Chapter XII: Part II: Concerning the History of Historiography (3)

The negation of Christian transcendency was the work of the age of the Renaissance, when, to employ the expression used by Fueter, historiography became 'secularized.' In the histories of Leonardo Bruni and of Bracciolini, who gave the first conspicuous examples of the new attitude of historiographical thought, and in all others of the same sort which followed them--among them those of Machiavelli and of Guicciardini shine forth conspicuously--we find hardly any trace of 'miracles.' These are recorded solely with the intention of mocking at them and of explaining them in an altogether human manner. An acute analysis of individual characters and interests is substituted for the intervention of divine providence and the actions of the popes, and religious strifes themselves are apt to be interpreted according to utilitarian passions and solely with an eye to their political bearing. The scheme of the four monarchies with the advent of Antichrist connected with it is allowed to disappear; histories are now narrated _ab inclinatione imperii,_ and even universal histories, like the _Enneads_ of Sabellicus, do not adhere to traditional ecclesiastical tradition. Chronicles of the world, universal miraculous histories, both theological and apocalyptic, become the literature of the people and of those with little culture, or persist in countries of backward culture, such as Germany at that time, or finally are limited to the circle of Catholic or Protestant confessional historiography, both of which retain so much of the Middle Ages, the Protestant perhaps more than the Catholic (at least at a first glance), for the latter contrived at least here and there to temporize and to accommodate itself to the times. All this is shown very clearly and minutely by Fueter, and I shall now proceed to take certain observations and some information from his book, which I shall rearrange and complete with some more of my own. In the political historiography of the late Middle Ages, the theological conception had been, as we have said, thrown into the background; but henceforward it is not to be found even there, and if at times we hear its formulas, they are just like those of the Crusade against the Turks, preaching the liberation of the tomb of Christ. These were still repeated by preachers, writers of verse, and rhetoricians (and continued to be repeated for three centuries), but they found no response in political reality and in the conscience of the people, because they were but empty sound. Nor was the negation of theologism and the secularization of history accomplished only in practice, unaccompanied with complete consciousness; for, although many minds really did turn in the direction indicated by fate, or in other words by the new mental necessity, and although the polemic was not always open, but on the contrary often surrounded with many precautions, evidence abounds of the agreement of the practice with the theory of historiography. The criticism of so grave a theorist of history as Bodin is opposed to the scheme of the four monarchies. He makes it his object to combat the _inveteratum errorem de quattuor imperiis,_ proving that the notion was capriciously taken from the dream of Daniel, and that it in no way corresponded with the real course of events. It would be superfluous to record here the celebrated epigrams of Machiavelli and of Guicciardini, who satirized theology and miracles. Guicciardini noted that all religions have boasted of miracles, and therefore they are not proofs of any one of them, and are perhaps nothing but "secrets of nature." He advised his readers never to say that God had aided so-and-so because he was good and had made so-and-so suffer because he was wicked, for we "often see the opposite," and the counsels of divine providence are in fact an abyss. Paolo Sarpi, although he admits that "it is a pious and religious thought to attribute the disposition of every event to divine providence," yet holds it "presumption" to determine "to what end events are directed by that highest wisdom"; for men, being emotionally attached to their opinions, "are persuaded that they are as much loved and favoured by God as by themselves." Hence, for example, they argued that God had caused Zwingli and Hecolampadius to die almost at the same time, in order that he might punish and remove the ministers of discord, whereas it is certain that "after the death of these two, the evangelical cantons have made greater progress in the doctrine that they received from both of them." Such a disposition of religious and cautious spirits is yet more significant than that of the radical and impetuous, openly irreverent, in the same way as the new importance attributed to history is notable in the increase of historiographical labour that is then everywhere noticeable, and in the formation of a true and proper philological school, not only for antiquity, but for the Middle Ages (Valla, Flavio Biondo, Calchi, Sigonio, Beato Renano, etc.), which publishes and restores texts, criticizes the authenticity and the value of sources, is occupied with the establishment of a technical method of examining witnesses, and composes learned histories.

