The Meaning of History, and other historical pieces

Front matter

THE MEANING OF HISTORY AND OTHER HISTORICAL PIECES THE Meaning of History AND OTHER HISTORICAL PIECES BY FREDERIC HARRISON LONDON MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1894 All rights reserved Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty NOTE THIS volume contains a collection of essays designed to stimulate the systematic study of general history. They are (with two exceptions) the permanent and condensed form of historical lectures given in a series of courses at various places of education. The writer has been constantly occupied with the teaching of history since 1862 ; and the first two chapters of this book were the introduction to a course of lectures given in that year to a London audience. They were printed at the time, but the issue has been long exhausted. The third chapter (which is in effect a Choice of Books of History) and also the fifth chapter (a synthetic survey of the Thirteenth Century) were inaugural lectures given in the New Schools at Oxford to the summer vacation students.

The other chapters are based on lectures given by the writer at various times at Newton Hall, Toynbee Hall, the London Institution, and other literary and scientific institutions. Several of these chapters (about half the present volume in bulk) have already appeared in the Fortnightly Review and in one or two other periodicals. They have in all cases been carefully revised and partly rewritten ; and the author has to express to the Editors and Proprietors of these organs his grateful thanks for the courtesy with which he has been enabled to use them. V CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. The Use of History, , II. The Connection of History, .... 26 III. Some Great Boors of History, . . Si IV. The History Schools (an Oxford Dialogue), . 124 V. A Survey of the Thirteenth Century, . . 146 VI. What the Revolution of 1789 did, . . .180 VII.

France in 1789 and 1889, 2I- VIII. The City : Ancient— Mediæval— Modern— Ideal, 233 (1) The Ancient City, 231; (11) The Mediæval City 244 (in) The Modern City, 250 (iv) The Ideal City, 256 IX. Rome Revisited, 265 X. Impressions of Athens, 298 XI. Constantinople as an Historic City, . . . 324 (1) Byzantine History, 324 (11) Topographical Conditions, . . . 334 (in; Antiquities of Constantinople, . . 346 XII. The Problem of Constantinople, .... 358 (1) The Historical Problem, . . . 359 (11) The Political Problem, .... 378 XIII. Paris as an Historic City, 387 CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE XIV. The Transformation of Paris, .... 4'5 XV. The Transformation of London, .... 433 (i) London in 1887, 433 (11) London in 1894, 4S2 XVI. The Sacredness of Ancient Buildings, . . . 459 XVII. Palæographic Purism,

Chapter I The Use Of History

What is the use of historical knowledge? Is an acquaintance with the events, the men, the ideas of the past, of any real use to us in these days — has it any practical bearing upon happiness and conduct in life? Two very different answers may be given to this question. The Gradgrinds and the Jack Cades assure us that there is no use at all. We are, they would say with Bacon, the mature age of the world ; with us lies the gathered wisdom of ages. To waste our time in studying exploded fallacies, in reproducing worn-out forms of society, or in recalling men who were only conspicuous because they lived amidst a crowd of ignorant or benighted barbarians, is to wander from the path of progress, and to injure and not to improve our understandings. On the other hand, the commonplace of literary gossip declares that history has fifty different uses.

It is amusing to hear what curious things they did in bygone times. Then, again, it is very instructive as a study of character ; we see in history the working of the human mind and will. Besides, it is necessary to A avoid the blunders they committed in past days : there we collect a store of moral examples, and of political maxims ; we learn to watch the signs of the times, and to be prepared for situations whenever they return. And it cannot be doubted, they add, that it is a branch of knowledge, and all knowledge is good. To know history, they conclude, is to be well-informed, is to be familiar with some of the finest examples of elegant and brilliant writing. Between the two, those who tell us plainly that history is of no use, and those who tell us vaguely that history is of fifty uses, there is not much to choose.

We must thoroughly disagree with them both, and of the two we would rather deal with the former. Their opposition, at any rate, is concentrated into a single point, and may be met by a single and a direct answer. To them we may say, Are you consistent ? Do you not in practice follow another course? In rejecting all connection with the facts and ideas of the past, are you not cutting the ground from under your own feet? Assume that you are an active politician and a staunch friend of the conservative or liberal party. What are the traditional principles of a party but a fraction, small, no doubt, but a sensible fraction, of history? You believe in the cause of progress. Yet what is the cause of progress but the extension of that civilisation, of that change for the better which we have all witnessed or have learned to recognise as an established fact ?

