Art Added To Scholarship

George Macaulay Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse & Other Essays (London/New York/Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949 [1913]), 162-3:

. . . history is not merely the accumulation and interpretation of facts—hard enough that in itself!—but involves besides the whole art of book composition and prose style. Life is short, art is long, but history is longest, for it is art added to scholarship.

The idea that histories which are delightful to read must be the work of superficial temperaments, and that a crabbed style betokens a deep thinker or conscientious worker, is the reverse of the truth. What is easy to read has been difficult to write. The labour of writing and rewriting, correcting and recorrecting, is the due exacted by every good book from its author, even if he know from the beginning exactly what he wants to say. A limpid style is invariably the result of hard labour, and the easily flowing connection of sentence with sentence and paragraph with paragraph has always been won by the sweat of the brow. 

Now in the case of history all this artistic work is superimposed on the labours of scholarship, themselves enough to fill a lifetime. The historical architect must quarry his own stones and build with his own hands. Division of labour is possible in only a limited degree. No wonder then that there have been so few historians really on a level with the opportunities of their great themes, and that except Gibbon every one of them is imperfect either in science or in art. The double task, hard as it is, we little people must shoulder as best we may, in the temporary absence of giants. And if the finest intellects of the rising generation can be made to realize how hard is the task of history, more of them will become historians.