Practicing History: Selected Essays Read online

  Distance does not always confer objectivity; one can hardly say Gibbon wrote objectively of the Roman Empire or Carlyle of the French Revolution. Objectivity is a question of degree. It is possible for the latter-day historian to be at least relatively objective, which is not the same thing as being neutral or taking no sides. There is no such thing as a neutral or purely objective historian. Without an opinion a historian would be simply a ticking clock, and unreadable besides.

  Nevertheless, distance does confer a kind of removal that cools the judgment and permits a juster appraisal than is possible to a contemporary. Once long ago as a freshman journalist I covered a campaign swing by Franklin D. Roosevelt during which he was scheduled to make a major speech at Pittsburgh or Harrisburg, I forget which.*1 As we were leaving the train, one of the newspapermen remained comfortably behind in the club car with his feet up, explaining that as a New Dealer writing for a Republican paper he had to remain “objective” and he could “be a lot more objective right here than within ten feet of that fellow.” He was using distance in space if not in time to acquire objectivity.

  I found out from personal experience that I could not write contemporary history if I tried. Some people can, William Shirer, for one; they are not affected by involvement. But I am, as I discovered when working on my first book, Bible and Sword. It dealt with the historical relations between Britain and Palestine from the time of the Phoenicians to the present. Originally I had intended to bring the story down through the years of the British Mandate to the Arab-Israeli War and the reestablishment of the state of Israel in 1948.

  I spent six months of research on the bitter history of those last thirty years: the Arab assaults and uprisings, the Round Tables, the White Papers, the cutting off of Jewish immigration, the Commissions of Inquiry, the ultimate historical irony when the British, who had issued the Balfour Declaration, rammed the ship Exodus, the whole ignominious tale of one or more chapters of appeasement.

  When I tried to write this as history, I could not do it. Anger, disgust, and a sense of injustice can make some writers eloquent and evoke brilliant polemic, but these emotions stunted and twisted my pen. I found the tone of my concluding chapter totally different from the seventeen chapters that went before. I had suddenly walked over the line into contemporary history; I had become involved, and it showed. Although the publisher wanted the narrative brought up to date, I knew my final chapter as written would destroy the credibility of all the preceding, and I could not change it. I tore it up, discarded six months’ work, and brought the book to a close in 1918.

  I am not saying that emotion should have no place in history. On the contrary, I think it is an essential element of history, as it is of poetry, whose origin Wordsworth defined as “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” History, one might say, is emotion plus action recollected or, in the case of latter-day historians, reflected on in tranquillity after a close and honest examination of the records. The primary duty of the historian is to stay within the evidence. Yet it is a curious fact that poets, limited by no such rule, have done very well with history, both of their own times and of times long gone before.

  Tennyson wrote the “Charge of the Light Brigade” within three months of the event at Balaclava in the Crimea. “Cannon in front of them volleyed and thundered … Flashed all their sabres bare … Plunged in the battery-smoke … Stormed at with shot and shell … When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made!” His version, even including the Victorian couplet “Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die,” as poetry may lack the modern virtue of incomprehensibility, but as history it captures that combination of the glorious and the ridiculous which was a nineteenth-century cavalry charge against cannon. As an onlooker said, “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (“It is magnificent, but it is not war”), which is exactly what Tennyson conveyed better than any historian.

  To me who grew up before Bruce Catton began writing, the Civil War will always appear in terms of

  Up from the meadows rich with corn,

  Clear in the cool September morn,

  The clustered spires of Frederick stand.

  Whittier, too, was dealing in contemporary history. Macaulay, on the other hand, wrote “Horatius at the Bridge” some 2,500 years after the event. Although he was a major historian and only secondarily a poet, would any of us remember anything about Tarquin the Tyrant or Roman history before Caesar if it were not for “Lars Porsena of Clusium / By the Nine Gods he swore,” and the rest of the seventy stanzas? We know how the American Revolution began from Longfellow’s signal lights in the old North Church.

  “One, if by land, and two, if by sea,

  And I on the opposite shore will be,

  Ready to ride and spread the alarm

  Through every Middlesex village and farm.”

  The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians, and sometimes they have given history a push. Kipling did it in 1899 with his bidding “Take up the White Man’s Burden,” addressed to Americans, who, being plunged into involuntary imperialism by Admiral Dewey’s adventure at Manila, were sorely perplexed over what to do about the Philippines. “Send forth the best ye breed,” Kipling told them firmly,

  To wait in heavy harness,

  On fluttered folk and wild—

  Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

  Half-devil and half-child.

  Take up the White Man’s burden,

  The savage wars of peace—

  Fill full the mouth of Famine

  And bid the sickness cease;

  Take up the White Man’s burden—

  Ye dare not stoop to less.

  The advice, published in a two-page spread by McClure’s Magazine, was quoted across the country within a week and quickly reconciled most Americans to the expenditure of bullets, brutality, and trickery that soon proved necessary to implement it.

