“All this comes out of your diary, I suppose?”
“No, I haven’t written it up yet. I’m going to write it up, about half an hour from now, that’s why you’re getting all this thrown at you. You see, when I think of you talking through that metaphone, it strikes me as a splendid allegory of the whole historical method in criticism—or rather, that abuse of the historical method which commonly usurps the title. The man who has theories about history is usually just that—a man talking down the metaphone, making a series of false statements to a person who isn’t there, and defying him to disprove them.”
“Gordon, I believe you’re going to solve the problem of my vocation. I’ve always hankered after being an amateur detective, but it seems to me the job is less attractive than I supposed—facts will keep coming in. But, by your way of it, it sounds as if I might be a success in one of the learned professions.”
“Certainly. Be an anthropologist, Reeves. Fish up a lot of facts, alleged on very doubtful authority, about primitive man—his marriage ceremonies, his burial customs, his system of land tenure. Look at the whole mass of facts squint-eyed until you can see a theory in it. Embrace the theory; trot out all the facts which support your theory; write a long appendix on all the facts which contradict your theory, showing them to be insignificant or irrelevant (you’d do that all right) and there you are. You’ll do quite as good anthropological research as—”
“Is there money in it?”
“I thought you were all right for money. No, if you’re out for that, I should take to psychoanalysis. The system’s the same, generally speaking, only instead of dealing with primitive man, whom you can disregard because he isn’t there, you are dealing with a living man, who will probably tell you that you are a liar. Then you tell him that he is losing his temper, which is the sign of a strong inhibition somewhere, and that’s just what you were saying all along. The beauty of psychoanalysis is that it’s all ‘Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.’ In medicine, your diagnosis of fever is a trifle disconcerted if the patient’s temperature is subnormal. In psychoanalysis you say, ‘Ah, that just proves what I was saying.’ ”
“It seems to me that I have been neglecting all these openings for our young men.”
“Well, I don’t know, the psycho-business is getting a bit overcrowded nowadays. But there are still plenty of openings in the historical line. You can read what theories you like into history, as long as you are careful to neglect human probabilities, and take your evidence entirely from a selection of external facts. There is danger in it, of course; any day some fool may dig up a great chunk of Livy, and all your theories go wrong. Still, the obvious remedy for that is to say that Livy was lying on purpose, leaving false clues about deliberately, like Marryatt, you know, on the railway line. All documents, you see, which don’t happen to support your point of view, thereby give themselves away as being late and untrustworthy.”
“But I don’t think I know any history much.”
“That doesn’t matter; it’s quite easy to read your stuff up if you confine yourself to a particular period or a particular kind of history. For the beginner, Church history may be confidently recommended. Public interest in the subject is so small that it is very unlikely anyone will take the trouble to contradict you. If the worst comes to the worst, you can always fall back upon literary criticism, and there you are on perfectly safe ground. A man with a documentary hypothesis can defy the rudest assaults of common sense.”
“How does one do that, exactly?”
“You have to start out by saying, ‘This document consists of three parts. One part is genuine, one part is spurious, the third part is faked evidence put in to make the spurious stuff look as if it was genuine!’ Then, you see, you are on velvet. You reject altogether the parts of the document which you don’t like. Then you take the remaining part, and find that it still contains a certain sort of dross—evidence which still conflicts with your theory. That dross you purge away by calling it a deliberate fake. The watch says 4:54—that is proof positive that, in the first place, the murder took place at 3:54, and, in the second place, the murderer tried to pretend it didn’t. You see the idea? Now, the more of that business you do, the more ingenious your theory becomes, and the more ingenious your theory becomes, the more easily will people accept it as true. Half the statements which we regard as facts in history and criticism are statements made by critics, which are so ingenious that nobody has the heart to doubt them. And so the silly old world goes on. What if our forefathers are misjudged? We keep our mouths, not our ears, to the metaphone, and the honourable gentlemen get no opportunity to reply: and it doesn’t matter much to them, because, like sensible people, they’ve dropped their end of the tube, and left us to talk into empty air.”
“Do you know, Gordon, I believe you talk an awful lot of rot.”
“I know. But it isn’t all rot. Well, what are you proposing to do?”
“I am proposing to devote myself in future to the Game—the Game, the whole Game, and nothing but the Game.”
XXV
The Dull Facts
The Dormy-house,
Paston Oatvile,
Binver
My dear
