( o rv t€Iur^rol fta tt<'tf ' ,'nlt, Eg ;stor { $*^: }kk : Vin\a3e-

€,ooks, \Qto t

tglCHAPTER I

THE HISTORIAN AI{DHIS FACTS

Wsar is history? I€st anyone think the questionmeaningless or superfuous, I will take as my text twopassages relating respectively to the fint and second in-carnations of The Conbtidge Modetn History- Hereis Acton in his report of October 1896 to the Syndicsof the Cambridge University Press on the work whichhe had undertaken to edit:

It is a unique opportunity of recording, in tlrevay mo$useful to thC greatat number, the fullness of the knowl-edge which the nineteenth century is about-to P:9u*9.. .-. By the iudicious division of labour we should be ableto do it, and to bring home to every man the last docu'menf and the ripest conclusions of international research.

Ultimate hittoty we cannot have in this ganeration; butwe can dispose of cunventional history and show thepoint we have reached on the road from one to the other,iow that all information is within reach, and every prob-lesr has become capable of solution.l

And almost exactly $ixty years later Professor SirGeorge Clark, in his general introduction to the sec-

ond Cambridge Moilem History, commented on this

tTho Cantbdilge Moilen History: lts Ot$tt, Authuship andProiluction (Cambridge Uuiveni$ Press; rgo7), PP, ro-tz'

' 4 WEAT rS ErSrOny?

belief of Acton and his oollaboraton tbat it wouldone day be possible to produce "ultimate history," andwent on:

Historians of a later generation do not looh forward toany such proqpect. They expet their work to be supet-sded again and again. They consider that knowledge ofthe past has come down through ooe or more humanninds, has been "processed" by them, and therefore cau-not consist of elsrental and impersonal atoms whichnothing can alter. . . . The orplontion $eems to be e,nd-less, and some impatient scholan take refuge in scepti-cisrr, or at least in the doctrine thab since aU historiceliudgmenb involve persons and points of view, one is asgood as another and there is no "obiectivd' historicaltruth.8

Where the pundits conbadict each other so fagrantlythe field is open to enquiry. I hope that I am sufr-ciently uptodate to recognize that anything writtenin the 1890'$ must be nonsense. But I am not yet ad-vrnced enouglr to be committed to the view that any-thing written in the r95o's necessarily makes sense.Indeed, it may already have occuned to you that thisenquiry is liable to stray into something even broaderthan the nature of history. The clash between Actonand Sir George Clark is a reflection of the change inour total outlook on society over the intewal betweenthese two pronouncturents. Acton speaks out of thepositive betief, the clearcyed self+onfidence of thelater Victorian age; Sir George Clark echoes the be

tTtlc Nev Canbtidge Moilern Hi$ory,I (Canbridgc UtrivqdttPres; rgSz), pp. niv-uv.

rEE EntrouaN AND EUt FACn3 5

wilderment and distrasted $cepticism of the beat gen-eration. When we attempt to answer the question,Whet is history?, our an$wer, consciously ot uIt@D'sciously, reflects our own position in time, and forrrspart of our enswer to the broader question, what viewwe take of the society in which we live. I have no fearthat my subiect may, on closer inspetion' seem trivial.I am afraid only that I may seem PresumPhrous tohave broached a question so vast and so important.

The nineteenth oentury wes e Sireat age for fasts.'"\ll/hat I want " said Mr. Gradgrind in Had Timos,"is Facb. . . . Facts alone are wanted in life." Nine'teenthcentury historians on the whole agreed withhim. When Ranke in the r83o's, in legitimate protestagainst moralizing history remarked that the task ofthe historian was "simply to show how it really was(x,ie es eigenttich gewesen)" this not very profoundaphorism had an astonishing success. Three genera'tions of German, Britislr, and even French historiansmarchod into battle intoning the magic words, "Wiees eigentlich gewesen" lfte an incantation-{esigne{like most incantations, to save them from the tire'some obligation to think for themselves. The Posi'tivists, anxious to stake out their claim for history as

a science, conEibuted the wergbt of their influenct tothis cult of facts. Fint ascertain the facb, said thepositivisb, then draw yout conclusions from them- InGreat Britain, this view of history fitted in perfectly

WEAT ts EISjTOTT?

nrith tDe cmpiricist hedition which uas the dominentshdn in Brifish philosopby from locke to BerhandRuselt Tbe empirical theory of knowledge pr€su1>pos€s a omplete separation betlyeen subiect and ob'iect FacB lfte sense'impresions, impinge on tteoherwr frcn outsider,and are independent of his oon-cciousn$s. The proc€ss of reception is passive: havingreceived the data, be then acb on th€m. The StlortqOxfoil Engtish Didtiottuy, a rsefuI but teodentiorrswork of the empirical s&ool, clearly marls the sqn-nteness of the two prooesses by defining a fact as "adetum of erperience as dlstinct from onclusions."Thfu il what nay be callcd the oomnoffiaute vientof history. llistory onsisb of a oqpus of asoerhinedfacts. The fucts are arnilable to the histodan iDdocumenb, inscriptionq and so on, lite fish on thefishmongeds slab. The historian collec.ls them, talcthem homg and oooks and serves them in whatercrstyle appeals to him. Acton, whose orlinary tastes wercaustete, wantd them served plain. In his letter of in"stnrctions to ontributon to the ftst CdnbrildgMoiLmt History he anuounad the requirement "that ourWaterloo must be one that satisfies French and Eng-lish, German and Dute,h dike; that nobody can te[without examining the list of authors where the Bishopof fford laid down the pen, and whether Fairbeirnor Gasquet, Liebermann or llarrison took it up."'Eveo Sir George Clarb critical as he was of Acton's

tActon: Iaanq on Modsn HUtory (Lodon: Mrcoilbn &Co; rqo6), p. 3r8.

lEE EITITORIAIT AIVD EfS TA TS 7

attitude, himself conbasted the 'hard core of facts"in history with the "surrounding pulp of disputable in-terpretation" '-forgettiog perhaps that the putpy partof the fnrit is more rewarding than the hard ctor€-

First get your facB straight, then plunge at your Pe"linto the shifting sands of interpretation-that is theultimate wisdom of the empirical, common*enseschool of history. It recalls the favourite dictum ofthe great libenl iournalist C. P. Scott: "FacB are sa'cred, opinion is free."

