mistresses and ministers, or by the life of Napoleon, of Rousseau, of Diderot, of Beaumarchais, and others?
The movement of the Russian people to the east, to Kazan and Siberia, is that expressed in the details of the morbid life of John IV. and his correspondence with Kurbsky?
Is the movement of the peoples at the time of the Crusades explained by the life and activity of certain Godfreys and Louis’ and their ladies?
It has remained beyond our comprehension, that movement of the peoples from west to east, without an object, without leadership, with a crowd of tramps following Peter the Hermit. And even more incomprehensible is the cessation of that movement, when a rational and holy object for the expeditions had been clearly set up by historical leaders—that is, the deliverance of Jerusalem.
Popes, kings, and knights urged the people to set free the Holy Land. But the people did not move, because that unknown cause, which had impelled them before to movement, existed no longer. The history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers evidently cannot be regarded as an epitome of the life of the peoples. And the history of the Godfreys and the Minnesingers has remained the history of those knights and those Minnesingers, while the history of the life of the peoples and their impulses has remained unknown.
Even less explanatory of the life of the peoples is the history of the lives of writers and reformers.
The history of culture offers us as the impelling motives of the life of the people the circumstances of the lives or the ideas of a writer or a reformer. We learn that Luther had a hasty temper and uttered certain speeches; we learn that Rousseau was distrustful and wrote certain books; but we do not learn what made the nations cut each other to pieces after the Reformation, or why men guillotined each other during the French Revolution.
If we unite both these kinds of history together, as do the most modern historians, then we shall get histories of monarchs and of writers, but not a history of the life of nations.