To my mind Thucydides is the true model of historians.  He relates facts without giving his opinion; but he omits no circumstance adapted to make us judge for ourselves.  He puts everything that he relates before his reader; far from interposing between the facts and the readers, he conceals himself; we seem not to read but to see.  Unfortunately he speaks of nothing but war, and in his stories we only see the least instructive part of the world, that is to say the battles.  The virtues and defects of the Retreat of the Ten Thousand and the Commentaries of Caesar are almost the same.  The kindly Herodotus, without portraits, without maxims, yet flowing, simple, full of details calculated to delight and interest in the highest degree, would be perhaps the best historian if these very details did not often degenerate into childish folly, better adapted to spoil the taste of youth than to form it; we need discretion before we can read him.  I say nothing of Livy, his turn will come; but he is a statesman, a rhetorician, he is everything which is unsuitable for a youth.

History in general is lacking because it only takes note of striking and clearly marked facts which may be fixed by names, places, and dates; but the slow evolution of these facts, which cannot be definitely noted in this way, still remains unknown.  We often find in some battle, lost or won, the ostensible cause of a revolution which was inevitable before this battle took place.  War only makes manifest events already determined by moral causes, which few historians can perceive.

The philosophic spirit has turned the thoughts of many of the historians of our times in this direction; but I doubt whether truth has profited by their labours.  The rage for systems has got possession of all alike, no one seeks to see things as they are, but only as they agree with his system.

Add to all these considerations the fact that history shows us actions rather than men, because she only seizes men at certain chosen times in full dress; she only portrays the statesman when he is prepared to be seen; she does not follow him to his home, to his study, among his family and his friends; she only shows him in state; it is his clothes rather than himself that she describes.

I would prefer to begin the study of the human heart with reading the lives of individuals; for then the man hides himself in vain, the historian follows him everywhere; he never gives him a moment’s grace nor any corner where he can escape the piercing eye of the spectator; and when he thinks he is concealing himself, then it is that the writer shows him up most plainly.

“Those who write lives,” says Montaigne, “in so far as they delight more in ideas than in events, more in that which comes from within than in that which comes from without, these are the writers I prefer; for this reason Plutarch is in every way the man for me.”

It is true that the genius of men in groups or nations is very different from the character of the individual man, and that we have a very imperfect knowledge of the human heart if we do not also examine it in crowds; but it is none the less true that to judge of men we must study the individual man, and that he who had a perfect knowledge of the inclinations of each individual might foresee all their combined effects in the body of the nation.