VI.THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER.
“Giveus the facts, and nothing but the facts,” is the sharp injunction of our age to its historians. Upon the face of it, an eminently reasonable requirement. To tell the truth simply, openly, without reservation, is the unimpeachable first principle of all right dealing; and historians have no license to be quit of it. Unquestionably they must tell us the truth, or else get themselves enrolled among a very undesirable class of persons, not often frankly named in polite society. But the thing is by no means so easy as it looks. The truth of history is a very complex and very occult matter. It consists of things which are invisible as well as of things which are visible. It is full of secret motives, and of a chance interplay of trivial and yet determining circumstances; it is shot through with transient passions, and broken athwart here and there by what seem cruel accidents; it cannot all be reduced to statistics or newspaper items or official recorded statements. And so it turns out, when the actual test of experiment is made, that the historian musthave something more than a good conscience, must be something more than a good man. He must have an eye to see the truth; and nothing but a very catholic imagination will serve to illuminate his matter for him: nothing less than keen and steady insight will make even illumination yield him the truth of what he looks upon. Even when he has seen the truth, only half his work is done, and that not the more difficult half. He must then make others see it just as he does: only when he has done that has he told the truth. What an art of penetrative phrase and just selection must he have to take others into the light in which he stands! Their dullness, their ignorance, their prepossessions, are to be overcome and driven in, like a routed troop, upon the truth. The thing is infinitely difficult. The skill and strategy of it cannot be taught. And so historians take another way, which is easier: they tell part of the truth,—the part most to their taste, or most suitable to their talents,—and obtain readers to their liking among those of similar tastes and talents to their own.
We have our individual preferences in history, as in every other sort of literature. And there are histories to every taste: histories full of the piquant details of personal biography, histories that blaze with the splendors of courts and resound withdrum and trumpet, and histories that run upon the humbler but greater levels of the life of the people; colorless histories, so passionless and so lacking in distinctive mark or motive that they might have been set up out of a dictionary without the intervention of an author, and partisan histories, so warped and violent in every judgment that no reader not of the historian’s own party can stomach them; histories of economic development, and histories that speak only of politics; those that tell nothing but what it is pleasant and interesting to know, and those that tell nothing at all that one cares to remember. One must be of a new and unheard of taste not to be suited among them all.
The trouble is, after all, that men do not invariably find the truth to their taste, and will often deny it when they hear it; and the historian has to do much more than keep his own eyes clear: he has also to catch and hold the eye of his reader. ’Tis a nice art, as much intellectual as moral. How shall he take the palate of his reader at unawares, and get the unpalatable facts down his throat along with the palatable? Is there no way in which all the truth may be made to hold together in a narrative so strongly knit and so harmoniously colored that no reader will have either the wish or the skill to tear its patterns asunder, and men willtake it all, unmarred and as it stands, rather than miss the zest of it?
It is evident the thing cannot be done by the “dispassionate” annalist. The old chroniclers, whom we relish, were not dispassionate. We love some of them for their sweet quaintness, some for their childlike credulity, some for their delicious inconsequentiality. But our modern chroniclers are not so. They are, above all things else, knowing, thoroughly informed, subtly sophisticated. They would not for the world contribute any spice of their own to the narrative; and they are much too watchful, circumspect, and dutiful in their care to keep their method pure and untouched by any thought of theirs to let us catch so much as a glimpse of the chronicler underneath the chronicle. Their purpose is to give simply the facts, eschewing art, and substituting a sort of monumental index and table of the world’s events.
