HISTORY
The activity of the foremost men of the eighteenth century in the composition of history is too remarkable a circumstance, not to deserve some attempt at explanation. There were historians in previous ages, but in the eighteenth century there was both in France, and afterwards in England, a special and extraordinary development in this direction. Partially no doubt this was due to the general movement of curiosity, the wide spread desire for all kinds of knowledge, which was in the air. Men were emancipating themselves from the trammels of an authority which had not widened the limits of inquiry in the same proportion as human faculties had strengthened, and, amid the universal expansion of intelligent interest and the eager scrutiny of all the objects of knowledge which the new dawn was baring to sight, it was not possible that the order of political and social facts in former epochs should be neglected. This, however, does not sufficiently explain why such a man as Hume betook himself to the composition of history, or why Gibbon found himself best able to attack Christianity by tracing some of the most important parts of its annals, or why Voltaire, who lived so entirely and intensely in the present, should have thought it worth while to give so much labour to presentation of the past. It is a striking fact, which must be something more than an accident, that the best secular histories which remain from this period, one of them the most striking monument in historical literature, were written by the most marked assailants of reigning superstition.
Was it not, indeed, to be expected that as the dark clouds of an absorbing consciousness of the supernatural cleared away, men of understanding would be more and more drawn towards study of human action, and that the advance of society under purely natural and positive conditions would immediately seize a foremost place among the objects of experiential inquiry? It is too constantly maintained by persons with something of a vested interest in darkness, that those who do not worship the gods are indifferent to the happiness of men. Yet the history of intellectual progress would seem to show that it was not until the commencement of a rapid decline in the acceptance of terrorist and jealous deities and incomprehensible dogmas, that serious attention was given to some of the subjects in which a sound knowledge is among the most indispensable conditions of the advancing welfare of men. For instance, as soon as the hold of ancient versions of the supernatural was loosened over the stronger spirits, by the middle of the century there instantly took place an astonishing development of activity in the physical sciences. The interest of historic and economic studies was at least as pressing. Becoming aware that men had made their own world, thinkers found the consideration of the process by which this world is made, and the order of society established and developed, forced upon them with an entirely new significance. The dry bones of the ancient valley of annalists and chroniclers were made to live, and the great work of the reconstruction of the past was begun, with an alertness and perseverance that has not been surpassed even in an age of far purer and juster historical intelligence. It was quite reasonable that the conviction of each act in the universe, from the crash of an empire to the fall of a sparrow to the ground, being due to an arbitrary and inscrutable decree, should prevent the rise of history from the level of annals into the region of philosophy. The decay of this theory of the government of the universe was as reasonably the cause of a new mode of looking at the long records of the race, and we find ourselves moving in a day of historical masterpieces.
Voltaire has told us the circumstances under which he was led to approach the philosophy of history. Madame du Châtelet, whose mind would fain have reached every kind of knowledge, but who was especially apt for metaphysics and geometry, had conceived an aversion for history. ‘What does it matter to me,’ she would ask, ‘a Frenchwoman living on my estate, to know that Egil succeeded Haquin in Sweden, and that Ottoman was the son of Ortogrul? I have read with pleasure the history of the Greeks and the Romans; they offered me certain great pictures which attracted me. But I have never yet been able to finish any long history of our modern nations. I can see scarcely anything in them but confusion; a host of minute events without connection or sequence, a thousand battles which settled nothing. I renounced a study which overwhelms the mind without illuminating it.’ To this frank statement of the case, to which so many thousands of persons in all epochs would so heartily subscribe, Voltaire replied by pointing out that perhaps the study of history would be no waste of time, if by cutting away all the details of wars, as tedious as they are untrustworthy, all the frivolous negotiations which have been nothing but pieces of purposeless cheating, all the minute incidents which stifle great events, and by retaining those which paint manners, you made of this chaos a general and well-arranged picture; in short, if you tried to disengage from the concourse of events the history of the human mind.[234] Not all the faults of execution ought to blind us to the merit of this notion of the true way of studying history, or to the admirable clearness of vision with which Voltaire, not only in this but in all his other historical pieces, adhered to his own two leading principles; first, that laws, arts, manners, are the chief matter and concern of history; and second, that ‘details which lead to nothing are in history what baggage is to an army, impedimenta, for we must look at things in large, for the very reason that the human mind is small and sinks under the weight of minutiæ.’ Minutiæ ought to be collected by annalists, or in some kind of dictionaries where one might find them at need.[235] In this last point Voltaire, as might be expected, was more just than Bolingbroke, who had said somewhat petulantly that ‘he had rather take the Darius whom Alexander conquered for the son of Hystaspes, and make as many anachronisms as a Jewish chronologer, than sacrifice half his life to collect all the learned lumber that fills the head of an antiquary.’[236] The antiquary’s is a vocation like another, and the highest kind of history can only flourish on condition that the humbler ancillary kind flourishes also, and that there are patient and scrupulous men to mark the difference between Darius Codomannus and Darius the son of Hystaspes.
