ABSTRACT
The study of history is a personal activity – it is an individual reading thesources of history for himself. History is, or ought to be, the least authoritarian of the sciences (if that is the right word). Its essential value lies in the shock and excitement aroused by the impact of the very ways and thought of the past upon the mind, and it is for this reason that actual original documents – themselves a physical survival of that past – exercise such fascination upon those who have caught something of its secret. The late canon Foster, writing of the marvellous riches of the archives of Lincoln Cathedral, has perfectly expressed the nature of this emotion. Acknowledging the debt of inspiration he owed to a brother historian, to whom he had written about them, he says: ‘Soon afterwards he paid me a visit in Lincolnshire, and it will be long before I shall forget his wonder and delight as I opened before his eyes box after box of the original charters. Each moment I expected to hear from his lips the famous “Pro-di-gi-ous” of the enthusiastic and simple-minded Dominie.’ The lectures and the textbooks are a necessary preliminary, a grammar of the subject; but the purpose of all this grammar is to lead the student himself to the sources, from the study of which whatever power our writing and talking has is derived. Where this object is not achieved, we have failed. In my youth it was still common for reviewers to state that A or B had said ‘the last word’ on the difficult question of X, Y or Z. The same fantastic conception still led historians to regard the sources as some dirty coal-mine, from which a precious deposit was recovered, leaving behind a vast, useless slag-heap. I would not be misunderstood: bibliography and historiography are, in their place, of the utmost importance; but the most brilliant reconstructions of the past can never lessen the immediate value of the sources of individual study.
