Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, August 1847

The progress made in this department of study is very perceptible in the several histories we possess of Greece. Mitford, notwithstanding his acknowledged imperfections and demerits, has had the tribute of applause paid to him, and deservedly, of having been the first to break through that icy timidity with which the moderns were wont to write the annals of ancient Greece. They seemed to be afraid of applying the knowledge which time and science had brought them, to the events and writings of a classical age and country, lest this should imply the presumption that they were wiser than the ancients. They sat down to their task like young scholars who are construing, not interpreting, their author. Little discrimination was made between the learned writings before them. If it was not, as it has been wittily observed, "all Greek, and therefore all true," at least every thing that was Greek had a mysterious air of learning which protected it from profane examination; and incongruities and futilities, absurdities of reasoning, and improbabilities of narrative, were veiled or half concealed under the charm of Grecian typography. Mitford set aside this too great reverence for the ancient literati. As he saw men, and not moving statues, in the heroes of Grecian history, so he was persuaded that the writers of that history were also men, fallible and prejudiced, like those who were living and writing about him. But Mitford overcame one set of prejudices by the force which prejudices of another kind had endowed him with. He saw how party spirit had raged in modern as well as ancient times, but he detected it with that proverbial readiness with which the thief detects the thief; he wrote himself with the energy and penetration, the want of candour and generosity, which at all times will distinguish the advocate. Moreover, the scholarship of Europe has since his time assumed so lofty a port, and taken such rapid strides, that on many subjects he has been left lagging in the rear.

The history of Greece by Dr Thirlwall is a great improvement on its predecessor. It is written with profounder learning, and a more equitable spirit; and is indeed pre-eminently distinguished by the calmness, candour, and judge-like serenity that pervades it. In a style always lucid in disquisition, and always elegant in narrative, he appears to be solely anxious to communicate the fair result, whatever it may be, to which his extensive reading has conducted him. But, unfortunately, Dr Thirlwall wrote his history in one of those transition states of mind which render impossible the accomplishment of an enduring work. He saw the futility of much that had been relied on as basis of historical belief; he was not disposed to credulity, nor at all likely to accept fable, in its own simple and gross form, for truth. But he had not taught himself to forego the vain attempt to extract history out of fable; he could not relinquish that habit of "learned conjecture," so dear to the scholar, so fatal to the historian. In the earlier portion of his work, he constructs his narrative under the singular disadvantage of one who sees perpetually the weakness of his own superstructure, yet continues to build on; and thus, with much show of scaffolding, and after much putting up and pulling down, he leaves at last but little standing on the soil. He had not laid down for himself a previous rule for determining what should be admitted as historical evidence, or the rules he had prescribed for himself were of an uncertain, fluctuating character. Neither do we discover in Dr Thirlwall the faculty, existing at least in any eminent degree, of realising to himself, or vividly representing to others, the intellectual condition of a nascent people, far removed from ourselves in habits of thought, and trained under quite different institutions, religious and political. In short, we note a deficiency--(to adopt the phraseology of Bacon)--in what we may be allowed to describe, as the more philosophical qualifications of the historian.

Precisely in these lies the peculiar strength of Mr Grote. With scholarship as extensive as that of his predecessors, he has united a stricter discipline of mind, and habits of closer reasoning; and he manifests a truer perception of the nature of past modes of thinking--of the intellectual life of unlettered and Pagan ages. He has passed through that transition state in which Dr Thirlwall unfortunately found himself, and has drawn with a firm hand the boundaries between history and fable. Not only has he drawn the line, and determined the principle on which the limits of the historical world should be marked out, but he has had the fortitude to adhere to his own principles, and has not allowed himself, in pursuit of some fragment of historic truth, (many of which doubtless lie in a half-discovered state beyond the circle he has drawn,) to transgress the boundary he has wisely prescribed to himself. The history is not far enough advanced to enable us to judge whether Mr Grote will preserve himself from a political bias, the opposite of that which has been so much censured in Mitford. A sufficient portion however, is published, to authorise us in saying that it is not in point of narrative that the present author will obtain any advantage over his predecessors. It is in disquisition that he rejoices, and succeeds; it is the argumentative matter which excites and sustains him. His style seems to languish when the effort of ratiocination gives place to the task of the narrator. We fancy we see him resume the pen with listlessness, when nothing remains for the historian but to tell his story.

