Historical and Political Essays

W >> William Edward Hartpole Lecky >> Historical and Political Essays

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Historians will probably always judge men and policies by their net
results, by their final consequences, and this judgment is on the
whole the most sure that we can attain. It is not, however, altogether
infallible. Apart from the question of the moral character of the
methods employed which a good historian should never omit from his
consideration, success is not always a decisive proof of sagacity.
Chance and the unexpected play a great part in human affairs, and a
judgment founded on a perfectly just estimate of probabilities will
often prove wrong. The result which was the least probable will come
true, some wholly unforeseen and unforeseeable occurrence will scatter
dangers that were very real and give a new complexion to events. The
rise of some pre-eminently great or of some pre-eminently mischievous
personage among the guiding influences of a nation will derange the
most sagacious calculations, and the reckless gambler or the obtuse
obstructionist may prove more right than the most cautious, the most
skilful, the most farseeing statesman.

A fatal and very common error is that of judging the actions of the
past by the moral standard of our own age. This is especially the
error of novices in history and of those who without any wide and
general culture devote themselves exclusively to a single period.
While the primary and essential elements of right and wrong remain
unchanged, nothing is more certain than that the standard or ideal of
duty is continually altering. A very humane man in another age may
have done things which would now be regarded as atrociously barbarous.
A very virtuous man may have done things which would now indicate
extreme profligacy. We seldom indeed make sufficient allowance for the
degree in which the judgments and dispositions of even the best man
are coloured by the moral tone of the time or society in which they
live. And what is true of individuals is equally true of nations. In
order to judge equitably the legislation of any people, we must always
consider corresponding contemporary legislations and ideas. When this
is neglected our judgments of the past become wholly false. How often,
for example, has such a subject as the history of the penal laws
against Irish Catholics been treated without the smallest reference to
the contemporary laws against Protestants that existed in every
Catholic nation and the contemporary laws against Catholics that
existed in almost every Protestant country in Europe. How often have
the English commercial restrictions on the American colonies been
treated as if they were instances of extreme and exceptional tyranny,
while a more extended knowledge would show that they were simply the
expression of ideas of commercial policy and about the relation of
dependencies to the mother-country which then almost universally
prevailed.

It is not merely the moral standard that changes. A corresponding
change takes place in the moral type, or, in other words, in the class
of virtues which is especially cultivated and especially valued. To
know an age aright we should above all things seek to understand its
ideal, the direction in which the stream of its self-sacrifice and
moral energy naturally flowed. Few things in history are more
interesting and more valuable than a study of the causes that produced
and modified these successive ideals. Thus in the moral type of pagan
antiquity the civic virtues occupied incomparably the foremost place.
The idea of a supremely good man was essentially that of a man of
action, of a man whose whole life was devoted to the service of his
country. The life and death of Cato were for generations the favourite
model. He was deemed, in the words of an old Latin historian, to be of
all men the one 'most like to virtue.' This pattern retained its force
till the softening influence of the Greek spirit, permeating Roman
life, made the stoical ideal seem too hard and unsympathising; till
the corruption and despotism of the Empire had withdrawn the best men
from political life and attached a certain taint or stigma to public
employment; till new religions arose in the East, bringing with them
new ideals to govern the world. Gradually we may trace the
contemplative virtues rising to the foremost place until, about the
fifth century, the ideal had totally changed. The heroic type was
replaced by the saintly type. The supremely good man was now the
ascetic. The first condition of sanctity was a complete abandonment of
secular duties and cares and a complete subjugation of the body. A
vast literature of legends arose reflecting and glorifying the
prevailing ideal and holding up the hermit life as the supreme pattern
of perfection, and this literature occupies a place in mediaevalism
very similar to that held by the 'Lives' of Plutarch in antiquity.

