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McGraw-Hill Paperbacks

Styl

History Peter Gay

jjctfe

/fait

Books by Peter Gay Style in History (1974)

(with R. K.

Webb) Modern Europe

(1973)

The Bridge of Criticism: Dialogues on the Enlightenment (1970) The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, volume 2, The Science of

Weimar

A

Culture:

Freedom (1969)

The Outsider

as Insider (1968)

Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (1966) The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, volume 1, The Rise of

The

Modern Paganism (1966)

Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment

(1964) Voltaire's Politics:

The Dilemma

The Poet

as Realist

of Democratic Socialism:

(1959)

Eduard Bernstein's

Challenge to Marx (1952)

TRANSLATIONS WITH INTRODUCTIONS Candide (1963) Voltaire: Philosophical Dictionary, two volumes (1962) Ernst Cassirer: The Question of Jean Jacques Rousseau (1954) Voltaire:

ANTHOLOGIES AND COLLECTIVE WORKS The Enlightenment:

A

Comprehensive Anthology (1973) Eighteenth Century Studies Presented to Arthur M. Wilson (1972) (with John A. Garraty) The Columbia History of the World (with Gerald

J.

(*97 2 ) Cavanaugh and Victor G. Wexler) Historians at

Work, two volumes (1972)

Deism: An Anthology (1968) John Locke on Education (1964)

Style in History

ssXw* ^Rfl^ -««m2& ^«RJ&». SSS»S -wsKs SK£*£

STYLE IN

HISTORY Peter ;i

Gay

McGraw-Hill Book Company

New York

San Francisco Bogota Diisseldorf Madrid Mexico Montreal Panama Paris Sao Paulo Tokyo Toronto St.

Louis

Copyright

©

1974 by Peter Gay. All

United States of America.

No

rights reserved. Printed in the

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may be

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gay, Peter, 1923Style in history.

Bibliography: p. Includes index.

Gibbon, Edward, 1737-1794. 2. Ranke, Leopold von, 1795-1886. 3. Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron, 1800-1859. 4. Burckhardt, Jakob Christoph, 1818-1897. 5. Historiography. 1.

I.

Title.

[D14.G39 1976] 907'.2'022 ISBN 0-07-023063-3

76-2549O

to Bob

Webb

Friend, Collaborator, Stylist

II

It is

our

most style

true, stylus

virum

arguit,

bewrays us."

—ROBERT BURTON, Anatomy

of

Melancholy

PREFACE

has had long Thisthebook, though have often crossed the short,

years,

it

my

intellectual terrain

I

claims and

mapped

concern with style

come

a historian;

remember. Also,

When

readers.

early 1950s,

I

I

is

it

much

I

older than

my

began to do

editor,

Christopher Herold, while

much

as

first

decision to beas

it

long

Hofstadter and Henry Roberts.

they did;

and with pain

thought, as

I

all

knew him

I

—

style abides." It

irreparable.

has

left its

The

this

little

"Men and

in

on

me

in

taught

I

them with have often

dynasties pass, is

friends' style

most graceful

summer

of 1954,

shared a house with the Hofstadters and watched

I

revising the

the

—

my

its

in the

Dick composing the Introduction to

and

first

comfort; the loss of a friend

labor that style exacts from even

was borne

my

book, of Sir Ronald Syme's

But I like to think that some of mark on the pages that follow.

practitioners

when

is

My

less well,

dead

for they are all

completed

can

three were candid, discriminating,

closing sentence in his Tacitus:

but

I

also intimate

and, at the same time, encouraging. In thinking of affection

as

serious writing in the

who were

critics

—Richard

as

my

have been singularly fortunate in

friends

me

And

from many perspectives.

have been interested in

had perceptive

I

During

history.

a

whole manuscript

same summer that

Mimesis.

It

was

a revelation,

I

first

and

his

The Age

of

Reform

for the publisher. It

Erich Auerbach's

read

for years

was

I

sought an oppor-

tunity to apply to historical writings the lessons of this in-

STYLE spired masterpiece,

HISTORY

IN

once philology and sociology. That

at

opportunity came in the early 1960s, I

when

for several years

on historiography to incoming graduate Columbia University. Some of the ideas I develop

offered the course

students at

book

in this

much

in detail

different and,

I

adumbrated

first

more primitive form. In

think, rather

I

in that course in a

those years, the inquiry into historical style was essentially an inquiry into the limitations that class and nation impose on

the historian. Relativists, directly indebted to Karl Karl

Mannheim

indebted to them by their

indirectly

or

reading of Charles Beard, held the

more sophisticated and, In

my own

lectures,

I

in

—objects—

really that

objectivity,

though

rewarding reading

to

field at all,

I

of

J.

but in philosophy;

I

owe

summed up my

sense of historical style in a

amid the

of three lectures,

lectures,

which

I

fostering,

hospitable sur-

Andrews and of Utrecht. have much rewritten and greatly

expanded, form the nucleus of several passages

to the witty icono-

Austin. During the academic year

L.

roundings of the Universities of

These

Perhaps the most

possible.

is

debt to the logical and epistemological writings

clastic lectures

series

kind of perspectival

be studied and understood, and that

Hempel and Ernest Nagel and

1970-1971,

optimistic.

did on historiography in the late 1960s

was not directly in that a particular

a

grew

analysis

the objects of historical study are

difficult, I

was an age of

some measure, more

began to develop

realism, suggesting that

of Carl

It

field.

Then, gradually, historiographical

suspicion.

Marx and

St.

this

book.

I

have incorporated

from an Overseas Fellow's Lecture, which

delivered in the Spring of 1971 at Churchill College,

I

Cam-

bridge, into the Conclusion.

As with

my

other work in the past,

consider myself lucky in

my

critics.

M

I

now once

owe

again

I

particular debts

Preface to

Quentin Skinner, R. K. Webb, and

their intense revise

and

thoughtful

I

my am

general argument also grateful

Henry Gibbons want

to

to

and

Ruth, for

me

to sharpen

Henry Turner

comments on the whole manuscript,

for his helpful criticism

I

wife,

and repeated readings, which compelled

refine

lesser points.

my

to

many

for

his

John Clive of the chapter on Macaulay, and to to

for a productive discussion of general strategy.

thank Betty Paine and Heather Anderson, amateur

my

paleographers, for their ability to decipher

manuscripts.

My

much-revised

D. Neuthaler, bears a heavy

editor, Paul

sponsibility for there being a

book

at

complacent thought on

my

a writer has the readers

he deserves.

all.

I

hope

it is

re-

not a

part to suspect, cheerfully, that

Peter

1974

[xi]

Gay

A

Since this

is,

after

NOTE ON CITATIONS

all,

a

book on

from the

original texts. In the

language

is

short

German,

and long,

passage

is

I

style, I

two

essays

not enclosed in quotation marks,

German and

is

sages will miss nothing I

historians

directly into the text, in italics.

but not a precise translation.

ments

on

whose

have placed excerpts from their work,

the English sentences just preceding

edge of

have quoted copiously

The

it

this

When

the

means that

are a close paraphrase

reader

who

compelled to skip the

more than whatever

has no knowlitalicized pas-

linguistic refine-

was unable to rescue into the English.

CONTENTS Introduction: Style— From

1

Gibbon:

A Modern

Manner

2

Ranke:

*9 21

Scholar Ironist

4°

Respectful Critic

The Dramatist The Scientist The Believer

3

57

59

67 76

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary

The Acrobat The Son The Liberal 4

The Poet

Burckhardt:

On

95

97 114 128

of Truth

The Condottiere The Poet 165 Conclusion:

Matter

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

The The

to

39

141

Style in History

83

Bibliography

219

Index

2 39 [xiii]

Introduction Style— From to

Manner

Matter

—

would seem,

a centaur, joining what nature, Style form and content, has decreed must be kept apart. It it

is

is

woven

into the texture of every art

and every

craft

including history. Apart from a few mechanical tricks of rhetoric,

and

manner

in turn

essays

is

indissolubly linked to matter; style shapes,

shaped by, substance.

is

anatomize

to

style the centaur; the

this

have written these

I

familiar yet really strange being,

book may be read

an extended

as

commentary on Button's famous saying that the the man.

critical

style

Buffon's epigram has a beautiful simplicity that makes

both possibly profound and certainly suspect. lous,

almost inappropriate, to be

necessary,

and

difficult,

stylish

to disentangle

about

It

seems

is

it

frivo-

style, for it is

the multiplicity of

meanings and the thicket of metaphors that have accrued to the word in the course of centuries. Style, dress of

thought and

expressive voice.

its

sinews,

There appear

for style as there are users. lyric

its

to

The

are told,

the

is

crowning glory and

be almost

critic

poet and the political publicist, [3]

we

as

many

its

uses

and the scholar, the each employs style

STYLE in his

own way and

HISTORY

IN own

for his

purposes: to appreciate ele-

gance and depreciate clumsiness, to decipher obscure passages, to exploit verbal ambiguities, to drive

The

who

historian,

does

all

home

a partisan point.

of these things

—though

one

wishes that he would keep his lyricism in check and discard his politics

when he

writes history

He

and other dimensions.

As

fessional reader.

is

a writer,

remaining a

a stylist while

—encounters

a professional writer

he

scientist;

style

an involuntary confession, or

a reader,

he

pretations,

and

he must give pleasure

may be

a conventional

As

a striking illumination.

and

prizes literary excellence, absorbs facts

and explores the words before him

working beneath their surface;

a pro-

under pressure to become

is

without compromising truth. His tool,

style in these

style

may

be,

inter-

truths

for

him, an

for

object of gratification, a vehicle of knowledge, or an instru-

ment Yet

As

I

of diagnosis. this will

profusion

show,

discriminate

it

is

desirable,

is

among

an opportunity

as

much

for the

as a

problem.

sake of clarity, to

the varied meanings of

style,

but

it

impossible, for the sake of understanding, to keep

them

manently segregated. The use of

for

functions need not be a

symptom

a

single

word

is

per-

many

of linguistic poverty;

it

can

be a sign that these functions are related to one another. That the

word

should enter diverse combinations

style

thought, style of

and others

life,

—without

—

style

of

strain reinforces

the impression that the several kinds of style, and style and substance, have

much

another. Style

like

is

to

do with, and to say about, one

Ranke's Venetian ambassadors: widely

traveled, highly adaptable, superbly informed, and,

if

adroitly

interrogated, splendidly indiscreet. For the historian, therefore,

the evidential value of style

giving evidence

—

is

enormous. [4]

—both

in getting

and

in

Style

—From Manner

have said that

I

commentary on Buffon's Le The commentary must be extended,

observation, the epigram

philosophers say, unpack

day, his

its

Matter

book may be read

this

critical

critical, for

to

for,

And

it.

Buffon at once says

an extended

Vhomme meme.

style est

though an important

we must,

so laconic that

is

bon mot was an

as

as the

commentary must be too much and too little. In the

energetic, almost unprecedented

demand

that style not be taken lightly as

but seen

as

mere decoration,

reaching into the very foundations of the writer's

work. 1 Yet style

whole man.

is

not always the man, certainly not the

manner and matter

If

marriage, irrevocably, this does not

mean

that they can never

Much

talk

about

felicities,

and

for the traditional,

be apart from each other. the search for literary

are joined in a Catholic

on

style centers

if

surprisingly elusive, virtue of clarity.

Moreover,

it is

privately deplore

a historical fact (which the historian

but must professionally investigate

may any

like

other) that style has not always been profoundly anchored.

— publishing— who

There have been those politics,

as the

even in

treat

it

in as

Middleton Murry once called

heresy of the

popular of

man

all

delusion half a

A

advertising,

journalism,

in

an afterthought,

Gothic facade irrelevantly plastered onto modern con-

crete walls.

1

in

this practice

"the

and thought it "the most 2 delusions about style/' He anatomized this century ago, but the heresy had been popular in the street"

rare early supporter of this

modern view was Robert Burton;

see his

bewrays us," which is the epigraph of this book. The view I defend here was well put by Marcel Proust in an interview of 1913: "Style," Proust said, "is in no way a decoration as some people believe; it is not even a matter of technique; it is as color is with painters a quality of vision. ..." I should note that in what follows, style is applied to writers only; obviously, composers, painters, architects confront stylistic problems in precisely the same way. See below, p. 189. 2 The Problem of Style (edn. i960), p. 10.

comment, "our

style

—

[5]

—

— STYLE

IN

HISTORY it

was when he wrote

for

mass consumption

long before and remains as popular as 1922.

in still

find

Makers of verbal it

to write

artifacts

convenient to ask researchers to do research, writers

it

Such

up, and stylists to add the fine touches.

Balkanization,

need hardly

I

say, fatally divides

what needs

be united; the products that such procedures throw on the

to

market dise,

we

are, as

all

know, persuasively packaged merchan-

decorated with obsessive puns, exhausted superlatives,

and unauthentic anecdotes. Style here mercial enterprise;

This

it is

by no means the

vast, vulgar subliterature

word

historian that the

is

style

"that novelist has style"

is

—but

is

man but

not only a term of praise also a neutral description

that the very idea of style

is

it

vista.

It

a bewildering

Aesthetically indifferent or aesthetically offen-

sive procedures, as

and

re-

as pleasure.

—

double

He must

infected with a central

must give information as well opens windows on both truth and beauty ambiguity:

the system.

a valuable reminder to the

"that novelist works in the Naturalist style/'

member

com-

a by-product of

long as they have a certain consistency

characteristic form, partake of style. Second-rate poets,

painters

—and

historians

—have

a style.

So do gangsters

per-

petrating gangland killings, songwriters manufacturing popular hits, priests

ized ways.

The

performing religious ceremonies in standardstudy of style has diagnostic value in

instances; to the historian they are

though not to the same

no reason

to subject matter

be

—

a

and

these

valid clues to the past,

historical experiences. If style gives

information not about the historian has

all

all

to

stylist

but about

be disappointed.

his culture, the

When

to evidence, the historian

is

it

comes

—or should

democrat.

Buffon, of course, was not a democrat, in his view of style or of anything else.

He

was speaking of the [6]

literary style of

— Style

—From Manner

the accomplished writer. writer,

I

think,

was

Matter

to

And what he meant the cultivated

this:

to say about the

manner

of the writer

instructively expresses his personal past as well as the culture's

ways of thinking, matic value of

feeling, believing, style

and working. The sympto-

therefore far greater than that of

is

providing insights into literary habits. 3 Style the carpet

—the unambiguous indication,

lector, of place

and time of

the wings of the butterfly

origin. It

is

And

gesture of the witness in the dock

— the

it

marking on

signature, to the

the involuntary

is

infallible sign, to the

To

unriddle the

it

remains too

ellipti-

be conclusive. Both halves of Buffon's epigram, both

and man, require further

nent and, for these style in its

essays,

narrow sense,

explication.

The most promi-

most productive kind of

literary style:

the

style

management rhythm of

sentences, the use of rhetorical devices, the ration.

col-

unriddle the man.

This exegesis makes a beginning, but

style

informed

also the

observant lawyer, of concealed evidence.

cal to

the pattern in

to the

—the unmistakable

alert lepidopterist of its species.

style, therefore, is to

is

is

of

nar-

Gibbon's way of pairing phrases, Ranke's resort to

dramatic

techniques,

Macaulay's

reiteration

of

antitheses,

Burckhardt's informal diction, taken by themselves, as single instances,

mean what

they say on the page.

They

describe a

battle, analyze a political artifice, chronicle a painter's career.

But once

characteristic

and habitual

elements in the historian's

mode

— that

is,

recognizable

of expression, of his style

they become signposts to larger, deeper matters. Partly idiosyncratic

and

partly conventional, partly selected

and

partly

should add that the four historians I have chosen do not in any way exhaust the possibilities of stylistic analysis; in principle, and in practice, the analysis of inferior historians should yield results that would be quite as interesting, if not quite so pleasing. 3 I

[7]

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

imposed by unconscious, professional, or

political pressures,

the devices of literary style are equally instructive, not always for the

conclusive answers they supply but for the fertile

questions they raise about the historian's central intentions

and overriding interpretations, the tial

beliefs of his culture

—and,

state of his art, the essen-

perhaps, about his insights

into his subject.

While witness,

have taken

I

style in its strict sense as

my materials have

compelled

me

my

principal

to reach out to other

related forms of expression, to styles in looser senses of the

word. call

Among

the historian's emotional

style,

what

want

to

his tone of voice as

it

the most revealing of these

is

emerges in the tension or repose of his phrases,

his favorite

adjectives, his selection of illustrative anecdotes, his

and epigrams. In classicism,

scribed,

in

I

emphases

a tightly regulated stylistic system like neo-

which expressive means

emotional

style

are

severely circum-

has potent diagnostic possibilities,

accepted canons of rhetoric, say, proscribe "low"

for while

epithets for highly placed personages, the range of permissible

expressions remains large choices.

Gibbon

"artful"

only

characterizing

tells

word

room for instructive the Emperor Augustus as to give

us that Augustus was

Gibbon thought him the pages of

enough

—

artful.

The Decline and

But

for

or,

rather,

that

scattered liberally across

Fall of the

artful begins to trail clouds of

becomes an emblem

—

Roman

Empire, the

meaning behind

it

and

Gibbon's cynical appraisal of the

Empire, a clue not merely to what he saw but what he, as an individual historian, was best equipped to freer,

more

emotional

In the

loose-jointed writing of the nineteenth century,

style retains its capacity to yield

interpreter:

see.

dividends to the

Burckhardt's chilling stories about Renaissance

despots point to perceptions

more general than those the [8]

Style

stories are

—From Manner

to

Matter

They help

designed to illuminate.

to outline the

contours of Burckhardt's historical vision. In our examination

we come

of a historian's emotional style,

man

very close to the

indeed.

Instructive as the historian's selection of expressive tech-

niques and unconscious coloring of narrative

—his

habit of doing research and offering proof style

—provides additional and

may

be,

professional

significant clues. It invites in-

ferences subtler

and more far-reaching than judgments of

competence or

his

Ranke

diligence.

assiduously visited

Macaulay preferred

accessible archives;

his

spend

to

his all

time

his

poring over broadsides and printed collections of popular

Gibbon mastered the history of ancient Rome from modern compilations; Burckhardt studied the Renaissance from contemporary accounts. To know this is to know some-

verses;

thing about the sheer validity of each historian's conclusions,

but

it

toward

also delineates his attitude

his material.

obsessive, almost religious conscientiousness, tinctive signature

on

all his

work,

as a grand, dramatic, divinely

the historian as a sional

man

credulousness,

of

which

Ranke's

left its dis-

reflects his sense of history

guided contest, and his sense of

God

in the world.

Gibbon's occa-

which contrasts so sharply with

his

pronounced, often malicious skepticism, suggests, not professional laxity,

but a

ness of priests

and the

other styles

beyond

The

I

will to believe

especially in the wicked-

lasciviousness of emperors. Like the

have mentioned, professional

style, too,

points

itself.

reality

all

point

these styles

analyst of style hopes to catch, less

—

is,

as

I

to,

the fish

that the

have suggested, nothing

than the historian's total perception of the past, the

constraints

within

which he works and the truths he

uniquely capable of grasping. Yet this exalted region [9]

is

—the

— STYLE ultimate destination of a

complete monopoly,

HISTORY

IN

stylistics

—where matter seems

invaded by manner

is

also.

I

to hold

am

speak-

ing of the historian's style of thinking, a convenient and

content in more than a

telling phrase that relates style to

For a historian's most fundamental

mere metaphorical

sense.

and therefore

examined assumptions about the nature of

the world,

least

its

aspect which

ontological

may

leave

or professional style.

Yet

makeup, its

also

have their expressive

traces in his literary, emotional,

thought

styles of

may

also find other,

more subterranean, channels of communication: a historian need not write, or feel, or work like another, and yet think like him and learn from him. Gibbon was deeply indebted to Tacitus' disenchantment, but Gibbon structured his sentences, chose his adjectives, and pursued his research in ways markedly different from the ways of Tacitus. Burckhardt

pronounced it is

sage, of the

wholes, but

affinity for Hegel's vision of cultural

— fortunately— impossible

had a

to mistake a passage, any pas-

Kultur der Renaissance in Italien for a passage,

any passage, of Hegel's lectures on history. In general, though, intellectual

affinities scatter

than they did in Gibbon and Burckhardt. discussed do not normally

touching. It

is

lie

by

side

significant that

The

more

styles

side as strangers,

many

stylistic

I

clues

have

without

qualities

are

hard to place: does Gibbon's irony or Macaulay's rhetoric

form part of

their literary or their

emotional

style?

Do

Burck-

hardt's stories serve to disclose his view of the world, his

private pessimism, his wish to keep his readers interested, or all

three?

These questions suggest

their answer: styles are a

network of clues to one another, and, together, to the to the historian at work.

[10]

man

Style

This brings

me

lives in several

—From Manner

Matter

to

to the second half of Buffon's epigram.

worlds at once, most notably in his private

sphere, in the comparatively intimate realm of his craft, in the

Man and

wide public domain of his culture. 4 Like the various

dimensions of

these worlds intersect and continuously

style,

impinge upon one another: the private person internalizes

commands

the standards of craft and the

and

large serves culture

ideals.

A

mature

and obediently expresses

literary style

ments, variously combined;

and

private

social,

of culture; craft by

and

its

overriding

a synthesis of all these ele-

is

once individual

therefore, at

it is,

public, a

combination of inherited

ways, borrowed elements, and unique qualities.

That

is

why

the student of style can treat this synthesis analytically and sort out the threads of

some Romantics were

as

If,

which the

stylistic tapestry is

inclined

simply the outward garb of inner

mation about

a

Romantics were wrong. this

is

the style on which

Writers are not born

an unceasing

own

voice.

5

psyche,

writer's

To I

the spontaneous

it

would

yield infor-

nothing more. But these

begin with, literary style

shall concentrate

stylists;

effort to

to think, style were

states,

overflowing of the springs of creativity,

composed.

—and

— can be learned.

they fashion their style through

overcome dependence and find

Normally, the apprentice writer

their

—and —discovers the here,

as

elsewhere, the historian acts like other writers style appropriate to

him by

first

following and then discarding

admired models; imitation seems to be an

essential

phase in

intend to explore these worlds, and their meaning for. the analysis of historical causation in a forthcoming book, Art and Act: On Causes in History Manet, Gropius, Mondrian. 5 See Burckhardt's comment to his friend Friedrich von Tschudi: "My way is, through dependence to independence." See below, p. 161. 4 I

—

["]

STYLE

the process of self-discovery.

part, straight

comes

To

Not even

come wholly from

does writing

most

HISTORY

IN

out of other books.

say that style can be learned It

is

learned. It

is

an act of

it

comes, for the

The

higher naivete

the heart;

the fruit of labor that conceals labor.

later,

enough.

in the beginning, then,

more accurate

is

therefore not precise

to say, rather, that style

must be

only in part a gift of talent; beyond that

will

and an

exercise of intelligence. It

that expressiveness pays to discipline. Style

Words,

of the practical reason.

is

it

is

the tribute

an instrument

is

many

of course, do

things:

they convey information, they disclose affection, they utter

warnings; they are, often, the unedited transcription of emotions into verbal form. to

an end; though,

and

side

its

But

we

as

style

well

is

the application of

know,

it

too has

its

means

passional

involuntarv revelations.

That is why styles have histories, even in individual writers. Gibbon is perhaps an exception: while even he found it necessary to experiment, he cast all his writings, early and late, into the same unmistakable mold. But, then, Gibbon was never young. 6 For nearly addition to being an style chronicles

Gibbon,

"is

all

other writers, style has been, in

endowment,

and analyzes that conquest. "Style," wrote

the image of character." 7 Here

cation of the uses that stylistics gives

him

This

is

discover.

'

I

am

a conquest; the study of

may have

is

the

first indi-

for the historian:

it

access to a writer's private, psychological world.

not the only world that the study of

Writing tempted

is

an

activity

style serves to

pursued within the texture of

to enter a protest against the trite

and

lavish praise of

the happiness of our boyish years, which is echoed with so much affectation in the world. That happiness I have never known, that time I have never regretted."

The Autobiography

(1961), p. 68. ' Autobiography

,

p.

of

Edward Gibbon,

27.

[12]

ed.

Dero A. Saunders

— Style

—From Manner Apart from

a literary tradition. writers,

a

handful of innovators, most

like the

Dadaist poets,

who

at incomprehensibility find their vocabulary within the

how

context of a society, no matter hensibility

is

their

way

of

with the others in their tion

Matter

even the greatest, speak in a language that others

have made familiar. Even those,

aim

to

may be

select; their

communicating

circle.

A

incompre-

—comprehensibly

writer's attitude to his tradi-

compliant, ambivalent, or rebellious.

He may

way before, way before. Whatever

write as he does because others have written his or because others have not written his his attitude,

he cannot be indifferent to the atmosphere that

his choice of profession

compels him to breathe.

Just as individual styles have a history, style itself has a history. In every epoch, writers

modes

available to them.

rules laying

down

have had specified expressive

They have always been

subject to

permissible language, to conventions chan-

neling their private preferences, to hierarchies appropriate to

any theme. Until modern times

—

—which,

in

this

context,

means the 1890s there have been some things historians must say and others that they would have found it unthinkable to say.

The boundaries within which pelled to

maneuver

of history.

That

historians have

been com-

are of peculiar importance for the history

history

is

the history of the emancipation

of a craft from powerful, normally overpowering, masters.

Through long

centuries, historians

have lived in

many

houses,

borrowing their speech and convictions from their hosts: the theatre in Greece, the law courts in

Rome,

the monastery in

the Middle Ages, the salon in the Enlightenment. Ancient,

medieval, and early as pieces of rhetoric;

employ accepted

modern

historians proffered their works

they had to satisfy moral demands and

literary devices.

[•3]

The

tradition of eloquence,

STYLE and distorted

reinforced

HISTORY

IN

in the early

modern

era

by memories

down to the when historians

of antique oratory, pervaded historical writings

and even the seventeenth century,

sixteenth

added

to this antique rhetorical tradition the eloquence of

The

the pulpit.

philosophe-historians' dependence

was actually

society in the eighteenth century

on

a giant step

toward independence: history became a respectable genre

among

Then,

own

some

losses.

literary

other respectable literary genres. the nineteenth century, historians

in

their

polite

house, the university

—

not,

I

moved

into

might add, without

But, whatever the losses, the

modern autonomy

of the historian has markedly increased

the range of his

stylistic options.

As more aspects of the past have become

more ways

accessible to inquiry,

have become permissible.

The

of speaking about the past

relation of the historian to his

work has changed; the craftsman has become Yet

debt that the individual historian owes

in principle, the

to his craft

—

its

dominant

exploratory techniques

The

modern

traditions,

its

current debates,

its

—has neither increased nor diminished.

study of historians'

medieval, or

a professional.

style, therefore,

whether of ancient,

practitioners, gives access to the world

of their craft.

But

it

also gives access, finally, to culture itself, of

craftsmanship

is

only a specialized, and sometimes recalcitrant,

representative. This said

insatiably

He

reading

2nd

what Macaulay had

desirous

Mommsen

is

mind when he

natural that he lively,

novelty

and excitement." 8 Reading

much about

the Greece of his day, just as

of

or

Namier

Thomas Babington Macaulay, edn., ed.

it

in

wrote for a nation susceptible, curious,

Herodotus 'tells us

8

is

of Herodotus that he "wrote as

should write.

which

Lady Trevelyan,

tells

"History,"

us

much about

The Works

8 vols. (1871), 5:124.

[14J

of

the Ger-

Lord Macaulay,

Style

—From Manner

to

Matter

many or England of their day. Conversely, it also tells us much about their perception of their culture: we cannot read Mommsen's Romische Geschichte, with its stunning anachronisms,

Momm-

Junkers in togas, without sensing within

its

sen, the objective scholar,

and frustrated

political

Mommsen,

another

We

animal.

the passionate

cannot read Namier's

Structure of Politics at the Accession of George lll resolute anti-intellectualism,

its

y

with

affectionate portrayal of

its

the political microcosm of mid-eighteenth-century England,

without detecting in Namier, the minute researcher, a hidden

Namier, the lover of English

must be

The if

information that style provides

social

we have

lost the

his utterance, will

men

place that

with is

as

remain opaque.

It

them

much

full

is

bearing of

has long been a

common-

often use words to conceal their meaning

we must

first

and ambiguity. 9 In such

we

solve the style before

a clue to style as style

nately this

symptom

the

solve other puzzles: there are times

its aid,

by no means

key that will unlock their message, the

veils of indirection, difficulty,

circumstances,

is

words were addressed to the chosen few,

intentions of the writer, and with

behind

infatuated that he

a foreigner.

infallible; if past

and

civility so

is

when

can,

politics

a clue to politics. Fortu-

not a logical but an existential

of the mutual dependence of style

may

hence, of the possibility that they

circularity,

and

life

a

and,

reciprocally illumi-

nate each other.

While one school and

his disciples, has

tween the

lines,

historian,

a

9

On

words

as

of intellectual historians,

made

Leo Strauss

a cottage industry of reading be-

reading the lines themselves remains, for the

rewarding enterprise.

concealment, see below,

Erich Auerbach,

p. 26.

[15]

in

his

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

may

Mimesis, has shown the path that

from philology to sociology.

It

is

easy to demonstrate, as he

does, that the barbarous Latin of a mirrors, with

its

game:

But with

Auerbach shows that

his analysis of Tacitus'

stylisrics

may

social perceptions. In describing a

Tacitus puts elevated words in the tineers, sprinkles his report

Rome

of his day.

10

mouth

more

trap

world elusive

mutiny, he notes, of one of the

mu-

with ethical adjectives, and em-

ploys the rhetorical devices current in the

Merovingian chronicle

impoverished vocabulary, the desperate decay

of antique culture.

view,

take the historian

among

cultivated orators

Auerbach deduces from such

guistic habits Tacitus' blindness to the social

and economic

pressures bubbling beneath the surface of events.

more than the political the demands of famished

failure as

bias of

fronting

soldiers;

Roman who does orders as full human

lin-

He

sees this

an aristocrat conhe

sees

it,

rather,

and cannot, see

as characteristic for a

not,

the lower social

beings. In sum, the

much

study of style provides a diagnostic instrument as

for

the historian's social and cultural as for his psychological and professional worlds, a decisive clue to their meanings, their

limitations

—and

their insights.

must add a final word. Style, I said earlier, is sometimes less than the man; often it is more than the man. In examining the styles of four great historians, I am in no way committing

I

myself to the fashionable usually been

10

relativist

that have

implications

drawn from Buffon's epigram. Historians have

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis:

The Representation

of Reality in

Literature (1946; trans. Willard R. Trask, 1953), pp. 33-40. to this passage; see below, pp. 30-31.

[16]

I

Western

shall return

Style

—From Manner

to

Matter

long been engaged in a great, or at least persistent, debate over the essential nature of their craft, and Buffon has been

taken as supporting the view that history cannot be a science,

but must be an

man and But

style.

—

reports in that idiosyncratic

and

is

may be an

a personal report

even possible that while reflects

a scientist.

I

do not want

to insist here: there

manner we

literary

is

man, the man

it

now much I

to decide this matter

Conclusion. But on this

no reason why

is

his

call

objective report. It

style reflects the

will return to it in the

want

encounter between a

a subjective

the past, which he reshapes through his private

and

vision

art

style

must be the

undistorted reflection of the historian's private neurosis, social location, or historical epoch. If

science

and competence

at

all,

he has any professional con-

he

is

bound

about the time of which he writes than the time lives.

11

results are style

is

in

which he

Individual stylists develop in rebellion against their

their

past,

more

to say far

environment, even against themselves, and the not always predictable. While in

instructive,

not

all

all

its

styles are instructive to

degree: like other writers, a historian usually has

aspects

the same

two

styles,

formal and informal, and both are an intermixture of expression and self-control. There recipe, setting

may it

down

disclose. All

will contribute

I

in

advance

claim

some

is

that

is

no

rule book,

self-

no prepared

what the study of style discloses much, and that

just it

light to the heated debate over the

nature of history. examine this point at greater detail in the Conclusion; meanwhile, it should be obvious that I reject E. H. Carr's popular simplistic relativism: "When we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who wrote it. Before you study the history, study the historian." What Is History? (1962), pp. 24, 54. While elsewhere in his book, Can retreats from this extreme position, it is these formulations that have gained wide currency and undeserved acceptance. 11 I

.

.

shall

.

[»7l

1

Gibbon

A Modern Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

The Scholar he architecture guide

is

is

familiar,

its

structure classical.

Gibbon, surveying the ruins of the

Roman

The Re-

public:

Every barrier of the

Roman

had been levelled by every fence had been extirpated

constitution

the vast ambition of the dictator;

by the cruel hand of the Triumvir. After the victory of Actium, the fate of the Roman world depended on the will of Octavianus, surnamed Caesar, by his uncle's adoption, and afterwards Augustus, by the flattery of the senate. The conqueror was at the head of forty-four veteran legions, conscious of their own strength, and of the weakness of the constitution, habituated, during twenty years' civil war, to every act of blood and violence, and passionately devoted to the house of Caesar, from whence alone they had received, and expected, the most lavish rewards. The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants.

The

people of

Rome,

viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy,

demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians,

who had almost

embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquillity, and sufuniversally

[21]

.

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom. With its power, the senate had lost its dignity; many of the most noble families were extinct. The fered not the pleasing

dream

republicans

and

of spirit

ability

battle, or in the proscription.

With rier

.

.

field

of

("Every bar-

vintage Gibbon.

is

singularly appropriate to

is

the

in

1

every fence"), this passage

;

antique gravitas tragic

had perished

measured, almost military tread

its

.

to

its

Its

grand and

theme: the transition of a great power from one form

While Gibbon

finds

room

for his

unconquerable cynicism, dwelling with evident

relish

on the

of

government

to another.

which "the people of Rome" view "the

"secret pleasure" with

humiliation of the aristocracy," he tactfully refrains from the

kind of derisive joke that marks so survey,

though rapid,

is

stately; it

and military history

cal

it

much

is

of his narrative. His

striking

how much

politi-

conveys to the reader, with

its

introduced glances at the past ("After the victory

skillfully

of Actium.

.

"The

."

.

provinces, long oppressed.

.

.

.")

and

("The rich and polite embraced the philosophy

informative parenthetical clauses

its

Italians,

who had almost

of Epicurus.

care that

.

.

."

)

.

Stateliness

—

does not

it

drawing up a

list

adoption

entail tedium.

at the

but he takes the curse implicit,

—and Gibbon takes

need not

Gibbon

moment

.

.

,

off his

enumeration by the tense,

by the

("by

His sentences are long

.

—Gibbon's melodic

.

Empire, ed.

J.

B. Bury, 7 vols. (1896-1902), [Chapter

[22]

.

,

line

Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and

if

uncle's

his

and the music

flattery of the senate")

of his rhythmic repetitions ("vast ambition

1

essentially

of Augustus' accession,

antitheses of his parallel clauses .

is

of structural changes that characterized the

Rome

situation of

universally

cruel is

hand")

rarely terse

Fall of the

iii],

1:59-60.

Roman

Gibbon:

—but he

A

Cynic among Ancient

varies their

apparent pace by introducing, at proper

moments, the dramatic caesura this

Politicians

of the semicolon. Yet, while

passage unmistakably belongs to Gibbon, he has here

dressed himself in borrowed plumage.

The

passage

is

a close

paraphrase, slightly rearranged and slightly rewritten, of a

chapter in Tacitus' Annals:

When

and Cassius there was no longer any army of the Commonwealth, when Pompeius was crushed in Sicily, and when, with Lepidus pushed aside and Antonius slain, even the Julian faction had only Caesar left to lead it, then, dropping the title of triumvir, and giving out that he was a Consul, and was satisfied with a tribune's authority for the protection of the people, Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen after the destruction of Brutus

in battle, or in the proscription, while the

remaining nobles, the

readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher

and promotion, so

by revolution, they preferred

that, aggrandised

the safety of the present to the dangerous past. inces

dislike

that

condition of

by wealth

affairs,

for

Nor

did the prov-

they distrusted the

government of the Senate and the people, because of the rivalries between the leading men and the rapacity of the officials, while the protection of the laws was unavailing, as they were continually deranged by violence, intrigue, and finally by corruption. 2

Reading these two paragraphs

Suzanne Curchot, the only professed to love, and

girl

who knew

knew her Gibbon, should note 2

in

Tacitus, Annals, trans. Alfred John ribb (1876, and often reprinted), Book

tandem, we can see why

whom Gibbon

had

briefly

her classics as well as she

that Tacitus was the "model

Church and William Jackson BrodI,

[23]

chap.

2.

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

and perhaps the source" 3 of much that went into the Decline

and

Fall.

Gibbon, of course, was not a favorite

he was engaging

and wholly respectable eighteenth-century

although in his time,

plagiarizing;

when

own way: he was

the civilized orders

in

practice,

writing an imitation. In his

still

had much Latin,

if less

Greek, free allusion to the classics was a popular literary and artistic device. It

placed the author in a mutually congratu-

latory relationship with his readers,

mented

for

he thus compli-

not forgetting what had been drilled into them

in their youth. trasts

whom

The

parallels, and,

even more, the subtle con-

which these imitations could mobilize, invited the permitted daring yet restrained criticism

liberal play of wit,

of contemporary affairs and, with their resonances of well-

beloved and half-remembered

texts,

of recognition. Alexander Pope's tions

employed ancient forms

poured new acid into old closer than theirs,

its

gave the intimate shock

and Samuel Johnson's imita-

to write

bottles.

modern

satire;

they

Gibbon's imitation was

echoes were louder; he was employing

ancient substance to write ancient history. But his deliberate and, to the educated, obvious dependence on an ancient

model was designed would have

to

make

a point that a freer paraphrase

dissipated.

But what point? And why Tacitus? He was, of course, a copious and eloquent reporter on events in the early Roman Empire. Yet some of Gibbon's contemporaries, notably Voltaire,

from

whom Gibbon

credit Tacitus'

learned a great deal, refused to

somber reportage. They thought

it

too pessi-

in G. M. Young, Gibbon (1932), p. 133. For an analysis of Gibbon's dependence on Tacitus, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An 3

Quoted

Interpretation,

vol.

1,

The

Rise of

Modern Paganism (1966),

156-159.

[M]

pp.

117,

Gibbon: mistic about

human

A

human

actions.

ness that

Cynic among Ancient

Yet

nature, too chilling in

it

made him

It is idle to

was,

it is

its

account of

suggest, precisely Tacitus' cold-

I

so appealing

and

so useful to

speculate which of the two,

was the colder;

Politicians

model

Gibbon.

or imitator,

important to recognize that the sources

of their mental temperature differed. Tacitus was an outraged

Gibbon an erudite cynic. Like all human beings, both historians had something to hide: Tacitus, a tormented moralist,

politician's guilt;

Gibbon,

a professional bachelor's conflicts.

If

Tacitus appears like a glacier concealing a volcano,

is

the glacier concealing an iceberg.

But

their affinity,

their shared coldness,

is

Gibbon

more than

a

matter of temperament and of psychological mechanisms.

matter of method and of essential world view. Both

It is a

historians concentrate

on

a purely

human

scene. Their causal

baggage conspicuously omits supernatural intervention, divine providence, abstract forces; the principal, practically the sole, subject matter of their histories therefore thought

it

is

man and

his passions.

