But,in reality,the Odyssey,the Telemachus,and all of that kind,are to the voyage-writing I here intend,what romance is to true history,the former being the confounder and corrupter of the latter.I am far from supposing that Homer,Hesiod,and the other ancient poets and mythologists,had any settled design to pervert and confuse the records of antiquity;but it is certain they have effected it;and for my part I must confess I should have honored and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose,than those noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages;for,though Iread these with more admiration and astonishment,I still read Herodotus,Thucydides,and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction.The original poets were not,however,without excuse.They found the limits of nature too straight for the immensity of their genius,which they had not room to exert without extending fact by fiction:and that especially at a time when the manners of men were too simple to afford that variety which they have since offered in vain to the choice of the meanest writers.In doing this they are again excusable for the manner in which they have done it.
Ut speciosa dehine miracula promant.
They are not,indeed,so properly said to turn reality into fiction,as fiction into reality.Their paintings are so bold,their colors so strong,that everything they touch seems to exist in the very manner they represent it;their portraits are so just,and their landscapes so beautiful,that we acknowledge the strokes of nature in both,without inquiring whether Nature herself,or her journeyman the poet,formed the first pattern of the piece.But other writers (I will put Pliny at their head)have no such pretensions to indulgence;they lie for lying sake,or in order insolently to impose the most monstrous improbabilities and absurdities upon their readers on their own authority;treating them as some fathers treat children,and as other fathers do laymen,exacting their belief of whatever they relate,on no other foundation than their own authority,without ever taking the pains or adapting their lies to human credulity,and of calculating them for the meridian of a common understanding;but,with as much weakness as wickedness,and with more impudence often than either,they assert facts contrary to the honor of God,to the visible order of the creation,to the known laws of nature,to the histories of former ages,and to the experience of our own,and which no man can at once understand and believe.If it should be objected (and it can nowhere be objected better than where I now write,[12]as there is nowhere more pomp of bigotry)that whole nations have been firm believers in such most absurd suppositions,I reply,the fact is not true.
They have known nothing of the matter,and have believed they knew not what.It is,indeed,with me no matter of doubt but that the pope and his clergy might teach any of those Christian heterodoxies,the tenets of which are the most diametrically opposite to their own;nay,all the doctrines of Zoroaster,Confucius,and Mahomet,not only with certain and immediate success,but without one Catholic in a thousand knowing he had changed his religion.
[12]At Lisbon.
What motive a man can have to sit down,and to draw forth a list of stupid,senseless,incredible lies upon paper,would be difficult to determine,did not Vanity present herself so immediately as the adequate cause.The vanity of knowing more than other men is,perhaps,besides hunger,the only inducement to writing,at least to publishing,at all.Why then should not the voyage-writer be inflamed with the glory of having seen what no man ever did or will see but himself?This is the true source of the wonderful in the discourse and writings,and sometimes,I believe,in the actions of men.There is another fault,of a kind directly opposite to this,to which these writers are sometimes liable,when,instead of filling their pages with monsters which nobody hath ever seen,and with adventures which never have,nor could possibly have,happened to them,waste their time and paper with recording things and facts of so common a kind,that they challenge no other right of being remembered than as they had the honor of having happened to the author,to whom nothing seems trivial that in any manner happens to himself.
Of such consequence do his own actions appear to one of this kind,that he would probably think himself guilty of infidelity should he omit the minutest thing in the detail of his journal.
