Is it not wonderful that by reading a brief biography, which perhaps occupies our leisure hours for a week, we can grasp and understand the life-work of a great man? Think of it! A whole life in one book. A whole history is in one of Plutarch's chapters. By turning to that new series of biographies called "Heroes of the Nations," you can study or teach the lessons derived from the lives and characters of such great men as Pericles, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Julian the Philosopher, Theodoric the Goth, Wyclif, the first of the English reformers, Prince Henry the Navigator, Henry of Navarre, Sir Philip Sidney, Gustavus Adolphus, Napoleon, Nelson, and Lincoln. Another excellent biographical series is that called "English Men of Action," published by Macmillan, and containing such noble lives as those of Wolfe, the conqueror of Quebec; David Livingstone, the Explorer of Africa, Lord Lawrence and Sir Henry Havelock, the saviors of India; General Gordon, the Hero of Khartoum. If your taste runs toward literature, you should read select biographies in the series called "English Men of Letters," embracing such characters as Gibbon, Carlyle, Byron, Shelly, and Hume. There is a corresponding American series, edited by Charles Dudley Warner, and embracing such men as Washington Irving, J. Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe. But among all biographies for boys and young men I know nothing better than the Autobiography of Franklin. This has encouraged and quickened many young Americans to a desire of knowledge and self-culture.
But let no student or teacher believe for one moment that historical biography is the full equivalent of History. Not all the biographies that have ever been written could possibly contain the world's great life. As the poet Tennyson truly says: "The individual withers, but the world is more and more." There must be great men in Church and State, to lead society forward, but there must be unnumbered thousands, yea millions, of good men and true, and of faithful, devoted women, in order to support good leadership and carry humanity forward from generation to generation. It is often the biography of some plain man or self-sacrificing woman that affords the greatest encouragement and incentive to ordinary humanity. But we must remember that no man, no woman is worthy of biographical or historical record, unless in some way he or she has contributed to the welfare of society and the progress of the world. Only those deeds which affect our fellow men in some noteworthy manner are fit for commemoration. What you do as a private individual, what you ate for breakfast, what you do in the seclusion of your own room, is not necessarily historic; but whether Napoleon was able to eat his breakfast on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, or whether an army has been properly fed, may have the greatest historic significance.
Not man alone, but man in organized society, is the subject of History. Man in his relation to his fellows, man as a military, political, social, intellectual, and religious being may become historic. Dr. Thomas Arnold sometimes defined History as the biography of nations. This is a large and noble conception, although not the largest, and it may be profitably emphasized, like human biography in the study and teaching of History. It is the duty of every school and college to lay great stress upon the history of England and of the United States in addition to General History. We all need to know the lives of our own people as well as the lives of great Englishmen like Pitt and Gladstone, and great Americans like Washington and Lincoln. We should teach and study the histories of those nations which are nearest our mother country—Scotland, France, Germany, and Italy. As Germany is now the great seat of culture and of university life for American students who go abroad, so was Italy for wandering English students in the days of the Renaissance. English literature from that time onward is pervaded with Italian elements, with the influences of "all Etruscan three," Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and also with the ideas of Machiavelli and the Italian historians. We cannot understand the literature of England or America without going back to its French and Italian sources. It would be wise for college professors of history to devote special attention to the Italian Renaissance or Revival of Learning, without which an understanding of the German Reformation and modern education is an impossibility.
In reading the biography of men or the biography of nations, teachers and students should note carefully the most interesting and memorial points. If you own the book which you are reading, use for note-taking the fly leaves at the end. Otherwise, use reference cards, like those employed in a library for a card catalogue, or else sheets of note paper. When you have found a fact or illustration which you think will prove useful at some future time, in connection with your work as a teacher or a student, note it briefly on paper with the proper reference to the book and page. Remember Captain Cuttle's advice: "When found, make a note of!" Recall the saying of Lord Bacon: "Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory."
In the multitude of modern books and amid all the variety of our modern reading, it is impossible to remember exact quotations and historical details. We must have a good system of note-taking and index-making. Every student and teacher can invent his own system. Mine is the use of fly leaves in books and cards topically and alphabetically arranged for miscellaneous data. I always carry a few of these reference cards in my pocket and make all my notes under appropriate catch words, for example, "Chautauqua" or "Johns Hopkins University," with the name of the writer on this subject and the exact reference or quotation.
Begin to collect a library for yourselves. Students and teachers do not always appreciate the opportunities they enjoy of acquiring good books of History. I would strongly urge students to save their money instead of spending it on poor theaters and variety shows. Buy standard books of literature, art, and history; devote your leisure hours to good reading, always with pen and pencil in hand, and with a dictionary and an atlas beside you. Seize the moment of excited curiosity and look up every point on which you need exact information. One of my former students, Dr. Albert Shaw, now editor of The Review of Reviews, said he was more grateful to me for that advice than for any other one feature of my instruction: Seize the moment of excited curiosity, or it will be lost forever.
