When we are talking of exorbitant claims made for the regard of others, we must not omit those of what is called neglected merit. A man feels that he has abilities or talents of a particular kind, that he has shown them, and still he is a neglected man. I am far from saying that merit is sufficiently looked out for: but a man may take the sting out of any neglect of his merits by thinking that at least it does not arise from malice prepense, as he almost imagines in his anger. Neither the public, nor individuals, have the time, or will, resolutely to neglect anybody. What pleases us, we admire and further: if a man in any profession, calling, or art, does things which are beyond us, we are as guiltless of neglecting him as the Caffres are of neglecting the differential calculus. Milton sells his “Paradise Lost” for ten pounds; there is no record of Shakespeare dining much with Queen Elizabeth. And it is Utopian to imagine that statues will be set up to right men in their day.
The same arguments which applied to the complaints of ingratitude, apply to the complaints of neglected merit. The merit is oftentimes not understood. Be it ever so manifest, it cannot absorb men’s attention. When it is really great, it has not been brought out by the hope of reward, any more than the kindest services by the hope of gratitude. In neither case is it becoming or rational to be clamorous about payment.
There is one thing that people hardly ever remember, or, indeed, have imagination enough to conceive; namely, the effect of each man being shut up in his individuality. Take a long course of sayings and doings in which many persons have been engaged. Each one of them is in his own mind the centre of the web, though, perhaps, he is at the edge of it. We know that in our observations of the things of sense, any difference in the points from which the observation is taken gives a different view of the same thing. Moreover, in the world of sense, the objects and the points of view are each indifferent to the rest; but in life the points of views are centres of action that have had something to do with the making of the things looked at. If we could calculate the moral parallax arising from these causes, we should see, by the mere aid of the intellect, how unjust we often are in our complaints of ingratitude, inconstancy, and neglect. But without these nice calculations, such errors of view may be corrected at once by humility, a more sure method than the most enlightened appreciation of the cause of error. Humility is the true cure for many a needless heartache.
It must not be supposed that in thus opposing unreasonable views of social affections, anything is done to dissever such affections. The Duke of Wellington, writing to a man in a dubious position of authority, says “The less you claim, the more you will have.” This is remarkably true of the affections; and there is scarcely anything that would make men happier than teaching them to watch against unreasonableness in their claims of regard and affection; and which at the same time would be more likely to ensure their getting what may be their due.
Ellesmere (clapping his hands). An essay after my heart: worth tons of soft trash. In general you are amplifying duties, telling everybody that they are to be so good to every other body. Now it is as well to let every other body know that he is not to expect all he may fancy from everybody. A man complains that his prosperous friends neglect him: infinitely overrating, in all probability, his claims, and his friends’ power of doing anything for him. Well, then, you may think me very hard, but I say that the most absurd claims are often put forth on the ground of relationship. I do not deny that there is something in blood, but it must not be made too much of. Near relations have great opportunities of attaching each other; if they fail to use these, I do not think it is well to let them imagine that mere relationship is to be the talisman of affection.
Dunsford. I do not see exactly how to answer all that you or Milverton have said; but I am not prepared, as official people say, to agree with you. I especially disagree with what Milverton has said about love. He leaves much too little power to the will.
Milverton. I daresay I may have done so. These are very deep matters, and any one view about them does not exhaust them. I remember C— once saying to me that a man never utters anything without error. He may even think of it rightly; but he cannot bring it out rightly. It turns a little false, as it were, when it quits the brain and comes into life.
Ellesmere. I thought you would soon go over to the soft side. Here, Rollo; there’s a good dog. You do not form unreasonable expectations, do you? A very little petting puts you into an ecstasy, and you are much wiser than many a biped who is full of his claims for gratitude, and friendship, and love, and who is always longing for well-merited rewards to fall into his mouth. Down, dog!
Milverton. Poor animal! it little knows that all this sudden notice is only by way of ridiculing us. Why I did not maintain my ground stoutly against Dunsford is, that I am always afraid of pushing moral conclusions too far. Since we have been talking, I think I see more clearly than I did before what I mean to convey by the essay—namely, that men fall into unreasonable views respecting the affections from imagining that the general laws of the mind are suspended for the sake of the affections.
Dunsford. That seems safer ground.
Milverton. Now to illustrate what I mean by a very similar instance. The mind is avid of new impressions. It “travels over,” or thinks it travels over, another mind; and, though it may conceal its wish for “fresh fields and pastures new,” it does so wish. However harsh, therefore, and unromantic it may seem, the best plan is to humour Nature, and not to exhaust by overfrequent presence the affection of those whom we would love, or whom we would have to love us. I would not say, after the manner of Rochefoucauld, that the less we see of people the more we like them; but there are certain limits of sociality; and prudent reserve and absence may find a place in the management of the tenderest relations.
Dunsford. Yes, all this is true enough: I do not see anything hard in this. But then there is the other side. Custom is a great aid to affection.
Milverton. Yes. All I say is, do not fancy that the general laws are suspended for the sake of any one affection.
Dunsford. Still this does not go to the question whether there is not something more of will in affection than you make out. You would speak of inducements and counter-inducements, aids and hindrances; but I cannot but think you are limiting the power of will, and therefore limiting duty. Such views tend to make people easily discontented with each other, and prevent their making efforts to get over offences, and to find out what is lovable in those about them.
Ellesmere. Here we are in the deep places again. I see you are pondering, Milverton. It is a question, as a minister would say when Parliament perplexes him, that we must go to the country upon; each man’s heart will, perhaps, tell him best about it. For my own part, I think that the continuance of affection, as the rise of it, depends more on the taste being satisfied, or at least not disgusted, than upon any other single thing. Our hearts may be touched at our being loved by people essentially distasteful to us, whose modes of talking and acting are a continual offence to us; but whether we can love them in return is a question.
Milverton. Yes, we can, I think. I begin to see that it is a question of degree. The word love includes many shades of meaning. When it includes admiration, of course we cannot be said to love those in whom we see nothing to admire. But this seldom happens in the mixed characters of real life. The upshot of it all seems to me to be, that, as Guizot says of civilisation, every impulse has room; so in the affections, every inducement and counter-inducement has its influence; and the result is not a simple one, which can be spoken of as if it were alike on all occasions and with all men.
Dunsford. I am still unanswered, I think, Milverton. What you say is still wholly built upon inducements, and does not touch the power of will.
Milverton. No; it does not.
Ellesmere. We must leave that alone. Infinite piles of books have not as yet lifted us up to a clear view of that matter.
Dunsford. Well, then, we must leave it as a vexed question; but let it be seen that there is such a question. Now, as to another thing; you speak, Milverton, of men’s not making allowance enough for the unpleasant weight of obligation. I think that weight seems to have increased in modern times. Essex could give Bacon a small estate, and Bacon could take it comfortably, I have no doubt. That is a much more wholesome state of things among friends than the present.
