THE MUSE OF HISTORY

"History helps me in my shows with her so-called LESSONS."P. 26.

I

It has been quite fair to make Satan and Clio herself, neither of whom I like, enumerate, as so many merits, some of the very reasons I have for disliking the Muse of History. Some of these characteristics arise from, and all are overshadowed by, the circumstance which sets me most against her.

Í know the Muse of History is a sycophantish partisan; a pretentious, often ignorant, humbug. She dotes on Satan, cloaking in exemplary denunciations what psychiatry might call a sadistic taste for works of his which only dirty the memory and spread retaliative infection to the feelings. In the still recent Past her feeding bottle (for she has no milk, which is human kindness, in her majestic bosom) nourished that devastating allegorical French female called La Gloire. In our own times she has been the nurse of all the artificially incubated Nationalisms and Irredentisms, from the one which near fifty years ago wrenched the Alsatians willy-nilly from France, to that which is restoring at this present moment the same unconsulted people as "stolen goods," as might be an umbrella or a hatbox. In this connexion she has desecrated that most modest of decent saints, "Jehane la Bonne Lorraine," into a tinselled wax doll, such as the purlieus of St. Sulpice breed on altars symmetrical with those of Notre Dame de Lourdes. She-am still indicting Clio-has abetted ever so many breaches of the peace, besides committing endless frauds and adulterations. I am aware of it all, and much besides; and dislike her in consequence. Yet, I confess that what I really least forgive her is that, calling herself History, she is also a Muse.

Before entering on this my personal plea against her, let me safeguard myself from any suspicion of lack of respect for either classical Antiquity or its divinest daughters, the genuine Muses. That Clio should have been accounted one in Greece is, I like to think, mere accident, the accident of

Herodotus, of all men the most impartially and naïvely interested in the bare how and why of human concerns, having dedicated each of his chapters to one of those nine sisters of the Delphic God in whose precipitous and stony sanctuary he read out loud his delightful manuscript to assembled Hellas; the first chapter (and by an easy confusion), the whole work and all similar ones being henceforward placed under the patronage of the eldest sister, Clio. This view of mine is founded on the fact that Herodotus himself, and the whole of classical Antiquity, perhaps because their world was so abundantly adorned, garlanded on altar and door-post, with art and poetry, did not require to put History to the same insidious, dramatic and æsthetic uses as have later, uglier ages, who more and more turned the Recorder, correct or incorrect, of Events into a purveyor of ideal emotions, largely for the pastime of the Ages-to-Come and other bored and futile persons. This much, lest the reader imagine that, because I don't want Homer and Virgil used as spellingbooks for little boys, I lack respect towards the Gods of Olympus. As regards the other notion that I may be devoid of æsthetic sensibilities, I joyfully seize this opportunity of inditing a hymn (however prosaic) of praise to the Sacred Nine (always excepting Clio).

II

To solace and sustain Man's spirit with a sufficiency of such emotions of greatness, significance, harmony and splendour, as are denied or charily doled out by life's reality; to brace, restore, make happy, whole and clean, by granting their heart's desire to those who have borne the brunt of reality's shortcomings, and steadily looked into reality's impassive, enigmatic face; this is the high, incomparable mission of the Muses, the lucidly inspired Sisters of him who is Sunlight and Prophecy, the great consoling Goddesses presiding over such perfection as Man, requiring it, recognizes as his own unreal handiwork. That handiwork is: Art, Music, Poetry, whether in the public and abiding works of specially gifted and traditionally trained men, or in

the hidden, evanescent day-dreams of all manner of loving persons, aware, however dimly, that the beloved is the beloved just because fashioned of their own soul's cravings. Nothing, not even the pursuit of truth, the glimpses (however partial) of reality by humble recognition of its nature-nothing is nobler, or more needed, than this consoling, fearless, conscious, creation of the harmony we need but find not ready-made. I even suspect that, alongside of its other sacred uses, art or poetry (call it as you please), has helped Man to recognize reality and seek its knowledge, teaching him to discriminate between what exists because he makes it for his pleasure, and those other things which exist (including his own self), apart from his wishes, by the mere necessity of their own nature and not his. Thus the statue he himself has fashioned is no longer an idol like the anointed stone; the drama declaimed on a stage is not a counterfeit of real events; the rhythm and rhyme of a sonnet show that this is not the real passion of real men and women; Music, which fulfils man's craving for the voice of God or of Love, is evidently man's own or that of instruments constructed by himself. And perhaps as much as any philosophical speculations, the undeniable fact that the divine structure in whose soaring spaces and distributed lights and glooms man mends his bruised, bent, spirit, is but so much stone cut, piled and cemented by man's very hand-perhaps the temple or church, which broodingly fulfils his need for something kinder and greater than his own existence, has helped man to the recognition that the surrounding universe is not made for his desires and that the divinity he seeks is the divinity within himself.