Now this clearly will not do. I shall not embarlc ona philosophical discussion of the nature of our knowl'edge of the past. Let us assume for present puqposesthat the fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and thefact that there is a table in the middle of the roomare facts of the same or of a comParable order' thatboth these facts enter our consciousness in the sameor in a comparable manner' and that both have thesame obiective character in relation to the Person whoknows them. But, wen on this bold and not veryplausible assumption, our argument at once nrns intolne aimculty that not all facts about the past are hlstorical facts, or are treated as such by the historian.What is the criterion which distinguishes the facts ofhistory frorn other facb about the past?

What is a historical fact? This is a cnrcid questioninto which we must look a little more closely. Accord-lng to the common-sense view, there are certain basic

.Quoted inThc Littrrnq (Ionc r9, r95u), P. 992.

WEAT IS E$IORY?

facm which are the sirme for dl historians and whicbform, so to speatc, the baclcbone of history-the fac[for example, that the Battle of Hastings was fouglrt inro66. But this view calls for hn'o ohervations. In the6rst place, it is uot with facts like these that the hirtorias is prinanly concerned. It is no doubt importantto know that the g,reat battle was fought in ro66 andnot in ro65 or tc6'7, and that it ums fought at flas,tings and not at Eastbourne or Brighton. The historian must not get these thiogs wrong. But when poinhof this kind are raisd I am reninded of Housman'sremark that 'accrrracy is a duty, not a virtue." t Topraise a historian for his accuracy irs like praising anarchitect for uing well-seasoned timber or properlymixed concrete in his building. It is a necessary condi.tion of his work, but not his essential function. It isprecisely for mattqs of this kind that the historian isentitled to tely on what havEbeen called the "arxiliaryscienc€$" of history--arcbaeology, epigraphy, numis,matics, chronology, and so fortb. The historian is notrequired to have the specid skills which enable the€xpert to determine the origrn and period of a frag-ment of pottery or marble, to decipher an obscure inscription, or to make the elaborate asbonomical cal-culations necessary to establish a precise date. Thesesocalled basic facls which are the same for all historians commonly belong to the catqory of the rawmaterials of the historian rather tbatr of history ibeU.

rM. Manilirsz tlftronqnioin: Libcr &imss, and. ed. (CanbridggUnivcnity Ples; rgt7), p. 82.

TEE srgroalAN Al{D BrS FAg$ IThe second observatidn is that the nwtssity to es'tablish these basic facb rests not on any quality in thefaets themselves, but on an aprioridecision of the his'torian. In spite of C. P. Scott's motto, every iournalistknows today that the most efiective way to influenceopinion is by the selection and an"ngement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that facts speak forthernselves. This is, of cputsg untnte. The fac'ls sPeak

only when the historian calls on them: it is he whodecides to which facb to give the foor, and in whatorder or context. It was, I think, one of Pirandello'scharacters who said that a fact is like a sack-it won'tstand up till you've put something in it. The onlyr€ason why we are interested to know that the battlewas fought at Hasthgs in ro66 i$ that historians rcgard it as a maior historical evenl It is the historianwho has decided for his own rcasons that Caesa/sctossing of that petty sEeam, the Rubicon, is a factof history, whereas the ctosing of the Rubicon bymillions of other peoPte before or sincre interesb no'body at all. The fact that you arrived in this buildinghalf an hour ago on foot, or on a bicycle' or in a crlt,is iust as much a fact about the past as the fact thatCaesar crossed the Rubicon. But it will probably bergnored by historians. Professor Talcott Parsons onc€called science "a selective qntem of cognitive orienta'6ons to realip." c It mlght perhaps have been put

'Talcott Parsons and Edwarll A. Shih: Towc:d cfuralnrcPryof Actfllt, rrd. ed. (Cambridge, Mas.: Harvard Udvcrsity P!c!rr95+), p. 16z.

tO W:rt\T lS EI$IORY?

more simply. But history is, among other things, that.The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in ahard core of historical facts existing obiectively andindependently of the inteqpretation of the historianis a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hardto eradicate.

Let us take a look at the process by which a merefact about the past is transformed into a fact of his-tory. At Stalybridge Wakes in r85o, a vendor of gin-gerbread, as the result of some petty dispute, was de-liberately kiclced to death by an angry mob. Is this'afact of history? A year ago I should unhesitatinglyhave said "no." It was recorded by an evewitness insome little*nown memoirs;' but I had never seen itiudged worthy of mention by any historian. A yearago Dr. Kitson Clark cited it in his Ford lectures inOxford." Does this make it into a historical fact? NoBI think, yet. Its present status, I suggest, is that it hasbeen proposed for membership of the select club ofhistorical facts. It now awaits a seconder and sponsors.It may be that in the course of the next few years weshall see this fact appearing first in footnotes, then inthe tort, of articles and books about nineteenth-century England, and that in twenty or thirty years'time it may be a well established historical fact. Al-ternatively, nobody may take it up, in which case it

?Iord George Sanger: Sewnty Yedn a Showman (Iondon:|; M. Dent & Sons; 19z6); pp. r8h.

