IT is said that when in 1751 a bill was introduced into the British Parliament for the reform of the calendar by passing at once from the 18th of February to the 1st of March, it met with fierce opposition. Lord Macclesfield, the President of the Royal Society, warmly advocated the bill; and when three years afterward his son was a candidate for Parliament in Oxfordshire, one of the most vehement cries raised against him was, — “Give us back the eleven days we have been robbed of!” When Mr. Bradley, the mathematician, another advocate of the bill, was dying of a lingering illness, the common people with one voice ascribed his sufferings to a judgment from Heaven for having taken part in that “impious undertaking.”
Something like this is the feeling of many persons in regard to the havoc made with their idols by modern historical criticism. One of the most painful moments in the experience of a student is when, after having spent years in acquiring a knowledge of the past, — in building painfully, brick by brick, an edifice of historical learning, — a doubt suggests itself whether the whole structure does not rest on sandy foundations. Beginning his researches with belief that “facts are stubborn things,” or, as the Scotch poet has it, that
“Facts are chiels that winna gang,
And daurna be disputed.”
he too often ends with the melancholy conviction that “nothing is so fallacious as facts, except figures.” That 172 compiled histories, like those of Hume and Gibbon, written by persons not concerned in the events, should abound in errors, is not strange; but it does startle us to be told that original memoirs, describing what men profess to have seen with their own eyes, or to have gathered from the lips of the actors themselves, are scarcely less likely to misrepresent the facts than derived history. If we may not implicitly believe Robertson, Froude, and Macaulay, shall we not credit Clarendon, Burnett, and Sully? Yet modern investigation has shown that in the latter class of writers falsifications, exaggerations, and distortions of fact, are nearly as frequent as in the former.
Who is not familiar with the despairing exclamation of Sir Walter Raleigh, on vainly trying to get at the rights of a squabble which he had witnessed in the court-yard of the Tower, in which he was imprisoned? Two gentlemen had entered the room, and given him conflicting, and, as he thought, untrue accounts of the brawl. “Here am I,” he cried, “employed in writing a History of the World, — trying to give a just account of transactions many of which occurred three thousand years ago, — when I cannot ascertain the truth of what happens under my window!” So the Duke of Sully tells us that, after the battle of Aumaule, Henry IV, being slightly wounded, conversed familiarly with some of his officers touching the perils of the day; “upon which,” says the Duke, “I observed, as something very extraordinary, that, amongst us all who were in the chamber, there were not two who agreed in the recital of the most particular circumstances of the action.”
Doubtless differences like these result from the different stand-points of the observers, just as two or more observers behold each a different rainbow, since the sun’s rays are 173 not reflected in the eyes of any two persons exactly in the same angle. Yet the rainbows are mainly the same, and so it may be with the differences of historians. But what if the discrepancies are essential, so as fundamentally to vary the whole statement? What if the witnesses are weak in intellect, dull of perception, dishonest, prejudiced, or deeply interested to give a lying account of the whole affair? Have we all of Cæsar’s blunders in his Commentaries, — all of Napoleon’s in his Memoirs? Who shall tell us of the true character of the Inquisition? Read Protestant historians, and you see an engine of devilish cruelty; read De Maistre, and in an instant all history is upturned, and all your convictions subverted. You find it to be a mild and beneficent institution, founded upon the same rock of eternal truth and justice as martyrdom, love and heroic sacrifice. Who, again, shall tell us what was the real character of John Graham, of Claverhouse? How shall we decide between the two views which history presents to us, — on this panel, the butcher and the assassin; on that, the heroic leader, with a rare genius for war, — the politic and tolerant statesman, with a rare capacity for civil organization?
It may be thought that a historian living many ages after the events he portrays is guarded against error by the fact that he can judge calmly and philosophically of men and their acts; that he can sift the statements of contemporary chroniclers, balancing one misstatement against another, and thus ascertain the precise amount of truth. But by what rule is he to decide among a variety of conflicting statements? By what hair-balance is he to ascertain the exact amount of weight to be given to each? Knowing that, as Boileau says, “Le vrai n’est pas toujours 174 le vraisemblable,” that Truth often lacks verisimilitude, — shall he declare that to be true which looks the most probable? Again: is it quite certain that distance from the evens guards the historian against prejudice? Is there not too much ground for the sarcasm of Rev. F. W. Robertson, that history, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is merely Mr. Hume’s or Mr. Gibbon’s theory, substantiated by a dry romance, until Mr. Somebody else comes and writes the romance in his way, the facts being pliable and equally available for both?
What are Mitford’s and Thirlwall’s Histories of Greece but elaborate and disguised party pamphlets, demonstrating, the one aristocratical principles from Grecian history, the other democratical principles from precisely the same facts? Or what is Alison’s History but Mr. Wordy’s account of the French Revolution, in twenty volumes, written to show that Providence was always on the side of the Tories? What Abbot’s Life of Napoleon, but a demonstration from the very same facts that the hero of Austerlitz was a great philanthropist, who immolated self on the altar of humanity? What is Macaulay’s so-called History but an ingenious and masterly piece of special pleading, designed to show that James II was a miscreant unworthy to live, while the asthmatic skeleton, his successor, an obstinate, hard-headed, uninteresting Dutchman, with a bull-dog tenacity of purpose, had, like Berkeley “every virtue under heaven?” Has not Mr. Froude shown that the facts of history are ductile, and can be manipulated so as to establish any desired theory, — even theories the most opposite? What, indeed, is the spirit of past ages, as preserved in most histories, “but the spirit,” as Faust said to the student, “of this or that good gentleman 175 in whose mind those ages are reflected?” All the events of the past come to us through the minds of those who recorded them; and they, it is plain, are neither machines nor angels, but fallible beings, with human passions and prejudices. Iron is iron in all its forms, but the sulphate of iron will always differ from the carbonate of iron. Smith and Brown may be equally anxious to give us the facts of the past, without change or coloring; but the Smithate of history will, nevertheless, always differ from the Brownate of history. With the self-same facts, by skillful selection and suppression, “you many have your Hegel’s philosophy of history, or you may have your Schlegel’s philosophy of history; you may prove that the world is governed in detail by a special Providence, or you may prove that there is no sign of any moral agent in the universe, except man; you may prove that our fathers were wiser than we, or you may prove that they were fools; you may maintain that the evolution of humanity has been a ceaseless progress toward perfection, or you may maintain that there has been no progress, that the race has barely marked time; or, again, that men were purest in primeval simplicity, when
“ ‘Wild through the woods the noble savage ran.’ ”
In days of old there were historians who avowedly wrote as they were bribed. It was said of Paulus Jovius that he kept a bank of lies. To those who paid him liberally he assigned a noble pedigree and illustrious deeds; those who gave nothing he vilified and blackened. He claimed that it was the historian’s privilege to aggravate or extenuate faults, to magnify or depreciate virtues, — to dress the generous paymaster in gorgeous robes, and the miserly magnate in mean apparel. Many later 176 historians, who would have scorned Jovius’s fees, have not hesitated to copy his practices, — heightening the portraits of some, and smearing the faces of others, as the Duchess of Marlborough, in a fit of rage, did the portrait of her daughter, declaring that she was now as black without as within.
What a tissue of falsification are many of the so-called histories of England! What lies have they perpetuated concerning the portraits of the Commonwealth and the age of Charles I! So outrageously have they misrepresented the facts and the principles of those times, that even De Quincey, a churchman and a Tory, expresses his disgust, and affirms that the clergy of the Church of England have been in a perpetual conspiracy since the era of the Restoration to misrepresent both. “There is not a page of the national history, even in its local subdivisions, which they have not stained with the atrabilious hue of their wounded remembrances.” Of Cromwell’s administration, the most glorious in English annals, they have given, he affirms, so mendacious a picture, that Continental writes have actually believed that Oliver was a ferocious savage, who built his palace of human skulls, and that his major-generals of counties were so many Ali Pachas, who impaled or shot a dozen prisoners every morning before breakfast, or, rather, so many ogres that ate up good Christian men, women and children alive.
Perhaps no historian ever piqued himself more on his judicial equanimity than David Hume. It was a favorite boast of his, that his first account of the Stuarts was free from all bias, and that he had held the balance between Whig and Tory with a delicate and impartial hand. Yet, that his prejudices powerfully warped his 177 mind, so as to render him altogether unsafe as a historian, few can doubt. Ten years after the first publication of his work irritated by the outcry against him “for presuming,” as he expresses it, “to shed a generous tear for the fate of Charles the first and the Earl of Stafford,” he avenged the censure by recasting his historical verdicts, so as to render them offensive to the party that had attacked him. Among his intimate friends at Edinburgh was an old Jesuit, who, like most of the order, was a scholar and a man of taste; and to his criticism, as the parts were finished, the MS. was submitted. Just after the publication of Elizabeth’s reign the priest chanced to turn over the pages, and was astonished to find on the printed page sins of the Scottish queen that had never sullied the written one. Mary’s character was the exact reverse of what he had found it in the manuscript. Seeking the author, he asked the meaning of this. “Why,” replied Hume, “the printer said he would lose £500 by that story; indeed, he almost refused to print it; so I was obliged to alter it as you saw.”
But what truth could be expected of a historian who wrote lying, — on a sofa? Nothing can surpass the exquisite ease and vivacity of Hume’s narration; the charm of the style which Gibbon despaired of imitating, is familiar to all. But the Scottish historian was too indolent to trouble himself about accuracy. Instead of applying his powerful critical faculty to sift truth out of tradition, he repeats legendary and half-mythological stories with the same air of belief as the well-authenticated events of modern times. Essentially a classicist of the Voltaire and Diderot school, he despised too heartily the barbarous monkish chroniclers to think of going 178 through the drudgery of examining their writings, and winnowing the grains of fact they contain from the chaff of superstition and imaginative detail. We need not be surprised, therefore, that the searching investigations to which his history was subjected some years ago by George Brodie brought to light so many departures from truth, both wilful and unintentional. “Upon any question of fact,” says De Quincey himself, like Hume, a Tory, “Hume’s authority is none at all.”
