: Historical Essays by Rhodes James Ford - History; Great Britain History; United States History

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umes to these memories, or to memoranda of conversations which he had with living actors after the close of the war drama, and while his main authority is the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,--which, no one appreciated better than he, were unique historical materials,--nevertheless this personal knowledge trained his judgment and gave color to his narrative.

It is pretty clear that Thucydides spent a large part of a life of about threescore years and ten in gathering materials and writing his history. The mass of facts which he set down or stored away in his memory must have been enormous. He was a man of business, and had a home in Thrace as well as in Athens, traveling probably at fairly frequent intervals between the two places; but the main portion of the first forty years of his life was undoubtedly spent in Athens, where, during those glorious years of peace and the process of beautifying the city, he received the best education a man could get. To walk about the city and view the buildings and statues was both directly and insensibly a refining influence. As Thucydides himself, in the funeral oration of Pericles, said of the works which the Athenian saw around him, "the daily delight of them banishes gloom." There was the opportunity to talk with as good conversers as the world has ever known; and he undoubtedly saw much of the men who were making history. There was the great theater and the sublime poetry. In a word, the life of Thucydides was adapted to the gathering of a mass of historical materials of the best sort; and his daily walk, his reading, his intense thought, gave him an intellectual grasp of the facts he has so ably handled. Of course he was a genius, and he wrote in an effective literary style; but seemingly his natural parts and acquired talents are directed to this: a digestion of his materials, and a compression of his narrative without taking the vigor out of his story in a manner I believe to be without parallel. He devoted a life to writing a volume. His years after the peace was broken, his career as a general, his banishment and enforced residence in Thrace, his visit to the countries of the Peloponnesian allies with whom Athens was at war,--all these gave him a signal opportunity to gather materials, and to assimilate them in the gathering. We may fancy him looking at an alleged fact on all sides, and turning it over and over in his mind; we know that he must have meditated long on ideas, opinions, and events; and the result is a brief, pithy narrative. Tradition hath it that Demosthenes copied out this history eight times, or even learned it by heart. Chatham, urging the removal of the forces from Boston, had reason to refer to the history of Greece, and, that he might impress it upon the lords that he knew whereof he spoke, declared, "I have read Thucydides."

Of Tacitus likewise is conciseness a well-known merit. Living in an age of books and libraries, he drew more from the written word than did Thucydides; and his method of working, therefore, resembled more our own. These are common expressions of his: "It is related by most of the writers of those times;" I adopt the account "in which the authors are agreed;" this account "agrees with those of the other writers." Relating a case of recklessness of vice in Messalina, he acknowledges that it will appear fabulous, and asserts his truthfulness thus: "But I would not dress up my narrative with fictions, to give it an air of marvel, rather than relate what has been stated to me or written by my seniors." He also speaks of the authority of tradition, and tells what he remembers "to have heard from aged men." He will not paraphrase the eloquence of Seneca after he had his veins opened, because the very words of the philosopher had been published; but when, a little later, Flavius the tribune came to die, the historian gives this report of his defiance of Nero. "I hated you," the tribune said to the emperor; "nor had you a soldier more true to you while you deserved to be loved. I began to hate you from the time you showed yourself the impious murderer of your mother and your wife, a charioteer, a stage-player, an incendiary." "I have given the very words," Tacitus adds, "because they were not, like those of Seneca, published, though the rough and vigorous sentiments of a soldier ought to be no less known." Everywhere we see in Tacitus, as in Thucydides, a dislike of superfluous detail, a closeness of thought, a compression of language. He was likewise a man of affairs, but his life work was his historical writings, which, had we all of them, would fill probably four moderate-sized octavo volumes.

