No. III.
Discourse delivered by M. Guizot, on the opening of his first Course of Lectures on Modern History. December 11th, 1812.
A statesman equally celebrated for his character and misfortunes, Sir Walter Raleigh, had published the first part of a 'History of the World;' while confined in the Tower, he employed himself in finishing the second. A quarrel arose in one of the courts of the prison; he looked on attentively at the contest, which became sanguinary, and left the window with his imagination strongly impressed by the scene that had passed under his eyes. On the morrow a friend came to visit him, and related what had occurred. But great was his surprise when this friend, who had been present at and even engaged in the occurrence of the preceding day, proved to him that this event, in its result as well as in its particulars, was precisely the contrary of what he had believed he saw. Raleigh, when left alone, took up his manuscript and threw it in the fire; convinced that, as he had been so completely deceived with respect to the details of an incident he had actually witnessed, he could know nothing whatever of those he had just described with his pen.
Are we better informed or more fortunate than Sir Walter Raleigh? The most confident historian would hesitate to answer this question directly in the affirmative. History relates a long series of events, and depicts a vast number of characters; and let us recollect, gentlemen, the difficulty of thoroughly understanding a single character or a solitary event. Montaigne, after having passed his life in self-study, was continually making new discoveries on his own nature; he has filled a long work with them, and ends by saying, "Man is a subject so diversified, so uncertain and vain, that it is difficult to pronounce any fixed and uniform opinion on him." He is, in fact, an obscure compound of an infinity of ideas and sentiments, which change and modify themselves reciprocally, and of which it is as difficult to disentangle the sources as to foresee the results. An uncertain produce of a multiplicity of circumstances, sometimes impenetrable, always complicated, often unknown to the person influenced by them, and not even suspected by those who surround him, man scarcely learns how to know himself, and is never more than guessed at by others. The simplest mind, if it attempted to examine and describe itself, would impart to us a thousand secrets, of which we have not the most remote suspicion. And how many different men are comprised in an event! how many whose characters have influenced that event, and have modified its nature, progress, and effects! Bring together circumstances in perfect accordance; suppose situations exactly similar: let a single actor change, and all is changed. He is urged by fresh motives, and desires new objects. Take the same actors, and alter but one of those circumstances independent of human will, which are called chance or destiny; and all is changed again. It is from this infinity of details, where everything is obscure, and nothing isolated, that history is composed; and man, proud of what he knows, because he forgets to think of how much he is ignorant, believes that he has acquired a full knowledge of history when he has read what some few have told him, who had no better means of understanding the times in which they lived, than we possess of justly estimating our own.
What then are we to seek and find in the darkness of the past, which thickens as it recedes from us? If Cæsar, Sallust, or Tacitus have only been able to transmit doubtful and imperfect notions, can we rely on what they relate? And if we are not to trust them, how are we to supply ourselves with information? Shall we be capable of disembarrassing our minds of those ideas and manners, and of that new existence, which a new order of things has produced, to adopt momentarily in our thoughts other manners and ideas, and a different character of being? Must we learn to become Greeks, Romans, or Barbarians, in order to understand these Romans, Barbarians, or Greeks, before we venture to judge them? And even if we could attain this difficult abnegation of an actual and imperious reality, should we become then as well acquainted with the history of the times of which they tell us, as were Cæsar, Sallust, or Tacitus? After being thus transported to the midst of the world they describe, we should find gaps in their delineations, of which we have at present no conception, and of which they were not always sensible themselves. That multiplicity of facts which, grouped together and viewed from a distance, appear to fill time and space, would present to us, if we found ourselves placed on the ground they occupy, as voids which we should find it impossible to fill up, and which the historians leave there designedly, because he who relates or describes what he sees, to others who see equally with himself, never feels called upon to recapitulate all that he knows.
Let us therefore refrain from supposing that history can present to us, in reality, an exact picture of the past; the world is too extensive, the night of time too obscure, and man too weak for such a portrait to be ever a complete reflection.
But can it be true that such important knowledge is entirely interdicted to us?—that in what we can acquire, all is a subject of doubt and error? Does the mind only enlighten itself to increase its wavering? Does it develope all its strength, merely to end in a confession of ignorance?—a painful and disheartening idea, which many men of superior intellect have encountered in their course, but by which they ought never to have been impeded!
Man seldom asks himself what he really requires to know, in his ardent pursuit of knowledge; he need only cast a glance upon his studies, to discover two divisions, the difference between which is striking, although we may be unable to assign the boundaries that separate them. Everywhere we perceive a certain innocent but futile labour, which attaches itself to questions and inquiries equally inaccessible and without results—which has no other object than to satisfy the restless curiosity of minds, the first want of which is occupation; and everywhere, also, we observe useful, productive, and interesting inquiry, not only advantageous to those who indulge in it, but beneficial to human nature at large. What time and talent have men wasted in metaphysical lucubrations! They have sought to penetrate the internal nature of things, of the mind, and of matter; they have taken purely vague combinations of words for substantial realities; but these very researches, or others which have arisen out of them, have enlightened us upon the order of our faculties, the laws by which they are governed, and the progress of their development; we have acquired from thence a history, a statistic of the human mind; and if no one has been able to tell us what it is, we have at least learned how it acts, and how we ought to act to strengthen its justice and extend its range.
Was not the study of astronomy for a long time directed to the dreams of astrology? Gassendi himself began to investigate it with that view; and when science cured him of the prejudices of superstition, he repented that he so openly declared his conversion, because, he said, many persons formerly studied astronomy to become astrologers, and he now perceived that they ceased to learn astronomy, since he had condemned astrology. Who then can prove to us that, without the restlessness of anticipation which had led men to seek the future in the stars, the science, by which today our ships are directed, would ever have reached its present perfection?