1 HISTORY.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1828.] To write history respectably—that is, to ab- | talent for description and dialogue, and the breviate despatches, and make extracts from pure sweet flow of his language, place him at speeches, to intersperse in due proportion the head of narrators. He reminds us of a epithets of praise and abhorrence, to draw up delightful child. There is a grace beyond the antithetical characters of great men, setting reach of affectation in his awkwardness, a forth how many contradictory virtues and malice in his innocence, an intelligence in his vices they united, and abounding in withs and nonsense, an insinuating eloquence in his lisp. withouts; all this is very easy. But to be a We know of no writer who makes such inreally great historian is perhaps the rarest of terest for himself and his book in the heart of intellectual distinctions. Many Scientific works the reader. At the distance of three-and-twenty are, in their kind, absolutely perfect. There centuries, we feel for him the same sort of are Poems which we should be inclined to pitying fondness which Fontaine and Gay are designate as faultless, or as disfigured only by said to have inspired in society. He has blemishes which pass unnoticed in the general written an incomparable book. He has writblaze of excellence. There are Speeches, ten something better perhaps than the best some speeches of Demosthenes particularly, history; but he has not written a good history; in which it would be impossible to alter a he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inword, without altering it for the worse. But ventor. We do not here refer merely to those we are acquainted with no History which ap-gross fictions with which he has been reproachproaches to our notion of what a history ought to be; with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line. The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory. ed by the critics of later times. We speak of that colouring which is equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive. The most authentic parts of his work bear the same relation to his wildest legends, which Henry the Fifth bears to the Tempest. There was an expedition undertaken by Xerxes against Greece; and there was an invasion of France. There was a battle at Platea; and there was a battle at Agincourt. Cambridge and Exeter, the Constable and the Dauphin, were persons as real as Demaratus and Pausanias. The harangue of the Archbishop on the Salic Law History, it has been said, is philosophy and the Book of Numbers differs much less teaching by examples. Unhappily what the from the orations which have in all ages prophilosophy gains in soundness and depth, the ceeded from the Right Reverend bench, than examples generally lose in vividness. A per- the speeches of Mardonius and Artabanus, fect historian must possess an imagination from those which were delivered at the Coun sufficiently powerful to make his narrative cil-board of Susa. Shakspeare gives us enuaffecting and picturesque. Yet he must con- merations of armies, and returns of killed and trol it so absolutely as to content himself with wounded, which are not, we suspect, much the materials which he finds, and to refrain less accurate than those of Herodotus. There from supplying deficiencies by additions of his are passages in Herodotus nearly as long as own. He must be a profound and ingenious acts of Shakspeare, in which every thing is reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self- told dramatically, and in which the narrative command to abstain from casting his facts in serves only the purpose of stage-directions. It the mould of his hypothesis. Those who can is possible, no doubt, that the substance of some justly estimate these almost insuperable diffi- real conversations may have been reported culties will not think it strange that every to the historian. But events which, if they writer should have failed, either in the narra-ever happened, happened in ages and nations tive or in the speculative department of his- so remote that the particulars could never have been known to him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account which he gives of transactions, respecting which he might possibly have been well informed, we can trust to any thing be example, yond the naked outline; whether, for the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the tory. It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerab'e qualifications and exceptions, that history oegins in Novel and ends in Essay. Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful The Romance of History. England. By HENRY NEELE. London, 1828. Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly transmitted to us. The great events are, no doubt, faithfully related. So, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances; but which of them it is impossible to ascertain. The fic⚫tions are so much like the facts, and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many most interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that there is truth, but we cannot exactly decide where it lies. thority, but in itself not improbable, it was composed not to be read, but to be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward. The great Olympian festival-the solemnity which collected multitudes, proud of the Grecian name, from the wildest mountains of Doris and the remotest colonies of Italy and Lybia— was to witness his triumph. The interest of the narrative and the beauty of the style were aided by the imposing effect of recitation-by the splendour of the spectacle-by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could have The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a asked for anthorities in the midst of such a scene simple and imaginative mind. Children and must have been of a cold and sceptical nature, servants are remarkably Herodotean in their and few such critics were there. As was the style of narration. They tell every thing dra-historian, such were the auditors-inquisitive, matically. Their says hes and says shes are credulous, easily moved by religious awe or proverbial. Every person who has had to patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very men settle their disputes knows that, even when to hear with delight of strange beasts, and they have no intention to deceive, their reports birds, and trees; of dwarfs, and giants, and of conversation always require to be carefully cannibals; of gods whose very names it was sifted. If an educated man were giving an impiety to utter; of ancient dynasties which account of the late change of administration, had left behind them monuments surpassing he would say, "Lord Goderich resigned; and all the works of later times; of towns like prothe king in consequence sent for the Duke of vinces; of rivers like seas; of stupendous Wellington." A porter tells the story as if he walls, and temples, and pyramids; of the rites had been hid behind the curtains of the royal which the Magi performed at daybreak on the bed at Windsor. "So Lord Goderich says, 'I tops of the mountains; of the secrets inscribed cannot manage this business; I must go out.' on the eternal obelisks of Memphis. With So the king says, says he, 'Well, then, I must equal delight they would have listened to the send for the Duke of Wellington, that's all.'" graceful romances of their own country. They This is the very manner of the father of his- now heard of the exact accomplishment of obtory. scure predictions; of the punishment of crimes over which the justice of Heaven had seemed to slumber; of dreams, omnens, warnings from the dead; of princesses for whom noble suitors contended in every generous exercise of strength and skill; of infans strangely pre served from the dagger of the assassin to fulfil high destinies. Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy.. His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition. Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first historians might therefore indulge, without fear of censure, in the license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon who has killed three French cuirassiers as a prodigy; yet we read, without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years stories about China and Bantam, which ough not to have imposed on an old nurse, were gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon was to hem what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last century. For such a people was the book of HerodoIus composed; and if we may trust to a report, not sanctioned, indeed, by writers of high au As the narrative approached their own times the interest became still more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political supremacy-a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race-a story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is pathetic and animating; with the gigan tic caprices of infinite wealth and despotic power; with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue, and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day, of provinces famished for a meal; of a passage for ships hewn through the mountains; of a road for armies spread upon the waves; of monarchies and commonwealths swept away; of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of despair!-and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity of evil and not found wanting; of resistance long maintained against desperate odds; of lives dearly sold when resistance could be maintained no more; of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge. Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well calculated to inflame the passions and to flatter national pride was cer tain to be favourably received. Between the time at which Herodotus is said Hence, though nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories for the most part seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up, but no new province is added to the dominions of the human mind. Still, where thousands of keen and ready intellects were constantly employed in speculating on the qualities of actions and on the principles of government, it was impossible that history should retain its old character. It became less gossipping and less picturesque; but much more accurate, and somewhat more scientific. to have composed his history and the close of the Peloponnesian war about forty years elapsed-forty years crowded with great military and political events. The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilization advanced, the citizens of that famous republic became still less visionary and still less simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought it their duty The history of Thucydides differs from that to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding of Herodotus as a portrait differs from the reto this change in the temper of his country-presentation of an imaginary scene; as the men. The father and son, in the Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The wild sublimity of Eschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides. Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which had characterized it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more like the modern French. The fashionable logic of the Greeks was, indeed, far from strict. Logic never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is conveyed orally. We are all aware how frequently fallacies which, when set down on paper, are at once detected, pass for unanswerable arguments when dexterously and volubly urged in parliament, at the bar, or in private conversation. The reason is evident. We cannot inspect them closely enough to perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before us; and as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and listening. His opinions on governments were picked up in the debates of the assembly. If he wished to study metaphysics, instead of shutting himself up with a book, he walked down to the market-place to look for a sophist. So completely were men formed to these habits, that even writing acquired a conversational air. The philosophers adopted the form of dialogue as the most natural mode of communicating knowledge. Their reasonings have the merits and the defects which belong to that species of composition; and are characterized rather by quickness and subtilty than by depth and precision. Truth is exhibited in parts and by glimpses. Innumerable clever hints are given; but no sound and durable system is erected. The argumentum ad hominem, a kind of argument most efficacious in debate, but utterly useless for the investigation of general principles, is among their favourite resources. Burke or Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the former case, the archetype is given: in the latter it is created. The faculties which are required for the latter purpose are of a higher and rarer order than those which suffice for the former, and indeed necessarily comprise them. He who is able to paint what he sees with the eye of the mind, will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye of the body. He who can invent a story and tell it well, will also be able to tell, in an interesting manner, a story which he has not invented. If, in practice, some of the best writers of fiction have been among the worst writers of history, it has been be cause one of their talents had merged in another so completely, that it could not be severed; because, having long been habituated to invent and narrate at the same time, they found it impossible to narrate without inventing. Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true. In the former case he is no historian. In the latter, he has no opportunity for displaying his abilities. For truth is one: and all who tell the truth must tell it alike. It is not difficult to elude both the horns of this dilemma. We will recur to the analogous art of portrait-painting. Any man with eyes and hands may be taught to take a likeness. The process, up to a certain point, is merely mechanical. If this were all, a man of talents might justly despise the occupation. But we could mention portraits which are resemblances, but not mere resemblances; faithful, but much more than faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit, at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives-in which the eye seems to scrutinize us, and the mourn to command us-in which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn-in which every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among narratives, what Vandyck's Lerd Straf ford is among paintings. Diversity, it is said, implies error; truth one, and admits of no degree. We answer, * 2 In this respect no writer has ever equalled Thucydides. He was a perfect master of