Even had Hume struggled against his indolence and his prejudices, there is one source of error which he could not have avoided. In condensing a narrative from the old chroniclers, and giving the pith of their statements in modern phraseology the historian almost invariably gives us a new and different story. The events, characters, all the features of the time, undergo a kind of translation or paraphrase, which materially changes their character and gives a false impression to the reader, — an impression as false as that which Dryden has given of Chaucer by his attempts to modernize the old bard. Every one knows how completely the aroma, the bouquet of the old poet, — the sly grace of his language, — the exquisite tone of naiveté, which, like the lispings of infancy, give such a charm to his verse, — have evaporated in the process of transfusion into more modern language. Words and ideas are so mystically connected, — so con-natural, — that the modernization of an old author is substantially a new book. It is not the putting of old thoughts into a new dress; it is the substitution of a new thought, more or less changed from the original type. Language is not the dress of thought; it is the incarnation of thought, and it controls both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea it utters.
179Even when Hume most unjustifiably perverts the truth of history, it is not usually by positively false statements. It is by suppression and exaggeration, — by gliding lightly over some parts, and scrutinizing others with microscopic eye and relentless severity, — that he commonly deceives the reader; a process by which it is easy to make a saint of Charles I, or a tyrant of William III. In the same manner the author of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” has Gibbonized the vast tract over which he has traversed. Guizot and Milman have both compared Gibbon’s work with the original authorities, and both, after the intensest scrutiny, pronounce him diligent and honest; but, as Mr. E. P. Whipple has observed, this by no means proves that he gives us the real truth of men and events. The qualities of the historian’s character steal out in every paragraph; and the reader who is magnetized by his genius rises from the perusal of the vast work informed of nothing as it was in itself, but of everything as it appeared to Gibbon, and especially doubting two things, — that there is any chastity in women, or any divine truth in Christianity. “He writes,” says Macaulay, “like a man who had received some personal injury from Christianity, and wished to be revenged on it and all its professors.” It is not, however, by what he expressly says, that he misleads the reader, but by what he hints and insinuates. Of all the writers who have “sapped a solemn creed” with irony, he is the most consummate master of the art of sneering. As Archbishop Whately has well said, “His way of writing reminds one of those persons who never dare look you full in the face.” Never openly attacking Christianity, advancing no opinions which he might find it difficult to 180 defend, he yet contrives to leave an impression adverse to the idea of its divine origin. Its rapid spread is accounted for by secondary causes, and the evidence upon which it rests are indirectly classed in the same category with the mythologies of paganism. Through two chapters an insidious poison is distilled and yet, so skilfully is it mixed, that it would be difficult to put one‘s finger on a single passage which the historian could not defend as consistent with the faith of the most orthodox believer.
“No man should write history,” says Montaigne, “who has not himself served the State in some civil or military capacity.” By this is meant that only a man of action, one versed in affairs, can judge fairly the conduct of men of action, the man of books being almost sure to judge men according to some fanciful theory, which he has adopted in his chimney corner, of what they might and ought to be, and not practically, according to what they really are. Besides this, there is yet another source of error against which the most conscientious historian finds it difficult to guard. It is that which Guizot calls the aptness to forget moral chronology, — to overlook the fact that history is essentially successive. “Take the life of any man,” he observes, — “of Oliver Cromwell, of Cardinal Richelieu, of Gustavus Adolphus; he enters upon his career; he pushes forward in life, and rises; great circumstances act upon him; he acts upon great circumstances. He arrives at the end of all things, and then it is we know him. But it is in his whole character; it is as a complete, finished piece; such in a manner as he is turned out, after a long labor, from the workshop of Providence. Now at his outset he was not what he thus became; he was not completed, not finished, at any single moment of his life; he was formed 181 successively. Men are formed morally as they are physically. They change every day. . . . The Cromwell of 1650 was not the Cromwell of 1640. . . . This, nevertheless, is an error into which a great number of historians have fallen. When they have acquired a complete idea of a man, have settled his character, they see him in the same character throughout his whole career. With them it is the same Cromwell who enters Parliament in 1628, and who dies in the palace of Whitehall thirty years afterwards.” Who can doubt that this mistake is a fruitful source of erroneous judgments? How often are public men, — especially usurpers and despots, — treated as if they had contemplated at the outset of their career the goal which they reached at last! It has been well said that Cromwell followed little events before he ventured to govern great ones; and that Napoleon never sighed for the sceptre until he gained the truncheon, nor dreamt of the imperial diadem until he had first conquered a crown. It is only by degrees that a man attains to the pinnacles of influence and power; and often none of those who gaze at the height to which he has risen are more astonished at his elevation than himself.
That Macaulay succeeded better than Hume is doubtless true; but in some respects he signally failed. That he was far from being impartial, few, even of his admirers, will deny. He was a brilliant advocate, rather than a calm and discriminating judge. The most superficial reader cannot be blind to his more palpable prejudices, such as his intense dislike of the Quakers, — his almost bitter hatred of the Duke of Marlborough, which led him to paint his character in the blackest ink, — and his idolatry of William III, which led him to palliate all the king’s 182 faults, even his faithlessness to his wife. But the historian had graver faults. To the height of the great argument of Puritanism he never rose. Cool, moderate, unenthusiastic in temperament, his genius exactly fitted him to portray the reign of Queen Anne. The poets and the politicians of that age he could thoroughly gauge; and his picture of that brilliant group of versatile, witty, corrupt, and splendid gentlemen would have been drawn with a masterly hand. But his hand faltered when he had to register grander passions and darker conflicts. The world, as Macaulay viewed it, was a very commonplace world. He did not brood over the mysteries of being, like Carlyle. His idea of the universe was essentially a Parliamentary one; and men with him are mainly Whigs and Tories. Nothing can surpass his historical pictures in pomp and splendor; they are woven into a grand and imposing panorama, and every figure, too, is finished, down to the buttons and the finger nails. But it is the accidents, rather than the realities of things, that he paints. To use a scholastic phrase, he sees the qualities, not the quiddities, of men. He never gets to their core. The heroes of the Commonwealth, and their motives of action, — the spiritual pains, the stormy struggles, which tore England asunder in the seventeenth century, — he never comprehended. His plummet could not fathom them; they lay beyond the reach of is even temperament and unimpassioned intellect, and set his measured antitheses at defiance. The strongest, richest, most unconventional, most original characters, become, when he touches them, comparatively insipid and tame.
Macaulay’s style, vivid, picturesque, and condensed, is almost perfect of its kind. His short, quick periods, it 183 has been well said, fall upon the ear like the rapid firing of a well-served battery. But the very splendor of his style is often its chief fault. The temptation to write epigrammatically, — to employ strong contrasts, — sometimes overmasters his judgment. He is too vehement and intense to be safe. There are whole pages in his history with hardly an adjective that is not super-superlative. The antithetical style, which by its salient contrasts is so well adapted to character-painting, does not lend itself readily, — at least when used in excess, — to the exact expression of facts. It is not strange, therefore, that even the most friendly critics of the Whig historian should have complained of his exaggeration. His characterizations are too extreme. He is always deepening the shadow and raising the light. To those he likes and to those he dislikes he gives more white and black than are due. Historical criticism with him was only a tribunal before which men were arraigned to be decisively tried by one or two inflexible tests, and then sent to join the sheep on the one hand, or the goats on the other. It is hard to believe that the hero of Blenheim, with all his avarice, was a moral monster, or that James II was a living contradiction because he risked his soul for the sake of his mistress, and risked his crown for the sake of his creed. Even when most dazzled by Macaulay’s brilliant word-painting, we feel that we would gladly exchange the most Martial-like epigram and the most glittering antithesis for a description which, tickling the fancy less, might be nearer the truth.
Half of the lies of history have their origin in this desire to be brilliant, — to charm and surprise rather than to instruct. Historic truth is usually too complex, — too full of half-lights and faint shadows, — to admit of startling 184 contrasts. The world is not peopled with angels and devils, but with men. To say that Robespierre was a “logic-formula,” with spectacles instead of eyes, and a cramp instead of a soul, as Carlyle has depicted him, and that, as he half suggests, if this “sea-green formula” had been sanguine and Danton bilious, there would have been no Reign of Terror, may be a vivid way of putting things; but we feel that the writer, in his effort to get below the husks and shells to the very souls of things, has falsified history as much by the excess of imagination as others by the lack of it.
It has been justly said that in humanity there is no such thing as a straight line or an unmixed color. You see the flesh color on the cheek of a portrait. The artist will tell you that the consummately-natural result was not attained by one wash of paint, but by the mixture and reduplication of a hundred tints, the play of myriad lights and shadows, no one of which is natural in itself, though the blending of the whole is. A man who lacks the historic instinct ignores all this. He seems to think that all moral distinctions are confounded, if Lucifer does not always wear a complete suit of black, and if there be a speck on Gabriel’s wing. In painting his men and women he assumes that they have but a few leading and consistent traits, and that these are always written in big and glaring type, like that employed by bill-stickers; whereas, the fact is, that all men act more or less from inexplicable motives, and resemble in some degree the poet Edgar A. Poe, — at night the hero of the drunken debauch, in the morning a wizard of song whose weird and fitful music is like that of the sirens.
“I believe that a philosopher,” says Disraeli, “would 185 consent to lose any poet to regain an historian.” No doubt, if the exchange were between a Massey and a Mommsen, a Tupper and a Tacitus; but what if the poet to be exchanged is a Homer or a Horace, a Shakspeare or a Milton? “Fancy,” it is added, “may be supplied, but truth once lost in the annals of mankind leaves a chasm never to be filled.” Unfortunately such fancy as that of Dante or Milton cannot be made to order; it is the growth of centuries; while the truth of many “annals” is purely imaginary. Even fiction itself is often more truthful than history. The creations of the great epic poets embody truths of universal application; and for a vivid and life-like picture of the civil wars of England, you must go, not to the stiff and stately pages of Clarendon, but to a romance of De Foe’s, which Lord Chatham, deceived by its naturalness, once quoted as history.
