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CREIGHTON LECTURE

THE MEANING OF
TRUTH IN HISTORY

BY THE

RIGHT HON. VISCOUNT HALDANE

K.T., F.R.S.
(Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain)

BEING THE CREIGHTON LECTURE FOR THE

YEAR 1913-14, DELIVERED BEFORE THE

UNIVERSITY ON MARCH 6th, 1914

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of Eonimn

PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD.
BY HODDER & STOUGHTON, WARWICK SQUARE, LONDON, E.G.

THE MEANING OF
TRUTH IN HISTORY

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CREIGHTON LECTURE

THE MEANING OF
TRUTH IN HISTORY

BY THE

RIGHT HON. VISCOUNT HALDANE

K.T.. F.R.S.
(Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain)

BEING THE CREIGHTON LECTURE FOR THE

YEAR 1913-14, DELIVERED BEFORE THE

UNIVERSITY ON MARCH 6th, 1914

iUmlron: SJnibemtg of JUmfcott

JBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON PRESS, LTD.
BY HODDER & STOUGHTON, WARWICK SQUARE, LONDON, E.G.

1914

.

THE MEANING OF TRUTH
IN HISTORY.

The occasion on which it is my privilege to
iddress you is one which is associated with the name
>f a remarkable man. He possessed gifts of intel-
lect and of character which would have made him
eminent in careers other than the one he chose for
himself. But he held tenaciously the principle,
adherence to which is essential for a man who
genuinely aspires to accomplish anything lasting.
He knew that he must concentrate, and he did so.
He lived a dedicated life — dedicated to the service
of his God and his Church, as he conceived them.
Such were his gifts that his work deeply impressed
with the sense of its reality those who were permitted
to come near him. The impression he made was
heightened by his obvious conviction that he could
best render the service to which he had consecrated
his life by following truth unswervingly, and seeking

as well a'S ke: could to extend the province of genuine
knowledge. The result of an unfaltering adhesion
to this principle was that his writings produced on
the public an impression of sincerity and thorough-
ness, an impression which deepened as time went on.
In so far as he devoted his gifts to the study of
history, it was therefore natural that his integrity of
purpose and his desire for the truth should lead to
his becoming known and trusted as an historian of
a wide and searching outlook.

It accords with what is fitting that among the
memorials erected to him there should have been
included this lectureship. To me it has fallen to be
the lecturer this year, and to choose a topic that is
appropriate. What Bishop Creighton cared for in
historical work was, above all, to treat the facts
justly, to see things not merely on the side that is
external and superficial and therefore transitory,
but in their fuller and more enduring significance.
It is out of a feeling of respect for this characteristic
of his life and writing that I have selected for my
subject "The Meaning of Truth in History."

But the subject is full of difficulty. As decade
succeeds decade, we in this country are learning
more and more, in science, in art, and in religion
alike, that the question, " What is Truth ? " is a ques-
tion of far-reaching significance, a significance that
seems to reach farther the more we reflect. And
the perplexity of the question extends not least to
the case of the historian. For it seems to-day that •

the genuine historian must be more than a biographer
or a recorder. The field of his enquiry cannot be
limited by the personality of any single human
being, nor can it be occupied by any mere enumera-
tion of details or chronicle of events. A great man,
such as Caesar or Charlemagne, may stand for a
period, but his personality is, after all, a feature
that is transitory. The §£intjxL^he_ageis generally
greater and more lasting than the spirit of any
individual. The spirit of the age is also more than
a mere aggregate of the events that a period can
display, or than any mere sum of individual wills.
What, then, is to be the standard of truth for the
historian? The analogy of the artist who paints a
portrait may prove not without significance for the
answer to this question. The great artist does not
put on canvas a simple reproduction of the appear-
ance of his subject at a particular moment; that is
the work of the photographer. Art, in the highest
sense, has to disentangle the significance of the
whole from its details and to reproduce it. The
truth of art is a truth that must thus be born again
of the artist's mind. No mere narration of details
will give the whole that at once dominates these
details and yet does not exist apart from them.
But art, with its freedom to choose and to reject,
selects details and moulds them into a shape that
is symbolic of what is at once ideal and real. In
art, thought and sense enter into the closest union,
or rather they form an entirety within which both

are abstractions from an actual that does not let
itself be broken up.

