[HUTTON] THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 227 
and will lift them up into the atmosphere which is familiar to himself 
and his readers, and will make modern history of them, and will 
re-write them in short for his own age and in the language of his own 
age, and in so doing will, in a sense, universalize them, in spite of certain 
obvious risks in so doing. Shelley said that every good historian 
was a poet. Carlyle illustrated Shelley’s contentions in his history 
of the French Revolution. Froude illustrated it in a less degree in 
his histories, and has been alternately exalted and depreciated since 
by students of history according as they follow Shelley’s or Aristotle’s 
conception of the function of the historian. (Aristotle said that his- 
tory was the antithesis of poetry, that poetry was more serious and 
more philosophic.) 
If after this preamble we turn to the historians of Greece, the 
same antithesis even there presents itself in germ at least, if not highly 
developed. 
Herodotus is frankly expansive, personal, imaginative. He de- 
sires to produce a certain general effect, and to produce this effect 
it is as nothing to him if some of his details be obviously imagined, 
be manifestly devoid of evidence. He is willing that it should be so. 
He is willing that any reader of his shall say ‘And now I know all and 
more than all that is known of this or that great man”: provided that 
the reader can add with some confidence “but not more than the angels 
know”, that is, provided that the added and imaginary details fur- 
nished by Herodotus from his inner consciousness are true in spirit 
to the details actually known: provided that they are ben trovato 
and furnish suitable diet for the intellectual repast of angels and other 
beings who live in the spirit. 
Nay more, Herodotus does not conceive that truth, even when 
conceived in this broad sense, is his only or his primary object. No: 
he is called upon rather to chronicle belief and word, fancy and con- 
versation, superstition or scandal, anything and everything which 
occupies man’s thoughts, rather than the historical facts, if any, 
beneath the words and fancies or scandals. He is not required to 
believe everything, nay anything that he has heard, but he is required 
to chronicle it. 
But Herodotus redeems his dangerous theory by his choice of 
his anecdotes, scandals, superstitions: if there are a few stories intro- 
duced only because they are macabre, grotesque, or gruesome, if 
occasionally Herodotus suggests a modern “‘realist’’, that is a writer 
of matter so exceptionally nasty as hardly to be real in a broad sense 
any longer, still on the whole he selects his anecdotes—however 
unauthentic—for their serious inner truth, for their profound moral 
significance. It is for this reason that he has become a storehouse for 
