If now we and our reader, reinterpreting for our present want that Life and Perform-contemporaries and posterity. All epochs, on ance of Diderot, have brought it clearer before us, be the hour spent thereon, were it even more wearisome, no profitless one! Have we not striven to unite our own brief present moment more and more compactly with the Past and with the Future; have we

ON HISTORY AGAIN.

[FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1833.]

it may be called, more generally still, the Mes- | what the given world was, what it had and what sage, verbal or written, which all Mankind it wanted, how might his clear effort strike in delivers to every man; it is the only articulate at the right time and the right point; wholly communication (when the inarticulate and increasing the true current and tendency, nomute, intelligible or not, lie round us and in where cancelling itself in opposition thereto! us, so strangely through every fibre of our Unhappily, such smooth-running, ever-accelebeing, every step of our activity) which the rated course is nowise the one appointed us; Past can have with the Present, the Distant cross currents we have, perplexed backfloods; with what is Here. All Books, therefore, innumerable efforts (every new man is a new were they but Song-books or treatises on Ma- effort) consume themselves in aimless eddies: thematics, are in the long run historical doc- thus is the River of Existence so wild-flowing, uments, as indeed all Speech itself is thus wasteful; and whole multitudes, and whole might we say, History is not only the fittest generations, in painful unreason, spend and study, but the only study, and includes all are spent on what can never profit. Of all others whatsoever. The Perfect in History, which, does not one half originate in this which he who understood, and saw and knew within we have named want of Perfection in History; himself, all that the whole Family of Adam the other half, indeed, in another want still had hitherto been and hitherto done, were per- deeper, still more irremediable? fect in all learning extant or possible; needed not henceforth to study any more; and henceforth nothing left but to be and to do something himself, and others might make History of it, and learn of him.

Allow even the thousandth part of human pub-case was always intrinsically similar. The lishing for the emission of Thought, though Life of Nero occupies some diamond pages of perhaps the millionth were enough, we have our Tacitus: but in the parchment and pastill the nine hundred and ninety-nine employ-pyrus archives of Nero's generation how many ed in History proper, in relating occurrences, did it fill? The Author of the Vie de Sénéque, or conjecturing probabilities of such; that is at this distance, picking up a few residuary to say, either in History or Prophecy, which snips, has with ease made two octavos of it. is a new form of History-and so the reader On the other hand, were the contents of the can judge with what abundance this life- then extant Roman memories, or, going to the breath of the human intellect is furnished in utmost length, were all that was then spoken our world; whether Nature has been stingy on it, put in types, how many "longitudinal to him or munificent. Courage, reader! Never feet" of small-pica had we,-in belts that would can the historical inquirer want pabulum, go round the Globe? better or worse; are there not forty-eight longitudinal feet of small-printed History in thy Daily Newspaper?

History, then, before it can become Universal History, needs of all things to be compressed. Were there no epitomizing of HisThe truth is, if Universal History is such a tory, one could not remember beyond a week. miserable defective" shred" as we have named Nay, go to that with it, and exclude compresit, the fault lies not in our historic organs, but sion altogether, we could not remember an wholly in our misuse of these; say rather, in hour, or at all: for Time, like Space, is inso many wants and obstructions, varying with finitely divisible; and an hour with its events, the various age, that pervert our right use of with its sensations and emotions, might be them; especially two wants that press heavily diffused to such expansion as should cover in all ages want of Honesty, want of Under-the whole field of memory, and push all else standing. If the thing published is not true, is only a supposition, or even a wilful invention, what can be done with it, except abolish it and annihilate it? But again, Truth, says Horne Tooke, means simply the thing trowed, the thing believed; and now, from this to the thing extant, what a new fatal deduction have we to suffer! Without Understanding, Belief itself will profit little and how can your publishing avail, when there was no vision in it, but mere blindness? For us in political appointments, the man you appoint is not he who was ablest to discharge the duty, but only he who was ablest to be appointed; so too, in all historic elections and selections, the maddest work goes on. The even worthiest to be known is perhaps of all others the least spoken of; nay some say, it lies in the very nature of such events to be so. Thus, in those same fortyeight longitudinal feet of History, or even when they have stretched out into forty-eight longitudinal miles, of the like quality, there may not be the forty-eighth part of a hair's-breadth that will turn to any thing. Truly, in these times, the quantity of printed Publication that will need to be consumed with fire, before the smallest permanent advantage can be drawn from it, might fill us with astonishment, almost with apprehension. Where, alas, is the intrepid Herculean Dr. Wagtail, that will reduce all these paper-mountains into tinder, and extract therefrom the three drops of Tinder-water Elixir?

