Introduction to the study of history

by Charles Victor Langlois; Charles Seignobos

There is still one more question to ask. Are men all alike, differing merely in the conditions under which they live (education, resources, government), and is evolution produced solely by changes in these conditions? Or are there groups of men with hereditary differences, born with tendencies to different activities and with aptitudes leading to different evolutions, so that evolution may be the product, in part at least, of the increase, the diminution, and the displacement of these groups? Taking the extreme cases, the white, black, and yellow races of mankind, the differences in aptitude are obvious; no black people has ever developed a civilisation. It is thus probable that smaller hereditary differences may have had their share in the determination of events. If so, historical evolution would be partly produced by physiological and anthropological causes. But history provides us with no sure means of determining the action of these hereditary differences between men; it goes no further than the conditions of their existence. The last question of history remains insoluble by historical methods.

CHAPTER V

EXPOSITION

We have still to study a question whose practical interest is obvious: What are the forms in which historical works present themselves? These forms are, in fact, very numerous. Some of them are antiquated; not all are legitimate; the best have their drawbacks. We should ask, therefore, not only what are the forms in which historical works appear, but also which of these represent truly rational types of exposition.

By "historical works" we mean here all those which are intended to communicate results obtained by the labour of historical construction, whatever may be the nature, the extent, and the bearing of these results. The critical elaboration of documents, which is treated of in Book II., and which is preparatory to historical construction, is naturally excluded.

Historians may differ, and up to the present have differed, on several essential points. They have not always had, nor have they all now, the same conception of the end aimed at by historical work; hence arise differences in the nature of the facts chosen, the manner of dividing the subject, that is, of co-ordinating the facts, the manner of presenting them, the manner of proving them. This would be the place to indicate how "the mode of writing history" has evolved from the beginning. But as the history of the modes of writing history has not yet been written well,[216] we shall here content ourselves with some very general remarks on the period prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, confining ourselves to what is strictly necessary for the understanding of the present situation.

I. History was first conceived as the narration of memorable events. To preserve the memory and propagate the knowledge of glorious deeds, or of events which were of importance to a man, a family, or a people; such was the aim of history in the tune of Thucydides and Livy. In addition, history was early considered as a collection of precedents, and the knowledge of history as a practical preparation for life, especially political life (military and civil). Polybius and Plutarch wrote to instruct, they claimed to give recipes for action. Hence in classical antiquity the subject-matter of history consisted chiefly of political incidents, wars, and revolutions. The ordinary framework of historical exposition (within which the facts were usually arranged in chronological order) was the life of a person, the whole life of a people, or a particular period in it; there were in antiquity but few essays in general history. As the aim of the historian was to please or to instruct, or to please and instruct at the same time, history was a branch of literature: there were not too many scruples on the score of proofs; those who worked from written documents took no care to distinguish the text of such documents from their own text; in reproducing the narratives of their predecessors they adorned them with details, and sometimes (under pretext of being precise) with numbers, with speeches, with reflections, and elegances. We can in a manner see them at work in every instance where it is possible to compare Greek and Roman historians, Ephorus and Livy, for example, with their sources.

The writers of the Renaissance directly imitated the ancients. For them, too, history was a literary art with apologetic aims or didactic pretensions. In Italy it was too often a means of gaining the favour of princes, or a theme for declamations. This state of affairs lasted a long time. Even in the seventeenth century we find, in Mézeray, an historian of the ancient classical pattern.

However, in the historical literature of the Renaissance, two novelties claim our attention, in which the mediæval influence is incontrovertibly manifest. On the one hand we see the retention of a form of exposition which was unusual in antiquity, which was created by the Catholic historians of the later ages (Eusebius, Orosius), and which enjoyed great favour in the Middle Ages,—that which, instead of embracing only the history of a single man, family, or people, embraces universal history. On the other hand there was introduced a mechanical artifice of exposition, having its origin in a practice common in the mediæval schools (the gloss), which had far-reaching consequences. The custom arose of adding notes to printed books of history.[217] Notes have made it possible to distinguish between the historical narrative and the documents which support it, to give references to sources, to disencumber and illustrate the text. It was in collections of documents, and in critical dissertations, that the artifice of annotation was first employed; thence it penetrated, slowly, into historical works of other classes.

A second period begins in the eighteenth century. The "philosophers" then began to conceive history as the study, not of events for their own sakes, but of the habits of men. They were thus led to take an interest, not only in facts of a political order, but in the evolution of the arts, the sciences, of industry, and in manners. Montesquieu and Voltaire personified these tendencies. The Essai sur les mœurs is the first sketch, and, in some respects, the masterpiece of history thus conceived. The detailed narration of political and military events was still regarded as the main work of history, but to this it now became customary to add, generally by way of supplement or appendix, a sketch of the "progress of the human mind." The expression "history of civilisation" appears before the end of the eighteenth century. At the same time German university professors, especially at Göttingen, were creating, in order to supply educational needs, the new form of the historical "manual," a methodical collection of carefully justified facts, with no literary or other pretensions. Collections of historical facts, made with a view to aid in the interpretation of literary texts, or out of mere curiosity in regard to the things of the past, had existed from ancient times; but the medleys of Athenæus and Aulus Gellius, or the vaster and better arranged compilations of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, are by no means to be compared with the "scientific manuals" of which the German professors then gave the models. These professors, moreover, contributed towards the clearing up of the vague, general notion which the philosophers had of "civilisation," for they applied themselves to the organisation of the history of languages, of literatures, of the arts, of religions, of law, of economic phenomena, and so on, as so many separate branches of study. Thus the domain of history was greatly enlarged, and scientific, that is, simple and objective, exposition began to compete with the rhetorical or sententious, patriotic or philosophical ideals of antiquity.