The trouble is that men refuse to be made any wiser by such means. Though they will readily enough let their eyes linger upon a monument of art, they will heedlessly pass by a mere monument of industry. It suggests nothing to them. The materials may be suitable enough, but the handling of them leaves them dead and commonplace. An interesting circumstance thus comes to light. Itis nothing less than this, that the facts do not of themselves constitute the truth. The truth is abstract, not concrete. It is the just idea, the right revelation of what things mean. It is evoked only by such arrangements and orderings of facts as suggest interpretations. The chronological arrangement of events, for example, may or may not be the arrangement which most surely brings the truth of the narrative to light; and the best arrangement is always that which displays, not the facts themselves, but the subtle and else invisible forces that lurk in the events and in the minds of men,—forces for which events serve only as lasting and dramatic words of utterance. Take an instance. How are you to enable men to know the truth with regard to a period of revolution? Will you give them simply a calm statement of recorded events, simply a quiet, unaccentuated narrative of what actually happened, written in a monotone, and verified by quotations from authentic documents of the time? You may save yourself the trouble. As well make a pencil sketch in outline of a raging conflagration; write upon one portion of it “flame,” upon another “smoke;” here “town hall, where the fire started,” and there “spot where fireman was killed.” It is a chart, not a picture. Even if you made a veritable picture of it, youcould give only part of the truth so long as you confined yourself to black and white. Where would be all the wild and terrible colors of the scene: the red and tawny flame; the masses of smoke, carrying the dull glare of the fire to the very skies, like a great signal banner thrown to the winds; the hot and frightened faces of the crowd; the crimsoned gables down the street, with the faint light of a lamp here and there gleaming white from some hastily opened casement? Without the colors your picture is not true. No inventory of items will even represent the truth: the fuller and more minute you make your inventory, the more will the truth be obscured. The little details will take up as much space in the statement as the great totals into which they are summed up; and, the proportions being false, the whole is false. Truth, fortunately, takes its own revenge. No one is deceived. The reader of the chronicle lays it aside. It lacks verisimilitude. He cannot realize how any of the things spoken of can have happened. He goes elsewhere to find, if he may, a real picture of the time, and perhaps finds one that is wholly fictitious. No wonder the grave and monk-like chronicler sighs. He of course wrote to be read, and not merely for the manual exercise of it; and when he sees readers turn away his heartmisgives him for his fellow-men. Is it as it always was, that they do not wish to know the truth? Alas! good eremite, men do not seek the truth as they should; but do you know what the truth is? It is a thing ideal, displayed by the just proportion of events, revealed in form and color, dumb till facts be set in syllables, articulated into words, put together into sentences, swung with proper tone and cadence. It is not revolutions only that have color. Nothing in human life is without it. In a monochrome you can depict nothing but a single incident; in a monotone you cannot often carry truth beyond a single sentence. Only by art in all its variety can you depict as it is the various face of life.
Yes; but what sort of art? There is here a wide field of choice. Shall we go back to the art of which Macaulay was so great a master? We could do worse. It must be a great art that can make men lay aside the novel and take up the history, to find there, in very fact, the movement and drama of life. What Macaulay does well he does incomparably. Who else can mass the details as he does, and yet not mar or obscure, but only heighten, the effect of the picture as a whole? Who else can bring so amazing a profusion of knowledge within the strait limits of a simple plan,nowhere encumbered, everywhere free and obvious in its movement? How sure the strokes, and how bold and vivid the result! Yet when we have laid the book aside, when the charm and the excitement of the telling narrative have worn off, when we have lost step with the swinging gait at which the style goes, when the details have faded from our recollection, and we sit removed and thoughtful, with only the greater outlines of the story sharp upon our minds, a deep misgiving and dissatisfaction take possession of us. We are no longer young, and we are chagrined that we should have been so pleased and taken with the glitter and color and mere life of the picture. Let boys be cajoled by rhetoric, we cry; men must look deeper. What of the judgment of this facile and eloquent man? Can we agree with him, when he is not talking and the charm is gone? What shall we say of his assessment of men and measures? Is he just? Is he himself in possession of the whole truth? Does he open the matter to us as it was? Does he not, rather, ride us like an advocate, and make himself master of our judgments?
Then it is that we become aware that there were two Macaulays: Macaulay the artist, with an exquisite gift for telling a story, filling his pages with little vignettes it is impossible to forget, fixingthese with an inimitable art upon the surface of a narrative that did not need the ornament they gave it, so strong and large and adequate was it; and Macaulay the Whig, subtly turning narrative into argument, and making history the vindication of a party. The mighty narrative is a great engine of proof. It is not told for its own sake. It is evidence summed up in order to justify a judgment. We detect the tone of the advocate, and though if we are just we must deem him honest, we cannot deem him safe. The great story-teller is discredited; and, willingly or unwillingly, we reject the guide who takes it upon himself to determine for us what we shall see. That, we feel sure, cannot be true which makes of so complex a history so simple a thesis for the judgment. There is art here; but it is the art of special pleading, misleading even to the pleader.