Ancient art was essentially the glorification of the body, a
representation of the full strength and beauty of developed manhood.
The saint of the mediaeval mosaic represents the body in its extreme
maceration and humiliation. The rhetorician, Dio Chrysostom, in a
somewhat whimsical passage, which was suggested by a remark of Plato,
found a special moral significance in the fact that Homer, though he
places his heroes on the the banks of what he calls 'the fishy
Hellespont,' never makes them eat fish, but always flesh and the flesh
of oxen, for this, as he says, is 'strength-producing food' and is
therefore suited for the formation of heroes and the proper diet for
men of virtue. Compare this judgment with the protracted, and indeed
incredible, fasts which the monkish writers delighted in attributing
to the saints of the desert, and we have a vivid picture of the change
that had passed over the ideal.

But as time moved on the ascetic ideal gradually declined and was
replaced by the very different ideal of chivalry. It consisted chiefly
of three new elements. The first element was a spirit of gallantry
which gave women a wholly new place in the imaginations of men. It was
in part a reaction against the extreme austerity of the saints, and
this reaction was much intensified after the cessation of the panic
which had risen at the close of the tenth century about the
approaching end of the world. It was in part produced by the softer
and more epicurean civilisation which grew up in the country bordering
on the Pyrenees. It was especially represented in the romances and
poems of the Troubadours, and the new tendency even received some
assistance from the Church when the Council of Clermont, which
originated the Crusades, imposed on the knight the religious
obligation of defending all widows and orphans.

The second element was an increased reverence for secular rank, which
grew out of the feudal system, when a great hereditary aristocracy
arose and all European society was moulded into a compact hierarchy,
of which the serf was the basis and the emperor the apex. The
principle of subordination and obedience ran through the whole
edifice, and a respect for rank was universally diffused. Men came to
associate their ideal of greatness with regal or noble authority, and
they were therefore prepared to idealise any great sovereign who might
arise. Such a sovereign appeared in Charlemagne, who exercised upon
Christendom a fascination not less powerful than that which Alexander
had once exercised upon Greece, and he accordingly soon became the
centre of a whole literature of romance.

The third element was the fusion of religious enthusiasm with the
military spirit. Christianity in its first phases was utterly opposed
to the military spirit; but this opposition was naturally mitigated
when the Church triumphed under Constantine and became associated with
governments and armies. The hostility was still further qualified when
many tribes of warlike barbarians embraced the faith, and the military
obligation which was an essential element of feudalism acted in the
same direction. But, above all, the rise and conquests of
Mohammedanism awoke the military energies of Christendom and
determined the direction it should take. In the Crusades the two great
streams of military enthusiasm and of religious enthusiasm met, and
the result was the formation of a new ideal which for a long period
mainly governed the imagination of Christendom.

It for a time absorbed, eclipsed, and transformed all purely national
ideals. No poet was ever more intensely English in his character and
sympathies than Chaucer, and he wrote when the dazzling glories of
Crecy and Poitiers were still very recent. Yet it is not on these
fields, but in the long wars with the Moslems, that his pattern knight
had won his renown. The military expeditions of Charlemagne were
directed almost exclusively against the Saxons and against Slavonic
tribes. With the Spanish Mohammedans he came but very slightly in
contact. He made in person but one expedition against them, and that
expedition was both insignificant and unsuccessful. But in the
Karlovingian romances, which were written when the crusading
enthusiasm was at its height, the figure of the great emperor
underwent a strange and most significant transformation. The German
wars were scarcely noticed. Charlemagne is surrounded with the special
glory that ought to have belonged to Charles Martel. He is represented
as having passed his entire life in a victorious struggle with the
Mohammedans of Europe, and is even gravely credited with a triumphant
expedition to Jerusalem. The three romances of the Crusades which are
believed to be the oldest were all written by monks, and they all make
Charlemagne their hero. Even geography was transformed by the new
enthusiasm, and old maps sometimes represent Jerusalem as the centre
of the world.

