This Essay was written for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize at Oxford
in 1879, the subject being ‘Historical Criticism among the Ancients.’
The prize was not awarded. To Professor J. W. Mackail thanks are due for
revising the proofs.
I
HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the
civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that complex
working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against
authority. It is merely one facet of that speculative spirit of an
innovation, which in the sphere of action produces democracy and
revolution, and in that of thought is the parent of philosophy and
physical science; and its importance as a factor of progress is based not
so much on the results it attains, as on the tone of thought which it
represents, and the method by which it works.
Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is not
to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms of Asia or
the stationary civilisation of Egypt. The clay cylinders of Assyria and
Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the pyramids, form not history but the
material for history.
The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest life of
the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a freedom from
invention, which is almost unparalleled in the writings of any people;
but the protective spirit which is the characteristic of that people
proved as fatal to their literature as to their commerce. Free criticism
is as unknown as free trade. While as regards the Hindus, their acute,
analytical and logical mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and
philosophy than to history or chronology. Indeed, in history their
imagination seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly
mingled together that any attempt to separate them seems vain. If we
except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian
Chandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truth of
their writings or examine their method of investigation.
It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that history
proper is to be found, as well as the spirit of historical criticism;
among that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans, whom we call by
the name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well said, we owe all that
moves in the world except the blind forces of nature.
For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and
journeyed, a nomad people, to Ægean shores, the characteristic of their
nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of historical
criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklärung or illumination of the
intellect which seems to have burst on the Greek race like a great flood
of light about the sixth century B.C.
_L’esprit d’un siècle ne naît pas et ne meurt pas à jour fixe_, and the
first critic is perhaps as difficult to discover as the first man. It is
from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its intolerance of
dogmatic authority, from physical science the alluring analogies of law
and order, from philosophy the conception of an essential unity
underlying the complex manifestations of phenomena. It appears first
rather as a changed attitude of mind than as a principle of research, and
its earliest influences are to be found in the sacred writings.
For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in
matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the spirit
of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development, it is not
confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining whether an event
happened or not, but is concerned also with the investigation into the
causes of events, the general relations which phenomena of life hold to
one another, and in its ultimate development passes into the wider
question of the philosophy of history.
Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two spheres of
sacred and uninspired history are essentially manifestations of the same
spirit, yet their methods are so different, the canons of evidence so
entirely separate, and the motives in each case so unconnected, that it
will be necessary for a clear estimation of the progress of Greek
thought, that we should consider these two questions entirely apart from
one another. I shall then in both cases take the succession of writers
in their chronological order as representing the rational order—not that
the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that
dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives its
advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of stagnation
and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual development, not
merely in the question of historical criticism, but in their art, their
poetry and their philosophy, seems so essentially normal, so free from
all disturbing external influences, so peculiarly rational, that in
following in the footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the
order sanctioned by reason.