58

DISADVANTAGES OF CONTEMPORARY HISTORY,

the work the interest of a full and flowing history; and a great deal too many detailed and analyzed, to let it pass for an essay on the philosophy, or greater results of these memorable transactions. We are the most struck with this last fault-which perhaps is inseparable from the condition of a contemporary writer; for, though the observation may sound at first like a paradox, we are rather inclined to think that the best historical compositions-not only the most pleasing to read, but the most just and instructive in themselves-must be written at a very considerable distance from the times to which they relate. When we read an eloquent and judicious account of great events transacted in other ages, our first sentiment is that of regret at not being able to learn more of them. We wish anxiously for a fuller detail of particulars-we envy those who had the good fortune to live in the time of such interesting occurrences, and blame them for having left us so brief and imperfect a memorial of them. But the truth is, if we may judge from our own experience, that the greater part of those who were present to those mighty operations, were but very imperfectly aware of their importance, and conjectured but little of the influence they were to exert on future generations. Their attention was successively engaged by each separate act of the great drama that was passing before them; but did not extend to the connected effect of the whole, in which alone posterity was to find the grandeur and interest of the scene. The connection indeed of those different acts is very often not then discernible. The series often stretches on, beyond the reach of the generation which witnessed its beginning, and makes it impossible for them to integrate what had not yet attained its completion; while, from similar causes, many of the terms that at first appeared most important are unavoidably discarded, to bring the problem within a manageable compass. Time, in short, performs the same services to events, which distance does to visible objects. It obscures and gradually annihilates the small, but renders those that are very great much more distinct and con

AND CAUSES OF THESE DISADVANTAGES.

59

ceivable. If we would know the true form and bearings of an Alpine ridge, we must not grovel among the irregularities of its surface, but observe, from the distance of leagues, the direction of its ranges and peaks, and the giant outline which it traces on the sky. A traveller who wanders through a rugged and picturesque district, though struck with the beauty of every new valley, or the grandeur of every cliff that he passes, has no notion at all of the general configuration of the country, or even of the relative situation of the objects he has been admiring; and will understand all those things, and his own route among them, a thousand times better, from a small map on a scale of half an inch to a mile, which represents neither thickets or hamlets, than from the most painful efforts to combine the indications of the strongest memory. The case is the same with those who live through periods of great historical interest. They are too near the scene-too much interested in each successive event-and too much agitated with their rapid succession, to form any just estimate of the character or result of the whole. They are like private soldiers in the middle of a great battle, or rather of a busy and complicated campaign-hardly knowing whether they have lost or won, and having but the most obscure and imperfect conception of the general movements in which their own fate has been involved. The foreigner who reads of them in the Gazette, or the peasant who sees them from the top of a distant hill or a steeple, has in fact a far better idea of them.

Of the thousand or fifteen hundred names that have been connected in contemporary fame with the great events of the last twenty-five years, how many will go down to posterity? In all probability not more than twenty: And who shall yet venture to say which twenty it will be? But it is the same with the events as with the actors. How often, during that period, have we mourned or exulted, with exaggerated emotions, over occurrences that we already discover to have been of no permanent importance!-how certain is it, that the far greater proportion of those to which we still attach an

60 IMPOSSIBLE TO ANTICIPATE GREAT RESULTS,

interest, will be viewed with the same indifference by the very next generation!-and how probable, that the whole train and tissue of the history will appear, to a remoter posterity, under a totally different character and colour from any that the most penetrating observer of the present day has thought of ascribing to it! Was there any contemporary, do we think, of Mahomet, of Gregory VII., of Faust, or Columbus, who formed the same estimate of their achievements that we do at this day? Were the great and wise men who brought about the Reformation, as much aware of its importance as the whole world is at present? or does any one imagine, that, even in the later and more domestic events of the establishment of the English Commonwealth in 1648, or the English Revolution in 1688, the large and energetic spirits by whom those great events were conducted were fully sensible of their true character and bearings, or at all foresaw the mighty consequences of which they have since been prolific?

