Essays and Lectures

Oscar Wilde

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pubOne.info thank you for your continued support and wish to present you this new edition. 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.

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• Publié par: Pub One Info
• Date de parution: 27 septembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782819928775
• Langue: English

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THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM
CHAPTER I
HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolatedfact in the civilisation or literature of any people. It is part ofthat complex working towards freedom which may be described as therevolt against authority. It is merely one facet of thatspeculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of actionproduces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is theparent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as afactor of progress is based not so much on the results it attains,as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method bywhich it works.
Being thus the resultant of forces essentiallyrevolutionary, it is not to be found in the ancient world among thematerial despotisms of Asia or the stationary civilisation ofEgypt. The clay cylinders of Assyria and Babylon, the hieroglyphicsof the pyramids, form not history but the material for history.
The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to thebarbarous forest life of the nation, are marked with a soberness ofjudgment, a freedom from invention, which is almost unparalleled inthe writings of any people; but the protective spirit which is thecharacteristic of that people proved as fatal to their literatureas to their commerce. Free criticism is as unknown as free trade.While as regards the Hindus, their acute, analytical and logicalmind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and philosophy thanto history or chronology. Indeed, in history their imaginationseems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly mingledtogether that any attempt to separate them seems vain. If we exceptthe identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the IndianChandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truthof their writings or examine their method of investigation.
It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanicrace that history proper is to be found, as well as the spirit ofhistorical criticism; among that wonderful offshoot of theprimitive 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 exceptthe blind forces of nature.
For, from the day when they left the chilltable-lands of Tibet and journeyed, a nomad people, to AEgeanshores, the characteristic of their nature has been the search forlight, and the spirit of historical criticism is part of thatwonderful Aufklarung or illumination of the intellect which seemsto have burst on the Greek race like a great flood of light aboutthe sixth century B. C.
L'ESPRIT D'UN SIECLE NE NAIT PAS ET NE MEURT PAS EJOUR FIXE, and the first critic is perhaps as difficult to discoveras the first man. It is from democracy that the spirit of criticismborrows its intolerance of dogmatic authority, from physicalscience the alluring analogies of law and order, from philosophythe conception of an essential unity underlying the complexmanifestations of phenomena. It appears first rather as a changedattitude of mind than as a principle of research, and its earliestinfluences are to be found in the sacred writings.
For men begin to doubt in questions of religionfirst, and then in matters of more secular interest; and as regardsthe nature of the spirit of historical criticism itself in itsultimate development, it is not confined merely to the empiricalmethod of ascertaining whether an event happened or not, but isconcerned 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 ofthe philosophy of history.
Now, while the workings of historical criticism inthese two spheres of sacred and uninspired history are essentiallymanifestations of the same spirit, yet their methods are sodifferent, the canons of evidence so entirely separate, and themotives in each case so unconnected, that it will be necessary fora clear estimation of the progress of Greek thought, that we shouldconsider these two questions entirely apart from one another. Ishall then in both cases take the succession of writers in theirchronological order as representing the rational order - not thatthe succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or thatdialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceivesits advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods ofstagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectualdevelopment, not merely in the question of historical criticism,but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems soessentially normal, so free from all disturbing externalinfluences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in thefootsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the ordersanctioned by reason.
CHAPTER II
AT an early period in their intellectual developmentthe Greeks reached that critical point in the history of everycivilised nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealedtruth, when the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer besatisfied by the lower, material conceptions of their inspiredwriters, and when men find it impossible to pour the new wine offree thought into the old bottles of a narrow and a trammellingcreed.
From their Aryan ancestors they had received thefatal legacy of a mythology stained with immoral and monstrousstories which strove to hide the rational order of nature in achaos of miracles, and to mar by imputed wickedness the perfectionof God's nature - a very shirt of Nessos in which the Heracles ofrationalism barely escaped annihilation. Now while undoubtedly thespeculations of Thales, and the alluring analogies of law and orderafforded by physical science, were most important forces inencouraging the rise of the spirit of scepticism, yet it was on itsethical side that the Greek mythology was chiefly open toattack.
It is difficult to shake the popular belief inmiracles, but no man will admit sin and immorality as attributes ofthe Ideal he worships; so the first symptoms of a new order ofthought are shown in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes andHeraclitos against the evil things said by Homer of the sons ofGod; and in the story told of Pythagoras, how that he saw torturedin Hell the 'two founders of Greek theology, ' we can recognise therise of the Aufklarung as clearly as we see the Reformationforeshadowed in the INFERNO of Dante.
Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of thesestories soon succumbed before the destructive effects of the APRIORI ethical criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, asis its custom, found immediately a convenient shelter under theaegis of the doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings.
To this allegorical school the tale of the fightaround the walls of Troy was a mystery, behind which, as behind aveil, were hidden certain moral and physical truths. The contestbetween Athena and Ares was that eternal contest between rationalthought and the brute force of ignorance; the arrows which rattledin the quiver of the 'Far Darter' were no longer the instruments ofvengeance shot from the golden bow of the child of God, but thecommon rays of the sun, which was itself nothing but a mere inertmass of burning metal.
Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness ofPhilistine analysis, has ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to asymbol of the dawn. There were Philistines among the Greeks alsowho saw in the [Greek text which cannot bereproduced] a mere metaphor for atmospheric power.
Now while this tendency to look for metaphors andhidden meanings must be ranked as one of the germs of historicalcriticism, yet it was essentially unscientific. Its inherentweakness is clearly pointed out by Plato, who showed that whilethis 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 universalprinciple; a position he is by no means prepared to admit.
Like many other great principles it suffered fromits disciples, and furnished its own refutation when the web ofPenelope was analysed into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic,the warp representing the premises, and the woof theconclusion.
Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation ofthe sacred writings as an essentially dangerous method, provingeither too much or too little, Plato himself returns to the earliermode of attack, and re-writes history with a didactic purpose,laying down certain ethical canons of historical criticism. God isgood; God is just; God is true; God is without the common passionsof men. These are the tests to which we are to bring the stories ofthe Greek religion.
'God predestines no men to ruin, nor sendsdestruction on innocent cities; He never walks the earth in strangedisguise, nor has to mourn for the death of any well-beloved son.Away with the tears for Sarpedon, the lying dream sent toAgamemnon, and the story of the broken covenant! ' (Plato,REPUBLIC, Book ii. 380; iii. 388, 391. )
Similar ethical canons are applied to the accountsof the heroes of the days of old, and by the same A PRIORIprinciples Achilles is rescued from the charges of avarice andinsolence in a passage which may be recited as the earliestinstance of that 'whitewashing of great men, ' as it has beencalled, which is so popular in our own day, when Catiline andClodius are represented as honest and far-seeing politicians, whenEINE EDLE UND GUTE NATUR is claimed for Tiberius, and Nero isrescued from his heritage of infamy as an accomplished DILETTANTEwhose moral aberrations are more than excused by his exquisiteartistic sense and charming tenor voice.
But besides the allegorising principle ofinterpretation, and the ethical reconstruction of history, therewas a third theory, which may be called the semi-historical, andwhich goes by the name of Euhemeros, though he was by no means thefirst to propound it.
Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declaredthat he had discovered in the island of Panchaia, and whichpurported to be a column erect