VIII

I hinted just now that I have known cases where Herodotus has taught men to see India; that the attempt page 37 to realise and interpret that international exhibition of his, in the sense in which he felt its instructiveness, is good discipline in what I might describe as regional history. I do not mean to say that your commentary on those earlier books of his, in which the scene is most crowded with ˝ργα μ∊γάλα τ∊ καì θωμαστά from Babylon, Egypt, and the Persian Empire, ought to trespass at all on more strictly historical enquiries if you have already the materials and the right point of view. But I do feel very strongly that at the outset of 'Greats' work, when there is still elbow room, and much sunshine between you and the Schools, you can do worse than expatiate rather freely; and with Herodotus among your set books, you may do it with a good conscience. You need have no fear that knowledge of Herodotus will damage your feeling for Thucydides; behind that tense reserve there is wider knowledge of Greek lands than you suspect until you begin to know Greece well; just as there is clearer insight, closer grip, and more coherent thinking than you would guess, until you know Greece well, in the table talk and museum talk of Herodotus.

No one expects you, now, to read ancient history as you would read it if you had to stop and be examined this June. You are beginning your course; it is foundations, not pinnacles, that you should be building; and you cannot lay foundations without materials; without materia in its old Roman sense. Remember also that foundations are not meant to show; only to be solid and wide. At this stage, you can hardly read too widely, within the regional limits of the old world; and you may easily go beyond it without wasting your time. Books like Hollis' Masai and Shwy Yeo's Soul of a People were not written when I read 'Greats'; but we had Eothen and Hadji Baba; and Codrington's Melanesia came out in my third year. There was already some Ramsay, and a copy of Devia Cypria was going about; but we still read Conybeare and Howson, and Smith's Voyage page 38 and Shipwreck of St. Paul; and of course Sinai and Palestine, and Layard's Nineveh, and Moltke's Letters front Turkey.

You can hardly go wrong either, at this stage, in plunging into historical questions of the hour. It is your privilege to begin 'Greats' in 1910, as it was mine in 1890; when we labelled the Lion Gate 'Phrygian,' and assigned the rest of Mycenae to the Carians of Thucydides; when we grew warm over Mirage Orientale and the Matriarchate, and heard from Cambridge the first rumblings of Totemism, and read the Gotten Bough and the Politeia; you will remember that they were new books almost together. We went a good way with Miiller - Striibing on Thucydides, and a good way with Professor Sayce on Herodotus, but I remember one early question that perplexed us even then:—'If Herodotus is such a fool as they seem to make out, why do they go on setting him for "Greats"?'

These were some of our third year foundations for history; the foundations of twenty years ago. 'Wood, hay, stubble,' you will say. Well, it is a question of degree. Some of us may live to see Mommsen's Caesar—to speak only of the dead—go the same road as Grote's Cleon and Alexander. Meanwhile, we must live when we can; and provided we are alive, what matter if it be in Mommsen's Rome?

It matters, in fact, much less what men think, than why they think it. The precise content of their thoughts depends far too much upon temporary and local conditions, and changes only too promptly in response to the changes of these. It is the point of view from which they approach the new problem; the predispositions which they bring; the training which their faculties have acquired through their previous experiences, which make the outcome of their thinking in any given case so incalculable, often, beforehand; so easy, afterwards, to explain in the light of a larger survey; so real to them; and of so permanent an interest to the historian.

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But it is the wider survey to which the historian aspires, which permits and authenticates the explanation of the things thought. What neither the historian nor the psychologist can hope to do is to explain the thinker of them, the hero or the genius. That phenomenon remains presupposed; a primum mobile, with effects indeed, but no causes within human view: and the historian's business is twofold. To follow forward the effects of the great man's interference in affairs; but also to follow backward what we can trace backwards, the antecedents of the other factors, society, culture, and environment, among which, at this particular moment, the new personality intervened; the ˝ργανα, ˝μψνχα and other, with which he strove to effect what he had it in his mind to imagine; though the work of art, when done, was not often quite what the artist started to create. Of the actual deeds, and words, and even of the thoughts of great men in the old world, we are never likely to know much more than we do now; but the increase in our knowledge of the other factors still seems limitless. Till limits appear, these are our contributions to the problem σi' η˝ν αìτíην ∊'πoλέμησαν àλλήλoισι; it is in the new light of them that we restate what Herodotus knew.

That is how history grows evergreen. It is our own experience that we bring to it, our personal enthusiasms that we lavish on it, which make it historically real. Like the grand-parents in the Blue Bird, the old people are always there when we think of them; but it is we who make them wake up; and each time we go to see them, it is we who have grown—sometimes almost out of recog-nition. One time it is with pick and basket that we go to them; another, we take our churingas to play with; and we generally end, like Tyltyl, in making the old place a bear garden. But next time anyone goes, he finds the old people once more, as Tyltyl did, 'just like when they were here.' It is only they, who find him page 40 altered. So I sometimes imagine Herodotus too, somewhere in the old place, asking us, each time, to 'come again soon,' still eager to hear ε˝ργα μ∊γάλα τ∊ καì θωναστά of his grandchildren in history; still demanding of us, Greeks and Trojans alike, in our warfare over him, δi' ήν αìτíην ∊'πoλ∊'μησαν α'λλήλoισι.