Historical facts can only be verified by the skeptical and the
inquiring, and skepticism and inquiry nip like a black frost the eager
credulity in which legendary biographies took their rise. You can
watch such stories as they grew in the congenial soil of belief. The
great saints of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, who converted
Europe to Christianity, were as modest and unpretending as true,
genuine men always are. They claimed no miraculous powers for
themselves. Miracles might have been worked in the days of their
fathers. They for their own parts relied on nothing but the natural
powers of persuasion and example. Their companions, who knew them
personally in life, were only a little more extravagant. Miracles and
portents vary in an inverse ratio with the distance of time. St.
Patrick is absolutely silent about his own conjuring performances. He
told his followers, perhaps, that he had been moved by his good angel
to devote himself to the conversion of Ireland. The angel of metaphor
becomes in the next generation an actual seraph. On a rock in the
county of Down there is, or was, a singular mark, representing rudely
the outline of a foot. From that rock, where the young Patrick was
feeding his master's sheep, a writer of the sixth century tells us
that the angel Victor sprang back to heaven after delivering his
message, and left behind him the imprinted witness of his august
visit. Another hundred years pass, and legends from Hegesippus are
imported into the life of the Irish apostle. St. Patrick and the Druid
enchanter contend before King Leogaire on Tara Hill, as Simon Magus
and St. Peter contended before the Emperor Nero. Again a century, and
we are in a world of wonders where every human lineament is lost. St.
Patrick, when a boy of twelve, lights a fire with icicles; when he
comes to Ireland he floats thither upon an altar-stone which Pope
Celestine had blessed for him. He conjures a Welsh marauder into a
wolf, makes a goat cry out in the stomach of a thief who had stolen
him, and restores dead men to life, not once or twice but twenty
times. The wonders with which the atmosphere is charged gravitate
towards the largest concrete figure which is moving in the middle of
them, till at last, as Gibbon says, the sixty-six lives of St. Patrick
which were extant in the twelfth century must have contained at least
as many thousand lies. And yet of conscious lying there was very
little; perhaps nothing at all. The biographers wrote in good faith
and were industrious collectors of material, only their notions of
probability were radically different from ours. The more marvelous a
story, the less credit we give to it; warned by experience of
carelessness, credulity, and fraud, we disbelieve everything for which
we cannot find contemporary evidence, and from the value of that
evidence we subtract whatever may be due to prevalent opinion or
superstition. To the mediaeval writer, the more stupendous the miracle
the more likely it was to be true; he believed everything which he
could not prove to be false, and proof was not external testimony, but
inherent fitness.
So much for the second period of what is called human history. In the
first or mythological there is no historical groundwork at all. In the
next or heroic we have accounts of real persons, but handed down to
us by writers to whom the past was a world of marvels, whose delight
was to dwell upon the mighty works which had been done in the old
times, whose object was to elevate into superhuman proportions the
figures of the illustrious men who had distinguished themselves as
apostles or warriors. They thus appear to us like their portraits in
stained-glass windows, represented rather in a transcendental
condition of beatitude than in the modest and checkered colors of real
life. We see them not as they were, but as they appeared to an adoring
imagination, and in a costume of which we can only affirm with
certainty that it was never worn by any child of Adam on this plain,
prosaic earth. For facts as facts there is as yet no appreciation;
they are shifted to and fro, dropped out of sight, or magnified, or
transferred from owner to owner,--manipulated to suit or decorate a
preconceived and brilliant idea. We are still in the domain of poetry,
where the canons of the art require fidelity to general principles,
and allow free play to fancy in details. The Virgins of Raphael are no
less beautiful as paintings, no less masterpieces of workmanship,
though in no single feature either of face or form or costume they
resemble the historical mother of Christ, or even resemble one
another.
At the next stage we pass with the chroniclers into history proper.
The chronicler is not a poet like his predecessor. He does not shape
out consistent pictures with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He is
a narrator of events, and he connects them together on a chronological
string. He professes to be relating facts. He is not idealizing, he is
not singing the praises of the heroes of the sword or the crosier; he
means to be true in the literal and commonplace sense of that
ambiguous word. And yet in his earlier phases, take him in what part
of the world we please,--take him in ancient Egypt or Assyria, in
Greece or in Rome, or in modern Europe,--he is but a step in advance
of his predecessor. He is excellent company. He never moralizes, never
bores you with philosophy of history or political economy. He never
speculates about causes. But on the other hand, he is uncritical. He
takes unsuspectingly the materials which he finds ready to his
hand,--the national ballads, the romances, and the biographies. He
transfers to his pages whatever catches his fancy. The more
picturesque an anecdote, the more unhesitatingly he writes it down,
though in the same proportion it is the less likely to be authentic.
