Friends in Council Part 14

Ellesmere. Humph! you put it mildly. But the man has made perhaps seven per cent. off his money; or, if he has made no per cent., has ruined several men of his own trade, which is not to go for nothing when a man is taking stock of his good deeds.

Milverton. There is one thing I forgot to say, that we want more individual will in building, I think. As it is at present, a great builder takes a plot of ground and turns out innumerable houses, all alike, the same faults and merits running through each, thus adding to the general dulness of things.

Ellesmere. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when she came from abroad, remarked that all her friends seemed to have got into drawing-rooms which were like a grand piano, first a large square or oblong room, and then a small one. Quite Georgian, this style of architecture.

But now I think we are improving immensely--at any rate in the outside of houses. By the way, Milverton, I want to ask you one thing: How is it that Governments and Committees, and the bodies that manage matters of taste, seem to be more tasteless than the average run of people? I will wager anything that the cabmen round Trafalgar Square would have made a better thing of it than it is.

If you had put before them several prints of fountains, they would not have chosen those.

Milverton. I think with you, but I have no theory to account for it. I suppose that these committees are frequently hampered by other considerations than those which come before the public when they are looking at the work done; and this may be some excuse.

There was a custom which I have heard prevailed in former days in some of the Italian cities, of making large models of the works of art that were to adorn the city, and putting them up in the places intended for the works when finished, and then inviting criticism.

It would really be a very good plan in some cases.

Ellesmere. Now, Milverton, would you not forthwith pull down such things as Buckingham Palace and the National Gallery? Dunsford looks at me as if I were going to pull down the Const.i.tution.

Milverton. I would pull them down to a certainty, or some parts of them at any rate; but whether "forthwith" is another question.

There are greater things, perhaps, to be done first. We must consider, too,

"That eternal want of pence Which vexes public men."

Still, I think we ought always to look upon such buildings as temporary arrangements, and they vex one less then. The Palace ought to be in the higher part of the Park, perhaps on that slope opposite Piccadilly.

Dunsford. Well, it does amuse me the way in which you youngsters go on, pulling down, in your industrious imaginations, palaces and national galleries, building aqueducts and cloacae maximae, forming parks, destroying smoke (so large a part of every Londoner's diet), and abridging plaster, without fear of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and the resistance of mankind in general.

Milverton. We must begin by thinking boldly about things. That is a larger part of any undertaking than it seems, perhaps.

Dunsford. We must, I am afraid, break off our pleasant employment of projecting public improvements, unless we mean to be dinnerless.

Ellesmere. A frequent fate of great projectors, I fear.

Milverton. Now then, homewards.

CHAPTER XI.

My readers will, perhaps, agree with me in being sorry to find that we are coming to the end of our present series. I say, "my readers," though I have so little part in purveying for them, that I mostly consider myself one of them. It is no light task, however, to give a good account of a conversation; and I say this, and would wish people to try whether I am not right in saying so, not to call attention to my labour in the matter, but because it may be well to notice how difficult it is to report anything truly. Were this better known, it might be an aid to charity, and prevent some of those feuds which grow out of the poverty of man's power to express, to apprehend, to represent, rather than out of any malignant part of his nature. But I must not go on moralising. I almost feel that Ellesmere is looking over my shoulder, and breaking into my discourse with sharp words; which I have lately been so much accustomed to.

I had expected that we should have many more readings this summer, as I knew that Milverton had prepared more essays for us. But finding, as he said, that the other subjects he had in hand were larger than he had antic.i.p.ated, or was prepared for, he would not read even to us what he had written. Though I was very sorry for this--for I may not be the chronicler in another year--I could not but say he was right. Indeed, my ideas of literature, nourished as they have been in much solitude, and by the reading, if I may say so, mainly of our cla.s.sical authors, are very high placed, though I hope not fantastical. And, therefore, I would not discourage anyone in expending whatever thought and labour might be in him upon any literary work.

In fine, then, I did not attempt to dissuade Milverton from his purpose of postponing our readings: and we agreed that there should only be one more for the present. I wished it to be at our favourite place on the lawn, which had become endeared to me as the spot of many of our friendly councils.

It was later than usual when I came over to Worth-Ashton for this reading; and as I gained the brow of the hill, some few clouds tinged with red were just grouping together to form the accustomed pomp upon the exit of the setting sun. I believe I mentioned in the introduction to our first conversation that the ruins of an old castle could be seen from our place of meeting. Milverton and Ellesmere were talking about it as I joined them.

Milverton. Yes, Ellesmere, many a man has looked out of those windows upon a sunset like this, with some of the thoughts that must come into the minds of all men on seeing this great emblem, the setting sun--has felt, in looking at it, his coming end, or the closing of his greatness. Those old walls must have been witness to every kind of human emotion. Henry the Second was there; John, I think; Margaret of Anjou and Cardinal Beaufort; William of Wykeham; Henry the Eighth's Cromwell; and many others who have made some stir in the world.

Ellesmere. And, perhaps, the greatest there were those who made no stir.

"The world knows nothing of its greatest men."

Milverton. I am slow to believe that. I cannot well reconcile myself to the idea that great capacities are given for nothing.

They bud out in some way or other.

Ellesmere. Yes, but it may not be in a noisy way.

Milverton. There is one thing that always strikes me very much in looking at the lives of men: how soon, as it were, their course seems to be determined. They say, or do, or think, something which gives a bias at once to the whole of their career.

Dunsford. You may go farther back than that, and speak of the impulses they got from their ancestors.

