The Historian as Artist

ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.

HISTORY has always seemed to me primarily an art, a branch of literature, a minor branch perhaps, subject to its own rules, concerned with its own issues, pursuing its own objectives, but committed nonetheless to the written word, and therefore a literary enterprise.

Of course, it is other things too; and modern tendencies in the writing of history have made these other things more prominent. First of all, the historian, unlike the novelist or poet, has a prescribed and inescapable task. That task is to reconstruct the past, to present as truthful a picture as he can of events that have already taken place. In performing this task, the historian requires, above all, evidence. It is the character of the evidence which establishes the framework within which he writes. He cannot imagine scenes for which he has no citation, invent dialogue for which he has no text, assume relationships for which he has no warrant. Fact is his raw material, and the farther he strays from his evidence, the more contentious his history becomes.

This peculiar dependence of history on evidence led some historians at the turn of the century to suppose that history was less an art than a science, that historical evidence working through the transparent medium of the historian could produce, in effect, its own answers. Obviously we know now that history is not a science in the latenineteenth-century sense of the word; indeed, we are reliably informed that physics isn’t either. But, even taking contemporary science, with its admission of relativism and indeterminacy and its acknowledgment that the experimenter affects the experiment, one must still conclude that history remains something considerably different. If the scientist is assumed to influence his own experiments, the historian, except in a metaphorical sense, cannot conduct experiments at all. If the scientist is implicated technically in his observations, the historian’s implication, which is philosophical and moral, is far more extensive and controlling. And if the test of science is predictability, historians who claim to be scientists might as well go out and cut their throats.

The view that history is a science is rarely advanced today in its naïve form, though it lingers in the notion that history is, to use an odious term, a “social science.” I should myself prefer to describe history as one of the humanities. Yet even some who would go this far would still assign history a lowly place among humane studies. Dr. Johnson, you will remember, instructed Boswell that the historian had no need for talent, since in historical composition the greatest powers of the human mind were necessarily quiescent. The historian, Johnson said, “has facts ready to his hand; so there is no exercise of invention. Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as is used in the lower kinds of poetry. Some penetration, accuracy, and colouring will fit a man for the task, if he can give the application which is necessary.”

This judgment is stern, essentially correct, no doubt, but a little invidious in its emphasis. If the difference between history and science is greater than people supposed in 1900, the difference between history and literature may be less than Dr. Johnson thought, or than people imagine today. The historian must depend on evidence, but the historian’s mission is much more than the transcription of evidence. The very term “evidence" implies criteria of relevance. The historical act is therefore, first of all, the act of selection; selection is just another word for interpretation; and interpretation implies a scale of priorities, a sense that some things matter more than others. The historian can no more escape this process than the novelist or poet. He noses around in chaos, like any other writer, and comes up with what his sensibility, within his discipline of demonstrable fact, finds appropriate.

If the historian’s faith is objectivity, is the novelist’s or poet’s any less so? Every writer, if he is any good, must be rigorously loyal to his own sense of the evidence. It would be hard to name, for example, a historian who has pursued objectiv - ity with such fanaticism as Henry James. And if James failed, have historians been any more successful? The thoughtful historian is bound to agree with Salvemini that historians cannot be impartial. “We can only,”Salvemini wrote, “be intellectually honest — that is, aware of our own passions, on our guard against them, and prepared to warn our readers of the dangers into which our partial views may lead them. Impartiality is a dream, and honesty a duty.”

Within the discipline of demonstrable fact, the historian employs, or at least is free to employ, nearly all the techniques cherished by what is complacently called the creative writer. The more effectively he employs them, the better he executes his task of historical reconstruction. Definition of theme, organization of narrative, setting of scene, dramatization of conflict, evocation of character and atmosphere, grace of style — all the elements of artistic form — are as organic in historical as in any other kind of literary composition. There are limits on the historian’s capacity for invention, but there need be none on his capacity for insight. Written history, after all, is the application of an aesthetic vision to a welter of facts; and both the weight and the vitality of a historical work depend on the quality of the vision. The simplest definition of history I know was tossed off years ago by Burckhardt in one of his lectures on general history at the University of Basel. History, Burckhardt said, is “what one age finds worthy of note in another.” This modest but penetrating remark suggests both the subjectivity and transience of written history and explains why each generation demands — and creates — its own version of the past. It suggests, too, why the historical works which survive from earlier generations do so in the main less as history than as art.

