Part 12

The Barbarian is very certain that the exact reproduction in line or colour of a thing seen is beneath him, and that a drunken blur for line, a green sky, a red tree and a purple cow for colour, are the mark of great painting.

The Barbarian hopes--and that is the very mark of him--that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.

The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth, "_Sine Auctoritate nulla vita_."

In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot _make_; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.

We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.

We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last.

Yet there is one real interest in watching the Barbarian and one that is profitable.

The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom. It is not he in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great and ancient body of Christendom, but if we come to see him triumphant we may be certain that that body, from causes much vaster than such as he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming for him a congenial soil--and that is as much as to say that we are dying.

XXXIII

ON KNOWING THE PAST

An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.

First, the mind must grasp the nature of historic change and must be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each successive period, as also with the general aspect of its revolution and progression.

Secondly, the actions of men, the times, that is the dates and hours of such actions, must be strictly and accurately acquired.

Neither of these two foundations upon which repose both the teaching and the learning of history is more important than the other. Each is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the establishment of truth.

History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor, the object lesson of political science; or it may be called the great story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the manifestation of God.

But whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the establishment of truth.

A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a particular event. But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he knows their due sequence and proportion; he knows not what to omit, nor what to enlarge upon, among so many, or rather a potentially infinite number of facts, and his picture will not be (as some would put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of truth. All that he establishes by his action, all that he confirms and makes stronger, is untruth. And so far as truth is concerned, it would be far better that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of history ill-stated as to the factor of human motive.

A living man has to aid his judgment and to guide him in the establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their acts and of his own are fully within his grasp.

If a man is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining mind from which the present has sprung, his information will illumine and expand and confirm his use of that present experience. If he know nothing of the past his personal observation and the testimony of his own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if he brings in aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the past which is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for ever read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining forces which do not explain them and which are not connected with them in the way he imagines. And he will easily come to regard his own society, which as a wholly uninstructed man he might fairly though insufficiently have grasped, through a veil of illusion and of false philosophy, until at last he cannot even see the things before his eyes. In a word, it is better to have no history at all than to have history which misconceives the general direction and the large lines of thought in the immediate and the remote past.

This being evidently the case one is tempted to say that a just estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in history, that is an acquaintance with the largest possible number of facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory, is as essential to this study as of that other background of motive which has just been examined.

The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect.

A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines if he have but a vague and general sentiment of the old Pagan civilisation of the Mediterranean so long as that sentiment corresponds to the very large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair. But he cannot possess so much as an impression of the truth if he has not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexandria, and of Jerusalem have never been mentioned to him.

Nor will a knowledge of facts, however slight, be valuable; contrariwise it will be detrimental and of negative value to his judgment if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate, thinking that red which was blue, inverting the order of any two events and putting without fail in the summer what happened in winter, or in the Germanies what took place in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with the human motive of them, and his errors upon externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal motive and suggest other and non-existent motive in its place.

It is, of course, a childish error to imagine that the knowledge of a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to imagine that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's self on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics, for instance, ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the "working" of institutions--as though it were possible to judge whether an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal that institutions might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the necessary accompaniment of it. Facts, which (to repeat) do not produce ideas but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and revelation.

Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has this further function: that it lends stuff to general apprehension of the past, which, however just, is the firmer, the larger and the more intense as the range of knowledge and its fixity increase. And scholarship has one more function, which is that it connects, and it connects with more and more precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency of the mind to develop a general and perhaps justly apprehended idea into imaginary regions: for the mind is creative; it will still make and spin, and if you do not feed it with material it will spin dreams out of emptiness.

Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the thirteenth century in England; he will perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its whole spirit according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy; but in either case, though his general impression was just, he will tend to add to it excrescences of judgment which, as the process continued, would at last destroy the true image were not scholarship there to come in perpetually and check him in his conclusions. He admires it, he will tend to make it more national than it was, to forget its cruelties because what is good in our own age is not accompanied by cruelty. He will tend to lend it a science it did not possess because physical science is in our own time an accompaniment of greatness. But if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will not oppress or warp his vision. More and more body will be added to that spirit, which he does justly but only vaguely know. And he will at last have with the English thirteenth century something of that acquaintance which one has with a human face and voice: these also are external things, and these also are the product of a soul.

Indeed--though metaphors are dangerous in such a matter--a metaphor may with reservation be used to describe the effect of the chronicle, of research and of accurate scholarship in the science of history. A man ill provided with such material is like one who sees a friend at a distance; a man well provided with it is like a man who sees a friend close at hand. Both are certain of the identity of the person seen, both are well founded in that certitude; but there are errors possible to the first which are not possible to the second, and close and intimate acquaintance lends to every part of judgment a surety which distant and general acquaintance wholly lacks. The one can say something true and say it briefly: there is no more to say. The other can fill in and fill in the picture, until though perhaps never complete, it is asymptotic to completion.