Both

the supreme task of the historian to

probe historical actors to their depths. David

one of the leading historians

in the

Age

Hume,

himself

of the Enlighten-

ment, appreciatively called Tacitus a "penetrating genius," 4

and

it

was Tacitus' penetration that attracted Gibbon to him.

"Proprium humani ingenii

est

odisse quern laeseris"

5

—

this

was the kind of disenchanted psychologist's epigram that a Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 4

4

David

vols.

(

1882), 4:100.

nature to hate the man whom you have injured." Agricola, 42. It was this classical remark that Macaulay remembered in his History of England, when he spoke of the petty persecution to which the Anglican parson subjected the dissenters: "He too often hated them for the wrong which he had done them." The Works of Lord Macaulay, 2nd edn., ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (1871), 1:261. 5

"It

is

characteristic of

human

[25]

STYLE could

Tacitus

HISTORY

IN

formulate and a Gibbon relish

he was not given

repeat, for, unlike his master,

if

scarcely

to the laconic

dictum. But as there are several styles of coldness, there

methods of penetration; Gibbon's

are several

affinity

Tacitus was fundamental rather than superficial, his

debt I

less to

the forms of Tacitus' style than to

its

stylistic

substance.

do not want to suggest that penetration and coldness

— the

gift of analysis.

to strike through the

For

it

takes a cool head

masks that

thoughts and their actions.

men

Now

significant

raw material, are

'The

pensable.

and

a clear

as then, despite

are

a truth,

much

deceptive as they are indis-

as

to express our

fore,

wants

almost a truism, about the

The

most

true use of speech," wrote Oliver Goldsmith,

Tacitus had said, finds injured.

carbon dat-

historians'

Gibbon's acquaintance and himself something of not so

mind

put on to disguise their

and family reconstitution, words

ing

are

but two aspects of a single capacity

distinct qualities; they are

"is

with

it

a historian,

as to conceal

human animal

them," 6

which, as

natural to hate the person he has

chief use of the historian's penetration, there-

was to dig beneath appearance

to reality.

Secularists are of course not alone in arguing that appear-

ance and

reality are distinct

and often

philosophers saw the natural world of

mere

screen.

But

in conflict: medieval

human

experience as a

for the Christian the reality

concealed by

appearance was a higher world of religious fulfillment, while the secularist treats this hidden reality as the

mundane world

of secret reasons. Tacitus saw Caesar Augustus as dominating

men while, and by, proclaiming that he is obeying them. The private motives of the ruled were significant for him too; while they are

less accessible,

they are threads in the fabric

Oliver Goldsmith, "On the Use of Language," Essay V, in The Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham, 4 vols. (1854), 3:159. 6

[26]

Works

of

Edward Gibbon After the portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds

COURTESY THE

NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

— A

Gibbon: of reality

—

civilians

Politicians

want cheap

food,

want power, and everyone wants peace.

easy to see

is

want bonuses,

soldiers

politicians It

Cynic among Ancient

why

Voltaire, a philanthropist masquerad-

ing as a cynic, should wince at Tacitus' savage portraits. But to depreciate Tacitus

sour debunker

miss

the

subtlety, the sheer virtuosity, of his psychological insight.

His

Augustus

men not The social

deceives theirs.

is

to

fraud;

he

but largely

for

gigantic fraud, but not simply a

a

is

a

as

solely for his

own

process pursues

its

profit,

devious course behind

the arcana that a shrewd government has set up; political

speeches must be read with care to disclose the gulf that

yawns between profession and

But appearance and separable; they are also, and practice.

not always cleanly

reality are

often, subtly intertwined. Tacitus' curt antitheses

nem at

faciunt,

pacem appellant" 7

"Solitudi-

—intimate that rhetoric

serves

once to disguise and, for the perceptive reader, to under-

score, the terrors of politics

Such

disillusioned perception of complexity requires a large

measure of veiled

and of war.

critical distance.

from

As long

as there are areas decently

criticism, this perception

is

blunted. Gibbon, like

his intellectual allies, the philosophes, insisted that inquirers

must be

employ

at liberty to

their critical

faculties

every-

where, including, and especially, in the two sacred regions of politics

and

religion.

Recalling, in his Autobiography,

the

Gibbon sonorously

an-

miserable slavery of his schooling,

nounced that "Freedom is

the

first

Fall he

is

the

first

wish of our heart; freedom

8 blessing of our Nature."

made

it

And

in the Decline

and

plain that freedom was also the indispensable

instrument of the scholar. Every pious averting of eyes, every

p.

7

"They make

8

The Autobiography

a desert

and

of

call

it

Edward

peace." Agricola, 30. Gibbon, ed. Dero A. Saunders

69.

[29]

(1961),

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

compulsory panegyric, cripples the pursuit of Moreover, to be

real

and

as well as external; it

freedom must be internal

effective,

must embrace, not merely immunity

from harassment and guarantees against

dom from

historical truth.

starvation,

but

free-

and from unquestioning

constricting prejudgments

acceptance of authority. Whatever his ultimate merits, Taci-

way of writing and, even more, his way of thinking provided Gibbon with a model for this kind of double freedom. Gibbon's Tacitean remark, "Augustus was sensible that mantus'

kind

is

ment

governed by names," 9 reads

like a delicate

acknowledg-

of his debt.

we

In our self-conscious, self-analytical age, ridden as

with the suspicion that our several loyalties impose limits this

on our

vision,

we

it

is

kind of inner freedom can be at

true that total

suppositions

is

it

is

seems

of, self-deception.

for like

Surely

a dispassionateness

the historian without pre-

beings;

man

like Aristotle's

beast or a god. Yet pressures

worst kind

all realistic. It

detachment implies

human

not granted to

strict

doubt that the demand

are apt to

just another, in fact the

are

without a

city,

either a

too easy to underestimate the

all

toward objectivity that craftsmanship can apply.

Tacitus was an aristocrat, an accomplice in the terrible reign of Domitian, a

Roman

of his day.

and he was deeply attached

Rome's

to

values at a discount in his lifetime.

shown, Tacitus'

historical

work

is

world view that entailed a specific

Yet none of are

this

compromises

He was And,

not an atheist,

traditional values, as

Auerbach has

the product of a specific set of social perceptions.

10

his masterly anatomies; they

something better than subtle apologies

for himself

or

9

Gibbon, Decline and Fall [iii], 1:71. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality Literature (1946; trans. Willard R. Trask, 1953), pp. 33-40. 10

[30]

in

Western

—

"

A

Gibbon: for his order.

Cynic among Ancient

One need

Politicians

not be a metaphysical skeptic to be

a methodological skeptic;

one need not be

a cynic to claim

the right to question everything. Gibbon's skepticism, even

more than

Tacitus' skepticism earlier, was a method, not a

conclusion.

To

the extent that

it

was

a conclusion,

it

did not

follow inescapably from his method.

What Gibbon

learned from Tacitus, then, was a kind of

discriminating disenchantment.

He

was persuaded that

it

was

a kind of lesson that Christian historians could not teach;

the critical temper was available only to pagans, ancient and

modern.

It

when he

was

this

singled

temper that Gibbon glimpsed

him out

as

Hume,

pher

is

a

Voltaire,

man who

n To Gibbon,

and the other philosophes, the philoso-

has conquered prejudices and given the

critical spirit free play.

And

to

Gibbon, Tacitus was such

man. 12 In the company of Seneca, the a few others,

he had "purified"

his

leaving behind the "prejudices"

and improving

his "excellent"

and the pursuit of

who

perhaps the only ancient

could truly be called a "philosophical historian. as to

in Tacitus

truth.

that in the centuries

13

It

when

Plinys, Epictetus,

a

and

mind with "Philosophy,"

of "popular superstition,"

understanding through study

was plain

—

at least to

Christianity

Gibbon

had shaped men's

minds, history, like philosophy, had obediently served as

handmaiden

to

a

glittering

eighteenth century, civilized

what Gibbon 11

superstition.

men

But now,

in

the

were living once again in

liked to call an "age of light

and

Essai sur V etude de la litterature, in Miscellaneous

liberty,"

Works

of

14

an

Edward

Gibbon, Esq. 2nd edn., ed. John Lord Sheffield, 5 vols. (1814), 4:66. To Gibbon, Tacitus was "the first of historians who applied the science of .

.

.

,

philosophy to the study of facts." Decline and Fall [ix], 1:213. 12 See Gay, Enlightenment, vol. 1, chapter 3, "The Climate of Criticism." 13 Gibbon, Decline and Fall [xv], 2:68. See Harold L. Bond, The Literary Art of Edward Gibbon (i960), pp. 9-13, 125. 14 Autobiography, p. 175. See below, p. 39.

[31]

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

supremely adapted to the writing of truthful

age, therefore, history.

F^om

this perspective,

antique model

Gibbon's ch oice of Tac itus

(rather than, say, Livy or Caesar)

as his

acquires

considerable diagnostic significance. It amounts to a decisive rejection of the Christian view of the world, a view that

own

continued to pervade the writing of history in Gibbon's

Much

century.

—

the philosophes liked to think so

as

—Christian

rather, to say so

mous with mendacious

history was

or,

by no means synony-

or superstitious history. In the seven-

teenth and early eighteenth centuries, an impressive band of

most scrupuscholarship with the most unimpeachable piety, and to

devout erudits found lous

serve their

God by

While most

it

possible to reconcile the

refining the

methods

of these scholars found

obligatory, to assert the

supremacy of

of historical research. it

God

made room

ultimate causal agent, they analysis of historical causation

reasonable, in fact in history as

for

the

by recognizing that

its

mundane

God

often

worked through "secondary causes": the passions and the reason of men, the practice of statecraft, the application of intelligence in military affairs. lar

and

At the same time, many popu-

influential histories, like Bossuet's Discours sur Vhis-

toire universelle of 1681, infallible

historical

continued to present Scriptures

document, use events decisive

as

for

an the

ancient Hebrews or the early Church to determine historical periodization,

and take the course of history

as

God's way of

rewarding the faithful and punishing the heretic. As late as the 1750s,

when Gibbon was meditating

his future vocation,

the most popular histories of the ancient world were the

volumes of the French Jansenist Charles Rollin, who had published an expansive Ancient History and an equally expansive

Roman

History in the 1730s, and whose historical [32]

A

Gibbon: views were,

if

histories loaded

same time that

more subservient to religious imperaDavid Hume rightly thought Rollin's

down with his

work

''puerilities/' yet

"is so well

that with superficial people

style,

The

Politicians

anything,

than Bossuet/s.

tives

it

he noted at the

wrote with respect to

passes for sufficient." 15

history that in the 1750s passed with superficial people

sufficient

for

Cynic among Ancient

wholly neglected recent scholarship whether

pious or impious, quoted Seneca, Livy, and the

ment with as

a set

indiscriminate credulity, and treated secular history

of demonstrations for the veracity of Scriptures.

While "profane

history," Rollin wrote, "treats only of nations

who had imbibed ship,"

it

all

the absurdities of a superstitious wor-

nevertheless "proclaims universally the greatness of

the Almighty, his power, his justice, and above

wisdom with which

rable

Old Testa-

the admi-

all

his providence governs

the uni-

verse." Nearly every page of history displays "the precious

footsteps

God

and shining proofs of

disposes

all

this great truth,

namely that

events as supreme Lord and Sovereign; that

he alone determines the

and the duration of the government of kingdoms

fate of kings

empires; and that he transfers

from one nation to another, because of the unrighteous

deal-

and wickedness committed therein." History properly begins with "the dispersion of the posterity of Noah," and all ings

history

is

simply the working out of a divine mysterious plan,

of which only part has been revealed, in Scriptures. in short,

is

principally a proving

ground

16

for theology,

fying tale calculated to keep the reader safe in the

History,

an

edi-

bosom

of

1759, in The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (1932), 1:297; Hume to Robertson, (Summer 1759), Letters, 1:315. 16 Charles Rollin, Ancient History, "Preface," in an anonymously translated two-volume eighteenth-century edition, published by George Virtue 15

Hume

(n.d.),

1

to

William Robertson, February

:i—ii.

[33]

8,

STYLE the Faith.

The measure

of the aid that an ancient writer like

Gibbon with

Tacitus could give forcefully

HISTORY

IN

when we

his liberation

emerges most

read the popular puerilities of Gibbon's

rivals.

Yet Gibbon's use of antiquity had

He

was compelled to maneuver

predicaments for him.

its

in a

convoluted maze of

tellectual forces. In taking Tacitus (as

in-

Suzanne Curchot had

model but also for a source, Gibbon was distancing himself from the most advanced scholarship of his day, a scholarship that Gibbon was equipped perceptively noted) not only for a

to appreciate better than

any other philosophe. While erudite

historians were beginning to discriminate with the

fingered delicacy

among

most

the sources on which they had to

surerely,

Gibbon was almost credulous in accepting the word of 17 writers he admired. Gibbon was a philosophe; his world view

—

his secularism, his hostility to "superstition," his

mitment

Hume,

to

criticism,

his

love

of Voltaire, of Diderot.

identified himself, consciously

of

Yet

and

freedom

—was

as a historian,

com-

that

of

Gibbon

bravely, with the erudits,

the scholars

whom

graceful stylists like Voltaire found tedious

beyond the

call of

duty.

While the "learning and language

Greece and Rome," he

later

by

Gibbon followed the

a

philosophic age,"

of

remembered, were "neglected erudits,

who

neglected neither, and amassed an impressive range of eru-

17

Arnaldo

D.

Momigliano, "Gibbon's Contribution to Historical Method" (1954), in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (1966), pp. 40-55, passim. At the same time, as a look at his scholarly notes reveals, it will not do to minimize Gibbon's scholarship. See, especially, The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. Patricia B. Craddock (1972). See

[34]

"

A

Gibbon: dition.

18

He

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

studied ancient coins and inscriptions, mastered

Roman He was

the geography of the specialized scholarship.

Empire, digested masses of

beholden not merely to con-

genial skeptics like Bayle, but also to Benedictines like Mabil-

lon and Montfaucon, Jansenists like Tillemont, Huguenots

Beausobre.

like

He

devoured their learning: he accepted their

settling of disputed dates,

their collections of elusive ful, in his

their reading of uncertain texts,

characteristic feline

ments often sound Decline and

Fall,

an

And he was duly grateway that made his acknowledg-

documents.

Reaching the year 519 in and, with that date, the end of his use like

insult.

Tillemont's great ecclesiastical history,

one of

farewell in

Gibbon

"And

his typical footnotes:

take leave forever of that incomparable guide is

bids his

here

his for

mentor I

must

—whose bigotry

overbalanced by the merits of erudition, diligence, veracity,

and scrupulous minuteness.

The

tone of this valedictory reveals more than a failure of

generosity;

it

ship. Just as

throws light on the paradox of Gibbon's scholar-

he could not accept the cavalier

"pedants"

for

19

of

characteristic

his

literary

intellectual

contempt allies,

the

philosophes, he could not accept the pronounced piety of his professional

allies,

the erudits.

of his Autobiography

While he populated

and the footnotes of

Fall with references to his seventeenth-

century authorities, he was all

of

all

them had worked not

and

his

the pages

Decline and

early eighteenth-

too vividly aware that nearly to blacken the

name, but to

At once dependent and independent, Gibbon the philosophical historian had to sustain the glory, of the Christian religion.

18

Autobiography,

the philosophes'

p.

123.

contempt

Gibbon for

than erudition. 19 Gibbon, Decline and Fall

for his part,

learning;

[xlvii],

they

5:132m

[35]

I

think, rather overstates

detested

pedantry

far

more

STYLE take a leap that

HISTORY

IN

Gibbon the scrupulous

even to contemplate. Yet he took critical history of

it.

Manicheanism with

scholar found

it

hard

Studying Beausobre's

he found that the

care,

book "discusses many deep questions of Pagan and Christian theology: and from this rich treasury of facts and opinions I

deduced

my own

the author."

20

consequences, beyond the holy circle of

Tacitus, preeminent

among

others, helped

him

to step out of the holy circle.

Tacitus was, of course, far from being Gibbon's only antique

While much Enlightenment history concentrated recent past, on Charles XII of Sweden or Louis XIV

inspiration.

on the

of France, classical antiquity exercised a continuing fascination

on the eighteenth-century mind. Today, when

learning

is

university,

much

classical

dying and has fled to privileged sanctuaries in the it

takes historical imagination to reconstruct

of a living force

Autobiography amply

it

how

was only two centuries ago. Gibbon's

testifies to its vitality;

the writings of his

—Diderot or Hume, Adam Smith or Samuel —confirm that Gibbon was not Johnson, Lessing contemporaries

or Jefferson

unique in feeling

its

power but

typical,

though

it

add that Gibbon experienced the lure of antiquity

is

fair to

as particu-

"Rome," he wrote, "is familiar to the schoolboy and the statesman," 21 but to no one so familiar as to him.

larly irresistible.

His famous discovery of covery.

Calm

as

Rome

October 1764 was a redishe normally was, his Italian diary shows him in

feverish with excitement; arriving in the city

walked about in a "songe d'antiquite' 22 sense

coming home. He

on October

—he was

later recalled in his

20

2,

he

in a very real

Autobiography:

Autobiography, pp. 135-136. Autobiography, p. 175. 22 October 2, 1764. Gibbon's Journey from Geneva to Rome: His Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (1961), p. 235. Evidently the metaphor pleased him; on October 9, 1764, he wrote to his 21

[36]

Gibbon:

A

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

My

temper is not very susceptible of enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which I do not feel I have ever scorned to affect. But at the distance of twenty-five years

can neither forget nor express

I

my mind

the strong emotions which agitated

and entered the Eternal

I

first

City. After a sleepless night

a lofty step, the ruins of the

Romulus

as

approached trod,

I

with

Forum; each memorable spot where

stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar

was at once present to my eye, and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation. 23

tempting to discount the passage;

It

is

its

diction so elevated:

Gibbon does not

with a lofty step at that.

And

are in the

rhythm of

not a set piece;

it

is

so familiar

walk, he treads, and

.

.

.

were

lost or

enjoyed")

his formal speech, his set pieces. it

is,

in

and

the pairs of verbs (''neither

forget nor express/' "several days

is

fell,

own

its

Yet

this

way, an outpouring of

emotion, recollected in genuine excitement. Gibbon knew

Rome

better than

most Romans he saw about him. Behind

modern and Renaissance Rome, the Rome

of Caesar

and of

Cicero was vividly and accurately present to his schooled

mind's eye.

He was

indeed the best-prepared traveler ever to enter the

"Eternal City."

He had been

over the ground before,

times, poring over maps, imagining historic

many

moments, hearing

the immortal orations. In general, his reading, a voracious affair,

ously

had been continuously

—

When

classical.

—

I

am tempted

he was compelled

to say gluttonto

forego

the

ancients during his service with the militia, he regretted

and remembered Rome

it

as a

time of starvation: "After

this

it

long

fund of entertainment for a mind somewhat prepared for it by an acquaintance with the Romans, that I am really almost in a dream." The Letters of Edward Gibbon, ed. J. E. Norton, 3 vols. (1956), 1:184. 23 Autobiography, p. 152. father from

that he

had "found such

[37]

a

STYLE fast,

at

the longest which

I

HISTORY

IN

have ever known,

I

once more tasted

Dover the pleasures of reading and thinking, and the

hungry appetite with which philosophical works

The foundations had been

is still

opened

I

present to

a

volume of Tully's

my memory/' 24

of this passion for Cicero as for the others

laid long before.

As

young scholar

a

in

Lausanne,

he read Cicero through, and

after finishing this great author, a library of

eloquence and reason,

formed a more extensive plan of reviewing the Latin classics under the four divisions of (1) historians, (2) poets, (3) orators, and (4) philosophers, in a chronological series from the days of Plautus and Sallust to the decline of the language and Empire of Rome; and this plan, in the last twenty-seven months of my residence at Lausanne ... I nearly accomplished. Nor was this review, however rapid, either hasty or superficial. I indulged myself in a second and even third perusal of Terence, Virgil, Horace, Tacitus, etc., and studied to imbibe the sense and spirit most congenial to my own. 25 I

We can always rely on Gibbon The

ancients were

to his

men

to supply the telling phrase.

of a "sense 'and spirit

own." They were congenial,

first,

because they furnished

a continuously interesting subject of study.

that Gibbon's work, which took write,

is

I

as well as

for all of

need not

insist that

teenth-century writers thought and wrote

And

I

him perhaps twenty

about antiquity; nor need

ancient world.

most congenial insist

years to

other eigh-

much about

the

them, antiquity had been ideal

theme. Gibbon did not need to teach his readers to

love antiquity

—

that they did without him.

He

filled

out the

outlines of their love with his gripping gift for narrative, his

24 25

Autobiography, p. 135. Autobiography, pp. 99-100.

[38]

Gibbon:

A

Cynic among Ancient

who remained Gibbon's

blessed specificity. Suzanne Curchot,

him with her in history,

and throwing over the chaos

— or

notorious

cost

—chapters

and Fall

Decline

Christianity.

and brought him more

effort

anything else he ever

than

the

the two most

and sixteenth, the chapters on

Gibbon immense

controversy

all,

the

of

immense gap

this bridge joining

modern world." 26 After

are the fifteenth

They

Necker, thanked

usual perceptiveness for "filling an

ancient to the

famous

Mme.

had become

friend long after she

Politicians

They

wrote.

are

Gibbon's natural history of Christianity, the historian's coun-

Hume's Natural History of Religion. He had flattered himself, Gibbon wrote, "that an age of light and liberty would receive, without scandal, an inquiry into the human terpart to

causes of the progress and establishment of Christianity." 27

These scandalous chapters on Christianity belong within larger frame.

ness of

They come

Roman

Roman

wholly disinterested.

we

Gibbon has

statesmen, the dignity of

decency of

the

after

are entitled to

With an

extolled the great-

Roman

Such

toleration.

ethics,

and

was

not

praise

conscious as

artist as

in

the

hymn

his first

to

Roman

norm

against

Rome

and Rome,

at

Gibbon

the beginning,

more than perfuncstrategically placed. They estab-

which the Christian millennium appears

as a dismal falling off.

nines

greatness

his

three chapters. These are

tory stage settings; they are lish a

Gibbon

assume that the very placement of

chapters has a purpose and reveals an intention. intones

a

is

To be

not perfect: Gibbon

his

protagonist,

even under the Anto-

sure,

has

is

its

recounting a tragedy, tragic

flaw.

In

some

Young, Gibbon, p. 134. See Mme. Necker's long and brilliant appraisal of the first volume of the Decline and Fall, in her letter to Gibbon of September 30, 1776, reprinted in Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works, 26

Quoted

in

2:176-180. 27 Autobiography,

p.

175.

[39]

STYLE memorable

phrases,

HISTORY

IN

Gibbon

describes the sense of unease, the

emptiness amidst prosperity, the drift in political

"A

seeping away of cultural vitality:

fatal

cloud of

the

life,

critics,

of

compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning,

and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste/'

made

it

28

Yet these

flaws of ancient civilization only

human. Gibbon presents

Rome

his

believable hero pitted

ious subversion of Christianity as a

His scholarship

against a believable villain. tagonists

seem

combat seem

believable; his style

just

—

facing the insid-

made

made

his

pro-

his version of their

in fact, inescapable.

The

Ironist

was at Rome," so runs the famous recollection, worth

It recording as

I

sat

barefooted

once again, "on the fifteenth of October 1764,

musing amid the

friars

ruins of the Capitol, while the

were singing vespers

that the idea of writing the decline started to

my

in the

and

mind." 29 Gibbon thus

temple of Jupiter, of the city

first

glimpsed his

life

fall

first

work, the bold enterprise of narrating in exhaustive detail

and with scholarly precision the tragedy of the greatest of historic empires, in the guise of

know

—Gibbon himself

he began to

tells

us

an ironic confrontation.

—

all

We

that he enlarged his canvas

on the task he was imposing on himself. And we may note, as he labors on his successive volumes, an as

reflect

28

Gibbon, Decline and Fall

29

Autobiography,

p.

pi],

1:58.

154.

[40]

— Gibbon:

A

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

But the stance he

increasing complexity of causal judgment.

took at the beginning of his great work long preceded

and did not change noble

monument

as

it

progressed:

it

it

was the sight of a

and of

of his beloved antiquity in ruins,

superstitious intruders desecrating, with their noisy piety, the

ancient pagan temple, that gave his diffuse ambition the

concentration he had so long sought. It was only afterwards that his choice of subject and his

mode

of treatment

assumed

the massive shape of inevitability.

Gibbon

insinuates his ironic perception into the very

first

paragraph of his masterpiece. In introducing his hero, Rome,

he

resorts to a device

he rarely uses

—

short sentences: "In the

Rome

second century of the Christian /Era, the empire of

comprehended the civilized portion of

the earth, and the most

fairest part of

mankind." From the

outset, then,

establishes the grandeur of his protagonist.

pears secure:

"The

Gibbon

The empire

frontiers of that extensive

ap-

monarchy were

guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valour. The gentle,

but powerful, influence of laws and manners had gradually

cemented the union of the provinces/' Rome's "peaceful habitants"

—and here

the imperial nest

the irony emerges, the

first

in-

cuckoo in

"enjoyed and abused the advantages of

wealth and luxury." And,

just as these peaceful inhabitants

challenged jealous fate by squandering, instead of husbanding, their

unprecedented prosperity, their polity rested on

preme sham: "The image with decent reverence.

of a free constitution

The Roman

was preserved

senate appeared to possess

the sovereign authority, and devolved on the emperors executive powers of government." 30

Gibbon, Decline and Fall

[i],

1:1. Italics mine.

[41]

all

the

The Roman people saw

only the image, the appearance, of political

30

a su-

reality;

fiction

"

STYLE and

fact

HISTORY

IN

were at war, though politicians prudently kept the

warfare below the surface.

Rome's happiness.

Deceit, in fact, lay at the very heart of

While Gibbon

is

willing to dwell

mainly to provide

on that

fragile happiness,

brilliant contrasts for his chiaroscuro;

this

is

it is

the deceit that really engages his attention and occupies

the center of the stage he

most important, forum various

modes

world, were

all

of

setting.

is

The most

for that deceit

obvious,

"The

the temple:

is

and

Roman

worship which prevailed in the

considered by the people, as equally true; by

the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as

Gibbon

equally useful." And,

points out, they were useful:

'Toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even 31

Roman

was not a

religious

concord.

passivity;

it

a subject

on which Gibbon expatiates with the greedy pleasure

of a

liberal

was an active manipulation of popular sentiment,

gourmet

irreligion

toleration

"Notwithstanding the fashionable

of duplicity:

which prevailed

both

in the age of the Antonines,

the interests of the priests and the credulity of the people were sufficiently

respected."

wrought

parallels

credulity

of

euphony and

the

Here,

as

so often,

("the interests

people")

irony, at the

serve

of his

Gibbon's highly

the priests

two

favorite

.

.

.

the

masters,

same time.

and conversation, the philosophers of antiquity asserted the independent dignity of reason; but they resigned their actions to the commands of law and of custom. Viewing, with a smile of pity and indulgence, the various errors of the vulgar, they In their writings

diligently practised the ceremonies of their fathers, devoutly fre-

quented the temples of the gods; and sometimes condescending to act a part on the theatre of superstition, thev concealed the

31

Gibbon, Decline and Fall

[ii],

1:28.

[42]

:

A

Gibbon:

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

sentiments of an Atheist under the sacerdotal robes. Reasoners of such a temper were scarcely inclined to wrangle about their

modes of faith, or of worship. It was indifferent to them what shape the folly of the multitude might choose to assume; and they approached, with the same inward contempt, and the same external reverence, the altars of the Libyan, the respective

Olympian, or the Capitoline

The

but

self-serving

tellectuals

Jupiter.

32

politically useful

hypocrisy of the in-

was matched and exploited by the shrewdness

of their governors

Imperial government

.

.

.

may be

disguised by the forms of a

Roman

defined an absolute monarchy

commonwealth. The masters

of the

world surrounded their throne with darkness, concealed

and humbly professed themselves the accountable ministers of the senate, whose supreme decrees they dictated and obeyed. 33 their irresistible strength,

These passages

worth pondering

are

analytical insights are

ancients

—

rulers

do not

moment. Their

by no means unique to Gibbon. The

Cicero, Ovid, Juvenal

exposed the political

for a

utility of a

believe.

among

others

—had

public worship in which the

Gibbon's

favorite

modern master,

Montesquieu, had devoted an essay to the "religious of antique

Roman

state while others

David

already

statesmen: "They

had made the

made

politics"

a religion for the

state for religion/'

34

And

Hume

studied piety

had anticipated Gibbon's description of the that Rome's most admirable writers and thinkers

did not scruple to practice as a kind of patriotic service:

32

Gibbon, Decline and Fall [ii], 1:30. Gibbon, Decline and Fall [ii], 1:68. 34 Sur la politique des Romains dans la Andre Masson, 3 vols. (1950-1955). 33

[43]

religion, in

CEuvres completes, ed.

STYLE If

HISTORY

IN

there ever was a nation or a time in which the public religion

lost all authority

we might

over mankind,

Rome, during the Ciceronian

expect, that infidelity

would openly have erected its throne, and that Cicero himself, in every speech and action, would have been its most declared abettor. But it appears, that, whatever sceptical liberties the great man might take, in his writings or his philosophical conversation, he yet avoided, in the common conduct of life, the imputation of deism and profaneness. Even in his own family, and to his wife Terentia, whom he highly trusted, he was willing to appear a devout religionist. 35 in

There

religious is

new

thus nothing

is

(which

is

age,

in

the substance of Gibbon's

really political)

He

Gibbon's ironic treatment.

sociology.

is

new

has adopted the smile of

and indulgence that he imagined on the

pity

What

Roman

faces of

philosophers, to expose, in his history, the needy irrationality of mankind; but with him,

Yet that smile, though

has

it

become

persistent, does

a smile of derision.

not become monot-

Gibbon knows how to vary it; if, as Gibbon the mark of style to express the writer's mind,

onous, for it

is

as

he knew, the task of

times,

style to

Gibbon compresses the

said, it

is,

hold the writer's audience. At ironic tension

between public

lies

and private convictions into

esis

("with the same inward contempt, and the same external

reverence,"

the

"masters

of

a

the

simple contiguous antith-

Roman

humbly

world"

professed themselves "the ministers of the senate," whose decrees they "dictated

and obeyed"). At other times, the

antithesis

("viewing, with a smile

is

less

direct

.

.

.

,

they

diligently practiced"; ancient philosophers "asserted the in-

dependent dignity of reason; but they resigned yy

).

And

there are times

when Gibbon

David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, question, see Gay, Enlightenment, 1:145-155.

85

this

[44]

their actions

puts aside his in-

in

Works, 4:347.

On

Gibbon: and

direction

may be

Cynic among Ancient

his sly polarities:

"Imperial government

.

.

.

monarchy disguised by the forms However much Gibbon indulges him-

he never forgets

his obligations to his readers.

Gibbon's irony informs of rhetoric

and

practice in

Roman

reality in

themes: the incongruity

his large

Roman

politics, of potential

culture, of pious humility

pride in the Christian Fathers.

had some occasion

But

it

One

and

and impious

we have

penetrates, as

words and

to observe, his very choice of

structuring of clauses. is

Politicians

defined an absolute

commonwealth. "

of a self,

A

instance of his pervasive irony

the strategic frequency with which he uses the word artful.

It fits

Gibbon's wily Augustus to perfection, but he applies

to others as well. It

is

a

carrying heavy loads of gests

word

both

—

it

skill

is

good word

an

capable of

ironist,

meaning on both shoulders;

and concealment,

craft in

it

sug-

both senses of the

the opposite of "natural," both in the sense of

straightforward and of crude. Using plies that

for

it

he has seen through

as

it

his subject

covery with his readers. In Chapter

3

he does, Gibbon im-

and

is

sharing his dis-

and

of the Decline

Fall,

the words "artful," "artfully," "arts," and "artificial," always in the ironic sense, occur at least six times. In addition,

word with

varies the

"subtle," "studied," "crafty,"

sented," a

"professed,"

dissembled,"

i(

illusion,"

synonyms:

a rich array of

among

"disguised,"

Gibbon

"fictitious,"

the adjectives; "repre"deceived,"

"affected,"

"seemed," among the verbs; "comedy" and

among

the nouns.

The whole

chapter, in fact,

abounds with phrases designed to secure the same balance of the sentences does more than describe,

effect. it

The

embodies

the dignified political charade of the early empire.

Gibbon

was "compelled to accept" a large grant of power from the senate; the "tender respect of Augustus

writes that Augustus

for a free constitution

which he had destroyed" [45]

is

explained

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

by the character of "that subtle tyrant." In these phrases, and

many

Gibbon imprisons the conflict between word and deed, constitutional rhetoric

others like them,

thought and action,

and despotic

pious profession and

fact,

them

into the narrowest space; he crowds

What

est possible explosive effect.

heimer said of the intimate States

character,

to achieve the great-

the late

hostility

and the Soviet Union

vicious

Robert Oppen-

J.

between the United war

of the cold

in the years

aptly applies to Gibbon's taut antitheses: they are

two

scor-

pions in a bottle.

The

adjective artful

Other adjectives insincerity

—

in

drew

its

Gibbon draw

or, at least,

bon's chapters on the irritating to believers

from

rise of

and

from

force

its

their force

patent sincerity.

from

their patent

their studied ambiguity. Gib-

the Christian religion were so

so enjoyable to unbelievers in part

because they contain such two-edged words in profusion. Christianity,

Gibbon

writes,

was

"pure and humble"

a

men's minds; the

ligion that "gently insinuated itself into

materials historian

on which the "candid but rational"

must base

re-

his inquiries are "scanty

ecclesiastical

and suspicious"

the remarkable victory of the Christian faith under such

untoward circumstances was ible,

and

if

we may

assisted, in part,

by the

"inflex-

use the expression, the intolerant zeal"

of the Christians; the professors of the

new

religion

distinguished by an

the

truth

gion"

36

"exclusive

zeal

unexceptionable adjectives

highly offensive,

if

read in another.

for all,

if

of

were reli-

read in one way;

Gibbon here

exercises his

irony in behalf of one part of his readership against another part. Dividing,

he conquered.

™

Gibbon, Decline and Fall [xv], 2:1-2. Italics mine. Gibbon's phrase "candid but rational" is worth noting his passion for antithesis is apparently so powerful that he cannot resist constructing one even when there is no

—

opposition requiring the "but."

[46]

A

Gibbon:

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

Uniting, he conquered as well; the ironic polarities, which

have already noted, catch the

I

rather than repose

—

mood

to perfection.

of his style

—

tension

Emperor Constantius em-

braced a "generous but artful system of policy"; Julian was

moved

emperor by "prudence

to resist his proclamation as

as well as loyalty"; Clovis' wife, a Catholic,

found

it

to "her

nterest, as well as her duty, to achieve the conversion of a

Pagan husband, and Clovis insensibly listened

and

of love

sion

religion";

on the truth

vanity."

37

Mohammed

of the

to the voice

rested the truth of his mis-

Koran "in the

spirit of

There are countless instances of

each invariably following the same formula.

enthusiasm or technique,

this I

cannot exag-

importance for Gibbon and for the understanding

gerate

its

of his

mind: Gibbon

closely couples a higher

motive and implies that the former while the latter only implies

is

this,

complice and

to

the actual

a lower

the ostensible reason

is

moving

and

force.

And

because he

he compels the reader to become

draw the unpleasant, generally

his ac-

cynical,

inference for himself. Gibbon's irony, a splendid instrument for

unmasking

others,

was

at the

did screen for protecting his

own

same time an equally privacy.

In a well-deserved tribute, Byron pictures dious, meditative, his

splen-

Gibbon

as stu-

and learned, shaping

weapon with an edge

severe,

Sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer;

The

lord of irony.

Yet, though "lord of irony" was an appropriate

bon, irony was far from being his only 37

title for

Gib-

stylistic resource, just

Gibbon, Decline and Fall [xix], 2:263, 4° 2 4:106, 5:343. It is clear from Gibbon's letters that this way of thinking was perfectly natural to him. Writing to his father about Commodore Acton, whom he had met in Italy, he refers to his religious conversion as springing "either from motives of interest or devotion." October 9, 1764, Letters, 1:184. >

[47]

STYLE as the discovery of

Rome had

Gibbon himself

experience.

HISTORY

IN

been

far

from

his only

two events

celebrates

— and 1780—

as serviceable to his historian's vocation.

of the

Hampshire grenadiers

House

his stint in the

Commons between

of

.

.

/'he wrote

it

prudence, 39

the

first

and most

We may doubt that his

empire/'

virtue

essential

far 40

an

of

from onerous military did

much more

what he had already experienced through

But they widened and gave

"has

first,

he wrote of the second, "were a school of

interlude or his silent "senatorial life" to amplify

of the

him "a clearer notion of the phalanx and the ancient Rome. 38 "The eight sessions that I sat

in Parliament/'

historian."

"The captain

gave

legions" of

civil

1774 and

Roman

not been useless to the historian of the because

in his adult

the militia between 1760 and 1762,

service with

his

life

shaping

than

his books.

on the outside world the Decline and Fall a sure sense

his angle of vision

his descriptions in

They permitted him to see. Exotic landscapes cities rouse Gibbon to word painting in which he

of intimacy.

and great

subdues his sarcasm and slows the pace of his narrative to obtain, crete,

and convey,

a view, at

of novel scenes.

intense political

once comprehensive and con-

moments

In contrast, battles or

combat induce him

to speed

up

of

his narrative

step and to enlist each detail in the service of the whole.

Thomas Mann once interesting, a

said that only the exhaustive

dictum that

Mann

himself did

less

is

truly

to justify

than Gibbon.

Gibbon, of course, was more than a courtly jester.

He

a painter, a narrator,

thought of himself

as

a philosophical

historian in the tradition of Tacitus. Accordingly

" s

Autobiography, p. 134. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. 39 Autobiography, p. 174. 40 Autobiography, p. 184.

The

passage

[48]

from Byron

and

is

in

he amply

Book

III

of

Gibbon:

A

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

and Fall with observations about human nature, about politics, warfare, and religion. These are neither funny nor colorful; they are witty but didactic: "The public favour seldom accompanies old age"; 41 and "Civil gov-

supplies his Decline

.

.

.

ernments, in their

first

institution, are voluntary associations

mutual defense"; 42 and again, "Bigotry and national

for

aversion are powerful magnifiers of every object of dispute." It

as a philosophical historian that

is

Gibbon

43

establishes his

presence in every sentence of his history; he rarely steps out

man-

on stage

to speak a line in the

agement

of the pace, his value-charged epithets, his psycho-

logical

and

pronouncements

sociological

the philosopher's

person, but his firm

first

mind behind

the narrative surface.

