23 Aug When we take up a work of history, our first concern should be with the historian who wrote it (E.H. CARR)
‘History’, says Professor Oakeshott, who on this point stands near to Collingwood, ‘is the historian’s experience. It is “made” by nobody save the historian: to write history is the only way of making it’
This searching critique, though it may call for some serious reservations, brings to light certain neglected truths.
In the first place, the facts of history never come to us’ pure’, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it. Let me take as an example the great historian in whose honour and in whose name these lectures were founded. G. M. Trevelyan, as he tells us in his autobiography, was ‘brought up at home on a somewhat exuberantly Whig tradition’; and he would not, I hope, disclaim the title if I described him as the last and not the least of the great English liberal historians of the Whig tradition. It is not for nothing that he traces back his family tree, through the great Whig historian George Otto Trevelyan, to Macaulay, incomparably the greatest of the Whig historians.
Trevelyan’s finest and maturest work, England under Queen Anne, was written against that background, and will yield its full meaning and significance to the reader only when read against that background. The author, indeed, leaves the reader with no excuse for failing to do so. For, if following the technique of connoisseurs of detective novels, you read the end first, you will find on the last few pages of the third volume the best summary known to me of what is nowadays called the Whig interpretation of history; and you will see that what Trevelyan is trying to do is to investigate the origin and development of the Whig tradition, and to root it fairly and squarely in the years after the death of its founder, William III.
Though this is not, perhaps, the only conceivable interpretation of the events of Queen Anne’s reign, it is a valid and, in Trevelyan’s hands, a fruitful interpretation. But, in order to appreciate it at its full value, you have to understand what the historian is doing.’ For if, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian. Study the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that great scholar Jones of St Jude’s, goes round to a friend at St Jude’s to ask what sort of chap Jones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. Indeed, if, standing” Sir George Qark on his head, I were to call history’ a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts’, my statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I venture to think, than the original dictum.
The second point is the more familiar one of the historian’s need of imaginative understanding for the minds of the people with whom he is dealing, for the thought behind their acts: I say ‘imaginative understanding’, not ‘sympathy’, lest sympathy should be supposed to imply agreement. The nineteenth century was weak in medieval history, because it was too much repelled by the superstitious beliefs of the Middle Ages, and by the barbarities which they inspired, to have any imaginative understanding of medieval people.
Or take Burckhardt’s censorious remark about the Thirty Years War: ‘It is scandalous for a creed, no matter whether it is Catholic or Protestant, to place its salvation above the integrity of the nation.’1 It was extremely difficult for a nineteenth-century liberal historian, brought up to believe that it is right and praiseworthy to kill in defence of one’s country, but wicked and wrong-headed to kill in defence of one’s religion, to enter into the state of mind of those who fought the Thirty Years War. This difficulty is particularly acute in the field in which I am now working. Much of what has been written in English-speaking countries in the last ten years about the Soviet Union, and in the Soviet Union about the English-speaking countries, has been vitiated by this inability to achieve even the most elementary measure of imaginative understanding of what goes on in the mind of the other party, so that the words and actions of the other are always made to appear malign, senseless, or hypocritical. History cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about whom he is writing.
The third point is that we can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the eyes of the present. The historian is of his own age, and is bound to it by the conditions of human existence. The very words which he uses – words like democracy, empire, war, revolution – have current’ connotations from which he cannot divorce them. Ancient historians have taken to using words like polis and plebs in the original, just in order to show that they have not fallen into this, trap. This does not help them. They, too, live in the present, and cannot cheat themselves into the past by using unfamiliar or obsolete words, any more than they would become better Greek or Roman historians if they delivered their lectures in a chlamys or a toga. The names by which successive French historians have described the Parisian crowds which played so prominent a role in the French revolution – les sans-culottes, le peuple, la canaille, les brasnus – are all, for those who know the rules of the game, manifestos of a political affiliation and of a particular interpretation.
Yet the historian is obliged to choose: the use of language forbids him to be neutral. Nor is it a matter of words alone. Over the past hundred years the changed balance of power in Europe has reversed the attitude of British historians to Frederick the Great. The changed balance of power within the Christian churches between Catholicism and Protestantism has profoundly altered their attitude to such figures as Loyola, Luther, and Cromwell. It requires only a superficial knowledge of the work of French historians of the last forty years on the French revolution to recognize how deeply it has been affected by the Russian revolution of 1917. The historian belongs not to the fast but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian’ ought to love the past V This is a dubious injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future.
WHAT IS HISTORY?
E.H. CARR
