perish because no one is present to testify to them.

So much for what history is.

Now for its motive: and that is a more serious business. Why do men write history? Why has society always attempted some such establishment of the past? It is because the life of man is communal and organic; because we are what we are on account of what came before; because the past is paternal and therefore creative creative in a much truer sense than Bergson with his confusion of metaphor and statement pretends Time to be.

It is because the Past has in a sense Authority, being very truly an Author. that history should exist, or rather that we have a crying need for it in human society.

That need shows itself in all sorts of ways, distorted and regular. It shows itself when men appeal to the origins of an institution in order to test its nature. It shows itself when they play the game of etymology and seek, through the descent of mere dead words, to grope at the descent of living ideas. It shows itself in the passion and quarrels that arise upon things apparently so vain as a disputed date or a doubtful inscription. It shows itself in the reverent affection which the scholar feels for his "period"; and it shows itself in the simple and beautiful eagerness of the crowd for some knowledge of the soil and the roots of its own life: there is no type of public lecture or teaching which will so hold a great popular audience as an historical description of the origin of some evil or some good which they suffer or enjoy.

It is easily perceived in all human effort that man must satisfy this craving for a knowledge of the past. It may be properly pretended that he first wrote and sculptured with the intention of preserving a record.

That

great human exhalation uncorrected and spontaneous, which we call legend, is the best proof of all that human society must remember things beyond the stretch of one life, if it is to remain social, that is, if man is to be man at all.

There is a negative way of determining this preliminary to our subject. What happens to a society whose history is neglected?

What happens to a society whose history is false?

A society whose history is neglected grows weak.

A society whose history is false becomes diseased.

Those societies which appreciate instinctively the weakness proceeding from an ignorance of history, or from an impossibility of obtaining it. guarantee themselves as best they can by fixing their institutions with a sort of superstitious rigidity. They are in far better case than the societies which repose upon false history, for these perpetually misunderstand their own nature, proceed from blunder to blunder, and act, so far as nature will allow them so to act, against the objects and the trend of their own being

But though the ignorant society is better off than the misinformed one, neither are in such good case nor in any way so healthy, as the society which is in full possession of its own past.

That possession has a thousand advantages of detail apart from the general advantage, or rather necessity, which we have just remarked. For instance, history is the object-lesson of politics. It is the test of practicability in social experiment. It is the Judge and even the last Court of Appeal between men when they dispute as to what the true nature of their particular society may be. It acts as a corrector, both upon the lighter side by its irony and upon the graver side by its view of man's majestic process, to

all that false philosophy which would pretend good morals to be indifferent or alien to the progress of a nation. In a word then we must have good history as we must have bread.

Now there are two clearly defined methods within either of which history may be written and it is my purpose in these few pages to maintain that we have suffered in the immediate past from having abandoned the one without having yet properly undertaken the other.

The first method is that of the Chronicle.

The chronicler sets down what may be called "the bald facts." If he is writing in a generation suitable for such a method-and those generations include the vast bulk of known historic time-his method is healthy and is sufficient. Let me give an example: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 591 sets it down that "There was a great slaughter in Britain at Woddesbeorge and Ceawlin was expelled." Again, the anonymous continuator of Fredegarius tells us under the year 767: that "Pepin, having ordered a general levy of the Franks, came by Troyes and Auxerre as far as Bourges; there was held by his orders the customary Camp of May; he there held counsel with his Great Men."

If we look closely at this method of chronicling—which is the universal and only known method of historical writing over much the greater part of recorded time-we discover two curious points about it. First it is apparently the most satisfactory and truthful we can conceive. Second, it tells us today hardly anything real of the past.

What do we make nowadays of such phrases coming from a remote past? Does "a great slaughter in Britain" connote racial war? Under what standard of political ethics was Ceawlin "expelled"? Under what sanction or what police did the opera

tion take place? Again, in regard to the second quotation, what is "a general levy of the Franks"? Who were "the Franks" in the second third of the eighth century? What was a "Camp of May," and who were "The Great Men"? Why had a King to "take counsel" with them?

All those points are matters of hot dispute between the scholars-and they are matters of hot dispute precisely because the chronicler was only a chronicler: he set down the bald facts: he was quite content and so were his readers at the time. But the process of change extended over many centuries has made him incomprehensible through his very simplicity, and for this reason, that he took for granted the whole mass of physical life around him and all the names by which every detail of that life was known.