6 Ttese will shortly be publhbed under the title Tlp Making olVictorim Englcnil.

lgE EISTORIA!{ AND EU' FAgM 11

will relapse into the limbo of unhistorical facts aboutthe pasl from which Dr. Kitson Clark has gallantlyattempted to rescue it. What witl decide which ofthese two things will happen? It will depend, I think,on whether the thesis or inteqpretation in support ofwhich Dr. Kitson Clark cited this incident is acceptedby other historians as valid and significant. Its statusas a historical fact will turn on a question of inteqpre-tation. This element of inteqpretation enters into€very fact of history.

May I be allowed a personal reminiscence? When Istudied ancient history in this university many years

ago, I had as a special subiect "Greece in the periodof the Persian Wars." I collected fifteen or twenty vol'umes on my shelves and took it for granted that there,recorded in these volumes, I had all the facts relatingto my subiect. Let us assume-it was very nearly true

-that those volumes contained all the facts about itthat were then known, or could be known. It neveroccurred to me to enquire by what accident or Processof attrition that minute selection of facts, out of allthe myriad facts that must have once been known tosomebody, had survived to becomethe facts of history.I suspect that even today one of the fascinations ofancient and mediaeval history is that it gives us the il-lusion of having all the facts at our disposal within amanageable compass: the nagging distinction betweenthe facts of history and other facts about the pastvanishes because the few known facts are all facts ofhistory. fu Bury, who had worked in both periods,

12 .lIilHAT IS IIISTORY?

said, "the records of ancient and mediaeval history arostarred with lacunae." o History has been called anenonnous iig+aw with a lot of missing parts. But themain trouble does not consist of the lacunae. Ourpicture of Greece in the fifth century B.c. is defectivenot primarily because so many of the bits have beenaccidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, thepicture formed by r tiny group of people in the cigof Athens. We know a lot about what fifth-centuryGreece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardlyanything about what it looked like to a Spartan, aCorinthian, or a Theban-not to mention a Persian,or a slave or other non+itizen resident in Athens. Ourpicture has been pre-selected and predetermined forus, not so much by accident as by people who wereconsciously or unconsciously imbued with a particularview and thought the facts which supported that viewwor*r preserving. In the same walt when I read in amodern history of the Middle Ages that the people ofthe Middle Ages were dr.ply concerned with religion,I wonder how we know this, and whether it is true.What we kncrw as the facts of mediaeval history havealmost all been selected for us by generations ofchroniclers who were professionally occupied in thetheory and practice of religion, and who thereforethought it supremely important, and recordedthing relating to i! and not much else. The pictrr-reof the Russian peasant as devoutlv religious was de_ clohn Blgnell Baryz &leceil F.nay Cambridge UaiverdtyPress; r93o), p. sz.

lEE lrrsToilaN al{D Ers FAqni 13

stroyed by the revolution of tgr7, The pieture of me'diaevd man as dwoutly religious, whether true or not'is indestructible, because nearly all the known facbabout him were pre*elected for us by people who be'lieved it, and wanted others to believe it and a mess

of other facts, in which we might possibly have foundevidence to the contrary has been lost beyond recall.The dead hand of vanished generations of historians,scribes, and chroniclers has determined beyond thepossibility of appeal the pattern of the past. "Thehistory we readr" writes Professor Barraclough, him'self trained as a mediaevalisf "though based on facb'is, strictly speaking, not factual at all, but a series ofaccepted iudgmenb."

tBut let us turn to the difierenf but equally grave,

phght of the modern historian. The ancient or medi'aeval historian may be grateful for the vast winnowingprocess which, over the Yss, has put at his disposala manageable corpus of historical facb- As LyttonStrachey said in his mischievous ws/, "ignorance isthe fint requisite of the historian, ignorance whichsimplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits."'When I am tempted, as I sometimes am' to envy theercbeme competence of colleagues engaged in writingancient or mediaeval history, I find consolation in thereflerdon that they are so competent mainly because

they are so ignorant of their subiecl The modern his-

l Geofirey Banaclough z History in a changhl€ wotlil (London:Basil Blackwell & Mott; 1955), P. 14.

t Lyuon Stnctrey: Prehe to Emhent Yictolirnn,

I

l

t4 wrraT rs ErsToRY?

torian enioys none of the advantages of this builtinignorance. He must cultivate this necessary ignorancefor himself-the more so the nearer he comes to hisown times. He has the dual task of discovering the fewsignificant facts and turning them into facts of his-tory, and of discarding the many insignificant facts asunhistorical. But this is the very converse of the nine-tecnth-centuqy heresy that history consists of the com-pilation of a maximum number of inefutable and obiective facts. Anyone who succumbs to this heresy willeither have to give up history as a bad io\ and taketo stamp-collecting or some other form of antiquarian-ism, or end in a madhouse. It is this heresy, whichduring the past hundred years has had such derastat-ing effects on the modern historian, producing in Ger-many, in Great Britain, and in the United States avast and growing mass of dry-asdust factual histories,of minutely specialized monogmphs, of would-be his-torians knowing more and more about less and less,sunk without trace in an ocsrn of facts. It was, I suspect, this heresy-rather than the alleged conflict be.hreen liberal and Catholic loyalties-which frustratedActon as a historian. In an early essay he said of histeacher DOllinger: "He would not rryrite with imper-fect matenals, and to him the materials were alwapimperfect " t Acton was surely here pronouncing an

TIrE rrrsroRraN aND rIIs FAcrs 15

anticipatory verdict on himself, on that strange phe-nomenon of a historian whom many would regard asthe most distinguished occupant the Regius Chair ofModern History in this university has ever had-butwho wrote no history. And Acton wrote his own epi-taph in the introductory note to the first volume ofthe Cambridge Modern History, published iust afterhis death, when he lamented that the requirementspressing on the historian "threaten to turn him froma man of letters into the compiler of an encyclopedia."' Something had gone wrong. What had gonewrong was the belief in this untiring and unending ac-cumulation of hard facts as the foundation of history,the belief that facts speak for themselves and that wecannot have too many facts, a belief at that time sounquestioning that few historians then thought it nec-essary-and some still think it unnecessary today-toask themselves the question: What is history?