And

always weighing, comparing, judging. cal historian that, in

year 476,

from

Gibbon

Chapter

stops

alert the reader to

it is as

is

a philosophi-

having reached the

38,

He

critical

the historical narration to deliver

high vantage point some "General Observations on

his

the Fall of the historian,

Roman Empire

in the

West." As a secular

he has insisted throughout on the

human and

geo-

graphic causes of historical events, but he has nowhere listed

them; now, looking back, he makes

explicit the causal nexus

of the awful spectacle he has been recounting. city,

which swelled into an empire," he notes,

as a singular prodigy, the reflection of a

The

fall

much; now, with the

—

half of his

—

first

and,

it

abounds: the cancer of decay in the

42

43

will turn out, the better

majestic recitation complete, he thinks out

loud about the ironies with which

41

philosophic mind."

of a city, he intimates, deserves such reflection quite

as

victor's

"The rise of a "may deserve,

adoption of his captives'

Gibbon, Decline and Fall Gibbon, Decline and Fall Gibbon, Decline and Fall

[ix],

[lx],

[49]

Rome

vitals of prosperity,

vices, the

2:207. 1:224. 6:368.

[xviii],

the history of

the

conversion of the

STYLE army from the protector

for imperial security into

Finally, as a philosopher

moment

this

whether the

HISTORY

IN

—and

philosophe

nemesis.

—Gibbon

can at

step back from history altogether, to speculate of

fall

Rome

implies the

fall

of

As always, Gibbon's philosophic stance

tion.

its

modern is

civiliza-

firmly within

the cosmopolitan and rational ambiance of the Enlighten-

ment:

"It

exclusive

is

the duty of a patriot to prefer and promote the

interest

philosopher

and glory

may be

of

his

native

country; but a

permitted to enlarge his views, and to

consider Europe as one great republic, whose various inhabitants

have attained almost the same

cultivation/' It

is

to this great republic that

addressing his history, and

concerning

''the

level of politeness

now

is

and

Gibbon has been

addressing his reassurances

probable causes

of

our actual security."

Because civilization has been steadily diffused,

men may

"acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion that every age of the

world has increased, and

still

increases, the real wealth, the

happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue, of the

human

race/'

Yet Gibbon shares not only the Enlighten-

ment's optimism, he shares

its

pessimism in the same measure

same reason; like d'Alembert, like Hume, like Wieland, Gibbon guards his castle of hope with the moat of

and

for the

company

Gibbon holds a law of compensation: every advance must be paid for some way. And so Gibbon modifies his hopeful conclusion

caution. In the to in

of the philosophes,

with a footnote in which he

reflects that

"the merit of

dis-

covery has too often been stained with avarice, cruelty, and fanaticism;

and the intercourse

communication his

paean to progress, the

44

will

of disease

produced the

and prejudice." 44 In the midst of

ironist

Gibbon, Decline and Fall appear later, Macaulay shared

of nations has

is

as alert as ever.

4:161, 163, 164, 169, 16911. As this philosophic view; see below, p. 131. [xxxviii],

[50]

A

Gibbon: It

is

as

Cynic among Ancient

tempting

as it

is

Politicians

perilous to discover in the Decline

and Fall Gibbon's whole past

—

a past that

we have

pieced

together from other sources. Yet that whole past went into

immense and

the making of his history. It draws on that

accurate scholarship he acquired, in spite of his dreary days

Magdalen College, Oxford, during

at

Lausanne;

it

draws, too, on that impressive library he assem-

bled with such greedy appetite.

and urbane

spiritedness

controversies

his

his conversations

timate way

diligent years at

his

it

with

It

embodies the polemical

self-possession lesser

like

incorporates his ironic perception of

perception of an observer as penetrating as he a craftsman is

whose highest

ideal

far better calculated to see

in

Warburton and Burke. And in the most in-

scholars

with equals like

he had perfected

is

life;

the

self-protective,

accuracy but whose vision

is

blemishes than virtues, decep-

tions rather than sincerity. His

famous abortive infatuation

with Suzanne Curchot, and the equally famous sentence with

which he records

whom

girl

a

his renunciation of a brilliant

his father

man whose

would not permit him

to marry, suggest

robustness was rhetorical, and whose

was largely borrowed. "I sighed

The

and charming

obedience, one senses,

as a lover;

came

I

obeyed

virility

as a son/'

readily; the sigh

was

45

a sigh

of relief.

While, without vision,

for

strain,

it

is

Gibbon, then, gravity and

and while both together define

coexisted

his historical

with levity that Gibbon was most at home.

laughs, not to keep from 45

levity

Autobiography,

p.

109.

He

weeping but because so much of

The words

comment, "A matrimonial

are

justly

famous;

less

familiar

is

has ever been the object of my terror rather than that of my wishes." Autobiography, p. 157. In his letter of farewell to Suzanne Curchot, Gibbon placed his familiar antitheses into temporal sequence, thus for once giving an impression of courtesy rather than cynicism: "Mademoiselle. Je ne puis commencer! Cependant il le faut. 1758, Je prends la plume, je la quitte, je la reprends." October 24, Letters, 1:106.

his

later

alliance

[51]

STYLE history

is

laughable.

HISTORY

IN

What

Byron called

"solemn sneer"

his

The

never far from the surface of Gibbon's consciousness.

is

history of

Rome's decline and

though

fall,

inciting the philosophical historian to his also

reflections,

many moments

has

comedy. Gibbon's irony

human

mixture in the

humor

sheer

reflects

his

a serious event

most philosophical

of high, and of low,

awareness of this rich

on the

past; his sarcastic wit fastens

that, to his

mind, the

scatters across the pages of history.

human

spectacle so freely

Again and again, Gibbon

the genial author seems to be leering companionably at his

when a troop of ManicheAlexius Comnenus, the emperor

reader: in the early twelfth century,

ans desert the standard of

"dissembled

till

the

moment

a friendly conference;

of revenge; invited the chiefs to

and punished the innocent and

by imprisonment, confiscation, and baptism." 46

—

especially, of course, the Christian religion

—

It

guilty

religion

is

that activates

Gibbon's most sneering humor. "His reflections," the formidable eighteenth-century classicist Richard Porson tartly, but fairly,

complained, "are often

just

and profound; he pleads

eloquently for the rights of mankind, and the duty of toleration;

nor does his humanity ever slumber, unless

are ravished, or the Christians persecuted." to

crowd

his

and shrewd

footnotes not merelv with J

appraisals,

but also with

jokes.

47

when women Gibbon likes

erudite

citations

About the

deposi-

tion of an antipope at the Council of Constance, he writes:

"Of the

three popes, John the twenty- third was the

tim: he fled and was brought back a prisoner: the

first vic-

most

scan-

dalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only

accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest." 48 4 r>

47

48

Gibbon, Decline and Fall [liv], 6:122. Quoted in Michael Joyce, Edward Gibbon (1953), Gibbon, Decline and Fall [lxx], 7:289.

[52]

p. 137.

He

A

Gibbon: quotes David

Cynic among Ancient

Hume

which had presumed Geoffrey had

all

on the

Politicians

of the chapter of Seez,

fate

to elect a bishop without authorization:

the clerics castrated and their testicles brought

him in a platter. Gibbon cannot refrain from adding his gloss: "Of the pain and danger they might justly complain, yet, since they had vowed chastity, he deprived them of a to

superfluous

Arab

treasure."

scholars,

49

Gibbon

controversies

among

''Among the Arabian

philoso-

Speaking notes:

of

phers, Averroes has been accused of despising the religion of

the Jews, the Christians and the of these sects his

would agree that

in

Mahometans.

.

.

two instances out

contempt was reasonable." 50 But

it is

.

Each

of three

needless to go on

own bouquet, admiring accord with his own taste

quoting; each reader can gather his the wit or deploring the malice, in

and convictions. Seriously as Gibbon's

humor

deserves to be taken,

not obstruct our view of his craftsman's virtues

—

it

must

the magnifi-

cence of his design, the polish of his performance, the precision of his scholarship, the judiciousness of his opinions,

however extravagantly expressed. military,

and

religious

history,

Brilliantly parading political,

Gibbon presided over the

arranged but happy marriage of erudition and philosophy.

Coercing potentially incompatible qualities into a peaceful

kingdom enabled Gibbon literature.

His

summary

to build a

monument

of the fall of

of historical

Rome, "the triumph

of barbarism and religion," does less than justice to his judg-

49

Gibbon, Decline and Fall [lxix], 7:21611. Gibbon, Decline and Fall [lii], 6:33n. The jokes get into the text as well. Speaking of the younger Gordian, Gibbon writes, "Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than for ostentation." Decline and Fall [vii], 1:176. 50

[53]

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

ment. Gibbon actually included among the causes of the fall

the long peace, which engendered effeminacy and

economic

tellectual sterility;

Romans

in-

which made most

exploitation,

unwilling to defend what did not really belong to

them; the lack of freedom, which deprived institutions of

Not even

to defend.

sympathy with the religious history

religious

wholly

is

just;

with

him above

—

of the time. For

the

simplicities

of

hard

temper incapacitated him

curiosity raised

some

it

the widespread charge that his lack of

irony

his rancor to

—

and

his sheer

nuanced

appraisals

Gibbon, take him

indeed,

for

marked, at times

his

all

ferocious, animosity, his professional probity

at least

made

the very size of the empire, which

flexibility;

all

all

simplicities

all

in

all,

—were

simply not enough.

Yet Gibbon's irony remains highly

wonder whether with Gibbon

inclined to

itself

to

matter,

worked hard "literary

or

matter yielded to

and

and below poetry, degenerated into

At the outset

my a

adapted

an Essai sur

Fall, to his native

"conscious," as he recalled later, "that

fare,

He certainly will. He lost his

but then returned, with a

short draft of the Decline

He

style

in 1761 in French, with

la litterature,

declamation." 52

raises a final,

style.

submitting his style to his

at

maidenhead" 51

VEtude de

and

His modern reader, accustomed to leaner

ironic, question. is

visible

style,

first

and

English

above prose

verbose and turgid

continued to experiment with his history.

was dark and doubtful, even the title of the work, the true era of the decline and fall of the empire, the limits of the introduction, the division of the chapters, and the order of the narrative. Many experiments were made before all

.

51

52

.

.

Autobiography, p. 127. Autobiography, p. 159.

[54]

Gibbon: I

A

Cynic among Ancient

Politicians

could hit the middle tone between a dull chronicle and a

Three times did I compose the first chapand twice the second and third, before I was tolerably

rhetorical declamation. ter,

satisfied

with their

Yet, though he

effect.

that he was "tempted to cast

testifies

the labor of seven years," great history gave as a

him

53

he

also testifies that writing his

great pleasure.

happy man and attributed much

work;

let

gloomy sages

Abdalrahman, count

He

describes himself

of that felicity to his

Solomon, or the Spanish caliph

like

their

away

happy days few and lament the

commonly imseldom impartial. If I may speak

vanity of this world: "Their expectations are

moderate, their estimates are

of myself (the only person for

my happy

tainty),

number"

the scanty

and

I

shall

whom

I

can speak with

hours have far exceeded, and

—

fourteen days

not scruple to add that

—

far exceed,

"of the caliph of Spain;

many

them

of

the pleasing labour of the present composition/' little

are

54

pressions

were deep,

splendid.

"The

his

style of

what he

symptoms

due to

We

reason to quarrel with this self-appraisal, for

so clearly succeeded in doing

cer-

have

Gibbon

out to do. His

set

few,

his

re-

sublimations

an author," he wrote, "should be

the image of his mind," 55 and he forged his style into exactly that.

Yet that

style,

interposing

its

highly wrought screen

between the writer and the reader, revealed, precisely in the measure that it mirrored his mind, more than he wished it to reveal.

His wit, his humor, his irony

—

scalpels

wielded with the deftness of the trained surgeon

that he

—

suggest

that his vision, though panoramic in scope, was telescopic in

depth. 53

54 55

He

lacked that oceanic feeling for unmixed motives.

Autobiography, p. 173. Gibbon, Decline and Fall Autobiography, p. 173.

[lii],

6:2611.

[55]

STYLE Is

it

right

to

HISTORY

conclude, then, that while for this learned

gnome, there was much anyone, there was also of seeing?

IN

in the past that

much

he saw better than

in the past that

That the question should

irony of Gibbon's history.

[56]

he had no way

arise at all

is

the final

2

Ranke The Respectful

Critic

—

—

The Dramatist ate

I

in

Book VII

approaches a

Ranke

of his Franzosische Geschichte, critical

moment

in

French

history:

the

mJ assassination of Henri IV. For scores of pages, Henri

IV, one of Ranke's favorite world-historical

figures,

nated his account; now, in 1610, the king

is

has domi-

bursting with

imaginative plans for France and for the European balance of power. is all

Yet Ranke now stops

jedoch ich halte inne: "It

too easy," he writes,

pondering

possibilities,

probable; suffice

He

it

to find oneself in the realm of the im-

to say that this prince

was

filled

with great

saw his star hovering over him, destined to do something marvelous— Wie leicht ist es, Moglichkeiten erwagend, in das Reich des Unwahrscheinlichen zu geratenl Genug, dass dieser Furst von grossen Gedanken voll war. Er meinte noch seinen Stern iiber sich zu sehen und bestimmt zu ideas.

sein,

fancied that he

still

etwas Wundervolles auszurichten. 1

But one

of Henri's nightmares

hideous

destiny

ein

grassliches

1

was about Geschick

Leopold von Ranke, Franzosische Geschichte, Werke (1868), 9:107.

[59]

to

come

true; a

—emerging

vol.

2,

in

from

Sammtliche

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

dark underground regions, awaited him. Ranke reports the unfolding of that destiny; he characterizes the assassin with a

few derisive epithets

wilder

as

wild uneducated fellow

a

Mensch ohne Erziehung

He

Ravaillac's motives.

—and

ein

then speculates about

opts for religious mania.

But he im-

mediately adds that the assassination, though the act of a

madman, happened

to

be a windfall for Henri's mortal

enemies, for the Jesuits, the Spaniards, and for dissident

French grandees. Having raised retreat

from

Instead, he

it;

he

tells

offers

this point,

Ranke seems

to

no comment, expresses no opinion.

three stories.

away Normandy who, they

The

say,

first is

about a nun in

far-

proclaimed Henri's death at

who insisted that she had heard it from the The second reports that Pope Paul V saw

the very hour, but birds in the

air.

the thrust of Ravaillac's knife as a divine chastisement for the king's worldly loves

and ambitions. The

third sets out the

sentiments of the Spaniards in the words of the Cardinal of

Toledo, telling the assembled Council of State: "If with

us,

who can be

Wenn

against us?

Gott fur uns

God ist,

is

wer

wider uns?" 2

ist

With tion,

Ranke

close.

complacent, even triumphant, rhetorical ques-

this

He

brings

sets the

Book VII next book,

of his History of France to a

"The Regency

Maria Medici," into motion with a graph:

'There was one

man

less

stark,

in the

of the Queen,

one-sentence para-

world

Ein

Mann

weniger war in der Welt."

The

effect

is

stunning.

Ranke has staged

a

memorable

scene in a few tautly written paragraphs; he has individualized the

main

actors with a handful of choice adjectives;

he has

aroused grave suspicions about a major power and an august institution with three pointed anecdotes.

2

Ranke, Franzosische Geschichte,

vol.

[60]

2, in

By

ringing

down

Werke, 9:108—110.

the

Ranke: The Respectful Critic curtain, not with the victim

and by ushering

but with the suspected

in the next act with a tight-lipped, ostenta-

tiously understated reference to the actor

the world stage forever,

most monumental the closing his

Ranke has secured

stature. Just as

moments

who for

has just

left

Henri IV the

Hamlet, dead, dominates

of his play, so Henri, dead, dominates

country as Louis XIII begins his nominal reign.

The

stage metaphors

I

have used in

passage are anything but fortuitous. line the point is

villains,

I

I

my

analysis of this

intend them to under-

wish to make. Ranke's modern reputation

The most

rent by conflicting appraisals.

casual student of

knows Ranke as the founder of scientific history. Even those, like some of his English critics, who have thought him bereft of ideas and too much enamored of facts, have drawn the familiar portrait of a cool scientist, only distorting it, slightly, into caricature. 3 Ranke's American admirers, though more inclined to extol his achievement than

historiography

to read his books, hailed

him

as the great

emancipator

who

had disentangled history from metaphysics and theology; Herbert Baxter Adams, one of the founders of American graduate training, characteristically called Ranke the ''father 4 of scientific history." Popular introductions to the historical

discipline

history

have hardened

who wants

stereotype:

to

arrangement of

facts in

neat cate-

5 Allan Nevins recommends Ranke. But other cur-

rents of opinion have long crisscrossed the

repute: for

some

historians,

Ranke,

a discount, spoiled his realism

far

See Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: of Historical Scholarship (1955), p. 100.

Georg G.

Iggers,

of Ranke's

from holding ideas at

The Study

of

The

History

of History: The National the Present (1968), p. 63. to History (rev. edn., 1962), p. 42.

The German Conception Thought from Herder To

Tradition of Historical 5 Allan Nevins, The Gateway

map

with his theology; for others,

3

4

the reader of

''systematized erudition, inexorable logic, a

scientific attention to the

gories,"

this

[61]

STYLE he was, precisely

an

as

achievement"; 6 for

he was an apologist hard to imagine

is

Idealist,

still

others,

coherence of his work, but

this

in

passage with which

more than

In

more than

and

how Ranke all

style.

"one of the summits of their

number

power, especially

for

dramatist, and theologian

The

HISTORY

IN

I

German

increasing,

power.

once without ruining the just

began

is

what

I

wish to argue.

characteristic of Ranke's

sixty years of indefatigable scribbling

sixty works,

It

could have been scientist,

at is

is

human

Ranke displayed the

we

gifts

and nor-

mally associate with storytellers or playwrights: speed, color, variety, freshness of diction,

and superb

He

control.

cunningly

absences; he takes care never to spoil climaxes with

uses

elaborate explanations; he establishes his characters with the precision of a novelist.

Ranke

is

an active

storyteller in the

German vein; as we hear the author's of Wilhelm Raabe or Gottfried Keller, so

nineteenth-century voice in the tales

we

see

Ranke

As Ranke's sent his

itself,

diaries suggest, these

own

years on,

unrolling his narrative and arranging his scenery.

metaphors accurately repre-

sense of his craft; repeatedly, and from his early

he returns to the imperative need

he notes,

mind must them above

strives to

for form.

Nature

produce form, and the works of the

same direction; form alone raises the commonplace and the traditional Nur durch strive

in the

Form erheben sie brachten. 7 Form alone,

die

sich iiber die eternal, pure

Menge

des Hervorge-

die ewige, reine

—grants

immortality to the tendencies and conversations making up daily

life.

8

Like Goethe, Ranke

insists

pline alone brings excellence to

that self-imposed disci-

all art,

to the shaping of

6

all

Friedrich Meinecke, "Leopold von Ranke: Gedachtnisrede," January 23, 1936, in Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (edn., 1959), p. 585. 7 Ranke, Tagebiicher, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs (1964), p. 158; from the

1830s. 8

Ranke, Tagebiicher,

p. 180;

from the end of the 1830s.

[62]

—

—

Ranke: The Respectful Critic noble writing

Alle Vortrefflichkeit in der Kunst, alle Bildung

eines edlen Stojfs in angemessener

Form

geht aus der Be-

schrankung hervor, die sich der Geist selbst cantly,

Ranke

drama

thinks of the

Poesie langer

als

literary artist

is

will

9

Signifi-

the genre peculiarly

man; equally

significantly,

outlive prose

Lebt wohl

qualified to penetrate into the inner

he wonders whether poetry

as

setzt.

Prosa? 10 In Ranke, the shaping hand of the

never far from the constructive effort of the

historian.

Any

of his histories

may

serve to illustrate Ranke's tech-

niques, for, certainly by the 1830s, his techniques were fully

matured. His treatment of Martin Luther in his Deutsche

Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation structive, for

Luther

is

makes sense

to

is

the giant in the

Ranke only

against the back-

ground of the German Reich around 1500, political, social,

religious disturbances. In

a realm rent

Book

I,

by

Ranke's

on Luther; he looms over its pages like brooding presence or, rather, absence as Ranke concen-

Reformation a

and

particularly in-

one of Ranke's, and one of Protestant

Germans', greatest heroes. While Luther tale, his rebellion

is

is

silent

—

trates

on the

—

politics of the

a climactic scene of

Reich and gradually builds up to

harrowing disorganization. Then Luther

steps onto center stage, but not into action, not yet. Luther is

so important, his character expands to such vast dimensions,

that

Ranke

feels

compelled to devote scores of pages to

Luther's early years.

There

is

never anything mechanical

about Ranke's allocation of space.

It reflects his

assessment

of the dramatic potential that his material contains.

His Reformation gives evidence of another decision,

dic-

tated like his allocation of space by dramatic considerations. 9

Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 169; from 1814. Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 180; from the end of the 1830s.

10

[63]

STYLE Ranke

likes to

HISTORY

IN

plant early information he will use

later.

Long

before he recounts the famous proclamation that puts Luther outside the protection of the laws, he analyzes the declining

power of the

legal device of outlawry;

long before he reaches

when Luther nails Wittenberg, Ranke analyzes

the epoch-making day in October 1517, his theses to the

church door at

the dubious proliferation of sacraments and the shabby prof-

Then, when he comes

iteering in indulgences.

moments

themselves,

Ranke

narration, undistracted

is

free to devote all his space to

by explanation.

made Ranke use own account than

to the historic

It

the same tactical

is

reason that

certain historical personages less

on

as prefigurations.

their

Erasmus

plays

John the Baptist to Luther, the savior: in Ranke's detailed discussion of Erasmus and of Erasmus' quarrel with the Church, he quarrel. still

is

rehearsing for a greater figure and an even greater

Erasmus' noble

failure prepares the reader for Luther's

nobler success, and

Ranke who has

it is

so thoughtfully

prepared him.

No

doubt, Ranke's free employment of dramatic devices

places

him

craft as a

camp

of those historians

branch of the storytelling

art.

who

treat their

By no means

all

power from suspense; epic and tragedy depend on the unfolding of tales whose end is known,

stories

alike

in the

derive their

while the classic detective story, the murder mystery, usually begins with the end

—the murder. But, however accepted the

technique, a well-told tale raises problems for

all storytellers,

including the historian, whose stories must meet the unique

requirement of having to be

true.

the imperial election of 1519

who was

it

We

know,

was Charles

after

V

of

all,

that in

Burgundy

elected emperor over his competitor Francis

I

of

France. Ranke's account of that election shows the dramatist at work;

he

enlists

the very foreknowledge of his readers to

heighten the tension. Ranke refuses to trick them into [64]

for-

Leopold von Ranke COURTESY THE

NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

——

—— —

Ranke: The Respectful Critic getting for a single

moment

would have been

cheap and probably ineffective device. In-

stead,

been

a

how

he demonstrates

The

different.

the election,

is

that Charles was victorious; that

nearly the

outcome might have

counterfactual alternative, Charles' losing

held before the reader's eyes and keeps

interested until Charles' election

Ranke produces

his

effects

He

space and sequences.

words with care and

is

him

a certainty.

not merely by manipulating

achieves them, also, by choosing his

feeling;

Ranke's self-effacing ideal of

Selbstausloschung certainly does not extend to his adjectives.

He

describes the Spanish Inquisition early in the sixteenth

century as taking the "most terrible

He

furchtharsten

7

form.

considers that the prayerbooks written at the height of

Mariolatry

were "peculiar

"naive" and "credulous

monuments

sonderbare"

to

He

wundergldubig" devotion.

a

sees

the Catholicism of the age as an odd mixture of "spiritual

and worldly power, imagination and cism, tender devotion and coarse

and superstition." And he wonders

arid

rohe if

a

—

scholasti-

violence,

religion

dilrre

—

"manly

could have flourished under such circumstances. hesitate to find

room

appreciatively of

The

To

.

religion"

he speaks

deutsche Ehrlichkeit.

Scientist

Ranke

whether he was a

.

Nor does he

for his patriotism in his history:

German honesty

characterize

.

as a dramatist raises the

scientist as well.

no law holding that

[67]

course, there

is

must be unreadable; itself compromise the

a scientist

the giving of pleasure does not in

Of

doubt

STYLE telling of truth.

It is

HISTORY

IN

worth noting, moreover, that Ranke

chose to focus his historical research on the

rise

of the great

powers, the three centuries between the emergence of Martin

Luther and the death of Frederick the Great, times of outsize

and

figures

make

stirring events that

tedious.

Yet Ranke

it

would take some

resorts to the

dramatic style so con-

sistently that these explanations explain too little.

brated

commitment

effort to

His

cele-

to science remains in question.

Ranke's aspiration to become a scientist of the past arose early and,

once acquired, never wavered. That aspiration

is

hard to disentangle from his mystical leanings, his Romantic tastes, his

admiration for Fichte's philosophy, none of them

calculated to strengthen the vein of empiricism in anyone.

The

origins of the eminently effective intellectual instrument that

Ranke made of himself will occupy us in the rest of this essay. But it is clear that whatever its principal impulses, the methods and results of Ranke's way as a historian were aimed straight at science:

the systematizing of research, the with-

drawal of ego from presentation, the unremitting effort at objectivity, the submission of results to critical public scrutiny.

11

Ranke's two best-known aphorisms, which have been

much quoted and much to the scientific

misunderstood, are in essence appeals

method. In the preface to

his first book, the

Geschichten der Romanischen und Germanischen

V biker von

151^ he repudiated all pretensions to word-painting, and assigned himself a humbler task; he would write history "as it had really been wie es eigentlich gewesen." It was the modest pronouncement of a scientist intent on doing his work, and on concentrating on what could be reliably known; 1494

it

bis

was a programmatic declaration in the tradition initiated 11

See

Ranke, Tagebiicher,

p.

233,

and

1810s.

[68]

related

aphorisms of the late

— Ranke: The Respectful Critic by Bacon, exemplified

in

Newton's famous assertion that he

did not feign hypotheses, and transmitted by the Enlighten-

—

ment

disclaimed.

one of

by the way,

ancestors,

all

The second

his lectures to

King Maximilian of Bavaria, was the

individuals, their due,

This, as

we

will see,

is

would have

aphorism, which Ranke threw out in

affirmation of a professional all

whom Ranke

:

must

the historian

and

see

them

give

own

in their

a devout call for

all

empathy, but

ages,

terms. it is

at

the same time a call for objectivity, for the separation of the inquirer from his inquiry: "Every epoch

and in

its

its

value in no

existence

Epoche

way depends on what

itself,

in

its

very self

immediate to God, has produced, but

it

Ich aber behaupte, jede

unmittelbar zu Gott, und ihr

ist

dem was

nicht auf

is

y

Wert

beruht gar

aus ihr hervorgeht, sondern in ihrer

Existenz selbst, in ihr em eigenen Selbst. ..." Ranke's career

was an extended commentary on these two patient, purposeful his

working out of

a

program conceived

youth. Ranke's professional history

rarities, a fully

The

life

of

achieved

life

sayings,

is

the in

that greatest of

work.

Ranke the dramatist was,

in

its

externals,

He was

born in 1795 in a small Thuringian town, into a family that had traditionally entered the

singularly undramatic.

Lutheran ministry. His parents were deeply

religious

tied as closely to their soil as to their faith. It

and were

was an envi-

—

—

ronment familial, pious, and disciplinarian against which Ranke never rebelled. Yet he did not enter the ministry, as his parents had wished: the classics, philology, and German literature

burgeoning in the midst of the Napoleonic wars

interested

him more than dogma. He was

faith,

but

it

sure of his religious

was diffused rather than concentrated. His voca-

tion lay elsewhere.

When

he obtained

his doctorate at the

University of Leipzig in 1817, he wrote his dissertation on [69]

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

Thucydides' political ideas, though this was not a dark hint of great things to

that drew

Ranke

come:

it

was

to his topic. His turn to history

Frankfurt an der Oder. Teaching the boys

first

that he

must know them

came

later,

Gymnasium

during the seven years he spent teaching in a

Ranke decided

not history,

classical philology,

in

the ancients,

well:

it

was the

application of his cardinal principle that thorough knowl-

edge of the sources

is, if

condition for everything

not everything, the indispensable preelse.

His

first

book, on the Romanic

and Germanic peoples between 1494 and 1514, was published late in 1824. It earned him the recognition he craved not,

—

perhaps, so

much

for himself as for his craft,

him more and more. Early

in 1825,

which possessed

he was appointed Aus-

serordentlicher Professor of History at the University of Berlin.

Though

the post did not carry tenure with

it,

it

showed that

Romanischen und Germanischen Volker an important work; it gave Ranke entree to

the Geschichten der

was recognized

as

stimulating society and influential

access to the royal library, with

all,

of

officials. It its

gave him, above

forty-eight

volumes

documents crammed with tantalizing materials on the

tory of Italy, Spain, the papacy, barely

What gier

12

he called his "archival curiosity"

which we might

"archival obsession"

touched by anyone. archivalische

Neu-

just as well call "archival greed," or

—had been aroused

only to be frustrated. In Berlin

whetted further. The

his-

result, his

it

was

earlier, in

gratified,

Frankfurt,

only to be

second book, on the Ottomans

and the Spanish monarchy, induced the Prussian government to give

of the

leave to study the famous relazioni

Venetian ambassadors. These secret reports, submitted

to their 12

Ranke extended

government over three centuries by those

To Ferdinand Ranke (August

Hoeft and Hans Herzfeld (1949),

31, 1839), in p. 268.

[70]

Neue

brilliant

Brief e. ed. Bernhard

Ranke: The Respectful Critic accredited spies, politely called "ambassadors," were copious,

candid, highly personal yet beautifully informed.

them famous, but torian

it

I

have called

was Ranke who made them so

had touched them

before.

The

use he

—no

made

of these

documents constituted more than the exploitation familiar historical material;

familiar historical

Ranke went on over

for

three

it

his-

un-

of

was the application of an un-

method. his leave late in 1827.

years,

He

hunting documents

remained abroad Vienna,

in

in

Rome, in Venice. He had good connections and he used them to good purpose, securing access to archives Florence, in

that had been kept locked before.

He

was patient, tenacious,

diplomatic. His letters to his brothers and to Karl Freiherr

vom

Stein

zum

Altenstein, the Prussian minister of educa-

tion, read like the diary of a discoverer;

Ranke poured

into

them his tension, his pleasure, his pride at being the first to see what had so long been concealed or neglected. Aptly enough, he likened himself to Columbus, 13 but his triumphs were

as

much

the fruit of a pedant's diligence as of a con-

quistador's boldness.

Up

early,

he would spend the best hours

of the day in the archives, showing copyists the

documents

he wanted, and moving on, reading, finding new day

treasures,

after day.

His long searches in Italy set the pattern for

later leaves of

absence; he punctuated his teaching with research trips to

London,

to Paris, to Brussels, to

many months. For

The Hague,

often lasting

a short time after his return to Prussia,

he

toyed with politics: late in 1831, he became editor of a semiofficial

—which

is

to say, moderately conservative

—political

journal, the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift. In the four years 13

See Theodore von Laue, Leopold Ranke:

P- 34-

[71]

The Formative Years (1950),

STYLE of

its

HISTORY

IN

tenuous existence, Ranke supplied

with most of

it

its

copy, including his instructive essay on the great powers. But,

—and useful—

fascinating

past politics that

he found present

as

would give shape

politics, it

to his long

was

When

life.

he

was appointed Ordentlicher Professor at the University of Berlin in 1834, his course was

set,

and he followed

deviations for over half a century. in 1871,

fame.

he continued to exert

Once

Even

after his retirement

brothers remained close,

and

became

did not marry until 1843,

men

forty-eight,

he was an attentive husband and affectionate

relaxed, as

He

him

lived

to

on

1886, past his ninetieth year, his intellectual powers

near their peak to the end, a lifelong order

He

and though

appears as a pleasing restful interlude that helped

until

to his

father, his family

replenish his seemingly inexhaustible energies.

its

ties

his celebrated seminars.

when he was

his

and good pay,

closer, his

his ties to other

he wrote and traveled and taught

life

and widen

his influence

settled in a post of high prestige

his ties to the Prussian state

without

it

—

or,

perhaps more to

my

monk

in the historical

point, a lifelong technician in

laboratory.

The

uniform, almost monotonous curve of Ranke's external

existence

That

documents

his greatest

his

devotion to the science of history.

works should

now be

dated

is

a tribute to

the exacting vocation he helped to transform.

Ranke

nized that history

He

after

all,

decessors;

that his it

is

a

progressive discipline.

own work was

recog-

claimed,

superior to that of his pre-

was hardly strange that the unearthing of new

documents, or the application of auxiliary techniques which, as

it

were, create

new documents, should [72]

allow lesser prac-

—

—

Ranke: The Respectful Critic titioners, fortunate to

superior to his. It that history

be born after him, to write histories

a familiar fact,

is

always being rewritten.

is

he noted in the 1840s,

The

way

only

to reduce

this persistent

need for revision

tine sources

Riickkehr zu der urspriinglichsten Mitteilung,

and thus

rise to

is

pure perception

to return to the

sich zu reiner

most

pris-

Anschauung

zu erheben. 14 Ranke was often amazed to find and pleased to record

how much

him

craftsmen allowed

was the

first

interpret,

of their past other countries and other

to read;

to discover;

how many

how many documents he

events he was the

at least, the first to interpret

or,

Ranke,

factual foundation.

who

prised nor displeased to see

motives than

his,

much

it

him

to

on any sound to set the

heavy

motion, would have been neither

train of history into

But had someone

did so

first

sur-

disappear beyond his horizon.

would use other locohe would not have believed him. Ranke told

that

it

could never have imagined that there were ways of reading

documents not dreamt of

in his philosophy of history.

Ranke's contribution to historical science, then, lay in his exalted view of documents. This was less a matter of technical

innovation than of personal

and on

style.

He

applied, consistently

what earlier scholars had confined to and used for narrowly defined purposes.

a large scale,

specialized subjects,

Probably

it is

the French Benedictine Jean Mabillon

who

has

the best claim to be the father of the scientific study of docu-

ments; his seded.

De

re

diplomatica of 1681 has never been super-

In Germany, a distinguished group of eighteenth-

century scholars, centered at the University of Gottingen, applied the most minute attention to the authentication of past records; in 1788, one of the group found

possible to

Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 241; from the 1840s. The idea of Anschauung recur in Burckhardt very prominently; see below, pp. 176-179.

14

will

it

—

[73]

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

be rather patronizing to Gibbon the sources.

15

And

in Ranke's

buhr wielded source criticism

for his relative naivete

own

day, Barthold

barely recognizable

Georg Nie-

to penetrate the veil of legend

behind which the history of the early in

about

Roman

Republic moved

Ranke, who greatly admired

form.

Niebuhr, generalized these practices into a principle. That

was the unique, privileged status of the contempo-

principle

document;

rary

time tion,

alone held the key to historical truth.

it

come, he prophesied

will

when

historians will

in the preface to his

The

Reforma-

no longer write modern history

from derivative treatments or even from contemporary torians will

—except

insofar as these

had

direct

knowledge

his-

—but

depend wholly on the reports of eyewitnesses, and on the

most authentic, most immediate sources

kommen, wo Berichte,

Ich sehe die Zeit

wir die neuere Geschichte nicht nicht

selbst

mehr auf

die

der gleichzeitigen Historiker, ausser

insoweit ihnen eine originate Kenntnis beiwohnte, geschweige

denn auf

die weiter abgeleiteten Bearbeitungen zu griinden

haben, sondern aus den Relationen der Augenzeugen und den echtesten,

unmittelbarsten

Ranke shaped

Urkunden aufbauen werden. 16

his prefaces into the record of his

researches; they are enthusiastic travel reports

who his

visited,

not

city after city,

but library

documentary by

a traveler

after library. In

second book, on Ottoman-Spanish relations in the

six-

teenth and seventeenth centuries, published in 1827, he notes

with evident pride that, had he been compelled to depend on history books, even

mented 15

See

Method,"

on those that were

urkundlicheren Arnaldo (1954),

D. in

relatively well docu-

—he would not have written

his ac-

Momigliano, "Gibbon's Contribution to Historical Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (1966), pp.

40-55. 16 Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, vol.

1,

in

Werke (1873),

i:ix-x.

[74]

—

—

Ranke: The Respectful Critic count. Fortunately, he had found other aids, often extremely valuable yet

unknown

still

Hilfsmittel, oft

von ausgezeich-

—the Venetian

netem Wert und dock noch unbekannt zioni.

17

rela-

Collected together with other despatches and letters

and placed into the Venetian

state archives,

these reports

come a little mysteriously on the international market; some of them had ended up in the royal library at Berlin, others in the ducal library at Gotha. Ranke had examined them all, delighting in their informativeness and

had

later

mourning

Waren

their incompleteness:

nur niemals Liicken

Ranke felt poor mitten wir uns arm yet still rich enough

darinl In the midst of wealth,

dem Reichtum

fiihlen

travel confidently past. It

among

events

in

—

to

now

three centuries in the

18

was from

mediate

this perspective

—that Ranke launched,

career, into

sole authority of the im-

at the very beginning of his

an aggressive critique of those among

who had

cessors

—the

crediting partial

written

histories

his prede-

out of other histories,

and passionate chroniclers

like Guicciardini

with a historian's detachment, and falsely assigning their writings the status of a document.

Ranke

certainly

would

have taken Tacitus not as an authority to be followed but as

a witness

to

be interrogated. In the light of the

charge that he was an ideologist for

which

I

will return

—

it is

most consistent German historians, nationalistic

Germany

—

a charge to

instructive to note that his critics

later

first

and

were the so-called "political"

and partisan scholars who wanted to

propel the historical profession into an active part in the

17

Leopold von Ranke, Fiirsten und Volker von Sudeuropa (fourth, enlarged edition of Die Osmanen und die Spanische Monarchie inn 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, 1877), in Werke, 35:v-vi. See above, pp. 70-71. 18 Ranke, Fiirsten und Volker, in Werke, 35:xii.

[75]

STYLE

Germany and

unification of

To

these enthusiasts

— Ranke's

IN

HISTORY

the glorification of her stature.

—Droysen,

Sybel, Treitschke,

famous objectivity was

excessive,

and others

downright

irre-

However we judge the indictments brought by his critics, however we appraise his objectivity, it is certain that Ranke at least took science seriously. He did not become the accomplished writer he became to compromise, or merely

sponsible.

to

decorate,

that science.

If

dramatist, the sources of his alone;

literary

he was indeed

commitment

a

to style

formidable

cannot be

they go to the heart of his vocation as a

historian.

The Believer Recounting in L

the bloody massacre of French Huguenots

August 1572, Ranke places the responsibility

for

the crime directly at the door of Catherine de Medici.

She acceded to the scheme of the ruling clique to ruin the

many Huguehowever many

Protestant party; she did her utmost to lure as nots to Paris as possible; she was aware that

would come, the

fanatical, easily roused

Parisian populace

would be superior

and

well- organized

to them; she

awakened

in her miserable son, Charles IX, all the fanaticism slumber-

word that called the people to that she had wanted only six persons killed,

ing within him; she spoke the

arms; she insisted

and would take only

their

deaths on her conscience, but

some 50,000 were slaughtered Katharina hat gesagt, habe nur sechs Menschen umzubringen gewiinscht; nur

actually sie

[76]

Ranke: The Respectful Critic

Tod nehme

deren

sie

auf ihr Gewissen;

—

es sind bei 50,000

umgebracht worden. 19 The cadences have the of sober reportage;

up

Ranke keeps

his longer sentences

themselves,

it

with emphatic semicolons.

would seem,

rhythm

his sentences short or breaks

The

enough

are extraordinary

nounce judgment on the perpetrators

Day

efficient

of the St.

events to pro-

Bartholomew's

But then Ranke's tone changes. The plot seemed to have fulfilled its purpose: the Huguenot leadership had been decimated, while Catholic princes, lay and ecclesimassacre.

astical,

and

sent their congratulations to the triumphant Catherine

to her puppet, her son.

