We need a literature of science which shall be
readable. So far from doing away with the school of great historians,
the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need
merely that the future writers of history, without losing the
qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the new
facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal. Dryness
is not in itself a measure of value. No "scientific" treatise about
St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that
Joinville's place is in both history and literature; no minute study
of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot--and Marbot is
as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the
branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art
of presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than
the layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics
which can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of
realization, it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the
future must essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great
historians of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an
honorable, but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian
who produces books which are not literature must rest content with the
honor, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him
who gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to
use.
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