BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Inheritance of Humour
There are some truths which seem to get old almost as soon as they are
born, and that simply because they are so astonishingly true that people
soon get to feel as though they have known them all their lives; and
such a truth is that which first one writer and then another in the last
five years has been insisting upon, until it is already a perfect
commonplace that nations do not know their own qualities. The inmost,
the characteristic thing, that which differentiates one community from
another, as tastes or colours differentiate things--that a
nation hardly ever knows until it is pointed out to it by some foreigner
or by some observer from within. It cannot know it, because one cannot
tell the very atmosphere in which one lives. It is universal and
therefore unnoticed. Now, if this is true of any nation, it is
particularly true of England. And English people need to be told
morning, noon, and night, not indeed the particular national
characteristic which they have, since for this no particular name could
be found, but rather what its evidences are; as, for instance,
spontaneity in design, a passion for the mystical in poetry and the
arts; a power in water-colour, in which they are perhaps quite alone,
and certainly the first in Europe; and, above all, the chief, the master
thing of all, humour.
There is not nor ever will be anything like English humour. It is a
thing quite apart, and by it for now more than two hundred years you may
know England. It does not puzzle the foreigner (as the more blatant kind
of intellectual man is too fond of boasting that it does); he simply
admires it as a rule and wonders at it always; sometimes he actually
dislikes it, but by it he knows that the thing he is reading is English
and has the savour and taste of England.
It is impossible to define it, because it is so full of stuff and so
organic a quality; but in our own time it was principally the pencil of
Charles Keene that has summed it up and presented it in a moment and at
once to the eye--the pencil of Charles Keene and that profound instinct
whereby he chose the legends for his drawing, whether he found them by
his own sympathy with the people or whether they were suggested to him
by friends.
It is the verdict of the men most competent perhaps to judge upon these
things that he had the greatest graphic power of his time, and that no
one had had that power to such an extent since Hogarth. Upon these
things the men of the trade must dispute; the layman cannot doubt that
he had here a genius and a genius comprehensively national. It is the
essence of a good draughtsman that what he wants to draw, that he draws.
The line that he desires to see upon the paper appears there as his
fingers move. It is a quality extremely rare in its perfection. And
Charles Keene had it in perfection, as in totally different manner had
the offensive and diseased talent of Beardsley.
But more important than the power to do is the quality of the thing
done, and the work of Charles Keene, multitudinous, varied, always
great, is an inheritance for English people comparable to the
inheritance they have in Dickens. It has also what Dickens had, a power
of representing, as it were, the essential English. Just that which
makes people say (with some truth) that Dickens never drew a gentleman
would make them say with equal truth that what was interesting in the
gentlemen of Charles Keene (and he perpetually drew them) was not the
externals upon which gentlemen so pride themselves, but the soul. Thus I
have in mind one picture wherein Keene drew a gentleman; true, he was a
gentleman who had just swallowed a bad oyster, and therefore he was a
man as well. I recall another of an old gentleman complaining of the
caterpillar on his chop: he is a gentleman of the professional rather
than the territorial classes, and, great heavens! what a power of line!
All you see beneath the round of his hat is the end of his nose, the
curve of his mouth, and two bushy ends of whiskers. Yet one can tell all
about that man; one could write a book on him. One knows his economics,
his religion, his accent, and what he thought of the Third Napoleon and
what of Garibaldi. I have called draughtsmanship of this quality an
inheritance--I might have called it perhaps with better propriety a
monument. It is possible that England in the near future will look back
with great envy, as she will certainly look back with great pride, to
the generation preceding our own: they were a solid and a happy
community of men. How much they owed to fortune, how much to themselves,
it is not the place of such random stuff as mine to consider.
They were nearly impregnable in their island; they were not bellicose.
They made and sold for all the world. Whether the very different future
which we are now entering is to be laid to their door or to our own,
that generation will still remain one of the principal things in English
history, like the Elizabethan generation, or the group of men who
organized the Seven Years' War, or the group of men who fought in the
Peninsula. And of that generation the note of health and of stability is
represented by its humour. I am not sure that of all things educational
to young men with no personal memory of that time, and especially to
young men with no family tradition of it to reflect it in their books
and their furniture; and--this yet more particularly--to young men born
out of England yet claiming communion with England, the Anglo-Indians
and the Colonials--I am not sure, I say, that the thing most educational
to these would not be some hundred of Charles Keene's drawings, for
therein they would find what it was that gave them the power and the
wealth that can hardly be defended unless its traditions are continued.
