I have long desired to make some protest against the attitude which the Very Learned take towards literary evidence. I know that the Very Learned chop and change. I know that they are in this country about fifty years behind the Continent. I know that their devotion to the extraordinary unintelligent German methods will soon be shaken by their discovery that new methods are abroad—in both senses of the word "abroad": for new methods have been abroad, thank Heaven, for a very long time.

But I also know that a mere appeal to reason will be of very little use, so I propose here to give a concrete instance, and I submit it to the judgment of the Very Learned.

The Very Learned when they desire to fix the date or the authenticity or both of a piece of literature, adopt among other postulates, these:

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(1) That tradition doesn't count.

(2) That common sense, one's general knowledge of the time, and all that multiplex integration which the same mind effects from a million tiny data to a general judgment, is too tiny to be worthy of their august consideration.

(3) That the title "Very Learned" (which gives them their authority) is tarnished by any form of general knowledge and can only be acquired by confining oneself to a narrow field in which any fool could become an absolute master in about two years.

These are their negative postulates in dealing with a document.

As to their positive methods, of one hundred insufficient tricks I choose in particular these:

(1) The establishment of the date of the document against tradition and general air, by allusion discovered within it.

(2) The conception that all unusual events recorded in it are mythical, and therefore necessarily anterior to the document.

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(3) The supposition that religious emotion, or indeed emotion of any kind, vitiates record.

(4) The admission of a single piece of correlative documentary evidence to destroy the reader's general judgment.

(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of their time in forging.

Now to test these nincompoops I will consider a contemporary document which I know a good deal about, called The Path to Rome. It professes to be the record of a journey by one H. Belloc in the year 1901 from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through a knowledge of surrounding circumstance, a popular idea of what the opening of the twentieth century was like, and a pathetic belief that Belloc had taken this journey in the year 1901.

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This is how the Very Learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in scepticism.

"A critical examination of the document has confirmed me in the conclusion that the so-called Path to Rome is composed of three distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and [Greek: theta]." (See my article E.H.R., September 3, 113, pp. 233 et seq. for [Greek: theta]. For W, see Furth in Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)

Of these three documents A is certainly much earlier than the rather loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the Continent decided some years ago in the Monograph of the one, and the Discursions which the other has incorporated in his Neo-Catholicism in the Twenty-Second Century.

The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit of A.D. 2208, and a doubtful superior limit of A.D. 2236. The German is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known arguments with which this view is supported (See Z.M. fs.[Pg 300] (Mk. 2) Arch., and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally that their argument reposes upon two considerations:

(1) The Centime, a coin which is mentioned several times in the book, went out of circulation before the middle of the twenty-first century, as we know from the only extant letter (undoubtedly genuine) of Henri Perro to the Prefect of Aude.

This gives them their superior limit. But it is the Inferior Limit which concerns us most, and here the argument reposes upon one phrase. (Perkins' edition, p..) This phrase is printed in italics, and runs, "Deleted by the Censor."

It is advanced that we know that a censorship of books was first established in America (where, as I shall show, The Path to Rome was written) in the year 2208, and there is ample evidence of the fact that no such institution was in actual existence before the twenty-second century in the English-speaking countries,[Pg 301] though there is mention of it elsewhere in the twenty-first, and a fragment of the twentieth appears to allude to something of the kind in Russia at that time. (Baker has confused the Censorship of Books with that of Plays, and an unknown form of art called "Morum"; probably a species of private recitation.)

Now Dr. Blick has conclusively shown in his critical edition of the mass of ancient literature, commonly known as The Statute Book, that the use of italics is common to distinguish later interpolation.

This discovery is here of the first importance. Not only does it destroy the case for the phrase, "Deleted by the Censor," as a proof of an Inferior............