INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE STUDY OF HISTORY,1906
It was with a feeling of deep discouragement that I realized on December 18 last, that I was expected within six or seven weeks to face my colleagues of the Modern History School, and the whole University, with an Inaugural Lecture. Such an address ought to be a sort of profession of faith, a solemn setting forth of the views which the newly-appointed professor holds, and the programme which he intends to carry out, so far as in him lies, during his tenure of his chair. I have heard many inaugural lectures; most of them were interesting, some were pronouncements of much importance and high literary merit. And now I have to come before you, not like so many of my predecessors with all the prestige of a reputation gained outside Oxford, not with the glamour of the unknown about me, but simply as a veteran college tutor with twenty-one years of essays and lectures behind me, to say what I must say. How can such a work-a-day being, known personally to almost every one here present, the most simple and comprehensible of phenomena, hope to deliver to you any message that you do not already know by heart? All that I can set forth is the impression which twenty-one years of practical teaching, interspersed with such research as my leisure would allow, has left upon my mind. I have no dreams of revolutionizing the University; I have no 'divine discontent' about me. I have always loved my work, and I think that our present history curriculum, despite certain faults, is on the whole a very admirable compromise between the practical and the ideal. If you expect me to advocate the abolition of our examinations and classes, or the substitution of some systems of seminars for the tutor's weekly essay, or the conversion of our Modern History School into a technical machine for training historians, I fear that you will be disappointed. Perhaps my thrice seven years in harness have stereotyped my views and made me short-sighted in my outlook on history at large; perhaps—and this I naturally prefer to believe myself, for man is a hopeful if a fallible being—they have given me some practical lessons, which not every history professor has had the chance of learning. It is for you to judge. I can but give my humble opinion for what it is worth, on what I think that history is, and how I think it can best be taught The theme, you may say, is trite—we have heard and read far too much about it already. Can I say anything that has not been put in a much better shape by some earlier venter of such harangues? Remember the wisdom of Bishop Stubbs's Inaugural of 1868, the passion of Freeman's declamation, the literary polish that Froude put into his half-ironical apology for himself and his works, the sober eloquence with which the present Regius Professor set forth his plea for the 'historical teaching of history'. What can I give that is worthy to follow on such a series of addresses? Nothing; I have but to deliver the comments of a practical teacher on what he has seen and what he has read during eighty continuous terms of residence in this University.