In few periods has there been so great a difference between the ideals
created by the popular imagination and the realities that are
recognised by history. Few wars have been accompanied by more cruelty,
more outrage, and more licentiousness than the Crusades or have
brought a blacker cloud of disasters in their train. Yet the idea that
inspired them was a lofty one, and they were so speedily transfigured
by the imaginations of men that in combination with the other
influences I have mentioned they created an ideal which is one of the
most beautiful in the history of the world. We may trace it clearly in
the romances of Arthur and Charlemagne and of the "Cid;" in the
"Red-Cross Knight" of Tasso and Spenser; in the old ballads which
paint so vividly the hero of chivalry, ever ready to draw his sword
for his faith and his lady-love and in the cause of the feeble and the
oppressed. The glorification of military courage and self-sacrifice
which had been so prominent in antiquity was again in the ascendant,
but it was combined with a new kind of honour and with a new vein of
courtesy, modesty, and gentleness. When we apply the epithet
'chivalrous' to a modern gentleman, this is no unmeaning term. There
is even now an element in that character which may be distinctly
traced to the ideal of chivalry which the Crusades made dominant in
Europe.

I do not propose to follow the history of other ideals that have in
turn prevailed. What I have written will, I trust, be sufficient to
illustrate a kind of history which appears to me to possess much
interest and value. It will show, too, that a faithful historian is
very largely concerned with the fictions as well as with the facts of
the past. Legends which have no firm historical basis are often of the
highest historical value as reflecting the moral sentiments of their
time. Nor do they merely reflect them. In some periods they contribute
perhaps more than any other influence to mould and colour them and to
give them an enduring strength. The facts of history have been largely
governed by its fictions. Great events often acquire their full power
over the human mind only when they have passed through the
transfiguring medium of the imagination, and men as they were supposed
to be have even sometimes exercised a wider influence than men as they
actually were. Ideals ultimately rule the world, and each before it
loses its ascendancy bequeaths some moral truth as an abiding legacy
to the human race.

THE POLITICAL VALUE OF HISTORY

When, shortly after I had accepted the honourable task which I am
endeavouring to fulfil to-night, I received from your Secretary a
report of the annual proceedings of the Birmingham and Midland
Institute,--when I observed the immense range and variety of subjects
included within your programme, illustrating so strikingly the intense
intellectual activity of this great town,--my first feeling was one of
some bewilderment and dismay. What, I asked myself, could I say that
would be of much real value, addressing an unknown audience, and
relating to fields of knowledge so vast, so multifarious, and in many
of their parts so far beyond the range of my own studies? On
reflection, however, it appeared to me that in this, as in most other
cases, the proverb was a wise one which bids the cobbler stick to his
last, and that a writer who, during many years of his life, has been
engaged in the study of English history could hardly do better than
devote the time at his disposal to-night to a few reflections on the
political value of history, and on the branches and methods of
historical study that are most fitted to form a sound political
judgment.

Is history a study of real use in practical, and especially in
political, life? The question, as you know, has been by no means
always answered in the same way. In its earlier stages history was
regarded chiefly as a form of poetry recording the more dramatic
actions of kings, warriors, and statesmen. Homer and the early
ballads are indeed the first historians of their countries, and long
after Homer one of the most illustrious of the critics of antiquity
described history as merely 'poetry free from the incumbrance of
verse.' The portraits that adorned it gave some insight into human
character; it breathed noble sentiments, rewarded and stimulated noble
actions, and kindled by its strong appeals to the imagination high
patriotic feeling; but its end was rather to paint than to guide, to
consecrate a noble past than to furnish a key for the future; and the
artist in selecting his facts looked mainly for those which could
throw the richest colour upon his canvas. Most experience was in his
eyes (to adopt an image of Coleridge) like the stern light of a ship,
which illuminates only the path we have already traversed; and a large
proportion of the subjects which are most significant as illustrating
the true welfare and development of nations were deliberately rejected
as below the dignity of history. The old conception of history can
hardly be better illustrated than in the words of Savage Landor. 'Show
me,' he makes one of his heroes say, 'how great projects were
executed, great advantages gained, and great calamities averted. Show
me the generals and the statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend
to them in reverence.... Let the books of the Treasury lie closed as
religiously as the Sibyl's. Leave weights and measures in the
market-place; Commerce in the harbour; the Arts in the light they
love; Philosophy in the shade. Place History on her rightful throne,
and at the sides of her Eloquence and War.'[1]

