English, to call old Herodotus a liar, or at least a dupe. What means
those wise men can have at this distance of more than 2000 years, of
knowing more about the matter than Herodotus, who lived within 100 years
of Cyrus, I for myself cannot discover. And I say this without the least
wish to disparage these hypercritical persons. For there are--and more
there ought to be, as long as lies and superstitions remain on this
earth--a class of thinkers who hold in just suspicion all stories which
savour of the sensational, the romantic, even the dramatic. They know
the terrible uses to which appeals to the fancy and the emotions have
been applied, and are still applied to enslave the intellects, the
consciences, the very bodies of men and women. They dread so much from
experience the abuse of that formula, that "a thing is so beautiful it
must be true," that they are inclined to reply: "Rather let us say
boldly, it is so beautiful that it cannot be true. Let us mistrust, or
even refuse to believe _a priori_, and at first sight, all startling,
sensational, even poetic tales, and accept nothing as history, which is
not as dull as the ledger of a dry-goods' store." But I think that
experience, both in nature and in society, are against that ditch-water
philosophy. The weather, being governed by laws, ought always to be
equable and normal, and yet you have whirlwinds, droughts, thunderstorms.
The share-market, being governed by laws, ought to be always equable and
normal, and yet you have startling transactions, startling panics,
startling disclosures, and a whole sensational romance of commercial
crime and folly. Which of us has lived to be fifty years old, without
having witnessed in private life sensation tragedies, alas! sometimes too
fearful to be told, or at least sensational romances, which we shall take
care not to tell, because we shall not be believed? Let the ditch-water
philosophy say what it will, human life is not a ditch, but a wild and
roaring river, flooding its banks, and eating out new channels with many
a landslip. It is a strange world, and man, a strange animal, guided, it