Essays and Lectures
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Oscar Wilde >> Essays and Lectures
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12 Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde
Scanned and proofed by David Price, ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Essays and Lectures
Contents
The Rise of Historical Criticism
The English Renaissance of Art
House Decoration
Art and the Handicraftman
Lecture to Art Students
London Models
Poems in Prose
THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the
civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that
complex working towards freedom which may be described as the
revolt against authority. It is merely one facet of that
speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action
produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the
parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a
factor of progress is based not so much on the results it attains,
as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method by
which it works.
Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is
not to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms
of Asia or the stationary civilisation of Egypt. The clay
cylinders of Assyria and Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the
pyramids, form not history but the material for history.
The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest
life of the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a
freedom from invention, which is almost unparalleled in the
writings of any people; but the protective spirit which is the
characteristic of that people proved as fatal to their literature
as to their commerce. Free criticism is as unknown as free trade.
While as regards the Hindus, their acute, analytical and logical
mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and philosophy than
to history or chronology. Indeed, in history their imagination
seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly mingled
together that any attempt to separate them seems vain. If we
except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian
Chandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truth
of their writings or examine their method of investigation.
It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that
history proper is to be found, as well as the spirit of historical
criticism; among that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans,
whom we call by the name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well
said, we owe all that moves in the world except the blind forces of
nature.
For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and
journeyed, a nomad people, to AEgean shores, the characteristic of
their nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of
historical criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklarung or
illumination of the intellect which seems to have burst on the
Greek race like a great flood of light about the sixth century B.C.
L'ESPRIT D'UN SIECLE NE NAIT PAS ET NE MEURT PAS E JOUR FIXE, and
the first critic is perhaps as difficult to discover as the first
man. It is from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its
intolerance of dogmatic authority, from physical science the
alluring analogies of law and order, from philosophy the conception
of an essential unity underlying the complex manifestations of
phenomena. It appears first rather as a changed attitude of mind
than as a principle of research, and its earliest influences are to
be found in the sacred writings.
For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in
matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the
spirit of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development,
it is not confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining
whether an event happened or not, but is concerned also with the
investigation into the causes of events, the general relations
which phenomena of life hold to one another, and in its ultimate
development passes into the wider question of the philosophy of
history.
Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two
spheres of sacred and uninspired history are essentially
manifestations of the same spirit, yet their methods are so
different, the canons of evidence so entirely separate, and the
motives in each case so unconnected, that it will be necessary for
a clear estimation of the progress of Greek thought, that we should
consider these two questions entirely apart from one another. I
shall then in both cases take the succession of writers in their
chronological order as representing the rational order - not that
the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that
dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives
its advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of
stagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual
development, not merely in the question of historical criticism,
but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems so
essentially normal, so free from all disturbing external
influences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in the
footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the order
sanctioned by reason.
CHAPTER II
AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks
reached that critical point in the history of every civilised
nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when
the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the
lower, material conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men
find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the
old bottles of a narrow and a trammelling creed.
From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a
mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove
to hide the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to
mar by imputed wickedness the perfection of God's nature - a very
shirt of Nessos in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped
annihilation. Now while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales,
and the alluring analogies of law and order afforded by physical
science, were most important forces in encouraging the rise of the
spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its ethical side that the Greek
mythology was chiefly open to attack.
It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man
will admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he
worships; so the first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown
in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the
evil things said by Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told
of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders
of Greek theology,' we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as
clearly as we see the Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of
Dante.
Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon
succumbed before the destructive effects of the A PRIORI ethical
criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom,
found immediately a convenient shelter under the aegis of the
doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings.
To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls
of Troy was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden
certain moral and physical truths. The contest between Athena and
Ares was that eternal contest between rational thought and the
brute force of ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of
the 'Far Darter' were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot
from the golden bow of the child of God, but the common rays of the
sun, which was itself nothing but a mere inert mass of burning
metal.
Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis,
has ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn.
There were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced] a mere metaphor for atmospheric
power.
Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings
must be ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it
was essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly
pointed out by Plato, who showed that while this theory will no
doubt explain many of the current legends, yet, if it is to be
appealed to at all, it must be as a universal principle; a position
he is by no means prepared to admit.
Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples,
and furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was
analysed into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp
representing the premises, and the woof the conclusion.
Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred
writings as an essentially dangerous method, proving either too
much or too little, Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of
attack, and re-writes history with a didactic purpose, laying down
certain ethical canons of historical criticism. God is good; God
is just; God is true; God is without the common passions of men.
These are the tests to which we are to bring the stories of the
Greek religion.
'God predestines no men to ruin, nor sends destruction on innocent
cities; He never walks the earth in strange disguise, nor has to
mourn for the death of any well-beloved son. Away with the tears
for Sarpedon, the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of
the broken covenant!' (Plato, REPUBLIC, Book ii. 380; iii. 388,
391.)
Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of
the days of old, and by the same A PRIORI principles Achilles is
rescued from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage
which may be recited as the earliest instance of that 'whitewashing
of great men,' as it has been called, which is so popular in our
own day, when Catiline and Clodius are represented as honest and
far-seeing politicians, when EINE EDLE UND GUTE NATUR is claimed
for Tiberius, and Nero is rescued from his heritage of infamy as an
accomplished DILETTANTE whose moral aberrations are more than
excused by his exquisite artistic sense and charming tenor voice.
But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the
ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which
may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of
Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it.
Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had
discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a
column erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on
earth, this shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and
heroes of ancient Greece were 'mere ordinary mortals, whose
achievements had been a good deal exaggerated and misrepresented,'
and that the proper canon of historical criticism as regards the
treatment of myths was to rationalise the incredible, and to
present the plausible residuum as actual truth.
To him and his school, the centaurs, for instance, those mythical
sons of the storm, strange links between the lives of men and
animals, were merely some youths from the village of Nephele in
Thessaly, distinguished for their sporting tastes; the 'living
harvest of panoplied knights,' which sprang so mystically from the
dragon's teeth, a body of mercenary troops supported by the profits
on a successful speculation in ivory; and Actaeon, an ordinary
master of hounds, who, living before the days of subscription, was
eaten out of house and home by the expenses of his kennel.
Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of
historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely
probable by the modern investigations into the workings of the
mythopoeic spirit in post-Christian times. Charlemagne and Roland,
St. Francis and William Tell, are none the less real personages
because their histories are filled with much that is fictitious and
incredible, but in all cases what is essentially necessary is some
external corroboration, such as is afforded by the mention of
Roland and Roncesvalles in the chronicles of England, or (in the
sphere of Greek legend) by the excavations of Hissarlik. But to
rob a mythical narrative of its kernel of supernatural elements,
and to present the dry husk thus obtained as historical fact, is,
as has been well said, to mistake entirely the true method of
investigation and to identify plausibility with truth.
And as regards the critical point urged by Palaiphatos, Strabo, and
Polybius, that pure invention on Homer's part is inconceivable, we
may without scruple allow it, for myths, like constitutions, grow
gradually, and are not formed in a day. But between a poet's
deliberate creation and historical accuracy there is a wide field
of the mythopoeic faculty.
This Euhemeristic theory was welcomed as an essentially
philosophical and critical method by the unscientific Romans, to
whom it was introduced by the poet Ennius, that pioneer of
cosmopolitan Hellenicism, and it continued to characterise the tone
of ancient thought on the question of the treatment of mythology
till the rise of Christianity, when it was turned by such writers
as Augustine and Minucius Felix into a formidable weapon of attack
on Paganism. It was then abandoned by all those who still bent the
knee to Athena or to Zeus, and a general return, aided by the
philosophic mystics of Alexandria, to the allegorising principle of
interpretation took place, as the only means of saving the deities
of Olympus from the Titan assaults of the new Galilean God. In
what vain defence, the statue of Mary set in the heart of the
Pantheon can best tell us.
Religions, however, may be absorbed, but they never are disproved,
and the stories of the Greek mythology, spiritualised by the
purifying influence of Christianity, reappear in many of the
southern parts of Europe in our own day. The old fable that the
Greek gods took service with the new religion under assumed names
has more truth in it than the many care to discover.
Having now traced the progress of historical criticism in the
special treatment of myth and legend, I shall proceed to
investigate the form in which the same spirit manifested itself as
regards what one may term secular history and secular historians.
The field traversed will be found to be in some respects the same,
but the mental attitude, the spirit, the motive of investigation
are all changed.
