Chapter V Clio’s Vintage
History after all is the true poetry.—CARLYLE
To the one who drinks of the wisdom of Clio, the Muse of history, there will come manifold riches other than the accrued satisfaction of well-weighed political judgment. A knowledge of history, in its broadest sense, may well be said to be the essential foundation of all cultural education. The movements in science, philosophy, music, literature and the plastic arts are all inseparably intertwined, and they have as their controlling background the political actions of men and the economic forces that move peoples.
It is as impossible to thoroughly understand the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley or Byron without having an appreciation of the political and economic events of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era, as it is to conceive of the Epics of Homer without the Trojan War. The music of Bach and Haydn has as its foundation the reasonableness in religion, philosophy and political thought of the eighteenth century, as the music of Wagner and Chopin the unreason and rampant individualism of the early nineteenth. The books of the Cromwellian period reflect the illiberality and severity of the Puritan parliaments: the books of the Restoration reflect the French upbringing of Charles II. Wars and rumors of war, famine and years of plenty, new discoveries and great invasions make up the life of the world, and it is of this life that literature and music are made. We could indefinitely cite instances of the influence that history has had upon the arts, but in this chapter let us consider history as an art, history as literature.
No historian who deserves the name should write “dry” histories. The greatest historian is he who has an inspired passion for delving into the past, and the ability to interpret it in its living, human aspects. The “scientific” student who considers his mission that of arriving at the precise facts is not an historian but a “dry-as-dust” recorder. He is useful, however, in providing the material that will enable the true historian to cast illuminating spotlights upon the centuries that have gone before. Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, one of the most distinguished of our American historical writers, tells us that “Hi’story’—let us not forget—is five-sevenths story.” The historians whom we want to read are those who tell us the dramatic story of the past. Two-sevenths of their ability should, perhaps, be their infinite patience and intellectual honesty in gathering, sorting and weighing documents and other sources of information, but the other five-sevenths must be that ability which is the genius of the story teller. Someone has said that every historian must be his own “dry-as-dust,” his own bespectacled investigator of authentic facts,—if the rest of him is an impassioned teller of tales we have a supreme historian. Gibbon, before the days of elaborately prepared source books, before the days of thoroughly indexed libraries, ransacked the learned treasuries of Europe and Asia Minor for information; to this infinite patience there was added in his character the gifts of the artist and the dreamer. The result, after ceaseless labor, was the monumental, yet fascinating and comparatively reliable, “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” a book that is acknowledged the acme of historical perfection.
A few months ago, a woman of intellect, a wide traveller, an omnivorous reader, a mother of a large family, an efficient manager in whatever she undertook, was asked the name of the book that had made the most impression upon her life. Without a moment’s hesitation she replied, Carlyle’s “History of the French Revolution.” Upon questioning her, we found that she had read the two large volumes three times, and with each rereading there had awakened in her the sentiments aroused by the greatest dramatic tragedy, the most intense human story.
Carlyle was not a scientific historian, he did not write histories for other historians; he wrote as one whom God directed to put upon pages of flame the characters, the drama, the magnificent incidents, the cruelties, the braveries, the cowardices, the heroisms of “the truth that is stranger than fiction.” It is indeed more interesting to read of what men have done as depicted by the historian, than what they might have done as depicted by the second-rate novelist!
If you have not read the “French Revolution,” read it at once! The author has taken the most dramatic period in modern times and he has treated it as it deserves. It has the power of tragedy, whose mission is, according to Aristotle, “to purify the soul through fear and terror.” Your soul will be enlightened, you will be made to feel, as all great history makes you feel, that life is played upon a wondrous highway, and that the sights and works upon the way are of the sort to make you live in a trembling condition of wonder and expectancy. The city crowds will have new meaning: men and women, for having once been participants in the terrible cataclysm of one hundred and twenty year ago, are still of the stuff to accomplish strange deeds, and to fulfil undreamed-of destinies.
Has it occurred to you what a relatively small and insignificant number of familiar acquaintances we are able in our daily life to have? How many men and women do you know who have guided the destinies of nations, led great armies into the field, or are to meet death in their attempts to overthrow the tyranny of a despot or a bigot? In history we may meet them, and become acquainted with their problems and struggles. The past is a select drawing-room into which we all may enter. We may derive inspiration from the same wells that prompted the Crusaders to set out time after time in their well-nigh fatal effort to drive the Moslems from Jerusalem; we may absorb the spirit that moved Cromwell’s Ironsides; we may appreciate the pettiness of our own weaknesses and vexations in comparison with the odds against which some of History’s heroes have fought and conquered. It is pleasant to live in the court of Louis XIV and to talk with kings and princes through the pages of St. Simon’s “Memoirs”; it is a spiritual tonic and excitement to follow the careers of the Indian Missionaries through Parkman’s glowing pages! It is in truth more downright “fun” than doing most things!
Undoubtedly it is true that Napoleon’s ruthless ambition brought devastation to the lands that he conquered, and sorrow to the nation whose young men he led to the cannon’s mouth, and yet I sometimes think that greater than the Code Napoleon, which he instituted, is the inspiration that his career has been to the young men of all countries. How many boys have dreamed their vision of the future when following the work of the little Corsican, who at the age of twenty-seven led the armies of France across the Alps to crumple in a series of whirlwind campaigns the proud power of Austria. And there was William Pitt, the Younger, who at twenty-four became Prime Minister of England, one-armed and half-blind Nelson at Trafalgar Bay, Lincoln, the rail-splitting President, Olive, Garibaldi, Hampden, and how many another has been a light that beckons our future soldiers and statesmen?