WE HAVE noted the change produced by the conception of history as a branch of science. A century ago, the historian was far more ready to employ the resources of the creative writer than he is today. If one considers history as written in recent times — from, say, Gibbon to the present — it is apparent that, within this span, the historians who rank as artists fall almost entirely into the first rather than the second half. It is therefore pertinent to consider the reasons both for the aesthetic commitment of the older historians and for the subsequent decline of history as an art form.

Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlyle, Parkman, Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, for all their political and philosophical differences, had in common the vision of history as drama. The past was a record of human struggle, human frustration, and human hope. The job of the historian was to recapture vanished emotions, to reproduce the anguish and the triumph, to convey a sense, suitably ordered and heightened, of how it felt when things happened. “Faithfulness to the truth of history,” wrote Parkman. “involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. . . . The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.”

Writing in this spirit, the classical historians set scenes, drew characters, delivered judgments, embellished fact with rhetoric, and aimed at the creation of pictorial and theatrical effect. Their vision dominated the facts without falsifying them. Their essential power was the power of narration. They possessed the quality which Henry Adams called “intellectual sensuousness.” They approached their material in the high style of the novelist, who combines a desire to maintain suspense with a knowledge of how the tale comes out. And, like the novelists, they both drew from and developed the pervading emotions of their own day.

Gibbon, a man of the eighteenth century, saw history as an exercise in irony. No one showed better the immense fascination of the historical brush at work on a great canvas, casting a clear, dry light on the endless “register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” The superb wit and cadence of his splendid sentences, marching across the long wastes of imperial decay, unfolded new possibilities in the historical medium. But the effect of irony, though strong, was narrow. History was still a somewhat marginal form of literary expression. It was the nineteenth century which brought history into its own. Several circumstances now combined to make it a central, almost an obsessive, form through which men sought to interpret their experience.

The rise of nationalism gave people an urgent desire to articulate their sense of national identity, to trace their life to its roots, and to document the course by which their past gave birth to their present. The new romanticism replaced the eighteenth-century conception of the world as a machine by a feeling for organic process. At the same time, it replaced Gibbonian detachment by a compulsion toward fervent commitment. And while nationalism and romanticism were becoming vital emotions, the ongoing movement of secularization drove theology off the center of the intellectual stage. History and the novel now rose together both to fill part of the gap left by religion and to meet the rising demands for self-knowledge.

IN ENGLAND, the historian and the novelist shared the stage. Scott magnificently demonstrated how writers might reconstruct the past, and historians drank deeply at his well. Carlyle learned from Scott to see history as “not abstractions . . . not diagrams and theorems; but men in buff coats and breeches, with color in their cheeks, with passions in their stomach and the idioms, features and vitalities of very men.” Macaulay observed that Scott “used those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them in a manner which may well excite their envy. He has constructed out of their gleanings works which, even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable than theirs.” Macaulay added, “But a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated” — a mission to which he promptly assigned himself.

The American situation was different and, in its way, even more revealing. The American writer of fiction, as Richard Chase brilliantly reminded us, was forced by his own literary predicament to turn not to the novel but to the romance, and thus could not satisfy the appetite for a full and solid evocation of the past. There could be no American Scott because America lacked the requisite density of tradition; there was, as Hawthorne complained, “no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight.” The American Scotts — say, Cooper and Simms — had nothing to write about except Indians and the wilderness. Still, Americans desperately wanted a national epic to prove their title to nationhood. “I should hope,” John Adams wrote in 1785, “to live to see our young America in Possession of an Heroick Poem, equal to those most esteemed in any country.” The early years of the republic were consequently strewn with the wreckage of narrative poems, earnestly composed, canto after canto, according to classical specifications as a testimony to national pride and national identity.

But the American epic could not be written in verse; the American literary tradition, still bearing the imprint of Puritanism, distrusted aesthetic ornamentation long after Puritan theology had loosened its grip. So here, even more than in Britain, history rushed to fill the vacuum. History was sufficiently didactic to satisfy the Puritans and sufficiently dramatic to satisfy the democrats. It was factual, sober, sustained, and founded on hard and meticulous labor. Yet in romantic hands it could be impassioned, rhapsodic, and philosophical. So, in the end, the “Heroick Poem,” the epic which best defined the early American sense of itself, was written not by Timothy Dwight or Joel Barlow but by George Bancroft.

The romantic generation of historians had several characteristics. These historians were possessed by visions of history which organized their material and controlled their interpretation. At the same time, they respected the autonomy of the past and tried to isolate its essence: it must not be forgotten that the romantic impulse animated Ranke’s passion to see history wie es eigentlich gewesen. They sought themselves to become sharers in the drama they depicted. They saw history, so to speak, in technicolor, with vivid lighting and hectic contrasts. They chose their themes and designed their work with conscious artistry. And they were in intimate and sustained contact with their audience. Thus Bancroft spoke directly to Jacksonian America, Macaulay to the Whig middle class of Britain, Carlyle to the sullen resentments of the submerged classes. History mattered: it summed up the hopes, communicated the ambitions, or ventilated the grievances of a great mass of people.