Nothing is more natural than that the new form of historiography should seem to be a return to Græco-Roman antiquity, as Christianity had seemed to be a return to the story of Eden (the interlude of paganism having been brought to an end by the redemption), or that the Middle Ages should still seem to some to-day to be a falling back into barbarous pre-Hellenic times. The illusion of the return was expressed in the cult of classical antiquity, and in all those manifestations, literary, artistic, moral, and customary, familiar to those who know the Renaissance. In the special field with which we are at present occupied, we find a curious document in support of the difficulty that philologists and critics experienced in persuading themselves that the Greek and Roman writers had perhaps been able to deceive themselves, to lie, to falsify, to be led astray by passions and blinded by ignorance, in the same way as those of the Middle Ages. Thus the latter were severely criticized while the former were reverenced and accepted, for it needed much time and labour to attain to an equal mental freedom regarding the ancients, and the criticism of texts and of sources was developed in respect to medieval history long before it attained to a like freedom in respect to ancient history. But the greatest proof and monument of the illusion of the return was the formation of the _humanistic_ type of historiography, opposed to the medieval. This had been chiefly confined to the form of chronicle and humanistic historiography, although it accepted the arrangement by years and seasons according to the examples set by the Greeks and Romans, cancelled as far as possible numerical indications, and exerted itself to run on unbrokenly, without chronological cuts and cross-cuts. Latin had become barbarous in the Middle Ages and had accepted the vocabularies of vulgar tongues, or those which designated new things in a new way, whereas the humanistic historiographers translated and disguised every thought and every narrative in Ciceronian Latin, or at least Latin of the Golden Age. We frequently find picturesque anecdotes in the medieval chronicles, and humanism, while it restored its dignity to history, deprived it of that picturesque element, or attenuated and polished it as it had done the things and customs of the barbaric centuries. This humanistic type of historiography, like the new philological erudition and criticism and the whole movement of the Renaissance, was Italian work, and in Italy histories in the vulgar tongue were soon modelled upon it, which found in the latinized prose of Boccaccio an instrument well suited to their ends. From Italy it was diffused among other countries, and as always happens when an industry is transplanted into virgin soil, and workmen and technical experts are invited to come from the country of its origin, so the first humanistic historians of the other parts of Europe were Italians. Paolo Emilio the Veronese, who _Gallis condidit historias,_ gave the French the humanistic history of France in his _De rebus gestis Francorum,_ and Polydore Virgil did the like for England, Lucio Marineo for Spain, and many others for other countries, until indigenous experts appeared and the aid of Italians became unnecessary. Later on it became necessary to throw off this cloak, which was too loose or too tight--indeed, was not cut to the model of modern thought. What there was in it of artificial, of swollen, of false, was blamed--these defects being indeed clearly indicated in the constructive principle of this literary form, which was that of imitation. But anyone with a feeling for the past will enjoy that historical humanistic prose as the expression of love for antiquity and of the desire to rise to its level. This love and this desire were so keen that they had no hesitation in reproducing things external and indifferent in addition to what was better and sometimes in default of it. Giambattista Vico, sometimes so sublimely puerile, is still found lamenting, three centuries after the creation of humanistic historiography, that "no sovereign has been found into whose mind has entered the thought of preserving for ever in the best Latin style a record of the famous War of the Spanish Succession, than which a greater has never happened in the world since the Second Carthaginian War, that of Cæsar with Pompey, and of Alexander with Darius." But what of this? Quite recently, during the war in Tripoli, came the proposal from the depths of one of the meridional provinces of Italy, one of those little countrysides where the shadow of a humanist still exists, that a Latin commentary should be composed upon that war entitled _De bello libico._ This proposal was received with much laughter and made even me smile, yet the smile was accompanied with a sort of tender emotion, when I recalled how long and devotedly our fathers and forefathers had pursued the ideal of a beautiful antiquity and of a decorous historiography.

Nevertheless, the belief in the effectivity or possibility of such a return was, as we have said, an illusion; nothing of what has been returns, nothing of what has been can be abolished; even when we return to an old thought the new adversary makes the defence new and the thought itself new. I read some time ago the work of a learned French Catholic. While clearing the Middle Ages of certain absurd accusations and confuting errors commonly circulated about them, he maintained that the Middle Ages are the truly modern time, modern with the eternal modernity of the true, and that therefore they should not be called the Middle Ages, which term should be applied to the period that has elapsed between the fifteenth century and our own day, between the Reformation and positivism. As I read, I reflected that such a theory is the worthy pendant to that other theory, which places the Middle Ages beneath antiquity, and that both had some time ago shown themselves false to historical thought, which knows nothing of returns, but knows that the Middle Ages preserved antiquity deep in its heart as the Renaissance preserved the Middle Ages. And what is 'humanism' but a renewed formula of that 'humanity' of which the ancient world knew little or nothing, and which Christianity and the Middle Ages had so profoundly felt? What is the word 'renaissance' or 'renewal' but a metaphor taken from the language of religion? And setting aside the word, is not the conception of humanism perhaps the affirmation of a spiritual and universal value, and in so far as it is that, altogether foreign, as we know, to the mind of antiquity, and an intrinsic continuation of the 'ecclesiastical' and 'spiritual' history which appeared with Christianity? The conception of spiritual value had without doubt become changed or enriched, for it contained within itself more than a thousand years of mental experiences, thoughts, and actions. But while it thus grew more rich, it preserved its original character, and constituted the religion of the new times, with its priests and martyrs, its polemic and its apologetic, its intolerance (it destroyed or allowed to perish the monuments of the Middle Ages and condemned its writers to oblivion), and sometimes even imitated the forms of its worship (Navagaro used to burn a copy of Martial every year as a holocaust to pure Latinity). And since humanity, philosophy, science, literature, and especially art, politics, activity in all its forms, now fill that conception of value which the Middle Ages had placed in Christian religious faith alone, histories or outlines of histories continue to appear as the outcome