On

by Hilaire Belloc

And here is the footnote:

This transformation is not given as absolutely certain, but as extremely probable. See Longueruana, Tom. I, p. 194.

That footnote at once "hedges"—modifies the falsehood in the text and assumes peculiar and recondite learning. That long title "Longueruana" sounds like the devil and all! You will be surprised to hear that the reference is to a rubbishy book of guess-work, with no pretence to historical value, run together by a Frenchman of the eighteenth century; from this Frenchman did Gibbon take the absurdity of St. George originating with George of Cappadocia. I was at the pains of looking this up—perhaps the first, and certainly the last, of my generation to do so.

Another vice of the footnote (equally illustrated in that lie of Gibbon's about St. George) is what I may call its use as the "footnote of exception." It is universal to-day. You say something which is false and then you quote in a footnote one or more authorities supporting it. Any one can do it: and if the reader is reasonably ignorant of the subject the trick always succeeds. Thus, one might say that the earth was flat and put in a footnote two or three references to the flat-earth pamphlets of which I have a little collection at home. I am told that a wealthy lady, the widow of a brewer, supported the Flat-Earth society which published these tracts and that upon her death it collapsed. It may be so.

The next step of the footnote in iniquity was when it became a mask. Who started this I know not, but I should imagine that the great German school which remodelled history in the nineteenth century was to blame. At any rate their successors the French are now infinitely worse. I have seen a book purporting to be a history in which of every page not more than a quarter was text, and the rest a dreary regiment of references. There is no doubt at all about the motives, mixed though they are. There is the desire of the fool to say "Though I can't digest the evidence, yet I know it. Here it is." There is the desire of the timid man to throw up fortification. There is the desire of the pedant to show other pedants as well as the general reader (who, by the way, has almost given up reading such things, they have become so dull) that he also has been in Arcadia.

I notice that when anything is published without such footnotes, the professional critic—himself a footnoter of the deepest dye—accuses the author of romancing. If you put in details of the weather, of dress and all the rest of it, minutely gathered from any amount of reading, but refuse to spoil a vivid narrative with the snobbery and charlatanism of these perpetual references, the opponent takes it for granted that you have not kept your notes and cannot answer him; and indeed, as a rule, you have not kept your notes and you cannot answer him.

For the most part, these enormous, foolish, ill-motived accretions are honest enough in their actual references, for the greater part of our modern historians who use them are so incapable of judgment and so lacking in style, so averse from what Rossetti called "fundamental brain-work," that they have not the power to do more than shovel all their notes on you in a lump and call it history. But now and then this temptation to humbug produces its natural result, and the references are false.

The late Mr. Andrew Lang used to say that the writer who writes under the pseudonym of "Anatole France" must have had his footnotes for his Life of Joan of Arc done by contract. The idea opens up a wide horizon. A man of name would sit down to write a general history of something of which he had a smattering, and would then turn it over to a poor man who would hack for him in the British Museum and find references—and they could always be found—for pretty well any statement he had chosen to make.

At any rate, in this particular case of Anatole France's Joan of Arc, Andrew Lang amply proved that the writer had never read his original authorities, though he quoted them in heaps.

And that reminds me of another footnote vice (the subject is a perfect jungle of vices!), which is the habit of copying other people's footnotes. I did it myself when I was young; I was lured into it by Oxford and I ask pardon of God and man. It is very common, and a little ingenuity will hide one's tracks. A learned man who was also civilised and ironical—but much too sparing in wine—told me once this amusing story.