The romantic generation had one other characteristic: they were mostly not, in the contemporary sense, professional historians. They had mastered the professional techniques, but they did not regard themselves as members of a guild, nor did they dwell in universities. They had other lives to live, and living them no doubt gave substance and energy to their history. Bancroft and Macaulay were politicians, Carlyle was a writer, Motley a diplomat. Neither Prescott nor Parkman ever held an academic chair or trained graduate students. Yet, even as they labored, their work was leading to the inevitable next stage. Ranke represented the link: he found history an art and left it a profession. Henry Adams, the last of our great historians who was also a great writer, was the link in America.

MANY factors contributed to the process of professionalization. The steady secularization of the curriculum made history a subject. The vast enlargement of the raw materials of history made specialization a necessity. The improvement of historical technology deepened the shafts of research. The spreading cult of positive science gave history a new and impressive model. The German example showed how teaching and research could be organized and bureaucratized, and thereby removed historians from the turbulence of politics and enterprise, transforming them into quiet professors secure behind ivied walls. The result was the new form of history, to which Herbert Butterfield has given the name of “technical history.” Technical history differed sharply from romantic history, and the sharpest difference lay in the transformation of the central historical task from narration to analysis.

The older history had tried to show how things happened. The art of history, said Macaulay, was “the art of narration, the art of interesting the affections and presenting pictures to the imagination . . . by skilful selection and disposition, without indulging in the licence of invention.” The new history tried to show why things happened. Its task was not, in the words of Michelet, to “evoke, recreate, revivify” the past, but to dissect it. The reconstruction of the past now seemed not a recovery of emotion but a reassessment of causation. In Carlyle’s phrase, the Artist in History gave way to the Artisan in History. The monograph became the characteristic vehicle. Instead of a sharer in the experience, the historian became a neutral observer, as little involved with his materials as a chemist with the elements in his test tube. Instead of the partisanship, the passion, the black-and-white contrasts of the romantic school, there appeared a miscellany of dry, detailed, dusty investigations, deliberately devoid of sentiment, of comment, and of grace. Instead of striving for artistic effect, the historian disdained the resources of the imagination and concentrated on the precise and low-pressure analysis of fact. “I may remind you,” said J. B. Bury when he succeeded Lord Acton as the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, “that history is not a branch of literature. . . . History is a science, no less and no more.”

It is hard to overstate the contributions technical history has made both to the control of historical materials and to the rigor, thrust, and comprehensiveness of historical method. It broadened the historian’s hypotheses, sharpened his tools, strengthened his mastery of the subject, and extended his range. It emancipated history from the tyranny of politics and dynasties, and by establishing the legitimacy of economic, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, it brought vital new areas within the historian’s domain. Above all, it turned the historian’s attention from description to explanation. It made him speculate about the network of causality behind any particular event and thereby drove him to new questions which compelled him to uncover new evidence. And it did all this without saddling history with an unintelligible patois in the style of sociology or anthropology.

Yet, for all the advantages of technical history, the historical art paid a price. As history became specialized and professional, it also seemed to become arid and dehydrated. As Ranke foresaw, it tended to be “harsh, disconnected, colorless, and tiring.” The disdain of artistry would have been all right — by our contemporary taste, a distinct improvement — if it had meant nothing more than a rejection of the rhetorical flourishes with which Macauray and Bancroft liked to adorn their work. But it meant much more than that: it meant a rejection of the whole idea of impressing the imagination. This, in turn, implied the tacit assumption that emotion had no place in history, and this whole conception not only impoverished history but falsified it.

Thus, it the rise of analysis made possible a far more sophisticated account of historical causation, the decline of narrative carried history away from what Parkman had called “the life and spirit of the times.” The technical historian seemed to know more but understand less. How, for example, could one hope to comprehend what brought about the American Civil War it one denied validity to the emotions of the abolitionists and the slaveholders and wrote as if inexplicable tantrums had pushed a “blundering generation” into a “needless war”? If the romantic historian had overdone drama to the neglect of more prosaic but more influential factors, the technical historian, by excluding drama, left a situation where, as Sir Llewellyn Woodward once put it, one could read “book after book about the Norman Conquest without realizing that it was a cruel act of force and not just a complicated transfer of real property.”