And

Ranke muses, can such

yet,

murderous actions ever

truly succeed?

the deepest mystery of

human

Do

they not contradict

the incomprehensible,

affairs,

innermost, inviolable principle of the eternal world order?

Men

can deceive themselves; they cannot shake the laws of

the spiritual world order on which their existence order,

which

rests.

That

rules the course of the stars, governs all existence

—Konnen aber wohl Attentate von so gelingen? Widerstreiten sie nicht

dem

blutiger

tieferen

menschlichen Dinge, den unbegriffenen, in

Natur jemals

Geheimnis der

dem Innern

wirk-

samen, unverletzlichen Prinzipien der ewigen Weltordnung?

Die Menschen konnen

sich

verblenden;

das

Gesetz

der

Weltordnung, auf dem ihr Dasein beruht, konnen nicht erschuttern. Mit der Notwendigkeit beherrscht es sie,

geistigen sie

die

den Gang der Gestirne

without uttering a

regelt.

false note,

Ranke the believer. The work from which

I

20

Without missing

Ranke the

historian has

a step,

become

have been quoting was published

19

Leopold von Ranke, Die Romischen Pdpste in den letzen vier Jahrhunderten, vol. 2, in Werke (1878), 38:44-45. 20 Ranke, Die Romischen Pdpste, vol. 2, in Werke, 38:45. See Ranke, Tagebiicher, pp. 119-120; from the late 1830s.

[77]

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

between 1834 and 1836; from the long vista of Ranke's productive life, it was a relatively young man's book. It was also one of

most widely read works, and

his

contributed to lish

its

style doubtless

popularity. Macaulay, greeting a fine Eng-

its

translation of the Papste in 1840, noted that Ranke's

was "known and esteemed wherever German

original version literature

studied."

is

21

While

in Ranke's greatest

German Reformation,

the histories of the

works

of France

and of

England, which occupied him from the late 1830s to the late 1860s

— the pious

asides are rarer than they are in the Papste,

the emotional religious substratum

the same.

is

the fervor of the preacher, whether

Ranke

lacks

the patriotic exalta-

it is

tion of a Treitschke or the prophetic anxiety of a Burckhardt.

The music and

for

of Ranke's style

is

lyrical;

he

strives for

breadth

smoothness. Even the one-sentence paragraph, one

of his trademarks, with

which he

punctuate his more

likes to

expansive exposition, serves not to interrupt but to speed his narrative. Like

materials,

his

Gibbon, Ranke maintains distance from

but unlike Gibbon, Ranke uses few tense

antitheses, little

if

any biting humor;

his distance

of the ironist but that of the Olympian. action, yet their surfaces are unruffled.

events he

is

sind

on man's calm dwelling

ruhiges Dasein in

—on

the golden

mediocritas massigkeit

—ein

22

writes

not that

dramas of

However baroque the

chronicling, Ranke's impulse

liked to reflect

ments

He

is

is

classicizing.

He

in the higher ele-

dem hohern Elemente,

in

dem

wir

middle way akin to Horace's aurea

idealer

Schwung

der Mehrzahl, der Mittel-

In the same review in which Macaulay remarks

21

Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Ranke's History of the Popes," The Works of Lord Macaulay, 2nd edn., ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (1871), 6:45422

Ranke, Tagebiicher,

p. 159;

from the

[78]

late 1830s.

— Ranke: The Respectful Critic upon the prominence he also notes

and

its

letters,

Yet

equally remote from levity

earnest, yet tolerant

word, like his

and impartial/' 23

style, is serene.

He

has

Yet even that exaltation has something rather it.

relevance of Ranke's religion to Ranke's history discovery; his readers have observed

workings deserve

its

giosity

literature,

of exaltation, though he reserves these for his

complacent about

a

spirit,

German

normally to his most intimate confidant, his brother

Heinrich.

The new

and

religiosity, in a

moments

his

"admirable

bigotry; serious

Ranke's

of Ranke's Pdpste in

it

is

for a century.

closer definition. Ranke's

still

not

reli-

was at once cultural and personal. Ranke was, in many

ways, a characteristic product of his time and place. As a good

German religion;

To

Protestant, he if

anything, for

saw no

him

had

science

speak of Ranke as a pious scientist

not metaphorically but

said, a

his

religious grounding.

is,

own.

It

precise quality of

was, as

I

matter of experience, not theological so

the highest sense of the word, vocational.

an eternal poem, and translate

24

insight

25

much

ist

is

as, in

has composed

is

for the "lazy" separation of

a lower

form of knowledge,

to belief; scholarship thus has religious

Ignorance, he noted in the late 1830s,

alone

Unwissenheit

God

have already

the historian's task to read and to

belief; belief

and knowledge leads justification.

it is

Ranke had no use

it.

knowledge and

sin;

therefore, to speak

But the

literally.

was very much

his religion

between science and

conflict

der Fulle der Einsicht. 26 Because

original

Ich denke noch immer:

blessedness

auch Erbsiinde.

is

.

.

God

.

Seligkeit bestiinde in is

in

man, and man

in

23

Macaulay, "Ranke's History of the Popes," Works, 6:454. 24 Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 105; from 1818-1824; for parallel thinking, see Burckhardt, below, p. 181. 25 Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 111; "from 1816-1817. 26 Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 127; from after 1836.

[79]

ways of

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

God, the knowledge that man us of God's

life

within us

Herzen? Es redet von

carries in his heart speaks to

Was

dem Leben

denn das Wissen im

sagt

Gottes in uns. 27

It is

not

Ranke can dispense with traditional Christian doctrines; man's life on this earth is in itself a religious event. He explicitly notes that he would prize the divine Logos even more highly if there were no miracles er ware mix noch lieber ohne die Wunder 28 In these reflections, Ranke commits the blasphemy of seesurprising,

then, that

ing the historian himself as divine.

Gott

regiert; but,

too, as long as the if

Ranke

God

adds, the writer, the teacher, reigns

world accepts his views;

it

—Es

ist

them God, in

will reject

they are not truthful, or arbitrary, not founded in

the divine on earth

nur

alone truly rules

der Schriftsteller, der Lehrer nur

Wahrheit sagt. Er regiert ebenWelt seine Meinungen annimmt. Aber sie

insofern machtig, als er die falls,

insofern die

wird dieselben nicht annehmen, heit enthalten,

dem

wenn

wenn

sie sich erst

sie willkurlich sind,

der

Wahr-

nicht in Gott

Gbttlichen auf Erden gegriindet. 29 This

is

not the

y

d.h. defi-

ance of a young rebel, but the rumination of a mature scholar; the entry

is

dated December 21, 1850,

when Ranke was

fifty-five.

In

fact,

Ranke's sense of his craft bears a striking resem-

blance to the position that literary

critics

from Matthew

Arnold to Oscar Wilde were developing in these if

years, almost,

not quite, seriously: criticism outranks creation. Just

as the

painter paints and the novelist writes so that the critic has

something on which to exercise well or a

CromRanke can

his discrimination, so a

Napoleon changes the world

so that a

discover wie es eigentlich gewesen. It was this self-esteem that 27

28

29

Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 154; from 1817. Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 122; from the 1830s. Ranke, Tagebiicher, pp. 132-133.

[80]

— Ranke: The Respectful Critic enabled the aged Ranke to say, with a perfectly straight face,

had won for himself immortal merit by following Gentz's advice and giving him Ranke access that Prince Metternich

—

—

Furst Metternich hat ein unsterbliches Ver-

to the archives

dienst erworben, dass er mir auf

den Rat des

geistvollen

Gentz

Benutzung des Archives gab. 30 In Ranke, at and believer, humility and pride are happily

die Erlaubnis zur

once historian

combined;

who have thought

like others

themselves the lowly

instrument of a higher being, Ranke did not

some

of the prestige

fail

borrow

to

from the divinity whose servant he

professed himself to be.

At the heart

of Ranke's conception of his work, then,

the idea of service.

hind

its

it,

Whatever the unconscious impulses

be-

consequences are unremitting labor and, at least

in the early stages,

its

dark companion, solitude. Ranke speaks

of his loneliness in touching letters to his brothers, into

he pours

is

his thirst for intimacy. "I live,"

he told

which

his brother

Heinrich in late 1820 from Frankfurt an der Oder, "not especially well,

not especially badly, without happiness or

misery, without love success; like

Stoic soul."

passion

is

assurance: lent or, at

and friendship, without

failure,

without

an intermundane god of Epicurus' and

He

confesses that he

is

like a

one of those whose "whole

moment, doubt clouds his selfis his consuming desire to make something excelthe very least, to aim at excellence, a truly religious

study."

Then,

for a

impulse? "Is that worldly? you ask,

Is

there really anything

worldly in this world, anything Godless?" 31 Later, in Berlin

Autobiographical dictation of November 1885, in Werke (1890), 5354:63; see von Laue, Ranke, p. 35m 31 November 1820, in Das Briefwerk, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs (1949), p. 24. Ranke's diary jottings, especially those of his early years, reveal a persistent, nagging concern with "selfishness" and a prayerful wish to wipe out Selbstsucht through the practice of historical scholarship. See, for one instance, Ranke, Tagebilcher, p. 59; from 1816-1817. 30

[8.]

STYLE and

salons,

HISTORY

IN

whom

in his intimacy with his students in

he

took paternal pride, the loneliness receded. But the labor

went on, and

his

social

connections increasingly reflected

men

the requirements of his craft. His intimates were

high

office,

not

men

men who

of letters;

in

in

some way might

help him. This was not self-seeking on his part; he was, after all,

not serving himself.

"We

must

adjust ourselves/' he wrote

with sublime naivete to his brother Heinrich in 1824, "to conditions prevailing even in the scholarly world/' 32

The

"In-

strument of History" needed instruments of his own. His devotion to service sounds an unvarying refrain in his

March 1820 he

In

letters.

grasp historical events superficially their life fest

in

flat,

all

moment

their thinking rigid:

history.

brother Heinrich that to

tells his

is

to

"God

make men

dwells, lives,

is

mani-

Every act gives witness of him, every

preaches his name, but most of

great connections of history.

hieroglyphic/' 33

miserable,

What

There he

good servant can

all,

I

think, in the

stands, like a holy rest

while the divine

remains undeciphered? Normally, the motto a

man

chooses reflects a genealogist's ingenuity; the motto

that

Ranke adopted, labor

The

script

ipse voluptas,

voluptas that his labor brought

was

literally

him was only

true.

rarely infected

with self-questioning. In 1824, he confessed to Heinrich that

he thought

his first

certain,

was born

is

I

else in the world; I

was born

shakes

it off:

book woefully incomplete: "One thing for study,

and

I

on the other hand,

am

no good

it is

for

anything

not certain whether

But he immediately and live in it, and it makes

for the study of history."

"I

have chosen

it,

32

February 18, 1824, in Briefwerk, p. 54. End of March 1820, in Briefwerk, p. 18. This letter is justly famous; Pieter Geyl quotes, "Ranke in the Light of the Catastrophe," in Geyl, Debates with Historians (1955), p. 7; see also von Laue, Ranke, p. 42. 33

[82]

—

—

—

Ranke: The Respectful Critic

my

soul

doubt

and gay/' 34 For Ranke,

contented,

blissful,

feel

passing and bliss lasting, for the joys of history

is

are endless.

And, presume

Ranke did not

repeat, they are in essence religious:

I

to understand

God and

told Heinrich late in 1820, "not to understand

sensing

him

And

to understand the rest."

in a beautiful

— "No,"

he

God, but

in

history directly

same

in the

letter,

metaphor, he translated Plato's theory of knowl-

edge into Christian vocabulary: man's most persistent complaint, really his sole complaint,

knows nothing

of his former

bering, a legend of

Lehren

all

Gegenwart und der Zeit" S5 had not sought

to

Heinrich in 1832,

was

a

as

live blissfully

Was

will

doing history,

Es

us

he repeated,

ist

told his brother

compelling duty to which he was

—diesem so schweren, aber calling,"

he claimed that he

Ranke

not equal but which he could not shirk Miissen: miissen.

Das

Legende Gottes aus der

Persistently

be that teacher; it

but remem-

is

the present and the past

ein Erinnern, eine

ist

that he forgets, that he

"All teaching

life.

God from

is

"We

man this

Pflicht

ist Pflicht.

could

hard but splendid profession

so grossem Berufe. "It

do not seek

ein hoherer Beruf.

He

da lange machen?

Man

it

out,

is

a higher

comes to

it

sucht es nicht, es

kommt

uns." 36

Worldly success therefore counts only

as

it

promotes the

divine plan for the individual: pinched for money, short of time,

and

far

from influence, the young Ranke

still

himself willing to remain without tenure forever,

if

declared

only he

could serve Clio. But he conceded that one could serve her better occupying a university chair. Writing to his favorite

34 35

36

February 18, 1824, in Briefwerk, p. 53. (December 23, 1820), in Neue Briefe, pp. 17-18. (End of April 1832), in Neue Briefe, pp. 170-171.

[83]

STYLE brother in

December

HISTORY

IN

Ranke announces the govern-

1833,

ment's promise of promotion to a

and

full

professorship in Berlin,

and adds:

a sizable increase in salary,

''I

have

just sent

the same news to our dear old parents and wept out loud as

I

fully visualized the gracious care of

the merciful

ambition

falls

need nothing

now he

is

God

hand he has extended over

us

away, like a discarded coat; else

on

truly the

earth.

," 37 .

.

He

I

all.

.

and

all, .

.

All

declare that

I

needs nothing because

instrument of providence. This, he told

brother Ferdinand from Paris in 1843,

his

for us

is

not hubris:

'What would providence be if it did not care for the individual too! That we are thought by an eternal thought, not transitory like the falling leaf of autumn, that we belong to 38 the essence of things that is the sum of all religion/' sincerely It was, in any event, the sum of Ranke's religion

—

felt,

—

consistently heartening,

In his formal prose, softly, but,

and

Ranke

though subdued,

struck this note a

it

the same. Ranke, the supreme

totally convenient.

was

there,

little

more

and unmistakably

embodiment

of the Protestant

ethic was not an uncomplicated Lutheran, but a philosophical

mind who had been touched by

the mystical hand of Neo-

platonism. His religion was the precipitate of wide reading

and vague thinking. But whatever ology,

it

its

shortcomings

as

the-

impelled him, in his historical work, to relentless

labor.

For Ranke, religion was more than a motive it

was also 37

38

Neue

a

for the historian,

key to history. In large and in small, history

Brief e, p. 184.

July 30 (1843), in

Neue

Brief e, p. 299.

[84]

Ranke: The Respectful Critic exemplifies divine work.

While Ranke saw the overarching

processes of world history as the noblest expression of the

same time, that

divine intent, he thought, at the

this

sym-

phonic whole was composed of an immense number of subsidiary themes.

The

particular

is

a mirror, a

worthy miniature,

of the universal. In the progression of his historical writings,

Ranke exhibited

almost as

his organic vision

if

by design: he

began with a prescient study of the Mediterranean world

and of the Reformation; he continued with massive tories of

major European powers; he concluded his career

with universal history. That

was cut

off in the

last effort,

Middle Ages, by

monument;

are his

in the preface,

said so often before: world history history.

his-

The

divine

scheme

the Weltgeschichte,

his death. Its six

he is

reiterates

volumes

what he had

the capstone of national

realizes itself

by and large through

nations or states, but in that great international conflict call history,

the universal element

is

we

always implicit: "Great

nations and states," he wrote, "have a double vocation, national

and

Because particular,

world-historical/'

God

39

works both through the universal and the

each epoch, each act has

its

own

dignity. This

is

what I have called Ranke's professional 40 This affirmation that "every epoch is immediate to God/' dictum, which is the single most important pronouncement the religious source of

in the historicist school,

consummates the nineteenth-century

rebellion against the historiography of the Enlightenment. It

is

the final repudiation of the antique doctrine that

disciplines, including history,

all

have an explicit ethical end. The

Ranke, Franzosische Geschichte, vol. 1, in Werke, 8:v. See above, p. 69. For a searching, if excessively sympathetic, analysis of this famous remark of 1854, see Friedrich Meinecke, "Deutung eines Rankewortes," in Aphorismen und Skizzen zur Geschichte, 2nd edn. (n.d.), pp. 100-129. 39

40

[85]

STYLE

IN

historian does not praise or

stand

—

to understand

called

this

condemn; he

seeks only to under-

from within, by adopting standards of

the period under study. tion to give each

HISTORY

41

epoch

In religious terms, this

its

historians to cast aside private prejudices

is

called

it

and

past as present, but the past as past that

to rise

it;

is

yet

it

in 1814,

but

his

work was

ist

es

If

above

is

not the

dem Menschen

a lifelong assault

mindedness, in particular on the

and

all

proper concern

his

gemass sich zu richten} 2 Ranke wrote these words

which

upon

auf diese gegenwartige Vergangenheit, sondern auf

die Vergangenheit als die vergangene

man,

far-

and time. History, Ranke once noted,

present to the historian as he studies

— nicht

invita-

injunction had

reaching professional reverberations because

their position in class

an

chance of immortality; Meinecke

Christian demand. This

a

is

liberals

religious

Ranke

Whig

as a

young

on present-

view of history, in

appear as good and conservatives as wicked,

men

as either superstitious, or crafty, or stupid.

for his part did

not quite succeed in overcoming

the Tory interpretation of history, his religious ideal for the

do

historian allowed the profession to

so.

Moreover, Ranke's theology of history demands the most scrupulous pursuit of the truth.

I

have already spoken of

Ranke's obsession with archives. Historians must generalize

without that history

is

generalizations on the detail. 41

I

dry chronicle. But they must base their

most intimate knowledge of

Again and again

in

Ranke's

life

we

all

possible

see the cheerful

have argued elsewhere that despite the charges of

historicists against

philosophes, the philosophic historians of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment recognized the need to see the past through its own eyes, even though the practice of Voltaire and Gibbon and Hume often left something to be desired in this regard. But then so did the practice of the historicists. See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2, The Science 0/

Freedom (1969), pp. 368-396. 42

Ranke, Tagehiicher,

p. 109.

[86]

Ranke: The Respectful Critic work exposing ignorance and battling prejudice. Ranke in 1827 asking the publisher of his second

revisionist at

There

book

is

to return the final draft of his manuscript because

document

found

a

There

are his reports

him

that requires

from

Italy,

to revise a chapter.

44

There

is,

above

While Ranke saw in

world history

a

hand-

the probity with

all,

the archives, for he knows that diplomats

visits all

for the historian

his

in Florence collecting "excel-

to their masters as well as to their counterparts.

lie

is

1830 he writes

on the Medicis, which might add up to

some half-volume. 45 There which he

right.

his materials; in

months

that he has spent three lent material"

by

43

ravenous with his desire to

master everything and get everything willingness to be guided

he has

religion as being of critical

and is,

for history alike,

worldly power; as he once put

importance

the principal agent

in his view, political power.

Ranke the pious servant was no

46

To

be

sure,

stranger to the advantages of

it,

he found

it

a source of

deep

happiness to be able to work within a state he could respect.

But whatever the place history,

way.

and

he

insisted,

While he

by the

writes,

in

dem

in

Ranke's

own

its

sign, it

ideal of service.

situation, in its

own

was shaped

also,

power did not have things

Only

all

in school or in

can we keep church history separate from

political history; in life

—

power

history stood under

significantly,

literature,

of

they are intertwined at every

lebendigen Dasein sind

sie

moment

jeden Augenblick ver-

bunden und durchdringen einander. 47 The European

43

To

Friedrich

and Heinrich Brockhaus, January

17,

1827,

in

state

Neue

Brief e, p. 94.

Heinrich Ritter (August 1, 1829), in Neue Brieje, pp. 125-126. 45 Friedrich Perthes (August 12, 1830), in Neue Brieje, p. 137. 46 Furst zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and Johann Friedrich Ancillon, October 27, 1836, in Neue Brieje, p. 228. 47 Rejormation, vol. 1, in Werke, 1:3. 44

To To To

[87]

STYLE system has embodied the

turies;

Staat

priestliche

—

interpenetration

this

and

warriors

of

state

HISTORY

IN

arose

first

der

priests

cen-

kriegerisch-

eighth century, 48

the

in

many

for

and

world-shaking events like Martin Luther's rebellion stand as visible

symbols of their intimacy and their tension.

In Ranke's scheme of things, the relation of power to ligion

is

not merely one of coexistence or even of cooperation.

There are times when

to identity. After

it rises

all,

power can

happily claim the same exalted origins as service: God's

The

family demonstrates

how power

the matrix of divine justice.

Ranke with

re-

In

will.

can be exercised within

some

striking

metaphors,

projects his loyalty to the institution of the family,

its

dominant and loving

paterfamilias,

onto

society,

organized into hierarchies of authorities and subjects, and

onto the universe, governed by

and

all-loving

God. The

its

all-powerful, all-creative,

hierarchical family

is

Ranke's master

image, sometimes explicit, often implicit. In the good state,

good family, the two poles of power and

as in the

coincide; service works to advance to

make

power

service effective.

large

and small

historical world.

The

is

Ranke saw

all

exists

manifestations of

creative statesman, the state, all forces,

are so

many

the

and the

sparks from

flint.

In this optimistic vision,

power

power and power

as expressions of divine activity in

world-historical interplay of

the divine

service

all

rarely problematical.

tragedy dissolves; for Ranke, It

is

not simply that Ranke

concentrates on the good that power can do and pushes the evil

as

out of sight; more important, he actually sees the

an instrument of the good. The divinely created

mechanism

is

in

the long run

self-regulating;

historical

crime

cruelty play the role that Goethe's Mephistopheles

48

Reformation,

vol.

1,

in

Werke,

1:5.

[88]

evil

and

found

Ranke: The Respectful Critic himself compelled to play: wishing to do

War, mendacious diplomacy,

he does good.

evil,

ruthless politics

are God's

all

many

experiments for solving the world's riddles; they are so

Not even Ranke's own

divine muscle exercises.

side, Protes-

tantism and conservatism, ought to live exempt from battle; the good comes from the battle

itself,

as well as

from

its

preordained outcome. In 1872, countering the pessimism of

who saw

his conservative friends

to

an end in universal

the world they

conflict,

knew coming

Ranke suggested that each

needs his enemy, and bad intentions will find their correction die falschen Intentionen

within themselves

rektiv in sich selbst finden.

49

Ranke does not

and he expects that wickedness,

Day

demands

Bartholomew's

a

all,

drama, by

he

its

treats

such

very nature,

resolutions.

In his last years,

where.

and

glorify brutality,

like the St.

massacre, will be punished. But above

things as parts of a drama,

werden ein Kor-

He

Ranke saw such

resolutions at

hand

every-

was thoroughly aware that he was living through

an age of revolutions; his persistent, even passionate preoccupation with the politics and diplomacy of his

him with the kind

provided

in his historical work.

and

of insight he found invaluable

But while he thought

in fact indispensable,

own time

he thought

it far

struggle inevitable

from endless. His

very last undertaking, the world history, reflected his confi-

dence in the ultimate triumph of the forces of order; without that,

he

said,

he would not have undertaken so vast

Liberalism, he conceded, has

its

scheme:

it

it

goads statesmen,

needing correction. But

whatever

its

radicalism

49

—

form it

its

place in the general dialectical calls their

attention to wrongs

proper function was opposition;

—popular sovereignty,

was

a project.

liberalism, or socialist

at heart negative, at worst destructive,

Ranke, Tagebiicher,

p.

413; from

December

[89]

31, 1872.

and

STYLE did not deserve to rule.

HISTORY

IN

The two

essential foundations of the

Ranke

best form of government, the monarchical state, flected in 1871, are finances

two

re-

and the army. To subject these

to the caprices of a deliberative

body would be

to sur-

render the sound and tested principles of good government:

"Everything we have achieved in the

last

few years has rested

on these elements/' 50 Power, then, is

the

is

march

of

God

through the world. This

one reason why most of Ranke's writings deal with

critical

moments in political history, and with the centuries when the modern state took its characteristic form. In France, England, Prussia, Ranke could trace the decisive clash between centralizing institutions and feudal privileges. The clash differed from

state to state, a difference for

izing perception

which Ranke's individual-

had prepared him

But the

well.

historical

function of that clash was everywhere the same: to find a

way

of controlling territories large

quate natural and a

human

network of competing

enough

resources,

states.

And

and

to

command

ade-

a proper balance in

this, too, is

why Ranke

concentrated his attention not merely on the state but on the J

was the age of the great powers, and Ranke

large state. It

wrote their history in the confident conviction that he was J concentrating on the main theme.

The important powers

were important quite simply because they were important. Ranke's

God

was bored by

losers.

In recent decades, the baneful consequences of such com-

placency have received intense study and hostile comment. 50

Neue

To Edwin

Freiherr von Manteuffel

Brief e, 561.

[90]

(before September

10,

1871); in

Ranke: The Respectful Critic After the Nazi catastrophe,

Rankean

as Friedrich

vision superior to the

writings

Meinecke

moral

to declare Burckhardt's

sunny acceptance that characterized the This

master.

of his

induced even so devout a

it

much

is

undeniable:

Ranke

blandly affirmed the powers that be; he adroitly fitted treaty breaking,

damaging than

him

to forgive the unforgivable.

51

But more was

his much-criticized refusal to judge

his

widely noticed readiness to judge. Behind the screen of

scientific objectivity,

He

economic warfare into God's

for

of history induced

less

invasions,

man; he threw the mantle of spiritual respectaover terrible men and terrible deeds. Ranke's philosophy

scheme bility

illegal

preferred the

Ranke made

definite political choices.

power of the German monarchy

power of the German

the

movement. Thus he found

his

to treat all historical forces with

an

Socialist

most earnest injunction

to

even hand quite impossible to carry out: in Ranke's scheme,

Bismarck was obviously more immediate to It

would be

him

I

mere

would argue instead that Ranke's

in this direction,

from gaining distance on through cool

than Bebel.

a mistake to treat this set of biases as a

accident or aberration. piety forced

God

both by preventing him

his cherished political convictions

critical inspection,

and by predisposing him

to

prefer the powerful to the powerless. In Ranke's religion, the first

51

shall

be

Foreign

first.

Thus, ultimately, Ranke's deepest impulse,

critics, especially after

often; Pieter Geyl's essay (Debates

the Nazi tyranny, have

With

made

Historians, pp. 1-18)

is

charge a splendid

this

and fair-minded instance of such criticisms. But even Germans, reevaluating their past, have taken a new and critical look at Ranke. See especially HansHeinz Krill, Die Ranke Renaissance: Max Lenz und Erich Marcks (1962); while Krill concentrates his fire on two of Ranke's best-known disciples, many of his bullets hit the master quite directly. Even Friedrich Me.inecke, Ranke's most enthusiastic supporter in the German historical guild, found the Nazi catastrophe shedding a new and somewhat harsher light on the historian he admired more than anyone else. See "Ranke und Burckhardt," in Aphorismen und Skizzen zur Geschichte, pp. 143-180.

[91]

STYLE which was the source of of his

most crippling

open

his greatest work,

was the source also

defect.

These are deep waters, are

HISTORY

IN

I

know. After

angles of vision

all, all

to bias; precisely as an atheist, an atheist can write

one-sided history just as

much

as a Christian.

The

history assumes the prevalence of perspectives, a

German

history of

whether

it is

historian underestimating the merits of France, a

bourgeois historian the maturity of the proletariat, a male historian the intelligence of

women. But Ranke was

peculiarly

vulnerable. Early in the 1840s, he noted that the historian

needs three cardinal qualities, honesty; the

become

first,

common

to grasp things at

frightened at

what he

sees;

um

moral

Mut und

fall

into

qualities govern

Etwas zu machen, dazu gehort

gesunder Menschenverstand,

and

the second, not to

the third, not to

self-deception; in short, the simplest

science as well

all;

sense, courage,

Redlichkeit.

dreierlei:

Der

erste,

um vor den Reum sich nicht selber

nur die Sache einzusehn, der zweite,

sultaten nicht zu erschrecken, der dritte,

etwas vorzumachen. So dass die einfachsten moralischen Ezgenschaften auch die Wissenschaft beherrschen. 52 But precisely

knew he had

science and tirelessly strove

precisely because

he had strong reasons to

because Ranke

for objectivity,

believe that he was not deceiving himself, he was particularly

susceptible to self-deception. It

is

true that Ranke, publishing

immensely, subjected himself to the public forum in which alone self-deception can be detected and corrected

ment

of his professional peers.

historical

But the shape

— the judg-

of the

German

profession was such that the criticism he got he

could not use, and the criticism he could have used he did

not 52

get.

Ranke, Tagebiicher,

p. 240;

from the

[92]

early 1840s.

Ranke: The Respectful Critic Ranke has sometimes been charged with ignoring the dimension of

history, those realities of technology

social

and eco-

nomics, of mass politics and mass communications, that were transforming the world in Ranke's lifetime and that should, in retrospect,

have deepened

scattered notebook jottings, lizing prospect that

his analysis of the past. In a

Ranke

few

in fact suggests the tanta-

he was playing with

social history.

He

professes himself interested in population, classes,

and games,

and he hints that the task of history might well be

to describe

the

rise

of

all

Das ware nun

elements

Geschichte, das allmahliche schildern.

53

But his

Emporkommen

Elemente zu

England, the sexual mores

Burckhardt thought suitable for

festivals that

tural history,

alter

and popular songs that Macaulay

freely using in his History of

and public

Aufgabe einer

practice was less comprehensive. Certainly,

in view of the broadsides

was

die

Ranke's conception of society was narrow.

cast of his characters

was

like a neoclassical tragedy,

cul-

The

with the

speaking parts almost exclusively reserved to the higher orders.

But Ranke did not it,

by subjecting

the "social

so

much

ignore the social world as distort

conflict to the pathos of reconciliation.

movement/' which he saw

1830s on, negative as

it

seemed

all

Even

about him from the

to him,

was destined in

Ranke's mind to be assimilated into an ever-growing social order.

54

Ranke was nothing

if

not a consensus historian. His

53

Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 323; from 1843. See also the important entry in the same work (pp. 239-40) from the 1830s. Rudolf Vierhaus has explored the question in detail in his Ranke und die soziale Welt (1957), which includes some hitherto unpublished notes from Ranke's Nachlass. Significantly, Burckhardt argued that the totality of perception that Ranke's die Totalitat writings seemed to offer at first glance was in fact an illusion der Anschauung, die seine Schriften bei dem ersten Anblick zu geben scheinen, ist illusorisch. Burckhardt to Heinrich Schreiber, October 2, 1842; 54

Max

Burckhardt, 7 vols: to date (1949-1969), 1:216. Ranke, Tagebiicher, p. 167; from August 11, 1880.

Brief e, ed.

[93]

STYLE him

wish for harmony led

merely the classes.

rise

HISTORY

IN

1843 not

to see in the Paris of

of equality but also the disappearance of

55

Thus Ranke's serene dramatic conception governed torical perceptions

He

from beginning to end.

his his-

recognized that

the mere piling up of documents and eyewitness relations, no

matter

how

reliable,

would only introduce

a

new kind

of dis-

tortion into history, by presenting history as a spectacle of a casual, facts, in

as

but

it

happy ending, was congenial

a

also

conceived dramatically. Ranke's

God who,

the Deists' watchmaker

and

all its

laws, withdraws

closer to Calvin's his decrees.

fully.

That

critic

who, it is

is

a

left

God was

not

man

He

was

much

with intimations of

continuous evidence of himself in history,

men

the historian

is

to testify to

it,

so important: he

truthis

the

devout study, accepts God's work and sees

good. Ranke's

God was

the immortal dramatist

has written the play, designed the tion,

and who continues

lines.

And, since

God

duty not to be

dull,

is

sets,

Ranke, Tagebiicher,

who

supervised the produc-

to observe the actors speaking their

never dull,

either.

it is

Style,

of prayer.

55

temperament,

having created the world

his creation.

few exceptional

why

after

from

God, who has

He gives

and has called

that

to his

impressed him as the appropriate form for a history

God had

that

meaningless accumulation of

desperate need of the ordering hand. Drama, as long

had

it

ultimately

disorderly,

p. 320;

from 1843.

[94]

the historian's highest

for

Ranke, was a form

3

Macaulay Intellectual Voluptuary

The Acrobat The

failings of

explored;

Macaulay's

it is

have been thoroughly

style

unlikely that the

reader will discover any

most unsympathetic

new grounds

In Macaulay's lifetime, wits found

its

for complaint.

extravagances ample

provocation for lampoons; after his death, serious students of literature raised the

of writing.

Thomas

A

it

way

to his

formidable array of essayists and historians

Carlyle and Walter Bagehot,

Lord Morley,

demned

most far-reaching objections

Sir Leslie

verbose,

as

Stephen and artificial,

Matthew Arnold and

Sir Charles Firth

—

con-

overemphatic: a virtuoso's

instrument played not to interpret the music but to glorify the performer. Macaulay's most discriminating readers found his style style of

wearisome and ultimately profoundly an orator

who smuggles onto

suitable to a debate in the

As

House

irritating,

the

the printed page tricks of

Commons,

if

there.

committed public speaker, he exaggerates his points, constructs false antitheses, grows heated beyond measure, expands immense ingenuity underlining the obvious and prova

ing the self-evident.

making His

airs

a case,

and

He

and sounds

argues

all

the time: he

is

always

as sure of it as only a debater can.

graces, his acrobatic pirouettes, far

[97]

from con-

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

cealing, only advertise the essential corruptness of his his-

work: he

torical

make

to

detest

is

an advocate rather than

Whig

things worse, a

—and,

a historian, and,

He

advocate.

worse, he really detests

—what he

professes to

too limited

is

to grasp: the subtler points of philosophy, the mysteries of

poetry, the sheer historical interest of personages or causes

he

does

Macaulay

not

find

Matthew Arnold

sympathetic.

a philistine, in fact the "Prince of Philistines, " a

verdict with

which

Leslie Stephen, with

curred; Gladstone called

him

vulgar

—

conceded Macaulay the quality of

them I

With Macaulay,

all

due caution, con-

in Greek.

clarity,

means and

clear with illegitimate

poses.

called

1

All his critics

but he seemed to

for illegitimate pur-

somehow becomes

clarity

a vice.

do not intend to minimize the gravity of the case against

Macaulay. His rhetorical self-indulgence and his Whiggish bias are too blatant to

be denied. Some of

work

are impossible to defend; his of restraint

and of

taste.

And,

not only the tone that

it is

with the other historians style

is

most,

if

not

all,

He

like

a

failure

of the

man. His way of writing

his

an imperious and

with Macaulay,

way

far

raises

of thinking as a historian.

he judges, dealing out

from impartial teacher. Lord

Morley, reading in Macaulay's History of England, found "full of cleverness, full of detailed

1

Matthew Arnold, "Joubert,"

as

considering in this book, the

rarely seeks simply to understand;

marks

marked by

in question;

am

uncomfortable doubts about

mannerisms

as his detractors rightly observed,

is

I

is

his

it

knowledge, extraordinarily

Works, 15 vols. (1903-1904), 3:333, and Friendship's Garland, letter 8, in Works, 6:307. Yet, when Macaulay died, Arnold wrote to his mother: "It is said he has left no more history ready, which is a national loss." December 31, 1859, in Works, 13:150. Leslie Stephen, "Macaulay," in Hours in a Library, 3 vols, (new edn., 1892), 2:355, 362. For Gladstone, see G. M. Young, "Macaulay," in Young, Victorian in

Essays (1962), p. 38.

[98]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary make my-

graphic and interesting. But/' he added, "I cannot self

That

the style.

like

happen." 2 This

not the way in which things

is

a devastating indictment:

is

the historian's business to record the

way

of course,

it is,

which things

in

happen.

Yet

me

we have done to Macaulay what We have judged him from our perspectives and we have done this because we live in

seems to

it

he did to

others.

rather than his,

that

an age to which the mentality of a Macaulay

Whigs,

stranger.

I

think

I

can safely

temper uncomfortable; Tories,

say,

is

make

unhappily a

modern

the

their sense of tragedy intact,

Macaulay, writes Pieter Geyl, speaking for

far better.

suit

it

this

temper, "rouses distrust and annoyance"; lacking

historical

3

There

is

But Macaulay's style has other, more And, in addition, it has many more personal

truth in this.

attractive aspects.

and

true

empathy, "vituperative" and "cocksure," his "writing

of history strikes us as decidedly old-fashioned."

much

all

cultural resonances than are immediately apparent;

surfaces hide a richly

complex man,

living in a richly

its

complex

age.

We I

must,

want

prose.

to

as

the Scholastics would have said, distinguish.

submit in evidence three samples of Macaulay's

"Such

a scene as the division of last

saw, and never expect to see again."

the stage the

House

of

Commons,

second reading of the Reform

Thomas Flower sisters,

2

Ellis,

Bill,

Tuesday

The time

is

I

March

never 1831,

the occasion the decisive the recipient of this letter

Macaulay's best and, apart from his

only friend.

May

1905, in Lord Morley, Recollections, 2 vols. (1917), 2:133. In the same entry, Morley significantly quotes Lord Acton as being "full of praise for the careful labour and good judgment of the History." 3 Pieter Geyl, "Macaulay in his Essays," in Geyl, Debates with Historians (i955), PP- 20-23.

Entry for

9,

[99]

STYLE If I

should

and sharp seeing

live fifty years the

my mind

in

mace from the

never to be forgotten. part.

When

we had

as

Caesar stabbed in

taking the

IN

if

it

HISTORY

impression of

had

just

it

will

taken place.

be It

as fresh

was

like

the Senate House, or seeing Oliver table, a sight to

The crowd

be seen only once and

overflowed the House in every

the strangers were cleared out and the doors locked

hundred and eight members present, more by fifty-five than ever were at a division before. The Ayes and Noes were like two vollies of cannon from opposite sides of a field of battle. When the opposition went out into the lobby— an operation by the bye which took up twenty minutes or more we spread ourselves over the benches on both sides of the House. For there were many of us who had not been able to find a seat during the evening. When the doors were shut we began to speculate on our numbers. Every body was desponding. "We have lost it. We are only two hundred and eighty at most. I do not think we are two hundred and fifty. They are three hundred. Alderman Thompson has counted them. He says they are two hundred and ninety-nine." This was the talk on our benches. I wonder that men who have been long in parliament do not acquire a better coup d'oeil for numbers. The House when only the Ayes were six

—

in it

looked to

me

a very fair

house— much

fuller

than

it

generally

had no hope however of three hundred. As the tellers passed along our lowest row on the left hand side the interest was insupportable— two hundred and ninety-one— two hundred and ninety-two— we were all standing up and stretching forward, telling with the tellers. At three hundred there was a short cry of joy, at three hundred and two another— suppressed however in a moment. For we did not yet know what the hostile force might be. We knew however that we could not be severely beaten. The doors were thrown open and in they came. Each of them as he entered brought some different report of their numbers. It must have been impossible, as you may conceive, in the lobby, crowded as they must have been, to form any exact estimate. First we heard that they were three hundred and three— then the number rose to three hundred and ten, then went down to three hundred and seven. Alexander is

even on debates of considerable

interest.

