Delphi complete works of.., p.809
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 809
But the point is that there grew up since Macaulay’s time, and especially with the increasing study of history as a college course, reckoned in majors, minors, passes and failures, an increasing contrast as between history of the literary type and history of the college type. The names do not entirely fit, but let them pass for want of better. Here on the one side are Hume and Gibbon, Bancroft and Macaulay, Francis Parkman, John Richard Green, Goldwin Smith and the Trevelyans — passe et des meilleurs. Here on the other are the rank and file of college historians writing books of fact, stating what happened for students to learn it, pass it and forget it. For the brilliant pages which the young ladies strained their necks to see, they substitute a history that is dull, arid and colourless, without light or character, without weather or scenery, without thrill or emotion, without life.
Worse still, the college text-book historians, by the sheer pride of their profession — or call it, if you like, by the academic brahminism of college people — created and spread an impression that theirs was the real history. It is true that no young ladies ever peep over their shoulder, none but an unhappy First Year Girl all in tears because the Dean of Women has told her that she is ‘liable’ to the French Revolution. That makes no difference. They regard the outside public as being only on the level of Macaulay himself.
Now here comes in a curious fact, and one which quite accidently and wrongly seems to strengthen the claim of the dry-as-dust college history. Within the last half century opportunities and facilities for historical research, and the official encouragement given to it, have increased beyond belief. Carlyle, for example, breathed a sigh of regret that one could form no idea of the true shape and structure of the Bastille. To-day we could give him a ground plan of the whole place. National archives are being as busily searched as grandfathers’ trunks. Such records as those of what was once the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, or the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company, are what are called treasure-houses of history. Hence each new book out-dates Macaulay by presenting new facts on William Penn, or renders Gibbon obsolete by resurrecting six pages of the personal diary of the Emperor Nero. Thus values get badly mixed. People confuse the material from which history is to be written with the history itself. All the baked bricks ever baked in Babylon won’t make Babylonian history — only the ingredients of the new loaf for the hand of the master baker to knead again to bread.
Thus stands what one may call the problem of writing history; or rather, one-half of the problem, for all that has been said concerns only the method of narration. There is still the problem of the interpretation of history. But let that sleep for the moment.
Now many people who wish to write might think that all this is no concern of theirs since they have not any aspirations towards writing history. To the majority of them a historian is a venerable old gentleman with a long white beard who is said to have spent twenty years in the British Museum and looks as if he had. His labour receives respect rather than envy. In all my college teaching days I have only known a few students who were born historians, who preferred fact to fancy and knew by instinct the difference between a first-hand document and a second-hand narrative. Such students took to history as ducks to water, and generally succeeded in it, as a labour of love is apt to do, returning to college twenty years after graduation, bearded and old, to receive a degree in recognition of what they had done towards a better knowledge of Ancient Crete or Early Babylon. Such labours are for the few.
But even the generality of writers are apt to find themselves concerned with history in the shape of historical romance, or stories with a historical setting, or in the plain matter-of-fact form of writing the condensed history required by an encyclopaedia and the coloured history washed over tourist ‘literature.’ Some notion of the presentation of historical problems connected with history writing ought to be part of the stock-in-trade and equipment of any literary worker. These peculiar problems only appear when one meets them in the attempt to write and studies them in actual cases and examples. Some history writing aims at the presentation of facts without making any judgment from them, as when an encyclopaedia includes the ‘History of Portugal’ in five hundred words. Other historical writing makes a presentation of facts with a view to proving a case, as when Macaulay writes an essay to put Warren Hastings where he belongs. Some historical writing on a larger canvas, the real history in the grand sense, undertakes to convey the annals of a nation, or even of all the world at large. A lesser section of history relates curious and interesting facts for their own sake, the story of the lost colony of Greenland, or the fate of the expedition of Admiral La Pérouse.
Quite contrasted again is military history, itself a whole province, aiming at the interest of the general reader, but at times focussed to the narrower but technical viewpoint of the soldier student. Similarly there branch away from the main trunk of history such expanding boughs as the history of commerce, of exploration, or the more newly discovered history of the life of the people. Some of these branches are matched by roots underground to be dug up as archaeology. The weapon here is not the pen but the spade; and the glowing page becomes the numbered catalogue. Centuries after the Greek historians and poets had done with Troy, Dr. Heinrich Schliemann, in the eighties of the last century, got after it with the spade. For many minds indeed there is higher interest in buried remains than in living actuality, more to them in a Roman helmet from Pompeii than in a modern Italian fedora hat. But let the fedora get old enough and it will rank with the helmet. This peculiar aspect of antiquity spreads wide till it extends from historians to coin collectors and relic hunters and the midget pursuit of postage stamps.