To increase one's knowledge by research, to train one's self to an accurate memory of it, does not mean that one's view of the past is continually changing. Only a fool can think, for instance, that some document somewhere will be discovered to show that the mass of the people of London had for James II an ardent veneration, or that the national defence organised by the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution was due to the unpopular tyranny of a secret society. But research in either of these cases, and a minute and increasing acquaintance with detail, does show one London largely apathetic in the first place, and does show one large sections of rebellious feeling in the armies of the Terror. It permits one to appreciate what energy and what initiative were needed for the overthrow of the Stuarts, and to see from how small a body of wealthy and determined men that policy proceeded. It permits one to understand how the battles of '93 could never have been fought upon the basis of popular enthusiasm alone; it permits one to assert without exaggeration that the autocratic power of the Committee of Public Safety and the secrecy of its action was a necessary condition of the National defence during the French Revolution.

One might conclude by saying what might seem too good to be true: namely, that minute and accurate information upon details (the characteristic of our time in the science of history) must of its own nature so corroborate just and general judgments of the past, that through it, when the modern phase of wilful distortion is over, mere blind scholarship will restore tradition.

I say it sounds too good to be true. But three or four examples of such action are already before us. Consider the Gospel of St. John, for instance, or what is called "the Higher Criticism" of the old Hebrew literature, and ask yourselves whether modern scholarship has not tended to restore the long and sane judgment of men, which, when that scholarship was still imperfect, seemed to imperil.

XXXIV

THE HIGHER CRITICISM

I have long desired to make some protest against the attitude which the Very Learned take towards literary evidence. I know that the Very Learned chop and change. I know that they are in this country about fifty years behind the Continent. I know that their devotion to the extraordinary unintelligent German methods will soon be shaken by their discovery that new methods are abroad--in both senses of the word "abroad": for new methods have been abroad, thank Heaven, for a very long time.

But I also know that a mere appeal to reason will be of very little use, so I propose here to give a concrete instance, and I submit it to the judgment of the Very Learned.

The Very Learned when they desire to fix the date or the authenticity or both of a piece of literature, adopt among other postulates, these:

(1) That tradition doesn't count.

(2) That common sense, one's general knowledge of the time, and all that multiplex integration which the same mind effects from a million tiny data to a general judgment, is too tiny to be worthy of their august consideration.

(3) That the title "Very Learned" (which gives them their authority) is tarnished by any form of general knowledge and can only be acquired by confining oneself to a narrow field in which any fool could become an absolute master in about two years.

These are their negative postulates in dealing with a document.

As to their positive methods, of one hundred insufficient tricks I choose in particular these:

(1) The establishment of the date of the document against tradition and general air, by allusion discovered within it.

(2) The conception that all unusual events recorded in it are mythical, and therefore necessarily anterior to the document.

(3) The supposition that religious emotion, or indeed emotion of any kind, vitiates record.

(4) The admission of a single piece of correlative documentary evidence to destroy the reader's general judgment.

(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of their time in forging.

Now to test these nincompoops I will consider a contemporary document which I know a good deal about, called _The Path to Rome_. It professes to be the record of a journey by one H. Belloc in the year 1901 from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through a knowledge of surrounding circumstance, a popular idea of what the opening of the twentieth century was like, and a pathetic belief that Belloc had taken this journey in the year 1901.

This is how the Very Learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in scepticism.

"A critical examination of the document has confirmed me in the conclusion that the so-called _Path to Rome_ is composed of three distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and [Greek: theta]." (See my article E.H.R., September 3, 113, pp. 233 _et seq._ for [Greek: theta]. For W, see Furth in Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)

Of these three documents A is certainly much earlier than the rather loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the Continent decided some years ago in the Monograph of the one, and the Discursions which the other has incorporated in his _Neo-Catholicism in the Twenty-Second Century_.

The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit of A.D. 2208, and a doubtful superior limit of A.D. 2236. The German is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known arguments with which this view is supported (See Z.M. fs. (Mk. 2) Arch., and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally that their argument reposes upon two considerations:

(1) The _Centime_, a coin which is mentioned several times in the book, went out of circulation before the middle of the twenty-first century, as we know from the only extant letter (undoubtedly genuine) of Henri Perro to the Prefect of Aude.

This gives them their superior limit. But it is the Inferior Limit which concerns us most, and here the argument reposes upon one phrase. (Perkins' edition, p..) This phrase is printed in italics, and runs, "_Deleted by the Censor_."

