in these days from approximating
to such a combination we need not here insist. Criticism
in the hands of men like Niebuhr seems to have
accomplished great intellectual triumphs: and in
Germany and France and among ourselves we have our
new schools of the philosophy of history; yet their real
successes have hitherto only been destructive; when
philosophy reconstructs, it does nothing but project its
own idea; when it throws off tradition, it cannot work
without a theory, and what is a theory but an imperfect
generalization caught up by a predisposition? what
is Comte's great division of the eras, but a theory, and
facts but as day in his hands which he can mould to
illustrate it, as every clever man will find facts to be,
let his theory be what it will. Intellect can destroy but
it cannot make alive again,--call in the creative faculties,
call in Love, Idea, Imagination, and we have living
figures, but we cannot tell whether they are figures which
ever lived before. Alas, the high faith in which Love
and Intellect can alone unite in their fulness, has not
yet found utterance in modern historians.

The greatest man who has as yet given himself to
the recording of human affairs is, beyond question,
Cornelius Tacitus. Alone in Tacitus a serene calmness
of insight was compatible with intensity of feeling; he
took no side; he may have been Imperialist, he may
have been Republican, but he has left no sign whether
he was either: he appears to have sifted facts with
scrupulous integrity; to administer his love, his scorn,
his hatred, according only to individual merit, and these
are rather felt by the reader in the life-like clearness of
his portraits than expressed in words by himself. Yet
such a power of seeing into things was only possible to
him, because there was no party left with which he
could determinedly side, and no wide spirit alive in
Rome through which he could feel; the spirit of Rome,
the spirit of life had gone away to seek other forms, and
the world of Tacitus was a heap of decaying institutions;
a stage where men and women, as they themselves were
individually base or noble, played over their
little parts. Life indeed was come into the world, was
working in it, and silently shaping the old dead corpse
into fresh and beautiful being; Tacitus alludes to it
once only in one brief scornful chapter; and the most
poorly gifted of those forlorn biographers whose
unreasoning credulity was piling up the lege