History as literature, and other essays

by Theodore Roosevelt

The great historian must be able to paint for us the life of the plain people, the ordinary men and women, of the time of which he writes. He can do this only if he possesses the highest kind of imagination. Collections of figures no more give us a picture of the past than the reading of a tariff report on hides or woollens gives us an idea of the actual lives of the men and women who live on ranches or work in factories. The great historian will in as full measure as possible present to us the every-day life of the men and women of the age which he describes. Nothing that tells of this life will come amiss to him. The instruments of their labor and the weapons of their warfare, the wills that they wrote, the bargains that they made, and the songs that they sang when they feasted and made love: he must use them all. He must tell us of the toil of the ordinary man in ordinary times, and of the play by which that ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget that no event stands out entirely isolated. He must trace from its obscure and humble beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of triumph has shaken the world.

Yet he must not forget that the times that are extraordinary need especial portrayal. In the revolt against the old tendency of historians to deal exclusively with the spectacular and the exceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and government, many modern writers have gone to the opposite extreme. They fail to realize that in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there are hours so fraught with weighty achievement, with triumph or defeat, with joy or sorrow, that each such hour may determine all the years that are to come thereafter, or may outweigh all the years that have gone before. In the writings of our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it is the ordinary every-day life which counts most; nor yet that seasons come when ordinary qualities count for but little in the face of great contending forces of good and of evil, the outcome of whose strife determines whether the nation shall walk in the glory of the morning or in the gloom of spiritual death.

The historian must deal with the days of common things, and deal with them so that they shall interest us in reading of them as our own common things interest us as we live among them. He must trace the changes that come almost unseen, the slow and gradual growth that transforms for good or for evil the children and grandchildren so that they stand high above or far below the level on which their forefathers stood. He must also trace the great cataclysms that interrupt and divert this gradual development. He can no more afford to be blind to one class of phenomena than to the other. He must ever remember that while the worst offence of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he can not write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.

There can be no better illustration of what I mean than is afforded by the history of Russia during the last thousand years. The historian must trace the growth of the earliest Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, the infiltration of Scandinavian invaders who gave them their first power of mass action, and the slow, chaotic development of the little communes into barbarous cities and savage princedoms. In later Russian history he must show us priest and noble, merchant and serf, changing slowly from the days when Ivan the Terrible warred against Bátory, the Magyar king of Poland, until the present moment, when with half-suspicious eyes the people of the Czar watch their remote Bulgarian kinsmen standing before the last European stronghold of the Turk. During all these centuries there were multitudes of wars, foreign and domestic, any or all of which were of little moment compared to the slow working of the various forces that wrought in the times of peace. But there was one period of storm and overthrow so terrible that it affected profoundly for all time the whole growth of the Russian people, in inmost character no less than in external dominion. Early in the thirteenth century the genius of Jenghiz Khan stirred the Mongol horsemen of the mid-Asian pastures to a movement as terrible to civilization as the lava flow of a volcano to the lands around the volcano’s foot. When that century opened, the Mongols were of no more weight in the world than the Touaregs of the Sahara are to-day. Long before the century had closed they had ridden from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. They had crushed Christian and Moslem and Buddhist alike beneath the iron cruelty of their sway. They had conquered China as their successors conquered India. They sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In mid-Europe their presence for a moment caused the same horror to fall on the warring adherents of the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they were a scourge so frightful, so irresistible, that the people cowered before them as if they had been demons. No European army of that day, of any nation, was able to look them in the face on a stricken field. Bestial in their lives, irresistible in battle, merciless in victory, they trampled the lands over which they rode into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny horse-bowmen drew a red furrow across Hungary, devastated Poland, and in Silesia overthrew the banded chivalry of Germany. But it was in Russia that they did their worst. They not merely conquered Russia, but held the Russians as cowering and abject serfs for two centuries. Every feeble effort at resistance was visited with such bloodthirsty vengeance that finally no Russian ventured ever to oppose them at all. But the princes of the cities soon found that the beast-like fury of the conquerors when their own desires were thwarted, was only equalled by their beast-like indifference to all that was done among the conquered people themselves, and that they were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid each Russian against his brother. Under this régime the Russian who rose was the Russian who with cringing servility to his Tartar overlords combined ferocious and conscienceless greed in the treatment of his fellow Russians. Moscow came to the front by using the Tartar to help conquer the other Russian cities, paying as a price abject obedience to all Tartar demands. In the long run the fierce and pliant cunning of the conquered people proved too much for the short-sighted and arrogant brutality of the conquerors. The Tartar power, the Mongolian power, waned. Russia became united, threw off the yoke, and herself began a career of aggression at the expense of her former conquerors. But the reconquest of racial independence, vitally necessary though it was to Russia, had been paid for by the establishment of a despotism Asiatic rather than European in its spirit and working.

The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were the present. He will make us see as living men the hard-faced archers of Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who followed Alexander down beyond the rim of the known world. We shall hear grate on the coast of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves whose children’s children were to inherit unknown continents. We shall thrill to the triumphs of Hannibal. Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities, and the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled to dust ages ago. Along ancient trade-routes, across the world’s waste spaces, the caravans shall move; and the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the oceans with their lonely prows. Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the course of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of forgotten seers. Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly, who saw in their vision peaks so lofty that never yet have they been reached by the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might and the love and the beauty of women. We shall see the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of the flowers in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon will be heavy to our senses. We shall sit at feast with the kings of Nineveh when they drink from ivory and gold. With Queen Maeve in her sun-parlor we shall watch the nearing chariots of the champions. For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The frowning strongholds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and the white palace-castles from whose windows Syrian princes once looked across the blue Ægean. We shall know the valor of the two-sworded Samurai. Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and the strange, crooked folly of the immemorial civilizations which tottered to a living death in India and in China. We shall see the terrible horsemen of Timur the Lame ride over the roof of the world; we shall hear the drums beat as the armies of Gustavus and Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to victory. Ours shall be the woe of burgher and peasant, and ours the stern joy when freemen triumph and justice comes to her own. The agony of the galley-slaves shall be ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked are brought low and the men of evil days have their reward. We shall see the glory of triumphant violence, and the revel of those who do wrong in high places; and the broken-hearted despair that lies beneath the glory and the revel. We shall also see the supreme righteousness of the wars for freedom and justice, and know that the men who fell in these wars made all mankind their debtors.

Some day the historians will tell us of these things. Some day, too, they will tell our children of the age and the land in which we now live. They will portray the conquest of the continent. They will show the slow beginnings of settlement, the growth of the fishing and trading towns on the seacoast, the hesitating early ventures into the Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show the backwoodsmen, with their long rifles and their light axes, making their way with labor and peril through the wooded wilderness to the Mississippi; and then the endless march of the white-topped wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the coast of the greatest of the five great oceans. They will show how the land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western and central Europe. The portentous growth of the cities will be shown, and the change from a nation of farmers to a nation of business men and artisans, and all the far-reaching consequences of the rise of the new industrialism. The formation of a new ethnic type in this melting-pot of the nations will be told. The hard materialism of our age will appear, and also the strange capacity for lofty idealism which must be reckoned with by all who would understand the American character. A people whose heroes are Washington and Lincoln, a peaceful people who fought to a finish one of the bloodiest of wars, waged solely for the sake of a great principle and a noble idea, surely possess an emergency-standard far above mere money-getting.

Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much that is unpleasant. This is but saying that they will describe the arch-typical civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is finally told, I believe that it will show that the forces working for good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that, with many blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and turning aside from the path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation.

BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY

BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY[2]

An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received, speaks in this university of ancient renown, can not but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that, as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth,” would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in the things of the body.