p. 238 This does not mean that a historian makes up his facts, like a poet or story teller. However, we might get into trouble if we insisted too strongly that a writer of fiction makes up his facts. He creates a world, as we have said. But this new world is not totally different from our own—indeed, it had better not be—and a poet is an ordinary man, with ordinary senses by and through which he has learned. He does not see things that we cannot see (he may see better or in a slightly different way). His characters use words that we use (otherwise we could not believe in them). It is only in dreams that human beings create really strange new worlds—yet even in the most fantastic dream the events and creatures of the imagination are made up out of elements of everyday experience. They are merely put together in strange new ways.
A good historian does not, of course, make up the past. He considers himself responsibly bound by some concept or criterion of accuracy or facts. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the historian must always make up something. He must either find a general pattern in, or impose one on, events; or he must suppose that he knows why the persons in his story did the things they did. He may have a general theory or philosophy, such as that Providence rules human affairs, and make his history fit that. Or he may abjure any such pattern, imposed as it were from the outside or above, and instead insist that he is merely reporting the real events that have occurred. But in that case he is likely to be forced to assign causes for events and motivations for actions. It is essential to recognize which way the historian you are reading is operating.
The only way to avoid taking either one or the other position is to assume that men do not do things for a purpose, or that the purpose, if it exists, is undiscoverable—in other words, that there is no pattern to history at all.
Tolstoy had such a theory about history. He was not a historian, of course; he was a novelist. But many historians have held the same view, particularly in modern times. The p. 239 causes of every human action, Tolstoy thought, were so manifold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened. Because theories of history differ, and because a historian’s theory affects his account of events, it is necessary to read more than one account of the history of an event or period if we want to understand it. Indeed, this is the first rule of reading history. And it is all the more important if the event in which we are interested has practical significance for us. It is probably of practical significance to all Americans that they know something about the history of the Civil War. We still live in the backwash of that great and sorry conflict; we live in a world it helped to make. But we cannot hope to understand it if we look at it through the eyes of only one man, or one side, or one faction of modern academic historians. The other day we opened a new Civil War history and noted that its author offered it as “an impartial, objective history of the Civil War from the point of view of the South.” The author appeared to be serious. Maybe he was; maybe such a thing is possible. At any rate, we would admit that every narrative history has to be written from some point of view. But to get at the truth, we ought to look at it from more than one viewpoint.
The Universal in History
We are not always able to read more than one history of an event. When we are not, we must admit that we do not have much chance of learning the truth of the matter in question—of learning what really happened. However, that is not the only reason to read history. It might be claimed that only the professional historian, the man who is writing a history himself, is required to cross-examine his sources by exhaustively checking one against the other. He must leave no stone unturned if he is to know what he ought to know about his subject. We, as lay readers of history, stand somewhere between p. 240 the professional historian, on the one hand, and the irresponsible amateur, on the other hand, who reads history only for amusement.
Let us take the example of Thucydides. You may be aware that he wrote the only major contemporary history of the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.C. In a sense, there is nothing to check his work against. What, then, can we expect to learn from it?
Greece is now a tiny country; a war that occurred there twenty-five centuries ago can have little real effect on our life today. Everyone who fought in it is long dead, and the specific things for which they fought are long dead, too. The victories are now meaningless, and the defeats without pain. The cities that were taken and lost have crumbled into dust. Indeed, if we stop to think of it, almost all that remains of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ account of it.
Yet that account is still important. For Thucydides’ story—we might as well use that word—has had an influence on the subsequent history of man. Leaders in later eras read Thucydides. When they found themselves in situations that even faintly approximated that of the tragically divided Greek city-states, they compared their own position to that of Athens or Sparta. They used Thucydides as an excuse and a justification, and even as a pattern of conduct. The result was that by ever so little, perhaps, but perceptibly, the history of the world was changed by the view held of a small portion of it by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. Thus we read Thucydides not because he described perfectly what happened before he wrote his book, but because he to a certain extent determined what happened after. And we read him, strange as this may seem, to know what is happening now.
“Poetry is more philosophical than history,” wrote Aristotle. By this he meant that poetry is more general, more universal. A good poem is true not only in its own time and place, but in all times and places. It has meaning and force for all men. History is not quite so universal as that. It is tied to events in a way that poetry is not. But any good history is also universal.
p. 241 Thucydides himself said that he was writing his history so that men of the future would not have to repeat the mistakes he had seen made and from which he had suffered personally and through the agony of his country. He described the kinds of human mistakes that would have meaning to men other than himself, to men other than Greeks. Yet some of the very same errors that the Athenians and the Spartans made 2,500 years ago, or at least very similar ones, are being made now, as they have been made over and over again since Thucydides’ time.