Oddly enough, Macaulay himself had had premonitions of the technical future as early as 1828. “History,” he wrote, “begins in novel and ends in essay.” More knowledge was not necessarily a guarantee of more understanding. “It perpetually happens,” Macaulay said, “that one writer tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths. ... A history in which every particular incident may be true may, on the whole, be false.” Almost half a century later, with professionalization nearly triumphant, Nietzsche denounced technical history for its betrayal of the life force in the interests of a sterile pseudoscience.

But technical history could not be denied. The apparatus of graduate study transformed it into a vested academic interest of massive proportions. One result was soon to attenuate the relationship of history to experience. Instead of seeking, however imprecisely, to grasp the essence of an age or a nation, history now became a means of establishing a precise hold on fragments and aspects. A by-product of this development was to attenuate the relationship of history to literature. The historian no longer considered it within his jurisdiction to evoke the atmosphere or the emotions of the past, and he felt himself able to dispense with both the act of conscious literary design and the technical resources of the creative writer. No novelist in the twentieth century influenced the writing of history as Scott had in the nineteenth. In time, the well-written book became almost an object of suspicion in a profession which had come to feel that literary felicity must be a means of covering up some defect in argument or gap in research. By the early twentieth century, the beleaguered Trevelyan, fighting a rearguard action for the view of history as art, sadly protested the prevalent notion that “a crabbed style betokens a deep thinker or conscientious worker.”

The effect of the progressive separation of history from both art and experience was, in the end, to separate it from the intellectual community. History ceased to matter to the reading public. In the mid-nineteenth century, everyone of consequence read Macaulay and Carlyle, Bancroft and Parkman. No technical historian has commanded a comparable audience; some seem almost to feel that they degrade their craft if they aspire to an audience larger than their graduate students. And the withdrawal by the professional historian from social influence has created a gap not unlike that created by the withdrawal of the theologian in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If the historian declined to meet the demand for an interpretation of public experience, then others had to rush to fill the vacuum.

That process has long since begun. The renunciation of the professionals has left the audience, on the one hand, to the nonprofessional historian and the historical novelist, and, on the other, to the journalistic pundit and the historical prophet. Together they dominate the field where Macaulay and Bancroft once trod. This situation has produced a real, if meagerly acknowledged, crisis in the historical profession.

I will say only a word about the so-called “popularizers” of history. One must regard responsible popularization with admiration and sympathy. If the amateur historian or the historical novelist respects the standards of the technical historian without succumbing to his inhibitions and his snobberies, if he makes history fascinating to large numbers of people, this is all to the good. His success challenges the historian to remember that exciting history need not be unsound, nor effective history dull. At his best, the popularizer brings to history qualities of style and insight which may even stimulate the professionals to a livelier conception of the technical enterprise.

Nor will I say much about the journalistic pundit. It is not the job of the historian to provide daily comment on history in the making, and it is his own fault if he fails to shape the thought of those who do. But I would call attention to what seems to me the gravest problem produced by the renunciation of the technical historian — that is, the rise of the prophetic historian, who has converted the genial visions of the romantic historian into dogmatic, comprehensive, universal, and tyrannical historical theories.

IT IS no accident that, as the technical historian retired to write monographs in his study, the prophetic historian advanced to utter revelations in the marketplace. Where the technical historian used a variety of small hypotheses to explain a variety of small things, the prophetic historian used one big hypothesis to explain everything. Marx, Spengler, Toynbee — to name the most formidable of the prophetic historians — derived part of their appeal, of course, from the circumstances of frustration, disorientation, and estrangement which always produce messianic and millennial movements. But they also benefited by the disappearance of the romantic historian and the abdication of the technical historian.

The prophetic historians have one salient trait in common: they are all monists. Their faith is that they have reduced the chaos of history to a single order of explanation, which can infallibly penetrate the mysteries of the past and predict the developments of the future. They represent, in William James’s famous distinction, the “tenderminded” as against the “tough-minded,”or, in the contrast which Isaiah Berlin revived from Archilochus, they are hedgehogs rather than foxes. Obviously they stand for determinism in history and inevitability in experience, and they ransack history to clothe their revelations with the plausibility of fact.

At the same time, it must be admitted that the prophetic historian very often restores imagination and design to the writing of history. He does possess — or is possessed by — controlling visions which give shape and coherence to his work. He revels in the allurements of drama. He delights in characterization, and inconsistently so, since his philosophy of history denies individuals the role which his art involuntarily concedes them. Indeed, the suspense with which a writer like Trotsky endows history undercuts his whole assumption of historical inevitability. Yet, in the end the prophetic historian employs the resources of art not to reconstruct the past but to charge his vision of the future with transcendent and eschatological significance. For him, existence must always capitulate to essence, and everything finally merges into a single, triumphant unity.

