Ellesmere. Listen and perpend, my historical friends.
“To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book, sealed with seven seals:
That which you call the spirit of ages past
Is but, in truth, the spirit of some few authors
In which those ages are beheld reflected,
With what distortion strange heaven only knows.
Oh! often, what a toilsome thing it is
This study of thine—at the first glance we fly it.
A mass of things confusedly heaped together;
A lumber-room of dusty documents,
Furnished with all approved court-precedents
And old traditional maxims! History!
Facts dramatised say rather—action—plot—
Sentiment, everything the writer’s own,
As it bests fits the web-work of his story,
With here and there a solitary fact
Of consequence, by those grave chroniclers,
Pointed with many a moral apophthegm,
And wise old saws, learned at the puppet-shows.”
Milverton. Yes; admirable lines; they describe to the life the very faults we have been considering as the faults of badly-written histories. I do not see that they do much more.
Ellesmere.
“To us, my friend, the times that are gone by
Are a mysterious book.”—
Milverton. Those two first lines are the full expression of Faust’s discontent—unmeasured as in the presence of a weak man who could not check him. But, if you come to look at the matter closely, you will see that the time present is also in some sense a sealed book to us. Men that we live with daily we often think as little of as we do of Julius Cæsar, I was going to say—but we know much less of them than of him.
Ellesmere. I did not mean to say that Faust spoke my sentiments about history in general. Still, there are periods of history which we have very few authors to tell us about, and I daresay in some of those cases the colouring of their particular minds gives us a false idea of the whole age they lived in.
Dunsford. This may have happened, certainly.
Milverton. We must be careful not to expect too much from the history of past ages, as a means of understanding the present age. There is something wanted besides the preceding history to understand each age. Each individual life may have a problem of its own, which all other biography accurately set down for us might not enable us to work out. So of each age. It has something in it not known before, and tends to a result which is not down in any books.
Dunsford. Yet history must be of greatest use in discerning this tendency.