INTERPRETATIVE CRITICISM (HERMENEUTIC)
I. When a zoologist describes the form and situation of a muscle, when a
physiologist gives the curve of a movement, we are able to accept their
results without reserve, because we know by what method, by what
instruments, by what system of notation they have obtained them.[128]
But when Tacitus says of the Germans, _Arva per annos mutant_, we do not
know beforehand whether he took the right method to inform himself, nor
even in what sense he used the words _arva_ and _mutant_; to ascertain
this a preliminary operation is required.[129] This operation is
internal criticism.
The object of criticism is to discover what in a document may be
accepted as true. Now the document is only the final result of a long
series of operations, on the details of which the author gives us no
information. He had to observe or collect facts, to frame sentences, to
write down words; and these operations, which are perfectly distinct one
from another, may not all have been performed with the same accuracy. It
is therefore necessary to _analyse_ the product of the author's labour
in order to distinguish which operations have been incorrectly
performed, and reject their _results_. _Analysis_ is thus necessary to
criticism; all criticism begins with analysis.
In order to be logically complete, the analysis ought to reconstruct
_all_ the operations which the author must have performed, and to
examine them _one by one_, to see whether each has been performed
correctly. It would be necessary to pass in review all the successive
acts by which the document was produced, from the moment when the author
observed the fact which is its subject up to the movements of his hand
by which he traced the letters of the document; or, rather, it would be
necessary to proceed in the opposite direction, step by step, from the
movements of the hand back to the observation. This method would be so
long and so tedious that no one would ever have the time or the patience
to apply it.
Internal criticism is not, like external criticism, an instrument used
for the mere pleasure of using it;[130] it yields no immediate
satisfaction, because it does not definitively solve any problem. It is
only applied because it is necessary, and its use is restricted to a
bare minimum. The most exacting historian is satisfied with an abridged
method which concentrates all the operations into two groups: (1) the
analysis of the contents of the document, and the positive
interpretative criticism which is necessary for ascertaining what the
author meant; (2) the analysis of the conditions under which the
document was produced, and its negative criticism, necessary for the
verification of the author's statements. This twofold division of the
labour of criticism is, moreover, only employed by a select few. The
natural tendency, even of historians who work methodically, is to read
the text with the object of extracting information directly from it,
without any thought of first ascertaining what exactly was in the
author's mind.[131] This procedure is excusable at most in the case of
nineteenth-century documents, written by men whose language and mode of
thought are familiar to us, and then only when there is not more than
one possible interpretation. It becomes dangerous as soon as the
author's habits of language or thought begin to differ from those of the
historian who reads him, or when the meaning of the text is not obvious
and indisputable. Whoever, in reading a text, is not exclusively
occupied with the effort to understand it, is sure to read impressions
of his own into it; he is struck by phrases or words in the document
which correspond to his own ideas, or agree with his own _a priori_
notion of the facts; unconsciously he detaches these phrases or words,
and forms out of them an imaginary text which he puts in the place of
the real text of the author.[132]
II. Here, as always in history, method consists in repressing the first
impulse. It is necessary to be penetrated by the principle, sufficiently
obvious but often forgotten, that a document only contains the ideas of
the man who wrote it, and to make it a rule to begin by understanding
the text by itself, _before_ asking what can be extracted from it for
the purposes of history. We thus arrive at this general rule of method:
the study of every document should begin with an analysis of its
contents, made with the sole aim of determining the real meaning of the
author.
This analysis is a preliminary operation, distinct and independent.
Experience here, as in the tasks of critical scholarship,[133] has
decided in favour of the system of slips. Each slip will contain the
analysis of a document, of a separate part of a document, or of an
episode in a narrative; the analysis ought to indicate not only the
general sense of the text, but also, as far as possible, the object and
views of the author. It will be well to reproduce verbally any
expressions which may seem characteristic of the author's thought.
Sometimes it will be enough to have analysed the text mentally: it is
not always necessary to put down in black and white the whole contents
of a document; in such cases we simply enter the points of which we
intend to make use. But against the ever-present danger of substituting
one's personal impressions for the text there is only one real
safeguard; it should be made an invariable rule never on any account to
make an extract from a document, or a partial analysis of it, without
having _first_ made a comprehensive analysis[134] of it mentally, if not
on paper.
To analyse a document is to discern and isolate all the ideas expressed
by the author. Analysis thus reduces to _interpretative criticism_.