No one who has not compared the elegant and polished works of modern historians with the homely old chronicles on which they are based, would dream of the extent to which the facts have been tortured or metamorphosed. Not only are dry, naked facts amplified, so as to clothe the skeleton of history with flesh and blood, but chasms are filled up, and new facts added, to eke out the story, and make it more “sensational”; while the entire narration is often so clipped, and rounded off, and polished, that the original author, were he to rise from the dead, would not recognize his own offspring. These historians do as the wolf did with Baron Munchausen’s horse, who began at the horse’s tail, and ate into him, until the Baron drove home the wolf harnessed in the skin of the horse. It would be difficult to name a practice which 186 has been more fatal to the trustworthiness of history than this of filling up the chasms in the historian’s information with conjecture. A Cuvier, from a bone, may reconstruct an antediluvian animal; but it is not so with the writer, who, from a few isolated facts, tries to supply a missing chapter in a nation’s history. In one case there is a correlation of the known and the unknown facts, a law of typical conformity, which makes it easy to supply those that are wanting; in the other there is no analogy, and we are left to our guesses.
What shall we say of the latest historian of England, Mr. Froude? Few writers have recognized more fully than he, in theory at least, the difficulty, nay, impossibility, of being entirely just in our estimate of other ages. He confesses that in historical inquiries the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most, — whose investigations are the profoundest, — approach least to agreement. In the eyes of Hume, he reminds us, the history of the Saxon Princes is “the scuffling of kites and crows.” Father Newman on the other hand, would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained in her royal palaces for the Calendar of the Blessed. How vast a chasm yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! “Again, the history of England scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the Revolution of 1788; and to Lord John Russell and Mr. Hallam the Reformation was the first outcome from centuries of folly and ferocity. Mr. Carlyle has studied the same subject with insight at least equal to theirs, and to him the greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English literature. 187 The race of heroes was already waning; the era of action was yielding before the era of speech.” Yet, in spite of these vivid examples of the difficulty of ascertaining the real facts of the past, and though Mr. Froude declares that he has been struck dumb with wonder at the facility with which men fill in gaps in their knowledge with guesses, — will pass their censures, as if all the secrets of the past lay out on an open scroll before them; and though he acknowledges that, wherever he has been fortunate enough to discover authentic explanations of English historical difficulties, he has rarely found any conjecture, either of his own or of any other modern writer, confirmed, yet even he, it seems, has not been able to avoid the errors of his predecessors; in his own words, “has not been able to leap from his shadow.” He has been accused by able writers of making in his history partial and highly colored representations, of summarizing state papers in such a way as to read into them a meaning which does not exist in the originals; of throwing in words and phrases for which no equivalent can be found in the originals; of suppressing facts not suited to his theories; of dealing in innuendoes and exaggerations; and even of misquoting and entirely misrepresenting his authorities.
Again, popular opinion and the so-called “dignity of history,” too often compel the writer to subordinate faithfulness to impression. Agesilaus must not hobble, nor the neck of Augustus be awry. Hannibal must not be one-eyed, nor Marshal Vendôme humpbacked; Suwarrow must be a giant in body as well as in intellect; Nelson, though dwarfish and lame, must stride the deck with the body, as well as the soul of a hero; Washington 188 must always spell correctly, call “Old Put” General Putnam, and never swear, and never pitch an offending servant out of a window; and all the facts must lose their ugliness or grotesqueness, and have the smoothly clipped uniformity of a Dutch ewe-tree.
Another of the banes of history is the necessity of finding out causes of sufficient dignity for its leading events. Half of the great movements in the world are brought about by means far more insignificant than a Helen’s beauty or an Achilles’ wrath. A grain more of sand, thought Pascal, in the brain of Cromwell, — one more pang of doubt in the tossed and wavering soul of Luther, — and the current of the world’s history would have been changed. Who can conjecture what that history would have been, had Cleopatra’s nose been shorter, — had the spider not woven its web across the cave in which Mahomet took refuge, — had Luther’s friend escaped the thunderstorm, — had the Genoese, after the peace of Paris, not sold the petty island of Corsica to France? Accidents, too, mere accidents, — the bullet which struck Gustavus on the field of Lützen, — the chance by which the Russian lancers missed Napoleon in the churchyard of Eylan, — the chance which stopped Louis XVI in his flight at Varennes, — the death of Elizabeth of Russia, which, in the hour of Frederic the Great’s despair, when he was almost overwhelmed by his enemies, broke the powerful combination against him, — turn the course of history as well as of life, changing alike the destinies of nations and of men. Sallust says that a periwinkle led to the capture of Gibraltar. “A chambermaid,” wrote Chesterfield to his son, “has often made a revolution palaces, which was followed by political revolution in 189 kingdoms; the subtlest diplomacy has sometimes been interrupted by a cough or a sneeze.” Causes like these, which the sensational writer is fond of assigning, seem inadequate and disproportionate to the grave historian; and so he hunts about for weightier ones. He cannot believe that the expedition of Henry of Guise, who went in a herring-boat and made himself King of Naples, was merely the frolic of a hare-brained youth; and he deems it necessary to show a long train of important circumstances leading to the expedition.
Who, again, is not familiar with the rehabilitations of historical villains, which have become so fashionable with recent historians? Special monarchs or statesmen having been selected, whose pilloried bodies have been for centuries the favorite target for filth of every description, they have been subjected to a scrubbing process, by which all their vilest sins have been rubbed off them. Not only has Richard III been “reconstructed,” so as to lose both his physical and his moral hump; not only has the Bluebeard of British history, Henry VIII, been transformed into almost a model husband, whose only fault was excessive uxoriousness; not only has “bloody Mary” lost nearly all her blood, except that running in her own veins; not only has Catiline, whom in our school-boy days we learned so to execrate, been whitewashed into a much-abused patriot; but even the bloody Borgias have been bleached; the Duke of Alva has been metamorphosed from a cruel and cold-blooded bigot into a “cool, moderate, far-seeing statesman”; Catherine de Medicis has been whitened; and Nero himself, the synonym of cruelty, will doubtless be proved to have been outrageously slandered; and some Froude or Niebuhr will yet show that, 190 when he fiddled while Rome was burning, he was only playing some “Dead March in Saul,” or other funereal strain, as a safety-valve to his agonized feelings! But pray tell us, — if the verdicts of the past are to be thus unsettled, and this process is to go on till all the “crook-backed tyrants” of history have been physically and morally straightened, and its pages purified from all cut-throats, — as if our historians had resolved to imitate Canning’s nice judge, who
“Swore, with keen, discriminating sight,
Black’s not so black, nor white so very white.”
— how shall we know when the real truth, the “hard pan” of past events, has been reached, and that History, now so changeful, has made her final and irreversible statement, which shall render her worthy of her proud boast that she is “philosophy teaching by examples”?
Perhaps in the next generation the fashion will have changed to the opposite point of the compass. We may start with a hero, and conclude with a Nero; we may begin with a saint, and end with a scamp. Indeed, the disenchanting process has already begun. Have not the German moles, who have been burrowing in the Eternal City among its old manuscripts and tombstones, shown by a dull realistic philosophy that all its early history is a myth? Have they not squeezed the breath out of Romulus and Remus, and shown that the wolf-suckling story, which so charmed our boyhood, is a fable? Has not the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian vespers, which for ages has been the theme of song and story, — which has inflamed the imagination of all civilized nations through the dreams and embellishments of the novelist and the dramatist, — been lately shown to be no 191 conspiracy at all? Has not Mr. Aaron Goodrich, of Minnesota, just sought to sap our faith in Columbus by showing that he was a pirate, whose true name was Griēgo — that he got all his ideas of the new World from the Northmen and some shipwrecked Venetian sailors, who had discovered the American coast, — that he meanly claimed of Queen Isabella the reward of discovery, though one of his sailors in another vessel had first descried the land, and he had again and again been ready to give up the expedition in despair? Has not Mr. John Pym Yeatman just demonstrated, — to his own satisfaction, at least, — that the Normans never conquered England, but only came down from the mountains and from Brittany, and retook what was their own before? Have not Innes and Pinkerton cut out eight centuries from the history of Scotland, and, crueller still, knocked in the head fifty of her kings? Are we not told that Dion Cassius painted every man whom he disliked as black as Erebus, and that Suidas was accustomed “to invent a horrid death” for those whose doctrines he hated?
Have not the historical critics of Germany shown that the notion which so kindled our youthful enthusiasm, that Brutus stabbed Cæsar from patriotic motives, is an illusion, — that the actual fact was, that, it being the custom in old Rome for the nobles to lend money to the plebeians at fearfully usurious rates, Cæsar forbade this by a law, and was immediately afterwards butchered by the “noble” Brutus and his fellow conspirators; and that consequently all Akenside’s fine poetry about Brutus’s rising “refulgent from the stroke,” is mere poetry, and nothing more? Have not Monsieur Dasent and Mr. Baring-Gould annihilated William Tell and his apple, by showing 192 that no mention of them was made in Switzerland till about two centuries after Tell’s supposed time, and that the story is common to the whole Aryan race, as well as to the Turks and Mongols, who never heard of Tell, or saw a book in their lives? Has not England’s patron saint been proved to be a low impostor, who got rich by fraud, theft, and the arts of a common informer, — turned religious adventurer, bribed his way to a bishopric, and, at last, upon being imprisoned for his crimes, was dragged out of jail, and lynched by an angry mob? Are we not all too familiar with the story of Amerigo Vespucchi, the pickle-dealer of Seville, who, though but a boatswain’s mate in an expedition that never sailed, contrived to supplant Columbus, and to baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name?
Has any other department of history been so deluged with lies as that of saintly biography? Not to dwell upon the counterfeits and fabrications in mediæval and later literature, which the monks spent their leisure in making, — have we no brummagem saints in modern times? What American that has visited London has not learned to honor the name of Thomas Guy, who founded Guy’s hospital, who gave away fabulous sums for benevolent purposes, and whose name stares at us in stone in sundry statues? Yet who and what was this Guy, when stripped of all his guises? Alas! For those who believe that the great secret of happiness is to preserve our illusions, this world-renowned philanthropist, whom the poor, crippled sailor so idolizes, was, if we may believe certain English writers, a clever stock-jobber, a miser, and a man who absolutely fattened on the wrongs of the poor cheated Jack Tars! At one time the English 193 sailors were paid, not in gold, but in paper, as inconvertible as our greenbacks. With these they were often forced to part at any discount which the money-changers chose to exact. The good Guy bought these tickets, and out of the profits became a millionaire.
