of Joseph Mazzini?

'Of God nor man was ever this thing said,
That he could give
Life back to her who gave him, whence his dead
Mother might live.
But this man found his mother dead and slain,
With fast sealed eyes,
And bade the dead rise up and live again,
And she did rise.'

Nor will our imaginary historian be unmindful of Cavour, or fail to thrill his readers by telling them how, when the great Italian statesman, with many sins upon his conscience, lay in the very grasp of death, he interrupted the priests, busy at their work of intercession, almost roughly, with the exclamation, 'Pray not for me.' 'Pray for Italy!' whilst if he be one who has a turn for that ironical pastime, the dissection of a king, the curious character, and muddle of motives, calling itself Carlo Alberto, will afford him material for at least two paragraphs of subtle interest. Lastly, if our historian is ambitious of a larger canvas and of deeper colours, what is there to prevent him, bracing himself to the task,--

'As when some mighty painter dips
His pencil in the hues of earthquake and eclipse,'

from writing the epitaph of the Napoleonic legend?

But all this time I hear Professor Seeley whispering in my ear, 'What is this but the old literary groove leading to no trustworthy knowledge?' If by trustworthy knowledge is meant demonstrable conclusions, capable of being expressed in terms at once exact and final, trustworthy knowledge is not to be gained from the witness of history, whose testimony none the less must be received, weighed, and taken into account. Truly observes Carlyle: 'If history is philosophy teaching by examples, the writer fitted to compose history is hitherto an unknown man. Better were it that mere earthly historians should lower such pretensions, and, aiming only at some picture of the thing acted, which picture itself will be but a poor approximation, leave the inscrutable purport of them an acknowledged secret.' 'Some picture of the thing acted.' Here we behold the task of the historian; nor is it an idle, fruitless task. Science is not the only, or the chief source of knowledge. The _Iliad_, Shakspeare's plays, have taught the world more than the _Politics_ of Aristotle or the _Novum Organum_ of Bacon.

Facts are not the dross of history, but the true metal, and the historian is a worker in that metal. He has nothing to do with abstract truth, or with practical politics, or with forecasts of the future. A worker in metal he is, and has certainly plenty of what Lord Bacon used to call 'stuff' to work upon; but if he is to be a great historian, and not a mere chronicler, he must be an artist as well as an artisan, and have something of the spirit which animated such a man as Francesco Francia of Bologna, now only famous as a painter, but in his own day equally celebrated as a worker in gold, and whose practice it was to sign his pictures with the word Goldsmith after his name, whilst he engraved Painter on his golden crucifixes.

The true historian, therefore, seeking to compose a true picture of the thing acted, must collect facts, select facts, and combine facts. Methods will differ, styles will differ. Nobody ever does anything exactly like anybody else; but the end in view is generally the same, and the historian's end is truthful narration. Maxims he will have, if he is wise, never a one; and as for a moral, if he tell his story well, it will need none; if he tell it ill, it will deserve none.

The stream of narrative flowing swiftly, as it does, over the jagged rocks of human destiny, must often be turbulent and tossed; it is, therefore, all the more the duty of every good citizen to keep it as undefiled as possible, and to do what in him lies to prevent peripatetic philosophers on the banks from throwing their theories into it, either dead ones to decay, or living ones to drown. Let the philosophers ventilate their theories, construct their blow-holes, extract their essences, discuss their maxims, and point their morals as much as they will; but let them do so apart. History must not lose her Muse, or 'take to her bosom doubts, queries, essays, dissertations, some of which ought to go before her, some to follow, and all to stand apart.' Let us at all events secure our narrative first--sermons and philosophy the day after.

CHARLES LAMB. {204}

Mr. Walter Bagehot preferred Hazlitt to Lamb, reckoning the former much the greater writer. The preferences of such a man as Bagehot are not to be lightly disregarded, least of all when their sincerity is vouched for, as in the present case, by half a hundred quotations from the favoured author. Certainly no writer repays a literary man's devotion better than Hazlitt, of whose twenty seldom read volumes hardly a page but glitters with quotable matter; the true ore, to be had for the cost of cartage. You may live like a gentleman for a twelvemonth on Hazlitt's ideas. Opinions, no doubt, differ as to how many quotations a writer is entitled to; but, for my part, I like to see an author leap-frog into his subject over the back of a brother.

I do not remember whether Bagehot has anywhere given his reasons for his preference--the open avowal whereof drove Crabb Robinson well-nigh distracted; and it is always rash to find reasons for a faith you do not share; but probably they partook of the nature of a complaint that Elia's treatment of men and things (meaning by things, books) is often fantastical, unreal, even a shade insincere; whilst Hazlitt always at least aims at the centre, whether he hits it or not. Lamb dances round a subject; Hazlitt grapples with it. So far as Hazlitt is concerned, doubtless this is so; his literary method seems to realize the agreeable aspiration of Mr. Browning's _Italian in England_:--

'I would grasp Metternich until
I felt his wet red throat distil
In blood thro' these two hands.'

