Mark Salber Phillips - On Historical Distance

On Historical Distance

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On Historical Distance Mark Salber Phillips

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Annie Burr Lewis Fund and from the foundation established in memory of Calvin Chapin of the Class of 1788, Yale College. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Electra and Trajan types by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Phillips, Mark, 1946– On historical distance / Mark Salber Phillips. p. cm. — Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-300-14037-8 (alk. paper) 1. Historiography—Philosophy. 2. History—Philosophy. D16.8.P42 2013 907.2—dc23

I. Title.

2012037687 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of Harry and Avie, who are always with me. And for Harry, Isaac, Zelda, and Miriam.

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CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xv

Introduction. Rethinking Historical Distance: From Doctrine to Heuristic

1

Part One Circa 1500: Machiavelli in the Florentine Tradition o n e Machiavelli Between History and Chronicle

25

t w o A Study in Contrasts: Machiavelli, Guicciardini,

and the Idea of Example 42

Part Two Circa 1800: History and Its Genres in the Long Eighteenth Century t h r e e “The Most Illustrious Philosopher and Historian of the Age”:

Hume and the Balances of Enlightenment History

61

f o u r “What Sympathy Then Touches Every Human Heart!”:

Emotional Identification in Enlightenment and Romantic Histories

79

f i v e Nine Hundred Scottish Ministers Write the History of Everyday Life:

Contrasting Distances in Sinclair’s “Statistical Account of Scotland”

97

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Contents s i x Past and Present: Contrastive Narratives in the Romantic Age

115

s e v e n “The Very Web and Texture of Society as It Really Exists”:

Literary History in Historiographical Perspective

140

e i g h t “A Topic That History Will Proudly Record”; or,

What Is the “History” in History Painting?

155

Part Three Circa 1968: Sentimental Histories n i n e On the Advantage and Disadvantage of

Sentimental History for Life 189 t e n Alternative Histories in the Public Realm:

Familiarizing and Defamiliarizing the Past

207

Epilogue. My Lai and Moral Luck; or, ’Tis Forty Years Since Notes

237

Index

283

Color plates follow page 126

233

PREFACE

Modern Western history essentially begins with differentiation between the present and the past. —Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, 1988 In answering this challenge I remind myself of the old advice that the doctrines which best repay critical examination are those which for the longest period have remained unexamined. —Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 1933

It is a salutary exercise for an intellectual historian to recollect how long it can take for an idea to germinate. I have explored the questions that run through this book in a number of recent essays, but its seeds go back to a teaching experience of a much earlier date. With a trepidation that proved to be well founded, I had decided to devote a class on historiography to some work of my own. The book was a microhistorical study of a little-known mid-fifteenth-century Florentine merchant and memorialist named Marco Parenti, whose account of a failed revolt against the Medici I had discovered in an anonymous manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence. My students seemed to enjoy the mix of political intrigue and social detail preserved in the family correspondence that was my chief biographical resource. But alongside these narrative pleasures there was also some nervousness about how far to trust this Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vision of a period they associated with much larger figures. They had come expecting to hear about Machiavelli and Savonarola; why all this attention to the ideas of an obscure memorialist with only a walk-on part in the politics of his day? ix