of these determinations, which were certainly new in respect to medieval literature, but were not less new in respect to Græco-Roman literature, where there was nothing to compare to them, or only treatises composed in an empirical and extrinsic manner. The new histories of values presented them selves timidly, imitating in certain respects the few indent examples, but they gave evidence of a fervour, an intelligence, an afflatus, which led to a hope for that increase and development wanting to their predecessors, which, instead of developing, had gradually become more superficial and finally disappeared again into vagueness. Suffice it to mention as representative of them all Vasari's _Lives of the Painters,_ which are connected with the meditations and the researches upon art contained in so many treatises, dialogues, and letters of Italians, and are here and there shot through with flashes such as never shone in antiquity. The same may be said of treatises on poetry and rhetoric, and of the judgments which they contain as to poetry and of the new history of poetry, then being attempted with more or less successful results. The 'state' too, which forms the object of the meditations of Machiavelli, is not the simple state of antiquity, city or empire, but is almost the national state felt as something divine, to which even the salvation of the soul must be sacrificed--that is to say, as the institution in which the true salvation of the soul is to be found. Even the pagan virtue which he and others opposed to Christian virtue is very different from the pure Græco-Roman disposition of mind. At that time a start was also made in the direction of investigating the theory of rights, of political forms, of myths and beliefs, of philosophical systems, to-day in full flower. And since that same consciousness which had produced humanism had also widened the boundaries of the known world, and had sought for and found people of whom the Bible preserved no record and of whom the Græco-Roman writers knew nothing, there appeared at that time a literature relating to savages and to the indigenous civilizations of America (and also of distant Asia, which had been better explored), from which arose the first notions as to the primitive forms of human life. Thus were widened the spiritual boundaries of humanity at the same time as the material.

We are not alone in perceiving the illusion of the 'return to antiquity,' for the men of the Renaissance were not slow in doing this. Not every one was content to suit himself to the humanistic literary type. Some, like Machiavelli, threw away that cloak, too ample in its folds and in its train, preferring to it the shorter modern dress. Protests against pedantry and imitation are indeed frequently to be heard during the course of the century. Philosophers rebelled against Aristotle (first against the medieval and then against the ancient Aristotle), and appeals were made to truth, which is superior both to Plato and to Aristotle; men of letters advocated the new 'classes,' and artists repeated that the great masters were 'nature' and the 'idea.' One feels in the air that the time is not far distant when the question, "Who are the true ancients?"--that is to say, "Who are the intellectually expert and mature?"--will be answered with, "We are"; the symbol of antiquity will be broken and there will be found within it the reality which is human thought, ever new in its manifestations. Such an answer may possibly be slow in becoming clear and certain as an object of common conviction, though it will eventually become so, and now suffices to explain the true quality of that return antiquity, by preventing the taking of the symbol for the thing symbolized.

This symbolical covering, cause of prejudices and misunderstandings, which enfolded the whole of humanism, was not the sole vice from which the historiography of the Renaissance suffered. We do not, of course, speak here of the bias with which all histories were variously affected, according as they were written by men of letters who were also courtiers and supported the interests of their masters, or official historians of aristocratic and conservative states like Venice, or men taking one or the other side in the conflicts within the same state, such as the _ottimani_ (or aristocratic) and the popular party of Florence, or upholders of opposed religious beliefs, such as the group of reformed divines of Magdeburg and Baronio. We do not speak here of the historians who became story-writers (they sometimes take to history, like Bandello), or of those who collected information with a view to exciting curiosity and creating scandal. These are things that belong to all periods, and are not sufficient to qualify a particular historiographical age. But if we examine only that which is or wished to be historical thought, the historiography of the Renaissance suffered from two other defects, each of which it had inherited from one of its progenitors, antiquity and the Middle Ages. And above all there came to it from antiquity the humanistic-abstract or pragmatical conception, as it is called, which inclines to explain facts by the individual in his singularity and in his atomism, or by means of abstract political forms, and the like. For Machiavelli, the prince is not only the ideal but the criterion that he adopts for the explanation of events. He does not only appear in his treatises and political opuscules, but in the Florentine Histories, where we meet with him at the very beginning--after the terrible imaginative description of the condition of Italy in the fifth century--in the great figure of Theodoric, by whose 'virtue' and 'goodness' not only Rome and Italy, but all the other parts of the Western empire, "arose free from the continual scourgings which they had supported for so many years from so many invasions, and became again happy and well-ordered communities." The same figure reappears in many different forms in the course of the centuries described in those histories. Finally, at the end of the description of the social struggles of Florence, we read that "this city had reached such a point that it could be easily adapted to _any form of government_ by _a wise law-giver._" In like manner, the _History of Italy_ by Guicciardini begins with the description of the happiness of Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, "acquired at various times and preserved for many reasons," not the least of which was "the industry and genius of Lorenzo de' Medici," who "strove in every way so to balance Italian affairs that they should not incline more in one direction than another." He had allies in Ferdinand of Aragon and Ludovic the Moor, "partly for the same and partly for other reasons," and the Venetians were held in check by all three of them. This perfect system of equilibrium was broken by the deaths of Lorenzo, of Ferdinand, and of the Pope. All historians of this period express themselves in the same way, and although a lively consciousness of the spiritual values of humanity was in process of formation, as has been seen, yet these were spoken of as though they depended upon the will and the intelligence of individuals who were their masters, not the contrary. In the history of painting, for example, the 'prince' for Vasari is Giotto, "who, although born among inexpert artisans, alone revived painting and reduced it to such a form as might be described as good." Biographies are also constantly individualistic, for they never succeed in perfectly uniting the individual with the work which he creates and which in turn creates him.