[100]

I

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary Baring told

me

hundred and Charles

that he

We

four.

Wood who

had counted and that they were three were

all

breathless with anxiety,

when

stood near the door jumped on a bench and

hundred and one." We set up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross— waving our hats— stamping against the floor and clapping our hands. The tellers scarcely got through the crowd: for the house was thronged up to the table, and all the floor was fluctuating with heads like the pit of a theatre. But you might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out— and many of us shed tears— I could scarcely refrain. And the jaw cried

out— 'They

of Peel

fell;

are only three

and the face of Twiss was

as the face of a

damned

and Herries looked like Judas taking his neck-cloth off for the last operation. We shook hands and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying, and huzzaing into the lobby. And no sooner were the outer doors opened than another shout answered that within the house. All the passages and the stairs into the waiting rooms were thronged by people who had waited till four in the morning to know the issue. We passed through a narrow lane between two thick masses of them; and all the way down they were shouting and waving their hats; till we got into the open air. I called a cabriolet— and the first thing the driver asked was, "Is the Bill carried? "Yes, by one." 'Thank God for it, Sir." And away I rode to Grey's Inn— and so ended a scene which will probably never be equalled till the reformed soul;

,,

Parliament wants reforming.

This

fine

4 .

victory was, as

.

.

we know, only temporary;

the

more than a year later, in June 1832, after a prolonged and intense political crisis complete with elections, resignations, and

Reform

Bill

did not receive the royal assent until

threats to

swamp

ceedings,

Macaulay took

4

March

a recalcitrant

a

House

prominent

of Lords. In these propart.

He had

1831. Quoted in Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Letters of Lord Macaulay (edn., 1908), pp. 146-147. 30,

[101]

The

entered

Life

and

STYLE the

House

Commons

of

HISTORY

IN

in 1830;

he was

just turning thirty,

already widely appreciated as a lucid and forceful essayist.

On March

1831, just three weeks before the historic vote

2,

he reported to bill

It

Macaulay

Ellis,

that Lord John Russell

was one of

had introduced the preceding

his best performances, like the others

and memorable. The House his rapid delivery, for

writer, a

day.

memorized

sat silent, intently trying to catch

Macaulay was, though

a great speech-

bad speaker. ''Turn where we may, within, around,

the voice of great events

is

you may preserve." This was

Now,

rose to speak in behalf of the

proclaiming to

who

Reform, that

his peroration:

therefore, while every thing at

ruin to those

us,

home and

abroad forebodes

persist in a hopeless struggle against the spirit

of the age, now, while the crash of the proudest throne of the

continent

is still

resounding in our

ears,

now, while the roof of a

an ignominious shelter to the exiled heir

British palace affords

we

on every side ancient institutions subverted, and great societies dissolved, now, while the heart of England is still sound, now, while old feelings and old associations retain a power and a charm which may too soon pass away, now, in this your accepted time, now, in this your day of salvation, of forty kings, now, while

see

not of the

take counsel, not of prejudice, not of Party

spirit,

ignominious pride of a

history, of reason,

fatal consistency,

but of

which are past, of the signs of this most portentous time. Pronounce in a manner worthy of the expectation with which this great debate has been anticipated, and of the long remembrance which it will leave behind. Renew the youth of the of the ages

State. Save property, divided against itself. Save the multitude,

endangered by its own ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest, and fairest, and most highly civilised community that ever existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible.

The time

is

short. If this bill should

[102]

be rejected,

I

pray

Thomas Babington Macaulay COURTESY THE

NEW YORK

PUBLIC LIBRARY

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary God

to

that

remember

none of those who concur

in rejecting

their votes with unavailing remorse,

may

it

ever

amidst the wreck

and the

of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, dissolution of social order. 5

Four years

after this speech, in 1835, while

member

as a legal

of the

began to write

years after that, in 1839, he first

peared.

two volumes of

The work

his History of

it.

Late in 1848,

England

finally ap-

has no wholly representative passages; like

Gibbon, Macaulay had occasion vasions, describe

in India

Supreme Council, he began ponderwork that would make him immortal; 6 four

ing the historical

the

he was

ways of

and

to narrate battles

living, depict character,

in-

and moralize

over the course of events. Devoted craftsman that he was, he varied his

manner

to

do

matter

his

sage of sufficient length, he

is

But

justice.

sure to deploy

in

any pas-

most

of his

techniques.

If

we would study with

our ancestors

profit the history of

[this

from the beginning of his famous third chapter on social history] we must be constantly on our guard against that delusion which the well known names of families, places, and offices naturally produce, and must never forget that the country of which we read was a very different country from that in which we is

live.

In every experimental science there

perfection. In every

human

being there

is

tendency towards

a

is

a wish to ameliorate

own condition. These two principles have often sufficed, even when counteracted by great public calamities and by bad instihis

tutions,

fortunes,

to carry civilisation

rapidly forward.

no ordinary misgovernment,

will

do

No

so

ordinary mis-

much

to

make

a

nation wretched, as the constant progress of physical knowledge

and the constant

effort of every

man

to better himself will

do

to

Speech on Parliamentary Reform, in The Works of Lord Macaulay, 2nd edn., ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. (1871), 8:24-25. 6 See John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (1973), 47^. 5

[

10 5]

STYLE make

HISTORY

IN

been found that profuse expenditure, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, cora nation prosperous. It has often

rupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagra-

have not been able to destroy capital so fast the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it. It

tions, inundations,

as

can easily be proved that, in our

own

land, the national wealth

been almost uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under the Tudors than under the Plantagenets; that it was greater under the Stuarts than under the Tudors; that, in spite of battles, sieges and confiscations, it was greater on the day of the Restoration than on the day when the during at least

has,

centuries,

six

Long Parliament met;

in

that,

spite

of

maladministration,

of

extravagance, of public bankruptcy, of two costly and unsuccessful

and of the fire, it was greater on the day of the death of Charles the Second than on the day of his wars, of the pestilence

Restoration. This progress, having continued during

became

many

ages,

about the middle of the eighteenth century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded, during the nineteenth, with at length,

accelerated velocity. 7

The

three passages

have

I

one mind. Yet they are

The and

letter

notably

is

larger than

its

true to say that is

quoted are

from identical

clearly the

Macaulay's

flexible.

stylistic repertoire

indicate. It

spoken

essays.

He

string to his lyre except perhaps true simplicity,

moments when he

presumably

a

hectoring

is

as un-

is

his writings are disguised orations as

to say that his orations are

are

of

from the History, though consistently

dominant tone would all

work

in their techniques.

intimate and spirited, the speech

biblical, the passage

rhetorical, is

is

far

just

even to

rises

that.

has every

and there

His letter to

spontaneous performance, shows

it

how

Ellis,

rapidly

he could compose a finished piece of reportage. Writing a

7

Thomas Babington Macaulay,

History

Works, 1:219-220.

[106]

of

England

[Chapter

iii],

in

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary week

after the dramatic

moment, Macaulay

—

that haunts every historical storyteller

end

piques

'We

three hundred.

have .

.

lost

First

.

bill.

by dwelling on the uncertainty of that

Ellis' interest

ending ("

knows the But Macaulay

his reader

302 to 301 for the

of the story:

problem

faces the

...

it.'

we heard

had no hope however

I .

.

.

of

then the number rose").

Without evident compunction, Macaulay,

on

pulling

'

his

reader's lapel, emphatically characterizes the event as exciting

("the interest was insupportable ...

more

anxiety"); but also,

He

two").

the

of

stilts

lends his

moment,

all

breathless with

he dramatizes the suspense

subtly,

("two hundred and ninety-one

we were

—two

hundred and ninety-

visible as it

most extraordinary

is

historical

on

own, the

its

parallels

("like

seeing Caesar stabbed ... or seeing Oliver taking the

from the table"). by making

it

benches. ...

He makes

his narrative brilliantly visual

wholly concrete ("we spread ourselves over the

we were

all

standing up. ...

all

the floor was

fluctuating with heads like the pit of a theatre").

not disdain pathos ("many of us shed tears")

he

homely

to a friend, the

is

a pin drop").

mace

And he

or,

He

does

writing as

might have heard

cliche ("y ou

completes his report by constructing a

dialogue suitable for the stage, with laconic question and laconic

Whig ("the 'Yes, this

response,

the popularity of the

neatly illustrating

program and the blessings of thing the driver asked was,

first

by one/ agile

Thank God

narrative,

for

it, Sir.'

Macaulay

also

a

deferential society

'Is

the Bill carried?'

"). Yet,

throughout

all

sounds a deeper, more

natural note, a pure boyish exuberance that will not be denied

("And the jaw

of Peel

fell

taking his neck-cloth off for

.

and Herries looked like Judas the last operation"). Macaulay is .

.

not too starchy to admit that sweeter

still

it

to win.

[107]

had been sweet

to fight,

STYLE When

HISTORY

IN

he ventures onto the public

lutely suppresses all such levity. In the

he

is

stage,

Macaulay

House

reso-

Commons,

of

The emphatic music of his rhythmic beating of a drum in

grave, urgent, humorless.

sentences resounds like the

That

the jungle, designed less to inform than to arouse. the point of

"now/'

is

Macaulay's insistent eightfold reiteration of

a technique

he borrowed from the rhetoric of the

Bible and intensified for his

own

secular assignment.

That

is

the point also of his equally insistent short sentences, either

beginning with the same word multitude. the

fairest,

.

.

.

short/')

"Save property.

Save the aristocracy.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Save the

Save the greatest,

the most highly civilised community") 8 or cast

the same shape

in

(

Here

is

("The danger

is

terrible.

The time

is

the demagogy of a connoisseur steeped in

the oratory of the ages, employed for the delectation of other connoisseurs, Macaulay's fellow

MPs. The Commons

dearly

loved a rousing speech, and hankered after the good old days of parliamentary oratory, the 1790s,

when

giants like Pitt

and

Fox and Burke had harangued and swayed the House. While Macaulay does not scruple on occasion to play on the widespread fear of violent upheaval, his is a demagogy less of message than of tone, a half-instinctive, half-calculated appeal

8

Macaulay's rage for anaphora is really relentless. Here is a sample from his essays, which are not quoted in my text. Speaking of the practices for which Lord Bacon was punished, he writes: "That these practices were common, we admit. But they were common, just as all wickedness to which there is strong temptation always was, and always will be common. They were common just as theft, cheating, perjury, adultery, have always been common. They were common, not because people did not know what was right, but because people liked to do what was wrong. They were common, though piohibited by law. They were common, though condemned by public opinion. They were common, because in that age law and public opinion united had not sufficient force to restrain the greediness of powerful and unprincipled magistrates. They were common, as every crime will be common when the gain to which it leads is great, and the chance of disgrace and punishment small. But though common, they were universally ." "Lord Bacon," in Works, 4:194-195. allowed to be altogether odious. .

.

[108]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary to inarticulate, indeed unconscious, inner periodicities. this

if

demagogy,

is

Macaulay's letter to grandiosity:

it

elevated;

is

Ellis

has given

the

way

Yet

concreteness

of

to circumlocutory

"while the roof of a British palace affords an

ignominious shelter to the exiled heir of forty kings/'

a

is

roundabout and rather precious way of alluding to France's former king, Charles X, dislodged by the Revolution of 1830,

and

living at Castle

Lulworth

in Dorset. Considering the five

hundred bottles of Bordeaux that the

family had

royal

remembered to bring along to sweeten the bread of exile, Macaulay 's choice of adjective "ignominious" seems a little

—

strained.

9

But Macaulay was

decorum and in mundane details that might spoil

the resounding effect, not in

them. His paraphrase of

—

St.

interested in

Paul's familiar Epistle to the

Romans ("Now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed," 10 underscores Macaulay's sense that

most solemn

may

addressing himself to the

is

His sober statesman's warning

of occasions.

("Reform, that you

he

preserve"), which carried reminders

of the conservative authority of

Burke and the populist threat

of Cobbett, redoubles that solemnity.

The

History

like all

is

something rather

its

is

ingratiating,

Macaulay's work, but since with the History he

courting popularity with a to

different. It

tastes

new

public,

he adapts

within the limits of his convictions.

is

his devices

He

is

still

making points ("we must be constantly on our guard and must never forget"), but at a less feverish, less ominous .

temperature than in his speeches. obiter dicta

human

He

is

still

("In every experimental science.

being.

.

.

."),

but he

now

.

.

laying

down

... In

every

takes the time to prove, or

For the bottles of Bordeaux, see David H. Pinlcney, The French Revolution of 1830 (1972), p. 179. 9

10 Epistle to

the Romans, 13:11.

[

1Q 9]

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

at least elaborate, his assertions,

more

in

leisurely

employing the

He

fashion.

and

inescapably orotund,

still

is

single phrase, "that

was greater/' four times

it

in a single sentence to link his evidence into

Yet he

is

Whether

an iron chain.

sensitive to the perils of repetitiousness;

power

for

in

speeches

may make

his sentences are

taste of the reader.

11

But

for

monotonous it is

argument

to press his

what makes

boredom

in

or not depends

certain that

he

books.

on the

tried to avoid

monotony. That long sentence beginning, "It has often been found" has the contours of a sleigh ground,

it

picks

of two-

list

up momentum

as

it

ride.

slides

Starting

on

level

downhill with

its

and three-word phrases ("profuse expenditure,

heavy taxation"), further accelerates with a rushing sequence of single words

("seditions, persecutions"),

gently to a stop with a neat antithesis destroy

.

likes his

.

.

and then

coasts

("not been able to

able to create"). In general, though,

Macaulay

sentences to be short and perspicuous: "But at the

court Jeffreys was cordially welcomed." Macaulay

is,

of course,

describing Lord Jeffreys, notorious for the Bloody Assizes.

He

own

James had watched the circuit with interest and delight. In his drawing room and at his table he had frequently talked of the havoc which was making among his disaffected subjects with a glee at which the foreign ministers stood aghast. With his own hand he had penned accounts of what he facetiously called his Lord Chief Justice's campaign in the West. Some hundreds of rebels, His Majesty wrote to The Hague, had been condemned. Some of them had been hanged; more should be hanged; and the rest should be was

a judge after his master's

heart.

sent to the plantations. 12

11

"His sentences are monotonous and mechanical." Stephen, "Macaulay,"

p. 36412

Macaulay, History of England

[v], in

[no]

Works, 1:515.

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary Macaulay's youthful affection for Ciceronian antithesis and

Augustan balance did not diminish: "But the

made

the nation had been

ernment" 13 spirits of

one of

is

men

his

summaries; "To bend and break the

What

The

money

he had not the generosity to do at

own expense he determined one

vices of the gov-

gave him pleasure; and to part with his

gave him pain.

is

by the

fruitless

liberality of

to

do

his

at the expense of others"

one of King James

of his characterizations, this

14

II.

profusion of parallel clauses in Macaulay's writings

suggests that he perceived history as a succession of dilemmas,

debates,

and combats

—between

conscience

and ambition,

bravery and cowardice, Protestants and Catholics, Cavaliers

and Roundheads, Whigs and Tories, passive obedience and

manly esis.

rebelliousness.

For Macaulay, history was a vast antith-

His character sketches, which he scatters

across

History with a liberal hand, simulate the complexity of beings by wallowing in antithetical

13

traits.

15

And

his

human

those paired

Works, 1:234. [viii], in Works, 2:99. 15 In his early essay on history, Macaulay made some observations he did not always remember himself; but even had he remembered them, the pairing of contrary traits would have made his sketches psychologically inadequate: "In every human character and transaction there is a mixture of good and 14

evil:

Macaulay, History of England Macaulay, History of England

[iii],

in

a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a

watchful and searching scepticism with respect to the evidence of one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth. This species of misrepresentation abounds in the most valuable works of modern historians." "History," quoted in Sir Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay' s History of England (1938), p. 23. Macaulay's critics fastened on his

inability

to

draw character: "There are no half tones, no subtle

blending of different currents of thought," writes

Sir Leslie

inter-

Stephen. "It

is

partly for this reason that his descriptions of character are often so unsatis-

He

man

bundle of contradictions, because it enables him to obtain startling contrasts. To anyone given to analysis, these contrasts are actually painful." Stephen, "Macaulay," p. 365. And Lord Morley noted: "Macaulay, great though he was, did not find his way to the indwelling man of many of his figures." Morley, Recollections, 1:118.

factory.

likes to

represent a

as a

.

[in]

.

.

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

lists

he called the "declamatory disquisition/' 16 with which he

sets

out

first

the claim

of.

one, then those of the other party,

are simply antitheses writ large.

The declamatory

he had learned from ancient

a technique

collective aspirations or grievances not

disquisition,

historians, illustrates

by quoting the words

of historical individuals, but by constructing an embracing

summary. Macaulay begins the great Chapter 9 of his History which he will crowd with such historic action as the English

,

expedition of William and the flight of James, with an extensive examination of the English conscience, divided to

between

depths

those

who

feel

compelled

king no matter what his crimes, and those

under extreme circumstances rebellion

is

to

who

justified.

obey

its

the

argue that

Macaulay

strews this debate with another favorite device, the rhetori-

answer behind:

cal question that drags its

really

turned the

the right?

.

.

.

left

Was

cheek to the ruffian

there any

government

"What Christian who has smitten

in the

world under

which there were not to be found some discontented and factious

men who would

say,

and perhaps think, that

their

grievances constituted an extreme case?" 17

This narrative manner involves the reader, and

is

brilliantly

calculated to keep his interest at a continuously high pitch.

Macaulay's book

seem

is

long, but he vigorously labors to

short. In his essay

on

history,

an early

effort,

make

it

Macaulay

had lamented the decline of the narrative genre and praised "the art of interesting the affections and presenting pictures to the imagination."

He

practiced that art by

moving the

story along with apt quotations, changes of pace,

16

and

finely

Macaulay noted in his diary that his declamatory disquisitions were a modern counterpart to the orations of the ancient historians. See Journal, December 10, 1850, in Trevelyan, Macaulay, p. 547. 17 Macaulay, History of England [ix], in Works, 2:185-190, especially 187.

[112]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary contrived opening sentences, which point forward like arrows

"The

acquittal of the Bishops/' thus begins

Chapter

9,

"was

not the only event which makes the thirtieth of June 1688 a great epoch in history/'

18

Much

like

Ranke, he

likes to

hint at

what might have happened: recounting the trial of the seven bishops, which ended with their sensational acquittal, he observes, with disarming ingenuousness, "that they would be convicted it was scarcely possible to doubt." Stirred by the improbability of the actual outcome, the reader reads on.

Performing

all

Macaulay

these acrobatic rhetorical feats,

never forgets to be concrete. Following his

own

advice,

he

presents pictures to the imagination where later historians

might have offered footnotes, was scarcely

charts, or tables. In 1685,

a rural grandee/'

"There

he writes about the Tory op-

position to a standing army,

who

wrongs and insults suffered by himself, or by his father, at the hands of the parliamentary soldiers. One old Cavalier had seen half of his manor house blown up. The hereditary elms of another had been hewn down. A third could never go into his parish church without being reminded by the could not

tell a

story of

defaced scutcheons and headless statues of his ancestry, Oliver's redcoats

had once stabled

that

their horses there. 19

His declamatory disquisitions are models of concreteness,

and when Macaulay has nurses "It

its

details

was ten

a dramatic

with an experienced

o'clock.

The coach

moment

to relate,

storyteller's

he

affection.

of the Lieutenant of the

—

Tower was ready" 20 so begins his celebrated account of the execution of Monmouth. "When William caught sight of the 18 19

20

Macaulay, History of England Macaulay, History of England Macaulay, History of England

Works, 2:185. [iii], in Works, 1:230. [v], in Works, 1:486.

[ix],

in

Italics

mine.

STYLE valley of the

IN

HISTORY

Boyne, he could not suppress an exclamation

and gesture of delight" 21

—

so begins his equally celebrated

account of the battle of the Boyne. In tively

translates

even the

pictures that can be

Of

the old

baronial

fact,

Macaulay imagina-

social history of

comprehended without keeps

many had been

Chapter

3

into

effort:

shattered by the

cannon of Fairfax and Cromwell, and lay in heaps of ruin, overgrown with ivy. Those which remained had lost their martial character, and were now rural palaces of the aristocracy. The moats were turned into preserves of carp and pike. The mounds were planted with fragrant shrubs, through which spiral walks ran up to the summer houses adorned with mirrors and paintings. 22

Macaulay nobility,

is

here really analyzing the decline of the military

but the one long word in the passage

sable "aristocracy." Instead of bearing the

concepts, the reader can, as

it

is

the indispen-

burden of abstract

were, see the decline from the

martial to the pastoral, with the ivy on the ruins, the carp in the moats,

and the pictures on the

shrubs, he can even smell

walls.

With

the fragrant

it.

The Son

To

probe beneath these techniques to the feelings that underlie

them

is

to encounter expansiveness

ety, the first candid,

and

anxi-

even aggressive, the second con-

cealed and sublimated. Macaulay's versatility does not bespeak 21

22

Macaulay, History of England [xvi], in Works, 3:287. Macaulay, History of England [iii], in Works, 1:227.

[•Ml

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary incoherence; his style expresses the unity of his intentions and

though more reluctantly, the strenuousness of

Macaulay fervently wishes to

persuade by pleasing. This

Macaulay wrote

and

to please

a great deal,

his

—he

not

it is

to

make

book," he confided to his private notebook on

a tolerable

1854, "and

6,

the

ordering of

how

know how much

readers

little

the parts has

Whatever contrivance Macaulay chose and polished every phrase; he grants

23 the writer!"

cost

to adopt, his writing

He

emerges from an intense self-consciousness.

has wrought

not a

his reader

of the relief that stretches of plain writing

Thomas

and

just did

'What labour

wrestle with himself in public.

trouble

to persuade,

apparent ease of execu-

tion does not preclude continuing travail

February

his execution.

continuously hard work;

is

but

7

would provide.

Carlyle, himself scarcely a relaxed writer,

strenuousness plain. "Macaulay

is

saw

this

well for a while," he said

"but one wouldn't

in the late 1830s,

moment

live

have suggested, Macaulay

under Niagara." 24

While,

as

readers,

he does not pay them the ultimate compliment of

I

them make

letting

their

own

discoveries.

vincial hotel keeper of the old days,

to ask

Of

if

everything

is

and

—the

anxiety effects

inform first,

than

the

a

single

23

in

like a pro-

satisfactory.

Macaulay's

style

make up Macaulay's

—expansiveness

being more public in second,

Macaulay was expansive repetitiousness

Much

he constantly reappears

the two essential qualities that

temper

his style to his

fits

is

also

easier

its

origins

to

its

comprehend.

in a quite literal sense. If

adjoining sentences or

and

and

he avoided

monotony within

paragraph, he escaped neither vice in the longer

See Trevelyan, Macaulay, p. 613.

from Commonplace Book. See Sir T. Wemyss Reid, The Life, Letters, and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes, First Lord Houghton, 2 vols. (1890), 2:478. 24 Extracts

[•15]

STYLE he

stretches:

HISTORY

IN

never content to report only once an irony

is

that amuses him, or an interpretation he

That James

owed

II

his

the

is

throne to the Anglican

he mistreated once he became king, that

first

to offer.

clerics

whom

was the seven-

it

teenth-century practice to blame the misconduct of rulers on evil counsellors, are

his readers

with the insistence of a nervous hostess.

aware, regretfully, that the historian

must

made

But when he

side of

he did not

err

on the

He

was

from the

select

profusion of the past, and so he bravely erred,

upon

observations that Macaulay presses

his choices.

economy.

Macaulay, indeed, lengthened his history by shortening time span. In 1838,

he wanted

it

when he began

to reach

from 1688

to think

25

about

it

its

seriously,

to 1832, beginning with the

Crown

''Revolution which brought the

into

harmony with

the Parliament," and ending with the "Revolution which

brought the Parliament into harmony with the nation." 26

When

he published the

later, this

first

volumes of the History ten years

grand harmonious design

"I propose to write the history of

sentence,

down

still

dominated

his

mind:

England," runs the opening

"from the accession of King James the Second

which

to a time

within the

is

memory

of

men

still

These two volumes were already gluttonous in their consumption of space: apart from the two introductory chapters, which provide a glance backward, they covered only three

living."

years, the reign of

James

II.

and most famous chapter

And Chapter

in these

vance chronology in any way; "No

picture

it

3,

the most original

two volumes, did not

ad-

provided an extensive survey

and no

history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole." Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review, May 1828, quoted in Sir Charles Firth, Commentary on Macaulay' s History, p. 19. 26

Macaulay

.

.

.

to Napier, July 20, 1838;

[116]

quoted

in Clive,

Macaulay,

p. 478.

— Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary

—population,

of English society

The

in the year 1685.

popular taste

cities, classes,

chapter was intimately relevant, and

drama that King James stands very much on its own,

in a sense introductory, to the political

was about to launch, 27 but as the partial fulfillment of

as

he said

in

it

Macaulay's commitment to

treat,

an introductory passage, more than "battles and

sieges" or the "rise

and

fall

of administrations."

He

proposed

to "relate the history of the people as well as the history of

the government, to trace the progress of useful and ornamental describe the rise of religious sects

arts, to

literary taste, to portray the

and not

to pass

this

and from the

among

manners of successive generations

dress, furniture, repasts,

ments." 28 In view of

which,

all

it

is

like

He

and public amuse-

commitment he made to perspective of modern social history ambitious

branches of history, has doubtless advanced

the most since Macaulay's day, Chapter

promise.

of

by with neglect even the revolutions which

have taken place in

his reader,

and the changes

returns to

its

3

did not

fulfill

his

chief preoccupations only rarely

an overture whose themes make only sporadic ap-

pearances in the opera for which

it

event, he did not live to balance

was written it

in

any

with a similar chapter

more recent

surveying England's society in

— and

times. It

is

not

complete, and far from adequately analytical, though, looking

backward instead of forward,

it

is

the occasional forays that David tory,

Hume made

and an advance beyond the

Voltaire had offered.

With

all

an immense leap beyond

its

brilliant failings,

into social hisintuitions

Chapter

3

that per-

mitted social history to become a serious discipline, and

27

The

political

forcefully stressed in

Macaulay's social history has been most an interesting pamphlet by Mark A. Thomson, Macaulay

relevance

of

(i959). 28 Macaulay, History of England

[i],

in

[117]

Works, 1:2-3.

STYLE the measure of

its

success

historians to raise— even

But whatever our this

IN is

HISTORY

the question

about the chapter

compelled

it

itself.

judgment, the point here

final

later

that

is

chapter did nothing to speed up the pace of Macaulay's

down. The great

suc-

and the enormous success of the two

vol-

History and served instead to slow

Chapter

cess of

umes with the revise his

3,

it

Macaulay

history-reading public, induced

scheme, and to study, with even greater diligence

than he had planned, the pamphlets and the battle the reign of William

volume

fifth

1861;

it

to

III.

He a

never got beyond his hero.

fragmentary account of the

days and the death in 1702 of as it was, the history retained

'When

to the end.

his

The

was published posthumously

of his History

concluded with

sites of

in

last

Dutch William. Incomplete

Macaulay's celebrated specificity

remains were laid out,

it

was found

that he wore next to his skin a small piece of black silk riband.

The

lords in waiting ordered

a gold ring

and

it

to

be taken

a lock of the hair of

off.

Mary/' 29

A

It

contained

history once

designed to span a century and a half had contracted, by ex-

panding, into a history covering every inch of seventeen years.

This was the reward, and the penalty, of expansiveness. Macaulay's expansiveness also set the tone of his History.

Lord Melbourne

is

reported to have said that he wished he

could be "as cocksure about anything as Macaulay everything,"

Walter

while

complained

Bagehot

is

about

that

in

Macaulay's writings 'You rarely come across anything which is

not decided.

.

.

."

This, he added,

was rapidly becoming familiar, tory."

Macaulay does seem

to

that tempts skeptical readers to

knows. 29 30

He

"is

making

a charge that

hardly the style for his-

know

—

everything

a posture

wonder how much he

describes the thoughts

and

really

feelings of his char-

Macaulay, History of England [xxv], in Works, 4:556. Both quoted in Firth, Commentary on Macaulay's History, pp. 54-55.

[118]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary acters as

1688

is

though he had been inside them: Sunderland

haunted by 'Visions of an innumerable crowd cover-

Tower

ing

in

Hill

and shouting with savage

of the apostate, of a scaffold

hung with

joy at the sight

Burnet

black, of

reading the prayer for the departing"; 31 William of Orange, reflecting

on the foreign policy of Louis XIV, "smiled

in-

wardly at the misdirected energy of his foe/' 32 Macaulay's sweeping, magisterial assertions tolerate no exceptions.

When

Mary of Modena, and Princess of Denmark down

the public learns that James IFs queen, is

pregnant,

"From

the Prince

and laundresses nobody alluded

to porters

birth without a sneer/' 33

to the

promised

Nobody? Macaulay the

historian

seems to be enjoying ubiquity

as well as omniscience.

This manner does Macaulay a as

Sir

was doubtless,

disservice. It

Charles Firth has observed, the secret of his public

success. It permitted

him

to realize,

and

greatly surpass, his

expressed ambition to "produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel

of

young

ladies."

authorities,

but

it

34

which has the same

principally addressing his work.

and of

tables

His cavalier and casual way of citing his origin,

may

did not trouble the reader to

simplicities

on the

his

liberal

novels and diaries and road

irritate

whom

the scholar,

Macaulay was

Yet the accuracy of allusions

to

his lofty

pamphlets and

maps was guaranteed by an im-

mense and voracious study of obscure sources, unpublished documents, and earlier historians. 35 Most writers have read less

than they get credit

for;

Macaulay had read more.

31

Macaulay, History of England [ix], in Works, 2:225. Macaulay, History of England [ix], in Works, 2:232. 33 Macaulay, History of England [viii], in Works, 2:121. 34 Quoted in Trevelyan, Macaulay, p. 621. 35 For details, see Firth, Commentary on Macaulay' s History, chaps. 4, 5. Macaulay's critics, including Sir Leslie Stephen, readily acknowledged his diligence and his learning. 32

["9]

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

The confident manner was the way to the public's heart. The first two volumes .sold 13,000 sets in four months; volumes 36 In three and four, twice that number in half the time. about a quarter of a century, Longmans sold more than 140,000 sets of the History in Great Britain alone. This

meant an average twenty million of history,

He

—though

an unprecedented figure for a work

Macaulay reached

a relatively small reading public.

could therefore write for people he, in a sense, knew and

whom

to

of 6,000 sets a year for a population of over

he did not have

to explain everything,

he loved to explain everything. Popular

as

much though

he intended

his

History to be, he could presuppose relatively cultivated and

who caught literary allusions and

well-informed readers

histori-

instances without needing the prompting of a conde-

cal

scending footnote. But, while Macaulay found his general reading public im-

mensely supportive, a

narrow

his expansiveness rested, as it were,

social base.

triumphantly, he

made

Somewhat

uneasily, but, in the end,

himself a part of England's intellectual

aristocracy; his certainty, his sense that

on

on the surface so

he was on the right

unruffled, reflects

track, in the right place,

and

not alone. Macaulay could hear reassuring supportive echoes wherever he turned.

and is

He was

influential army, all of

a meritorious officer in a select

whose generals were

cousins. This

not a farfetched metaphor. In nineteenth-century England,

intellectual leadership families.

A

was the business of a few extended

few ramified clans translated the

classics,

edited

the journals, headed the colleges, reformed the schools, ad-

vanced the sciences, and wrote the laws. There was some circulation within this elite,

and much adroit renewal: the

leading families rarely let a promising recruit get away.

36

See Trevelyan, Macaulay, p. 622.

[120]

They

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary co-opted him, or her, by marriage.

The

march

shock troops. 37

in

England, and these were

Thomas Babington Macaulay guard, carrying the

His

flag.

its

intellect

was on the

struggled to be in the van-

life

is

a splendid instance of

the careers open to the talented from the middling classes.

He came from

a respectable family of exemplary piety, with

few connections, and average income

been

less

absorbing,

Macaulay made racy,

his

its

—indeed,

had

its

piety

income would have been more ample.

way

into the favor of the

Whig

aristoc-

though not without qualms and hesitations, and was

created Baron Macaulay in 1857, for his literary attainments.

He remained

a bachelor,

but

beloved

his

ried Charles, later Sir Charles, Trevelyan,

a

distinguished

Charles'

son,

public servant

and

Hannah marwho was to become sister

civil

service

reformer.

Macaulay's nephew, George Otto, later

Sir

George, Trevelyan, became a fine modern historian and his uncle's

first

Macaulay Trevelyan, became right

named George famous historian in his own

biographer; Sir George's son, aptly a

and master of Trinity College, Cambridge, which

his

M. Trevelyan Mrs. Humphry Ward,

even more famous great-uncle had attended. G. married the daughter of the novelist

who was Matthew

Arnold's niece, thus joining the Macaulays

who,

to the Arnolds

in turn,

formed connections with the

Huxleys and the Penroses. It

was a clan but not a

individualists. fields

—

Many

of

sect, a brittle

troop of high-strung

them achieved eminence

in

their

in economics, in literature, in art criticism, in govern-

For the march of intellect, see R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 1790-1848: Literacy and Social Tension (1955), p. 13. About the intellectual aristocracy, discussed in this paragraph and below, I have learned much from Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to his Time (1952), especially p. 3; and from Annan's splendid 37

essay,

to

"The

Intellectual Aristocracy," in Studies in Social History:

G. M. Trevelyan,

ed.

J.

H. Plumb (1955), pp. 241-287.

[12,]

A

Tribute

STYLE ment,

less in

HISTORY

IN

—and they

the church, but impressively in history

did not always agree.

Nor were they

and

Whigs

a foretaste of

of Macaulay's

him an immortality. Macaulay

But they

persuasion, or of any persuasion. intelligent audience

all

offered

longed for immediate popularity. But, sounding

he liked to

caress

in

his

mind

like Stendhal,

the applause of the ages:

"Corragio," he wrote in his Journal in 1850, "and think of a.d.

2850." 38 Unlike Stendhal though, Macaulay found his

public in his lifetime.

understanding of the public,

At home

in his

world, sure of the

and the approval of the

elite

Macaulay was naturally confident about

his

larger

work and

hopeful for the future.

That was the public Macaulay. There was also a private Macaulay, and he is far more elusive. 39 To the extent that his formal style was meant to protect, rather than express, his character,

when

it

style

gives his biographer little help

becomes

a

mask

the study of style reaches

limits,

its

his

Macaulay.

instead of being confident,

it is

at this point,

rather than remaining a face, that

becomes indispensable. Yet structive for the private

—

it

and independent evidence

style It

is

not wholly unin-

becomes

indiscreet

proclaims confidence.

when,

It gives

involuntary testimony with such favorite words as "voluptuary": he characterized himself,

if

unwittingly, in character•40

izing the Earl of Dorset as an "intellectual voluptuary."38 Journal, 39 It was

January 12, 1850, in Trevelyan, Macaulay, p. 536. only after his nephew G.O. Trevelyan's masterly life and letters appeared in 1876 that the private side of Macaulay's temper first emerged. "No reader of Macaulay's works," notes Sir Leslie Stephen, "will be surprised at the manliness which is stamped no less plainly upon them than upon his whole career. But few who were not in some degree behind the scenes would be prepared for the tenderness of nature which is equally conspicuous." Stephen, "Macaulay," p. 343. "Manliness" is a term others also applied to him, including Trevelyan and Taine. 40 See Macaulay, History of England [viii], in Works, 2:129. For other 7

uses see

two passages

in

Chapter

9, in

Works, 2:193-194.

[122]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary Perhaps the best opening to the inner Macaulay I

is

the point

have already made: Macaulay was a performer anxious to

please.

Now,

addresses,

if

the person he wanted to please most, unconsciously,

all

the time,

is

Clive, in his penetrating biography of the

whom

he

John

his father.

young Macaulay,

both begins and concludes with the historian's father, and justly so.

Zachary Macaulay was prominent in what Sydney

Smith, the wit, called the

Clapham

sect, a

party of earnest

Evangelicals devoted to the religion of the heart and the

improvement of the world. William Wilberforce, the was

slavery agitator,

was small,

its

its

anti-

most famous member. The group

influence enormous.

The Claphamites

relied

on arguments that plain Christians, weary and suspicious of theological refinements, could understand: the experience of

conversion, the primacy of Scripture, the sincerity of belief,

They occupied strategic posts in English some were Members of Parliament; some were pros-

the need for action. society:

perous merchants; some, like Zachary Macaulay, were respected public servants.

Tom

sect, early familiar

and

early

in the

with the good, sober talk of

imbued wtih the heavy

was a precocious his

Macaulay grew up

midst of

men

this

of affairs

obligations of sainthood.

child, a notable prodigy, anxiously loved

mother, adored by his

sisters,

acquaintances. His father loved

and spoiled by

him

in his

He by

his astonished

own Claphamite

way; not without affection, he undertook to keep his son's

ego within bounds

—

it

would not do

for sinful Christians to

be proud.

The Claphamites' devout, unwearied quest for self-improvement entailed close and candid attention to the imperfections of others. This

was not cant or self-indulgence:

criticisms

were

unsparing but mutual, and to proffer them responsibly was

among

the Evangelicals' highest duties.

[123]

Young Macaulay

felt

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

the lash of paternal admonition

he did not dare

—and

to retaliate. In 1824, already a

Tom

too often. As an apprentice

might have smitten the

Evangelical, he a dutiful son,

all

Macaulay delivered

a

other's

in fact did not wish

young man

of great promise,

powerful oration against the

slave trade before the Society for the Mitigation

which

of Slavery, It

was

father

a great occasion; the

and Abolition

had founded the year

before.

Claphamites were there in

force,

member of the royal family consented to grace platform. The speech was a triumph, a foretaste of the

and even the

his

cheek; as

a

parliamentary speeches Macaulay would deliver only a few years later.

father

had

Applause was prolonged and enthusiastic, and the tears of pride in his eyes.

But

as

the two walked

home together, Zachary Macaulay told his son, "By the way, Tom, you should be aware that when you speak in the presence of royalty, you should not fold your arms." 41

That

this sort

of severity was hard for the father to sustain seems likely;

that a rebuff at such a

the son

is

as parental It

is

the

moment was

a devastating affront to

This was sadistic propriety masquerading

certain.

wisdom.

way

of the world that

those significant figures

whom

men

try hardest to please

they please the

victories bring little satisfaction; repeated failures

reiterated effort, to the

moment

least.

encourage

of ultimate gratification or

ultimate resignation. As Macaulay grew up, went to bridge,

and entered the world, he continued

father, to seek his elusive applause. After faith,

his

Macaulay moderated

father's sake,

his

Easy

he

Cam-

to pacify his

lost his religious

language in controversy for

stopped for a time sending contributions

to a high-spirited quarterly because 41

its

tone offended his father,

See Clive, Macaulay, p. 72. For a slightly different account of the dent, see the appendix in Trevelyan, Macaulay, pp. 721-722.