Shall we add to all these instances of men whom history or biography has canonized, that of Sallust, denouncing in his elegant pages, with burning anger, the corruption of Rome and the extortion in its provinces, yet establishing his famous museum-garden “with the gold and the tears of Numidia;” Pope Gregory VII, the haughtiest of pontiffs, entitling himself “the servant of the servants of God,” at the very time when he expected that kings and emperors should kiss his toe and hold his stirrup; Francis I, the pink of chivalry, threatening to stab himself rather than sign a dishonorable treaty, and, on signing a treaty, declaring secretly to his counsellors his intention, on a miserable pretext, of breaking it; Jean Jacques Rousseau, invoking parental care for infancy, and sending his own children to a foundling hospital; Lord Bacon, holding with one hand the scales of justice, and with the other taking bribes; the great Duke of Marlborough, now acting history in minutes, and now dirtying his hands by peculation in army contracts, — the politest of men and the meanest; Lord Peterborough, the hero of Barcelona and the amateur cook, walking from market in his blue ribbon, with a fowl under one arm and a cabbage under the other; Algernon Sydney, one moment mouthing patriotism, and at another accepting bribes from France; the sentimental Sterne, weeping over a dead ass, and neglecting a living mother; Sheridan, firing off in the House of Commons impromptu jokes kept in pickle for months; the poet 194 Young, spending his best days in toadying and place-hunting, and in old age satirizing the pursuits in which he had failed, — draining the cup of pleasure to the dregs, — and then turning State’s-evidence against the world and its follies?
Shall we speak of the poet Thomson, singing the praises of early rising, and lying abed till noon; Woodworth, singing in his “Old Oaken Bucket” the praises of cold water, under the inspiration of brandy; Dr. Johnson, in his dictionary, defining pension as “pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country,” and afterwards accepting from George III. a pension for himself; William Cobbett, denouncing the House of Commons as “a Den of Thieves,” and afterward putting himself forward as a candidate for admission into this thieving fraternity, and proudly taking his place as one of its members; Byron, dining at Rogers’s on a potato and a little vinegar, and secretly stuffing like an anaconda, — sending £4,000 to Greece, and writing privately to a friend that “he did not see how he could well have got off for less,” — or sending a copy of his famous “Fare-thee-well” verses to Lady Byron, with a butcher’s bill inclosed, with a slip like this, “I don’t think we could have had so much meat as this;” George I, gaining by act of Parliament a crown to which he had no hereditary title, yet in his very first speech to that body talking of “ascending the throne of his ancestors”? But England (as some of our examples have shown) has no monopoly of what one of her writers has called “these humiliating humbugs of history;” we have but to cross the channel to find among her glory-loving neighbors others worthy to rank with a note-shaving Brutus, patriotic from private spite, or a Thomas Guy, ostentatiously giving to the seamen with one hand what he had squeezed out of them with the other.
195“History,“ wrote Voltaire to a friend, “is, after all, nothing but a parcel of tricks we play with the dead.” . . . As for the portraits of men, they are nearly all the creations of fancy; ’tis a monstrous piece of charlatanry to pretend to paint a personage with whom you have never lived.” Did the French historians think of this when they told the story of the Vengeur? Riddled in the sea-fight of June 1, 1794, by three English ships, the Vengeur, they tell us, began to fill. Her crew fought her lower tier of guns till the rising water poured forth through the ports; then, running to the next tier, they fired its guns till again the water drove them off. Then they took to the deck guns; and, at last, grouping, with arms stretched to heaven, and shouting Vive la Republique! their colors still flying, and préférant la mort à la captivité they went down, the waters rolled over them, and all was over!
All this is very magnifique, and many a Frenchman’s heart swelled as he thought that these men were his countrymen, till unfortunately, a letter of the French captain, written on the ship to which he had surrendered, was discovered, showing that the Vengeur has struck her colors, that her crew shrieked for help, that her captain and a good part of her men were taken from her, that she sank as a British prize, and that a British prize-crew went down with her. Notwithstanding these facts, Thackeray saw in the Louvre, in 1841, a great painting representing the Vengeur going down with colors flying, and fired upon by the British soldiers in red coats; and now, to save the national honor, which is so much dearer than truth, the French captain’s official letter is pronounced a forgery!* 196 Perhaps this method of getting rid of the facts was suggested to the French by the irony of Dean Swift: “I have always,” says the Dean, “borne that laudable partiality to my own country which Dionysius Halicarnassus with so much justice recommends to an historian. I would hide the frailties and deformities of my political mother, and place her virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light.”
Passing from the sea to the land, who has not read the glorious tale of the chivalry of Fontenoy? — how two regiments, French and English, approached on the hill, and the officers rode out from each front, bowing and doffing hats, while the gallant Hay cried, “Gentlemen of the French Guards, will you please to fire first?” — to which the count d’Auteroche responds: “We never fire first.” Now what were the facts? Few persons have read them, as stated by Carlyle in his Life of Frederic the Great, that the bowing was mockery, the polite speeches huzzahs, the chivalry mere “chaffing,” and that the French did fire first, and that, too, without standing on the order of firing, but immediately on catching sight of the English, and without even waiting to say, “By your leave.”
Leaving France, and coming nearer home, need we cite Commissioner Oulds’ defence of Wirz, the pious jailor of Andersonville; how he proved him to be a hero of the noblest type, whose only foible was an excess of tenderness, and gave as a reason for this revelation “a desire to vindicate the truth of history”? Are we not all familiar with the thrilling story of Farragut, who, at the battle of Mobile Bay, lashed himself to the mast-head of his battle-scarred flagship, and thence signaled to his fleet 197 as he sailed by Forts Gaines and Morgan vomiting flame? The simple fact is, that the Admiral was not at the mast-head, — was not lashed, — did not go aloft to encourage his men or to signal from his position, but simply stepped into the main rigging to get a good view of the situation, as sings Mr. T. Buchanan Read:
“High in the mizzen-shroud,
(Lest the smoke his sight o’erwhelm,)
Our Admiral’s voice rang loud, —
‘Hard a-starboard your helm!’ ”
And again:
“From the main-top, bold and brief,
Came the word of our grand old chief, —
‘Go on!’ ’Twas all he said,
And the Hartford passed ahead.
So hard is it to get the facts touching what is going on to-day, and almost before our very eyes! “It is probable,” says an able Scottish writer, “that not one fact in the whole range of history, original and derived, is truly stated.”†
Had we space, it would not be difficult to show that many of the most striking incidents of history, — scenes and events which artists have been so fond of depicting, and orators of citing, — are pure fiction. Such are the stories of Xerxes flogging the Hellespont, — that his army numbered five millions, and drank whole rivers dry; that three hundred Spartans checked his career at Thermopylae, when, in fact, they numbered over seven thousand; that Virginia perished by her father’s hand; that Omar burned the Alexandrian library; and that Wellington at Waterloo took refuge in a square; while grave doubts have assailed the story of Cleopatra’s dying by the asp’s sting, that of 198 Canute commanding the waves to roll back, and that of Charles IX firing on the Huguenots from a window of the Louvre during the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Who is not familiar with the touching story of St. Pierre and his companions delivering up the keys of Calais to Edward III, with halters round their necks, and having their lives spared at the intercession of the Queen? Hume discredited it; it was shown by a French antiquary in 1835 to be unfounded; and now a later French writer points to documentary proof that St. Pierre was in collusion with the besiegers, and was pensioned by the English King. Who, again, has not heard the popular story of the origin of the Order of the Garter, — that it was owing to the accident that happened to the Countess of Salisbury, when dancing at the court of Edward III? It may be true; but the first mention made of it is by Polydore Virgil, who wrote two hundred years later. What historical tableau has been more deeply impressed on the public mind than the parting of Louis XVI from his family? The scene has been described in prose and verse, and portrayed in pictures of all sizes, yet never occurred. It is true the Queen wished, with the children, to see the King on the morning of the execution, and he consented; but he subsequently requested that they might not be permitted to return, as their presence too deeply affected him.
Again: what Napoleon-worshipping disciple of Headley or Abbott ever dreams of doubting that the hero of Lodi and Austerlitz really did scale the Alps on a fiery, high-mettled charger, with “neck clothed with thunder,” as David, the French artist, has painted him? But let us hear the great Corsican himself: “The First Consul mounted, at the worst part of the ascent, the mule of 199 an inhabitant of St. Peter, selected by the prior of the convent as the surest-footed mule of that country.” Such is the difference between reality and painting, truth and declamation. Again and again has it been denied by historical critics that the Russians burned Moscow to prevent Napoleon from making it his winter-quarters; and in vain do they assert what Mr. Douglas, at one time our minister to Russia, has confirmed, that hardly more than the suburbs, where the French were quartered, were set on fire, to cover the Russian attack. Maelzels and other showmen still renew the infandum dolorem of the conflagration in paintings and panoramas.
So long as biography is written, or an essayist loves to point his moral with an anecdote, we shall hear the story of Newton and his dog Diamond, which destroyed the papers which the philosopher set himself so patiently to rewrite; and that he cut two holes in his study door for his cat and kitten to go out and in, a big hole for the cat, and a small hole for the kitten, — albeit both stories are myths, since neither purring puss nor sprightly poodle were allowed within the precincts of the mathematician’s thought-hallowed rooms. But the APPLE, — the falling of the apple? Surely, the lynx-eyed critics of history, who have cheated us out of so many pleasing illusions, will not rob us of that? In one sense, it is of little consequence whether the story be true or false. Unless observed by a mind already so prepared to make the discovery that any falling body would have started the proper train of ideas, the falling of ten thousand apples would have led to no discovery of gravitation. But what are the facts? We have, for the story, the authority of several of Newton’s friends, and the opinion of M. Biot, 200 the eminent French savant, after a scrutiny of all the facts in the case; yet Sir David Brewster, who, in the first edition of his biography, declared his disbelief of the story, sticks still to his incredulity, and rhetoricians must still refer, with less confidence than eloquent effect, to “Newton and the falling apple.”
It is popularly believed that Milton, in his blindness, dictated his immortal epic to his daughters, and a British painter has depicted the scene; though Dr. Johnson, in his life of the poet, declares that he would not suffer them to learn to write. The story that the Duke of Clarence was drowned at his own request, in a butt of Malmsey, is still repeated in popular compilations of history; and the Right Hon. J. W. Croker, in a book for children, has had the incident illustrated by a wood-cut. The only foundation for the story, according to a historian of the Tower of London, is the well-known fondness of Clarence for Malmsey. “Whoever,” says Horace Walpole, “can believe that a butt of wine was the engine of his death, may believe that Richard (the Third) helped him into it, and kept him down till he was suffocated.”