Your voice, if you are a politician and a democrat, is on the side of freedom. Well, but do you never appeal to Magna Charta, to the Bill of Rights, to the Reform Acts, to American Independence, or the French Revolution ? Or you are an imperialist, and you will suffer no outrage on the good name of England. You are ready to cover the seas with armaments to uphold the national great ness. But what is the high name of England if it is not the memory of all the deeds by which, in peace or war, on sea or land, England has held her own amongst the foremost of the earth ? Nor is it true that we show no honour to the men of the past, are not guided by their ideas, and do not dwell upon their lives, their work, and their characters. The most turbulent revolutionary that ever lived, the most bitter hater of the past, finds many to admire.

It may be Cromwell, it may be Rousseau, or Voltaire, it may be Robert Owen, but some such leader each will have ; his memory he will revere, his influence he will admit, his principles he will contend for. Thus it will be in every sphere of active life. No serious politician can fail to recognise that, however strongly he repudiates antiquity, and rebels against the tyranny of custom, still he himself only acts freely and consistently when he is following the path trodden by earlier leaders, and is working with the current of the principles in which he throws himself, and in which he has confidence. For him, then, it is not true that he rejects all common purpose with what has gone before. It is a question only of selection and of degree. To some he clings, the rest he rejects. Some history he does study, and finds in it both profit and enjoyment.

Suppose such a man to be interested in any study whatever, either in promoting general education, or eager to acquire knowledge for himself. He will find, at every step he takes, that he is appealing to the authority of the past, is using the ideas of former ages, and carrying out principles established by ancient, but not forgotten thinkers. If he studies geometry he will find that the first text-book put into his hand was written by a Greek two thousand years ago. If he takes up a grammar, he will be only repeating rules taught by Roman schoolmasters and professors. Or is he interested in art ? He will find the same thing in a far greater degree. He goes to the British Museum, and he walks into a building which is a good imitation of a Greek temple. He goes to the Houses of Parlia ment to hear a debate, and he enters a building which is a bad imitation of a mediæval town-hall.

Or, again, we know that he reads his Shakespeare and Milton ; feels respect for the opinions of Bacon or of Hume, or Adam Smith. Such a man, the moment he takes a warm interest in anything — in politics, in education, in science, in art, or in social improvement — the moment that his intelligence is kindled, and his mind begins to work — that moment he is striving to throw himself into the stream of some previous human efforts, to identify himself with others, and to try to understand and to follow the path of future progress which has been traced out for him by the leaders of his own party or school. Therefore, such a man is not consistent when he says that history is of no use to him. He does direct his action by what he believes to be the course laid out before him ; he does follow the guidance of certain teachers whom he respects.

We have then only to ask him on what grounds he rests his selection ; why he chooses some and rejects all others ; how he knows for certain that no other corner of the great field of history will reward the care of the ploughman, or bring forth good seed. In spite of him self, he will find himself surrounded in every act and thought of life by a power which is too strong for him. If he chooses simply to stagnate, he may, perhaps, dis pense with any actual reference to the past ; but the moment he begins to act, to live, or to think, he must use the materials presented to him, and, so far as he is a member of a civilised community, so far as he is an Englishman, so far as he is a rational man, he can as little free himself from the influence of former genera tions as he can free himself from his personal identity ; unlearn all that he has learnt ; cease to be what his previous life has made him, and blot out of his memory all recollection whatever.

Let us suppose for a moment that any set of men could succeed in sweeping away from them all the influ ences of past ages, and everything that they had not themselves discovered or produced. Suppose that all knowledge of the gradual steps of civilisation, of the slow process of perfecting the arts of life and the natural sciences, were blotted out ; suppose all memory of the efforts and struggles of earlier generations, and of the deeds of great men, were gone ; all the landmarks of history ; all that has distinguished each country, race, or city in past times from others ; all notion of what man had done, or could do ; of his many failures, of his suc cesses, of his hopes ; suppose for a moment all the books, all the traditions, all the buildings of past ages to vanish off the face of the earth, and with them the institutions of society, all political forms, all principles of politics, all systems of thought, all daily customs, all familiar arts ; suppose the most deep-rooted and most sacred of all our institutions gone ; suppose that the family and home, property, and justice were strange ideas without meaning ; that all the customs which surround us each from birth to death were blotted out ; suppose a race of men whose minds, by a paralytic stroke of fate, had suddenly been deadened to every recollection, to whom the whole world was new, — can we imagine a condition of such utter helplessness, con fusion, and misery?