[124]

inci-

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary was desolated when he

failed in

mathematics

because he feared his father's reproaches

husband

event, begged her

Even

while.

he was

after

Cambridge

—

his mother, in

any

to spare the son at least for a

he had been

in his thirties,

at

in politics for

some

when

years,

Macaulay would take positions

in

which

he did not quite believe because he hoped they would make

He

Zachary Macaulay happy.

Hannah

his sister

felt

in 1831, that

himself fortunate, he told

he had managed to soften

ambition "into a kind of domestic feeling/' This, he wrote,

owe

"I

to

my

always took in

dear mother, and to the interest which she

my

childish successes.

the gratification of those

with the gratification of

From my

whom I love my own thirst

two have become inseparably joined letter tile

It

has been associated for fame, until the

my

in

demonstrates that with Macaulay,

earliest years,

as

mind." 42 This

with others, infan-

patterns survived, suitably transmogrified, in the man.

makes plain that among

was easy to

please.

What

his intimate audience, his it

leaves unsaid

is

mother most

that the

important target of his desperate anxiety was his father.

One was

powerful ingredient in Macaulay's inner

his yearning for his father's approval.

life,

then,

Another ingredient,

quite as powerful, was his passionate love for two of his

younger

Hannah and Margaret. Even remembering effusiveness of much nineteenth-century cor-

sisters,

the unbridled

respondence, the profuse employment of extravagant epithets,

and the easy equating of

affection

with love,

we cannot

escape the conclusion that Macaulay's feelings for his

were extraordinary in essence.

and

his

48

He

their

called his love for

intensity

them

and

erotic

his "greatest

"strongest feeling"; he addressed

their

enjoyment"

Hannah

42

July 6, 1831, quoted in Trevelyan, Macaulay, pp. 165-166.

43

See Clive, Macaulay, p. 267.

[125]

in

sisters

as

"my

STYLE dear

my

girl,

told her

my

sister,

how he

HISTORY

IN

darling

—my own sweet

and

friend/'

pined "for your society, for your voice, for

your caress." While he bravely steeled himself for the inevitable

day that

his sisters

would marry, when they did, he

suffered

bouts of depression resembling breakdowns; in the midst of his gratifying political activities

and arduous

legal labor,

he

wept, professed that his heart was broken, and declared that,

when Hannah married

Trevelyan, "the work of

twenty years" had "vanished in This

is

not the voice of a

but of one bor.

To

aim

its

who

if

man

—

has steered his sexuality into a sheltered har-

—

it

was a love inhibited in

one was Byron. But why should

unless, of course,

gratifying

month." 44

deficient in sexual passion,

love one's sister was safe;

Macaulay pour

—

a single

more than

kind of ungratified

his passion into this

all

incest?

At

this point, conjecture

must supply

the want of adequate evidence. Macaulay' s love for his father

was a prolonged of an

impregnable

fortress

his

punctuated by desertions from

by "idle reading," and by sloppy

so impossible a task, Significantly,

but protracted siege

strain, the intermittent

sister

Hannah

recalled later

Macaulay's faults "were peculiarly those that

no patience with." 45 for

mother included

his

gression;

lavish

On

large

portions

intimate care during illnesses he

father that

it

father

that

had

his share,

but

emerged most

44

of

voluptuous

re-

the motherly touch, her

recall

sake of her closeness. 46 Ambivalence

his

my

life

the other hand, Macaulay's love

he would fondly

and Macaulay had

in

attire.

it

is

welcomed

for

the

the lot of humanity,

was

visibly,

in his relation to

though

rarely into

For these passages, see Clive, Macaulay, pp. 266-272, 281, 284-285. See Trevelyan, Macaulay, p. 48; William A. Madden, "Macaulay's Style," in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. George Levine and William Madden (1968), p. 15m. 46 On this point see Clive, Macaulay, p. 34. 45

[126]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary open consciousness. Behind the screen of the was rage and,

affection there

Another

son's poignant

think, rivalry.

I

bit of evidence adds

mosaic of Macaulay's character:

the

a significant piece to

his volubility.

a great talker, and, like other great talkers, a

was given to one-sided conversations and

Macaulay was

bad

listener.

He

rapid-fire delivery.

Sydney Smith was once asked how he had spent the night.

"Oh, I

my

horrid, horrid,

was chained to

a rock

dear fellow!" he replied. "I dreamt

and being talked

to death

Martineau and Macaulay/' 47 Others had

When

waking hours.

their

on Macaulay

in the History,

in his journal that

Quakers waited

48

of easy jokes,

Macaulay complacently noted

he had completely routed them: "They

had absolutely nothing literally.

a delegation of

nightmare in

to protest against his malicious caricature of

William Penn

take

this

to say," a

remark we are entitled to

But the compulsive is

a

wounded

talker,

though the target

being, driven by his neurosis

either to blurt out dreadful secrets, or to get in a

wise before he

is

interrupted.

I

to him. His offerings in despair,

word edge-

would suggest that the

orator was unconsciously terrified that

and half

by Harriet

no one was

had been spurned and

great

listening

so, half in

hope

he made them over and over again. The

only arena in which Macaulay could permit himself to be a voluptuary

47

p.

was

See R. K.

in the

Webb,

realm of the

Harriet

intellect.

Martineau:

A

Victorian Radical

(i960),

11. 48 Firth,

owe

Commentary on Macaulay' s

this malicious

History, 272-273, to which

reading of Macaulay's words.

[127]

I

also

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

The Liberal Macaulay, psychological needs and

Forhappily coincided. No one wholly escapes least of all

Macaulay.

What loomed

social

realities

his early past,

large for

Macaulay

the young boy, and what was symbolized by the heroic stature of his pious and exigent father, was the Evangelicalism of the

Clapham

As

sect.

he extricated

his religious beliefs faded, as

himself from the mire of biblicism, he retained the energy of the Claphamites, their detestation of evil desire to aid

good

history as a

combat between two

and

their

solemn

causes. In fact, his dramatic perception of clearly delineated

forces

translated the Evangelicals' view of things into secular terms. Similarly, to celebrate progress in history,

and

to insure

49

its

future advance, was to translate early injunctions into mature

conduct.

Such

translations are

commonly

called a secular religion,

most

in-

congruous phenomena, merits the historian's suspicion.

A

but

which has been used

this term,

to explain the

fervent conviction that emerges after a religious belief has

gone may be

its

functional replacement;

it

may

give the sense

of exaltation, the certainty of salvation, or the pleasure of ritual that the

now

discarded faith once gave. But the two

may be independent

of one another; and, even

psychological equivalents,

which half of the term phasis. Normally,

secular has

49

Amid

its

it is

own

it

remains a

secular or religion

religion that has

claims.

What may

they are

question just

—deserves

em-

borne the weight. But

matter

is

not that a set

G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of 1953), retains its vitality on this and many other matters.

a large literature,

an Age (2nd edn.,

difficult

if

[128]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary of convictions resembles, or even replaces, a religion with irrational tenacity

and

its

its

resistance to empirical evidence, but

that

it

permits a scientific appraisal of the world. Seculariza-

tion

is

never a small step. 50

With Macaulay, certainly, the emphasis must be on the adjective. The precise contours of his religious views have not been

fully

but he obviously detested

traced,

enthusiasm, rejected miracles and the

literal

religious

inspiration or

even the symbolic supremacy of the Bible, and softened the stern doctrine of original sin into the anthropological

monplace of human his beliefs

fallibility.

—understandably

so.

Macaulay was

The

com-

reticent about

coarse candor and wide-

spread freethinking of the eighteenth century had been placed, decades before the accession of Victoria, by a

emphasis on respectability and

among

a

re-

new

measure of public piety

the ruling orders. It was not until 1858, the year before

Macaulay's death, that the House of

member

Commons

—Lionel de Rothschild—unable

admitted a

to take the oath, pre-

viously required, that he was a Christian.

And

it

was only

in

the following year that Darwin's shattering Origin of Species

Before

appeared.

common

then

it

had been neither prudent nor

to profess oneself an agnostic, let alone an atheist,

and even

later

it

remained

rare.

Lacking public professions,

must depend on the tenor of his philosophical remark and that one

the student of Macaulay

work, and on a rare

marginal

—that

—

has been drafted to do heavy duty for the

understanding of Macaulay: "But," the eighteenth-century skeptic Conyers

Middleton had written,

think freely; to practise what 50

my

is

"if to live strictly

and

moral and to believe what

is

"Rhetorics and Politics in the French Revolution," in Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment (1964), pp. 162-187, especially pp. 165-170. As my late friend Henry L. Roberts once wrote: "It must be admitted that a 'secular religion' is not an altogether obvious entity." Russia and America (1956), p. 19.

See

essay

[129]

STYLE

be consistent with the sincere profession of Christi-

rational, anity,

then

sors."

Underlining the

I

"Haec

note,

HISTORY

IN

myself like one of

shall acquit

critical

passage,

pher amounted to

was

and

truest profes-

Macaulay added

est absoluta et perfecta philosophi vita."

Macaulay, then, the absolute and perfect

practice

its

strict

living

and

rational belief. If that

a Christian.

But

not, and,

it is

life

free

For

of the philoso-

thinking,

moral

Macaulay

Christianity,

is

a

reasonable to conclude,

it is

neither was Macaulay. 51

While Macaulay did not make a god of God, he did not make a god of progress either. His confidence in progress was grounded

optimism.

in realities that offered daily tributes to

Whether one accepted Macaulay's definition of what constitutes progress or not, few even among devout and sophisticated Christians desirable.

—had

—

any question that progress

And once one

is

accepted his definition, there could

be no doubt that the evidence Macaulay's

itself

for progress

style fits into this progress

was overwhelming.

The

with ease.

ampli-

tude of his periods, his accumulative prose, aptly mirrors the

improvements

all

time for reading. gests

around him.

It

Its

very leisureliness

breathes and presupposes opulence. It sug-

comfortable chairs, warming

China

tea, efficient servants,

dends.

In

this

demands

expansive

Macaulay's History a

expensive slippers,

long weekends, and high

divi-

money was

and

culture,

fitting

fires,

companion

time,

to the long novel,

52 For Macaulay, the the long poem, and the long dinner.

r>1

The

passage from Middleton has been

much

quoted;

I

am

citing

it

from

add that Macaulay when challenged at a public meeting at Leeds, angrily told his questioners, "Gentlemen, I am a Christian." Trevelyan, Macaulay, p. 204. My interpretation stands. 52 Taine was moved to similar metaphors. "Seated in an arm chair, with our feet on the fender, we see little by little as we turn over the leaves of ." History of the book, an animated and thoughtful face arise before us. English Literature, trans. H. van Laun (1873), p. 627.

Clive, Macaulay, p. 489.

It

is

fair

to

.

h3°]

.

— Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary message of progress was more than a psychological weapon, it

was also a report on contemporary

history.

Macaulay was not wholly naive about the

signs of the times.

G. M. Young has called him an Augustan, 53 and the implicahe was,

tion that

much

as in his

speaking and writing, a son of the eighteenth century,

style of is

in his style of thinking as

highly suggestive. In decisive ways, Macaulay was not a

beginning but an end. But he was heir to more than the

He was

English Augustans.

Western En-

heir also to the

lightenment, both in his belief in progress and in his reserve.

The

philosophes, as

I

my

noted in

essay

on Gibbon,

sur-

with caution, and believed that

rounded

their confidence

progress

must somehow be paid

for.

Macaulay

his speeches, his essays, his History, that it

is

all

reiterated, in

better to be

cultivated than barbaric, better to live in cities than in hovels,

better to religion.

have the truths of science than the fancies of

But "rude"

ages,

candor and spontaneity sipate.

he acknowledged, had advantages

— that advanced cultures

Gains to reason meant

forward march of civilization forever.

traveler

54

A new

may

visit

is

losses

not

tend to

dis-

And

the

poetry.

for

likely to

go on unchecked

may come, and some future now the monuments of Western

barbarism

what

are

greatness to see only their ruins.

But these were shadows bright. life,

As Macaulay

in a

insists in his

despite grievous setbacks,

ing. In the

Macaulay

panoramic picture

famous peroration

essentially

History and often elsewhere,

had improved and to

Chapter

proffers this conviction in the

53

3

is

improv-

of his History,

most concentrated

Young, Victorian England, p. 8n. John Clive rejects this designation, as I do, though for other reasons; he sees Macaulay as being far more sympathetic to the Romantics than has generally been acknowledged. Clive, Macaulay, p. 79. 54 See above, p. 50; and Clive, Macaulay, pp. 77-78, 107.

[131]

STYLE He

form.

HISTORY

IN

deplores the inclination to imagine "the England of

the Stuarts as a

which we

live."

more pleasant country than the England in Nostalgia is human; it springs from mankind's

we

"natural impatience of the state in which

which disposes us times.

to

we were

because, "if

source

a

is

of bygone

the happiness

exaggerate

This very discontent

actually are,"

improvement,

of

perfectly satisfied with the present,

we

should cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the future." Yet, natural as

mirage.

nostalgia

it is,

Minds have softened and matured; and

extirpated teachers,

and

life

jailers

is

an

illusion, a

diseases have

has been lengthened; fathers, husbands,

have grown

far

more humane; games and

politics alike are infinitely less coarse

under Victoria than they

had been under William. Most impressive, the poor in

number and

been

are fewer

better off than ever before. "Every class doubt-

has gained largely by this great moral change: but the

less

class

which has gained most

is

the poorest, the most de-

pendent, and the most defenceless." 55

Much

as

Macaulay loved the

knew them, he found himself

classics,

in the

and intimately

camp

of the

whatever battles the ancients and moderns were

He

derided

the

fashion

of

praising

as

he

moderns

in

still

ancient poets

fighting.

simply

because they were ancient, and he invidiously compared the poetry of Plato with the philosophy of Bacon. Indeed, Bacon was, in Macaulay's eyes, a decisive turning point in history.

He had

mankind

to

human

created a system of thought that permitted

glimpse the power of practical thought

unlimited potential of reason, reasonably employed, to

not just a

life

5

">

little prettier

Macaulay, History of England

Works, 6:135-245,

make

but a great deal better. In a vast

views, see "Southey's Colloquies," in in

—the

Works,

332-333. For similar Works, 5:330-368; and "Lord Bacon,"

[iii],

in

1:

especially the second, analytical half of the essay.

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary essay

on Bacon

—almost

a

book

—that added up

to over 50,000

more the benefits of health, faster communica-

words, Macaulay in 1837 rehearsed once true philosophy: longer tions, in short, greater

life,

better

power over nature.

Macaulay cheerfully acknowledged the

materialistic edge

to this kind of appraisal. Bacon's philosophy principally benefited

what

side

of

cultivated

life.

promising

It

men

were pleased to disdain

—or

improved existence without producing

—Utopia.

It

sustained the body, even

if it

perfect the spirit. Yet, as the essay itself testifies,

by no means underestimated the force of the it

industrial revolutions. But, fond as

engine.

But there

the Stoics

is

and

Macaulay was of the

father,

man

of the

than a steam-

a grander object

are steam-engines.

yet to be born."

Macaulay

scientific

he was even fonder of the offspring. "The wise

no doubt, be

did not

spirit: after all,

was Bacon's philosophy that had fathered the

Stoics would,

low

as the

And

the wise

man

His choice of metaphor

anything but accidental; Macaulay,

far

the machine, unhesitatingly celebrates

of is

from being afraid of

it.

He

recognized and

welcomed the transforming power of the railway; its fatal impact on the stagecoach and its invasion of the English landscape did not give him pause. If it had harmful effects, they were consequent not upon the invention of the machine but

upon the unregulated activities of the financiers; Macaulay spoke in behalf of governmental regulation of the rather

railways in order to protect a national asset.

56

Surveying the

Macaulay compared it unfavorsystem a system more modern, more

archaic English legal system,

ably with the industrial

—

aesthetically satisfying than the antique

which Englishmen were 56

Speech on the Ten Hour

especially

tried Bill,

in

May

362.

[133]

jumble of

court. 22,

"Can

rules

under

there be

a

1846, in Works, 8:360-376,

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

stronger contrast/' he asked rhetorically, "than that which

between the beauty, the completeness, the speed, the precision with which every process is performed in our facexists

and the awkwardness, the rudeness, the slowness, the

tories,

uncertainty of the apparatus by which offenses are punished

and right vindicated?" 57

No wonder

Macaulay should

find

the Great Exhibition of 1851 dazzling and exceedingly roman-

no wonder that Ruskin should

tic;

But glorious and palpable not find

it

be automatic.

to

Evangelical that liberal that

be

men

was

He

joined the

is

the

name

demand

this principled posture, rather

Whig:

to remain."

Macaulay did

made Macaulay proudly

con-

Whig;" he

told

"I entered public life a

Whig

am

I

deter-

But he immediately added that he used

"in no narrow sense." It defined, not loyalty to a

or a favorite statesman, not even to a party for

sake,

but to a set of values that

rule,

corrupt politics, religious intolerance,

were

all

unmitigated

some

ture of the

evils,

this party

and

it

regrettable lapses,

characteristic vein,

Whigs

for the past

was the Whigs who had, opposed them

Whig

In his

And now,

Stuarts,

and the Hanoverians, the Whigs remain the

Whigs

as

is

pos-

the knot

policy together

humane

"To

all.

two centuries and more; the

string of

endeavor.

own

inhumane laws

Macaulay enumerates the progressive

that securely holds the pearls of

their purpose:

its

embodied. Arbitrary

phrase "It was that party/' uttered seven times,

57

can

it

than social

book

despite

of the

necessary but

the electors at Edinburgh in 1839, "and a

mined

naive.

should do good to the confidence of the

origins or social ambition, that

himself a

Macaulav

as progress was,

they can do good: effort

effective. It

fess

find

on

under Elizabeth, the faithful to

of the nineteenth century

Speech on Parliamentary Reform, June

[*34]

5,

a

1831, in Works, 8:32.

we

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary owe

that the

it

House

Commons

of

The

has been purified.

abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of colonial slavery,

the extension of popular education, the mitigation of the rigour of the penal code,

and of that

party,

I

all, all

repeat,

I

were effected by that party;

am

member." 58

a

It

was

elec-

tioneering talk of this sort, which he blithly imported into his essays

Stephen

and into passages of

to observe that

Whig, but fools/'

pretty

his History, that

moved

Macaulay "was not only

much convinced

that

all

Leslie

a thorough

but Whigs were

59

For the debater and reformer,

for the historian it presented pitfalls

pelled Macaulay,

mitigate as only

had

this stance

advantages;

its

hard to avoid.

com-

It

much against his conscious intention, to human the failings of those he admired

while he pilloried as detestable the failings of those he detested.

60

His historical sympathy was by no means always

dormant; on

many

occasions

susceptibility to paradox,

made him

notice

liberal

his

sense

of

justice,

and sheer immensity of information

what he might have

liked to overlook. His

long essay on Bacon, for one, dwells with almost painful relish

on Bacon's cruelty and corruption, and excuses them

not one

bit.

device from

Yet often enough

(to

Mommsen) Macaulay

perception that the

New

borrow an anachronistic falls

into the error

York Times detected

in

its

of cor-

respondents covering the Republican Convention of 1952, 58 59

Speech at Edinburgh, May 29, 1839, in Works, 8:158-159. "Macaulay, Thomas Babington," in Dictionary of National Biography

(edn., 1949), 12:411. 60

At the same time, Macaulay found

historians

—other

historians

—who

were "advocates" thoroughly unsatisfactory on that ground. He criticized Hume as an "accomplished advocate," and he used this term of opprobrium for a practice he himself was guilty of: extenuating the failings of his own -

side

and

exercising great severity against the other.

on Macaulay' s History,

p. 23.

I>35]

See Firth,

Commentary

STYLE when

HISTORY

IN

they regularly called the managers of Eisenhower's

campaign the "Eisenhower organization/' and the managers of Taft's

campaign the "Taft machine/' The Whigs were

Macaulay's Eisenhower, the Tories his Taft.

Whiggism

the entire range of Macau-

left its tracks across

At the very time that Ranke was proclaiming the historicist principle that would oblige historians to see every epoch as equally close to God, Macaulay saw the past partly as a prologue to the present, a time to lay's historical exploration.

away from and improve upon. What imperiled his historical work was not so much that he made partisan moral

get

judgments, but that he

once again, for distance

it is

and

and, as a drama,

made moral judgments

at

Yet,

all.

important to recognize Macaulay's capacity

The

objectivity. it

was interesting

past was a moral drama, for

its

own

sake.

No

reader

of his history can miss his noble, and often strikingly success-

himself to the seventeenth century,

ful,

efforts to transport

and

to take his readers with

again,

and

Macaulay

assesses

served,

visualizes events

them with

torian reader,"

him on

its

his voyage.

through the eyes of the past

standards. "Like Macaulay's Vic-

one recent student of Macaulay's

"what we remember when we

memorable

style has ob-

finish the

'going back,' the displacement in time,

events the most

Again and

aspects of

and the

book

is

re-living of

which have

This

testimonial

to

Macaulay's

valuable precisely because

from 61

a critic

intel-

61

history-mindedness

displacement in time and reliving of events is

to

little

do with the history of England's material, moral, and lectual progress."

the

it

is

—

for

precisely that

forms part of an indictment,

convinced that Macaulay's way of "losing himself

Madden, "Macaulay's

Style," p.

150.

[136]

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary in the past"

is

the product of a psychological malaise, the

studied avoidance of troubling emotional problems which

Macaulay "chose not driven by

demons

confront." 62

to

That Macaulay was

of denial, that his style functioned

other things as a suit of armor against intolerable a proposition to which

But we cannot have

it

much

have devoted

I

both ways:

realities, is

of this essay.

used to take what

critics

they considered Macaulay's present-mindedness as a

now

of his political passions; critics are

Whether Whig

or neurotic, Macaulay,

This has been so for a long time;

it

of his fear of

life.

seems, cannot win.

back

as far

symptom

taking what they

symptom

consider his past-mindedness as a

among

as

Gladstone,

readers have taken Macaulay's style as a mirror of his defects

rather than of his virtues.

63

submit that a more generous estimate

I

would be more

just.

Macaulay,

I

is

possible

was right to think

think,

of himself as something better than a professional

He

was, in the largest sense of that difficult

liberal.

Whig.

modern word,

with

to his decency. all his

pation,

The

considerable dialectical

removal of Jewish

—Catholic

emanci-

educational

reform,

skills

disabilities,

time of hesitation and

instruction, state intervention in setting limits to the

—were

testa-

causes he stood for and supported

intellectual liberty, and, after a

day

a

His parliamentary speeches, his essays, insofar as they

touch on such matters, and his History, are a voluble

ment

and

causes characteristic for a

humane and

self-

working

generous-

149, 151. George Levine agrees: "He violating any of the canons of truthfulness, and he dwelled in the unreal world all the time he argued the superiority of the real world from which he was retreating." Levine, The 62

Madden, "Macaulay's Style," pp. converted history into romance without

Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman (1968), p. 158. 63 Gladstone thought that Macaulay's style was a "mirror which reflects the image of himself," lacking perspective, balance, and breadth. See Madden, "Macaulay's Style," p. 127.

[137]

STYLE

IN

minded man. Like many

HISTORY Macaulay was

liberals in his time,

prone to bouts of hysteria over the threat of red socialism, but his fears did

not compel him to repudiate the causes in which

he believed; they simply confirmed pulse, to

work

for the timely

his earliest political im-

and far-reaching reforms that

would make revolution unnecessary. Macaulay's proverbial

the

clarity deserves

same complex

response. It was in part a sign of superficiality, in part evi-

dence

for his inability to grasp the tragic

in part the didactic streak that urged

him

least as a historian, his principal task

understand. But

and obfuscation,

it

was

dimension to teach

in things,

when,

at

should have been to

a sign also of his impatience with cant

his desire to get to the

bottom

at least of

those things that he recognized to be deep. It expressed the

expansive energy that characterized the age in which he lived. I

am

style

not arguing, with so many, that the vices of Macaulay's

were

his

own,

its

virtues the virtues of his age. In

both

the historian and the age, virtues and vices were thoroughly intermingled. energetic,

But that he should have been

and opulent

is

venial rather than mortal,

scarcely vicious.

clear,

hopeful,

His gravest

sin,

complacency, and he had some

is

reason even for that.

We see more deeply now than Macaulay,

but then our world

is

style

is

a far sadder place

than

a style as inappropriate to our time as

priate to his

is

a reflection far less

[138]

on

his

his. it

That

his

was appro-

time than on ours.

4

Burckhardt The Poet

of Truth

The Condottiere An

/A JL

old anecdote (one of those that

everywhere true) describes

jL narrator

in the strategic

is

nowhere and yet

roughly as follows. "

The

Jacob Burckhardt; the old anecdote appears

opening section of

in Italien; the situation

dence of Italian

it

is

rulers

it

on

his

describes

is

Kultur der Renaissance the anomalous depen-

their hired soldiers of fortune, the

condottieri.

Once

the burghers of a city— apparently Siena

who had freed them from foreign how to reward him, and concluded

is

meant— had

a

They consulted

general

pressure.

daily

that no reward they

had

power was great enough, not even if they made him lord of the city. At last one of them rose and suggested, "Let us kill him and then worship him as the patron saint of the city." And in their

that,

we

are told,

senate did with

nirgends so:

how they dealt with him, much as the Roman Romulus— Eine alte Anekdote, von jenen, die

is

und dock

uberall

wahr

sind, schildert dasselbe ungefahr

Einst hatten die Burger einer Stadt—es

soil

Siena gemeint

sein—einen Feldherrn, der sie von feindlichem Druck befreit hatte; taglich berieten sie, wie er zu belohnen sei und urteilten, keine Belohnung, die in ihren Kraften stande, ware gross genug, selbst nicht, wenn sie ihn zum Herrn der Stadt machten. Endlich erhob y

sich einer

und meinte, "Lasst uns ihn umbringen und dann [141]

als

STYLE anbeten."

Stadtheiligen

HISTORY

IN

Und

so

man

sei

mit ihm verfahren,

ungefahr wie der rbmische Senat mit Romulus. 1

This chilling story

which ingenuity alone

a mental world in city fathers are

sudden horrifying glimpse into

offers a

not just cruel or cynical

moral constraints. But the story also

— they

These are

Italian

beyond

offers a glimpse,

who

relates

sixteenth-century

it.

Burckhardt's source

"Roman

diary/' a

is

all

puzzling

than horrifying, into the mental world of the

rather torian

rules.

his-

Stefano Infessura's

compendium

of rumors,

historical dates, eyewitness reports, written partly in Latin,

partly

in

Italian,

litany

a

of

treaty

breaking,

treacherous

promises of safe-conduct, poisoned dinners, of unrelieved,

At the time Burckhardt chose to quote curious document, he was a mature and responsible

lighthearted slaughter. this

scholar, occupying a respected chair of history at the Univer-

And

sity of Basel.

a

it

was

a

work of history he was

writing, not

romance; he was reporting on a voyage of exploration un-

precedented for cultural history, and, precisely because of his

he needed to be cautious. The

daring,

hardt practically copied,

down

which Burck-

to the formula indicating

sunt qui dicunt—is, in

be hearsay

story,

all'

it

to

likelihood, a traditional

topos illustrating the lengths to which man's ingratitude can go.

2

Burckhardt was ready to admit that

strictly true,

but rather,

an archetypal anecdote.

as his reference to

Why

undependable, an informant as

That blinking

is

the

—

I

first

employ

might not be

Romulus

indicates,

so tainted, or at least,

this?

question this story

am tempted

it

raises.

Burckhardt's un-

to say, affectionate

—report

on

its

Jacob Burckhardt, Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch, ed. Walter Goetz (1925), pp. 21-22; [The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy: An Essay, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore, 1878 (ed. L. Goldscheider, 1

1945), pp. 13-M]. 2 See Stefano Infessura, Diario della Citta di

(1890),

p.

105.

[142]

Roma,

ed. Oreste

Tommasini

The Poet

Burckhardt:

of Truth

A

imaginative sadism raises a second question.

historian's

choice of subject, and even more, his handling of

deeply emotional ally

affair.

be in eliminating

initia l selection

and

However

successfu l he

may

a

eventu-

person from his conclusions, his

his

strategic

approaches are part of his

p rivate biography There are times, to be .

principally responses

is

it,

m ost

when they

sure,

are

the wishes of a professor or the

to

blandishments of a publisher. But in general, the character of the historian and the character of his history stand in an intimate,

reason

if

why

subterranean, relationship. There

is,

of course,

no

they need to be identical twins; the historian's

identification with his material

may be

the candid salute of

recognizing his like or the involuntary expression of an un-

conscious

affinity. It

a sinner dwelling

on

may

also

be a compensation or a wish:

purity, a servant

on masters.

Certainlv with Burckhardt, the contrast between the extravagant violence on which he concentrates and the sober

moderation of

his

life

Outwardly, at

striking.

is

least,

his

existence was tranquil, securely circumscribed. Jacob Burck-

hardt was, except for his genius, a typical Swiss patrician.

was born in Basel in 1818, he died in Basel

in 1897, an94]

On of these

is

Style in History

known than

better

the second, but

ting out. It holds that the study of style

is

world

And

as their historical world.

style that supplies the

set-

a study in limitations.

Clearly, like other historians, these four masters torical

worth

still

saw the

clearly, it

most incriminating evidence

his-

their

is

for their

ineradicable, unconscious parochialism.

Gibbon the

Ranke the

Burckhardt the poet

—each

believer,

Macaulay the

of these looked

liberal,

on the past from

which only partly intersected that of the

ironist,

his angle of vision

others.

This sweeping skepticism, which questions the very possibility of objective history, finds

theory of perception that

sustenance in a well-known

the psychological counterpart of

is

the sociological theory of false consciousness. It lar

with historians

—

largely,

I

suspect, because

from the imputation of naivete. perception

is

largely projective,

Its

it

is

very popu-

rescues

them

proponents argue that

and motivation determinative

of results. Notions like the ''innocent eye," they insist, or

mind

of the

as a passive

and accurate camera, are nothing

better than misconceived metaphors, the delusions of simple-

minded

positivists or equally

perception

Goethe

is

a

construction;

said long ago)

is

simpleminded

Realists.

the simplest observation

(as

already a theory. Facts are never

they are impregnated with value judgments.

neutral;

Every

The

child hears not just a sound, but a loving or a scolding voice;

the adult looking at a painting translates lines

and

reality.

its

two-dimensional

colors into a representation of three-dimensional

Reinforcing the pressures of social location or cultural

presuppositions, the accidents of time

and place and

create mental sets that act like so

many

What

affiliation

distorting lenses.

same time to act; the historian studies the past that he may influence, no matter how modestly, the world around and the world within is

more, to observe and to

l>95]

reflect are at the

STYLE him.

The

HISTORY

IN

control he seeks

may be no more than

a reassuring sense of familiarity or

hope

self-control,

in a bewildering or

threatening environment. But his historical inquiries, like inquiries, are always the response to

all

some need, and always built into his most prim-

some purpose; interest is itive acts of perception and appears in suitably disguised form in his most urbane presentations. And the evidence for this position is ample and seems irrefutable: different reports on the same realities, different interpretations of the same events, directed to

and, as always, different styles.

In sharp contrast, the natural sciences, this line of argu-

ment

goes on, have discarded their biases in the course of their

triumphant

career; rising

above

class or

nation or anthropo-

morphism, they have gained distance with

their repeatable

experiments, falsifiable theories, and dispassionate vocabulary.

Whatever the metaphysical

status of the realities the scien-

— and philosophers the question — natural tist

studies

of science continue to debate

scientists

their counter readings,

and

have their chemical analyses,

their

mathematical formulas. In

the midst of such wealth (to recall Ranke's saying from a

He may have information no reasonable critic will dispute: he may know the precise date of a battle or the correct wording of a charter. He has different context) the historian

is

poor.

him

techniques, often quite sophisticated, enabling forgeries

and make jumbled numbers

intelligible.

to expose

The

prestige

of natural science continues to haunt his waking dreams.

Like the natural

main

scientist, the historian also

of certainty.

But

it is

pitifully small.

true stories, but there are so story that the very historian's

meaning

strategies

of

many ways of "the

exposition

He

aspires to tell

of telling the

same" are

governs his do-

is

all,

imperiled.

same

The

consciously

or

unconsciously, strategies of persuasion. Style, therefore, just

[196]

On because

it

the

is

distinction,

is

Style in History

mark

and

of the historian's distinctiveness

also the proof of his

unconquerable subjectivity.

This pessimistic assessment of the historian's claim to

been the stock-in-trade of historiography,

objectivity has long

which,

as

I

have suggested,

argument that historians it

is

are

justifies

existence with the

its

doomed

to limited perspectives;

the wrestling with these limits, the offering of new,

be

larger interpretations that prove to

give the writing of history

history.

There

is

nothing very

In perceiving their task to be the

bold about this view. analysis

its

limits in turn, that

of perspectives, historiographers have drifted with

prevailing currents in the theory of knowledge. For over centuries,

epistemologists

two

have been propelled by an un-

masking animus; they have been intent on exposing the unchallenged prejudices, the unrecognized preconceptions, the

comfortable ignorance built into the pursuit, and concealed in the very possibility, of knowledge. This critical current was usually

on

one-sided,

classical

combative,

sources,

it

rose

polemical.

with

Though

it

the antitheological

drew

and

antimetaphysical crusade of the Enlightenment, and crested in the sociology of

Marx, the epistemology of Nietzsche, and

the ontology of the historicists. Since the mid-nineteenth century,

have reiterated that progressive historians

historians

write progressive history history,

and

and bourgeois

that, like their controlling assumptions, the style

of these historians

is

the expected, indeed the inescapable,

style of their party or their class.

their

historians bourgeois

skeptical

And

epistemology with a

they have reinforced

relativist

metaphysics,

questioning the* objective existence of facts as distinct from the historian

who

interprets them. Historical facts, Carl Becker

wrote, are not out there, in the world of the past, but in here, in the

mind

of the historian.

And

[197]

the popular conclusion has

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

been summarily put by E. H. Carr: "The

belief in a

hard

core of facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian

one which

The

it is

tenor of Carr's conclusion suggests

beyond

My

more hopeful

far

deny

among

Yet

discussion.

wish to defend.

and

a preposterous fallacy, but

very hard to eradicate." 10

this position carries

I

is

how much

historians today.

Most

authority

consider

precisely this preposterous fallacy

it is

essays permit a drastically different

set of conclusions.

—how could —that the I?

I

historian's

am

not disposed to

mental

set or secret

emotions often cause partial blindness or involuntary but

tortions,

would argue that they can

I

it

dis-

also provide a

historian with a clear view of past actions that other historians

have been too ill-prepared to understand, too indifferent even to see.

dom:

As Burckhardt put if

transmitting a bit of ancient wis-

our eye were not in some way sunlike,

Unser huge

see the sun

Sonne

it,

nicht.

11

may become

is

could not

sonnenhaft, sonst sake es die

Passion, notorious as the historian's

pling liability,

consciousness

ist

it

his

most valuable

most

asset.

crip-

Not

all

false consciousness.

This position, too, finds impressive support in modern psychology, both in psychoanalysis and in the psychology of perception, and to little

impact on the

ception

is

10 x

its

findings,

which have had

historical profession, are conclusive. Per-

and the dominant direction not toward myth or self-protection, but

part of the total person,

of the person

1

my mind

may

be,

E. H. Carr, What Is History? (1962), p. 6. Jacob Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, ed. Albert Oeri, in

Jacob Burckhardt-Oesamtausgabe (1929), 7:6, 6n.

[198]

On toward mastery and

Style in History

reality.

or even with limitation, are motives

cient

and

To

equate motive with distortion,

demonstrably illegitimate; there

is

toward the

ideals driving the inquirer

comprehension of the outside world. The need that

generates inquiry

may be sublimated

into disinterestedness.

Even empathy, the very emotion that the modern is

ceaselessly enjoined

to

has

cultivate,

cannot exaggerate the significance of

historian

com-

objective

its

ponent. Qualities are as inherent in the object as I

effi-

size.

12

this psychological

point of view for the historian. As he trains his senses and

become more

his conceptual apparatus to

sensitive

and

ac-

curate instruments, as he ascends from the self-indulgent and self-centered realm of the pleasure principle to the austere

atmosphere of the there

is

reality principle,

match more and more

wish to relate the past

as

it

what he

closely.

actually

And

historians' distortions are richly

rate

and

I

and what

Ranke's celebrated

happened

fatuous fantasy nor a concealed ideology. It perfectly realistic expectation.

sees

is

is

neither a

a difficult

but

might add that while

documented,

effective perceptions are richly

historians' accu-

documented

as well:

convergent reports on the past, reduction in the range of acceptable interpretations, and precise expressiveness in

While normally,

style.

then, the historian of history proceeds

from apparent objectivity to concealed

subjectivity,

that he can profitably reverse this procedure and subjectivity to understanding.

Read

I

propose

move from

in this fashion, these four

more than reports on the limitations that bias imposes and style reveals; they are reports as well on the

essays

12

are

There are "aspects of objects perceived

as emotionally significant with-

out being subjective in character. That is, they are not delusive projections but features of things, and an aspect of knowledge of physical events." George S. Klein, Perception, Motives, and Personality (1970), p. 65.

[*99]

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

special capacity of each of these historians to see historical

inaccessible

realities

feline malice

to

others.

have suggested that the

I

animating Gibbon's parallel clauses exhibits

his

mixed motives. But

his

insensitivity to the oceanic feeling for

ironic vision

equipped him to penetrate the fraudulent ma-

chinations of

Roman

ness of the

Church

and the all-too-human

politicians,

Fathers.

petti-

have argued that the dramatic

I

devices shaping Ranke's prose reveal his implicit conformity

and conservatism. But

dramatic vision gave Ranke an

his

unprecedented appreciation of the complex confrontations

among

the great powers.

have treated the bourgeois ampli-

I

tude of Macaulay's rhetoric

and expansive English

as a

symptom

social system.

But

of a prosperous

his optimistic vision

allowed Macaulay to discard the nostalgia that obstructed the perception of others and to value, without embarrassment, the

improvements I

in England's social, cultural,

and economic

life.

have traced Burckhardt's informal and emphatic way of writ-

ing to his unconscious identifications with the magnificent

But it was this empathetic vision that for the first time encompassed the enormous vitality of the Renaissance and its historic uniqueness. The most rigorous test of this analytical strategy would personalities of the Renaissance.

be

a look at the cognitive style

a scholar, a

want

man

of letters,

13

and

to write yet a fifth essay,

combines these historical

work

a

known

but there

who

partisan.

is

prove

a

Theodor Mommsen, the only

is

I

at

once

do not

one historian who

in heroic proportions,

qualities will

of a historian

and whose

bulwark against skepticism.

historian

(if

we

except Winston

Churchill) ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, was

an unsurpassed scholar,

13

For

a

distinguished stylist and, by his

this term, see Klein, Perception,

Motives, and Personality, pp. 8-10.