It is advanced that we know that a censorship of books was first established in America (where, as I shall show, _The Path to Rome_ was written) in the year 2208, and there is ample evidence of the fact that no such institution was in actual existence before the twenty-second century in the English-speaking countries, though there is mention of it elsewhere in the twenty-first, and a fragment of the twentieth appears to allude to something of the kind in Russia at that time. (Baker has confused the Censorship of _Books_ with that of _Plays_, and an unknown form of art called "Morum"; probably a species of private recitation.)

Now Dr. Blick has conclusively shown in his critical edition of the mass of ancient literature, commonly known as _The Statute Book_, that the use of italics is common to distinguish _later_ interpolation.

This discovery is here of the first importance. Not only does it destroy the case for the phrase, "_Deleted by the Censor_," as a proof of an Inferior Limit, 2208, but in this particular instance it is conclusive evidence that we have interpolation here, for it is obvious that _after_ the establishment of a Censorship the right would exist to delete a name in the text, and a contemporary Editor would warn the reader in the fashion which he has, as a fact, employed.

So much for the negative argument. We can be certain after Dr. Blick's epoch-making discovery that even the year 2208 is not our Inferior Limit for A, but we have what is much better, conclusive evidence of a much earlier _Superior_ Limit, to which I must claim the modest title of discoverer.

There is a passage in A (pp. 170-171) notoriously corrupt, in which a dramatic dialogue between three characters, the Duchess, Major Charles and Clara, is no longer readable. All attempts to reconstitute it have failed, and on that account scholars have too much tended to neglect it.

Now I submit that though the passage is hopelessly corrupt its very corruption affords us a valuable indication.

The Duchess, in a stage indication, is made to address "Major Charles." It is notorious that the term "Major" applied to a certain functionary in a religious body probably affiliated to the Jesuits, known to modern scholars under a title drawn from the only contemporary fragment concerning it, as "Old Booth's Ramp." This society was suppressed in America in the year 2012, _and the United States were the last country in which it survived_.

No matter how correct, therefore, the text is in this passage, we may be certain that even the careless scribe took the contemporary existence of a "major" for granted. And we may be equally certain that even our existing version of A incorporated in the only text we possess, was not written later than the first years of the twenty-first century. We have here, therefore, a new superior limit of capital importance, but, what is even more important, we can fix with fair accuracy a new inferior limit as well.

In the Preface (whose original attachment to A is undoubted) we have the title "Captain Monologue," p. XII (note again the word "Captain," an allusion to "Booth's Ramp,") and in an anonymous fragment (B.M. m.s.s., 336 N., (60)), bearing the title, "Club Gossip," I have found the following conclusive sentence: "He used to bore us stiff, and old Burton invented a brand new title for him, 'Captain Monologue,' about a year before he died, which the old chap did an hour or two after dinner on Derby Day."

Now this phrase is decisive. We have several allusions to "dinner" (in all, eight, and a doubtful ninth, tabulated by Ziethen in his _Corpus. Ins. Am._). They all refer to some great public function the exact nature of which is lost, but which undoubtedly held a great place in political life. At what intervals this function occurred we cannot tell, but the coincident allusion to Derby Day settles it.

The only Lord Derby canonized by the Church died in 1960 and the promulgation of Beatification (the earliest date that would permit the use of the word "day" for this Saint) was issued by Pope Urban XV in May, 2003. It is, therefore, absolutely certain that A was written at some time between the years 2003 to 2012. Nearer than that I do not profess to fix it; but I confess that the allusion (p. 226) to drinking coffee coupled with the corresponding allusion to drinking coffee in a license issued for a Lockhart's Restaurant in 2006 inclines me to that precise year as the year in which A appeared, or at any rate was written.

I think in the above I have established the date of A beyond dispute.

I have no case to bring forward of general conclusions, and I know that many scholars will find my argument, however irrefutable, disturbing, for it is universally admitted that excluding the manifestly miraculous _Episodes of the Oracle_, _The Ointment of Epinal_, _The View of the Alps over a Hundred Miles_, etc., which are all of them properly referred to in W. and [Greek: theta] respectively, A itself contains numerous passages too closely connected with the text to be regarded as additions, yet manifestly legendary--such as the perpetual allusions to spirits, and in particular to a spirit called "Devil," the inordinate consumption of wine, the gift of tongues, etc. etc. But I submit that a whole century, especially in a time which pullulated with examples of credulity, such as the "Flying Men," "The Telephone," "Wireless Telegraphy," etc., is ample to allow for the growth of these mythical features.