Interpretation passes through two stages: the first is concerned with
the literal, the second with the real meaning.
III. The determination of the literal meaning of a document is a
linguistic operation; accordingly, Philology (in the narrow sense) has
been reckoned among the auxiliary sciences of history. To understand a
text it is first necessary to know the language. But a _general_
knowledge of the language is not enough. In order to interpret Gregory
of Tours, it is not enough to know Latin in a general way; it is
necessary to add a special study of the particular kind of Latin written
by Gregory of Tours.
The natural tendency is to attribute the same meaning to the same word
wherever it occurs. We instinctively treat a language as if it were a
fixed system of signs. Fixity, indeed, is a characteristic of the signs
which have been expressly invented for scientific use, such as
algebraical notation or the nomenclature of chemistry. Here every
expression has a single precise meaning, which is absolute and
invariable; it expresses an accurately analysed and defined idea, only
one such idea, and that always the same in whatever context the
expression may occur, and by whatever author it may be used. But
ordinary language, in which documents are written, fluctuates: each word
expresses a complex and ill-defined idea; its meanings are manifold,
relative, and variable; the same word may stand for several different
things, and is used in different senses by the same author according to
the context; lastly, the meaning of a word varies from author to author,
and is modified in the course of time. _Vel_, which in classical Latin
only has the meanings _or_ and _even_, means _and_ in certain epochs of
the middle ages; _suffragium_, which is classical Latin for _suffrage_,
takes in mediaeval Latin the sense of _help_. We have, then, to learn to
resist the instinct which leads us to explain all the expressions of a
text by their classical or ordinary meanings. The grammatical
interpretation, based on the general rules of the language, must be
supplemented by an historical interpretation founded on an examination
of the particular case.
The method consists in determining the special meaning of the words in
the document; it rests on a few very simple principles.
(1) Language changes by continuous evolution. Each epoch has a language
of its own, which must be treated as a separate system of signs. In
order to understand a document we must know the _language of the
time_--that is, the meanings of words and forms of expression in use at
the time when the text was written. The meaning of a word is to be
determined by bringing together the passages where it is employed: it
will generally be found that in one or other of these the remainder of
the sentence leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the word in
question.[135] Information of this kind is given in historical
dictionaries, such as the _Thesaurus Linguae Latinae_; or the glossaries
of Du Cange. In these compilations the article devoted to each word is a
collection of the passages in which the word occurs, accompanied by
indications of authorship which fix the epoch.
When the author wrote in a dead language which he had learnt out of
books--this is the case with the Latin texts of the earlier middle
ages--we must be on our guard against words used in an arbitrary sense,
or selected for the sake of elegance: for example, _consul_ (count,
earl), _capite census_ (censitary), _agellus_ (grand domain).
(2) Linguistic usage may vary from one region to another; we have, then,
to know the _language of the country_ where the document was
written--that is, the peculiar meanings current in the country.
(3) Each author has his own manner of writing; we have, then, to study
the _language of the author_, the peculiar senses in which he used
words.[136] This purpose is served by lexicons to a single author, as
Meusel's _Lexicon Caesarianum_, in which are brought together all the
passages in which the author used each word.
(4) An expression changes its meaning according to the passage in which
it occurs; we must therefore interpret each word and sentence not as if
it stood isolated, but with an eye to the general sense of the context.
This is the _rule of context_,[137] a fundamental rule of
interpretation. Its meaning is that, before making use of a phrase taken
from a text, we must have read the text in its entirety; it prohibits
the stuffing of a modern work with _quotations_--that is, shreds of
phrases torn from passages without regard to the special sense given to
them by the context.[138]
These rules, if rigorously applied, would constitute an exact method of
interpretation which would hardly leave any chance of error, but would
require an enormous expenditure of time. What an immense amount of
labour would be necessary if, in the case of _each_ word, we had to
determine by a special operation its meaning in the language of the
time, of the country, of the author, and in the context! Yet this is the
labour demanded by a well-made translation: in the case of some ancient
works of great literary value it has been submitted to; for the mass of
historical documents we content ourselves, in practice, with an abridged
method.
All words are not equally subject to variations of meaning; most of them
keep a fairly uniform meaning in all authors and in all periods. We may
therefore be satisfied to study specially those expressions which, from
their nature, are liable to take different meanings: first, ready-made
expressions which, being fixed, do not follow the evolution of the words
of which they are composed; secondly, and chiefly, words denoting things
which are in their nature subject to evolution; classes of men (_miles_,
_colonus_, _servus_); institutions (_conventus_, _justitia_, _judex_);
usages (_alleu_, _benefice_, _election_); feelings, common objects. In
the case of all words of such classes it would be imprudent to assume a
fixed meaning; it is an absolutely necessary precaution to ascertain
what is the sense in which they are used in the text to be interpreted.