The nineteenth*entury fetishism of facts was com-pleted and iustified by a fetishism of documents. Thedocuments were the Ark of the Covenant in the tenr-ple of facts. The reverent historian approached themwith bowed head and spoke of them in awed tones.If you find it in the documents, it is so. But whatwhen we get down to it, do these documents-thedecrees, the treaties, the rent-rolls, the blue books, theofficial correspondencg the private letten and diaries

eble to men" (History of Freedom and Othq Erccyr [LoodooMacnillan & Co.; rgozJ, p. 435)..The Conbriilge MoihnHistory,I (r9oz), p. r

_-tQuoted in George P. Gooch: History ail Histofiarc h tlrlNircte,enth _Ccnttny ,

(Iondon_: Longmans, Groen & C;ompany;195-z), p. 381 ,Iatel Acton sgid of Dillinger that ..it wes givd hi;to furm his pbilosophy of bistorv on the lirgest induction &cr avail.

j'i i

',1 .

16 wEAT rs Er$roRy?

-tell us? No document can tell us more than whatthe author of the document thought-what he-eoognt had happened, what he thoight ought tohappeo or would happen, or perhaps Jof, *L, n"q'nted othen to think he thought, oi even only whathe himself thought he though[ lL"" of this meansauything until the historian has got to work on it anddeipiered iL The facts, whether found in documenbor atit, have still to be procesed by tn" nrt*i,.n before he can make any use of theur: the .oe he mekesof thm rs, if I r"y put it that uan tbe proocsingProoess.

ret me illustrate what I am sog to say by an ex-lopb whictr I happen to know o'ru. Tt/hen'Gusbvsbaemana, the Foieign Minister of the weimar Republic' died in r9z9,nc ut behind hrm an enormourmase-300 boxes -ffi-r papers, ofrciar, semiofrciar,and primte, nearly arl rerating to the six yeare of hishure of ofrce as Foreign Minister. His iriends andrelatives naturally ttrougtlt that a mon,rrnent shouldbc misd to the ot..ory of so great a man. His faith-fuI secretary Bernhatdt got to iork; and within threeyea$ there appeared three masive vorumes, of some6oo pages each, of selected documenm from the 3oobo*es, with the impressive titte strqeno,ti ver-firicluf',is- In the ordinary way the documenb therr-selvs would have mourdered aqney in some celar orattic and disappeared for €v€r; or pirhaps in a hundredyears or so some curious scholar would have comeupon them and set out to compare them with Bern_

lgE IIISTORIAN AI{D EIS FACNS

hardt's t€xt. what happened was far more dramatic"In 1945 the documenb fell into the hands of the Brit-ish and the American govenrments, who photographedthe lot

-and put the photostats at the a$osat or soot-

ars in the Public Record ofice in London and in theNational fuchives in washington, so thaf if we harasufrcient patience and curiosity, we can discover er-actly what Bernhardt did. what he did qns neithervery unusual nor very sho&iog. when shesemanndied, his western policy seemed to have been crownedwith a series of bnlliant successes-Locarnq the ad-mission of Germany to the League of Nations, theDawes and Young plans and the American loans,the withdrarval of allied ocrupation armies from theRhineland. This seemed the important aud reuatdingpart of Stresesrann's foreign policy; and it was notunnatural that it should have been over-rqpresented inBernhardfs selection of documents. sheseurann'${astern policy, on the other hand, his relations withthe soviet union, seemed to have led nowhere in par-ticular; and, since masses of documents about nego-tiations which yielded only trivial results were notvery interesting and added nothing to stresemann'sreputation, the process of selection oould be morerigorous. stresemann in fact devoted a far more con-stant and arxious attention to relations with the Sorrietullo"' and they played a far larger part in his foreignpolicy as a whole, than the reader of the Bernhardtselection would surrrise. But the Bernhardt volumes"sompare favorably, I suspect, with many published

r8 wHAT ur ErsnoRY?

collections of documents on which the ordinary his-torian implicitly relies.

This is not the end of my story. Shortly after thepublication of Bernhardt's volumes, Hitler came intoIpwer. Stresemann's neme was consigned to oblivionin Gerrrany, and the volumes disappeared from circu-Iation: many, perhaps most, of the copies must havebeen destroyed. Today Stresemdnta Yermiichtnis is erather rare book. But in the West Stresemann's repu-tation stood high. In ry117 an Bnglish publisherbrought out an abbreviated translation of Bernhardfswork-a selection from Bernhardt's selection; perhapsone tlrird of the original was omitted. Sutton, a well-known translator from the German, did his iob com-petently and well. The English version, he explainedin the preface, was "slightly condensed, but only bythe omission of a certain amount of whaf it was felbwas more ephemeral matter . . . of little interest toEnglish readers or students."' This again is naturalenough. But the result is that Stresemann's Easternpolicy, already under+epresentcd in Bernhardt, recedesstill further from view, and the Soviet Union appearsin Sutton's volumes merely as an occasional andrather unwelcome intruder in Stresemann's predomi-nantly Western foreign poliry. Yet it is safe to saythat, for all except a few specialists, Sutton and notBernhardt-and still less the documents themselves-

'Grls&dy Sfivsemanw Hb Diarlict,l*ttcrt, and Papert (Iondon:Mecurillen & Co.; rqff ), I, &litor'r Notc.

rsB E$TOnIAT{ AlrD ErS FAsrS 19

represents for the Western world the authentic voiceof Stresemann. Had the documenb perished in 1945in the bombing, and had the remaining Bernhardtvolumes disappeared, the authenticity and authorityof Sutton would never have been questioned. Manyprinted collectrons of documents gratefully acceptedby historians in default of the originals rest on nosecurer basis than this.