  Kipling had a peculiar gift for recognizing history at close quarters. He wrote “Recessional” in 1897 at the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee when he sensed a self-glorification, a kind of hubris, in the national mood that frightened him. In The Times on the morning after, when people read his reminder—

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  —it created a profound impression. Sir Edward Clark, the distinguished barrister who defended Oscar Wilde, was so affected by the message that he pronounced “Recessional” “the greatest poem written by any living man.”

  What the poets did was to convey the feeling of an episode or a moment of history as they sensed it. The historian’s task is rather to tell what happened within the discipline of the facts.

  What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement. His method is narrative. His subject is the story of man’s past. His function is to make it known.

  * * *

  New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1964.

  *1 See “Campaign Train,” this page.

  History by the Ounce

  AT A PARTY given for its reopening last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York served champagne to five thousand guests. An alert reporter for the Times, Charlotte Curtis, noted that there were eighty cases, which, she informed her readers, amounted to 960 bottles or 7,680 three-ounce drinks. Somehow through this detail the Museum’s party at once becomes alive; a fashionable New York occasion. One sees the crush, the women eyeing each other’s clothes, the exchange of greetings, and feels the gratifying sense of elegance and importance imparted by champagne—even if, at one and a half drinks per person, it was not on an exactly riotous scale. All this is conveyed by Miss Curtis’ detail. It is, I think, the way history as well as journalism should be written. It is what Pooh-Bah, in The Mikado, meant when, telling how the victim’s head stood on i
ts neck and bowed three times to him at the execution of Nanki-Poo, he added that this was “corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” Not that Miss Curtis’ narrative was either bald or unconvincing; on the contrary, it was precise, factual, and a model in every way. But what made it excel, made it vivid and memorable, was her use of corroborative detail.

  Pooh-Bah’s statement of the case establishes him in my estimate as a major historian or, at least, as the formulator of a major principle of historiography. True, he invented his corroborative detail, which is cheating if you are a historian and fiction if you are not; nevertheless, what counts is his recognition of its importance. He knew that it supplies verisimilitude, that without it a narrative is bald and unconvincing. Neither he nor I, of course, discovered the principle; historians have for long made use of it, beginning with Thucydides, who insisted on details of topography, “the appearance of cities and localities, the description of rivers and harbors, the peculiar features of seas and countries and their relative distances.”

  Corroborative detail is the great corrective. Without it historical narrative and interpretation, both, may slip easily into the invalid. It is a disciplinarian. It forces the historian who uses and respects it to cleave to the truth, or as much as he can find out of the truth. It keeps him from soaring off the ground into theories of his own invention. On those Toynbeean heights the air is stimulating and the view is vast, but people and houses down below are too small to be seen. However persuaded the historian may be of the validity of the theories he conceives, if they are not supported and illustrated by corroborative detail they are of no more value as history than Pooh-Bah’s report of the imagined execution.

  It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of the evidence rather than the other way around, like so many revisionists today. It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord. This to me is the excitement, the built-in treasure hunt, of writing history. In the book I am working on now, which deals with the twenty-year period before 1914 (and the reader must forgive me if all my examples are drawn from my own work, but that, after all, is the thing one knows best), I have been writing about a moment during the Dreyfus Affair in France when on the day of the reopening of Parliament everyone expected the Army to attempt a coup d’état. English observers predicted it, troops were brought into the capital, the Royalist pretender was summoned to the frontier, mobs hooted and rioted in the streets, but when the day had passed, nothing had happened; the Republic still stood. By this time I had assembled so much corroborative detail pointing to a coup d’état that I had to explain why it had not occurred. Suddenly I had to stop and think. After a while I found myself writing, “The Right lacked that necessary chemical of a coup—a leader. It had its small, if loud, fanatics; but to upset the established government in a democratic country requires either foreign help or the stuff of a dictator.” That is a historical generalization, I believe; a modest one, to be sure, but my size. I had arrived at it out of the necessity of the material and felt immensely pleased and proud. These moments do not occur every day; sometimes no more than one a chapter, if that, but when they do they leave one with a lovely sense of achievement.

  I am a disciple of the ounce because I mistrust history in gallon jugs whose purveyors are more concerned with establishing the meaning and purpose of history than with what happened. Is it necessary to insist on a purpose? No one asks the novelist why he writes novels or the poet what is his purpose in writing poems. The lilies of the field, as I remember, were not required to have a demonstrable purpose. Why cannot history be studied and written and read for its own sake, as the record of human behavior, the most fascinating subject of all? Insistence on a purpose turns the historian into a prophet—and that is another profession.