Hazlitt is always grasping some Metternich. He said himself that Lamb's talk was like snap-dragon, and his own not very much 'unlike a game of nine-pins.' Lamb, writing to him on one occasion about his son, wishes the little fellow a 'smoother head of hair and somewhat of a better temper than his father;' and the pleasant words seem to call back from the past the stormy figure of the man who loved art, literature, and the drama with a consuming passion, who has described books and plays, authors and actors, with a fiery enthusiasm and reality quite unsurpassable, and who yet, neither living nor dead, has received his due meed of praise. Men still continue to hold aloof from Hazlitt; his shaggy head and fierce scowling temper still seem to terrorize; and his very books, telling us though they do about all things most delightful--poems, pictures, and the cheerful playhouse--frown upon us from their upper shelf. From this it appears that would a genius ensure for himself immortality, he must brush his hair and keep his temper; but, alas! how seldom can he be persuaded to do either. Charles Lamb did both; and the years as they roll do but swell the rich revenues of his praise. Lamb's popularity shows no sign of waning. Even that most extraordinary compound, the rising generation of readers, whose taste in literature is as erratic as it is pronounced; who have never heard of James Thomson who sang _The Seasons_ (including the pleasant episode of Musidora bathing), but understand by any reference to that name only the striking author of _The City of Dreadful Night_; even these wayward folk--the dogs of whose criticism, not yet full grown, will, when let loose, as some day they must be, cry 'havoc' amongst established reputations--read their Lamb, letters as well as essays, with laughter and with love.

If it be really seriously urged against Lamb as an author that he is fantastical and artistically artificial, it must be owned he is so. His humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets. How it affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well--that dour spirit required more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and laugh. It took Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was always, three parts of it, derision. Lamb's elaborateness, what he himself calls his affected array of antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked in these strange days, when it is thought better to read about an author than to read him. To read aloud the _Praise of Chimney Sweepers_ without stumbling, or halting, not to say mispronouncing, and to set in motion every one of its carefully-swung sentences, is a very pretty feat in elocution, for there is not what can be called a natural sentence in it from beginning to end. Many people have not patience for this sort of thing; they like to laugh and move on. Other people, again, like an essay to be about something really important, and to conduct them to conclusions they deem worth carrying away. Lamb's views about indiscriminate almsgiving, so far as these can be extracted from his paper _On the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, are unsound, whilst there are at least three ladies still living (in Brighton) quite respectably on their means, who consider the essay entitled _A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People_ improper. But, as a rule, Lamb's essays are neither unsound nor improper; none the less they are, in the judgment of some, things of naught--not only lacking, as Southey complained they did, 'sound religious feeling,' but everything else really worthy of attention.

To discuss such congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a whole--letters and poems no less than essays--these notes of fantasy and artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self- restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of swamps, who was never his own man, and who died, like Brian de Bois Gilbert, 'the victim of contending passions.' It should never be forgotten that Lamb's vocation was his life. Literature was but his byplay, his avocation in the true sense of that much-abused word. He was not a fisherman, but an angler in the lake of letters; an author by chance and on the sly. He had a right to disport himself on paper, to play the frolic with his own fancies, to give the decalogue the slip, whose life was made up of the sternest stuff, of self-sacrifice, devotion, honesty, and good sense.

Lamb's letters from first to last are full of the philosophy of life; he was as sensible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions, 'poor Charles Lamb,' 'gentle Charles 'Lamb,' as if he were one of those grown-up children of the Leigh Hunt type, who are perpetually begging and borrowing through the round of every man's acquaintance. Charles Lamb earned his own living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped; a man who was beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand, a shrewd man, capable of advice, strong in council. Poor Lamb, indeed! Poor Coleridge, robbed of his will; poor Wordsworth, devoured by his own _ego_; poor Southey, writing his tomes and deeming himself a classic; poor Carlyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs, where he

'Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way,
Tormenting himself with his prickles'--

call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do so, but not Lamb, who was rich in all that makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he used to get drunk. This explains all. Be untruthful, unfaithful, unkind; darken the lives of all who have to live under your shadow, rob youth of joy, take peace from age, live unsought for, die unmourned--and remaining sober you will escape the curse of men's pity, and be spoken of as a worthy person. But if ever, amidst what Burns called 'social noise,' you so far forget yourself as to get drunk, think not to plead a spotless life spent with those for whom you have laboured and saved; talk not of the love of friends or of help given to the needy; least of all make reference to a noble self-sacrifice passing the love of women, for all will avail you nothing. You get drunk--and the heartless and the selfish and the lewd crave the privilege of pitying you, and receiving your name with an odious smile. It is really too bad.