Now the historian surely must resemble the
portrait painter rather than the photographer. The
secret of the art of a Gibbon or a Mommsen seems
to lie in this : that they select their details, select
those that are relevant and that can be moulded
into a characteristic setting without sacrifice of
integrity or accuracy, a setting which is typical of
a period. At some point or other we may want to
have the details which have been passed by. We
may want them for a picture of the period under
another aspect. But we do not always want all the
details. " Le secret d'ennuyer c'est tout dire."
Carlyle passed much by when he wrote his French
Revolution, and it is well that he did. We find
what he left alone in other historians who present
the story from a different standpoint. Just as there
may be several portraits, all of superlative excel-
lence, while differing in details and even in their
presentation of actual features, so there may be
several histories, equal in value, but differing in a
similar fashion.

To judge, then, of excellence in the historian we
must possess a standard not wrholly dissimilar from
that by which we judge of excellence in the artist.
In the case of the artist, there can be little doubt
about one point, at all events, in that standard.
Whether it is nature or man that he presents, the
image must interpret character. It does not detract

9

from the truth of the work of the artist that the
cottage and the figures in his landscape never
existed exactly as he has painted them, or even at
.all. What is important is that they should suggest
the deeper and more enduring meaning of what is
actual, in the fullest and most important sense.
The expression which the portrait painter has put
on canvas may be a rare one — the expression,
perhaps of an individuality seized at a unique
moment of existence. But all the more does that
expression stand out as the truth about the real
life of the man whose portrait is there. Now, the
historian also is concerned with what is ideal. He
is concerned with this just because it is only through
the ideal that what has happened can be lifted above
the particularity of the events that obscure its
meaning. M. Renan has put this point admir-
ably :—

"II n'y a guere de details certains en histoire;
les details cependant ont toujours quelque signi-
fication. Le talent de 1'historien consiste a faire un
ensemble vrai avec des traits qui ne sont vrai qu'a
demi." And again : — " L'histoire pure doit con-
struire son edifice avec deux sortes de donnees, et,
si j'ose le dire, deux facteurs; d'abord, Petat
general de Tame humaine en un siecle et dans un
pays donnes; en second lieu, les incidents par-
ticuliers qui, se combinant avec les causes generates,
ont determine le cours des evenements. Expliquer
1'histoire par des incidents est aussi faux que de

10

1'expliquer par des principes purement philo-
^sophiques. Les deux explications doivent se
soutenir et se completer Tune 1'autre."1

The work of the historian and that of the artist
seem to be so far analogous. Both are directed to
finding the true expression of their subjects.
Neither is concerned with accidents of detail that
are fortuitous. But the analogy extends only a
little way, for the subjects are very different. That
of a portrait is, after all, a single and isolated per-
sonality. It is the business of the artist to express
this personality, and to express it as a work of art
in which thought and feeling are blended in a unity
that cannot be broken up. But the historian is not
concerned with any single personality. His work
seems rather to be to display the development of a
nation or of a period, and to record accurately, and
in the light of the spirit of the nation or period,
the sequence of events in which its character has
manifested itself. Like the artist, the historian
may omit many details. But he does not possess
the freedom of the artist. What we ask from the
great painter is his interpretation of a personality,
and he may take liberties in imagining costume and
background. Indeed, he often must take liberties,
for the expression counts for more than circum-
stances which obscure rather than assist in revealing
it. But the picture created by the historian, though
it, too, can only be created by his genius and must

1 { Vie de Jesus', Preface de la treizieme Edition.

II

be born of his mind, is of a different order. The
presentation of the whole and the description of
actual facts are here more closely related. Literal
accuracy counts for much, for others than himself
will claim the liberty to refer to his book for actual
facts, and to interpret them, it may be, differently
from his rendering. Thus the historian is under
restrictions greater than those of the artist. If he
uses as complete a liberty as the artist claims, he
is reckoned as belonging to quite a different pro-
fession, that of a writer of historical romance, such
as the romances of Sir Walter Scott.

But this is not all. The artist depicts as what is
characteristic an expression that may have been
found only at one moment in the history of his
subject. The historian has to present events and
their meaning over a period that is often long.
Even occurrences that seem isolated, like the execu-
tion of Charles I., or the taking of the Bastille, or
the Battle of Waterloo, have to be shown as cul-
minating events in a course of development which
must be recorded because apart from it they lose
their significance. It is only by tracing the genesis
not merely of culminating events but of national
institutions, and by exhibiting them as the outcome
and embodiment of the genius of the people to
whom they belong, that in many cases they can be
made intelligible. This principle is the foundation
of the historical method. It is a principle which
to-day seems almost a commonplace, but it has not

12

always been so. It is striking to observe how really
great writers suffer when they violate it. Some
extreme instances are to be found among the his-
torians of Jurisprudence. I will take two cases of
the kind, and I offer no apology for turning aside
for a moment to the highly specialised branch of
history from which I take them. For they are
admirable examples of the fault in method which I
wish to illustrate. Moreover, I am a lawyer whose
almost daily duty it is to ascertain the reasons why
the law has become what it is, because unless I can
do so, I am bound to fail in the interpretation of
its scope and authority. There has thus been forced
on me direct experience of the embarrassment which
the fault of which I am speaking causes. Those
who have to consult almost daily otherwise great
books dealing with the history of legal institutions
encounter this fault in its worst form.

