Historical Difficulties and Contested Events
9781465681577
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The age in which we live seems remarkable for its appreciation of men of renown, and for the homage rendered to them. Societies that are still in their youth are liable to be dazzled by the superficial wonders of historical tradition, and to allow their admiration to be easily taken captive; but an epoch ripened by experience, and by a long habit of literary criticism, should rather reserve its enthusiasm for ascertained facts, and for such deeds of renown as are beyond the pale of doubt and discussion. Thus we find in the present day a marked predilection, not only as a matter of general utility but also from a sense of justice, for a keen research into every doubtful point of history. Nations as well as individuals need the maturity of time to appreciate at their real value the actions and the traditions of past ages. The art of writing history has two very distinct branches, the combination of which is essential to the production of a complete historian. A research into, and a criticism of, events with no other aim than to elicit truth, is one branch of the historical art; the other is the resolution to interpret, to describe, to give to each event its full signification and colouring; to put that life into it in fact which belongs to every human spectacle. It is only the first part of the task that we propose to undertake in these essays. Seneca has said that we must not give too ready credence to hearsay, for some disguise the truth in order to deceive, and some because they are themselves the victims of deception. Other Greek and Latin writers have also warned us against a too ready faith in popular traditions. How many errors bequeathed to us by the historians of antiquity owe their enlarged growth, ere they reached us, to their passage through the middle ages. De Quincy tells us that if a saying has a proverbial fame, the probability is that it was never said. The same opinion may be held of a great many so-called historical facts which are perfectly familiar even to the ignorant, and yet which never happened. The French critic Lenglet du Fresnoy, in his work “L’Histoire justifiée contre les Romans,” has devoted about 100 pages to historical doubts; but he only touches the surface of the subject. Many years before Niebuhr, the Abbé Lancellotti published at Venice in 1637, under the title of “Farfalloni degli antichi Storici,” a curious volume, now rare, in which he exposes the many absurd stories taught in schools as history. The book contains more than a hundred of these fictions, and was translated into French by T. Oliva 1770.
