Brian Wormald on Butterfield
For the generation now in its twenties, it may be difficult to understand the power ex- ercised over the undergraduate mind twenty years ago by the author of The Whig Interpretation of History, Christianity and History, The Statecraft of Machiavelli, The Origins of Modern Science and George III, Lord North and the People. Sir Herbert Butterfield's impact was extensive and diverse and contributed in many directions to the development of 'professional history'. tit was, however, at the same time the outcome of intense reflection upon the shortcomings of professional history and the difficulties that stand in the way of historical understanding. It is here that Sir Herbert's teaching ought to have been clearest, It is here that there have been most misun- derstandings. Sir Herbert made his strategic • pro- nouncement in mid-career in an article published in 1951 and reprinted in History and Human Relations. In 'The Dangers of
History' he asserted that human presumption and arrogance, the most widespread evils and the most terrifying in their results, are the besetting diseases of historians, and that the effect of an historical education often encouraged them. The normal history book creates the illusion of a greater sovereignty over the course of things than men.and governments ever actually possess, and the pretended lessons extracted from history are usually founded on the assump-, tion that we know what would have hap- pened if somebody in the past had acted differently. 'So from an armchair every Tom, Dick and Harry in England can con- duct a facile course of reasoning which will satisfy him that he could easily have thwarted Hitler at an earlier point in the story—because he, for his part, would have
done the other thing: as though in such a
case a man like Hitler would not have done something different too at the next remove.' In Sir Herbert's view the inflated sinister influences of historical professors, historical politicians and the myriad history books have stepped into the place of religion 'and of anything else that seems authentic' to give men and nations a sense of their station in the universe and of their purpose in life and a notion of what they can do with their destiny; 'they acquire an academic dream- impression of what statesmen can do in the world, what governments achieve, what their national mission is, and what can be brought about by sheer self-assertion and will'.
Given history's spurious pretensions and the harm it does, it might be thought Sir Herbert would want to abolish it..He admits to wondering whether it would not be better for the world to forget the past and just face the future. But the harm has been done and is being done all the time. The world does not forget the past. It remembers, but with the aid of built-in passions and blindness it remembers wrong. Dangerous, therefore, as history is as an educational subject since normally it merely joins and indeed takes over the general conspiracy, there remains the basic and necessary task of fighting against the prevailing state of affairs. No one can do this but the historian and he only by realising that the cure for false history is more history still.
It is Sir Herbert's contention that it is only after long training that we come to see what it means genuinely to establish an historical statement. This is not, as one might suppose, because history is a deeply abstruse, highly technical science. It is not. Though he chtims that it is a science and speaks much about 'technical' history, what he means is not abstruse at all. The reason why history is such a slow and difficult business is simply the nature of what we are up against, either in the material studied or in the constitution of our own heads: the normal inelasticity of human minds, their normal inability to put themselves in someone else's shoes, and their normal laziness. For while, for instance, one new bit of information coming to light (or indeed one old bit that never really fitted in) may demand not some slight recasting of an existing view, but instead a totally new overall picture, minds normally move on in well-worn grooves.
The history which Sir Herbert has mounted against all this, which he has preached in principle, practised in his writings and administered to his pupils, is in its own way no less formidable and alarming than what he attacks. Though pupils of his may have lapsed out of weakness, wilfulness or mere philosophy into scepticism or relativism, he has never had. time for either.
He believes that truth in history is attainable, even though with him we can never finally get there. 'Historical knowledge is valuable only while it is, so to speak, liquid—it is worse than lumber if it freezes and hardens in the mind.' And so for the whole-time historian there must be perennial work of re-creation : while in the case of the man whose higher education has taken the form of a history course, the hope is that he will forget the facts and that they will be 'trans- muted into a deeper wisdom that melts into the rest of experience and is incorporated in the fabric of the mind itself'.
Sir Herbert's definition of the best kind of history teacher, he says, is not the one who can tell us with most authority what to believe about the past, but the one, aware of the dangers of the 'subject, who construes it as his task to redeem history as far as it is redeemable. My own definition of the best kind of historian is Sir Herbert himself, sit- ting with his books working on and on and for ever being elastic. In lectures he stood the textbook story of European history on its head. In teaching and conversation he made circles round anything his pupils could think, write or say. It seems that sometimes he did the same with colleagues. By some he was mistaken for a communist. More recently it seems likely that he has been the unintending fount of what has come to look like a school of tories.
The Diversity of History: Essays in Honour of Sir Herbert Butterfield is a birthday present for his seventieth birthday. Except to say that it is a disappointment, this is not the right journal to review it in, since the essays are the work of professional specialists. The best thing in the book apart from a fine piece of Brogan is an essay by Professor Pocock of Washington University. St Louis on Hobbes and eschatology. But perhaps a general point should be made. The Foreword states that we shall recognise in the diversity of the contributions a reflection of the remarkable diversity of interests of Sir Herbert himself. That statement if it implies that he was a specialist in many fields misses a central point. Though a professional, Sir Herbert has never been a specialist, and in this he belongs to a more august tradition than do most of the contributors. His wide- ranging interests ,.have corresponded with what everybody, historians or not, have regarded as the great important themes,
events and personalities of the European past: Machiavelli, the Reformation, the age of Louis xtv, the origins and rise of modern science, Frederick the Great, Whigs and Tories, Pitt and Fox, Napoleon, the origins of the two World Wars. Furthermore, and
in this too he represents the older tradition,
he is a moralist, though it is a fact that there is nothing he has more abominated than moralising historians.
Brian Wormald, University Lecturer in His- tory at Cambridge, is the author of Claren- don: Politics, History and Religion.
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