But other branches of the great tree of history wave so high above the roots that they begin to take on something of the colours of the sky seen through the leaves. Here plays the fancy of the historical romance, and romantic history, better to vision thus enchanted than truth itself. Indeed this historical romance now extends its growth so fast and so far, that like the banyan tree it dips its branches to earth again, takes new roots and spreads on in a dozen varied forms. Here is first the pure romance of history, as written especially for children; nursery history, its pages bright with fluttering flags and flashing swords, or wet with tears that fell for the little princes in the Tower, or thumbed with eager interest where Horatius kept the bridge or some one else bridged the keep.... Here is the historical novel of maximum specific gravity, as light as lead, sticking close to truth itself.... Here again is the lighter historical novel turning all historical characters into such up-to-date individuals, all swearing and laughter and smut, that it makes them less convincing than ever. Beyond that history takes wings and flies up into the colours of the morning, just beautiful coloured patches done with gas in what is called ‘tourist literature’ with sentences such as:
Here Montcalm breathed his last, Wolfe having breathed his last first.
Let us then, as an exercise proper to this volume, sit down to write history together. We will not attempt at first to strike the chords of romance, but begin with the plain single notes of recorded fact. In other words we will begin by doing a history article for an encyclopaedia. Here we may well recall at the start the instructions sent out — it was years ago, or I would not refer to it — by one of our leading encyclopaedias to its academic contributors, ‘This encyclopaedia wants the facts, and wants all the facts, but your own opinion we can do without.’ The language is as brutal as it is inelegant, but the editors were dealing with professors and had to take a firm stand. Yet even at that many contributors to encyclopaedias take some time to learn and some never learn the difference between plain statements of fact and statements which seek to add life and colour. Facts, as such, for some reason or other, stand in deep disrepute with the ordinary mind. We speak of ‘bald’ facts, a cruel comparison for elderly men to think of. Bald facts presumably need hair; dry facts need be made wet and dull facts to be brightened. Even when these epithets run out facts are described as plain, hard, unadorned, unwholesome — in short, fit company for no one. Yet the encyclopaedia lives on them as a raven grows wise on carrion.
We cannot wonder, therefore, that the literary spirit at first revolts from the harness of the encyclopaedia. But let us begin, anyway.
I suggest then that we undertake an article upon Newfoundland. I suggest that subject because I recall from some years back an article, or rather a contribution that never became an article, on Newfoundland, submitted to a great encyclopaedia at its own request by an author so distinguished and so well acquainted with Newfoundland that it seemed like asking Columbus to write on America. That was the trouble. He wrote too well and he knew too much. Indeed we might start from the article thus submitted, as far as I recall the text of it, instead of writing one of our own. Of course my memory is inexact and blurred by time, but it is correct enough for the essential idea.
The article begins:
Newfoundland. This grand old isle, whose rocky cliffs and granite coast bid defiance on one side to the surges of the angry Atlantic, and on the other to the treacherous ice, stands like a barrier thrown by jealous nature across the St. Lawrence-gateway to North America.’
Stop! stop! That won’t do at all. You can’t call it a grand old isle. Who said grand? That’s just your thought. Cut it out — and isle, you can’t use that. There’s no such thing as an isle in an encyclopaedia, only an ‘island.’ Get down to bald fact, call it an island. Better leave out old; keep that for the little section, called palaeography that we shall slip in later.
Very good. Now cut out all that ‘bidding defiance’ and angry Atlantic, etc. The Atlantic has never been angry, no more than the Pacific has been pacific — and surges, leave them to the poets who can make a surge suit; we can’t. In fact wouldn’t it be much nicer and more modest if we began:
Newfoundland. An island in the North Atlantic (fat this, long, that) lying across the opening of the St. Lawrence, its outer coast facing the Atlantic from north-west to south. The coast-line, deeply indented, is composed chiefly of basaltic rock overlying subcutaneous feldspar.
Now let our author continue for a while:
Newfoundland is as old and older than history. We cannot doubt that the Norsemen from Greenland came driving into its fiords on the foam of the east wind. John Cabot, we know, gashed at its iron-bound shores from the deck of his carvel. Tor half a century the swarthy Basque fisherman gathered its prolific cod to feed a fasting Christendom. But the banner of England was first proudly hoisted on its soil by the chivalrous Sir Humphrey Gilbert and his dare-devil Elizabethan crew fresh from their destruction of the Armada.
