"Living in History" is an essay by Agnes Repplier that mounts a sustained defense of historical knowledge against the intellectual fashions of willful ignorance, false neutrality, and the cultivated fatigue that dismisses great events as irrelevant to ordinary life. Repplier opens by identifying what Walter Bagehot called "a fatigued way of looking at great subjects," arguing that this attitude, though it presents itself as modern sophistication, is in fact a timeless form of spiritual evasion. She traces its ancient precedents among Greeks and Romans who were spiritually paralyzed by the very greatness of the civilization surrounding them, and she identifies its modern equivalents in the pacifist writers, academic theorists, and popular commentators of her own era, particularly those writing during and immediately after the First World War. The essay takes direct aim at a then-fashionable English novelist's claim, approvingly quoted by the journal the Nation, that history concerns itself only with the "absurd and theatrical doings of a few people," and that ordinary life persists and flourishes in spite of history rather than because of it. Repplier methodically dismantles this position. She points out that the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, the signing of Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution, and comparable events were not merely theatrical spectacles but the very conditions that made peaceful, creative, and productive life possible. The strolling players of Elizabethan England could perform their comedies because Elizabethan soldiers and sailors had secured the ground on which the theaters stood. A central concern of the essay is the ignorance of history prevalent in American education. Repplier describes with dismay encountering a university student who had been failed for knowing nothing whatsoever about the Reformation, not what it was, where it occurred, or who had any part in it. She contrasts this with her own Catholic schoolgirl education, in which she was immersed in the subject whether she liked it or not, encountering Wycliffe, Cranmer, Knox, Luther, Calvin, and Huss at every turn. She argues that this thorough, even uncomfortable, grounding in historical fact is not mere pedantry but a moral and intellectual necessity. To be ignorant of history is not a neutral condition analogous to ignorance of chemistry or metaphysics; it actively impairs judgment, destroys the capacity for contrast and estimation, and renders a person unable to understand the nation to which they belong or the world in which they live. Repplier quotes Henry James to the effect that the least significant footnote of history stirred him more than the most passionate fiction, and she endorses this view warmly. She argues that dismissals of history as a tissue of lies, as proposed by Matthew Arnold's description of it as "the vast Mississippi of falsehood" or Henry Adams's verdict that it is "in essence incoherent and immoral," are clever sayings that ultimately illuminate nothing. History remains the only record of humanity's unending effort to adjust and readjust itself to the world, and that record is indispensable. The essay addresses the mentality of American pacifists during the years of neutrality before American entry into the First World War. Repplier treats their weariness, their insistence that war's brutalities prove it unworthy of admiration, and their arguments against what they called the false patriotism of American school histories as expressions not of superior wisdom but of ordinary human cowardice dressed in intellectual clothing. She does not deny that war is brutal, but she insists that history has never concealed its horrors and that the brutalities committed in the Netherlands three and a half centuries before Belgium's suffering in 1914 were recorded with unflinching candor by Motley and other historians. Repplier pays particular attention to the education of children. She opposes the view, associated with the educational theorist G. Stanley Hall, that young Americans maintained an admirable neutrality toward the war in Europe and that this impartiality fitted them to pronounce history's true verdict. She argues that such enforced neutrality cheats children of their kinship with humanity. A child raised in imaginative acquaintance with Saint Genevieve will not be indifferent to the siege of Paris; a child who has lived in spirit with Joan of Arc will not be unmoved by the destruction of Reims Cathedral. Historical sympathy, enthusiasm, and even partisan feeling are not defects in a young mind but the very conditions that make genuine moral understanding possible. The essay closes by quoting John Maynard Keynes on the exhaustion of victorious England, a people too spent to feel the significance of what they had endured and preserved. Repplier acknowledges the reality of this exhaustion but refuses to accept it as a permanent or philosophically respectable state. She compares England to a swimmer who has carried a lifeline through the surf and now lies broken on the shore, and she suggests that when breath returns, the magnitude of what was averted by Allied resistance will become clear again. She ends by invoking Froissart's declaration that history is "the most profitable thing in the world for the institution of human life," offering it as a statement that events may yet vindicate.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1894 · Genre: Essays, History, Biography