Peter Bell could recognize a fact when he saw it:—
| "A primrose on the river's brim |
| A yellow primrose was to him, |
| And it was nothing more." |
As long as the primrose was there, he could be trusted to describe it accurately enough. But set Peter Bell the task of describing last year's primrose. "There aren't any last year's primroses on the river's brim," says Peter, "so you must be content with a description of the one in my herbarium. Last year's primroses, you will observe, are very much flattened out." To Mr. Peter Bell, after he has spent many years in the universities, a document is a document, and it is nothing more. When he has compared a great many documents, and put them together in a mechanical way, he calls his work a history. That's where he differs from the Gentle Reader who calls it only the crude material out of which a man of genius may possibly make a history.
To the Gentle Reader it is a profoundly interesting reflection that since this planet has been inhabited people have been fighting, and working, and loving, and hating, with an intensity born of the conviction that, if they went at it hard enough, they could finish the whole business in one generation. He likes to get back into any one of these generations just "to get the feel of it." He does not care so much for the final summing up of the process, as to see it in the making. Any one who can give him that experience is his friend.
He is interested in the stirring times of the English Revolution, and goes to the historical expert to find what it was all about. The historical expert starts with the Magna Charta and makes a preliminary survey. Then he begins his march down the centuries, intrenching every position lest he be caught unawares by the critics. His intellectual forces lack mobility, as they must wait for their baggage trains. At last he comes to the time of the Stuarts, and there is much talk of the royal prerogative, and ship money, and attainders, and acts of Parliament. There are exhaustive arguments, now on the one side and now on the other, which exactly balance one another. There are references to bulky volumes, where at the foot of every page the notes run along, like little angry dogs barking at the text.
The Gentle Reader calls out: "I have had enough of this. What I want to know is what it's all about, and which side, on the whole, has the right of it. Which side are you on? Are you a Roundhead or a Cavalier? Are your sympathies with the Whigs or the Tories?"
"Sympathies!" says the expert. "Who ever heard of a historian allowing himself to sympathize? I have no opinions of my own to present. My great aim is not to prejudice the mind of the student."
"Nonsense," says the Gentle Reader; "I am not a student, nor is this a school-room. It's all in confidence; speak out as one gentleman to another under a friendly roof! What do you think about it? No matter if you make a mistake or two, I'll forget most that you say, anyway. All that I care for is to get the gist of the matter. As for your fear of warping my mind, there's not the least danger in the world. My mind is like a tough bit of hickory; it will fly back into its original shape the moment you let go. I have a hundred prejudices of my own,—one more won't hurt me. I want to know what it was that set the people by the ears. Why did they cut off the head of Charles I., and why did they drive out James II.? I can't help thinking that there must have been something more exciting than those discussions of yours about constitutional theories. Do you know, I sometimes doubt whether most of the people who went to the wars knew that there was such a thing as the English Constitution; the subject hadn't been written up then. I suspect that something happened that was not set down in your book; something that made those people fighting mad."
Then the Gentle Reader turns to his old and much criticised friend Macaulay, and asks,—