Historical and Political Essays | Page 3

into ways of reasoning or feeling very different from his own. One of
the most valuable of all forms of historical imagination is that which
enables a writer to place himself in the point of view of the best men on
different sides, and to bring out the full sense of opposing arguments.
All these gifts or qualities are never in a high degree united, but they
are all essential to a great historian, and a true school of history should
widen instead of narrowing our conception of it.
The supreme virtue of the historian is truthfulness, and it may be
violated in many different degrees. The worst form is when a writer
deliberately falsifies facts or deliberately excludes from his picture

qualifying circumstances. But there are other and much more subtle
ways in which party spirit continually and often quite unconsciously
distorts history. All history is necessarily a selection of facts, and a
writer who is animated by a strong sympathy with one side of a
question or a strong desire to prove some special point will be much
tempted in his selection to give an undue prominence to those that
support his view, or, even where neither facts nor arguments are
suppressed, to give a party character to his work by an unfair
distribution of lights and shades. The strong and vivid epithets are
chiefly reserved for the good or bad deeds on one side, the vague,
general and comparatively colourless epithets for the corresponding
deeds on the other side; and in this way very similar facts are brought
before the reader with such different degrees of illumination and relief
that they make a wholly different impression on his mind. In the history
of Macaulay this defect may, I think, be especially traced. The
characteristic defect of that great and in most respects admirable writer,
both as historian and artist, was the singular absence of graduation in
his mind. The neutral tints which are essential to the accurate shading
of character seemed almost wanting, and a love of strong contrasted
lights and shades, coupled with his supreme command of powerful
epithets, continually misled him. But no attentive reader can fail to
observe how unequally those epithets are distributed and how clearly
this inequality discloses the strong bias under which he wrote.
The truth of an historical picture lies mainly in its judicious and
accurate shading, and it is this art which the historian should especially
cultivate. He will scarcely do so with success unless it becomes to him
not merely a matter of duty, but also a pleasure and a pride. The kind of
interest which he takes in his narrative should be much less that of a
politician and an advocate than of a painter, who, now darkening and
now lightening the picture, seeks by many delicate touches to catch
with exact fidelity the tone and hue of the object he represents.
The degree of certainty that it is possible to attain in history varies
greatly in different departments. The growth of institutions and laws,
military events, changes in manners and in creeds, can be described
with much confidence, and although it is more difficult to depict the

inner moral life of nations, the influences that form their characters and
prepare them for greatness or decay, yet when the materials for our
induction are sufficiently large this field of history may be studied with
great profit. Diplomatic history and the more secret springs of political
history can only be fully disclosed when the archives relating to them
have been explored and when the confidential correspondence of the
chief actors in them has been published. The biographical element in
history is always the most uncertain. Even among contemporaries the
judgment of character and motives depends largely on indications so
slight and subtle that they rarely pass into books and are only fully felt
by direct personal contact, and the smallest knowledge of life shows
how quickly anecdotes and sayings are distorted, coloured, and
misplaced when they pass from lip to lip. Most of the 'good sayings' of
history are invention, and most of them have been attributed to
different persons. A history which is plainly written under the influence
of party bias has the value of an advocate's speech giving one side of
the question. When our only materials for the knowledge of a period
are derived from such histories, the saying of Voltaire should be
remembered--that we can confidently believe only the evil which a
party writer tells of his own side and the good which he recognises in
his opponents. In judging the historian we must consider his nearness to
the events he relates, his probable means of information and the
internal evidence in his narrative of accuracy, honesty, and judgment,
and we must also consider the standard