Phil could stand this no longer

Phil could stand this no longer. With a whoop and a bound (he had just won the long jump in his college sports) he cleared the broad ditch, and alighted clean in the meadow round which they were tramping.

‘ Why,’ he cried, as a second bound brought him back again to the side of his Venerable friend, ‘ at that rate we should want at least a hundred works, I suppose in ten volumes each, or a thousand volumes in all, cram full of gritty facts of no good to any one. All this week I have been entering in my note-book such bits as this: — “ Ecgfrith marched to a place called the Hoar Apple-Tree. It is not known where this is, or why he went there. He left it the next day, and neither he nor it are ever mentioned again in the chronicles.” What is the good to me of knowing that? ’ he asked, as if a cheeky freshman was likely to put the Reverend iethelbald into a tight place.

‘ Bad, bad! ’ said the tutor, who began to fear that he was wasting his time on Phil, ‘ you will never be a credit to your college if you can make game of “truth” like that ! One would think a young man who hoped to do something would care to know a few true facts about his English forbears a thousand years ago. But the question is not what you care to know, but what you ought to know; and every Englishman ought to know every word in the Saxon Chronicle, to say nothing of the rest daily sofia tour.

Nor is it a question at all about your thousand volumes of history, the bulk of which deal with “periods” that do not concern you at all. Your thousand volumes, too, is a very poor estimate after all. You would find that not ten thousand volumes, perhaps not a hundred thousand volumes, would contain all the truths which have ever been recorded in contemporary documents, together with the elucidations, comments, and various amplifications which each separate truth would properly demand.’

‘ But at this rate,’ said the freshman gloomily, ‘ I shall never get beyond Ecgfrith and the other break-jaw Old- English sloggers. When we come up to Oxford we never seem to get out of an infinite welter of “origins” and primitive forms of everything.

I used to think the Crusades, the Renascence, Puritanism, and the French Revolution were interesting epochs or movements. But here lectures seem to go round and round the Mark-system, or the aboriginal customs of the Jutes. We are told that it is mere literary trifling to take any interest in Richelieu and William of Orange, Frederick of Prussia, or Mirabeau and Danton. The history of these men has been adequately treated in very brilliant books which a serious student must avoid. He must stick to Saxon charters and the Doomsday Survey.’

‘Of course, he must,’ said the tutor, ‘if that is his “period” — and a very good period it is. If you know how many houses were inhabited at Dorchester and Brid- port at the time of the Survey, and how many there had been in the Old-English time, you know something definite. But you may write pages of stuff about what smatterers call the “philosophy of history,” without a single sentence of solid knowledge. When every inscription and every manuscript remaining has been copied and accurately unravelled, then we may talk about the philosophy of history.’

‘ But surely,’ said Crichtonius mirabilis, ‘you don’t wish me to believe that there is no intelligible evolution in the ages, and that every statement to be found in a chronicle is as much worth remembering as any other statement? ’

Reverend Aithelbald dogmatically

‘You have got to remember them all,’ replied the Reverend Aithelbald dogmatically, ‘ at any rate, all in your “period.” You may chatter about “evolution” as fast as you like, if you take up Physical Science and go to that beastly museum; but if you mention “evolution” in the History School, you will be gulfed — take my word for it! I daresay that all statements of fact—true statements I mean — may not be of equal importance; but it is far too early yet to attempt to class them in order of value. Many generations of scholars will have to succeed each other, and many libraries will have to be filled, before even our bare materials will be complete and ready for any sort of comparative estimate. All that you have to do, dear boy, is to choose your period (I hope it will be Old-English somewhere), mark out your “claim,” as Californian miners do, and then wash your lumps, sift, crush quartz, till you find ore, and don’t cry “ Gold! ” till you have had it tested.’

This was a hard saying to his Admirable young friend, who felt like the rich young man in the Gospel when he was told to sell all that he had and to follow the Master. ‘ I have no taste for quartz-crushing,’ said he gloomily; ‘what I care for are Jules Michelet on the Middle Ages, Macaulay’s pictures of Charles 11. and his court — (wonderfull scene that, the night of Charles’s seizure at Whitehall!) — Carlyle on Mirabeau and Danton, and Froude’s Reformation and Armada. These are the books which stir my blood. Am I to put all these on the shelf? ’