LITERARY FORGERIES.
WE are not premature, we suppose, in concluding that Mr. Shapira's Recension of the Ten Commandments is of North-German rather than of Phoenician or Moabite origin. The ingenious persons who have deceived Mr. Shapira, and hoped to deceive Europe in general, counted too much upon the interest with which the discovery of a manuscript dating long before the Christian era would be received. Of course, there are many persons who would be so willing to believe in such a " find " that they would overlook difficulties and be con- tent with insufficient evidence. But this is not the attitude of the learned. They are inclined to apply the proverb, "Too good to be true," and to suspect the genuineness of a discovery the more keenly in proportion to the magnitude of its claims. A forger who should add another to the number of unread and unreadable treatises of Epicurean philosophy which are among the curiosities of Herculaneum, would be more likely to escape detection, than if he submitted to the inspection of scholars one of the lost Decades of Liu. The experts in Oriental learning seem to have approached the examination of Mr. Shapira's manuscript in a spirit of incredulity, which has certainly been justified by the result.
It has been remarked in the course of the discus-ion that if the learning of the forgers had been equal to their ingenuity, the attempt might have been successful Their learning was certainly at fault. The compiler of the text, according to Dr. Ginsburg, was not more than moderately well acquainted with Hebrew, and quite unversed in the Phcnnician character. But the ingenuity of the forgers was not such as to escape detection. It will have been observed that the most cogent arguments against the genuine character of the codex were those which dealt with the material on which it was written. Dr. Ginsburg, in his official report to the Librarian of the British Museum, the French scholar who had anticipated some of his con- clusions, and the board of Berlin eavane, who seem to him rejected the manuscript before it was brought over to this country, agree in insisting on the comparative modernness of the material on which it is written. In other respects the ex- ternal evidence of authenticity broke down, as indeed in such, cases it is pretty certain to do. There are scholars in Europe who could reproduce some of the lost fragments of Classical antiquity with a skill which would make detection, to say the least of it, very difficult. Professor Jebb, whom we name honoris coma, could doubtless, if he were so minded, produce an admirable imitation of one of the Dirges of Pindar, and frag- ments which should satisfy the sharpest inspection of criticism, of the lost plays of the Promethean Trilogy. Happily, the very best men, to whom alone such imitations would be possible, never are so minded; and the degraded scholar who is willing to impose upon the world has lost, if he ever had, the power of suc- cessfully deceiving. In any case, it may be doubted whether the mechanical necessities of such an imposture could ever be satis- fied. The actual document on which the recovered fragment was found would have to be produced, and it may be doubted whether any ingenuity could produce out of new materials a manuscript of seeming antiquity which would defy the united scrutiny of the learned and the scientific. The late M. Simonides had probably developed, by practice, this ingenuity to its largest possibilities, and he had not such success as would encourage followers of the art. It will be remembered how a document elaborated with all his skill and artfully plated among &number of genuine manuscripts was almost instantaneously detected by the late Librarian of the Bodleian. And it is probable that the
science of detection has gained ground, and will gain ground here- after, more rapidly than the science of imitation. Generally, it may be affirmed that the day of such frauds has passed. In the early days of literature, these were as common as they were suc- cessful. Then, indeed, they could hardly be called frauds. A Hebrew who attributed his ethical or prudential maxims to Solomon, or a Greek who put the name of Homer at the head of a hymn to Apollo, had no thought but of doing honour to the master whose title he assumed, and his work was accepted in the same good-faith with which it was done. The more deliberate at- tempt to deceive, which is to be seen in such frauds as the so-called "Sibylline Oracles," was, happily, followed by a spirit of critical inquiry ; and such impostures have never had more than a temporary success. Of course, it is possible that we may be accepting as genuine productions of antiquity, secular or sacred, some ingenious pretences. Scholars, for instance, doubt the genuineness of some of the " Heroides " of Ovid ; and a writer, who might have made more impression upon the learned if he had been in any sense a scholar, tried lately to make us believe that the " Annals " of Tacitus were the work of Bracciolini, commonly called " Poggio." The Scholars of the Revival of Letters had, indeed, a grand opportunity of fraud, and if they had not been so busy in discovering what was genuine—what a list is that of Poggio's "finds," Quintilian, four or five orations of Cicero, Lucretius, twelve comedies of Plautus, ezc. !—might have invented a good deal. In these days, invention is impossi- ble, as discovery seems to be hopeless.
Nor is it easy to say where the ingenuity of the artists in literary deception, of whom there seems to be always a supply, is to find a field. We look back with wonder at the success with which George Psalrnanazar, not more than a hundred and fifty years ago, imposed upon many of his contemporaries. At the age of sixteen, he conceived the idea of passing himself off as a native of Formosa; and to support this character, he in- vented a language, with a grammar and a vocabulary, a new division of the year (the people of Formosa had twenty months, it seemed), and a new religion. The men of science, it is true, looked somewhat coldly and incredulously upon him, but the clergy received him with open arms. He was employed to trans- late the Church Catechism into Formosan, and his version PM pronounced by the learned to be grammatically correct. "A History of Formosa" followed; but Psalmanazar's head seemed to have been turned by success, and the extravagancies of his history dealt a great blow to his credit. Still, it was years before the imposture was finally exposed. It may be safely affirmed that now-a-days it would not last as many days. A dozen persons, at least, would instantly be found who were acquainted with the dialect of Formosa, or any other island which the impostor might select; and the grammar and dic- tionary of the imaginary tongue would certainly not stand any longer the scrutiny of experts in language.
The fact is that in these matters the conditions to be satisfied axe too numerous and too difficult to admit of success. The arts, it is well known, present amore promising field for decep- tion. A collector of pictures who left his gallery a few years ago to the nation, was found to have continued for years to purchase, at high prices, spurious examples of the Old Masters. It is probable that not a few copies occupy places of honour in great collections. The authenticity of many so.called master- pieces is fiercely disputed, and though it would be difficult in any one case to estimate the value of the opposing argu- ments, it is certain that in some cases out of the whole number the truth is on the side of those who impugn. With regard to the works of modern painters, the facility of fraud and the diffi- culty of detection must be greatly increased. If the artist be still living, he can, indeed, be called in to decide on the genuine- ness of the attributed work. This test, we understand, is not invariably conclusive, the painter not being always able to speak with certainty. There are evidently large opportunities of forging the works of artists recently deceased. In such things, too, as the wares of China and Japan, there must, one would think, be no small opportunities of fraud. Experts, indeed, profess to know the genuine from the false, and doubtless the faculties of sight and touch can be trained to reach a very subtle power of criticism. But there must be some uncertainty about tests, the operation of which those who exercise them would be scarcely able to describe. And here, too, it is the Oriental workman, a wonderfully skilful master in the art of imitation, who is pitted against Western acuteness. It is the modern Chinese or Japanese copies of the ancient ware of those countries, against which the connoisseur has to be on his guard.
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