If not Macaulay, what master shall we follow? Shall our historian not have his convictions, and enforce them? Shall he not be our guide, and speak, if he can, to our spirits as well as to our understandings? Readers are a poor jury. They need enlightenment as well as information; the matter must be interpreted to them as well as related. There are moral facts as well as material, and the one sort must be as plainly told as theother. Of what service is it that the historian should have insight if we are not to know how the matter stands in his view? If he refrain from judgment, he may deceive us as much as he would were his judgment wrong; for we must have enlightenment,—that is his function. We would not set him up merely to tell us tales, but also to display to us characters, to open to us the moral and intent of the matter. Were the men sincere? Was the policy righteous? We have but just now seen that the “facts” lie deeper than the mere visible things that took place, that they involve the moral and motive of the play. Shall not these, too, be brought to light?
Unquestionably every sentence of true history must hold a judgment in solution. All cannot be told. If it were possible to tell all, it would take as long to write history as to enact it, and we should have to postpone the reading of it to the leisure of the next world. A few facts must be selected for the narrative, the great majority left unnoted. But the selection—for what purpose it is to be made? For the purpose of conveyingan impressionof the truth. Where shall you find a more radical process of judgment? The “essential” facts taken, the “unessential” left out! Why, you may make the picture what you will, and in any case it mustbe the express image of the historian’s fundamental judgments. It is his purpose, or should be, to give a true impression of his theme as a whole,—to show it, not lying upon his page in an open and dispersed analysis, but set close in intimate synthesis, every line, every stroke, every bulk even, omitted which does not enter of very necessity into a single and unified image of the truth.
It is in this that the writing of history differs, and differs very radically, from the statement of the results of original research. The writing of history must be based upon original research and authentic record, but it can no more be directly constructed by the piecing together of bits of original research than by the mere reprinting together of state documents. Individual research furnishes us, as it were, with the private documents and intimate records without which the public archives are incomplete and unintelligible. But by themselves these are wholly out of perspective. It is the consolation of those who produce them to make them so. They would lose heart were they forbidden to regard all facts as of equal importance. It is facts they are after, and only facts,—facts for their own sake, and without regard to their several importance. These are their ore,—very precious ore,—which they are concerned to getout, not to refine. They have no direct concern with what may afterwards be done at the mint or in the goldsmith’s shop. They will even boast that they care not for the beauty of the ore, and are indifferent how, or in what shape, it may become an article of commerce. Much of it is thrown away in the nice processes of manufacture, and you shall not distinguish the product of the several mines in the coin, or the cup, or the salver.
The historian must, indeed, himself be an investigator. He must know good ore from bad; must distinguish fineness, quality, genuineness; must stop to get out of the records for himself what he lacks for the perfection of his work. But for all that, he must know and stand ready to do every part of his task like a master workman, recognizing and testing every bit of stuff he uses. Standing sure, a man of science as well as an artist, he must take and use all of his equipment for the sake of his art,—not to display his materials, but to subordinate and transform them in his effort to make, by every touch and cunning of hand and tool, the perfect image of what he sees, the very truth of his seer’s vision of the world. The true historian works always for the whole impression, the truth with unmarred proportions, unexaggerated parts, undistorted visage. He has no favorite parts ofthe story which he boasts are bits of his own, but loves only the whole of it, the full and unspoiled image of the day of which he writes, the crowded and yet consistent details which carry, without obtrusion of themselves, the large features of the time. Any exaggeration of the parts makes all the picture false, and the work is to do over. “Test every bit of material,” runs the artist’s rule, “and then forget the material;” forget its origin and the dross from which it has been freed, and think only and always of the great thing you would make of it, the pattern and form in which you would lose and merge it. That is its only high use.