Milverton. Yes, undoubtedly. An extreme notion about independence has made men much less generous in receiving.
Dunsford. It is a falling off, then. There was another comment I had to make. I think, when you speak about the exorbitant demands of neglected merit, you should say more upon the neglect of the just demands of merit.
Milverton. I would have the Government and the public in general try by all means to understand and reward merit, especially in those matters wherein excellence cannot, otherwise, meet with large present reward. But, to say the truth, I would have this done, not with the view of fostering genius so much as of fulfilling duty: I would say to a minister—it is becoming in you—it is well for the nation, to reward, as far as you can, and dignify, men of genius. Whether you will do them any good or bring forth more of them, I do not know.
Ellesmere. Men of great genius are often such a sensitive race, so apt to be miserable in many other than pecuniary ways and want of public estimation, that I am not sure that distress and neglect do not take their minds off worse discomforts. It is a kind of grievance, too, that they like to have.
Dunsford. Really, Ellesmere, that is a most unfeeling speech.
Milverton. At any rate, it is right for us to honour and serve a great man. It is our nature to do so, if we are worth anything. We may put aside the question whether our honour will do him more good than our neglect. That is a question for him to look to. The world has not yet so largely honoured deserving men in their own time, that we can exactly pronounce what effect it would have upon them.
Ellesmere. Come, Rollo, let us leave these men of sentiment. Oh, you will not go, as your master does not move. Look how he wags his tail, and almost says, “I should clearly like to have a hunt after the water-rat we saw in the pond the other day, but master is talking philosophy, and requires an intelligent audience.” These dogs are dear creatures, it must be owned. Come, Milverton, let us have a walk.
CHAPTER X.
After the reading in the last chapter, my friends walked homewards with me as far as Durley Wood, which is about half-way between Worth-Ashton and my house. As we rested here, we bethought ourselves that it would be a pleasant spot for us to come to sometimes and read our essays. So we agreed to name a day for meeting there. The day was favourable, we met as we had appointed, and finding some beech logs lying very opportunely, took possession of them for our council. We seated Ellesmere on one that we called the woolsack, but which he said he felt himself unworthy to occupy in the presence of King Log, pointing to mine. These nice points of etiquette being at last settled, Milverton drew out his papers and was about to begin reading, when Ellesmere thus interrupted him:—
Ellesmere. You were not in earnest, Milverton, about giving us an essay on population? Because if so, I think I shall leave this place to you and Dunsford and the ants.
Milverton. I certainly have been meditating something of the sort; but have not been able to make much of it.
Ellesmere. If I had been living in those days when it first beamed upon mankind that the earth was round, I am sure I should have said, “We know now the bounds of the earth: there are no interminable plains joined to the regions of the sun, allowing of indefinite sketchy outlines at the edges of maps. That little creature man will immediately begin to think that his world is too small for him.”
Milverton. There has probably been as much folly uttered by political economy as against it, which is saying something. The danger as regards theories of political economy is the obvious one of their abstract conclusions being applied to concrete things.
Ellesmere. As if we were to expect mathematical lines to bear weights.
Milverton. Something like that. With a good system of logic pervading the public mind, this danger would of course be avoided; but such a state of mind is not likely to occur in any public that we or our grandchildren are likely to have to deal with. As it is, an ordinary man hears some conclusion of political economy, showing some particular tendency of things, which in real life meets with many counteractions of all kinds: but he, perhaps, adopts the conclusion without the least abatement, and would work it into life, as if all went on there like a rule-of-three sum.
Ellesmere. After all, this error arises from the man’s not having enough political economy. It is not that a theory is good on paper, but unsound in real life. It is only that in real life you cannot get at the simple state of things to which the theory would rightly apply. You want many other theories and the just composition of them all to be able to work the whole problem. That being done (which, however, scarcely can be done), the result on paper might be read off as applicable at once to life. But now, touching the essay; since we are not to have population, what is it to be?
Milverton. Public improvements.
Ellesmere. Nearly as bad; but as this is a favourite subject of yours, I suppose it will not be polite to go away.
Milverton. No; you must listen.
PUBLIC IMPROVEMENTS.
What are possessions? To an individual, the stores of his own heart and mind pre-eminently. His truth and valour are amongst the first. His contentedness, or his resignation may be put next. Then his sense of beauty, surely a possession of great moment to him. Then all those mixed possessions which result from the social affections—great possessions, unspeakable delights, much greater than the gift last mentioned in the former class, but held on more uncertain tenure. Lastly, what are generally called possessions? However often we have heard of the vanity, uncertainty, and vexation that beset these last, we must not let this repetition deaden our minds to the fact.
Now, national possessions must be estimated by the same gradation that we have applied to individual possessions. If we consider national luxury, we shall see how small a part it may add to national happiness. Men of deserved renown, and peerless women, lived upon what we should now call the coarsest fare, and paced the rushes in their rooms with as high, or as contented thoughts, as their better-fed and better-clothed descendants can boast of. Man is limited in this direction; I mean, in the things that concern his personal gratification; but when you come to the higher enjoyments, the expansive power both in him and them is greater. As Keats says,
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.”
What then are a nation’s possessions? The great words that have been said in it; the great deeds that have been done in it; the great buildings, and the great works of art, that have been made in it. A man says a noble saying: it is a possession, first to his own race, then to mankind. A people get a noble building built for them: it is an honour to them, also a daily delight and instruction. It perishes. The remembrance of it is still a possession. If it was indeed pre-eminent, there will be more pleasure in thinking of it than in being with others of inferior order and design.
On the other hand, a thing of ugliness is potent for evil. It deforms the taste of the thoughtless: it frets the man who knows how bad it is: it is a disgrace to the nation who raised it; an example and an occasion for more monstrosities. If it is a great building in a great city, thousands of people pass it daily, and are the worse for it, or at least not the better. It must be done away with. Next to the folly of doing a bad thing is that of fearing to undo it. We must not look at what it has cost, but at what it is. Millions may be spent upon some foolish device which will not the more make it into a possession, but only a more noticeable detriment.
It must not be supposed that works of art are the only, or the chief, public improvements needed in any country. Wherever men congregate, the elements become scarce. The supply of air, light, and water is then a matter of the highest public importance: and the magnificent utilitarianism of the Romans should precede the nice sense of beauty of the Greeks. Or rather, the former should be worked out in the latter. Sanitary improvements, like most good works, may be made to fulfil many of the best human objects. Charity, social order, conveniency of living, and the love of the beautiful, may all be furthered by such improvements. A people is seldom so well employed as when, not suffering their attention to be absorbed by foreign quarrels and domestic broils, they bethink themselves of winning back those blessings of Nature which assemblages of men mostly vitiate, exclude, or destroy.
