Lectures on Modern history | Page 9

sacred, because it is the cause of truth and honour, we
may import a profitable lesson from the highly unscientific region of
public life. There a man does not take long to find out that he is
opposed by some who are abler and better than himself. And, in order
to understand the cosmic force and the true connection of ideas, it is a
source of power, and an excellent school of principle, not to rest until,
by excluding the fallacies, the prejudices, the exaggerations which
perpetual contention and the consequent precautions breed, we have
made out for our opponents a stronger and more impressive case than
they present themselves #65. Excepting one to which we are coming
before I release you, there is no precept less faithfully observed by
historians.
Ranke is the representative of the age which instituted the modern
study of History. He taught it to be critical, to be colourless, and to be
new. We meet him at every step, and he has done more for us than any
other man. There are stronger books than any one of his, and some may
have surpassed him in political, religious, philosophic insight, in
vividness of the creative imagination, in originality, elevation, and
depth of thought; but by the extent of important work well executed, by
his influence on able men, and by the amount of knowledge which
mankind receives and employs with the stamp of his mind upon it, he
stands without a rival. I saw him last in 1877, when he was feeble,
sunken, and almost blind, and scarcely able to read or write. He uttered

his farewell with kindly emotion, and I feared that the next I should
hear of him would be the news of his death. Two years later he began a
Universal History, which is not without traces of weakness, but which,
composed after the age of 83, and carried, in seventeen volumes, far
into the Middle Ages, brings to a close the most astonishing career in
literature.
His course had been determined, in early life, by Quentin Durward. The
shock of the discovery that Scott's Lewis the Eleventh was inconsistent
with the original in Commynes made him resolve that his object
thenceforth should be above all things to follow, without swerving, and
in stern subordination and surrender, the lead of his authorities. He
decided effectually to repress the poet, the patriot, the religious or
political partisan, to sustain no cause, to banish himself from his books,
and to write nothing that would gratify his own feelings or disclose his
private convictions #66. When a strenuous divine, who, like him, had
written on the Reformation, hailed him as a comrade, Ranke repelled
his advances. "You," he said, "are in the first place a Christian: I am in
the first place a historian. There is a gulf between us." #67 He was the
first eminent writer who exhibited what Michelet calls le
desinteressement des morts. It was a moral triumph for him when he
could refrain from judging, show that much might be said on both sides,
and leave the rest to Providence #68. He would have felt sympathy
with the two famous London physicians of our day, of whom it is told
that they could not make up their minds on a case and reported
dubiously. The head of the family insisted on a positive opinion. They
answered that they were unable to give one, but he might easily find
fifty doctors who could.
Niebuhr had pointed out that chroniclers who wrote before the
invention of printing generally copied one predecessor at a time, and
knew little about sifting or combining authorities. The suggestion
became luminous in Ranke's hands, and with his light and dexterous
touch he scrutinised and dissected the principal historians, from
Machiavelli to the Memoires d'un Homme d'Etat, with a rigour never
before applied to moderns. But whilst Niebuhr dismissed the traditional
story, replacing it with a construction of his own, it was Ranke's

mission to preserve, not to undermine, and to set up masters whom, in
their proper sphere, he could obey. The many excellent dissertations in
which he displayed this art, though his successors in the next
generation matched his skill and did still more thorough work, are the
best introduction from which we can learn the technical process by
which within living memory the study of modern history has been
renewed. Ranke's contemporaries, weary of his neutrality and suspense,
and of the useful but subordinate work that was done by beginners who
borrowed his wand, thought that too much was made of these obscure
preliminaries which a man may accomplish for himself, in the silence
of his chamber, with less demand on the attention of the public #69.
That may be reasonable in men who are practised in