I do not ask the Freshman who is going to be a historian to realize Macaulay’s ideal of a scholar, to “read Plato with his feet on the fender,”[2] but he should at least acquire a pretty thorough knowledge of classical Latin, so that he can read Latin, let me say, as many of us read German, that is with the use of a lexicon and the occasional translation of a sentence or a paragraph into English to arrive at its exact meaning. Of this, I can speak from the point of view of one who is deficient. The reading of Latin has been for me a grinding labor and I would have liked to read with pleasure in the original, the History and Annals of Tacitus, Cæsar’s Gallic and Civil wars and Cicero’s Orations and Private Letters even to the point of following Macaulay’s advice, “Soak your mind with Cicero.”[2] These would have given me, I fancy, a more vivid impression of two periods of Roman history than I now possess. Ferrero, who is imparting a fresh interest to the last period of the Roman republic, owes a part of his success, I think, to his thorough digestion and effective use of Cicero’s letters, which have the faculty of making one acquainted with Cicero just as if he were a modern man. During a sojourn on the shores of Lake Geneva, I read two volumes of Voltaire’s private correspondence, and later, while passing the winter in Rome, the four volumes of Cicero’s letters in French. I could not help thinking that in the republic of letters one was not in time at a far greater distance from Cicero than from Voltaire. While the impression of nearness may have come from reading both series of letters in French, or because, to use John Morley’s words, “two of the most perfect masters of the art of letter writing were Cicero and Voltaire,”[3] [p52] there is a decided flavor of the nineteenth century in Cicero’s words to a good liver whom he is going to visit. “You must not reckon,” he wrote, “on my eating your hors d’œuvre. I have given them up entirely. The time has gone by when I can abuse my stomach with your olives and your Lucanian sausages.”[4]
To repeat then, if the student, who is going to be a historian, uses his acquisitive years in obtaining a thorough knowledge of French and Latin, he will afterwards be spared useless regrets. He will naturally add German for the purpose of general culture and, if languages come easy, perhaps Greek. “Who is not acquainted with another language,” said Goethe, “knows not his own.” A thorough knowledge of Latin and French is a long stride towards an efficient mastery of English. In the matter of diction, the English writer is rarely in doubt as to words of Anglo-Saxon origin, for these are deep-rooted in his childhood and his choice is generally instinctive. The difficulties most persistently besetting him concern words that come from the Latin or the French; and here he must use reason or the dictionary or both. The author who has a thorough knowledge of Latin and French will argue with himself as to the correct diction, will follow Emerson’s advice, “Know words etymologically; pull them apart; see how they are made; and use them only where they fit.”[5] As it is in action through life, so it is in writing; the conclusions arrived at by reason are apt to be more valuable than those which we accept on authority. The reasoned literary style is more virile than that based on the dictionary. A judgment arrived at by argument sticks in the memory, while it is necessary for the user of the dictionary constantly to invoke authority, so that the writer who reasons out the meaning [p53] of words may constantly accelerate his pace, for the doubt and decision of yesterday is to-day a solid acquirement, ingrained in his mental being. I have lately been reading a good deal of Gibbon and I cannot imagine his having had frequent recourse to a dictionary. I do not remember even an allusion either in his autobiographies or in his private letters to any such aid. Undoubtedly his thorough knowledge of Latin and French, his vast reading of Latin, French, and English books, enabled him to dispense with the thumbing of a dictionary and there was probably a reasoning process at the back of every important word. It is difficult, if not impossible, to improve on Gibbon by the substitution of one word for another.
A rather large reading of Sainte-Beuve gives me the same impression. Indeed his literary fecundity, the necessity of having the Causerie ready for each Monday’s issue of the Constitutionnel or the Moniteur, precluded a study of words while composing, and his rapid and correct writing was undoubtedly due to the training obtained by the process of reasoning. Charles Sumner seems to be an exception to my general rule. Although presumably he knew Latin well, he was a slave to dictionaries. He generally had five at his elbow (Johnson, Webster, Worcester, Walker, and Pickering) and when in doubt as to the use of a word he consulted all five and let the matter be decided on the American democratic principle of majority rule.[6] Perhaps this is one cause of the stilted and artificial character of Sumner’s speeches which, unlike Daniel Webster’s, are not to be thought of as literature. One does not associate dictionaries with Webster. Thus had I written the sentence without thinking of a not infrequent confusion between Noah and Daniel Webster, and this confusion reminded me of a story which [p54] John Fiske used to tell with gusto and which some of you may not have heard. An English gentleman remarked to an American: “What a giant intellect that Webster of yours had! To think of so great an orator and statesman writing that dictionary! But I felt sure that one who towered so much above his fellows would come to a bad end and I was not a bit surprised to learn that he had been hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman.”
