Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/616

600 monk and biographer. The Anglo Saxon chronicle was a yearbook of events recorded by monks from the 8th to the 12th century. After the Conquest the chief authors were still ecclesiastics, and their works were usually chronicles or lives of saints. Among them were Marianus Scotus, Florence of Worcester, Eadmer, Ordericus Vitalis, William of Malmsbury, Wace, Geoffrey Gaimar, Henry of Huntington, Fitzstephen, Thomas of Ely, and so on through subsequent reigns, in which the relationship continues for a long time to be marked, but during which the rise of secular competitors in the sphere of literature becomes gradually manifest.

Even without specification of such facts we might safely infer that since, during mediæval days, there was scarcely any culture save that of ecclesiastics, the writing of biography and history was, by the necessities of the case, limited to them.

That fiction has developed out of biography scarcely needs proof. Unless a biographer is accurate, which even modern biographers rarely are and which ancient biographers certainly were not, it inevitably happens that there is more or less of fancy mingled with his fact. The same tendencies which in early times developed anecdotes of chiefs into mythological stories of them as gods, operated universally, and necessarily produced in narratives of men's lives exaggerations which greatly distorted them. If we remember the disputes among the Greeks respecting the birthplaces of poets and philosophers we see how reckless were men's statements and how largely the actual was perverted by the imaginary. So, too, on coming down to Christian times it needs but to name the miracles described in the lives of the saints to have abundant proof of such vitiations. As in our own days the repeater of an anecdote, or circulator of a scandal, is tempted to make his or her story interesting by making much of the striking points; so, still more in early days, when truth was less valued than now, were stories step by step perverted as they passed from mouth to mouth.

Of course the narrator who gave the most picturesque version of an adventure or achievement was preferred by listeners; and, of course, ever tempted to increase the imaginary additions, passed insensibly into a maker of tales. Even children, at first anxious to know whether the stories told them are true, by and by become ready to accept untrue stories; and then some of them, thus taught by example, invent wonderful tales to interest their companions. With the uncivilized or semi-civilized a like genesis naturally occurs among adults. Hence the established class of story-tellers in the East—authors of oral fictions. And how gradually by this process fiction is differentiated from biography,