Читать книгу The Bruce - Barbour John - Страница 10

Table of Contents

A comparison of judgments on the value of The Bruce as a contribution to history plunges us into a thicket of contradictions. Green’s verdict that it is “historically worthless”[43] is but a petulant aside. It repeats itself, however, in the pronouncement of Mr. Brown that “in no true sense is it an historical document,”[44] but Mr. Brown selects, as illustrative of this, examples, such as the Simon Fraser identification,[45] and the Stanhope Park inference,[46] which recoil to the confusion of the critic.[47] Mr. Cosmo Innes has sought to discriminate, unfortunately upon wrong lines. Of Barbour as historian, he writes: “Satisfied to have real persons and events, and an outline of history for his guide, and to preserve the true character of things, he did not trouble himself about accuracy of detail.”[48] As it happens, it is just in his outline—that is, in his dates and succession of events—that Barbour may be adjudged most careless; his details contain the most remarkable examples of his accuracy. The latest expression of opinion on this head is not even self-consistent. In the Cambridge History of English Literature it is thus written of The Bruce: first, that “it is in no real sense a history ... though, strange to say, it has been regarded from his own time to this as, in all details, a trustworthy source for the history of the period”—a clear exaggeration;[49] and then a few pages farther on: “While Barbour’s narrative contains a certain amount of anecdotal matter derived from tradition, and, on some occasions, deviates from the truth of history, it is, on the whole, moderate, truthful, and historical”[50]—which is quite another pair of sleeves.

The fact is that these wayward judgments rest upon too narrow a basis of induction, and that induction, too, usually irrelevant or uncertain—considerations as to the nature of Romance, Barbour’s literary awkwardness and literary dressing, with inadequate examination of the external evidence. But if Barbour professes to write history, as he does profess, and as he gives every evidence of honestly trying to do, he can surely claim to be tried by the appropriate tests—those of official records or other contemporary accounts, and, in the last resource, by his performance so far as these carry us, and by an estimate of the probable sources of what is peculiar to himself. Nor must the quality of his critical equipment be overlooked; he frankly lets us know that of certain incidents different versions were in circulation—some said that the fatal quarrel between Bruce and Comyn fell otherwise than as he has related, and he includes the divergent accounts of how Bruce and his man escaped the hound; and there are other matters for which, lacking certainty himself, he is content to cite popular report. Towards prevailing and attractive superstitions, necromancy, astrology, and the like, his attitude is bluntly sceptical; yet an apparently well-attested case of prophecy—not one, it must be owned, exhibiting any exceptional degree of penetration—he does record, with very distinct reservation of judgment.[51] There is no supernatural machinery in The Bruce, no visions, miraculous agencies, or other such distractions: for these we must go to sober prose. But such is not the manner of popular romance with which it has been usual to class the manner of The Bruce. Barbour is not writing a conventional romance with historic persons and incidents for his material; he is writing history which has all the qualities of romance in real life. Of the same type were the exploits of Edward Bruce, which of themselves, he says, would furnish material for many romances.[52]

So comes it, then, that a careful and most competent investigator like Joseph Bain can authoritatively pronounce The Bruce to be “of the highest value for the period,”[53] and affirm that “in these details he is almost always correct, with occasional errors in names.”[54] Barbour’s errors, indeed, lie on the surface, and are typical of his time, not wilful perversions on his part—events are transposed, wrong dates given, figures almost always exaggerated. On the other side a study of the notes to the present volume will show how trustworthy he is in the main, and, repeatedly, how strikingly and minutely accurate. His profession to tell a truthful story, so far as his knowledge will take him, must be accepted as fully borne out.

Moreover the reflection is forced upon us at many points that, in addition to the oral accounts of which he makes use, those of actual participators like Sir Allan of Cathcart, and John Thomson for the Irish campaigns, besides relations and reminiscences otherwise derived, Barbour had various contemporary writings at his command. Such was certainly the case with Sir Thomas Gray, who wrote, a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle, twenty years before. His Scalacronica embodies the results of research in the library of his prison where he found Scottish chronicles in verse and prose, in Latin, French, and English, and he expressly refers to such chronicles in his account of Bruce, letting us know that there was in existence a description of the Battle of Bannockburn, and, incidentally, that Barbour even has not exhausted the fund of stories of adventure told of the fugitive King. More curious and suggestive is the citation, in the bye-going, by Jean le Bel, Canon of Liège, of a “history made by the said King Robert” (en hystoire faitte par le dit roy Robert), that is the King Robert whom, he tells us, Edward I. had chased by hounds in the forests.[55] It is an allowable inference that these accessible materials were known to the learned and inquiring Barbour, when he took to deal with a subject familiar to him from his earliest years, and so congenial to his instincts, literary and national.

It is worth noting that Sir Walter Scott, on the publication of the Lord of the Isles, which draws so handsomely upon The Bruce, was accused of a lack of proper patriotism, meaning the pungent and rather aggressive patriotism of a long-irritated Scotland distinctive of The Wallace and certain subsequent productions, but not of The Bruce, the spirit of which, too, was in harmony with that of the great reviver of romance. There is no malice in The Bruce; the malice and bitterness are in the contemporary war-literature of the other side. And Barbour is no sentimentalist; his patriotism is not pretentious or exclusive, nor such as leads him to depreciate an opponent, and is therefore not a distorting influence on facts, as Mr. Henderson postulates it must have been.[56] It is not possible to point to a single error on Barbour’s part which is fairly traceable to this cause. And his faults and errors, such as they are, may be paralleled over and over again from the most reputable of that century’s historians, to say nothing of those who, in later times, had to weave their web from less tangled and broken material.

THE BRUCE