But I want to carry the story one step furlher. Letus forget about Bernhardt and Sutton, and be thank-ful that we can, if we choose, consult the authenticpapen of a leading participant in some importantevenb of recent European history. What do the pa-pers tell us? Among other things they contain recordsof some hundreds of Stresemann's conversations withthe Soviet arnbassador in Berlin and of a score or sowith Chicherin. These records have one feature incommon. They depict Stresemann as having the lion'sshare of the conversations and reveal his argumenb asinrariably well put and cogent, while those of his parbner are for the most part scanty, confused, and un-convincing. This is a familiar characteristic of all rec-ords of diplomatic conversations. The documents donot tell us what happened, but only what Stresemannthought had happened" or what he wanted others tothink, or perhaps what he wanted himself to think,had happened. It was not Sutton or Bernhardt butStreseurann himself, who started theprocess of selec-tion. And, if we had, say, Chicherin's records of these

IN WEAT trI EISTORY?

same conversations, we should still learn from themonly what Chicherin thoughf and what really hap.pened would still have to be reconstnrcted in the mindof the historian. Of course, facts and documents areessential to the historian. But do not make a fetish ofthem. They do not by themselves constitute history;they provide in thernselves no ready-made answer tothis tiresome question: What is history?

At this point I should like to say a few words on thequestion of why nineteenthcentury historians weregenerally indifferent to the philosophy of history. Thetemr was invented by Voltairg and has since beenused in different senses; but I shall take it to mean, ifI use it at all, our answer to the question: What is his.tory? The nineteenth cenhrry was, for the intellectualsof Western Europg a comfortable perid exudingconfidence and optimism. The facts were on the wholesatisfactory; and the inclination to ask and answerawkward questions about them was conespondinglyweak. Ranke piousty believed that divine providencewould take care of the meaning of history if he tookcare of the facts; and Burckhardt with a more moderntouch of cynicism observed that "we are not initiatedinto tlre purposes of the eternal wisdom." ProfessorButterfield as late as 1931 noted with apparent satis-faction that "historians have reflected little upon thenature of things and even the nature of their own subiect." c But my predecessor in these lectures, Dr. A. L

oHerbert Butterfield: The Whig Interptctdbn of Hilory (lndoo: George Bell & Sons; r93r) , p. 67.

TEE SISTORIAN AND IIIS FACTS 'I

Rowse, more iustly critical, wrote of Sir WinstonChurchill's The World Crisis-his book about theFint World War-that, while it matched Trotsky'sHistory of the Russian Rwolution in personality, viv-idnCIs, and vitality, it was inferior in one respect: ithad "no philosophy of history behind it." t British hi$.torians refused to be drawn, not because thoy believedthat history had no meaning, but because they bc-lieved that its meaning was implicit and self-evident.The liberal nineteenth*entury view of history had aclose afrnity with the economic doctrine of laisser-faire-also the product of a serene and selfconfidentoutlook on the world. [,et everyone get on with hisparticular iob, and the hidden hand would take careof the universal harmony The facts of history wercthernselves a demonstration of the supreme fact of abeneficent and apparently infinite progress towardshigher things. This was the age of innocencg and his-torians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrapof philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamedbefore the god of history. Since then, we have knownSin and experienced a Fall; and those historians wholoday pretend to dispense with a philosophy of historyare merely trying, vainly and self-consciously, Iikemembers of a nudist colonl, to recreate the Gardenof Eden in their garden suburb. Today the awlcnnrdguestion can no longer be evaded

tAlfred L. Ro*re: The End of an Epoch (Iondon; Mrcurilhtt Co.; ,g+z), pp. z8z-3.

2' T|EAT IS EISK)TY?

During the pCIt fifty yean a good deal of seriouswork has been done on the question: What is history?It was from Gerrrany, the country which was to doso much to upset the comfortable reign of nineteenth-mtury liberalism, that the first challenge cnme in ther88o's and rSgo's to the doctrine of the primacy andautonomy of facts in history. The philosophers whomade the challenge are now little more than names:Dilthey is the only one of them who has recently neceived some belated recoguition in Great Britain. Before the turn of the cenhrry, prosperity and confidencewere still too Seat in this country for any attention tobe paid to heretics who attacked the cult of facts. Butaily in the new c€ntury, the torch pased to ltaly,where Croce began to propound a philosophy of his-tory which obviously owed much to Geruran masters.All history is "contemporary historyr" declared Crocersmeaning that history consists essentially iu seeing thepast throogh the eyes of the present and in the lightof ib problems, and that the main work of the histerian is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he doesnot evaluatE how can he know what is worlb record-ing? In tgto the American philosopher, Carl Becker,argud in deliberately provocative language that "the

tlbc mtert of this celebrated apbor&t:n ic es follmrc: *Theprecticet rcquiremenb whicb underlie every historicel iudgncot giveo dl histo'ry the eiharacter of 'cootearponry hirtory,' becatrse, hw-cvcr remote in time wcnb thts recormted may seem to be, t[c higtory in rcelity refen to present needs and preseot situstions wbcrcinthoee errenb vibrate" (Benedetto Croe: Hbtory o the Story 4libe,rry [London: Gcorge Alleo & Urwiry r94rJ, p. r9).

lgE gISf,ORIAIiI AND EIS FASIS 29

facre of history do not exist for any historian till hecreates therr."' These challenges were for the moment little noticed. It was only after rgzo that Crocebegan to have a considerable vogue in France andGreat Britain. This was not perhaps because Croctwas a subtler thinker or a better stylist than his Ger-man predecessors, but because, after the First World'War, the facts seemed to smile on us less propitiorslythan in the yea$ before tgt+ and we were thereforcmore accessible to a philosophy which soughl to di-minish their prestige. Croce was an important infu-ence on the Oxford philosopher and historian Colting-wood, the only British thinker in the present centurywho has made a serious contribution to the philosophyof history. He did not live to urite the systematic bea-tise he had planned; but his published and unpublished papers on the subiect were collected after hisdeath in a volume entitled Tlu lilsa of History, whichappeared in ry45.

The views of Collingrrood can be summarized asfollows. The philosophy of history is concerned neitherwith "the past by itself" nor with "the historian'sthought about it by ibelf," but with "the two thingsin their mutual relations." (This dictum refects thetwo current meanings of the word 'tistory"-the en-quiry conducted by the historian and the series of pastevents into which he enquires.) "The past which ahistorian studies is not a dead pasq but a past which

e AlJordic Mord;lily (Ocbb€E r9z8), p. 5r8.

24 WEAT rS ErS"nDnY?

in some sense is still living in the presenL" But a pastact is dea4 i.a. meanirgless to the historiaq unless hecan understand the thought that lay behind it. llence"dl history is the bistory of thought " and "history isthe reenactsnent in the historian's mind of thethought whose history he is studying." The reconsti-tution of the past in the historian's mind is dependenton ernpirical evidence. But it is not in itself an em-pirical process, and cannot consist in a mere recital offacrls. On the conbary, the procos of reconstitutiongoverns the selection and interprebtion of ttre facm:this, indee4 is what malres thern historical facts."History" seys Professor Oakeshotf who on this pointstends ncir to Collingwod "is the historian's eqperience. It is 'madd by nobody save the historian: towite histoqy is the only way of making iL" I

This searching cri6que, though it may call for someserious resenations, brings to light certain nqlectedtnrths.

In the first place, the facb of history netrer oome tous "purd' since they do not and cannot exist in a pureform: they are dways refracted through the mind ofthe recorder. It follows that when we take uP a workof history our fint concern should be not with thefacts which it contains but with the historhn whowrote it. L€t me take as an example the great historianin whose honour and in whose name these lestureswere founded. TrwelyaD, illi be tells us in his auto

l Mi&ael Oatesbott: Exc,crbrc olnil ltt M&a (CohidS?Univenity Pres; rgll), p. 99.

rEE srsToRrAll al{D grll FAqIs 95

biography, was 'trought up at home on a somewhatexuberantly Whig tradition";3 and he would noT Ihope disclaim the title if I described him as the lastand not the least of the gatEnglish liberal historiansof the Whig tradition. It is not for nothing that hetracts back his faurily tree, through the great Whighistorian George Otto Trwelyan, to Macaulay, in-comparably the greatest of the Whig historians. Dr.Ttwelyan's finest and maturest work Englad urderQueen Antu was written against that background,and will yield its full meaning and siguificance to thereader only when read against that background. Theauthor, indeed, leaves the reader with no excuse forfailing to do $o. For if, following the technique ofconnoisseun of detective novels, you read the end finLyou will find on the last few pages of the third volumethe best summary known to me of what is uowadayscalled the Whig interpretation of history; and you willsee that whatTrevelyan is trying to do is to investigatethe origin and dwelopment of the Whig tradition,and to roof it fairly and squarely in the yean after thedeath of its founder, William III. Though this is not'perhap$ the only conccivable interpretation of theevents of Queen Anne's reign, it is a valid and, inTrwelpn's hands, a fnritful interpretatioD. But, inorder to appreciate it at ib full ralue' you have to un-derstand what the historian is doing. For if, as Colling-wood says, the historian must re+nact in thought what

3G. M. Trctclyan: An lbnobiogqlry (Inndon: Iongnans,Grcco & Cmpeoy; tg4g), P. rr'

23 wEAT rs nsrony?

has gone on in the mind of his dramotis personae, sothe reader in his turn must recnact what goes on inthe mind of the historian. Study the historian beforcyou begin to study the facts. This is, after dl, uot veryabstruse. It is what is aheady done by the intelligentundergraduate who, when recommended to read awork by that great scholar fones of St. fude\ goesround to a friend at St. |ude's to ask what sort of chapfones is, and what bees he has in his bonnet Whenyou read a work of history, always listen out for thebuzzing. If you can detect none, either you arc tonedeaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are reallynot at all like 6sh on the fishmonger's slab. They arelfte fish swimming about in a vast and sometimesinaccessible oceary and what the historian catches willdepend partly on chance, but mainly on what part ofthe ocean he chooses to fish in and what tacHe hechooses to use-these two factors briog, of course, de,termined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By andlarge, the historian will get the kind of facts he wanb.History means interpretation. Inded, if, standing SirGeorge Clark on his head, I were to call history "ahard core of interpretation sunounded by a pulp ofdiqputable facb," my statement would, no doubt, beone+ided and mislea&g, but no more sq I veufure tothink, than the original dictrm.

The second point is the more familiar one of thc his,torian's need of imaginative understanding for theminds of the people with whom he is dealing for thethought behind their acts: I say "imaginative under-

rsE grsroRrarY aND Es FACrrl 27

standing" not "q@pathy," lest sympathy should besupposed to imply agreemenL The runeteenth centurywas weak in mediaeral history because it was toomuch repelled by the superstitious beliefs of the Middle Ages and by the barbarities which thty inspired, tohave any imaginative understanding of mediaeval people. Or take Burckhardt's censorious remark about theThirty Yean' War: "It is scandalous for a creed, nomatter whether it is Catholic or Protestant, to place itssalvation above the integrity of the nation." I It was eic-

tremely difficult for a nineteenthcentury liberal his-torian, brought up to believe that it is right and praise'wor&y to kill in defence of one's country, but wickedand vnong-headed to kill in defence of one's religion,to enter into the state of mind of thosc who fought theThirty Years' War, This difrculty is particularly acutein the field in which I am now working. Much of wbatbas been written in English*peaking countries in thelast ten years about the Soviet Union, and in the SovietUnion about the English-speaking countries, has beenvitiated by this inability to achieve even the mosteleurentary measure of imaginative understanding ofwhat goes on in the mind of the other Pa$, so that thewords and actions of the other are always made tQ appear malign, senseless, or hypocritical. History cannotbe written unless the historian can achieve some kindof contact with the mind of those about whom he isr*ritiog.

rJecob Burctherrdtz ludgmatu on Hinory dttd Hi#otidru (Lo'don: S. I. Rcginrld Seundcn & Cornpany; rgtE), P. r7g.

zB wEAT rs Ersronr.

The third point is that we qln view the pasf andachieve our understanding of the pasb o"lt throughthe eyes of the present. Thehi;storian is of his own age,and is bound to it h thr conditions of human exist-ence. The very words which he uses-words like de-mocracy, empire, war, revolution-have current connt>tations from which he ennot divorce tite*. Ancienthistorians have taken to using words like potis andplebs in the original, iust in order to show that theyhave not fallen into this trap. This does not help thetn.They, toq live in the presen! and cannot cheat thesr-selves into the past by using unfamiliar or obsoletewords, any more than they would become betterGreek or Roman historians if th.y delivered their lec'fures in a chlarrlys ot a toga. The names by which suc-cessive French historians have descnbed the parisiancrowds which played so prominerrt a role in theFrench revolution-les sdtuctrlottes, le peupte, h conaille, les bra-nlrs-are all, for those who know thenrles of the game, manifestos of a politicar afiriationand of a particular interpretation. Yet the historianis obliged to choose: the use of language forbids himto be neutral. Nor is it a matter of words alone. Overthe past hundred years tJre changed balance of powerin Europe has reversed the attitude of British histerians to Frederick the Greal The changed balancr ofpower within the christian churches between cathoti.cism and Protestantism has profoundly altered theirattitude to such figures as Loyola, Luther, and Crom.well. It requires only a superficial knowledge of the

lEE ETSTORTAN Al{D Erlt FACTS 29

work of French historians of t}e last forty yea$ on theFrench revolution to recognize how deeply it has beenaffected by the Russian revolution of r9r7. The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Profes-sor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian "ought tolove the past."' This is a dubious iniunction. To lovethe past may easily be an expression of the nostalgicromanticism of old men and old societies, a symptomof loss of faith and interest in the present or future.oClichd for clich6,I should prefer the one about freeingoneself from "the dead hand of the past." The func-tion of the historian is neither to love the past nor toernancipate himself from the past, but to master andunderstand it as the key to the understanding of thepresent.

If, however, these are some of the insights of what Imay call the Collingwood view of history, it is time toconsider some of the dangers. The emphasis on therole of the historian in the making of history tends, ifpressed to its logical conclusion, to rule out any obiective history at all: history is what the historianmakes. Collingrrood seems indeed, at one moment in

'Intsoduction to Burckhardtz luilgmmtc on History and Hbtui4w, p. l-7,

5 Compare Nietzsche's view of history: "To old age belonp tbcold man's business of looking ba* and casting up his accounh, ofseeking ctnsolation in tbe memories of tbe pasb in historical cnl.ture" (Tftoughts Otrt of fuason [Iondon: Macmillan & Co.; rgogJ,II, pp. 6s.6).

WEAT UI SISIONY?

an unpublished note quoted by his editor, to havereached this conclusion:

- Sf 4ugustine loolced at history from the point of

vie$'of the early Christian; Tilleuron! from tirat of aseventeenthcentury Frenchman; Gibbon, from that of aneighteenth-century Englishman; Mommsen, from that ofa nineteenthcentury German. There is no point in askingwhiclr was the right point of view. Each wis tne onty oniposible for the man who adopted itJTtis amounts to total scepticism, like Froudet remarkthat history is "a child's box of letten with which wecan spell any word we please." t Collingwood, in hisreaction against "scissors-and-paste historyr" againstthe view of history as a mere compilation of facb,oomes perilously near to treating history as sometbingqpun out of the human brain, and leads back to thecpnclusion referred to by Sir George Clark in the pas-sage which I quoted earlier, that "tlere is no 'obiective'historical truth." In place of the th*ry that historyha9 no meaning, we are oftered bere the theory of aninfinity of meanings, none any more right thau anyother-which comes to much the same thing. ThLsecond theory is surely as untenable as the fint. It doesnot follow thab because a mouutain appears to take ondifferent shapes from difterent angles of vision, it hasobiectively either no shape at all or an infinity of

IgE SISTORIAI\T AT{D AIS FACTS 3T

shapes. It does not follow that, because interpretationplays a necessary part in establishing the facb of hivtory, and because no existing interpretation is whollyobiective, one inteqpretation is as good as another, andthe facts of history are in principle not amenable toobiective inteqpretation. I shall have to consider at alater stage what exactly is meant by obiectivity inhistory.

But a still geater danger lurks in the Collingrroodhypothesis. If the historian neccssarily looks at hisperiod of history through the eyes of his own time,and studies the problems of the past as a key to thoseof the presenf will he not fall into a purely pragmaticview of the facts, and maintain that the criterion of aright interpretation is its suitability to some presentpurpose? On this hypothesis, the facts of histoqy arenothing, interpretation is everything. Nietzsche hadalready enunciated the principle: '"The falseness of anopinion is not for us any obiection to it. . . . TItequestion is how far it is life-furthering, life-presewing,speciespresewingr perhaps speciestreating."t TheAmerican pragmatists, moved, less explicitly and leswholeheartedly, along the same line. Knowledge isknowledge for some purpose. The validity of theknowledge depends on the validity of the puqpose.Bub even where no such theory has been professed,the practice has often been no less disquieting. In myown field of study I have seen too'many examples of

6 Froude: Beyort'd Good anil Elnl, Ch. i.

__'.Robin G. Collingwood: The lded of History (London: OxfordUliyersity Press; 1946), p. *ii., ilry*- Anthony Froude: Short Sfudier on Grut &dliecu(r8g+), I, p. zr.

g2 WEAT UI E$IOnI?

extsavagant interpretation riding roughshod over fac.b,not to be impressed with the reality of this danger. Itis not surprising that perusal of some of the more eE-Eeme produc'ts of Soviet and anti-Soviet schools ofhistoriography should sometimes breed a certrain nos,talgia for that illusory nineteenth-century haven ofpurely factual history.

How then, in the middle of the twentieth century,are we to define the obligation of the historian to hisfacts? I trust that I have spent a sufrcient number ofhoun in recent years chasing and penrsing doormeob,and stufing my historical narrative with properly foot-noted facts, to escape the imputation of treating factsand docurnents too cavalietly. The duty of the historian to respect his facts is not extrausted by the obliga-tion to see that his facts are accurate. He must seek tobring into the picture all known or knowable facts rel-evant, in one sense or another, to the tleme on whichhe is engaged and to the interpretation proposed. If heseeks to depict the Victorian Englishman as a moraland rational being he must not forget what happenedat Stalybridge Wakes in r85o. nufttrq in turn, doesnot mean that he can eliminate interpretatioq whichis the life-blood of history. Laymen-that is to say,non-academic friends or friends from other acadeuricdisciplines-sometimes ask me how the historian goesto work when he writes history. The commonest as,sumption appears to be that the historian divides hiswork into two sharply distinguishable phases or peri-ods. First, he spends a long preliminary period reading

rEE HISTORIAN A}ID HIS FAqTS 33

his sources and filling his notebooks with facts: then,when this is over' he puts aspy his sourcet, takes outhis notebooks, and writes his book from beginning toend. This is to me an unconvincing and unplausiblepicture. For mpelf, as soon as I have got going on alew of what I take to be the capital sources, the itchbecomes too strong and I begin to write-not neces-

sarily at the beginning but somewhere, anywhereThereafter, reading and writing go on simultaneously.The writing is added to, subtracted from, re+haped,cancelled, as I go on reading. The reading is guidedand directed and made fruitful by the writing: themore I unite, the more I know what I am looking for,the better I understand the significanct and relevanceof what I find. Some historians probably do all thispreliminary writing in their head without using pen,paper, or typeruriter, iust as some people play chess inthiir heads without recourse to board and chess'men:this is a talent which I envy, but cannot emulate. ButI am convinced thai for any historian worth thename, the two Processes of what economists call "in'put" and "output" go on simultaneously and are, inpractice, parts of a single Process. If you try to separate

ihe., or to give one priority over the other, you fallinto one of two heresies. Either you write scissors-and-

past€ history without meaning or significanc€; or youwrite propagalda or historical 6ction, and merely use

facts of the pist to embroider a kind of writing whic,hhas nothing to do with history.

Our oramination of the relation of the historian to

u WEAT IS TSTORY?

the facb of history finds us, thereforg in an apparentlyprecarious situation, navigating delicately behveen theScylla of an untenable theory of history as an obiectivecompilation of facb, of the unqualified primacy offact over interpretation, and the Charybdis of anequally untenable theory of history as the subiectiveproduct of the mind of the historian who establishesthe facts of history and masters them ttrrough the proc-ess of interpretation, between a view of history havingthe centre of gravity in the past and the view havingthe centre of gravity in the present. But our sifuationis less precerious than it seems. We shall encounterthe same dichotomy of fact and inteqpretation againin these lectures in other guises-the particular andthe general, the empirical and the theoretical, the obiective and the subiective. The predicament of thehistorian is a reflerion of the nature of man. Man,except perhaps in earliest infancy and in extreme oldage, is not totally involved in his environment and un-conditionally subject to it. On the other hand, he isnever totally independent of it and its unconditionalmaster. The relation of man to his environment is therelation of the historian to his theme. The historian isneither the humble slavq nor the tyrannical master, ofhis facts. The relation between the historian and hisfacb is one of equality, of giveand-take. As any work-ing historian knows, if he itopr to reflect what he isdoing as he thinks and writes, the historian is engagedon a continuous process of moulding his facts to his

lsE EIITORrA!{ AND ErS FAcnt 35

interpretation and his interpretation to his facb. It isimpossible to assign primacy to one over the other.

The historian starb with a provisional selection offacts and a provisional inteqpretation in the light ofwhich that selection has been made-by others as wellas by himself. As he worls, both the inteqpretation andthe selection and ordering of facb undergo subtle andperhaps partly unconscious changes through the recip-rocal action of one or the other. And this recrprocalaction also involves reciprocity between present andpast, since the historian is part of the present and thefacts belong to the past. The historian and the facts ofhistory are necessary to one another. The historianwithout his facts is rootless and futile; the facts with-out their historian are dead and meaningless. IlIy fintanswer therefore to the queston, What is history?, isthat it is a continuous process of interaction betweenthe historian and his facts, an unending dialogue be-tween the present and the past.