It may take
liberties with time and space, and give the action distinctness by
throwing it into more manageable compass. But it may not alter the real
conditions of things, or represent life as other than it is. The
greatness of the poet depends on his being true to Nature, without
insisting that Nature shall theorize with him, without making her more
just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and, in difficult
matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be explained.
And if this be true of poetry--if Homer and Shakespeare are what they
are from the absence of every thing didactic about them--may we not thus
learn something of what history should be, and in what sense it should
aspire to teach?
If poetry must not theorize, much less should the historian theorize,
whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.
If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,
because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also
under the same conditions. "Macbeth," were it literally true, would be
perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind
of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and
words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful.
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