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One student in particular stayed in my memory because he was prepared to put his doubts quite bluntly, as well as to extend them to other, more notable representatives of the microhistorical genre—the lousy Cathar peasants, massacred cats, deluded millers, and returned husbands he had encountered in more than one of his undergraduate history courses. My protest that microhistory had created a new way to represent ordinary lives and everyday experience was simply waved away: “Aren’t you actually saying that your generation came too late to get the really important stuff—the lives of people like Cosimo de’ Medici or Lorenzo the Magnificent—so really there was not much left over except this bunch of oddballs and small potatoes?” Looking back, I am surprised to see how unprepared I was to articulate an approach that was then at the height of historiographical fashion. Instead I found myself improvising a new direction that came to seem more fruitful because it highlighted broader issues of shared sensibilities and generational perspectives rather than of microhistory as such. Shifting to safer ground, I suggested a choice between two quite different accounts of the battle of Stalingrad. The first book presents this crucial battle in a form that is traditional to military histories: that is, it provides a tactical narrative of the conflict and analyzes the success of the Soviet command in outmaneuvering the invaders, so that the German troops found themselves encircled and cut off from supplies. Alternately we might want to read a rather different sort of narrative, one that deliberately ignores the larger strategic considerations and uses the letters written by the trapped German armies to re-create the increasingly desperate condition of rank-and-file soldiers as they found themselves facing defeat and starvation in the depths of a Russian winter. This time there was no doubt where the students wanted to invest their sympathies: most people (they said) would simply be less engaged by the tactics of generals than by the personal experiences of common soldiers—and the more directly expressed the better. Why they held this preference was less clear, or how far they were prepared to defend it, but there was a strong sense in the room that they were expressing the natural impulses of their generation. As students of history, they could appreciate that those who confronted these events in the immediate aftermath of the war would have come with different questions in mind, but a half-century later it had become possible to sympathize with the sufferings of ordinary soldiers, even if they were on the enemy side. I came away thinking that though the passage of time had provided some of the necessary conditions, the fundamental change of perspective involved impulses that were more complex and wide-ranging than could be included in our customary

Preface

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ideas of historical distance. Paradoxically, too, increased temporal distance had made possible a new, more democratized proximity. The idea that historical sensibilities change over time was hardly a surprise, but this was perhaps the first occasion that I saw such changes as entailing a shift of distance or that I began to consider the multiple distances that structure our engagement with the past. It became increasingly evident to me that if we think of history as fundamentally a literature of mediation, then reexamining the concept of historical distance might provide new ways to explore the complexities of historical representation. For both the historian and the reader, I have come to realize, distance is both historically given and historiographically constructed in ways that move far beyond the standard association of distance with objectivity and the passage of time. There is no doubt, for example, that the interval that separates the present-day historian from the momentous events of 1942–43 plays a part in making available a variety of possible understandings of what occurred. As the years pass and a longer history unfolds, we can expect to find new vantage points on this history, and the result might well be a clearer picture of what happened. (Clearer at least to us.) Nonetheless, temporal distance is just the beginning, since historical understanding is inconceivable outside of the affective and ideological engagements that give the past so much of its meaning, or the formal structures that make representation possible. Consequently, an idea so fundamental to the historical vocabulary might need to be rethought in more open and imaginative terms. Belief in historical distance is hardly new. “Time stills the loud noise of opinions,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in an 1844 review of Carlyle’s Past and Present; it “sinks the small, raises the great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect harmony to all eyes; but the truth of the present hour, except in particulars and single relations, is unattainable. . . . The historian of to-day is yet three ages off.” Metaphors of distance permeate historical thought and provide the classic narrative of modernity’s awakening to historical consciousness. Some point to the Renaissance’s longing for antiquity, others to the disruptions of the French Revolution, but in either case history is figured as a response to a profound sense of distantiation. Scholarship, too, has its cherished story of tradition and rupture, with distance marking the divide between modern scholarly methods and the literary amateurism of an earlier epoch. In this context, distance continues to be cited as the special virtue of professional practice—the quality that, more than any other, distinguishes academic rigor from popular memory or everyday journalism. Indeed, even those who are quickest to reject

