THE RELATION OF POETRY TO HISTORY, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE ΤΟ SHAKSPEARE'S ENGLISH HISTORICAL PLAYS. BY SAMUEL DAVEY, F.R.S.L. [Read May 27th, 1903.] THE study of history, like that of human nature, is full of perplexities. The old-world question, "What is truth?" may be repeated over and over again as we examine the conflicting records of the past. The primary facts of history may be combined and grouped into endless varieties, and can be manipulated to establish any desired theory. For men see what they wish to see; and what they look for they are sure to find. One pessimistic historian, in surveying the past, can see nothing but horror and bloodshed, a battle of kites and crows, or a blindfolded dance of death. To that sarcastic and sceptical spirit the whole course of the world is but the accident of events," a supreme ironic procession with the laughter of the gods in the background." One writer sees a special Providence in every action and event, while another notices a sublime repose in the order and uniformity of nature, and would agree with the philosophical historian "that God moves through history as the giants of Homer through VOL. XXIV. 14 space-He takes a step, and ages have rolled away." One school of historical investigators determine human affairs and the facts of history by physical causes alone, and regard man as a complicated and variously endowed automaton, whose actions, mental as well as physical, are governed by laws like those which regulate the planets and the tides. There are doctrinaire idealists who evolve history out of their inner consciousness, and follow the process described by Butler, " by which anything can be made to mean anything." Then there are romance writers of history, who make for us a past, which never had a present. It is not easy among so many speculations, various readings, and discrepancies of opinion, arising out of such an enormous mass of entangled materials, to get at the real facts of history, to be sure that a fact is a fact; though the quarrel appears to be not so much about the actual facts. as the interpretations of them. It is a sad confession of the weakness of reason, and of the imperfections underlying human language, that any fact or circumstance, however clear, may be rendered doubtful by a too subtle refinement of logical ingenuity. A great deal of history is written in the spirit and after the manner the late Charles Austen humorously described as Macaulay's method. "He [Macaulay] always had by him some black and white paint. When he described a Tory he put on the black; when a Whig the white." Some critics have a universal solvent in which they decompose the records and the traditions of the past, and leave a residuum of lies. Like Lucian, they ignore probabilities, and Herodotus, the father of history, is summarily dismissed as the father of lies; and those beautiful stories interspersed in his narrative, such as Cleobis and Biton, Atys and Adrastus, Croesus, Psammenitus, etc., which once glowed with life and feeling, are like antique statues, dumb and cold, although beautiful in their dead immortality. That "blind old man of Scio's rocky isle," who sang the lay of Troy, who has been called the father of all our modern poems, fables, and romances,-he and all his gods and heroes vanish like spectres before the light of these, so-called, philosophical historians. "The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religions, The power, the beauty, and the majesty That had their haunts in dale or piny mountain, Or chasms and watery depths,—all these have vanished. It would be well for us to know that the authors of our early mythologies and fables were men who looked out upon this wondrous world and strove to read the riddle thereof. They were the poets, bards, or seers (vates), who gathered together and preserved the myths, traditions, beliefs, visible and invisible, by which they were environed. Our earliest histories were preserved in poetry, though legend often entered into their records. Herodotus, the father of history, gave the titles of his books in his history the names of the nine Muses. Macaulay, in his early essay on Milton, says, "We think that as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines;" and you we suppose that, in an age of reason and common. sense, the study of physical science will subordinate the poetical and spiritual. But poetry and science ought not to be antagonistic to each other, for both teach us the infinite possibilities of nature; and what a dull, prosy, plodding world it would be with nothing in it but what G. H. Lewis called "stupid common sense"! To the commonplace, matter-offact man, whose mind is only in his eyes, the poet will ever soar beyond his ken. As a man is, so he sees; and his vision is limited to what is given to him, the faculty of seeing. Someone once said to Turner, after looking at one of his pictures, "I never saw anything like that in nature." "Don't you wish could?" was the great artist's reply. The spirit of modern practical life, which regards the chief method of reaching truth to be through the syllogistic inflexibility of logic, would have us believe that the glorious gift of imagination, which Plato calls "the soul's wing," was given only to deceive and lead astray, as it resists the understanding. Against this dictum Professor Tyndall, in his essay on the "Scientific use of the imagination," shows how necessary this faculty is when united with reason in scientific research. It may be well asked, "For what end have men been endowed with the creative faculty of the imagination? Why gifted with the large poetic heart, burdened with divine inspiration?" We answer that without imagination the heart of man would soon grow cold, and life become a dreary, mechanical routine. The mind continually refreshed from the fountain of poetry is ever young. Well sings the poet of those "Olympian bards who sung And always keep us so." Poetry, romance, parable, and fairy tale lift us above the beaten, dusty, weary track of ordinary life, and help to restore to our minds-fearfully disordered, but, haply, not wholly quenched-the ideals of faith, justice, pity, mercy, and to domesticate in us a higher and nobler spiritual nature. If we view history as a mere collection of isolated facts, how little of interest will be left to us! A mere dry and barren relation of events is not history, but chronology, for history is a record of facts and ideas. Could we quench the poetry out of the Old Testament, with its psalms, hymns, songs, and allegories, would not its history become as uninteresting, except to the antiquarian, as the Assyrian records? If we regard history as the essence of innumerable biographies, the sum total of millions of lives who toiled here, who fought the battle of life as we are doing now, and if we find each individual life, like our own, a mystery, we must despair of interpreting human life in the aggregate. As we wander among the ruins and relics of the past, into the wilderness of the dead, well may we exclaim, in the words of the inspired prophet, "Who can make these dry bones live?" Not the learned doctor with his scholastically mummified heart, who lives the life of the dead; who, with the dust of twenty centuries in his eyes, gropes among the débris of ancient books; who can write learned volumes on words, and less than words-syllables, letters, accents, and |