A child's guide to reading

THE READING OF HISTORY

The plays of Shakespeare which are based upon the chronicles of English kings are grouped in the Folio edition of the dramatic works as “Histories.” It will not surprise any reader, who happens not to have thought of it before, to learn that the episodes in “Henry IV” and “Henry V” do not follow the actual course of events in the reigns of the real kings; we take it for granted that Shakespeare meant to write historical fiction, and we read the plays as creations of the poetic imagination. But many readers will be surprised to hear that most works which we call historic are likewise figments of the imagination, and that we should read many of them in somewhat the same spirit as we read the historical plays of Shakespeare or good historical novels. Not only do we get the most pleasure out of the great historians by regarding their works as pieces of artistic writing, but we save ourselves from the error of accepting their narratives as fact. For it is generally true that the more glowing, the more imaginative, the more architectural a work of history, the more it is open to suspicion that it is not an exact account of true events. In taking this position we are not appropriating to the uses of literary enjoyment works of information that should be left among the dictionaries and encyclopedias; we are only obeying the best critical historians, who warn us not to believe the accepted masterpieces of history, but allow us to enjoy them. And enjoyment is what we seek and value.

The conception of history as the work of the imagination was held by all the older historians. Bacon said that poetry is “feigned history.” That is, he conceived that the methods of poetry and history are the same and that the difference lies in the material, the poet inventing the substance of his story, the historian finding his substance in the recorded events of the past. This view of history obtained up to the nineteenth century. Macaulay said that history is a compound of poetry and philosophy. And Carlyle thought it proper to designate as a history his “French Revolution,” a work based on certain facts in history but consisting in large part of dramatic fiction, philosophic reflection, and political argument. In the last hundred years there has grown up a view of history as a science, the purpose of which is to examine the evidences of the past in human life as the geologist studies the past of the physical globe on which we live. The new school of history is comparatively so young that it has not produced many writers of high rank in eloquence and literary power, whereas poetic history is as old as literature and includes the work of many great masters. These masters live by their eloquence; for it is eloquence rather than mere truth to fact that gives a work a permanent place in literature. So our knowledge of historic events must come to us, the world of general readers, in large part from historians who were great artists rather than accurate scholars. And scientific history, and also scientific biography, will for another century be a voice crying in the beautiful wilderness of legend, myth, philosophical opinion, political prejudice, and patriotic enthusiasm.

We can cheerfully leave this scientific history where it belongs, in the hands of historians and special students. The better for us as readers if we can read the great histories with the same delight and somewhat the same kind of interest that we bring to the reading of romances. There will be enough truth in them to give us a fairly just view of former ages. The culture and humanity will be there. Shakespeare’s stories of English kings give us the spirit of England. Carlyle’s “French Revolution” will never cease to be a splendid work of art. Bancroft’s “History of the United States” will remain a noble celebration of democracy, even though he was not strict in his use of documents.

In school we expect to learn true lessons in history, to get our dates right and keep our judgments impartial. Out of school we shall read history for pleasure and like it the better if it is informed with the eloquence, the prejudice, the philosophy, in short the personality of a great writer.

There are certain books that occur immediately as introductions to the various departments of literature. We agreed that Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury” is the best book to put into the hands of one knocking for the first time at the door of poetry. Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” is a perfect biography to win the new reader’s liking for biographical literature and memoirs. And so there is one volume of history that seems the best of all books in which English-speaking youth may read the great story of the race, Green’s “Short History of the English People.” One might wish from patriotic motives that there were an American history equally good, but there is none, so far as I know—none which covers our national life as a whole. We can, however, be content with Green, for the American cannot know his own history or his own literature and traditions without knowing those of England. Our literature is English literature and must be for centuries to come, and in most of our reading of poetry and fiction we shall find that the history of England is involved more deeply than the history of our country.

The merits of Green’s History, the literary merits, are its clear arrangements, the fine lucidity of the writing, its condensation of national movements into rich chapters where, as from a peak one overlooks the great epochs of disaster and progress. These are the opening sentences:

“For the fatherland of the English race we must look far away from England itself. In the fifth century after the birth of Christ, the one country which we know to have borne the name of Angeln or the Engleland lay in the district which we now call Sleswick, a district in the heart of the peninsula which parts the Baltic from the northern seas. Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships, looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there by meadows which crept down to the marshes and the sea.”

Could any historic novel, we may say could any other historic romance, open more enticingly? Here is rich promise, promise of the picturesque, promise of the eloquent phrase, promise of a sympathetic history of a people who are delvers in the soil, dwellers in homesteads, and no mere pawns in the game of kings. This is to be a history of a people. We shall learn of their great common characteristics; we shall understand them as we understand a family, and every adventure from King Alfred’s burning of the cakes to Clive’s conquest of India will spring like the episodes in a great plot from the character of the English race.

