Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/103

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by Motley, the history of Charles the Bold by Foster Kirk, or of the United States by Bancroft.

Besides this succession to the historians of the 18th century, who were led by general ideas and sought literary form adequate to their conception of personalities and developments, the German philosophy of the opening years of the 19th century, the diplomatic and archivistic studies of the French Benedictines some decades earlier, the scrupules of the archaeologists gave rise to another directive in the writing of history: the methodical pursuit of truth, the attainable verities in the facts. For other schools, strong, enlightened minds were necessary, with some literary talent and notably an experience of life: their interpretation had ever the personal character of a creative spirit; for the second, good schooling, a normal intelligence and the sense of honestly accomplising their duty to the university sufficed.

The democratic directives of contemporary life, as well as the necessity of having teachers of history for the secondary schools, archivists and librarians for the public repositaries of knowledge, favoured the development, the universal expansion of this second school. A product of bureaucratic Germany, where everything could be accomplished without direct contact with the world, within the four walls of a study, and not of the organic Germany, brilliantly represented by the most open mind which ever interested itself with history (that of Leopold von Ranke), it was extended to other nations by the enhanced prestige of victorious German arms after 1870. Not however in conservative England, where such splendid works as the «Constitutional History of England» by Stubbs, who as a professor was obliged only at rare intervals to hold the lectures which were later collected in a rare volume, were written without the aid of foreign methods,