The new history; essays illustrating the modern historical outlook

Preface

All of the essays in this volume, with the exception of the fourth, have been printed before, as addresses or contributions to periodicals. They have, however, not only been carefully revised, but have been adjusted so as to give as much coherence as possible to the collection. They all illustrate, each in its particular way, the conception of "the new history" developed in the first essay.

In No. I, I borrow portions from an article on "Popular Histories and their Defects" which appeared in the now defunct International Monthly, July, 1900, but have made a new use of them. The second paper was originally prepared as one in a series of non-technical lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1908 and published by the Columbia University Press. With it has been combined portions from a paper on "The New History" read before the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, April 22, 191 1. No. Ill was read before the American Historical Association, December, 19 10, and printed in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, March 16, 191 1, where No. VIII also appeared on May 11 of the same year.

vi PREFACE

No. V was read, under the caption "The Significance of History in Industrial Education/' before the superintendents of the larger cities at the meeting of the National Educational Association at Indianapolis, March 2, 19 10, and was printed in The Educational Bi- Monthly, June, 1910. No. VI was read before the New England Teachers Association at Hartford, April 27, 1906. No. VII is a combination of two articles : "The Tennis Court Oath," prepared for the meeting of the American Historical Association in 1894 and published in their proceedings and in the Political Science Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 3, and "The French Declaration of the Rights of Man/' which was printed in the latter journal, Vol. XIV, No. 4; together with borrowings from an article in the American Historical Review, April, 1906, on "Some Recent Tendencies in the Study of the French Revolution."

J. H. R.

Columbia University, New York, November, 191 1.

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER

I. The New History

II. The History of History 26

II

The essay which immediately follows this will be devoted to a sketch of the history of history, and will explain more fully the development of the older ideals of historical composition. It will make clear that these ideals have changed so much from time to time that it is quite possible that an essentially new one may in time prevail. History is doubtless

An orchard bearing several trees And fruits of different tastes.

It may please our fancy, gratify our serious or idle curiosity, test our memories, and, as Bolingbroke says, contribute to " a creditable kind of ignorance." But the one thing that it ought to do, and has not yet effectively done, is to help us to understand ourselves and our fellows and the problems and prospects of mankind. It is this most significant form of history's usefulness that has been most commonly neglected.

It is true that it has long been held that certain lessons could be derived from the past, — precedents for the statesman and the warrior, moral guidance and consoling instances of providential interference for the commonalty. But there is a growing suspicion, which has reached conviction in the minds of most modern historians, that this type of usefulness is purely illusory. The present writer is anxious to avoid any risk of being regarded as an advocate of these supposed advantages of historical study. Their value rests on the assumption that conditions remain sufficiently uniform to give precedents a perpetual value, while, as a matter of fact, conditions, at least in our own time, are so rapidly altering that for the most part it would be dangerous indeed to attempt to apply jS the new history

past experience to the solution of current problems. Moreover, we rarely have sufficient reliable information in regard to the supposed analogous situation in the past to enable us to apply it to present needs. Most of the appeals of inexpensive oratory to "what history teaches" belong to this class of assumed analogies which will not bear close scrutiny. When I speak of history enabling us to understand ourselves and the problems and prospects of mankind, I have something quite different in mind, which I will try to make plain by calling the reader's attention to the use that he makes of his own personal history. ■ We are almost entirely dependent upon our memory of our past thoughts and experiences for an understanding of the situation in which we find ourselves at any given moment. To take the nearest example, the reader will have to consult his own history to understand why his eyes are fixed upon this particular page. If he should fall into a sound sleep and be suddenly awakened, his memory might for the moment be paralyzed, and he would gaze in astonishment about the room, with no realization of his whereabouts. The fact that all the familiar objects about him presented themselves plainly to his view would not be sufficient to make him feel at home until his memory had come to his aid and enabled him to recall a certain portion of the past. The momentary suspension of memory's functions as one recovers from a fainting fit or emerges from the effects of an anaesthetic is sometimes so distressing as to amount to a sort of intellectual agony. In its normal state the mind selects automatically, from the almost infinite mass of memories, just those things in our past which make us feel at home in the present. It works so easily and efficiently that we are unconscious of what it is doing for us an*! of how dependent we are upon it. It s"pph*eg_so promptly and so precisely what we need from the past in order to make the present intelligible that we are beguiled into the mistaken notion that the present is self-explanatory and quite able to take care of itself, and that the past is largely dead and irrelevant, except when we have to make a conscious effort to recall some elusive fact.