[200]

—

— On

Style in History

testimony, a lifelong animal politicum. 1 *

own

Mommsen

public knows

But the as a

entrepreneur,

who

and

tion,

filled

For

though

men

relentless in his pursuit of dehistorical imagina-

brilliant conjectures as for

and inspired emenda-

Burckhardt, the imagination was

the mother of history as well as of poetry aller

tainly

is

born not made. 16

worked on

his prose;

Mommsen insisted that But Mommsen himself

ist.

15

the cer-

his style, taking pleasure in the felicity of

he cultivated

by reading

his taste

French novels and English poetry of Burckhardt,

die Phantasie,

Poesie so auch aller Historie Mutter

In a much-quoted address, historian

Mommsen

grievous lacunae in abundant yet fragmentary

Mommsen,

welche wie

nar-

with his enthusiasm

was richly endowed with

documents with tions.

knows

historical profession

inspired younger

for the sources. Yet,

Mommsen

and

analytical lucidity

its

meticulous inquirer and inventive academic

preeminently

tail,

general

the author of the Romische

as

Geschichte, a work notable for rative vigor.

The

Mommsen

—

was a

belles lettres

all his life.

gifted,

if

In the

—

manner

occasional, poet

and, in Burckhardt's manner, he responded sensitively to the

emotional and aesthetic side of his experience.

Romische Geschichte is

displays his literary culture,

of central interest here are his 14

Mommsen's but what

notorious anachronisms.

The

phrase comes from a passage in his will, written in 1899, but not printed until 1948: "I have never had, and never aspired to political position and political influence; but in my innermost being, and I think with the best that is within me, I have always been an animal politicum and wished to be a good citizen bin ich stets ein animal politicum gewesen und wiinschte ein Burger zu sein. That is not possible in our nation, in which the individual, even the best, never gets beyond serving in the ranks, and beyond political fetishism." Quoted in Alfred Heuss, Theodor Mommsen und das 19. ]ahrhundert 15

und 16

(1956), p. 282. Quoted in Albert Wucher, Theodor

Politik (1956), p. 2in. "Rede bei Antritt des Rektorates,"

Aufsatze (3rd printing, 1912), pp. 3-16.

[20l]

Mommsen:

October

15,

Geschichtsschreibung 1874, in

Reden und

STYLE Mommsen's

first

IN

HISTORY

made much

readers

of his "subjective

way

of

Even more than his clarity and vigor, it was his putting ancients into modern dress, those "Liberals" and 'Junkers" who march through his pages, that was the most writing history."

distinctive aspect of his style

Mommsen sciousness.

"There

he wrote to that the

He

first

his

justified is

a lot to

from the beginning. 17 practice with

a

certain self-con-

be said about that modern tone,"

Wilhelm Henzen in 1854, the year volume of his Romische Geschichte appeared.

his

insisted that

friend

he had no intention of cajoling the public.

True, direct allusions had offered themselves by the hundreds,

but he had scorned them

make

the ancients clirnb

all.

Yet he had found

down from

it

essential to

their imaginary pedestals

them once again into the real world, where men love and hate, work and play, invent fantasies and tell lies. That is why the consul had to become the mayor und darum musste der Konsul ein Burgermeister werden" and

to

place

He might

have overdone

it,

but he was confident that his

in-

und richtig" 18 We have no cause to question the purity of Mommsen's intentions, though we may doubt that his desire to endow faded historical figures with new life exhausts his reasons

tentions, at least,

were "pure and right

for introducing Junkers

When stirring

rein

and Agrarians onto the

Roman

stage.

he undertook to write the Romische Geschichte, the

and dismaying events

of the revolutions of 1848 lay

Mommsen

those revolutions as

had been engaged in partisan and publicist, and had been

briefly deprived of his

academic post during the

in his

immediate memory.

first

period of

For their reception, see the citations in Wucher, Mommsen, chap. 3. Mommsen to Henzen, November 26, 1854. Quoted in Ludo Moritz Hartmann, Theodor Mommsen. Eine Biographische Skizze (1908), pp. 62-63. 17

1S

[202]

On reaction.

He

was

—

Style in History

in the

German

fashion

—

a liberal;

he hated

the rural oligarchy and distrusted military and clerical power

In the years that followed the

alike.

Romische Geschichte, despite

his

three volumes of

first

immense and wide-

his

ranging activity as professor of ancient history and superin-

tendent of numerous scholarly enterprises, he found time to serve

first

in the Prussian,

Nor was he

a latter-day

then in the

Gibbon, a

German

legislature.

silent senator.

He

was

contentious, outspoken, and fearless. Politics was in his bones,

on

his It

mind

—and under

his pen.

would seem only natural

for such a political being to

see the past principally in political terms political struggles in that past

Mommsen's

critics leveled

his

own

Rome

And

against

time and have leveled ever since: Caesar of ancient

to invest the

not merely with the urgency,

but with the very shape, of the present. that

and this

him during

Mommsen

his life-

worshipped the

modern demagogy, he smuggled

his offended feelings into his assessment of the

Mommsen

was

Republican

sensitive to such criti-

cisms. In the second edition of his third volume, lineates

the charge

because he longed for a Caesar in

time; disgusted with

opposition to Caesar. 19

is

the ascent of his hero,

Mommsen

which

added

a

de-

long

passage firmly denying that his admiration for Julius Caesar

meant admiration

for

Caesarism, and turned the criticism

against his critics: his glorification of Caesar, precisely be-

cause he was so great a statesman with so noble an aim,

should actually be read

as a devastating critique of his

modern

authoritarian disciples.

19

on Mommsen, the English historian Francis Haverfield noted: "Probably he had met his Cicero: there were many in 1848 who talked admirably and acted feebly." English Historical Review, Writing

an

19 (1904), 84. In

obituary

Wucher, Mommsen,

p.

[203]

92m

STYLE Mommsen

protested in vain; his disclaimer, though as ex-

and eloquent

plicit

viction.

20

It

HISTORY

IN

he could make

as

it,

has not carried con-

was indeed eminently plausible to argue that

Mommsen's anachronisms are symptomatic of partisanship. Yet this verdict on Mommsen's historical perception trivialaccomplishment. Near the end of

izes his

said once again

what he had often

said

Unser Lebensnerv

presuppositions

Mommsen

and always acted on:

the vital nerve of the scholarly enterprise all

his life

ist

is

inquiry free from

die voraussetzungs-

Forschung. 21 This was anything but rhetorical

lose

Mommsen's view

fication:

self-justi-

of antiquity was something

more

than a mere outlet for the frustrated passions of a defeated liberal.

Mommsen's Roman

other northerners

experience was shared by

—Englishmen,

Netherlanders,

many

Germans

facing, for the first time, the sources of their classical culture. Italy

was the sunny playground of their schoolboy imagination,

and the

though overlaid by medieval and modern

reality,

accretions,

was more intense than their most lavish

To be overwhelmed by Goethe, duly recorded

had been the experience

much

felt

as

poets.

good company. history!

step

The

went

on your holy

trip

as well, historians as

he was, had

Ranke and Burckhardt.

to Italy in 1844, his emotions were in

"Italy!"

first

it

Gibbon, unsentimental

the Italian magic, and so had

When Mommsen

of

— and dutifully reexperienced by count-

Germans. But others had experienced

less

as

Italy: that

fantasies.

he wrote, "holy

soil of nature,

art,

own sea, the first he reached Rome, he wept.

through your very

soil!"

And when he came back

After

to Italy thirty years later,

20

he traveled

But note the more favorable appraisals in the more recent literature by Heuss and Wucher (see notes 14 and 15 above.) 21 "Universitatsunterricht und Konfession" (1901), in Reden und Aufsatze, p.

4^2.

[204]

— On through the country a

metaphor,

sen's

for the

layers only the

of

an old lover recalling

like

must add, that

I

emotion

composed

Style in History

most

Roman

is

his first love

Mommsen's own. 22 Mommwhose

past was a palimpsest,

delicate reading can discriminate. It

memories reinforced by

action; this thirst, in turn,

was

his thirst for political

was fed by memories; and both

stood under the severe discipline of his scholarly probity.

—

sum and this, of course, is the point of this exploration Mommsen's passions gave him insights denied to earlier historians of the Roman Republic. Modern research has pulIn

—

verized the

Roman

party contest, and has

shown the

parties

have been interest groups clustering around family

to

ances.

23

Mommsen

doubtless oversimplified the struggle, giv-

ing Cicero's sweeping terms optimates and populates credit than they deserved. in the politics of his

open eyes

Yet

it

more

was because he participated

—with partisan convictions but with

day

—that Mommsen saw the

with a vividness unavailable to

much

alli-

politics of ancient

earlier historians,

Rome

and with

as

objectivity as the historians' techniques then in exis-

tence would permit.

Gibbon had thought

his captaincy in

the Hampshire militia not useless to the historian of the

Roman

Empire, and in the same way, Mommsen's

activities

proved not useless to the historian of the

Republic.

And his chosen style was map of his discoveries.

pendable

political

Roman

the perspicuous and de-

Lothar Wickert, Theodor Mommsen: Eine Biographie, vol. 2, Wanderjahre: Frankreich und Italien (1964), pp. 43, 55f. A fascinating book could be written on the impact of Italy on great historians. 23 See especially Lily Ross Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (1949). Another historian whom it would be very interesting to examine from this perspective would be Jules Michelet, whose gift for empathy was enormous. "I am accomplishing a hard task," he wrote in 1849, "that of reliving, remaking, and suffering the Revolution. I have just passed through September and all the horrors of death: massacred at the Abbey, I am going 22

See

[205]

STYLE

The

HISTORY

IN

dramatically divergent potentialities inherent in the his-

mental set

torian's

raise the interesting prospect of similar

polarities in the other dimensions,

which the historian his style.

Most

culture

and

from

craft,

also draws his motives, his materials,

cultures, at

most

times, with their rewards for

compliance and their horror of subversion, confine the torian's choice of subject

and

matter and

mode

of

his-

judgment within

defined boundaries of social decorum and political accept-

No braver

ability.

than most men, few historians have courted

We

the martyrdom of the heretic.

told,

and

most historians preside over the construction the collective memory. And they are not architects whose

rightly,

of

have often been

that

them

patrons have given

a free hand.

They

are

under pressure

to design an impressive, even a glorious facade that

may

bear

only a tangential resemblance to the structure of events concealed behind

it.

Memory, we know,

is

the supple minister

memory

is

in this respect, as in

of self-interest,

and

others, like the

memory

ory

is

nesia;

collective

of individuals.

a convenient distortion or it

has

all

collective

mem-

an equally convenient am-

too often been the historian's assignment to

assist his culture in

remembering events that did not happen,

and

in forgetting events that did.

can

use.

24

Most

This cosmetic

The

activity, I

culture wants a past

need hardly add,

is

it

rarely

before the Revolutionary Tribunal, that is, to the guillotine." Quoted in Emery Neff, The Poetry of History (1947), p. 149. 24 When I was giving this conclusion its final revision, I recalled an essay by my late friend, Richard Hofstadter, which anticipates this argument in substance, and even in phrasing. I reprint the passage here: "Society and special interests in society call upon him [the historian] to provide them with

memory. The kind

of

memory

that

is

too often desired

[206]

is

not very different

On

Style in History

venal or even conscious; to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, historians

do

do not need

The

for nothing.

to

parochial or nationalist productions by

respectable practitioners torian

is

most

be paid to do what they are eager to

show only too

plainly that the his-

when them and

insidious as a purveyor of cultural biases

he does not recognize them

be

to

biases,

but shares

them to be established conclusions rather than unexamined prejudices. But this is only the depressing, if admittedly the more prominent, side of a two-sided story. There have been times when societies have called, not for reassuring tales, but for takes

Then

harsh truths about their past.

the historian exchanges

the embroidered robe of the appointed panegyrist for the

— profession — the

white coat of the independent anatomist. Paradoxically is,

as

we

shall see,

historian can be

not the only paradox of his

most useful when he

is

most

free.

it

Yet what-

ever beneficial consequences flow from the historian's pursuit of truth, they are available only to a relatively

which permits professional ards

and

open

own

fraternities to set their

tolerates intelligent

society,

stand-

and organized discontent. Cos-

mopolitans in a parochial culture, skeptics in a religious culture, socialists in a capitalist culture

can

feel free to

under-

take historical investigations that aim at veracity rather than beautification;

outsiders often

command

prospect, above the assumptions

a

high and wide

and values generally taken

for granted. Critical history, of course, carries

its

own

risks;

—

that is, memory that knows how to provide for ourselves forget, memory that will rearrange, distort, and omit so much as is needed to make our historical self-images agreeable. In a liberal society the his-

from what we

torian

is

all

free to try to dissociate

but that same impulse also at work in him." Hofstadter,

myth from

reality,

myth-making that moves his fellow men is "History and the Social Sciences," in Varieties of History,

to

359-360.

[207]

ed.

Stern,

pp.

STYLE it

new myths

often substitutes

for truth

HISTORY

IN

and indignation

for old, or mistakes

unmasking

But the point

for demonstration.

remains that culture

disinterested

historical inquiry.

may at times actually foster And history records enough

instances of

hope that these

are perhaps

such

moments

to permit the

no means abnormal, interludes

exceptional, but by

age-old effort to deceive himself

and oppress

from

free

umphs.

presuppositions celebrated

all

was notoriously sour, judging

well placed for the study of history.

and

all literatures

all

the

and

most notable

tri-

Burckhardt, whose assessment of

It is striking to see

his century

when

researches

its

its

man's

others.

Nineteenth-century liberal culture was the time ideal of a historical science uninhibited in

in

modes

it

The

to

be exceptionally

easy accessibility of

of thought, the relative indiffer-

ence of states to the results of historical research, the impotence of established religions to interfere with the free airing of their past,

seemed

him

to

the most prominent reasons

why

time was propitious for historians. 25 Liberalism, to be

his

sure,

suffered

from complacency,

were among the

first

to point out. It

as

Macaulay's detractors

smuggled

self-satisfaction

into historical interpretation through the theory of progress,

and cheerfully counted

earlier cultural

all

imperfect prefigurations of

its

achievements

own. But liberalism

ated a refreshing atmosphere of self-criticism. It possible,

though,

I

liberal historians at

should add,

it

as

also gener-

made Marx

held Marx's critique of

bay until well into the twentieth century.

Yet, however self-serving the liberal ideal, and however flawed its

application,

it

had

its

share in producing an intellectual

climate congenial to the pursuit of objectivity. It

is

—and

not an accident

this brings

25

me

to the dimension

See Burckhardt, Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, 7:9-19.

[so8]

in

Gesamtausgabe,

On of craft

—that

Style in History

the nineteenth century should also have wit-

nessed the transformation of history into a profession. then, as

have

I

house, the university. Practically the age

—Ranke

into his

own

the leading historians of

all

and Burckhardt, Michelet and Fustel de

Mommsen

Coulanges,

moved

said, that the historian

was

It

and Maitland

—were

and

professors;

another, Macaulay, could have been a professor had he not preferred to write history instead.

move

that this

exacted

its

before or since, imposed

own

exercise of the inquisitive spirit:

sometimes doxies

servile

Craft in that century, as

price. its

have already suggested

I

on the

free

generally cautious

and

constraints

its

relation to power,

often

its

and respectable points of view, and

tance to radical

new

vistas.

But

it

also

smug

ortho-

stubborn

its

developed

resis-

internal

its

impulse toward autonomy, a capacity for detachment from the society that in general

it

served.

Professionalism at

its

best braced the historian to resist the egregious, and to recognize the subtlest, pressures for conformity that culture could

bring to bear on the individual historian. Professionalism can do, and has done, as

it

more than

intervenes to regulate the historian's

culture,

it

intervenes to regulate his

establishing standards of proof

traffic

traffic

this. Just

with his

with himself. In

and presentation

—the

footnote, the honest bibliography, the accurate citation

full

—

it

compels the historian's sources, reasoning, and conclusions into the glaring light of public scrutiny

and

serves to dis-

criminate what he owes to others from what he has contributed is

on

his

own. The judgment of the professional forum

always candid and often cruel, and

more

inclusive

Like so

much

objectivity

is

and more accurate

it

prepares the

way

for

historical interpretations.

else in the discipline of history, the struggle for

a collective affair.

[209]

STYLE The is

share of professionalism in epistemological clarification

more

far

HISTORY

IN

extensive than has usually been recognized. In

serving as the systematic critic of personal perceptions,

acts

it

kind of public superego, strengthening and extending

as a

the self-criticism that any responsible practitioner builds into

and

his practice.

realistic

because the

his proceedings in the course of his training

And

this pressure

toward objectivity

is

objects of the historian's inquiry are precisely that, objects,

out there in a real and a single past

^ ^

a)i

in i|0t in

rial

tofla*^

Historical controversy

no way compromises

their ontological integrity ./The tree

the woods of the past

fell

in only

one way, no matter

fragmentary or contradictory the reports of

whether there are no tentious historians in

soun ds

If this

mean

it

re ason

like

historians,

no matter

one historian, or several con-

future to record and debate itl

its

n aive Realism,

I

can only plead that

though not of the naive

to be feealisml

why

its fall,

how

variety.

I

One

interpretation has been generally treated as an that historians have illegitimately

e xercise in subjecti vity

is

imp osed one meani ng

of inte rpretation, smuggled in from

the

arts,

arts,

me aning,

on anothe r

interpretation

is

appropriate to history

among

the interpreter's choice

set of alternatives, as in

an

the word in this permissive sense

Economic

An Economic

Interpretation;

indefinite article to

show

In the a valid

actor's interpretation of a role or

a conductor's interpretation of a score. Charles

his precise title,

.

he

when he

Beard used

called attention to

Interpretation, rather than insisted that

he had used the

his awareness that his

being the only possible interpretation.

The

With

was

far

from

the same

ill-

placed modesty, Burckhardt offered his interpretation of the

Renaissance this

begs

as

only one of several,

usage (of which, the

very

I

must

question

an

equally legitimate. But

all

confess,

I

too have been guilty)

interpretation

[210]

is

designed

to

On

Style in History

answer. 26 For the historian, an interpretation

a general

is

explanation of events, nearly always pr oviding a hierarchy of

To

causes.

pretation It

is,

the extent that

any conflicting

common knowledge

of course, a matter of

interpretation.

are

usually

inter-

But

I

want

that his-

burdened with more than one to offer

niable fact of the historian's

ment maps

correct,

is false.

events

torical

it is

two

glosses

on

Interpretations

life.

this

may

unde-

supple-

rather than contradict one another, just as different

same

of the

being in conflict at tions, in short,

is

may be equally correct without any point. The coexistence of interpreta-

territory

possible

and even

likely

if

these interpre-

tations are, in the benign sense of that word, partial.

But when

interpretations contradict each other, the his-

torian cannot resign himself to these conflicts

on the ground

that they are inherent in his material, or in the nature of historical research. It

is

precisely the conflicts of interpretation

that are the measure of

the historical discipline

how

unsatisfactory the knowledge of

on

this point. Physicists, seeking to

is

reconcile incompatible theories of the origin of the universe, or the nature of particles, take such conflicts as a spur to

further

work rather than

spectivism of

human

a reflection

knowledge.

It

is

on the inescapable in

per-

any event reassuring

pendulum of historical interpretations does not always swing with the same vehemence. New facts, better

to note that the

readings of old facts, the elimination of discredited views all

bring about a reduction in

to be sure, 26

its

oscillations. Interpretations,

do not always tend toward the

inertia of total

An Economic

Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, 2nd edn. (1935), "Introduction to the 1935 Edition"; Burckhardt, Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, p. 3 [p. 1]; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. I suppose "the Interpretation" would

See Charles Beard,

have sounded immodest; but

it

would have been what

[211]

I

meant.

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

agreement; the impress of great events in the present encourages historians to take a

new

look at the past and discover

the importance of what had been thought insignificant before, or the insignificance of

what had been thought important. Or

the impulse from neighboring disciplines

push to the pendulum by throwing old or by I

am

not suggesting that

history, too

is

certainties into

—the

doubt

histories of

is

its

process will ever end; the

for that. In fact,

map

that will

not for the reason usually offered in

end of t une^or,

The meaning

never need revision

must

The commonplace

predecessors.

modern

such a conclusive

to say that every generation

rather, because events

or, in

One commonplace way

unrealizable in principle. that principle

this

too remote, too obscure,

overcrowded

interpretation

its

give a fresh

making unsuspected connections.

landscape of the past

th e

may

its

rewrite the true,

is

but

behalf. It holds true,

may

have posterities that

continue to

at least, the__£nd_oLalLhist orical

wr itir^

its

posterities, as distinct

contemporary meaning or

its

causes,

from

perpetually open

is

As new generations reappraise the French Terror

new meanings,

or the Great Depression, these events acquire

and these

is

of stating

of an event for

to revision.

—

in turn

tion. History, in a

fut ure always uses

become word, its

subject to inquiry

and

interpreta-

unfinished in the sense

is

past in

new way^ But

this

thaMjie

argument

in

no way damages the point that an interpretation is an attempt and it is, to offer an objective account of an objective past

—

in

any

case, the task of the profession to

like the

a

make

it so.

In sum,

realms of culture and of private character, craft has

Janus face, looking not merely toward subjectivity but

toward science. This has important bearing on is

the man,

much

style. Style, as

of the time, and, as

[212]

I

I

have argued,

have also argued,

On man

compounded

is

Style in History

of several dimensions. Style

is

the vector

of their complex, sometimes conflicting, pressures. Culture

and

between them supply the

craft

possibilities

the range of expression; character makes choices

then,

is

tivity,

restrict

among

the

and lends the touch of individuality that

available options

becomes the

and

historian's stylistic signature.

27

Whether

style,

a clue to incurable subjectivity or to scientific objec-

or to a mixture of the two,

is

a question that

we can

never answer in advance.

There

still

history.

I

remains one more obstruction to the definition of

have noted what kind of art history can claim to

want now to specify what kind of science it is. Since Wilhelm Windelband's celebrated address of 1894, historians

be;

I

have sharply separated Geschichte from Naturwissenschaft. In Windelband's

unique events;

vocabulary,

it is

history

seeks

to

understand

idiographic. Natural science, in contrast,

aims at general laws;

it is

nomothetic. 28 Historians of a wide

range of persuasions have accepted this distinction; they have

argued that historians seeking general laws have ceased to be historians

and have turned into retrospective

sociologists,

nostalgic demographers, or pretentious metaphysicians.

the argument

hard sciences

is

false, or at least

like

incomplete.

The

But

so-called

astronomy or molecular biology are often

concerned to explain singular events that are in nature

like

27 "It

seems useful to visualize the motivational field as having a center and a periphery determined by the adaptive relevance of component motives, the peripheral ones including not only those irrelevant to the specific adaptive purpose but also repressed motives." Klein, Perception, Motives, and Personality,

p.

61.

28

See Wilhelm Windelband, "Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft" (1894), in Praludien, 2 vols, in 1 (7th and 8th edn., 1921), 2:136-160.

[213]

STYLE the events the historian

HISTORY

IN

himself to understand.

fits

And

natural sciences, like geology, generally concentrate vidual events,

on

indi-

and thus resemble history more often and more

closely than, say, physics. if

other

29

On

the other side, historians, even

they do not seek to establish general laws, freely use

them

in their interpretations, especially their causal interpretations,

and

The

in their logic of proof.

historians' great debate over

the place that history should occupy in the spectrum of the sciences has

been bedeviled by

their identification of science

with the most abstract, most severe, has induced

sciences,

even in

not its

style

manic

—with

and

its

effort at

is

its

explanations, laws that

other disciplines chology. 30 In

—

almost

all

—

aping the natural

may

What

incessant pressure for

verifiable propositions;

capacity to generate laws but

its

branches. This

disheartening results.

a science into a science

objectivity

its

to beat a despairing retreat into belles

or to undertake a

lettres,

makes

them

among

its

what

reliance

actually be

as they are, in history,

defines

on laws

is

(to

is

in

borrowed from

mainly from

of these defining characteristics, history

a science. It

it

psyis

borrow Levi-Strauss' phrase) the

science of the concrete.

We and

are

now

say: history

in position to is

amend

Bury's famous dictum

almost a science and more than a science.

29

See for these issues, above all, Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (1961); and Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (1965). 30 They are I should perhaps say: they should be. I am in any case convinced that the principal auxiliary science for history is psychology, in particular the branch known as ego psychology, developed by Heinz Hartmann, Anna Freud, and Erik Erikson from the work of Freud, a distinct move toward realizing Freud's greatest ambition: to construct a general psychology, applicable to "normal" persons as much as to neurotics. Once again, I want to refer to my forthcoming book, Art and Act: On Causes in History Manet, Gropius, Mondrian.

—

—

[214]

— On This definition all

more

the

Style in History

admittedly paradoxical. But that makes

is

precise, for the historian's craft, especially in

modern, professional incarnation,

There

it

is, first

of

all,

pervaded by paradox.

is

the pair of incompatible injunctions that

are required baggage for every apprentice historian

same time,

to empathize with the past, but, at the

distance from

If

it.

its

he neglects the

he

first,

he

:

is

told

to preserve

never leave

will

the present but parade in his writings contemporary actors dressed up in period costumes.

he

will never leave the past,

And

if

he neglects the second,

becoming not

its

student but

its

accomplice. This paradox denotes the tense yet productive coexistence of engagement and detachment that differentiates

him from

the other. This

not the only way in

is

who must

historian resembles the psychoanalyst, ically

on which the modern

the novelist on one side and the physicist

sympathet-

penetrate the most secret recesses of his patient's

yet remain, as Freud poignantly put

it,

life,

stranger to his

a

patient forever.

This paradox

arises because, unlike the scientist of nature,

the scientist of the materials.

That

is

human

past

what makes

of the sciences, susceptible to

of the

is

same

history into the all

stuff as his

most

fragile

the germs carried by the

winds of doctrine, and vulnerable to the charges of prejudice or ideology that are so familiar.

other

modern

scientists take for

a laborious victory over

The

critical

granted

sympathy and

is,

distance that

for the historian,

anxiety.

The emotional

empathy that is irrelevant to other scientists is a quality he must patiently cultivate. Though one among the sciences, history faces problems no other science shares to the same degree.

The

dual nature of history

—

at

once science and

art

emerges even more strikingly in the related paradox that [215]

STYLE history

at the

is

HISTORY

IN

same time

a progressive discipline

and a

Nowadays the historian will not begin his studies of ancient Rome with Gibbon or Mommsen; they are no longer the last word. Yet The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Romische Geschichte are imperishable masterpieces which no amount of fresh facts timeless treasure house of classics.

or revisionist interpretations will eject from the pantheon.

What makes them

immortal

merit, great though that truths that have

become

a

is.

more than

is

Their view of the past embodies

been confirmed by other historians and have

permanent

cultural possession.

fashioned maps: delightful to consult, a

It

is

still

useful for

art of that style

flourishes apart,

it

map

its

must not

interfere with

but the precise means of conveying

function of Gibbon's irony, whatever to

appropriate

give

A

few

the historian's

not separate from historical it.

that principally dictates his stylistic choices.

is

distinct form.

of a very special kind.

is

science. His literary devices are truth,

somewhat oldmodel to later mapif

showing others the way.

the historian's style that gives his

But the

These books, and

drawn

others like them, are like exquisitely

makers, and

their sheer literary

expression

its

to

It is this

The

aim

objective

psychological origins,

the

irony

pervading

Roman history. The

objective function of Burckhardt's energy,

whatever

is

its

origins,

of the Renaissance.

to express the energy informing the age

The

historian's use of elevated diction,

compression or elongation of time spans, synecdoche, anaphora, indirect free use,

style, or

whatever other devices he

perform reportorial functions.

sake, to tation,

make to

To

use words for their

may own

jokes that are not instrumental to the presen-

employ emphasis

in

the interest of drama not

inherent in the material, are sheer self-indulgence, mere fine writing.

[216]

On The

Style in History

relation of style to truth has

been obscured by the

too patent fact that a work of history

all

real world.

present in sequential

But that

is

to

that exist concur-

an inconvenience the historian shares with

While the

stylist's

shaping

be imposing order on disparate, often seem-

ingly disconnected past realities, his act of ordering

exacted by the requirements of presentation.

The

is

formal,

order

something the historian does not make; he finds

is

The

compels the historian to

fashion structures

the astronomer and the sociologist.

hand appears

not a copy of the

a report, often with aesthetic merit.

It is

linear nature of written literature

rently.

is

itself it.

So

controversial an activity as the carving out of a historical

period

is

not a construction but a discovery.

The

order, the

period, are there.

Historians are always rhetoric differs

But

gist.

this

making the happy discovery that

their

from the rhetoric of the chemist or the biolodoes not entail the expulsion of history from

the family of the sciences. It simply makes the historian's science special, withjits

own way

of telling the

truthJWhat

should prevent the historian from offering his findings in the dry, deliberately graceless

psychology,

such a ful

mode

is

not

manner

literary aversion

of presentation

is

but

his recognition that

would be not merely

than a disciplined narrative

(Style

of a paper, say, in clinical

—

it

would

also

less delight-

be

less

true.

the art of the historian's science!

/dfy

[217]

ft

faK

0f/f

BIBLIOGRAPHY I

have compiled

this bibliography

prehensive, let alone complete;

on the writings difference in

my

have

I

cite in the text,

I

with no intention of being comlisted

and

commented have made a

briefly

and on others that

thinking.

Introduction: Style-From Stylistics

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis:

Manner

to

Matter

and Linguistics

The Representation

Western

of Reality in

A

Literature (1946; trans. Williard R. Trask, 1953). classic bridge from philology to sociology spanning Western literature from Homer to Virginia

Woolf; enormously perceptive and

Charles Bally, he langage et

modern stylistics, Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric literary

(1925; 3rd edn., 1951). A pioneerconcentrating on ordinary speech.

la vie

ing study in

amination of

of Fiction (1961). Clearheaded ex-

strategies

modes of writing. E. H. Gombrich, Art and

justly influential.

of

novelists;

applicable

to

other

A

Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Perception (2nd edn., 1961). A brilliant attack on the notion of the "innocent eye," and a documented account of the various ways in which the seer contributes to what he sees. (But see

Gibson and Klein

Charles F. Hockett,

Illusion:

titles in

A

Conclusion, pp. 237, 238.)

Course in Modern Linguistics

(1970).

recommended general introduction to the field. Graham Hough, Style and Stylistics (1969). Short but

A

highly

lucid

in-

troductory essay with useful summaries of the classic works; a short bibliography. J.

Middleton Murry, The Problem of Style (1922; edn. i960) Though .

hardly profound,

it

has some interesting observations.

A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (1923; 10th edn., 1949). A well-known early statement in modern seman-

C. K. Ogden and

I.

tics.

Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915;

Wade

Baskin,

1959).

The

wellspring of

[219]

modern

trans.

linguistics;

its

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

between langue and parole was important

basic distinction

to this

essay.

Meyer Schapiro, "Style" (1953), most ed. Morris Philipson

hensive survey of

Leo

all

accessible in Aesthetics Today,

(1961), pp. 81-113. Brilliant and compre-

the meanings of style. Indispensable.

and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (1948). Important collection of exemplary and civilized studies with a suggestive introduction on "Linguistics and Literary History/' Stephen Ullmann, Style in the French Novel (1957; 2nd edn., 1964). The Image in the Modern French Novel i960) Language and Style: Collected Papers (1964). All highly informative and highly suggestive studies; Ullmann's reading of literary Linguistics

Spitzer,

(

,

,

texts

exemplary for the historian.

is

Style in History; History of Style

H. Hale Bellot, American History and American Historians: A Review of Recent Contributions to the Interpretation of the History of the United States (1952)

.

An

intelligent survey. (See also

Higham

title,

p. 221.)

Herbert Butterfield,

Man

Historical Scholarship especially

Ranke

good on the

section, pp.

E. H. Carr,

What

Is

The Study of the History of (1955). Contains some illuminating essays, emergence of the German school. (See also on His

Past:

224-227.) History? (1962).

lectures, essentially preaching

An enormously

an untenable relativism

popular

set of

—though with

some self-protective reservations. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946). The classic statement of the modern Idealist position; in this context, Collingwood's excessively neat but immensely revealing Autobiography (1939) debe read. F. M. Cornford, Thucydides Mythistoricus ( 1907) An important early statement of the proposition that Thucydides' history followed the conventions of Greek drama. (But see Finley and Ullman titles serves to

.

in this section.)

John H. Finley, Thucydides (1942). An important modification of Cornford's thesis; the book embodies the findings of Finley's articles, including especially "The Origins of Thucydides' Style," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 50 (1939), 35-84. Peter Gay, A Loss of Mastery: Puritan Historians in Colonial America (

1966)

.

A

set of lectures

on one type of seventeenth-century

writing.

[220]

history-

.

Bibliography The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, vol. 2, The Science of Freedom (1969), pp. 368-396. A brief interpretation of history•,

writing in the eighteenth century. Clifford Geertz,

"Ideology as a Cultural System," in Ideology and

Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (1964), pp. 47-76.

Much

the most

and most comprehensive interpretation of a heatedly debated notion. (See also Lichtheim title in this section.) G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913; 1959). Though thoroughly old-fashioned, a comprehensive rational

survey of the classic century of history-writing.

John Higham, with Leonard Krieger and Felix Gilbert, History ( 1965) A searching essay on the development of history-writing in the United States; aided by supplementary, equally searching, essays on European history in America and on some major European historians.

Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Partington (1968). A civilized trio of essays; doing justice both to the sociology and the psychology of history.

John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (1953). An interesting study of the relation of rhetoric to philosophy in writings of Carlyle, Disraeli, and other great Victorians.

M.

L.

W.

Laistner,

The Greater Roman

sizable literature, stands out as a

Historians

(1947). In a

good survey.

George Lichtheim, "The Concept of Ideology" (1965), reprinted in Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (1967). A well-informed historical survey. Karl

Mannheim, Ideology and

Utopia:

An

Introduction

Sociology of Knowledge 1929-1931, trans. Louis Wirth and A. Shils (1936). The classic statement. ,

to

the

Edward

Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti

(1952).

An

important posthumous collection on special aspects of

the sociology of knowledge. Friedrich Meinecke, Historism, 2 vols. (1936; trans. J. E. Anderson, 1972). A subtle and elegant tracing of the historicist strand as it

Enlightenment in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany, culminating in Ranke. Important and, to my mind, totally misleading. Robert K. Merton, "The Sociology of Knowledge," "Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Knowledge," in Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, (rev. edn., 1957), pp. 456-488, 489-508. Two

emerged

in reaction to the

lucid appraisals. J.

G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law; A

[22i]

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (1957). A model of how t^e social roots of historical style should be exposed and appraised. Sir Ronald Syme, Tacitus, 2 vols. (1958). A powerful and exhaustive account of Tacitus, deliberately written in a Tacitean style. James W. Thompson, A History of Historical Writing, 2 vols. (1942). There are other general histories, but this is probably the best, though none too good; a full history of history remains to be written. B. C. Ullman, "History and Tragedy/' Transactions of the American

^

Philological Association, 73 (1942), 25-53. sensible modification of Cornford's extreme position, it argues that while ancient history

borrowed from the drama, it had scientific elements. Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, 1750— 10,50, 4 vols, to date (1955-1965). In the absence of a complete history of styles this magisterial history of literary criticism can serve as an immensely informative substitute.

1

:

Gibbon

:

A Modern Cynic among Ancient Politicians Bv Gibbon

The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, ed. Dero A. Saunders 1961 The most accessible version of Gibbon's memoirs, which present (

)

something of a bibliographical nightmare. A careful critical edition is that by Georges A. Bonnard (1966). The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. Patricia B. Craddock (1972)

.

A

carefully edited collection.

Essai sur V etude de la litterature, in Miscellaneous

Gibbon, Esq.

2nd edn.,

ed.

John Lord

Works

of

Edward

Sheffield, 5 vols.

(1814), 4:1-93. This five-volume collection also contains most of Gibbon's minor writings; its correspondence is now superseded (See below, .

.

.

,

under Norton ) Gibbon's Journal to January 28, 1763. My Journal, I, II, III, and Ephemerides, ed. D. M. Low (1929). Definitive. Gibbons Journey from Geneva to Rome: His Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (1961). Definitive as well.

The History

and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. (1896-1902). The best critical edition, though some

of the Decline

Bury, 7 vols. of its notes are

The

Letters of

Another

now

out of date.

Edward Gibbon,

ed.,

definitive edition.

[222]

J.

E. Norton,

3

vols.

(1956).

,

Bibliography Library of Edward Gibbon, Introduction by Geoffrey Keynes (1950). Fascinating information about a great collector and reader

The

of books.

On Gibbon J.

B. Black,

The Art

of History (1926). Civilized essays

eighteenth-century

great

Hume,

Voltaire,

historians,

including

and Robertson are the other

one

on the four on Gibbon;

three.

Harold L. Bond, The Literaiy Art of Edward Gibbon (i960). Very helpful stylistic analysis.

Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction: Hume, Fielding and Gibbon ( 1970) Interestingly places Gibbon into company with a philosopher and a novelist. C. N. Cochrane, 'The Mind of Edward Gibbon," University of Toronto Quarterly, 12, no. 1 (October 1942), 1-17; 12, no. 2 .

(January 1943), 146-166.

A

careful survey of Gibbon's philosophi-

cal position.

Lewis P. Curtis, "Gibbon's Paradise Lost," in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (1949), pp. 73-90. An elegant essay ing Gibbon as the aristocratic educator.

Giuseppe Giarrizzo, Edward Gibbon e

la

on Gibbon's

style, see-

cultura europea del settecento

(1954). A wide-ranging study, living up to its title. James William Johnson, The Formation of English

Neo-Classical

Thought (1967). Culminates in a long chapter on Gibbon. Michael Joyce, Edward Gibbon (1953). Short and clear. D. M. Low, Edward Gibbon, 1737-1794 (1937). Remains the

best

biography.

Antagonism to Christianity and the Has Provoked (1933). Detailed and special-

Shelby T. McClov, Gibbon Discussions That It

s

ized.

D.

Momigliano, "Gibbon's Contribution to Historical Method" ( 1954), in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography ( 1966) pp. 40-55. A very important essay.

Arnaldo

Thomas

P. Peardon,

The

1760—1830 (1933).

A

Transition in English Historical Writing, judicious

monograph, which places Gibbon

into his time.

Ward

Swain, Edward Gibbon the Historian (1966). Inferior to earlier studies, especially Low's.

Joseph

H. R. Trevor-Roper, "Edward Gibbon after 200 Years," The Listener, 72, no. 1856 (October 22, 1964), 617-619; 72, no. 1857 (October

[223]

STYLE 29, 1964),

657-659.

IN

Warmly

HISTORY

and, more surprisingly but persuasively, of

On

Gibbon the historian Gibbon the man.

appreciative of

Gibbon's World

B. Brumfitt, Voltaire, Historian (1958). A reliable monograph. M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England, 1700-1830 (1945). Survey of classical learning in Gibbon's day. J.

edn. (1951). An neglected generations of

David C. Douglas, English Scholars, 1660-1730, important, illuminating study of the

much

rev.

who preceded Gibbon. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966); The Science of Freedom (1969). An scholars

attempt to offer a comprehensive interpretation of Gibbon's century; both volumes have full bibliographies. Arnaldo D. Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," in

Momigliano, Studies in Historiography, pp. 1-39. Another of Momigliano's penetrating essays. Jean Seznec, Essais sur Diderot et Vantiquite (1957). Moves far beyond its announced subject to provide understanding of links between the eighteenth century and classical antiquity. Jiirgen von Stackelberg, "Rousseau, d'Alembert et Diderot traducteurs de Tacite," Studi Francesi, no. 6 (September-December 1958), 395-4°7,

Tacitus in der Romania: Studien zur literarischen Rezeption

des Tacitus in Italien

und Frankreich (i960). Together

the heritage of Tacitus in France.

