Chapter 41
History and historians; the record and writing of the past; its lessons and course.
688 passages · 231 principal · Covers the 49 volumes of primary texts
History, as these books use the word, covers both the past itself and the record of it. It means the course of human affairs, the registers that keep that course from being forgotten, and the art of the historians who write it down. Raleigh calls it a picture of time past drawn in a large table1. Hobbes classes it among the kinds of knowledge as the register of facts, natural or civil2. Freeman calls it the politics of the past, as politics is the history of the present3. The idea is great for these volumes because nearly every author leans on the past: the statesman for precedent, the believer for testimony, the naturalist for the record of the rocks, the moralist for examples. Many of them also stop to ask whether that past can be known at all, and what knowing it is worth.
The oldest quarrel is whether history teaches as well as poetry or philosophy. Sidney states the historian’s claim fairly. History calls itself the witness of times and the light of truth, and says it teaches virtue by example where the philosopher offers only abstract precept4. Sidney then turns the claim against it. Because the historian is tied to the particular truth of what was, his examples carry no necessary consequence5. Fortune often overrules wisdom in his pages and he cannot give causes6. He must show Socrates and Phocion executed while tyrants prosper7. So Sidney follows Aristotle in holding poetry the more philosophical of the two8, a judgment Arnold still cites9. Dryden allows the poet to feign only in the dark recesses of antiquity, where well-known history does not contradict him10. Rousseau gives philosophy a different office: when history is silent, it supplies the linking facts11. The romantics answer by finding poetry inside history. Hugo calls Herodotus a Homer12 and lets the dramatist restore what chroniclers omitted13, as where no document explains Cromwell’s refusal of the crown14. Shelley calls epitomes the moths of just history that eat out its poetry15.
Behind this quarrel lies a harder question: how certain can historical knowledge be? Herodotus records hearsay and leaves readers to judge its credit16. Augustine treats belief in secular history as a kind of faith without sight17. Hobbes says such belief rests on the authority of the historian18. Hume grounds it more carefully. We reach ancient events through chains of testimony back to eyewitnesses19, and we trust historians only because experience has shown report and reality to agree20,21. Freeman concludes that such inquiries cannot reach mathematical certainty, because they concern human will and testimony, though at best they reach moral certainty22. The sceptics go further. Browne holds that human history presents the past in counterfeit shapes23. Sidney thinks historians affirming things in cloudy knowledge can hardly escape lies24. Goethe’s Faust calls the past a book with seven seals, and says the spirit of the times is only the historian’s own spirit25.
The moderns extend the notion of a record to nature itself. Faraday reads the strata as a wonderful history26, and Helmholtz finds in rocks and ice histories that reach back into the primeval world27. Lyell calls fossil strata archives of nature. He warns that such fragments can no more make a consecutive history than a fragment of Chinese history could fill the gaps in European annals28, and that the record will always be imperfect29. Darwin develops the image: the geological record is a history of the world imperfectly kept, written in a changing dialect, of which few pages survive30. Geikie draws the parallel the other way. A land is understood through its history, just as a people is understood through what shaped its past31. Emerson calls language itself the archives of history32. The problem of the fragmentary witness turns out to be common to the humanities and the sciences.
What the historian should be is stated most plainly by Cervantes: precise, true and free of passion, since history is the mother of truth and the witness of the past33. The ideal is mostly announced through complaints. Confucius regrets that historians no longer leave blanks rather than invent34. Plutarch finds truth hard to recover, because later writers are distant and contemporaries distort through envy and flattery35. Cicero openly asks a historian to set aside the laws of history and praise him warmly36. Pliny, by contrast, holds that strict truth is enough for worthy actions37. Browne demands conscience in compilers, since a story can belie good names to posterity38. Raleigh warns that modern history which follows truth too closely endangers its writer39. Montaigne prefers historians who commanded in affairs or shared in them40. He prizes Comines’s simplicity over du Bellay’s pleading for his king41, and judges that middling historians spoil history by shaping it to their fancy42. Yet the eyewitness has limits too. Haskell insists that his account of Gettysburg is not history and that a full account can never be written43. Voltaire blames party spirit for the lack of good English historians44. Burke mocks heraldic historians who give every peer heroic merit45. Macaulay goes against the demand for exactness and suggests that vivid embellishment, in the manner of Herodotus and Tacitus, may convey character better46.
The method of establishing fact begins with Herodotus, who checks the priests’ records at Memphis, Thebes and Heliopolis against one another47. He weighs priestly testimony against Greek legend about Troy and distinguishes inquiry from certain knowledge48. Plutarch sifts his authorities on Pericles and prefers Thucydides and Aristotle to Duris’s exaggerations49,50. He dismisses inventions about Themistocles’ tomb as tragic embellishment51. He also admits that no one knows how Cleopatra died52. Manzoni, writing a novel, still judges discrepant chroniclers of the Milan plague by their reliability and dates53,54. Long adds a rule of method: evidence must be accepted or rejected whole, not picked over for its probable parts55. Hume offers a test from human nature, exposing forgeries in which the actions ascribed contradict known motives56. Documents and monuments widen the field. Herodotus uses a priestly papyrus and the evidence of successive statues57,58. Harrison cites charters and tithe records to prove that vines once grew in England59. Darwin reads ruins and relics as records of ancient peoples60. Taine holds that memoirs and poems reveal a people’s psychology better than charters do61. Chronology becomes a criticism of its own. Herodotus refutes the tale that Rhodopis built a pyramid62. Voltaire reports Newton’s use of astronomy to bring the Argonauts five centuries nearer63, and his finding that nations inflate their origins by overcounting the length of reigns64,65.