Public improvements are sometimes most difficult in free countries. The origination of them is difficult there, many diverse minds having to be persuaded. The individual, or class, resistance to the public good is harder to conquer than in despotic states. And, what is most embarrassing, perhaps, individual progress in the same direction, or individual doings in some other way, form a great hindrance, sometimes, to public enterprise. On the other hand, the energy of a free people is a mine of public welfare; and individual effort brings many good things to bear in much shorter time than any government could be expected to move in. A judicious statesman considers these things; and sets himself especially to overcome those peculiar obstacles to public improvement which belong to the institutions of his country. Adventure in a despotic state, combined action in a free state, are the objects which peculiarly demand his attention.
To return to works of art. In this also the genius of the people is to be heeded. There may have been, there may be, nations requiring to be diverted from the love of art to stern labour and industrial conquests. But certainly it is not so with the Anglo-Saxon race, or with the Northern races generally. Money may enslave them; logic may enslave them; art never will. The chief men, therefore, in these races will do well sometimes to contend against the popular current, and to convince their people that there are other sources of delight, and other objects worthy of human endeavour, than severe money-getting or more material successes of any kind.
In fine, the substantial improvement, and even the embellishment of towns, is a work which both the central and local governing bodies in a country should keep a steady hand upon. It especially concerns them. What are they there for but to do that which individuals cannot do? It concerns them, too, as it tells upon the health, morals, education, and refined pleasures of the people they govern. In doing it, they should avoid pedantry, parsimony, and favouritism; and their mode of action should be large, considerate, and foreseeing. Large; inasmuch as they must not easily be contented with the second best in any of their projects. Considerate; inasmuch as they have to think what their people need most, not what will make most show. And therefore, they should be contented, for instance, at their work going on underground for a time, or in byways, if needful; the best charity in public works, as in private, being often that which courts least notice. Lastly, their work should be with foresight, recollecting that cities grow up about us like young people, before we are aware of it.
Ellesmere. Another very merciful essay! When we had once got upon the subject of sanitary improvements, I thought we should soon be five fathom deep in blue-books, reports, interminable questions of sewerage, and horrors of all kinds.
Milverton. I am glad you own that I have been very tender of your impatience in this essay. People, I trust, are now so fully aware of the immense importance of sanitary improvements, that we do not want the elementary talking about such things that was formerly necessary. It is difficult, though, to say too much about sanitary matters, that is, if by saying much one could gain attention. I am convinced that the most fruitful source of physical evil to mankind has been impure air, arising from circumstances which might have been obviated. Plagues and pestilences of all kinds, cretinism too, and all scrofulous disorders, are probably mere questions of ventilation. A district may require ventilation as well as a house.
Ellesmere. Seriously speaking, I quite agree with you. And what delights me in sanitary improvements is, that they can hardly do harm. Give a poor man good air, and you do not diminish his self-reliance. You only add to his health and vigour—make more of a man of him. But now that the public mind, as it is facetiously called, has got hold of the idea of these improvements, everybody will be chattering about them.
Milverton. The very time when those who really do care for these matters should be watchful to make the most of the tide in their favour, and should not suffer themselves to relax their efforts because there is no originality now about such things.
Dunsford. Custom soon melts off the wings which Novelty alone has lent to Benevolence.
Ellesmere. And down comes the charitable Icarus. A very good simile, my dear Dunsford, but rather of the Latin-verse order. I almost see it worked into an hexameter and pentameter, and delighting the heart of an Eton boy.
Dunsford. Ellesmere is more than usually vicious to-day, Milverton. A great “public improvement” would be to clip the tongues of some of these lawyers.
Ellesmere. Possibly. I have just been looking again at that part of the essay, Milverton, where you talk of the little gained by national luxury. I think with you. There is an immensity of nonsense uttered about making people happy, which is to be done, according to happiness-mongers, by quantities of sugar and tea, and such-like things. One knows the importance of food, but there is no Elysium to be got out of it.
Milverton. I know what you mean. There is a kind of pity for the people now in vogue which is most effeminate. It is a sugared sort of Robespierre talk about “The poor but virtuous People.” To address such stuff to the people is not to give them anything, but to take away what they have. Suppose you could give them oceans of tea and mountains of sugar, and abundance of any luxury that you choose to imagine, but at the same time you inserted a hungry, envious spirit in them, what have you done? Then, again, this envious spirit, when it is turned to difference of station, what good can it do? Can you give station according to merit? Is life long enough for it?
Ellesmere. Of course we cannot always be weighing men with nicety, and saying, “Here is your place, here yours.”
Milverton. Then, again, what happiness do you confer on men by teaching them to disrespect their superiors in rank, by turning all the embellishments which adorn various stations wrong side out, putting everything in its lowest form, and then saying, “What do you see to admire here?” You do not know what injury you may do a man when you destroy all reverence in him. It will be found out some day that men derive more pleasure and profit from having superiors than from having inferiors.
Dunsford. It is seldom that I bring you back to your subject, but we are really a long way off at present; and I want to know, Milverton, what you would do specifically in the way of public improvements. Of course you cannot say in an essay what you would do in such matters, but amongst ourselves. In London, for instance.
Milverton. The first thing for Government to do, Dunsford, in London, or any other great town, is to secure open spaces in it and about it. Trafalgar Square may be dotted with hideous absurdities, but it is an open space. They may collect together there specimens of every variety of meanness and bad taste; but they cannot prevent its being a better thing than if it were covered with houses. Public money is scarcely ever so well employed as in securing bits of waste ground and keeping them as open spaces. Then, as under the most favourable circumstances, we are likely to have too much carbon in the air of any town, we should plant trees to restore the just proportions of the air as far as we can. [161] Trees are also what the heart and the eye desire most in towns. The Boulevards in Paris show the excellent effect of trees against buildings. There are many parts of London where rows of trees might be planted along the streets. The weighty dulness of Portland Place, for instance, might be thus relieved. Of course, in any scheme of public improvements, the getting rid of smoke is one of the first objects.
Ellesmere. Yes, smoke is a great abuse; but then there is something ludicrous about it, just as there is about sewerage. I believe, myself, that for one person that the Corn Laws have injured, a dozen have had their lives shortened and their happiness abridged in every way by these less palpable nuisances. But there is no grandeur in opposing them—no “good cry” to be raised. And so, as abuses cannot be met in our days but by agitation—a committee, secretaries, clerks, newspapers, and a review—and as agitation in this case holds out fewer inducements than usual, we have gone on year after year being poisoned by these various nuisances, at an incalculable expense of life and money.