’Tis a pity to see how even the greatest minds will often lack the broad and catholic vision with which the just historian must look upon men and affairs. There is Carlyle, with his shrewd and seeing eye, his unmatched capacity to assess strong men and set the scenery for tragedy or intrigue, his breathless ardor for great events, his amazing flashes of insight, and his unlooked-for steady light of occasional narrative. The whole matter of what he writes is too dramatic. Surely history was not all enacted so hotly, or with so passionate a rush of men upon the stage. Its quiet scenes must have been longer, not mere pauses and interludes whilethe tragic parts were being made up. There is not often ordinary sunlight upon the page. The lights burn now wan, now lurid. Men are seen disquieted and turbulent, and may be heard in husky cries or rude, untimely jests. We do not recognize our own world, but seem to see another such as ours might become if peopled by like uneasy Titans. Incomparable to tell of days of storm and revolution, speaking like an oracle and familiar of destiny and fate, searching the hearts of statesmen and conquerors with an easy insight in every day of action, this peasant seer cannot give us the note of piping times of peace, or catch the tone of slow industry; watches ships come and go at the docks, hears freight-vans thunder along the iron highways of the modern world, and loaded trucks lumber heavily through the crowded city streets, with a hot disdain of commerce, prices current, the haggling of the market, the smug ease of material comfort bred in a trading age. There is here no broad and catholic vision, no wise tolerance, no various power to know, to sympathize, to interpret. The great seeing imagination of the man lacks that pure radiance in which things are seen steadily and seen whole.
It is not easy, to say truth, to find actual examples when you are constructing the ideal historian,the man with the vision and the faculty divine to see affairs justly and tell of them completely. If you are not satisfied with this passionate and intolerant seer of Chelsea, whom will you choose? Shall it be Gibbon, whom all praise, but so few read? He, at any rate, is passionless, it would appear. But who could write epochal history with passion? All hot humors of the mind must, assuredly, cool when spread at large upon so vast a surface. One must feel like a sort of minor providence in traversing that great tract of world history, and catch in spite of one’s self the gait and manner of a god. This stately procession of generations moves on remote from the ordinary levels of our human sympathy. ’Tis a wide view of nations and peoples and dynasties, and a world shaken by the travail of new births. There is here no scale by which to measure the historian of the sort we must look to see handle the ordinary matter of national history. The “Decline and Fall” stands impersonal, like a monument. We shall reverence it, but we shall not imitate it.
If we look away from Gibbon, exclude Carlyle, and question Macaulay; if we put the investigators on one side as not yet historians, and the deliberately picturesque and entertainingraconteursas not yet investigators, we naturally turn, I suppose,to such a man as John Richard Green, at once the patient scholar,—who shall adequately say how nobly patient?—and the rare artist, working so like a master in the difficult stuffs of a long national history. The very life of the man is as beautiful as the moving sentences he wrote with so subtle a music in the cadence. We know whence the fine moral elevation of tone came that sounds through all the text of his great narrative. True, not everybody is satisfied with ourdoctor angelicus. Some doubt he is too ornate. Others are troubled that he should sometimes be inaccurate. Some are willing to use his history as a manual; while others cannot deem him satisfactory for didactic uses, hesitate how they shall characterize him, and quit the matter vaguely with saying that what he wrote is “at any rate literature.” Can there be something lacking in Green, too, notwithstanding he was impartial, and looked with purged and open eyes upon the whole unbroken life of his people,—notwithstanding he saw the truth and had the art and mastery to make others see it as he did, in all its breadth and multiplicity?
Perhaps even this great master of narrative lacks variety—as who does not? His method, whatever the topic, is ever the same. His sentences, his paragraphs, his chapters are pitchedone and all in the same key. It is a very fine and moving key. Many an elevated strain and rich harmony commend it alike to the ear and to the imagination. It is employed with an easy mastery, and is made to serve to admiration a wide range of themes. But it is always the same key, and some themes it will not serve. An infinite variety plays through all history. Every scene has its own air and singularity. Incidents cannot all be rightly set in the narrative if all be set alike. As the scene shifts, the tone of the narrative must change: the narrator’s choice of incident and his choice of words; the speed and method of his sentence; his own thought, even, and point of view. Surely his battle pages must resound with the tramp of armies and the fearful din and rush of war. In peace he must catch by turns the hum of industry, the bustle of the street, the calm of the country-side, the tone of parliamentary debate, the fancy, the ardor, the argument of poets and seers and quiet students. Snatches of song run along with sober purpose and strenuous endeavor through every nation’s story. Coarse men and refined, mobs and ordered assemblies, science and mad impulse, storm and calm, are all alike ingredients of the various life. It is not all epic. There is rough comedy and brutal violence. The drama can scarcebe given any strict, unbroken harmony of incident, any close logical sequence of act or nice unity of scene. To pitch it all in one key, therefore, is to mistake the significance of the infinite play of varied circumstance that makes up the yearly movement of a people’s life.