If your view of history is limited, if you go to it to discover only what really happened, you will not learn the main thing that Thucydides, or indeed any good historian, has to teach. If you read Thucydides well, you may even decide to give up trying to discover what really happened in the past.
History is the story of what led up to now. It is the present that interests us—that and the future. The future will be partly determined by the present. Thus, you can learn something about the future, too, from a historian, even from one who like Thucydides lived more than two thousand years ago.
Let us sum up these two suggestions for reading history. The first is: if you can, read more than one history of an event or period that interests you. The second is: read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular time and place in the past, but also to learn the way men act in all times and places, especially now.
Questions to Ask of a Historical Book
Despite the fact that most histories are closer to fiction than to science, they can be read as expository works, and therefore they should be. Hence, we must ask the same questions of a historical book that we ask of any expository book. Because of the special nature of history, we must ask those questions a little differently and must expect to receive slightly different kinds of answers.
p. 242 As far as the first question is concerned, every history has a particular and limited subject. It is surprising, then, how often readers do not trouble to find out what this is. In particular, they do not always note carefully what limitations the author sets for himself. A history of the Civil War is not a history of the world in the nineteenth century. It probably will not be a history of the American West in the 1860’s. It could, though perhaps it should not, ignore the state of American educ
ation in that decade, or the movement of the American frontier, or the progress of American freedom. Hence, if we are to read a history well, it is necessary to know precisely what it is about and what it is not about. Certainly, if we are to criticize it, we must know the latter. An author cannot be blamed for not doing what he did not try to do.
With regard to the second question, the historian tells a story, and that story, of course, occurred in time. Its general outlines are thus determined, and we do not have to search for them. But there is more than one way to tell a story, and we must know how the historian has chosen to tell his. Does he divide his work into chapters that correspond to years or decades or generations? Or does he divide it according to other rubrics of his own choosing? Does he discuss, in one chapter, the economic history of his period, and cover its wars and religious movements and literary productions in others? Which of these is most important to him? If we discover that, if we can say which aspect of the story he is telling seems to him most fundamental, we can understand him better. We may not agree with his judgment about what is basic, but we can still learn from him.
Criticism of history takes two forms. We can judge—but only, as always, after we understand what is being said—that a historian’s work lacks verisimilitude. People just do not act that way, we may feel. Even if the historian documents his statements by giving us access to his sources, and even if to our knowledge they are relevant, we can still feel that he has misunderstood them, that he has judged them in the wrong p. 243 way, perhaps through some deficiency in his grasp of human nature or human affairs. We tend to feel this, for example, about many older historians who do not include much discussion of economic matters in their work. People, we may be inclined to think now, act out of self-interest; too much nobility ascribed to the “hero” of a history may make us suspicious.
On the other hand, we may think, especially if we have some special knowledge of the subject, that the historian has misused his sources. We may be indignant to discover that he has not read a certain book that we have read. And he may be misinformed about the facts of the matter. In that case, he cannot have written a good history of it. We expect a historian to be informed.
The first criticism is, however, more important. A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.
With regard to the last question, What of it?, it is possible that no kind of literature has a greater effect on the actions of men than history. Satires and pictures of philosophical Utopias have little effect; we would all like the world to be better, but we are seldom inspired by the recommendations of authors who do no more than describe, often bitterly, the difference between the real and the ideal. History, which tells us of the actions of men of the past, often does lead us to make changes, to try to better our lot. In general, statesmen have been more learned in history than in other disciplines. History suggests the possible, for it describes things that have already been done. If they have been done, perhaps they can be done again—or perhaps they can be avoided.
The main answer to the question, What of it?, therefore, lies in the direction of practical, political action. For this reason it is of great importance that history be read well. Unfortunately, leaders have often acted with some knowledge of history but not enough. With the world as small and dangerp. 244ous as it has become, it would be a good idea for all of us to start reading history better.
How to Read Biography and Autobiography
A biography is a story about a real person. This mixed patrimony causes it to have a mixed character.
Some biographers would object to this description. But ordinarily, at least, a biography is a narrative account of the life, the history, of a man or woman or of a group of people; thus, a biography poses many of the same problems as a history. The reader must ask the same sort of questions—what is the author’s purpose? What are his criteria of truth?—as well, of course, as asking the questions we must ask of any book.