  To return to my own: Corroborative detail will not produce a generalization every time, but it will often reveal a historical truth, besides keeping one grounded in historical reality. When I was investigating General Mercier, the Minister of War who was responsible for the original condemnation of Dreyfus and who in the course of the Affair became the hero of the Right, I discovered that at parties of the haut monde ladies rose to their feet when General Mercier entered the room. That is the kind of detail which to me is worth a week of research. It illustrates the society, the people, the state of feeling at the time more vividly than anything I could write and in shorter space, too, which is an additional advantage. It epitomizes, it crystallizes, it visualizes. The reader can see it; moreover, it sticks in his mind; it is memorable.

  The same is true, verbally though not visually, of a statement by President Eliot of Harvard in 1896 in a speech on international arbitration, a great issue of the time. In this chapter I was writing about the founding tradition of the United States as an anti-militarist, anti-imperialist nation, secure within its own shores, having nothing to do with the wicked armaments and standing armies of Europe, setting an example of unarmed strength and righteousness. Looking for material to illustrate the tradition, I found in a newspaper report these words of Eliot, which I have not seen quoted by anyone else: “The building of a navy,” he said, “and the presence of a large standing army mean … the abandonment of what is characteristically American.… The building of a navy and particularly of battleships is English and French policy. It should never be ours.”

  How superb that is! Its assurance, its conviction, its Olympian authority—what does it not reveal of the man, the time, the idea? In those words I saw clearly for the first time the nature and quality of the American anti-militarist tradition, of what has been called the American dream—it was a case of detail not merely corroborating but revealing an aspect of history.

  Failing to know such details, one can be led astray. In 1890 Congress authorized the building of the first three American battleships and, two years later, a fourth. Shortly thereafter, in 1895, this country plunged into a major quarrel with Great Britain, known as the Venezuelan crisis, in which there was much shaking of fists and chauvinist shrieking for war. Three years later we were at war with Spain. She was no longer a naval power equal to Britain, of course, but still not negligible. One would like to know what exactly was American naval strength at the time of both these crises. How many, if any, of the battleships authorized in 1890 were actually at sea five years later? When the jingoes were howling for war in 1895, what ships did we have to protect our coasts, much less to take the offensive? It seemed to me this was a piece of information worth knowing.

  To my astonishment, on looking for the answer in textbooks on the period, I could not find it. The historians of America’s rise to world power, of the era of expansion, of American foreign policy, or even of the Navy have not concerned themselves with what evidently seems to them an irrelevant detail. It was hardly irrelevant to policymakers of the time who bore the responsibility for decisions of peace or war. Text after text in American history is published every year, each repeating on this question more or less what his predecessor has said before, with no further enlightenment. To find the facts I finally had to write to the Director of Naval History at the Navy Department in Washington.

  My point is not how many battleships we had on hand in 1895 and ’98 (which I now know) but why this hard, physical fact was missing from the professional historians’ treatment. “Bald and unconvincing,” said Pooh-Bah of narrative without fact, a judgment in which I join.

  When I come across a generalization or a general statement in history unsupported by illustration I am instantly on guard; my reaction is, “Show me.” If a historian writes that it was raining heavily on the day war was declared, that is a detail corroborating a statement, let us say, that the day was gloomy. But if he writes merely that it was a gloomy day without mentioning the rain, I want to know what is his evidence; what made it gloomy. Or if he writes,
“The population was in a belligerent mood,” or, “It was a period of great anxiety,” he is indulging in general statements which carry no conviction to me if they are not illustrated by some evidence. I write, for example, that fashionable French society in the 1890s imitated the English in manners and habits. Imagining myself to be my own reader—a complicated fugue that goes on all the time at my desk—my reaction is of course, “Show me.” The next two sentences do. I write, “The Greffulhes and Breteuils were intimates of the Prince of Wales, le betting was the custom at Long-champs, le Derby was held at Chantilly, le steeplechase at Auteuil and an unwanted member was black-boulé at the Jockey Club. Charles Haas, the original of Swann, had ‘Mr’ engraved on his calling cards.”

  Even if corroborative detail did not serve a valid historical purpose, its use makes a narrative more graphic and intelligible, more pleasurable to read, in short more readable. It assists communication, and communication is, after all, the major purpose. History written in abstract terms communicates nothing to me. I cannot comprehend the abstract, and since a writer tends to create the reader in his own image, I assume my reader cannot comprehend it either. No doubt I underestimate him. Certainly many serious thinkers write in the abstract and many people read them with interest and profit and even, I suppose, pleasure. I respect this ability, but I am unable to emulate it.

  My favorite visible detail in The Guns of August, for some inexplicable reason, is the one about the Grand Duke Nicholas, who was so tall (six foot six) that when he established headquarters in a railroad car his aide pinned up a fringe of white paper over the doorway to remind him to duck his head. Why this insignificant item, after several years’ work and out of all the material crammed into a book of 450 pages, should be the particular one to stick most sharply in my mind I cannot explain, but it is. I was so charmed by the white paper fringe that I constructed a whole paragraph describing Russian headquarters at Baranovici in order to slip it in logically.