INTRODUCTION

TO THE

STUDY OF HISTORY

BY

CH. V. LANGLOIS & CH. SEIGNOBOS

OF THE SORBONNE

Translated by G. G. BERRY

With a Preface by F. YORK POWELL

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1904

TO THE READER

It is a pleasure to recommend this useful and well-written little book to English readers. It will both interest and help. There are, for instance, a few pages devoted to the question of evidence that will be an aid to every one desirous of getting at the truth respecting any series of facts, as well as to the student of history. No one can read it without finding out that to the historian history is not merely a pretty but rather difficult branch of literature, and that a history book is not necessarily good if it appears to the literary critic 'readable and interesting,' nor bad because it seems to him 'hard or heavy reading.' The literary critic, in fact, is beginning to find out that he reads a history as he might read a treatise on mathematics or linguistics, at his peril, and that he is no judge of its value or lack of value. Only the expert can judge that. It will probably surprise some people to find that in the opinion of our authors (who agree with Mr. Morse Stephens and with the majority of scholars here) the formation and expression of ethical judgments, the approval or condemnation of Caius Julius Cæsar, or of Cæsar Borgia, is not a thing within the historian's province. His business is to find out what can be known about the characters and situations with which he is engaged, to put what he can ascertain before his readers in a clear form, and lastly to consider and attempt to ascertain what scientific use can be made of these facts he has ascertained. Ethic on its didactic side is outside his business altogether. In fact MM. Langlois and Seignobos write for those "who propose to deal with documents [especially written documents] with a view to preparing or accomplishing historic work in a scientific way." They have the temerity to view history as a scientific pursuit, and they are endeavouring to explain to the student who intends to pursue this branch of anthropologic science the best and safest methods of observation open to him, hence they modestly term their little book "an essay on the method of historic sciences." They are bold enough to look forward to a day, as not far distant, when a sensible or honest man will no more dare to write history unscientifically than he would to-day be willing to waste his time and that of others on observing the heavens unscientifically, and registering as trustworthy his unchecked and untimed observations.

Whether we like it or not, history has got to be scientifically studied, and it is not a question of style but of accuracy, of fulness of observation, and correctness of reasoning, that is before the student. Huxley and Darwin and Clifford have shown that a book may be good science and yet good reading. Truth has not always been found repulsive although she was not bedizened with rhetorical adornments; indeed, the very pursuit of her has long been recognised as arduous but extremely fascinating. Toute trouvaille, as our authors aptly remark, procure une jouissance.

It will be a positive gain to have the road cleared of a mass of rubbish, that has hindered the advance of knowledge. History must be worked at in a scientific spirit, as biology or chemistry is worked at. As M. Seignobos says, "On ne s'arrête plus guère aujourd'hui à discuter, sous sa forme théologique la théorie de la Providence dans l'Histoire. Mais la tendence à expliquer les faits historiques par les causes transcendantes persiste dans des théories plus modernes où la metaphysique se déguise sous des formes scientifiques." We should certainly get rid in time of those curious Hegelianisms "under which in lay disguise lurks the old theologic theory of final causes"; or the pseudo-patriotic supposition of the "historic mission (Beruf) attributed to certain people or persons." The study of historic facts does not even make for the popular newspaper theory of the continuous and necessary progress of humanity, it shows only "partial and intermittent advances, and gives us no reason to attribute them to a permanent cause inherent in collective humanity rather than to a series of local accidents." But the historian's path is still like that of Bunyan's hero, bordered by pitfalls and haunted by hobgoblins, though certain of his giant adversaries are crippled and one or two slain. He has also his own faults to master, or at least to check, as MM. Langlois and Seignobos not infrequently hint, e.g. "Nearly all beginners have a vexatious tendency to go off into superfluous digressions, heaping up reflexion and information that have no bearing on the main subject. They will recognise, if they think over it, that the causes of this leaning are bad taste, a kind of naïve vanity, sometimes a disordered mind." Again: "The faults of historic works intended for the general public ... are the results of the insufficient preparation of the bad literary training of the popularisers." What an admirable criticism there is too of that peculiarly German shortcoming (one not, however, unknown elsewhere), which results in men "whose learning is ample, whose monographs destined for scholars are highly praiseworthy, showing themselves capable, when they write for the public, of sinning heavily against scientific methods," so that, in their determination to stir their public, "they who are so scrupulous and particular when it is a question of dealing with minutiæ, abandon themselves like the mass of mankind to their natural inclinations when they come to set forth general questions. They take sides, they blame, they praise, they colour, they embellish, they allow themselves to take account of personal, patriotic, ethical, or metaphysical considerations. Above all, they apply themselves with what talent has fallen to their lot to the task of creating a work of art, and, so applying themselves, those of them who lack talent become ridiculous, and the talent of those who possess it is spoilt by their anxiety for effect."

On the other hand, while the student is rejoicing at the smart raps bestowed upon the Teutonic offender, he is warned against the error of thinking that "provided he can make himself understood, the historian has the right to use a faulty, low, careless, or clogged style.... Seeing the extreme complexity of the phenomena he must endeavour to describe, he has not the privilege of writing badly. But he ought always to write well, and not to bedizen his prose with extra finery once a week."

Of course much that is said in this book has been said before, but I do not know any book wherein the student of history will find such an organised collection of practical and helpful instructions. There are several points on which one is unable to find oneself in agreement with MM. Langlois and Seignobos, but these occur mainly where they are dealing with theory; as far as practical work goes, one finds oneself in almost perfect concurrence with them. That they know little of the way in which history is taught and studied in England or Canada or the United States is not at all an hindrance to the use of their book. The student may enjoy the pleasure of making his own examples out of English books to the rules they lay down. He may compare their cautions against false reasoning and instances of fallacy with those set forth in that excellent and concise essay of Bentham's, which is apparently unknown to them. He will not fail to see that we in England have much to learn in this subject of history from the French. The French archives are not so fine as ours, but they take care to preserve their local and provincial documents, as well as their national and central records; they give their archivists a regular training, they calendar and make accessible all that time and fate have spared of pre-revolutionary documents. We have not got farther than the provision of a fine central Record Office furnished with very inadequate means for calendaring the masses of documents already stored and monthly accumulating there, though we have lately set up at Oxford, Cambridge, and London the regular courses of palæography, diplomatic, and bibliography, that constitute the preliminary training of the archivist or historical researcher. We want more: we must have county archives, kept by trained archivists. We must have more trained archivists at the disposal of the Deputy Keeper of the Rolls, we must have such means as the Bibliothèque de l'École des Chartes for full reports of special and minute investigations and discoveries, for hand-lists and the like, before we can be considered as doing as much for history as the heavily taxed French nation does cheerfully, and with a sound confidence that the money it spends wisely in science is in the truest sense money saved.

For those interested in the teaching of history, this book is one of the most suggestive helps that has yet appeared. With a blackboard, a text (such as are now cheap), or a text-book (such as Stubbs or Prothero or Gardiner), an atlas, and access to a decent public library and an average local museum, the teacher who has mastered its intent should never be at a loss for an interesting catechetical lecture or exposition to a class, whether of adults or of younger folk.

Not the least practical part of the work of MM. Langlois and Seignobos has been the consideration they have given to such every-day issues as the teacher is constantly called upon to face. History cannot safely be neglected in schools, though it is by no means necessary that the Universities should turn out large bodies of trained historians. It is possible indeed that the serious study of history might gain were there fewer external inducements at the Universities to lead to the popularity of the History Schools. But in this very popularity there lies a great opportunity for concerted efforts, not only to better the processes of study, but also to clear off the vast arrears of classification and examination of the erroneous historic material at our disposition in this country.

The historian has been (as our authors hint) too much the ally of the politician; he has used his knowledge as material for preaching democracy in the United States, absolutism in Prussia, Orleanist opposition in France, and so on (English readers will easily recall examples from their own countrymen's work): in the century to come he will have to ally himself with the students of physical science, with whose methods his own have so much in common. It is not patriotism, nor religion, nor art, but the attainment of truth that is and must be the historian's single aim.

But it is also to be borne in mind that history is an excellent instrument of culture, for, as our authors point out, "the practice and method of historic investigation is a pursuit extremely healthful for the mind, freeing it from the disease of credulity," and fortifying it in other ways as a discipline, though precisely how to best use history for this purpose is still in some ways uncertain, and after all it is a matter which concerns Pædagogic and Ethic more than the student of history, though it is plain that MM. Langlois and Seignobos have not neglected to consider it.

One can hardly help thinking, too, that, in schools and places where the young are trained, something might be gained by treating such books as Plutarch's Lives not as history (for which they were never intended) but as text-books of ethic, as examples of conduct, public or private. The historian very properly furnishes the ethical student with material, though it is not right to reckon the ethical student's judgment upon the historian's facts as history in any sense. It is not an historian's question, for instance, whether Napoleon was right or wrong in his conduct at Jaffa, or Nelson in his behaviour at Naples; that is a matter for the student of ethic or the religious dogmatist to decide: all that the historian has to do is to get what conclusion he can out of the conflict of evidence, and to decide whether Napoleon or Nelson actually did that of which their enemies accused them, or, if he cannot arrive at fact, to state probability, and the reasons that incline him to lean to the affirmative or negative.

As to the possibility of a "philosophy of history," a real one, not the mockeries that have long been discredited by scientific students, the reader will find some pregnant remarks here in the epilogue and the chapters that precede it. There is an absence of unreasonable optimism in our authors' views. "It is probable that hereditary differences have contributed to determine events; so that in part historic evolution is produced by physiological and anthropologic causes. But history furnishes no trustworthy process by which it may be possible to determine the action of those hereditary differences between man and man," i.e. she starts with races 'endowed' each with peculiarities that make them 'disposed to act' somewhat differently under similar pressure. "History is only able to grasp the conditions of their existence." And what M. Seignobos calls the final problem—Is evolution produced merely by changed conditions?—must according to him remain insoluble by the legitimate processes of history. The student may accept or reject this view as his notions of evidence prompt him to do. M. Seignobos has at all events laid down a basis for discussion in sufficiently clear terms.

As to the composition of the joint work we are told that M. Seignobos has been especially concerned with the chapters that touch theory, and M. Langlois with those that deal with practice. Both authors have already proved their competence—M. Seignobos' labours on Modern History have been widely appreciated, while M. Langlois' "Hand-book of Historic Bibliography" is already a standard text-book, and bids fair to remain so. We are grateful to both of them for the pains they have taken to be clear and definite, and for their determination to shirk none of the difficulties that have met them. They have produced a hand-book that students will use and value in proportion to their use of it, a book that will save much muddle of thought and much loss of time, a book written in the right spirit to inspire its readers. We are not bound to agree with all M. Seignobos' dogmas, and can hardly accept, for instance, M. Langlois' apology for the brutal methods of controversy that are an evil legacy from the theologian and the grammarian, and are apt to darken truth and to cripple the powers of those who engage in them. For though it is possible that the secondary effect of these barbarous scuffles may sometimes have been salutary in deterring impostors from 'taking up' history, I am not aware of any positive examples to justify this opinion. There is this, however, to be said, that fully conscious of their own fallibility, M. Langlois and his excellent collaborator have supplied in their canons of criticism and maxims the best corrections of any mistakes into which they may have fallen by the way. Is not the House of Fame, as the poet tells us, a more wonderful and quaintly wrought habitation than Domus Dedali itself? And may not honest historians be pardoned if they are sometimes confused for a brief moment by the never-ending noise and marvellous motion of that deceptive mint and treasury, and fatigued by the continual trial and examination of the material that issues therefrom? The student will, at least, learn from MM. Langlois and Seignobos to have no mercy on his own shortcomings, to spare no pains, to grudge no expenditure of time or energy in the investigation of a carefully chosen and important historical problem, to aim at doing the bit of work in hand so thoroughly that it will not need to be done again.

It would be unjust to omit here to mention Dr. Bernheim's "Exposition of Historic Method," or Lehrbuch der historischen Methode, so justly praised and used by our authors, but I believe that as an introduction to the subject, intended for the use of English or North American students, this little volume will be found the handier and more practical work. Of its value to English workers I can speak from experience, and I know many teachers to whom it will be welcome in its present form.

It would have been easy to 'adapt' this book by altering its examples, by modifying its excellent plan, by cutting here and carving there to the supposed convenience of an imaginary public, but the better part has been chosen of giving English readers this manual precisely as it appeared in French. And surely one would rather read what M. Langlois, an experienced teacher and a tried scholar, thought on a moot point, than be presented with the views of some English 'adaptor' who had read his book, as to what he would have said had he been an Englishman lecturing to English students. That the present translator has taken much pains to faithfully report his authors, I know (though I have not compared English and French throughout every page), so that I can commend his honest work to the reader as I have already commended the excellent matter that he has been concerned in preparing for a wider public than the French original could command.

F. YORK POWELL.

Oriel College, Oxford, July 1898.

CONTENTS

AUTHORS' PREFACE

The title of this work is clear. However, it is necessary to state succinctly both what our intention has, and what it has not been; for under this same title, "Introduction to the Study of History," very different books have already been published.

It has not been our intention to give, as Mr. W. B. Boyce[1] has done, a summary of universal history for the use of beginners and readers of scanty leisure.

Nor has it been our intention to add a new item to the abundant literature of what is ordinarily called the "Philosophy of History." Thinkers, for the most part not professed historians, have made history the subject of their meditations; they have sought for its "analogies" and its "laws." Some have supposed themselves to have discovered "the laws which have governed the development of humanity," and thus to have "raised history to the rank of a positive science."[2] These vast abstract constructions inspire with an invincible a priori mistrust, not the general public only, but superior minds as well. Fustel de Coulanges, as his latest biographer tells us, was severe on the Philosophy of History; these systems were as repugnant to him as metaphysics to the positivists. Rightly or wrongly (without doubt wrongly), the Philosophy of History, not having been cultivated exclusively by well-informed, cautious men of vigorous and sound judgment, has fallen into disrepute. The reader will be reassured—or disappointed, as the case may be—to learn that this subject will find no place in the present work.[3]

We propose to examine the conditions and the methods, to indicate the character and the limits, of historical knowledge. How do we ascertain, in respect of the past, what part of it it is possible, what part of it it is important, to know? What is a document? How are documents to be treated with a view to historical work? What are historical facts? How are they to be grouped to make history? Whoever occupies himself with history performs, more or less unconsciously, complicated operations of criticism and construction, of analysis and synthesis. But beginners, and the majority of those who have never reflected on the principles of historical methodology, make use, in the performance of these operations, of instinctive methods which, not being, in general, rational methods, do not usually lead to scientific truth. It is, therefore, useful to make known and logically justify the theory of the truly rational methods—a theory which is now settled in some parts, though still incomplete in some points of capital importance.

The present "Introduction to the Study of History" is thus intended, not as a summary of ascertained facts or a system of general ideas on universal history, but as an essay on the method of the historical sciences.

We proceed to state the reasons why we have thought such a work opportune, and to explain the spirit in which we have undertaken to write it.

I

The books which treat of the methodology of the historical sciences are scarcely less numerous, and at the same time not in much better favour, than the books on the Philosophy of History. Specialists despise them. A widespread opinion is expressed in the words attributed to a certain scholar: "You wish to write a book on philology; you will do much better to produce a book with some good philology in it. When I am asked to define philology, I always answer that it is what I work at."[4] Again, in reference to J. G. Droysen's Précis of the Science of History, a certain critic expressed an opinion which was meant to be, and was, a commonplace: "Generally speaking, treatises of this kind are of necessity both obscure and useless: obscure, because there is nothing more vague than their object; useless, because it is possible to be an historian without troubling oneself about the principles of historical methodology which they claim to exhibit."[5] The arguments used by these despisers of methodology are strong enough in all appearance. They reduce to the following. As a matter of fact, there are men who manifestly follow good methods, and are universally recognised as scholars or historians of the first order, without having ever studied the principles of method; conversely, it does not appear that those who have written on historical method from the logical point of view have in consequence attained any marked superiority as scholars or historians: some, indeed, have been known for their incompetence or mediocrity in these capacities. In this there is nothing that need surprise us. Who would think of postponing original research in chemistry, mathematics, the sciences proper, until he had studied the methods employed in those sciences? Historical criticism! Yes, but the best way to learn it is to apply it; practice teaches all that is wanted.[6] Take, too, the extant works on historical method, even the most recent of them, those of J. G. Droysen, E. A. Freeman, A. Tardif, U. Chevalier, and others; the utmost diligence will extract from them nothing in the way of clear ideas beyond the most obvious and commonplace truisms.[7]

We willingly recognise that this manner of thinking is not entirely wrong. The great majority of works on the method of pursuing historical investigations and of writing history—what is called Historic in Germany and England—are superficial, insipid, unreadable, sometimes ridiculous.[8] To begin with, those prior to the nineteenth century, a full analysis of which is given by P. C. F. Daunou in the seventh volume of his Cours d'études historiques,[9] are nearly all of them mere treatises on rhetoric, in which the rhetoric is antiquated, and the problems discussed are the oddest imaginable.[10] Daunou makes merry over them, but he himself has shown good sense and nothing more in his monumental work, which at the present time seems little better, and certainly not more useful, than the earlier treatises.[11] As to the modern ones, it is true that not all have been able to escape the two dangers to which works of this character are exposed—that of being obscure on the one hand, or commonplace on the other. J. G. Droysen's Grundriss der Historik is heavy, pedantic, and confused beyond all imagination.[12] Freeman, Tardif, and Chevalier tell us nothing but what is elementary and obvious. Their followers may still be observed discussing at interminable length idle questions, such as: whether history is a science or an art; what are the duties of history; what is the use of history; and so on. On the other hand, there is incontestable truth in the remark that nearly all the specialists and historians of to-day are, as far as method goes, self-taught, with no training except what they have gained by practice, or by imitating and associating with the older masters of the craft.

But though many works on the principles of method justify the distrust with which such works are generally regarded, and though most professed historians have been able, apparently with no ill results, to dispense with reflection upon historical method, it would, in our opinion, be a strained inference to conclude that specialists and historians (especially those of the future) have no need to make themselves acquainted with the processes of historical work. The literature of methodology is, in fact, not without its value: gradually there has been formed a treasury of subtle observations and precise rules, suggested by experience, which are something more than mere common sense.[13] And, admitting the existence of those who, without having ever learnt to reason, always reason well, by a gift of nature, it would be easy to set against these exceptions innumerable cases in which ignorance of logic, the use of irrational methods, want of reflection on the conditions of historical analysis and synthesis, have robbed the work of specialists and historians of much of its value.

The truth is, that, of all branches of study, history is without a doubt the one in which it is most necessary for students to have a clear consciousness of the methods they use. The reason is, that in history instinctive methods are, as we cannot too often repeat, irrational methods; some preparation is therefore required to counteract the first impulse. Besides, the rational methods of obtaining historical knowledge differ so widely from the methods of all other sciences, that some perception of their distinctive features is necessary to avoid the temptation of applying to history the methods of those sciences which have already been systematised. This explains why mathematicians and chemists can, more easily than historians, dispense with an "introduction" to their subject. There is no need to insist at greater length on the utility of historical methodology, for there is evidently nothing very serious in the attacks which have been made on it. But it behooves us to explain the reasons which have led to the composition of the present work. For the last fifty years a great number of intelligent and open-minded men have meditated on the methods of the historical sciences. Naturally we find among them many historians, university professors, whose position enables them to understand better than others the intellectual needs of the young; but at the same time professed logicians, and even novelists. In this connection, Fustel de Coulanges left a tradition behind him at the University of Paris. "He endeavoured," we are told,[14] "to reduce the rules of method to very precise formulæ ...; in his view no task was more urgent than that of teaching students how to attain truth." Among these men, some, like Renan,[15] have been content to insert scattered observations in their general works or their occasional writings;[16] others, as Fustel de Coulanges, Freeman, Droysen, Laurence, Stubbs, De Smedt, Von Pflugk-Harttung, and so on, have taken the trouble to express their thoughts on the subject in special treatises. There are many books, "inaugural lectures," "academic orations," and review-articles, published in all countries, but especially in France, Germany, England, the United States, and Italy, both on the whole subject of methodology and on the different parts of it. It will occur to the reader that it would be a far from useless labour to collect and arrange the observations which are scattered, and, one might say, lost, in these numerous books and minor writings. But it is too late to undertake this pleasant task; it has been recently performed, and in the most painstaking manner. Professor Ernst Bernheim, of the University of Greifswald, has worked through nearly all the modern works on historical method, and the fruit of his labours is an arrangement under appropriate headings, most of them invented by himself, of a great number of reflections and selected references. His Lehrbuch der historischen Methode[17] (Leipzig, 1894, 8vo) condenses, in the manner of German Lehrbücher, the special literature of the subject of which it treats. It is not our intention to do over again what has already been done so well. But we are of opinion that even after this laborious and well-planned compilation something still remains to be said. In the first place, Professor Bernheim deals largely with metaphysical problems which we consider devoid of interest; while, conversely, he entirely ignores certain considerations which appear to us to be, both theoretically and practically, of the greatest importance. In the second place, the teaching of the Lehrbuch is sound enough, but lacks vigour and originality. Lastly, the Lehrbuch is not addressed to the general public; both the language in which it is written and the form in which it is composed render it inaccessible to the great majority of French readers. This is enough to justify our undertaking to write a book of our own, instead of simply recommending the book of Professor Bernheim.[18]

II

This "Introduction to the Study of History" does not claim, like the Lehrbuch der historischen Methode, to be a treatise on historical methodology.[19] It is a sketch in outline. We undertook its composition, at the beginning of the scholastic year 1896-97, in order that the new students at the Sorbonne might be warned what the study of history is and ought to be.

Long experience has taught us the necessity of such warnings. The greater part of those who enter upon a career of historical study do so, as a matter of fact, without knowing why, without having ever asked themselves whether they are fitted for historical work, of the true nature of which they are often ignorant. Generally their motives for choosing an historical career are of the most futile character. One has been successful in history at college;[20] another feels himself drawn towards the past by the same kind of romantic attraction which, we are told, determined the vocation of Augustin Thierry; some are misled by the fancy that history is a comparatively easy subject. It is certainly important that these irrational votaries should be enlightened and put to the test as soon as possible.

Having given a course of lectures, to novices, by way of "Introduction to the Study of History," we thought that, with a little revision, these lectures might be made useful to others besides novices. Scholars and professed historians will doubtless have nothing to learn from this work; but if they should find in it a stimulus to personal reflection on the craft which some of them practise in a mechanical fashion, that would be something gained. As for the public, which reads the works of historians, is it not desirable that it should know how these works are produced, in order to be able to judge them better?

We do not, therefore, like Professor Bernheim, write exclusively for present and future specialists, but also for the public interested in history. We thus lay ourselves under an obligation to be as concise, as clear, and as little technical as possible. But to be concise and clear on subjects of this kind often means to appear superficial. Commonplace on the one hand, obscurity on the other: these, as we have already seen, are the evils between which we have the sorry privilege of choosing. We admit the difficulty. But we do not think it insurmountable, and our endeavour has been to say what we had to say in the clearest possible manner.

The first half of the book has been written by M. Langlois, the second by M. Seignobos; but the two collaborators have constantly aided, consulted, and checked each other.[21]

Paris, August 1897.

INTRODUCTION TO
THE STUDY OF HISTORY

BOOK I

PRELIMINARY STUDIES

CHAPTER I

THE SEARCH FOR DOCUMENTS (HEURISTIC)

The historian works with documents. Documents are the traces which have been left by the thoughts and actions of men of former times. Of these thoughts and actions, however, very few leave any visible traces, and these traces, when there are any, are seldom durable; an accident is enough to efface them. Now every thought and every action that has left no visible traces, or none but what have since disappeared, is lost for history; is as though it had never been. For want of documents the history of immense periods in the past of humanity is destined to remain for ever unknown. For there is no substitute for documents: no documents, no history.

In order to draw legitimate inferences from a document to the fact of which it is the trace, numerous precautions are requisite which will be indicated in the sequel. But it is clear that, prior to any critical examination or interpretation of documents, the question presents itself whether there are any documents at all, how many there are, and where they are. If I undertake to deal with a point of history,[22] of whatever nature, my first step will be to ascertain the place or places where the documents necessary for its treatment, if any such exist, are to be found. The search for and the collection of documents is thus a part, logically the first and most important part, of the historian's craft. In Germany it has received the convenient, because short, name of Heuristik. Is there any need to prove the capital importance of Heuristic? Assuredly not. It is obvious that if it is neglected, if the student does not, before he sets to work on a point of history, place himself in a position to command all accessible sources of information, his risk (no small one at the best) of working upon insufficient data is quite unnecessarily increased: works of erudition or history constructed in accordance with the rules of the most exact method have been vitiated, or even rendered worthless, by the accidental circumstance that the author was unacquainted with the documents by which those which he had within reach, and with which he was content, might have been illustrated, supplemented, or discredited. The scholars and historians of to-day, standing, as they do, in other respects on an equality with their predecessors of the last few centuries, are only enabled to surpass them by their possession of more abundant means of information.[23] Heuristic is, in fact, easier to-day than it used to be, although the honest Wagner has still good grounds for saying:

"Wie schwer sind nicht die Mittel zu erwerben,
Durch die man zu den Quellen steigt!"[24]

Let us endeavour to explain why the collection of documents, once so laborious, is still no easy matter, in spite of the progress made in the last century; and how this essential operation may, in the course of continued progress, be still further simplified.

I. Those who first endeavoured to write history from the sources found themselves in an embarrassing situation. Were the events they proposed to relate recent, so that all the witnesses of them were not yet dead? They had the resource of interviewing the witnesses who survived. Thucydides, Froissart, and many others have followed this procedure. When Mr. H. H. Bancroft, the historian of the Pacific Coast of California, resolved to collect materials for the history of events many of the actors in which were still alive, he mobilised a whole army of reporters charged to extract conversations from them.[25] But when the events to be related were ancient, so that no man then living could have witnessed them, and no account of them had been preserved by oral tradition, what then? Nothing was left but to collect documents of every kind, principally written ones, relating to the distant past which was to be studied. This was a difficult task at a time when libraries were rare, archives secret, and documents scattered. About the year 1860, Mr. Bancroft, in California, was in a situation analogous to that of the earlier researchers in our part of the world. His plan was as follows: He was rich; he cleared the market of all documents, printed or manuscript; he negotiated with financially embarrassed families and corporations for the purchase of their archives, or the permission to have them copied by his paid agents. This done, he housed his collection in premises built for the purpose, and classified it. Theoretically there could not be a more rational procedure. But this rapid, American method has only once been employed with sufficient resources and sufficient consistency to ensure its success; at any other time, and in any other place, it would have been out of the question. Nowhere else have the circumstances been so favourable for it.

At the epoch of the Renaissance the documents of ancient and modern history were scattered in innumerable private libraries and in innumerable depositories of archives, almost all of them inaccessible, not to mention those which lay hidden beneath the soil, their very existence as yet unsuspected. It was at that time a physical impossibility to procure a list of all the documents serving for the elucidation of a question (for example, a list of all the manuscripts still preserved of an ancient work); and if, by a miracle, such a list was to be had, it was another impossibility to consult all these documents except at the cost of journeys, expenses, and negotiations without end. Consequences easy to foresee did, as a matter of fact, ensue. Firstly, the difficulties of Heuristic being insurmountable, the earliest scholars and historians—employing, as they did, not all the documents, nor the best documents, but those documents on which they could lay their hands—were nearly always ill-informed; and their works are now without interest except so far as they are founded on documents which have since been lost. Secondly, the first scholars and historians to be relatively well-informed were those who, in virtue of their profession, had access to rich storehouses of documents—librarians, keepers of archives, monks, magistrates, whose order or whose corporation possessed libraries or archives of considerable extent.[26]

It is true that collectors soon arose who, by money payments, or by more questionable expedients, such as theft, formed, with more or less regard for the interests of scientific study, "cabinets" of collections of original documents, and of copies. But these European collectors, of whom there has been a great number since the fifteenth century, differ very noticeably from Mr. Bancroft. The Californian, in fact, only collected documents relating to a particular subject (the history of certain Pacific states), and his ambition was to make his collection complete; most European collectors have acquired waifs and strays and fragments of every description, forming, when combined, totals which appear insignificant by the side of the huge mass of historical documents which existed at the time. Besides, it was not, in general, with any purpose of making them generally accessible that collectors like Peiresc, Gaignières, Clairambault, Colbert, and many others, withdrew from circulation documents which were in danger of being lost; they were content (and it was creditable to do as much as this) to share them, more or less freely, with their friends. But collectors (and their heirs) are fickle people, and sometimes eccentric in their notions. Certainly it is better that documents should be preserved in private collections, than that they should be entirely unprotected and absolutely inaccessible to the scientific worker; but in order that Heuristic should be made really easier, the first condition is that all collections of documents should be public.[27]

Now the finest private collections of documents—libraries and museums combined—were naturally, in the Europe of the Renaissance, those possessed by kings. And while other private collections were often dispersed upon the death of their founders, these, on the contrary, never ceased to grow; they were enriched, indeed, by the wreckage of all the others. The Cabinet des manuscrits de France, for example, formed by the French kings, and by them thrown open to the public, had, at the end of the eighteenth century, absorbed the best part of the collections which had been the personal work of the amateurs and scholars of the two preceding centuries.[28] Similarly in other countries. The concentration of a great number of historical documents in vast public (or semi-public) establishments was the fortunate result of this spontaneous evolution.

The arbitrary proceedings of the Revolution were still more favourable, and still more effective in securing the amelioration of the material conditions of historical research. The Revolution of 1789 in France, analogous movements in other countries, led to the violent confiscation, for the profit of the state (that is, of everybody), of a host of private archives and collections—the archives, libraries, and museums of the crown, the archives and libraries of monasteries and suppressed corporations, and so on. In France, in 1790, the Constituent Assembly thus placed the state in possession of a great number of depositories of historical documents, previously scattered, and guarded more or less jealously from the curiosity of scholars; these treasures have since been divided among four different national institutions. The same phenomenon has been more recently observed, on a smaller scale, in Germany, Spain, and Italy.

The confiscations of the revolutionary period, as well as the collections of the period which preceded it, have both been productive of serious damage. The collector is, or rather often was, a barbarian who did not hesitate, when he saw a chance of adding to his collection of specimens and rare remains, to mutilate monuments, to dissect manuscripts, to break up whole archives, in order to possess himself of the fragments. On this score many acts of vandalism were perpetrated before the Revolution. Naturally, the revolutionary procedure of confiscation and transference was also productive of lamentable consequences; besides the destruction which was the result of negligence and that which was due to the mere pleasure of destroying, the unfortunate idea arose that collections might be systematically weeded, those documents only to be preserved which were "interesting" or "useful," the rest to be got rid of. The task of weeding was entrusted to well-meaning but incompetent and overworked men, who were thus led to commit irreparable havoc in our ancient archives. At the present day there are workers engaged in the task, one requiring an extraordinary amount of time, patience, and care, of restoring the dismembered collections, and replacing the fragments which were then isolated in so brutal a manner by these zealous but unreflecting manipulators of historical documents. It must be recognised, moreover, that the mutilations due to revolutionary activity and the pre-revolutionary collectors are insignificant in comparison with those which are the result of accident and the destructive work of time. But had they been ten times as serious, they would have been amply compensated by two advantages of the first importance, on which we cannot lay too much stress: (1) the concentration, in a relatively small number of depositories, of documents which were formerly scattered, and, as it were, lost, in a hundred different places; (2) the opening of these depositories to the public. The remnant of historical documents which has survived the destructive effects of accident and vandalism is now at last safely housed, classified, made accessible, and treated as public property.

Ancient historical documents are now, as we have seen, collected and preserved chiefly in those public institutions which are called archives, libraries, and museums. It is true that this does not apply to all existing documents; in spite of the unceasing acquisitions by purchase and gift which archives, libraries, and museums all over the world have been making every year for a long time past, there still exist private collections, dealers who supply them, and documents in circulation. But the exceptions, which in this case are negligeable, do not affect the general rule. Besides, all the ancient documents which, in limited quantity, still range at large, are destined sooner or later to find their way into the state institutions, whose doors are always open to let in, but never to let out.[29]

It is to be desired, as a matter of principle, that the depositories of documents (archives, libraries, and museums) should not be too numerous; and we have pointed out that, fortunately, they are now beyond comparison less numerous than they were a hundred years ago. Could not the centralisation of documents, with its evident advantages for researchers, be carried still further? Are there not still collections of documents of which it would be hard to justify the separate existence? Perhaps;[30] but the problem of the centralisation of documents is no longer urgent, now that the processes of reproduction have been perfected, especially as the inconveniences arising from a multitude of depositories are met by the expedient, now in general use, of allowing the documents to travel: it is now possible for the student to consult, without expense, in the public library of the city where he resides, documents belonging, say, to the libraries of St. Petersburg, Brussels, and Florence; we now rarely meet with institutions like the Archives Nationales at Paris, the British Museum at London, and the Méjanes Library at Aix-en-Provence, whose statutes absolutely prohibit all lending-out of their contents.[31]

II. It being granted that the majority of historical documents are now preserved in public institutions (archives, libraries, and museums), Heuristic would be very easy if only good descriptive catalogues had been drawn up of all the existing collections of documents, if these catalogues were furnished with indexes, or if general repertories (alphabetical, systematic, &c.) had been made relating to them; lastly, if there were some place where it was possible to consult the complete collection of all these catalogues and their indexes. But Heuristic is still difficult, because these conditions are, unfortunately, still very far from being adequately realised.

Firstly, there are depositories of documents (archives, libraries, and museums) whose contents have never been even partially catalogued, so that no one knows what is in them. The depositories of which we possess complete descriptive catalogues are rare; there are many collections preserved in celebrated institutions which have only been catalogued in part, and the bulk of which still remains to be described.[32] In the second place, what a variety there is among existing catalogues! There are some old ones which do not now correspond to the present classification of documents, and which cannot be used without reference-tables; there are new ones which are equally based on obsolete systems, too detailed or too summary; some are printed, others in manuscript, on registers or slips; some are carefully executed and clear, many are scamped, inadequate, and provisional. Taking printed catalogues alone, it requires a whole apprenticeship to learn to distinguish, in this enormous mass of confusion, between what is trustworthy and what is not; in other words, to make any use of them at all. Lastly, where are the existing catalogues to be consulted? Most of the great libraries only possess incomplete collections of them; there is no general guide to them anywhere.

This is a deplorable state of things. In fact, the documents contained in uncatalogued depositories and collections are practically non-existent for researchers who have no leisure to work through the whole of their contents for themselves. We have said before: no documents, no history. But to have no good descriptive catalogues of collections of documents means, in practice, to be unable to ascertain the existence of documents otherwise than by chance. We infer that the progress of history depends in great measure on the progress of the general catalogue of historical documents which is still fragmentary and imperfect. On this point there is general agreement. Père Bernard de Montfaucon considered his Bibliotheca bibliothecarum manuscriptarum nova, a collection of library catalogues, as "the most useful and most interesting work he had produced in his whole life."[33] "In the present state of science," wrote Renan in 1848,[34] "nothing is wanted more urgently than a critical catalogue of the manuscripts in the different libraries ... a humble task to all appearance; ... and yet the researches of scholars are hampered and incomplete pending its definitive completion." "We should have better books on our ancient literature," says M. P. Meyer,[35] "if the predecessors of M. Delisle [in his capacity of administrator of the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris] had applied themselves with equal ardour and diligence to the cataloguing of the treasures committed to their care."

It will be well to indicate briefly the causes and state the exact consequences of a state of things which has been deplored as long as scholars have existed, and which is improving, though slowly. "I assure you," said Renan,[36] "that the few hundred thousand francs a Minister of Public Instruction might apply to the purpose [of preparing catalogues] would be better employed than three-quarters of the sum now devoted to literature." It is rare to find a minister, in France or elsewhere, convinced of this truth, and resolute enough to act accordingly. Besides, it has not always been true that, in order to obtain good catalogues, it is sufficient, as well as necessary, to make a pecuniary sacrifice: it is only recently that the best methods of describing documents have been authoritatively fixed; the task of recruiting competent workers—no great difficulty nowadays—would have been neither easy nor free from anxiety at an epoch when competent workers were rarer than they are now. So much for the material obstacles—want of money and want of men. A cause of another kind has not been without its influence. The functionaries charged with the administration of depositories of documents have not always displayed the zeal which they now display for making their collections accessible by means of accurate catalogues. To prepare a catalogue (in the exact and at the same time summary form which is now used) is a laborious task, a task without joy and without reward. It has often happened that such a functionary, living, in virtue of his office, in the midst of documents which he is at liberty to consult at any moment, and placed in a much more favourable position than the general public for utilising the collection without the aid of a catalogue, and making discoveries in the process, has preferred to work for himself rather than for others, and made the tedious construction of a catalogue a secondary matter compared with his personal researches.

Who are the persons that in our own day have discovered, published, and annotated the greatest number of documents? The functionaries attached to the depositories of documents. Without a doubt this circumstance has retarded the progress of the general catalogue of historical documents. The situation has been this: the persons who were the best able to dispense with catalogues were precisely the persons whose duty it was to make them.

The imperfection of descriptive catalogues has consequences which deserve our attention. On the one hand, we can never be sure that we have exhausted all the sources of information; who knows what may be held in reserve by the uncatalogued collections?[37] On the other hand, in order to obtain the maximum amount of information, it is necessary to be thoroughly acquainted with the resources furnished by the existing literature of Heuristic, and to devote a great deal of time to preliminary researches. In point of fact, every one who proposes to collect documents for the treatment of a point of history begins by consulting indexes and catalogues.[38] Novices set about this important operation so slowly, with so little skill, and with so much effort, as to move more experienced workers to mirth or pity, according to their disposition. Those who find amusement in watching novices stumble and strain and waste their time in the labyrinth of catalogues, neglecting those which are valuable, and thoroughly exploring those which are useless, remember that they also have passed through similar experiences: let every one have his turn. Those who observe with regret this waste of time and strength consider that, while inevitable up to a certain point, it serves no good purpose; they ask whether something might not be done to mitigate the severity of this apprenticeship to Heuristic, which at one time cost them so dear. Besides, is not research, in the present condition of its material aids, difficult enough whatever the experience of the researcher? There are scholars and historians who devote the best part of their powers to material searches. Certain branches of historical work, relating chiefly to mediæval and modern subjects (the documents of ancient history are fewer, have been more studied, and are better catalogued than the others), imply not merely the assiduous use of catalogues, not all furnished with indexes, but also the personal inspection of the whole contents of immense collections which are either badly catalogued or not catalogued at all. Experience proves beyond a doubt that the prospect of these long searches, which must be performed before the more intellectual part of the work can be begun, has deterred, and continues to deter, men of excellent abilities from undertaking historical work. They are, in fact, confronted with a dilemma: either they must work on a supply of documents which is in all probability incomplete, or they must spend themselves in unlimited searches, often fruitless, the results of which seldom appear worth the time they have cost. It goes against the grain to spend a great part of one's life in turning over catalogues without indexes, or in passing under review, one after another, all the items which go to form accumulations of uncatalogued miscellanea, in order to obtain information (positive or negative) which might have been obtained easily and instantaneously if the collections had been catalogued and if the catalogues had been indexed. The most serious consequence of the present imperfection of the material aids to Heuristic is the discouragement which is sure to be felt by many able men who know their worth, and have some sense of the due proportion of effort and reward.[39]

If it lay in the nature of things that the search for historical documents, in public depositories, must necessarily be as laborious as it still is, we might resign ourselves to the inconvenience: no one thinks of regretting the inevitable expenditure of time and labour which is demanded by archæological research, whatever the results may prove to be. But the imperfection of the modern instruments of Heuristic is quite unnecessary. The state of things which existed for some centuries has now been reformed indifferently; there is no valid reason why it should not some day be reformed altogether. We are thus led, after treating of the causes and the effects, to say a few words about the remedies.

The instruments of Heuristic are being continually perfected, before our eyes, in two ways. Every year witnesses an increase in the number of descriptive catalogues of archives, libraries, and museums, prepared by the functionaries attached to these institutions. In addition to this, powerful learned societies employ experts to pass from one depository to another cataloguing the documents there, in order to pick out all the documents of a particular class, or relating to a special subject: thus the society of Bollandists caused a general catalogue of hagiographical documents to be prepared by its emissaries, and the Imperial Academy of Vienna catalogued in a similar manner the monuments of patristic literature. The society of the Monumenta Germaniœ Historica has for a long time been conducting vast searches of the same kind; and it was by the same process of exploring the museums and libraries of the whole of Europe that the construction of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum was lately rendered possible. Lastly, several governments have taken the initiative in sending abroad persons charged to catalogue, on their behalf, documents in which they are interested: thus England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and other governments, grant regular subsidies to agents of theirs occupied in cataloguing and transcribing, in the great depositories of Europe, the documents which relate to the history of England, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United States, and the rest.[40] With what rapidity and with what perfection these useful labours can be conducted, provided that a competent staff, suitably directed, can be had as well as the money to pay it, is shown by the history of the general catalogue of the manuscripts in the public libraries of France. This excellent descriptive catalogue was begun in 1885, and now, in 1897, it extends to nearly fifty volumes, and will soon be completed. The Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum will have been produced in less than fifty years. The results obtained by the Bollandists and the Imperial Academy of Vienna are not less conclusive. Assuredly nothing is now lacking, except funds, to secure the speedy endowment of historical study with the indispensable instruments of research. The methods employed in the construction of these instruments are now permanently fixed, and it is an easy matter to recruit a trained staff. Such a staff must evidently be largely composed of keepers of archives and professional librarians, but it would also contain unattached workers with a decided vocation for the construction of catalogues and indexes. Such workers are more numerous than one would at first be inclined to think. Not that cataloguing is easy: it requires patience, the most scrupulous attention, and the most varied learning; but many minds are attracted by tasks which, like this, are at once determinate, capable of being definitely completed, and of manifest utility. In the large and heterogeneous family of those who labour to promote the progress of historical study, the makers of descriptive catalogues and indexes form a section to themselves. When they devote themselves exclusively to their art they acquire by practice, as one might expect, a high degree of dexterity.

While waiting for the fact to be clearly recognised that the time is opportune for pushing vigorously in every country the construction of a general catalogue of historical documents, we may indicate a palliative: it is important that scholars and historians, especially novices, should be accurately informed of the state of the instruments of research which are at their disposal, and be regularly apprised of any improvements that from time to time may be made in them. Experience and accident have been for a long time trusted to supply this information; but empirical knowledge, besides being costly, as we have already pointed out, is almost always imperfect. Recently the task has been undertaken of constructing catalogues of catalogues—critical and systematic lists of all the catalogues in existence. There can be no doubt that few bibliographical enterprises have possessed, in so great a degree, the character of general utility.

But scholars and historians often need, in respect of documents, information not usually supplied by descriptive catalogues; they wish, for example, to know whether such and such a document is known or not, whether it has already been critically dealt with, annotated, or utilised.[41] This information can only be found in the works of former scholars and historians. In order to become acquainted with these works, recourse must be had to those "bibliographical repertories," properly so called, of all kinds, compiled from very different points of view, which have already been published. Among the indispensable instruments of Heuristic must thus be reckoned bibliographical repertories of historical literature, as well as repertories of catalogues of original documents.