Be this as it may, and whether or not art, by creating for the heart's desire, has taught respect towards reality outside and indifferent to, us; this much is certain, that the nobility and innocence of art depends upon its straightforward standing aloof from assertions of what is true or untrue. This, therefore, is one item in the greatness of the Muses, the Consolers, the givers of what life often refuses but man's spirit often needs.

The Muses excepting of course Clio. ambiguous and often unclean nature.

And hence her hybrid,

III

Let no one imagine I am demanding an inordinate amount of truth from History. No human creature can have entire insight into the character and concatenations of any event, least of all past ones; and everyone sees what he does see in the light or darkness of his prepossessions. It is natural that to one man certain happenings and personages should be attractive, to another repulsive. Carlyle's view of 1793 cannot be the same as Michelet's, though both may represent complementary aspects of the Revolution. Neither must you expect people who write history to restrain their natural eagerness to jump at conclusions and the human, all too human, tampering a tiny trifle with evidence. That happens in all scientific research, and all gets compensated, averaged out, into fairly correct notions on the student's part. Similarly, and as with other sorts of fact, you must not expect (or expecting will be disappointed) that seekers for historical truth should unconsciously or consciously reject the temptation of using their facts to point the moral or adorn the tale. All this is understood, and in so far, harmless. What Clio does (whence my dislike of her) is something else, and usually pure mischief. I withdraw that statement, not pure mischief, not always mischief, but often mischief; and always recklessness about mischief.

To the extent, neither more nor less, that Clio asserts herself to be a Muse and claims Muse's privilege (and duty) of employing counterfeit presentments for the satisfaction of our emotions, to that extent Clio is an artist, and therefore not a liar nor a pander. This (since the ugly word has come out), this pandering of so-called History to our dramatic instincts, often sanguinary; to our insidious collective vanity and (what is quite harmless in comparison) to the snobbishness which makes simple persons delight in discussing the looks and habits of royalties and pry into the peccadilloes of illustrious men; this pandering implies that we translate the past into terms of the present, else we should not sympathize, and thereby cheats us of History's fundamental lesson, which is that nothing which happens is ever entirely alike. Now it is

only such habitual recognition of change which allows real understanding of cause and effect, and allows thereby the just estimation of responsibility. Of course I do not mean that there are not all through the universe apparently stable laws, but these are generalizations which we deduce from recognition of similarity in difference and in alteration. Such abstractions are part of what I have called our recognition of Otherness; thereby an essential of true Altruism. For the "nothing new under the sun" is not a general principle extracted by comparison of single cases; but on the contrary, the indolent expectancy of repetition, the unimaginative inability of responding to what our faculties are not yet set for. It is the egotistic intrusion of our own motives into the motives of other folks and other times; indeed the dilettantish assumption that other folks and times, other anything, exist primarily to instruct or amuse us. And the expectancy of repetition, even where repetition exists, results not from observation but rather from the lack of it.

Being thus inertly prone to think in terms of sameness, the study of the Past might serve us as corrective to an intellectual and (since justice cannot exist apart from understanding) moral lack of activity whence we all suffer, and whereby we all make others suffer. For History could show us conditions differing from our own and from one another, and show the modifications (and their modus operandi) which connect those dissimilar conditions in a great chain of change. In other words, History, if treated as a science, would be par excellence the Science of Change, showing it us in stages more minute and complex than geology or biology. Instead of which, thanks to the Muse and her Votaries, the notion of Evolution has had to be introduced into History from geology and biology; and it is because of our recognition of the gradual transitions which have built up continents in epochs far out-spanning our imagination; it is because of the study of living and extinct animal species, and the concatenation of form in fossils and in embryos, that we are beginning to think of human institutions in terms of evolution, and to be interested in their varying and allied forms. Indeed it is one of Clio's unintended practical jokes that we are more able