In every epoch of history we will find new horizons opened that will enrich and broaden our daily life; in every vital struggle we will find individuals and peoples who have acted in such a way that we should hope to be guided by them in our struggles and ambitions; in the failures of the past we may obtain moral lessons for the present and the future; in coördinating our forces and forming our judgments we will obtain a training for our minds which will be of use to every man in carrying out the enterprises in which he is engaged.
Dr. Johnson well said that the traveller brings from his journeys that which he brings to them. It is indeed pitiful to be in Paris and to see countless American tourists rushing about “seeing Paris.” What a difference there is between those who bring to the storied city on the Seine a familiarity with her past, and those who bring nothing but time and money to spend. For the first, there are human dramas lurking in the shadows of Notre Dame; Quasimodo, the strange dwarf in Hugo’s great romance, still swings on the bells of the belfry; the narrow streets and turbulent cafes may still contain the instigators of the Reign of Terror and their shouting mobs of “sans culottes”; Camille Desmoulins may still be visualized in the Café Royal plucking the leaves to make his tricolor cockade. At every turn, in every ancient building, there are rich historic memories that may feed the traveller who has prepared himself.
And the others, to whom history is a closed book! How barren and incompetent are their wanderings in Paris, London, Vienna, or any other old world city! To think that one can appreciate the historic gathering places of the human race without having knowledge of their past is as absurd as to believe one knows the woods when one cannot appreciate the beauty and wonder of the wild life that makes of the woods its dwelling place. Go among the trees some day with one who has studied and absorbed “the woodnotes varied”! Wander about the Quais of Paris, or the Temple Inns of London, with a man who has read history with a human interpretation, and consider upon your return the increased wealth, you carry in your mind!
We cannot all be travellers, but it is always safe to store up material against a possible future; although I have never read far into the history of China, and though there is little possibility of my ever visiting the land of ancient civilizations, I am sure I could derive much pleasure and obtain a better understanding of our Occident if I followed a course of reading upon the varied fortunes of the different dynasties that have ruled the richly storied Eastern nation.
Our history books teach us valuable lessons in the art of living,—and this is assuredly the most important of the arts! As a man who brings something upon his travels besides his pocket-book and luggage comes home with rich experiences and memories, so does the man who approaches life with something more than a hungry stomach obtain from life more than he otherwise would. The greater variety of experiences we have, the more we know of the affairs of men, the richer our understanding of the forces that have ruled the world, the more replete with ecstatic living is our daily life. If the best of life is to be won by living in the world keen and alive to everything that moves, or thinks, or glitters, a great share of riches must go to the man who has studied and thought in other realms than those which immediately surround his own dwelling house.
In Philadelphia I sometimes watch the hurrying crowds of business men go scurrying underneath the shadow of Independence Hall. I wonder if these crowds are in any true sense aware of the important and heroic deeds that were accomplished in that building. I am sure that if they did their movements beneath that shadow would be rich in living experience. At political conventions, I sometimes wonder whether the delegates are aware of the vast consequence of the long governmental tradition which they, as delegates, have been called upon to uphold, and I feel sure that those who do, fulfil their responsibilities with a quickened sense of their weight and human moment.
On the observation car of a twentieth-century flyer the road-bed is so smooth, the rails so even, the power so terrific, that the past as an industrial development that has cast aside the stage coach, the prairie schooner, the pony express, makes one alive to the romance of the present. Down on the beach of a popular New Jersey summer resort when the water is dotted black with bobbing civilized bathers, look out over the waves and wonder at the change of but four hundred years. In a moment your mind can travel back to the Spanish castle and see Columbus begging the gold that would enable him to equip his ships to sail westward into the unknown sea. Romance cannot be dead so long as men work, and strive, and play.
There is an art in reading history as there is an art in writing it. The writer who tells us of a battle with the same lack of imagination as the recorder who prepares mortality statistics must be compared to the reader who crams his mind full of dates and uncoördinated facts without drawing from them the riches and lessons of experience. The true historian and the proper reader of history must find in the past a world of enlightenment, an enrichment that magnifies, clarifies, and makes living the present. It is better to have studied a minute epoch, the history of your county or town, with a human understanding than to have unintelligently digested the careers of a hundred heroes, the military movements in fifty campaigns.
Do not turn from the eight bulky volumes of Gibbon’s masterpiece with the fear that they are dry and useless, but begin them with the determination of finding an enlightenment to your vision of inestimable value in “the art of living.” The dates of battles, the names of individuals, the data about which life revolved, are only of value in that they are the framework upon which you can hang the true meaning of the past—the evolving germ of the present. The Song of Solomon is not to be read because it is the Bible, but rather because it is a love song of which the world can never grow weary; Motley’s “History of the Dutch Republic” is not to be read because it is recommended in the schools and colleges, but because in it you will find the unrolling of a human drama that will quicken your pulse and strengthen your faith in men.
Read the record of the past with the desire of obtaining a deeper understanding, an enlarged vision, an inspired ideal, a rich experience, and you will have become proficient in the art of reading history. You must have often thought upon the difficulty of determining exactly what you want. What do you desire life and your exertions to give you? In reading history perhaps you will be helped by finding out what Christ wanted when he died upon the cross, what the Pilgrims wanted when they left comfort and sailed to strange lands, what Stanley wanted when he buried himself in darkest Africa. Clio has had many wooers, from Thucydides to Carlyle and George Trevelyan, and their offerings form a treasure trove which must not be neglected.