To supply the classified list of all those repertories (repertories of catalogues, bibliographical repertories, properly so called), together with other appropriate information, in order to save students from mistakes and waste of time, is the object of what we are at liberty to call the "science of repertories," or "historical bibliography." Professor Bernheim has published a preliminary sketch[42] of it, which we have endeavoured to expand.[43] The expanded sketch bears date April 1896: numerous additions, not to speak of revision, would already be necessary, for the bibliographical apparatus of the historical sciences is being renewed, at the present time, with astonishing rapidity. A book on the repertories for the use of scholars and historians is, as a general rule, out of date the day after it has been completed.

III. The knowledge of repertories is useful to all; the preliminary search for documents is laborious to all; but not in the same degree. Certain parts of history, which have been long cultivated, now enjoy the advantage of having all their documents described, collected, and classified in large publications devoted to the purpose, so that, in dealing with these subjects, the historian can do all that need be done at his desk. The study of local history does not generally require more than local search. Some important monographs are based on a small number of documents, all belonging to the same collection, and of such a nature that it would be superfluous to look for others elsewhere. On the other hand, a humble piece of work, such as a modest edition of a text of which the ancient copies are not rare, and are to be found scattered in several libraries of Europe, may have involved inquiries, negotiations, and journeys without end. Since the majority of the documents of mediæval and modern history are still unedited, or badly edited, it may be laid down as a general principle that, in order to write a really new chapter of mediæval or modern history, it is necessary to have long haunted the great depositories of original documents, and to have, if we may use the expression, worried their catalogues.

It is thus incumbent on every one to choose the subject of his labours with the greatest care, instead of leaving it to be determined by pure chance. There are some subjects which, in the present state of the instruments of research, cannot be treated except at the cost of enormous searches in which life and intellect are consumed without profit. These subjects are not necessarily more interesting than others, and some day, perhaps to-morrow, improvements in the aids to research will make them easily manageable. It is necessary for the student consciously and deliberately to make his choice between different historical subjects depend on the existence or non-existence of particular catalogues of documents and bibliographical repertories; on his relative inclination for desk work on the one hand, and the labour of exploring depositories on the other; even on the facilities he has for making use of particular collections. "Is it possible to do work in the provinces?" Renan asked at the congress of learned societies at the Sorbonne in 1889; and gave a very good answer to his own question: "At least half one's scientific work can be done at one's own desk ... Take comparative philology, for example: with an initial outlay of some thousands of francs, and subscriptions to three or four special publications, a student would command all the tools of his trade ... The same applies to universal philosophy ... Many branches of study can thus be prosecuted quite privately, and in the closest retirement."[44] Doubtless, but there are "rarities, specialities, researches which require the aid of powerful machinery." One half of historical work may now be done in private, with limited resources, but only half; the other half still presupposes the employment of such resources, in the way of repertories and documents, as can only be found in the great centres of study; often, indeed, it is necessary to visit several of these centres in succession. In short, the case stands with history much as it does with geography: in respect of some portions of the globe, we possess documents published in manageable form sufficiently complete and sufficiently well classified to enable us to reason about them to good purpose without leaving our fireside; while in the case of an unexplored or badly explored region, the slightest monograph implies a considerable expenditure of time and physical strength. It is dangerous to choose a subject of study, as many do, without having first realised the nature and extent of the preliminary researches which it demands; there are instances of men struggling for years with such researches, who might have been occupied to better advantage in work of another character. As precautions against this danger, which is the more formidable to novices the more active and zealous they are, an examination of the present conditions of Heuristic in general, and positive notions of Historical Bibliography, are certainly to be warmly recommended.

CHAPTER II

"AUXILIARY SCIENCES"

Let us suppose that the preliminary searches, treated of in the preceding chapter, have been made methodically and successfully; the greater part, if not the whole, of the documents bearing on a given subject have been discovered and made available. Of two things one: either these documents have been already subjected to critical elaboration, or they are in the condition of raw material; this is a point which must be settled by "bibliographical" researches, which also, as we have already observed, form part of the inquiries which precede the logical part of the work. In the first case, where the documents have already gone through a process of elaboration, it is necessary to be in a position to verify the accuracy of the critical work; in the second case, where the documents are still raw material, the student must do the critical work himself. In both cases certain antecedent and auxiliary knowledge of a positive kind, Vor-und Hülfskenntnisse, as they are called, are every whit as indispensable as the habit of accurate reasoning; for if, in the course of critical work, it is possible to go wrong through reasoning badly, it is also possible to go wrong out of pure ignorance. The profession of a scholar or historian is, moreover, similar in this respect to all other professions; it is impossible to follow it without possessing a certain equipment of technical notions, whose absence neither natural aptitude nor even method can make good. In what, then, does the technical apprenticeship of the scholar or the historian consist? Or, to employ language which, though inappropriate, as we shall endeavour to show, is in more common use: what, in addition to the knowledge of repertories, are the "auxiliary sciences" of history?

Daunou, in his Cours d'études historiques,[45] has proposed a question of the same kind. "What studies," says he, "will the intending historian need to have gone through, what kinds of knowledge ought he to have acquired, in order to begin writing a work with any hope of success?" Before him, Mably, in his Traité de l'étude de l'histoire, had also recognised that "there are preparatory studies with which no historian can dispense." But on this subject Mably and Daunou entertained views which nowadays seem singular enough. It is instructive to mark the exact distance which separates their point of view from ours. "First of all," said Mably, "study the law of nature, public law, moral and political science." Daunou, a man of great judgment, permanent secretary to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, writing about 1820, divides the studies which, in his opinion, constitute "the apprenticeship of the historian," into three classes—literary, philosophical, historical. On the "literary" studies he expatiates at great length: to begin with, the historian must "have read with attention the great models." Which great models? Daunou "does not hesitate" to place in the front rank "the masterpieces of epic poetry;" for "it is the poets who have created the art of narrative, and whoever has not learnt it from them cannot have more than an imperfect knowledge of it." He further recommends the reading of modern novels; "they will teach the method of giving an artistic pose to persons and events, of distributing details, of skilfully carrying on the thread of the narrative, of interrupting it, of resuming it, of sustaining the attention and provoking the curiosity of the reader." Finally, good historical works should be read: "Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, and Plutarch among the Greeks; Cæsar, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus among the Latins; and among the moderns, Macchiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannone, Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, the Cardinal de Retz, Vertot, Voltaire, Raynal, and Rulhière. Not that I would exclude the others, but these will suffice to provide all the styles which are suitable for history; for a great diversity of form is to be met with in the works of these writers." In the second place come philosophical studies; a thorough mastery of "ideology, morals, and politics" is required. "As to the works from which knowledge of this kind is to be obtained, Daguesseau has instanced Aristotle, Cicero, Grotius: I should add the best ancient and modern moralists, treatises on political economy published since the middle of the last century, the writings on political science in general, and on its details and application, of Macchiavelli, Bodin, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Mably, and the most enlightened of their disciples and commentators." In the third place, before writing history, "it is evidently necessary to know it." "A writer will not give the world new information on a subject like this unless he begins by making himself master of what is already known of it." The future historian has already made the acquaintance of the best historical works, and studied them as models of style; "it will be to his advantage to read them a second time, but endeavouring more particularly to grasp all the facts which they contain, and to let them make so deep an impression on his mind that they may be permanently fixed in his memory."

These are the "positive" notions which, eighty years ago, were considered indispensable to the general historian. At the same time there was a confused idea that "in order to acquire a profound knowledge of particular subjects" there were yet other useful branches of study. "The subjects of which historians treat," says Daunou, "the details which they occasionally light upon, require very extensive and varied attainments." He goes on to particularise, observe in what terms: "very often a knowledge of several languages, sometimes too some notion of physics and mathematics." And he adds: "On these subjects, however, the general education which we may assume to be common to all men of letters is sufficient for the writer who devotes himself to historical composition...."

All the authors who, like Daunou, have attempted to enumerate the preliminary attainments, as well as the moral or intellectual aptitudes, necessary for "writing history," have either fallen into commonplace or pitched their requirements ridiculously high. According to Freeman, the historian ought to know everything—philosophy, law, finance, ethnography, geography, anthropology, natural science, and what not; is not an historian, in point of fact, likely enough in the course of his study of the past to meet with questions of philosophy, law, finance, and the rest of the series? And if financial science, for example, is necessary to a writer who treats of contemporary finance, is it less so to the writer who claims to express an opinion on the financial questions of the past? "The historian," Freeman declares, "may have incidentally to deal with any subject whatever, and the more branches of knowledge he is master of, the better prepared he is for his own work." True, all branches of human knowledge are not equally useful; some of them are only serviceable on rare occasions, and accidentally: "We could hardly make it even a counsel of perfection to the historian to make himself an accomplished chemist, on the chance of an occasion in which chemistry might be of use to him in his study;" but other special subjects are more closely related to history: "for example, geology and a whole group of sciences which have a close connection with geology.... The historian will clearly do his own regular work better for being master of them...."[46] The question has also been asked whether "history is one of those studies anciently called umbratiles, for which all that is wanted is a quiet mind and habits of industry," or whether it is a good thing for the historian to have mingled in the turmoil of active life, and to have helped to make the history of his own time before sitting down to write that of the past. Indeed, what questions have not been asked? Floods of ink have been poured out over these uninteresting and unanswerable questions, the long and fruitless debating of which has done not a little to discredit works on methodology. Our opinion is that nothing relevant can be added to the dictates of mere common sense on the subject of the apprenticeship to the "art of writing history," unless perhaps that this apprenticeship should consist, above everything, in the study, hitherto so generally neglected, of the principles of historical method.

Besides, it is not the "literary historian," the moralising and quill-driving "historians," as conceived by Daunou and his school, that we have had in view; we are here only concerned with those scholars and historians who intend to deal with documents in order to facilitate or actually perform the scientific work of history. These stand in need of a technical apprenticeship. What meaning are we to attach to this term?

Let us suppose we have before us a written document. What use can we make of it if we cannot read it? Up to the time of François Champollion, Egyptian documents, being written in hieroglyphics, were, without metaphor, a dead-letter. It will be readily admitted that in order to deal with ancient Assyrian history it is necessary to have learnt to decipher cuneiform inscriptions. Similarly, whoever desires to do original work from the sources, in ancient or mediæval history, will, if he is prudent, learn to decipher inscriptions and manuscripts. We thus see why Greek and Latin epigraphy and mediæval palæography—that is, the sum of the various kinds of knowledge required for the deciphering of ancient and mediæval manuscripts and inscriptions—are considered as "auxiliary sciences" to history, or rather, the historical study of antiquity and the middle ages. It is evident that mediæval Latin palæography forms part of the necessary outfit of the mediævalist, just as the palæography of hieroglyphics is essential to the Egyptologist. There is, however, a difference to be observed. No one will ever think of devoting himself to Egyptology without having first studied the appropriate palæography. On the other hand, it is not very rare for a man to undertake the study of local documents of the middle ages without having learnt to date their forms approximately, and to decipher their abbreviations correctly. The resemblance which most mediæval writing bears to modern writing is sufficiently close to foster the illusion that ingenuity and practice will be enough to carry him through. This illusion is dangerous. Scholars who have received no regular palæographical initiation can almost always be recognised by the gross errors which they commit from time to time in deciphering—errors which are sometimes enough to completely ruin the subsequent operations of criticism and interpretation. As for the self-taught experts who acquire their skill by dint of practice, the orthodox palæographic initiation which they have missed would at least have saved them much groping in the dark, long hours of labour, and many a disappointment.

Suppose a document has been deciphered. How is it to be turned to account, unless it be first understood? Inscriptions in Etruscan and the ancient language of Cambodia have been read, but no one understands them. As long as this is the case they must remain useless. It is clear that in order to deal with Greek history it is necessary to consult documents in the Greek language, and therefore necessary to know Greek. Rank truism, the reader will say. Yes, but many proceed as if it had never occurred to them. Young students attack ancient history with only a superficial tincture of Greek and Latin. Many who have never studied mediæval French and Latin think they know them because they understand classical Latin and modern French, and they attempt the interpretation of texts whose literal meaning escapes them, or appears to be obscure when in reality perfectly plain. Innumerable historical errors owe their origin to false or inexact interpretations of quite straightforward texts, perpetrated by men who were insufficiently acquainted with the grammar, the vocabulary, or the niceties of ancient languages. Solid philological study ought logically to precede historical research in every instance where the documents to be employed are not to be had in a modern language, and in a form in which they can be easily understood.

Suppose a document is intelligible. It would not be legitimate to take it into consideration without having verified its authenticity, if its authenticity has not been already settled beyond a doubt. Now in order to verify the authenticity or ascertain the origin of a document two things are required—reasoning power and knowledge. In other words, it is necessary to reason from certain positive data which represent the condensed results of previous research, which cannot be improvised, and must, therefore, be learnt. To distinguish a genuine from a spurious charter would, in fact, be often an impossible task for the best trained logician, if he were unacquainted with the practice of such and such a chancery, at such and such a date, or with the features common to all the admittedly genuine charters of a particular class. He would be obliged to do what the first scholars did—ascertain for himself, by the comparison of a great number of similar documents, what features distinguish the admittedly genuine documents from the others, before allowing himself to pronounce judgment in any special instance. Will not his task be enormously simplified if there is in existence a body of doctrine, a treasury of accumulated observations, a system of results obtained by workers who have already made, repeated, and checked the minute comparisons he would otherwise have been obliged to make for himself? This body of doctrines, observations, and results, calculated to assist the criticism of diplomas and charters, does exist; it is called Diplomatic. We shall, therefore, assign to Diplomatic, along with Epigraphy, Palæography, and Philology, the character of a subject auxiliary to historical research.

Epigraphy and Palæography, Philology, and Diplomatic with its adjuncts (technical Chronology and Sphragistic) are not the only subjects of study which subserve historical research. It would be extremely injudicious to undertake to deal critically with literary documents on which no critical work has as yet been done without making oneself familiar with the results obtained by those who have already dealt critically with documents of the same class: the sum of these results forms a department to itself, which has a name—the History of Literature.[47] The critical treatment of illustrative documents, such as the productions of architecture, sculpture, and painting, objects of all kinds (arms, dress, utensils, coins, medals, armorial bearings, and so forth), presupposes a thorough acquaintance with the rules and observations which constitute Archæology properly so called and its detached branches—Numismatic and Heraldry.

We are now in a position to examine to some purpose the hazy notion expressed by the phrase, "the sciences auxiliary to history." We also read of "ancillary sciences," and, in French, "sciences satellites." None of these expressions is really satisfactory.

First of all, the so-called "auxiliary sciences" are not all of them sciences. Diplomatic, for example, and the History of Literature are only systematised accumulations of facts, acquired by criticism, which are of a nature to facilitate the application of critical methods to documents hitherto untouched. On the other hand, Philology is an organised science, and has its own laws.

In the second place, among the branches of knowledge auxiliary—properly speaking, not to history, but to historical research—we must distinguish between those which every worker in the field ought to master, and those in respect of which he needs only to know where to look when he has occasion to make use of them; between knowledge which ought to become part of a man's self, and information which he may be content to possess only in potentiality. A mediævalist should know how to read and understand mediæval texts; he would gain no advantage by accumulating in his memory the mass of particular facts pertaining to the History of Literature and Diplomatic which are to be found, in their proper place, in well-constructed works of reference.

Lastly, there are no branches of knowledge which are auxiliary to History (or even historical research) in general—that is, which are useful to all students irrespectively of the particular part of history on which they are engaged.[48] It appears, then, that there is no general answer possible to the question raised at the beginning of this chapter: in what should the technical apprenticeship of the scholar or historian consist? In what does it consist? That depends. It depends on the part of history he proposes to study. A knowledge of palæography is quite useless for the purpose of investigating the history of the French Revolution, and a knowledge of Greek is equally useless for the treatment of a question in mediæval French history.[49] But we may go so far as to say that the preliminary outfit of every one who wishes to do original work in history should consist (in addition to the "common education," that is, general culture, of which Daunou writes) in the knowledge calculated to aid in the discovery, the understanding, and the criticism of documents. The exact nature of this knowledge varies from case to case according as the student specialises in one or another part of universal history. The technical apprenticeship is relatively short and easy for those who occupy themselves with modern or contemporary history, long and laborious for those who occupy themselves with ancient and mediæval history.

This reform of the historian's technical apprenticeship which consists in substituting the acquisition of positive knowledge, truly auxiliary to historical research, for the study of the "great models," literary and philosophical, is of quite recent date. In France, for the greater part of the present century, students of history received none but a literary education, after Daunou's pattern. Almost all of them were contented with such a preparation, and did not look beyond it; some few perceived and regretted, when it was too late for a remedy, the insufficiency of their early training; with a few illustrious exceptions, the best of them never rose to be more than distinguished men of letters, incapable of scientific work. There was at that time no organisation for teaching the "auxiliary sciences" and the technique of research except in the case of French mediæval history, and that in a special school, the École des chartes. This simple fact, moreover, secured for this school during a period of fifty years a marked superiority over all the other French (or even foreign) institutions of higher education; excellent workers were there trained who contributed many new results, while elsewhere people were idly discussing problems.[50] To-day it is still at the École des chartes that the mediævalist has the opportunity of going through his technical apprenticeship in the best and most complete manner, thanks to the combined and progressive three-years courses of Romance philology, palæography, archæology, historiography, and mediæval law. But the "auxiliary sciences" are now taught everywhere more or less adequately; they have been introduced into the university curricula. On the other hand, students' handbooks of epigraphy, palæography, diplomatic, and so forth, have multiplied during the last twenty-five years. Twenty-five years ago it would have been vain to look for a good book which should supply the want of oral instruction on these subjects; since the establishment of professorships "manuals" have appeared[51] which would almost make them superfluous were it not that oral instruction, based on practical exercises, has here an exceptional value. Whether a student does or does not enjoy the advantage of a regular drilling in an institution for higher education, he has henceforth no excuse for remaining in ignorance of those things which he ought to know before entering upon historical work. There is, in fact, less of this kind of neglect than there used to be. On this head, the success of the above-mentioned "manuals," with their rapid succession of editions, is very significant.[52]

Here, then, we have the future historian armed with the preliminary knowledge, the neglect of which would have condemned him to powerlessness or to continual mistakes. We suppose him protected from the errors without number which have their origin in an imperfect knowledge of the writing and the language of documents, in ignorance of previous work and the results obtained by textual criticism; he has an irreproachable cognitio cogniti et cognoscendi. A very optimistic supposition, by the way, as we are bound to admit. We know but too well that to have gone through a regular course of "auxiliary sciences," or to have read attentively the best treatises on bibliography, palæography, philology, and so on, or even to have acquired some personal experience by practical exercises, is not enough to ensure that a man shall always be well informed, still less to make him infallible. In the first place, those who have for a long time studied documents of a given class or of a given period possess, in regard to these, incommunicable knowledge in virtue of which they are able to deal better than others with new documents which they may meet with of the same class or period; nothing can replace the "special erudition" which is the specialist's reward for hard work.[53] And secondly, specialists themselves make mistakes: palæographers must be perpetually on their guard not to decipher falsely; is there a philologist who has not some faults of construing on his conscience? Scholars usually well informed have printed as unedited texts which had already been published, and have neglected documents it was their business to know. Scholars spend their lives in incessantly perfecting their "auxiliary" knowledge, which they rightly regard as never perfect. But all this does not prevent us from maintaining our hypothesis. Only let it be understood that in practice we do not postpone work upon documents till we shall have gained a serene and absolute mastery over all the "auxiliary branches of knowledge:" we should never dare to begin.

It remains to know how to treat documents supposing one has successfully passed through the preliminary apprenticeship.

BOOK II

ANALYTICAL OPERATIONS

CHAPTER I

GENERAL CONDITIONS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

We have already stated that history is studied from documents, and that documents are the traces of past events.[54] This is the place to indicate the consequences involved in this statement and this definition.

Events can be empirically known in two ways only: by direct observation while they are in progress; and indirectly, by the study of the traces which they leave behind them. Take an earthquake, for example. I have a direct knowledge of it if I am present when the phenomenon occurs; an indirect knowledge if, without having been thus present, I observe its physical effects (crevices, ruins), or if, after these effects have disappeared, I read a description written by some one who has himself witnessed the phenomenon or its effects. Now, the peculiarity of "historical facts"[55] is this, that they are only known indirectly by the help of their traces. Historical knowledge is essentially indirect knowledge. The methods of historical science ought, therefore, to be radically different from those of the direct sciences; that is to say, of all the other sciences, except geology, which are founded on direct observation. Historical science, whatever may be said,[56] is not a science of observation at all.

The facts of the past are only known to us by the traces of them which have been preserved. These traces, it is true, are directly observed by the historian, but, after that, he has nothing more to observe; what remains is the work of reasoning, in which he endeavours to infer, with the greatest possible exactness, the facts from the traces. The document is his starting-point, the fact his goal.[57] Between this starting-point and this goal he has to pass through a complicated series of inferences, closely interwoven with each other, in which there are innumerable chances of error; while the least error, whether committed at the beginning, middle, or end of the work, may vitiate all his conclusions. The "historical," or indirect, method is thus obviously inferior to the method of direct observation; but historians have no choice: it is the only method of arriving at past facts, and we shall see later on[58] how, in spite of these disadvantages, it is possible for this method to lead to scientific knowledge.

The detailed analysis of the reasonings which lead from the inspection of documents to the knowledge of facts is one of the chief parts of Historical Methodology. It is the domain of criticism. The seven following chapters will be devoted to it. We shall endeavour, first of all, to give a very summary sketch of the general lines and main divisions of the subject.