Till recently it was generally believed that Britain exchanged the name it had borne for more than a thousand years, for the new one of Anglia, or England, in the reign of Egbert, king of Wessex. A Witanegemot, or Parliament, the old chronicler tells us, was held at Winchester, A.D. 800, and then and there the change was made. But now comes Francis Palgrave with his “History of the Anglo-Saxons,” and declares that the first nine hundred years of Egbert’s reign are a void in all the authentic chronicles, that the country “was not denominated England till a much later period,” and that “the Parliament of England is a pure fable.”
201Among the stories of travelers which have been repeated again and again in histories, geographies, and Sunday-School books, none is more familiar to men in Christian lands than the account of “Juggernaut,” the hideous idol under the wheels of whose car the deluded heathen of India have been supposed to throw themselves, with the hope of winning heaven by their self-sacrifice. According to the latest and highest authorities‡ on the subject, the popular belief on this later point, so deeply rooted in childhood, and made vivid by wood-cuts, rests upon an entire misapprehension of the facts. “Jugernath,” or rather “Jagernath,” means simply “the Lord of Life”; self-immolation is utterly opposed to the spirit of his worship; and the poor wretches who have been supposed to court death by the idol, were simply involuntary victims, who, among the multitudes that crowded round the rope to pull, fell, in the excitement, under the wheels and were crushed.
It is said that a famous Hebrew commentator, having determined to write a work on Ezekiel, bargained, before he began his book for a supply of 300 tons of oil. Were any writer to attempt the giant task of disabusing the world of all its historical illusions, he would need, we fear, not only tons of midnight oil, but an extra pair of brains and hands, and a lease of lives “renewable for ever.” Among the grand and impressive incidents of history, none are more interesting than the mots, or striking expressions, which have dropped on memorable occasions from the mouths of great men. These, being brief, and so pungent as to stick like burrs in the memory, 202 one might suppose to have been accurately caught and reported by history. Yet, probably, not one in a hundred of these famous sayings was ever uttered, — at least as reported, — by the men with whose names they are labelled. The fact is, the vast majority of these pungent anecdotes have received their point in the manufactory of the wit.
So long as the star-spangled banner continues to wave, and heroism to be admired, Americans will continue to believe that General Taylor at the crisis of Buena Vista called out, “A little more grape, Captain Bragg”; and equally impossible will it be to make them disbelieve that General Jackson fought at New Orleans behind breastworks of cotton. Yet Captain Bragg asserts that the “little more grape,” like the schoolboy’s whistle, produced itself, — in other words is a poetic fiction; and “Old Hickory” always denied the truth of the cotton bale story, which certainly rather detracts from, than adds to, his glory. The only foundation for it was the fact that a few bales of cotton goods were flung into the breastwork, forming but an insignificant part of the material. Again: how often on the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans are we reminded of the famous cry of the British soldiers, viz.: “Beauty and Booty,” though it has been declared by every surviving officer of that battle to be a fiction. Perhaps no hero of ancient or modern times ha been credited with so many grand and even sublime utterances which he never uttered, as Lord Nelson. In Southey’s admirable life of the hero, it is related that, when, going into the battle of the Nile, Captain Berry, Nelson’s second in command, was told of the plan and its probable results, he exclaimed with transport, 203 “If we succeed, what will the world say?” “There is no if in the case,” replied Nelson: “that we shall succeed, is certain. Who may live to tell the story, is a very different question.” Mr. Massey quotes the anecdote in his history of the reign of George IV, and adds: “We are assured, on the authority of Captain Berry himself, that no such scene took place.”
Again: who has not admired the simple majesty of the sentiment expressed in the order of Nelson at Trafalgar, which has so often been the battle-cry of Britannia’s sons on sea and land: “England expects every man to do his duty”? Yet the real order was, “Nelson expects every man to do his duty,” for which the former was ingeniously substituted by the officer whose business it was to telegraph the order to the fleet, simply because he could find no flag by which to telegraph the word Nelson. Once more, — whose soul has not been thrilled by the sublime sentiment of the reply with which the same hero is said to have silenced the affectionate importunities of his officers, when they entreated him to conceal the stars on his breast at the same battle: “In honor I gained them, and in honor I will die with them!” History has recorded few nobler sentiments, than which Tacitus could not have put a finer into the mouth of Agricola. But its merit is purely imaginative. The facts are, as Dr. Arnold gathered them from Sir Thomas hardy, that Nelson wore on the day of battle the same coat which he had worn for weeks, having the Order of the Bath embroidered on it; and when his friends expressed some fears regarding the danger, Nelson answered that he was aware of the danger, but that it was “too late then to shift a coat.”
204“Up, Guards, and at them!” men will always believe to have been the exclamation of Wellington, while they thrill at the story of Waterloo, in spite of the Duke’s protest that he uttered no such nonsense; and just as implicitly will they believe the tallying statement, that the captain of the Imperial Guards uttered the bravado, “La garde meurt, et ne se rende pas!” — which is purely a myth, albeit so dramatically introduced by Victor Hugo in his picture of the battle in Les Miserables, and inscribed, too, on the monument at Nantes. The last bombastic phrase was a pure invention of a French journalist two days after the battle. On the authority of Lamartine, every Frenchman religiously believes that Wellington in that terrible fight had seven horses killed under him, though it is well known in England that Copenhagen, the one horse that bore him through the day, escaped the murderous bullets, and died “in a green old age” at Strathfieldsaye. If we may believe the same poetic writer, the French were not beaten at Waterloo; they simply left the field in disgust. The splendid irony of Alexandre Dumas’s compliment to the author of the “History of the Girondins” has rarely been surpassed. Meeting Dumas soon after the publication of that work, Lamartine inquired anxiously of the great romancer, if he had read it. “Oui; c’est superbe! C’est de l’histoire elevée à la hauteur du roman.”
A less memorable French mot than that invented for the commander of the Imperial Guard, is the cry of Philip of Valois, when, flying from the battle of Crecy, he arrived before the closed gates of the Castle of Braye, and exclaimed: “Ouvrez, ouvrez, c’est la fortune de la France, — Open, open to the fortunes of France.” Turning 205 to Froissart, the original source of the anecdote, we find — what? Instead of the fine sentiment we have quoted, by which the king embodies in himself the stricken fortunes of his country, only the tame exclamation, “Ouvrez, ouvrez, c’est l’infortune Roi de la France, — Open, open; ’tis the unfortunate King of France.” Will any one who knows the intensity of a Frenchman’s love for dramatic “effects” be surprised to learn that Chateaubriand, that splendid mendax writer, having misrelated this story in his History of France, refused, on being informed of his error, to correct it? Or is it strange that, with the same noble scorn for strict accuracy, and exclusive regard for artistic effect, Voltaire, on being asked where he found a certain startling “fact,” in one of his histories, replied: “It is a frolic of my imagination?” For three centuries, historians have delighted to repeat the heroic sentiment expressed by Francis I, when writing to his mother from the battle-field of Pavia: “All is lost but honor” (Tout est perdu fors l’honneur). But how runs the letter which the King actually wrote on the occasion, and which has been preserved? Instead of the pithy, epigrammatic communication, as terse as a telegram, which Francis is said to have despatched from the battle-field, and which so electrifies the reader as the grand outburst of a regal spirit in sudden adversity, it turns out that the French monarch wrote in prison, by permission, a long letter, in which, after describing the battle, he says, prosaically: “With regard to the remaining details of my misfortune, honor, and life, which is safe (l’honneur et la vie qui est saulvé,) are all that are left to me,” etc., etc. Hardly less diluted in the original is the sententious despatch which Henry IV is said to have written to one of his nobles 206 after the battle of Arques: “Hang thyself, brave Crillon; we have fought, and thou wert not there!” When we have learned, too, that “Hang thyself!” was a hackneyed expression of Henry’s, repeated on the most trivial occasions, the mot sinks into the veriest commonplace.
What is more hackneyed than the saying attributed to Demosthenes, that “action, action, action!” that is, gesticulation, is the one thing essential to success in oratory? The word he used is χινησις, the true signification of which is agitation, motion, anything of a stirring character. Not action, but emotion, which, if deeply felt, like murder, “will out,” was what Demosthenes held to be so vitally essential, agreeing herein with the well-known maxim of Horace, that “if you wish me to weep, you must first grieve yourself.” Again: how often has Cicero been quoted as having said, “I would rather err with Plato than hold the truth with the philosophers.” The real sentiment of Cicero, “Errare mehercule malo cum Platone . . . quam cum istis vera sentire,” — which has been so often applauded by some, and by others denounced as an instance of excessive and almost idolatrous reverence for a giant intellect, — occurs in the “Tusculan Questions”; and it is only by the grossest perversion of the language that it can be construed into such an expression of a humiliating general submission to the authority of Plato as it is supposed to contain. The immediate point under discussion was the immortality of the soul, which was maintained by Plato, but denied by the Epicureans; and it is solely with reference to the conclusion of Plato on this one point, not to the weight of his authority, that Cicero prefers to err with him rather than to think rightly with them. In other words, the Roman writer prefers to share with the Greek what he deems the beneficent 207 possible error of eternal life, rather than entertain with Plato’s opponents what he (Cicero) regards as the fearful and pernicious truth, if truth it be, of final annihilation.
A suspicious circumstance connected with many fine sentiments is, that they have been put by historians into the mouths of different persons, and on widely different occasions, — thus suggesting a doubt whether they were not invented for rhetorical effect. Thus when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, Christina of Sweden is reported to have said; “He has cut off his left arm with the right.” The epigram is as old as Valentinian. Almost every reader is familiar with the sarcasm attributed to Lord Eldon, concerning his predecessor on the woolsack, Lord Brougham, “If he only knew a little of law, he would know a little of everything.” This is but a recoinage of a saying of Louis. Passing out of chapel after a sermon by the Abbé Maury, he said; “If the Abbé had said a little of religion, he would have spoken to us of everything.” Sully, in his Memoirs, tells us that going one day to see Henry IV, he met on the back stairs leading to the King’s apartment a young lady veiled and dressed in green. Being asked by the King whether he had not been told that his majesty had a fever, and could not receive that morning: “Yes, sire,” replied the minister, “but the fever is gone; I have just met it on the staircase dressed in green.” Precisely the same story is told of Demetrius and his father.
