Anachronism

“ Anachronisms may be committed in many ways, originating, for instance, in disregard of the different modes of life and thought that characterize different periods, or in ignorance of the progress of the arts and sciences and the other ascertained facts of history, and may vary from glaring inconsistency to scarcely perceptible misrepresentation. Much of the thought entertained about the past is so deficient in historical perspective as to be little better than a continuous anachronism. ”

“ Labels like Middle Ages, Renaissance, ... are none of them earlier than the eighteenth century, which also saw the new expressions develop and development, and the fact that the significant words anachronism, [48] evolution, [48] and prehistoric, with the new perspectives they denote, only appeared during the nineteenth century may make us doubtful whether the mists of time have even yet fallen wholly from our eyes. ”

“ An anachronism is something that is misplaced in time. In this instance, it is a throwback to a more primitive age which is, at best, a misfit and, at worst, a destructive force in the age in which it occurs. ”

“ It doth not merely refer to the history of an individual, or even of one nation, but to the history of man. It respects the progress of the arts; and an anachronism here is of considerable importance, because, being established upon a supposed fact, it becomes a precedent for writers in future ages. ”

“ A far worse kind of anachronism, though rarely noticed as such, is where a writer ascribes sentiments and modes of thought incapable of co-existing with the sort or the degree of civilization then attained, or otherwise incompatible with the structure of society in the age or the country assigned. ”

“ We perceive the anachronism involved in explaining away as mere passing fancies, personal eccentricities or anomalous beliefs the superstitious or bizarre notions of those to whom tradition has accorded great fame. ”

“ Anachronisms and the like are in themselves of no account, and become important only when they make a gap too wide for our illusion to cross unconsciously, that is, when they are anacoluthons to the imagination. The aim of the artist is psychologic, not historic truth. ”

“ What we have to account for is not only the relative lack of anachronisms in poems supposed to have been made through a period of at least four hundred years, but also the harmony of the CHARACTERS in subtle details. ”

“ As will be noticed in the introductions and original notes to several of these volumes, it is stated that they possess anachronisms; that they are not portraits of people living or dead, and that they only assume to be in harmony with the spirit of men and times and things. ”

“ Why then should not cycles of history, two, three, or more cycles of history, be allowed to exist, within which all the really important factors have their origin and development, and, it may be, work out their full destiny; successive great dramas of ages, the interest of which is self-contained, although there is enough of common ground between them and those which precede and follow to give them a simple continuity, and although there is doubtless in the divine mind one great plan of cosmical action in which each drama of the human ages serves as a single act or even a single incident? ”

“ I say history, in the modern sense of the word, that is, not barely a chronicle of events and record of current traditions or venerable myths, but a narrative based upon evidence which has been critically sifted, and in which the narrator endeavors to trace, amid the tangled occurrences of human life, the thread of natural causation which connects them with the needs and the passions of men. The chronicler is more or less of a gossip, the historian more or less of a man of science. ”

“ But don't let us forget in the hours of quiet that there is no reason at all to expect that any of these arbitrary, and conventional, and unreal distinctions of calendars and dates make any difference in that uniform strand of our life which just runs the same, which is reeled off the great drum of the future and on to the great drum of the past, and that is all spun out of one fibre and is one gauge, and one sort of stuff from the beginning to the end. ”

“ I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy.
‘The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. ”

“ We instinctively long to set bounds to the past, to measure it by the unit of years. It affords us satisfaction to give dates for events long since gone by. For any event in the domain of history, it is natural and appropriate to gratify this desire. It gives precision to our thoughts, and more firmly fixes the march of events. But the historical portion of human life on the globe is but a small part of the grand whole. ”

“ To all who in history look for the true connexion between causes and effects, chronology is not a dry and mechanical compilation of barren dates, but the explanation of events and the philosophy of facts. ”

“ Not chronology but relationship is ultimately what the historian deals in. The element of time, so vital at first glance, assumes a constantly more subordinate character. That the past is past becomes ever less [Pg 119] important. Except for perspective it might as well be the present or the future or, if one can conceive it, a parallel time. ”

“ Chronicles were written when the science of true history had yet no existence; a chronicle then in reality is but a part of history. Every fact dispersed in its insulated state refuses all combination; cause and effect lie remote and obscured from each other; disguised by their ostensible pretexts, the true motives of actions in the great actors of the drama of history cannot be found in the chronological chronicler. The real value of his diligence consists in copiousness and discrimination; qualities rather adverse to each other. ”

“ TRUTH.
“A century is a formula; an epoch is an expressed thought. One such thought-expressed civilization passes to another. The centuries are the phrases of civilization; what she says here she does not repeat there. But these mysterious phrases are linked together: logic—the logos—is within them, and their series constitutes progress. In all these, phrase expressions of a single thought, the divine thought, we are slowly deciphering the word fraternity.
“All light is at some point condensed into a flame; likewise every epoch is condensed in a man. ”