Neither can we congratulate Mr Grote on possessing the art of arrangement or compression, on the knowing when to abbreviate, or how to omit. His subject has in itself this unavoidable disadvantage, that the history of Greece lies scattered and broken up amongst many independent cities and communities: this disadvantage our author's voluminous and discursive manner does nothing to remedy, does much to aggravate. One would almost suspect that Mr Grote had entertained the idea that it belonged to the history of Greece to give us an account of all that the Greeks knew of history. It seems sufficient that a subject has been mentioned by Herodotus to entitle it to a place in his pages. This fulness of matter, it may be said, will enrich the work. Very true. But what if, in this process of enriching, the work be made unreadable? What if the treasures be so piled up and heaped together that to get at them may be little less difficult than to extract the precious metals originally from the mine? If the work advance on the plan hitherto pursued, it will be found that, "A History of Greece" is far too restricted a title, and that it should rather have been called a history of the ancient world during the times when the Greeks rose and flourished;--so well disposed does the author appear to wander over to Phoenicia and Assyria, to Babylon and Egypt. Mr Alison might as well have entitled his great historical work simply a history of the French Revolution. It is true, there is no reason to be given why Mr Grote should not do for ancient Europe during the period of the development of the Greeks, what Mr Alison has done for modern Europe during the great drama enacted by the people of France. Unhappily, however, Mr Grote does not possess those descriptive powers which, in the work of Mr Alison, render the parts which are most episodical, invariably the most interesting; so that, however important and eventful the main stream of his narrative may be, a reader of Alison always delights to find the author starting afresh from some remote era, on some distant soil, and call willingly quit even Paris and her Revolution, to revisit with him the rustic republics of Switzerland, or to build up Holland again from the sea, or to call to life the people of Poland, and fill the plains again with their strange military diet of a hundred thousand mounted senators.

There is much of the philosopher, little of the artist, in Mr. Grote; nor are the charms of style those which he has sedulously cultivated, or by which he is anxious to obtain attention. He writes in a manly, straightforward manner, and expresses his meaning with sufficient force and perspicuity: but there is no sustained elegance of diction; there is often all apparent disdain of it. At least we meet occasionally with quite conversational expressions, introduced--not, be it remarked, with that dexterous ease and felicitous taste which render them so effective in compositions of the highest order--but bluntly, carelessly, as if they were verily the first that came to hand, and the author did not think it worth his while to look for others. It should be mentioned, however, that this inequality of style is partly the effect of a desire to keep as close as possible in his narrative to the original Greek, so that it is the crudeness of translation we sometimes encounter. We raise no quarrel with him ourselves on this point; his language, in general, is all that is requisite; but a critic disposed to be severe on the minor delinquencies of style, might justify his censure by extracting many a hasty and neglected sentence, and many all uncouth expression. In fine, we accept of the present work as a valuable contribution to the history of Greece, and to the science itself of history; we accept it as a manifest improvement upon its predecessors in some of the highest and most important elements of historical composition; but we by no means accept it as the History of Greece, as the final narrative of the people of Athens and Sparta. For this it is too polemical, diffuse, incondite. On the ground which this writer and others have been obliged to contend for, which they have conquered and cleared, our posterity will one day, it is to be hoped, see a structure arise--grand, and simple, and yet ornate. For if the fitness of things be a rule for our expectation, we may safely prophesy that some future age will possess a History of Greece which will be to all other histories what the Grecian temple is to all other temples; which shall be itself a temple worthy of the memory of the most extraordinary people that have yet appeared upon the earth.

Mr Grote has done in the history of Greece what Dr Arnold did in that of Rome: he has at once excluded the early legends entirely from the class of historical records. The outcry which we sometimes hear against that scepticism which has resulted from later and more severe investigations into the nature of historical evidence, and the loss thereby sustained of many a popular tale, is--need we insist upon it?--mere childishness. It is never found that we lose any thing by truth, and certainly not here. The popular tale, legend, or myth, may be displaced entirely from the records of the past, (for what it contains, or may be supposed to contain, of fact or event;) but it remains with us in its true character of fable, as the offspring of the teeming invention and the ready faith of an unlettered generation; and, in this character, is more thoroughly understood by our present race of thinkers, and more vividly appreciated, than it ever was before. But shall we believe nothing of it?--surely something, must be true,--is the whole legend to be lost? To such exclamations we answer, that the whole legend, instead of being lost, is regained, is restored to us. While you doubt of its true nature, and strive to make it speak the language of history, you can never see the legend itself,--never clearly understand it,--never gather from it the curious knowledge it is able to reveal of our own species. If, instead of looking askance at the bold inventions of past times, with a half faith and a half denial, busied with tricks of interpretation, and teased with ever-recurring incredulity, you embrace it cordially as the genuine product of an imaginative age, redolent of the marvellous, you will, as such, gather from it a far higher and more profitable instruction than could be extracted from some supposed historic fact which it is thought to conceal, and which is received as credible on the very ground that it resembles a host of similar facts already well established.