There were heroes before the son of Atreus and historians before
Herodotus, yet the latter is rightly hailed as the father of
history, for in him we discover not merely the empirical connection
of cause and effect, but that constant reference to Laws, which is
the characteristic of the historian proper.
For all history must be essentially universal; not in the sense of
comprising all the synchronous events of the past time, but through
the universality of the principles employed. And the great
conceptions which unify the work of Herodotus are such as even
modern thought has not yet rejected. The immediate government of
the world by God, the nemesis and punishment which sin and pride
invariably bring with them, the revealing of God's purpose to His
people by signs and omens, by miracles and by prophecy; these are
to Herodotus the laws which govern the phenomena of history. He is
essentially the type of supernatural historian; his eyes are ever
strained to discern the Spirit of God moving over the face of the
waters of life; he is more concerned with final than with efficient
causes.
Yet we can discern in him the rise of that HISTORIC SENSE which is
the rational antecedent of the science of historical criticism, the
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced], to use the words of a
Greek writer, as opposed to that which comes either [Greek text
which cannot be reproduced].
He has passed through the valley of faith and has caught a glimpse
of the sunlit heights of Reason; but like all those who, while
accepting the supernatural, yet attempt to apply the canons of
rationalism, he is essentially inconsistent. For the better
apprehension of the character of this historic sense in Herodotus
it will be necessary to examine at some length the various forms of
criticism in which it manifests itself.
Such fabulous stories as that of the Phoenix, of the goat-footed
men, of the headless beings with eyes in their breasts, of the men
who slept six months in the year ([Greek text which cannot be
reproduced]), of the wer-wolf of the Neuri, and the like, are
entirely rejected by him as being opposed to the ordinary
experience of life, and to those natural laws whose universal
influence the early Greek physical philosophers had already made
known to the world of thought. Other legends, such as the suckling
of Cyrus by a bitch, or the feather-rain of northern Europe, are
rationalised and explained into a woman's name and a fall of snow.
The supernatural origin of the Scythian nation, from the union of
Hercules and the monstrous Echidna, is set aside by him for the
more probable account that they were a nomad tribe driven by the
Massagetae from Asia; and he appeals to the local names of their
country as proof of the fact that the Kimmerians were the original
possessors.
But in the case of Herodotus it will be more instructive to pass on
from points like these to those questions of general probability,
the true apprehension of which depends rather on a certain quality
of mind than on any possibility of formulated rules, questions
which form no unimportant part of scientific history; for it must
be remembered always that the canons of historical criticism are
essentially different from those of judicial evidence, for they
cannot, like the latter, be made plain to every ordinary mind, but
appeal to a certain historical faculty founded on the experience of
life. Besides, the rules for the reception of evidence in courts
of law are purely stationary, while the science of historical
probability is essentially progressive, and changes with the
advancing spirit of each age.
Now, of all the speculative canons of historical criticism, none is
more important than that which rests on psychological probability.
Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the
presence of Helen within the walls of Troy. Had she been there, he
says, Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]) as not to give her up, when they
and their children and their city were in such peril (ii. 118); and
as regards the authority of Homer, some incidental passages in his
poem show that he knew of Helen's sojourn in Egypt during the
siege, but selected the other story as being a more suitable motive
for an epic. Similarly he does not believe that the Alcmaeonidae
family, a family who had always been the haters of tyranny ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]), and to whom, even more than to
Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever
have been so treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of
Marathon as a signal for the Persian host to fall on the city. A
shield, he acknowledges, was held up, but it could not possibly
have been done by such friends of liberty as the house of Alcmaeon;
nor will he believe that a great king like Rhampsinitus would have
sent his daughter [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].
Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of
probability; a Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been
rich enough to build a pyramid, and, besides, on chronological
grounds the story is impossible (ii. 134).
In another passage (ii. 63), after giving an account of the
forcible entry of the priests of Ares into the chapel of the god's
mother, which seems to have been a sort of religious faction fight
where sticks were freely used ([Greek text which cannot be
reproduced]), 'I feel sure,' he says, 'that many of them died from
getting their heads broken, notwithstanding the assertions of the
Egyptian priests to the contrary.' There is also something
charmingly naive in the account he gives of the celebrated Greek
swimmer who dived a distance of eighty stadia to give his
countrymen warning of the Persian advance. 'If, however,' he says,
'I may offer an opinion on the subject, I would say that he came in
a boat.'
