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Whitman

To M y Father George Edwin Emery
Poet, yoarnalist and Hixtorical Writer

 

 

 

A NEW
TEA/CHING 0F HISTORY

HERE has been a great, an im—
mense change in the writing of his—

tory, mainly in the last thirty years,
brought about by the researches of scholars
and the bringing to light by the publication,
as well as by the perusal of the documents,
the records and the long—buried letters of the
whole world. All this has reyolutionized

history, and must change the thought of
millions.

No government which possesses manu—
scripts but has at length yielded them to the
patient labor of the men and women who

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guard the future, the writer who makes plain
what the world has been, that we may not
stumble in the world which is to be. Every
ducal palace, every governmental bureau,
every country manor, every peasant home is
being literally ransacked for tidings of the
past, and all this is poured into print with
as great fervor and relentless speed as if
another and greater French Revolution
were upon us and all the originals were to
be destroyed.

It is inevitable that, with a fuller knowl—
edge, many of the conclusions drawn by elder
writers should undergo marked change, per-
haps not so much in the mitigation ofvillainy,
or the adulation of virtue, as in the clearer
sight of causes and efiects,—what may be
termed the physics of history. Both in
character and volume history has changed.
How much only its custodians know.

For the first, one may turn to the True
George Washington and Real Benjamin
Franklin—works in every one’s mouth;

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that is, in every one’s‘ beyond the coal~
breaker boy, and they would not be beyond
him but for a new slavery that has arisen
upon the earth. A new sin which has had
its counterpart, but never its like upon the
earth before.

In its volume and exact recording of causes
and effects, the change has been astounding
and incalculable. For the last, one may speak
of the oft—quoted and solemnly inculcated
statement that William Penn’s treaty with
the Indians was the only one never broken,
because of the strictjustice and tolerant kind-
ness of the early Quaker proprietors toward
the savages. The cause of all this, as John
Fiske, one of our greatest modern historians,
has conclusively shown, was the cruel con—
quering of the tribes of the seaboard by their
fierce enemies of kindred blood, the Five
Nations, who at the time of Penn’s settle—
ment had more than half exterminated them,
and had bound the survivors in the bonds of
a cruel slavery which left them subject to

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any newcomers. They were bound by oath
which if broken meant annihilation by their
foes, to bear no arms and to pursue only the
occupations ofsquaws or Indian women. It
is small wonder and small glory compared
with that which he has been receiving with so
much complacency for two hundred and fifty
years that the founders of our wealthy com—
monwealth will get from revised history.

But in volume, in torrent, in mass, in ex-
tent, and in breadth and painstaking detail,
in a distribution of fertile fact, which, like an
inundation of the Nile, has covered the earth,
no subject of modern thought and study, ex—
cept science, equals it.

The production of literature varies com—
paratively little from age to age; in all
countries allowing thought and record its
blossoming is sure. Its value difiers amaz-
ingly; so much that, dazzled by the radiance
of the spacious days of the great Elizabeth
and our late Victorian era, we forget that,
though less highly valued, the dismal inter-

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regnums had almost as many poets and
prosifiers.

Do not misunderstand when I say that
never has there been so great a forest of his—
tory. Records. made as records should be, in
bare, simple and concise form, easily tabu—
lated,——- these, invaluable as they are and will
continue to be, --— are not history. They are
only the materials of history. Literature
may have fact or imagination for its founda—
tion; it blossoms to truth and beauty from
either stem. Would that it were always the
good as well as the true and the beautiful!

History is the orderly and systematic pre—
sentation of the sequence of facts with a view
to their important bearing upon future
thought and conduct. Literature has, or
should have, ethical fitness —— the sanction of
true religion; but beyond that its tangled
blossoms may riot as fancy’s pleasure is. Can
,history be derived from literature? Some-
times. It is a diflicult matter; for, first, the
literature as literature is destroyed, and the

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resultant facts to be used as material collected
as from dust— dry records for its use.