What we call history is not so different from our more intimate personal memories as at first sight it seems to be ; for very many of the useful and essential elements in our recollections are not personal experiences at all, but include a multitude of things which we have been told or have read ; and these play a very important part in our life. Should the reader of this page stop to reflect, he would perceive a long succession of historical antecedents leading up to his presence in a particular room, his ability to read the English language, his momentary freedom from pressing cares, and his inclination to center his attention upon a discussion of the nature and value of historical study, fflere he not_yaguely conscious of these historical antecedents, he would be in the bewildered condition spoken of above. Some of the memories necessary to save him from his bewilderment are parts of his own past experience, but many of them belong to the realm of history, namely, to what he has been told or what he has read of the past.

I could have no hope that this line of argument would make the slightest impression upon the reader, were he confined either to the immediate impressions of the moment, or to his personal experiences. It gives one something of a shock, indeed, to consider what a very small part of our guiding convictions are in any way connected with our personal experience. The date of our own birth is quite as strictly historical a fact as that of Artaphernes or of Innocent III ; we are forced to a helpless reliance upon the evidence of others for both events.

So it comes about that our personal . recollections insensibly merge into history in the ordinary sense of the word. History, from this point of view, may be regarded as an artificial extension and broadening. _of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations. Could we suddenly be endowed with a Godlike and exhaustive knowledge of the whole history of mankind, far more complete than the combined knowledge of all the histories ever written, we should gain forthwith a Godlike appreciation of the world in which we live, and a Godlike insight into the evils which mankind now suffers, as well as into the most promising methods for alleviating them, not because the past would furnish precedcnts of conduct, but because our conduct would be based upon a per fect^coin prehension jo j existing conditions founded upon a perfect knowledge^ thepast. As yet we are not in a position to interrogate the past with a view to gaining light on great social, political, economic, religious, and educational questions in the manner in which we settle the personal problems which face us — for example, whether we should make such and such a visit or investment, or read such and such a book, — by unconsciously judging the situation in the light of our recollections. Historians have not as yet set themselves to furnish us with what lies behind our great contemporaneous task of human betterment. They have hitherto had other notions of their functions, and were they asked to furnish answers to the questions that a person au courant with the problems of the day would most naturally put to them, they would with one accord begin to make excuses. One would say that it had long been recognized that it was the historian's business to deal with kings, parliaments, constitutions, warSj treaties; and territorial changes ; another would declare that recent history cannot be adequately written and that, therefore, we can never hope to bring the past into relation with the present, but must always leave a fitting interval between ourselves and the nearest point to which the historian should venture to extend his researches ; a third will urge that to have a purpose in historical study is to endanger those principles of objectivity upon which all sound and scientific research must be based. So it comes about that our books are like very bad memories which insist upon recalling facts that have no assignable relation to our needs, and this is the reason why the practical value of history has so long been obscured.

In order to make still clearer our dependence upon history in dealing with the present, let the reader remember that we owe most of our institutions to a rather remote past, which alone can explain their origin. The conditions which produced the Holy Roman Apostolic Church, trial by jury, the Privy Council, the degree of LL.D., the Book of Common Prayer, "the liberal arts," were very different from those that exist to-day. Contemporaneous religious, educational, and legal ideals are not the immediate product of existing circumstances, but were developed in great part during periods when man knew far less than he now does. Curiously enough our habits of thought change much more slowly than our environment and are usually far in arrears. Our respect_for a given institution or social convention may be purely traditional and have little relation to its value^as judged by existing conditions. We are, therefore, in constant danger of viewing present problems with obsolete emotions and of attempting to settle them by obsolete reasoning. This is one of the chief reasons why we are never by any means perfectly adjusted to our environment.

Our notions of a church and its proper function in society, of a capitalist, of a liberal education, of paying taxes, of Sunday observance, of poverty, of war, are determined only to a slight extent by what is happening to-day. The belief on which I was reared, that God ordained the observance of Sunday from the clouds of Sinai, is an anachronism which could not spontaneously have developed in the United States in the nineteenth century ; nevertheless, it still continues to influence the conduct of many persons. We pay our taxes as grudgingly as if they were still the extortions of feudal barons or absolute monarchs for their personal gratification, although they are now a contribution to our common expenses fixed by our own representatives. Few have outgrown the emotions connected with war at a time when personal prowess played a much greater part than the Steel Trust. Conservative college presidents still feel obliged to defend the "liberal arts" and the "humanities" without any very clear understanding of how the task came to be imposed upon them. To do justice to the anachronisms in conservative economic and legal reasoning would require a whole volume.

