Of this last it is quite impossible to afford a test or to
construct a measure; its presence in an argument is none the less as
readily felt as fresh air in a room; without it nothing is convincing
however laboured, with it, even though it rely upon slight evidence, one
has the feeling of walking on a firm road. But it must be "common
sense"--it must be of the sort, that is, which is common to man various
and general, and it is in this perhaps that history suffers most from
the charlatanism and ritual common to all great matters.
Men will have pomp and mystery surrounding important things, and
therefore the historians must, consciously or unconsciously, tend to
strut, to quote solemn authorities in support, and to make out the
vulgar unworthy of their confidence. Hence, by the way, the plague of
footnotes.
These had their origin in two sources: the desire to show that one was
honest and to prove it by a reference; the desire to elucidate some
point which it was not easy to elucidate in the text itself without
making the sentence too elaborate and clumsy. Either use may be seen at
its best in Gibbon. With the last generation they have served mainly,
and sometimes merely, for ritual adornment and terror, not to make
clearer or more honest, but to deceive. Thus Taine in his monstrously
false history of the Revolution revels in footnotes; you have but to
examine a batch of them with care to turn them completely against his
own conclusions--they are only put there as a sort of spiked paling to
warn off trespassers.
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