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'OHN FISKE'S ten volumes of American history' constitute a continuous and a well-nigh complete history of America, from the earliest times to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States in 1787. The volumes have the defects and the advantages of their origin. Nearly if not all of them were originally delivered as lectures. They contain in occasional summaries repetitions necessary in a course of lectures but not in a continuous history, and occasional colloquialisms in style, more appropriate to the platform than to the printed book; and the chapters have a quasi-independence of one another, to be looked for in lectures, but not in separate chapters of a volume. But the advantages of Mr. Fiske's method of composition fully counterbalance the minor disadvantages. Some books are said to smell of the lamp; these books smack of the platform, and the flavor is excellent. We do not know anything in historical literature quite parallel in this respect to Mr. Fiske's American histories. They are in striking contrast to the histories of Gibbon and Macaulay. Nor do they resemble John Lord's historical lectures; the latter are oratorical, these are conversational. Like Thackeray, Mr. Fiske talks to his readers and tells rather than writes his story. It is partly for this reason that his volumes are such fascinating material for reading aloud.

Four elements enter into historical literature, and its character depends upon their proportion and the manner in which they are fused. The historian must first of all be accurate, he must be conscientious in research and judicial in temper; he must strive above everything else to ascertain and report the facts, whether they appear to confirm or to refute his theories. "I embrace and caress truth," says Montaigne, "in what hand soever I find it, and cheerfully surrender myself, and extend to it my conquered arms, as far off as I can discover it." This is a The Discovery of America, 2 vols. Old Virginia and Her Neighbours, 2 vols. The Beginnings of New England, I vol. The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, 2 vols The American Revolution, 2 vols,

The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789, I vol. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston.

fine definition of the true historical spirit, the lack of which is a prime defect in the otherwise admirable and always interesting histories of Macaulay and of Froude. The partisanship of the former, the dramatic instincts of the latter, make them sometimes reluctant to receive the truth, or ready to receive without adequate and thorough inquiry a fraudulent pretense whose disguise it should not have been difficult to penetrate. But it is not enough to know and to report the facts. The historian must be an interpreter; he must comprehend the vital meaning of the facts. As literature is an interpretation of life through the imagination, so history is an interpretation of life through the observation. The historian is more than an annalist, more than a dry reporter of events in their chronological order. It is not enough to tell us that the battle of Marston Moor was fought on a certain day between Puritans and Cavaliers; we must know who the Puritans and the Cavaliers were, and what they stood for. The historian, therefore, must be a dramatist; not, indeed, using history as Shakespeare used it, for dramatic purposes, but seeing the drama in each event, and so narrating the event as to make his reader see its dramatic meaning. Life is composed not merely of outward circumstances; it is the interplay of soul on soul-a current whose swirls and eddies are the product of conflicting human wills intermingling, mcdifying, clashing with each other. The historian must comprehend this real life, discover these motives, unmask the men whose story he tells, disrobe them of their aliases which they have assumed, or which have been put upon them by others. Nor is this enough to make a great historian. Again, history is more than a series of outward events; it is also more than a series of successive dramas. Behind the events are human purposes; behind the human purposes is a divine will working out, in Strange ways and despite recalcitrant instruments, a great design. Mr. Fiske, in narrating certain events in the Virginia colony, thus states this truth with rare

vigor of faith and simplicity of expression: "In the unfolding of these events there is poetic beauty and grandeur as the purpose of the Infinite wisdom reveals itself in its cosmic process, slowly but inexorably, hasting not but resting not, heedless of the clashing aims and discordant cries of short-sighted mortals, sweep ing their tiny efforts into its majestic current, and making all contribute to the fulfillment of God's will." It is because Augustine saw this truth so clearly that his history of "The City of God" is a classic, despite the lack of the scientific spirit and the dramatic instinct; it is because Gibbon did not see it at all, but could discover in the birth-pains of a new and Christian civilization in Europe nothing but the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, that his history is fatally defective, despite painstaking research and dramatic and literary genius. Finally, the historian must have a style which will enable him to communicate to others the results of his historical research, his dramatic insight, and his philosophical understanding. Without this his volumes. may be valuable, but they will not be interesting. Dullness is deadly; and if the history is dull, be it never so valuable, like Bancroft's History of the United States it may get upon the shelves of every reputable library, but, like Bancroft's History, it will remain there, occasionally referred to but rarely read.

John Fiske, as a historian, possesses in an eminent degree these four qualities.