Such a race might retain their old powers of mind and of activity, nay, both might be increased tenfold, and yet it would not profit them. Can we conceive such a race acting together, living together, for one hour? They would have everything to create. Would any two agree to adopt the same custom, and could they live without any? They would have all the arts, all the sciences to reconstruct anew ; and even their tenfold intellect would not help them there. With minds of the highest order it would be impossible to think, for the world would present one vast chaos ; even with the most amazing powers of activity, they would fall back exhausted from the task of reconstructing, reproducing everything around them. Had they the wisest teachers or the highest social or moral purposes, they would all be lost and wasted in an interminable strife, and con tinual difference ; for family, town, property, society, country, nay, language itself, would be things which each would be left to create for himself, and each would create in a different manner.

It would realise, indeed, the old fable of the tower of Babel ; and the pride of self would culminate in confusion and dispersion. A race with ten times the intellect, twenty times the powers, and fifty times the virtues of any race that ever lived on earth would end, within a generation, in a state of hopeless barbarism ; the earth would return to the days of primeval forests and swamps, and man descend almost to the level of the monkey and the beaver. Now, if this be true, if we are so deeply indebted and so indissolubly bound to preceding ages, if all our hopes of the future depend on a sound understanding of the past, we cannot fancy any knowledge more important than the knowledge of the way in which this civilisation has been built up. If the destiny of our race, and the daily action of each of us, are so completely directed by it, the useful existence of each depends much upon a right estimate of that which has so constant an influence over him ; will be advanced as he works with the work ing of that civilisation, above him, and around him ; will be checked as he opposes it ; it depends upon this, that he mistakes none of the elements that go to make up that civilisation as a whole, and sees them in their due relation and harmony.

This brings us to that second class of objectors ; those who, far from denying the interest of the events of the past, far from seeing no use at all in their study, are only too ready in discovering a multitude of reasons for it, and at seeing in it a variety of incongruous pur poses. If they suppose that it furnishes us with parallels when similar events occur, the answer is, that similar events never do and never can occur in history. The history of man offers one unbroken chain of constant change, in which no single situation is ever reproduced. The story of the world is played out like a drama in many acts and scenes, not like successive games of chess, in which the pieces meet, combat, and manœuvre for a time, and then the board is cleared for another trial, and they are replaced in their original positions.

Political maxims drawn crudely from history may do more harm than good. You may justify anything by a pointed example in history. It will show you instances of triumphant tyranny and triumphant tyrannicide. You may find in it excuses for any act or any system. What is true of one country is wholly untrue of another. What led to a certain result in one age, leads to a wholly opposite result in another. Then as to character, if the sole object of studying history is to see in it the workings of the human heart, that is far better studied in the fictitious creations of the great masters of character — in Shakespeare, in Moliere, in Fielding, and Scott. Macbeth and Richard are as true to nature as any name in history, and give us an impression of desperate ambition more vivid than the tale of any despot in ancient or modern times.

Besides, if we read history only to find in it picturesque incident or subtle shades of character, we run as much chance of stumbling on. the worthless and the curious as the noble and the great. A Hamlet is a study in interest perhaps exceeding all others in fiction or in fact, but we shall hardly find that Hamlets have stamped their trace very deep in the history of mankind. There are few lives in all human story more romantic than that of Alcibiades, and none more base. Some minds find fascination in the Popish plots of Titus Oates, where the interest centres round a dastardly ruffian. And the bullies, the fops, the cut-throats, and the Jezebels who crowded the courts of the Stuarts and the Georges, have been con signed to permanent infamy in libraries of learned and of brilliant works.