I will refer first to the shortcomings of a really
remarkable Englishman. The case of Jeremy
Bentham is notable. He ignored the light which
history had to throw on the institutions about which
he was writing, and his reputation thereby suffered.
He rendered great services to the cause of law
reform in England and elsewhere by the force of
his destructive criticism. The very abstractness of
his methods added to the incisiveness of this
criticism. But when he describes, and even where
he brings an indictment that is obviously true, he
is, generally speaking, utterly defective as an his-

13

torian. His unconsciousness of the genesis of the
facts with which he is dealing is extraordinary in
a man of such acuteness. He attributes the con-
tinued existence of bad laws to the unscrupulous-
ness of contemporary rulers and judges, as if they
had individually devised them. When, for example,
with admirable insistence, he denounces the exist-
ence of the rule which, contrary to what we now
regard as plain common-sense, used to prevent a
party to a suit from giving evidence in it, he is
apparently unconscious of the fact that there was
once a stage in the evolution of public opinion at
which it was inevitable that the rule should be what
it was.1 While religious opinion dominated in
matters secular, it was almost universally held that
to allow an interested party to give evidence on his
own behalf was to tempt him to perjury, and perjury,
which meant everlasting damnation, seemed to our
forefathers a more disastrous result than the loss
of property. It was, in such a period, quite natural
that public opinion should prefer spiritual safety to
secular justice, and fashion law accordingly. We
have to understand that this was so, if we would
understand the history of the rules which restricted
the admission of evidence in the Courts of England.
That we have now passed to a different standpoint
does not lessen the necessity. Bentham again, to

i See his remarks on Blackstone and the Judges in his
'Rationale of Judicial Evidence,' Book IX, C. 5 (Vol. 7 of
Bowring's Edition of his Works.)

take another example, denounced the Roman law
as being a parcel of dissertations badly drawn up !
He knew nothing of its history or of the circum-
stances of its development. He had not heard of
the work of the great historical school of Roman
law which Savigny was even then leading. His
method was always to assume certain abstract prin-
ciples, and to judge everything in their light without
regard to time or place. He insisted on immediate
codification, just as Savigny, on the other hand,
insisted on the postponement of codes until the
common law had completed a full course of natural
growth. But Savigny himself, to take my second
illustration, at times incurred the perils which are
inseparable from occasional lapses into abstract-
ness of mind. Although he was an apostle of the
historical method, and, in general, took far more
account of history than did Bentham, he, too, at
moments, made what to a later generation have
become mistakes. For example, he attacked the
code which Napoleon had enacted for France. He
attacked it on the ground that to enact such a code
was unscientific.1 He was probably right in desir-
ing that the spirit of the great Roman lawyers
should continue, at least for a time, to work through-
out Germany, where it held sway, unobstructed by
the rules of a rigid code. In that country, where

1 See the section headed ' Die drei neuen Gesetzbiicher,' in his
book 'Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit fur Gesetzgebung und Rechts
wissenschaft.'

the tradition of the Roman law actually occupied
the field, the provisions of a code might well have
proved not only unduly rigid, but also artificial.
Yet his attack on Napoleon's great Code did not do
justice to the overwhelming reasons for enacting it
in France. France, unlike Germany, had, before
Napoleon's time, no general body of laws. The
different parts of the country were subject to utterly
divergent systems, such as were the Customs of
Paris and of Normandy. It was remarked by
Voltaire that a man travelling in France in his own
time changed laws as often as he changed horses.
The rough common-sense of Napoleon saw that a
general code was a necessity. He framed one that
was not ideal, judged by the high standards of
Savigny, but it was the best he could frame at a
time when nothing was to be hoped for in the way
of development on the basis of the prevailing laws.
Gradual reform of this kind might well have been
possible had the Roman law been the general
foundation of a single system of jurisprudence in
France. But it was not so, and Napoleon therefore
took the course which the necessities of the time
dictated.

