I Believe and other essays

“Et quidquid Graecia mendax,
Audet in historia.”

    Juvenal.
Sir Robert Walpole, who sometimes spoke with an eloquent crash that echoes in our ears to-day, once said, “Do not read history to me, for that, I know, must be false.” Walpole may have read the Scienza Nuova of Vico probably in the French translation, and could hardly have failed to know something of Bossuet and Montesquieu. The result of his deliberations on the labours of contemporary historians is expressed thus, in a short, sudden bark of contempt.

Sir Robert made history, and did not dare to attempt the far more arduous task of writing it. When he gave it, his judgment had not so much value as it has to-day. Some of us read the limpid prose of Bossuet still, nor is the Grandeur et Décadence des Romains forgotten. Yet if at this moment a statesman were to repeat the opinion in reference to most of the history taught and written in Oxford, he would only be speaking the literal truth. The youth of a nation are Trustees for posterity, and it is to them in the first place, and to those who are responsible for their education in the second, that this paper is addressed.

I am aware that I am going to say some astonishing things, nor am I, under the sense of a strong conviction, confounding antipathy with duty. My words may fail to penetrate into the gloom of that temple where the fanatic priests of the inarticulate, inaccurate, and dull still sacrifice victims to the idols Freeman and Stubbs. But I have a reasonable expectation of a wider audience, and it lies in the hands of that audience, the undergraduate members of the University and their parents, to say if the present state of things shall continue. The Hebdomadal Council, Congregation and Convocation represent an insignificant minority. It is to the Pupil not the Tutor, to the Parent not the Fellow, to the Majority not to the Minority that I propose to speak.

It is axiomatic that no sum which the well-to-do undergraduate is prepared to pay could be too high for a perfect education and a learned environment. It is the fact that neither the one nor the other is provided, which deserves the attention, and should excite the alarm, of those who expect the former, the latter, or a combination of them both.

The poor man, to whom a good degree means a knife with which he will open the world’s oyster, suffers more greatly than the wealthier man. But both suffer, and both have a right to expect that in paying money for a genuine article they shall certainly obtain it.

The object of this essay, therefore, is to awaken the majority upon the whole matter, more especially that portion of the majority that designs to read history. The power lies in your hands. It is only by your acquiescence that the scandal continues, and it is the money of you and your parents which runs the machine. Once supplies are stopped, the present state of things will also stop with automatic suddenness. The art of history – for it is an art and not a science – will then revive in its full splendour, as the frescoes glow out upon the walls of an ancient church when the disfiguring whitewash is removed. The art of history will take its proper place and exercise its right function in the University, and the Historicides will remove their activities to a sphere in which they will be more appreciated. I believe that a University exists in Hayti…

I purpose a comprehensive summary of this question, and have spared no trouble to make the indictment as fair and accurate as I can. For a considerable period I have been steadily gathering data and forming opinions. Documents of importance and value have been furnished to me, and if something actual and conclusive does not result, then the fault is that of the writer, who has failed to deal adequately with the material which he has himself collected and with which he has been lavishly and generously supplied.

“Doest thou well to be angry?” was the question asked of the Hebrew prophet, who thereupon “went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.” And finally came the answer of Jonah, “I do well to be angry, even unto death.” My friends and I have built our modest place of espial, and we have our idea of what would become of the city were it left in the hands of certain rulers. That we do well to be angry I hope to show.

In the first place, it is really necessary to define history, and the duties of the historian. Until we have done this we have no standpoint. The axiom must always precede the syllogism just as the epithet concludes it. No one can build a basis in a vacuum. Innumerable minds have been at pains to define history.

From the remote time when Lucian published his treatise How History ought to be Written until the depressing moment when Bishop Stubbs first attempted to write it, there has been an enormous divergence of thought on this point. Kant believed that Dynasty and Nation, Emperor and Clown were alike incidents and puppets illustrating the theory that an irresistible, all-pervading Force works through history towards one end – the development of a perfect constitution. If Kant had written history and applied his method instead of indicating it, he would have had us believe that history is a science to be studied under the limiting influence of a rigid formula.

