INAUGURAL ADDRESS

BY

J. R. SEELEY, ESQ., M.A.,

(Professor of Modern History, Cambridge,)

PRESIDENT OF THE SOCIETY.

October 26th, 1882.

ON what subject shall I address you? If I had no purpose but to gratify you, if I but asked myself how I might make the hour pass most agreeably, I should look for some new topic, and avoid, as already sufficiently treated, the subject I chose for my address last year. We students of history may assuredly boast that no pursuit affords such a variety of interesting topics; how easy it would be for me to find novelty if I sought it! I might choose some interesting passage of history and endeavour to treat it so, with so much gravity on the one hand, and with such delicate touches of imagination on the other, that you might thank me for a rare intellectual treat. I say I might endeavour to do this. If the skill should fail me I might securely calculate that your own love for history, which has led you to establish this society, and your good-will to me, which has led you to choose me a second time for its president, would in a great degree supply the deficiency. But I am not here to give you pleasure, and I believe you did not invite me here that I might give you pleasure. The study of history is indeed delightful, but in my opinion it is at the same time so important, so momentously and anxiously important, that I almost cease to find delight in it, and am inclined to envy those who lived when history could be regarded as a fairyland in which

poets might wander, a quarry out of which Waverley Novels and Lays of Ancient Rome might be hewn. I think too that you must enter into this feeling, since after hearing me last year hold this somewhat austere language, you did not, as I confess I thought you would, decide that one such address was enough, but have applied to me for another. I told you then that delightful history was almost another name for untrue history, and that the practice of reading history for mere pleasure, which has been indulged without restraint in the modern periods, has ended within those periods in destroying history, so that actually an impression has become current that recent times lie in some way outside history, and for some reason are not worth studying. I said that your society would have the function of making history a serious study, which, alas! implies, it cannot be denied, diminishing somewhat its delightfulness, its poetical charm. You, however, were not discouraged; you recognised that your society had a serious object, that your meetings are not held simply that you may pass agreeable hours. And in asking me to address you again you must have resolved to face this austere theory a second time.

I take courage, therefore, to go back to the old topic, not the most delightful, but in my opinion, by far the most important topic which I can choose. It is all-important just at this moment when you are entering upon a new path, in which probably many other great towns will before long follow you, that you should avoid the wrong turning. Instead of an earnest, painstaking, self-denying pursuit of truth, it is open to you to treat the study of history as a refined pleasure, a high intellectual enjoyment. In short, you have now to decide the all-important question whether you will regard history as a scientific or as a literary pursuit. History is now an old subject, and undeniably for some two thousand years it has been reckoned under the head of literature. Historians have been placed by the side of poets, and have been praised almost in the same words and for the same merits-for eloquence, imagination, sublimity, pathos. They have seldom been reckoned among men of science. Some scientific qualities, no

doubt, research, accuracy, impartiality, have been expected from them, but such qualities have added but little to their fame, for their fame has been popular rather than scientific. The historian has been vaguely wondered at for knowing a great deal, for having stored up a prodigious number of facts. He is often supposed to be necessarily a man of remarkable power of memory Thus we repeat with admiration that Macaulay said "Any fool could repeat his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards," and abroad they tell of Johannes Müller, the great historian of Switzerland, that he was called upon by some people who had a wager on the result to repeat off-hand the whole list of the Counts of Bugey, with the date of the accession of each, and that he did it without hesitation, only chafing very much to find that in the case of one count he could not recollect whether he succeeded on his father's death or had been associated by his father in the government. Such wonderful tales show that we think of the historian as being a person of mysterious knowledge; but this knowledge we do not conceive as simple science, but some wonderful personal endowment, a kind of witchcraft. All this, however, we regard from a distance ; whatever the historian may be in himself, in his relation to the public he is a literary man; he is a writer who can relate in a rich and fascinating style the fine things that have happened in past times So it has always been; and therefore when I come forward and say that such a view belongs to the infancy of historical method, and that for the future the historian must be as unlike this as the modern philosopher is unlike Thomas Aquinas, I utter, no doubt, a hard saying; I cannot expect to produce conviction at once; I must return again and again to the subject.

Now, in my last address, I was mainly occupied in showing that the mistake, as I consider it, is really made, especially in the history of recent periods, because in that department there has been no organisation, and the supply of history has been regulated solely by the unintelligent popular demand. I did, indeed, at the same time make some estimate of the evil consequences resulting from such inadequate treatment of an important subject, but this