I have cited these examples of the desirability of
the historical spirit in estimating legal institutions,
partly because they illustrate admirably the truth
of the saying of Balduinus, a great jurist of the
sixteenth century, " Sine historia caecam esse juris-
prudentiam." But I have cited them also because

i6

they illustrate the wider proposition that no event
in history of any kind can be judged without full
knowledge of its context and of the spirit of its
particular age. The execution of Charles L
has been the subject of the hottest controversy.
Did the tribunal which decreed it sit wholly without
constitutional warrant, and was the trial conducted
quite illegally? Probably both questions must be
answered affirmatively from the standpoint of the
common law. But this does not conclude the discus-
sion. It is true that acts of the kind — that is, revolu-
tionary acts — are outside the provisions of ordinary
law. And yet they may be justified under what is
called martial law, but is, in our country, only an
application of the maxim, " Salus populi suprema
lex." Had Cromwell not put Charles to death, it
was more than merely possible that Charles would
have seized the first chance of putting Cromwell
himself to death and of upsetting the new order of
government. As Lord Morley, in his " Life of
Cromwell," has pointed out, the real justification of
Cromwell must depend on the question whether
what can only be justified as an act of war, was or
was not a public necessity. And the answer to this
question requires that the problem should be ap-
proached as a large one, and in the spirit which
demands a survey of the events of the periods both
before and after the year 1649. The judgment of
posterity upon the act of Oliver Cromwell must
turn, not on what he was as an individual, but on

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;

the extent to which he was the representative figure
in a movement which must be judged before he
can be approved or condemned.

Now it is just this obligation of the historian that
makes his work so difficult. Like the portrait painter,
he has, in his search after expression, to select
details, but he has to select them under far more
stringent conditions as to completeness and accuracy.
Exact these details must be, but complete they can-

ot be. Much must be rejected as irrelevant. The
test of relevancy is the standard of what is neces-
sary, not merely for exactness, but for the adequate
portraiture of the spirit of the time. And this test
necessitates great insight into the characteristics of
that spirit. Otherwise misleading details will be
selected, and undue prominences and proportions
will be assigned. The historian must be able to
estimate what are the true and large characteristics
of the age, and one test of his success will be, as
in the case of the artist, the test of his stature. Can

e rise high enough to present the truth in what,
almost as it were by direct perception, we seem to
recognise as a great form of deep significance? I
say almost by direct perception, for the analogy of

e intuition of art and literature appears to come
in here. One recognises the quality of size in a
Gibbon or a Carlyle, as one recognises it in the
great portrait painter and the great dramatic poet.
But in the domain of history the predominance of
this quality is conditioned by the imperative duty to

14360

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be accurate to an extent that is incumbent neither
on the painter nor on the poet. The historian who
has a whole period to describe must be more than
exact; he has to be lord over his details. He must
marshal these details and tower above them, and
reject and select in the light of nothing less than
the whole. He must not let his view of that whole,
as has been the case with both a Bossuet, on the
one hand, and a Buckle, on the other, be distorted
by a priori conceptions that are abstract and in-
adequate to the riches of the facts of life. He must
frame his estimate after a study of the whole
sequence of events, of those events which throw
light on the conduct and characteristics of a nation
in the variety of phases in its existence. It is just
here that he is apt to be beset by obsessions that
come from unconscious pre-judgments.

I wish to try to say something about the origin
of this kind of temptation to pre-judgment — a
temptation to which a long list of historians have
succumbed in a greater or less degree. Indeed, no
one can wholly escape it. But it has various forms,
some of which are worse than others. In those that
are most misleading it seems to arise from an in-
sufficiently considered application of the conceptions
under which the observer searches after facts, con-
ceptions which are often too narrow for the facts
themselves. It appears as exactly the same kind of
temptation as that into which in various forms
students of the exact sciences have been prone to

19

fall. I will therefore ask you to bear with me while
I touch on the general subject of scientific method.
For in every department of science just the same
difficulty arises as arises in that of the historian, and
the source of these difficulties in some branches of
science can be easily traced. Facts are apt to be
distorted in the mind of the observer by pre-
conceived hypotheses of which he is hardly con-
scious. The attempts which have been made to
exhibit the life of an organism as the result of
physical forces operating from without on an aggre-
gate of minute mechanisms or chemical compounds,
have, notwithstanding their usefulness from the
point of view of physics and chemistry, fallen short
as regards the nature of life itself. When we are
confronted with the unquestionable facts of repro-
duction and heredity, these attempts have always
broken down. We are driven to admit, not the exist-
ence of a special vital force controlling development
from without, but the conception of something in
the nature of an end realising itself, a whole which
exists only in what it controls, but which, while it
may still fall far short of conscious purpose, is not
on that account less real. We may, indeed, dislike
expressions which suggest abstract or even conscious
purpose, and prefer, with the author of that remark-
able book, " Creative Evolution," to speak of what
is realised as a tendency rather than an end. But
one thing is clear, however we may express our-
selves. We must not let the terror of theology and

14360 B 2

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the supernatural, which often afflicts men of science
with fears, deflect us from our duty to be true in our
descriptions to actual experience, and drive us by
way of reaction into purely mechanistic theories
which are inadequate to explain it. The history of
biology seems to have been at times as sad an illus-
tration of the dangers of anti-theological dogmas as
it has at other periods been of the dangers of those
of a theological teleology.