An English writer, Langford, in his Praise of Books, well says: "In books the past is ours as well as the present. With them we live yesterday over again. All the bygone ages are with us, and we look on the face of the infancy of the world. We see the first dawning of thought in man. We are present at the beginnings of cities, states, and nations; and can trace the growth and development of governments, policies, and laws. The marvelous story of humanity is enacted again for our edification, instruction, and delight. We behold civilizations begin, struggle, triumph, and decay, giving place to higher and nobler as they pass away. Poet, lawgiver, and soldier sing their songs, make their codes, and fight their battles again, while we follow the never-dying effects of song, of law, and of battle. We sit down with 'princes, potentates, and powers,' watching them, as they think, governing the world.... Shut up in a little room we can witness the whole drama of man's history played on the vast stage of the world. All that he has thought and done from the earliest dawn of recorded time to our own day is enacted before us; and our hopes are strengthened, our faith deepened, in the great destiny yet awaiting mankind; in the higher, holier work yet to be done by those who have accomplished such mighty things, achieved such noble victories. Books which record the history of the past are the infallible and unerring prophets of the future."
"History is the grandest study in the world." My College President, Dr. Julius H. Seelye, was right. There is no art or science comparable to it, for it embraces the whole experience of man in organized society. History takes hold of all the past and points the way to all the future. The French historian, Guizot, in his "History of My Time" (III. 162) says: "Religion opens the future and places us in the presence of eternity. History brings back the past and adds to our own existence the lives of our fathers." Pliny said of History: "Quanta potestas, quanta dignitas, quanta majestes, quantum denique numen sit historiae." Perhaps the highest conception of History comes from the Greek. The etymology of the ward is an inspiration for both student and teacher. History, from the Greek word historia, is a knowing or learning by inquiry. To study History is to understand by means of research, for History is a science; its very essence consists in knowledge. Historical science is perhaps the most comprehensive and the noblest of all sciences, for it is the self-knowledge of Humanity. The subject of History is Humanity itself; it is the self-conscious development of the human race. History, therefore, does not consist in dead facts, but is itself a living fact; it is the self-knowledge of the present with regard to its evolution from the past. Clio is a living muse, not a dead, cold form. She stands upon that very threshold of the future and glances backwards over the long vista Humanity has traversed. In the plastic art of the Greeks you will notice that the muse of History is represented in the attitude of reflection; the pen is uplifted, but the word unwritten.
We sometimes speak of written history and of its standard works as though the essence of that science consisted in books and not in knowledge. "There are no standards of history," said Droysen, a German professor to an American student who had asked his advice respecting the choice of standard works for an historical library. In this caustic saying there lies a profound truth. History is a living, self-developed science, not a collection of fossils. Books like facts, are sometimes dead to history, and historical standards, like historical facts, are grander in their spiritual influence than in their material form. In the onward march of historical science, historians are perhaps the standard bearers of fact and their works may be called the battle-flags of history which kindle the zeal of the ever-advancing present in men and awaken a sense of unity with the great past, which has gone on before us. But written history often becomes shot-riddled by criticism and is set away, at last, like battle-flags, after many honorable campaigns, in some museums of relics or some temple of fame. Unless such trophies continue to awaken in the living present a sort of enthusiasm and a sense of unity with the past experience of our race, then are our historic standards but antiquarian rubbish, indeed, as useless and unmeaning as the banners and symbols of heraldry.
The subject of History is the self-conscious development of the human race, the Ego of Humanity. The realization of this Ego does not lie in any fictitious personality, but in the universal consciousness that man is one in all ages and that the individual human mind may mirror to itself and to others the thought and experience of the race. As the heavens are reflected in a single drop of dew, so in the thoughts of the individual human mind we may sometimes behold a reflection of the self-knowledge of Humanity. For the individual is sometimes the very best expression of the whole with which it stands in connection. The onward march of world-history seems to have concentrated itself in the development of individual peoples like the Jews, Greeks, Romans, and the Germanic peoples. As these nations best typify historic progress and certain world-historic ideas, so the historic thought of manhood may be most fully realized by individual minds. For example, a single historian, like Thucydides, may reflect the self-consciousness of his age, and a single mind, in our own day, may realize, in some measure, at least through the works of history, the self-knowledge, the Ego of Humanity. It should be the aim of every student of History thus to realize in his own consciousness the historic thought of mankind. "The life of each individual," says Dr. W. T. Harris, the American Hegel, "presupposes the life of the race before him, and the individual cannot comprehend himself without comprehending first the evolution of his day and generation historically from the past."