Brilliant and ingenious writing has been the bane of history ; it has degraded its purpose, and perverted many of its uses. Histories have been written which are little but minute pictures of scoundrelism and folly triumphant. Wretches, who if alive now would be con signed to the gallows or the hulks, have only to take, as it is said, a place in history, and generations after generations of learned men will pore over their lives, collect their letters, their portraits, or their books, search out every fact in their lives with prurient inquisitiveness, and chronicle their rascalities in twenty volumes. Such stories, some may say, have a human interest. So has the Newgate Calendar a human interest of a certain kind. Brilliant writing is a most delusive guide. In search of an effective subject for a telling picture, men have wandered into strange and dismal haunts.

We none of us choose our friends on such a plan. Why, then, should we choose thus the friends round whom our re collections are to centre ? We none of us wish to be intimate with a man simply because he is a picturesque looking villain, nor do we bring to our firesides men who have the reputation of being the loudest braggarts or keenest sharpers of their time. Let us pass by untouched these memoirs of the un memorable — these lives of those who never can be said to have lived. Pass them all : these riotings, intrigues, and affectations of worthless men and worthless ages. Better to know nothing of the past than to know only its follies, though set forth in eloquent language and with attractive anecdote. It does not profit to know the names of all the kings that ever lived, and the catalogue of all their whims and vices, and a minute list of their particular weaknesses, with all their fools, buffoons, mistresses, and valets.

Again, some odd incident becomes the subject of the labour of lives, and fills volume after volume of ingenious trifling. Some wretched little squabble is exhumed, unimportant in itself, unimportant for the persons that were engaged in it, trivial in its results. Lives are spent in raking up old letters to show why or how some parasite like Sir T. Overbury was murdered, or to unravel some plot about a maid of honour, or a diamond necklace, or some conspiracy to turn out a minister or to detect some court impostor. There are plenty of things to find out, or, if people are afflicted with a morbid curiosity, there are Chinese puzzles or chess problems left for them to solve, without ransacking the public records and libraries to discover which out of a name less crowd was the most unmitigated scoundrel, or who it is that must have the credit of being the author of some peculiarly venomous or filthy pamphlet.

Why need we have six immense volumes to prove to the world that you have found the villain, and ask them to read all about him, and explain in brilliant language how some deed of darkness or some deed of folly really was done ? And they call this history. This serving up in spiced dishes of the clean and the unclean, the wholesome and the noxious ; this plunging down into the charnel house of the great graveyard of the past, and stirring up the decaying carcases of the outcasts and male factors of the race. No good can come of such work : without plan, without purpose, without breadth of view, and without method ; with nothing but a vague desire to amuse, and a morbid craving for novelty. If there is one common purpose running through the whole history of the past, if that history is the story of man's growth in dignity, and power, and goodness, if the gathered knowledge and the gathered conscience of past ages does control us, support us, inspire us, then is this commemorating these parasites and offscourings of the human race worse than pedantry or folly.

It is filling us with an unnatural contempt for the greatness of the past — nay, it is committing towards our spiritual forefathers the same crime which Ham committed against his father Noah. It is a kind of sacrilege to the memory of the great men to whom we owe all we prize, if we waste our lives in poring over the acts of the puny creatures who only encumbered their path. Men on the battle-field or in their study, by the labour of their brains or of their hands, have given us what we have, and made us what we are ; a noble army who have done battle with barbarism and the powers of nature, martyrs often to their duty ; yet we are often invited to turn with indifference from the story of their long march and many victories, to find amusement amidst the very camp-followers and sutlers who hang upon their rear.

If history has any lessons, any unity, any plan, let us turn to it for this. Let this be our test of what is history and what is not, that it teaches us something of the advance of human progress, that it tells us of some of those mighty spirits who have left their mark on all time, that it shows us the nations of the earth woven together in one purpose, or is lit up with those great ideas and those great purposes which have kindled the conscience of mankind. Why is knowledge of any kind useful ? It is certainly not true that a knowledge of facts, merely as facts, is desirable. Facts are infinite, and it is not the millionth part of them that is worth knowing. What some people call the pure love of truth often means only a pure love of intellectual fussiness. A statement may be true, and yet wholly worthless.

It cannot be all facts which are the subject of knowledge. For instance, a man might learn by heart the Post-0 jfice Directory, and a very remarkable mental exercise it would be ; but he would hardly venture to call himself a well-informed man. No ; we want the facts only which add to our power, or will enable us to act. They only give us knowledge ■ — they only are a part of education. For instance, we begin the study of mathematics ; of algebra, or geometry. We hardly expect to turn it to practical account like another Hudibras, who could 'tell the clock by algebra ' ; but we do not find Euclid's geometry help us to take the shortest cut to our own house. Our object is to know something of the simplest principles which underlie all the sciences : to understand practically what mathematical demonstration means : to bring home to our minds the conception of scientific axioms.