In the same way, if we would know the truth
about men and affairs, we must learn to study their
history quite simply and with minds as free as we
can make them from prejudice. Our preconcep-
tions generally arise from our having unconsciously
become metaphysicians. We do not need to be
metaphysicians at all, except to the modest extent
of knowing how to guard against falling without
being aware of it into bad metaphysics. Uncon-
scious prejudice is apt to tempt us to deny the reality
of much of the world as it seems, and seek to stretch
that world on the rack of some special principle of
very limited application. The only way of safety
is to train the mind to be on the watch for the
intrusion of limited and exclusive ideas. If to yield
to such intrusion is dangerous in the field of biology,
the danger becomes still more apparent when we
are confronted with the phenomena which belong
to the region of human existence. We can neither
deny the reality of the moral and intellectual atmo-
sphere in which, as persons, we live and move and

21

have our being, nor resolve it into the constructions
which represent the utmost limits attainable by the
mathematical and physical sciences. Of all that
really lives, Goethe's well-known criticism appears
to be true : —

"Wer will was Lebendig's erkennen und beschreiben
Sucht erst den Geist heraus zu treiben,
Dan hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,
Fehlt leider nur das geistige Band."

I In point of fact, the warning which Goethe gave
to the biologist of his time is not less important for
the student of history. The latter, also, must refuse

• the injunctions to limit his outlook which come from
the materialist, and he must refuse not less sternly
the counter-materialism of those who would seek in
the events of the world only for the interference
and mechanical guidance of a Power operating from
without. He must recognise, too, the reality of
social wholes, outside of which individuals cannot
live — social wholes which are actual just in so far as
the individuals who compose them in some measure
think and will identically. For, apart from his
social surroundings, the individual appears to have
no adequate life. Such social wholes cannot be
satisfactorily described in biological language. The
practice of attempting to so express them is a very
common one. People talk of social organisms and
their development by means of natural selection.
But in speaking of the organisation of society and
of its development, we have passed into a region

22

where the categories of biology are not adequate.
In this region we only darken counsel by using
phrases drawn from the vocabulary of a branch of
knowledge that does not take account of conscious
purpose and of the intelligence and volition which
are characteristic of persons as distinguished from
organisms. No doubt human beings are organisms.
But they are also much more than organisms. The
biological method in history and sociology is there-
fore unsatisfactory. It may be, and sometimes
must be used, just as are the methods of physics
and chemistry in biology itself. But its application
ought always to be a restricted and guarded one,
because, if the application is made uncritically, the
reality of much that is actual in present and past
alike will inevitably be ignored. Darwinian methods
and conceptions avail here only to a very limited
extent. For the social wholes with which history has
to deal are conscious wholes representing intelli-
gence and volition.

And this is why the historian is not only at liberty,
but is bound to recognise in the spirit of an age
something of which he can legitimately take account.
It is also the reason why he can never be a mere
recorder, and why he must always be a man of Art
as well as of Science. For Art alone can adequately
make the idea of the whole shine forth in the par-
ticulars in which it is immanent, and this is as true
of the history of a period as it is of a moment in
the life of a man.

23

In saying these things, I am far from suggesting
that the historian should become a student of philo-
sophy with a view to having a standpoint of his
own. I have touched on the topic for a directly
contrary purpose. I am anxious that he should not
unconsciously commit the fault of a Bossuet or a
Bentham or a Buckle by slipping into a philo-
sophical attitude without knowing it. It may well
be that he cannot avoid placing himself at some
particular standpoint for the purposes of his review.
Most historians seem to me to do so to a greater or
less degree. What I am concerned about is simply
to make it plain that the choice of such a standpoint
is no easy matter, or one that a man dare lightly
adventure. And I have said what I have, simply
for the purpose of laying emphasis on the need, in
making such a choice, of knowledge of the alterna-
tives and consciousness of the magnitude of the
field of controversy. The historian has to approach
the records of the experience of nations with a mind
sufficiently open to enable him to attach weight to
every phase of that experience. His conception of
it must be sufficiently wide to enable him to take
account of every aspect which he may encounter.
He must exclude neither rationality nor irrationality.
Now, if experience thus conceived be the material
on which the historian has to operate, his method
must not be either to search for and record isolated
facts which can never really be interpreted apart
from their context, or to set out abstract principles.

