ON THE BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY.*
THE new issue of Mr. Buckle's work gives a good occasion for reconsidering his estimate of the value of early history. Holding strongly and justly to the results of modern science, Mr. Buckle was a little prone to disparage the achievements of men in un- critical centuries. More especially was he jealous of any admixture of the ecclesiastical spirit in literature. One of his most curious .chapters explains how the rhymed chronicles of primitive ages were comparatively reliable, and were gradually corrupted by the introduction of writing which lessened the number of traditionary truths, by the multiplication of records, which confounded per- sonages and events, and by the spirit of Christian missionaries, who interpreted all legends by reference to the Biblical narrative. In short, the times of mere barbarism had been more favourable to bistorie,a1 truth than those of an imperfect civilization, and we were separated in Mr. Buckle's opinion by genuinely dark ages from a time of comparative light. It is an old theory in a new -dress.
Let us first consider the value and extent of rhymed histories, such as have come down to us in fragments or entirety from an early time. The Roman ballads quoted in Livy and versified by Macaulay are popular instances. They are, no doubt, based upon real events. We may quite believe in a Cocks who kept the bridge, in a lustful Tarquin, and in a great King Porsena. But the moment we try to construct a real narrative by piecing 'together the people's lyrical outpourings, we find difficulties accumulate. All the legends point to a Roman triumph over .enemies, and all the collateral facts of history to a great humilia- tion of Rome. The poet who sang to charm the public did not care to record the national dishonour, and was not checked by the necessities of a connected narrative. The " Nibelunge Nat" is one of the finest remains of poetical history. Its last stanzas represent Attila and Theodoric, of Verona, in tears over a slaughter of Burgundian nobles. The Gododin of Aneurin, a famous Welsh bard of the seventh century, describes a great battle in which he was himself taken prisoner, and in which the incredible number of 360 chiefs fell in a combat of seven days. We have often heard English sailors chanting a recitative about Napoleon. It gave the broad facts pointedly enough, dwelling with curious displeasure on Wellington having "killed poor Marshal Ney," but it placed the expedition to Russia after Waterloo. These instances might be multiplied to any extent, and they certainly suggest that neither rhyme, nor the absence of a Christian bias, nor ignorance of other histories is at all sufficient to ensure • Buchie's Sider, of Civilizalion in England. New edition. London ; Longman!. accuracy. The -most that can be said is that poems preserved by oral tradition commonly concern themselves only with the most salient facts of a period.
As writing came in and records multiplied, the uncritical spirit of which Mr. Buckle complains becomes more evident, because we have larger opportunities of testing it. A monk, living apart from the world, could only tell what had happened in another part of England by the rumours that reached his village. Instead of Caesar, Tacitus, or Eginhard, the soldier or the statesman, we get a class of whom Bede is a high exemplar, carefully compiling and collecting, but unable adequately to sift their materials. Every one must admit that the class of writer is impaired, but is the new method an absolute falling off from legend as well as from history ? Would the world have gained anything ? would it not rather have lost, if Herodotus, instead of importuning all he talked with for information till his desperate friends silenced him with legends like that about Krophi and Mophi, the two fountains of the Nile, had confined himself to a digest of what was well proved, or what he had seen himself? Is any mediaeval legend wilder than the story which Tacitus given of the Jews guided by an ass through the desert and worshipping its head ? —yet is not that very story invaluable, as lighting up and explaining the Roman contempt for the people of Palestine ? Mr. Buckle's instances of mediaeval credulity are chiefly from two sources. One is where uncritical writers like Matthew Paris and Matthew of Westminster digress from their actual narrative into stories of Judas marrying his mother, or of Mahomet being eaten by swine. Grotesque as these legends appear to us, they contain nothing that is actually impossible ; they are given only as on second-hand testimony, and they relate to distant times and foreign countries, with which the annalist could not be well conversant. Both writers are pre-eminently uncritical, but each is fairly veracious, and is accepted as an authority for his own time. The other and stronger instance which Mr. Buckle quotes is the popularity of Geoffrey of Mon- mouth, with his legends of Bladud, of Lear and Cordelia, of Arthur, Merlin, and Modred. That stories embalming such exquisite poetry should commend themselves to the taste of a whole society is, per- haps, not very wonderful. But the curious fact is that Geoffrey of Monmouth's influence upon history was greater in compara- tively recent times than in his own century. Two of his con- temporaries denounced him vehemently. Giraldus Cambrensis treated him as an impudent liar, and declared that his book attracted devils. William of Newbury, in a short and solid criticism, showed the inconsistency of the British legends with the more credible Saxon narrative. Higden adopted and endorsed these arguments. It is to the early English histories in such books as Robert of Gloucester, Holinshed, and Baker, that Geoffrey of Monmouth's abiding influence must be attributed, and the stories rejected under Henry II. were accepted under Elizabeth, and as Mr. Earle has lately shown, under George II. After all is said, Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Britons is of high though undefinable value. It contains the genuine products of the British mind, and so testifies to the enduring influence of the race. Critics like Dr. Guest are able here and there to extract a reliable fact from it, and its very geography bears incidental witness to the character of the Saxon conquest, dealing only with local names in the west, as if the east of England was inhabited by a different race. We could spare many writers better than Geoffrey of Monmouth.
