Page:Tacitus Histories Fyfe (1912) Vol1.djvu/15

Rh conspiracy. 'He withdrew his attention and thought about Tom Thumb.'

There is no worse fault in criticism than to blame a work of art for lacking qualities to which it makes no pretension. Tacitus is not a 'bad military historian'. He is not a 'military' historian at all. Botticelli is not a botanist, nor is Shakespeare a geographer. It is this fault which leads critics to call Tacitus 'a stilted pleader at a decadent bar', and to complain that his narrative of the war with Civilis is 'made dull and unreal by speeches'—because they have not found in Tacitus what they had no right to look for. Tacitus inserts speeches for the same reason that he excludes tactical details. They add to the human interest of his work. They give scope to his great dramatic powers, to that passionate sympathy with character which finds expression in a style as nervous as itself. They enable him to display motives, to appraise actions, to reveal moral forces. It is interest in human nature rather than pride of rhetoric which makes him love a good debate.

The supreme distinction of Tacitus is, of course, his style. That is lost in a translation. 'Hard' though his Latin is, it is not obscure. Careful attention can always detect his exact thought. Like Meredith he is 'hard' because he does so much with words. Neither writer leaves any doubt about his meaning. It is therefore a translator's first duty to be lucid, and not until that duty is done may he try by faint flushes of epigram to reflect something of the brilliance of