History and literature cannot be fully comprehended, still less fully enjoyed, except in connection with one another. I confess I have little love either for "Histories of Literature," or for chapters on "the literature of the period," hanging at the end of history books like the tail from a cow. I mean, rather, that those who write or read the history of a period should be soaked in its literature, and that those who read or expound literature should be soaked in history. The "scientific" view of history that discouraged such interchange and desired the strictest specialisation by political historians, has done much harm to our latter-day culture. The mid Victorians at any rate knew better than that.
8 February 2016
Soaked in History
George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Recreations of an Historian (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1919), p. 32:
