The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science | Page 4

is not strictly needful for my present
purpose that I should say anything about narratives which are
professedly fictitious. Yet it may be well, perhaps, if I disclaim any
intention of derogating from their value, when I insist upon the
paramount necessity of recollecting that there is no sort of relation
between the ethical, or the aesthetic, or even the scientific importance
of such works, and their worth as historical documents. Unquestionably,
to the poetic artist, or even to the student of psychology, "Hamlet" and
"Macbeth" may be better instructors than all the books of a wilderness
of professors of aesthetics or of moral philosophy. But, as evidence of
occurrences in Denmark, or in Scotland, at the times and places
indicated, they are out of court; the profoundest admiration for them,
the deepest gratitude for their influence, are consistent with the
knowledge that, historically speaking, they are worthless fables, in
which any foundation of reality that may exist is submerged beneath
the imaginative superstructure.
At present, however, I am not concerned to dwell upon the importance
of fictitious literature and the immensity of the work which it has
effected in the education of the human race. I propose to deal with the
much more limited inquiry: Are there two other classes of consecutive
narratives (as distinct from statements of individual facts), or only one?
Is there any known historical work which is throughout exactly true, or
is there not? In the case of the great majority of histories the answer is
not doubtful: they are all only partially true. Even those venerable
works which bear the names of some of the greatest of ancient Greek

and Roman writers, and which have been accepted by generation after
generation, down to modern times, as stories of unquestionable truth,
have been compelled by scientific criticism, after a long battle, to
descend to the common level, and to confession to a large admixture of
error. I might fairly take this for granted; but it may be well that I
should entrench myself behind the very apposite words of a historical
authority who is certainly not obnoxious to even a suspicion of
sceptical tendencies.
Time was--and that not very long ago--when all the relations
of ancient authors concerning the old world were received with a ready
belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith accepted with equal
satisfaction the narrative of the campaigns of Caesar and of the doings
of Romulus, the account of Alexander's marches and of the conquests
of Semiramis. We can most of us remember when, in this country, the
whole story of regal Rome, and even the legend of the Trojan
settlement in Latium, were seriously placed before boys as history, and
discoursed of as unhesitatingly and in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of
the Catilline Conspiracy or the Conquest of Britain. ...
But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the birth and
growth of a new science--the Science of Historical Criticism. ... The
whole world of profane history has been revolutionised. ...<1> quote>
If these utterances were true when they fell from the lips of a Bampton
lecturer in 1859, with how much greater force do they appeal to us now,
when the immense labours of the generation now passing away
constitute one vast illustration of the power and fruitfulness of
scientific methods of investigation in history, no less than in all other
departments of knowledge.
At the present time, I suppose, there is no one who doubts that histories
which appertain to any other people than the Jews, and their spiritual
progeny in the first century, fall within the second class of the three
enumerated. Like Goethe's Autobiography, they might all be entitled
"Wahrheit und Dichtung"--"Truth and Fiction." The proportion of the
two constituents changes indefinitely; and the quality of the fiction
varies through the whole gamut of unveracity. But "Dichtung" is
always there. For the most acute and learned of historians cannot
remedy the imperfections of his sources of information; nor can the

most impartial wholly escape the influence of the "personal equation"
generated by his temperament and by his education. Therefore, from
the narratives of Herodotus to those set forth in yesterday's "Times," all
history is to be read subject to the warning that fiction has its share
therein. The modern vast development of fugitive literature cannot be
the unmitigated evil that some do vainly say it is, since it has put an end
to the popular delusion of less press-ridden times, that what appears in
print must be true. We should rather hope that some beneficent
influence may create among the erudite a like healthy suspicion of
manuscripts and inscriptions, however ancient; for a bulletin may lie,
even though it be written in cuneiform characters. Hotspur's starling,
that was to be