I. We may distinguish two species of documents. Sometimes the past event has left a material trace (a monument, a fabricated article). Sometimes, and more commonly, the trace is of the psychological order—a written description or narrative. The first case is much simpler than the second. For there is a fixed relation between certain physical appearances and the causes which produced them; and this relation, governed by physical laws, is known to us.[59] But a psychological trace, on the other hand, is purely symbolic: it is not the fact itself; it is not even the immediate impression made by the fact upon the witness's mind, but only a conventional symbol of that impression. Written documents, then, are not, as material documents are, valuable by themselves; they are only valuable as signs of psychological operations, which are often complicated and hard to unravel. The immense majority of the documents which furnish the historian with starting-points for his reasonings are nothing else than traces of psychological operations.

This granted, in order to conclude from a written document to the fact which was its remote cause—that is, in order to ascertain the relation which connects the document with the fact—it is necessary to reproduce the whole series of intermediate causes which have given rise to the document. It is necessary to revive in imagination the whole of that series of acts performed by the author of the document which begins with the fact observed by him and ends with the manuscript (or printed volume), in order to arrive at the original event. Such is the aim and such the process of critical analysis.[60]

First of all we observe the document. Is it now in the same state as when it was produced? Has it deteriorated since? We endeavour to find out how it was made in order to restore it, if need be, to its original form, and to ascertain its origin. The first group of preliminary investigations, bearing upon the writing, the language, the form, the source, constitutes the special domain of External Criticism, or critical scholarship. Next comes Internal Criticism: it endeavours, by the help of analogies mostly borrowed from general psychology, to reproduce the mental states through which the author of the document passed. Knowing what the author of the document has said, we ask (1) What did he mean? (2) Did he believe what he said? (3) Was he justified in believing whatever he did believe? This last step brings the document to a point where it resembles the data of the objective sciences: it becomes an observation; it only remains to treat it by the methods of the objective sciences. Every document is valuable precisely to the extent to which, by the study of its origin, it has been reduced to a well-made observation.

II. Two conclusions may be drawn from what we have just said: the extreme complexity and the absolute necessity of Historical Criticism.

Compared with other students the historian is in a very disagreeable situation. It is not merely that he cannot, as the chemist does, observe his facts directly; it very rarely happens that the documents which he is obliged to use represent precise observations. He has at his disposal none of those systematic records of observations which, in the established sciences, can and do replace direct observation. He is in the situation of a chemist who should know a series of experiments only from the report of his laboratory-boy. The historian is compelled to turn to account rough and ready reports, such as no man of science would be content with.[61] All the more necessary are the precautions to be taken in utilising these documents, the only materials of historical science. It is evidently most important to eliminate those which are worthless, and to ascertain the amount of correct observation represented by those which are left.

All the more necessary, too, are cautions on this subject, because the natural inclination of the human mind is to take no precautions at all, and to treat these matters, which really demand the utmost obtainable precision, with careless laxity. It is true that every one admits the utility of criticism in theory; but this is just one of those principles which are more easily admitted than put into practice. Many centuries and whole eras of brilliant civilisation had to pass away before the first dawn of criticism was visible among the most intellectual peoples in the world. Neither the orientals nor the middle ages ever formed a definite conception of it.[62] Up to our own day there have been enlightened men who, in employing documents for the purpose of writing history, have neglected the most elementary precautions, and unconsciously assumed false generalisations. Even now most young students would, if left to themselves, fall into the old errors. For criticism is antagonistic to the normal bent of the mind. The spontaneous tendency of man is to yield assent to affirmations, and to reproduce them, without even clearly distinguishing them from the results of his own observation. In every-day life do we not accept indiscriminately, without any kind of verification, hearsay reports, anonymous and unguaranteed statements, "documents" of indifferent or inferior authority? It takes a special reason to induce us to take the trouble to examine into the origin and value of a document on the history of yesterday; otherwise, if there is no outrageous improbability in it, and as long as it is not contradicted, we swallow it whole, we pin our faith to it, we hawk it about, and, if need be, embellish it in the process. Every candid man must admit that it requires a violent effort to shake off ignavia critica, that common form of intellectual sloth, that this effort must be continually repeated, and is often accompanied by real pain.

The natural instinct of a man in the water is to do precisely that which will infallibly cause him to be drowned; learning to swim means acquiring the habit of suppressing spontaneous movements and performing others instead. Similarly, criticism is not a natural habit; it must be inculcated, and only becomes organic by dint of continued practice.

Historical work is, then, pre-eminently critical; whoever enters upon it without having first been put on his guard against his instinct is sure to be drowned in it. In order to appreciate the danger it is well to examine one's conscience and analyse the causes of that ignavia which must be fought against till it is replaced by a critical attitude of mind.[63] It is also very salutary to familiarise oneself with the principles of historical method, and to analyse the theory of them, one by one, as we propose to do in the present volume. "History, like every other study, is chiefly subject to errors of fact arising from inattention, but it is more exposed than any other study to errors due to that mental confusion which produces incomplete analyses and fallacious reasonings.... Historians would advance fewer affirmations without proof if they had to analyse each one of their affirmations; they would commit themselves to fewer false principles if they made it a rule to formulate all their principles; they would be guilty of fewer fallacies if they were obliged to set out all their arguments in logical form."[64]

SECTION I.—EXTERNAL CRITICISM

CHAPTER II

TEXTUAL CRITICISM

Let us suppose that an author of our own day has written a book: he sends his manuscript to the printer; with his own hand he corrects the proofs, and marks them "Press." A book which is printed under these conditions comes into our hands in what is, for a document, a very good condition. Whoever the author may be, and whatever his sentiments and intentions, we can be certain—and this is the only point that concerns us at present—that we have before us a fairly accurate reproduction of the text which he wrote. We are obliged to say "fairly accurate," for if the author has corrected his proofs badly, or if the printers have not paid proper attention to his corrections, the reproduction of the original text is imperfect, even in this specially favourable case. Printers not unfrequently make a man say something which he never meant to say, and which he does not notice till too late.

Sometimes it is required to reproduce a work the author of which is dead, and the autograph manuscript of which cannot be sent to the printer. This was the case with the Mémoires d'outre-tombe of Chateaubriand, for example; it is of daily occurrence in regard to the familiar correspondence of well-known persons which is printed in haste to satisfy the curiosity of the public, and of which the original manuscript is very fragile. First the text is copied; it is then set up by the compositor from the copy, which comes to the same thing as copying it again; this second copy is lastly, or ought to be, collated (in the proofs) with the first copy, or, better still, with the original, by some one who takes the place of the deceased author. The guarantees of accuracy are fewer in this case than in the first; for between the original and the ultimate reproduction there is one intermediary the more (the manuscript copy), and it may be that the original is hard for anybody but the author to decipher. And, in fact, the text of memoirs and posthumous correspondence is often disfigured by errors of transcription and punctuation occurring in editions which at first sight give the impression of having been carefully executed.[65]

Turning now to ancient documents, let us ask in what state they have been preserved. In nearly every case the originals have been lost, and we have nothing but copies. Have these copies been made directly from the originals? No; they are copies of copies. The scribes who executed them were not by any means all of them capable and conscientious men; they often transcribed texts which they did not understand at all, or which they understood incorrectly, and it was not always the fashion, as it was in the time of the Carlovingian Renaissance, to compare the copies with the originals.[66]

If our printed books, after the successive revisions of author and printer's reader, are still but imperfect reproductions, it is only to be expected that ancient documents, copied and recopied as they have been for centuries with very little care, and exposed at every fresh transcription to new risk of alteration, should have reached us full of inaccuracies.

There is thus an obvious precaution to be taken. Before using a document we must find out whether its text is "sound"—that is, in as close agreement as possible with the original manuscript of the author; and when the text is "corrupt" we must emend it. In using a text which has been corrupted in transmission, we run the risk of attributing to the author what really comes from the copyists. There are actual cases of theories which were based on passages falsified in transmission, and which collapsed as soon as the true readings were discovered or restored. Printers' errors and mistakes in copying are not always innocuous or merely diverting; they are sometimes insidious and capable of misleading the reader.[67]

One would naturally suppose that historians of repute would always make it a rule to procure "sound" texts, properly emended and restored, of the texts they have to consult. That is a mistake. For a long time historians simply used the texts which they had within easy reach, without verifying their accuracy. And, what is more, the very scholars whose business it is to edit texts did not discover the art of restoring them all at once; not so very long ago, documents were commonly edited from the first copies, good or bad, that came to hand, combined and corrected at random. Editions of ancient texts are nowadays mostly "critical;" but it is not yet thirty years since the publication of the first "critical editions" of the great works of the middle ages, and the critical text of some ancient classics (Pausanias, for example) has still to be constructed.

Not all historical documents have as yet been published in a form calculated to give historians the security they need, and some historians still act as if they had not realised that an unsettled text, as such, requires cautious handling. Still, considerable progress has been made. From the experience accumulated by several generations of scholars there has been evolved a recognised method of purifying and restoring texts. No part of historical method has a more solid foundation, or is more generally known. It is clearly explained in several works of popular philology.[68] For this reason we shall here be content to give a general view of its essential principles, and to indicate its results.

I. We will suppose a document has not been edited in conformity with critical rules. How are we to proceed in order to construct the best possible text? Three cases present themselves.

(a) The most simple case is that in which we possess the original, the author's autograph itself. There is then nothing to do but to reproduce the text of it with absolute fidelity.[69] Theoretically nothing can be easier; in practice this elementary operation demands a sustained attention of which not every one is capable. If any one doubts it, let him try. Copyists who never make mistakes and never allow their attention to be distracted are rare even among scholars.

(b) Second case. The original has been lost; only a single copy of it is known. It is necessary to be cautious, for the probability is that this copy contains errors.

Texts degenerate in accordance with certain laws. A great deal of pains has been taken to discover and classify the causes and the ordinary forms of the differences which are observed between originals and copies; and hence rules have been deduced which may be applied to the conjectural restoration of those passages in a unique copy of a lost original which are certainly corrupt (because unintelligible), or are so in all probability.

Alterations of an original occurring in a copy—"traditional variants," as they are called—are due either to fraud or to error. Some copyists have deliberately modified or suppressed passages.[70] Nearly all copyists have committed errors of judgment or accidental errors. Errors of judgment when half-educated and not wholly intelligent copyists have thought it their duty to correct passages and words in the original which they could not understand.[71] Accidental errors when they misread while copying, or misheard while writing from dictation, or when they involuntarily made slips of the pen.

Modifications arising from fraud or errors of judgment are often very difficult to rectify, or even to discover. Some accidental errors (the omission of several lines, for example) are irreparable in the case we are considering, that of a unique copy. But most accidental errors can be detected by any one who knows the ordinary forms: confusions of sense, letters, and words, transpositions of words, letters, and syllables, dittography (unmeaning repetition of letters or syllables), haplography (syllables or words written once only where they should have been written twice), false divisions between words, badly punctuated sentences, and other mistakes of the same kind. Errors of these various types have been made by the scribes of every country and every age, irrespectively of the handwriting and language of the originals. But some confusions of letters occur frequently in copies of uncial originals, and others in copies of minuscule originals. Confusions of sense and of words are explained by analogies of vocabulary or pronunciation, which naturally vary from language to language and from epoch to epoch. The general theory of conjectural emendation reduces to the sketch we have just given; there is no general apprenticeship to the art. What a man learns is not to restore any text that may be put before him, but Greek texts, Latin texts, French texts, and so on, as the case may be; for the conjectural emendation of a text presupposes, besides general notions on the processes by which texts degenerate, a profound knowledge of (1) a special language; (2) a special handwriting; (3) the confusions (of sense, letters, and words) which were habitual to those who copied texts of that language written in that style of handwriting. To aid in the apprenticeship to the conjectural emendation of Greek and Latin texts, tabulated lists (alphabetical and systematic) of various readings, frequent confusions, and probable corrections, have been drawn up.[72] It is true that they cannot take the place of practical work, done under the guidance of experts, but they are of very great use to the experts themselves.[73]

It would be easy to give a list of happy emendations. The most satisfactory are those whose correctness is obvious palæographically, as is the case with the classical emendation by Madvig of the text of Seneca's Letters (89, 4). The old reading was: "Philosophia unde dicta sit, apparet; ipso enim nomine fatetur. Quidam et sapientiam ita quidam finierunt, ut dicerent divinorum et humanorum sapientiam ..."—which does not make sense. It used to be supposed that words had dropped out between ita and quidam. Madvig pictured to himself the text of the lost archetype, which was written in capitals, and in which, as was usual before the eighth century, the words were not separated (scriptio continua), nor the sentences punctuated; he asked himself whether the copyist, with such an archetype before him, had not divided the words at random, and he had no difficulty in reading: "...ipso enim nomine fatetur quid amet. Sapientiam ita quidam finierunt...." Blass, Reinach, and Lindsay, in the works referred to in the note, mention several other masterly and elegant emendations. Nor have the Hellenists and Latinists any monopoly; equally brilliant emendations might be culled from the works of Orientalists, Romancists, and Germanists, now that texts of Oriental, Romance, and Germanic languages have been subjected to verbal criticism. We have already stated that scholarly corrections are possible even in the text of quite modern documents, reproduced typographically under the most favourable conditions.

Perhaps no one, in our day, has equalled Madvig in the art of conjectural emendation. But Madvig himself had no high opinion of the work of modern scholarship. He thought that the humanists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, in this respect, better trained than modern scholars. The conjectural emendation of Greek and Latin texts is, in fact, a branch of sport, success in which is proportionate not only to a man's ingenuity and palæographical instinct, but also to the correctness, rapidity, and delicacy of his appreciation of the niceties of the classical languages. Now, the early scholars were undoubtedly too bold, but they were more intimately familiar with the classical languages than our modern scholars are.

However that may be, there can be no doubt that numerous texts which have been preserved, in corrupt form, in unique copies, have resisted, and will continue to resist, the efforts of criticism. Very often criticism ascertains the fact of the text having been altered, states what the sense requires, and then prudently stops, every trace of the original reading having been obscured by a confused tangle of successive corrections and errors which it is hopeless to attempt to unravel. The scholars who devote themselves to the fascinating pursuit of conjectural criticism are liable, in their ardour, to suspect perfectly innocent readings, and, in desperate passages, to propose adventurous hypotheses. They are well aware of this, and therefore make it a rule to draw a very clear distinction, in their editions, between readings found in manuscripts and their own restorations of the text.

(c) Third case. We possess several copies, which differ from each other, of a document whose original is lost. Here modern scholars have a marked advantage over their predecessors: besides being better informed, they set about the comparison of copies more methodically. The object is, as in the preceding case, to reconstruct the archetype as exactly as possible.

The scholars of earlier days had to struggle, as novices have to struggle now, in a case of this kind, against a very natural and a very reprehensible impulse—to use the first copy that comes to hand, whatever its character may happen to be. The second impulse is not much better—to use the oldest copy out of several of different date. In theory, and very often in practice, the relative age of the copies is of no importance; a sixteenth-century manuscript which reproduces a good lost copy of the eleventh century is much more valuable than a faulty and retouched copy made in the twelfth or thirteenth century. The third impulse is still far from being good; it is to count the attested readings and decide by the majority. Suppose there are twenty copies of a text; the reading A is attested eighteen times, the reading B twice. To make this a reason for choosing A is to make the gratuitous assumption that all the manuscripts have the same authority. This is an error of judgment; for if seventeen of the eighteen manuscripts which give the reading A have been copied from the eighteenth, the reading A is in reality attested only once; and the only question is whether it is intrinsically better or worse than the reading B.

It has been recognised that the only rational procedure is to begin by determining in what relation the copies stand to each other. For this purpose we adopt as our starting-point the incontrovertible axiom that all the copies which contain the same mistakes in the same passages must have been either copied from each other or all derived from a copy containing those mistakes. It is inconceivable that several copyists, independently reproducing an original free from errors, should all introduce exactly the same errors; identity of errors attests community of origin. We shall cast aside without scruple all the copies derived from a single manuscript which has been preserved. Evidently they can have no value beyond what is possessed by their common source; if they differ from it, it can only be in virtue of new errors; it would be waste of time to study their variations. Having eliminated these, we have before us none but independent copies, which have been made directly from the archetype, or secondary copies whose source (a copy taken directly from the archetype) has been lost. In order to group the secondary copies into families, each of which shall represent what is substantially the same tradition, we again have recourse to the comparison of errors. By this method we can generally draw up without too much trouble a complete genealogical table (stemma codicum) of the preserved copies, which will bring out very clearly their relative importance. This is not the place to discuss the difficult cases where, in consequence of too great a number of intermediaries having been lost, or from ancient copyists having arbitrarily blended the texts of different traditions, the operation becomes extremely laborious or impracticable. Besides, in these extreme cases there is no new method involved: the comparison of corresponding passages is a powerful instrument, but it is the only one which criticism has at its disposal for this task.

When the genealogical tree of the manuscripts has been drawn up, we endeavour to restore the text of the archetype by comparing the different traditions. If these agree and give a satisfactory text, there is no difficulty. If they differ, we decide between them. If they accidentally agree in giving a defective text, we have recourse to conjectural emendation, as if there were only one copy.

It is, theoretically, much more advantageous to have several independent copies of a lost original than to have only one, for the mere mechanical comparison of the different readings is often enough to remove obscurities which the uncertain light of conjectural criticism would never have illuminated. However, an abundance of manuscripts is an embarrassment rather than a help when the work of grouping them has been left undone or done badly; nothing can be more unsatisfactory than the arbitrary and hybrid restorations which are founded on copies whose relations to each other and to the archetype have not been ascertained beforehand. On the other hand, the application of rational methods requires, in some cases, a formidable expenditure of time and labour. Some works are preserved in hundreds of copies all differing from each other; sometimes (as in the case of the Gospels) the variants of a text of quite moderate extent are to be counted by thousands; several years of assiduous labour are necessary for the preparation of a critical edition of some mediæval romances. And after all this labour, all these collations and comparisons, can we be sure that the text of the romance is sensibly better than it would have been if there had been only two or three manuscripts to work upon? No. Some critical editions, owing to the apparent wealth of material applicable to the work, demand a mechanical effort which is altogether out of proportion to the positive results which are its reward.

"Critical editions" founded on several copies of a lost original ought to supply the public with the means of verifying the "stemma codicum" which the editor has drawn up, and should give the rejected variants in the notes. By this means competent readers are, at the worst, put in possession, if not of the best possible text, at least of the materials for constructing it.[74]

II. The results of textual criticism—a kind of cleaning and mending—are purely negative. By the aid of conjecture, or by the aid of conjecture and comparison combined, we are enabled to construct, not necessarily a good text, but the best text possible, of documents whose original is lost. What we thus effect is the elimination of corrupt and adventitious readings likely to cause error, and the recognition of suspected passages as such. But it is obvious that no new information is supplied by this process. The text of a document which has been restored at the cost of infinite pains is not worth more than that of a document whose original has been preserved; on the contrary, it is worth less. If the autograph manuscript of the Æneid had not been destroyed, centuries of collation and conjecture would have been saved, and the text of the Æneid would have been better than it is. This is intended for those who excel at the "emendation game,"[75] who are in consequence fond of it, and would really be sorry to have no occasion to play it.

III. There will, however, be abundant scope for textual criticism as long as we do not possess the exact text of every historical document. In the present state of science few labours are more useful than those which bring new texts to light or improve texts already known. It is a real service to the study of history to publish unedited or badly edited texts in a manner conformable to the rules of criticism. In every country learned societies without number are devoting the greater part of their resources and activity to this important work. But the immense number of the texts to be criticised,[76] and the minute care required by the operations of verbal criticism,[77] prevent the work of publication and restoration from advancing at any but a slow pace. Before all the texts which are of interest for mediæval and modern history shall have been edited or re-edited secundum artem, a long period must elapse, even supposing that the relatively rapid pace of the last few years should be still further accelerated.[78]

CHAPTER III

CRITICAL INVESTIGATION OF AUTHORSHIP

It would be absurd to look for information about a fact in the papers of some one who knew nothing, and could know nothing, about it. The first questions, then, which we ask when we are confronted with a document is: Where does it come from? who is the author of it? what is its date? A document in respect of which we necessarily are in total ignorance of the author, the place, and the date is good for nothing.

This truth, which seems elementary, has only been adequately recognised in our own day. Such is the natural ἁκρισἱα of man, that those who were the first to make a habit of inquiring into the authorship of documents prided themselves, and justly, on the advance they had made.

Most modern documents contain a precise indication of their authorship: in our days, books, newspaper articles, official papers, and even private writings, are, in general, dated and signed. Many ancient documents, on the other hand, are anonymous, without date, and have no sufficient indication of their place of origin.

The spontaneous tendency of the human mind is to place confidence in the indications of authorship, when there are any. On the cover and in the preface of the Châtiments, Victor Hugo is named as the author; therefore Victor Hugo is the author of the Châtiments. In such and such a picture gallery we see an unsigned picture whose frame has been furnished by the management with a tablet bearing the name of Leonardo da Vinci; therefore Leonardo da Vinci painted this picture. A poem with the title Philomena is found under the name of Saint Bonaventura in M. Clément's Extraits des poètes chrétiens, in most editions of Saint Bonaventura's "works," and in a great number of mediæval manuscripts; therefore Philomena was written by Saint Bonaventura, and "we may gather thence much precious knowledge of the very soul" of this holy man.[79] Vrain-Lucas offered to M. Chasles autographs of Vercingetorix, Cleopatra, and Saint Mary Magdalene, duly signed, and with the flourishes complete:[80] here, thought M. Chasles, are autographs of Vercingetorix, Cleopatra, and Saint Mary Magdalene. This is one of the most universal, and at the same time indestructible, forms of public credulity.