We may say that three kinds of men write history: the gazetteer or annalist, the statesman, and the philosopher. The annalist’s business is to investigate and record events, and his highest merits are clearness, accuracy, and simplicity. The political historian seeks the superficial and immediate causes of great transactions, and he serves us by mixed penetration and soundness of judgment. The historical philosopher is concerned only with groups of events, the changes and movements that transform communities, and with the trains of conditions that lead to such movements. The majority of historians, from the illustrious Bacon down to the compiler of a manual, illustrate the first kind. Thucydides and Tacitus, among the ancients, a Machiavelli or a Finlay, among moderns, may illustrate the second kind. As Voltaire was sometimes gazetteer and sometimes statesman, so Montesquieu took the statesman’s point of view in his reflections on the decline of Rome, and that of the philosopher in the Spirit of Laws. It is the statesman or man of the world, who, after recounting Caesar’s failure on one occasion to comply with the etiquette of the senate, proceeds to make the following reflection, that ‘we never offend men more, than when we shock their ceremonies and usages: seek to oppress them, and that is sometimes a proof of the importance you attach to them; but shock their customs, and that is always a mark of contempt.’[237] It is the philosopher, feeling for the causes of things and their order, who being led to inquire into the spirit or meaning of Laws, understands such an inquiry to involve a comparative investigation of the relations between laws and physical climate, the quality of ground, situation and extent of territory, the mode of life of the people, agricultural, hunting, or pastoral; between laws and the freedom of the constitution, the religion, wealth, trade, moral ideas, and manners, of the inhabitants; above all, historically, between laws and their origin and the order of things on which they were first founded.
In a similar way we may divide Voltaire’s historical pieces into two main classes. Indeed, if we count the Annals of the Empire, which he wrote to please the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, he may rank also under the third remaining head among the annalistic historians. This, however, is too unsatisfactory a piece of work for us to care either to classify or to remember it. The subject was not of his own selection, he knew comparatively little about it, his materials were extremely scanty and imperfect, and he composed it at a time when his whole mind was violently perturbed by his recent quarrel with Frederick, and torn by anxiety where he should find a home in rest and freedom. It was the only work he ever wrote, for which he perhaps had no heart, and the least observant reader will notice how vast a difference this made in the temper of its composition. Indeed, Voltaire was not born to be a simple chronicler. The realistic and practical leanings of his intellect naturally gave him a distaste for the collection of mere uninterpreted and unapplied facts. His clear comprehensiveness, the product of a vigorous imagination with strong sense, as naturally impelled him to group circumstances, and to introduce the widest possible generality among them. He has one of the peculiar gifts of the historian, as distinguished from the gazetteer, of throwing rapid glances over a wide field on the suggestion of a minor fact as he passes by it, and of converting what to others would be the mere unconsidered trifles of narrative into something possessed of its due measure of vitality and significance. He fills his pages with reflections that are usually not brought from very far depths, but which are almost always lively, just, and in real matter. Perhaps this is not an unmixed good, for it is not unconnected with an extraordinary evenness and light facility of style, which tends to draw the reader somewhat too rapidly and too smoothly over ground that had been rugged enough to the actual travellers. It tends therefore tacitly to plant a false impression about the tardiness, difficulty, peril, and infinitely varied possibilities of the social movements which are history’s object and material. Perhaps a reader has a better idea of the true manner in which events march, from Comines or Clarendon, than from all the elegance and manifold graces of Voltaire, and we sometimes feel inclined to repeat De Maistre’s angry demand for that grave and unhasting dignity which is the life of history.