24

The very width of his field of research must neces-
sitate the selection of his facts and their relation to
each other and to the particular system in which
'alone they have their meaning. For meaning is the
foundation of system in history. The sense of this,
and the extraordinary difficulty which the historian
has in determining what is relevant and what is not
relevant to a true interpretation, has caused some
critics to despair of history, and others to try to
confine its task in a fashion which, if strictly carried
out, would deprive the historian of the chance of
calling to his aid the method of the artist. It is
interesting to observe to what lengths these two
divergent tendencies have been carried.

I will refer first to the criticism which rejects the
possibility of reliable history altogether. In his
" Farbenlehre," Goethe makes an observation on
the value of exact records. " We are told," he says,
" to look to the spirit rather than to the letter.
Usually, however, the spirit has destroyed the letter,
or has so altered it that nothing remains of its
original character and significance." He puts the
same thought in another fashion when he makes
Faust say to Wagner, in an often-quoted passage : —

" Mein Freund, die Zeiten der Vergangenheit,
Sind uns ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln ;
Was ihr den Geist der Zeiten heisst,
Das ist im Grund der Herren eigner Geist
In dem die Zeiten sich bespiegeln."

This seems a highly sceptical utterance. The
historian is told that he can succeed neither in

25

recovering the spirit of the past, nor in discovering
its letter. And if the historian were faced with the
dilemma Goethe puts to him, his case would indeed
be a difficult one. But is it so ? Let us look at the
case of records. Goethe was no doubt right in his
scepticism about mere records. For if a man in-
dulges himself with the belief that in quoting
records accurately he is collecting the truth about
the history of a period, he is indulging himself
rashly. What do such records consist of? Bio- /
graphics written at the time, letters, and State
papers are their main forms. As to the biographies,
they are often valuable as presenting a fine portrait
of their subject; and the narrative and the corre-
spondence quoted are, of course, of much use. But
they are almost invariably coloured. The selection
of material is necessarily dependent on the object
with which the selection is made, and that is the
biography of one man. You have only to read
another biography, that of his political rival, in
order, if they were both famous men, to realise that
whatever value the story possesses as portraiture, it
is by no means to be relied on implicitly for a
scientific record of the facts. Lord Morley, in his
" Notes on Politics and History," quotes Bismarck
on this point. Reading a book of superior calibre,
that remarkable man once came, so Lord Morley
tells us, on a portrait of an eminent personage whom
he had known well. " Such a man as is described
here," he cried, " never existed. It is not in diplo-

26

matic materials, but in their life of every day that
you come to know men." So, remarks Lord Morley,
does a singularly good judge warn us of the perils
of archivial research.

As to isolated letters, there again colour is inevit-
ably present. The writers, however intimately
acquainted with the facts, are too near to see them in
their proper perspective. From their correspond-
ence many fragments of solid and useful fact may
be extracted ; but the bulk of what is there is, taken
by itself, unreliable material for the historian. It
is only by careful selection from a variety of sources,
and by recasting — that is, by following the method
of Art rather than that of Science — that he can pro-
duce the true expression of the period as a living
whole.

State papers, again, are written by Ministers, or
by diplomatists, or, more often, by their officials
under somewhat loose inspiration. They embody
the view of the moment. Their value is mainly a
passing one. They may contain documents of more
than passing value, treaties or agreements or plans
which have subsequently been translated into action.
But as material out of which a scientific and lasting
account of the facts can be reconstructed, they suffer
from inevitable because inherent defects. Ambas-
sadors' letters and the letters written to them are
documents in which the impressions of the moment
are recorded, impressions which are very often
evanescent. Such documents are, from the cir-

2?

cumstances in which they are composed, almost
always fragmentary and incomplete. In public life
the point of view is constantly changing. If a hun-
dred years after this an historian, desiring to describe
the relations between Great Britain and Germany,
or between the former country and France, in the
commencement of the twentieth century, were to
confine himself to the State papers of particular
years, he would be misled. He would see little to
explain the rapid evolution and change that had
taken place within a very brief period. Nor could
he ever discover the traces of almost imperceptible
and rarely recorded influences and incidents which
had stimulated the development. This is true of
the evolution of policy at home as well as abroad.
Speaking with some knowledge of what has gone on
from day to day during the last eight years of the
public life of this country, my experience has im-
pressed me with a strong feeling that to try to recon-
struct the story from State papers or newspaper
accounts or letters or biographical sources would be
at present, and must for some time remain, a hope-
less attempt. And I know from my conversations
with men of still longer and greater experience that
they hold this view as strongly as I do. The
materials so afforded must be used at a later period
by a man who possesses the gifts requisite for pre-
senting the narrative as that of an organic whole,
/ and that organic whole must in its expression be born
afresh in his mind. So only will he present a picture

