page break

IV

This change in the position occupied by the great ancient historians is only one phase of the change which was inevitable in the authority of all literary sources, as soon as non-literary sources, of whatever kind, were available, and recognised as being so. This change would not perhaps have been so noticeable as it has actually been, had it not happened that the literary oracles, who had for so long been so nearly all-in-all, turned out to be surprisingly silent, when we appealed to them to interpret the new evidence. Nothing, I think, has brought home so forcibly to students of ancient history the fragmentariness of all literary sources, as the discovery that so many new things, which were not in the literature at all, were knowable about the ancient world; and the result has been to demonstrate, with peculiar insistence, the existence of two quite distinct points of view from which to regard the history of an ancient people.

On the one hand, clearly, we may take such a people at their own valuation, and base our estimate of them on the story which they told about themselves. We may take our start from their historical literature, and formulate from this the conception which the nation itself formed of its mission in the world, of the difficulties which it encountered, and of the guidance, human and other, through which it believed that it overcame those difficulties, and attained its object. But if we take this road we shall do well to remember that, in the life of a nation, as in that of an individual, there will certainly be many things, of which the subject of the autobiography was but imperfectly aware, even if they were consciously realised at all; that the standard of values will necessarily be a personal one, and that occasionally, even in the best-balanced natures, the wish may be father to the thought. It is not always the principal actor in a, scene in which emotions run high, and page 20 ideals stand out clear and near, who is the best witness afterwards as to the things which actually happened We shall also have to keep in mind that a nation, even more than an individual, is a very complex thing, and that a large part of its growth takes place, as in the other case, unconsciously. While the great thinkers and creators at the top are living the life of reason and emotion, there is a vast mass of living tissue at the bottom which has little time for either; it lives, and moves, and has its being, but it takes no further part in the matter; except that one fine day it inflames, or rots, or is crushed or amputated beyond repair; and the last people to tell you how it all happened are those who were advancing head in air and enjoying the view. Not one of the statesmen or historians of antiquity was able to explain, any more than he could remedy, that' distress of nations with perplexity,' that nightmare of pessimism beyond all temporary or local alleviation 'for fear of those things which were coming on the earth.' They put it down to the gods, to misgovernment, to original sin, to national processes of birth, and growth, and decay; they did not know—nor did we till yesterday—that the bow in the cloud could bring death to man as well as life; that Nature was cutting off the water.

The other way of enquiry is that which is followed perforce in the study of inanimate nature; in the study of the other animals; and indeed in the study of nine-tenths of humanity as well. It consists in collecting, first of all, the extant remains of the peoples themselves, and of their works; and in constructing, from the data supplied by these remains, a presentation of the origin, the history, and the characteristics of their civilisation. If the extant remains include a literature, that is ot course an enormous gain; and if the literature includes a historian, our gain is greater still. But this source ot evidence is not indispensable to the method; and if a literature does in this way come under review, the first question which we put to it is, 'how far is its record in page 21 conformity with the rest of the evidence'? Were the people, that is, good judges of themselves, and of their place in the world? And clearly it will be only in proportion as the literature or any part of it sustains this test, that the literary documents will be admitted as evidence at all.

Broadly speaking, the mode of study which I am now trying to describe is that which in the ease of living races we call anthropology; in the case of peoples whose career is over, we call it archaeology, which is anthropology in the past tense: not forgetting, however, that in current speech archaeology is always tending to have two other usages, more specific and limited, according as the distinction is drawn between the literary evidence on the one hand, and the non-literary on the other; or between evidence for the mere daily life of the people, and for higher thought and feeling.

