Chronicle

“ Chronicles were written when the science of true history had yet no existence; a chronicle then in reality is but a part of history. Every fact dispersed in its insulated state refuses all combination; cause and effect lie remote and obscured from each other; disguised by their ostensible pretexts, the true motives of actions in the great actors of the drama of history cannot be found in the chronological chronicler. The real value of his diligence consists in copiousness and discrimination; qualities rather adverse to each other. ”

“ But such a history should not set forth deeds and events after the fashion of a chronicle; it should transport us by its fascinating power, without any effort or clear consciousness on our part, into the very midst of the life of that time, so that we ourselves should seem to be walking and standing and deciding and acting with them. ”

“ The present chronicle is an attempt to give an answer, inevitably a very tentative one, to this formidable question; the writer, feeling that, as in all these matters, where the elusiveness of human nature plays so prominent a part, there is more hope of approaching the truth, indirectly, and by means of the imaginative mirror of art, than directly, and by means of rational theorizing. ”

“ History hath but few pages—soon is told
Man's ordinary life,
Labour, and care, and strife,
Make up the constant chronicle of old. ”

“ History, chronicle, and philology, of which we have seen the origin, are series of mental forms, which, although distinct from one another, must all of them be looked upon as physiological—that is to say, true and rational. ”

“ SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. ”

“ But as the legendary chroniclers are more occupied with extolling the merits of their favourites, than with establishing their place in the page of history, it becomes a well-nigh impossible task for the modern investigator to trace out and fix the times and seasons of all those who, either in fact or in fiction, have borne the name, or even to distinguish with certainty how many there have been, still less, what are the peculiar deeds and attributes of each. ”

“ It is this power of discovering what is really important that distinguishes the true historian from the mere chronicler, in whose eyes everything is important, particularly if he has discovered it himself. ”

“ The first we call chronicles, the second lives, and the third narrations or relations. Of these, although the first be the most complete and absolute kind of history, and hath most estimation and glory, yet the second excelleth it in profit and use, and the third in verity and sincerity. For history of times representeth the magnitude of actions, and the public faces and deportments of persons, and passeth over in silence the smaller passages and motions of men and matters. ”

“ Decorous chronicles and biographies and monographs and eulogies exist, bound in leather and stamped in gold, each lauding its own hero: chronicles written in really beautiful language, and high-minded and noble, out of which the heroes come unstained. ”

“ The chronicle descends as late as 1513, although, as might be expected from the author's character, it is entitled to much less confidence in the discussion of events which fell without the scope of his personal observation. ”

“ But he gives us much invaluable information for which we should search the more methodical chroniclers in vain. He throws a flood of light upon the manners and ideas of his own age; he sometimes comments with surprising shrewdness upon the broader aspects and tendencies of history. ”

“ And the records of the past, whether appearing to us, from a literary point of view, as mere chronicles or as true histories, become history again whenever they are apprehended by a new mind as an answer to a present problem, partaking of the activity of the mind that thinks them anew. ”

“ They are not bare records of fact, like the Chronicles; imagination enters into their scope; non-human, miraculous incidents are allowable; their content is not a matter for faith or factual record; they may be called historical fiction, which, broadly taken, corresponded to actual events, and typified the national strivings and ideals. ”

“ There exist, also, valuable prose chronicles which are believed to contain the substance of others of a very early date, and which furnish an authentic contemporary history of the country in the language of the people from the fifth century. ”

“ The chronicles of the time deserve to be studied with patient attention by anyone who wishes to know the prose writers of the century and the character of the men of that time and their outlook on life. It is usually considered that chroniclers are rather tiresome old fogies who talk much and say very little, who accept all sorts of legends on insufficient authority and who like to fill up their pages with wonderful things regardless of their truth. ”

“ And often it is the bit choicest and most intimate of detail, binding the chronicle into a dramatic whole, which the iron pick of Research digs from the heap of bones, and wise men say: "That brilliant hero never lived ”

“ And if ancient chronicles were dumb, Countless stones in witness forth would come From the deepest entrails of the earth. But this highly-favored race has gone, Gone forever to the realms of night. We, we live! The moments are our own, And the living judge the right. ”

“ Of these, and others, 'table traits,' and other traits, are here given: brief chronicles of their life's stage, over which a curtain has so long been dropped, are supplied carefully from well established sources: it is with characters, not with literary history, that we deal; and do our best to make the portraitures life-like, and to bring forward old memories, which, without the stamp of antiquity, might be suffered to pass into obscurity. ”

“ Increase in other knowledge, physical, anthropological, and psychological, may enable an historian of A.D. 1800 to give a much truer account of certain events and characters than the contemporary chroniclers had given, who lived in an age of ignorance and superstition. ”

“ But the primitive chronicler had very slight material for his stories of bygone times—he had few, if any, documents—he was himself creating the documentary evidence for those who came after him; he could only compile his narratives from tradition, legends, anecdotes of heroic ancestors, from information picked up by travel to famous places, and so on. ”

“ You will in general find the same things repeated up and down the world. The ancient chronicles are full of them, those of the middle age, the recent. Cities and households to-day are full of them. There is nothing new, all alike familiar and short-lived. ”