The idea of chance or fortune persisted alongside the pragmatic conception, its ancient companion. Machiavelli assigns the course of events half to fortune and half to human prudence, and although the accent falls here upon prudence, the acknowledgment of the one does not abolish the force of the other, so mysterious and transcendent. Guicciardini attacks those who, while attributing everything to prudence and virtue, exclude "the power of fortune," because we see that human affairs "receive at all times great impulsions from fortuitous events, which it is not within the power of man either to foresee or to escape, and although the care and understanding of man may moderate many things, nevertheless that alone does not suffice, but good fortune is also necessary." It is true that here and there there seems to appear another conception in Machiavelli, that of the strength and logic of things, but it is only a fleeting shadow. It is also a shadow for Guicciardini, when he adds that even if we wish to attribute everything to prudence and virtue, "must at least admit that it is necessary to fall upon or be born in times when the virtues or qualities for which you value yourself are esteemed." Guicciardini remains perplexed as to one point only, as though he had caught a glimpse of something that is neither caprice of the individual nor contingency of fortune: "When I consider to what accidents and dangers of illness, of chance, of violence, of infinite sorts, is exposed the life of man, the concurrence of how many things is needful that the harvest of the year should be good, nothing surprises me more than to see an old man or a good harvest." But even here we do not get beyond uncertainty, which in this case manifests itself as astonishment. With the renewal of the idea of fortune, even to a partial extent, with the restitution of the cult of this pagan divinity, not only does the God of Christianity disappear, but also the idea of rationality, of finality, of development, affirmed during the medieval period. The ancient Oriental idea of the circle in human affairs returns; it dominated all the historians of the Renaissance, and above all Machiavelli. History is an alternation of lives and deaths, of goods and ills, of happiness and misery, of splendour and decadence. Vasari understands the history of painting in the same way as that of all the arts, which, "like human bodies, have their birth, their growth, their old age, and their death." He is solicitous of preserving in his book the memory of the artistic capacity of his time, lest the art of painting, "either owing to the neglect of men or to the malignity of the ages or to decree of heaven (which does not appear to wish to maintain things here below for long in the same state), should encounter the same disorder and ruin" as befell it in the Middle Ages. Bodin, while criticizing and rejecting the scheme of the four monarchies, and demonstrating the fallaciousness of the assertion that gold deteriorates into copper, or even into clay, and celebrating the splendour of letters, of commerce, of the geographical discoveries of his age, does not, however, conclude in favour of progress, but of the circle, blaming those who find everything inferior in antiquity, _cum, æterna quadam lege naturæ, conversiti omnium rerum velut in orbem redire videatur, ut aqua vitia virtutibus, ignoratio scientiæ, turpe honesto consequens sit, ac tenebræ luci._ The sad, bitter, pessimistic tone which we observe among ancient historians, which sometimes bursts forth into the tragic, is also often to be met with among the historians of the Renaissance, for they saw perish many things that were very dear to them, and were constrained to tremble for those which they still enjoyed, or at least to fear for them by anticipation, certain that sooner or later they would yield their place to their contraries.