There are several kinds of biographies. The definitive biography is intended to be the final, exhaustive, scholarly work on the life of someone important enough to deserve a definitive biography. Definitive biographies cannot be written about living persons. They are seldom written until several non-definitive biographies have first appeared, all of them often somewhat inadequate. All sources are gone through, all letters read, and a great deal of contemporary history examined by the author. Since the ability to gather the materials is somewhat different from the talent for shaping them into a good book, definitive biographies are not always easy reading. This is too bad. A scholarly book does not have to be dull. One of the greatest of all biographies is Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and it is continuously fascinating. It is certainly definitive (though other biographies of Dr. Johnson have since appeared), but it is also uniquely interesting.
A definitive biography is a slice of history—the history of a man and of his times, as seen through his eyes. It should be read as history. An authorized biography is not the same thing at all. Such works are usually commissioned by the heirs or p. 245 friends of some important person, and they are carefully written so that the errors the person made and the triumphs he achieved are seen in the best light possible. They can sometimes be very good indeed, because the author has the advantage—not as a rule accorded to other writers—of being allowed access to all pertinent material by those who control it. But, of course, an authorized biography cannot be trusted in the same way that a definitive biography can be. Instead of reading it simply as history, the reader should understand that it may be biased—that this is the way the reader is expected to think of the book’s subject; this is the way his friends and associates want him to be known to the world.
The authorized biography is a kind of history, but it is history with a difference. We may be curious to know what interested persons want the public to know about someone’s private life, but we should not expect to know what the private life really was. The reading of an authorized biography will thus often tell us much about the time in which it was written, about its customs and manners, about those actions and attitudes that were acceptable—and, by implication and with a little extrapolation, about those that were not. But we should not hope to discover the real life of a human being any more than we would hope to know the real story of a war if we read the communiqués of only one side. To get at the truth we must read all the communiqués, ask people who were there, and use our own minds to make sense out of the muddle. A definitive biography has already done this work; in the case of an authorized biography (and most biographies of living persons are of this sort), there is still much to do.
There remain those biographies that are neither definitive nor authorized. Perhaps we may call them ordinary biographies. In such works, we expect the author to be accurate, to know his facts. We want above all to be given the feeling that we are viewing the life of a real person in another time and place. Human beings are curious, and especially curious about other human beings.
p. 246 Such books, although not trustworthy in the way definitive biographies are, are often very good reading. The world would be the poorer without Izaak Walton’s Lives of his friends, the poets John Donne and George Herbert, for example (Walton is of course better known for his The Compleat Angler); or John Tyndall’s account of his friend Michael Faraday in Faraday the Discoverer.
Some biographies are didactic. They have a moral purpose. Not many of this sort are written any more, but they used to be common. (They are still written for children, of course.) Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans is such a work. Plutarch told the stories of great men of the Greek and Roman past in order to help his contemporaries to be great also, and to help them avoid the errors into which the great so often fall—or so he felt. The Lives is a marvelous book; but, although many of the accounts are the only ones we have of their subjects, we do not read it so muc
h for its biographical information as for its view of life in general. Its subjects are interesting people, good and bad, but never indifferent. Plutarch realized this himself. His original intention in writing had been to instruct others, he said, but in the course of the work he discovered that more and more it was he himself who was deriving profit and stimulation from “lodging these men one after the other in his house.”
Incidentally, Plutarch’s is another historical work that has exercised a profound influence on subsequent history. For example, just as Plutarch shows Alexander the Great modeling his own life on that of Achilles (whose life he learned about from Homer), so many later conquerors have tried to model their lives on that of Plutarch’s Alexander.
Autobiographies present some different and interesting problems. First of all, it is questionable whether anyone has ever written a true autobiography. If it is difficult to know the life of anyone else, it is even more difficult to know one’s own. And, of course, all autobiographies have to be written about lives that are not yet complete.
p. 247 The temptation to tell either less or more than the truth (the latter may be more common), when there is no one to contradict you, is almost irresistible. Everybody has some secrets he cannot bear to divulge; everybody also has some illusions about himself, which it is almost impossible for him to regard as illusions. However, although it is not possible to write a wholly true autobiography, neither is it possible to write one that contains no truth at all. Just as no man can be a perfect liar, so every autobiography tells us something about its author, if only that there are things that he wants to conceal.
It is customary to say that the Confessions of Rousseau, or some other book written about the same time (about the middle of the eighteenth century), is the first real autobiography. This is to overlook Augustine’s Confessions, for example, and Montaigne’s Essays; but the error is more serious than that. In fact, much of what anyone writes on any subject is autobiographical. There is a great deal of Plato in the Republic, of Milton in Paradise Lost, of Goethe in Faust—though we may not be able to put our finger on it exactly. If we are interested in humanity, we will tend, within reasonable limits, to read any book partly with an eye to discovering the character of its author.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Page 25
