CRITICAL CLASSIFICATION OF SOURCES
By the help of the preceding operations the documents, all the
documents, let us suppose, of a given class, or relating to a given
subject, have been found. We know where they are; the text of each has
been restored, if necessary, and each has been critically examined in
respect of authorship. We know where they have come from. It remains to
combine and classify the materials thus verified. This is the last of
the operations which may be called preparatory to the work of higher (or
internal) criticism and construction.
Whoever studies a point of history is obliged, first of all, to classify
his sources. To arrange, in a rational and convenient manner, the
verified materials before making use of them, is an apparently humble,
but really very important, part of the historian's profession. Those who
have learnt how to do it possess, on that account alone, a marked
advantage: they give themselves less trouble, and they obtain better
results; the others waste their time and labour; they are smothered
sometimes under the disorderly mass of notes, extracts, copies, scraps,
which they themselves have accumulated. Who was it spoke of those busy
people who spend their lives lifting building-stones without knowing
where to place them, raising as they do so clouds of blinding dust?
I. Here, again, we have to confess that the first, the natural impulse,
is not the right one. The first impulse of most men who have to utilise
a number of texts is to make notes from them, one after another, in the
order in which they study them. Many of the early scholars (whose papers
we possess) worked on this system, and so do most beginners who are not
warned beforehand; the latter keep, as the former kept, note-books,
which they fill continuously and progressively with notes on the texts
they are interested in. This method is utterly wrong. The materials
collected must be classified sooner or later; otherwise it would be
necessary, when occasion arose, to deal separately with the materials
bearing on a given point, to read right through the whole series of
note-books, and this laborious process would have to be repeated every
time a new detail was wanted. If this method seems attractive at first,
it is because it appears to save time. But this is false economy; the
ultimate result is, an enormous addition to the labour of search, and
great difficulty in combining the materials.
Others, well understanding the advantages of systematic classification,
have proposed to fit their materials, as fast as collected, into their
appropriate places in a prearranged scheme. For this purpose they use
note-books of which every page has first been provided with a heading.
Thus all the entries of the same kind are close to one another. This
system leaves something to be desired; for additions will not always
fit without inconvenience into their proper place; and the scheme of
classification, once adopted, is rigid, and can only be modified with
difficulty. Many librarians used to draw up their catalogues on this
plan, which is now universally condemned.
There is a still more barbarous method, which need not receive more than
passing mention. This is simply to register documents in the memory
without taking written notes. This method has been used. Historians
endowed with excellent memories, and lazy to boot, have indulged this
whim, with the result that their quotations and references are mostly
inexact. The human memory is a delicate piece of registering apparatus,
but it is so little an instrument of precision that such presumption is
inexcusable.
Every one admits nowadays that it is advisable to collect materials on
separate cards or slips of paper. The notes from each document are
entered upon a loose leaf furnished with the precisest possible
indications of origin. The advantages of this artifice are obvious: the
detachability of the slips enables us to group them at will in a host of
different combinations; if necessary, to change their places: it is easy
to bring texts of the same kind together, and to incorporate additions,
as they are acquired, in the interior of the groups to which they
belong. As for documents which are interesting from several points of
view, and which ought to appear in several groups, it is sufficient to
enter them several times over on different slips; or they may be
represented, as often as may be required, on reference-slips. Moreover,
the method of slips is the only one mechanically possible for the
purpose of forming, classifying, and utilising a collection of documents
of any great extent. Statisticians, financiers, and men of letters who
observe, have now discovered this as well as scholars.
The method of slips is not without its drawbacks. Each slip ought to be
furnished with precise references to the source from which its contents
have been derived; consequently, if a document has been analysed upon
fifty different slips, the same references must be repeated fifty times.
Hence a slight increase in the amount of writing to be done. It is
certainly on account of this trivial complication that some obstinately
cling to the inferior note-book system. Again, in virtue of their very
detachability, the slips, or loose leaves, are liable to go astray; and
when a slip is lost how is it to be replaced? To begin with, its
disappearance is not perceived, and, if it were, the only remedy would
be to go right through all the work already done from beginning to end.
But the truth is, experience has suggested a variety of very simple
precautions, which we need not here explain in detail, by which the
drawbacks of the system are reduced to a minimum. It is recommended to
use slips of uniform size and tough material, and to arrange them at the
earliest opportunity in covers or drawers or otherwise. Every one is
free to form his own habits in these matters. But it is well to realise
beforehand that these habits, according as they are more or less
rational and practical, have a direct influence on the results of
scientific work. Renan speaks of "these points of private librarianship
which make up the half of scientific work."[95] This is not too strong.
One scholar will owe a good part of his well-deserved reputation to his
method of collecting, while another will be, so to speak, paralysed by
his clumsiness in that particular.[96]
After having collected the documents, whether copied _in extenso_ or
abridged, on slips or loose leaves, we classify them. On what scheme? In
what order? Clearly different cases must be treated differently, and it
would not be reasonable to lay down precise formulae to govern them all.
However, we may give a few general considerations.
II. We distinguish between the historian who classifies verified
documents for the purposes of historical work, and the scholar who
compiles "_Regesta_." By the words "_Regesta_" and "_Corpus_" we
understand methodically classified collections of historical documents.
In a "_Corpus_" documents are reproduced _in extenso_; in "_Regesta_"
they are analysed and described.
The use of these compilations is to assist researchers in collecting
documents. Scholars set themselves to perform, once for all, tasks of
search and classification from which, thanks to them, the public will
henceforth be free.