And since history thus conceived does not represent progress but a circle, and is not directed by the historical law of development, but by the natural law of the circle, which gives it regularity and uniformity, it follows that the historiography of the Renaissance, like the Græco-Roman, has its end outside itself, and affords nothing but material suitable for exhortations toward the useful and the good, for various forms of pleasure or as ornament for abstract truths. Historians and theorists of history are all in agreement as to this, with the exception of such eccentrics as Patrizzi, who expressed doubts as to the utility of knowing what had happened and as to the truth itself of narratives, but ended by contradicting himself and also laying down an extrinsic end. "Each one of us can find, both on his own account and on that of the public weal, many useful documents in the knowledge of these so different and so important examples," writes Guicciardini in the proem to his History of Italy. "Hence will clearly appear, as the result of innumerable examples, the instability of things human, how harmful they are often wont to be to themselves, but ever to the people, the ill-conceived counsels of those who rule, when, having only before their eyes either vain errors or present cupidities, they are not mindful of the frequent variations of fortune, and converting the power that has been granted them for the common weal into an injury to others, they become the authors of new perturbations, either as the result of lack of prudence or of too much ambition." And Bodin holds that _non solum præsentia commode explicantur, sed etiam futura colliguntur, certissimaque rerum expetendarum ac fugiendarum præcepta constantur,_ from historical narratives. Campanella thinks that history should be composed _ut sit scientiarum fundamentum sufficiens_; Vossius formulates the definition that was destined to appear for centuries in treatises: _cognitio singularium, quorum memoriam conservari utile sit ad bene beateque vivendum._ Historical knowledge therefore seemed at that time to be the lowest and easiest form of knowledge (and this view has been held down to our own days); to such an extent that Bodin, in addition to the _utilitas_ and the _oblectatio,_ also recognized to history _facilitas,_ so great a facility _ut, sine ullius artis adjumento, ipsa per sese ab omnibus intelligatur._ When truth had been placed outside historical narrative, all the historians of the Renaissance, like their Greek and Roman predecessors, practised, and all the theorists (from Pontanus in the _Actius_ to Vossius in the _Ars historica_) defended, the use of more or less imaginary orations and exhortations, not only as the result of bowing to ancient example, but through their own convictions. Eventually M. de la Popelinière, in his _Histoire des histoires, avec l'idée de l'histoire accomplie_ (1599), where he inculcates in turn historical exactitude and sincerity with such warm eloquence, suddenly turns round to defend imaginary _harangues et concions,_ for this fine reason, that what is necessary is 'truth' and not 'the words' in which it is expressed! The truth of history was thus not history, but oratory and political science; and if the historians of the Renaissance were hardly ever able to exercise oratory (for which the political constitution of the time allowed little scope), all or nearly all were authors of treatises upon political science, differently inspired as compared with those of the Middle Ages, which had ethical and religious thought behind them, resuming and advancing the speculations of Aristotle and of ancient political writers. In like manner, treatises on historical art, unknown to the Middle Ages, but which rapidly multiplied in the Renaissance (see a great number of them in the _Penus artis historicæ_ of 1579), resumed and fertilized the researches of Græco-Roman theorists. It is to be expected that the historiography of this period should represent some of the defects of medieval historiography in another form, owing to its character of reaction already mentioned and to the new divinity that it had raised up upon the altars in place of the ancient divinity, humanity. The Renaissance everywhere reveals its effort to oppose the one term to the other, and since scholasticism had sought the things of God and of the soul, it wished to restrict itself to the things of nature. We find Guicciardini and a chorus of others describing the investigations of philosophers and theologians and "of all those who write things above nature or such as are not seen" as 'madnesses'; and because scholasticism had defined science in the Aristotelian manner as _de universalibus,_ Campanella opposed to this definition his _Scientia est de singularibus._ In like manner its men of letters, prejudiced in favour of Latin, at first refused to recognize the new languages that had been formed during the Middle Ages, as well as medieval literature and poetry; its jurists rejected the feudal in favour of the Roman legal code, its politicians representative forms in favour of absolute lordship and monarchy. It was then that first appeared the conception of the Middle Ages as a whole, opposed to another whole, formed of the ancient and the ancient-modern, into which the Middle Ages were inserted like an irksome and painful wedge. The word 'medieval' was certainly late in appearing as an official designation, employed in the divisions and titles of histories (toward the end of the seventeenth century, as it would seem, in the manuals of Cellario); previously it had only just occurred here and there; but the thought contained in it had been in the air for some time--that is to say, in the soul of everybody--eked out with other words, such as 'barbarous' or 'Gothic' ages, and Vasari expresses it by means of the distinction between ancient and 'old,' calling those things ancient which occurred before the existence of Constantine, of Corinth, of Athens, of Rome, and of other very famous cities built up to the time of Nero, of the Vespasians, of Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus, and 'old' those "which had their origin from St Silvester onward." In any case, the distinction was clear: on the one hand most brilliant light, on the other dense darkness. After Constantine, writes the same Vasari, "every sort of virtue" was lost, "beautiful" souls and "lofty" intellects became corrupted into "most ugly" and "basest," and the fervent zeal of the new religion did infinite damage to the arts. This means neither more nor less than that _dualism,_ one of the capital traits of the Middle Ages, was retained, although differently determined, for now the god was (although not openly acknowledged) antiquity, art, science, Greek and Roman life, and its adversary, the reprobate and rebel, was the Middle Age, 'Gothic' temples, theology and philosophy bristling with difficulties, the clumsy and cruel customs of that age. But just because the respective functions of the two terms were merely inverted, their opposition remained, and if Christianity did not succeed in understanding Paganism and in recognizing its father, so the Renaissance failed to recognize itself as the son of the Middle Ages, and did not understand the positive and durable value of the period that was closing. For this reason, both ages destroyed or allowed to disappear the monuments of the previous age. This was certainly far less the case with the Renaissance, which expressed itself less violently and was deeply imbued with the thought of the Middle Ages, and, owing to the idea of humanity, had an obscure feeling of the importance of its predecessor. So much was this the case that the school of learned men and philologists already mentioned was formed at that time, with the new of investigating medieval antiquities. But the learned are the learned--that is to say, they do not take an active part in the struggles of their time, though busied with the collection and arrangement of its chronicles and remains, which they often judge in accordance with the vulgar opinion of their own time, so that it is quite customary to find them despising the subject of their labours, declaring that the poet whom they are studying has no value, or that the period to which they are consecrating their entire life is ugly and displeasing. It needed much to free the flame of intelligence from the heaps of medieval antiquities accumulated for centuries by the learned, and the Middle Ages were abhorred during the Renaissance, even when they were investigated. The drama of love and hatred was not dissimilar in its forms, nor less bitterly dualistic, although vastly more interesting, than that which was then being played out between Catholics and Protestants. The latter called the Pope Antichrist, and the primacy of the Roman Church _mysterium iniquitatis,_ and compiled a catalogue _testium veritatis_ of those who had opposed that iniquity even while it prevailed. The Catholics returned the compliment with remarks about Luther and the Reformation, and composed catalogues of heretics, Satan's witnesses. But this strife was a relic of the past, and would have ended by becoming gradually attenuated and dispersed; whereas the other was an element of the future, and could only be conquered by long effort and a new conception of the loftiest character.

V

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Meanwhile the historiography which immediately followed pushed the double aporia of antiquity and of the Middle Ages to the extreme; and it was owing to this radical unprejudiced procedure that it acquired its definite physiognomy and the right of being considered a particular historiographical period. The symbolical vesture, woven of memories of the Græco-Roman world, with which the modern spirit had first clothed itself, is now torn and thrown away. The thought that the ancients had not been the oldest and wisest among the peoples, but the youngest and the least expert, and that the true ancients, that is to say, the most expert and mature in mind, are co be found in the men of the modern world, had little by little made its way and become universally accepted. Reason in its nudity, henceforth saluted by its proper name, succeeds the example and the authority of the Græco-Romans, which represented reason opposed to barbaric culture and customs. Humanitarianism, the cult of humanity, also idolized by the name of 'nature,' that is to say, ingenuous general human nature, succeeds to humanism, with its one-sided admirations for certain peoples and for certain forms of life. Histories written in Latin become scarce or are confined to the learned, and those written in national languages are multiplied; criticism is exercised not only upon medieval falsifications and fables, upon the writings of credulous and ignorant monks in monasteries, but upon the pages of ancient historians, and the first doubts appear as to the truth of the historical Roman tradition. A feeling of sympathy, however, toward the ancients still persists, whereas repugnance and abhorrence for the Middle Ages continue to increase. All feel and say that they have emerged, not only from darkness, but from the twilight before dawn, that the sun of reason is high on the horizon, illuminating the intellect and irradiating it with most vivid light. 'Light,' 'illumination,' and the like are words pronounced on every occasion and with ever increasing conviction and energy; hence the title 'age of light,' of 'enlightenment' or of 'illumination,' given to the period extending from Descartes to Kant. Another term began to circulate, at first used rarely and in a restricted sense--'progress.' It gradually becomes more insistent and familiar, and finally succeeds in supplying a criterion for the judgment of facts, for the conduct of life, for the construction of history, becomes the subject of special investigations, and of a new kind of history, the history of the _progresses_ of the human spirit.