Again, we study some of the physical laws of nature — plain facts about gravitation, or heat, or light. What we want is to be able to know something of what our modern philosophers are talking about. We want to know why Faraday is a great teacher ; to know what it is which seems to affect all nature equally ; which brings us down heavily upon the earth if we stumble, and keeps the planets in their orbits. We want to understand what are laws of nature. We take up such pursuits as botany or geology ; but then, again, not in order to discover a new medicine, or a gold-field, or a coal-mine. No, we want to know something of the mystery around us. We see intelligible structure, consistent unity, and common laws in the earth on which we live, with the view, I presume, of feeling more at home in it, of be coming more attached to it, of living in it more happily.

Some study physiology. We do not expect to discover the elixir of life, like an eminent novelist, nor do we expect to dispense with the aid of the surgeon. We want to get a glimpse of that marvellous framework of the human form, some notion of the laws of its exist ence, some idea of the powers which affect it, which depress or develop it, some knowledge of the relation of the thinking and feeling process and the thinking and feeling organ. We seek to know something of the influences to which all human nature is subject, to be able to understand what people mean when they tell us about laws of health, or laws of life, or laws of thought. We want to be in a position to decide for ourselves as to the trustworthiness of men upon whose judgment we depend for bodily existence. Now, in this list of the subjects of a rational educa tion something is wanting.

It is the play of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark : — ' The proper study of mankind is man.' Whilst Man is wanting, all the rest remains vague, and incomplete, and aimless. Mathematics would indeed be a jumble of figures if it ended in itself. But the moment we learn the influence which some great dis covery has had on the destinies of man ; the moment we note how all human thought was lighted up when Galileo said that the sun, and not the earth, was the centre of our world ; the moment we feel that the de monstrations of Euclid are things in which all human minds must agree — indeed, are almost the only things in which all do agree, — that moment the science has a meaning, and a clue, and a plan. It had none so long as it was disconnected from the history and the destiny of man — the past and the future.

It is the same with every other science. What would be the meaning of laws of nature, unless by them man could act on nature ? What would be the use of knowing the laws of health, unless we supposed that a sounder knowledge of them would ameliorate the condition of men ? What, indeed, is the use of the improvement of the mind ? It is far from obvious that mere exercise of the intellectual faculties alone is a good. A nation of Hamlets (to take a popular misconception of that character) would be more truly miserable, perhaps more truly despicable, than a nation of Bushmen. By a cultivated mind, a mental training, a sound education, we mean a state of mind by which we shall become more clear of our condition, of our powers, of our duties towards our fellows, of our true happiness, by which we may make ourselves better citizens and better men — more civilised, in short.

The preceding studies have been but a preparation. They have been only to strengthen the mind, and give it material for the true work of education — the inculcation of human duty. All knowledge is imperfect, we may almost say mean ingless, unless it tends to give us sounder notions of our human and social interests. What we need are clear principles about the moral nature of man as a social being ; about the elements of human society ; about the nature and capacities of the understanding- We want landmarks to guide us in our search after worthy guides, or true principles for social or political action. Human nature is unlike inorganic nature in this, that its varieties are greater, and that it shows con tinual change. The earth rolls round the sun in the same orbit now as in infinite ages past ; but man moves forward in a variable line of progress.

Age after age develops into new phases. It is a study of life, of growth, of variety. One generation shows one faculty of human nature in a striking degree; the next exhibits a different power. All, it is true, leave their mark upon all succeeding generations, and civilisation flows on like a vast river, gathering up the waters of its tribu tary streams. Hence it is that civilisation, being not a fixed or lifeless thing, cannot be studied as a fixed or lifeless subject. We can see it only in its movement and its growth. Except for eclipses, some conjunctions of planets, and minor changes, one year is as good as another to the astronomer ; but it is not so to the political observer. He must watch successions, and a wide field, and compare a long series of events. Hence it is that in all political, all social, all human questions whatever, history is the main resource of the inquirer.