“Were I to die at this moment,” Nelson is said to have written to the English government after the Battle of the Nile, “more frigates would be found written on my heart.” Two and a half centuries before, Mary, Queen of England, 208 is said to have deplored the loss of the last foothold of the English in France with the exclamation, “When I die Calais will be found written on my heart.” Once more: Mr. Motley tells us in his History of the Dutch Republic, that Montpensier, a French prince, protested to Philip II of Spain that he would be cut in pieces for that monarch’s service, and affirmed that “if his body were to be opened at that moment, the name of Philip would be found imprinted on his heart.“ Who has not admired the noble reply of Wellington to a lady who expressed a passionate desire to witness a great victory, — “Madam, there is nothing so dreadful as a great victory, — excepting a great defeat.” Yet this speech was made long before by D’Argenson, and is reported by Grimm. Among the countless pungent witticisms attributed to Voltaire, we are informed that having extolled Haller, he was told that he was very generous in so doing, since Haller had just said the contrary of him; whereupon Voltaire remarked, after a short pause, “Perhaps we are both of us mistaken.” Is it not a curious coincidence, that, centuries before this, Libanius should have written to Aristænetus, “You are always speaking ill of me. I speak nothing but good of you. Do you not fear that neither of us shall be believed?”
It has been said with truth that in Athenæus, Macrobius, and other old jest-books, we shall find more than one witty saying which now adorns the brazen front of the plagiary. It is stated that when Lord Stormont boasted to Foote, the English comedian, of the great age of some wine which, in his parsimony, he doled out in very small glasses, Foote observed, “It is very little of its age.” This identical joke is reported by Athenæus, and assigned to one Gnathæna, whose jokes were better than her character.”
209In Irving’s “Abbotsford” we are told that Sir Walter Scott was going on with great glee to tell a story of the Laird of Macnab, “who, poor fellow,” he said, “is dead and gone.” “Why, Mr. Scott,” exclaimed his “gude wife,” “Macnab’s not dead, is he?” “Faith, my dear,” replied Scott, with humorous gravity, “if he is not dead, they have done him great injustice, for they’ve buried him.” The joke “passed harmless and unnoticed by Mrs. Scott, but hit the poor Dominie just as he had raised a cup of tea to his lips, causing a burst of laughter which sent half of the contents about the table.” Queer, — is it not, — that in Dean Swift’s specimens of genteel conversation in his own time, we should find the following: “Colonel. Is it certain that Sir John Blunderbuss is dead at last? Lord Sparkish. Yes, or else he’s sadly wronged for they have buried him.” Among the after-dinner facetiæ attributed to Thackeray is a saying of his to Angus B. Reach, a clever young Scotchman, who, when addressed as Mr. Reach, indignantly exclaimed, “My name is pronounced Ree-ack, in two syllables.” Handing his angry neighbor a peach, Mr. Thackeray said: “Mr. Ree-ack, will you allow me to help you to a pee-ach?” In the Diary of Thomas Moore, we read that Luttrell, the wit, dined at he same table with a gentleman whose father invented the small napkins called from the name, doilies. This gentleman having insisted on being addressed as Mr. D’Oyley, with a long rest between the “D” and the rest of the name, Luttrell, pointing to a dumpling, blandly said, “Mr. D’—Oyley, may I ask you for a little of the d’—umpling, near you?”
Macaulay’s famous New Zealander is now known to be the same person, in different costume, as Shelley’s “Transatlantic Commentator,” Kirke White’s “Bold Adventurer,” 210 and Horace Walpole’s “Traveler from Lima”; and the joke attributed to Sheridan, on his son’s saying that he had gone down a mine to be able to say he had done so, — “Why not say you had, without going down?” has been reclaimed by Mr. Forster for Goldsmith. An English wit used to say: “I don’t like my jokes until Sheridan has used them, then I can appreciate them.” Wit, it has been well said, like gold, is circulated sometimes with one head on it, and sometimes with another, according to the potentates who rule its realm. What was the memorable jest, in all the newspapers a few years ago, about the eccentricities of a certain family, but a repetition of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s witticism that “the world was made up of men and women and Herveys?” So the germ of Douglas Jerrold’s joke, that “it is better to be witty and wise than witty and otherwise,” has been detected in a book published in 1639: and the threadbare illustration of a dwarf standing on the soldiers of a giant, employed to illustrate the advantage of modern over ancient learning, is used by Sir William Temple, is quoted by old Burton, and has been traced back to the twelfth century.
Many of these similarities of thought and expression, like many wonderful discoveries and inventions, are, no doubt, merely coincidences. As the human mind and the human heart are the same in all ages, we must not be surprised to find that
“— kindred objects kindred thoughts inspire,
As summer clouds flash forth electric fire.”
Perhaps of all the memorable sayings of great men, there is no other about which loves of rhetoric have so often had their commonplace, as about the famous “e pur si muove,” — “and yet the earth does move,” — of the 211 silenced, but not persuaded Galileo. And yet, as a late French writer has shown, not only is there no proof that Galileo ever uttered the epigram, but it flagrantly contradicts his whole demeanor on the trial. To regard him as a martyr of science is simply ridiculous. Never was a martyr less disposed for martyrdom. He denied everything with impatient alacrity. He offered to prove that he had never held the doctrine of the earth’s mobility, and declared himself ready to show, by fresh arguments, the error of that doctrine. In short, the epigram is “one of those mots de circonstance, invented after the occasion, which tradition eagerly adopts because it so admirably expresses the general sentiment.”
Writers on religious toleration are fond of quoting the supposed saying of Charles V, Emperor of Germany, who in his retirement kept many clocks and watches, the mechanism of which he was fond of studying, that it was unreasonable to expect men to think alike, when no two clocks or watches could be made to keep precisely the same time. Not only does the story rest on no good authority, but its mythical character is evident à priori from the fact that in his last hours Charles enjoined on his son Philip to enforce uniformity of opinion by means of that terrible engine, the Inquisition. Moreover, he again and again expressed his regret that he did not put Luther to death when he had him in his power. Another story of Charles, long implicitly believed on the authority of the Scottish historian, Robertson, but now exploded, is that the Emperor held a mock funeral of himself, — celebrated his own obsequies, — and in so doing caught a cold which made a real funeral necessary two days afterwards.
Among the stereotyped quotations of our political writers 212 and stump orators, there is no one which drops oftener from their lips and pens than that which is so generally attributed to Gen. Charles Cotesworthy Pinckney, namely: “Millions for defence, — not one cent for tribute.” While Mr. P. was Ambassador to the French Court, Bonaparte was preparing for operations against Great Britain, and had pledged the representatives of other powers to degrading contributions. What Mr. Pinckney really did say, when Napoleon turned to him and asked, “And what will your Republic give?” was, “Not a penny, — not a penny.” The cent was not then known among our coin. Nearly contemporary with this was the witty reply said to have been made by Thelwall to Erskine, when the latter, in reply to the former’s proposal to defend himself from the charge of treason, wrote, “If you do, you’ll be hanged.” “Then I’ll be hanged if I do,” was Thelwall’s prompt rejoinder. A living relative of Thelwall’s declares that he had from his own lips the statement that no such correspondence ever took place.
Of all the brilliant epigrammatic sayings that have been attributed to the wrong author, no one perhaps has been more frequently quoted than that ascribed to that prince of epigrammatists, Talleyrand, on the murder of the Duke D’Enghien by Napoleon: “It is worse than a crime: it is a blunder.” The real author of the mot was Fouché. So, because they have the ring of his unique witticisms, to Talleyrand have been attributed the saying, “It is the beginning of the end;” the Chevalier de Panat’s remark on the Bourbons, that “they had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing;” the saying of Chamfort that “revolutions are not made with rose-water;” and Napoleon’s observation, “A king by birth is shaved by another. He who 213 makes kings is shaved by himself.” To the same arch diplomatist and wit has been attributed the famous saying that “speech was given to man to conceal this thoughts, — a mot which has been traced back to Goldsmith, to Voltaire, to the poet Young, to South, to Job, till we almost reach the Prometheus who stole the original fire from Heaven. So lucky or so cunning was Talleyrand that he even got the credit of saying of others what was said against himself. Thus, the remark, “Who would not adore him, — he is so vicious?” was said of him by Montrond, not by him of Montrond; and his pithy interrogatory to the dying man who cried out that he was suffering the torments of the damned, — “Deja?” (Already?) — was murmured by Louis Phillippe when Talleyrand thus characterized his own sufferings.
Of all peoples the French have the most passionate love for epigrams, and when a great man or a great occasion wants one, they do not hesitate to invent it. Chamfort characterizes the old rêgime as “an absolute monarchy tempered by epigrams.” Henry IV reigned by bon mots, and even Bonaparte, in the plenitude of his power, could not dispense with them. It was in the feign of Louis XIV that they reached the zenith of their splendor. When the king made an appointment, he communicated it to the object of his condescension in an elegant saying. “If I had known a more deserving person,” he would say, “I would have selected him.” Perhaps no impromptu has been more admired than the well-known saying of Louis XII, when urged to revenge certain insults offered to him before his accession to the throne: “The King of France does not revenge the injuries of the Duke of Orleans.” Of both the Roman Emperor, Hadrian, and the Duke of 214 Savoy, predecessors of Louis, is the same anecdote related: and, instead of being uttered thus concisely by Louis to the Duke de la Tremonille, the saying was the conclusion of an address to the deputies of the city of Orleans, who were told that it would not be decent or honorable in a King of France to revenge the quarrels of a Duke of Orleans. The reply of Hadrian was: “Minime licere Principi Romano ut quæ privatus agitasset odia, ista Imperator exequi.”
Who has not admired the daring address of Mirabeau to the minister of Louis XVI, who had been sent to the National Assembly, to denounce its dissolution? — “Go tell your master that we are here by the will of the people, and that we will not depart except at the point of the bayonet!” The real language of Mirabeau is far milder, and lacks the most audacious words ascribed to him. Almost every history of the French Revolution records the famous invocation to Louis on the scaffold: “Fils de Saint-Louis, montez au ciel!” Yet, when questioned on the address by Lord Holland, the Abbé Edgeworth frankly owned that he had no recollection of having made it. It was put into his mouth, on the evening of the execution, by a journalist.
