which we have lost or rejected for ourselves.
Yet it has been a fatal mistake with the critics.
They found themselves off the recognized ground of
Romance and Paganism, and they failed to see the same
principles at work, though at work with new materials.
In the records of all human affairs, it cannot be
too often insisted on that two kinds of truth run
for ever side by side, or rather, crossing in and
out with each other, form the warp and the woof of
the coloured web which we call history. The one,
the literal and external truths corresponding to the
eternal and as yet undiscovered laws of fact:
the other, the truth of feeling and of thought, which
embody themselves either in distorted pictures of
the external, or in some entirely new creation; sometimes
moulding and shaping real history, sometimes taking
the form of heroic biography, of tradition, or popular
legend; sometimes appearing as recognized fiction
in the epic, the drama, or the novel. It is useless
to tell us that this is to confuse truth and falsehood.
We are stating a fact, not a theory, and if it makes
truth and falsehood difficult to distinguish, that
is nature’s fault, not ours. Fiction is
only false, when it is false, not to fact, else how
could it be fiction? but when it is—to
law. To try it by its correspondence to the real
is wretched pedantry; we create as nature creates,
by the force which is in us, which refuses to be restrained;
we cannot help it, and we are only false when we make
monsters, or when we pretend that our inventions are
fact, when we substitute truths of one kind for truths
of another; when we substitute,—and again
we must say when we intentionally substitute;—whenever
persons, and whenever facts seize strongly hold of
the imagination, (and of course when there is anything
remarkable in them they must and will do so,) invention
glides into the images as they form in us; it must,
as it ever has, from the first legends of a cosmogony,
to the written life of the great man who died last
year or century, or to the latest scientific magazine.
We cannot relate facts as they are, they must first
pass through ourselves, and we are more or less than
mortal if they gather nothing in the transit.
The great outlines alone lie around us as imperative
and constraining; the detail we each fill up variously
according to the turn of our sympathies, the extent
of our knowledge, or our general theories of things,
and therefore it may be said that the only literally
true history possible, is the history which mind has
left of itself in all the changes through which it
has passed.
Suetonius is to the full as extravagant and superstitious as Surius, and Suetonius was most laborious and careful, and was the friend of Tacitus and Pliny; Suetonius gives us prodigies, when Surius has miracles, but that is all the difference; each follows the form of the supernatural which belonged to the genius of his age. Plutarch writes a life of Lycurgus with details of his childhood, and of the trials and vicissitudes of his age; and the existence of Lycurgus is now quite as questionable as that of St. Patrick or of St. George of England.