Milverton. There is something in what you say, I think, but you press it too far; for of late these sanitary subjects have worked themselves into notice, as you yourself admit.
Ellesmere. Late indeed.
Milverton. Well, but to go on with schemes for improving London. Open spaces, trees—then comes the supply of water. This is one of the first things to be done. Philadelphia has given an example which all towns ought to imitate. It is a matter requiring great thought, and the various plans should be thoroughly canvassed before the choice is made. Great beauty and the highest utility may be combined in supplying a town like London with water. By the way, how much water do you think London requires daily?
Ellesmere. As much as the Serpentine and the water in St. James’s Park.
Milverton. You are not so far out.
Well, then, having gone through the largest things that must be attended to, we come to minor matters. It is a great pity that the system of building upon leases should be so commonly adopted. Nobody expects to live out the leasehold term which he takes to build upon. But things would be better done if people were more averse to having anything to do with leasehold property. C. always says that the modern lath-and-plaster system is a wickedness, and upon my word I think he is right. It is inconceivable to me how a man can make up his mind to build, or to do anything else, in a temporary, slight, insincere fashion. What has a man to say for himself who must sum up the doings of his life in this way, “I chiefly employed myself in making or selling things which seemed to be good and were not, and nobody has occasion to bless me for anything I have done.”
Ellesmere. Humph! you put it mildly. But the man has made perhaps seven per cent. off his money; or, if he has made no per cent., has ruined several men of his own trade, which is not to go for nothing when a man is taking stock of his good deeds.
Milverton. There is one thing I forgot to say, that we want more individual will in building, I think. As it is at present, a great builder takes a plot of ground and turns out innumerable houses, all alike, the same faults and merits running through each, thus adding to the general dulness of things.
Ellesmere. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when she came from abroad, remarked that all her friends seemed to have got into drawing-rooms which were like a grand piano, first a large square or oblong room, and then a small one. Quite Georgian, this style of architecture. But now I think we are improving immensely—at any rate in the outside of houses. By the way, Milverton, I want to ask you one thing: How is it that Governments and Committees, and the bodies that manage matters of taste, seem to be more tasteless than the average run of people? I will wager anything that the cabmen round Trafalgar Square would have made a better thing of it than it is. If you had put before them several prints of fountains, they would not have chosen those.
Milverton. I think with you, but I have no theory to account for it. I suppose that these committees are frequently hampered by other considerations than those which come before the public when they are looking at the work done; and this may be some excuse. There was a custom which I have heard prevailed in former days in some of the Italian cities, of making large models of the works of art that were to adorn the city, and putting them up in the places intended for the works when finished, and then inviting criticism. It would really be a very good plan in some cases.
Ellesmere. Now, Milverton, would you not forthwith pull down such things as Buckingham Palace and the National Gallery? Dunsford looks at me as if I were going to pull down the Constitution.
Milverton. I would pull them down to a certainty, or some parts of them at any rate; but whether “forthwith” is another question. There are greater things, perhaps, to be done first. We must consider, too,
“That eternal want of pence
Which vexes public men.”
Still, I think we ought always to look upon such buildings as temporary arrangements, and they vex one less then. The Palace ought to be in the higher part of the Park, perhaps on that slope opposite Piccadilly.
Dunsford. Well, it does amuse me the way in which you youngsters go on, pulling down, in your industrious imaginations, palaces and national galleries, building aqueducts and cloacæ maximæ, forming parks, destroying smoke (so large a part of every Londoner’s diet), and abridging plaster, without fear of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and the resistance of mankind in general.
Milverton. We must begin by thinking boldly about things. That is a larger part of any undertaking than it seems, perhaps.
Dunsford. We must, I am afraid, break off our pleasant employment of projecting public improvements, unless we mean to be dinnerless.
Ellesmere. A frequent fate of great projectors, I fear.
Milverton. Now then, homewards.
CHAPTER XI.
My readers will, perhaps, agree with me in being sorry to find that we are coming to the end of our present series. I say, “my readers,” though I have so little part in purveying for them, that I mostly consider myself one of them. It is no light task, however, to give a good account of a conversation; and I say this, and would wish people to try whether I am not right in saying so, not to call attention to my labour in the matter, but because it may be well to notice how difficult it is to report anything truly. Were this better known, it might be an aid to charity, and prevent some of those feuds which grow out of the poverty of man’s power to express, to apprehend, to represent, rather than out of any malignant part of his nature. But I must not go on moralising. I almost feel that Ellesmere is looking over my shoulder, and breaking into my discourse with sharp words; which I have lately been so much accustomed to.
I had expected that we should have many more readings this summer, as I knew that Milverton had prepared more essays for us. But finding, as he said, that the other subjects he had in hand were larger than he had anticipated, or was prepared for, he would not read even to us what he had written. Though I was very sorry for this—for I may not be the chronicler in another year—I could not but say he was right. Indeed, my ideas of literature, nourished as they have been in much solitude, and by the reading, if I may say so, mainly of our classical authors, are very high placed, though I hope not fantastical. And, therefore, I would not discourage anyone in expending whatever thought and labour might be in him upon any literary work.
In fine, then, I did not attempt to dissuade Milverton from his purpose of postponing our readings: and we agreed that there should only be one more for the present. I wished it to be at our favourite place on the lawn, which had become endeared to me as the spot of many of our friendly councils.
It was later than usual when I came over to Worth-Ashton for this reading; and as I gained the brow of the hill, some few clouds tinged with red were just grouping together to form the accustomed pomp upon the exit of the setting sun. I believe I mentioned in the introduction to our first conversation that the ruins of an old castle could be seen from our place of meeting. Milverton and Ellesmere were talking about it as I joined them.
Milverton. Yes, Ellesmere, many a man has looked out of those windows upon a sunset like this, with some of the thoughts that must come into the minds of all men on seeing this great emblem, the setting sun—has felt, in looking at it, his coming end, or the closing of his greatness. Those old walls must have been witness to every kind of human emotion. Henry the Second was there; John, I think; Margaret of Anjou and Cardinal Beaufort; William of Wykeham; Henry the Eighth’s Cromwell; and many others who have made some stir in the world.
Ellesmere. And, perhaps, the greatest there were those who made no stir.
“The world knows nothing of its greatest men.”
Milverton. I am slow to believe that. I cannot well reconcile myself to the idea that great capacities are given for nothing. They bud out in some way or other.
Ellesmere. Yes, but it may not be in a noisy way.
Milverton. There is one thing that always strikes me very much in looking at the lives of men: how soon, as it were, their course seems to be determined. They say, or do, or think, something which gives a bias at once to the whole of their career.
Dunsford. You may go farther back than that, and speak of the impulses they got from their ancestors.