One of the most signally successful hits in the form of an invented saying, in French history, is the speech put into the mouth of the Comte d’Artois, brother of Louis XVIII, at the Restoration. As his Royal Highness rode into town, he was received by a brilliant company, and, in reply to an address by Talleyrand, stammered out a few confused sentences, for which it was felt by the shrewd statesman that some substitute must be prepared for the Moniteur. Dupont offered to do it. “No, no,” 215 replied Talleyrand, “you would make it too poetical. Beugnot will do for that.” Beugnot sat down to his task, but, finding some difficulty, returned to Talleyrand, and told him of it. “Why,” said Talleyrand, “if what he said does not suit you, invent an answer for him.” “But how can I make a speech that Monsieur never pronounced?” “There is no difficulty about that,” replied Talleyrand; “make it good, suitable to the person and to the occasion, and I promise you that Monsieur will accept it, and so well, that in two days he will believe he made it himself; and he will have made it himself, you will no longer have had anything to do with it.” “ ‘Capital!’ I answered, says Beugnot, “and attempted my first version, and brought it to be approved. ’That won’t do,’ said Talleyrand; ‘Monsieur never makes antitheses or rhetorical flourishes.’ I attempt a new version, and am sent back a second time for making it too elaborate. At last I am delivered of the one inserted in the Moniteur, in which I make the prince say: ‘No more discord: Peace and France; at last I revisit my native land; nothing is changed, except it be that there is one Frenchman the more.‘ ‘This time I give in!’ exclaimed Talleyrand. ‘That is what Monsieur did say, and I answer for its having been pronounced by him.’ In fact, the speech proved a perfect success; the newspapers took it up as a lucky hit; it was repeated as an engagement made by the Prince; and the expression, ‘One Frenchman more!’ became the necessary pass-word of the harangues, which began to pour in from all quarters.” When the Prince complained to the ministers that he never uttered it, he was told that there was an 216 imperious necessity for his having uttered it, and it became history.
But the French are not the only people who have been cheated into admiration of grand oratorical explosions that never took place. Chatham’s famous outburst in reply to Horace Walpole, beginning, “The atrocious crime of being a young man,” etc., is the composition of Dr. Johnson, who was not even present when the actual reply was made, and of whose fidelity as a parliamentary reporter we may judge from his boast that he took care always that the Whig dogs should have the worst of it.
The interest which attaches to the dying words of great men offers a powerful temptation to the inventive talents of historians and biographers. Many of these last utterances are too epigrammatic and sensational, — too well rounded off and polished, — not to provoke a doubt about their genuineness. Did Augustus Cæsar, in dying, ask if he had played his part well on life’s stage, and, when answered in the affirmative, say, “Then applaud”? Did Vespasian bid his attendants raise him from his couch, adding that an Emperor ought to die on his legs, — decet Imperatorum stantem mori? Did Chaucer alleviate his dying pains by “A Balade, made upon his dethe-bedde, lying in his great anguysse?” Did Scarron say to those weeping about him, “My children, you will never weep for me one half so much as I have made you laugh”? Did Chesterfield courteous to the last, gasp out in articulo mortis, “Give Dayrolles a chair”? How often has it been stated in private, and echoed from the pulpit, that the skeptic Hume died in an agony of remorse, though his Christian biographer declares that his last moments were as peaceful and unruffled as the 217 gentle Addison’s, and though some of Hume’s more intelligent enemies have asserted that in jesting about Charon and the boat, and his arguments with the ferry-man to let him off a little longer, the Scottish philosopher affected an indifference which he did not feel! It is said the last words of Louis XV to Madame Du Berri were, “We shall meet again in another world.” “A pleasant rendezvous he is giving me!” she murmured; “that man never thought of any one but himself.” Almost precisely the same story is told of Louis XIV and Madame Maintenon. Among the last words of Burns were, “Don’t let the awkward squad fire over me,” meaning a body of local militia, of which he was a member, and whose discipline he, to the last, humorously disparaged. It is reported that the philosopher Haller kept his finger on his pulse till he expired, which was immediately upon saying, “My friend, the artery ceases to beat.” Pitt’s heart was broken by Austerlitz, and he died exclaiming, “Oh, my country! how I leave my country!”
It is a popular belief that Truth, if run over by a locomotive and train, gets well; while Error dies of lockjaw, if it but scratches its finger. But facts show this to be an illusion. When the world has once got hold of a lie, it is wonderful how hard it is to get it out of the world. You beat it on the head, and think it has given up the ghost, when lo! it jumps up again as lively and thrifty as ever. Bacon, in one of his weighty essays, after remarking that truth is a naked and open daylight, that does not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately and daintily as candle-lights, adds, that “a mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure.” Once declare to the world 218 that Berkeley denies the existence of matter, and all over the world men with Berkeley in their hands will echo the absurdity. Say that Locke denies all knowledge except through the medium of the senses, and though Locke be studied in every college, the statement will pass unchallenged. Let some Fourth of July Orator quote from Bacon the hackneyed sentiment, “Knowledge is power,” and other orators will ring the changes upon it in saecula saeculorum, though Bulwer again and again deny that the author of the “Instauration” ever penned such an aphorism.
Of all popular fallacies there is no one more frequently on men’s lips than the statement that Bacon was the father of the Inductive Philosophy, the great founder of modern science. But it may be doubted whether his Novum Organon, or new instrument of Philosophy, was really new when he announced it as such, either as a process followed in scientific discovery, or as a theory of the true method of discovery. Bacon was neither the first to proclaim the barrenness of the Aristotelian philosophy, nor is his the glory of having ended the reign of that philosophy in Europe. He but hastened the downfall of a system already in disrepute, and which would soon have been banished from the schools had his “Instauration” never been published. In short, as De Maistre has shown, he was a barometer that announced the fine weather after a long period of storm and controversy; and because he foretold the glorious daylight of true science after the darkness of the middle ages, he was proclaimed the author of it. A contemporary called him truly “the prophet of science.” “I have seen,” says De Maistre, “the design of a medal struck in his honor, the body of which is a rising sun, with the inscription, Exortus uti aetherius sol (‘He 219 rose like the sun in the sky’). Nothing is more plainly false. Better an aurora, with the inscription, Nuncia solis (’Messenger of the sun’); and even this would be an exaggeration, for, when Bacon rose, it was at least ten o’clock in the morning.”
How often do we hear attributed to Sir Robert Walpole the execrable saying, “All men have their price.” Pope refers to it in the lines:
“Would he oblige me, let me only find
He does not think me what he thinks mankind.”
But the “Grand Corrupter,” as he was nicknamed by his libelers, uttered no such sweeping slander against his fellow-men. He simply declared of his corrupt opponents, “All those men have their price,” a truth as unquestionable as his alleged maxim was false. Again, let Lord Orrery relate, as an unquestionable occurrence, that Dean Swift once began the service when nobody, except the clerk, attended his church, with “Dearly beloved Roger, the scripture moveth you and me in sundry places,” and the scandal will be again and again repeated, though a kinsman of the Dean show that it was published of another person in a jest book before Swift was born. The author of “The Tale of a Tub” and “The Battle of the Books” was not so destitute of originality as to have to borrow a joke as paltry as it was profane. So Swift and Butler will forever continue, we suppose, to divide the honors of the closing couplet of the epigram on the feud between Handel and Bononcini:
“Strange that all this difference should be
’Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee, —”
though neither of these wits was the author, but Dr. Byrom, of Manchester. As “to him that hath shall be given,” 220 to Butler, so long as the world is infested with rascals, will be awarded the credit of Trumball’s sarcasm on the Tories of the Revolution:
“No rogue e’er felt the halter draw
With good opinion of the law.”
Among the hackneyed quotations of the day is the line,
“Small by degrees, and beautifully less,”
which is invariably misquoted from “Henry and Emma,” a parody published in 1521, on Matthew Prior’s “Nut Brown Maid.” Describing the dress of Emma, the lover says:
“No longer shall the bodice, aptly laced,
From thy full bosom to thy slender waist,
That air of harmony and shape express,
Fine by degree, and beautifully less.”
Another current quotation which, in England and France, and occasionally in this country, is attributed to Buffon, is this: “Le style, c’est homme,” — the style is the man. Even Professor March, in his lectures on the English language, reproduces the misquotation, which asserts a manifest untruth. What Buffon really did say was this: “Le style est de l’homme même,” — “the style of a writer,” that is, distinguished from the contents of a work, which must be pushed aside by fresh discoveries, “is his own peculiar contribution.” Perhaps the tritest of all threadbare quotations is the saying: “There is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous;” yet even of this the paternity is commonly mistaken. It has so often been credited to Napoleon, instead of to Thomas Paine, that even intelligent persons are puzzled to fix the authorship.
It has been well observed that sometimes an invented pleasantry passes for fact, as in the asparagus and oil story 221 of Fontenelle. Fontenelle, — so the myth runs, — was supping with a friend who liked oil, which the former disliked. It was agreed that half the asparagus should be dressed with oil, and half without. The friend dropped down in an apoplectic fit, and immediately Fontenelle hurried to the door, and called out, “Point d’huile!“ — “No oil!” How many thousands have believed the malicious story about Gibbon, that, offering himself to Mademoiselle Churchod (afterwards Madam Neckar), he went down on his knee, and, being very fat, was unable to get up. The simple fact is, that she asked him why he did not go down on his knees to her, and he replied: “Because you would be obliged to ring for your footman to get me up again.”
So many historic sayings have never been uttered by the great men to whom they have been attributed that we need not be astonished if we one day learn that Cæsar’s “Veni, vedi, vici,” is a myth; that Perry never wrote the immortal words, “We have met the enemy, and they are ours;” and that Lawrence’s “Don’t give up the ship!” is an old sailor’s yarn. Indeed, Napoleon, who understood the military skill of “the foremost man of all the world,” ridiculed as absurd that saying of the great Julius to the pilot in a storm, “What do you fear? You carry Cæsar!” Americans, at least American musical critics, are not excessively proud of “Yankee Doodle, either the words or the tune; but the poor honor of its composition, it seems, is not ours. The song and tune date back to the wars of Roundhead and Cavalier. An early version of the words in England runs:
“Nankee Doodle came to town
Upon a Kentish pony;
He stuck a feather in his hat,
And called him Macaroni.”
