James Thomson Shotwell

“ The saga, or epos, was a great advance upon the myth, for in it the deeds of men replace or tend to replace the deeds of the gods. But we are still largely in the realm of imagination. Poetry, as Thucydides complained, is a most imperfect medium for fact. The bard will exaggerate or distort his story. True history, as a record of what really has happened, first reached maturity in prose. Therefore, although much of the past has been handed down to us in epic, in ballad and in the legends of folk-lore, we must turn from them to what became history in the narrower sense. ”

“ It is only in the scientific environment of to-day that we recognize once more, with those earliest of the forerunners of Herodotus, that history involves two distinct operations, one of which, investigation, is in the field of science, while the other, the literary presentation, is in the field of art.
The history of history itself is therefore two-fold. History as art flourishes with the arts. ”

“ Its history does not run parallel with the scientific side, but rather varies in inverse ratio with scientific activity. Those periods which have been dominated by the great masters of style have been less interested in the criticism of the historian’s methods of investigation than in the beauty of his rhetoric. The scientific historian, deeply interested in the search for truth, is generally but a poor artist, and his uncoloured picture of the past will never rank in literature beside the splendid distortions which glow in the pages of a Michelet or Macaulay. ”

“ From the first, Christianity had a philosophy of history. Its earliest apologists sought to show how the world had followed a divine plan in its long preparation for the life of Christ. From this central fact of all history, mankind should continue through war and suffering until the divine plan was completed at the judgment day. The fate of nations is in God’s hands; history is the revelation of His wisdom and power. Whether He intervenes directly by miracle, or merely sets His laws in operation, He is master of men’s fate. ”

“ The so-called Renaissance did much; but it did not do the things attributed to it by those who see the “middle ages” through humanist glasses.
Upon the whole, therefore, it would seem that not only was there no one middle age common to all branches of human evolution, except the period more definitely marked as the dark age, but that those characteristics which are generally regarded as “medieval” were by no means limited to a single epoch of European history. In short, the dark age was a reality; but the traditional “middle ages” are a myth. ”

“ In the realm of art the “middle ages” had already set in before Constantine robbed the arch of Titus to decorate his own, and before those museums of antiquity, the temples, were plundered by Christian mobs. The victory of Christianity—iconoclastic in its primitive spirit—was but a single chapter in the story of decline. The process was completed by the misery of the decaying empire, and by the Germanic invasions. The barbarians, however, destroyed less than has been commonly supposed. Destruction was more the product of necessity than of wantonness. ”

“ In legal history there was a distinct medieval period, when Germanic customs superseded Roman law, that most splendid of Rome’s legacies. But the renaissance of law began relatively early; by the 12th century it had created a university, by the 13th it was helping to organize national states and laying the basis for that order which the economic renaissance was already demanding.
In science there was no great product in antiquity to be lost. Compared with art or law, literature or philosophy, ancient science (in our sense) was almost insignificant. ”

“ His return to France was urgently needed, as Blanche of Castile, whom he had left as regent, had died in November 1252, and upon the removal of her strong hand feudal turbulence had begun to show itself.
This period between his first and second crusades (1254–1269) is the real age of Saint Louis in the history of France. He imposed peace between warring factions of his nobility by mere moral force, backed up by something like an awakened public opinion. His nobles often chafed under his unrelenting justice but never dared rebel. ”

“ The 4th and 5th centuries saw a great revolution in the history of history. The story of the pagan past slipped out of mind, and in its place was set, by the genius of Eusebius, the story of the world force which had superseded it, Christianity, and of that small fraction of antiquity from which it sprang,—the Jews. Christianity from the first had forced thinking men to reconstruct their philosophy of history, but it was only after the Church’s triumph that its point of view became dominant in historiography. ”

“ The king’s consciousness of his weakness was combined with a sense of duty, and it was upon these two chords that Richelieu played. Besides, he was eternally on the alert. Spies in every salon in Paris and every court in Europe kept the grim courtier informed of every change in his master’s disposition and every intrigue against himself. The piquant comments of his platonic friend, Mademoiselle de Hautefort, upon Richelieu were relished by the king until he was informed of others said to have been made by her upon himself. ”

“ In Thucydides a higher art than that of Herodotus was combined with a higher science. He scorned the story-teller “who seeks to please the ear rather than to speak the truth,” and yet his rhetoric is the culmination of Greek historical prose. He withdrew from vulgar applause, conscious that his narrative would be considered “disappointing to the ear,” yet he recast the materials out of which he constructed it in order to lift that narrative into the realm of pure literature. Speeches, letters and documents are reworded to be in tone with the rest of the story. ”

“ Mankind did not, as Burckhardt and J. A. Symonds lead one to imagine, suddenly throw off a cowl that has blinded the eyes for a thousand years to the beauty of the world around, and awaken all at once to the mere joy of living. If any one was ever awake to the joys of living it was the minnesinger, troubadour or goliard, and the world had to wait until Rousseau and Burns before its external beauty was discovered, or at least deeply appreciated, by any but a few Dutch artists. ”