We have already noticed one of the differences between Voltaire and Rousseau, which arose from the predominance of sentiment over reason in the latter. In the present connection another fact well worth noticing is that Rousseau was entirely wanting in either taste or serious regard for history. The past seems to have been to him a kind of blurred tablet, confused and indecipherable, interposed between the vision of men and the only thought or knowledge which it is good for them to possess. Voltaire’s reading of this tablet was inadequate enough, in many respects it was even a grave distortion of the truth; but with that sound sense in which Rousseau was so absolutely deficient, he felt how irrational it was, in the first place, to shut our eyes deliberately to the course and meaning of all the foregone action of the race, and, in the second, to leave unattacked and unturned the strong position which the traditional parables of the past and their undisturbed interpretation conferred upon the champions of orthodoxy and absolutism. Rousseau, being a sentimentalist, appears to have discerned nothing of this. His ideas all involved a breach with the past, as Voltaire’s did, but Voltaire deserves credit for perceiving that, to make this effective, you must at least find out as well as you can what the past was.
For his four works in the class of political history he had the best attainable authorities and material, and no one was ever more diligent in putting them to the best possible use.[238] His acute sense, strengthened by contact with the world and its most active personages, made him what we may almost call prematurely scientific in his demand for adequate evidence and proof. It is rather striking, for example, to find him anticipating more recent objections to the trustworthiness of Tacitus, pointing out the extraordinary improbabilities in his account of Tiberius, Nero, and the others. There is all the difference, he says, between a faithful historian equally free from adulation and hatred, and ‘a malicious wit who poisons everything through the medium of a concise and energetic style.’ Are we to believe, he asks elsewhere, on the story of a man who lived long after Tiberius, that this emperor, nearly eighty years old, who had up to that time been decent almost to austerity, yet passed all his time in debaucheries hitherto unknown, and so monstrous as to need new names for them?[239] And in the same way he questions the alleged atrocities of Nero and Caligula, as well as the motives imputed to Domitian by Tacitus for the frequency with which he sent to inquire after the health of Agricola. These historic doubts sprang from none of the political judgment or feeling which propounds them in more modern times, but purely from scientific incredulity. ‘History,’ he once wrote, ‘is after all nothing but a parcel of tricks that we play the dead.’[240] He did not hold this slightly splenetic theory, in which assuredly there is a painful truth, to absolve him from the duty of doing what he could to belie it, and to make history as correct and as faithfully representative of actual occurrences, as careful inquiry from those most likely to know the characters of the most prominent actors could make it. In the composition of the Siècle de Louis XV., he had of course the advantage of knowing all these leaders of the public activity personally and at first hand, while if he had not that advantage to the same extent in the Siècle de Louis XIV., he at least mixed on intimate terms with many who had been intimate with the court of the great monarch. For the history of Russia he was amply provided with documents and authentic narratives from the Russian court, at whose solicitation he undertook a work which was the first full introduction of that hitherto barbarous and unknown country to the literature of civilised Europe. His letters to Schouvalof, the imperial chamberlain, attest the unremitting industry with which he sought for every kind of information that might be useful to him. ‘The enlightened spirit which now reigns among the principal nations of Europe, requires that we should go to the bottom, where in former times a historian barely thought it worth while to skim the surface. People wish to know how a nation grew together; what was its population before the epoch of which you treat; the difference in the number of the regular army then and in former times; the nature and growth of its commerce; what arts have sprung up within the country, and what have been introduced from elsewhere and been perfected there; what used to be the ordinary average revenue of the state, and what it is now; the birth and extension of its navy; the proportion in numbers between its nobles and its ecclesiastics and monks, and between the latter and the cultivators of the soil, etc.’