Chronicling may be regarded as the most obvious, the most just, and the most sincere form of all historical writing-when the audience is prepared for it. It is going on all round us to-day, and will go on for ever. But its defect or limitation lies especially in this, that it assumes on the part of the reader a perfect knowledge of the society described and of the terms in which the description is made. When a modern biographer writes of some bill, let us say in 1835, "Mr. Jones was doubtful whether he could command a majority for his bill and was certain that, even if he had a majority in the Commons, it would be thrown out by the House of Lords," the modern reader though he is living seventy years afterwards, knows exactly what is meant. The words "Majority;" "Commons," "House of Lords," "Bill" are familiar to him; the "bald facts" as I have called them are all he needs to know. But suppose the efflux of five hundred years, and scholars all at sea as to what the four words "Majority." "Commons," "Lords,"

"Bill," may stand for in the realities of the time. Then the chronicler, from his very simplicity, is useless to history.

Hence must arise a second or new method peculiar to those rare and probably ephemeral stages in the come and go of human affairs which we call "highly civilized": a method which should attempt a perfect resurrection of the distant past in its detail and atmosphere, and a presentation of it so living by a combination of minute information and an exact order in the marshalling of that information shall give the reader life in the past. He meets dead people, as he would meet a living character. Their particular actions fit in with their general aspect and with all that they are as complex human organisms. Their institutions seem naturally to flow from the way they live and think and act.

as

This second method of writing history is necessary to those fevered and highly differentiated epochs which some would call the summits of po-litical development, which others would call the corrupt last stages in which a State trembles with an intense activity before it dies or goes to sleep. Our own time is one of these.

I do not say that such conditions of society are good or healthy or normal or destined to endure. Personally I think they are none of any of these things. But at any rate we are living in such a stage of European society today and the history of our past can only be properly presented to us by this new or second method.

The historian in any such very active, very interested, very various and very "modern" society, can only truly present the past by making it a resurrection from the dead.

It would be readily granted by such of my readers as have busied themselves with historical study that, until

quite lately, this method has not been properly pursued.

Whether it can be pursued at all or not I shall discuss in a moment, but we must begin by admitting that the historians of the nineteenth century— picturesque, vivid, convinced, many of them sincerely learned-have not attempted the full task which I here say was theirs and ours. They have held a brief, they have replied to opponents, they have discussed difficulties, they have attempted to establish theories, but they have not raised the dead. They have not effected a resurrection of the flesh, if I may be permitted to repeat that bold metaphor.

Their lay readers have been perplexed almost in proportion as the historians have been honest, and satisfied almost in proportion as the historians have been conspicuously partisans. But it was not the honesty of the honest which made them dull, still less was it the partisanship of the partisan which gave him his wide public. The one has confused the general reader by masses of technical discussion and by the taking for granted of technical terms and of previous technical debates which the general reader cannot be expected either to have met or to care about; the other, the partisan, has achieved his unfortunate success not because he was a partisan but because his unjust and insecure method (often designed, I fear, with the object of gain rather than of presenting the truth) at least had the merits of simplicity and vividness.

Here are examples of the first sort taken from two great authorities, one English, one French: perhaps the two greatest modern names one could quote in connection with historical science, Dr. Stubbs, the Bishop of Oxford, and Fustel de Coulanges.

Dr. Stubbs is speaking about those German tribes whom he believed to be the ancestors of the English. He

is, the ancient Germans did not possess the institution of private property in land. Now this is one of the most disputed points in all history. There is no real proof behind it one way or the other so he has to back it up with a footnote: here is the footnote:

Tac. Germ. c. 26: “agri pro numero cultorum ab universis in vices (al. vicis) occupantur, quos mox inter se secundum dignationem partiuntur." If the reading "in vices" be retained and the annual change of allotment be understood, this passage must be translated, "The fields are alternately occupied by the whole body of cultivators according to the number, and these they afterwards divide among themselves according to their individual estimation." But Dr. Waitz, with good MS. authority, prefers to read vicis and to understand the statement as referring to initial occupation: "The lands are occupied by the collective townships according to the number of cultivators, and these they afterwards divide among themselves (the cultivators) according to the estimation." The passage is confessedly one of great difficulty. See for an account of the very numerous interpretations, Waitz, D.V.G. i. 140-148. See also G. L. von Maurer, Einleitg. pp. 5, 6.