Society is to-day engaged in a tremendous and unprecedented effort to better itself in manifold ways. Never has our knowledge of the world and of man been so great as it now is ; never before has there been so much general good will and so much intelligent social activity as now prevails. The part that each of us can play in forwarding some phase of this reform will depend upon our understanding of existing conditions and opinion, and these can only be explained, as has been shown, by following more or less carefully the processes that produced them. We must develop historical-mindedness upon a far more generous scale than hitherto, for this will add a still deficient element in our intellectual equipment and will promote rational progress as nothing else can do. The present has hitherto been the willing victim of the past ; the time has now come when it. should turn on the past and exploit it in the interests of advance.

The "New History" is escaping from the limitations formerly imposed upon the study of the past. It will come in time consciously to meet our daily needs ; it will avail itself of all those discoveries that are being made about mankind by anthropologists, economists, psychologists, and sociologists — discoveries which during the past fifty years have served to revolutionize our ideas of the origin, progress, and prospects of our race. There is no branch of organic or inorganic science which has not undergone the most remarkable changes during the last half century, and many new branches of social science, even the names of which would have been unknown to historians in the middle of the nineteenth century, have been added to the long list. It is inevitable that history should be involved in this revolutionary process, but since it must be confessed that this necessity has escaped many contemporaneous writers, it is no wonder that the intelligent public continues to accept somewhat archaic ideas of the scope and character of history.

The title of this little volume has been chosen with the view of emphasizing the fact that history should not be regarded as a stationary subject which can only progress by refining its methods and accumulating, criticizing, and assimilating new material, but that it is bound to alter its ideals and aims with the general progress of society and of the social sciences, and that it should ultimately play an infinitely more important role in our intellectual life than it has hitherto done.

" History" is so vague a term at best, and has during the past twenty-five hundred years undergone such considerable changes in character and purpose, that it is well for one to review its somewhat startling vicissitudes if he desires to understand the conflicting notions which prevail to-day in regard to the significance of the past and the proper way of dealing with it. When we look back over the history of history, from Hecatasus of Miletus and Herodotus to the freshest doctor's dissertation, we perceive that its point of view has never been a settled one; that it has been the victim at once of routine and of transient circumstances. SojrL£.~jofL,its former ambitions it has now been forced to surrender; it has been chastened by a growing consciousness of ignorance ; but these humiliations have been far more than offset by the extraordinary extension of its domain, which has taken place very recently and almost insensibly. Half a century ago, man's past was supposed to include less than six thousand years ; now the story is seen to stretch back hundreds of thousands of years. But it is not man alone that has a history, — animals, plants, rocks, stars, even atoms, have theirs as well. So the zoologist, the botanist, the geologist, the astronomer, even the chemist have come to worship at History's shrine.

The growth of historifiaj-rninrieriness k thus perhaps the chief intellectual trait of our age. It is deeply affecting not only the social sciences but our general conceptions of the whole organic and inorganic world. Yet in its beginnings history had no very serious aims. It was doubtless discovered, in the first instance, by the story-teller, and its purpose has usually been to tell a tale rather than to contribute to a well-considered body of scientific knowledge. Indeed we shall not be far astray, if we view history, as it has existed through the ages, and even down to our own day, as a branch of general literature, the object of which has been to present past events in an artistic manner, in order to gratify a natural curiosity in regard to the achievements and fate of conspicuous persons, the rise and decay of monarchies, and the signal commotions and disasters which have repeatedly afflicted humanity.

Although the persistence of this primitive notion of history is so obvious as scarcely to demand illustration, it is interesting to note that as late as 1820, Daunou, a reputable French historian of his time, in a course of lectures upon the pursuit of history delivered at the College de France, declares that the masterpieces of epic poetry should claim the first attention of the would-be historian, since it is the poets who have created the art of narrative. Then, from the modern novel, Daunou continues, the student may learn "the method of giving an artistic pose to persons and events, of distributing details, of skilfully carrying on the thread of the narrative, of interrupting it, of resuming it, of sustaining the attention and provoking the curiosity of the reader." After the poets and novelists, the works of standard historians should be read with a view to surprising the secrets of their style — Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Plutarch; Caesar, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus ; and, among the moderns, Macchiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannone, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, and Voltaire. When the foundations of an elegant literary style are firmly established, the student may re-read the standard treatises with attention to the matter rather than the form; for, as even the judicious Daunou concedes, before writing history "it is evidently necessary to know it." Both Daunou's program and his list of names — unquestionably the most distinguished among historians throughout the centuries — testify to the strength of literary traditions among historical writers.

