Truth and fact
Douglas Johnson
The Origins of History Herbert Butterfield (Eyre Methuen pp. 252, £12.50) Historians are a fidgetty lot. In their smart but sullen craft they are for ever seeking a definition of what they are about. Some say that a mountain, seen from different angles, appears to have a different shape and size, but in fact it has a definable and measurable shape and size. Others say that the historian can look through a telescope one way and see things magnified, so that an inherently small episode will be viewed and understood, but that the historian can also look through the other end of the telescope and see a whole number of distant episodes happening together and claiming equal significance. There are other historians who talk about a tide which comes in and a tide which goes out, so that there is one crucial moment when the water is neither advancing nor retreating and it is that moment which the historian must identify. But whether the historian considers himself to be someone who explains, narrates or analyses, he does his work in the certain knowledge that everyone has a sense of the past, is fascinated by the past or has a use for the past.
However intensely the past looms about the lives of men, this is not the same as history, which is an intellectual process. Until fairly recent times there was no history as we know it and it is a fact that ages which were capable of profound philosophy and complex mathematics were extraordinarily credulous and uncritical in their attitudes to the legends and stories of bygone times. It is an essential question, therefore, to ask why and how men began to study the past in a positive sense and to give it shape and form. It was in order to answer this question that Sir Herbert Butterfield devoted many years of research and reflection. Whilst regretting that he never wrote his projected life of Charles James Fox, it is perhaps appropriate that Butterfield's last contribution to historical scholarship should have been this unfinished manuscript, since he was always interested in formulating generalisations, in reviewing ideas, and in considering vast issues.
It is appropriate too because Butterfield, as an active Christian (his father-in-law had been an itinerant preacher) was drawn to history as the necessary source of the truth. He wanted to examine the way in which men had put God into history and had then, once he was in, taken him out again.
Perhaps others have written about the origins of historical science with greater erudition and authority. Almost certainly Butterfield would have revised and extended this work in a number of ways (this edition has been prepared for publication by his friend, Adam Watson), but one has the feeling that he is not writing with the same assurance about, say, Greek historiography, as have many of his predecessors. Since the days of Collingwood we have accepted the fact that the Greek historian could not, like Gibbon, seek to write a great historical work and then choose his subject. Instead of the historian choosing the subject, the subject chose the historian. Memorable events demanded a chronicler and the historian became the autobiographer of his generation (just as Arthur Balfour once said that Winston Churchill had written his autobiography under the title 'The World Crisis'). We have grown accustomed too to the idea that those Greeks who read were interested in biographies of kings and tyrants in much the same way that they were interested in strange and foreign lands (and was not Skylax of Caryanda both a biographer and an explorer?). But Butterfield suggests that the Greeks developed a scientific method of treating historical data. This was not the same thing as inventing a technique of discovery. It is a way of saying, like Brillat Savarin, that man lives not on what he eats but on what he digests. It leads Butterfield to suggest that the Greeks wrote history with an insight and an understanding which has never been surpassed. Like many of Butterfield's statements this contains a certain boldness which is attractive. When the idea of progress is discussed we are told to remember certain simple facts. One is that the Bible contains the notion that the future is going to be better than the past. God did not exhaust his creative powers when he first made the universe. He is able to produce absolutely new things in the course of history. nut another is that men have a totally pessimistic view about the present in relation to the past. They believe, for example, that the weather has consistently got worse, and even in the early 17th century there seems to have been an obsession with the idea that the weather used to be ideal in the past, and, along with this, there was the assumption that the world had, at some time, taken a turn for the worse. There was the Jewish idea of history based on the Promise, the belief in a chosen people designed to carry out a mission. And there was the belief, expressed by certain Jewish writers at the beginning of the Christian era, that the world was getting old, that nature was becoming exhausted, that it was no longer possible to produce men who were as vigorous and fine as they had been, just as it was no longer possible to produce trees which were as large and as healthy as they had been in the past. It was possible to believe in progress, and in a sum of knowledge which was accumulating; yet at the same time one could believe that the splendours were gone, that institutions were declining, that the quality of life was not what it had been. Perhaps this is an example of how historians are unable to distinguish between accuracy and the truth. The facts may be right; the sense is not always there. The evidence may have been respected; but the feeling may not be right. Historians have got to know themselves as well as their sources. They must always know why they are engaged in a certain type of work and research. Sir Herbert Butterfield's posthumously pubfished meditations are more than valuable in guiding them to understand their own business.
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