It would be less than just to say that Green’s pages do not reveal the variety of English life the centuries through. It is his glory, indeed, as all the world knows, to have broadened and diversified the whole scale of English history. Nowhere else within the compass of a single book can one find so many sides of the great English story displayed with so deep and just an appreciation of them all, or of the part of each in making up the whole. Green is the one man among English historians who has restored the great fabric of the nation’s history where its architecture was obscure, and its details were likely to be lost or forgotten. Once more, because of him, the vast Gothic structure stands complete, its majesty and firm grace enhanced at every point by the fine tracery of its restored details.
Where so much is done, it is no doubt unreasonable to ask for more. But the very architectural symmetry of this great book imposes a limitation upon it. It is full of a certain sort of variety; butit is only the variety of a great plan’s detail, not the variety of English life. The noble structure obeys its own laws rather than the laws of a people’s fortunes. It is a monument conceived and reared by a consummate artist, and it wears upon its every line some part of the image it was meant to bear, of a great, complex, aspiring national existence. But, though it symbolizes, it does not contain that life. It has none of the irregularity of the actual experiences of men and communities. It explains, but it does not contain, their variety. The history of every nation has certainly a plan which the historian must see and reproduce; but he must reconstruct the people’s life, not merely expound it. The scope of his method must be as great as the variety of his subject; it must change with each change of mood, respond to each varying impulse in the great process of events. No rigor of a stately style must be suffered to exclude the lively touches of humor or the rude sallies of strength that mark it everywhere. The plan of the telling must answer to the plan of the fact,—must be as elastic as the topics are mobile. The matter should rule the plan, not the plan the matter.
The ideal is infinitely difficult, if, indeed, it be possible to any man not Shakespearean; but thedifficulty of attaining it is often unnecessarily enhanced. Ordinarily the historian’s preparation for his task is such as to make it unlikely he will perform it naturally. He goes first, with infinite and admirable labor, through all the labyrinth of document and detail that lies up and down his subject; collects masses of matter great and small, for substance, verification, illustration; piles his notes volumes high; reads far and wide upon the tracks of his matter, and makes page upon page of references; and then, thoroughly stuffed and sophisticated, turns back and begins his narrative. ’Tis impossible then that he should begin naturally. He sees the end from the beginning, and all the intermediate way from beginning to end; he has made up his mind about too many things; uses his details with a too free and familiar mastery, not like one who tells a story so much as like one who dissects a cadaver. Having swept his details together beforehand, like so much scientific material, he discourses upon them like a demonstrator,—thinks too little in subjection to them. They no longer make a fresh impression upon him. They are his tools, not his objects of vision.
It is not by such a process that a narrative is made vital and true. It does not do to lose the point of view of the first listener to the tale, or torearrange the matter too much out of the order of nature. You must instruct your reader as the events themselves would have instructed him, had he been able to note them as they passed. The historian must not lose his own fresh view of the scene as it passed and changed more and more from year to year and from age to age. He must keep with the generation of which he writes, not be too quick to be wiser than they were or look back upon them in his narrative with head over shoulder. He must write of them always in the atmosphere they themselves breathed, not hastening to judge them, but striving only to realize them at every turn of the story, to make their thoughts his own, and call their lives back again, rebuilding the very stage upon which they played their parts. Bring the end of your story to mind while you set about telling its beginning, and it seems to have no parts: beginning, middle, end, are all as one,—are merely like parts of a pattern which you see as a single thing stamped upon the stuff under your hand.