Ellesmere. Or the nets around them of other people’s ways and wishes. There are many things, you see, that go to make men puppets.
Milverton. I was only noticing the circumstance that there was such a thing, as it appeared to me, as this early direction. But, if it has been ever so unfortunate, a man’s folding his hands over it in a melancholy mood, and suffering himself to be made a puppet by it, is a sadly weak proceeding. Most thoughtful men have probably some dark fountains in their souls, by the side of which, if there were time, and it were decorous, they could let their thoughts sit down and wail indefinitely. That long Byron wail fascinated men for a time; because there is that in Human Nature. Luckily, a great deal besides.
Ellesmere. I delight in the helpful and hopeful men.
Milverton. A man that I admire very much, and have met with occasionally, is one who is always of use in any matter he is mixed up with, simply because he wishes that the best should be got out of the thing that is possible. There does not seem much in the description of such a character; but only see it in contrast with that of a brilliant man, for instance, who does not ever fully care about the matter in hand.
Dunsford. I can thoroughly imagine the difference.
Milverton. The human race may be bound up together in some mysterious way, each of us having a profound interest in the fortunes of the whole, and so, to some extent, of every portion of it. Such a man as I have described acts as though he had an intuitive perception of that relation, and therefore a sort of family feeling for mankind, which gives him satisfaction in making the best out of any human affair he has to do with.
But we really must have the essay, and not talk any more. It is on History.
HISTORY.
Among the fathomless things that are about us and within us, is the continuity of time. This gives to life one of its most solemn aspects. We may think to ourselves: Would there could be some halting-place in life, where we could stay, collecting our minds, and see the world drift by us. But no: even while you read this, you are not pausing to read it. As one of the great French preachers, I think, says, We are embarked upon a stream, each in his own little boat, which must move uniformly onwards, till it ceases to move at all. It is a stream that knows “no haste, no rest”; a boat that knows no haven but one.
This unbated continuity suggests the past as well as the future. We would know what mighty empires this stream of time has flowed through, by what battle-fields it has been tinged, how it has been employed towards fertility, and what beautiful shadows on its surface have been seized by art, or science, or great words, and held in time-lasting, if not in everlasting, beauty. This is what history tells us. Often in a faltering, confused, be-darkened way, like the deed it chronicles. But it is what we have, and we must make the best of it.
The subject of this essay may be thus divided: Why history should be read—how it should be read—by whom it should be written—how it should be written—and how good writers of history should be called forth, aided, and rewarded.
I. WHY HISTORY SHOULD BE READ.
It takes us out of too much care for the present; it extends our sympathies; it shows us that other men have had their sufferings and their grievances; it enriches discourse, it enlightens travel. So does fiction. But the effect of history is more lasting and suggestive. If we see a place which fiction has treated of, we feel that it has some interest for us; but show us a spot where remarkable deeds have been done, or remarkable people have lived, and our thoughts cling to it. We employ our own imagination about it: we invent the fiction for ourselves. Again, history is at least the conventional account of things: that which men agree to receive as the right account, and which they discuss as true. To understand their talk, we must know what they are talking about. Again, there is something in history which can seldom be got from the study of the lives of individual men; namely, the movements of men collectively, and for long periods—of man, in fact, not of men. In history, the composition of the forces that move the world has to be analysed. We must have before us the law of the progress of opinion, the interruptions to it of individual character, the principles on which men act in the main, the trade winds, as we may say, in human affairs, and the recurrent storms which one man’s life does not tell us of. Again, by the study of history, we have a chance of becoming tolerant travelling over the ways of many nations and many periods; and we may also acquire that historic tact by which we collect upon one point of human affairs the light of many ages.
We may judge of the benefit of historical studies by observing what great defects are incident to the moral and political writers who know nothing of history. A present grievance, or what seems such, swallows up in their minds all other considerations; their little bottle of oil is to still the raging waves of the whole human ocean; their system, a thing that the historian has seen before, perhaps, in many ages, is to reconcile all diversities. Then they would persuade you that this class of men is wholly good, that wholly bad; or that there is no difference between good and bad. They may be shrewd men, considering what they have seen, but would be much shrewder if they could know how small a part that is of life. We may all refer to our boyhood, and recollect the time when we thought the things about us were the type of all things everywhere. That was, perhaps, after all no silly princess who was for feeding the famishing people on cakes. History takes us out of this confined circle of child-like thought; and shows us what are the perennial aims, struggles, and distractions of mankind.
History has always been set down as the especial study for statesmen, and for men who take an interest in public affairs. For history is to nations what biography is to individual men. History is the chart and compass for national endeavour. Our early voyagers are dead: not a plank remains of the old ships that first essayed unknown waters; the sea retains no track; and were it not for the history of these voyages contained in charts, in chronicles, in hoarded lore of all kinds, each voyager, though he were to start with all the aids of advanced civilisation (if you could imagine such a thing without history), would need the boldness of the first voyager.
And so it would be with the statesman, were the civil history of mankind unknown. We live to some extent in peace and comfort upon the results obtained for us by the chronicles of our forefathers. We do not see this without some reflection. But imagine what a full-grown nation would be if it knew no history—like a full-grown man with only a child’s experience.
The present is an age of remarkable experiences. Vast improvements have been made in several of the outward things that concern life nearly, from intercourse rapid as lightning to surgical operation without pain. We accept them all; still, the difficulties of government, the management of ourselves, our relations with others, and many of the prime difficulties of life remain but little subdued. History still claims our interest, is still wanted to make us think and act with any breadth of wisdom.
At the same time, however, that we claim for history great powers of instruction, we must not imagine that the examples which it furnishes will enable its readers to anticipate the experience of life. An experienced man reads that Cæsar did this or that, but he says to himself, “I am not Cæsar.” Or, indeed, as is most probable, the reader has not to reject the application of the example to himself: for from first to last he sees nothing but experience for Cæsar in what Cæsar was doing. I think it may be observed, too, that general maxims about life gain the ear of the inexperienced, in preference to historical examples. But neither wise sayings nor historical examples can be understood without experience. Words are only symbols. Who can know anything soundly with respect to the complicated affections and struggles of life, unless he has experienced some of them? All knowledge of humanity spreads from within. So in studying history, the lessons it teaches must have something to grow round in the heart they teach. Our own trials, misfortunes, and enterprises are the best lights by which we can read history. Hence it is that many an historian may see far less into the depths of the very history he has himself written than a man who, having acted and suffered, reads the history in question with all the wisdom that comes from action and suffering. Sir Robert Walpole might naturally exclaim, “Do not read history to me, for that, I know, must be false.” But if he had read it, I do not doubt that he would have seen through the film of false and insufficient narrative into the depth of the matter narrated, in a way that men of great experience can alone attain to.
