22 HISTORY precisely the history of remote ages which the writers of the 18th century boldly undertook to treat. That they often failed is not surprising. It would have been a miracle if they had succeeded. We are now so imbued with the notions of growth and development in all forms that we find no difficulty in apply ing them to society as well as other phenomena. But these notions were all but entirely wanting in the 18th century; indeed, they did not fully emerge till the 19th had run a good portion of its course. It was difficult for all true sons of the 18th century to conceive of men or of societies dif ferent from the men and the societies they saw around them. Or if they were forced to admit that men could exist under conditions widely differing from those in which they themselves lived, they unhesitatingly pronounced them barbarians, unpolished, hardly worthy of attention. They consequently speak of past ages habitually in a tone of supercilious contempt which is to us highly amusing. Men who differed in every other opinion agreed in this. " The Athenians of the age of Demosthenes were a people of brutes, a barbarous people," said Dr Johnson ; and Voltaire was quite of his way of thinking on this point (Diet. Philosophique, art. " Anciens et Modernes "). With such views or rather feelings it was impossible to understand the past ; they did not even wish to do so. They mostly re garded their own age as the only one worthy of respect and admiration, the only one in which "polite manners" had existed. The past to them was mainly a record of crime, ignorance, folly, and fanaticism (notice the way in which the sober Robertson speaks of the crusades) ; and they did not even wish to see it as it really was. It is ob vious that such men could not write history as we under stand it. The moral prejudices of the age shut out a true view of past times. Indeed they preferred a distorted view, if it represented better their notions of the seemly and the noble. They had always a tendency to dress up the past in the garb of the present. The French writers surpassed the English in this foible. For them the only ideal of a king is Louis XIV., and all kings must be made to resemble him more or less, though of course they were not so great. This disposition reaches its acme of absurdity in Scipion Dupleix, historiographer of France, who died in 1661. Describing the baptism of Clovis, he represents the bar barian Frank as approaching St Remi, " with lofty port and grave demeanour, richly dressed, scented, and powdered, with long wig carefully curled and perfumed according to the custom of the ancient French kings." More serious is the profound misapprehension of every great character and great period which differed from the current pattern. The unworthy interpretation of all political and religious phenomena with which the writers were unfamiliar, by sagacious references to state and priestcraft, is also apt at times to appear to us wilfully perverse, and even disin genuous. We may. be sure it was nothing of the kind, and only resulted from the inadequate degree of culture then attained. But the historians in question were hindered not only by prejudice which they could not avoid from understanding the past; they were also hindered by a want of knowledge which it was impossible for them to have. To say nothing of the larger conceptions of society which we have only recently acquired, they were unfurnished with those preparatory means of accurately observing the past which were soon to be discovered. The science of economics, as we shall presently see, was about to throw a broad and vivid light on many hitherto obscure problems of history. But the writers in question did not yet enjoy the benefit of it, and surely the fault was none of theirs. When we see a man of the genius and erudition of Montesquieu (Grandeur et Decadence ties Romulus, c. 17) gravely ascribing the decline of old Rome to the fact that all the gold and silver after the division of the empire were carried to Constantinople, we realize the value of true conceptions relative to the wealth of nations. But in Montesquieu s time the precious metals were regarded as the sole or chief sources of wealth, and he applied without hesitation to history a principle which he saw statesmen apply without hesitation to politics. Again, Gibbon, writing on the same subject, the decline and fall of Rome, considers the real cause to have been the reluctance of the soldiers to wear defensive armour. It seems hardly credible, but here are his words : " They (the soldiers) complained of the weight of their armour, which they seldom wore; and they successively obtained permission to lay aside both their cuirasses and their helmets. The heavy weapons of their ancestors dropped from their feeble hands, and their pusillanimous indolence may be considered the immediate cause of the downfall of the empire " (chap. 27). Montesquieu and Gibbon were men of an historical genius second to none. Yet they could descend to such trivialities, and the reason was that the true sources of national wealth and military strength had not been laid open in their day. It would be easy to multiply examples of a similar kind, taken from the ablest writers, in which the most superficial explanation of wide- reaching events is hastily caught at, as if one were to explain an earthquake by a scratching of the earth s surface. In fact the old writers might be likened to surveyors as contrasted with geologists. They have little or no concep tion of the forces at work under the surface they see. But a change was near a change in feeling and a change in knowledge. That singular modulation of key in the moral life of Europe, often called, for want of a better term, the Romantic movement, which arrested and surprised the attention of the latter half of the 18th century, was felt in relation to history as well as to philosophy, politics, and religion. Whether represented by the fierce rebellion of Rousseau in France, or a milder literary reform in England and Germany, it essentially consisted in a weariness of and disenchantment with the present and the recent past, iti a vague feeling after ideas and emotions outside the conven tional circle in which men had been contented to live for several generations. The tastes and the tempers of men changed with a strange rapidity. The 18th century philo sophy, as it is called, lately so high and apparently secure, was cast out with contumely. The recent idols Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Diderot were smitten down, and others needless to name were put in their place. The whole movement is now seen to have been retrograde, and finally abortive, though temporarily successful. But it had its raison d etre and even its uses, as all social phenomena have. Among its uses was the service it rendered to history. As it was a first principle with the Romantics to burn what their predecessors had worshipped and the con verse, the past which had been recently an object of con tempt was put in the place of honour. Especially the Middle Age, so unjustly despised, seemed to rise out of its grave as a lovely vision full of knights and chivalry, troubadour song, and Gothic architecture, the latter just beginning to be appreciated. Where men had only recently seen barbarism, superstition, and ignorance, they and their sons saw an enchanted land of beauty, piety, and grace. Then came Sir Walter Scott, who turned a current already flowing fast into a headlong torrent. The Middle Agu was studied eagerly, sympathetically, perhaps a little too much so ; zeal never is according to knowledge. But the bringing of the Middle Age into the circle of serious historic study had an influence beyond its immediate object. When men had brought themselves to study and understand llth century popes and emperors, monasticism, feudalism,
scholasticism, they became bold and capable of further