But here we observe the persistence and the potency of Christian and theological thought. The progress so much discussed was, so to speak, a progress without _development,_ manifesting itself chiefly in a sigh of satisfaction and security, as of one, favoured by fortune, who has successfully encountered many obstacles and now looks serenely upon the present, secure as to the future, with mind averted from the past, or returning to it now and then for a brief moment only, in order to lament its ugliness, to despise and to smile at it. Take as an example of all the most intelligent and at the same time the best of the historical representatives of enlightenment M. de Voltaire, who wrote his _Essai sur les mœurs_ in order to aid his friend the Marquise du Châtelet to _surmonter le dégoût_ caused her by _l'histoire moderne depuis la décadence de l'Empire romain,_ treating the subject in a satirical vein. Or take Condorcet's work, _l'Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain,_ which appears at its end like a last will and testament (and also as the testament of the man who wrote it), and where we find the whole century in compendium. It is as happy in the present, even in the midst of the slaughters of the Revolution, as rosy in its views as to the future, as it is full of contempt and sarcasm for the past, which had generated that present. The felicity of the period upon which they were entering was clearly stated. Voltaire says that at this time _les hommes ont acquis plus de lumières d'un bout de l'Europe à l'autre que dans tous les âges précédents._ Man now brandishes the arm which none can resist: _la seule arme contre le monstre, c'est la Raison: la seule manière d'empêcher les hommes d'être absurdes et méchants, c'est de les éclairer; pour rendre le fanatisme exécrable, il ne faut que le peindre._ Certainly it was not denied that there had been something of good and beautiful in the past. They must have existed, if they suffered from superstition and oppression. _On voit dans l'histoire les erreurs et les préjugés se succéder tour à tour, et chasser la vérité et la raison: on voit les habiles et les heureux enchaîner les imbéciles et écraser les infortunés; et encore ces habiles et ces heureux sont eux-mêmes les jouets de la fortune, ainsi quelles esclaves qu'ils gouvernent._ And not only had the good existed, though oppressed, but it had also been efficient in a certain measure: _au milieu de ces saccagements et de ces destructions nous voyons un amour de l'ordre qui anime en secret le genre humain et qui a prévenu sa ruine totale: c'est un des ressorts de la nature, qui reprend toujours sa force...._ And then the 'great epochs' must not be forgotten, the 'centuries' in which the arts nourished as the result of the work of wise men and monarchs, les quatre âges heureux of history. But between this sporadic good, weak or acting covertly, or appearing only for a time and then disappearing, and that of the new era, the quantitative and energetic difference is such that it is turned into a qualitative difference: a moment comes when men learn to think, to rectify their ideas, and past history seems like a tempestuous sea to one who has landed upon solid earth. Certainly everything is not to be praised in the new times; indeed, there is much to blame: _les abus servent de lois dans presque toute la terre; et si les plus sages des hommes s'assemblaient pour faire des lois, où est l'État dont la forme subsistât entière?_ The distance from the ideal of reason was still great and the new century had still to consider itself as a simple step toward complete rationality and felicity. We find the fancy of a social form limit even in Kant, who dragged after him so much old intellectualistic and scholastic philosophy. Sometimes indeed its final form was not discovered, and its place was taken by a vertiginous succession of more and more radiant social forms. But the series of these radiant forms, the progress toward the final form and the destruction of abuses, really began in the age of enlightenment, after some episodic attempts in that direction during previous ages, for this age alone had entered upon the just, the wide, the sure path, the path illumined with the light of reason. It sometimes even happened in the course of that period that a doctrine leading to Rousseau's inverted the usual view and placed _reason,_ not in modern times or in the near or distant future, but in the past, and not in the medieval, Græco-Roman, or Oriental past, but in the prehistoric past, in the 'state of nature,' from which history represented the deviation. But this theory, though differing in its mode of expression, was altogether identical in substance with that generally accepted, because a prehistoric 'state of nature' never had any existence in the reality, which is history, but expressed an ideal to be attained in a near or distant future, which had first been perceived in modern times and was therefore really capable of moving in that direction, whether in the sense of realization or return. The religious character of all this new conception of the world cannot be obscure to anyone, for it repeats the Christian conceptions of God as truth and justice (the lay God), of the earthly paradise, the redemption, the millennium, and so on, in laical terms, and in like manner with! Christianity sets the whole of previous history in opposition to itself, to condemn it, while hardly admiring here and there some consoling ray of itself. What does it matter that religion, and especially Christianity, was then the target for fiercest blows and shame and mockery, that all reticence was abandoned, and people were no longer satisfied with the discreet smile that had once blossomed on the lips of the Italian humanists, but broke out into open and fanatical warfare? Even lay fanaticism is the result of dogmatism. What does it matter that pious folk were shocked and saw the ancient Satan in the lay God, as the enlightened discovered the capricious, domineering, cruel tribal deity in the old God represented by the priest? The possibility of reciprocal accusations confirms the _dualism,_ active in the new as in the old conception, and rendering it unsuitable for the understanding of development and of history.