Note how Victorian England dealt with the humour of a Volunteer review;
note how it dealt with the humour of excessive wealth; and note how it
dealt with the humour of schools and of Dons. One might almost define it
by negations. There is in all of it no--but here I lack a word.... When
things ring false it is because they have got by exaggeration or by some
other form of falsity beside themselves. Appreciation of rank or
even of worth becomes snobbishness; appreciation of another's judgment
false taste; and patriotism, the most beautiful, the noblest, the most
necessary of the great emotions, corrupts into something very vile
indeed.
Well, the Victorians, and notably this man of whose power of the pencil
I am speaking, did lack that false savour, that savour of just missing
what one wishes to say or to feel, which haunts us to-day; and I should
imagine that whether it were cause or effect the salt present in the
preservation of the moral health of that society was humour. Let us
enjoy it like an heirloom. It is more national than the language; at
least it is more national than what the language has become under
foreign pressure; it is infinitely more national than our problems and
our tragedies. It is so national that--who knows?--it may crop up again
of itself one of these days; and may that not be long.
I had occasion about a fortnight ago to meet a man more nearly ninety
than eighty years of age, who had had special opportunity for
discovering the changes of Europe during his long life. He was of the
English wealthier classes by lineage, but his mother had been of the
French nobility and a Huguenot. His father had been prominent in the
diplomacy of a couple of generations ago. He had travelled widely, read
perhaps less widely, but had known and appreciated an astonishing number
of his contemporaries.
I was interested (without any power of my own to judge whether his
decisions were right or wrong) to discover what most struck him in the
changes produced by that great stretch of years, all of which he had
personally observed: he was born just after Waterloo, and he could
remember the Reform Bill.
He surprised me by telling me, in the first place, that the material
changes and discoveries, enormous though they were in extent, were not,
in his view, the most striking. He was ready to leave it open whether
these material changes were the causes of moral changes more remarkable,
or merely effects concomitant with these. When I asked him what had
struck him most of the great material developments, he told me the
phonograph and the aeroplane among inventions; Mendel's observations in
the sphere of experimental knowledge; and, in the sphere of pure theory,
the breakdown of many things that had been dogmas of physical science in
his early manhood.
Since I did not quite understand what he meant by this last, he gave me,
after some hesitation, a few examples: That the interior of the earth
was molten; that a certain limited number of elements--not all yet
isolated, but certainly few in their total--were at the base of all
material forms, and were immutable; that the ultimate unit of each of
these was a certain indivisible, eternal thing called the Atom; and so
forth.
He assured me that views of this sort, extending over a hundred or a
thousand other points, were so universally accepted in his time that to
dispute them was to be ranked with the unlettered or the fantastic. I
asked him if it were so in economics. He said: Yes, in England, where
there was a similar dogma of Free Trade: not abroad.
When I asked him why Mendel's published experiments and the theory based
upon them had so much impressed him, he said because it was almost the
first attempt to apply to the speculative dogmas of biology some
standard demonstrably true; and here he wandered off to explain to me
why the commonly accepted views upon biology, which had so changed
thought in the latter part of his life, were associated with the name of
Darwin. Darwin, he assured me, had brought forward no new discovery, but
only a new hypothesis, and that only a small and particular hypothesis,
whereby to explain the general theory of transformism. This theory, he
told me--the unbroken descent of living organisms and their physical
connection with one another and with common parents--had been a
favourite idea from the beginning of history with many great thinkers,
from Lucretius to Buffon and from Augustus of Hippo to Lamarck.
Darwin's, the old gentleman assured me, which he had defended with
infinite toil, was that the method in which this continuity of descent
proceeded was by an infinitely slow process of very small changes
differentiating each minute step from the one before and the one after
it, and these small changes Darwin's hypothesis referred to a natural
selection. Nothing else in Darwin's work, he assured me, was novel, and
yet it was the one thing which subsequent research had rendered more and
more doubtful. Darwin (he said) said nothing new that was also true.
At this point I was moved to contradict the old gentleman, and to say
that one unquestioned contribution to science of Darwin, as novel as it
was secure, was his patient discovery of the work of earthworms, and of
its vast effect. The old gentleman was willing to admit that I was
right, but he said he was only speaking of Darwin in connection with
transformism and the whimsical way in which his private name (and his
errors) had become identified with evolution in general.