xii

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that “noble dream” of objectivity stake their position on the alterity of other times. “The past is a foreign country,” has become the historian’s motto: “they do things differently there.” When powerful ideas dwindle into shibboleths it is easy to consider them spent, but there is wisdom in Whitehead’s remark on the value of revisiting old doctrines. Whitehead’s point, I think, is not just that entrenched ideas need an occasional shake-up, a truism that could be applied to any number of historical concepts. Rather, his dictum suggests the potential for broad-scale renewal that lies dormant within the most enduring ideas. In this sense disciplinary reformations resemble religious ones and take on additional force to the extent that they reexamine our most settled beliefs. Valuable insights may emerge from any number of places, but the deepest reforms trace a path back to the heart of a discipline and find new challenges in its oldest traditions. This book is not intended as a connected history of Western historical thought across the three periods it surveys. It might better be described as ten experiments around a central idea. Beginning with the introduction, I outline an approach to historical representation considered as an issue of mediation and distance, followed by studies of three distinct periods of changing historiographical practice: circa 1500, or the shift from late medieval chronicles to Renaissance histories; circa 1800, or the transition from Enlightenment to Romantic representation; and circa 1968, the emergence of microhistory and affective historiography after the Annales. It would have been simpler, no doubt, to frame the entire book around its long central section (Part Two, “Circa 1800”), but doing so would have risked giving the impression that the question of distance arises within one privileged moment of emergent historical consciousness. In fact, claims of this sort have been a staple of historiographical scholarship, most notably in the writings of R. G. Collingwood, Friedrich Meinecke, and Reinhart Koselleck, all of whom identify the period around 1800 as key to the emergence of modern historical thought. But like so many quests for beginnings, these origin stories are deeply problematic since their impulse is as much prescriptive as historical. The result is a genealogy that authorizes a particular strain of historical thought and blesses it with the name of modernity. My interest is strictly heuristic. Far from privileging one moment in a lengthy tradition, I am drawn to the question of distance because it offers the basis for an approach that is open to all periods and all modes of representation. More specifically, my premise is that an analysis of historical distance should help to clarify two sorts of issues: one having to do with periodic shifts in historiographical style, the other with comparisons between rival historical genres. The first

Preface

xiii

dictates the book’s episodic form, while the second motivates the extra length allowed to the middle part. Together, these two considerations give the book its episodic and comparative structure. If assumptions about distance and mediation underpin important aspects of historical practice, it follows that significant changes in these assumptions play a part in the emergence of new schools of historical thought. Since no single episode of change would provide enough scope to test this view, the book is structured around three separate moments of redistancing. All three episodes hold an important place in the history of historical thought. But if there is no need to defend the prominence of the Florentine Renaissance, the Scottish Enlightenment, or “the cultural turn,” it is worth reiterating that the point is to instantiate some larger patterns rather than to make a claim for the unique importance of these particular moments. This book is as much a study of historical genres as of eras of historical thought. Though we talk about history as if it constituted a single body of work, “history” is no more unitary than “poetry” or “art.” For critical purposes we need to get away from “real solemn history” (as Jane Austen’s Catherine Moreland calls it) and cultivate a better understanding of history’s diversity. Here questions of distance play a significant role, helping to differentiate national narratives from local (to take an obvious example), biography from memoir, or neoclassical history painting from portrait. Though each of the three parts includes a comparative dimension, it is in the longer, second episode that I have given myself most room to explore the variety of genres that constitute the wider family of historical representation. In addition to more canonical forms of historical writing, this part includes chapters concerned with a “statistical” survey, “contrast narratives,” the writing of literary histories, and history painting. In all three periods, however, my aim has been to offer the reader a decidedly wide-angled portrait of the family of historical representations.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In a book that draws on every stage of my historical interests, the oldest friendships deserve first mention. No student of European historiography is more wide-ranging or more generous than Peter Burke, and I have called on his help on many occasions. Natalie Davis gave encouragement when it was most needed by responding to an early articulation of the idea for this book with all the force of her characteristic energy. From the first John Burrow’s writings offered me a model to emulate. Later, I was flattered by opportunities to enjoy the warmth of his company, and I treasured his growing enthusiasm for what seemed a most un-Burrow-like project. His premature death was a great loss. Stefan Collini, too, has long been a loyal talking partner on all matters historical and literary. Closer to home, I have been fortunate to enjoy the companionship of Ken Dewar, Blair Neatby, and April London, now added to by the stimulus of a younger generation of friends and colleagues, especially Mitchell Frank, Franny Nudelman, Stephane Roy, Matt Lauzon, and Dale Smith. Equally, I prize the collaboration of Barbara Caine and Julia Adeney Thomas, whose work has taught me to see new dimensions of the problem of distance. I have had the good fortune to discuss the themes of this book with a variety of audiences in several countries. At the inception of the book, Paul Wood hosted a three-day symposium at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia. Later, a visiting fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, highlighted by a week-long seminar, made it possible to have extended conversations with a number of generous friends, including Stefan Hoesel Ulich, Basim Mussalam, Pete de Bolla, Michael Sonenscher, Istvan Hont, and Simon Goldhill. I am equally grateful to King’s College London, whose offer of a visiting professorship provided the setting for much helpful discussion with Ludmilla Jordanova,

