As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out
those great thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of
this spirit of historical criticism, I shall pass over those
annalists and chroniclers who intervened between Thucydides and
Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve to throw new light on the real
nature of this spirit and its intimate connection with all other
forms of advanced thought if I give some estimate of the character
and rise of those many influences prejudicial to the scientific
study of history which cause such a wide gap between these two
historians.
Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the
Isocratean school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena
for the display either of pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific
investigation into laws.
The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive
attention to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne,
prefer music to meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the
later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained
gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history. The
rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to
the aesthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more
than one metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and
historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but
by the goodness of the Greek they write.
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