From Green’s History, as a whole, we shall learn what are the important things in the history of any people. His admirable sense of the relative values of events and persons informs his work with a philosophy of life that is just, wholesome, and salutary for a young person to be imbued with who must look out on the daily struggle about him, read the endless hodge-podge of newspaper chronicle, and weigh the day’s events wisely. Green fulfils the ideal which he sets forth in the preface: “It is the reproach of historians that they have too often turned history into a mere record of the butchery of men by their fellow men. But war plays a small part in the real history of European nations, and in that of England its part is smaller than in any.... If I have said little of the glories of Cressy, it is because I have dwelt much on the wrong and misery which prompted the verse of Longland and the preaching of Ball. But on the other hand, I have never shrunk from telling at length of the triumphs of peace. I have restored to their place among the achievements of Englishmen the ‘Faerie Queene’ and the ‘Novum Organum.’ I have set Shakespeare among the heroes of the Elizabethan age.... I have had to find a place for figures little heeded in common history—the figures of the missionary, the poet, the printer, the merchant, the philosopher.”

One of the practical merits of Green’s England as an introduction to the reading of historic literature is that at the head of each chapter he gives the works from which he has drawn. And as his nature and ideals of history led him to the most fertile and interesting of other historians, his lists contain the titles of readable books rather than dry and obscure sources. So that if a reader finds one part of the story of England especially fascinating he can turn aside to those historians who have treated it more fully, to the authorities whom Green read and enjoyed. For instance, see the wealth of books which Green mentions at the head of the chapter that most concerns us, The Independence of America. There are Lord Stanhope’s “History of England from the Peace of Utrecht,” Bancroft’s “History of the United States,” Massey’s “History of England from the Accession of George the Third,” Lecky’s “History of England in the Eighteenth Century”; the letters and memoirs of individuals who witnessed the struggle, or took part in it, such as the “Letters” of Junius, “Life and Correspondence of Charles James Fox,” Burke’s speeches and pamphlets. And we should add the newest important authority on the conflict, Trevelyan’s “American Revolution.”

These books in turn will lead to others as far as the reader cares to go. Indeed it is one of the delights and excitements of reading that one book suggests another, and the eager reader, who is under no obligation to go along a definite course, finds himself in a glorious tangle of bypaths. A book like Green’s may lead into any corner of literature; one may follow, as it were, over the intellectual ground where he got his education. We may begin with Gibbon’s “Rome” which he read at sixteen (other boys of sixteen can read it with as much pleasure as he found in it, even if they do not become historians), and we can go on through his early studies of the English church. If one reads only the poets and men of letters to whom he gives a place in his chronicle of English life one will be, before one knows it, a cultivated man—even a learned man.

Let us dwell a moment on this aspect of leadership in books. No two persons will ever follow the same course of reading; no list will prove good for everybody; but any book which has interested you, and which you have reason to think the product of a great mind, will constitute itself a guide to reading;[3] it will throw out a hundred clues, far-leading and profitable to take up, clues which show what has been the reading of the author whose work suggests them. And there must always be safety in following where a great man has gone in his literary pilgrimages.

If there is no history of America comparable in scope and style to Green’s “Short History of the English People,” there are several American historians of high rank. Perhaps because they were endowed with dramatic imagination, or were influenced by the literary rather than the scientific masterpieces of history, American historians of genius have applied their talents to romantic periods in the story of foreign nations, or to those early navigations and settlements which resulted in the founding of our nation. Washington Irving began in his “Life of Columbus” and “The Conquest of Granada” the brilliant stories of Spanish chivalry and adventure, which were continued by William Hickling Prescott in “The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella,” “The Conquest of Mexico” and “The Conquest of Peru.” The writings of Prescott and Irving have a kind of antique gorgeousness in which the modern historian does not allow himself to indulge. The history of the French and the Indians and the pioneers appealed to the genius of Francis Parkman. The beginner may settle down to any book of Parkman’s with the happy certainty of finding a brilliant and thrilling story. John Lothrop Motley, in “The Rise of the Dutch Republic” and “The United Netherlands,” treats of a people whose story the American reader may learn in youth or may postpone until after he has become acquainted with some books on English and American history. The colonial history of America is best read in the work of John Fiske, whose gifts of style and philosophic outlook on life place him among the great historians. The history of America from the beginning to modern times must be read in books by various authors, who deal with limited sections and periods. It is especially true of recent periods that no one historian is adequate. Partisanship and our closeness to the Civil War have prevented the American historian from seeing the conflict clearly in its relations to the rest of our national story, and for a just impression of the struggle between the states, the reader should go to the documents and the memoirs of the time. The reminiscences of the political leaders, the biography of Lincoln, and the excellent narratives of Union and Confederate generals—Grant, Alexander, Longstreet, Gordon, Sherman, Sheridan, and others—constitute a history of the period. There is peculiar validity in the reminiscences of the contemporary witnesses of historical events. The writer of autobiography and memoirs is not expected to give final judgments, and we unconsciously allow for his personal limitation. The professional historian, on the other hand, is obliged to make sweeping decisions, and we are likely too often to accept his decisions as final, unless we are trained and critical students of history. If one reads several memoirs of the same period, one gradually forms an historical judgment about it and comes to a position midway between the points of view of the various writers.