Ellesmere. Or the nets around them of other people's ways and wishes. There are many things, you see, that go to make men puppets.

Milverton. I was only noticing the circ.u.mstance that there was such a thing, as it appeared to me, as this early direction. But, if it has been ever so unfortunate, a man's folding his hands over it in a melancholy mood, and suffering himself to be made a puppet by it, is a sadly weak proceeding. Most thoughtful men have probably some dark fountains in their souls, by the side of which, if there were time, and it were decorous, they could let their thoughts sit down and wail indefinitely. That long Byron wail fascinated men for a time; because there is that in Human Nature. Luckily, a great deal besides.

Ellesmere. I delight in the helpful and hopeful men.

Milverton. A man that I admire very much, and have met with occasionally, is one who is always of use in any matter he is mixed up with, simply because he wishes that the best should be got out of the thing that is possible. There does not seem much in the description of such a character; but only see it in contrast with that of a brilliant man, for instance, who does not ever fully care about the matter in hand.

Dunsford. I can thoroughly imagine the difference.

Milverton. The human race may be bound up together in some mysterious way, each of us having a profound interest in the fortunes of the whole, and so, to some extent, of every portion of it. Such a man as I have described acts as though he had an intuitive perception of that relation, and therefore a sort of family feeling for mankind, which gives him satisfaction in making the best out of any human affair he has to do with.

But we really must have the essay, and not talk any more. It is on History.

HISTORY.

Among the fathomless things that are about us and within us, is the continuity of time. This gives to life one of its most solemn aspects. We may think to ourselves: Would there could be some halting-place in life, where we could stay, collecting our minds, and see the world drift by us. But no: even while you read this, you are not pausing to read it. As one of the great French preachers, I think, says, We are embarked upon a stream, each in his own little boat, which must move uniformly onwards, till it ceases to move at all. It is a stream that knows "no haste, no rest"; a boat that knows no haven but one.

This unbated continuity suggests the past as well as the future. We would know what mighty empires this stream of time has flowed through, by what battle-fields it has been tinged, how it has been employed towards fertility, and what beautiful shadows on its surface have been seized by art, or science, or great words, and held in time-lasting, if not in everlasting, beauty. This is what history tells us. Often in a faltering, confused, be-darkened way, like the deed it chronicles. But it is what we have, and we must make the best of it.

The subject of this essay may be thus divided: Why history should be read--how it should be read--by whom it should be written--how it should be written--and how good writers of history should be called forth, aided, and rewarded.

I. WHY HISTORY SHOULD BE READ.

It takes us out of too much care for the present; it extends our sympathies; it shows us that other men have had their sufferings and their grievances; it enriches discourse, it enlightens travel. So does fiction. But the effect of history is more lasting and suggestive. If we see a place which fiction has treated of, we feel that it has some interest for us; but show us a spot where remarkable deeds have been done, or remarkable people have lived, and our thoughts cling to it. We employ our own imagination about it: we invent the fiction for ourselves. Again, history is at least the conventional account of things: that which men agree to receive as the right account, and which they discuss as true. To understand their talk, we must know what they are talking about.

Again, there is something in history which can seldom be got from the study of the lives of individual men; namely, the movements of men collectively, and for long periods--of man, in fact, not of men.

In history, the composition of the forces that move the world has to be a.n.a.lysed. We must have before us the law of the progress of opinion, the interruptions to it of individual character, the principles on which men act in the main, the trade winds, as we may say, in human affairs, and the recurrent storms which one man's life does not tell us of. Again, by the study of history, we have a chance of becoming tolerant travelling over the ways of many nations and many periods; and we may also acquire that historic tact by which we collect upon one point of human affairs the light of many ages.

We may judge of the benefit of historical studies by observing what great defects are incident to the moral and political writers who know nothing of history. A present grievance, or what seems such, swallows up in their minds all other considerations; their little bottle of oil is to still the raging waves of the whole human ocean; their system, a thing that the historian has seen before, perhaps, in many ages, is to reconcile all diversities. Then they would persuade you that this cla.s.s of men is wholly good, that wholly bad; or that there is no difference between good and bad. They may be shrewd men, considering what they have seen, but would be much shrewder if they could know how small a part that is of life. We may all refer to our boyhood, and recollect the time when we thought the things about us were the type of all things everywhere. That was, perhaps, after all no silly princess who was for feeding the famishing people on cakes. History takes us out of this confined circle of child-like thought; and shows us what are the perennial aims, struggles, and distractions of mankind.

History has always been set down as the especial study for statesmen, and for men who take an interest in public affairs. For history is to nations what biography is to individual men. History is the chart and compa.s.s for national endeavour. Our early voyagers are dead: not a plank remains of the old ships that first essayed unknown waters; the sea retains no track; and were it not for the history of these voyages contained in charts, in chronicles, in h.o.a.rded lore of all kinds, each voyager, though he were to start with all the aids of advanced civilisation (if you could imagine such a thing without history), would need the boldness of the first voyager.

And so it would be with the statesman, were the civil history of mankind unknown. We live to some extent in peace and comfort upon the results obtained for us by the chronicles of our forefathers.

We do not see this without some reflection. But imagine what a full-grown nation would be if it knew no history--like a full-grown man with only a child's experience.

The present is an age of remarkable experiences. Vast improvements have been made in several of the outward things that concern life nearly, from intercourse rapid as lightning to surgical operation without pain. We accept them all; still, the difficulties of government, the management of ourselves, our relations with others, and many of the prime difficulties of life remain but little subdued. History still claims our interest, is still wanted to make us think and act with any breadth of wisdom.