Experience and reflection have shown the necessity of methodically checking these instinctive impulses of confiding trust. The autographs of Vercingetorix, Cleopatra, and Mary Magdalene had been manufactured by Vrain-Lucas. The Philomena, attributed by mediæval scribes now to Saint Bonaventura, now to Louis of Granada, now to John Hoveden, now to John Peckham, is perhaps by none of these authors, and certainly not by the first-named. Paintings in which there is not the least gleam of talent have, in the most celebrated galleries of Italy, been tricked out, without the least shadow of proof, with the glorious name of Leonardo. On the other hand, it is perfectly true that Victor Hugo is the author of the Châtiments. The conclusion is, that the most precise indications of authorship are never sufficient by themselves. They only afford a presumption, strong or weak—very strong, in general, where modern documents are concerned, often very weak in the case of ancient documents. False indications of authorship exist, some foisted upon insignificant works in order to enhance their value, some appended to works of merit in order to serve the reputation of a particular person, or to mystify posterity; and there are a hundred other motives which may easily be imagined, and of which a list has been drawn up:[81] the "pseudepigraphic" literature of antiquity and the middle ages is enormous. There are, in addition, documents which are forged from beginning to end; the forgers have naturally furnished them with very precise indications of their alleged authorship. Verification is therefore necessary. But how is it to be had? When the apparent authorship of a document is suspected, we use for its verification the same method which serves to fix, as far as possible, the origin of documents which are furnished with no indications at all on this head. As the procedure is the same in both cases, it is not necessary to distinguish further between them.

I. The chief instrument used in the investigation of authorship is the internal analysis of the document under consideration, performed with a view to bring out any indications it may contain of a nature to supply information about the author, and the time and place in which he lived.

First of all we examine the handwriting of the document. Saint Bonaventura was born in 1221; if poems attributed to him are contained in manuscripts executed in the eleventh century, we have in this circumstance an excellent proof that the attribution is ill-founded: no document of which there exists a copy in eleventh-century handwriting can be posterior in date to the eleventh century. Then we examine the language. It is known that certain forms have only been used in certain places and at certain dates. Most forgers have betrayed themselves by ignorance of facts of this kind; they let slip modern words or phrases. It has been possible to establish the fact that certain Phœnician inscriptions, found in South America, were earlier than a certain German dissertation on a point of Phœnician syntax. In the case of official instruments we examine the formulæ. If a document which purports to be a Merovingian charter does not exhibit the ordinary formulæ of genuine Merovingian charters it must be spurious. Lastly, we note all the positive data which occur in the document—the facts which are mentioned or alluded to. When these facts are otherwise known, from sources which a forger could not have had at his disposal, the bonâ fides of the document is established, and the date fixed approximately between the most recent event of which the author shows knowledge, and the next following event which he does not mention but would have done if he had known of it. Arguments may also be founded on the circumstance that particular facts are mentioned with approval, or particular opinions expressed, and help us to make a conjectural estimate of the status, the environment, and the character of the author.

When the internal analysis of a document is carefully performed, it generally gives us a tolerably accurate notion of its authorship. By means of a methodical comparison, instituted between the various elements of the documents analysed and the corresponding elements of similar documents whose authorship was known with certainty, the detection of many a forgery[82] has been rendered possible, and additional information acquired about the circumstances under which most genuine documents have been produced.

The results obtained by internal analysis are supplemented and verified by collecting all the external evidence relative to the document under criticism which can be found scattered over the documents of the same or later epochs—quotations, biographical details about the author, and so on. Sometimes there is a significant absence of any such information: the fact that an alleged Merovingian charter has not been quoted by anybody before the seventeenth century, and has only been seen by a seventeenth-century scholar who has been convicted of fraud, suggests the thought that it is modern.

II. Hitherto we have considered only the simplest case, in which the document under examination is the work of a single author. But many documents have, at different times, received additions which it is important to distinguish from the original text, in order that we may not attribute to X, the author of the text, what really belongs to Y or Z, his unforeseen collaborators.[83] There are two kinds of additions—interpolations and continuations. To interpolate is to insert into the text words or sentences which were not in the author's manuscript.[84] Usually interpolations are accidental, due to the negligence of the copyist, and explicable as the introduction into the text of interlinear glosses or marginal notes; but there are cases where some one has deliberately added to (or substituted for) the author's text words or sentences out of his own head, for the sake of completeness, ornament, or emphasis. If we had before us the manuscript in which the deliberate interpolation was made, the appearance of the added matter and the traces of erasure would make the case clear at once. But the first interpolated copy has nearly always been lost, and in the copies derived from it every trace of addition or substitution has disappeared. There is no need to define "continuations." It is well known that many chronicles of the middle ages have been "continued" by various writers, none of whom took the trouble to indicate where his own work began or ended.

Sometimes interpolations and continuations can be very readily distinguished in the course of the operations for restoring a text of which there are several copies, when it so happens that some of these copies reproduce the primitive text as it was before any addition was made to it. But if all the copies are founded on previous copies which already contained the interpolations or continuations, recourse must be had to internal analysis. Is the style uniform throughout the document? Does the book breathe one and the same spirit from cover to cover? Are there no contradictions, no gaps in the sequence of ideas? In practice, when the continuators or interpolators have been men of well-marked personality and decided views, analysis will separate the original from the additions as cleanly as a pair of scissors. When the whole is written in a level, colourless style, the lines of division are not so easy to see; it is then better to confess the fact than to multiply hypotheses.

III. The critical investigation of authorship is not finished as soon as a document has been accurately or approximately localised in space and time, and as much information as possible obtained about the author or authors.[85] Here is a book: we wish to ascertain the origin of the information contained in it, that is, to be in a position to appreciate its value; is it enough to know that it was written in 1890, at Paris, by So-and-so? Perhaps So-and-so copied slavishly, without mentioning the fact, an earlier work, written in 1850. The responsible guarantor of the borrowed parts is not So-and-so, but the author of 1850. Plagiarism, it is true, is now rare, forbidden by the law, and considered dishonourable; formerly it was common, tolerated, and unpunished. Many historical documents, with every appearance of originality, are nothing but unavowed repetitions of earlier documents, and historians occasionally experience, in this connection, remarkable disillusions. Certain passages in Eginhard, a ninth-century chronicler, are borrowed from Suetonius: they have nothing to do with the history of the ninth century; how if the fact had not been discovered? An event is attested three times, by three chroniclers; but these three attestations, which agree so admirably, are really only one if it is ascertained that two of the three chroniclers copied the third, or that the three parallel accounts have been drawn from one and the same source. Pontifical letters and Imperial charters of the middle ages contain eloquent passages which must not be taken seriously; they are part of the official style, and were copied word for word from chancery formularies.

It belongs to the investigation of authorship to discover, as far as possible, the sources utilised by the authors of documents.

The problem thus presented to us has some resemblance to that of the restoration of texts of which we have already spoken. In both cases we proceed on the assumption that identical readings have a common source: a number of different scribes, in transcribing a text, will not make exactly the same mistakes in exactly the same places; a number of different writers, relating the same facts, will not have viewed them from exactly the same standpoint, nor will they say the same things in exactly the same language. The great complexity of historical events makes it extremely improbable that two independent observers should narrate them in the same manner. We endeavour to group the documents into families in the same way as we make families of manuscripts. Similarly, we are enabled in the result to draw up genealogical tables. The examiners who correct the compositions of candidates for the bachelor's degree sometimes notice that the papers of two candidates who sat next each other bear a family likeness. If they have a mind to find out which is derived from the other, they have no difficulty in doing so, in spite of the petty artifices (slight modifications, expansions, abstracts, additions, suppressions, transpositions) which the plagiarist multiplies in order to throw suspicion off the scent The two guilty ones are sufficiently betrayed by their common errors; the more culpable of the two is detected by the slips he will have made, and especially by the errors in his own papers which are due to peculiarities in those of his accommodating friend. Similarly when two ancient documents are in question: when the author of one has copied directly from the other, the filiation is generally easy to establish; the plagiarist, whether he abridges or expands, nearly always betrays himself sooner or later.[86]

When there are three documents in a family their mutual relationships are sometimes harder to specify. Let A, B, and C be the documents. Suppose A is the common source: perhaps B and C copied it independently; perhaps C only knew A through the medium of B, or B knew it only through C. If B and C have abridged the common source in different ways, they are evidently independent. When B depends on C, or vice versâ, we have the simplest case, treated in the preceding paragraph. But suppose the author of C combined A and B, while B had already used A: the genealogy begins to get complicated. It is more complicated still when there are four, five, or more documents in a family, for the number of possible combinations increases with great rapidity. However, if too many intermediate links have not been lost, criticism succeeds in disentangling the relationships by persistent and ingenious applications of the method of repeated comparisons. Modern scholars (Krusch, for example, who has made a speciality of Merovingian hagiography) have recently constructed, by the use of this method, precise genealogies of the utmost solidity.[87] The results of the critical investigation of authorship, as applied to the filiation of documents, are of two kinds. Firstly, lost documents are reconstructed. Suppose two chroniclers, B and C, have used, each in his own way, a common source X, which has now disappeared. We may form an idea of X by piecing together the fragments of it which occur imbedded in B and C, just as we form an idea of a lost manuscript by comparing the partial copies of it which have been preserved. On the other hand, criticism destroys the authority of a host of "authentic" documents—that is, documents which no one suspects of having been falsified—by showing that they are derivative, that they are worth whatever their sources may be worth, and that, when they embellish their sources with imaginary details and rhetorical flourishes, they are worth just nothing at all. In Germany and England editors of documents have introduced the excellent system of printing borrowed passages in small characters, and original passages whose source is unknown in larger characters. Thanks to this system it is possible to see at a glance that celebrated chronicles, which are often (very wrongly) quoted, are mere compilations, of no value in themselves: thus the Flores historiarum of the self-styled Matthew of Westminster, perhaps the most popular of the English mediæval chronicles, are almost entirely taken from original works by Wendover and Matthew of Paris.[88]

IV. The critical investigation of authorship saves historians from huge blunders. Its results are striking. By eliminating spurious documents, by detecting false ascriptions, by determining the conditions of production of documents which had been defaced by time, and by connecting them with their sources,[89] it has rendered services of such magnitude that to-day it is regarded as having a special right to the name of "criticism." It is usual to say of an historian that he "fails in criticism" when he neglects to distinguish between documents, when he never mistrusts traditional ascriptions, and when he accepts, as if afraid to lose a single one, all the pieces of information, ancient or modern, good or bad, which come to him, from whatever quarter.[90]

This view is perfectly just. We must not, however, be satisfied with this form of criticism, and we must not abuse it.

We must not abuse it. The extreme of distrust, in these matters, is almost as mischievous as the extreme of credulity. Père Hardouin, who attributed the works of Vergil and Horace to mediæval monks, was every whit as ridiculous as the victim of Vrain-Lucas. It is an abuse of the methods of this species of criticism to apply them, as has been done, indiscriminately, for the mere pleasure of it. The bunglers who have used this species of criticism to brand as spurious perfectly genuine documents, such as the writings of Hroswitha, the Ligurinus, and the bull Unam Sanctam,[91] or to establish imaginary filiations between certain annals, on the strength of superficial indications, would have discredited criticism before now if that had been possible. It is praiseworthy, certainly, to react against those who never raise a doubt about the authorship of a document; but it is carrying the reaction too far to take an exclusive interest in periods of history which depend on documents of uncertain authorship. The only reason why the documents of modern and contemporary history are found less interesting than those of antiquity and the early middle ages, is that the identity which nearly always obtains between their apparent and their real authorship leaves no room for those knotty problems of attribution in which the virtuosi of criticism are accustomed to display their skill.[92]

Nor must we be content with it. The critical investigation of authorship, like textual criticism, is preparatory, and its results negative. Its final aim and crowning achievement is to get rid of documents which are not documents, and which would have misled us; that is all. "It teaches us not to use bad documents; it does not teach us how to turn good ones to account."[93] It is not the whole of "historical criticism;" it is only one stone in the edifice.[94]

CHAPTER IV

CRITICAL CLASSIFICATION OF SOURCES

By the help of the preceding operations the documents, all the documents, let us suppose, of a given class, or relating to a given subject, have been found. We know where they are; the text of each has been restored, if necessary, and each has been critically examined in respect of authorship. We know where they have come from. It remains to combine and classify the materials thus verified. This is the last of the operations which may be called preparatory to the work of higher (or internal) criticism and construction.

Whoever studies a point of history is obliged, first of all, to classify his sources. To arrange, in a rational and convenient manner, the verified materials before making use of them, is an apparently humble, but really very important, part of the historian's profession. Those who have learnt how to do it possess, on that account alone, a marked advantage: they give themselves less trouble, and they obtain better results; the others waste their time and labour; they are smothered sometimes under the disorderly mass of notes, extracts, copies, scraps, which they themselves have accumulated. Who was it spoke of those busy people who spend their lives lifting building-stones without knowing where to place them, raising as they do so clouds of blinding dust?

I. Here, again, we have to confess that the first, the natural impulse, is not the right one. The first impulse of most men who have to utilise a number of texts is to make notes from them, one after another, in the order in which they study them. Many of the early scholars (whose papers we possess) worked on this system, and so do most beginners who are not warned beforehand; the latter keep, as the former kept, note-books, which they fill continuously and progressively with notes on the texts they are interested in. This method is utterly wrong. The materials collected must be classified sooner or later; otherwise it would be necessary, when occasion arose, to deal separately with the materials bearing on a given point, to read right through the whole series of note-books, and this laborious process would have to be repeated every time a new detail was wanted. If this method seems attractive at first, it is because it appears to save time. But this is false economy; the ultimate result is, an enormous addition to the labour of search, and great difficulty in combining the materials.

Others, well understanding the advantages of systematic classification, have proposed to fit their materials, as fast as collected, into their appropriate places in a prearranged scheme. For this purpose they use note-books of which every page has first been provided with a heading. Thus all the entries of the same kind are close to one another. This system leaves something to be desired; for additions will not always fit without inconvenience into their proper place; and the scheme of classification, once adopted, is rigid, and can only be modified with difficulty. Many librarians used to draw up their catalogues on this plan, which is now universally condemned.

There is a still more barbarous method, which need not receive more than passing mention. This is simply to register documents in the memory without taking written notes. This method has been used. Historians endowed with excellent memories, and lazy to boot, have indulged this whim, with the result that their quotations and references are mostly inexact. The human memory is a delicate piece of registering apparatus, but it is so little an instrument of precision that such presumption is inexcusable.

Every one admits nowadays that it is advisable to collect materials on separate cards or slips of paper. The notes from each document are entered upon a loose leaf furnished with the precisest possible indications of origin. The advantages of this artifice are obvious: the detachability of the slips enables us to group them at will in a host of different combinations; if necessary, to change their places: it is easy to bring texts of the same kind together, and to incorporate additions, as they are acquired, in the interior of the groups to which they belong. As for documents which are interesting from several points of view, and which ought to appear in several groups, it is sufficient to enter them several times over on different slips; or they may be represented, as often as may be required, on reference-slips. Moreover, the method of slips is the only one mechanically possible for the purpose of forming, classifying, and utilising a collection of documents of any great extent. Statisticians, financiers, and men of letters who observe, have now discovered this as well as scholars.

The method of slips is not without its drawbacks. Each slip ought to be furnished with precise references to the source from which its contents have been derived; consequently, if a document has been analysed upon fifty different slips, the same references must be repeated fifty times. Hence a slight increase in the amount of writing to be done. It is certainly on account of this trivial complication that some obstinately cling to the inferior note-book system. Again, in virtue of their very detachability, the slips, or loose leaves, are liable to go astray; and when a slip is lost how is it to be replaced? To begin with, its disappearance is not perceived, and, if it were, the only remedy would be to go right through all the work already done from beginning to end. But the truth is, experience has suggested a variety of very simple precautions, which we need not here explain in detail, by which the drawbacks of the system are reduced to a minimum. It is recommended to use slips of uniform size and tough material, and to arrange them at the earliest opportunity in covers or drawers or otherwise. Every one is free to form his own habits in these matters. But it is well to realise beforehand that these habits, according as they are more or less rational and practical, have a direct influence on the results of scientific work. Renan speaks of "these points of private librarianship which make up the half of scientific work."[95] This is not too strong. One scholar will owe a good part of his well-deserved reputation to his method of collecting, while another will be, so to speak, paralysed by his clumsiness in that particular.[96]

After having collected the documents, whether copied in extenso or abridged, on slips or loose leaves, we classify them. On what scheme? In what order? Clearly different cases must be treated differently, and it would not be reasonable to lay down precise formulæ to govern them all. However, we may give a few general considerations.

II. We distinguish between the historian who classifies verified documents for the purposes of historical work, and the scholar who compiles "Regesta." By the words "Regesta" and "Corpus" we understand methodically classified collections of historical documents. In a "Corpus" documents are reproduced in extenso; in "Regesta" they are analysed and described.

The use of these compilations is to assist researchers in collecting documents. Scholars set themselves to perform, once for all, tasks of search and classification from which, thanks to them, the public will henceforth be free.

Documents may be grouped according to their date, according to their place of origin, according to their contents, according to their form.[97] Here we have the four categories of time, place, species, and form; by superposing, then, we obtain divisions of smaller extent. We may undertake, for example, to make a group of all the documents having a given form, of a given country, and lying between two given dates (French royal charters of the reign of Philip Augustus); or of all the documents of a given form (Latin inscriptions); or of a given species (Latin hymns); of a given epoch (antiquity, the middle ages). We may recall, by way of illustration, the existence of a Corpus Inscriptionum Græcarum, of a Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, of a Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, the Regesta Imperii of J. F. Böhmer and his continuators, the Regesta Pontificum Romanorum of P. Jaffé and A. Potthast.

Whatever the division chosen, there are two alternatives: either the documents to be placed in this division are dated or they are not.

If they are dated, as is the case, for example, with the charters issued from the chancery of a prince, care will have been taken to place at the head of each slip the date (expressed in modern reckoning) of the document entered upon it. Nothing is then easier than to group in chronological order all the slips, that is, all the documents, which have been collected. The rule is to use chronological classification whenever possible. There is only one difficulty, and that is of a practical order. Even in the most favourable circumstances some of the documents will have accidentally lost their dates; these dates the compiler is bound to restore, or at least to attempt to restore; long and patient research is necessary for the purpose.

If the documents are not dated, a choice must be made between the alphabetical, the geographical, and the systematic order. The history of the Corpus of Latin inscriptions bears witness to the difficulty of this choice. "The arrangement according to date was impossible, seeing that most of the inscriptions are not dated. From the time of Smetius it was usual to divide them into classes, that is, a distinction was made, resting solely on the contents of the inscription, and having no regard to their place of origin, between religious, sepulchral, military, and poetical inscriptions, those which have a public character, and those which only concern private persons, and so on. Boeckh, although he had preferred the geographical arrangement for his Corpus Inscriptionum Græcarum, was of opinion that the arrangement by subjects, which had been hitherto employed, was the only possible one for a Latin Corpus...." [Even those who, in France, proposed the geographical arrangement] "wished to make an exception of texts relating to the general history of a country, certainly, at any rate, in the case of the Empire; in 1845 Zumpt defended a very complicated eclectic system of this kind. In 1847 Mommsen still rejected the geographical arrangement except for municipal inscriptions, and in 1852, when he published the Inscriptions of the Kingdom of Naples, he had not entirely changed his opinion. It was only on being charged by the Academy of Berlin with the publication of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, that, grown wise by experience, he rejected even the exceptions proposed by Egger in the case of the general history of a province, and thought it his duty to keep to the geographical arrangement pure and simple."[98] And yet, considering the nature of epigraphic documents, the arrangement according to place was the only rational one. This has been amply demonstrated for more than fifty years; but collectors of inscriptions did not come to an agreement on the subject till after two centuries of tentative efforts in different directions. For two centuries collections of Latin inscriptions have been made without any perception of the fact that "to group inscriptions according to their subjects is much the same thing as to publish an edition of Cicero in which his speeches, treatises, and letters should be cut up and the fragments arranged according to their subject-matter;" that "epigraphic monuments belonging to the same territory mutually explain each other when placed side by side;" and, lastly, that "while it is all but impossible to range in order of subject-matter a hundred thousand inscriptions nearly all of which belong to several categories; on the other hand, each monument has but one place, and a very definite place, in the geographical order."[99]

The alphabetical arrangement is very convenient when the chronological and geographical arrangements are unsuitable. There are documents, such as the sermons, the hymns, and the secular songs of the middle ages, which are not precisely dated or localised. They are arranged in the alphabetical order of their incipit—that is, the words with which they begin.[100]

The systematic order, or arrangement by subjects, is not to be recommended for the compilation of a Corpus or of regesta. It is always arbitrary, and leads to inevitable repetition and confusion. Besides, given collections arranged in chronological, geographical, or alphabetical order, nothing more than the addition of a good table of contents is needed to make them available for all the purposes which would be served by a systematic arrangement. One of the chief rules of the art of Corpus and regesta-making, that great art which has been carried to such perfection in the second half of the nineteenth century,[101] is to provide these collections, whatever the grouping adopted, with a variety of tables and indexes of a kind to facilitate the use of them: incipit tables in chronological regesta which lend themselves to such treatment, indexes of names and dates in regesta arranged by order of incipit, and so on.

Corpus and regesta-makers collect and classify for the use of others documents in which, at any rate in all of which, they have no direct interest, and are absorbed in this labour. Ordinary workers, on the other hand, only collect and classify materials useful for their individual studies. Hence certain differences arise. For example, the arrangement by subjects, on a predetermined system, which is so little to be recommended for great collections, often provides those who are composing monographs on their own account with a scheme of classification preferable to any other. But it will always be well to cultivate the mechanical habits of which professional compilers have learnt the value by experience: to write at the head of every slip its date, if there is occasion for it, and a heading[102] in any case; to multiply cross-references and indices; to keep a record, on a separate set of slips, of all the sources utilised, in order to avoid the danger of having to work a second time through materials already dealt with. The regular observance of these maxims goes a great way towards making scientific historical work easier and more solid. The possession of a well-arranged, though incomplete, collection of slips has enabled M. B. Hauréau to exhibit to the end of his life an undeniable mastery over the very special class of historical problems which he studied.[103]

CHAPTER V

CRITICAL SCHOLARSHIP AND SCHOLARS

The sum of the operations described in the preceding chapters (restoration of texts, investigation of authorship, collection and classification of verified documents) constitutes the vast domain of external criticism, or critical scholarship.