For, indeed, looking at the activity of the historic Pen and Press through this last half century, and what bulk of History it yields for that period alone, and how it is henceforth like to increase in decimal or vigesimal geometric progression,-one might feel as if a day were not distant, when perceiving that the whole Earth would not now contain those writings of what was done in the Earth, the human memory must needs sink confounded, | and cease remembering!-To some the reflection may be new and consolatory, that this state of ours is not so unexampled as it seems; that with memory and things memorable the

over the limits. Habit, however, and the natural constitution of man, do themselves prescribe serviceable rules for remembering; and keep at a safe distance from us all such fantastic possibilities;-into which only some foolish Mohammedan Caliph, ducking his head in a bucket of enchanted water, and so beating out one wet minute into seven long years of servitude and hardship, could fall. The rudest peasant has his complete set of Annual Registers legibly printed in his brain; and, without the smallest training in Mnemonics, the proper pauses, sub-divisions, and subordinations of the little to the great, all introduced there. Memory and Oblivion, like Day and Night, and indeed like all other Contradictions in this strange dualistic Life of ours, are necessary for each other's existence: Oblivion is the dark page, whereon Memory writes her lightbeam characters, and makes them legible; were it all light, nothing could be read there, any more than if it were all darkness.

As with man and these autobiographic Annual-Registers of his, so goes it with Mankind and its Universal History, (which also is its Autobiography :) a like unconscious talent of remembering and of forgetting again does the work here. The transactions of the day, were they never so noisy, cannot remain loud for ever; the morrow comes with its new noises, claiming also to be registered: in the immeasurable conflict and concert of this chaos of existence, figure after figure sinks, as all that has emerged must one day sink: what cannot be kept in mind will even go out of mind; History contracts itself into readable extent; and at last, in the hands of some Bossuet or Müller, the whole printed History of the World, from the Creation downwards, has grown shorter than that of the Ward of Portsoken for one solar day.

Whether such contraction and epitome is always wisely formed, might admit of question; or rather, as we say, admits of no question. Scandalous Cleopatras and Messalinas, Caligulas and Commoduses, in unprofitable proportion, survive for memory; while a scientific

Pancirollus must write his Book of Arts Lost; | sand times, if we name him George Fourth. and a moral Pancirollus (were the vision lent The whole Saxon Heptarchy, though events, him) might write a still more mournful Book to which Magna Charta, and the world-famous of Virtues Lost; of noble men, doing, and Third Reading, are as dust in the balance, daring, and enduring, whose heroic life, as a took place then (for did not England, to mennew revelation and development of Life itself, tion nothing else, get itself, if not represented were a possession for all, but is now lost and in Parliament, yet converted to Christianity?) forgotten, History having otherwise filled her is summed up practically in that one sentence page. In fact, here as elsewhere what we call of Milton's (the only one succeeding writers Accident governs much; in any case, History have copied, or readers remembered) of the must come together not as it should, but as it "fighting and flocking of kites and crows." can and will. Neither was that an unimportant wassail-night, when the two black-browed Brothers, strongheaded, headstrong, Hengist and Horsa, (Stallion and Horse,) determined on a man-hunt in Britain, the boar-hunt at home having got over-crowded; and so, of a few hungry Angles, made an English Nation, and planted it here, and-produced thee, O Reader! Of Hengist's whole campaignings scarcely half a page of good Narrative can now be written; the Lord Mayor's Visit to Oxford standing, meanwhile, revealed to mankind in a respectable volume. Nay what of this? Does not the Destruction of a Brunswick Theatre take above a million times as much telling as the Creation of a World?

