| <The Saturday Review Jan. 25, 1862>
| <Lord Cranborne's Historical Essays>
| <Lord Robert Cecil>
| <pb n="105">
| Historical essayists are a class whom it is rather 
| difficult to criticize, because they bear a false 
| resemblance to another class of writers, with whom 
| they have really nothing in common.  At first sight, they 
| look like historians on a small scale.  But it would be 
| very erroneous to judge them by the same standard, or 
| to require of them the same species of success.  They 
| have important functions of their own to perform, and, 
| as Lord Macaulay sufficiently showed, they can attain 
| to a very brilliant excellence:  but neither their 
| functions nor their excellence are those of the historian.  
| It is not their part to disinter new facts, or to elaborate 
| new theories of history.  The process of rehabilitation 
| which is the peculiar mania of the present day, cannot 
| be applied with success either to persons or to causes by 
| the essayist; because the limits of an essay give no 
| room for the necessary exhibition of proofs.  The 
| utmost stretch of novelty which is permitted to him is 
| the grouping together acknowledged facts in a new way, 
| and applying to them a new philosophy of explanation.  
| His real office is to carry the facts of history to 
| numberless minds which they would never reach at all 
| without his aid.  His function is to manufacture the raw 
| material which the researches of others have collected 
| into a form in which a lazy or a busy age can consume 
| it.  At the present pace at which the world is going, 
| human life is far too short to suffer the mass of active 
| men to study anything thoroughly; and if they are to be 
| acquainted with any of the details of history at all 
| beyond those which they learn at school, they must be 
| indebted for it to the writers whose business it is to 
| compress history into a compact and readable form.  
| <reg orig="Every one"> Everyone </reg> ought to 
| know something of the details of the history of France; 
| but who that has any other engrossing employment is 
| equal even to a superficial study of seven or eight 
| shelves full of <hi rend="italic"> Memoires pour servir! 
| </hi>  A hierophant is needed to stand between the 
| dusty oracle and its indolent inquirers, who shall 
| undertake the labour of bringing down his lengthy 
| utterances to the level of their intelligence or their 
| leisure.
| Tried by this standard, Lord Cranborne has produced a 
| series of historical essays of great merit.  They are 
| written upon periods belonging ~~ with the exception 
| of one upon Agnes Sorel ~~ exclusively to the section 
| of history which Mr. Hallam has divided off as modern; 
| but, with this limitation, they are not confined to any 
| special period or country.  He appears to have directed 
| his attention more especially to French history, but he 
| has not neglected Spain, Italy, or Russia.  Like most 
| Englishmen, he appears to shrink from the chaotic 
| details and unfascinating heroes of German history, but 
| otherwise his interests are catholic enough.  His style is 
| admirably adapted for conveying information and 
| impressing it on the mind ~~ being shrewd and simple 
| and jealous of needless ornament.  He has adhered with 
| severity to the conception which he has formed of an 
| essayist's part, and studiously avoids all episodes and 
| irrelevant discussions.  He will not give in to the 
| ordinary practice of review writers, who are always 
| afraid that plain facts and calm opinions will tire their 
| readers, and think it necessary occasionally to beguile 
| the weary path of history with a display of literary 
| fireworks.  Neither will he make the essay a vehicle of 
| party propagandism.  Excepting the fact that he is an 
| Englishman and Protestant, it would be impossible to 
| discover from his writings that he belongs to any party 
| or entertains any sharply defined political opinions.  He 
| approaches the most exciting questions of modern 
| politics in a spirit of absolute neutrality, and writes of 
| the convulsions that have disturbed Europe with as little 
| bias as if he were describing the late Chinese revolution 
| and the successes of Prince Kung.  Of course this 
| impartiality deprives his compositions necessarily of 
| whatever attractions one-sided judgments may have for 
| headlong partisans.  But he gives them, by this 
| abstinence, a permanent, instead of a merely transient 
| value.  There are few forms of political pamphlet so 
| effective as that which mirrors the present in cunningly 
| composed pictures of the past.  Without openly pointing 
| its moral, or avowing the lurking purpose, it conveys to 
| the reader's mind the desired political doctrines, in a 
| form which does not suggest to him to protect himself 
| from proselytism.  But this device is necessarily ruinous 
| to historical truth, and has caused more confusion in the 
| minds of the mass of Englishmen, as to the facts of 
| history, than any other source of error.  Lord Cranborne 
| is wholly free from the reproach of disguising a 
| pamphlet as an essay.  Several
| <pb n="106">
| essays which appear in this volume in reference to the 
| later history of the Bourbon dynasty in France, display 
| this impartiality in a more marked degree than could 
| have been expected from a writer of the present 
| generation.  The Essays on Italy will be read with 
| interest for the same reason.  The author writes in part 
| from information collected personally in Italy, and the 
| truth upon Italian questions has been so distorted by the 
| keen partisanship of <reg orig="every one"> everyone 
| </reg> who has dealt with the subject, that the 
| testimony of a clear-minded and neutral witness is of no 
| small importance.
| The Essays are in themselves a valuable contribution to 
| their particular class of literature; but they derive a 
| peculiar interest from a circumstance to which Lord 
| Cranborne alludes in his preface:  ~~
| <q> </q>
| It is impossible to read the book through, bearing this 
| fact in mind, without being amazed at the powers of 
| memory which so wide a grasp of historical knowledge 
| under such circumstances implies.  The accuracy with 
| which the author's facts are recounted, and the 
| judgment with which they are arranged, would have 
| been noticeable in an ordinary case as constituting the 
| intrinsic value of the book, and its real recommendation 
| to that large class of persons who will read an historical 
| sketch and will not read a history; but in the present 
| case they indicate an extraordinary development of the 
| faculty which is the most important an historical writer 
| can possess.  For the purposes of clear and lucid 
| narrative, no amount of authorities on the shelves of a 
| library are equal in value to a memory in which the 
| authorities are accessible at once without the laborious 
| aid of catalogue and index.  In his preface, Lord 
| Cranborne intimates that he has been for some time 
| collecting materials for the prosecution of historical 
| labours upon a more extended scale.  If he carries out 
| this intention, these essays give every promise that he 
| will do so with eminent success.  Impartiality of temper 
| and thorough mastery of his field of research are the 
| two great qualifications for a true historian; though in 
| our days we have been accustomed to see some of the 
| claimants to that name eke out their deficiencies in this 
| respect by the arts of the novelist or the platform orator.  
| Lord Cranborne, in his criticism on Prescott, to whose 
| example he naturally looks, gives token of a truer 
| appreciation of an historian's character:  and if he aids 
| in bringing back his countrymen to a severer standard 
| of historical excellence, he will have done no trivial 
| service to the science to which he has devoted himself.  
| He will do a still better service to society at large in 
| continuing to give, as he has already given by this work, 
| an example of the uses to which wealth and leisure may 
| be put.  There is much work for literature which poor 
| and busy men cannot do, and which is not done by 
| those who are free from these drawbacks quite as 
| abundantly as might be expected.  Political volunteers 
| from the wealthier classes are numerous enough; but 
| the literary volunteers are a comparatively scanty band.  
| The spectacle of historical labours undertaken for the 
| mere love of them, with so much success, and under 
| circumstances of some discouragement, is a welcome 
| one.  We are glad to see from the words <p> "first 
| series" </p> on his title-page, that Lord Cranborne's 
| great historical aptitudes are not to remain unemployed 
| for the future; and, besides the additional Essays which 
| those words promise, we hope in due time to welcome 
| from his pen some work of a more important and 
| comprehensive character.