EDWARD EGGLESTON THE NEW HISTORY [Address by Edward Eggleston, editor, author (born in Vevay, Ind., December 10, 1837; ——————————), delivered at his inauguration as President of the American Historical Association, held in Boston, December, 1900.] MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION, FELLOW STUDENTS OF HISTORY:-I thank you to-night for your preference in choosing me to the Presidency of the Historical Association. It is one of the honors of my life. It I remember hearing Mr. Lowell apologize for reading an address he had been accustomed to speak off-hand. He said, "I have suffered a loss of the memory of names. is the first falling of the leaves of memory." I, who have been wont to speak without notes for more than forty years, must come here to-night with Lowell's beautiful apology on my lips. Since a little more than a year ago my memory cannot be depended on for names, and I too am forced to plead "the first falling of the leaves of memory." Let me begin without further introduction. Let me speak the things in my heart. Let me bring myself along with me, as Wendell Phillips said at Harvard. I propose to speak to you mainly of the New History. All our learning takes its rise from Greece. No other superstition has held so long as the classic. For five hundred years nearly every historical writer has felt it necessary to touch his cap in a preface to Herodotus and Thucydides. They are certainly models of style, no one contradicting. A man like myself, on whose Greek the rust of thirty-five years has fallen, may be permitted to shelter himself behind so great a Grecian as Professor Jebb. In the following keen words he makes retrenchments on Thucydides: "It is a natural subject of regret, though not a just cause of surprise or complaint, that the history [of Thucydides] tells us nothing of the literature, the art, or the social life under whose influences the author had grown up." "Among the illustrious contemporaries," says Jebb, "whose very existence would be unknown to us from his pages are the dramatists Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes; the architect Ictinus; the sculptor Phidias; the physician Hippocrates; the philosophers Anaxagoras and Socrates." .“ If Thucydides had mentioned Sophocles," continues he, "as a general in the Samian war, it may be doubted whether he would have noticed the circumstance that Sophocles also wrote dramas, unless it had been for the purpose of distinguishing him from a namesake." Jebb qualifies his statement by urging that Thucydides sought to do only one thing, to write the history of the Pelopennesian war without permitting the intrusion of anything else. But Thucydides must have had the notion that war was the most important thing in the world and that all the art and eloquence of his time were, as he calls them, merely "recreations of the human spirit." Add to this that nearly one fourth of Thucydides' history is made up of speeches imitated from the epic poets and that most of them were the work of the author. His history is a splendid piece of literature, but it is not a model for a modern writer. The reductions on Herodotus are essential. His credulity alone is an impairment to his character as a historian. Neither from Herodotus nor from Thucydides can we learn to write history in the modern sense. Their histories will remain, as Thucydides said of his, "a possession forever." But it would be strange if we had not learned anything of the art of writing history in a cycle of nearly twenty-four hundred years. Let us brush aside once for all the domination of the classic tradition. Let us come to English letters. One of our early examples is one of our best. In English literature Sir Walter Raleigh is in a sense both Herodotus and Thucydides and something more, as became a modern. The |