Ranke thought, and thought rightly, that the analysis of original documents alone made possible the synthesis of the past, while the trained historian in his endeavour to get at the truth should be chary of accepting contemporary authors, unless eye-witnesses of the events they chronicled. Yet Ranke definitely placed himself with those who were beginning to believe that history was a science and nothing more.

Guizot, who edited Gibbon, freshly defined the labours of the historian. Guizot’s view was that faithful research, with its results duly applied, ought to enable the historian to supply such a picture of the past that it should be both to his readers and himself a veritable present. I know of no more illuminating conception. But how can an historian supply the picture unless he has a competent knowledge of psychology? To write about human beings in the past without a knowledge of psychology is exactly like writing a history of locomotives without understanding anything whatever about the nature and properties of steam.

It is only quite lately that the scientists have allowed psychology to be a science, with, for example, as fixed a place and purpose as biology. If any one asked me for a list of authors from whom he would learn something of psychology I should probably commend to him Maher (1900), Spencer (1890), Stout (1899), James (1892), M’Cosh (1886), and so on.

You see the dates, do you not? You realize what every one who lives in the realm of thought, as also many who work in the sphere of action, must realize? Briefly it is this. The old historians were concerned only with the simple results of investigation; the best modern historian adds to his equipment a knowledge of the processes of thought. The older sciences are joining hands with the new science of psychology. It is discerned that the individual temperament must clothe the bones of fact with the colour and movement that psychological knowledge alone can give.

It is discerned, but only by the important people as yet – only by the people who matter and count. The Oxford historians whom I am attacking have not realized it and will never realize it, which is the precise reason why we must reform them or give them the alternative of staffing the upper grade board schools.

James Anthony Froude did realize this certainty, and his works are not recommended to be read by candidates for history honours. The malignant personal hatred of Freeman, the stupidity of lesser men, long endeavoured to crush and limit the influence of the greatest historian, because the completest artist, who wrote history in our era. The endeavour to suppress him continues, but it is no longer anything but an endeavour. The times are changing very rapidly, and the triumphant war-whoops of some years ago have sunk to-day into the moribund whimpers of the discredited and deposed.

Everybody in Oxford is waking up to the fact that if history is to have unity of organism and purpose it must have artistic proportion and be informed by art. The leaven has been working for a long time, unobserved by the people it is destined to destroy at the moment of completed fermentation. It is always thus with revolutions. The period of gestation is lengthy and its processes are obscure. But the completed moment arrives, the goddess bursts in full armour from her sire, or Gargantua is born “crying not as other babes used to do, miez, miez, miez, miez, but with a high, sturdy, and big voice!”

The occasion that has set in motion forces which in no short time will destroy the little eminence of the Oxford Historicides, was the publication of Mr. Herbert Paul’s Life of James Anthony Froude. Everything had led up to that; I was cognizant of all the restlessness and disgust which were seething below the surface, and when at last the volume fell into Oxford with the noise and reverberation of a thunder-bolt, I was daily informed of the hideous consternation of those who realized that their day was over, that the judge was set and the doom begun, that no one could stay it.

I wish that I could write frankly and openly of the disturbance and alarm the book occasioned. If I were publishing this essay in the first instance in America I should certainly do so. However, as it will appear in England and afterwards in the Land of Freedom of Speech, this joy is not permitted to me. As Mr. H. G. Wells would say, “Figure that the bomb fell upon the green of All Souls’ while the clock in the gateway of Christ Church was in the act of striking twelve.”

The rush and hurry, the frightened consultations, the squeaks of those who realized that Nemesis was at hand at last and was beating at the door, were, I can assure the public that will read this paper, comparable to nothing so much as the occasion when the feet of the ferret are heard drumming down the hollow burrows of the warren, while the rabbits know the day of irresponsible frolic is over and that they must die in the dark or in the open, but must die.