I asked him, since he had such a knowledge of men from observation, why
this was so.
"It seems at first sight," he said, "as ridiculous as though we should
associate the theory of light with the name of Newton, who inclined to
the exploded corpuscular hypothesis, or the general conception of
orbital motion in the universe to the great Bacon, who, in point of
fact, rudely repudiated the Copernican theory in particular."
"Did he, indeed?" said I, interested.
"I believe so," said the old gentleman; "at any rate you were asking me
why Darwin, with his single contribution to the theory of transformism,
and that a doubtful one--or, to be accurate, an exploded one--should be
associated in the popular mind with the invention of so ancient a theory
as that of evolution. The reason is, I think, no more than that he came
at a particular moment when any man doing great quantities of detailed
work in this field was bound to stand out exaggeratedly. The society in
which he appeared had, until just before his day, accepted a narrow
cosmogony, quite unknown to its ancestors. Darwin's book certainly
exploded that, and the mind of his time--ignorant as it was of the
past--was ready to accept the shattering of its father's idols as a new
revelation."
"But you were saying," said I, when he had thus dealt harshly with a
great name, "that not the material but the moral changes of your time
seemed to you the greatest. Which did you mean?"
"Why, in the first place," said the old man thoughtfully and with some
hesitation, "the curiously rapid decline of intelligence, or if you will
have it differently, the clouding of thought that has marked the last
thirty years. Men in my youth knew what they held and what they did not
hold. They knew why they held it or why they did not hold it; but the
attempt to enjoy the advantages of two contradictory systems at the same
time, and, what is worse, the consulting of a man as an authority upon
subjects he had never professed to know, are intellectual phenomena
quite peculiar to the later years of my life."
I said we of the younger generation had all noticed it, as, for
instance, when an honest but imperfectly intelligent chemist was
listened to in his exposition of the nature of the soul, or a well-paid
religious official was content to expound the consolations of
Christianity while denying that Christianity was true.
"But," I continued, "we are usually told that this unfortunate decline
in the express powers of the brain is due to the wide and imperfect
education of the populace at the present moment."
"That is not the case," answered the old man sharply, when I had made
myself clear by repeating my remarks in a louder tone, for he was a
little deaf.
"That is not the case. The follies of which I speak are not particularly
to be discovered among the poorer classes who have passed through the
elementary schools. These" (it was to the schools that he was
alluding with a comprehensive pessimism) "may account for the gross
decline apparent in the public manners of our people, but not for faults
which are peculiar to the upper and middle classes. It is not in the
populace, but in those wealthier ranks that you will find the sort of
intellectual decay of which I spoke."
I asked him whether he thought the tricks it was now considered cultured
to play with mathematics came within the category of this intellectual
decay. The old gentleman answered me a little abruptly that he could not
judge what I was talking about.
"Why," said I, "do you believe that parallel straight lines
converge or diverge?"
"Neither," said he, a little bewildered. "If they are parallel they
cannot by definition either diverge or converge."
"You are, then," said I, "an old-fashioned adherent of the theory of the
parabolic universe?" At which sensible reply of mine the old man
muttered rather ill-temperedly, and begged me to speak of something
else.
I asked him whether the knowledge of languages had not declined in his
time. He said, somewhat emphatically, yes, and especially the knowledge
of French, assuring me that in his early years many a Fellow of a
College at Oxford or at Cambridge was capable of speaking that tongue in
such a fashion as to make himself understood. On the other hand, he
admitted that German and Spanish were more widely known than they had
been, and Arabic certainly far more widely diffused among those
officials of the Empire who took their work seriously.
When I asked him whether politics were more corrupt as time proceeded,
he said No, but more cynical; and as to morals he would not judge, for
he was certain that as one vice was corrected another appeared in its
place.
What he told me he most deplored in the social system of his country was
the power of the police and of the statistician by whom the policeman
was guided. This he ascribed to the growth of great towns, to civic
cowardice, and to a new taboo laid upon uniformed and labelled public
authorities, who are now regarded as sacred, and also inordinately
feared.
"In my youth," he said, "there was a joke that every man in Paris was
known to the police. Today that is universally true, and no joke with
regard to every man in London. Our movements are marked, our earnings,
our expenses, and our most private affairs known to the innumerable
officials of the Treasury, our records of every sort, however intimate,
are exactly and correctly maintained. The obtaining of work and a
livelihood is dependent upon strong organizations. There is hardly an
ailment or a domestic habit, from drinking wine to eating turnips, which
some crank who has obtained the ear of a politician does not control or
threaten in the immediate future to control."
