FREDERIC HARRISON. _The Meaning of History._ An excellent guide to the reading of history. FOOTNOTES: [3] See also page 244 of this Guide. CHAPTER VIII THE READING OF BIOGRAPHY Since literature is, broadly, the written record of human life, biography, the life story of real men, lies at the core and center of literature. On one side biography is allied to history, which is the collective biography of many men. On the other side it is related to fiction. In our discussion of “History” we found that there are two ideals or methods of writing it: one the picturesque, the other the scientific. The scientific historian accuses the picturesque historian of falsifications and disproportions. Scientific history is new and aggressive and it accentuates its differences from the old ideals. Yet there is no essential opposition between fact and an imaginative representation of fact. Gibbon is picturesque, yet he is one of the first great historians to make exhaustive study and accurate use of documents. Carlyle can be as eloquent when he is telling the truth as when he is misled by his love of color and his partisan passions. The great historian of the future will not falsify or distort facts except as human nature must always intervene before the facts which it presents in human language. The true historian will have great imagination, great vision, and yet have scrupulous care to precisions of truth. For the present, history is recovering from its traditional eloquence and trying to learn to present facts honestly and clearly. Never again will the spirit of history and historical criticism tolerate such a magnificent fabrication as the end of De Quincey’s “Flight of a Tartar Tribe,” in which he gives, with all the paraphernalia of a learned note, the inscription carved on the columns of granite and brass to commemorate the migration of the Kalmucks. The columns are a structure of De Quincey’s fancy, and the inscription is in such prose as he alone among white men or Chinamen knew how to write! In De Quincey’s time it was not considered an ethical aberration to invent facts. In a ponderous article which he wrote for the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ on Shakespeare, he quoted the poet from memory and spun some of the biography from his own fancy. The pious and learned President of Harvard College, Jared Sparks, for the greater glory of America and its founder, “improved” the style of Washington’s private papers and ably defended the emendations. And Weems, an early biographer of the man who seems nobler the more truly we know him and who needs no legend to dignify him, wrote his life of Washington with the deliberate purpose, indicated on the title page, of inculcating patriotic and moral lessons in the young. Hence the cherry-tree story.