A more serious charge against mediaeval writers is that which implies that they could not take in the bearings of the facts they saw about them or describe accurately. It is no doubt true that only men of the highest range of intellect are able to comprehend phenomena that are beyond the ordinary range of their experience. Herodotus was staggered at the story that certain navigators, who had doubled the Cape, had the sun to the north of them. Bacon declared that he would exhibit a " noble constancy" in rejecting the discoveries of Copernicus. Some of the most eminent members of every profession are always found among the enemies of its improvement; and the very doctrine of the circula- tion of the blood had been discovered sixty years before Harvey forced it on the faculty. But admitting all this, there is more equality between men of accurate habits of thought in different centuries than we are at first disposed to admit. Dr. Arnold quoted a description in Bede of the breakers in the Solent as an instance of uncritical exaggeration, and Mr. Buckle repeats the charge. But late researches have made it probable that the Isle of Wight in Bede's time was a peninsula, and we know that till the great storms in which the Zuyder Zee was formed much of the English coast was under water. It is evident that a stronger sea.
than at present chafing in a narrower channel might easily produce a surf such as Bede describes in no very coloured language. The statement of old historians that Archimedes set fire to the Roman fleet by mirrors was disbelieved and declared impossible till Kircher, after a series of experiments, succeeded in reproducing a similar. result. Within its own domain, indeed, history has a greater finality than science ; and while we cannot be quite sure that future discoveries may not remodel the laws of electricity or revolutionize chemistry by making it a branch of mathematics, we know that the facts of Caesar's life and death, once accurately stated, are beyond cavil or change, and that future writers can only add a better arrangement, a happier style, or more philosophical inferences. Could we establish the fact of a single miracle, in such sense that no unprejudiced man could doubt it, the supposed invariability of the laws of nature would be no evidence against it. But as we ascend from the observation of a simple fact, like the tides of the Solent, to the observation of highly complex phenomena, which no science can even yet treat adequately, we grope more and more in the dark. We can account for a false impression in Bede's mind if he saw the Solent on a windy day, or if he only saw it as a child. A second independent testimony to the same facts would, however, remove our difficulty. But with miracles of healing, the case is altogether different. Eginhard, a statesman, and singularly veracious, has left a long account of miracles which he saw performed in the shrines of St. Marcellinus and St. Peter. The difficulty is that where Eginhard was interested in believing, (for he had procured the relics,) where the priests were interested in deceiving him, and where an ignorant and superstitious populace was highly accessible to nervous influences, we cannot be sure that Eginhard did not mix up his inferences and his facts. We may easily believe that he saw a suppliant approach the shrine on crutches and -walk away unassisted, but the man may have been an impostor, or the cure may be explained from an excited fancy. Ten independent witnesses to the truth of Eginhard's narrative would not establish it, for we do not reject what he saw, but what he inferred. If he and three other equally competent witnesses told us that they had seen the relics of a saint restore an amputated leg, we should then indeed get a crucial experiment ; but it is to the credit of mediaeval writers that they never make this demand upon our acquiescence. Their liability to error lies in their inability to test evidence, not in their incapacity to see or to describe. The task of sifting their statements belongs to the modern critic.
Mr. Buckle's charges against mediaeval historians are, then, we think, stated too strongly. He has selected the faultiest examples, but even these generally display an advance in knowledge and a regard for veracity. They break down chiefly where they digress from their immediate subject, or where they are tempted to confuse impressions and inferences with ascertained facts. Let us add that this source of error is by no means confined to the Middle Ages, or to men of a devout temperament. Not to mention the belief in witchcraft, which has lasted down in the Eastern Counties through the times when neither Church nor Dissent had any influence, it is curious that table-turning and spirit-rapping found votaries in the economist and the rationalist, quite as much as in the clergyman. We have heard a highly educated man declare that he inclined to reject the -Gospels, but could not resist the evidence for spirit-rapping. We know of another who apologized for his faith in self-moving tables by explaining that he was not superstitious, "he did not believe in a God." Perhaps the happiest statement of this philosophy was that of the French postilion ; "I do not believe in God because I have never seen Him, but I believe in St. Martin of Tours, because I have seen the miracle that he wrought." In fact the blunt common sense that refuses to believe in anything but what it can see or handle, is as apt to mislead inquiry as the mysticism that refers everything to a few formulas. During the last century, which was perhaps the most sceptical of any, the study of history rather retrograded than advanced. It is not too much to say that it tasks all the moral sympathies and critical intellect of society to understand its own past; and a generation which is insensible to any one large impulse, be it the warlike or the devotional, will be so far unfitted to comprehend a portion of past time.
Previous page