II. HOW HISTORY SHOULD BE READ.
I suppose that many who now connect the very word history with the idea of dulness, would have been fond and diligent students of history if it had had fair access to their minds. But they were set down to read histories which were not fitted to be read continuously, or by any but practised students. Some such works are mere framework, a name which the author of the Statesman applies to them; very good things, perhaps, for their purpose, but that is not to invite readers to history. You might almost as well read dictionaries with a hope of getting a succinct and clear view of language. When, in any narration, there is a constant heaping up of facts, made about equally significant by the way of telling them, a hasty delineation of characters, and all the incidents moving on as in the fifth act of a confused tragedy, the mind and memory refuse to be so treated; and the reading ends in nothing but a very slight and inaccurate acquaintance with the mere husk of the history. You cannot epitomise the knowledge that it would take years to acquire into a few volumes that may be read in as many weeks.
The most likely way of attracting men’s attention to historical subjects will be by presenting them with small portions of history, of great interest, thoroughly examined. This may give them the habit of applying thought and criticism to historical matters.
For, as it is, how are people interested in history? and how do they master its multitudinous assemblage of facts? Mostly, perhaps, in this way. A man cares about some one thing, or person, or event, and plunges into its history, really wishing to master it. This pursuit extends: other points of research are taken up by him at other times. His researches begin to intersect. He finds a connection in things. The texture of his historic acquisitions gradually attains some substance and colour; and so at last he begins to have some dim notions of the myriads of men who came, and saw, and did not conquer—only struggled on as they best might, some of them—and are not.
When we are considering how history should be read, the main thing perhaps is, that the person reading should desire to know what he is reading about, not merely to have read the books that tell of it. The most elaborate and careful historian must omit, or pass lightly over, many points of his subject. He writes for all readers, and cannot indulge private fancies. But history has its particular aspect for each man: there must be portions which he may be expected to dwell upon. And everywhere, even where the history is most laboured, the reader should have something of the spirit of research which was needful for the writer: if only so much as to ponder well the words of the writer. That man reads history, or anything else, at great peril of being thoroughly misled, who has no perception of any truthfulness except that which can be fully ascertained by reference to facts; who does not in the least perceive the truth, or the reverse, of a writer’s style, of his epithets, of his reasoning, of his mode of narration. In life, our faith in any narration is much influenced by the personal appearance, voice, and gesture of the person narrating. There is some part of all these things in his writing; and you must look into that well before you can know what faith to give him. One man may make mistakes in names, and dates, and references, and yet have a real substance of truthfulness in him, a wish to enlighten himself and then you. Another may not be wrong in his facts, but have a declamatory or sophistical vein in him, much to be guarded against. A third may be both inaccurate and untruthful, caring not so much for anything as to write his book. And if the reader cares only to read it, sad work they make between them of the memories of former days.
In studying history, it must be borne in mind that a knowledge is necessary of the state of manners, customs, wealth, arts, and science at the different periods treated of. The text of civil history requires a context of this knowledge in the mind of the reader. For the same reason, some of the main facts of the geography of the countries in question should be present to him. If we are ignorant of these aids to history, all history is apt to seem alike to us. It becomes merely a narrative of men of our own time, in our own country; and then we are prone to expect the same views and conduct from them that we do from our contemporaries. It is true that the heroes of antiquity have been represented on the stage in bag-wigs, and the rest of the costume of our grandfathers: but it was the great events of their lives that were thus told—the crisis of their passions—and when we are contemplating the representation of great passions and their consequences, all minor imagery is of little moment. In a long-drawn narrative, however, the more we have in our minds of what concerned the daily life of the people we read about, the better. And in general it may be said that history, like travelling, gives a return in proportion to the knowledge that a man brings to it.
III. BY WHOM HISTORY SHOULD BE WRITTEN.
Before entering directly on this part of the subject, it is desirable to consider a little the difficulties in the way of writing history. We all know the difficulty of getting at the truth of a matter which happened yesterday, and about which we can examine the living actors upon oath. But in history the most significant things may lack the most important part of their evidence. The people who were making history were not thinking of the convenience of future writers of history. Often the historian must contrive to get his insight into matters from evidence of men and things which is like bad pictures of them. The contemporary, if he knew the man, said of the picture, “I should have known it, but it has very little of him in it.” The poor historian, with no original before him, has to see through the bad picture into the man. Then, supposing our historian rich in well-selected evidence—I say well-selected, because, as students tell us, for many an historian one authority is of the same weight as another, provided they are both of the same age; still, how difficult is narration even to the man who is rich in well-selected evidence. What a tendency there is to round off a narrative into falsehood; or else by parenthesis to destroy its pith and continuity. Again, the historian knows the end of many of the transactions he narrates. If he did not, how differently often he would narrate them. It would be a most instructive thing to give a man the materials for the account of a great transaction, stopping short of the end, and then see how different would be his account from the ordinary ones. Fools have been hardly dealt with in the saying that the event is their master (“eventus stultorum magister”), seeing how it rules us all. And in nothing more than in history. The event is always present to our minds; along the pathways to it, the historian and the moralist have walked till they are beaten pathways, and we imagine that they were so to the men who first went along them. Indeed, we almost fancy that these ancestors of ours, looking along the beaten path, foresaw the event as we do; whereas, they mostly stumbled upon it suddenly in the forest. This knowledge of the end we must, therefore, put down as one of the most dangerous pitfalls which beset the writers of history. Then consider the difficulty in the “composition,” to use an artist’s word, of our historian’s picture. Before both the artist and the historian lies Nature as far as the horizon; how shall they choose that portion of it which has some unity and which shall represent the rest? What method is needful in the grouping of facts; what learning, what patience, what accuracy!
By whom, then, should history be written? In the first place, by men of some experience in real life; who have acted and suffered; who have been in crowds, and seen, perhaps felt, how madly men can care about nothings; who have observed how much is done in the world in an uncertain manner, upon sudden impulses and very little reason; and who, therefore, do not think themselves bound to have a deep-laid theory for all things. They should be men who have studied the laws of the affections, who know how much men’s opinions depend on the time in which they live, how they vary with their age and their position. To make themselves historians, they should also have considered the combinations amongst men and the laws that govern such things; for there are laws. Moreover our historians, like most men who do great things, must combine in themselves qualities which are held to belong to opposite natures; must at the same time be patient in research and vigorous in imagination, energetic and calm, cautious and enterprising. Such historians, wise, as we may suppose they will be, about the affair of other men, may, let us hope, be sufficiently wise about their own affairs to understand that no great work can be done without great labour, that no great labour ought to look for its reward. But my readers will exclaim as Rasselas to Imlac on hearing the requisites for a poet, “Enough! thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be an historian. Proceed with thy narration.”
