Bearing this in mind, we approach the records of history in a new spirit
and with a new hope. We desire to know neither origins nor ends, we
expect no cosmogony and we look for no apocalyptic vision. What we aim
at understanding is what we now are and where we now stand, and we
realize that to understand this we must not restrict our study to what
is merely of recent acquisition or growth. Neither ourselves nor our
environment are bounded by chronological limits; both are contemporary
with the Pyramids just as much as with the Eiffel Tower. We are not
merely the heirs but the epitomes of the ages. As our bodies are but the
present forms on which the secular forces of the earth continue their
dateless activities, so our spirits, our minds, our very selves are the
forms in which other spirits now forgotten or dimly remembered still
live and move and have their being, fulfilling the work which, while
still their names were named, they initiated or advanced. Not in pious
gratitude only must we labour to rescue their memory from fast-coming
oblivion, but because only so can we reach that knowledge of ourselves
and our world which is to us as living men all and alone important. Nor
will such study deny to us the reward we seek. So approaching the
labours of the historian, we shall not be jealous because he comes
before us with a tale, or as we call it, with a 'story'--a narrative of
'old unhappy things and battles long ago'. For though he so puts it,
spacing it out in sections, half-concealing, half-revealing its logical
connexions and ultimate unity, its real meaning, its ultimate--which is
also its present--import is an account of what we now are and the
situation in which we now stand; and unless somehow for each of us its
message comes into such an account, distils and sublimates into such a
quintessential judgement on the present, History remains but 'a tale of
sound and fury, signifying nothing'. It is in the profoundest sense
useless to us unless in the end we can say '_De nobis fabula