Now this æsthetic quality is, it seems to me, required both from “natural beauty” and historic narrative; but if there is here a resemblance between them, in other respects they are profoundly different. Landscape appeals to us directly. I do not mean that our enjoyment of it, both in quality and quantity, is not largely due to the work of artists. Our tastes have, no doubt, been formed and our sensibilities educated by the interpretation of nature which we owe to painters and poets. But though this is true, it is also true that what we see and what we enjoy is not art but nature, nature at first hand, nature seen immediately, if not as she is, at least as she appears. In the case of history it is otherwise. Except when we happen to have been ourselves spectators of important events, there is always an artist to be reckoned with. It may be Thucydides. It may be Dr. Dryasdust. It may be a mediæval chronicler. It may be Mrs. Candour at the tea-table. But there is always somebody; and though that somebody might repudiate the notion that his narrative was a work of art, yet he cannot evade responsibility for selection, for emphasis, and for colour. We may think him a bad artist, but, even in his own despite, an artist he is;—an artist whose material is not marble or sound, but brute fact.

There is another way in which the æsthetic interest of history characteristically differs from the interest we feel in beauty, whether of art or of nature. It is massive rather than acute. Particular episodes may indeed raise the most poignant emotions. But, broadly speaking, the long-drawn story of man and his fortunes stirs feelings which (to borrow a metaphor from physics) are great in quantity but of low intensity. So it comes about that, whereas in the case of art the emotions stand out prominently above their associated judgments, in the case of history the positions are commonly reversed.

Yet this need not be so; and in particular it need not be so when we are contemplating the historical process as a whole. Details are then merged in a general impression; and the general impression drives us beyond the limits of history proper into questions of origin and purpose, into reflections about man and destiny, into problems of whence and whither. Speculations like these have an emotional as well as an intellectual value, which must be affected by the answers we give them.

Let me illustrate and explain. It is possible, indeed it is easy, to contemplate aspects of history with the coolest intellectual interest. In this mood we might, for instance, study the development of science and religion out of primitive magics and superstitions. In this mood we might observe the characteristics of the city state, or the growth and decay of feudalism, or the history of the Mongols. On the other hand, the interest often becomes tinged with stronger feelings when we sympathetically follow the changing fortunes of particular individuals or communities. We are then, as it were, spectators of a drama, moved by dramatic hopes and fears, dramatic likes and dislikes, dramatic “pity and terror.” And our emotions are not merely those appropriate to drama; they have, besides, that special quality (already referred to) which depends on the belief that they are occasioned by real events in a world of real people.

But there is yet a third case to be considered, in which the two previous cases are included and partially submerged. This occurs when the object of our contemplative interest is not episodic but general, not the fate of this man or that nation, this type of polity or that stage of civilisation, but the fate of mankind itself, its past and future, its collective destiny.

Now we may, if we please, treat this as no more than a chapter of natural history. Compared with the chapter devoted, let us say, to the Dinosaurs it no doubt has the disadvantage of being as yet unfinished, for the Dinosaurs are extinct, and man still survives. On the other hand, though the natural history of “Homo Sapiens” is incomplete, we may admit that it possesses a peculiar interest for the biologist; but this interest is scientific, not historical.

For what does historical interest require? Not merely “brute fact,” but brute fact about beings who are more than animals, who look before and after, who dream about the past and hope about the future, who plan and strive and suffer for ends of their own invention; for ideals which reach far beyond the appetites and fears which rule the lives of their brother beasts. Such beings have a “natural history,” but it is not with this that we are concerned. The history which concerns us is the history of self-conscious personalities, and of communities which are (in a sense) self-conscious also. Can the contemplative values which this possesses, especially in its most comprehensive shape, be regarded as independent of our world-outlook? Surely not.

Observe that history, so conceived, must needs compare faculty with desire, achievement with expectation, fulfilment with design. And no moralist has ever found pleasure in the comparison. The vanity of human wishes and the brevity of human life are immemorial themes of lamentation; nor do they become less lamentable when we extend our view from the individual to the race. Indeed, it is much the other way. Men’s wishes are not always vain, nor is every life too brief to satisfy its possessor. Only when we attempt, from the point of view permitted by physics and biology, to sum up the possibilities of collective human endeavour, do we fully realise the “vanity of vanities” proclaimed by the Preacher.

I am not, of course, suggesting that history is uninteresting because men are unhappy: nor yet that naturalism carries pessimism in its train. It may well be that if mankind could draw up a hedonistic balance-sheet, the pleasures of mundane existence would turn out to be greater than its sufferings. But this is not the question. I am not (for the moment) concerned with the miseries of the race, but with its futility. Its miseries might be indefinitely diminished, yet leave its futility unchanged. We might live without care and die without pain; nature, tamed to our desires, might pour every luxury into our lap; and, with no material wish unsatisfied, we might contemplate at our ease the inevitable, if distant, extinction of all the life, feeling, thought, and effort whose reality is admitted by a naturalistic creed.

But how should we be advanced? What interest would then be left in the story of the human race from its sordid beginnings to its ineffectual end? Poets and thinkers of old dimly pictured a controlling Fate to which even the Olympian gods were subject. The unknown power, which they ignorantly worshipped, any text-book on physics will now declare unto you. But no altars are erected in its honour. Its name is changed. It is no longer called Fate or Destiny, but is known by a title less august if more precise, the law of energy-degradation, or (if you please) “the second law of thermo-dynamics.” It has become the subject of scientific experiment; the physicists have taken it over from the seers, and its attributes are defined in equations. All terrestrial life is in revolt against it; but to it, in the end, must all terrestrial life succumb. Eschatology, the doctrine of the last things, has lapsed from prophecy to calculation, and has become (at least potentially) a quantitative science.