Yet a formal distinction at least has of course always been made between history and other branches of literature. This is emphasized by Polybius, writing in the second century before Christ. " Surely," he says, "an historian's object should be not to amaze his readers by a series of thrilling anecdotes, nor should he aim to produce speeches which might have been delivered, nor to study dramatic propriety in detail, like a writer of tragedy. On the contrary, his function is, above all, to record with fidelity what was actually said or done, no matter how commonplace it may be."

These warnings of Polybius were, however, commonly neglected by the ancient historian, whose j}bject was to interest his readers in the great men and striking events of the past, or to prepare him for public life by describing and analyzing the policy of former statesmen and generals, or to teach him to bear with dignity_the vicissitudes of fortune by recalling the_ calamities of others. It is clear that these ends of amusing, instructingror edifying were to be attained mainly by literary skill rather than by painful historical research.

To Thucydides, Polybius, and Tacitus, history appeared to be purely human and secular. Its significance was confined to this world. To them any allusion to the influence of the gods or to providence would have seemed quite out of place. But with the establishment of the Christian church the past began to take on a religious and theological meaning.

II

To the early Christians Hebrew history, as narrated in the Old Testament, served as a very important substantiation and illustration of their contention that the Messiah had at last come. By means of allegorical interpretation the most casual episodes of a remote past could be given a vivid and essential relation to the present. The Christians were perhaps the first to suspect a real grandeur in history, for to them it became a divine epic, stretching back to the creation of man and forward to the final separation of the good and evil in a last magnificent and decisive crisis.

But this theological unity and meaning of history was won at the tremendous sacrifice of all secular perspective and accuracy. The Amorites were invested with an importance denied the Carthaginians. Enoch and Lot loomed large in a past which scarcely knew of a Pericles. Allegory rendered all literary or historical criticism irrelevant, if not an impious questioning of God's own revealed truth. Then Augustine came to give an elaborate and plausible form to his theory of two cities, — a City of God which had existed from the first and which could be traced through the Old Testament into the New, and a City of Satan, founded by the fallen angels, exemplified in King Belus and Queen Semiramis, and trailing its obscene existence down through the Roman Empire to his own day. History became sacred and profane. The fantastically interpreted Jewish records, continued in the story of Christian martyrs and miracles, constituted history par excellence.

All the achievements of Egypt, Greece, and Rome tended to sink out of sight in the mind of Augustine's disciple, Orosius; only the woes of a devilworshiping heathendom lingered. At Augustine's suggestion he prepared his Seven Books of History directed against the Pagans. His aim was to refute those heathen detractors of Christianity who maintained that their age was accursed above all others, ^ owing to the desertion of the ancient gods. He boldly maintained that, on the contrary, a veritable carnival of death had preceded the appearance of Christianity. To prove this he brought together, as he tells us, in the compass of a single volume, all the examples he could find in the annals of the past "of the most signal horrors of war, pestilence, and famine, of the fearful devastations of earthquakes and inundations, the destruction wrought by fiery eruptions, by lightning and hail, and the awful misery due to crime." His convenient and edifying treatise became the standard manual of < universal history for a thousand years to follow. It was agreeable reading to medieval Christians, and it enjoyed the sanction of the chief among the church fathers. History thus became for Orosius, and for his innumerable readers in succeeding centuries, the story of God's punishment of sin and of the curse which man's original transgression had brought upon the whole earth.

But we need not expose ourselves to the hot and withering blasts of Orosius's rhetoric in order to realize the salient contrast between his conception of history's purpose and usefulness, and that of the classical Greek and Roman writers. In the old days the danger had been that Clio would fall into the way of aping her sisters, Poetry and the Drama, and of borrowing their finery. Now, she permitted herself to be led away blindfolded by Theology, which was for so long to be the potent rival of literature. The Greek historians and the greatest of the Romans, Tacitus, were forgotten in the Middle Ages ; so the polemical pamphlet of Orosius served to distort Europe's vision of the past for a thousand years until Thucydides and Polybius came once more within its ken.