“ The second habitual error is, that in this comparison of ages we divide time merely into past and present, and place these in the balance to be weighed against each other; not considering that the present is in our estimation not more than a period of thirty years, or half a century at most, and that the past is a mighty accumulation of many such periods, perhaps the whole of recorded time, or at least the whole of that portion of it in which our own country has been distinguished. ”

“ But the Memory and Imagination of successions present to us nothing but the successions themselves. If then the Memory and Imagination of successions, give us the idea of Time, the idea of Time can only be some part or the whole of the idea of the successions.
“The World has been likened to a variety of Things, but it appears to resemble no one more than some moving spectacle (such as a procession or a triumph) that abounds in every part with splendid objects, some of which are still departing, as fast as others make their appearance. ”

“ The chronological arrangement of events, for example, may or may not be the arrangement which most surely brings the truth of the narrative to light; and the best arrangement is always that which displays, not the facts themselves, but the subtle and else invisible forces that lurk in the events and in the minds of men,—forces for which events serve only as lasting and dramatic words of utterance. ”

“ And as you do not show any reason for the failure, permit us to give ours before we take your ground and deny that prophecy can be understood. Every man of common intellect and information knows that we are dependent in some things on what we call human chronology for the conclusion of our premises as it respects time. Again, they well know that our most learned and studious writers and historians disagree in the chronology of the events from which we date, some four or five years. ”

“ We may learn this, among other instances, from the order which is always observed in historical narrations. Nothing but an absolute necessity can oblige an historian to break the order of time, and in his narration give the precedence to an event, which was in reality posterior to another. ”

“ We now pass on to times which seem, in their customs, to approach more nearly to the present, yet far back enough to be called old times; and we think it may be pardoned if we indulge in some reminiscences of them, tacking on to our short-lived memories the greater recollection of history, and thus reversing the wheels of time, which are hurrying us forward faster than we care to go. ”

“ The Middle Ages served their purpose: but why extend them to the confusion of modern chronology? We have seen God, as no generation before has seen Him. Let us then live, and not die, until the grave be digged, and the night overshadow us at last. ”

“ But such a history should not set forth deeds and events after the fashion of a chronicle; it should transport us by its fascinating power, without any effort or clear consciousness on our part, into the very midst of the life of that time, so that we ourselves should seem to be walking and standing and deciding and acting with them. ”

“ But out of these conventional and multiplied divisions of time, these wheels within the great wheel, arise results far more important than the verification of a chronological series or the establishment of the harmonies of history. Through them not only may the ages of the world be said to intercommunicate, and the ends of the earth in a sense to meet, but by their aid the whole business of the life of nations and of individuals is regulated, and a set of mnemonics established upon which hinges the history of the human heart. ”

“ We shall therefore endeavour not to confine ourselves to the narrative of a dry and monotonous chronology, but to select from the number of ascents that have taken place within the last eighty years, only those whose special character renders them worthy of more detailed and severe investigation. ”

“ But that which has fallen together, has fallen in, has fallen close, and lies in a little heap, is the past itself—time—the fact of antiquity.
He has grown into a smaller world as he has grown older. There are no more extremities. Recorded time has no more terrors. The unit of measure which he holds in his hand has become in his eyes a thing of paltry length. The discovery draws in the annals of mankind. ”

“ The periodization of history is subject to the same criticism. To think history is certainly to divide it into periods, because thought is organism, dialectic, drama, and as such has its periods, its beginning, its middle, and its end, and all the other ideal pauses that a drama implies and demands. ”

“ CHRONOLOGY is the science of the measurement of time, of ascertaining and fixing dates, which constitute the landmarks by which the mind is guided in its backward course through the long vista of years, and enabled to locate and fix the events of history, the knowledge of which would otherwise be a confused and wellnigh useless attainment. ”

“ The eye of the historian sees nothing intervening betwixt the cause and the effect; his mind is fixed upon the action, not the manner of its accomplishment; and knowing the whole to be the result of the same power and the arrangement of the same providence, he combines in one cycle or week the entire series of events, one day of which unto the Eternal is as a thousand, and a thousand, but as one day. ”

“ The spirit of meditation and retrospection seems to hover over those solemn effigies resting in their eternal sleep, guarding in inimitable and awful silence secrets of the historic past that can never be solved. ”

“ In the study of events, the two circumstances of time and place constantly demand our attention. Accordingly, Chronology and Geography have been called the two eyes of History. It is only by the use of both that we can gain a complete and life-like impression of events. ”

“ Can it be possible that half a century should have passed—fleeted by like a dream—as a tale that is told and that I should again stand here, looking at the work of my hands in that old time, whereof the memory is so fresh? ”

“ History was therefore arranged in spiritual epochs or phases, through which humanity was born, grew up, and attained completion: there were six, seven, or eight epochs, according to the various ways of dividing and calculating, which sometimes corresponded to the ages of human life, sometimes to the days of the creation, sometimes to both these schemes combined ”

“ And the records of the past, whether appearing to us, from a literary point of view, as mere chronicles or as true histories, become history again whenever they are apprehended by a new mind as an answer to a present problem, partaking of the activity of the mind that thinks them anew. ”