“ It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. ”

“ The discovery of the outer world is a recent thing in art as well as in science. As for the claim that the “Renaissance” delivered men from that blind reliance upon authority which was typical of “medieval” thought, that is a fallacy cherished by those who themselves rely upon the authority of historians, blind to the most ordinary processes of thought. In this regard, indeed, in spite of the advance of scientific method and the wealth of material upon which to base criticism, we are still for the most part in the middle ages. ”

“ Solids are solids no longer. The universe is in motion in every particle of every part; rock and metal merely a transition stage between crystallization and dissolution. This idea of universal activity has in a sense made physics itself a branch of history. It is the same with the other sciences—especially the biological division, where the doctrine of evolution has induced an attitude of mind which is distinctly historical.
But the tendency to look at things historically is not merely the attitude of men of science. ”

“ History in the wider sense is all that has happened, not merely all the phenomena of human life, but those of the natural world as well. It includes everything that undergoes change; and as modern science has shown that there is nothing absolutely static, therefore the whole universe, and every part of it, has its history. ”

“ In religious history—to be distinguished from that of the political organization referred to above as the papal monarchy—the official recognition of the Christian Church by Galerius in 311 serves as a convenient starting-point for what we know as universal Christendom, though the slow disappearance of paganism, as distinct from Christianity, stretches over at least a century more. The Reformation of the 16th century has long been regarded as the close of the period. The real close, however, is the present day—as the result of the rationalism and science of the 18th and 19th centuries. ”

“ Biblical criticism is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin or Hebrew sources, and now fifty centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. ”

“ St Boniface has well been called the proconsul of the papacy. His organizing genius, even more than his missionary zeal, left its mark upon the German church throughout all the middle ages. The missionary movement which until his day had been almost independent of control, largely carried on by schismatic Irish monks, was brought under the direction of Rome. But in so welding together the scattered centres and binding them to the papacy, Boniface seems to have been actuated by simple zeal for unity of the faith, and not by a conscious political motive. ”

“ A single Roger Bacon does not relieve his age of the charge. But the middle age in science must include much of antiquity, including Pliny.
Philosophy was the one subject which had, clearly and definitely, a medieval period. Scholasticism, which absorbed the attention of most thinkers from about the 11th to about the 15th centuries, is so easily marked off and played so considerable a rôle in the academic history of that time, that historians often refer to it as the only intellectual interest of “medieval” men. ”

“ Saint Louis stands in history as the ideal king of the middle ages. An accomplished knight, physically strong in spite of his ascetic practices, fearless in battle, heroic in adversity, of imperious temperament, unyielding when sure of the justness of his cause, energetic and firm, he was indeed “every inch a king.” Joinville says that he was taller by a head than any of his knights. ”

“ In the 19th century the science of history underwent a sort of industrial revolution. The machinery of research, invented by the genius of men like Mabillon, was perfected and set going in all the archives of Europe. Isolated workers or groups of workers grew into national or international associations, producing from archives vast collections of material to be worked up into the artistic form of history. ”

“ Rejected by the Yahweh who became the Christian God, they have remained to the present day, in Sunday schools and in common opinion, not nations of living men, with the culture of arts and sciences, but outcasts who do not enter into the divine scheme of the world’s history. When a line was drawn between pagan and Christian back to the creation of the world, it left outside the pale of inquiry nearly all antiquity. But it must be remembered that that antiquity was one in which the German nations had no personal interest. ”

“ The commonest form of medieval historical writing was the chronicle, which reaches all the way from monastic annals, mere notes on Easter tables, to the dignity of national monuments. Utterly lacking in perspective, and dominated by the idea of the miraculous, they are for the most part a record of the trivial or the marvellous. Individual historians sometimes recount the story of their own times with sober judgment, but seldom know how to test their sources when dealing with the past. Contradictions are often copied down without the writer noticing them ”

“ This phase began to give way in the 11th century to a commercial and industrial renaissance, which received a great impetus from the crusading movements—themselves largely economic—and by the 14th century had made the Netherlands the factory of Europe, the Rhine a vast artery of trade, and north Italy a hive of busy cities. The discovery of America and the expansion of commerce merely readjusted conditions already highly developed. The period of isolated economy which we may term medieval lasted only from about the 5th to the 12th centuries. ”

“ The Roman Empire,—the last general form of the earthly city,—gives way slowly to the heavenly. This is the main thread of Augustine’s philosophy of history. The mathematical demonstration of its truth was left by Augustine for his disciple, Paulus Orosius.
Orosius’ Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans, written as a supplement to the City of God, is the first attempt at a Christian “World History.” This manual for the middle ages arranged the rise and fall of empires with convincing exactness. The history of antiquity, according to it, begins with Ninus. ”

“ The correct perspective places between the summits of modern and ancient times, not a long level stretch of a thousand years, with mankind stationary, spell-bound under the authority of the Church, absorbed in war or monastic dreams, but a downward and then a long upward slope, on both of which the forces which make for civilization may be seen at work. ”