England remains

to

A

full

establish

study for his influence on

be written, though Auerbach and Bond are most

useful.

2

:

Ranke The Respectful :

Critic

By Ranke Sammtliche Werke,

Leopold von Ranke, Alfred Dove, and others, 54 vols. (1867-1890). The most comprehensive, though not wholly complete edition; the masterpieces have been published ed.

separately or in collections of selected works.

Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, ed. Paul Joachimsen, 6 vols. (1926). Notable for including some posthumous fragments, like the "Luther-Fragment" of 1817 (6:313-399), and the so-called "Frankfurt Manuscript" of 1837 (6:403-469). Other

[224]

.

Bibliography posthumous publications are conveniently

listed in

Rudolf Vierhaus,

Ranke und die soziale Welt (1957), pp. 251-252. Das Briefwerk, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs (1949). A good collection of Ranke letters. Neue Brief e, ed. Bernhard Hoeft and Hans Herzfeld (1949). A valuable companion volume. Aus Werk und Nachlass, vol. 1, Tagebucher, ed. Walther Peter Fuchs (1964) Immensely revealing. .

On Ranke Ludwig Dehio, "Ranke and German Imperialism" (1950), in Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century, trans. Dieter

A

Pevsner (1959).

brave attempt, from within the

torical establishment, to reevaluate

Pieter Geyl,

"Ranke but

in the Light of the Catastrophe," in Geyl,

much

his-

Ranke's historical work.

bates with Historians (1955), pp. 1-18. satisfactory,

German

A

severe

De-

and not wholly

needed, critique.

G. P. Gooch, "Ranke's Interpretation of German History," in Gooch, Studies in German History (1948), pp. 210-266. A second visit to territory Gooch had explored much earlier, in History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century. (See above, p. 221.) Eugen Guglia, Rankes Leben und Werke (1893). ^ biography that has been superseded by numerous publications of documents. Hanno Helbling, Leopold von Ranke und der historische Stil (1953). Studies on Ranke's stylistic procedures. H. F. Helmolt, Leopold von Rankes Leben und Wirkung (1921). The most recent biography; too uncritical. Carl Hinrichs,

(1954).

Georg G. torical

A

Ranke und

die

Geschichtstheologie

der Goethezeit

suggestive work on Ranke's world of ideas.

Ranke in American and German HisThought," History and Theory, 2 (1962), 17-40. A most Iggers,

"The Image

of

useful article. (See also Iggers

title, p.

227.)

Theodore von Laue, Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years (1950). Compact essay on the development of his historical ideas. Makes accessible, in good translations, two important Ranke essays, "A Dialogue on Politics," and "The Great Powers." Gerhard Masur, Rankes Begriff der Weltgeschichte (1926). Very useful on Ranke's ideas on universal history. Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State (1963 Robert B. Kimber, 1970) Machiavellianism (1924; trans. Douglas Scott, 1957).

ed.; trans. ,

[225]

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

Historism, 2 vols. (1936; trans. J. E. Anderson, 1972.) In these three major works, and in many minor ones, Meinecke -,

studied

Ranke with

affectionate

admiration; both

affection

and

admiration seem, at least to me, excessive, though we can learn much about the subtlety of Ranke's mind and (indirectly) the

power

of Ranke's

way

of thinking over

German

historiography. (See

Krill title, p. 227.)

"Deutung eines Rankewortes," in Aphorismen und Skizzen zur Geschichte, 2nd edn. (n.d.), pp. 100-129. Variations on Ranke's saying that all epochs are equally near to God. 'Ranke und Burckhardt," in Aphorismen und Skizzen, pp. 143-180. An old man's reappraisal; with new reservations and new -,

insights.

Wilhelm Mommsen, Stein, Ranke, Bismarck: Ein Beitrag zur schen und sozialen Bewegung des 19. Jahrhunderts (1954).

politi-

Inter-

on Ranke's politics. Moriz Ritter, Die Entwicklung der Geschichtswissenschaft, an den juhrenden Werken betrachtet (1919), pp. 362-421. A long chapesting essay

ter in a general history of history.

Ernst Simon, Ranke und Hegel (1928). An examination of the claim that Ranke was indebted to Hegel's philosophy.

Rudolf Vierhaus, Ranke und die soziale Welt (1957). Already referred to (p. 225) for its valuable bibliography, this thoughtful essay seeks to establish Ranke's concern with society and social history; it contains some hitherto unpublished excerpts from Ranke's Nachlass.

Ranke's World and Impact l

Maarten Cornelis Brands, Historisme als Ideologie. Het Onpolitieke en 'Anti-Normatieve' Element in de duitse Geschiedwetenschap (1965). An inquiry into the profession and the practices of the

German

historicists.

Walter Bussmann, Treitschke: Sein Welt- und Geschichtsbild (1962). A good biography of Ranke's great rival. Ludwig Dehio, 'Thoughts on Germany's Mission, 1900-1918" (1952), in Dehio, Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century, trans. Dieter Pevsner (1959), pp. 72-108. Courageous thoughts on the imperialist world Ranke helped to build. (See also Dehio's essay on Ranke, cited above, p. 225.) Andreas Dorpalen, Heinrich von Treitschke (1957). A critical and fair-minded biography. Felix Gilbert,

Johann Gustav Droysen und

[226]

die

preussisch-deutsche

.

Bibliography An

Frage, Beiheft 20, Historische Zeitschrift (1931).

illuminating

esasy.

Walter

Goetz,

Historiker

in

Meiner

Zeit:

Gesammelte

Aufsdtze

(1957). Autobiographical, biographical, and historiographical essays by a liberal German historian; Ranke and his influence mark almost every page.

Too

respectful but informative.

Wolfgang Hock, Liberates Denken im Zeitalter der Paulskirche: Droysen und die Frankfurter Mitte (1957). National liberal historians at a critical time

— 1848—

in

the

life

German

of

history,

and German historians. Walther Hofer, Geschichtsschreibung und Weltanschauung (1950). A searching inquiry into Meinecke's historical work and thought. Highly recommended. Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present ( 1968) A comprehensive survey, with a chapter on Ranke, but surrounding it with his precursors, his few critics, and many followers. Useful. Hans-Heinz Krill, Die Ranke Renaissance: Max Lenz und Erich Marcks (1962). A scholarly examination of two highly regarded German followers of Ranke. Devastating and important. Friedrich Meinecke, Erlebtes, 1862-1 gig (1964). A volume of autobiography that chronicles the growth of a Rankean in a highly favorable atmosphere.

W. M. Simon, "Power and

Otto Hintze's Place in German Historiography," in The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of Hajo Holborn ed. Leonard Xrieger and Fritz Stern (1967), pp. 199-219. Fine essay on a historian marked by Ranke's view of history. Richard W. Sterling, Ethics in a World of Power: The Political Ideas of Friedrich Meinecke (1958). Can be read in conjunction with Responsibility:

f

Hofer, above.

Ernst

Weymar, Das

Selbstverstandnis der Deutschen

on history teaching

in

for its concentration

3:

German

on

(

1961

)

.

A

report

schools in the age of Ranke; valuable

relatively little

known

writers of textbooks.

Macaulay: Intellectual Voluptuary.

By Macaulay The Works

of

Lord Macaulay, 2nd

edn., ed.

Lady Trevelyan,

(1871). A very full but not wholly complete or Usable for almost all purposes.

[227]

critical

8 vols. edition.

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

and Thomas

Pinney (1972). Judicious selections, with excellent bibliography and introduction.

Selected

Writings,

ed.

John

Clive

On

Macaulay

Walter Bagehot, "Thomas Babington Macaulay/' Literary Studies, 2 (1879), 221-260. Witty and critical. Richmond C. Beatty, Lord Macaulay, Victorian Liberal (1938). Unimpressive; for the early years wholly superseded by Clive, below. John Clive, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (1973). An impressive study of the growth of the historian's mind, down to his return from India; an important book. 'Macaulay 's Historical Imagination," Review of English '

,

(October i960), 20-28. A fine essay. Sir Charles Firth, A Commentary on Macaulay's History of England (1938). Posthumous lectures; an immensely valuable survey of style, scholarship, achievements, and prejudices. Literature,

G.

S.

1

"Macaulay's

Fraser,

Literature,

Pieter Geyl,

1

Style

Essayist,"

as

(October i960), 9-19.

"Macaulay

in his

A

Review of English

brief helpful survey.

Essays," in Geyl, Debates with His-

torians (1955), pp. 19-34. Excessively hostile but deserves attention.

W.

E. Gladstone, "Macaulay," in Gleanings of Past Years, vol. 2 (1879). An important contemporary assessment.

George Levine, "Macaulay: Progress and Retreat," in Levine, The Boundaries of Fiction: Carlyle, Macaulay, Newman (1968). Sensitive analysis; perhaps too emphatic on Macaulay's retreat from reality.

William A. Madden, "Macaulay's Style," in George Levine and William Madden, eds., The Art of Victorian Prose (1968), pp. 127-153. Helpful. John Morley, "Macaulay," Critical Miscellanies, vol. 1 (1888). By a late Victorian. J.

H. Plumb, "Thomas Babington Macaulay," University of Toronto Quarterly, 26 (1956-1957), 17-31. Traces Macaulay's style (mistakenly,

I

think) to lack of sexual passion.

Leslie Stephen,

"Macaulay,"

in

Hours

in a Library, 3 vols. (1892), 2:

343-376. Like Morley's appraisal, vigorous and valuable. "Macaulay, Thomas Babington," Dictionary of National Biography (1949), 12:410-418. Judicious and summary. Mark A. Thomson, Macaulay (1959). A lucid pamphlet, stressing ,

Macaulay's commitment to

politics.

[

22 8]

Bibliography M.

G.

Trevelyan, "Macaulay and the Sense of Optimism," in Ideas

and

Beliefs

of the Victorians,

foreword by

Harman Grisewood

(1949; 1966), pp. 46-52. A brief appreciative appraisal. G. O. Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols. (1876; enlarged one-volume edn., 1908). A splendid Victorian machine, filled with judicious views and complete letters; until

Thomas

Pinney's edition of the Macaulay's letters appears, this

(and Clive's) work remains an indispensable source.

Ronald Weber, "Singer and Seer: Macaulay on the Historian as Poet/' Papers on Language and Literature, 3 (Summer 1967), 210-219.

G.

Good

study of the part that literary art played in Macaulay's his-

torical

work.

M. Young, "Macaulay" (1937), in Victorian Essays, selected by W. D. Handcock (1962), pp. 35-45. Elegant and discriminating. Macaulay's

World

Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (1952). A brilliant study of Evangelicalism and its aftermath in Victorian England.

"The

,

A

Intellectual Aristocracy," in Studies in Social History:

Tribute to G.

M.

Trevelyan, ed.

}.

H. Plumb (1955), pp. 241-

287. Important. Sir

A J.

The Whig Interpretation of History (1932). the modern critique of liberal historiography.

Herbert Butterfield,

minor

classic in

W.

Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (1970). Foundations of evolutionary views in Spencer,

Tylor,

and

others;

highly relevant

to

Macaulay's

perception

of

the past.

E.

M.

Forster,

Marianne Thornton:

1887 (1956).

A

A

Domestic Biography, 1797loving account of Clapham, by a famous des-

cendant.

William Minto, A Manual of English Prose Literature (edn. 1891). A general, thoroughgoing survey that pays close attention to Macaulay. John Morley, Recollections, 2 vols. (1917). Reminiscences and scattered diary entries by a cultivated late Victorian. Mario Praz, The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, trans. Angus Davidson (1956). Places Macaulay into a general bourgeois, antiheroic framework (see especially pages 102-117, which are specifically devoted to Macaulay); too mechanical in pursuit of a thesis, but worth reading.

[229]

STYLE The English

Eric Stokes,

HISTORY

IN

Utilitarians

and India (1959). Excellent;

should be read in conjunction with Clive.

Hippolyte Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. van Laun (1873). Contains a long and remarkable chapter on Macaulay

(Book V, chap. R. K.

Webb,

3).

Harriet Martineau:

A

Radical Victorian (i960).

A

fine

biography of one of Macaulay's most significant contemporaries.

G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 2nd edn. ( 1953) Amidst a large literature, still an outstanding general essay.

4:

Burckhardt:

The Poet

of

Truth

By Burckhardt Jacob Burckhardt-Gesamtausgabe, ed. Albert Oeri, Heinrich Wolfflin, and others, 14 vols. (1929-1933). The standard edition.

Max

Burckhardt, 7 vols, to date (1949-1969) This will be definitive, when complete. Meanwhile the following selections, all

Briefe, ed.

.

rather different, are

most helpful:

by Max Burckhardt ( 1965) Briefe, ed. Walther Rehm ( 1946) Briefe zur Erkenntnis seiner geistigen Gestalt, ed. Briefe, selected

(1935). Letters, ed.

A

Fritz

Kaphan

pioneering selection.

and

trans.

Alexander Dru (1955).

The

first

English col-

lection.

The Age of Constantine the Great, trans. Moses Hadas (1949). Good English version of Burckhardt's Zeit Constantins des Grossen (1853; 2nc edn., 1880) The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy for the Use of Travelers and Students (1908). Partial translation of Der Cicerone *

(1855).

The

Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy:

Middlemore (1878). There

is

a

An

Essay, trans. S. G. C.

good and accessible

illustrated

by L. Goldscheider (2nd. edn., 1945). Among German editions of Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (i860), the Kroner Verlag edition is handy and kept in edition, introduction

print.

and Freedom: Reflections on History (trans. Anonymous, 1943). The important posthumous Weltgeschichtliche Betrach-

Force

tungen (1905)

in English.

Recollections of Rubens, trans. late

essay,

Mary Hottinger (1950).

published posthumously in

[230]

1898.

A

revealing

.

Bibliography

On

Burckhardt

Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (1948). Though much more inclusive than Burckhardt, gives him pride of place and puts him into the historiographical context.

im Leben und V/erk Jacob Burckpoetry and literature in Burckhardt;

Alfred Lukas Gass, Die Dichtung hardts

(

1967)

On

.

the place of

very suggestive and informative.

Peter Gay, "Burckhardt's Renaissance:

Power,"

in

The

Between Responsibility and

Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in

Honor

Hajo Holborn, ed. Leonard Krieger and Fritz Stern (1967), pp. 183-198. An essay on which I have drawn. Hajo Holborn, "Introduction" to Burckhardt, Civilization of the of

Renaissance in Italy (Modern Library edition, 1954). Short but excellent.

Karl Joel, Jacob Burckhardt als Geschichtsphilosoph

(1918). Useful

essay.

Werner

Kaegi, Jacob Burckhardt: Eine Biographie, 4 vols, to date

Most

book were vol. 2, Das Erlebnis der geschichtlichen Welt (1950), and vol. 3, Die Zeit (1947-

Definitive.

).

der klassischen

Werke

useful for this

1956) Karl Lowith, Jacob Burckhardt: Der Mensch inmitten der Geschichte (1936). Essays, including one on Burckhardt's "relation to language." (

Burckhardt's Renaissance

Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early manism and Republican Liberty Ernst

in an

Age

of

edn. (1966). The classic account of Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos

Tyranny,

HuClassicism and civic humanism.

Italian Renaissance: Civic

rev.

in

Renaissance

Philosophy trans. Mario Domandi (1963). A profound study. Federico Chabod, "The Concept of the Renaissance," in Chabod, Machiavelli and the Renaissance trans. David Moore (1958), pp. ,

,

149-200. ,

A

lucid orienting essay.

"Cultural History and

Problems," Rapports, Eleventh

its

International Congress of Historical Sciences (i960), 1:40-58.

A

valuable report.

Eugenio

Garin,

Italian

Humanism,

trans.

P.

(1966).

A

and History

in

Munz

splendidly balanced survey. Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli

and Guicciardini: [23

1

]

Politics

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

Sixteenth-Century Florence (1965).

An

excellent double essay in

intellectual-cultural-political history.

E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (1969) An expanded lecture; a vigorous attack, from a position close to Sir Karl Popper's, .

on Hegelian holism, including Burckhardt's.

If

too severe, worth

pondering. ,

Norm and Form

(1966). Interesting essays on Renaissance

art.

Denys Hay, The (1961). indebted

A to,

Renaissance in

Italian

Its

Burckhardt.

and Humanist

Strains

1961

(

Renaissance Thought

(1965).

Background

very good short account, independent of, but openly

Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought:

,

Historical

Two

The

Classic, Scholastic,

)

II:

Papers on

Humanism and

the Arts

learned and lucid collections of Renaissance thought

and culture. Very valuable. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art ( i960) A modern vindication of Burckhardt's view that there was a distinct Renaissance, by one of the great art historians of our century.

On

Intuition

and Knowledge

Claude Bernard, Introduction a Vetude de la medecine experimental (1865). A great work by a distinguished biologist on how scientists actuallv proceed.

P. B.

Medawar, The Art

of the Soluble: Creativity

and

Originality in

Science (edn. 1969). A series of essays and reviews in scientific philosophy and procedures; lucid expositions of the anti-inductivist position.

Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (1969). Lectures on scientific method; carries forward the nineteenth-century ,

arguments of Bernard and Whewell. Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, 2nd edn. (1965). A series of related essays setting forth Popper's anti-inductivist theorv of knowledge. The Logic of Scientific Discovery (trans. 1959). The English version of an important treatise in epistemology first published in ,

!934-

William Whewell, The Philosophy of Discovery (i860). The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (1847). Highly significant challenges to the empiricist epistemology ,

of

John Stuart Mill.

[232]

.

Bibliography

Conclusion

(Many

:

On

Style in History

of the titles listed in the Introduction are applicable here.)

History: Art or Science?

Charles Beard, "Written History as an Act of Faith," American His-

Review, 39, no. 2 (January 1934), 219-229; conveniently reprinted in Hans Meyerhoff, ed., The Philosophy of History in torical

An

Anthology (1959), pp. 140-151. The famous presidential address bringing Idealism to the American historical proour Time: fession.

Carl Becker, Quarterly,

"What

are Historical Facts?"

no.

The Western

Political

(September

1955), 327-340; available in Meyerhoff, Philosophy of History, pp. 120-137. A characteristically witty relativist statement, first written in 1926. Marc Bloch, The Historians Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (1953). 8,

3

Fragmentary but immensely illuminating thoughts by a great and heroic historian. L. P. Curtis, ing,

Jr.,

ed.,

A

pioneer-

not always successful, set of sixteen essays by contemporary

historians linking

A

The Historians Workshop (1971). their

backgrounds and motives to their work.

genre that deserves further exploration. (See Namier

title

below.)

Arthur C. Danto, Analytical Philosophy of History (1965). An influential view, from the standpoint of analytical philosophy, holding that history had

own, storytelling logic. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), especially chap. 12. The locus classicus of the pragmatist argument that history is essentially responsive to the historian's need. (See Lovejoy title its

below.)

William H. Dray, Philosophy of History (1964).

A

clear

and

fair-

minded introduction. G. R. Elton, The Practice of History ,

(

1967)

and Practices (1970). Vigorous, the craft by a practicing craftsman.

Political History: Principles

in fact combative, assessments of

Good common

sense mixed in generous proportions with elemen-

tary philosophical confusions.

torical

Thought

historians;

Toward

a Logic of His(1970). Pert, often impertinent attack on other

David Hackett Fischer, Historians'

Fallacies:

sometimes amusing, but

[233]

filled

with

its

own

fallacies.

STYLE V. H. Galbraith,

HISTORY

IN

An

Introduction to the Study of History (1964). Clearheaded defense of history as truth-seeking.

W.

and the

B. Gallie, Philosophy

Defense of the view of history

Historical Understanding (1964). as storytelling. Impressive

but (to

my

mind) unconvincing. Patrick Gardiner, The Nature of

Historical Explanation (1955). Part of philosophers' debate over the place of causal analysis in history.

Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli

and Guicciardini:

Sixteenth-Century Florence

Politics

(1965). Again:

Hanna H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The

H. Hexter, "The Historian and His Day," in History (1961). pp. 1-13.

A

way

work.

in ,

which historians

"The Rhetoric

really

study.

(October-December

in Hexter, Reappraisals

typically energetic

account of the

of History," in International Encyclopedia of

the Social Sciences, ed. David L.

A

splendid

in

Pursuit of Eloquence,"

Journal of the History of Ideas, 24, no. 4 1963), 497-514. A pioneering essay. J.

a

and History

Sills,

17 vols. (1968) 6:368-394.

deservedly familiar essay, seeking to establish an independent

place for history through

its

rhetoric.

Amusing, vigorous but,

I

think, unpersuasive.

The History Primer 1971 "The Rhetoric of History." -,

in

(

)

.

Expansion of the view expressed

Richard Hofstadter, "History and the Social Sciences," in The Varieties of History, ed. Fritz Stern

(1956), pp. 359-370. Short, informal,

humane. H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science (1964). Subtitled "Twin Vistas on the Past," this interesting collection of essays examines

the

of

relation

history

to

literature,

psychoanalysis,

anthropology, and other neighbors.

Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (1970).

Donald R.

An David

Kelley,

excellent analysis.

Landes and Charles Tillv, eds., History as Social Science (1971). Brief report on interdisciplinary work being done or needing doing; sketchy but rather helpful. Gordon Leff, History and Social Theory (1969). A strong critique of the Marxist view of history and an examination of the place of S.

history

among

the sciences of man.

Arthur O. Lovejoy, "Present Standpoints and Past History" (1939), conveniently reprinted in slightly abridged form in Hans Meyerhoff, ed., The Philosophy of History in Our Time: An Anthology (1959), pp. 173-187.

A

powerful refutation of Dewey's attack on

[234]

.

Bibliography objectivity;

develops the idea of "interestingness" as a cause for

inquiry.

Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge:

Answer

to Relativism (1967).

to Dilthey,

Mannheim, and

A

An

philosophically sophisticated reply

others; a valuable analysis.

Marrou, De la connaissance historique, 4th edn. (1959). Reflectons by a distinguished ancient historian. Hans Meyerhoff, The Philosophy of History in Our Time: An Anthology (1959). Well-chosen series of excerpts from a variety of H.-I.

philosophical positions.

Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography (1971). A rare thing: a candid biography of a controversial historian; while it does not assess Namier's histories, it clarifies his psychological makeup. Lewis Namier, "History," in Namier, Avenues of History (1952), pp. 1-10. Witty, brief observations. Emery Neff, The Poetry of History: The Contribution of Literature and Literary Scholarship to the Writing of History Since Voltaire Julia

(1947). A" e ^ e g anr rather neglected essay on the subject of Conclusion: the definition of history. >

J.

my

H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (1970). A wide-ranging survey of the way cultures have used their past; stimulating and informative.

David M. Potter, History and American Society ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (1973). A beautiful collection of essays that illuminate the debts the historian owes to culture, and culture to the historian. Social Science Research Council, Bulletin 54, Theory and Practice in Historical Study ( 1946) Bulletin 64, The Social Sciences in Historical Study (1954). Instructive; should be read together as illustrations of development of thought in the American profession. Chronicles a certain decline ,

,

in relativism.

Fritz

Stern,

ed.,

The

Varieties of History

,

From

Voltaire

the

to

Present (1956). A useful, varied anthology. G. M. Trevelyan, "Clio: A Muse" (1903). Conveniently reprinted in

somewhat abridged form

in Stern, Varieties of History, pp.

245. Important defense of history as literature. H. R. Trevor-Roper, History: Professional and Lay (1957). plea for history as a literary pursuit.

Stephen Usher, The Historians of Greece and

Rome

A

227-

spirited

(1969).

An

intelligent survey.

W.

H. Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction, (1958). Introductory, but clear and intelligent.

[235]

rev.

edn.

STYLE

IN

HISTORY A New

George Watson, The Study of Literature:

Rationale of Literary

1969) A clear-headed essay. Morton White, Foundations of Historical Knowledge History

.

(

(1965).

A

philosopher's technical analysis.

Peter

Winch, The Idea

Philosophy (1958). Among the best "philosophical psychology" identified

ment

that

and

of a Social Science

the science of

man and

whollv distinct. Other well-known

known with

Relation to

Its

of the writings

Wittgenstein's

on

argu-

the sciences of nature are

titles

in this school include A.

Melden, Free Action (1961), and R. S. Peters, The Concept of Motivation (i960). But see, for a defense of determinism as being quite compatible with free action, Alasdair Maclntyre, "The Antecedents of Action" and "The Idea of a Social Science," in Maclntyre, Against the Self-images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (1971), pp. 191-210, 211-229. C. Vann Woodward, The Age of Reinterpretation, Publication No. 35, Service Center For Teachers of History (1961). A persuasive I.

essay.

On

the Definition of Science

R. B. Braithwaite, Scientific Explanation: A Study of the Function of Theory, Probability and Law in Science (1953). Technical but lucid.

Arthur Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser, (i960).

One

of the

most useful of

eds.,

Philosophy of Science

several anthologies.

George Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (1967). A very important essay by an imaginative scholar, both psychoanalyst and anthropologist, on the psychological charges the researcher puts into his research, and how to neutralize them. (See also

Myrdal, below.)

Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid

Readings in Philosophical Analysis (1949). Though no longer new, this anthology contains

a

number

of

now

Sellars,

eds.,

classic articles illuminating the

nature of

modern

scientific thinking.

Charles Coulston Gillispie,

The Edge

of Objectivity:

the History of Scientific Ideas (i960). the definition of science.

A

An

Essay in

valuable contribution to

Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (1965). A collection of seminal essays, including the classic

"The Function

of General

Laws

in

History," by a philosopher persuasively arguing that the logic of

[236]

,

.

Bibliography history

and that of the natural sciences are the same. Indispensable.

(See also Nagel, below.)

Philosophy of Natural Science (1966). Beautifully clear and remarkably brief. -,

Gunnar Myrdal,

plea that social scientists

science

(1969). A vigorous recognize the peculiar nature of their

Objectivity in Social Research

and acknowledge

(in

order

overcome)

to

their

biases.

Fits equally well into the next category.

The

Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (1961). A splendidly clear exposition of the

Ernest Nagel,

positivist position, assimilating history to science

and incidentally

refuting, with great dash, opposing points of view.

An

important

book.

On J.

L.

Austin,

Perception

Philosophical Papers,

ed.

J.

Warnock (1961) How To Do Things With Words,

O. Urmson and G.

J.

.

O. Urmson (1962) Sense and Sensibilia, reconstructed from notes by G. J. Warnock (1962). Witty lectures and articles constituting a brilliant assault on the sense-data theory and an amusing and profound ,

ed.

}.

,

restatement of Realism.

Egon Brunswik, "The Conceptual Framework national Encyclopedia of Unified Science, short essay on

what kind

1,

of Psychology," Inter-

No. 10 (1952).

of science psychology in fact

Sigmund Freud, "Formulations on the Two

A

fine

is.

Mental Functioning" (1911), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., 23 vols, to date (1953)> 12:213-226. The first compressed statement on the pleasure and the reality principles. In an important sense, of course, all of Freud's work is relevant to the study of the way in which the perceiver grasps, masters, and disPrinciples

of

torts reality.

Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (1950). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (1966). Two masterly statements of the view that perception is in general strikingly adequate, and can be improved. Highly pertinent to my

James

J. ,

Conclusion.

Nelson

Goodman, 'The

Way The

World

Is,"

The Review

of

(September i960), pp. 48-56. Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation Metaphysics, 14, no.

1

[237]

STYLE

HISTORY

IN

(1939; trans. David Rapaport, 1958). A classic essay on the "conflict-free sphere of the ego" by Freud's distinguished disciple. Essays on

-,

analytic directly

Ego Psychology:

Selected Problems in

Theory (1964). Several essays contained in this volume relate to man's perception of his world; an authoritative

statement of ego psychology, further advancing Freud's

make George

Psycho-

to

effort

psychoanalysis into a general psychology. S.

Klein,

brilliant series

home

(1970). A of studies by a psychologist of perception wholly at Perception,

Motives, and Personality

an impressive attempt to mediate between the objectivism of Gibson and the subjectivism of other psychologists. Its formulations were important to my Conclusion. Ivo Kohler, The Formation and Transformation of the Perceptual World (1951; trans. H. Fiss, 1964). A seminal essay, from which American psychologists of perception have learned much. Robert J. Swartz, ed., Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing (1965). A sound selection of articles on the philosophy of perception. in psychoanalytic theory;

On Mommsen Ludo Moritz Hartmann, Theodor Mommsen, Eine Biographische Skizze (1908). A very useful first sketch; with much unpublished correspondence. Alfred Heuss, Theodor

Mommsen und

das 19. Jahrhundert

(1956).

Excellent appraisal.

David Knowles, "The Monumenta Germaniae Historica," in Great Historical Enterprises; Problems in Monastic History (1963), pp. 63-97. Includes a discussion of

Mommsen's

scholarly activities.

Theodor Mommsen, Reden und Aufsatze, 3rd printing (1912). A spirited collection of essays and addresses. Rbmische Geschichte, 3rd edn., 3 vols. (1861). The Republic down to or up to Julius Caesar. Lily Ross Taylor, Party Politics in the Age of Caesar (1949). A ,

—

—

scholarly examination of the age to torical

passion; a

fine

summary

which

Mommsen

gave his

of the historiographical

his-

work of

Gelzer and Premerstein.

Lothar Wickert, Theodor

Mommsen: Eine

Biographie,

3 vols, to

date

Stodgy but authoritative. Albert Wucher, Theodor Mommsen: Geschichtsschreibung und Politik (1956). A fine, thorough essay; very favorable to Mommsen, but

(1959-

justifies its

).

point of view.

[238]

INDEX and

Adams, Herbert Baxter, 61 Analysis, in Tacitus and Gibbon,

scientific history,

173-175, 176-180; skepticism of, 163164; stylistic development of,

26 Ancient History (Rollin), 32-33 Annals (Tacitus), 23

of,

Arnold, Matthew, on Macaulay,

tion,"

98 Auerbach, Erich, on social perceptions in style, 15-16

tense,

*73 Byron, on Gibbon, 47

Balzac, 190-191

Capote, Truman, 194

Becker, Carl, 197 Bernard, Claude, 178 Bossuet, 32

Carlyle,

Brenner, Albert, 170 Buffon, on style, 3, 5, 6-7

Christian history, 32-34

165-167; sublimation

145; appraisal of, 182;

Cicerone,

166;

coherence

and of,

171-173; compared to Ranke, 181-182; devotion to readable style of, 146;

emotional

style of,

and Gewaltmenschen, 167169, 170, 182; on individualism, 158-163; and Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 141142; on Leon Battista Alberti, 143-145;

literary

style of, 7; personality of,

146,

164-165; personal style of, 150156; on poetry and history, 175-176, 180-181; professional style of, 9; and psychology of research, 178-180; on Ranke, 146, 149; on Renaissance, 156163;

scholarship

169-170; and use of "intui-

and use of present 155; and Zeitgeist, 171179;

Thomas, on Macaulay,

Cicerone (Burckhardt), 166 Culture: impact on historian 206-208; and stvle, 14-15

of,

149-150;

of,

Curchot, Suzanne, 23, 39, 51 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon), 8, 41,

42-43

8;

157; life of,

works

Carr, E. H., 198

Burckhardt, Jacob: anti-Semitism of,

in

De

Mabillon ) 73 Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter re

diplomatica

(

,

der Reformation (Ranke), 63 Dickens, 191-192

Discours de Vhistoire universelle (Bossuet), 32 Doyle, Conan, 192 Fiction, relation to history,

190-

194 First Circle,

Forster, E.

[239]

The

(Solzhenitzyn),

M., 191

STYLE

IN

HISTORY

Franzosische Geschichte (Ranke),

194-197; relation of art and science in, 185-190; as science, 213-215; See also objectivity,

59-61 Freud, Sigmund, 190

Historian (s) Galbraith, V. H., 188

Romanischen und Germanischen Vblker von

Geschichten

der

1514 (Ranke), 68 Edward: appraisal

bis

1494 Gibbon,

of,

53-56; antithetical rhetoric

of,

45-47; discovery of Rome, 3639; emotional style of, 8; and History of the Decline and Fall of the

Roman

Empire, 21-22,

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gib-

bon), 21-22, 41, 42-43 Hochhuth, Rolf, 192 Hume, David, 25, 33, 39, 43 Humor, Gibbon's use of, 51—53 Imitation: style,

24;

on,

influences

ironic

style

of,

34-36, 48; 41-50, 54-56;

literary style of, 7;

and natural

history of Christianity,

jection of Christian world view,

style,

23;

style

12;

stylistic

40-41;

development of

on

Oliver,

of,

41-50,

(Burckhardt), 10, 141-142, 171

Mabillon, Jean, 73 Macaulay, Thomas

of,

religion,

44-46 Goldsmith,

use

Kafka, Franz, 192 Kultur der Renaissance in Italien

22-

analvsed,

treatment

11-12

Werner, 177

Kaegi,

34-36; on

of,

and

48-

50; professional style of, 9; re-

scholarship

24;

54-56

38-40;

as philosophical historian,

32;

classics,

Gibbon's

Irony,

41, 42-43; humor of, 51-53; imitation of Tacitus' style, 21-

of

use

of

audience

of,

120-121; on Ba-

132-133; belief in progof, ress 130-134; impact of Claphamites on, 123-124; crit-

con,

icism of, 97-99; and ''declamatory disquisition," 112-113; ex ~

pansiveness

speech, 26

Babington:

in

stvle

of,

115,

118-119; and History of England, 116-118; intellectual circle of, 121-122; life of, 121116,

Historian (s )

:

and

culture,

208; perspectives of,

206-

197-200; 209-210;

and professionalism, and style, 4; and subjectivity,

ernism

199-200; See also History

of,

Historisch-Politische

Zeitschrift,

terpretation

in,

132-134; personality 114-115; political causes of, style of,

215-

190-194; in210-212; and

79; relationship with father of, 123-125, 126-127; relationship

nature

216; and fiction,

mod-

of,

137-138; professional 9;

dual

7;

99-101, 102, 105-106; on Ranke, 78-

71 History:

127; literary style of,

of,

[240]

prose

passages

of,

1

Index with

sisters

scholarship

125-126;

of, of,

secular

119;

128-129; and social history, 116-118; speech style of, 108-109; stylistic techniques religion of,

of,

Ranke, Leopold von: aphorisms of, 68-69; app^isal of, 60-62, 72-73; compared to Gibbon, 75-76; and Deutsche Geschichte im Zeit78;

106-114; and use of histor-

ical

parallels,

parallel

107;

clauses,

use

of

rhythmic reiteration, 108, 110; volubility of,

gism,

127;

of,

Reformation, 63; votion to service of, 81-83; Die Romischen Papste in letzten vier Jahrhunderten,

and den 76-

documentary research

of,

alter der

and use of

111;

criticism

and Whig-

77;

134-136

Macaulay, Zachary, 123, 124

70-71,

86-87; dramatic tech-

niques

of,

62-64, 67; Franzbsische Geschichte,

Norman, 194 Mann, Thomas, 191 Mailer,

de-

and

Melville, 191

5961; and Geschichten der Romanischen und Germanischen Volker von 1494 bis 1514, 68;

Michelet, 149

life of,

Mimesis (Auerbach), 16 Mommsen, Theodor: criticism

7; political biases of,

Meinecke, Friedrich, 91

literary style of,

91-92; on

power, 87-90; professional style

of,

203; impact of political activ-

on work of, 205; politics of, 202-203; Roman experience of, 204-205; scholarship of, 200-201; style of, 201-202 Montesquieu, 43 Murry, Middleton, 5

69-72;

of, 9;

ities

religiositv of,

and

scientific

68;

and

78, 79-86;

method, 61, 67history,

social

93-94; style characterized, 62, 76-79; and theology of history, 84-86; and use of primary sources, 7475; and use of words, 67 Religion, Gibbon's treatment of,

44-46

Natural History of Religion

Rollin, Charles, 32-33

(Hume), 39

Roman History

(Rollin), 32-33 Romantics, view of stvle, 1

Nevins, Allan, 61 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 74 Nietzsche, 162

Romische

Geschichte

(Momm-

sen), 201, 202, 203 Penetration, in Tacitus and Gib-

Die Romischen

of

historians,

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 191

Porson, Richard, 52 Professionalism, impact torian of,

(Ranke), 76-77

197-

200

in

letzten vier Jahrhunderten

bon, 25-26 Perspectives,

Papste

209-210

and imitation, 24 Scholarship, of Gibbon, 34-36 Satire,

on

his-

Scientific history, 61

[241]

den

STYLE Skepticism

in

IN

Tacitus and

Gib-

Macaulay's

con-

bon, 29 Social

history,

tribution to,

Society

116-118

the

for

1

and

of,

abuse

development 11-12; dimensions of, 212of, 5-6;

213; elements of, 8-9; function of, of,

13-14;

objectivity, roles of, in,

3;

7-8;

12; social information

study

of,

6;

of

McGraw-Hill Paperbacks

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University of Leipzig, 69 Voltaire, 29

West, Rebecca, 194 Whewell, William, 178 Windelband, Wilhelm, 213

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University of Basel, 142 University of Berlin, 70, 72 University of Gottingen, 73

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1221

imitation

and

17; professional, 9;

14-16;

bon's

23;

emotional,

216; history

literary,

and Annals,

world view

24

Solzhenitzyn, 192-193 Sources, Ranke's use of, 74-75 Strauss, Leo, 1 Style:

thought, 9-10; and truth, 217; uses of, 3-4; value of, 7 Tacitus:

Mitigation

Abolition of Slavery,

HISTORY

HISTORY

Style 111

History What does an

Peter

Gay

and lucid guide to the proper reading of Gibbon, Ranke, Macaulay, and Burckhardt— great historians who were also great stylists— Peter Gay demonstrates that, as much as it is a symptom of his bias and belief, style is an invaluable clue to the historian's insight. historian's style reveal? In this original

By showing how the habits

research and presentation— "professional" style— relate to "literary" and "personal" style, Professor Gay suggests that a knowledge of the historian's working methods is an interpretative factor in itself: Ranke assiduously visited all accessible archives; Macaulay pored over broadsides and collections of verses; Gibbon mastered the history of ancient Rome from modern compilations; and Burckhardt searched for Renaissance biographies which he transformed into chilling stories. of

Thus, for Peter Gay, style is the key to culture, and the "truth" of history— as it helps to define that culture— can only be fully understood through an objective and thorough analysis of all its elements. "Style

in

History takes up that marvellous perennial— What

is

History?— from a new perspective with enormous success It is like going through a portrait gallery from a Rembrandt to a Vermeer to a Manet to a Cezanne. It is a real tour de force. 1 '

—Robert

L.

Heilbroner

Peter Gay, one of America's leading cultural historians, is Durfee Professor of History at Yale. Among his many books are The En-

Modern Paganism, for which he received the National Book Award in 1967, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, and Art and Act— On Causes in History: Manet, Gropius, lightenment: The Rise of

Mondrian.

m

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