Stop! stop! It’s all gone wrong again. The Norsemen didn’t drive in on the foam. The proper phrase is, visited the coast. John Cabot didn’t gaze at it. He saw it. Get back to hard fact — and he may have been on the deck of his carvel or sitting up on the main truck — see under Shipyards: Rigging. And the Basque fishermen. Its quite right to refer to them. They came back and forward for a century. But you mustn’t call them swarthy, at least not here; this is no place for saying that the Basques are swarthy. That information belongs elsewhere, under RACES OF EUROPE, HUMAN COMPLEXION, see also Dermatology and Diseases of the Skin. And never mind what cod are used for — that’s another matter... and of course the banner was really hoisted proudly but we mustn’t say so; and of course the Elizabethan sailors should not have been called dare-devils but simply labelled See under Armada.
Which shows one of the peculiar technical difficulties in writing for an encyclopaedia — how to know what belongs in your own article and what belongs elsewhere. An untrained writer wanders like a cow on the roadside. The editor has to cut out his material and insert: see under Cod-fisheries, see under Gilbert, see Strait. But the technical man keeps inside the fence, or even gets out of difficulties when he fails to find information by passing the buck with a (See under something else). Thus: The aborigines of Newfoundland, now dead, were of mixed origin (see under North American Indians).
But this is a purely technical matter, more of editorial than literary interest. We may let it go at that.
For if I remember rightly it was at about the point of editorial revision that the distinguished author withdrew his article. It was published later, at about five times encyclopaedia prices, with beautiful illustrations, by the Ladies’ Something Magazine, under the title O! Cod.
Now many people who want to write might think that this business of encyclopaedia writing and the method of encyclopaedia statement is of no interest or advantage to people who are interested only in the idea of writing stories. There they are quite wrong. In relating a story, which is from the nature of the case untrue, one of the chief problems is how to make it sound true. This gift of producing’verisimilitude’ (likeness to truth), as we saw in the last chapter is a very high literary art, often instinctive and unconscious, but capable like all other instinctive performances of improvement by industry.
Perhaps I have not made sufficiently clear what I mean by the difference between an encyclopaedia sentence and a literary sentence. The literary sentence may often be superior in reach, but it doesn’t sound quite as true.... Example: We are writing a sea story and we want to show what a terrific fellow the bos’n was.
Literary method:
I do not think I have ever seen anyone who gave me the same impression of elemental power as the bos’n.
Encyclopaedia method:
The hos’n was a gigantic man, swarthy and heavily set; six feet two by fifty inches.
One description says what the bos’n was, the other tells what we think about the bos’n. Both ways of writing are quite in order. But there are times when the encyclopaedia style creates the better effect.
But let us pass from this outlying ground to the main field of history, the writing of the annals of a nation, the thing that anyone tries to do who writes a book called the History of the United States, or the History of England. This is the real thing and from the days of Thucidides and Tacitus it has called forth much of the best intellectual power of mankind. Many people never tire of history. Indeed our life interest in literature begins with it in infancy, since Jack the Giant Killer, as narrated, is straight history. ‘Once upon a time,’ begins the mother in opening the narration, and the charm of the old phrase lingers on for ever.
Now the principal thing that I want to say here is that real history, as apart from mere books of material, cannot be presented so as to convey the full and adequate impression of what happened without a fitting presentation of scene and circumstance. History in other words must be ‘literary.’ This is the point which I indicated above and which I now wish to elaborate with practical examples.
Let us consider, as the most striking case in point, the work of Francis Parkman. Parkman lived from 1823 to 1893. He wrote a dozen volumes dealing with the history of North America from the beginning of European settlement until the fall of the French Empire on this continent. The series practically ends with Montcalm and Wolfe since the Conspiracy of Pontiac, the Indian war that followed the surrender of New France in 1760 and the Cession of 1763, was merely an appendage of what went before. Parkman worked with a zeal that never slackened and an industry that never flagged, visited battlefields, delved into archives, yet with the resulting product of a page so clear and lucid and attractive, so easy to read, so effortless to remember, that many of his readers never think him a historian at all. They think he was only a writer. You see, what he wrote is such easy stuff that you could hardly call it history.
Parkman has an intense and instinctive feeling for the presentation of each event in the light of the scene and surroundings. He must know not only what happened but what it was like where it happened. The statement that Cain killed Abel would be of little use to him. He must know whether it was at midnight in a thunderstorm in the heart of a forest, or in the still dawn of a summer morning just as the mist rose off the Garden of Eden. For others it is quite enough that Cain killed Abel; for a lawyer, for instance, anything else is extraneous. He would object to bringing in the weather as evidence. Many writers of history take it in just this sense. They would digest Park- man’s volumes into a quarter of their size; and there would be nothing left of them.
For Parkman’s pages are redolent of the salt wind off the sea and the odour of the forest, they burn with the glare of the sun on the desert sand and are still and cool with the mist of the morning; they are swept with the wind over the prairies where the ‘dark hollows seem to glide along and chase the sunny ridges.’