There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the
instances I have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands
on the borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note
even the most minute instances of the rise of the critical and
sceptical spirit of inquiry.
How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, be shown
by a reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic
tests to matters connected with religion. He nowhere, indeed,
grapples with the moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek
Bible; and where he rejects as incredible the marvellous
achievements of Hercules in Egypt, he does so on the express
grounds that he had not yet been received among the gods, and so
was still subject to the ordinary conditions of mortal life ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]).
Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems
to have been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage
(ii. 45) concludes with a pious hope that God will pardon him for
having gone so far, the great rationalistic passage being, of
course, that in which he rejects the mythical account of the
foundation of Dodona. 'How can a dove speak with a human voice?'
he asks, and rationalises the bird into a foreign princess.
Similarly he seems more inclined to believe that the great storm at
the beginning of the Persian War ceased from ordinary atmospheric
causes, and not in consequence of the incantations of the MAGIANS.
He calls Melampos, whom the majority of the Greeks looked on as an
inspired prophet, 'a clever man who had acquired for himself the
art of prophecy'; and as regards the miracle told of the AEginetan
statues of the primeval deities of Damia and Auxesia, that they
fell on their knees when the sacrilegious Athenians strove to carry
them off, 'any one may believe it,' he says, 'who likes, but as for
myself, I place no credence in the tale.'
So much then for the rationalistic spirit of historical criticism,
as far as it appears explicitly in the works of this great and
philosophic writer; but for an adequate appreciation of his
position we must also note how conscious he was of the value of
documentary evidence, of the use of inscriptions, of the importance
of the poets as throwing light on manners and customs as well as on
historical incidents. No writer of any age has more vividly
recognised the fact that history is a matter of evidence, and that
it is as necessary for the historian to state his authority as it
is to produce one's witnesses in a court of law.
While, however, we can discern in Herodotus the rise of an historic
sense, we must not blind ourselves to the large amount of instances
where he receives supernatural influences as part of the ordinary
forces of life. Compared to Thucydides, who succeeded him in the
development of history, he appears almost like a mediaeval writer
matched with a modern rationalist. For, contemporary though they
were, between these two authors there is an infinite chasm of
thought.
The essential difference of their methods may be best illustrated
from those passages where they treat of the same subject. The
execution of the Spartan heralds, Nicolaos and Aneristos, during
the Peloponnesian War is regarded by Herodotus as one of the most
supernatural instances of the workings of nemesis and the wrath of
an outraged hero; while the lengthened siege and ultimate fall of
Troy was brought about by the avenging hand of God desiring to
manifest unto men the mighty penalties which always follow upon
mighty sins. But Thucydides either sees not, or desires not to
see, in either of these events the finger of Providence, or the
punishment of wicked doers. The death of the heralds is merely an
Athenian retaliation for similar outrages committed by the opposite
side; the long agony of the ten years' siege is due merely to the
want of a good commissariat in the Greek army; while the fall of
the city is the result of a united military attack consequent on a
good supply of provisions.
Now, it is to be observed that in this latter passage, as well as
elsewhere, Thucydides is in no sense of the word a sceptic as
regards his attitude towards the truth of these ancient legends.
Agamemnon and Atreus, Theseus and Eurystheus, even Minos, about
whom Herodotus has some doubts, are to him as real personages as
Alcibiades or Gylippus. The points in his historical criticism of
the past are, first, his rejection of all extra-natural
interference, and, secondly, the attributing to these ancient
heroes the motives and modes of thought of his own day. The
present was to him the key to the explanation of the past, as it
was to the prediction of the future.
Now, as regards his attitude towards the supernatural he is at one
with modern science. We too know that, just as the primeval coal-
beds reveal to us the traces of rain-drops and other atmospheric
phenomena similar to those of our own day, so, in estimating the
history of the past, the introduction of no force must be allowed
whose workings we cannot observe among the phenomena around us. To
lay down canons of ultra-historical credibility for the explanation
of events which happen to have preceded us by a few thousand years,
is as thoroughly unscientific as it is to intermingle preternatural
in geological theories.
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