Though Ranke's chief works had been published before the period to which this lecture is confined, his influence can be traced in almost every writer on modern history during the last half-century. His greatest service to scholarship was to divorce the study of the past from the passions of the present, and, to quote the watchword of his first book, to relate what actually occurred. A second was to establish the necessity of founding historical construction on strictly contemporary authorities. When he began to write in 1824 historians of high repute believed memoirs and chronicles to be trustworthy guides. When he laid down his pen in 1886 every scholar with a reputation to make had learned to content himself with nothing less than the papers and correspondence of the actors themselves and those in immediate contact with the events they describe. A third service was to found the science of evidence by the analysis of authorities, contemporary or otherwise, in the light of the author's temperament, affiliations, and opportunity of knowledge, and by comparison with the testimony of other writers. There can be no better preparation for the perils and responsibilities of authorship than to study the critical analyses of Guicciardini and Sarpi, Clarendon, Saint-Simon, and many another, scattered through the sixty volumes of the master. And finally he taught by precept and practice the necessity of exploring the relations of States to one another and of measuring the interaction of foreign and domestic policy.
These sound principles have been applied by the scholars of all countries who have jointly built up the history of the last four centuries. We may study the Tudors under the guidance of Pollard, the Stuarts under Gardiner and Firth, the Hanoverians under Lecky, without fear that we are being misled or that essential facts are being withheld from our notice. We continue to admire the literary brilliance of Macaulay and Carlyle, Motley and Froude; but we are instinctively aware that their partisanship is out of date. The same cooling process has taken place in France, where the passions and tempers of Thiers and Michelet have tended to yield place to the calm lucidity of which Mignet and Guizot were the earliest masters. There is, it must be confessed, a good deal of the old Adam in Taine's elaborate study of Jacobinism, in Masson's innumerable volumes on Napoleon, and even in Aulard's priceless contributions to our knowledge of the French Revolution; but such works as Lavisse's full-length portrait of Louis XIV, Ségur's volumes on Turgot and Necker, Sorel's massive treatise on Europe and the Revolution, and Vandal's incomparable presentation of the Consulate rank as high in scholarship as in literature.