Try the method with the history of our own land and people. How will you begin? Will you start with a modern map and a careful topographical description of the continent? And then, having made your nineteenth-century framework for thenarrative, will you ask your reader to turn back and see the seventeenth century, and those lonely ships coming in at the capes of the Chesapeake? He will never see them so long as you compel him to stand here at the end of the nineteenth century and look at them as if through a long retrospect. The attention both of the narrator and of the reader, if history is to be seen aright, must look forward, not backward. It must see with a contemporaneous eye. Let the historian, if he be wise, know no more of the history as he writes than might have been known in the age and day of which he is writing. A trifle too much knowledge will undo him. It will break the spell for his imagination. It will spoil the magic by which he may raise again the image of days that are gone. He must of course know the large lines of his story; it must lie as a whole in his mind. His very art demands that, in order that he may know and keep its proportions. But the details, the passing incidents of day and year, must come fresh into his mind, unreasoned upon as yet, untouched by theory, with their first look upon them. It is here that original documents and fresh research will serve him. He must look far and wide upon every detail of the time, see it at first hand, and paint as he looks; selecting, as the artist must, butselecting while the vision is fresh, and not from old sketches laid away in his notes,—selecting from the life itself.
Let him remember that his task is radically different from the task of the investigator. The investigator must display his materials, but the historian must convey his impressions. He must stand in the presence of life, and reproduce it in his narrative; must recover a past age; make dead generations live again and breathe their own air; show them native and at home upon his page. To do this, his own impressions must be as fresh as those of an unlearned reader, his own curiosity as keen and young at every stage. It may easily be so as his reading thickens, and the atmosphere of the age comes stealthily into his thought, if only he take care to push forward the actual writing of his narrative at an equal pace with his reading, painting thus always direct from the image itself. His knowledge of the great outlines and bulks of the picture will be his sufficient guide and restraint the while, will give proportion to the individual strokes of his work. But it will not check his zest, or sophisticate his fresh recovery of the life that is in the crowding colors of the canvas.
A nineteenth-century plan laid like a standard and measure upon a seventeenth-century narrativewill infallibly twist it and make it false. Lay a modern map before the first settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth, and then bid them discover and occupy the continent. With how superior a nineteenth-century wonder and pity will you see them grope, and stumble, and falter! How like children they will seem to you, and how simple their age, and ignorant! As stalwart men as you they were in fact; mayhap wiser and braver too; as fit to occupy a continent as you are to draw it upon paper. If you would know them, go back to their age; breed yourself a pioneer and woodsman; look to find the South Sea up the nearest northwest branch of the spreading river at your feet; discover and occupy the wilderness with them; dream what may be beyond the near hills, and long all day to see a sail upon the silent sea; go back to them and see them in their habit as they lived.
The picturesque writers of history have all along been right in theory: they have been wrong only in practice. It is a picture of the past we want—its express image and feature; but we want the true picture and not simply the theatrical matter,—the manner of Rembrandt rather than of Rubens. All life may be pictured, but not all of life is picturesque. No great, no true historian would put false or adventitious colors into his narrative, orlet a glamour rest where in fact it never was. The writers who select an incident merely because it is striking or dramatic are shallow fellows. They see only with the eye’s retina, not with that deep vision whose images lie where thought and reason sit. The real drama of life is disclosed only with the whole picture; and that only the deep and fervid student will see, whose mind goes daily fresh to the details, whose narrative runs always in the authentic colors of nature, whose art it is to see, and to paint what he sees.
It is thus and only thus we shall have the truth of the matter: by art,—by the most difficult of all arts; by fresh study and first-hand vision; at the mouths of men who stand in the midst of old letters and dusty documents and neglected records, not like antiquarians, but like those who see a distant country and a far-away people before their very eyes, as real, as full of life and hope and incident, as the day in which they themselves live. Let us have done with humbug and come to plain speech. The historian needs an imagination quite as much as he needs scholarship, and consummate literary art as much as candor and common honesty. Histories are written in order that the bulk of men may read and realize; and it is as bad to bungle the telling of the story as to lie, as fatal to lack avocabulary as to lack knowledge. In no case can you do more than convey an impression, so various and complex is the matter. If you convey a false impression, what difference does it make how you convey it? In the whole process there is a nice adjustment of means to ends which only the artist can manage. There is an art of lying;—there is equally an art,—an infinitely more difficult art,—of telling the truth.