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Acknowledgments

as well as a conference on the idea of distance, co-organized with Julia Adeney Thomas and Barbara Caine. Additionally, I have had the good fortune to participate in a series of lively colloquia on the subject of historical distance, including meetings organized by Barbara Taylor at the Raphael Samuel Centre in London, Bradin Cormack at the University of Chicago, Michael McKeon at Rutgers, Barbara Caine at Monash, and Jaap den Hollander, Herman Paul, and Rik Peters at Groningen. Most recently, I benefited from a lively week-long seminar at Ghent, presided over with much warmth and wide scholarship by Jurgen Pieters. For aid to research, I am pleased to have this chance to acknowledge the support of the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass., the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Clare Hall, Cambridge, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale. Important additional support has come from the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Carleton, as well as from the university’s Vice President for Research. I owe a great deal to several talented research assistants in the Cultural Mediations program at Carleton who gave long hours to readying this book for the press. My sincerest thanks go to Emma Lind, Steven Rifkin, Stacey Loyer, and Jenna Stidwill. For help with visual collections at Yale I am indebted to Cynthia Roman and Susan Walker at the Lewis Walpole Library and to Gillian Forrester at the Center for British Art. At Yale University Press, it has been my pleasure to work with an editor of the caliber of Chris Rogers, whose understanding of the complex demands of the project has been such a valuable stimulus. Gavin Lewis has been the best of copyeditors and has saved the text from many blemishes. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers whose careful assessments have helped to guide my revisions. I must single out three friends who had the generosity and perseverance to work their way through the full manuscript as it moved toward completion. To Edward Hundert, Robert Goheen, and Noelle Gallagher I owe more than I can say. Their responses differed in a number of useful ways, but all three gave the manuscript the kind of attention one cannot take for granted even in the best readers. Whatever clarity or grace is to be found in the final text owes a great deal to their careful suggestions. The warm friendship and unending generosity of Josie and Guy Mayers has made London almost a second home. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Ruth, whose wise combination of support and dispatch has helped so much to bring the book to completion. As always, she has been my indispensable companion on a very long journey.

Acknowledgments

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Early versions of several chapters have appeared in print and appear here by permission of their respective publishers. Chapter 1 draws upon “Barefoot Boy Makes Good: A Study of Machiavelli’s Historiography,” Speculum 59 (1984): 585–605. Chapter 3 is a revision of “‘The Most Eminent Philosopher and Historian of His Time’: Hume’s History of England,” in A Companion to Hume, ed. Elizabeth S. Radcliffe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Chapter 4 revises “Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography,” PMLA 118 (2003): 436–49. Chapter 7 draws on “Literary History and Literary Historicism in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Historiographical Perspective,” in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, ed. Cynthia Wall (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005). Chapter 9 revises parts of “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life,” History Workshop Journal 65 (2008): 49–64, as well as a fragment from “Histories, Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 211–29. Parts of Chapter 10 draw upon “Contesting Time, Place, and Nation in the First Peoples’ Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization,” in Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation, ed. Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) (with Ruth Phillips). An earlier version of the introduction was published as “Rethinking Historical Distance,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 50 (December 2011): 11–23, by courtesy of Yale University Press.