The young man beginning to read history now, as Green began Gibbon at sixteen, may consider whether he will devote himself to the task of writing the history of the American people. Even if his ambitions are not so high, he may be sure that as a citizen of the Republic he can never know too much about the history of his nation and of the men who helped to make it.

As aids to historical reading, it is well to have some books of bare facts, a short history of America, a dictionary of dates, and a compact general encyclopedia of events, such as Ploetz’s “Epitome.” But these are for reference and not for entertainment. As a rule, text books of history prepared for schools, however excellent they may be for the purposes of study, are not entertaining to read. They have not space for all the elaborate plots, political intrigues, biographical interludes, accounts of popular movements of thought, which appeal to the imagination of the leisurely reader. Our school teachers will take care that we learn the salient facts which everyone must know. By ourselves we shall dip into Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe” or Prescott’s “Conquest of Mexico” or Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” In reading these masterpieces for pleasure, we shall be supplementing our work in school and making our daily lessons easier.

LIST OF WORKS OF HISTORY

Supplementary to Chapter VII

The following list of titles is not intended to outline an adequate reference library for the student of history. It includes principally books that have taken their place in literature by virtue of their readability and their imaginative power, and may therefore be supposed to interest the general reader. A few books are included which deal with current historical problems and politics.

AMERICAN HISTORY

Covers exhaustively the period immediately following the Revolution.

The recognized authority on American political institutions.

Said to be the best of the one-volume histories of this country.

Four volumes of extracts from diaries and writers who lived in the epochs under consideration. A rich source of information and enjoyment, as are also the following books:

Selected from his “History of England in the Eighteenth Century.” This with Trevelyan’s “American Revolution” will give American readers the history of the conflict from a British point of view.

To be read in conjunction with the Memoirs by Grant, Porter, Sherman, Gordon, Alexander, and other Union and Confederate generals.

“France and England in North America” is divided into seven parts under the following titles:

The second work, in five volumes, covers the history of the country from the beginnings to the present time; both readable and trustworthy.

GREAT BRITAIN

The first great piece of critical history in our language.

A vivid account of the Cromwellian wars by a royalist. Interesting to read in connection with Carlyle’s “Elucidations” of the letters and speeches of Cromwell.

The three histories last named constitute a continuous work of eighteen volumes. Gardiner is not the easiest historian to read, but his work is indispensable to anyone who would get a true view of a period which more than any other in English history has been discolored by brilliant biased historians, from Clarendon to Carlyle and Macaulay.

The “History” is a longer, though, perhaps, not a “greater,” book than the “Short History.”

In eight volumes of Everyman’s Library.

Almost displaced as a historian by later writers, but still interesting because of his philosophic and literary genius.

In three volumes in Everyman’s Library.

In Everyman’s Library.

FRANCE

English translation, published by Crowell & Co.

Deals with the Coup d’etat of 1851, of which Hugo was a witness. Vivid, powerful writing, easy to read in the French.

The work of a modern scientific historian, may be read after Carlyle’s “French Revolution” as a corrective and for the sake of comparing two historical methods.

The application to French history of somewhat the same philosophic methods and principles that inform his “History of English Literature.”

GERMANY

ANCIENT GREECE

Especially adapted to young readers.

A monumental German work to be found in a readable translation.

In Everyman’s Library.

The standard English work in Greek history. In twelve volumes of Everyman’s Library.

Extracts retold by Alfred John Church, especially for young readers.

ANCIENT ROME

The supreme contribution of England to historical literature, in its combination of distinguished style and scientific method.

A great German work, in five volumes, to be found in a readable English translation.

OTHER HISTORIES

Of this great History planned by the late Lord Acton, ten volumes have been published. It is the work of many writers and will be a storehouse of the most competent historical writing of our time.

Readers of Bryce’s “American Commonwealth” will seek this other excellent work.

In Everyman’s Library.

There are several translations and condensations of Froissart’s “Chronicles,” notably “The Boy’s Froissart,” edited by the American poet, Sidney Lanier.

A fine piece of historical writing showing that Stevenson had the gifts of the historian as well as the gifts of the poet and romancer.

A mixture of history and vivid reporting by a great war correspondent.

These books demonstrate the wide range of Irving’s genius from burlesque, mingled with genuine study of racial characteristics, to sober and poetic history.

Accompanied in the English translation by the critical essays of Macaulay and Carlyle. Easy to read in the French.

A work of rare beauty on the men, the history, and the art of Italy.

Raleigh’s “History of the World” is not so large as it sounds in scope, but in imagination it almost lives up to its title. Thoreau says: “He is remarkable in the midst of so many masters. There is a natural emphasis in his style, like a man’s tread, and a breathing space between his sentences.”

An excellent guide to the reading of history.