The Historicides of Oxford have always feared an extended public and distrusted a name that has been made without their connivance, and which is beyond their reach. I find it difficult to suppose that those who do not realize the incredible narrowness and stupidity of a certain type of history don, will believe the anecdote I am about to tell. Nevertheless, it is true. A pedant, whose name I will not give, was recently heard to refer to Mr. Thomas Hardy in these words, “Hardy? Hardy? Oh, do you mean the little novelist man?”

Let me put it before you quite plainly and in antithesis. Hardly anything could better illustrate the appalling mental position of the camarilla that has got to go. Here is a priggish person, whom no one has ever heard of outside Oxford, piping out his contempt for a man who is generally recognized as one of the most distinguished novelists and one of the chief artists alive in our time.

It is possible that many people will not immediately appreciate the reason for all the terror excited by Mr. Paul’s biography. The outside man cannot quite know how Froude is, and always was, hated and feared by a certain section of the Oxford historians. They were always trying to hit him below the belt because he hit them above the intellect. There was a definite conspiracy among the malignant, from Freeman downwards, to lie about Froude in every conceivable way, and to complete their malicious impudence by calling Froude himself a liar. Froude was a master of English prose; the highest praise that can be given to the jargon which his detractors wrote, and write, is that it is not exactly Esperanto. Froude understood the colour of words, the movements of a paragraph, the harmonic rhythm of an emotion expressed in prose. His words were the incarnation of his original thought, theirs but accentuated their borrowings. While the genius of this great man was coming into its own, while it burned brightly and yet more bright, while all thoughtful England was beginning to be moved and stirred by a new force, and the possessor of it was living with intellects as great and gracious as his own, the Oxford historians slept in their padded rooms, and because they snored loudly imagined they were thinking. Too indolent to search for the truth, they contented themselves with dodging difficulties, and persuading each other that their ostentatious obscurity was fame.

There came a time at last when James Anthony Froude could no longer be ignored. His achievement was beginning to be a national possession, and he shared the councils of the rulers. The echoes of his fame reached the ears of the troglodytes, and, led by Freeman, they swarmed to the attack, yelping a pæan to mediocrity and brandishing weapons from a more than doubtful armoury.

Froude, as Mr. Paul has pointed out, “toiled for months and years over parchments and manuscripts often almost illegible, carefully noting the calligraphy, and among the authors of a joint composition assigning his proper share to each. Freeman wrote his History of the Norman Conquest, upon which he was at this time engaged, entirely from books, without consulting a manuscript or original document of any kind.”

Freeman, – the head of the daguerreotypical historians, – attacked a man whom he very well knew was his superior, pretending publicly to a greater knowledge of the special subject under discussion, and cynically denying any special knowledge in private. In public Freeman represented his hostile attitude as the natural outcome of his zeal for truth; in private it was known that he was actuated by personal hatred, and the discoveries made by Mr. J. B. Rye on the margins of Freeman’s books in Owens College library have discredited him for all time. Again I quote from Mr. Paul’s Life of Froude: —

“Freeman’s biographer, Dean Stephens, preserves absolute and unbroken silence on the duel between Freeman and Froude. I think the Dean’s conduct was judicious. But there is no reason why a biographer of Froude should follow his example. On the contrary, it is absolutely essential that he should not; for Freeman’s assiduous efforts, first in The Saturday, and afterwards in The Contemporary Review, did ultimately produce an impression, never yet fully dispelled, that Froude was an habitual garbler of facts and constitutionally reckless of the truth. But, before I come to details, let me say one word more about Freeman’s qualifications for the task which he so lightly and eagerly undertook. Freeman, with all his self-assertion, was not incapable of candour. He was staunch in friendship, and spoke openly to his friends. To one of them, the excellent Dean Hook, famous for his Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, he wrote, on the 27th of April, 1857, ‘You have found me out about the sixteenth century. I fancy that from endlessly belabouring Froude, I get credit for knowing more of those times than I do. But one can belabour Froude on a very small amount of knowledge, and you are quite right when you say that I “have never thrown the whole force of my mind on that portion of history.”’ These words pour a flood of light on the temper and knowledge with which Freeman must have entered on what he really seemed to consider a crusade. His object was to belabour Froude. His own acquaintance with the subject was, as he says, ‘very small,’ but sufficient for enabling him to dispose satisfactorily of an historian who had spent years of patient toil in thorough and exhaustive research. On another occasion, also writing to Hook, whom he could not deceive, he said, ‘I find I have a reputation with some people for knowing the sixteenth century, of which I am profoundly ignorant.’ It does not appear to have struck him that he had done his best in The Saturday Review to make people think that, as Froude’s critic, he deserved the reputation which he thus frankly and in private disclaims.