One cannot deny that the prophetic historian has important roots in the romantic movement. But he springs from a decadent and corrupt romanticism. Romanticism, in its significant phases, was a celebration of the diversity, spontaneity, and unpredictability of life, and not an attempt to stuff experience into a single ordained category. Yet the challenge of the prophetic historian remains, and it will last so long as the technical historian refuses the great issues, refuses art, refuses imagination, refuses judgment, and refuses influence.

This is the current dilemma of historians. The time for romantic history has passed. Winston Churchill was its last great master, and it will not revive until another man of Churchill’s heroic dimension appears with the flair and dash to carry the thing off. Technical history has its indispensable but limited — and limiting — role. Prophetic history is a source of mischief, of confusion, and of fanaticism. What can be done to revive the centrality of what Pieter Geyl has called “rational history,” to restore its connection with experience, to renew its ties with literature, and to reconquer its audience?

THERE is no easy answer, and I fear that this essay may seem a very long road leading to a very small house. But one must suggest that part of the answer lies in the historian’s willingness to approach his task not only as a researcher and analyzer but also as an artist. For the problem which must be solved is in significant aspects a technical problem: it is the problem of combining narration and analysis in a way which will give emotion and atmosphere their legitimate place in history, preserve the excitement and suspense of history-inthe-making, interest the affections and present pictures to the imagination, and yet contain the technical and analytical material essential to satisfy the contemporary historical intelligence.

This problem is not insoluble. But it cannot be solved without care and thought. To solve it, the historian must become a more conscious craftsman than he has been for a century. He must consider how he can slide analysis into narrative without too abrupt a shift in gears or too visible an alteration of texture. He must brood lengthily on the question of structure and note the cunning skill with which the great historians constructed their intricate and majestic works. He must accept the challenges of theme and atmosphere and characterization. He must, in short, understand that history does not write itself, and that this is the reason why historians must write it.

He will not revive the weaknesses of the romantic historians — their extravagance of language, their righteousness of judgment, their naïveté of analysis, their superficiality of conception, their promiscuity of sentiment. Our taste today is more fastidious, our canons of scholarship more rigorous, our partialities more contained, our diagnosis more complex, our judgments more tolerant.

But he will seize the great qualities of the romantic vision. He will understand, in the words of James, that “the crudity of experience remains an eternal element thereof. There is no possible point of view from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact.” The world is indeterminate; its parts, wrote James, “have a certain amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be ambiguous. . . . Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact. It says that there is a certain ultimate pluralism . . . [that] actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they are chosen; and, somewhere, indeterminism says, such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.”

Above all, the historian will begin to understand how he must strive to function as a literary artist. Recent works have renewed our sense of the way the great American historians conceived their responsibilities. One thinks of Howard Doughty’s subtle and sensitive Francis Parkman, J. C. Levenson’s penetrating The Mind and Art of Henry Adams, or, to take another sort of book, C. Harvey Gardiner’s edition of The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott and Mason Wade’s edition of The Journals of Francis Parkman. Here we read of men who understood the writing of history as an act of conscious and meditated composition, and whose works, despite new materials, new research, new theories, will in consequence never die.

In 1828, the young Prescott addressed a series of admonitions to himself as he started his History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. He said, “Never sacrifice truth or correct view, to effect in composition. Facts, facts, whether in the shape of incidents, or opinion, are what I must rely upon: by which I must stand or fall,” But he went on: “Do not affect learning”; and “Give the subject a proper symmetry and make it a complete whole in itself”; and ‘ Always write, or endeavour to, with the ardor and interest which I feel on taking a general view of the subject”; and “Never introduce what is irrelevant, or superfluous, or unconnected for the sake of crowding in more facts. They injure the interest, and the effect”; and “When an interest, or an enthusiastic feeling is aroused, never cool it by the interpolation of extraneous, or merely incidental facts, or allusions.”

One does not set down these injunctions because they especially illuminate problems of history as art. One sets them down to remind us of a way of thinking about history which our age of technical history has largely lost. If a new artistic consciousness can charge the critical apparatus of technical history with the imaginative and emotional power of romantic history, if it can weave narration and analysis into a single literary fabric, then history can regain contact with a significant audience. Rational history will then elevate the popularizers, influence the journalists, and devalue the prophets. Let historians recover their grand tradition — the tradition of history as art — and historians will once again speak with force and cogency to their societies and their times.