28

of what actually happened in a period of history.
The historian will fail hopelessly if he seeks to be
a mere recorder. For the truth about the whole, the
expression of which is what matters, was not realised
in its completeness until time and the working of the
spirit of the period had enabled the process de-
veloped in a succession of particular events to be
completed. It is a mistake to suppose that states-
men are always conscious of the ends which they
are accomplishing. It is not by the piecing together
of mechanical fragments, but by a process more akin
to the development of life, that societies grow and
are changed.

There is thus, if I am right, an inevitable element
of what seems at first sight to be unreality in even
the best work of historians. But this need not dis-
courage us if our notion of reality, and therefore of
our standard of truth, is something more than the
mere correspondence of isolated images and facts.
If the test of truth in history must be the presentation
ot an expression, true at least in the sense in which
we use the word about a great portrait, then the
recording of the chance fragments of isolated facts
which alone have survived for us is quite inadequate
to the fulfilment of the test. All the historian writes
ought to be true in the sense of being a faithful and
accurate account of what has happened. But that
does not mean that he should record every detail
of what has happened. If he tries to do this he will
lose both his real subject and himself. His business

29

is to select in the light of a larger conception of the
truth. He must look at his period as a whole and
in the completeness of its development. And this
is a task rather of the spirit than of the letter. Those
who furnish him with the materials have not, and
cannot have, the insight which is requisite for him,
if he is to be a great historian of reality. And yet,
of course, their work, if it is well done, is indis-
pensable. It is indispensable, only it is not history
until it has been re-fashioned in the mind of the
historian. When a really competent historian has
done this we may fairly think, Goethe's scepticism
notwithstanding, that real history is possible, inas-
much as we see before us the picture of the spirit
of the past.

I now turn to a second form of criticism, that
which would reject as inadmissible the intrusion of
art into the domain of history. Two well-known
authorities on its study, M. Langlois and M. Seig-
nobos, some fifteen years ago published a joint book
for the purpose of warning their students at the
Sorbonne what the study of history ought not to be,
It was in effect an essay on the method of the his-
torical sciences. It is interesting to observe the
result at which they arrived, for this result shows the
difficulties into which anyone is bound to get who
adopts their conception of the subject. Broadly
stated, their conclusion is, that while up to about the
middle of last century history continued to be treated
as a branch of literature, a change has now taken

30

place, and scientific forms of historical exposition
have been evolved and settled, based on the general
principle that the aim of history must be, not to
arouse the emotions or to give moral guidance, but to
impart knowledge pure and simple. They admit
that for many form still counts before matter, and
that consequently a Macaulay or a Michelet or a
Carlyle continues to be read, although he is no
longer on a level with current knowedge. But such
writing is not, according to them, history proper.
What is justified in the case of a work of art is not
justified in a work of science. And the methods of
the older historians cannot, they therefore hold, now
be justified. Thus, they say, Thucydides and Livy
wrote to preserve the memory and propagate the
knowledge of glorious deeds or of important events,
and Polybius and Plutarch wrote to instruct and
give recipes for action. Political incidents, wars,
and revolutions were in this fashion the main theme
of ancient history. Even in our own time they
think that the German historians have adopted the
old rejected habits. Mommsen and Curtius they
instance as authors whose desire to make a strong
impression has led them to a certain relaxation of
scientific vigour. Speaking for myself, I should not
have been surprised had they, on the assumption that
their severe standard is to be adopted, put Treitschke
in particular into the pillory, for he was a very great
offender against their precepts. According to them,
history ought to be in the main a science and not

31

an art. It is only indirectly that it should possess
practical utility. Its main object should be accuracy
in recording. It consists only, so they say, in the
utilisation of documents, and chance therefore pre-
dominates in the formation of history, because it is
a matter of chance whether documents are preserved
or lost. But they admit that the work of the his-
torian cannot be limited by the bare documentary
facts which he collects himself. To an even greater
degree than other men of science he works with
material which is to a large extent collected by
others. These may have been men who devoted
their energies to the task of search and collection,
whose work has merely been what is called
" heuristic." Or they may have been previous his-
torians. The point is that, as the knowledge of the
historian is only partially derived from his own direct
research, his science is one of inference rather than
of observation.