Romulus and Remus suckled by the wolf; Curtius jumping into the gulf;
our English Alfred spoiling the cakes; or Bruce watching the leap of
the spider,--stories of this kind he relates with the same simplicity
with which he records the birth in his own day, in some outlandish
village, of a child with two heads, or the appearance of the
sea-serpent or the flying dragon. Thus the chronicle, however
charming, is often nothing but poetry taken literally and translated
into prose. It grows, however, and improves insensibly with the growth
of the nation. Like the drama, it develops from poor beginnings into
the loftiest art, and becomes at last perhaps the very best kind of
historical writing which has yet been produced. Herodotus and Livy,
Froissart and Hall and Holinshed, are as great in their own
departments as Sophocles or Terence or Shakespeare. We are not yet
entirely clear of portents and prodigies. Superstition clings to us as
our shadow, and is to be found in the wisest as well as the weakest.
The Romans, the most practical people that ever lived,--a people so
pre-eminently effective that they have printed their character
indelibly into the constitution of Europe,--these Romans, at the very
time they were making themselves the world's masters, allowed
themselves to be influenced in the most important affairs of State by
a want of appetite in the sacred chickens, or the color of the
entrails of a calf. Take him at his best, man is a great fool. It is
likely enough that we ourselves habitually say and practice things
which a thousand years hence will seem not a jot less absurd. Cato
tells us that the Roman augurs could not look one another in the face
without laughing; and I have heard that bishops in some parts of the
world betray sometimes analogous misgivings.
In able and candid minds, however, stuff of this kind is tolerably
harmless, and was never more innocent than in the case of the first
great historian of Greece. Herodotus was a man of vast natural powers.
Inspired by a splendid subject, and born at the most favorable time,
he grew to manhood surrounded by the heroes of Marathon and Salamis
and Plataea. The wonders of Egypt and Assyria were for the first time
thrown open to the inspection of strangers. The gloss of novelty was
not yet worn off, and the impressions falling fresh on an eager,
cultivated, but essentially simple and healthy mind, there were
qualities and conditions combined which produced one of the most
delightful books which was ever written. He was an intense patriot;
and he was unvexed with theories, political or moral. His philosophy
was like Shakespeare's,--a calm, intelligent insight into human
things. He had no views of his own, which the fortunes of Greece or
other countries were to be manipulated to illustrate. The world as he
saw it was a well-made, altogether promising and interesting world;
and his object was to relate what he had seen and what he had heard
and learnt, faithfully and accurately. His temperament was rather
believing than skeptical; but he was not idly credulous. He can be
critical when occasion requires. He distinguishes always between what
he had seen with his own eyes and what others told him. He uses his
judgment freely, and sets his readers on their guard against uncertain
evidence. And there is not a book existing which contains in the same
space so much important truth,--truth which survives the sharpest test
that modern discoveries can apply to it.
The same may be said in a slightly less degree of Livy and of the best
of the late European chroniclers: you have the same freshness, the
same vivid perception of external life, the same absence of what
philosophers call subjectivity,--the projection into the narrative of
the writer's own personality, his opinions, thoughts, and theories.
Still, in all of them, however vivid, however vigorous the
representation, there is a vein of fiction largely and perhaps
consciously intermingled. In a modern work of history, when a
statesman is introduced as making a speech, the writer at any rate
supposes that such a speech was actually made. He has found an account
of it somewhere either in detail or at least in outline or epitome.
The boldest fabricator would not venture to introduce an entire and
complete invention. This was not the case with the older authors.
Thucydides tells us frankly that the speeches which he interweaves
with his narrative were his own composition. They were intended as
dramatic representations of the opinions of the factions and parties
with which Greece was divided, and they were assigned to this person
or to that, as he supposed them to be internally suitable. Herodotus
had set Thucydides the example, and it was universally followed. No
speech given by any old historian can be accepted as literally true
unless there is a specific intimation to that effect. Deception was
neither practiced nor pretended. It was a convenient method of
exhibiting characters and situations, and it was therefore adopted
without hesitation or reserve.