222The English, it is said, borrowed the song from Germany, and it was introduced to America as a martial or national air by a Dr. Shackburg, a surgeon of the regular troops at Albany, who was so struck by the outré appearance of the raw colonial levies gathered there in 1755 for the attack on the French posts of Niagara and Frontenac, that he quizzically prepared a song for them to the tune of Yankee Doodle, which they at once adopted as their own. It would be easy to multiply these illustrations, but we will add but one more, — the over-hackneyed piece of nonsense attributed to Archimedes, that give him a place to stand on with his lever, and he would move the world. This is one of the standard allusions, a part of the necessary stock-in-trade of all orators and newspaper-writers; and persons, whenever they meet with it, think of Archimedes as an extraordinarily great man, — a giant of intellectual giants, — and cry, “Really, how wonderful!”
Now, it is a well-known principle of mechanical forces that the velocities at the extremities of a lever are reciprocally as the weights at those extremities, and the lengths of the arms directly as those same velocities. So it has been shown that if, at the moment when Archimedes uttered his memorable saying, God had taken him at his word by furnishing him with place, prop, and lever, also with materials of sufficient strength, together with a counter-weight of two hundred pounds, — the fulcrum being at three thousand leagues from the centre of the earth, — the great geometer would have required a lever of twelve quadrillions of miles long, and a velocity at the extremity of the long arm equal to that of a cannon ball, to raise the earth one inch in twenty-seven trillions of years! Yet will this exposure of the colossal absurdity 223 be of any use? Of not the slightest. Orators will continue to employ this bravura of rhetoric, and men will continue to gape with astonishment at the boast of Archimedes, as if he had been foolish enough to make it, — of which, out of Plutarch, there is no proof whatever.
The Roman poet, Horace, tells of a crazy citizen of Argos who fancied that he sat in a theatre, seeing and applauding wonderful tragedies. Being cured of his madness by his friends with a dose of hellebore, instead of thanking them, he was indignant, and exclaimed, “By Pollux, you have killed me, not saved me, in thus robbing me of my pleasure, and expelling from my mind a most delightful illusion!” Not unlike this, we fear, have been the feelings of the reader, while we have been disabusing him, perhaps, of some of his historical hallucinations. Cui bono? Of what use is it thus to throw all our heroes and heroines into the crucible? Are you sure that, as Dryden said of Shakspeare, burn them down as you will, there will always be precious metal at the bottom of the melting pot? Can we be confident of anything that is told us of past times? Is all history false? or, if not, how are we to discriminate the gold from the dross, — the reality from the counterfeit? If I choose to believe in the gaunt she-wolf of the Tiber, or that the unhappy Mary of Scotland was as good as she was beautiful, what harm can it do me? Why must I be pestered into the conviction that the first is a myth, and that the last was a courtesan and a murderess? Grant that the heroism of a Lucretia, — of a Mucius Scævola, — is a fable; as Goethe says, “if the Romans were great enough to invent such stories, we should at least be great enough to believe them.” If it be true that “where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise”; if 224 the secret of all earthly bliss lies in preserving our illusions, — in contriving, as we go through life, not to be disenchanted; how can you expect us to be grateful to, even if we are not positively angry with, the Niebuhrs, the Lewises, and other historical big-wigs, who have dethroned so many of our idols? Is history so rich in noble deeds and utterances, that we can afford to love any of the god-like acts, any of the sparkling jests, the happy inspirations, the thrilling improvisations, of great and good men? Are not these “fables,” as you call them, almost the only poetry the State and county taxes have not crushed out of our hearts? Nay, can we spare a single epigram?
In reply, let us say, first, that, in spite of all we have said, the substance of history remains intact. As in the case of money, the very word counterfeit implies the existence of a true, — nay, that the great mass of silver or gold coin is genuine, — so with the stories of nations. Again, let us remember that the spirit of inquiry and the spirit of scepticism are as widely removed as the poles. The same relentless iconoclasm, the same searching spirits of inquiry, which cheats us of many of our fond illusions,, may also relieve human nature of countless unjust stigmas of meanness, stupidity, cowardice, and cruelty.
Again, as the value of the real gem is enhanced by the exposure of the counterfeit, — as the Dutch, by destroying one-half of their spice trees, increased the value of the entire crop, — so will the common stock of recorded or traditional wit, virtue, and heroism, be rather increased in value than depreciated by the illusion-destroying process to which history has been subjected by modern criticism. The occasional loss of a charming error will 225 be compensated, and more than compensated, by the habits of sharpness and accuracy we shall acquire, by challenging every story which taxes our credulity. We are aware that it is sometimes said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. If this be so, then it follows that one of the noblest and healthiest exercises of the mind rests chiefly on a deceit and a delusion, — that, with fuller knowledge, all our enthusiasm would case; whereas, in fact, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which, with fuller insight, we should perceive to be a cheat or a sham, a hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that which is admirable indeed. While, therefore, some eyes will look sorrowfully upon this information, — will regard it, in the fine image of Landor, like breaking off a crystal from the vault of a twilight cavern, out of mere curiosity to see where the accretion ends and the rock begins, — others will agree with Dr. Johnson, that the value of a story depends on its truth; on its being a picture of an individual, as of human nature in general; and that, if it be false, it is a picture of nothing.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu closes one of her letters with the remark: “There is nothing can pay one for that valuable ignorance which is the companion of youth. . . . To my extreme mortification, I find that I am growing wiser and wiser every day.” But does any sensible man regret, — or any sensible woman, in this age of Somervilles, Stowes, and Martineaus,, — that he is no longer cheated by the fictions that amused his childhood? — that he has ceased to believe that Romulus and Remus were suckled by a wolf, and that Jack-the-Giant-killer, Sinbad the Sailor, and Robinson Crusoe, were flesh-and-blood 226 personages? If not, why should he mourn because some relentless investigator threatens to sweep away the myths that have deceived his maturer judgment by suggesting grave doubts whether Curtius did actually jump into the gulf, or whether there was any gulf for him to leap into; whether Portia swallowed live coals; whether Xerxes cut a canal through Mount Athos, and clouded the sun with the arrows of his soldiers; whether Cocles defended a bridge, single-handed, against an entire army; whether Rome was saved by a goose, and captured by a hare; whether Hannibal levelled rocks, and Cleopatra dissolved pearls, with vinegar; whether Belisarius did beg an obuls in the streets of Constantinople; whether Scævola burned his right hand, or Regulus died a heroic death; whether Zisca’s skin was made into a drum-head; whether Columbus’s egg had not tried its trick of balancing long before the fifteenth century; whether he did not first discover Watling Island, instead of Cat Island (or San Salvador), and whether the Norwegians were not 500 years ahead of him; whether Alfred really burnt the cakes, and went disguised into the Danish camp; whether Hengist and Horsa, Rowena and Vortigern, are not shadows; whether Cromwell’s dead body was hung in chains at Tyburn; whether there was really a Pope Joan? And whether Captain John Smith had more lives than ten cats, and was saved by Pocahontas.
Within a few years it has been found, by the discovery of the Sinaitic and other very ancient manuscripts of the New Testament, that some of its most admired passages are forgeries, — mediæval additions to the original text. It is sad to learn that the story of the woman taken in adultery is a myth. It is sadder still to learn 227 that the utterance of our Lord on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” is not to be found in some of the old manuscripts, and that the words in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matt. v, 44, — “Bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you,” — word which lie at the very foundation of Christian morality, — must be swept away from the sacred text. What, then, shall we do? Shall we throw aside our Testaments, or shall we weep over the loss of these precious verses? What, indeed, do we want? Is it the interpolations of monks, or the very words, the exact language, of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, without a syllable or a letter added or removed? For ourselves, we thank God for every exposure of a forgery, whether in His book or in man’s books; and to our mind the most cogent proof that the Holy Scriptures are from Him, is the fact that while other histories have been found to swarm with errors, they, when subjected to the intensest, most microscopic scrutiny of modern criticism, have come forth from the ordeal substantially unscathed.
God grant that the day may never come when we shall adopt the Jesuitical doctrine of Infidelity’s latest champion, Rénan. “For the success of what is good,” he tells us in his “Life of Jesus,” “less pure ways are necessary”; “the best cause is only won by ill means; we must accept men as they are, with all their illusions, and thus endeavor to work upon them; France would not be what it is, if it had not for a thousand years believed in the flask of holy oil at Rheims; when we with our scrupulous regard for truth have accomplished what the heroes did by their deceptions, then, and not till then, shall 228 we have a right to blame them; the only culprit in such cases is mankind, who wants to be cheated.” (The italics are ours). So, according to this unblushing apostle of fraud, we are not to believe with John Milton that “Truth is strong, next to the Almighty; she needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings, to make her victorious.” Instead of destroying the delusions of our fellow men, we must use them cunningly, cheat those who want to be cheated, and rouge and powder, if need be, the face of Truth herself, to make her attractive. And this is the morality of a French democrat who would have us give up our Bibles! Let us cultivate a reverent love for Truth, — pure Truth, without gloss, alloy, or adulteration. Let us seek to know “the truth, the whole Truth, and NOTHING BUT THE Truth,” in history, in science, in literature, and in religion, at whatever sacrifice of our prejudices, or whatever havoc it may make with our fondly-cherished illusions; for, if there is any truth which all the experience of the past thunders in our ears, it is that falsehood is moral poison, — that any short-lived pleasure which we may derive from cheating ourselves or from being cheated, will be dearly paid for by the disappointment and anguish which will be ours when the veil shall be torn away, and we shall see things as they are.
* Admiral Griffiths, one of the survivors of the engagement, who was living in 1838, declares the French story to be “a ridiculous piece of nonsense.” “Never,” he says, “were men in distress more ready to save themselves.” There was “not one shout beyond that of horror and despair.”
† For most of the facts and citations in the last three pages, the author is indebted to a writer in the N. Y. “Galaxy.”
‡ “Orissa,” by Dr. N. W. Hunter, and “Ten Great Religions,” Rev. J. G. Clarke.