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INTRODUCTION RETHINKING HISTORICAL DISTANCE: FROM DOCTRINE tO HEURISTIC

To grasp reality we have to detach ourselves from the present. —Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” 1955 To make the past present, to bring the distant near. —T. B. Macaulay, “Hallam’s Constitutional History,” 1828

It would be hard to name an idea that historians have more often invoked or more persistently taken for granted than the one that this book explores. As commonly understood, historical distance refers to the growing clarity that comes with the passage of time. Conceived in this sense, the idea of distance has exercised an important influence on how we think about historical understanding, elevating distancing and detachment to a privileged position with respect to knowledge of the past. The idea acquires much greater suppleness, however, when distance is reconceived in relation to the wide range of mediatory purposes that shape historical representation. In this context, calendrical time and objective knowledge have to be put in context with other forms of engagement that mediate the now/then of history. Formal structures and rhetorics, affective coloring, the strong summons of ideology, the quest for intelligibility and understanding—the push and pull of these fundamental investments gives distance a new complexity that has been missing from older formulations. Historians are not alone in believing that “Truth is the daughter of Time,” but the idea holds a special place in the historical discipline—indeed, has come

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Introduction

to define history as a discipline. “Retrospectiveness,” as Eric Hobsbawm once put it, “is the secret weapon of the historian.”1 As the years pass, so we believe, we come to see events more accurately, reduce them to their proper proportion, and observe their consequences with greater detachment. In personal life, this process is identified with adulthood: we grow up and learn to see things in perspective, albeit with some nostalgia for the lost vividness of childhood. By analogy, awareness of historical distance is figured as the maturity of nations: a stage of consciousness far removed from the simplicity of earlier ages, which expressed their view of history in the bright colors of chronicles and romantic legends. In modernity, however, we have become so attuned to discriminations of historical time that it becomes possible to be playful about time-consciousness in ways that would have been unthinkable earlier. As moderns, we note Shakespeare’s anachronisms with indulgence, never worrying that an inventive staging of Julius Caesar set in gangland Chicago might look like a slip. Equally, we find pleasure in images of ancient saints walking the streets of medieval Bruges or Siena, attracted by a display of faith that seems all the more sincere for being innocent of time’s passing. For historians, it is evident, mastery of distance carries strong positive connotations, but the association of distancing with intellectual clarity needs to be put in context with an accompanying desire for other kinds of relation to the past. “To grasp reality,” writes Erwin Panofsky, “we have to detach ourselves from the present.” But he also goes on to distinguish the humanities from other disciplines in their relation to time: “The humanities are not faced by the task of arresting what otherwise would slip away, but of enlivening what otherwise would remain dead.”2 Since the late eighteenth century at least, Europeans have seen some form of distancing as bound up with historical knowledge. Yet the same condition of estrangement also produces a strong countercurrent, encouraging a widespread desire to recapture a feeling of historical intimacy and connected tradition. Historians and philosophers have conceived this challenge in a wide variety of ways, calling it “resurrection” (Michelet), “Verstehen” (Dilthey), “reenactment” (Collingwood), or “tradition” (Gadamer). Behind each of these terms, however, stand some similar assumptions about the conditions of historical understanding: namely that a genuine encounter with the past must trace a path from initial recognition of alterity to some form of insight and comprehension. Far from putting an end to the desire for engagement, modernity’s preoccupation with rupture has made the desire to abbreviate distance all the more compelling. Conventionally, narratives that make presence their central concern are associated with epochs of romantic emotionalism, but Macaulay’s ambition “to

