Oh evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fell slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main....
he is doing something, he is catching the moment, in a way that can seldom be achieved in history, unless history brings in fiction to help her. History, then, fails the romanticist. Its shortcomings become apparent when we try to particularise, when say, we wish to see a definite picture. About the closest human things, history only tells us enough to set us guessing and wondering.
The history of text-books, the history that can be made out of the recoverable facts of the past, is really little more than a chart to the past. If people think of England there flashes in upon them a panorama, of green fields and telegraph-posts, and intersecting roads and clusters of houses. “England” comes home to us as a jumble of pictures that melt into one another and that we have caught perhaps from the windows of a railway-carriage as we have darted across country. Similarly, if we unlock the past in our minds a score of pictures leap before us, breaking into one another. And the history that history-books can tell us bears a relation to that picture which we make for ourselves of the past, something like the relation which a map of England bears to that mental picture that we form of the English countryside. And just as when we look at an ordnance map we can see where a path runs and can tell where it strikes up hill or down dale, where it touches a wood and where it follows a stream, but if we wish to make a picture of the walk we must put in the hawthorn-hedges, the pretty turns of the path, and the rocky edge of the stream for ourselves—so when we read history, if we wish not merely to see great figures strutting upon a stage, acting a public part, but to fill in the lines of the picture with the robust life of the countryside, and to catch the hundred human touches, if we wish, say, to see the vivid life of three hundred years ago stirring in the crooked streets and topsy-turvy houses that converge upon York Minster, we must charge our history with some of the human things that are irrecoverable, we must reinforce history by our imagination. The public life of great men is before our eyes, some of their private life is open to us; but the life that fills the street with bustle, that makes every corner of a slum a place of wonder and interest, the life that is a sad and gay, weary and thrilling thing in every hillside cottage, is a dim blurred picture in a history. Because of this, history cannot come so near to human hearts and human passions as a good novel can; its very fidelity to facts makes it not perhaps less true to life, but farther away from the heart of things. All the real history of people that a text-book could give is like the chart of Treasure Island—just enough to set a wild heart dreaming; the chart gives generalities, it describes the lie of the land, but if we wish to see a picture of Treasure Island we must make the chart the jumping-off board for some play of the imagination.
There is a poem, called “The Old Ships,” in which Flecker tells of how he has seen vessels, “with leaden age o’er cargoed,” sail “beyond the village which men still call Tyre.” These ships, like everything that survives from the past, are a hint to the imagination; they suggest a story; and this is the kind of thinking to which they drive the poet:
“And all those ships were certainly so old,
Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun,
Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges,
The pirate Genoese
Hell-raked them, till they rolled
Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold—