The tricks of the Old Historians
Raymond Carr
NOT BY FACT ALONE by John Clive Collins Harvill, £15, pp. 334 The Sixteenth Century Journal is about to publish an article entitled Who's on Top? Gender as Societal Power Configura- tion in Italian Renaissance Drama. Sociolo- gy is bad enough; retrospective sociology when tarted up with a joke that would have made Gibbon wince, is more than flesh and blood can stand. I take as a spoof Professor Clive's assertion that a work exists on the relationship between baldness and the number of siblings fathered by Ohio clock makers between 1823 and 1859; spoof or not it is an indication of the way things are going with the New History. It's all a long way from Gibbon, Macaulay, de Toc- queville and Carlyle. It is the purpose of this bundle of sensitive, humane and perceptive essays that we should turn again to the great masters of the past for instruc- tion and amusement. What drove them to write history? What can we learn from them?
Well, there are the tricks of the trade, as Professor Clive calls them: for example, Macaulay's mastery of the art of transition. In his famous third chapter on society in the 17th century he leads us smoothly from the state of the roads to female education and Restoration licentiousness. It is the schoolmaster's maxim that the last sent- ence of a paragraph should run into the first sentence of the next raised to a fine art by a consummate rhetorician. There is Halevy's use of suspense, stringing the reader along, as in a detective novel, from factors that do not explain the relative stability of English society after Waterloo to the conclusion that the solution of the mystery is to be found in religious senti- ments.
I share Professor Clive's view that the supreme trick of the trade, employed with due caution, is the use of the illuminating instance. De Tocqueville, the greatest of retrospective sociologists, believed that history was the history of classes and that they alone should occupy the attention of the historian. Yet he does not confront us with the bare statistics of class composi- tion, but with Madame Duchatelet undres- sing in front of her manservants 'being unable to convince herself that mere lack- eys were real flesh-and-blood men'.
All the great historians enter into a conspiracy with the reader, a device that reached monstrous proportions with Car- lyle. Gibbon plays a game with his 'gener- ous reader', especially in his footnotes. But Gibbon's ironic wit is more than a joke shared with the reader. It reflects his view of human nature. He can only regard as comic the efforts of religion to make men renounce carnal desires and worldly success. 'Insulted Nature' will vindicate its rights. A shaft of Gibbonian wit can demolish a specious argument. When the dons of Christ Church argued that the college should admit women as students in order not to fall out of step with other colleges which were already doing so, that austere historian, Charles Stuart, observed that the fate of the last of the Gadarene swine was not noticeably better than that of the first. Gibbon would have relished that.
It is in the examination of the experi- ences and motives that drove the great historians to write history that this book excells. It was an aesthetic experience monks chanting vespers amidst the ruins of the Capitol — that ignited the spark of Gibbon's great work on the rise of Christ- ianity and the concomitant decline of Rome. Those who use history for polemic- al purposes find themselves driven to write it. Macaulay, in his great speech on the Reform Bill of 1832, reminded a Parlia- ment reluctant to make concessions of the lesSons of the French revolution: the ruined castles, the hotels of the Faubourg St. Germain turned into cheap lodging houses revealed the fate of a nobility that, in its pride and narrowness of heart, had refused concession till the time came when concession was of no avail. 'Woe to the government', he wrote at the height of the crisis, 'which thinks that a steady and long continued movement of the public mind is to be stopped like a street riot'. Having celebrated the triumph of the 'public mind' in the great political battle for parliamen- tary reform, in which he had fought in the front line, the exploration of the role of the public mind in the Glorious Revolution became a main concern for his History. It is, as Professor Clive concludes, the en- counter between personal commitment and scholarship that lies at the heart of great history. That is why we (or at least some of us) still read Tacitus and Thucy- dides.
Alas Professor Clive does not succeed in overcoming the (prejudiced?) distaste I feel for Carlyle. For me the jump from the frying pan of Orthodox Christianity into the fires of German idealism with its God present in all things, his purposes inter- preted by heroes, is a pointless spiritual exercise. It is understandable only in the light of the Victorians' incapacity to get a God of some kind or other out of their systems. Gibbon destroyed Carlyle's faith and he extended his resentment of Gibbon to a violent hatred of the century at large: it deserved to be consumed in the fires of the French Revolution and it is Carlyle's delight in the conflagration that makes that work glow with life. But I have never succeeded in getting through his Frederick the Great. The biography of an .18th- century enlightened and cynical despot was Carlyle's odd choice to furnish an example of moral heroism for the Victorian middle class. No wonder writing the book was an `extended torture' to its author; it remains such for at least one of its readers.
This book is full of good things yet ended by depressing me. It repeatedly raises the question that tortures any historian who has thought about his craft. How can one combine narrative history, which is linear, and social history which is multi- dimensional? Where Macaulay failed there is not much hope for any of us. Of course we pigmies know more than our giant predecessors but given the cumulative way that historical knowledge develops we can- not hope, like them, for immortality. In despair we have become pros writing for other pros. Perhaps, after all, we are victims of Carlyle's belief in the therapeu- tic effects of hard labour. A stint in the Record Office and the British Library, its memorial a Ph.D., constitutes the obliga- tory first rung on the academic ladder. When I entered the trade, it was a First in Schools (preferably two, for it is the First in Greats that gives Trevor-Roper his Gibbonian edge), and a kind word from J.C. Masterman or Keith Feiling that set one off. Bizarre credentials, no doubt, not incapable of producing bizarre elections to fellowships. But rather harder to obtain than a Ph.D.
Previous page