Now, obviously, in either of these narrower interpretations, archaeology is just as much in danger of presenting a one-sided and imperfect picture, as is the exclusive study of the literary evidence. It may give us an outline of the conditions of material life, of the arts and manufactures, warfare and commerce; of the masses of the population, and also, with good luck, of the minority who live in kings' palaces; it will measure ups and downs of national prosperity so far as imports and exports can measure them, of national morality so far as honesty in workmanship, or exchange, is a clue to that; of the standard of taste, so far as this is expressed in decorative art employed upon some durable material. But it will necessarily fail to distinguish the fool from the sage; the poet, or the prophet, or the patriot, from the prodigal, or the man with the muckrake. The last in fact will be, if anything, the most conspicuous of them all; for his goods, at all events, cannot follow him where he is gone; but remain to divert the archaeologist.

Now the ideal state of things would exist if we were able tp apply both these methods concurrently page 22 to a people as it grew; to watch literary achievement accumulating on the one hand, and potsherds piling up on the other; to feel the pulse and listen to the cries of infant genius, and to construct a history which should be autobiography and ethnology in one. But the child of genius is not born with a thermometer in his mouth, and the only civilisation which we are privileged to study de die is that of the early twentieth century.

Next best would be the case in which the whole of the surviving records should be thrown pell-mell into our lap; physique, artefacts, and literature, all in one heap, to disentangle at our will; and there are instances in which almost this has happened, by the sudden accident of discovery; as for example in Minoan Crete, or in tit sand-buried sites of the Taklamakan. For here, at all events, neither side of the evidence would be at advantage in face of the other; or at least it would be our own fault or misfortune if we allowed any class of data to possess us, to the exclusion of any other.

Far commoner is it that either the material evidence has come to us in abundance, and the literature—the men's own story—eludes us yet; as we have it for the most part in Egypt, in Central and Northern Europe, and among the illiterates of Outland; or else, where the literature, and all that that brings with it, has survived, but the soil has closed over cities and temples, aud the land is left without inhabitant. In either case, there is obviously grave danger that it may become customary to apply methods of enquiry which, however suitable to their immediate purpose, stop short of a point which would qualify the student to deal with new and heterogeneous material, if it came, merely because method itself has become atrophied on one side or other, for sheer want of corrective evidence; while the skill of the enquirer has become specialised in the direction where there was most to do.

A good and extreme instance of this atrophy is the history of Jewish history. For some two thousand page 23 years a great original literature was the subject of persistent and detailed study, on literary lines, though with the additional limitation that certain prevalent beliefs as to the character of this literature prevented certain advances, even in literary criticism, which had been made in the study of other literatures, as for example in those of Greece and Rome, from being regarded as applicable to the interpretation of this one. Still less, as may well be imagined, were lines of investigation which either started from, or took account of, evidence other than literary, regarded as capable of leading to conclusions of the same validity as those which resulted from the specialised literary method. In the meantime political circumstances which had nothing whatever to do with the matter at issue, had the effect of cutting off the students of Jewish literature for more than a thousand years from all opportunity of access either to the archaeological evidence for Jewish history, or to any other branch of ancient Semitic literature. At home, besides, an inadequate hypothesis of the relation of Man to Nature, and a similar divorce of tradition from observation in the study of Greek antiquity, prevented the great majority of students even from conceiving how great was the blank in their knowledge.

It is only within the last two generations, therefore, that the political decay of the Turkish Empire on one side, and the irruption, on the other, of the methods of the geologist, the geographer, and the evolutionary biologist, into the fields of literary criticism, of language and of mythology, have re-written from end to end the history of the Jews, as an integral part of an ordered History of the Nearer East, conceived as the history of two great riparian cultures, their intercourse with each other, their influence on their neighbours, and their perils at the hands of men from the plateaux and the steppes. This larger history has indeed but one chapter still not wholly written—that, namely, which shall deal page 24 with the ancient peoples of the plateau heart of Asia Minor; for Egypt, for Babylonia and Assyria, and for all the principal divisions of the Syrian highland, its outlines are not only traced, but for the most part filled with detail. Yet all this has been done with materials for history which were only in small part literary; even where they were literary at all, they had but the slightest claim to rank as history in themselves.