IV. HOW HISTORY SHOULD BE WRITTEN.
One of the first things in writing history is for the historian to recollect that it is history he is writing. The narrative must not be oppressed by reflections, even by wise ones. Least of all should the historian suffer himself to become entangled by a theory or a system. If he does, each fact is taken up by him in a particular way: those facts that cannot be so handled cease to be his facts, and those that offer themselves conveniently are received too fondly by him.
Then, although our historian must not be mastered by system, he must have some way of taking up his facts and of classifying them. They must not be mere isolated units in his eyes, else he is mobbed by them. And a man in the midst of a crowd, though he may know the names and nature of all the crowd, cannot give an account of their doings. Those who look down from the housetop must do that.
But, above all things, the historian must get out of his own age into the time in which he is writing. Imagination is as much needed for the historian as the poet. You may combine bits of books with other bits of books, and so make some new combinations, and this may be done accurately, and, in general, much of the subordinate preparation for history may be accomplished without any great effort of imagination. But to write history in any large sense of the words, you must be able to comprehend other times. You must know that there is a right and wrong which is not your right and wrong, but yet stands upon the right and wrong of all ages and all hearts. You must also appreciate the outward life and colours of the period you write about. Try to think how the men you are telling of would have spent a day, what were their leading ideas, what they cared about. Grasp the body of the time, and give it to us. If not, and these men could look at your history, they would say, “This is all very well; we daresay some of these things did happen; but we were not thinking of these things all day long. It does not represent us.”
After enlarging upon this great requisite, imagination, it seems somewhat prosaic to come down to saying that history requires accuracy. But I think I hear the sighs, and sounds more harsh than sighing, of those who have ever investigated anything, and found by dire experience the deplorable inaccuracy which prevails in the world. And, therefore, I would say to the historian almost as the first suggestion, “Be accurate; do not make false references, do not mis-state: and men, if they get no light from you, will not execrate you. You will not stand in the way, and have to be explained and got rid of.”
Another most important matter in writing history, and that indeed in which the art lies, is the method of narrating. This is a thing almost beyond rules, like the actual execution in music or painting. A man might have fairness, accuracy, an insight into other times, great knowledge of facts, some power even of arranging them, and yet make a narrative out of it all, so protracted here, so huddled together there, the purpose so buried or confused, that men would agree to acknowledge the merit of the book and leave it unread. There must be a natural line of associations for the narrative to run along. The separate threads of the narrative must be treated separately, and yet the subject not be dealt with sectionally, for that is not the way in which the things occurred. The historian must, therefore, beware that those divisions of the subject which he makes for our ease and convenience, do not induce him to treat his subject in a flimsy manner. He must not make his story easy where it is not so.
After all, it is not by rule that a great history is to be written. Most thinkers agree that the main object for the historian is to get an insight into the things which he tells of, and then to tell them with the modesty of a man who is in the presence of great events; and must speak about them carefully, simply, and with but little of himself or of his affections thrown into the narration.
V. HOW GOOD WRITERS OF HISTORY SHOULD BE CALLED FORTH, AIDED, AND REWARDED.
Mainly by history being properly read. The direct ways of commanding excellence of any kind are very few, if any. When a State has found out its notable men, it should reward them, and will show its worthiness by its measure and mode of reward. But it cannot purchase them. It may do something in the way of aiding them. In history, for instance, the records of a nation may be discreetly managed, and some of the minor work, therefore, done to the hand of the historian. But the most likely method to ensure good historians is to have a fit audience for them. And this is a very difficult matter. In works of general literature, the circle of persons capable of judging is large; even in works of science or philosophy it is considerable: but in history, it is a very confined circle. To the general body of readers, whether the history they read is true or not is in no way perceptible. It is quite as amusing to them when it is told in one way as in another. There is always mischief in error: but in this case the mischief is remote, or seems so. For men of ordinary culture, even if of much intelligence, the difficulty of discerning what is true or false in the histories they read makes it a matter of the highest duty for those few persons who can give us criticism on historical works, at least to save us from insolent and mendacious carelessness in historical writers, if not by just encouragement to secure for nations some results not altogether unworthy of the great enterprise which the writing of history holds out itself to be. “Hujus enim fidei exempla majorum, vicissitudines rerum, fundamenta prudentiæ civilis, hominum denique nomen et fama commissa sunt.” [183]
Ellesmere. Just wait a minute for me, and do not talk about the essay till I come back. I am going for Anster’s Faust.
Dunsford. What has Ellesmere got in his head?
Milverton. I see. There is a passage where Faust, in his most discontented mood, falls foul of history—in his talk to Wagner, if I am not mistaken.
Dunsford. How beautiful it is this evening! Look at that yellow-green near the sunset.
Milverton. The very words that Coleridge uses. I always think of them when I see that tint.
Dunsford. I daresay his words were in my mind, but I have forgotten what you allude to.
Milverton.
“O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood,
To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo’d,
All this long eve, so balmy and serene,
Have I been gazing on the western sky,
And its peculiar tint of yellow-green:
And still I gaze—and with how blank an eye!
And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars;
Those stars that glide behind them or between,
Now sparkling, now bedimmed, but always seen:
Yon crescent Moon as fixed as if it grew
In its own cloudless, starless lake of blue;
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel how beautiful they are.”
Dunsford. Admirable! In the Ode to Dejection, is it not? where, too, there are those lines,
“O Lady! we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live.”
Milverton. But here comes Ellesmere with triumphant look. You look as jovial, my dear Ellesmere, as if you were a Bentley that had found a false quantity in a Boyle.
Ellesmere. Listen and perpend, my historical friends.
“To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book, sealed with seven seals:
That which you call the spirit of ages past
Is but, in truth, the spirit of some few authors
In which those ages are beheld reflected,
With what distortion strange heaven only knows.
Oh! often, what a toilsome thing it is
This study of thine—at the first glance we fly it.
A mass of things confusedly heaped together;
A lumber-room of dusty documents,
Furnished with all approved court-precedents
And old traditional maxims! History!
Facts dramatised say rather—action—plot—
Sentiment, everything the writer’s own,
As it bests fits the web-work of his story,
With here and there a solitary fact
Of consequence, by those grave chroniclers,
Pointed with many a moral apophthegm,
And wise old saws, learned at the puppet-shows.”
Milverton. Yes; admirable lines; they describe to the life the very faults we have been considering as the faults of badly-written histories. I do not see that they do much more.
Ellesmere.