“Another curious piece of evidence has come to light. After Freeman’s death his library was transferred to Owens College, Manchester, and there, among his other books, is his copy of Froude’s History. He once said himself, in reference to his criticism of Froude, ‘In truth there is no kind of temper in the case, but only a strong sense of amusement in bowling down one thing after another.’ Let us see. Here are some extracts from his marginal notes. ‘A lie, teste Stubbs,’ as if Stubbs were an authority, in the proper sense of the term, any more than Froude. Authorities are contemporary witnesses, or original documents. Another entry is ‘Beast,’ and yet another is ‘Bah!’ ‘May I live to embowel James Anthony Froude,’ is the pious aspiration with which he has adorned another page. ‘Can Froude understand honesty?’ asks this anxious inquirer; and again, ‘Supposing Master Froude were set to break stones, feed pigs, or do anything else but write paradoxes, would he not curse his day?’ Along with such graceful compliments as ‘You’ve found that out since you wrote a book against your own father,’ ‘Give him as slave to Thirlwall,’ there may be seen the culminating assertion, ‘Froude is certainly the vilest brute that ever wrote a book.’ Yet there was ‘no kind of temper in the case,’ and ‘only a strong sense of amusement.’ I suppose it must have amused Freeman to call another historian a vile brute. But it is fortunate that there was no temper in the case. For if there had, it would have been a very bad temper indeed.”

Until Mr. Herbert Paul’s Life of Froude appeared a year ago, the Historicides had been continually repeating the lie that Froude garbled documents, was untrustworthy, and wrote not history but fiction. History, of course, often imitates fiction, for good fiction always deals with realities. But these slanderers did not pause for a definition. They continued to abuse Froude, to prevent their pupils from reading him, and to refuse him a place in the recognized curriculum of historical study at the University.

From time to time a doubter or inquirer arose and was promptly suppressed. Nor was it likely that a man, whatever his private opinion of those in authority might be, was going to jeopardize his chance of a good degree by publishing it. There were awkward moments, of course, for the slanderers. A lie is like a forged promissory note. When it becomes due another must be forged in order to take up the first. But the Historicides had the whip-hand. They controlled the examinations, and they could do what they pleased.

I once wrote a little story which I will outline here, because I think it illustrates the method of these people whenever any ugly fact was discovered and some one required an explanation.

There was once a simple-minded old gentleman of a philosophic temper and an inquiring mind. Blessed with an ample fortune and untroubled by any business instincts, he devoted his life to the search for truth. On the whole his life was a happy one, because he possessed the faculty of going on. His failures were not made tragic with courage, but were minimized by persistence, and so were not very different from successes. Yet, as the years went on, he began to feel that in his time he would never achieve his end. Seeing him somewhat downcast, and becoming indifferent to his chop and Chambertin, his butler, a faithful person, came to him one day, and, after venturing a privileged remonstrance, stated that he had something to disclose. “I have lately heard, sir,” said the butler, “that truth is really hidden at the bottom of a well. It may of course, sir, be mere idle talk, but I think, as far as I remember, we have not looked there yet? There was the church, sir – we found nothing there – and then I held the lantern for you in the chapel, too. There was none behind the art wall-paper, nor did Liberty have any in stock. And it wasn’t in history, sir, because I turned over every leaf of them Oxford books myself, and shook them well, too. You did think you’d found it in science, sir, I remember, there was something that you thought was truth in the bottom of the test-tube, but then you told me it wasn’t, though I forget what you said it was after all.”