[241] Even importunities of this kind continued over a space of some years, and the copious responses which they brought, never consoled Voltaire for not having made the journey to the Russian capital in his proper person. ‘I should have learnt more from you in a few hours of conversation,’ he wrote to Schouvalof, ‘than all the compilers in the world will ever teach me.’[242] In writing the History of Charles XII. of Sweden, one of the most delightful of his books, the art of which is none the less because it is so little ostentatious and striking and seems so easy, he had procured a large quantity of material from Fabrice, who knew the Swedish king during his detention at Bender and subsequently, and met Voltaire in London. This material was supplemented in later years by information picked up at Lunéville from the ex-Polish king Stanislas, who was indebted to Charles for his sovereignty, that true δῶρον ἄδωρον. ‘As for the portraits of men,’ Voltaire declared, ‘they are nearly all the creations of fancy; ‘tis a monstrous piece of charlatanry to pretend to paint a personage with whom you have never lived.’[243] Napoleon, in the memorable campaign of 1812, coming to various places which Voltaire had occasion to describe in his History of Charles XII., found his account weak and inaccurate, and threw it aside in favour of Adlerfeldt. This was to be expected from the very merit of the book; for how should a picture, painted in large for the general instruction of the world, satisfy the minute requirements of strategical topography? It was precisely Voltaire’s object to separate history from geography, statistics, anecdote, biography, tactics, and to invest it with an independent character and quality apart from all these.
It is another of the distinctions of his new method of writing history that, with the exception of the book on Charles XII., he throws persons and personal interests into a second place, as being no more than instruments or convenient names for critical turning-points in the large movements of peoples. In the narration of the rise of Russia to a place among civilised nations, the character of Peter the Great inevitably comes into marked prominence, because when a population lies on the stagnant level of barbarism, the first man who summons them to undertake the task of national elevation constitutes an element of paramount importance in their annals. In proportion, however, as they rise to the fulfilment of this surpassing work, the importance of the heroic individual diminishes; as the national self-consciousness and collective powers become greater, the figure of the individual shows less.
Voltaire was always conscious, though not so clearly as writers are now, of the great historical principle that besides the prominent men of a generation there is a something at work underneath, a moving current on whose flood they are borne. He never fixed this current by any of the names which now fall so glibly from our lips,—tendency of the times, tenor of public opinion, spirit of the age, and the like, by which we give a collective name to groups of sentiments and forces, all making in what seems to be a single direction. But although unnamed, this singular and invisible concurrence of circumstance was yet a reality to him. The age was something besides its heroes, and something besides its noisiest and most resounding occurrences. His divisions of the great epochs of humanity are undoubtedly open to much criticism, because the principles on which he drew the dividing lines have lost their force in new generations. It was to be expected that they would do so; and his four great epochs[244] were not likely to remain the four great epochs of a posterity, which has partially learnt the lesson that he had not learnt at all, that perfection in the fine arts is not the highest mark of an age in which humanity may glory. Nevertheless, we are bound to recognise that a new way of regarding human action, as well as a new way of composing history, was being introduced by a writer whose first paragraph declared that he proposed to himself a greater object than an account of the life of Lewis XIV.; that he designed to paint for the instruction of posterity, not the actions of a single man, but the spirit of men; and that while all periods must be alike to one who only desires to fill his memory with facts, discrimination among them cannot be dispensed with for one who thinks.