Another superiority of the classical historians, as I reckon, arose from the fact that they wrote what was practically contemporaneous history. Herodotus was born 484 B.C., and the most important and accurate part of his history is the account of the Persian invasion which took place four years later. The case of Thucydides is more remarkable. Born in 471 B.C., he relates the events which happened between 435 and 411, when he was between the ages of thirty-six and sixty. Tacitus, born in 52 A.D., covered with his Annals and History the years between 14 and 96. "Herodotus and Thucydides belong to an age in which the historian draws from life and for life," writes Professor Jebb. It is manifestly easier to describe a life you know than one you must imagine, which is what you must do if you aim to relate events which took place before your own and your father's time. In many treatises which have been written demanding an extraordinary equipment for the historian, it is generally insisted that he shall have a fine constructive imagination; for how can he re-create his historic period unless he live in it? In the same treatises it is asserted that contemporary history cannot be written correctly, for impartiality in the treatment of events near at hand is impossible. Therefore the canon requires the quality of a great poet, and denies that there may be had the merit of a judge in a country where there are no great poets, but where candid judges abound. Does not the common rating of Thucydides and Tacitus refute the dictum that history within the memory of men living cannot be written truthfully and fairly? Given, then, the judicial mind, how much easier to write it! The rare quality of a poet's imagination is no longer necessary, for your boyhood recollections, your youthful experiences, your successes and failures of manhood, the grandfather's tales, the parent's recollections, the conversation in society,--all these put you in vital touch with the life you seek to describe. These not only give color and freshness to the vivifying of the facts you must find in the record, but they are in a way materials themselves, not strictly authentic, but of the kind that direct you in search and verification. Not only is no extraordinary ability required to write contemporary history, but the labor of the historian is lightened, and Dryasdust is no longer his sole guide. The funeral oration of Pericles is pretty nearly what was actually spoken, or else it is the substance of the speech written out in the historian's own words. Its intensity of feeling and the fitting of it so well into the situation indicate it to be a living contemporaneous document, and at the same time it has that universal application which we note in so many speeches of Shakespeare. A few years after our Civil War, a lawyer in a city of the middle West, who had been selected to deliver the Memorial Day oration, came to a friend of his in despair because he could write nothing but the commonplaces about those who had died for the Union and for the freedom of a race which had been uttered many times before, and he asked for advice. "Take the funeral oration of Pericles for a model," was the reply. "Use his words where they will fit, and dress up the rest to suit our day." The orator was surprised to find how much of the oration could be used bodily, and how much, with adaptation, was germane to his subject. But slight alterations are necessary to make the opening sentence this: "Most of those who have spoken here have commended the law-giver who added this oration to our other customs; it seemed to them a worthy thing that such an honor should be given to the dead who have fallen on the field of battle." In many places you may let the speech run on with hardly a change. "In the face of death resolved to rely upon themselves alone. And when the moment came they were minded to resist and suffer rather than to fly and save their lives; they ran away from the word of dishonor, but on the battlefield their feet stood fast; and while for a moment they were in the hands of fortune, at the height, not of terror, but of glory, they passed away. Such was the end of these men; they were worthy of their country."

Consider for a moment, as the work of a contemporary, the book which continues the account of the Sicilian expedition, and ends with the disaster at Syracuse. "In the describing and reporting whereof," Plutarch writes, "Thucydides hath gone beyond himself, both for variety and liveliness of narration, as also in choice and excellent words." "There is no prose composition in the world," wrote Macaulay, "which I place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides.... I was delighted to find in Gray's letters, the other day, this query to Wharton: 'The retreat from Syracuse,--is it or is it not the finest thing you ever read in your life?'" In the Annals of Tacitus we have an account of part of the reign of Emperor Nero, which is intense in its interest as the picture of a state of society that would be incredible, did we not know that our guide was a truthful man. One rises from a perusal of this with the trite expression, "Truth is stranger than fiction;" and one need only compare the account of Tacitus with the romance of Quo Vadis to be convinced that true history is more interesting than a novel. One of the most vivid impressions I ever had came immediately after reading the story of Nero and Agrippina in Tacitus, from a view of the statue of Agrippina in the National Museum at Naples.

President's Inaugural Address, American Historical Association, Boston, December 27, 1899; printed in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1900.

Since this essay was first printed I have seen the authenticity of this portrait statue questioned.

CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Address delivered at the Meeting of the American Historical Association in Detroit, December, 1900.

CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY

Called on at the last moment, owing to the illness of Mr. Eggleston, to take the place of one whose absence can never be fully compensated, I present to you a paper on the writing of history. It is in a way a continuance of my inaugural address before this association one year ago, and despite the continuity of the thought I have endeavored to treat the same subject from a different point of view. While going over the same ground and drawing my lessons from the same historians, it is new matter so far as I have had the honor to present it to the American Historical Association.

A historian, to make a mark, must show some originality somewhere in his work. The originality may be in a method of investigation; it may be in the use of some hitherto inaccessible or unprinted material; it may be in the employment of some sources of information open to everybody, but not before used, or it may be in a fresh combination of well-known and well-elaborated facts. It is this last-named feature that leads Mr. Winsor to say, in speaking of the different views that may be honestly maintained from working over the same material, "The study of history is perennial." I think I can make my meaning clearer as to the originality one should try to infuse into historical work by drawing an illustration from the advice of a literary man as to the art of writing. Charles Dudley Warner once said to me, "Every one who writes should have something to add to the world's stock of knowledge or literary expression. If he falls unconsciously into imitation or quotation, he takes away from his originality. No matter if some great writer has expressed the thought in better language than you can use, if you take his words you detract from your own originality. Express your thought feebly in your own way rather than with strength by borrowing the words of another."

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