The

Scottish Historical Review

VOL. VI., No. 21

OCTOBER 1908

Literature and History'

HE title I have chosen for this paper certainly leaves much to be desired in point of clearness and precision. It may suggest, for example, a difference of opinion that exists. regarding the manner in which history should be written. According to one view history should have nothing whatever to do with literature. What we want from history is fact only, and all narrative and exposition, however admirable, only obscure or distort the fact which it is our primary object to ascertain and estimate. According to this conception of history, the most truthworthy form in which past events can be presented is a catalogue raisonné, which will present facts in their logical connections and leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. The upholders of the other view maintain that the investigator of the facts is likely to understand them better than his reader, that his reflections regarding them must have an independent value of their own, and that the merit of his narrative or exposition will depend on the skill and force with which he presents his own views, on the logical arrangement of his materials, the clearness and attractiveness of his style. In this conception history becomes literature in a true sense, for the historian, to attain his ideal, has need of aesthetic no less than of scientific qualifications for his task. The consideration of these two views regarding the most fruitful method of presenting the facts of history might be the subject of an interesting enquiry. On the present occasion, however, it is another theme to which I would invite your 1 An Address to the Glasgow University Historical Society.

attention. What are the relations between literature and the facts of history? What reciprocal light do they throw upon each other? How may we best study both to draw the fullest nutriment from them for our souls and minds? These questions, it is evident, may be regarded from two points of view from the point of the writer of history and the point of view of the reader. Fortunately, the readers of history still outnumber its writers, and it may be more profitable to consider the point of view of the former class. It is from the reader's point of view, then, that the following remarks are made.

Regarded in their primary intention, history and literature may seem to be disparate and even antagonistic subjects. Taken in their essence, they make appeal to different desires and faculties of our nature. The primary aim of history is instruction, and when Bacon said that histories make men wise,' he implied that instruction must be the historian's main object. On the other hand, the primary aim of literature is not instruction but pleasure; its immediate appeal is not to the cognitive faculties, but to our emotions and our tastes. In point of fact, however, we cannot draw so hard and fast a line between the aim and scope of literature and history. There are histories which do afford pleasure as well as instruction, and there are purely literary productions which yield instruction as well as pleasure. Macaulay declared that he would make his history as interesting as a novel, and his publisher's cheque for £20,000 is a sufficiently cogent proof that he fulfilled his intention. Of George Eliot's novels it has been said that, as you read them, you feel as if you were in the confessionalwhich is surely instruction with a witness.

In one sense, and a very important sense, every production in pure literature is history, and the larger its scope, the greater its scale the deeper and wider is its historical significance. The most trifling occasional poem is as much the product of the age to which it belongs as of the poet who wrote it. The thoughts, the emotions that inspire it are drawn from the spiritual and intellectual capital of the time, and the poet, so to speak, only draws his cheque on this funded capital which is the common property of his generation. True, his individual signature is affixed to the cheque; the poet, in so far as he is a real poet, has his own impression, his own vision of men and things. Nevertheless, the greatest and most important

portion of the materials with which he works is impersonal, and he is only an inheritor of the common stock.

If this be true of the slighter productions of literature, it is true in a larger and deeper sense of the great masterpieces of all times. For in proportion to the range of the poet's sympathy and intelligence is the extent to which he appropriates and expresses the thought and experience of the age to which he belongs. Such works as Dante's Divine Comedy, the Plays of Shakspeare, and Paradise Lost, are an epitome of the preoccupations and speculations and aspirations of the times out of which they sprang. In Dante's great poem we have the presentation of almost every important interest that engaged the hearts and minds of his contemporaries. We find in it the official solution of human destiny in its eternal relations, and we find in it also the doubts and reserves with which that solution was accepted. In it, too, we find the clashing political and social ideals of the time, and the warring forces that imperilled the unitas Catholica which had been the ideal of the Medieval Church from its beginning. Above all we find in it the spirit of the time-a spirit which reveals itself in the intemperance of the poet's passions, equally of love and hate, and which led a certain critic, thinking of certain passages in the poem, to declare that it remains for ever a monument of human malevolence.

There can be no more instructive lesson in history than to pass from the poem of Dante to the Plays of Shakspeare. They are divided from each other by only three centuries, but what travail of thought and act and emotion had man passed through in that intervening period! Alike in form and substance the work of Dante and the work of Shakspeare belong to different worlds. The very centre of things is different for each. Dante's scheme of thought, alike in temporal and spiritual things, had the rigidity and completeness of that system which his age accepted from Ptolemy as the mechanical explanation of the universe. For Shakspeare, on the other hand, everything was an open question. His thought and fancy play over men and things with the unchartered freedom of a mind for which dogmatic assertion is a vain assumption of certainty, where certainty is impossible. Doubtless the different geniuses of the two men partly explain their different points of view. Born in the age and in the circumstances of Dante, Shakspeare by no possibility could have had Dante's vision of Hell, Purgatory,

and Paradise. But it is to history we must go for the adequate explanation of the difference in form and spirit that distinguishes their respective creations.

Between Dante's and Shakspeare's day the unitas Catholica had been fatally broken up; the philosophy, the science, the religious dogma of the Middle Age had ceased to dominate the mind of Christendom; and in their place had arisen those new conceptions of nature and man which were mainly due to the rediscovered world of classical antiquity. It was amid the ferment occasioned by this revolution that the genius of Shakspeare found its characteristic scope, and only by taking account of that revolution can we have any intelligent understanding of the substance of his work and of the spirit in which he regarded it.

The case of Shakspeare is the supreme illustration of Goethe's remark that he only can be said to know a poet who knows his age, but it is also an illustration of the essential relations between literature and history. We can have no adequate comprehension of the Shakspearian plays without regarding them as a product of the general mind of the age, but, on the other hand, how imperfect, how limited in depth and scope, would our conception of that general mind be if a Shakspeare had not been its exponent! Thus literature and history are the complements of each other, and the fulness of both is only realised when they are studied in their mutual relations.

The contrast between Dante and Shakspeare is hardly greater than the contrast between Shakspeare and Milton. In contrasting the work of Shakspeare and Milton we have again to take due account of their different types of genius. In no circumstances can we imagine that Shakspeare's free outlook on man and the world could have been possible to Milton. For Milton as for Dante it was an intellectual and spiritual necessity that he should have a definite system of thought embracing every subject that concerns the temporal and spiritual interests of men. This contrast between the mind of Shakspeare and the mind of Milton doubtless determined the fundamental distinction between their respective creations, but it is not an adequate explanation of the ideas that underlie them. Milton's day, both in England and on the Continent, men were preoccupied with problems which had not taken definite shape in the age of Shakspeare. By the date when Milton had reached maturity the Protestant scholastic theology was

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