It is true that there is little indication that Mr. Fiske has made for these histories any of that kind of original research which makes itself apparent in the work of Motley, Stubbs, Green, Gardiner, and Winsor. He has not brought to light material before either absolutely unknown or wholly inaccessible, as Dr. Pastor has done in his recent History of the Popes. The volumes were written, so far as appears, in this country, and the sources were found in the libraries at Cambridge, Mass., and Washington, D. C. But in the use of these libraries no pains has been spared; the latest accessible materials have been found and full use has been made of them; they have been studied with an unprejudiced temper; and, what is more important to the general reader, their real significance, and their bearing

on the characters whom Mr. Fiske is portraying and on the history which he is narrating, are well interpreted. Illustrations of this wise use of manuscripts which others have unearthed are afforded by Mr. Fiske's account of the letters sent by the Spanish Ambassador in London to his royal master at Madrid, discovered and published by Alexander Brown, and of the manuscript records of the Virginia Company, now in the Congressional Library, and by his interpretation of the significance of both. Equally striking illustrations of his painstaking inquiry into a historical problem, and his keen judicial temper in weighing the respective merits of conflicting records, are furnished by his admirable story of the life of John Smith, whom he succeeds in transforming from the realm of legend to that of history, and in succoring from the charges of his enemies, which have been given a too ready credence by certain historians, chiefly for the reason that the charges were incorporated in official documents.

It is not, however, as a discoverer but as an interpreter that John Fiske is preeminent. His sympathies are unconcealedly and unreservedly democratic. His statement that Jefferson " was in his way a much more profound thinker than Hamilton, though he had not such a constructive genius as the latter," sufficiently indicates his political point of view. The reader who compares Mr. Fiske's account of the preliminary events which led up to the American Revolution with that furnished by Goldwin Smith in his " History of the United States," or the portraits of Samuel Adams furnished by the two historians, will perhaps think, as we do, that Mr. Fiske overestimates the self-restraint of the New England colonists, if he does not overstate the wrongs which they suffered. But if the reader still further compares the two histories with the accounts furnished of that epoch by Sir George Trevelyan in his "American Revolution," and by Lecky in his "History of England in the Eighteenth Century," he will probably conclude that Mr. Fiske is far nearer the truth in his estimates of events and far less prejudiced in his estimates of men than Goldwin Smith. As a reader of men Mr. Fiske appears to us to be unsurpassed. He neither deifies George Washington nor

vilifies Benedict Arnold. In all his portrayal of men he is himself intensely human.

Nor is it in depicting dramatic events and in analyzing dramatic character alone that Mr. Fiske's insight appears; his broad human sympathies appear equally in his general understanding of contrasted types of character, such as the Puritans in New England and the Cavaliers and their camp-followers in Virginia. He believes. He believes in freedom of speech; he has no appetite for a Puritan theocracy; he admires Roger Williams; but he sees good reason for the exclusiveness of the Massachusetts colonists, and he declines to stigmatize them as bigoted because they would not allow religious dissension in their community at a time when men had not yet learned to act together in the State if they differed from one another in their theology. He appreciates and shares the humane sentiments which characterize our later civilization; but he is also able to realize the conditions which confronted the early colonists, and to write: "As a matter of practical policy the annihilation of the Pequots can be condemned only by those who read history so incorrectly as to suppose that savages whose business is to torture and slay can always be dealt with according to the methods in use between civilized peoples." At the same time he insists that a mighty nation, like the United States, is in honor bound to treat the red man with scrupulous justice, and refrain from cruelty in punishing his delinquencies." In short, his dominating sense of respect for humanity, which makes him temperamentally a democrat, never degenerates into sentimentalism, and his vital faith in what the nineteenth century stands for never causes him to forget that the seventeenth century was not the nineteenth. "It was a day of dungeons, whipping-posts, and thumbscrews, when slight offenders were maimed and bruised, and great offenders cut into pieces." It is only as the historian of New England understands this spirit of the seventeenth century that he can understand either the Inquisition in Spain or the punishments inflicted by the Puritans in New England.

This instinctive sympathy with all sorts and conditions of men, which is the source of the true dramatic temper, is mixed in

John Fiske with an evolutionary philosophy which is profoundly though not often professedly religious. The two types of men represented in theology by the Arminian and the Calvinist are represented in history by the biographer and the philosopher. The former sees men and their actions, the latter law and its operations. To Thomas Carlyle "Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here." To John William Draper, on the other hand, the great events of history come upon us in an unavoidable and inevitable way, and are due far more to precedent events and environing soil and climate than to any wit or wisdom, folly or wickedness, of men. John Fiske's dramatic sympathies give to him something of Carlyle's biographical view of history, his evolutionary philosophy gives to him something of Draper's philosophical view of history, and he finds—at least this is our understanding of his posi tion-the reconciliation of the two in the faith that the laws of nature are the laws of an Infinite Wisdom, which reveals itself in the progress of events, and makes al! things contribute at last to the fulfillment of the divine will. It may be said that Mr. Fiske was an evolutionist before he was a historian; but to him evolution is not the irresistible and glacier-like movement of a blind and passionless fate coercing men whose imagined freedom is a fantasy of egotistical brains; it is the work of an intelligent, purposeful, and beneficent Designer, accomplishing his designs through intelligent and free moral beings, whose better purposes he guides and reinforces, whose evil purposes he thwarts and overrules.

If we are right in thinking that these four elements enter into and combine to make the truly great historian-- painstaking research for the truth, dramatic interpretation of character, clear conception of the laws of human progress and the issues of human life, and vividness of style in so portraying events that both their human and their divine significance are apparent-then John Fiske, though perhaps surpassed in certain of these qualities by other writers, in the combination of them all deserves to rank among the foremost of the world's historians.