"As for doctors!" he began, his voice cracking with indignation, "their
abominable...." but here the old gentleman fell into so violent a fit of
coughing that he nearly turned black in the face, and when I
respectfully slapped him on the back, in the hopes of granting him
relief, he made matters worse by shaking himself at me with an energy
worthy of 1842. His nurse rushed in, clapped him upon his pillows, and
was prepared to vent her wrath upon me for having caused this paroxysm,
when the old man's exhaustion and laboured breathing captured all her
attention, and I had the opportunity to withdraw.
The last book to be published upon the last Dauphin of France set me
thinking upon what seems to me the chief practical science in which
modern men should secure themselves. I mean the science of history--and
in this science almost all lies in the appreciation of evidence, for one
of the chief particular problems presented to the student of history at
the present moment is whether the Dauphin did or did not survive his
imprisonment in the Temple.
Let me first say why, to so many of us, the science of history and the
appreciation of the evidence upon which it depends is of the first
moment. It is because, short of vision or revelation, history is our
only extension of human experience. It is true that a philosophy common
to all citizens is necessary for a State if it is to, live--but short
of that necessity the next most necessary factor is a knowledge of the
stuff of mankind: of how men act under certain conditions and impulses.
This knowledge may be acquired, and is in some measure, during the
experience of one wise lifetime, but it is indefinitely extended by the
accumulation of experience which history affords.
And what history so gives us is always of immediate and practical
moment.
For instance, men sometimes speak with indifference of the rival
theories as to the origin of European land tenure; they talk as though
it were a mere academic debate whether the conception of private
property in land arose comparatively late among Europeans or was native
and original in our race. But you have only to watch a big popular
discussion on that very great and at the present moment very living
issue, the moral right to the private ownership in land, to see how
heavily the historic argument weighs with every type of citizen. The
instinct that gives that argument weight is a sound one, and not less
sound in those who have least studied the matter than in those who have
most studied it; for if our race from its immemorial origins has desired
to own land as a private thing side by side with communal tenures, then
it is pretty certain that we shall not modify that intention, however
much we change our laws. If, on the other hand, it could be shown that
before the advent of a complex civilization Europeans had no conception
of private property in land, but treated land as a thing necessarily and
always communal, then you could ascribe modern Socialist theories with
regard to the land to that general movement of harking back to the
origins which Europe has been assisting at through over a hundred years
of revolution and of change.
It sounds cynical, but it is perfectly true, that much the largest
factor in the historical conception of men is assertion. It is literally
true that when men (with the exception of a very small proportion of
scholars who are also intelligent) consider the past, the picture on which
they dwell is a picture conveyed to them wholly by authority and by
unquestioned authority. There was never a time when the original sources
of history were more easily to be consulted by the plain man; but whether
because of their very number, or because the habit is not yet formed, or
because there are traditions of imaginary difficulty surrounding such
reading, original sources were perhaps never less familiar to fairly
educated opinion than they are today; and therefore no type of book gives
more pleasure when one comes across it than those little cheap books, now
becoming fairly numerous, in which the original sources, and the
original sources alone, are put before the reader. Mr. Rait has already
done such work in connection with Mary Queen of Scots, and Mr. Archer
did it admirably in connection with the Third Crusade.
But apart from the importance of consulting original sources--which is
like hearing the very witnesses themselves in court--there is a factor
in historical judgment which by some unhappy accident is peculiarly
lacking in the professional historian. It is a factor to which no
particular name can be attached, though it may be called a department of
common sense. But it is a mental power or attitude easily recognizable
in those who possess it, and perhaps atrophied by the very atmosphere of
the study. It goes with the open air with a general knowledge of men and
with that rapid recognition of the way in which things "fit in" which is
necessarily developed by active life.
For instance, when you know the pace at which Harold marched down from
the north to Hastings you recognize, if you use that factor of historic
judgment of which I spake, that the affair was not barbaric. There must
have been fairly good roads, and there must have been a high
organization of transport. You have only to consider for a moment what a
column looks like, even if it be only a brigade, to see the truth of
that. Again, this type of judgment forbids anyone who uses it to ascribe
great popular movements (great massacres, great turmoils, and so forth)
to craft. It is a very common thing, especially in modern history, to
lay such things to the power of one or two wealthy or one or two bloody
leaders, but you have only to think for a few moments of what a mob is
to see the falsity of that. Craft can harness this sort of explosive
force, it can control it, or persuade it, or canalize it to certain
issues, but it cannot create it.
