XIIHISTORIANS AS ENTERTAINERS

Herodotus is one of the oldest illustrations of the fact that a test of good literature is its capacity to entertain us. There are two sorts of writing—the entertaining and the dull—and the dull is outside literature. This is a fact which, though it is perfectly obvious, tends to be forgotten by many writers, even by many able writers, in every century. Authors fall in love with their own ponderosity, forgetting that a huge tome is too often a huge tomb. That is the explanation of the long lives and the still longer histories that the publishers and the authors of the nineteenth century loved. Biographies became life-size, and histories rivalled in length the wars they chronicled. A Victorian biographer appeared to think that he was performing more ambitious work in writing a life of Milton in six volumes than if he were to write it in one. Similarly, a historian instead of giving us a Cromwell that the eye could take in as one absorbingfigure, would devote one volume to this bit of him and another to that, and would leave us with a mass of information about hisdisjecta membra, which we might or might not piece together, just as we pleased. This was called scientific history. Its disciples forgot that history is an art and that, like all other arts, whatever its ultimate object, it should be subject to the law of entertainment. Nothing else will keep history alive, except as a schoolbook or a source-book. An inaccurate history that entertains will outlive an accurate history that wearies. Herodotus did not cease to be read, even when he was generally regarded as the father of lies. It is true that scholars no longer regard him as a liar, and that Mr. Godley, in the preface to his admirable translation in the Loeb Library, claims with Dr. Macan that “the most stringent application of historical and critical methods to the text of Herodotus leaves the work irrevocably and irreplaceably at the head of European prose literature, whether in its scientific or in its artistic character.” At the same time, even if we did not know about the scientific value of Herodotus, his artistic value would be indisputable. He was as indefatigably interested in the world as Mr. Pepys was in himself, and he can infect us with the thrill of his delightful curiosity.

Curiosity, on the other hand, implies interest in some sort of truth, and the pursuit of some sort of truth seems to be an essential in a book that is to entertain us permanently. The artist is moralist as well as entertainer, and the truth that lies in him shapes his work, whether he is Æschylus or Plato, Herodotus or Sallust. Sallust’sJugurtha, Professor Rolfe warns us in a preface to the Loeb translation, “is rather like a historical novel of the better class than like sober history” and theCataline, we are told, “is inaccurate in many of its details ... with inevitable distortion of the facts.” Even so, both works are entertaining statements of a great moral idea—the idea of the corruption of human nature by success. Sallust, it may be argued, had the propagandist purpose of attacking the corruption of the nobles rather than the moral purpose of exhibiting the corruption of human nature, but he writes his history with an amazing dramatic sense of the catastrophe that occurs even in great souls. It occurred in the soul of Jugurtha, and in the soul of Rome. “When Carthage, the rival of Rome’s sway, had perished root and branch, and all seas and lands were open, then Fortune began to grow cruel and to bring confusion into all our affairs. Those who had found it easy to bear hardship and dangers, anxiety and adversity,found leisure and wealth, desirable under other circumstances, a burden and a curse. Hence the lust for power, then for money, grew upon them; these were, I may say, the root of all evils.” What is all literature but the fable of such things? It may be an inspiring fable or a derisive fable, a tragic fable or a comic fable, but in any event it cannot be good literature unless it is an entertaining fable.

