Page images
PDF
EPUB

President of the South Carolina Historical Society. Georgia of To-day by His Excellency, John M. Slaton, Governor of Georgia. Mr. Barnwell was not able to attend the banquet on account of illness, and Mr. Lawton B. Evans of Augusta responded to the sentiment of his address in a very appropriate impromptu speech.

The occasion was most enjoyable and successful in every way. The annual reports, and the addresses so far as it has been possible to obtain them, follow.

History

Address by Hon. Walter G. Charlton

Mr. President and Members of the Georgia Historical Society, Ladies and Gentlemen:

As I approach the exploitation of the theme which has been assigned to me, I congratulate myself that it is a Savannah audience to which I will speak. It is of the generous nature of Savannahians to listen with patience and apparent enthusiasm to any response-a happy condition emphasized by the fact that the speaker is not expected to be wise or profound or exhaustive nor the audience to give indications that it is swaying on the verge of impatience. The unwritten law is, if the subject may not be developed in ten minutes, the developer simply must not take sixty; if he is expected to write a sketch, he is not expected to follow in the footsteps of Buckle or Kirby and Spence and present a three volume introduction. History! What is History? I confess I do not know. Will we ever know, or will it enthuse us when we find the answer? When it comes to plain facts, Herodotus is not so far removed from Alice in Wonderland, and yet a precisian like Thucydides did not hesitate to make speeches for his historical characters which they never made nor could have made. You may select any of the volumes of Gibbon and with the spell of that genius upon you read until there is little time left for sleep, and all the while the doubt is with us whether we are following the decline and fall of an empire or the processes of "an iron will sapping with iron strength an iron creed." There is more of the human being than historian about Macaulay, and this does not put us on alarm. The one thing we do not exact of History is accuracy. We clamor for it and denounce the

tendency to rush after the glaring and the spectacular, but when the band begins to play and the flags to wave and the tramp of the warriors sounds on the highways, we follow with cheers and exact of the teller of the story that he record our impressions and not the truth. A great man or a great deed will occasionally pass down the corridors of time under the chaperonage of the Muse of History, but we may be very sure that the procession which follows will have in it the repellent figures of malice and slander and perversion, perversion by expression, perversion by silence. If the Muse must escort all of our great in this parlous time of ours, she is not without her embarrassments; and we can sympathize with her if she puts away her flowing robes and appears upon the scene narrowed as to skirts; broadened as to coat, aigretted as to head, with a tasteful legend in gold and green across her breast; and with the powder of peace upon her engaging features, and the powder of war veiling with its murky shadows the fascinating depths of her beautiful eyes. What is History? Is it the bare accumulation of dates and names and events; the lurid spectacle of stark battlefields; the swaying columns and crashing walls of empires; the tragedy of crushed hopes and the vision of mouldering ideals? Or is it the science of the ages; the deduction of great and vital principles formulated in the cold, precise expressions of definite conclusions, appealing to reason and not to emotion, logic rather than enthusiasm, to the selfishness of preservation and not to the wild abandon of patriotism? When we approach its domain are we to deaden our hearing to the beating of the drums and the blasts of the bugle; close our eyes to the glitter of the bayonets and the gleam of the sabre, the banners streaming in the smoke and glare of the combat? Or are we with atrophied memories and selfish consideration to search for the bare results of human struggles and human tragedy that the plodder along the highways of life may be advised when he comes to the parting of the ways that to the right is an abyss filled

with the skeletons of dead governments and to the left the waste and desolation of ice-bound deserts? If we are to hear no more the soft voice of the Muse of poetry singing of the deeds which made men great, and beguile our hours with nothing more entrancing than the epitaphs of noble causes-why do we not take to heart the lessons and warnings of History, and if necessary, turn back to the things which mean life and liberty and dignity and character? Why travel along the Appian Way with its ruins and travesties and inglorious endings when we may walk the Georgia roads with Georgia History in our hearts and Georgia's victories singing in our memories! Are we never to cause questioning when we consider history? Would any one read history with more pleasure than he would break rocks on the street if it consisted of Carlyle's account of the ancestry of Frederick the Great! Is History meant to be the crystallized pathos of human endeavor toward noble ends, adorned by the interpreting graces of literature and appealing to the enthusiasm of the patriot and the sympathy of the good and true? Is Napoleon with folded arms and scowling brow, trampling on the hopes and destinies of mankind; posing before pyramids, and leaving his army to struggle with hunger and despair and misery as it stumbled along the ice-bound roads of Russia, any more of history than the poor stupid King of the French, escorted by the mob to the end of all things whilst they sang the cheerful song "Where can one be happier than in the bosom of his family?" If the test of true greatness is to be found in the elaborate display of printer's ink, why is not Thaw greater than either? Does it make any difference whether Marbot really rode up the hill at Eylau or only dreamed he did! We nevertheless see his return charge, the cannon ball crashing through his hat, and his Italian mare tearing out the faces of the obstructing enemies. Be the facts what they may, it is Macaulay's description of Walker at Londonderry which will live; and Horatius at the Bridge; and Regulus in bonds, and the

narrow pass at Thermopylae, and the deep-hued waters of Salamis; and, with mental reservations, Spartacus and Casabianca. And whenever a monster appears in Crete, we pray that another Theseus will arise in Athens. We may preach forever the austerity of History; its natural isolation from the allurements which the topics of human action throw out; its stolid impartiality. That is the theory of the History we affect. What we desire is another matter. Victory and retreat; the sweeping charge; the tramp of the march; legions and brigades and regiments; armies and generals and privates; those who strive and conquer, those who strive and fail-this is the array which swarm into our thoughts. The suffering and sacrifice; the broken hearts and smiling faces; the prisons and "white washed halls," how they throng into our hearts and memories, shaping our lives, bending the strong with pity and putting the stamp of triumph upon the features of the weak! If History dealt only with results, its terms would be measurably pronounced. It is in the consideration of causes that the historian encounters his bad quarter of an hour. Great movements and great events have their beginnings in some trifling act or mood or word, a frown or a smile, a phase of nature, or a molecule in the eye. If Drouet had been hired to change the horses he would not have peered into the stolid face of Louis the Sixteenth and there might never have been lanterns ornamented with swaying forms, nor tumbrils and guillotines. The literary canity of a member of the committee on style caused the omission from the preamble to the Constitution of the names of the States, and put in action the processes which culminated in four years of bitter warfare. A storm off Hatteras gave the Governor of South Carolina just time to meet the treacherous expedition to Sumter. The historian who can trace causes and their formative course through the life of a people, and tell the truth and nothing but the truth is yet to be born. The temptation is overwhelming in deducing general principles from facts to distort facts to

« PreviousContinue »