Introduction

3

make the past present, to bring the distant near”3 remains a goal for historians whose style and ideology are far removed from the age of Carlyle and Michelet. Some of the best historical writing of the past generation has cultivated a more immediate connection to the ordinary worlds of men and women in the past, and though the result has been to foreground affective experience, it would be hard to dismiss the motives as romantic. Strong ideological commitments fueled this democratized interest in questions of gender, memory, or trauma, just as they inspired a whole generation of left-leaning historians to rally to Edward Thompson’s call to rescue forgotten lives from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”4 In historical representation, as in daily life, proximity is often associated with sympathetic understanding, as it is in Thompson’s championing of the casualties of history. Quite the opposite effect, however, is intended by the opening of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, where a close-up description of the tortures inflicted on Damiens, the would-be regicide, is not designed to enlist the reader’s pity. The hideous violence inflicted on Damiens’ body works in the contrary direction, functioning as a kind of “alienation effect” that estranges all regimes of punishment alike, the modern penitentiary system as much as the premodern tearing of the flesh. In combination, Foucault’s coldly aggressive close-up and the warm persuasions of Thompson’s sympathy draw attention to the plasticity of distance, while demonstrating that the same formal device (close-up description) can point toward quite different affects or actions. By extension, comparisons of this sort point to the importance of distance in discriminating between various modes of historical representation, distinguishing the political bite of journalism from the measured judgment of academic scholarship, or the often intimate tone of memoir from the wider compass of history “proper.” Though these assumptions are seldom fully explicit, they are so embedded in our understanding of the rhetoric of historical representation that it seems impossible to define the competing claims of different historical genres without implicit reference to associations of this kind. Form, affect, and ideology’s summons to action shape much of our engagement with the past, but distance assumptions have powerful implications for historical understanding as well. For the past two centuries especially, doctrines related to distance have exercised a powerful role in setting the terms for both practice and speculation. Much like the discipline of art history, historical scholarship has made mastery of perspective an index of progress and sophistication. Medieval and early modern societies, it is widely agreed, lacked a proper sense of anachronism, and even the Enlightenment, if we credit Dilthey or

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Collingwood, fell short of a full historical consciousness. It was only with Vico, Herder, and their successors (so the story goes) that historians and philosophers turned away from the generalizing ambitions of the eighteenth century to grasp the essential particularity of historical process. The dialectics of distance—of alterity and insight—acquired a new authority as the indispensable structure of historical understanding.5 These views, carried forward as a legacy of nineteenth-century historicism, have exercised a deep influence on historians at large, legitimating certain forms of historical thought, while relegating others to an inferior station. (What is “history and memory” if not a shorthand for two modes of historical distance?) The consequence is that certain prescriptive views of distance have become so incorporated into historical doctrine that the idea of historical distance now seems barely distinguishable from the idea of history itself. DISTANCE AS MEDIATION

To the degree that historians build their disciplinary claims on prescriptive understandings of distance, they make it difficult to conceptualize distance as anything less than a natural feature of our relation to time—the historical equivalent of visual perspective. Indeed, as the term is generally used, “historical distance” assumes a strong analogy between time and space, both of which are conceived as open to objective measurement. Such thinking is doubly reductive, since it simplifies the ways we experience time while focusing on temporality to the exclusion of other engagements that mediate our relations with the past. Against these simplifications, a more adequate discussion has to begin from a recognition that historical distance is a variable and multifaceted construction. Not just the bequest of time, it is the work of hands, hearts, and minds (sometimes tugging in different directions). Redefined in these terms, distance loses something of the reassuring objectivity that has long been its primary attraction, but it acquires the complexity needed to comprehend many of the central features of historical representation. For many practical purposes, time may be measured by precise abstractions, but history’s movements are neither neutral nor uniform. Though time is often compared to a river (a more apt metaphor if we think of it as a current of fish as well as of water), it might also be imagined as a city street, where the traffic changes its rhythms with the flow of everyday life. In narrative, as in a streetscape, heterogeneity produces a variety not reducible to a single optimum viewpoint—what some have wanted to call a truly historical perspective.6 Rather, historical distance emerges as a complex balance that has as much to

