Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles | Page 5

drama
were not known. For to Clarendon history was the record of the
struggle of personalities. When we are in the midst of a crisis, or view
it from too near a distance, it is natural for us to think of it as a fight
between the opposing leaders, and the historians of their own time are
always liable to attribute to the personal force of a statesman what is
due to general causes of which he is only the instrument. Of these
general causes Clarendon took little account. 'Motives which
influenced masses of men', it has been said, 'escape his appreciation,

and the History of the Rebellion is accordingly an account of the
Puritan Revolution which is unintelligible because the part played by
Puritanism is misunderstood or omitted altogether'.[7] But the History
of the Rebellion is a Stuart portrait gallery, and the greatest portrait
gallery in the English language.
[Footnote 1: Book II, ed. Aldis Wright, pp. 92-5.]
[Footnote 2: 'Historæ nostræ particulam quidam non male: sed qui
totum corpus ea fide, eaque dignitate scriptis complexus sit, quam
suscepti operis magnitudo postularet, hactenus plane neminem extitisse
constat.... Nostri ex fæce plebis historici, dum maiestatem tanti operis
ornare studuerunt, putidissimis ineptiis contaminarunt. Ita factum est
nescio qua huiusce insulæ infoelicitate, ut maiores tui, (serenissima
Regina) viri maximi, qui magnam huius orbis nostri partem imperio
complexi, omnes sui temporis reges rerum gestarum gloria facile
superarunt, magnorum ingeniorum quasi lumine destituti, iaceant ignoti,
& delitescant.']
[Footnote 3: _Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century_, ed.
Spingarn, vol. i, pp. 82-115.]
[Footnote 4: See also Camden Society Publications, No. 7, 1840.]
[Footnote 5: Roger Ascham in his Scholemaster divides History into
'Diaria', 'Annales', 'Commentaries', and 'Iustam Historiam'.]
[Footnote 6: Bacon told Queen Elizabeth that there was no treason in
Hayward's _Henry IV_, but 'very much felony', because Hayward 'had
stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus'
(_Apophthegms_, 58). Hayward and Bacon had a precursor in the
author of _The History of King Richard the Thirde_, generally
attributed to Sir Thomas More, and printed in the collection of his
works published in 1557. It was known to the chroniclers, but it did not
affect the writing of history. Nor did George Cavendish's _Life and
Death of Thomas Wolsey_, which they likewise used for its facts.]
[Footnote 7: C.H. Firth, 'Burnet as a Historian', in Clarke and Foxcroft's
_Life of Gilbert Burnet_, 1907, pp. xliv, xlv.]

II. The Literary Models.
The authentic models for historical composition were in Greek and
Latin. Much as our literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
owed to the classics, the debt was nowhere more obvious, and more

fully acknowledged, than in our histories. The number of translations is
in itself remarkable. Many of them, and notably the greatest of all,
North's Plutarch, belong to the early part of Elizabeth's reign, but they
became more frequent at the very time when the inferiority of our
native works was engaging attention.[1] By the middle of the
seventeenth century the great classical historians could all be read in
English. It was not through translation, however, that their influence
was chiefly exercised.
The classical historians who were best known were Thucydides,
Polybius, and Plutarch among the Greeks, and Sallust, Livy, Tacitus,
and Suetonius among the Latins; and the former group were not so well
known as the latter. It was recognized that in Thucydides, to use
Hobbes's words, 'the faculty of writing history is at the highest.'[2] But
Thucydides was a difficult author, and neither he nor Polybius exerted
the same direct influence as the Latin historians who had imitated them,
or learned from them. Most of what can be traced ultimately to the
Greeks came to England in the seventeenth century through Latin
channels. Every educated man had been trained in Latin, and was as
familiar with it for literary purposes as with his native tongue. Further,
the main types of history--the history of a long period of years, the
history of recent events, and the biographical history--were all so
admirably represented in Latin that it was not necessary to go to Greek
for a model. In one respect Latin could claim pre-eminence. It might
possess no single passage greater than the character study of Pericles or
of the Athenians by Thucydides, but it developed the character study
into a recognized and clearly defined element in historical narrative.
Livy provided a pattern of narrative on a grand scale. For 'exquisite
eloquence' he was held not to have his equal.[3] But of all the Latin
historians, Tacitus had the greatest influence. 'There is no learning so
proper for the direction of the life of man as Historie; there is no
historie so well worth the reading as Tacitus. Hee hath written the most
matter with best conceit in fewest words of