But even the revival of classical learning by no means put an end to the " providential " conception of the past. This finds beautiful expression in Bossuet's Universal History. He perceives behind all the great events which he recalls, the secret ordering of Providence : —

Dieu tient du plus haut des cieux les renes de tous les royaumes ; il a tous les coeurs en sa main ; tantot il retient les passions, tantot il leur lache la bride, et par la il remue tout le genre humain. Veut-il faire des conquerants ; il fait marcher l'epouvante devant eux, et il inspire a eux et a leurs soldats une hardiesse invincible. Veut-il faire des legislateurs ; il leur envoie son esprit de sagesse et de prevoyance ; il leur fait prevenir les maux qui menacent les etats, et poser les fondements de la tranquillite publique. II connoit la sagesse humaine, tou jours courte par quelque endroit ; il l'eclaire, il etend ses vues, et puis l'abandonne a ses ignorances ; il l'aveugle, il la precipite, il la confond par elle-meme ; elle s'enveloppe, elle s'embarrasse dans ses propres subtilites, et ses precautions lui sont un piege. Dieu exerce par ce moyen ses redoutables jugements, selon les regies de sa justice toujours infaillible. 1

1 Discours sur Vhistoire universelle, concluding chapter.

Unhappily the mysterious character of divine dispensations opened the door to conflicting views of their meaning. All history seemed to Bossuet to exhibit God's constant solicitude for the1 Catholic Church and his anger against all who swerved from the faith delivered to Peter and handed down by his successors. Luther, on the other hand, believed that History supported him in his attack upon what he called the "Teufels Nest zu Rom." And not long after his death a group of Protestants had compiled a vast history of the church — T/ic Magdeburg Centuries, as it was called — in which they sought to prove the diabolical origin of the papacy and of the Roman Catholic Church. Cardinal Baronius replied in twelve folio volumes, written, as he trusted, under the direct auspices of the Virgin Mary, in which he set forth "the calamities divinely sent for the punishment of those who have dared to oppose in their arrogance, or conspire against, the true church of God." For three centuries each party continued to suborn history in its own interest, and one must still, to-day, allow for religious bias in important fields of historical research. Yet in spite of all their bitterness and blindness, religious controversies have stimulated much scholarly investigation in modern times, and we should be much poorer if certain works of a distinctly partisan character had never been written, — such, for example, as Raynaldus' continuation of Baronius and, in our own days, Janssen's History of the German People.

To the authors of the Magdeburg Centuries and to Cardinal Baronius — to Protestant and Catholic historians alike — the great, obvious, determining ^ historical forces were God and the devil. Our conception of God, as well as our ideas of history, have, however, been changing since the sixteenth century, and it is rare now to find a historian who possesses the old confidence in his ability to penetrate God's counsels and trace his dispensations in detail. As for the devil, few events can longer be ascribed to him with perfect assurance.

Ill

The reversion to the worldly standards of historical composition, represented by Macchiavelli and Guicciardini in the early sixteenth century, became pronounced in the eighteenth. Gibbon, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson, and others successfully resecularized history and strove to give their narrative of political events the ancient elegance of form.

Lord Bolingbroke, in his Letters on the Study of History, written about 1737, says: "An application to any study that tends neither to make us better men and better citizens is at best but a specious and ingenious sort of idleness; . . . and the knowledge we acquire by it is a creditable kind of ignorance, nothing more. This creditable kind of ignorance is, in my opinion, the whole benefit which the generality of men, even the most learned, reap from the study of history : and yet the study of history seems to me of all others the most proper to train us up to private and public virtue." History, ne quite properly says, is read by most people as a form of amusement, as they might play at cards. Some devote themselves to history in order to adorn their conversation with historical allusions, — and the argument is still current that one should know enough of the past to understand literary references to noteworthy events and persons. The less imaginative scholar, Bolingbroke complains, satisfies himself with making fair copies of foul manuscripts and explaining hard words for the benefit of others, or with constructing more or less fantastic chronologies based upon very insecure data. Over against these Bolingbroke places those who have perceived that history is after all only " philosophy teaching by example." For "the examples which we find in history, improved by the lively descriptions and the just explanations or censures of historians," will, he believes, have a much better and more permanent effect than declamation, or the "dry ethics of mere philosophy." Moreover, to summarize his argument, we can by the study of history enjoy in a short time a wide range of experience at the expense of other men and without risk to ourselves. History enables us "to live with the men who lived before us, and we inhabit countries that we never saw. Place is enlarged, and time prolonged in this manner : so that the man who applies himself early to the study of history may acquire in a few years, and before he sets foot in the world, not only a more extended knowledge of mankind, but the experience of more centuries than any of the patriarchs saw." Our own personal experience is doubly defective ; we are born too late to see the beginning, and we die too soon to see the end of many things. History supplies in a large measure these defects.