y are sorry
afterwards. The knowing ones do not take the risk; the tasks of critical
scholarship have no seductions for them, for they are aware that the
labour is great and the glory moderate, and that the field is engrossed
by clever specialists not too well disposed towards intruders. They see
plainly there is no room for them here. The blunt uncompromising honesty
of the scholars thus delivers them from undesirable company of a kind
which the "historians" proper have still occasionally to put up with.

Bad workers, in fact, on the hunt for a public less closely critical
than the scholars, are very ready to take refuge in historical
exposition. The rules of method are here less obvious, or, rather, not
so well known. While the criticism of texts and sources has been placed
on a scientific basis, historical synthesis is still performed
haphazard. Mental confusion, ignorance, negligence--faults which stand
out so clearly in works of critical scholarship--may in historical
works be disguised up to a certain point by literary artifices, and the
public at large, which is not well educated in this respect, is not
shocked.[127] In short, there is still, in this department, a certain
chance of impunity. This chance, however, is diminishing, and a day will
come, before so very long, when the superficial writers who make
incorrect syntheses will be treated with as little consideration as is
now received by those who show themselves unscrupulous or unskilful in
the technique of preparatory criticism. The works of the most celebrated
historians of the nineteenth century, those who died but yesterday,
Augustin Thierry, Ranke, Fustel de Coulanges, Taine, and others, are
already battered and riddled with criticism. The faults of their methods
have already been seen, defined, and condemned.

Those who are insensible to other considerations ought to be moved to
honesty in historical work by the reflection that the time is now past,
or nearly so, when it was possible to do bad work without having to
suffer for it.

_SECTION II.--INTERNAL CRITICISM_

CHAPTER VI

INTERPRETATIVE CRITICISM (HERMENEUTIC)

I. When a zoologist describes the form and situation of a muscle, when a
physiologist gives the curve of a movement, we are able to accept their
results without reserve, because we know by what method, by what
instruments, by what system of notation they have obtained them.[128]
But when Tacitus says of the Germans, _