Pictures of the Past
When we read or think about the past, what images actually form in our minds? Take the average American, for instance. He probably has two sets of such images and no more. One is of bunchy persons in preposterous garments—something between a toga and a burnoose—moving over the garish landscape of a Sunday-school card. The other is of heroic gentlemen in the blue-and-buff of the American Revolution, with powdered wigs and elaborate manners, either engaging in battle or else dancing minuets with the furbelowed dames who, like their gallants, abound in the illustrations of the old-fashioned history books. As the blue-and-buff habiliments represent actually a very brief period of history, and those of the Sunday-school pictures none at all, this is but a scanty wardrobe for the imagination. And in matters not quite so sartorial, things are little better. There are probably only a few persons alive anywhere who can sit down and assemble anything like an accurate mental picture of a street in Athens or Rome or Florence or Paris or London or Weimar or Philadelphia, even in the days which mean most and are consequently most studied in the history of those cities. We have generally but the vaguest notions of the physiognomy of the ancients, or even of the remoter moderns. We cannot actually visualize them at their meals, at their work, at their relaxations.
If this is the case now, when we possess libraries of archaeology to draw upon if we care to, what was the case before illustrated books had become common? To judge by the paintings of the Middle Ages, the past then was visualized as merely like the present in its outward details. On the Elizabethan stage the Greeks and Romans were set forth pretty much after the fashions contemporary with the audiences. And even far down through the eighteenth century this custom prevailed. Garrick acted Lear in breeches and wig and nobody minded. It is certain that, while many in his audience would have known better if they had been questioned, they did not experience the shock that we should feel. Lear belonged to an age about which the eighteenth century readers knew little. They were, however, hardly more exact in their images of the Greek and Roman past. Examine, for instance, the illustrations of Pope’s Homer, completed a little over two hundred years ago. It was issued in a magnificent folio with elaborate plates. The frontispiece to the second volume, “Troja cum Locis pertingentibus,” aims to exhibit the plains of Troy, with the sea in the foreground and at the back the city itself. It is true that the ships have slightly Grecian prows, and the warriors on the plains fight with bows and spears and shields and chariots. But the citadel towers above the surrounding houses suspiciously as does St. Paul’s above the City of London. The landscape rolls across the page with the soft curves of England. Here and there are English hedgerows, and the brooks and mountains, so far as they have any vraisemblance at all, are of English make. Quaint and incredible! But what chance, after all, had the illustrator for knowing better? Not for a generation did the excavations begin at Herculaneum and Pompeii or Winckelmann begin the great career which taught the world to think of the ancients very much in their true proportions, though not in their true colours or movements. The fact of the matter is that the Renaissance and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, spiritual great-grandchildren of Greece and Rome and worshippers of their ancestors, did not really know what their ancestors looked like. Yet in those ages a great and truthful art grew out of that worship.
The moral seems to be that we lean very little upon definite images in our imagination of the past. The vaguest images will do for most people. Even when we deal with more recent periods and have striking illustrations to help us out, such as Hogarth’s for his age, or those of Phiz for Dickens and Ainsworth, or those of the too-much-neglected F. O. C. Darley for the old American frontier, we probably depend less upon them than we think. We create our favoured personages from history or fiction in our own image. Let any reader of an historical novel, even of so incomparably vivid a series of pictures as Salammbô, examine himself as he reads, and the chances are he will find that, having seized upon a few mental or moral traits of the characters, he follows them by this scent and hardly notices their outward appearances again, any more than he carefully visualizes the landscape, much pleasure as he may take from its presence in the action. Such an examination is likely to show, on simple psychological grounds, that Lessing has not been wholly superseded in his doctrine of the true provinces of poetry and art. It is likely also to make us ask whether the Imagists, exquisite lyrics and vivid episodes as they have produced, can ever by images alone build up any great or sustained illusion of events really transacted in something like a real world.