the art of gradual diminution. His history is sometimes as concise as a chronological chart; yet it is always perspicuous. It is sometimes as minute as one of Lovelace's letters; yet it is never prolix. He never fails to contract and to expand it in the right place. that this principle holds good only in abstract sented on a large scale, others diminished; reasonings. When we talk of the truth of the great majority will be lost in the dimness imitation in the fine arts, we mean an imper- of the horizon; and a general idea of their fect and a graduated truth. No picture is ex- joint effect will be given by a few slight actly like the original: nor is a picture good touches. in proportion as it is like the original. When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the canvass the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdignaggian maids of honour. If he were to do this, the effect would not merely be unpleasant, but unless the scale of the picture were proportionably enlarged, would be absolutely false. And, after all, a microscope of greater power than that which he had employed would convict him of innumerable omissions. The same may be said of history. Perfectly and absolutely true, it cannot be; for, to be perfectly and absolutely true, it ought to record all the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions-all the things done, and all the words uttered, during the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the Bodleian library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What is told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small proportion to what is suppressed. The difference between the copious work of Clarendon, and the account of the civil wars in the abridgment of Goldsmith, vanishes, when compared with the immense mass of facts respecting which both are equally silent. No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole. He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths. In the imitative arts we constantly see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape, which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to be all introduced into a painting together, or all omitted together. A sketch into which none of them enters may be excellent; but if some are given and others left out, though there are more points of likeness, there is less likeness. An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it than a bad painting in oils. Yet the worst painting in oils that ever hung in Somerset House resembles the original in many more particulars. A bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a blooming face. Colour the lips and cheeks of the bust, leaving the hair and eyes unaltered, and the similarity, instead of being more striking, will be less so. History has its foreground and its background. and it is principally in the management of its perspective, that one artist differs from another. Some events must be repre Thucydides borrowed from Herodotus the practice of putting speeches of his own into the mouths of his characters. In Herodotus this usage is scarcely censurable. It is of a piece with his whole manner. But it is altogether incongruous in the work of his successor; and violates, not only the accuracy of history, but the decencies of fiction. When once we enter into the spirit of Herodotus, we find no inconsistency. The conventional probability of his drama is preserved from the beginning to the end. The deliberate orations and the familiar dialogues are in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are neither preceded nor followed by any thing with which they harmonize. They give to the whole book something of the gro tesque character of those Chinese pleasuregrounds, in which perpendicular rocks of granite start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking, where truth is in such close juxtaposition with it. Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly. But it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as that of Pericles. In spite of this great fault, it must be allowed that Thucydides has surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention. But narration, though an important part of the business of an historian, is not the whole. To append a moral to a work of fiction, is either useless or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what is already known, but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it; but we try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially imitative. Its merit consists in its resemblance to a model with which we are already familiar, or to which at least we can instantly refer. Hence it is that the The defi- 55 sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill cases. This opinion will, we fear, be considered as heterodox. For, not to speak of the illusion which the sight of a Greek type, or the sound a Greek diphthong, often produces, there are some peculiarities in the manner of Thuycidides, which in no small degree have tended to secure to him the reputation of profundity. His book is evidently the book of a man and a Thucydides was undoubtedly a sagacious statesman; and in this respect presents a reand reflecting man. This clearly appears markable contrast to the delightful childishfrom the ability with which he discusses prac-ness of Herodotus. Throughout it there is an tical questions. But the talent of deciding on air of matured power, of grave and melanthe circumstances of a particular case is often choly reflection, of impartiality and habitual His feelings are rarely inself-command. possessed in the highest perfection by persons destitute of the power of generalization. Men, dulged, and speedily repressed. Vulgar preskilled in the military tactics of civilized na- judices of every kind, and particularly vulgar His style is tious, have been amazed at the far-sightedness superstitions, he treats with a cold and sober and penetration which a Mohawk displays in disdain peculiar to himself. concerting his stratagems, or in discerning weighty, condensed, antithetical, and not unthose of his enemies. In England, no class frequently obscure. But when we look at his possesses so much of that peculiar ability political philosophy. Wiithout regard to these which is required for constructing ingenious circumstances, we find him to have been, what schemes, and for obviating remote difficulties, indeed it would have been a miracle if he had as the thieves and the thief-takers. Women not been, simply an Athenian of the fifth cenLaw-tury before Christ. have more of this dexterity than men. yers have more of it than statesmen men have more of it than philosophers. Monk had more of it than Harrington and all his club. Walpole had more of it than Adam Smith or Beccaria. Indeed, the species of discipline by which this dexterity is acquired tends to contract the mind, and to render it incapable of abstract reasoning. states The Grecian statesmen of the age of Thucydides were distinguished by their practical Xenophon is commonly placed, out we think without much reason, in the same rank with Herodotus and Thucydides. He resembles them, indeed, in the purity and sweetness of his style; but in spirit, he rather resembles that later school of historians, whose works seem to be fables, composed for a moral, and who, in their eagerness to give us warnings and example, forget to give us men and wor men. The life of Cyrus, whether we look upor |