Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/617

Rh is shown by the fact that at first these stories which, as exaggerations of actual incidents, are partially believed in by the narrators are wholly believed in by the listeners. In his Three Years in a Levantine Family Mr. Bayle St. John tells us that when The Arabian Nights were being read aloud, and when he warned those around that they must not suppose the narratives to be true, they insisted on believing them: asking—Why should a man sit down to write lies? So that after fiction comes into existence it is still classed as biography—is not distinguished from it as among civilized nations.

The early history of these civilized nations shows that in the genesis of imaginary biography the priesthood at first took some part. In Henry I's time Wace, a reading clerk, was also a romance writer. So, in the next reign, we have Walter Map, chaplain to the king, who wrote religious and secular romances; and there are subsequently named romances which probably had clerical authors though there is no proof. But the general aspect of the facts appears to show that after that time in England, the telling of tales of imagination became secularized.

Meanwhile derivative forms of literature were showing themselves, mostly, however, having a biographical element. As a writer on Church government the Saxon abbot Dunstan diverged somewhat from the purely clerical sphere; and after the Conquest Sewulf, who, becoming a monk, wrote his travels, gives us a deviation into an autobiographical, as well as a geographical, form of literature. Then in Henry II's reign we have Nigel Wireker, a monastic who wrote a satire on the monks, as did also the chaplain Walter Map, in addition to his volume of anecdotes. Under Richard I there was Geoffrey de Vinsauf, an ecclesiastic who was also a critic of poetry, and Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote topography. In the reign of Henry III came the monk Mathew Paris, who, in denouncing pope and king, wove biographical matter into a satire. In subsequent reigns Wiclif, John Trevisa, and others, added the function of translator to their literary functions; and some, as Bromyard and Lydgate, entered upon various subjects—law, morals, theology, rhetoric. Here it is needless to accumulate details. It is enough for us to recognize the ways in which in early days the priest took the lead as man of letters.

Of course along with the secularization of biography, history, and literature at large, men of letters have become more diversified in their kinds. History, at first predominantly biographical, has divided itself. There is the unphilosophical kind, such as that written by Carlyle, who thought the doings of great men the only subject-matter worth dealing with, and there is the philosophical kind, which more and more expands history into an account of national development: Green's Short History being an example.