NEAL BROWN. SPECIAL ADDRESS. THE COMEDY OF HISTORY. NEAL BROWN, OF WAUSAU, WISCONSIN. The study of the past, whenever it is written about according to the established method, demonstrates that the chief weakness of the Muse of History is her habit of taking herself seriously, and always writing large in her pretentious folios. She is never duller than when she is giving us the toll of the dead from some big battle field, or describing the parades of kings and dignitaries. If History is Philosophy teaching by example, these things are not the main parts of History. They tell nothing of the causes of great movements, or of the decadence, rise or destruction of nations, or of the influence of moral forces. The story of human life must be rescued from the dust and rubbish, the oblivion and fable, of conventional history before it can be rightly read. From such history we get mainly detached parts,-mere bones unfleshed. As Saint Beuve puts it, History is in large part a set of fables which men agree to believe in. Who now cares to know the number of the dead who fell on Pharsalia's Plain, or what were the military tactics of Caesar and Pompey? Our question is,-What was the living Roman like? What we thirst for is knowledge of the every day life of Rome, the life of the streets, and shops, of hut and patrician place, of barber and shoemaker, as well as of lofty senator, of subject peoples on remote frontiers, or being led SPECIAL ADDRESS. as spoil of conquest, in the capital. For wherever there is a man, history is made. To simply read of the slaughter of the early Christians in the arena, is not entirely satisfying. What manner of people were they? Were they pure and holy beings, or were pagans and Christians of one breed? Were they all Christians de jure, or were some only Christians de facto, capable, if they had the power, of casting their pagan brethren to the wild beasts? Certain it is that as soon as they divided into sects, Christians gave each other only the mercy of the pagan. Fox's Book of Martyrs is obscure enough on this important matter to rank as a typical history. All his martyrs are properly sublimated and sanctified, but complete sanctification cannot atone for the absence of character sketches of martyr and persecutor. It is likely that some of the martyrs were not saints, but mere rebels against the state, and consequently the state religion, on political, not religious grounds. Probably they were not always persecuted in Rome because they were Christians, or later, because they were Protestants or reformers, but because they were trying to destroy the existing government. Many of them doubtless enjoyed persecution, and took a stubborn pride in their ability to burn for conscience's sake. The distance may not be far between them and the savage devotee of self torture, who hangs himself up by means of a hook thrust through the muscles of his back. The love of non-conformity dominates some men, they non-conform for the sake of non-conformity. It is the pose of vanity, not an unselfish sacrifice. One cannot reach these conclusions from the History of Martyrs without reading between the lines. In these dense and solid volumes, a martyr is a saint, not a mere human being. You do not look for qualification of this any more than you would expect to find in folk-lore tales, the elder brother, or sister, good, or the younger brother or sister, bad. NEAL BROWN. The best history has been written by those who did not know that they were writing history as they artlessly babbled and gossiped of the life about them. Our prayer should be, not for more Macaulays, or Humes, each with a case to make, a theory to sustain, always retained for the prosecution or defense, and writing history as a brief, but for more Boswells, more gossips like Pepys. The kitchen midden of the Cave Man, battlefield, buried city, and ruined castle, have alike one tale to tell, but how worthless it is if we read from it only the great events, the great tragedies, and leave unread the long levels between. The Battle of New Orleans, where Wellington's veterans went down before the squirrel rifle, was a brief but tremendous drama. But more important is the life of the Indianfighters and frontiersmen, who piled that field with British dead. Before we had gained our independence, men of their blood were climbing the mountain ranges and spreading westward. More adventurous than the Puritan, and many of them more Puritan than the New Englanders, they were killing Indians from their block houses on the Mississippi before New England had commenced to overflow into the great West. They did not like to be crowded, and when settlers became too thick, they moved on. The advance guard was elbowed out of the South before Wisconsin became a State, and trekking across the wilderness to the Columbia River, established there a republic of their own, where they lived in great content, undisturbed for many years by near neighbors. They always took with them enough government for their own needs. They conducted their foreign relations with the rifle. They granted lands to each other, and these grants were confirmed in the Oregon Donation Act, when Oregon was admitted to the Union. If those of this tribe had been defeated at New Orleans, we might never have dislodged the British from Louisiana, |