Fustel de Coulanges is arguing in his second volume that the conception of a Cæsar, an absolute monarch of the whole Empire (the antithesis of the Feudal conception), survived into the ninth century. Here again is a highly disputed point. So, having made his statement, he puts among a hundred other portions of his pleading, this:

Every man who had sworn fealty to the King as King swore again to the Emperor as Cæsar. Capitulary of 802, Boretius, p. 92; Pertz. Leges, 1, 91; Baluze, 1, 363, 378 [cf. sup. p. 247, n. 11.).

Now that is learning, high learning,

and it is pleading, good pleading: but it is not history. It is not a story told which the citizen can appreciate and read and lay to heart. It is all Greek to the citizen. It is to history what a piece of chemical analysis is to the medicine which one swallows and which makes one well. I am not saying for a moment that the thing is not necessary. What I am saying is that this mass of scholarly argument which has marked so much of modern history is no satisfactory alternative for the new method which I postulate as necessary for our time. It may be a foundation for it, but it is not a substitute for it. With the partisans it is worse by far.

I open Renan's History of the People of Israel and I find quietly stated and in beautiful prose as though it were a simple historical fact "that the human race developed from a number of origins in a number of separate parts of the Globe."

There is not a shred of evidence given. It is a mere statement. But the general reader no doubt takes it for history. The directness, the simplicity and the good presentation of the

falsehood make it seem almost like that second method which I am postulating. It has all the directness and appeal of a true resurrection of the past-the only trouble is that the past it pretends to resurrect was never there at all.

I open Blunt's History of the Reformation in England and I find on the second page of it what the author calls "An axiom." The "Axiom" runs thus: "The Church of England has had a continuous and never-ceasing vitality in every stage of its ancient and modern existence."

I open Green's Making of England and I read a picturesque description of the way in which "our forefathers" sternly hewed their way up the Valley to York during the pirate invasions

of the fifth century. The picture sprang entirely from the writer's imagination: it bears no reference to any historical record whatever.

I open Bright's School History and I find (on page 226 of the first volume) a map of Crécy which is direct, simple and easy to grasp. It must by this time have been copied by thousands of school boys and school girls to the order of their masters and mistresses. It makes of the battle an exceedingly clear and comprehensible thing. But it has this defect, that it bears no relation whatsoever to the actual field! The woods, the hills, the watercourses and the town of Crécy itself have been put down at random by someone who had not looked at any map of the place and perhaps had not so much as spoken to anyone who had been there.

Now this sort of history, which I have called "Partisan History" and which might be better termed, "History written to sell," is obviously much worse for us than mere ignorance; and that is true whether it concerns an unmoral detail like the plan of a battle, or a matter of the highest moral significance like the uprooting of the Catholic Church in this country at the Reformation.

It succeeds because it does possess that quality of direct and vivid presentation which the general reader demands, and it works in the field of hypothesis (or worse) with instruments that should only be used in the field of facts.

I say, a time such as our own demands the presentation of the past in a form demonstrably true: and that we should have such a presentation given with a detail and yet a vigor which the chronicle can only supply in matters the reader is already acquainted with, or in connection with institutions and with a life which he understands and takes for granted.

I think there is a method to which

our modern advantages particularly lend themselves and which will succeed in providing just such history, true, voluminous and absolute as the time demands. I think that what I have called "the new method" is feasible, and what is more I believe we can point to its beginnings and to examples of it already apparent in modern literature. A few such examples will go far to prove my case.

I will first cite them and then submit them to analysis. Here is a pas

sage from Lenotre:

The

"It is 7 o'clock in the morning. Parliament is beginning its discussion in the Riding School of the Palace. On the eight steps outside there is an almost indescribable confusion and tumult. In the narrow corridor which leads from the hall to the lane of the feuillants a crowd half panic-stricken surges: murders have taken place and severed heads appear above the crowd on pikes. Suddenly a man comes breathlessly to the bar to say that the King and his family are crossing the garden and are coming to the Parliament to take refuge there. Almost at the same moment, at the great door which opens wide on to the steps, the soldiers of the Guard with fixed bayonets march in, trying to force their way through the crowd. There is a cry of 'No soldiers! no arms! and the members of the Parliament themselves rise to thrust back the soldiers. It is just at this moment that the King is first seen; then in the midst of the seething and moving mass of people one makes out the Queen, Madame Elizabeth holding the hands of the little Princess Royal, and, last of all, a Grenadier of the Militia carrying the Dauphin, whom he lifts up in safety over the heads of the crowd."

I have translated freely in order to give a true impression of the original, and I would beg the reader to note closely the nature of this passage.