and colour,
from the height of an individual interest of our own, and beneath the
light of our individual character. We see only very little at a time,
and that little is not what it appeared to the men of the past; but we
see at least, if not the same things, yet in the same manner in which
they saw, as we see from the standpoints of personal interest and in the
light of personal temper. Scientifically we doubtless lose; but is the
past to be treated only scientifically? and can it not give us, and do
we not owe it, something more than a mere understanding of why and how?
Is it a thing so utterly dead as to be fit only for the scalpel and the
microscope?

Surely not so. The past can give us, and should give us, not merely
ideas, but emotions: healthy pleasure which may make us more light of
spirit, and pain which may make us more earnest of mind; the one, it
seems to me, as necessary for our individual worthiness as is the other.
For to each of us, as we watch the past, as we lie passive and let it
slowly circulate around us, there must come sights which, in their
reality or in their train of associations, and to the mind of each
differently, must gladden as with a sense of beauty, or put us all into
a sullen moral ache. I should hate to be misunderstood in this more,
perhaps, than in anything else in the world. I speak not of any dramatic
emotion, of such egotistic, half-artistic pleasure as some may get from
the alternation of cheerfulness and terror, from the excitement caused
by evil from which we are as safely separated as are those who look on
from the enfuriate bulls in an arena. To such, history, and the history
especially of the Renaissance, has been made to pander up but too much.
The pain I speak of is the pain which must come to every morally
sentient creature with the contemplation of some one of the horrible
tangles of evil, of the still fouler intermeshing of evil with good,
which history brings up ever and anon. Evil which is past, it is true,
but of which the worst evil almost of all, the fact of its having been,
can never be past, must ever remain present; and our trouble and
indignation at which is holy, our pain is healthy: holy and healthy,
because every vibration of such pain as that makes our moral fibre more
sensitive; because every immunity from such sensation deadens our higher
nature: holy and healthy also because, just as no image of pleasurable
things can pass before us without gathering a