CHAPTER XVIII
THE ERROR OF POMPOUS HISTORY
“Reason will tell you,” wrote George Hakewill in 1627, “that old age or antiquity is to be accounted by the farther distance from the beginning and the nearer approach to the end, the times wherein we now live being in propriety of speech the most ancient since the world’s creation.” The same thought was expressed by Giordano Bruno in 1564, and by Pascal in his Treatise on Vacuum. “For as old age,” the latter writes, “is that period of life most remote from infancy, who does not see that old age in this universal man ought not to be sought in the times nearest his birth, but in those most remote from it?” “These present times,” says Bacon, “are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient, ordine retrogrado by a computation backward from ourselves.”
It is curious to notice how completely we have all fallen into the error which these writers expose. We speak naturally of “the elder days,” and we attribute to any period of the “olden times” an age which is in reality the sum of all the ages since. We seem to forget that antiquity, viewed as a period, is only old when we falsely add to it our own weight of years; and that antiquities, as objects, are only hoary when they have taken upon them the marks of their slow attainment, century by century, to the venerable age in which we now live. It is the Present that is old and hoary, not the Past. It is To-day that is burdened with the cares of advanced life; and, as compared with its heavy accountability, the bygone ages are light-hearted, irresponsible and unsubdued: for it is our own epoch, not theirs, that is encrusted with the corrosion of time.
When we essay to study history we are accustomed to take the Present as our standpoint, and, looking back to some remote period, we find it old with the years we have crossed to reach it. But the historian should rather take the Past as his natural standpoint, and should forget To-day; for in dealing with bygone events it is surely obvious that we have no right to make the circumstances of our present existence our criterion. We must project ourselves into the youthful ages which we are studying, and must cast aside the cumbrous habits of thought which have been built up within us by the experiences of our ripe maturity. There is only one right way to examine the past years of mankind: we must look at them as, individually, we look at our own childhood, remembering the sensations and emotions of those times and contemplating life with those eyes. We cannot hope to comprehend the outlook of the Past unless we divest our minds of a large part of the world’s subsequent experience; for the Past is simply the nursery of the Present, and differs from it in just that degree in which a boy differs from a man.
The regarding of former ages as being ancient and hoary has led the historian to introduce them to the reader in an unnecessarily sober and heavy manner. It has long been the habit to write history as though the story of the Past were a solemn subject calling for a grave and even melancholy treatment. The writing of an historical treatise is usually regarded as a legitimate opportunity for the display of the author’s turn for rhythmic prose or knowledge of punctuation and grammar. Rolling, dignified words, sentences which frown in their tremendousness, periods staid and smooth, are employed as the means whereby the picture of the Past, as he sees it, may be conveyed to the imagination of his readers. Macaulay even speaks of a certain subject as being “beneath the dignity of history.” The historian fails to see that it is not the giving out of the facts, but only their discovery, which requires ponderous study.
The men and women who walked the earth in the days of its youth are not antiquated: the up-to-date young men and the modern young women are the real old fogies, for they are the tenants of the world’s old age, the products of the most ancient phase of the human story. To the Past we must go as a relief from To-day’s harshness; for the Past is spread out before us as a children’s garden, where jolly laughter and sudden, quick-ended tears are to be experienced; where the waters are alive with mermen and the woods are filled with brownies; where nymphs and fairies dwell among the flowers, and enchanted castles crown the hilltops; where heroes die for fame, and the victors marry kings’ daughters. There in that garden we may forget the mature cruelty and the sins of the present time; for if there be wickedness in the Past, we may usually name it the thoughtless mischief of childhood.
One contemplates with positive relief the tortures and massacres of the distant ages, for they are child’s play as compared with the reasoned brutality of these wicked olden days in which we now live. How pleasant it is to turn from the organised beastliness of our own times to the irresponsible slaughter of the early Christians in Rome or to the wholesale impalings and flayings which followed an Assyrian battle! In the last-named cases we are but shocked at the suffering inflicted by the inhabitants of the world’s nursery upon one another; but in the other we are appalled by the spectacle of humanity’s old men gleefully slaughtering one another.
The historian should always remember that by rights it is to the days of long ago that he and his readers ought to turn for those scenes which make their special appeal to the ardent eyes of youth. It is into the early times that we must all wander when, sick of life’s conformity and weary of the cramped stiffness of the conventions amongst which we move, we would breathe the unenclosed air of a freer order of things. He must not, therefore, amidst the stately forest of his phrases hide the gateway of this joyous domain both from himself and his followers. It should stand open and unconcealed at the end of the highroad which leads from the Present to the Past; so that all those who make the great adventure and set out in search of the forgotten years shall, by his direction, find that gateway and pass through it into the land where the burden of To-day’s old age drops from the shoulders and the buoyancy of the early times stimulates and enlivens.
There, in those enchanted regions, men are heroes and women are beautiful, and all that the heart desires is to be found. There, and perhaps only there, grow “the flower of peace, and the rose that cannot wither.” Beyond that gateway stand the gorgeous palaces wherein sit the queens of the young world, of whose beauty the fairest women of our own age have but a semblance. There they rest upon their marble thrones, their loveliness causing the brain to reel and the heart to faint; and into their presence the initiate may penetrate, unchecked and unannounced. Here in this garden a man may at will become one with burly Antony; and with pleasant arrogance may mount the dais’ steps to Cleopatra’s side, and put his arm about her bewildering shoulders. He may merge himself into splendid Lucullus, and watch with mild amusement the amazement of his self-invited guests, Cicero and Pompey, served at a moment’s notice with a fifty-thousand drachmæ dinner in the sumptuous apartment called “Apollo.”
In the twinkling of an eye, for so mighty is the magic of the garden, he may turn from Lucullus to become that Roman’s enemy, the swift-footed royal athlete Mithradates, wooing the reluctant Monime in the palace of Miletus on the banks of Meander. Now he is young Cimon, intoxicated by the beauty of Asteria of Salamis; and now he is Demetrius in the happy toils of the fair Lamia. Mounting the magic carpet he may leap over the seas and deserts to Babylon, where, with a gesture, he may become one with Sargon, and may parade the hanging gardens in the light of the tremendous moon. Away he may fly once more to the valley of the Nile, whence, in the guise of King Unis, he may ascend the “ladder of the sun,” burst open the “double gates of the sky,” and play with “the imperishable stars.”