Again, this sort of sense easily recognizes in historic types the
parallels of modern experience. It avoids the error of thinking history
a mistake and making of the men and women who appear there something
remote from humanity, extreme, and either stilted or grandiose.
In aid of this last feature in historical judgment there is nothing of
such permanent value as a portrait. Obtain your conception (as, indeed,
most boys do) of the English early sixteenth century from a text, then
go and live with the Holbeins for a week and see what an enormously
greater thing you will possess at the end of it. It is indeed one of the
misfortunes of European history that from the fifth century to at least
the eleventh we are, so far as Western European history is concerned,
deprived of portraits. And by an interesting parallel the writers of the
dark time seemed to have had neither the desire nor the gift of vivid
description. Consider the dreariness of the hagiographers, every one of
them boasting the noble rank and the conventional status of his hero,
and you may say not one giving the least conception of the man's
personality. You have the great Gallo-Roman noble family of Ferreolus
running down the centuries from the Decline of the Empire to the climax
of Charlemagne. Many of those names stand for some most powerful
individuality, yet all we have is a formula, a lineage, with symbols and
names in the place of living beings, and even that established only by
careful work, picking out and sifting relationships from various lives.
The men of that time did not even think to tell us that there was such a
thing as a family tradition, nor did it seem important to them to
establish its Roman origin and its long succession in power.
Next it must be protested that the smallness and particularity of the
questions upon which historical discussion rages are no proof either of
its general purposelessness nor of their insignificance. All
advance of knowledge proceeds in this fashion. Physical science affords
innumerable examples of the way in which progress has depended upon a
curiosity directed towards apparently insignificant things, and there is
something in the mind which compels it to select a narrow field for the
exercise of its acutest powers. Moreover, special points, discussion
upon which must evidently be lengthy and may be indefinite, are
peculiarly attractive to just that kind of man who by a love of
prolonged research enlarges the bounds of knowledge and at the same time
strengthens and improves for his fellows by continual exercise all the
instruments of their common trade. Take, for instance, this case of the
little Dauphin, Louis XVII. It really does not matter to day whether the
boy got away or whether he died in prison. It does not prolong the line
of the Capetians--the heir to that is present in the Duke of Orleans. It
does not even affect our view of any other considerable part of
history--save possibly the policy of Louis XVIII--and it is of no direct
interest to our pockets or to our affections. Yet the masses of work
which have accumulated round that one doubt have solved twenty other
doubts. They have illuminated all the close of the Terror; they are
beginning to make us understand that most difficult piece of political
psychology, the reaction of Thermidor, and with it how Europeans lose
their balance and regain it in the course of their quasi-religious wars;
for all our wars have something in them of religion.
Three elements appear to enter into the judgment of history. First,
there is the testimony of human witnesses; next, there are the non-human
boundaries wherein the action took place, boundaries which, by all our
experience, impose fixed limits to action; thirdly, there is that
indefinable thing, that mystic power, which all nations deriving from
the theology of the Western Church have agreed to call, with the
schoolman, common sense; a general appreciation which transcends
particular appreciations and which can integrate the differentials of
evidence. Of this last it is quite impossible to afford a test or to
construct a measure; its presence in an argument is none the less as
readily felt as fresh air in a room; without it nothing is convincing
however laboured, with it, even though it rely upon slight evidence, one
has the feeling of walking on a firm road. But it must be "common
sense"--it must be of the sort, that is, which is common to man various
and general, and it is in this perhaps that history suffers most from
the charlatanism and ritual common to all great matters.
Men will have pomp and mystery surrounding important things, and
therefore the historians must, consciously or unconsciously, tend to
strut, to quote solemn authorities in support, and to make out the
vulgar unworthy of their confidence. Hence, by the way, the plague of
footnotes.
These had their origin in two sources: the desire to show that one was
honest and to prove it by a reference; the desire to elucidate some
point which it was not easy to elucidate in the text itself without
making the sentence too elaborate and clumsy. Either use may be seen at
its best in Gibbon. With the last generation they have served mainly,
and sometimes merely, for ritual adornment and terror, not to make
clearer or more honest, but to deceive. Thus Taine in his monstrously
false history of the Revolution revels in footnotes; you have but to
examine a batch of them with care to turn them completely against his
own conclusions--they are only put there as a sort of spiked paling to
warn off trespassers. Or, again, M. Thibaut, who writes under the name
of "Anatole France," gives footnotes by the score in his romance of Joan
of Arc, apparently not even caring to examine whether they so much as
refer to his text, let alone support it. They seem to have been done by
contract.