Remark nevertheless how, by natural tendency alone, and as it were without man's forethought, a certain fitness of selection, and this even to a high degree, becomes inevitable. Wholly worthless the selection could not be, were there no better rule than this to guide it: that men permanently speak only of what is extant and actively alive beside them. Thus do the things that have produced fruit, nay whose fruit still grows, turn out to be the things chosen for record and writing of; which things alone were great, and worth recording. The Battle of Chalons, where Hunland met Rome, and the Earth was played for, at swordfence, by two earth bestriding giants, the sweep of whose swords cut kingdoms in pieces, hovers dim in the languid remembrance of a few; while the poor police-court Treachery of a wretched Iscariot, transacted in the wretched land of Palestine, centuries earlier, for "thirty pieces of silver," lives clear in the heads, in the hearts of all men. Nay moreover, as only that which bore fruit was great; so of all things, that whose fruit is still here and grow ing must be the greatest, the best worth remembering; which again, as we see, by the very nature of the case, is mainly the thing remembered. Observe too how this " mainly" tends always to become a "solely," and the approximate continually approaches nearer: for triviality after triviality, as it perishes from the living activity of men, drops away from their speech and memory, and the great and vital more and more exclusively survive there. Thus does Accident correct Accident; and in the wondrous boundless jostle of things, (an aimful POWER presiding over it, say rather, dwelling in it,) a result comes out that may be put up with.

To use a ready-made similitude, we might liken Universal History to a magic web; and consider with astonishment how, by philosophic insight and indolent neglect, the evergrowing fabric wove itself forward, out of that ravelled immeasurable mass of threads and thrums, (which we name Memoirs ;) nay, at each new lengthening, (at each new epoch,) changed its whole proportions, its hue and structure to the very origin. Thus, do not the records of a Tacitus acquire new meaning, after seventeen hundred years, in the hands of a Montesquieu? Niebuhr must reinterpret for us, at a still greater distance, the writings of a Titus Livius: nay, the religious archaic chronicles of a Hebrew Prophet and Lawgiver escape not the like fortune; and many a ponderous Eichhorn scans, with new-ground philosophic spectacles, the revelation of a Moses, and strives to re-produce for this century what, thirty centuries ago, was of plainly infinite significance to all. Consider History with the beginnings of it stretching dimly into the remote Time; emerging darkly out of the Curious, at all events, and worth looking at mysterious Eternity: the ends of it enveloping once in our life, is this same compressure of us at this hour, whereof we, at this hour, both History, be the process thereof what it may. as actors and relators, form part! In shape How the "forty-eight longitudinal feet" have we might mathematically name it Hyperbolicshrunk together after a century, after ten Asymptotic; ever of infinite breadth around us; centuries! Look back from end to beginning, soon shrinking within narrow limits: ever over any History; over our own England: narrowing more and more into the infinite how, in rapidest law of perspective, it dwindles depth behind us. In essence and significance from the canvas! An unhappy Sybarite, if we it has been called "the true Epic Poem, and stand within two centuries of him and name universal Divine Scripture, whose 'plenary inhim Charles Second, shall have twelve times spiration' no man (out of Bedlam or in it) the space of a heroic Alfred; two or three thou- | shall bring in question."

small number seem utter Pasquils, mere ribald libels on Humanity: these too, however, are at times worth reading.