The public at large, with its vulgar and superficial standards, has nothing but disdain for the whole of critical scholarship. Some of its votaries, on the other hand, are inclined to exalt it unduly. But there is a happy medium between these extremes of over-appreciation and contempt.

The crude opinion of those who pity and despise the minute analysis of external criticism hardly deserves refutation. There is only one argument for the legitimacy and honourable character of the obscure labours of erudition, but it is a decisive argument: it rests on their indispensability. No erudition, no history. "Non sunt contemnenda quasi parva," says St. Jerome, "sine quibus magna constare non possunt."[104]

On the other hand, scholars by profession, in their zeal to justify their pride in their work, are not content with maintaining its necessity; they allow themselves to be carried away into an exaggeration of its merit and importance. It has been said that the sure methods of external criticism have raised history to the dignity of a science, "of an exact science;" that critical investigations of authorship "enable us, better than any other study, to gain a profound insight into past ages;" that the habit of criticising texts refines or even confers the "historical sense." It has been tacitly assumed that external criticism is the whole of historical criticism, and that beyond the purgation, emendation, and classification of documents there is nothing left to do. This illusion, common enough among specialists, is too crude to need express refutation; the fact is, that it is the psychological criticism which deals with interpretation and examines into the good faith and accuracy of authors that has, better than any other study, enabled us to gain a profound insight into past ages, not external criticism.[105] An historian who should be fortunate enough to find all the documents bearing on his studies already edited correctly, classified, and critically examined as to authorship, would be in just as good a position to use them for writing history as if he had performed all the preliminary operations himself. It is quite possible, whatever may be said, to have the historical sense in full measure without having ever, both literally and figuratively, wiped away the dust from original documents—that is, without having discovered and restored them for oneself. We need not interpret in the Jewish or etymological sense the dictum of Renan: "I do not think it possible for any one to acquire a clear notion of history, its limits, and the amount of confidence to be placed in the different categories of historical investigation, unless he is in the habit of handling original documents."[106] This is to be understood as simply referring to the habit of going direct to the sources, and treating definite problems.[107] Without doubt a day will come when all the documents relating to the history of classical antiquity shall have been edited and treated critically. There will then be no more room, in this department of study, for textual criticism or the investigation of sources; but, for all that, the conditions for the treatment of general ancient history, or special parts of it, will be then eminently favourable. External criticism, as we cannot too often repeat, is entirely preparatory; it is a means, not an end; the ideal state of things would be that it should have been already sufficiently practised that we might dispense with it for the future; it is only a temporary necessity. Theoretically, not only is it unnecessary for those who wish to make historical syntheses to do for themselves the preparatory work on the materials which they use, but we have a right to ask, as has been often asked, whether there is any advantage in their doing it.[108] Would it not be preferable that workers in the field of history should specialise? On the one class—the specialists—would devolve the absorbing tasks of external or erudite criticism; the others, relieved of the weight of these tasks, would have greater liberty to devote themselves to the work of higher criticism, of combination and construction. Such was the opinion of Mark Pattison, who said, History cannot be written from manuscripts, which is as much as to say: "It is impossible for a man to write history from documents which he is obliged to put for himself into a condition in which they can be used."

Formerly the professions of "critical scholar" and "historian" were, in fact, clearly distinguished. The "historians" cultivated the empty and pompous species of literature which then was known as "history," without considering themselves bound to keep in touch with the work of the scholars. The latter, for their part, determined by their critical researches the conditions under which history must be written, but were at no pains to write it themselves. Content to collect, emend, and classify historical documents, they took no interest in history, and understood the past no better than did the mass of their contemporaries. The scholars acted as though erudition were an end in itself, and the historians as if they had been able to reconstruct vanished realities by the mere force of reflection and ingenuity applied to the inferior documents, which were common property. So complete a divorce between erudition and history seems to-day almost inexplicable, and it was in truth mischievous enough. We need not say that the present advocates of the division of labour in history have nothing of the kind in view. It is admittedly necessary that close relations should obtain between the world of historians and that of critical scholars, for the work of the latter has no reason for existence beyond its utility to the former. All that is meant is, that certain analytical and all synthetic operations are not necessarily better performed when they are performed by the same person; that though the characters of historian and scholar may be combined, there is nothing illegitimate in their separation; and that perhaps this separation is desirable in theory, as, in practice, it is often a necessity.

In practice, what happens is as follows. Whatever part of history a man undertakes to study, there are only three possible cases. In the first the sources have already been emended and classified; in the second the preliminary work on the sources, which has been only partially done, or not at all, offers no great difficulty; in the third the sources are in a very bad state, and require a great deal of labour to fit them for use. We may observe, in passing, that there is naturally no proportion between the intrinsic importance of the subject and the amount of preliminary work which must be done before it can be treated: there are some subjects of the highest interest, for example the history of the origin and early development of Christianity, which could not be properly attacked till after the completion of investigations which occupied several generations of scholars; but the material criticism of the sources of the history of the French Revolution, another subject of the first rank, gave much less trouble; and there are comparatively unimportant problems in mediæval history which will not be solved till after an immense amount of external criticism shall have been performed.

In the two first cases the expediency of a division of labour does not come in question. But take the third case. A man of ability discovers that the documents which are necessary for the treatment of a point of history are in a very bad condition; they are scattered, corrupt, and untrustworthy. He must take his choice; either he must abandon the subject, having no taste for the mechanical operations which he knows to be necessary, but which, as he foresees, would absorb the whole of his energy; or else he resolves to enter upon the preparatory critical work, without concealing from himself that in all probability he will never have time to utilise the materials he has verified, and that he will therefore be working for those who will come after him. If he adopts the second alternative he becomes a critical scholar by profession, as it were in spite of himself. A priori, it is true, there is nothing to prevent those who make great collections of texts and publish critical editions from using their own compilations and editions for the writing of history; and we see, as a matter of fact, that several men have divided themselves between the preparatory tasks of external criticism and the more exalted labours of historical construction: it is enough to mention the names of Waitz, Mommsen, and Hauréau. But this combination is very rare, for several reasons. The first is the shortness of life; there are catalogues, editions, regesta on a great scale, the construction of which entails so much mechanical labour as to exhaust the strength of the most zealous worker. The second is the fact that, for many persons, the tasks of critical scholarship are not without their charm; nearly every one finds in them a singular satisfaction in the long run; and some have confined themselves to these tasks who might, strictly speaking, have aspired to higher things.

Is it a good thing in itself that some workers should, voluntarily or not, confine themselves to the researches of critical scholarship? Yes, without a doubt. In the study of history, the results of the division of labour are the same as in the industrial arts, and highly satisfactory—more abundant, more successful, better regulated production. Critics who have been long habituated to the restoration of texts restore them with incomparable dexterity and sureness; those who devote themselves exclusively to investigations of authorship and sources have intuitions which would not occur to others less versed in this difficult and highly specialised branch; those who have spent their lives in the construction of catalogues and the compilation of regesta construct and compile them more easily, more quickly, and better than the man in the street. Thus, not only is there no special reason for requiring every "historian" to be at the same time an active worker in the field of critical scholarship, but even those scholars who are engaged in the operations of external criticism come under different categories. Similarly, in a stoneyard there is no point in the architect being at the same time a workman, nor have all the workmen the same functions. Although most critical scholars have not rigorously specialised so far, and although they vary their pleasures by voluntarily executing different kinds of critical work, it would be easy to name some who are specialists in descriptive catalogues and indexes (archivists, librarians, and the like), others who are more particularly "critics" (purifiers, restorers, and editors of texts), and others who are pre-eminently compilers of regesta. "The moment it is admitted that erudition is only valuable for the sake of its results, it becomes impossible to carry the division of scientific labour too far;"[109] and the progress of the historical sciences corresponds to the narrower and narrower specialisation of the workers. It was possible, not very long ago, for the same man to devote himself successively to all the operations of historical inquiry, but that was because he appealed to a not very exacting public: nowadays we require of those who criticise documents a minute accuracy and an absolute perfection which presuppose real professional skill. The historical sciences have now reached a stage in their evolution at which the main lines have been traced, the great discoveries made, and nothing remains but a more precise treatment of details. We feel instinctively that any further advance must be by dint of investigations of such extent, and analyses of such depth, as none but specialists are capable of.

But the best justification of the division of workers into "scholars" and "historians" (and of the distribution of the former among the various branches of external criticism) is to be found in the fact that different persons have a natural vocation for different tasks. One of the chief justifications of the institution of higher historical teaching is, in our opinion, the opportunity afforded the teachers (presumably men of experience) of discerning in the students, in the course of their university career, either the germ of a vocation for critical scholarship, or fundamental unfitness for critical work, as the case may be.[110] Criticus non fit, sed nascitur. For one who is not endowed by nature with certain aptitudes, a career of technical erudition has nothing but disappointments in store: the greatest service that can be rendered to young men hesitating whether to adopt such a career or not is to warn them of the fact. Those who hitherto have devoted themselves to the preparatory tasks of criticism have either chosen them in preference to others because they had a taste for them, or else have submitted to them because they knew they were necessary; those who engaged in them by choice have less merit, from the ethical point of view, than those who submitted to them, but, for all that, they have mostly obtained better results, because they have worked, not as a matter of duty, but joyfully and whole-heartedly. It is important that every one should realise the situation, and, in his own as well as the general interest, embrace the special work which suits him best.

We now propose to examine the natural aptitudes which fit, and the truly prohibitory defects which disqualify, for the labours of external criticism. We shall, then, devote a few words to the effects produced on the character by professional habituation to the labours of critical scholarship.

The chief condition of success in these labours is to like them. Those who are exceptionally gifted as poets or thinkers—that is, those who are endowed with creative power—have much difficulty in adapting themselves to the technical drudgery of preparatory criticism: they are far from despising it; on the contrary, they hold it in honour, if they are clear-sighted; but they shrink from devoting themselves to it, for fear of using a razor, as is said, to cut stones. "I have no mind," wrote Leibnitz to Basnage, who had exhorted him to compile an immense Corpus of unpublished and printed documents relating to the history of the law of nations; "I have no mind to turn transcriber.... Does it not occur to you that the advice you give me resembles that of a man who should wish to marry his friend to a shrew? For to engage a man in a lifelong work is much the same as to find him a wife."[111] And Renan, speaking of those immense preliminary labours "which have rendered possible the researches of the higher criticism" and attempts at historical construction, says: "The man who, with livelier intellectual needs [than those of the men who performed these labours], should now accomplish such an act of abnegation, would be a hero...."[112] Although Renan directed the publication of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, and Leibnitz was the editor of the Scriptores rerum Brunsvicensium, neither Leibnitz, nor Renan, nor their peers have, fortunately, had the heroism to sacrifice their higher faculties to purely critical learning.

Outside the class of superior men (and the infinitely more numerous class of those who wrongly think themselves such), nearly every one, as we have already said, finds in the long run a kind of satisfaction in the minutiæ of preparatory criticism. The reason is, that the practice of this criticism appeals to and develops two very widespread tastes—the taste for collecting and the taste for puzzles. The pleasure of collecting is one which is felt not by children only, but by adults as well, no matter whether the collection be one of various readings or of postage-stamps. The deciphering of rebuses, the solution of small problems of strictly definite scope, are occupations which attract many able minds. Every find brings pleasure, and in the field of erudition there are innumerable finds—some lying exposed and obvious, some guarded by all but impenetrable barriers—to reward both those who do and those who do not delight in surmounting difficulties. All the scholars of any distinction have possessed in an eminent degree the instincts of the collector and the puzzle-solver, and some of them have been quite conscious of the fact. "The more difficulties we encountered in our chosen path," says M. Hauréau, "the more the enterprise pleased us. This species of labour, which is called bibliography [investigations of authorship, principally from the point of view of pseudepigraphy], could not aspire to the homage of the public, but it has a great attraction for those who devote themselves to it. Yes, it is doubtless a humble study, but how many others are there which so often compensate the trouble they give by affording us opportunity to cry Eureka."[113] Julien Havet, when he was "already known to the learned men of Europe," used to divert himself "by apparently frivolous amusements, such as guessing square words or deciphering cryptograms."[114] Profound instincts, and, for all the childish or ridiculous perversions which they may exhibit in certain individuals, of the highest utility! After all, these are forms, the most rudimentary forms, of the scientific spirit. Those who are devoid of them have no place in the world of critical scholarship. But those who aspire to be critical scholars will always be numerous; for the labours of interpretation, construction, and exposition require the rarest gifts: all those whom chance has thrown into the study of history, who desire to do useful work in that department, but are wanting in psychological tact, or find composition irksome, will always allow themselves to be fascinated by the simple and calm pleasures of the preliminary tasks.

But in order to succeed in critical labours it is not enough to like them. It is necessary to possess qualifications "for which zeal is no substitute." What qualifications? Those who have asked this question have answered vaguely: "Qualifications of the moral rather than the intellectual order, patience, intellectual honesty...." Is it not possible to be more precise?

There are young students with no a priori repugnance for the labours of external criticism, who perhaps are even disposed to like them, who yet are—experience has shown it—totally incapable of performing them. There would be nothing perplexing in this if these persons were intellectually feeble; this incapacity would then be but one manifestation of their general weakness; nor yet if they had gone through no technical apprenticeship. But we are concerned with men of education and intelligence, sometimes of exceptional ability, who do not labour under the above disadvantages. These are the people of whom we hear: "He works badly, he has the genius of inaccuracy." Their catalogues, their editions, their regesta, their monographs swarm with imperfections, and never inspire confidence; try as they may, they never attain, I do not say absolute accuracy, but any decent degree of accuracy. They are subject to "chronic inaccuracy," a disease of which the English historian Froude is a typical and celebrated case. Froude was a gifted writer, but destined never to advance any statement that was not disfigured by error; it has been said of him that he was constitutionally inaccurate. For example, he had visited the city of Adelaide in Australia: "We saw," says he, "below us, in a basin with a river winding through it, a city of 150,000 inhabitants, none of whom has ever known or will ever know one moment's anxiety as to the recurring regularity of his three meals a day." Thus Froude, now for the facts: Adelaide is built on an eminence; no river runs through it; when Froude visited it the population did not exceed 75,000, and it was suffering from a famine at the time. And more of the same kind.[115] Froude was perfectly aware of the utility of criticism, and he was even one of the first in England to base the study of history on that of original documents, as well unpublished as published; but his mental conformation rendered him altogether unfit for the emendation of texts; indeed, he murdered them, unintentionally, whenever he touched them. Just as Daltonism (an affection of the organs of sight which prevents a man from distinguishing correctly between red and green signals) incapacitates for employment on a railway, so chronic inaccuracy, or "Froude's Disease" (a malady not very difficult to diagnose) ought to be regarded as incompatible with the professional practice of critical scholarship.

Froude's Disease does not appear to have ever been studied by the psychologists, nor, indeed, is it to be considered as a separate pathological entity. Every one makes mistakes "out of carelessness," "through inadvertence," and in many other ways. What is abnormal is to make many mistakes, to be always making them, in spite of the most persevering efforts to be exact. Probably this phenomenon is connected with weakness of the attention and excessive activity of the involuntary (or subconscious) imagination which the will of the patient, lacking strength and stability, is unable sufficiently to control. The involuntary imagination intrudes upon intellectual operations only to vitiate them; its part is to fill up the gaps of memory by conjecture, to magnify and attenuate realities, and to confuse them with the products of pure invention. Most children distort everything by inexactitude of this kind, and it is only after a hard struggle that they ever attain to a scrupulous accuracy—that is, learn to master their imagination. Many men remain children, in this respect, the whole of their lives.

But, let the psychological causes of Froude's Disease be what they may, another point claims our attention. The man of the sanest and best-balanced mind is liable to bungle the simplest kinds of critical work if he does not allow them the necessary time. In these matters precipitancy is the source of innumerable errors. It is rightly said that patience is the cardinal virtue of the scholar. Do not work too fast, act as if there were always something to be gained by waiting, leave work undone rather than spoil it: these are maxims easy enough to pronounce, but not to be followed in practice by any but persons of calm temperament. There are nervous, excitable persons, who are always in a hurry to get to the end, always seeking variety in their occupations, and always anxious to dazzle and astonish: these may possibly find honourable employment in other careers; but if they embrace erudition, they are doomed to pile up a mass of provisional work, which is likely to do more harm than good, and is sure in the long run to cause them many a vexation. The true scholar is cool, reserved, circumspect. In the midst of the turmoil of life, which flows past him like a torrent, he never hurries. Why should he hurry? The important thing is, that the work he does should be solid, definitive, imperishable. Better "spend weeks polishing a masterpiece of a score of pages" in order to convince two or three among the scholars of Europe that a particular charter is spurious, or take ten years to construct the best possible text of a corrupt document, than give to the press in the same interval volumes of moderately accurate anecdota which future scholars will some day have to put through the mill again from beginning to end.

Whatever special branch of critical scholarship a man may choose, he ought to be gifted with prudence, an exceptionally powerful attention and will, and, moreover, to combine a speculative turn of mind with complete disinterestedness and little taste for action; for he must make up his mind to work for distant and uncertain results, and, in nearly every case, for the benefit of others. For textual criticism and the investigation of sources, it is, moreover, very useful to have the puzzle-solving instinct—that is, a nimble, ingenious mind, fertile in hypotheses, prompt to seize and even to guess the relations of things. For tasks of description and compilation (the preparation of inventories and catalogues, corpus and regesta-making) it is absolutely necessary to possess the collector's instinct, together with an exceptional appetite for work, and the qualities of order, industry, and perseverance.[116] These are the aptitudes required. The labours of external criticism are so distasteful to those who lack these aptitudes, and the results obtained are, in their case, so small in comparison with the time expended, that it is impossible for a man to make too sure of his vocation before entering upon a career of critical scholarship. It is pitiful to see those who, for want of a wise word spoken in due season, lose their way and vainly exhaust themselves in such a career, especially when they have good reason for believing that they might have employed their talents to better advantage in other directions.[117]

II. As critical and preparatory tasks are remarkably well suited to the temperament of a very large number of Germans, and as the activity of German erudition during the present century has been enormous, it is to Germany that we must go for the best cases of those mental deformations which are produced, in the long run, by the habitual practice of external criticism. Hardly a year passes but complaints are heard, in and about the German universities, of the ill effects produced on scholars by the tasks of criticism.

In 1890, Herr Philippi, as Rector of the University of Giessen, forcibly deplored the chasm which, as he said, is opening between preparatory criticism and general culture: textual criticism loses itself in insignificant minutiæ; scholars collate for the mere pleasure of collating; infinite precautions are employed in the restoration of worthless documents; it is thus evident that "more importance is attached to the materials of study than to its intellectual results." The Rector of Giessen sees in the diffuse style of German scholars and in the bitterness of their polemical writings an effect of the habit they have contracted of "excessive preoccupation with little things."[118] In the same year the same note was sounded, at the University of Bâle, by Herr J. v. Pflugk-Harttung. "The highest branches of historical science are despised," says this author in his Geschichtsbetrachtungen[119]: "all that is valued is microscopic observations and absolute accuracy in unimportant details. The criticism of texts and sources has become a branch of sport: the least breach of the rules of the game is considered unpardonable, while conformity to them is enough to assure the approval of connoisseurs, irrespectively of the intrinsic value of the results obtained. Scholars are mostly malevolent and discourteous towards each other; they make molehills and call them mountains; their vanity is as comic as that of the citizen of Frankfort who used complacently to observe, 'All that you can see through yonder archway is Frankfort territory.'"[120] We, for our part, are inclined to draw a distinction between three professional risks to which scholars are subject: dilettantism, hypercriticism, and loss of the power to work.

To take the last first: the habit of critical analysis has a relaxing and paralysing action on certain intelligences. Men, of naturally timid dispositions, discover that whatever pains they take with their critical work, their editing or classifying of documents, they are very apt to make slight mistakes, and these slight mistakes, as a result of their critical education, fill them with horror and dread. To discover blunders in their signed work when the time for correction is past, causes them acute suffering. They reach at length a state of morbid anxiety and scrupulosity which prevents them from doing anything at all, for fear of possible imperfections. The examen rigorosum to which they are continually subjecting themselves brings them to a standstill. They give the same measure to the productions of others, and in the end they see in historical works nothing but the authorities and the notes, the apparatus criticus, and in the apparatus criticus they see nothing but the faults in it which require correction.

Hypercriticism.—The excess of criticism, just as much as the crudest ignorance, leads to error. It consists in the application of critical canons to cases outside their jurisdiction. It is related to criticism as logic-chopping is to logic. There are persons who scent enigmas everywhere, even where there are none. They take perfectly clear texts and subtilise on them till they make them doubtful, under the pretext of freeing them from imaginary corruptions. They discover traces of forgery in authentic documents. A strange state of mind! By constantly guarding against the instinct of credulity they come to suspect everything.[121] It is to be observed that in proportion as the criticism of texts and sources makes positive progress, the danger of hypercriticism increases. When all the sources of history have been properly criticised (for certain parts of ancient history this is no distant prospect), good sense will call a halt. But scholars will refuse to halt; they will refine, as they do already on the best established texts, and those who refine will inevitably fall into hypercriticism. "The peculiarity of the study of history and its auxiliary philological sciences," says Renan, "is that as soon as they have attained their relative perfection they begin to destroy themselves."[122] Hypercriticism is the cause of this.

