Remarks by Charles Harding Firth | V2Melody Quotations

“The time has gone by when one man could sit down in his study and undertake to write a continuous history of England or France; and it will not come again in our days.”

On history becoming too vast for solitary mastery · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

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Work

“He has remained too long the passive recipient of other men's knowledge.”

Criticising a training that leaves students merely receptive · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“It is legal tender everywhere in Oxford, and like all paper currencies drives out better money.”

A wry image for how a mediocre standard crowds out a better one · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“The exercises of the parade-ground have not prepared him for the campaign.”

On the gap between examination training and real historical work · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“Your little pool feels every wind and reflects the stars; your little plot of ground becomes a miniature world, reproducing the greater one without.”

A vivid image for how deep study of one period opens onto the whole · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“To understand one thing it is necessary to know so many others that a man is always learning something new.”

Arguing that specialisation need not narrow the mind · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“This implies, as all concentration must, some renunciation, some self-discipline, some restraint of wandering desires; but it brings its reward at once.”

On the cost and payoff of disciplined study · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“When we are sober we resolve to know one thing, if we can.”

On the need to narrow ambition to a single field of study · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“When we begin reading we are insatiably curious; all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them seem to lie open before us in our books.”

Recalling the boundless appetite of a young student · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“Only those endure in which the matter is so solid and the form so perfect, and both so harmoniously united, that they still satisfy and charm, and seem to triumph over time.”

On what allows a work of history to last · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

Style
Time

“How transitory and fragile is the reputation of histories that were welcomed as perfect in their day.”

On the short life of most historical scholarship · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

Fame
Time

“To me truth seems to lie between these two extremes. History is neither, but it partakes of the nature of both.”

Weighing whether history is a science or an art · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“The wisest historians I have known recognized most fully how little they could know about the times they knew best.”

Praising intellectual humility as a mark of the best scholars · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“One half of his business is the discovery of the truth, and the other half its representation.”

Defining the twin scientific and artistic tasks of the historian · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

Craft
Truth

“Judgement is now more needed than memory, constructive skill than fluency.”

Distinguishing the demands of real historical work from examination training · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“He has been taught results instead of methods; not how to find out, but what to remember.”

Criticising an education that prizes memorised facts over method · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“He feels that he moves in a little circle of light, seeing as far as his little candle throws its beams; and beyond that comes darkness.”

On the historian's awareness of the limits of his own knowledge · Inaugural lecture, A Plea for the Historical Teaching of History, 1904

“The historian should use ‘scientific’ methods to arrive at a ‘faithful representation of the life of the time.”

Expressing his belief that historical scholarship should reconstruct the past faithfully through disciplined research · Historical writing and teaching

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