CRITICISM
507
CRITICISM
hf [).iy no attention whatever to rumour? He does
iipiiher. He gathers eagerly the various narratives
ciirient and compares them with one another, notes
th( ir points of agreement, and their elements of diver-
1:1 lu-p. Nor does he conclude in haste. He suspends
his judgment, .seeks to procure official reports, writes
til Ills friends who are on the spot to learn from them
r' liilile news, i. e. confirmation of the facts on which
i I gree. solutions of the difficulties which arise from
'idant versions of the event. Po.ssibly he has no
idence in the persons charged with drawing up
il;' official reports; po.ssibly, too, he cannot corre-
si"ind with his friends, owing to the interruption of
c mimunications by rea.son of war or other causes. In
- i vi ( >r(l, if such a man found himself dependent on pub-
ln rumour alone he would remain indefinitely in a -I to of doul)t, content with a more or less probable kiHiwledge imtil some more certain source of informa- tii'ii offered.
Wliy should we not deal similarly with popular tra- .1 t ill II? It appeals in just this way to our attention and ur have the same motives for mistrusting it. More
- III iince it has been helpful to judicious critics and
!od the way to important discoveries which they 'il never have made with the sole aid of written 1! nnent.s or monuments. Let us look at the matter in another way. Have not all students of historical documents come frequently across the same peculiar, one might say capricious admixture of true and false which meets us at every step in the case of popular tra- ditions? It would be equally rash on the one hand to reject all tradition and place faith only in written testi- mony or contemporary monimients, and on the other to accord to tradition an implicit confidence merelybe- cau.se it was not formally contradicted byotherhistori- cal data, though it received from them no confirmation. The historian should collect with care the popular tra- ditions of the countries and epochs he is treating, com- pare them with one another, and determine their value in the light of other information scientifically acquired. Should this light, too, eventually fail him, he must wait patiently until fresh discoveries renew it, content in the meantime With such measure of probability as tradi- tion affords. In this way the already acquired histori- cal wealth will be retained, yet no danger run of exag- gerating its value, or, finally, of casting suspicion on its trustworthiness by incorporating with it false or doubtful statements.
The Neg.\tive Argument. — The negative argu- ment in history is that which is drawn from the silence of contemporary or ciuasi-contemporary documents concerning a given fact. The great masters of histori- cal science have often used it with success in their refu- tation of historical errors, .sometimes long intrenched in popular belief. It is to be noted that on such occa- sions they have always held firmly to two principles: first, that the author whose silence is invoked as a proof of the falsity of a given fact, could not have been ignorant of it had it really occurred as related ; second, that if he were not ignorant of the fact, he would not have failed to speak of it in the work liefore us. The greater the certainty of the.se two points, the stronger fs the negative argument. Whenever all doubt in re- gard to them is removed, we are quite right in holding that a writer's silence concerning a fact in question is equivalent to a formal denial of its truth. There is nothing more rational than this process of reasoning; it is daily employed in our courts of justice. How often is a legal line of attack ordofence broken by purely neg- ative evidence. HonDUrable men are brought before a judicial tribimal who would certainly, in the hypo- thesis of their truth, have knowledge of the facts al- leged by one of the contending parties. If they affirm that they have no knowledge of them, their deposit ions are rightly coiisidereil positive proofs of the falsity of the allegations. Now, evidence of this kind does not differ substantially from the negative argument in the
above conditions. In one case, it is true, the witnesses
formally state that they know nothing, while in the
other we learn as much from their silence. Neverthe-
less this silence, in the given circumstances, is as signifi-
cant as a positive a.ssertion.
There are, nevertheless, some who claim that a nega- tive argument can never prevail against a formal text. But this a.ssertion is not even admissible respecting a contemporary text. If the writer to whom it belongs does not offer an absolute and incontestable guarantee of knowledge and veracity, his authority may be very much weakened or even destroyed by the silence of a more reliable antl more prudent writer. It often hap- pens in courts of law that the deposition of an eye or ear-witness is questioned, or even rejected, in view of the deposition of some other witness, equally well- placed to see and hear all that occurred, but who yet declares that he neither saw anything nor heard any- thing. Mabillon was certainly wrong in maintaining that the negative argument could never be used imless one had before him all the works of all the authors of the time w-hen the event happened. On the contrary, a single work of a single author may in certain cases fur- nish a very sound negative argument. Laimoy, on the other hand, is equally wrong in maintaining that the imiversal silence of writers for a period of about two centuries furnishes a sufficient proof of the falsity of facts not mentioned by them; it is quite possible that no author of this period was morally bound by the na- ture of his subject-matter to state such facts. In this case the silence of such authors is by no means equiva- lent to a denial. But, it is objected, in order to raise a doubt as to a fact related by later writers, have not the best critics often relied on this universal silence of his- torians for some considerable time? This is true, but the epoch in question was one already carefully studied and conscientiously described by several historians. Moreover, the disputed fact, if true, would necessarily have been so public, and such, in kind and importance, that neither ignorance nor wilful omission could be posited for all these historians. We have here, there- fore, the two conditions needed to make inexplicable the silence of these authors ; consequently, the negative argument loses none of its strength, and is powerful in proportion to the number of silent witnesses. Of course, this line of argvunent does not apply in the case of some obscure detail, which may easily have been un- know^n to, or little remarked by some contemporary authors and cjuite neglected by others ; nor, more par- ticularly, does it apply to an epoch of which few monu- ments are extant, especially few historical writings. In the latter case, the fact of a imiversal silence on the part of all w-riters for a considerable period, may, in- deed, weaken the certainty of a fact ; in reality we do no more than ascertain thereby the absence of all posi- tive evidence in its favour, otherthan a tradition of un- certain origin. However, once the lack of information is admitted, it is not permissible to advance a step fur- ther and present the silence of documents as proof of the falsity of the fact. Their .silence in this case is not the negative argument as descril)ed above.
The rule laid down in the preceding paragraphs seems to lack no element of precision and practical ad- vantage. But in applying it to ancient times some caution is necessary. In an age of widespread public- ity like our own, no important event can occur in any part of the civilized world without being immediately known everywhere and to all. Its principal details, indeed, are at once so fixed in the memory of all inter- ested jiartics that they will not easily be effaced with- in a long perioil. Itis astonishing to .see how easily .some modern writers forpet that the former conditions of mankind were very different. They seek to estab- lish an irrefutable negative argument on the hj-pothesis that a given public fact of importance could not have been unknown to a certain person of education and re- finement who lived shortly afterwards. Such writers
