But for my purpose it will be sufficient to take one very important
branch which I can claim to have watched with some care, and that is the
branch of History.
It may be said with truth that in our generation no single first-rate
piece of history has enjoyed an appreciable sale. That is not true of
France, it is not true of the United States, it is not even true of
Germany in her intellectual decline, but it is true of England.
History is an excellent test. No man will read history, at least history
of an instructive sort, unless he is a man who can read a book, and
desires to possess one. To read History involves not only some permanent
interest in things not immediately sensible, but also some permanent
brain-work in the reader; for as one reads history one cannot, if one is
an intelligent being, forbear perpetually to contrast the lessons it
teaches with the received opinions of our time. Again, History is
valuable as an example in the general thesis I am maintaining, because
no good history can be written without a great measure of hard work. To
make a history at once accurate, readable, useful, and new, is probably
the hardest of all literary efforts; a man writing such history is
driving more horses abreast in his team than a man writing any other
kind of literary matter. He must keep his imagination active; his style
must be not only lucid, but also must arrest the reader; he must
exercise perpetually a power of selection which plays over innumerable
details; he must, in the midst of such occupations, preserve unity of
design, as much as must the novelist or the playwright; and yet with all
this there is not a verb, an adjective or a substantive which, if it
does not repose upon established evidence, will not mar the particular
type of work on which he is engaged.
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