Legend presses at the edges of history. Caxton defends Arthur’s existence by chronicles, tomb and relics66. Renan traces how an obscure chieftain grew into a sovereign, with discoveries of his tomb invented for policy67, and he warns that popular and historical traditions rarely agree over distant centuries68. Cervantes makes comedy of the confusion. Quixote cites Orlando’s horn as proof that the romances are true69, and the canon must separate real peers from Turpin’s embellishments70. Hume observes that prodigies thin out in a nation’s early histories as enlightened ages approach71.
The same tools are turned on sacred history. Pascal trusts only histories whose witnesses died for them72. He argues that a book which creates a nation is as old as the people73, and that God provided a contemporary historian and a whole people to guard the record of creation74, passed down through a short chain of long-lived patriarchs75. He contrasts Moses with fabulous writers like Homer76 and counts the silence of Josephus and Tacitus about Christ in Christianity’s favour77. Hume reaches the opposite verdict. He reads the Pentateuch as a barbarous people’s uncorroborated account of its origins, less credible than the miracles it reports78. Rousseau’s vicar notes how much erudition the judging of revelation requires79.
Why keep records at all? Partly for fame. Cicero asks a friend to record his consulship and admits that self-written history lacks credit80. Pliny is asked to record his uncle’s death for posterity81, and Sancho wants a chronicler for his master’s deeds82. Burke holds that history keeps a durable record that censures sovereigns and revolutionaries alike83. Against this desire stands loss. Cervantes blames time for devouring records84. Bacon imagines floods so thorough that the survivors could not pass on letters85. Haskell judges that a just history of Gettysburg will never be written86. Antiquaries try to recover origins. Tacitus notes that ballads are the Germans’ only record87, and Emerson weighs the guesses about Stonehenge88. Burns laughs at the antiquary whose relics reach back to Adam89.
Biography is treated as history’s near kin. Plutarch writes lives to compare dispositions through actions90,91. Montaigne loves historians who reveal the man within92. Johnson notes that biography depends on fading personal knowledge and must spare the living, so it is better to say nothing false than all that is true93. Carlyle answers for candour: a biography stripped of unornamental facts is wind and shadow94,95. Bagehot prefers selecting characteristic events to Masson’s exhaustive method, which merges a life into a history of its age96,97. On self-written lives, Cellini says men of achievement should write their own, but only after forty98. Franklin defends his life as a useful example99.
The uses of history are argued from opposite sides. For Hume its chief use is to reveal the constant principles of human nature, its records being a collection of experiments100. Marcus Aurelius thinks the past lets one foresee the future101, and Machiavelli bids princes study great men’s wars and imitate them102. Locke calls history the great mistress of prudence, though useless without geography and chronology103. Montaigne would have the young taught to judge history rather than memorize dates104. Manzoni’s Don Ferrante holds that history without politics is a guide with no followers105. Macaulay reads history aright as showing how circumstances shape opinions106. A providential reading runs alongside these. The Koran points to vanished peoples as lessons107. The Nights holds that former lives restrain later men108. Raleigh reads English kings as a chain of crime and vengeance under one God109,110. Yet the lesson can be lost or misused. Raleigh admits that men forget experience111. Descartes fears that histories lead readers into extravagant projects112. Burke shows history perverted into a weapon for parties, when it should teach abhorrence of both sides’ misdeeds113,114. Emerson calls history an impertinence unless it is a parable of one’s own being115, and Channing values it only as it illuminates present duty116.
Finally, the authors ask whether history has a course. The ancients incline to repetition. Marcus finds the same drama with different actors in every court117,118, and Raleigh lists fallen empires119. The moderns propose stages instead. Hugo sees the race passing through childhood, maturity and age120. Mill reports the St. Simonian alternation of organic and critical periods121 and equates a theory of progress with a philosophy of history122. Channing denies that the future must copy the past123. Emerson reduces all history to the biography of a few earnest persons124. Taine seeks impersonal laws of race, epoch and environment125,126, and treats a civilization as a living unit127. Freeman, working from the record itself, stresses gradual, unconscious causes and accident, such as Isabella’s marriage128,129. Smith points to calm seas and rivers130, and Mill to custom, which leaves much of the world with no history at all131.
These questions remain open. The books do not settle whether history yields laws or only examples, whether the soul or circumstance drives it, or whether its record, like Darwin’s broken volume, can ever be read whole.
Introductory essay written by Claude Opus 5.5 from the outline and the notes on every passage below; quotations are checked against this edition.
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See also: Geology 4b · Evolution 6a
See also: Poetry 2c
See also: Prophecy 8d · Religion 14c · Truth 3a
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See also: Evolution 1a · Race and Nationality 2c
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See also: Judgment 6b
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See also: Progress 1d
See also: Race and Nationality 3a · Language 9c · National Character 1a · Cause 6c
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See also: Race and Nationality, Poetry, Language, National Character, Geology, Progress