Part 50 (2/2)
CHAPTER II
HISTORY
[Sidenote: History an artificial memory.]
The least artificial extension of common knowledge is history. Personal recollection supplies many an anecdote, anecdotes collected and freely commented upon make up memoirs, and memoirs happily combined make not the least interesting sort of history. When a man recalls any episode in his career, describes the men that flourished in his youth, or laments the changes that have since taken place, he is an informal historian. He would become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented and controlled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate pains to gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematic investigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens the basis for imaginative reconstruction. It b.u.t.tresses somewhat the frail body of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged an individual's attention.
History is nothing but a.s.sisted and recorded memory. It might almost be said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not what science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we must rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has to be a.s.sumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw.
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but a s.h.i.+fting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the original experience which it purports to describe.
[Sidenote: Second sight requires control.]
It is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise the curtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. We may imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but, though hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in some spiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like other telepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-gone perception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minutiae and trivial concomitants, might involve no true repet.i.tion of anything that had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether.
The sense of knowing const.i.tutes only a working presumption for experiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption can claim no respect from the outsider.
[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories.]
While memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can be compared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only when memory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itself corroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity and approach scientific knowledge. Two presumptions, when they coincide, make a double a.s.surance. While memory, then, is the basis of all historical knowledge, it is not called history until it enters a field where it can be supported or corrected by evidence. This field is that natural world which all experiences, in so far as they are rational, envisage together. a.s.sertions relating to events in that world can corroborate or contradict one another--something that would be impossible if each memory, like the plot of a novel, moved in a sphere of its own. For memory to meet memory, the two must present objects which are similar or continuous: then they can corroborate or correct each other and help to fix the order of events as they really happened--that is, as they happened independently of what either memory may chance to represent. Thus even the most miraculous and direct recovery of the past needs corroboration if it is to be systematically credited; but to receive corroboration it must refer to some event in nature, in that common world in s.p.a.ce and time to which other memories and perceptions may refer also. In becoming history, therefore, memory becomes a portion of natural science. Its a.s.sertions are such that any natural science may conceivably support or contradict them.
[Sidenote: Growth of legend.]
Nature and its transformations, however, form too serried and complicated a system for our wayward minds to dominate if left to their spontaneous workings. Whatever is remembered or conceived is at first vaguely believed to have its place in the natural order, all myth and fable being originally localised within the confines of the material world and made to pa.s.s for a part of early history. The method by which knowledge of the past is preserved is so subject to imaginative influence that it cannot avail to exclude from history anything that the imagination may supply. In the growth of legend a dramatic rhythm becomes more and more marked. What falls in with this rhythm is reproduced and accentuated whenever the train of memory is started anew.
The absence of such cadences would leave a sensible gap--a gap which the momentum of ideation is quick to fill up with some appropriate image.
Whatever, on the other hand, cannot be incorporated into the dominant round of fancies is consigned more and more to oblivion.
This consolidation of legend is not intentional. It is ingenuous and for the most part inevitable. When we muse about our own past we are conscious of no effort to give it dramatic unity; on the contrary, the excitement and interest of the process consist in seeming to discover the hidden eloquence and meaning of the events themselves. When a man of experience narrates the wonders he has seen, we listen with a certain awe, and believe in him for his miracles as we believe in our own memory for its arts. A bard's mechanical and ritualistic habits usually put all judgment on his own part to sleep; while the sanct.i.ty attributed to the tale, as it becomes automatically more impressive, precludes tinkering with it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with which early history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with malice prepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling, between night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time the tale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since it is memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only if some record of the narrative in its former guise, or some physical memorial of the event related, survives to be confronted with the modified version. The modified version itself can make no comparisons.
It merely inherits the name and authority of its ancestor. The innocent poet believes his own lies.
Legends consequently acquire a considerable eloquence and dramatic force. These beauties accrue spontaneously, because rhythm and ideal pertinence, in which poetic merit largely lies, are natural formative principles for speech and memory. As symmetry in material structures is a ground for strength, and hills by erosion are worn to pyramids, so it is in thoughts. Yet the stability attained is not absolute, but only such stability as the circ.u.mstances require. Dramatic effect is not everywhere achieved, nor is it missed by the narrator where it is wanting, so that even the oldest and best-pruned legends are full of irrelevant survivals, contradictions, and sc.r.a.ps of nonsense. These literary blemishes are like embedded fossils and tell of facts which the mechanism of reproduction, for some casual reason, has not obliterated.
The recorder of verbal tradition religiously sets down its inconsistencies and leaves in the transfigured chronicle many tell-tale incidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body, reveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction or beauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and pious minstrel carries it with him to the end.
[Sidenote: No history without doc.u.ments.]
For these reasons there can be no serious history until there are archives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privileged position may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of his own time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archives and records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian from paying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the same concessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence of doc.u.ments, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle that elicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out of remembered events. In both cases the facts are automatically foreshortened and made to cl.u.s.ter, as it were providentially, about a chosen interest. The historian's politics, philosophy, or romantic imagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that falls within that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, the rest is pa.s.sed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possible to say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest which guides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on the events he relates and especially on their grouping and significance.
History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
The conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts and put a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and an honest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish, as he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits of his book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a very great mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent and such a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative of all reality.
[Sidenote: The aim is truth.]
Some historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical that they avowedly write history with a view to effect, either political or literary. Moralising historians belong to this school, as well as those philosophers who wors.h.i.+p evolution. They sketch every situation with malice and twist it, as if it were an argument, to bring out a point, much as fas.h.i.+onable portrait-painters sometimes surcharge the characteristic, in order to make a bold effect at a minimum expense of time and devotion. And yet the truly memorable aspect of a man is that which he wears in the sunlight of common day, with all his generic humanity upon him. His most interesting phase is not that which he might a.s.sume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The characteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral variation in the honest and st.u.r.dy lump. To catch only the heartless s.h.i.+mmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that supports it. Therefore a broad and n.o.ble historian sets down all within his apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly devoted to expressing the pa.s.sions of the dead. His ideal, emanating from his function and chosen for no extraneous reason, is to make his heroes think and act as they really thought and acted in the world.
Nevertheless the opposite happens, sometimes to a marked and even scandalous degree. As legend becomes in a few generations preposterous myth, so history, after a few rehandlings and condensations, becomes unblus.h.i.+ng theory. Now theory--when we use the word for a schema of things' relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and fulness--is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion. The function of history, if it could be thoroughly fulfilled, would be to render theory unnecessary. Did we possess a record of all geological changes since the creation we should need no geological theory to suggest to us what those changes must have been. Hypothesis is like the rule of three: it comes into play only when one of the terms is unknown and needs to be inferred from those which are given. The ideal historian, since he would know all the facts, would need no hypotheses, and since he would imagine and hold all events together in their actual juxtapositions he would need no cla.s.sifications. The intentions, acts, and antecedents of every mortal would be seen in their precise places, with no imputed qualities or scope; and when those intentions had been in fact fulfilled, the fulfilments too would occupy their modest position in the rank and file of marching existence. To omniscience the idea of cause and effect would be unthinkable. If all things were perceived together and co-existed for thought, as they actually flow through being, on one flat phenomenal level, what sense would there be in saying that one element had compelled another to appear? The relation of cause is an instrument necessary to thought only when thought is guided by presumption. We say, ”If this thing had happened, that other thing would have followed”--a hypothesis which would lapse and become unmeaning had we always known all the facts. For no supposition contrary to fact would then have entered discourse.
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