But though it may thus require the lapse of ages to develop the true character of a great transaction, and though its history may therefore be written with most advantage very long after its occurrence, it does not follow that such a history will not be deficient in many qualities which it would be desirable for it to possess. All we say is, that they are qualities which will generally be found incompatible with those larger and sounder views, which can hardly be matured while the subjects of them are recent. That this is an imperfection in our histories and historians, is sufficiently obvious; but it is an imperfection to which we must patiently resign ourselves, if it appear to be an unavoidable consequence of the limitation of our faculties. We cannot both enjoy the sublime effect of a vast and various landscape, and at the same time discern the form of every leaf in the forest, or the movements of every living creature that breathes within its expanse. Beings of a higher order may be capable of this;-and it would be very desirable to be so: But, constituted as we are, it is impossible; and, in our delineation of such

OR TO RECORD ALL THEIR CAUSES.

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a scene, all that is minute and detached, however interesting or important to those who are at hand, must therefore be omitted- while the general effect is entrusted to masses in which nothing but the great outlines of great objects are preserved, and the details left to be inferred from the character of their results, or the larger features of their usual accompaniments.

It is needless to apply this to the case of history; in which, when it records events of permanent interest, it is equally impossible to retain those particular details which engrossed the attention of contemporaries—both because the memory of them is necessarily lost in the course of that period which must elapse before the just value of the whole can be known- and because, even if it were otherwise, no human memory could retain, or human judgment discriminate, the infinite number of particulars which must have been presented in such an interval. We shall only observe, further, that though that which is preserved is generally the most material and truly important part of the story, it not unfrequently happens, that too little is preserved to afford materials for a satisfactory narrative, or to justify any general conclusion; and that, in such cases, the historian often yields to the temptation of connecting the scanty materials that have reached him by a sort of general and theoretical reasoning, which naturally takes its colour from the prevailing views and opinions of the individual writer, or of the age to which he belongs. If an author of consummate judgment, and with a thorough knowledge of the unchangeable principles of human nature, undertake this task, it is wonderful indeed to see how much he may make of a subject that appears so unpromising and it is almost certain that the view he will give to his readers, of such an obscure period, will, at all events, be at least as instructive and interesting as if he had had its entire annals before him. In other hands, however, the result is very different; and, instead of a masterly picture of rude or remote ages, true at least to the general features of such periods, we have nothing but a transcript of the author's own most recent

62

RISKS OF THEORETICAL HISTORY.

fantasies and follies, ill disguised under the masquerade character of a few traditional names. It is only necessary to call to mind such books as Zouche's Life of Sir Philip Sydney, or Godwin's Life of Chaucer, to feel this much more strongly than we can now express it. These, no doubt, are extreme cases;-but we suspect that our impressions of almost all remote characters and events, and the general notions we have of the times or societies which produced them, are much more dependent on the peculiar temper and habits of the popular writers in whom the memory of them is chiefly preserved, than it is very pleasant to think of. If we ever take the trouble of looking for ourselves into the documents and materials out of which those histories are made, we feel at once how much room there is for a very different representation of all those things from that which is current in the world: And accordingly we occasionally have very opposite representations. Compare Bossuet's Universal History with Voltaire's-Rollin with Mitford - Hume or Clarendon with Ralph or Mrs. M'Aulay; and it will be difficult to believe that these different writers are speaking of the same persons and things.

The work before us, we have already said, is singularly free from faults of this description. It is written, we do think, in the true spirit and temper of historical impartiality. But it has faults of a different character; and, with many of the merits, combines some of the appropriate defects, both of a contemporary and philosophical history. Its details are too few and too succinct for the former- they are too numerous and too rashly selected for the latter; while the reasonings and speculations in which perhaps its chief value consists, seem already to be too often thrown away upon matters that cannot long be had in remembrance. We must take care not to get entangled too far among the anecdotes - but the general reasoning cannot detain us very long.

It is the scope of the book to show that France must have a free government—a limited monarchy-in express words, a constitution like that of England. This, Madame de Staël says, was all that the body of the nation