Lectures on Modern history | Page 3

they have
sought to know the ground they stand on, and the road they travel, and
the reason why. Over them, therefore, the historian has obtained an
increasing ascendancy #17. The law of stability was overcome by the
power of ideas, constantly varied and rapidly renewed #18; ideas that
give life and motion, that take wing and traverse seas and frontiers,

making it futile to pursue the consecutive order of events in the
seclusion of a separate nationality #19. They compel us to share the
existence of societies wider than our own, to be familiar with distant
and exotic types, to hold our march upon the loftier summits, along the
central range, to live in the company of heroes, and saints, and men of
genius, that no single country could produce. We cannot afford
wantonly to lose sight of great men and memorable lives, and are
bound to store up objects for admiration as far as may be #20; for the
effect of implacable research is constantly to reduce their number. No
intellectual exercise, for instance, can be more invigorating than to
watch the working of the mind of Napoleon, the most entirely known
as well as the ablest of historic men. In another sphere, it is the vision
of a higher world to be intimate with the character of Fenelon, the
cherished model of politicians, ecclesiastics, and men of letters, the
witness against one century and precursor of another, the advocate of
the poor against oppression, of liberty in an age of arbitrary power, of
tolerance in an age of persecution, of the humane virtues among men
accustomed to sacrifice them to authority, the man of whom one enemy
says that his cleverness was enough to strike terror, and another, that
genius poured in torrents from his eyes. For the minds that are greatest
and best alone furnish the instructive examples. A man of ordinary
proportion or inferior metal knows not how to think out the rounded
circle of his thought, how to divest his will of its surroundings and to
rise above the pressure of time and race and circumstance #21, to
choose the star that guides his course, to correct, and test, and assay his
convictions by the light within #22, and, with a resolute conscience and
ideal courage, to remodel and reconstitute the character which birth and
education gave him #23.
For ourselves, if it were not the quest of the higher level and the
extended horizon, international history would be imposed by the
exclusive and insular reason that parliamentary reporting is younger
than parliaments. The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government,
and no arcanum imperii. For him the foundations have been laid bare;
every motive and function of the mechanism is accounted for as
distinctly as the works of a watch. But with our indigenous constitution,
not made with hands or written upon paper, but claiming to develop by

a law of organic growth; with our disbelief in the virtue of definitions
and general principles and our reliance on relative truths, we can have
nothing equivalent to the vivid and prolonged debates in which other
communities have displayed the inmost secrets of political science to
every man who can read. And the discussions of constituent assemblies,
at Philadelphia, Versailles and Paris, at Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva,
Frankfort and Berlin, above nearly all, those of the most enlightened
States in the American Union, when they have recast their institutions,
are paramount in the literature of politics, and proffer treasures which
at home we have never enjoyed.
To historians the later part of their enormous subject is precious
because it is inexhaustible. It is the best to know because it is the best
known and the most explicit. Earlier scenes stand out from a
background of obscurity. We soon reach the sphere of hopeless
ignorance and unprofitable doubt. But hundreds and even thousands of
the moderns have borne testimony against themselves, and may be
studied in their private correspondence and sentenced on their own
confession. Their deeds are done in the daylight. Every country opens
its archives and invites us to penetrate the mysteries of State. When
Hallam wrote his chapter on James II, France was the only Power
whose reports were available. Rome followed, and The Hague; and
then came the stores of the Italian States, and at last the Prussian and
the Austrian papers, and partly those of Spain. Where Hallam and
Lingard were dependent on Barillon, their successors consult the
diplomacy of ten governments. The topics indeed are few on which the
resources have been so employed that we can be content with the work
done for us and never wish it to be done over again. Part of the lives of
Luther and Frederic, a little of the Thirty Years' War, much