The historiographical _aporia_ of antiquity was also being increased by abstract individualism or the 'pragmatic' conception. So true was this that it was precisely at that time that the formula was resumed, and pragmatism, as history of human ideas, sentiments, calculations, and actions, as a narrative embellished with reflections, was opposed to theological or medieval history and to the old ingenuous chronicles or erudite collections of information and documents. Voltaire, who combats and mocks at belief in divine designs and punishments and in the leadership of a small barbarous population called upon to act as an elect people and to be the axle of universal history (so that he may substitute for it the lay theology which has been described), is the same Voltaire who praises in Guicciardini and in Machiavelli the first appearance of an _histoire bien faite._ The pragmatic mode of treatment was extended even to the narrative of events relating to religion and the Church and was applied by Mosheim and others in Germany. Owing to this penetration of rationalism into ecclesiastical historiography and into Protestant philosophy, it afterward seemed that the Reformation had caused thought to progress, whereas, as regards this matter, the Reformation simply received humanistic thought in the new form, to which it had previously been opposed. If, in other respects, it aided the advance of the historical conception in an original manner, this was brought about, as we shall see, by means of another element seething within it, mysticism. But meanwhile not even Catholicism remained immune from the pragmatic, of which we find traces in the _Discours_ of Bossuet, who represents the Augustinian conception, shorn of its accessories, reduced and modernized, lacking the irreconcilable dualism of the two cities and the Roman Empire as the ultimate and everlasting empire, allowing natural causes preordained by God and regulated by the laws to operate side by side with divine intervention, and conceding a large share to the social and political conditions of the various peoples. We do not speak of the last step taken by the same author in his _Histoire des variations des églises_, when he conceived the history of the Reformation objectively and in its internal motives, presenting it as a rebellious movement directed against authority. Even his adversary Voltaire recognized that Bossuet had not omitted _d'autres causes_ in addition to the divine will favouring the elect people, because he had several times taken count de l'esprit des nations. Such was the strength of _l'esprit du siècle._ The pragmatic conceptions of that time are still so well known and so near to us, so persistent in so many of our narratives and historical manuals, that it would be useless to describe them. When we direct our thoughts to the historical works of the eighteenth century, there immediately rises to the memory the general outline of a history in which priests deceive, courtiers intrigue, wise monarchs conceive and realize good institutions, combated and rendered almost vain through the malignity of others and the ignorance of the people, though they remain nevertheless a perpetual object of admiration for enlightened spirits. The image of chance or caprice appears with the evocation of that image, and mingling with the histories of these conflicts makes them yet more complicated, their results yet stranger and more astonishing. And what was the use, that is to say, the end, of historical narrative in the view of those historians? Here also the reading of a few lines of Voltaire affords the explanation: _Cet avantage consiste surtout dans la comparaison qu'un homme d'état, un citoyen, peut faire des lois et des mours étrangères avec celles de son pays: c'est ce qui excite l'émulation des nations modernes dans les arts, dans l''agriculture, dans le commerce. Les grandes fautes passées servent beaucoup à tout genre. On ne saurait trop remettre devant les yeux les crimes et les malheurs: on peut, quoi qu'on en dise, prévenir les uns et les autres._ This thought is repeated with many verbal variations and is to be found in nearly all the books of historiographie theory of the time, continuing the Italian mode of the Renaissance in an easier and more popular style. The words 'philosophy of history,' which had later so much success, at first served to describe the assistance obtainable from history in the shape of advice and useful precepts, when investigated without prejudice--that is to say, with the one 'assumption' of reason.

The external end assigned to history led to the same results as in antiquity, when history became oratorical and even historico-pedagogic romances were composed, and as in the Renaissance, when 'declamatory orations' were preserved, and history was treated as material more or less well adapted to certain ends, whence arose a certain amount of indifference toward its truth, so that Machiavelli, for instance, deduced laws and precepts from the decades of Livy, not only assuming them to be true, but accepting them in those parts which he must have recognized to be demonstrably fabulous. Orations began to disappear, but their disappearance was due to good literary taste rather than to anything else, which recognized how out of harmony were those expedients with the new popular, prosaic, polemical tone that narrative assumed in the eighteenth century. In exchange they got something worse: lack of esteem for history, which was considered to be an inferior reality, unworthy of the philosopher, who seeks for laws, for what is constant, for the uniform, the general, and can find it in himself and in the direct observation of external and internal nature, natural and human, without making that long, useless, and dangerous tour of facts narrated in the histories. Descartes, Malebranche, and the long list of their successors do not need especial mention here, for it is well known how mathematics and naturalism dominated and depressed history at this period. But was historical truth at least an inferior truth? After fuller reflection, it did not seem possible to grant even this. In history, said Voltaire, the word 'certain,' which is used to designate such knowledge as that "two and two make four," "I think," "I suffer," "I exist," should be used very rarely, and in the sole sense of "very probable." Others held that even this was saying too much, for they altogether denied the truth of history and declared that it was a collection of fables, of inventions and equivocations, or of undemonstrable affirmations. Hence the scepticism or Pyrrhonism of the eighteenth century, which showed itself on several occasions and has left us a series of curious little books as a document of itself. Such is, indeed, the inevitable result when historical knowledge is looked upon as a mass of individual testimonies, dictated or altered by the passions, or misunderstood through ignorance, good at the best for supplying edifying and terrible examples in confirmation of the eternal truths of reason, which, for the rest, shine with their own light.