Herodotus, certainly, never forgets for long that history is a fable. That wonderful anecdote of Gyges and the infatuated King who compelled him to hide behind the door and to look on the Queen when she was naked, with the result that the Queen on discovering him, ordered him to kill the King and marry her or die himself, is not a mere unrelated scene as from a ballet, but has its tragic signature five generations later, when the power of Crœsus, the descendant of Gyges, is destroyed and he is a prisoner in the camp of Cyrus. Crœsus, being unable to understand how the disaster had happened, obtained permission from Cyrus to send messengers to Delphi to enquire of the Oracle why it had deceived him. And the priestess replied: “None may escape his destined lot, not even a god. Crœsus hath paid for the sin of his ancestor of the fifth generation: who, being of the guard of the Heraclidæ,was led by the guile of a woman to slay his master, and took to himself the royal state of that master, whereto he had no right.” We find in pagan literature a sense of the divine government of the world that is missing from the greater part of modern Christian literature. The pagan historians, I think, have a profounder sense of sin and of the sufferings that result from sin than most of the Christian historians. Nowadays, we hesitate before allowing even Richard III or Judge Jeffreys to have been a sinner. And, as we have found no substitute for those ancient colours of vice and virtue, much of our history is colourless and uninteresting. The sense of sin is of infinite value to an artist, if only because it enables him to see how striking are the contrasts that exist in every human being. He sees the great man as a miserable sinner, and he sees him all the more truthfully for this. He sees the beautiful woman as a miserable sinner, and he sees her all the more truthfully for this. Aristotle, indeed, thought that it was impossible to write great tragic literature except about a noble character who was seen to be a sinner. It was probably never done till the appearance of the Gospels, and I am not sure whether it has been done since. Shakespeare had as compassionate a sense of the flaw in human nature even at itsgreatest as the Greek dramatists and the supreme Greek biographer.

There is, no doubt, a school of writers who have so keen a sense of the flaws that they can see scarcely anything else. This is inimical to art. Suetonius provides us with a feast of flaws, from which we rise with the feeling that we have been dining on spiced and putrid dishes. His was not a disinterested observation of human character. He was a specialist in the vices. It is appalling to think what he would have made of Sempronia, one of the many Roman ladies whom Catiline enticed into his conspiracy. Sallust’s portrait of her is a masterpiece:

Now among these women was Sempronia, who had often committed many crimes of masculine daring. In birth and beauty, in her husband and children, she was abundantly favoured by fortune; well read in the literature of Greece and Rome, able to play the lyre and dance more skilfully than an honest woman need, and having many other accomplishments which minister to voluptuousness. But there was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity; you could not easily say whether she was less sparing of her money or her honour; her desires were so ardent that she sought men more often than she was sought by them. Even before the time of the conspiracy, she had often broken her word, repudiated her debts, been privy to murder; poverty and extravagance combined had driven her headlong.Nevertheless, she was a woman of no mean endowments; she could write verses, bandy jests, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton; in fine, she possessed a high degree of wit and charm.

A miserable sinner, undoubtedly. How odious and how interesting!

But, even as gossips, how these ancient historians still keep their hold on us! Herodotus is the father of nursery tales as well as of moral tales. His account of Egypt in the second book of his history may appeal to the anthropologist in some of us; it also appeals to the child in all of us. He must have omitted thousands of the stories that he heard on his travels, but he had a genius for finding room for the interesting story. His pages are rich in attractive stories like that which tells how Psammetichus decided whether the Egyptians or the Phrygians were the oldest nation:

Now before Psammetichus became king of Egypt, the Egyptians deemed themselves to be the oldest nation on earth.... Psammetichus, being nowise able to discover by enquiry what men had first come into being, devised a plan whereby he took two new-born children of common men and gave them to a shepherd to bring up among his flock. He gave charge that none should speak any word in their hearing; they were to lie by themselves in a lonely hut, and in due season the shepherd was to bringgoats and give the children their milk and do all else needful. Psammetichus did this, and gave this charge, because he desired to hear what speech would first break from the children, when they were past the age of indistinct babbling. And he had his wish; for, when the shepherd had done as he was bidden for two years, one day as he opened the door and entered, both the children ran to him, stretching out their hands and calling “Bekos.” When he first heard this he said nothing of it; but coming often and taking careful note, he was ever hearing this same word, till at last he told the matter to his master, and on command brought the children into the King’s presence. Psammetichus heard them himself, and enquired to what language this word “Bekos” might belong; he found it to be a Phrygian word signifying bread. Reasoning from this fact the Egyptians confessed that the Phrygians were older than they.

Scientific? Perhaps not. And yet science and art may embrace in the recording of such stories as this. But it is in the museum of the arts, not in that of the sciences, that Herodotus holds his immortal place. He may not be the first of the scientific historians: he is certainly the first of the European masters of the art of entertaining prose.

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