ls or its manners.

(6) The author endeavoured to please the public by literary artifices.
He distorted facts in order to embellish them according to his own
aesthetic notions. We have therefore to look for the ideal of the author
or of his time, in order to be on our guard against passages distorted
to suit that ideal. But without special study we may calculate on the
common kinds of literary distortion. Rhetorical distortion consists in
attributing to persons noble attitudes, acts, sentiments, and, above
all, words: this is a natural tendency in young boys who are beginning
to practise the art of composition, and in writers still in a
semi-barbarous stage; it is the common defect of the mediaeval
chroniclers.[151] Epic distortion embellishes the narrative by adding
picturesque details, speeches delivered by the persons concerned,
numbers, sometimes names of persons; it is dangerous, because the
precision of the details produces an illusive appearance of truth.[152]
Dramatic distortion consists in grouping the facts in such a way as to
enhance the dramatic effect by concentrating facts, which in reality
were separate, upon a single moment, a single person, or a single group.
Writing of this kind is what we call "truer than the truth." It is the
most dangerous form of distortion, the form employed by artistic
historians, by Herodotus, Tacitus, the Italians of the Renaissance.
Lyrical distortion exaggerates the intensity of the sentiments and the
emotions of the author and his friends: we should remember this when we
attempt to reconstruct "the psychology" of a person.

Literary distortion does not much affect archives (though instances of
it are found in most charters of the eleventh century); but it
profoundly modifies all literary texts, including the narratives of
historians. Now, the natural tendency is to trust writers more readily
when they have talent, and to admit statements with less difficulty when
they are presented in good literary form. Criticism must counteract this
tendency by the application of the paradoxical rule, that the more
interesting a statement is from the artistic point of view,[153] the
more it ought to be suspected. We must distrust every narrative which
is very picturesque or very dramatic, in which the personages assume
noble attitudes or manifest great intensity of feeling.

This first series of questions will yield the _provisional_ result of
enabling us to note the statements which hav