H.—ANTHROPOLOGY 153 
‘ in all his dealings, and an enemy of flatterers and favourites. His sincere 
‘ piety bordered on asceticism.’ 
Even had there been no contemporary records of the youth of Henry V, 
there are points in the account adopted by Shakespeare which might lead 
the sober critic to doubt its veracity. The first is that it would be, to say 
the least, surprising that a man should be an idle and dissolute scapegrace 
one day, and the first soldier and statesman of his age the next. The 
second is that the stories belong to an ancient and widespread class of 
folk-tales. Had, however, our critic ventured to express his doubts, with 
what scorn would he not have been assailed by believers in the historicity 
of tradition! ‘ Here,’ they would have said, ‘ is an impudent fellow who 
‘ pretends to know more about the fifteenth century than those who lived 
‘in it. The facts which he dares to dispute were placed on record by 
‘educated and respectable persons, the first historians of their day. 
* Could anything be more absurd than to suppose that they would invent 
‘ discreditable stories about a national hero, at a time when all the facts 
‘ of his career must have been widely known? No reasonable person can 
* doubt that Falstaff was as real as Piers Gaveston.’ As we have seen, 
however, the only evidence for Falstaff’s existence is tradition, and tradi- 
tion can never be evidence for an historical fact. He is a purely mythical 
character, who plays Silenus to Henry’s Dionysus, as does Abu Nawas 
to the Dionysus of Hariin ar-Reshid. 
The assimilation of the king to Dionysus no doubt goes back to a time 
when an aspirant to the throne had to perform various rites and undergo 
various ordeals, but whether these stories had previously been told of 
other English princes, and became permanently attached to Henry V 
through the invention of printing, or whether they were recently introduced 
from classical sources, I have no idea. 
It may be objected that Henry V, an historical character, appears in 
tradition, and that tradition is therefore to that extent historical ; but this 
isnotso. ‘The characters in a traditional narrative are often anonymous. 
When named they may be supernatural beings, or persons for whose 
existence there is no real evidence. When the names of real persons are 
mentioned, these names form no part of the tradition, but merely part of 
the machinery by which the tradition is transmitted. Just as the same 
smart saying may be attributed to half a dozen wits in succession, so the 
same feat may be attributed to half a dozen heroes in succession, but it is 
the anecdote or feat which, if it is transmitted from age to age, becomes a 
tradition, and not the ephemeral name. The name selected is that of 
some prominent person whose memory is fading ; who has been dead, 
that is to say, for about a hundred years, or less if the real facts have never 
been widely known. His name remains attached to the tradition till some 
other suitable person has been dead for a suitable length of time. 
This explains certain facts which have puzzled Prof. Gilbert Murray, 
who asks : ‘ Why do they [sc. the Homeric poets] refer not to any war- 
“fare that was going on at the time of their composition, but to war- 
“fare of forgotten peoples under forgotten conditions in the past? .. . 
“What shall one say of this? Merely that there is no cause for surprise. 
“It seems to be the normal instinct of a poet, at least of an epic poet. The 
