CHRISTMAS BOOKS 2 History not what it was

JOEL HURSTFIELD

In my last years at school I used to dream of going to a university to take a degree in English. I was awakened from this dream of academe by two harsh facts. The first came from a candid friend who told me that for a degree in English I would have to take a compulsory course in the unspeakable:and deservedly extinct, Gothic, and another on 'The Long Poem of the Eighteenth Century'. (Compulsory Gothic has long since disap= peared from the course but I have no idea what happened to 'The Long Poem of the Eighteenth Century'.) But more important, the fact of living in the 'thirties somehow in- duced in me the conviction that if I turned to history I might begin to understand the origins of poverty, inequality, suffering and war. In history I would find an ally in the cause of social betterment. That dream faded also.

I learned that in all the great controversies of our society the past is a neutral. It is a vast collection of uncorrelated events, disorderly, inexplicable, infinite in variety, impossible to record. In the time that it will take to read this single paragraph millions of events will have occurred, some possibly of great importance, most of them historically insignificant. They will be forgotten. Yet one day a historian will look at this last month of the 1960s and try to make sense of it, per- haps of the whole decade. He will say that he is reconstructing the past; in fact he will be inventing it. For he will be omitting the overwhelming majority of the events of our decade: he will select, assemble, recreate. He will embark on a major act of the imagination. If he is successful, the past will fall into place; he will in part explain the causes which we can only dimly perceive.

This is one of the reasons why historiography—the study of historical writing—can- be as fascinating as history itself. For here, as it were, the historian puts his documents on one side, stops what he is doing and talks to us about the art and craft of history, and also about its philosophy. And when a man of such distinction and integrity as Professor J. H. Plumb un- dertakes this task we look forward to a good and stimulating book.

Our expectations are fulfilled. The Death of the Past (Macmillan 35s) is a short book of some 140 pages. It is closely argued and it needs, and repays, careful reading. It ranges over many countries and through several millennia. His footnotes delight with the catholicity of his references; and I found one of them particularly rewarding. After a fascinating discussion of forgeries he goes on to consider bogus holy relics, and gives as the first of his references for this subject, G. Rattray Taylor, Sex in History (1953), ppA2- 3. It is, no doubt, my loss that I have never read the book; and I must confess that Sex in History is not the first source I would have turned to in order to learn about holy relics. But now I can scarcely wait to get it.

Professor Plumb's theme is simple. Man has always been dominated by his past; or rather, the past has been used by those in authority to preserve the foundations and the outlook of their society. Alternatively, the past is used to indicate lines of future development. I should mention here that Professor Plumb's use of the word 'past' is different from my own. To me the past is everything that happened, the whole, un- differentiated mass before the historian set to work. To him the past is the myth in- vented by prophets, sages, chroniclers, public servants, men who joined tradition with knowledge, fact with fiction, the gods with men, and out of it there emerged an accepted version of the origin and growth of a tribe or nation. It was this version which served `to explain man's complex destiny, to recon- cile him to his condition, to lead him to ac- cept the inevitable process of Time.' It could be used also to show that the powers that be were ordained of God. This is what Pro- fessor Plumb means by 'the sanction of the past'. I have myself seen a contemporary pedigree which traces Elizabeth I in a straight line back to Adam. The historian Camden did a comparable service for William Cecil, in her reign, though he got no further than some obscure princes lost in remote antiquity among the mists of the Welsh mountains. The arriviste was given a princely lineage. The past, as it were, validated the present.

But, writes Professor Plumb, the past had another service to fulfil : it could sanctify the future. For out of the past the prophets discovered divine guidance for future con- duct. There was the Jewish past of a race chosen by God and inspired to endure all things and survive; the American past of a people which set itself 'free from the age-old corruptions of Europe', and in the open spaces of the new world became 'a noble breed of virile men.' It was this which carried them against incredible hardships to the west coast and, until the day before yesterday, gave them a civilising mission throughout the whole world. There was the British past which combined the Whig theory of history with progress and with 'a splash of jingoism'. Macaulay—with his 'coarse and obvious mind'—did this best of all and 'in so doing he provided the bulk of the British nation with a usable past by which they could ease their consciences in the present and look with optimism towards the future'.

What was good for Macaulay was good for his great contemporary, Marx, though of course Marx made certain essential struc- tural changes which his theme required. In a subtle passage, Professor Plumb shows the Christian concept of the past with its struggle between.good and evil, its call for suffering in a great cause, its prospects of ultimate paradise, all transmuted in the Marxist dialectic into a vision of the ultimate triumph of a socialist society, after long suffering and heroic struggle against its class enemies. But we are still in a world of fact married to fiction.

The Englishman Gibbon and the German Ranke were among the true founders of modern history. In his final chapter, Pro- fessor Plumb turns from the 'past' to history itself, whose task he defines as `to understand men both as individuals and in their social relationships in time'. This is not static but within the process of movement and change. The historian, he argues, must discover what really happened, so far as that is possible. using the most up-to-date techniques of research. He must follow the search wherever it leads him. But it is something more than this. Understanding the past is itself a guide to our future conduct, 'a pro- founder knowledge, a profounder awareness will help to mould human attitudes and human actions. Knowledge and under• standing should not end in negation, but in action.' In short, the historian is detached in

his methods as a social scientist, though Pro- fessor Plumb does not use the words, but is

committed as a human being to use the truth he uncovers for the betterment of man. What is that truth? That progress, material and spiritual, has come through the ap- plication of reason. Thus we come to a final declaration of faith: 6. . . It is the duty of the historian to teach this, to proclaim it, to demonstrate it in order to give humanity some confidence in a task that will still be cruel and long—the resolu- tion of the tensions and antipathies that exist within the human species.'

In ending with this text for the times Pro- fessor Plumb is, in essence, recalling teachers and students of history to a commitment to and beyond, their subject to a social cause. I believe that he is right in this thesis that reason gives man the things which religions and political mysticism cannot, that ordered argument creates the best things which violence (under any auspices) destroys. And this needs to be said many times. But the past as myth is not dying and yielding place to history. The myth-makers are more powerful than ever; and they have the mass media as powerful allies. And still there are large questions to resolve. Why do some societies fly from reason? Has any societ survived after abandoning the use of for in its own preservation? Has any societ, succeeded in preventing the descent from mass rule into disorder and then into auto- cracy? The boy who hoped for so much from history in the 'thirties questions him- self in the 'sixties after a lifetime devot to its study. These are the questions %%10 will more and more engage the attent of historians. Professor Plumb has answered them in his vigorous, eloqu and stimulating book; but he has made ask them again.

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