"These studies of words," said Fustel de Coulanges, "have a great
importance in historical science. A badly interpreted term may be the
source of serious error."[139] And, in fact, simply by a methodical
application of interpretative criticism to a hundred words or so, he
succeeded in revolutionising the study of the Merovingian epoch.
IV. When we have analysed the document and determined the literal
meaning of its phrases, we cannot even yet be sure that we have reached
the real thoughts of the author. It is possible that he may have used
some expressions in an oblique sense; there are several kinds of cases
where this occurs: allegory and symbolism, jests and hoaxes, allusion
and implication, even the ordinary figures of speech, metaphor,
hyperbole, litotes.[140] In all these cases it is necessary to pierce
through the literal meaning to the real meaning, which the author has
purposely disguised under an inexact form.
Logically the problem is very embarrassing: there is no fixed external
criterion by which we can make sure of detecting an oblique sense; in
the case of the hoax, which in the present century has become a branch
of literature, it is an essential part of the author's plan to leave no
indication which would betray the jest. In practice we may be morally
certain that an author is not using an oblique sense wherever his prime
object is to be understood; we are therefore not likely to meet with
difficulties of this kind in official documents, in charters, and in
historical narratives. In all these cases the general form of the
document permits us to assume that it is written in the literal sense of
the words.
On the other hand, we must be prepared for oblique senses when the
author had other interests than that of being understood, or when he
wrote for a public which could understand his allusions and read between
the lines, or when his readers, in virtue of a religious or literary
initiation, might be expected to understand his symbolisms and figures
of speech. This is the case with religious texts, private letters, and
all those literary works which form so large a part of the documents on
antiquity. Thus the art of recognising and determining hidden meanings
in texts has always occupied a large space in the theory of
_hermeneutic_[141] (which is Greek for interpretative criticism), and in
the _exegesis_ of the sacred texts and of classical authors.
The different modes of introducing an oblique sense behind the literal
sense are too varied, and depend too much on special circumstances, for
it to be possible to reduce the art of detecting them to definite rules.
Only one general principle can be laid down, and that is, that when the
literal sense is absurd, incoherent, or obscure, or in contradiction
with the ideas of the author or the facts known to him, then we ought to
presume an oblique sense.
In order to determine this sense, the procedure is the same as for
studying the language of an author: we compare the passages in which the
expressions occur in which we suspect an oblique sense, and look to see
whether there is not one where the meaning may be guessed from the
context. A celebrated instance of this procedure is the discovery of the
allegorical meaning of the Beast in the Apocalypse. But as there is no
certain method of solving these problems, we never have a right to say
we have discovered all the hidden meanings or seized all the allusions
contained in a text; and even when we think we have found the sense, we
shall do well to draw no inferences from a necessarily conjectural
interpretation.
On the other hand, it is necessary to guard against the temptation to
look for allegorical meanings everywhere, as the neo-Platonists did in
Plato's works and the Swedenborgians in the Bible. This attack of
_hyper-hermeneutic_ is now over, but we are not yet safe from the
analogous tendency to look for allusions everywhere. Investigations of
this kind are always conjectural, and are better calculated to flatter
the vanity of the interpreter than to furnish results of which history
can make use.
V. When we have at length reached the real sense of the text, the
operation of positive analysis is concluded. Its result is to make us
acquainted with the author's conceptions, the images he had in his mind,
the general notions in terms of which he represented the world to
himself. This information belongs to a very important branch of
knowledge, out of which is constituted a whole group of historical
sciences:[142] the history of the illustrative arts and of literature,
the history of science, the history of philosophical and moral
doctrine, mythology and the history of dogmas (wrongly called religious
beliefs, because here we are studying official doctrines without
inquiring whether they are believed), the history of law, the history of
official institutions (so far as we do not inquire how they were applied
in practice), the assemblage of popular legends, traditions, opinions,
conceptions (inexactly called beliefs) which are comprised under the
name of folk-lore.
All these studies need only the external criticism which investigates
authorship and origin and interpretative criticism; they require one
degree less elaboration than the history of objective facts, and
accordingly they have been earlier established on a methodical basis.