Documents may be grouped according to their date, according to their
place of origin, according to their contents, according to their
form.[97] Here we have the four categories of time, place, species, and
form; by superposing, then, we obtain divisions of smaller extent. We
may undertake, for example, to make a group of all the documents having
a given form, of a given country, and lying between two given dates
(French royal charters of the reign of Philip Augustus); or of all the
documents of a given form (Latin inscriptions); or of a given species
(Latin hymns); of a given epoch (antiquity, the middle ages). We may
recall, by way of illustration, the existence of a _Corpus Inscriptionum
Graecarum_, of a _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, of a _Corpus
Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum_, the _Regesta Imperii_ of J. F.
Boehmer and his continuators, the _Regesta Pontificum Romanorum_ of P.
Jaffe and A. Potthast.
Whatever the division chosen, there are two alternatives: either the
documents to be placed in this division are dated or they are not.
If they are dated, as is the case, for example, with the charters issued
from the chancery of a prince, care will have been taken to place at the
head of each slip the date (expressed in modern reckoning) of the
document entered upon it. Nothing is then easier than to group in
chronological order all the slips, that is, all the documents, which
have been collected. The rule is to use chronological classification
whenever possible. There is only one difficulty, and that is of a
practical order. Even in the most favourable circumstances some of the
documents will have accidentally lost their dates; these dates the
compiler is bound to restore, or at least to attempt to restore; long
and patient research is necessary for the purpose.
If the documents are not dated, a choice must be made between the
alphabetical, the geographical, and the systematic order. The history of
the _Corpus_ of Latin inscriptions bears witness to the difficulty of
this choice. "The arrangement according to date was impossible, seeing
that most of the inscriptions are not dated. From the time of Smetius it
was usual to divide them into classes, that is, a distinction was made,
resting solely on the contents of the inscription, and having no regard
to their place of origin, between religious, sepulchral, military, and
poetical inscriptions, those which have a public character, and those
which only concern private persons, and so on. Boeckh, although he had
preferred the geographical arrangement for his _Corpus Inscriptionum
Graecarum_, was of opinion that the arrangement by subjects, which had
been hitherto employed, was the only possible one for a Latin
_Corpus_...." [Even those who, in France, proposed the geographical
arrangement] "wished to make an exception of texts relating to the
general history of a country, certainly, at any rate, in the case of the
Empire; in 1845 Zumpt defended a very complicated eclectic system of
this kind. In 1847 Mommsen still rejected the geographical arrangement
except for municipal inscriptions, and in 1852, when he published the
Inscriptions of the Kingdom of Naples, he had not entirely changed his
opinion. It was only on being charged by the Academy of Berlin with the
publication of the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, that, grown wise by
experience, he rejected even the exceptions proposed by Egger in the
case of the general history of a province, and thought it his duty to
keep to the geographical arrangement pure and simple."[98] And yet,
considering the nature of epigraphic documents, the arrangement
according to place was the only rational one. This has been amply
demonstrated for more than fifty years; but collectors of inscriptions
did not come to an agreement on the subject till after two centuries of
tentative efforts in different directions. For two centuries collections
of Latin inscriptions have been made without any perception of the fact
that "to group inscriptions according to their subjects is much the same
thing as to publish an edition of Cicero in which his speeches,
treatises, and letters should be cut up and the fragments arranged
according to their subject-matter;" that "epigraphic monuments belonging
to the same territory mutually explain each other when placed side by
side;" and, lastly, that "while it is all but impossible to range in
order of subject-matter a hundred thousand inscriptions nearly all of
which belong to several categories; on the other hand, each monument has
but one place, and a very definite place, in the geographical
order."[99]
The alphabetical arrangement is very convenient when the chronological
and geographical arrangements are unsuitable. There are documents, such
as the sermons, the hymns, and the secular songs of the middle ages,
which are not precisely dated or localised. They are arranged in the
alphabetical order of their _incipit_--that is, the words with which
they begin.[100]
The systematic order, or arrangement by subjects, is not to be
recommended for the compilation of a _Corpus_ or of _regesta_. It is
always arbitrary, and leads to inevitable repetition and confusion.
Besides, given collections arranged in chronological, geographical, or
alphabetical order, nothing more than the addition of a good table of
contents is needed to make them available for all the purposes which
would be served by a systematic arrangement. One of the chief rules of
the art of _Corpus_ and _regesta_-making, that great art which has been
carried to such perfection in the second half of the nineteenth
century,[101] is to provide these collections, whatever the grouping
adopted, with a variety of tables and indexes of a kind to facilitate
the use of them: _incipit_ tables in chronological _regesta_ which lend
themselves to such treatment, indexes of names and dates in _regesta_
arranged by order of _incipit_, and so on.
_Corpus_ and _regesta_-makers collect and classify for the use of others
documents in which, at any rate in _all_ of which, they have no direct
interest, and are absorbed in this labour. Ordinary workers, on the
other hand, only collect and classify materials useful for their
individual studies. Hence certain differences arise. For example, the
arrangement by subjects, on a predetermined system, which is so little
to be recommended for great collections, often provides those who are
composing monographs on their own account with a scheme of
classification preferable to any other. But it will always be well to
cultivate the mechanical habits of which professional compilers have
learnt the value by experience: to write at the head of every slip its
date, if there is occasion for it, and a heading[102] in any case; to
multiply cross-references and indices; to keep a record, on a separate
set of slips, of all the sources utilised, in order to avoid the danger
of having to work a second time through materials already dealt with.
The regular observance of these maxims goes a great way towards making
scientific historical work easier and more solid. The possession of a
well-arranged, though incomplete, collection of slips has enabled M. B.
Haureau to exhibit to the end of his life an undeniable mastery over the
very special class of historical problems which he studied.[103]