Dilettantism.—Scholars by profession and vocation have a tendency to treat the external criticism of documents as a game of skill, difficult, but deriving an interest, much as chess does, from the very complication of its rules. Some of them are indifferent to the larger questions—to history itself, in fact. They criticise for the sake of criticism, and, in their view, the elegance of the method of investigation is much more important than the results, whatever they may be. These virtuosi are not concerned to connect their labours with some general idea—to criticise systematically, for example, all the documents relating to a question, in order to understand it; they criticise indiscriminately texts relating to all manner of subjects, on the one condition of being sufficiently corrupt. Armed with their critical skill, they range over the whole of the domain of history, and stop wherever a knotty problem invites their services; this problem solved, or at least discussed, they go elsewhere to look for others. They leave behind them no coherent work, but a heterogeneous collection of memoirs on every conceivable subject, which resembles, as Carlyle says, a curiosity shop or an archipelago of small islands.

Dilettanti defend their dilettantism by sufficiently plausible arguments. To begin with, say they, everything is important; in history there is no document which has not its value: "No scientific work is barren, no truth is without its use for science ...; in history there is no such thing as a trivial subject;" consequently, "it is not the nature of the subject which makes work valuable, but the method employed."[123] The important thing in history is not "the ideas one accumulates; it is the mental gymnastics, the intellectual training—in short, the scientific spirit." Even supposing that there are degrees of importance among the data of history, no one has a right to maintain a priori that a document is "useless." What, pray, is the criterion of utility in these matters? How many documents are there not which, after being long despised, have been suddenly placed in the foreground by a change of standpoint or by new discoveries? "All exclusion is rash; there is no research which it is possible to brand beforehand as necessarily sterile. That which has no value in itself may become valuable as a necessary means." Perhaps a day may come when, science being in a sense complete, indifferent documents and facts may be safely thrown overboard; but we are not at present in a position to distinguish the superfluous from the necessary, and in all probability the line of demarcation will never be easy to trace. This justifies the most special researches and the most futile in all appearance. And, if it come to the worst, what does it matter if there is a certain amount of work wasted? "It is a law in science, as in all human effort," and indeed in all the operations of nature, "to work in broad outlines, with a wide margin of what is superfluous."

We shall not undertake to refute these arguments to the full extent in which this is possible. Besides, Renan, who has put the case for both sides of the question with equal vigour, definitively closed the debate in the following words: "It may be said that some researches are useless in the sense of taking up time which would have been better spent on more serious questions.... Although it is not necessary for an artisan to have a complete knowledge of the work he is employed to execute, it is still to be desired that those who devote themselves to special labours should have some notion of the more general considerations which alone give value to their researches. If all the industrious workers to whom modern science owes its progress had had a philosophical comprehension of what they were doing, how much precious time would have been saved!... It is deeply to be regretted that there should be such an immense waste of human effort, merely for want of guidance, and a clear consciousness of the end to be pursued."[124]

Dilettantism is incompatible with a certain elevation of mind, and with a certain degree of "moral perfection," but not with technical proficiency. Some of the most accomplished critics merely make a trade of their skill, and have never reflected on the ends to which their art is a means. It would, however, be wrong to infer that science itself has nothing to fear from dilettantism. The dilettanti of criticism who work as fancy or curiosity bids them, who are attracted to problems not by their intrinsic importance, but by their difficulty, do not supply historians (those whose work it is to combine materials and use them for the main purposes of history) with the materials of which the latter have the most pressing need, but with others which might have waited. If the activity of specialists in external criticism were exclusively directed to questions whose solution is important, and if it were regulated and guided from above, it would be more fruitful.

The idea of providing against the dangers of dilettantism by a rational "organisation of labour" is already ancient. Fifty years ago it was common to hear people talking of "supervision," of "concentrating scattered forces;" dreams were rife of "vast workshops" organised on the model of those of modern industry, in which the preparatory labours of critical scholarship were to be performed on a great scale, in the interests of science. In nearly all countries, in fact, governments (through the medium of historical committees and commissions), academies, and learned societies have endeavoured in our day, much as monastic congregations did of old, to group professed scholars for the purposes of vast collective enterprises, and to co-ordinate their efforts. But this banding of specialists in external criticism for the service and under the supervision of competent men presents great mechanical difficulties. The problem of the "organisation of scientific labour" is still the order of the day.[125]

III. Scholars are often censured for pride and excessive harshness in the judgments which they pass on the labours of their colleagues; and these faults, as we have seen, are often attributed to their excessive "preoccupation with little things," especially by persons whose attempts have been severely judged. In reality there do exist modest and kindly scholars: it is a question of character; professional "preoccupation with little things" is not enough to change natural disposition in this respect. "Ce bon monsieur Du Cange," as the Benedictines said, was modest to excess. "Nothing more is required," says he, in speaking of his labours, "but eyes and fingers in order to do as much and more;" he never blamed any one, on principle. "If I study it is for the pleasure of studying, and not to give pain to any one else, any more than to myself."[126] It is, however, true that most scholars have no compunction in exposing each other's mistakes, and that their austere zeal sometimes finds expression in harsh and overbearing language. Barring the harshness they are quite right. Like physicians, chemists, and other members of learned and scientific professions, they have a keen appreciation of the value of scientific truth, and it is for this reason that they make a point of calling offenders to account. They are thus enabled to bar the door against the tribe of incapables and charlatans who once infested their profession.

Among the youths who propose to devote themselves to the study of history there are some in whom the commercial spirit and vulgar ambition are stronger than the love of science. These are apt to say to themselves: "Historical work, if it is to be done according to the rules of method, requires an infinite amount of labour and caution. But do we not see historical writings whose authors have more or less seriously violated the rules? Are these authors thought any the less of on this account? Is it always the most conscientious writer who enjoys the highest consideration? Cannot tact supply the place of knowledge?" If tact really could supply the place of knowledge, then, as it is easier to do bad work than good, and as the important thing with these people is success, they might be tempted to conclude that it does not matter how badly they work as long as they succeed. Why should not things go in these matters as they do in life, where it is not necessarily the best men that get on best? Well, it is due to the pitiless severity of the critics that calculations of this kind would be as disastrous as they are despicable.

Towards the end of the Second Empire there was in France no enlightened public opinion on the subject of historical work. Bad books of historical erudition were published with impunity, and sometimes even procured undeserved rewards for their authors. It was then that the founders of the Revue Critique d'histoire et de littérature undertook to combat a state of things which they lightly deemed demoralising. With this object they administered public chastisement to those scholars who showed lack of conscience or method, in a manner calculated to disgust them with erudition for ever. They performed sundry notable executions, not for the pleasure of it, but with the firm resolve to establish a censorship and a wholesome dread of justice, in the domain of historical study. Bad workers henceforth received no quarter, and though the Revue did not exert any great influence on the public at large, its police-operations covered a wide enough radius to impress most of those concerned with the necessity of sincerity and respect for method. During the last twenty-five years the impulse thus given has spread beyond all expectation.

It is now a matter of great difficulty to impose on the world of scholars, in matters connected with their studies, or at least to keep up the deception for any length of time. In the case of the historical sciences, as well as the sciences proper, it is now too late to found a new error or to discredit an old truth. It may be a few months, possibly a few years, before a bungled experiment in chemistry or a scamped edition is recognised as such; but inexact results, though temporarily accepted under reserve, are always sooner or later, and generally very soon, discovered, denounced, and eliminated. The theory of the operations of external criticism is now so well established, the number of specialists thoroughly versed in them is now so great in every country, that, with rare exceptions, descriptive catalogues of documents, editions, regesta, monographs, are scrutinised, dissected, and judged as soon as they appear. It is well to be warned. It will for the future be the height of imprudence to risk publishing a work of erudition without having first done everything possible to make it unassailable; otherwise it will immediately, or after brief delay, be attacked and demolished. Not knowing this, certain well-meaning persons still show themselves, from time to time, simple enough to enter the lists of critical scholarship insufficiently prepared; they are filled with a desire to be useful, and are apparently convinced that here, as in politics and elsewhere, it is possible to work by extemporised and approximate methods without any "special knowledge." They are sorry afterwards. The knowing ones do not take the risk; the tasks of critical scholarship have no seductions for them, for they are aware that the labour is great and the glory moderate, and that the field is engrossed by clever specialists not too well disposed towards intruders. They see plainly there is no room for them here. The blunt uncompromising honesty of the scholars thus delivers them from undesirable company of a kind which the "historians" proper have still occasionally to put up with.

Bad workers, in fact, on the hunt for a public less closely critical than the scholars, are very ready to take refuge in historical exposition. The rules of method are here less obvious, or, rather, not so well known. While the criticism of texts and sources has been placed on a scientific basis, historical synthesis is still performed haphazard. Mental confusion, ignorance, negligence—faults which stand out so clearly in works of critical scholarship—may in historical works be disguised up to a certain point by literary artifices, and the public at large, which is not well educated in this respect, is not shocked.[127] In short, there is still, in this department, a certain chance of impunity. This chance, however, is diminishing, and a day will come, before so very long, when the superficial writers who make incorrect syntheses will be treated with as little consideration as is now received by those who show themselves unscrupulous or unskilful in the technique of preparatory criticism. The works of the most celebrated historians of the nineteenth century, those who died but yesterday, Augustin Thierry, Ranke, Fustel de Coulanges, Taine, and others, are already battered and riddled with criticism. The faults of their methods have already been seen, defined, and condemned.

Those who are insensible to other considerations ought to be moved to honesty in historical work by the reflection that the time is now past, or nearly so, when it was possible to do bad work without having to suffer for it.

SECTION II.—INTERNAL CRITICISM

CHAPTER VI

INTERPRETATIVE CRITICISM (HERMENEUTIC)

I. When a zoologist describes the form and situation of a muscle, when a physiologist gives the curve of a movement, we are able to accept their results without reserve, because we know by what method, by what instruments, by what system of notation they have obtained them.[128] But when Tacitus says of the Germans, Arva per annos mutant, we do not know beforehand whether he took the right method to inform himself, nor even in what sense he used the words arva and mutant; to ascertain this a preliminary operation is required.[129] This operation is internal criticism.

The object of criticism is to discover what in a document may be accepted as true. Now the document is only the final result of a long series of operations, on the details of which the author gives us no information. He had to observe or collect facts, to frame sentences, to write down words; and these operations, which are perfectly distinct one from another, may not all have been performed with the same accuracy. It is therefore necessary to analyse the product of the author's labour in order to distinguish which operations have been incorrectly performed, and reject their results. Analysis is thus necessary to criticism; all criticism begins with analysis.

In order to be logically complete, the analysis ought to reconstruct all the operations which the author must have performed, and to examine them one by one, to see whether each has been performed correctly. It would be necessary to pass in review all the successive acts by which the document was produced, from the moment when the author observed the fact which is its subject up to the movements of his hand by which he traced the letters of the document; or, rather, it would be necessary to proceed in the opposite direction, step by step, from the movements of the hand back to the observation. This method would be so long and so tedious that no one would ever have the time or the patience to apply it.

Internal criticism is not, like external criticism, an instrument used for the mere pleasure of using it;[130] it yields no immediate satisfaction, because it does not definitively solve any problem. It is only applied because it is necessary, and its use is restricted to a bare minimum. The most exacting historian is satisfied with an abridged method which concentrates all the operations into two groups: (1) the analysis of the contents of the document, and the positive interpretative criticism which is necessary for ascertaining what the author meant; (2) the analysis of the conditions under which the document was produced, and its negative criticism, necessary for the verification of the author's statements. This twofold division of the labour of criticism is, moreover, only employed by a select few. The natural tendency, even of historians who work methodically, is to read the text with the object of extracting information directly from it, without any thought of first ascertaining what exactly was in the author's mind.[131] This procedure is excusable at most in the case of nineteenth-century documents, written by men whose language and mode of thought are familiar to us, and then only when there is not more than one possible interpretation. It becomes dangerous as soon as the author's habits of language or thought begin to differ from those of the historian who reads him, or when the meaning of the text is not obvious and indisputable. Whoever, in reading a text, is not exclusively occupied with the effort to understand it, is sure to read impressions of his own into it; he is struck by phrases or words in the document which correspond to his own ideas, or agree with his own a priori notion of the facts; unconsciously he detaches these phrases or words, and forms out of them an imaginary text which he puts in the place of the real text of the author.[132]

II. Here, as always in history, method consists in repressing the first impulse. It is necessary to be penetrated by the principle, sufficiently obvious but often forgotten, that a document only contains the ideas of the man who wrote it, and to make it a rule to begin by understanding the text by itself, before asking what can be extracted from it for the purposes of history. We thus arrive at this general rule of method: the study of every document should begin with an analysis of its contents, made with the sole aim of determining the real meaning of the author.

This analysis is a preliminary operation, distinct and independent. Experience here, as in the tasks of critical scholarship,[133] has decided in favour of the system of slips. Each slip will contain the analysis of a document, of a separate part of a document, or of an episode in a narrative; the analysis ought to indicate not only the general sense of the text, but also, as far as possible, the object and views of the author. It will be well to reproduce verbally any expressions which may seem characteristic of the author's thought. Sometimes it will be enough to have analysed the text mentally: it is not always necessary to put down in black and white the whole contents of a document; in such cases we simply enter the points of which we intend to make use. But against the ever-present danger of substituting one's personal impressions for the text there is only one real safeguard; it should be made an invariable rule never on any account to make an extract from a document, or a partial analysis of it, without having first made a comprehensive analysis[134] of it mentally, if not on paper.

To analyse a document is to discern and isolate all the ideas expressed by the author. Analysis thus reduces to interpretative criticism.

Interpretation passes through two stages: the first is concerned with the literal, the second with the real meaning.

III. The determination of the literal meaning of a document is a linguistic operation; accordingly, Philology (in the narrow sense) has been reckoned among the auxiliary sciences of history. To understand a text it is first necessary to know the language. But a general knowledge of the language is not enough. In order to interpret Gregory of Tours, it is not enough to know Latin in a general way; it is necessary to add a special study of the particular kind of Latin written by Gregory of Tours.

The natural tendency is to attribute the same meaning to the same word wherever it occurs. We instinctively treat a language as if it were a fixed system of signs. Fixity, indeed, is a characteristic of the signs which have been expressly invented for scientific use, such as algebraical notation or the nomenclature of chemistry. Here every expression has a single precise meaning, which is absolute and invariable; it expresses an accurately analysed and defined idea, only one such idea, and that always the same in whatever context the expression may occur, and by whatever author it may be used. But ordinary language, in which documents are written, fluctuates: each word expresses a complex and ill-defined idea; its meanings are manifold, relative, and variable; the same word may stand for several different things, and is used in different senses by the same author according to the context; lastly, the meaning of a word varies from author to author, and is modified in the course of time. Vel, which in classical Latin only has the meanings or and even, means and in certain epochs of the middle ages; suffragium, which is classical Latin for suffrage, takes in mediæval Latin the sense of help. We have, then, to learn to resist the instinct which leads us to explain all the expressions of a text by their classical or ordinary meanings. The grammatical interpretation, based on the general rules of the language, must be supplemented by an historical interpretation founded on an examination of the particular case.

The method consists in determining the special meaning of the words in the document; it rests on a few very simple principles.

(1) Language changes by continuous evolution. Each epoch has a language of its own, which must be treated as a separate system of signs. In order to understand a document we must know the language of the time—that is, the meanings of words and forms of expression in use at the time when the text was written. The meaning of a word is to be determined by bringing together the passages where it is employed: it will generally be found that in one or other of these the remainder of the sentence leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the word in question.[135] Information of this kind is given in historical dictionaries, such as the Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ; or the glossaries of Du Cange. In these compilations the article devoted to each word is a collection of the passages in which the word occurs, accompanied by indications of authorship which fix the epoch.

When the author wrote in a dead language which he had learnt out of books—this is the case with the Latin texts of the earlier middle ages—we must be on our guard against words used in an arbitrary sense, or selected for the sake of elegance: for example, consul (count, earl), capite census (censitary), agellus (grand domain).

(2) Linguistic usage may vary from one region to another; we have, then, to know the language of the country where the document was written—that is, the peculiar meanings current in the country.

(3) Each author has his own manner of writing; we have, then, to study the language of the author, the peculiar senses in which he used words.[136] This purpose is served by lexicons to a single author, as Meusel's Lexicon Cæsarianum, in which are brought together all the passages in which the author used each word.

(4) An expression changes its meaning according to the passage in which it occurs; we must therefore interpret each word and sentence not as if it stood isolated, but with an eye to the general sense of the context. This is the rule of context,[137] a fundamental rule of interpretation. Its meaning is that, before making use of a phrase taken from a text, we must have read the text in its entirety; it prohibits the stuffing of a modern work with quotations—that is, shreds of phrases torn from passages without regard to the special sense given to them by the context.[138]

These rules, if rigorously applied, would constitute an exact method of interpretation which would hardly leave any chance of error, but would require an enormous expenditure of time. What an immense amount of labour would be necessary if, in the case of each word, we had to determine by a special operation its meaning in the language of the time, of the country, of the author, and in the context! Yet this is the labour demanded by a well-made translation: in the case of some ancient works of great literary value it has been submitted to; for the mass of historical documents we content ourselves, in practice, with an abridged method.

All words are not equally subject to variations of meaning; most of them keep a fairly uniform meaning in all authors and in all periods. We may therefore be satisfied to study specially those expressions which, from their nature, are liable to take different meanings: first, ready-made expressions which, being fixed, do not follow the evolution of the words of which they are composed; secondly, and chiefly, words denoting things which are in their nature subject to evolution; classes of men (miles, colonus, servus); institutions (conventus, justitia, judex); usages (alleu, bénéfice, élection); feelings, common objects. In the case of all words of such classes it would be imprudent to assume a fixed meaning; it is an absolutely necessary precaution to ascertain what is the sense in which they are used in the text to be interpreted. "These studies of words," said Fustel de Coulanges, "have a great importance in historical science. A badly interpreted term may be the source of serious error."[139] And, in fact, simply by a methodical application of interpretative criticism to a hundred words or so, he succeeded in revolutionising the study of the Merovingian epoch.

IV. When we have analysed the document and determined the literal meaning of its phrases, we cannot even yet be sure that we have reached the real thoughts of the author. It is possible that he may have used some expressions in an oblique sense; there are several kinds of cases where this occurs: allegory and symbolism, jests and hoaxes, allusion and implication, even the ordinary figures of speech, metaphor, hyperbole, litotes.[140] In all these cases it is necessary to pierce through the literal meaning to the real meaning, which the author has purposely disguised under an inexact form.

Logically the problem is very embarrassing: there is no fixed external criterion by which we can make sure of detecting an oblique sense; in the case of the hoax, which in the present century has become a branch of literature, it is an essential part of the author's plan to leave no indication which would betray the jest. In practice we may be morally certain that an author is not using an oblique sense wherever his prime object is to be understood; we are therefore not likely to meet with difficulties of this kind in official documents, in charters, and in historical narratives. In all these cases the general form of the document permits us to assume that it is written in the literal sense of the words.

On the other hand, we must be prepared for oblique senses when the author had other interests than that of being understood, or when he wrote for a public which could understand his allusions and read between the lines, or when his readers, in virtue of a religious or literary initiation, might be expected to understand his symbolisms and figures of speech. This is the case with religious texts, private letters, and all those literary works which form so large a part of the documents on antiquity. Thus the art of recognising and determining hidden meanings in texts has always occupied a large space in the theory of hermeneutic[141] (which is Greek for interpretative criticism), and in the exegesis of the sacred texts and of classical authors.

The different modes of introducing an oblique sense behind the literal sense are too varied, and depend too much on special circumstances, for it to be possible to reduce the art of detecting them to definite rules. Only one general principle can be laid down, and that is, that when the literal sense is absurd, incoherent, or obscure, or in contradiction with the ideas of the author or the facts known to him, then we ought to presume an oblique sense.

In order to determine this sense, the procedure is the same as for studying the language of an author: we compare the passages in which the expressions occur in which we suspect an oblique sense, and look to see whether there is not one where the meaning may be guessed from the context. A celebrated instance of this procedure is the discovery of the allegorical meaning of the Beast in the Apocalypse. But as there is no certain method of solving these problems, we never have a right to say we have discovered all the hidden meanings or seized all the allusions contained in a text; and even when we think we have found the sense, we shall do well to draw no inferences from a necessarily conjectural interpretation.

On the other hand, it is necessary to guard against the temptation to look for allegorical meanings everywhere, as the neo-Platonists did in Plato's works and the Swedenborgians in the Bible. This attack of hyper-hermeneutic is now over, but we are not yet safe from the analogous tendency to look for allusions everywhere. Investigations of this kind are always conjectural, and are better calculated to flatter the vanity of the interpreter than to furnish results of which history can make use.

V. When we have at length reached the real sense of the text, the operation of positive analysis is concluded. Its result is to make us acquainted with the author's conceptions, the images he had in his mind, the general notions in terms of which he represented the world to himself. This information belongs to a very important branch of knowledge, out of which is constituted a whole group of historical sciences:[142] the history of the illustrative arts and of literature, the history of science, the history of philosophical and moral doctrine, mythology and the history of dogmas (wrongly called religious beliefs, because here we are studying official doctrines without inquiring whether they are believed), the history of law, the history of official institutions (so far as we do not inquire how they were applied in practice), the assemblage of popular legends, traditions, opinions, conceptions (inexactly called beliefs) which are comprised under the name of folk-lore.

All these studies need only the external criticism which investigates authorship and origin and interpretative criticism; they require one degree less elaboration than the history of objective facts, and accordingly they have been earlier established on a methodical basis.

CHAPTER VII

THE NEGATIVE INTERNAL CRITICISM OF THE GOOD FAITH AND ACCURACY OF AUTHORS

I. Analysis and positive interpretative criticism only penetrate as far as the inward workings of the mind of the author of a document, and only help us to know his ideas. They give no direct information about external facts. Even when the author was able to observe them, his text only indicates how he wished to represent them, not how he really saw them, still less how they really happened. What an author expresses is not always what he believed, for he may have lied; what he believed is not necessarily what happened, for he may have been mistaken. These propositions are obvious. And yet a first and natural impulse leads us to accept as true every statement contained in a document, which is equivalent to assuming that no author ever lied or was deceived; and this spontaneous credulity seems to possess a high degree of vitality, for it persists in spite of the innumerable instances of error and mendacity which daily experience brings before us.

