Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/464

 432 HISTORY OF GREECE. In the semi-historical theory respecting Grecian mythical aar rative, the critic unconsciously transports into the Homeric age those habits of classification and distinction, and that standard of acceptance or rejection, which he finds current in his own. Amongst us, the distinction between historical fact and fiction is highly valued as well as familiarly understood : we have a long history of the past, deduced from a study of contemporary evi- dences ; and we have a body of fictitious literature, stamped with its own mark and interesting in its own way. Speaking generally, no man could now hope to succeed permanently in transferring any striking incident from the latter category into the former, nor could any man deliberately attempt it without incurring well-merited obloquy. But this historical sense, now so deeply rooted in the modern mind that we find a difficulty in con- ceiving any people to be without it, is the fruit of records and inquiries, first applied to the present, and then preserved and studied by subsequent generations ; while in a society which has not yet formed the habit of recording its present, the real facts of the past can never be known ; the difference between attested History of Henry II., has the following just remarks (book iv. vol. iii. p. 13, quarto) : " One may reasonably suppose that in MSS. written since the Irish received the Roman letters from St. Patrick, some traditional truths recorded before by the bards in their unwritten poems may have been preserved to our times. Yet these cannot be so separated from many fabulous stories derived from the same sources, as to obtain a firm credit ; it not being sufficient to establish the authority of suspected traditions, that they can be shown not to be so improbable or absurd as others with which they are mixed since there may be specious as well as senseless fictions. Nor can a poet or bard, who lived in the sixth or seventh century after Christ, if his poem is still extant, be any voucher for facts supposed to have happened before the in carnation ; though his evidence ("allowing for poetical license) may bo received on such matters as come within his own time, or the remembrance of old men with whom he conversed. The most judicious historians pay no regard to the Welsh or British traditions delivered by Geoffrey of Monmouth, though it is not impossible but that some of these may be true." One definition of a my the given by Plutarch coincides exactly with a tpecious fiction : *O ftiidof dvai (JoiiheTai Aoyof ipevdijf cottcuf akt]$iviJ (Pin- tarch, Bellone an pace clariores fucmnt Athenienses, p. 348). " Der Grand- Trieb des Mythus (Crenzer jnstly expresses it) das G- dachtc in ein Geschehenes omzusctzen." (Symbolik der Alien Welt, sect. 43. p. 99.)