Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Earl of
History
Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913
Cromer, Evelyn Baring, Earl of
Colonies; Colonization; History; Literature
Truth, as the old Greek adage says, is indeed the fellow-citizen of the
gods; but if the standard of historical truth be rated too high, and if
the authority of all who have not strictly complied with that standard
is to be discarded on the ground that they stand convicted of
partiality, we should be left with little to instruct subsequent ages
beyond the dry records of men such as the laborious, the useful, though
somewhat over-credulous Clinton, or the learned but arid Marquardt,
whose "massive scholarship" Mr. Gooch dismisses somewhat summarily in a
single line. Such writers are not historians, but rather compilers of
records, upon the foundations of which others can build history.
Under the process we have assumed, Droysen, Sybel, and Treitschke would
have to be cast down from their pedestals. They were the political
schoolmasters of Germany during a period of profound national
discouragement. They used history in order to stir their countrymen to
action, but "if the supreme aim of history is to discover truth and to
interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim to a place in the
first class." Patriotism, as the Portuguese historian, Herculano da
Carvalho, said, is "a bad counsellor for historians"; albeit, few have
had the courage to discard patriotic considerations altogether, as was
the case with the Swiss Kopp, who wrote a history of his country "from
which Gessler and Tell disappeared," and in which "the familiar
anecdotes of Austrian tyranny and cruelty were dismissed as legends."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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