Another ailment in this department is the negative one, whereby an
historian will leave out some aspect which to him, cramped in a study,
seems unimportant, but which any plain man moving in the world would
have told him to be the essential aspect of the whole matter. For
instance, when Napoleon left Madrid on his forced march to intercept Sir
John Moore before that general should have reached Benevente, he thought
Moore was at Valladolid, when as a fact he was at Sahagun. In Mr. Oman's
history of the Peninsular War the error is put thus: "Napoleon had not
the comparatively easy task of cutting the road between Valladolid and
Astorga, but the much harder one of intercepting that between Sahagun
and Astorga."
Why is this egregious nonsense? The facts are right and so are the dates
and the names, yet it makes one blush for Oxford history. Why? Because
the all-important element of distance is omitted. The very first
question a plain man would ask about the case would be, "What were the
distances involved?" The academic historian doesn't know, or, at least,
doesn't say; yet without an appreciation of the distances the statement
has no value. As a fact the distances were such that in the first case
(supposing Moore had been at Valladolid) Napoleon would have had to
cover nearly three miles to Moore's one to intercept him--an almost
superhuman task. In the second case (Moore being as a fact at Sahagun)
he would have had to go over four miles to his opponent's one--an
absolutely impossible feat.
To march three miles to the enemy's one is what Mr. Oman
calls "a comparatively easy task"; to march four to his one is what Mr.
Oman calls a "much harder" task; and to write like that is what an
informed critic calls bad history.
The other two factors in an historical judgment can be more easily
measured.
The non-human elements which, as I have said, are irremovable (save to
miracle), are topography, climate, season, local physical conditions,
and so forth. They have two valuable characters in aid of history; the
first is that they correct the errors of human memory and support the
accuracy of details; the second is that they enable us to complete a
picture. We can by their aid "see" the physical framework in which an
action took place, and such a landscape helps the judgment of things
past as it does of things contemporary. Thus the map, the date, the
soil, the contours of Crécy field make the traditional spot at which the
King of Bohemia fell doubtful; the same factors make it certain that
Drouet did not plunge haphazard through Argonne on the night of June 21,
1791, but that he must have gone by one path--which can be determined.
Or, again, take that prime question, why the Prussians did not charge at
Valmy. On their failure to do so all the success of the Revolution
turned. A man may read Dumouriez, Kellermann, Pully, Botidoux,
Massenback, Goethe--there are fifty eye-witnesses at least whose
evidence we can collect, and I defy anyone to decide. (Brunswick himself
never knew.) But go to that roll of land between Valmy and the high
road; go after three days' rain as the allies did, and you will
immediately learn. That field between the heights of "The Moon" and the
site of old Valmy mill, which is as hard as a brick in summer (when the
experts visit it), is a marsh of the worst under an autumn drizzle; no
one could have charged.
As for human testimony, three things appear: first, that the witness is
not, as in a law court, circumscribed. His relation may vary infinitely
in degree of proximity of time or space to the action, from that of an
eye-witness writing within the hour to that of a partisan writing at
tenth hand a lifetime after. That question of proximity comes first,
from the known action of the human mind whereby it transforms colours
and changes remembered things. Next there is the character of the
witness for the purposes of his testimony. Historians write, too
often, as though virtue--or wealth (with which they often confound
it)--were the test. It is not, short of a known motive for lying; a
murderer or a thief casually witnessing to a thing with which he is
familiar is worth more than the best man witnessing in a matter which he
understands ill. It was this error which ruined Croker's essay on
Charlotte Robespierre's Memoirs. Croker thought, perhaps wisely, that
all radicals were scoundrels; he could not accept her editor's evidence,
and (by the way) the view of this amateur collector without a tincture
of historical scholarship actually imposed itself on Europe for nearly
seventy years!
And the third character in the witness is support: the support upon
converging lines of other human testimony, most of it indifferent, some
(this is essential) casual and by the way--deprived therefore of motive.
When I shall find these canons satisfied to oppose the strong
probability and tradition of the Dauphin's death in prison I shall doubt
that death, but not before.
BELLOC-FIRST AND LAST - The Inheritance of Humour