“To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book.”—
Milverton. Those two first lines are the full expression of Faust’s discontent—unmeasured as in the presence of a weak man who could not check him. But, if you come to look at the matter closely, you will see that the time present is also in some sense a sealed book to us. Men that we live with daily we often think as little of as we do of Julius Cæsar, I was going to say—but we know much less of them than of him.
Ellesmere. I did not mean to say that Faust spoke my sentiments about history in general. Still, there are periods of history which we have very few authors to tell us about, and I daresay in some of those cases the colouring of their particular minds gives us a false idea of the whole age they lived in.
Dunsford. This may have happened, certainly.
Milverton. We must be careful not to expect too much from the history of past ages, as a means of understanding the present age. There is something wanted besides the preceding history to understand each age. Each individual life may have a problem of its own, which all other biography accurately set down for us might not enable us to work out. So of each age. It has something in it not known before, and tends to a result which is not down in any books.
Dunsford. Yet history must be of greatest use in discerning this tendency.
Ellesmere. Yes; but the Wagner sort of pedant would get entangled in his round of history—in his historical resemblances.
Dunsford. Now, Milverton, if you were called upon to say what are the peculiar characteristics of this age, what should you say?
Ellesmere. One of Dunsford’s questions this, requiring a stout quarto volume with notes in answer.
Milverton. I would rather wait till I was called upon. I am apt to feel, after I have left off describing the character of any individual man, as if I had only just begun. And I do not see the extent of discourse that would be needful in attempting to give the characteristics of an age.
Ellesmere. I think you are prudent to avoid answering Dunsford’s question. For my own part, I should prefer giving an account of the age we live in after we have come to the end of it—in the true historical fashion. And so, Dunsford, you must wait for my notions.
Dunsford. I am afraid, Milverton, if you were to write history, you would never make up your mind to condemn anybody.
Milverton. I hope I should not be so inconclusive. I certainly do dislike to see any character, whether of a living or a dead person, disposed of in a summary way.
Ellesmere. For once I will come to the rescue of Milverton. I really do not see that a man’s belief in the extent and variety of human character, and in the difficulty of appreciating the circumstances of life, should prevent him from writing history—from coming to some conclusions. Of course such a man is not likely to write a long course of history; but that I hold has been a frequent error in historians—that they have taken up subjects too large for them.
Milverton. If there is as much to be said about men’s character and conduct as I think there mostly is, why should we be content with shallow views of them? Take the outward form of these hills and valleys before us. When we have seen them a few times, we think we know them, but are quite mistaken. Approaching from another quarter, it is almost new ground to us. It is a long time before you master the outward form and semblance of any small piece of country that has much life and diversity in it. I often think of this, applying it to our little knowledge of men. Now, look there a moment: you see that house; close behind it is apparently a barren tract. In reality there is nothing of the kind there. A fertile valley with a great river in it, as you know, is between that house and the moors. But the plane of those moors and of the house is coincident from our present point of view. Had we not, as educated men, some distrust of the conclusions of our senses, we should be ready to swear that there was a lonely house on the border of the moors. It is the same in judging of men. We see a man connected with a train of action which is really not near him, absolutely foreign to him, perhaps, but in our eyes that is what he is always connected with. If there were not a Being who understands us immeasurably better than other men can, immeasurably better than we do ourselves, we should be badly off.
Such precautionary thoughts as these must be useful, I contend. They need not make us indifferent to character, or prevent us from forming judgments where we must form them, but they show us what a wide thing we are talking about when we are judging the life and nature of a man.
Ellesmere. I am sure, Dunsford, you are already convinced: you seldom want more than a slight pretext for going over to the charitable side of things. You are only afraid of not dealing stoutly enough with bad things and people. Do not be afraid though. As long as you have me to abuse, you will say many unjust things against me, you know, so that you may waste yourself in good thoughts about the rest of the world, past and present. Do you know the lawyer’s story I had in my mind then? “Many times when I have had a good case,” he said, “I have failed; but then I have often succeeded with bad cases. And so justice is done.”
Milverton. To return to the subject. It is not a sort of equalising want of thought about men that I desire; only not to be rash in a matter that requires all our care and prudence.
Dunsford. Well, I believe I am won over. But now to another point. I think, Milverton, that you have said hardly anything about the use of history as an incentive to good deeds and a discouragement to evil ones.
Milverton. I ought to have done so. Bolingbroke gives in his “Letters on History,” talking of this point, a passage from Tacitus, “Præcipuum munus annalium,”—can you go on with it, Dunsford?
Dunsford. Yes, I think I can. It is a passage I have often seen quoted. “Præcipuum munus annalium, reor, ne virtutes sileantur; utque pravis dictis factisque ex posteritate et infamiâ metus sit.”
Ellesmere. Well done; Dunsford may have invented it, though, for aught that we know, Milverton, and be passing himself off upon us for Tacitus.
Milverton. Then Bolingbroke goes on to say (I wish I could give you his own flowing words), that the great duty of history is to form a tribunal like that amongst the Egyptians which Diodorus tells of, where both common men and princes were tried after their deaths, and received appropriate honour or disgrace. The sentence was pronounced, he says, too late to correct or to recompense; but it was pronounced in time to render examples of general instruction to mankind. Now, what I was going to remark upon this is, that Bolingbroke understates his case. History well written is a present correction, and a foretaste of recompense, to the man who is now struggling with difficulties and temptations, now overcast by calumny and cloudy misrepresentation.
Ellesmere. Yes; many a man makes an appeal to posterity which will never come before the court; but if there were no such court of appeal—
Milverton. A man’s conviction that justice will be done to him in history is a secondary motive, and not one which, of itself, will compel him to do just and great things; but, at any rate, it forms one of the benefits that flow from history, and it becomes stronger as histories are better written. Much may be said against care for fame; much also against care for present repute. There is a diviner impulse than either at the doing of any actions that are much worth doing. As a correction, however, this anticipation of the judgment of history may really be very powerful. It is a great enlightenment of conscience to read the opinions of men on deeds similar to those we are engaged in or meditating.
Dunsford. I think Bolingbroke’s idea, which I imagine was more general than yours, is more important: namely, that this judicial proceeding, mentioned by Diodorus Siculus, gave significant lessons to all people, not merely to those who had any chance of having their names in history.
Milverton. Certainly: for this is one of Bolingbroke’s chief points, if I recollect rightly.
Ellesmere. Our conversations are much better things than your essays, Milverton.
Milverton. Of course, I am bound to say so: but what made you think of that now?
Ellesmere. Why, I was thinking how in talk we can know exactly where we agree or differ. But I never like to interrupt the essay. I never know when it would come to an end if I did. And so it swims on like a sermon, having all its own way: one cannot put in an awkward question in a weak part, and get things looked at in various ways.
Dunsford. I suppose, then, Ellesmere, you would like to interrupt sermons.