HOW LITERATURE MAY ILLUSTRATE HISTORY.
HOW LITERATURE MAY ILLUSTRATE HISTORY.[8]
Some of the ways in which Literature may illustrate History are obvious enough. In the poems, the songs, the dramas, the novels, the satires, the speeches, even the speculative treatises, of any time or nation, there is imbedded a wealth of direct particulars respecting persons and events, additional to the information that has been transmitted in the formal records of that time or nation, or in its express histories of itself. “It has often come to my ears that it is a saying too frequently in your mouth that you have lived long enough for yourself:” so did Cicero, if the speech in which the passage occurs is really his, address Cæsar face to face, in the height of his power, and not long before his assassination, remonstrating with him on his melancholy, and his carelessness of a life so precious to Rome and to the world. If the words are any way authentic, what a flash they are into the mind of the great Roman in his last years, when, blasé with wars and victories, and all the sensations that the largest life on earth could afford, he walked about the streets of Rome, consenting to live on so long as there might be need, but, so far as he himself was concerned, heedless when the end might come, the conspirators in a ring round him, the short scuffle, the first sharp stab of the murderous knife!
Let this pass as one instance of a valuable illustration of Biography and History derived from casual reading. Literature teems with such: no one can tell what particles of direct historical and biographical information lie yet undiscovered and unappropriated in miscellaneous books. But there is an extension of the use for the historian of the general literature of the time with which he may be concerned. Not only does Literature teem with yet unappropriated anecdotes respecting the persons and events of most prominent interest in the consecutive history of the world; but quite apart from this, the books, and especially the popular books, of any time, are the richest possible storehouses of the kind of information the historian wants. Whatever may be the main thread of his narrative, he has to re-imagine more or less vividly what is called the general life of the time, its manners, customs, humours, ways of thinking, the working of its institutions, all the peculiarities of that patch of the never-ending, ever-changing rush and bustle of human affairs, to-day above the ground, and to-morrow under. Well, here in the books of the time he has his materials and aids. They were formed in the conditions of the time; the time played itself into them; they are saturated with its spirit; and costumes, customs, modes of eating and drinking, town-life, country life, the traveller on horseback to his inn, the shoutings of mobs in riot, what grieved them, what they hated, what they laughed at, all are there. No matter of what kind the book is, or what was its author’s aim; it is, in spite of itself, a bequest out of the very body and being of that time, reminding us thereof by its structure through and through, and by a crust of innumerable allusions. It has been remarked by Hallam, and by others, how particularly useful in this way for the historian, as furnishing him with social details of past times, are popular books more especially of the humorous order—comic dramas and farces, poems of occasion, and novels and works of prose-fiction generally. How the plays of Aristophanes admit us to the public life of Athens! How, as we read the Satires and Epistles of Horace, we see old Rome, like another huge London, only with taller houses, and the masons mending the houses, and the poet himself, like a modern official in Somerset House, trudging along to his office, jostled by the crowds, and having to get out of the way of the ladders and the falling rubbish, thinking all the while of his appointment with Mæcenas! Or, if it is the reign of George II. in Britain that we are studying, where shall we find better illustration of much of the life, and especially the London life, of that coarse, wig-wearing age, than in the novels of Fielding and Smollett?
These, and perhaps other ways in which Literature may illustrate History, are tolerably obvious, and need no farther exposition. There is, however, a higher and somewhat more subtle service which Literature may perform towards illustrating History and modifying our ideas of the Past.
What the historian chiefly and finally wants to get at, through all his researches, and by all his methods of research, is the mind of the time that interests him, its mode of thinking and feeling. Through all the trappings, all the colours, all the costumes, all those circumstances of the picturesque which delight us in our recollections of the past, this is what we seek, or ought to seek. The trappings and picturesque circumstances are but our optical helps in our quest of this; they are the thickets of metaphor through which we push the quest, interpreting as we go. The metaphors resolve themselves; and at last it is as if we had reached that vital and essential something—a clear transparency, we seem to fancy it, and yet a kind of throbbing transparency, a transparency with pulses and powers—which we call the mind or spirit of the time. As in the case of the individual, so in that of a time or a people, we seem to have got at the end of our language when we use this word, mind or spirit. We know what we mean, and it is the last thing that we can mean; but, just on that account, it eludes description or definition. At best we can go to and fro among a few convenient synonyms and images. Soul, mind, spirit, these old and simple words are the strongest, the profoundest, the surest; age cannot antiquate them, nor science undo them; they last with the rocks, and still go beyond. But, having in view rather the operation than the cause, we find a use also in such alternative phrases as “mode of thinking,” “mode of feeling and thinking,” “habit of thought,” “moral and intellectual character or constitution,” and the like. Or, again, if we will have an image of that which from its nature is unimaginable, then, in our efforts to be as pure and abstract as possible, we find ourselves driven, as I have said, into a fancy of mind as a kind of clear aërial transparency, unbounded or of indefinite bounds, and yet not a dead transparency, but a transparency full of pulses, powers, motions, and whirls, capable in a moment of clouding itself, ceasing to be a transparency, and becoming some strange solid phantasmagory, as of a landscape smiling in sunshine or a sky dark with a storm. Yet again there is another and more mechanical conception of mind which may be of occasional use. The thinking power, the thinking principle, the substance which feels and thinks, are phrases for mind from of old: what if we were to agree, for a momentary advantage, to call mind rudely the thinking apparatus? What the advantage may be will presently appear.
Mind, mode of thinking, mode of thinking and feeling, moral and intellectual constitution, that mystic transparency full of pulses and motions, this thinking apparatus,—whichever phrase or image we adopt, there are certain appertaining considerations which we have to take along with us.