The completion of Mr. Ainger's edition of Lamb's works deserves a word of commemoration. In our judgment it is all an edition of Lamb's works should be. Upon the vexed question, nowadays so much agitated, whether an editor is to be allowed any discretion in the exclusion from his edition of the rinsings of his author's desk, we side with Mr. Ainger, and think more nobly of the editor than to deny him such a discretion. An editor is not a sweep, and, by the love he bears the author whose fame he seeks to spread abroad, it is his duty to exclude what he believes does not bear the due impress of the author's mind. No doubt as a rule editors have no discretion to be trusted; but happily Mr. Ainger has plenty, and most sincerely do we thank him for withholding from us _A Vision of Horns_ and _The Pawnbroker's Daughter_. Boldly to assert, as some are found to do, that the editor of a master of style has no choice but to reprint the scraps or notelets that a misdirected energy may succeed in disinterring from the grave the writer had dug for them, is to fail to grasp the distinction between a collector of _curios_ and a lover of books. But this policy of exclusion is no doubt a perilous one. Like the Irish members, or Mark Antony's wife--the 'shrill-toned Fulvia'--the missing essays are 'good, being gone.' Surely, so we are inclined to grumble, the taste was severe that led Mr. Ainger to dismiss _Juke Judkins_. We are not, indeed, prepared to say that Judkins has been wrongfully dismissed, or that he has any right of action against Mr. Ainger, but we could have put up better with his presence than his absence.

Mr. Ainger's introduction to the _Essays of Elia_ is admirable; here is a bit of it:

'Another feature of Lamb's style is its allusiveness. He is rich in
quotations, and in my notes I have succeeded in tracing most of them
to their source, a matter of some difficulty in Lamb's case, for his
inaccuracy is all but perverse. But besides those avowedly introduced
as such, his style is full of quotations held, if the expression may
be allowed, in solution. One feels, rather than recognises, that a
phrase or idiom or turn of expression is an echo of something that one
has heard or read before. Yet such is the use made of the material,
that a charm is added by the very fact that we are thus continually
renewing our experience of an older day. This style becomes aromatic,
like the perfume of faded rose-leaves in a china jar. With such
allusiveness as this I need not say that I have not meddled in my
notes; its whole charm lies in recognising it for ourselves. The
"prosperity" of an allusion, as of a jest, "lies in the ear of him
that hears it," and it were doing a poor service to Lamb or his
readers to draw out and arrange in order the threads he has wrought
into the very fabric of his English.'

Then Mr. Ainger's notes are not meddlesome notes, but truly explanatory ones, genuine aids to enjoyment. Lamb needs notes, and yet the task of adding them to a structure so fine and of such nicely studied proportions is a difficult one; it is like building a tool-house against La Sainte Chapelle. Deftly has Mr. Ainger inserted his notes, and capital reading do they make; they tell us all we ought to want to know. He is no true lover of Elia who does not care to know who the 'Distant Correspondent' was. And Barbara S---. 'It was not much that Barbara had to claim.' No, dear child! it was not--'a bare half-guinea'; but you are surely also entitled to be known to us by your real name. When Lamb tells us Barbara's maiden name was Street, and that she was three times married--first to a Mr. Dancer, then to a Mr. Barry, and finally to a Mr. Crawford, whose widow she was when he first knew her--he is telling us things that were not, for the true Barbara died a spinster, and was born a Kelly.

Mr. Ainger, as was to be expected, has a full, instructive note anent the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple. Some hasty editors, with a sorrowfully large experience of Lamb's unblushing fictions and Defoe-like falsehoods, and who, perhaps, have wasted good hours trying to find out all about Miss Barbara's third husband, have sometimes assumed that at all events most of the names mentioned by Lamb in his immortal essay on the Benchers are fictitious. Mr. Ainger, however, assures us that the fact is otherwise. Jekyl, Coventry, Pierson, Parton, Read, Wharry, Jackson, and Mingay, no less than 'unruffled Samuel Salt,' were all real persons, and were called to the Bench of the Honourable Society by those very names. One mistake, indeed, Lamb makes--he writes of Mr. Twopenny as if he had been a Bencher. Now, there never yet was a Bencher of the name of Twopenny; though the mistake is easily accounted for. There was a Mr. Twopenny, a very thin man too, just as Lamb described him, who lived in the Temple; but he was not a Bencher, he was not even a barrister; he was a much better thing, namely, stockbroker to the Bank of England. The holding of this office, which Mr. Ainger rightly calls important, doubtless accounts for Twopenny's constant good-humour and felicitous jesting about his own person. A man who has a snug berth other people want feels free to crack such jokes.

Of the contents of these three volumes we can say deliberately what Dr. Johnson said, surely in his haste, of Baxter's three hundred works, 'Read them all, they are all good.' Do not be content with the essays alone. It is shabby treatment of an author who has given you pleasure to leave him half unread; it is nearly as bad as keeping a friend waiting. Anyhow, read _Mrs. Leicester's School_; it is nearly all Mary Lamb's, but the more you like it on that account the better pleased her brother would have been.

We are especially glad to notice that Mr. Ainger holds us out hopes of an edition, uniform with the works, of the letters of Charles Lamb. Until he has given us these, also with notes, his pious labours are incomplete. Lamb's letters are not only the best text of his life, but the best comment upon it. They reveal all the heroism of the man and all the cunning of the author; they do the reader good by stealth. Let us have them speedily, so that honest men may have in their houses a complete edition of at least one author of whom they can truthfully say, that they never know whether they most admire the writer or love the man.

EMERSON.