“ While the mediæval historians, compilers, and abbreviators from records of the past laboured under all the disadvantages of an age deficient in the critical spirit, and produced works of little value either for their substance or their literary style, the chroniclers, who told the story of their own times, Villehardouin, Joinville, Froissart, Commines, and others, have bequeathed to us, in living pictures or sagacious studies of events and their causes, some of the chief treasures of the past. ”

“ The religious significance of the past is dominant, and the past is idealized from a later standpoint; and whether the narratives in Chronicles are expressly styled Midrash or not, they are the fruit of an age which sought to inculcate explicitly those lessons which, it conceived, were implied in the events of the past. ”

“ Obits, battles, and successions, with occasional quotations from the historical poets, form the substance of the events of the year, and the entries become fuller and fuller as time advances, till in the later years up to 1616 the authors often write as literary historians, and not as mere chroniclers. ”

“ Truly it might seem that the fortunes of that strange people had been designed for a special lesson, not to them only, but to the whole human race; and the general outlines of that lesson have never been more clearly and forcibly indicated than in the Book of Kings.
[Pg 46]
CHAPTER V. HISTORY WITH A PURPOSE.
"History, as distinguished from chronicles or annals, must always contain a theory whether confessed by the writer or not. ”

“ My duty is that of a chronicler; and if I perform that conscientiously, the lessons which my observations suggest will need no pointing out. ”

“ In them the romance of centuries seems to be epitomised, and to the “seeing eye” they are the types and emblems of the changing life of our great nation; legend and tradition gather round, and weird stories and scraps of family history are associated with them that bring vividly before the mind’s eye the domestic life and manners of those who have gone before, and show in how large a degree the Past may be made a guide for the Present and the Future. ”

“ Four ways there are of telling a curious world that endless story of the past which it is never tired of hearing. History, memoir, biography, and the diary run back like four smooth roads, connecting our century, our land, our life, with other centuries and lands and lives that have all served in turn to make us what we are. ”

“ For the tale of our life is mainly tragedy. And we may outline now the manner in which that tale will be told. We shall have, first, a long, dim dawn,--mysterious peoples of the hidden past coming together to our land from the outlying darkness. A first period, which has left abundant and imperishable traces everywhere among our hills and valleys, writing a large history in massive stone, yet a history which, even now, is dim as the dawn it belongs to. ”

“ THE STORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE CIRCULATION A Study of the Times and Labors of William Harvey [9]
History in general is but a record of the succession of great events or epochs which have moulded the world's affairs. That which is of the greatest import in the life of the individual may count for little in the lives of his contemporaries, and yet it must be said that in the events of to-day there has occurred a great epoch in the life of each of you, presumably the most important as yet in your personal records. ”

“ I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy.
‘The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. ”

“ We understand by history a record of events that are past, and that it embraces chronology, biography, manners and customs, statistics, governments, and the rise and fall of kingdoms, nations and empires. ”

“ With us the word 'history,' like its equivalents in all modern languages, signifies either a form of literary composition or the appropriate subject or matter of such composition—either a narrative of events, or events which may be narrated. ”

“ All of these Ages, which represent the life history of the world, left their impression on the rocks of their times, and each Age is connected with the preceding and the succeeding Age like links in a long, long chain. ”

“ The passions, influences and conditions which generate, shape and control events, lend a coloring to their recital, which deep-hued or faint as painted by the writer at the time, are toned down or made stronger by the historian of a future generation, who, unmindful of passions, influences or conditions, and with an eye single to the preservation of history by means of the truth, makes past occurrences stand out in their true light. ”

“ The historian presents to you the outward face, the external form of history; Historical Romance would show you the heart of history, and thus bring near to your heart what, else, would stand so far off. ”

“ Others present nothing but wooden puppets put into the carefully studied costume of their period, and stiffly working out the facts, with much pains but no life. These, however, have a certain value, not only because perverse youth will read them when it will not read real history; but also because when a special period has to be ‘got up,’ they impress details of manners, dress, and habits in a convenient way. We shall therefore endeavour to give a chronological list of English, foreign, and Church history tales. ”

“ In diction and style, the marks of the true historian are frankness and truth, lucidity and simplicity. The preface should be in proportion to the subject. “The body of the history ... is nothing from beginning to end but a long narrative; it must therefore be graced with the narrative virtues—smooth, level, and consistent progress, neither soaring nor crawling, and the charm of lucidity.” “Brevity is always desirable.” ”

“ No one but a scholar familiar with the course of history could have marshalled such a procession of events into a connected and intelligible sequence. It is indeed a flight rather than a march; the reader is borne along as on the wings of a soaring poem, and sees the rising and decaying empires of history beneath him as a bird of passage marks the succession of cities and wilds and deserts as he keeps pace with the sun in his journey. ”

“ Historical continuity and mobility.—Historical continuity, which maintains the identity of the present with the past, implies the existence of a body of tradition which is transmitted from the older to the younger generations. Through the medium of tradition, including in that term all the learning, science, literature, and practical arts, not to speak of the great body of oral tradition which is after all a larger part of life than we imagine, the historical and [Pg 284] cultural life is maintained. ”