“Merely a note of a recorded fact, Thomas,” said the old gentleman sorrowfully. “But do you really think there is anything in this idea of yours?”

“I cannot be positive, sir,” the butler replied; “but I see it stated definite at the end of a leading article in the Artesian Engineer.”

“Have we a well on the premises, Thomas?” the old gentleman asked, putting on his spectacles and rubbing his hands briskly together.

“I asked the gardener this morning, sir,” Thomas answered, “and he informs me that there is an old disused well by the cucumber-frame which could be opened easily enough by a couple of men working for a week.”

“Engage some men at once,” said the old gentleman, now thoroughly interested and pleased, and that day he enjoyed his chop with all his accustomed pleasure. The faithful butler, who had all his life lived worthily and well without truth, was overjoyed at the success of his suggestion. Anticipating, however, another disappointment, he gave private instructions, received con amore by the workmen, that they were not to hurry over their task of opening the well, and for a month the old gentleman’s appetite whetted by hope, was all that his faithful retainer could desire.

At length the work was done, the well was fully opened, and the page-boy (an adventurous youth) descended in the bucket. There was a tense silence in the garden as the boy disappeared, until his hollow-sounding voice hailed them from below vibrating with excitement.

“I’ve got un, sir,” ascended in a triumphant pipe; “he be here, sir, sure ’nuff!”

In a moment more the young fellow came to the surface, holding a large and speckled toad in his hand. On the back of the reptile an arrangement of orange-coloured spots spelt out the word TRUTH.

The old gentleman saw it, fell into uncontrollable rage, snatched the wondering reptile from the page-boy’s hand and stamped out its life upon the ground.

“To the house all of you,” he cried; “and never let me hear the name of truth again!” With that he forswore all his former theories, and in bitter irony started a society paper. However, the gardener, a wise, silent, and pawky person, came along later, and, picking a diamond from the crushed débris of the toad took it home and hid it away for the rest of his life, fearing discovery. When the gardener died, his relatives discovered the jewel, and knowing nothing of its value threw it away.

The old gentleman made an enormous fortune out of the society paper.

Forgive the digression. This, or something like it, was what the Historicides of Oxford did before the publication of Mr. Paul’s book. Whenever any one showed them the truth they snatched it from him, and ordered him back into Stubbs’s Charters.

I have already said something of the terror the Life of Froude excited. In a swift moment pretensions were exposed, lies were shown to be lies, and people began to read Froude. Mr. Paul made it quite plain that the accusations of dishonesty against Froude were utter fabrications. Mr. Paul, himself a learned historian, an artist and a man of letters, has gone into the charges seriatim, and triumphantly disproved them. No one can ever make them again. They are lies, they have been proved once and for ever to be lies. I cannot quote here the mass of refutation which has brought about the complete vindication of the accused historian. This is a summary and nothing more. It stands for all to read in Mr. Paul’s book, a volume which should be in the hands of every man who is reading, and means to read history at Oxford.

This memorable book is a protest against the charlatanry of the pseudo-scientific school of history. The acts and intentions of people in the past cannot be known better than the intentions and acts of people in the present. No one man can possibly sift all, or anything like all the evidence for any period. Much of the important evidence is missing. No one can be examined or cross-examined, and for an historian to write as if he were a judge delivering a decision is a piece of impertinence. The abler man, assuming his honesty, will make the abler historian, and the mere bookworm is not the best judge of what probably happened. It is the dull and incompetent who formerly invented the fable that brilliant writers are superficial. This is the lie behind which the “dry as dusts” have lurked for years; it was their last line of defence, and Mr. Paul has destroyed it.

The historian must be able to write distinguished English, and he must understand the enormous possibilities of his medium. He must add a sense of artistry to his scholarship. He must be a man of experience in human event, a man who has done and suffered; must have been in crowds and seen “how madly men can care about nothings,” and he must disabuse his mind of formula and theory before he begins to write. Sir Arthur Helps said this years ago: —

“To make themselves historians, they should also have considered the combinations among 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.”