It was chiefly in the eighteenth century that a very different
conception of history grew up. Historians then came to believe that
their task was not so much to paint a picture as to solve a problem;
to explain or illustrate the successive phases of national growth,
prosperity, and adversity. The history of morals, of industry, of
intellect, and of art; the changes that take place in manners or
beliefs; the dominant ideas that prevailed in successive periods; the
rise, fall, and modification of political constitutions; in a word,
all the conditions of national well-being became the subjects of their
works. They sought rather to write a history of peoples than a history
of kings. They looked specially in history for the chain of causes and
effects. They undertook to study in the past the physiology of
nations, and hoped by applying the experimental method on a large
scale to deduce some lessons of real value about the conditions on
which the well-being of society mainly depends.

How far have they succeeded in their attempt, and furnished us with a
real compass for political guidance? Let me in the first place frankly
express my own belief that to many readers of history the study is not
only useless, but even positively misleading. An unintelligent, a
superficial, a pedantic or an inaccurate use of history is the source
of very many errors in practical judgment. Human affairs are so
infinitely complex that it is vain to expect that they will ever
exactly reproduce themselves, or that any study of the past can enable
us to predict the future with the minuteness and the completeness that
can be attained in the exact sciences. Nor will any wise man judge the
merits of existing institutions solely on historic grounds. Do not
persuade yourself that any institution, however great may be its
antiquity, however transcendent may have been its uses in a remote
past, can permanently justify its existence, unless it can be shown
to exercise a really beneficial influence over our own society and our
own age. It is equally true that no institution which is exercising
such a beneficial influence should be condemned, because it can be
shown from history that under other conditions and in other times its
influence was rather for evil than for good.

These propositions may seem like truisms; yet how often do we hear a
kind of reasoning that is inconsistent with them! How often, for
example, in the discussions on the Continent on the advantages and
disadvantages of monastic institutions has the chief stress of the
argument been laid upon the great benefits which those institutions
produced in ages that were utterly different from our own,--in the
dark period of the barbarian invasions, when they were the only
refuges of a pacific civilisation, the only libraries, the only
schools, the only centres of art, the only refuge for gentle and
intellectual natures; the chief barrier against violence and rapine;
the chief promoters of agriculture and industry! How often in
discussions on the merits and demerits of an Established Church in
England have we heard arguments drawn from the hostility which the
Church of England showed towards English liberty in the time of the
Stuarts; although it is abundantly evident that the dangers of a royal
despotism, which were then so serious, have utterly disappeared, and
that the political action of the Church of England at that period was
mainly governed by a doctrine of the Divine right of kings, and of the
duty of passive obedience, which is now as dead as the old belief that
the king's touch could cure scrofula! How often have the champions of
modern democracy appealed in support of their views to the glories of
the democracies of ancient Greece, without ever reminding their
hearers that these small municipal republics rested on the basis of
slavery, and that the bulk of those who would exercise the chief
controlling influence over affairs in a pure democracy of the modern
type were absolutely excluded from political power! How often in
discussions about the advantages and disadvantages of Home Rule in
Ireland do we find arguments drawn from the merits or demerits of the
Irish Parliament of the eighteenth century, with a complete
forgetfulness of the fact that this Parliament consisted exclusively
of a Protestant gentry; that it represented in the highest degree the
property of the country, and the classes who are most closely attached
to English rule; that it was constituted in such a manner that the
English Government could exercise a complete control over its
deliberations, and that for good or for ill it was utterly unlike any
body that could now be constituted in Ireland!