So great is the difference between literature
and history l It is, I again repeat, not a mere
matter of style, but of content, and that of
history is of strict, definite purpose. . Liter—
ature, like religion, persuades; history, like
law, teaches.

Dealing sometimes with the same subjects,
often with the same epochs, the distinction
between them is not clearly seen. When it
is, there will come the time for a difference
in their teaching.

To me, who for years have been kept to
another work, watching the special work of
my desire in instruction done as best they
could by others, has come a time when the
desire to instruct those who must do what I
no longer shall have power to do, to be what
is the ideal of any worker in any field, a leader
ofa new and a better way to accomplish an .
important and honorable purpose, to teach
history as it should be taught, with the modern
mass of history before us.

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However great the amount of literature in
any language is or may be, the point of se—
lection once passed, any portion may be taken
by itself alone. One or twenty poems, plays
or volumes, all precious,—- it is a matter then
only of hours, of tastes, of ability to choose
for mental profit and for the soul’s solace.
We have many a teacher of literature, from
the mother who sings the old ballad to her
listening children and the primary teacher
with her flock of children who with folded
hands repeat their memory gems to the great
ones of earth, poets themselves, who have
taught themselves as they taught others song.

Just as it always has been taught, so liter—
ature must ever be taught, from the old he—
ginnings onward. From the narrow rivulets
and trickling streams and shining cascades of
rippling song to the broad sea of Shake—
speare’s almost boundless mind and art.

History, as I have already said, is, in its
plan, its purpose, its scope, different; more—
over by the immense mass of new material

I I

furnished by modern research, it has assumed
a new character, taken on new aspects and
shows new and unexpected features even in
familiar places.

How shall the modern teacher deal with
it ? Every author has his own methods, but
the well—equipped instructor of so important
a branch as this has no one writer for his sole
guide, else human liberty of thought were
lost and human progress impeded.

To make a good beginning is imperative.
To start with myth is to establish a false
base—to presentliterature and not history,—
and history is not a mere side growth from
the literary stem; it is the indispensably
secular and constructive. Comparing them
both to pyramids, literature never quite comes
down to the ground; it would not be litera—
ture if it did, but its mouth is towards us
like a huge trumpet, its apex in the clouds,
and through it may come the immediate voice
of God to man. To study literature we be-
gin by studying its beginnings and its pro-

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ducers. To study itin its entirety is to study
the spirit of God Himself, and to study
it individually is to study the soul of man.
History began only with the civilization of
man and the keeping ofunimpassioned record
for no purpose of partisanship; and not for
praise only, but for the steady protection and
progress ofmankind. From the world around
us, and from what has been, we find our his-
tory to be made.

This distinction at last, in these later years,
having been clearly made between literature
and history, but one thing follows, and must
follow in the course of time —that is, differ—
ence in their teaching. Heretofore all has
been considered literature and has been so
taught, from myth to modern song.

History stands now, clear and distinct, by
itself and should be taught from the present
back to its sources, with a contemporary sur—
vey at every step.

Beginning with the present state of man—
ners and men, in whatever country or clime,

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all available records should contribute to the
understanding of the production of the pres—
ent age. That, before being studied, takes
us farther back, and so, going, we gain a phil—‘
osophy and depth of knowledge otherwise
unreached.

For history is not the beautiful artificial
thing that literature is —literature which is
true or should be true to ethics only, and
which soars with free and rainbow wing above
the realm of fact. History marches, like the
armies of Napoleon, in solid platoons and
columns along the highways of fact, and falls,
ifit must fall, every man in his place, defeated
only in the invasion of the dark, barbaric
past.

All history should be taught backwards, to
give its full effect and importance. When
the world really comprehends the vast ac—
quisitions it has made in the last thirty years,
it will be so done.

That I have not done it myself, is no
fault of mine. The teacher's desk has been

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mine for twenty years, but other and less con-

genial tasks allotted me have left no oppor—
tunity for a life’s cherished design.

MARY E.- B. EMERY.

 

 

University of Pennsylvania Libraries
www.1ibra .u enn.edu

leatm ent
" 215-898-7556

 

      

  

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