It is a corollary from the view of truth in history
which I have just been quoting that it should reject,
not merely all efforts to look for the hand of Provi-
dence as the interpretation of human development,
but also the attempts which have been made in
philosophies of history to see in it the evolution of
forms of mind. Bossuet and Hegel come alike
under condemnation. " On ne s'arrete plus guere
aujourd'hui a discuter," says M. Seignobos, "sous
la forme theologique la theorie de la Providence
dans 1'histoire. Mais la tendance a expliquer les

32

faits historiques par les causes transcendantes per-
siste dans des theories plus modernes, ou la meta-
physique se deguise sous des formes scientifiques."
Now there is no doubt much to be said for the
resolute spirit in which the two professors of the
Sorbonne set themselves to eliminate all prejudices
and theories and methods which can distract from
impartiality and exactness of description. But their
own admissions, as I have just quoted them, about
deficiency in material, and the impossibility of his-
tory being a science of pure observation as dis-
tinguished from inference, deprive their protest of
a good deal of its value. Without going as far as
Goethe went in his scepticism about records, it is
plain that the business of selection must bulk largely
in every historical undertaking. And that is why,
while rules as to historical evidence such as the
two authors lay down are of use and should be
adhered to wherever it is possible, the historian who
confined himself within what alone these rules allow
would produce little or nothing. The necessity of
artistic selection from materials which are admittedly
imperfect, not to speak of the personal equation of
the writer, would make a history founded on merely
scientific methods a mockery. History belongs to
the region of art at least as much as it does to that
of science, and this is why, -pace M. Seignobos, we
shall continue to delight in Michelet and Macaulay
and Carlyle, and to insist on regarding their books
as among the world's most valuable records. They

33

are presentations by great artists of the spirit of a
period, and the artists are great because with the
power of genius they have drawn portraits which
we recognise as resembling the results of direct
perception. Genius has been called the capacity
for taking pains that is infinite, and these men have
taken immeasurable pains and have been inspired
by a passion for truth according to their lights. Of
course, they have selected and refashioned the
materials which through close research were first
collected, as great artists always must. Doubtless,
too, there are aspects which they have left out or
left over for presentation by other artists. But por-
traits may, as we have seen, vary in expression and
yet be true, for the characteristic of what is alive
and intelligent and spiritual is that it may have
many expressions, all of which are true. With what
is inert and mechanical, it is for certain purposes
different, but what is inert and mechanical is the
subject neither of the artist nor the historian. It is
because they let themselves go in bringing out the
expression of life and personality that we continue
to cling to Gibbon and Mommsen. Their problem
is to display before us the course of the lives of
men and of nations. Men and nations cannot be
estimated through the medium of the balance and
the measuring-rod alone, nor are these the most
important instruments for estimating them. The
phenomena which belong to the region of the spirit
can be interpreted only through the medium of the

14360 c

34

spirit itself. We cannot interpret by mechanical
methods a play of Shakespeare or a sonata of
Beethoven. In the regions of life and personality
the interpretation must come through life and per-
sonality, and the mind recognises the truth of their
interpretation when it recognises in it what accords
with its own highest phases. History is not mere
imagination. It must always rest on a severely-
proved basis of fact. But no mere seventy of proof
will give the historian even this basis. The judg-
ment of truth implies a yet higher standard of com-
pleteness and perfection.

I am therefore unable to agree with those
who think that history must be either exclusively
a science or exclusively an art. It is a science to the
extent to which what are commonly known as scien-
tific methods are requisite for accuracy and proper
proportion in the details used in the presentation.
But the presentation must always be largely that of
an artist in whose mind it is endowed with life and
form. Truth in history requires, in order to be truth
in its completeness, that the mind of the reader
should find itself satisfied by that harmony and
sense of inevitableness which only a work of art
can give. Abstractness of detail and absence of
coherence offend this sense of harmony, and so
offend against truth by incompleteness of presenta-
tion. The reader feels that the facts must have
appeared, at the period in which they did really
appear, in a fashion quite different. Unless the

35

history which he reads gives him something of a
direct sense of the presence of the actual, his assent
will be at the most what Cardinal Newman called
notional as distinguished from real. To define the
meaning of truth in history thus becomes a problem
that is difficult, because it is complex. But this at
least seems clear, that some notions about this mean-
ing that have been current in days gone by, and are
still current, ought to be reconsidered. A clear con-
ception of first principles is essential in most things,
and not least in the writing of history. If I have
succeeded in rendering plain to you the reasons
which make me feel this need strongly, I shall have
accomplished all that I ventured to hope for on the
present occasion.

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