Or again, to turn to another field: it is quite certain that every age
has special dangers to guard against, and that as time moves on these
dangers not only change, but are sometimes even reversed. There have
been periods in English history when the great dangers to be
encountered sprang from the excessive and encroaching power of a
monarchy or of an aristocracy. The battle to be then fought was for
the free exercise of religious worship and expression of religious
opinion, for a free parliament, for a free press, for a free platform,
for an independent jury-box. All the best patriotism, all the most
heroic self-sacrifice of the nation, was thrown into defence of these
causes; and the wisest statesmen of the time made it the main object
of their legislation to protect and consolidate them.

These things are now as valuable as they ever were, but no reasonable
man will maintain that they are in the smallest danger. The battles of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been definitely won. A
kind of language which at one period of English history implied the
noblest heroism is now the idlest and cheapest of clap-trap. The
sycophant and the self-seeker bow before quite other idols than of
old. The dangers of the time come from other quarters; other
tendencies prevail, other tasks remain to be accomplished; and a
public man who in framing his course followed blindly in the steps of
the heroes or reformers of the past would be like a mariner who set
his sails to the winds of yesterday.

It is difficult, I think, to doubt that the judgments of all of us are
more or less affected by causes of this kind. It is, I imagine, true
of the great majority of educated men that their first political
impression or bias is formed much less by the events of their own time
than by childish recollections of the more dramatic conflicts of the
past. We are Cavaliers or Roundheads before we are Conservatives or
Liberals; and although we gradually learn to realise how profoundly
the condition of affairs and the balance of forces have altered, yet
no wise man can doubt the power which the first bias of the
imagination exercises in very many cases through a whole life.
Language which grew out of bygone conflicts continues to be used long
after those conflicts and their causes have ended; but that which was
once a very genuine voice comes at last to be little more than an
insincere echo.

The best corrective for this kind of evil is a really intelligent
study of history. One of the first tasks that every sincere student
should set before himself is to endeavour to understand what is the
dominant idea or characteristic of the period with which he is
occupied; what forces chiefly ruled it, what forces were then rising
into a dangerous ascendancy, and what forces were on the decline; what
illusions, what exaggerations, what false hopes and unworthy
influences chiefly prevailed. It is only when studied in this spirit
that the true significance of history is disclosed, and the same
method which furnishes a key to the past forms also an admirable
discipline for the judgment of the present. He who has learnt to
understand the true character and tendencies of many succeeding ages
is not likely to go very far wrong in estimating his own.

Another branch of history which I would especially commend to the
attention of all political students is the history of Institutions. In
the constantly fluctuating conditions of human life no institution
ever remained for a long period unaltered. Sometimes with changed
beliefs and changed conditions institutions lose all their original
utility. They become simply useless, obstructive, and corrupt; and
though by mere passive resistance they may continue to exist long
after they have ceased to serve any good purpose, they will at last be
undermined by their own abuses. Other institutions, on the other hand,
show the true characteristic of vitality--the power of adapting
themselves to changed conditions and new utilities. Few things in
history are more interesting and more instructive than a careful study
of these transformations. Sometimes the original objects almost wholly
disappear, and utilities which were either never contemplated by the
founders or were only regarded as of purely secondary importance take
the first place on the scene. The old plan and symmetry almost
disappear as the institution is modified now in this direction and now
in that to meet some pressing want. The first architects, if they
could rise from the dead, would scarcely recognise their
creation--would perhaps look on it with horror. The indirect
advantages of an institution are sometimes greater than its direct
ones; and institutions are often more valuable on account of the evils
they avert than on account of the positive advantages they produce.
Not unfrequently in their later and transformed condition they
exercise wider and greater influence than when they were originally
established; for the strength derived from the long traditions of the
past and from the habits that are formed around anything that is
deeply rooted in the national life gives them a vastly increased
importance.

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