Reflection has been forced on historians in the course of their work by the circumstance of their finding documents which contradicted each other; in such cases they have been obliged to doubt, and, after examination, to admit the existence of error or mendacity; thus negative criticism has appeared as a practical necessity for the purpose of eliminating statements which are obviously false or erroneous. But the instinct of confidence is so indestructible that it has hitherto prevented even those professionally concerned from systematising the internal criticism of statements in the same way as the external criticism which deals with the origin of documents has been systematised. Historians, in their works, and even theoretical writers on historical method,[143] have been satisfied with common notions and vague formulæ in striking contrast with the precise terminology of the critical investigation of sources. They are content to examine whether the author was roughly contemporary with the events, whether he was an ocular witness, whether he was sincere and well-informed, whether he knew the truth and desired to tell it, or even—summing up the whole question in a single formula—whether he was trustworthy.

This superficial criticism is certainly better than no criticism at all, and has sufficed to give those who have applied it the consciousness of incontestable superiority. But it is only a halfway-house between common credulity and scientific method. Here, as in every science, the starting-point must be methodical doubt.[144] All that has not been proved must be temporarily regarded as doubtful; no proposition is to be affirmed unless reasons can be adduced in favour of its truth. Applied to the statements contained in documents, methodical doubt becomes methodical distrust.

The historian ought to distrust a priori every statement of an author, for he cannot be sure that it is not mendacious or mistaken. At the best it affords a presumption. For the historian to adopt it and affirm it afresh on his own account implies that he regards it as a scientific truth. To take this decisive step is what he has no right to do without good reasons. But the human mind is so constituted that this step is often taken unconsciously (cf. book ii. chap. i.). Against this dangerous tendency criticism has only one means of defence. We must not postpone doubt till it is forced upon us by conflicting statements in documents; we must begin by doubting. We must never forget the interval which separates a statement made by any author whatsoever from a scientifically established truth, so that we may continually keep in mind the responsibility which we assume when we reproduce a statement.

Even after we have accepted the principle and resolved to apply this unnatural distrust in practice, we tend instinctively to free ourselves from it as soon as possible. The natural impulse is to perform the criticism of the whole of an author, or at least of the whole of a document, in the lump; to divide authorities into two categories, the sheep on the right, the goats on the left; on the one side trustworthy authors and good documents, on the other suspected authors and bad documents. Having thus exhausted our powers of distrust, we proceed to reproduce without discussion all the statements contained in the "good document." We consent to distrust suspected authors such as Suidas or Aimo, but we affirm as established truth everything that has been said by Thucydides or Gregory of Tours.[145] We apply to authors that judicial procedure which divides witnesses into admissible and inadmissible: having once accepted a witness, we feel ourselves bound to admit all his testimony; we dare not doubt any of his statements without a special reason. Instinctively we take sides with the author on whom we have bestowed our approval, and we go so far as to say, as in the law courts, that the burden of proof rests with those who reject valid testimony.[146]

The confusion is still further increased by the use of the word authentic, borrowed from judicial language. It has reference to the origin only, not to the contents; to say that a document is authentic is merely to say that its origin is certain, not that its contents are free from error. But authenticity inspires a degree of respect which disposes us to accept the contents without discussion. To doubt the statements of an authentic document would seem presumptuous, or at least we think ourselves bound to wait for overwhelming proof before we impeach the testimony of the author.

II. These natural instincts must be methodically resisted. A document (still more a literary work) is not all of a piece; it is composed of a great number of independent statements, any one of which may be intentionally or unintentionally false, while the others are bonâ fide and accurate, or conversely, since each statement is the outcome of a mental operation which may have been incorrectly performed, while others were performed correctly. It is not, therefore, enough to examine a document as a whole; each of the statements in it must be examined separately; criticism is impossible without analysis.

Thus internal criticism conducts us to two general rules.

(1) A scientific truth is not established by testimony. In order to affirm a proposition we must have special reasons for believing it true. It may happen in certain cases that an author's statement is a sufficient reason for belief; but we cannot know that beforehand. The rule, then, will be to examine each separate statement in order to make sure whether it is of a nature to constitute a sufficient reason for belief.

(2) The criticism of a document is not to be performed en bloc. The rule will be to analyse the document into its elements, in order to isolate the different statements of which it is composed and to examine each of them separately. Sometimes a single sentence contains several statements; they must be separated and criticised one by one. In a sale, for example, we distinguish the date, the place, the vendor, the purchaser, the object, the price, and each one of the conditions.

In practice, criticism and analysis are performed simultaneously, and, except in the case of texts in a difficult language, may proceed pari passu with interpretative analysis and criticism. As soon as we understand a phrase we analyse it and criticise each of its elements.

It thus appears that logically criticism comprises an enormous number of operations. In describing them, with all the details necessary for the understanding of their mechanism and the reasons for their employment, we are likely to give the impression of a procedure too slow to be practicable. Such an impression is inevitably produced by every verbal description of a complicated process. Compare the time occupied in describing a movement in fencing with that required to execute it; compare the tedium of the grammar and dictionary with the rapidity of reading. Like every practical art, criticism consists in the habit of performing certain acts. In the period of apprenticeship, before the habit is acquired, we are obliged to think of each act separately before performing it, and to analyse the movements; accordingly we perform them all slowly and with difficulty; but the habit once acquired, the acts, which have now become instinctive and unconscious, are performed with ease and rapidity. The reader must therefore not be uneasy about the slowness of the critical processes; he will see later on how they are abridged in practice.

III. The problem of criticism may be stated as follows. Given a statement made by a man of whose mental operations we have no experience, and the value of the statement depending exclusively on the manner in which these operations were performed; to ascertain whether these operations were performed correctly. The mere statement of the problem shows that we cannot hope for any direct or definitive solution of it; we lack the essential datum, namely, the manner in which the author performed the mental operations concerned. Criticism therefore does not advance beyond indirect and provisional solutions, and does no more than furnish data which require a final elaboration.

A natural instinct leads us to judge of the value of statements by their form. We think we can tell at a glance whether an author is sincere or a narrative accurate. We seek for what is called "the accent of sincerity," or "an impression of truth." This impression is almost irresistible, but it is none the less an illusion. There is no external criterion either of good faith or of accuracy. "The accent of sincerity" is the appearance of conviction; an orator, an actor, an habitual liar will put more of it into his lies than an undecided man into his statement of what he believes to be the truth. Energy of affirmation does not always mean strength of conviction, but sometimes only cleverness or effrontery.[147] Similarly, abundance and precision of detail, though they produce a vivid impression on unexperienced readers, do not guarantee the accuracy of the facts;[148] they give us no information about anything but the imagination of the author when he is sincere, or his impudence when he is the reverse. We are apt to say of a circumstantial narrative: "Things of this kind are not invented." They are not invented, but they are very easy to transfer from one person, country, or time to another. There is thus no external characteristic of a document which can relieve us of the obligation to criticise it.

The value of an author's statement depends solely on the conditions under which he performed certain mental operations. Criticism has no other resource than the examination of these conditions. But it is not a case of reconstructing all of them; it is enough to answer a single question: did the author perform these operations correctly or not? The question may be approached on two sides.

(1) The critical investigation of authorship has often taught us the general conditions under which the author operated. It is probable that some of these influenced each one of the operations. We ought therefore to begin by studying the information we possess about the author and the composition of the document, taking particular pains to look in the habits, sentiments, and personal situation of the author, or in the circumstances in which he composed, for all the reasons which could have existed for incorrectness on the one hand, or exceptional accuracy on the other. In order to perceive these reasons it is necessary to be on the lookout for them beforehand. The only method, therefore, is to draw up a general set of questions having reference to the possible causes of inaccuracy. We shall then apply it to the general conditions under which the document was composed, in order to discover those causes which may have rendered the author's mental operations incorrect and vitiated the results. But all that we shall thus obtain—even in the exceptionally favourable cases in which the conditions of origin are well known—will be general indications, which will be insufficient for the purposes of criticism, for criticism must always deal with each separate statement.

(2) The criticism of particular statements is confined to the use of a single method, which, by a curious paradox, is the study of the universal conditions under which documents are composed. The information which is not furnished by the general study of the author may be sought for by a consideration of the necessary processes of the human mind; for, since these are universal, they must appear in each particular case. We know what are the cases in which men in general are inclined to alter or distort facts. What we have to do in the case of each statement is to examine whether it was made under such circumstances as to lead us to suspect, from our knowledge of the habits of normal humanity, that the operations implied in the making of it were incorrectly performed. The practical procedure will be to draw up a set of questions relating to the habitual causes of inaccuracy.

The whole of criticism thus reduces to the drawing up and answering of two sets of questions: one for the purpose of bringing before our minds those general conditions affecting the composition of the document, from which we may deduce general motives for distrust or confidence; the other for the purpose of realising the special conditions of each statement, from which special motives may be drawn for distrust or confidence. These two sets of questions ought to be drawn up beforehand in such a form as may enable us to examine methodically both the document in general and each statement in particular; and as they are the same for all documents, it is useful to formulate them once for all.

IV. The critical process comprises two series of questions, which correspond to the two series of operations by which the document was produced. All that interpretative criticism tells us is what the author meant; it remains to determine (1) what he really believed, for he may not have been sincere; (2) what he really knew, for he may have been mistaken. We may therefore distinguish a critical examination of the author's good faith, by which we seek to determine whether the author of the document lied or not, and a critical examination of his accuracy, by which we seek to determine whether he was or was not mistaken.

In practice we rarely need to know what an author believed, unless we are making a special study of his character. We have no direct interest in the author; he is merely the medium through which we reach the external facts he reports. The aim of criticism is to determine whether the author has reported the facts correctly. If he has given inexact information, it is indifferent whether he did so intentionally or not; to draw a distinction would complicate matters unnecessarily. There is thus little occasion to make a separate examination of an author's good faith, and we may shorten our labours by including in a single set of questions all the causes which lead to misstatement. But for the sake of clearness it will be well to discuss the questions to be asked in two separate series.

The questions in the first series will help us to inquire whether we have any reason to distrust the sincerity of a statement. We ask whether the author was in any of those situations which normally incline a man to be insincere. We must ask what these situations are, both as affecting the general composition of a document, and as affecting each particular statement. Experience supplies the answer. Every violation of truth, small or great, is due to a wish on the part of the author to produce a particular impression upon the reader. Our set of questions thus reduces to a list of the motives which may, in the general case, lead an author to violate truth. The following are the most important cases:—

(1) The author seeks to gain a practical advantage for himself; he wishes to deceive the reader of the document, in order to persuade him to an action, or to dissuade him from it; he knowingly gives false information: we then say the author has an interest in deceiving. This is the case with most official documents. Even in documents which have not been composed for a practical purpose, every interested statement has a chance of being mendacious. In order to determine which statements are to be suspected, we are to ask what can have been the general aim of the author in writing the document as a whole; and again, what can have been his particular purpose in making each of the separate statements which compose the document. But there are two natural tendencies to be resisted. The first is, to ask what interest the author could have had in lying, meaning what interest should we have had in his place; we must ask instead what interest can he have thought he had in lying, and we must look for the answer in his tastes and ideals. The other tendency is to take sole account of the individual interest of the author; we ought, however, to remember that the author may have given false information in order to serve a collective interest. This is one of the difficulties of criticism. An author is a member at one and the same time of several different groups, a family, a province, a country, a religious denomination, a political party, a class in society, whose interests often conflict; we have to discover the group in which he took most interest, and for which he worked.

(2) The author was placed in a situation which compelled him to violate truth. This happens whenever he has to draw up a document in conformity with rule or custom, while the actual circumstances are in some point or other in conflict with rule or custom; he is then obliged to state that the conditions were normal, and thus make a false declaration in respect of all the irregularities. In nearly every report of proceedings there is some slight deviation from truth as to the day, the hour, the place, the number or the names of those present. Most of us have observed, if not taken part in, some of these petty fictions. But we are too apt to forget them when we come to criticise documents relating to the past. The authentic character of the documents contributes to the illusion; we instinctively make authentic a synonym of sincere. The rigid rules which govern the composition of every authentic document seem to guarantee sincerity; they are, on the contrary, an incentive to falsify, not the main facts, but the accessory circumstances. From the fact of a person having signed a report we may infer that he agreed to it, but not that he was actually present at the time when the report mentions him as having been present.

(3) The author viewed with sympathy or antipathy a group of men (nation, party, denomination, province, city, family), or an assemblage of doctrines or institutions (religion, school of philosophy, political theory), and was led to distort facts in such a manner as to represent his friends in a favourable and his opponents in an unfavourable light. These are instances of a general bias which affects all the statements of an author, and they are so obvious that the ancients perceived them and gave them names (studium and odium); from ancient times it has been a literary commonplace for historians to protest that they have steered clear of both.

(4) The author was induced by private or collective vanity to violate truth for the purpose of exalting himself or his group. He made such statements as he thought likely to give the reader the impression that he and his possessed qualities deserving of esteem. We have therefore to inquire whether a given statement may not be influenced by vanity. But we must take care not to represent the author's vanity to ourselves as being exactly like our own vanity or that of our contemporaries. Different people are vain for different reasons; we must inquire what was our author's particular vanity; he may have lied in order to attribute to himself or his friends actions which we should consider dishonourable. Charles IX. falsely boasted of having organised the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. There is, however, a kind of vanity which is universal, and that is, the desire to appear to be a person of exalted rank playing an important part in affairs. We must, therefore, always distrust a statement which attributes to the author or his group a high place in the world.[149]

(5) The author desired to please the public, or at least to avoid shocking it. He has expressed sentiments and ideas in harmony with the morality or the fashion of his public; he has distorted facts in order to adapt them to the passions and prejudices of his time, even those which he did not share. The purest types of this kind of falsehood are found in ceremonial forms, official formulæ, declarations prescribed by etiquette, set speeches, polite phrases. The statements which come under this head are so open to suspicion that we are unable to derive from them any information about the facts stated. We are all aware of this so far as relates to the contemporary formulæ of which we see instances every day, but we often forget it in the criticism of documents, especially those belonging to an age from which few documents have come down to us. No one would think of looking for the real sentiments of a man in the assurances of respect with which he ends his letters. But people believed for a long time in the humility of certain ecclesiastical dignitaries of the middle ages, because, on the day of their election, they began by refusing an office of which they declared themselves unworthy, till at last comparison showed that this refusal was a mere conventional form. And there are still scholars who, like the Benedictines of the eighteenth century, look in the chancery-formulæ of a prince for information as to his piety or his liberality.[150]

In order to recognise these conventional declarations there are two lines of general study to be pursued: the one is directed to the author, and seeks to discover what was the public he addressed, for in one and the same country there are usually several different publics, each of which has its own code of morals or propriety; the other is directed towards the public, and seeks to determine its morals or its manners.

(6) The author endeavoured to please the public by literary artifices. He distorted facts in order to embellish them according to his own æsthetic notions. We have therefore to look for the ideal of the author or of his time, in order to be on our guard against passages distorted to suit that ideal. But without special study we may calculate on the common kinds of literary distortion. Rhetorical distortion consists in attributing to persons noble attitudes, acts, sentiments, and, above all, words: this is a natural tendency in young boys who are beginning to practise the art of composition, and in writers still in a semi-barbarous stage; it is the common defect of the mediæval chroniclers.[151] Epic distortion embellishes the narrative by adding picturesque details, speeches delivered by the persons concerned, numbers, sometimes names of persons; it is dangerous, because the precision of the details produces an illusive appearance of truth.[152] Dramatic distortion consists in grouping the facts in such a way as to enhance the dramatic effect by concentrating facts, which in reality were separate, upon a single moment, a single person, or a single group. Writing of this kind is what we call "truer than the truth." It is the most dangerous form of distortion, the form employed by artistic historians, by Herodotus, Tacitus, the Italians of the Renaissance. Lyrical distortion exaggerates the intensity of the sentiments and the emotions of the author and his friends: we should remember this when we attempt to reconstruct "the psychology" of a person.

Literary distortion does not much affect archives (though instances of it are found in most charters of the eleventh century); but it profoundly modifies all literary texts, including the narratives of historians. Now, the natural tendency is to trust writers more readily when they have talent, and to admit statements with less difficulty when they are presented in good literary form. Criticism must counteract this tendency by the application of the paradoxical rule, that the more interesting a statement is from the artistic point of view,[153] the more it ought to be suspected. We must distrust every narrative which is very picturesque or very dramatic, in which the personages assume noble attitudes or manifest great intensity of feeling.

This first series of questions will yield the provisional result of enabling us to note the statements which have a chance of being mendacious.

V. The second series of questions will be of use in determining whether there is any reason to distrust the accuracy of a statement. Was the author in one of those situations which cause a man to make mistakes? As in dealing with good faith, we must look for these conditions both as affecting the document as a whole, and as affecting each of the particular statements in it.

The practice of the established sciences teaches us the conditions of an exact knowledge of facts. There is only one scientific procedure for gaining knowledge of a fact, namely, observation; every statement, therefore, must rest, directly or indirectly, upon an observation, and this observation must have been made correctly.

The set of questions by the aid of which we investigate the probabilities of error may be drawn up in the light of experience, which brings before us the most common cases of error.

(1) The author was in a situation to observe the fact, and supposed he really had observed it; he was, however, prevented from doing so by some interior force of which he was unconscious, an hallucination, an illusion, or a mere prejudice. It would be useless, as well as impossible, to determine which of these agencies was at work; it is enough to ascertain whether the author had a tendency to observe badly. It is scarcely possible in the case of a particular statement to recognise that it was the result of an hallucination or an illusion. At the most we may learn, either from information derived from other sources or by comparison, that an author had a general propensity to this kind of error.

There is a better chance of recognising whether a statement was due to prejudice. In the life or the works of an author we may find the traces of his dominant prejudices. With reference to each of his particular statements, we ought to ask whether it is not the result of a preconceived idea of the author on a class of men or a kind of facts. This inquiry partly coincides with the search for motives of falsehood: interest, vanity, sympathy, and antipathy give rise to prejudices which alter the truth in the same manner as wilful falsehood. We therefore employ the questions already formulated for the purpose of testing good faith. But there is one to be added. In putting forward a statement has the author been led to distort it unconsciously by the circumstance that he was answering a question? This is the case of all statements obtained by interrogating witnesses. Even apart from the cases where the person interrogated seeks to please the proposer of the question by giving an answer which he thinks will be agreeable to him, every question suggests its own answer, or at least its form, and this form is dictated beforehand by some one unacquainted with the facts. It is therefore necessary to apply a special criticism to every statement obtained by interrogation; we must ask what was the question put, and what were the preconceptions to which it may have given rise in the mind of the person interrogated.

(2) The author was badly situated for observing. The practice of the sciences teaches us what are the conditions for correct observation. The observer ought to be placed where he can see correctly, and should have no practical interest, no desire to obtain a particular result, no preconceived idea about the result. He ought to record the observation immediately, in a precise system of notation; he ought to give a precise indication of his method. These conditions, which are insisted on in the sciences of observation, are never completely fulfilled by the authors of documents.

It would be useless, therefore, to ask whether there have been chances of inaccuracy; there always have been, and it is just this that distinguishes a document from an observation. It only remains to look for the obvious causes of error in the conditions of observation: to inquire whether the observer was in a place where he could not see or hear well, as would be the case, for example, with a subordinate who should presume to narrate the secret deliberations of a council of dignitaries; whether his attention was greatly distracted by the necessity for action, as it would be on the field of battle, for example; whether he was inattentive because the facts had little interest for him; whether he lacked the special experience or general intelligence necessary for understanding the facts; whether he analysed his impressions badly, or confused different events. Above all, we must ask when he wrote down what he saw or heard. This is the most important point: the only exact observation is the one which is recorded immediately it is made; such is the constant procedure in the established sciences; an impression committed to writing later on is only a recollection, liable to be confused in the memory with other recollections. Memoirs written several years after the facts, often at the very end of the author's career, have introduced innumerable errors into history. It must be made a rule to treat memoirs with special distrust as second-hand documents, in spite of their appearance of being contemporary testimony.

(3) The author states facts which he could have observed, but to which he did not take the trouble to attend. From idleness or negligence he reported details which he has merely inferred, or even imagined at random, and which turn out to be false. This is a common source of error, though it does not readily occur to one, and is to be suspected wherever the author was obliged to procure information in which he took little interest, in order to fill up a blank form. Of this kind are answers to questions put by an authority (it is enough to observe how most official inquiries are conducted in our own day), and detailed accounts of ceremonies or public functions. There is too strong a temptation to write the account from the programme, or in agreement with the usual order of the proceedings. How many accounts of meetings of all kinds have been published by reporters who were not present at them! Similar efforts of imagination are suspected—sometimes, it is thought, clearly recognised—in the writings of mediæval chroniclers.[154] The rule, then, will be to distrust all narratives conforming too closely to a set formula.

(4) The fact stated is of such a nature that it could not have been learnt by observation alone. It may be a hidden fact—a private secret, for example. It may be a fact relating to a collectivity, and applying to an extensive area or a long period of time; for example, the common act of a whole army, a custom common to a whole people or a whole age, a statistical total obtained by the addition of numerous items. It may be a comprehensive judgment on the character of a man, a group, a custom, an event. Here we have to do with propositions derived from observations by synthesis or inference: the author can only have arrived at them indirectly; he began with data furnished by observation, and elaborated them by the logical processes of abstraction, generalisation, reasoning, calculation. Two questions arise. Does it appear that the author had sufficient data to work upon? Was he accurate, or the reverse, in his use of the data he had?