To return to my theme: One does not associate dictionaries with Daniel Webster. He was given to preparing his speeches in the solitudes of nature, and his first Bunker Hill oration, delivered in 1825, was mainly composed while wading in a trout stream and desultorily fishing for trout.[7] Joe Jefferson, who loved fishing as well as Webster, used to say, “The trout is a gentleman and must be treated as such.” Webster’s companion might have believed that some such thought as this was passing through the mind of the great Daniel as, standing middle deep in the stream, he uttered these sonorous words: “Venerable men! You have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives that you might behold this joyous day.” I think Daniel Webster for the most part reasoned out his choice of words; he left the dictionary work to others. After delivery, he threw down the manuscript of his eulogy on Adams and Jefferson and said to a student in his law office, “There, Tom, please to take that discourse and weed out the Latin words.”[8]
When doubtful as to the use of words, I should have been helped by a better knowledge of Latin and enabled very often to write with a surer touch. Though compelled to resort frequently to the dictionary, I early learned to pay little attention to the definition but to regard with care the illustrative [p55] meaning in the citations from standard authors. When I began writing I used the Imperial Dictionary, an improvement over Webster in this respect. Soon the Century Dictionary began to appear, and best of all the New English Dictionary on historical principles edited by Murray and Bradley and published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford. A study of the mass of quotations in these two dictionaries undoubtedly does much to atone for the lack of linguistic knowledge; and the tracing of the history of words, as it is done in the Oxford dictionary, makes any inquiry as to the meaning of a word fascinating work for the historian. Amongst the multiplicity of aids for the student and the writer no single one is so serviceable as this product of labor and self-sacrifice, fostered by the Clarendon Press, to whom, all writers in the English language owe a debt of gratitude.
Macaulay had a large fund of knowledge on which he might base his reasoning, and his indefatigable mind welcomed any outside assistance. He knew Greek and Latin thoroughly and a number of other languages, but it is related of him that he so thumbed his copy of Johnson’s Dictionary that he was continually sending it to the binder. In return for his mastery of the languages, the dictionaries are fond of quoting Macaulay. If I may depend upon a rough mental computation, no prose writer of the nineteenth century is so frequently cited. “He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life,” said John Morley;[9] and this is partly due to his exact use of words. There is never any doubt about his meaning. Macaulay began the use of Latin words at an early age. When four and a half years old he was asked if he had got over the toothache, to which question came this reply, “The agony is abated.”
Mathematics beyond arithmetic are of no use to the [p56] historian and may be entirely discarded. I do not ignore John Stuart Mill’s able plea for them, some words of which are worth quoting. “Mathematical studies,” he said, “are of immense benefit to the student’s education by habituating him to precision. It is one of the peculiar excellences of mathematical discipline that the mathematician is never satisfied with an à peu près. He requires the exact truth…. The practice of mathematical reasoning gives wariness of the mind; it accustoms us to demand a sure footing.”[10] Mill, however, is no guide except for exceptionally gifted youth. He began to learn Greek when he was three years old, and by the time he had reached the age of twelve had read a good part of Latin and Greek literature and knew elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly.
The three English historians who have most influenced thought from 1776 to 1900 are those whom John Morley called “great born men of letters”[11]—Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle; and two of these despised mathematics. “As soon as I understood the principles,” wrote Gibbon in his “Autobiography,” “I relinquished forever the pursuit of the Mathematics; nor can I lament that I desisted before my mind was hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration, so destructive of the finer feelings of moral evidence, which must however determine the actions and opinions of our lives.”[12] Macaulay, while a student at Cambridge, wrote to his mother: “Oh, for words to express my abomination of mathematics … ‘Discipline’ of the mind! Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, annihilation!… I feel myself becoming a personification of Algebra, a living trigonometrical canon, a walking table of logarithms. All my perceptions of elegance and beauty gone, or at least going…. Farewell [p57] then Homer and Sophocles and Cicero.”[13] I must in fairness state that in after life Macaulay regretted his lack of knowledge of mathematics and physics, but his career and Gibbon’s demonstrate that mathematics need have no place on the list of the historian’s studies. Carlyle, however, showed mathematical ability which attracted the attention of Legendre and deemed himself sufficiently qualified to apply, when he was thirty-nine years old, for the professorship of Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh. He did not succeed in obtaining the post but, had he done so, he “would have made,” so Froude his biographer thinks, “the school of Astronomy at Edinburgh famous throughout Europe.”[14] When fifty-two, Carlyle said that “the man who had mastered the first forty-seven propositions of Euclid stood nearer to God than he had done before.”[15] I may cap this with some words of Emerson, who in much of his thought resembled Carlyle: “What hours of melancholy my mathematical works cost! It was long before I learned that there is something wrong with a man’s brain who loves them.”[16]
Mathematics are of course the basis of many studies, trades, and professions and are sometimes of benefit as a recreation for men of affairs. Devotion to Euclid undoubtedly added to Lincoln’s strength, but the necessary range of knowledge for the historian is so vast that he cannot spend his evenings and restless nights in the solution of mathematical problems. In short, mathematics are of no more use to him than is Greek to the civil or mechanical engineer.
In the category with mathematics must be placed a detailed study of any of the physical or natural sciences. I think that a student during his college course should have [p58] a year’s work in a chemical laboratory or else, if his taste inclines him to botany, geology, or zoölogy, a year’s training of his observing powers in some one of these studies. For he ought to get, while at an impressible age, a superficial knowledge of the methods of scientific men, as a basis for his future reading. We all know that science is moving the world and to keep abreast with the movement is a necessity for every educated man. Happily, there are scientific men who popularize their knowledge. John Fiske, Huxley, and Tyndall presented to us the theories and demonstrations of science in a literary style that makes learning attractive. Huxley and Tyndall were workers in laboratories and gave us the results of their patient and long-continued experiments. It is too much to expect that every generation will produce men of the remarkable power of expression of Huxley and John Fiske, but there will always be clear writers who will delight in instructing the general public in language easily understood. In an address which I delivered eight or nine years ago before the American Historical Association, I cheerfully conceded that, in the realm of intellectual endeavor, the natural and physical sciences should have the precedence of history. The question with us now is not which is the nobler pursuit, but how is the greatest economy of time to be compassed for the historian. My advice is in the line of concentration. Failure in life arises frequently from intellectual scattering; hence I like to see the historical student getting his physical and natural science at second-hand.