"THE life of every man," says our friend Herr Sauerteig, "the life even of the meanest "In this wise," continues our too obscure man, it were good to remember, is a Poem; friend, "out of all imaginable elements, awakperfect in all manner of Aristotelean requi-ening all imaginable moods of heart and soul, sites; with beginning, middle, and end; with barbarous enough to excite, tender enough perplexities, and solutions; with its Will-to assuage,' ever contradictory yet ever costrength, (Willenkraft,) and warfare against alescing, is that mighty world-old Rhapsodia Fate, its elegy and battle-singing, courage of Existence, page after page, (generation after marred by crime, everywhere the two tragic generation,) and chapter, (or epoch,) after elements of Pity and Fear; above all, with chapter, poetically put together! This is what supernatural machinery enough,-for was not some one names the grand sacred Epos, or the man born out of NONENTITY; did he not Bible of World-History; infinite in meaning die, and miraculously vanishing return thither? as the Divine Mind it emblems; wherein he The most indubitable Poem! Nay, whoso will, is wise that can read here a line and there a may he not name it a Prophecy, or whatever line. else is highest in his vocabulary; since only in Reality lies the essence and foundation of all that was ever fabled, visioned, sung, spoken, or babbled by the human species; and the actual Life of Man includes in it all Revelations, true and false, that have been, are, or are to be. Man! I say therefore, reverence thy fellow-man. He too issued from Above; is mystical and supernatural, (as thou namest it:) this know thou of a truth. Seeing also that we ourselves are of so high Authorship, is not that, in very deed, 'the highest Reverence,' and most needful for us: Reverence for oneself?'

“Remark, too, under another aspect, whether it is not in this same Bible of World-History that all men, in all times, with or without clear consciousness, have been unwearied to read, (what we may call read ;) and again to write, or rather to be written! What is all History, and all Poesy, but a deciphering somewhat thereof, (out of that mystic heaven-written Sanscrit,) and rendering it into the speech of men? Know thyself, value thyself, is a moralist's commandment, (which I only half approve of;) but Know others, value others, is the hest of Nature herself. Or again, Work while it is called To-day is not that also the irreversible "Thus, to my view, is every Life, more pro-law of being for mortal man? And now, what perly is every Man that has life to lead, a is all working, what is all knowing, but a faint small strophe, or occasional verse, composed interpreting and a faint showing forth of that by the Supernal Powers; and published, in same Mystery of Life, which ever remains insuch type and shape, with such embellish- finite,-heaven-written mystic Sanscrit? View ments, emblematic head-piece and tail-piece it as we will, to him that lives Life is a divine as thou seest, to the thinking or unthinking matter; felt to be of quite sacred significance. universe. Heroic strophes some few are; Consider the wretchedest straddling biped full of force and a sacred fire, so that to latest that wears breeches' of thy acquaintance; ages the hearts of those that read therein are into whose wool-head, Thought, as thou rashly made to tingle. Jeremiads others seem: mere supposest, never entered; who, in froth-element weeping laments, harmonious or disharmo- of business, pleasure, or what else he names nious Remonstrances against Destiny; whereat it, walks forever in a vain show; asking not we too may sometimes profitably weep. Again Whence, or Why, or Whither; looking up to have we not (flesh-and-blood) strophes of the the Heaven above as if some upholsterer had idyllic sort, though in these days rarely, made it, and down to the Hell beneath as if he owing to Poor Laws, Game Laws, Population had neither part nor lot there: yet tell me, Theories, and the like! Farther, of the comic does not he too, over and above his five finite laughter-loving sort; yet ever with an un- senses, acknowledge some sixth infinite sense, fathomable earnestness, as is fit, lying under- were it only that of Vanity? For, sate him in neath for, bethink thee, what is the mirth- the other five as you may, will this sixth sense fullest, grinning face of any Grimaldi, but a leave him rest? Does he not rise early and transitory mask, behind which quite otherwise sit late, and study impromptus, and, (in congrins the most indubitable Death's-head! How-stitutional countries,) parliamentary motions, ever, I say farther, there are strophes of the and bursts of eloquence, and gird himself in pastoral sort, (as in Ettrick, Affghaunistan, whalebone, and pad himself and perk himself, and elsewhere;) of the farcic-tragic, melo- and in all ways painfully take heed of his dramatic, of all named and a thousand un-goings; feeling (if we must admit it) that an nameable sorts there are poetic strophes, written, as was said, in Heaven, printed on Earth, and published, (bound in woollen cloth, or clothes,) for the use of the studious. Finally, a

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altogether infinite endowment has been intrusted him also, namely, a Life to lead? Thus does he too, with his whole force, in his own way, proclaim that the world-old Rhapsodia of