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do with the emotional or political uses of the past as with its explanatory functions or its formal design. To eighteenth-century Britons, ancient Rome seemed more immediate and compelling than classical Athens, but to their nineteenthcentury descendants the reverse was generally true. (Witness Mill’s remark that “The Battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.”)7 Similarly, Americans today feel the Founding Fathers as a presence in their history and continue an engagement with the eighteenth century that has little resonance for their Anglo-Canadian neighbors. Francophone and Aboriginal Canadians, however, come to the same period with yet another set of memories. An old-fashioned, but still usefully compact formulation of history’s mediational character is Burckhardt’s dictum that history “is on all occasions the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.”8 This unapologetic recognition that history is the product of present interests as much as past realities endows historical understanding with a binocular depth absent from the positivist conceptions Burckhardt opposed. Rather than detracting from its truthfulness, history’s dialogical character supplies the essential questions that carry the narrative forward in an effort to establish meaningful relations between past and present. For this reason, history is best seen as a mediatory practice, requiring what Gadamer, writing a century later (and with different mediations in mind), would call a “fusion of horizons.”9 This redefinition, it should be added, does not require historians to neglect their traditional concern for questions of evidence and explanation, nor to abandon their more recent interest in narratology and rhetoric. Rather, the mediatory focus suggests ways to bring all of these issues together under a set of common concerns. As conventionally understood, distance carries a heavy weight of prescription. This prescriptiveness is not accidental. Historians generally invoke principles of distance in order to define the optimum position from which to observe historical events, or (what amounts to much the same thing) to trace a genealogy of modernity, where contemporary practice is assumed to set the standard. How often, for example, have students of the Renaissance cited a growing sensitivity to anachronism as evidence of the prescience of that age?10 There is real irony in historians’ failure to think historically about the historical discipline itself, yet no one should underestimate the difficulty of historicizing our own methods. The challenge is the historian’s equivalent to life in zero gravity, a state impossible to achieve on earth. But if this degree of self-distancing is unattainable, that does not mean we are exempted from self-scrutiny just where it touches most closely on our own work. On the contrary, we should welcome any theoretical reflection which helps with so difficult a problem.

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This is where an expanded understanding of distance offers significant advantages, because it helps to problematize a set of ideas that have been assumed to provide a stable basis for modern historical practice. In this spirit, I want to propose a liberal heuristic that encompasses a wider range of positions, none of which is privileged except in relation to the specific purposes pursued by historical authors and readers. Every representation of history, whatever its genre, incorporates elements of making, feeling, acting, and understanding—or (to alter the terms) questions of formal structure and vocabulary, affective impact, moral or ideological interpellation, and underlying intelligibility. Consequently, a more ramified analysis of historical representation needs to consider the problem of mediation as it relates to four fundamental dimensions of distance that shape our experience of historical time. First, we must examine the genres, media, and conventions that give a history its formal structures of representation, including its aesthetic qualities and rhetorical address. Second, we should give attention to the work’s affective character—whether (for instance) historical conditions are made accessible to us through cool appraisal or lively emotions. Third, we need to scrutinize the history’s implications for action, whether the summons it issues is primarily political, religious, or ethical in nature. Fourth come the work’s fundamental assumptions regarding explanation and understanding. These ideas guide historical practice and provide the conceptual grounds on which its intelligibility depends. Combining in various ways to shape our experience of time, these four overlapping, but distinguishable distances—form, affect, summoning, and understanding—provide an orientation to some of the central problems of historical representation.11 In this, more complex meaning, distance enters into all the ways a narrative works to bridge the then-and-now of history, including its formal structures, its affective and ideological demands, and its claims to truth or understanding. But a further expansion is still required to make the best use of a conception that has been hobbled by a combination of prescriptive and polarized usage. In ordinary speech, “distance” refers to a position of detachment or separation: chronologically a “then” that is remote from “now.” In relational terms, however, this binarism dissolves into a continuous gradation made up of all positions from near to far. Affect, to make an obvious point, can take many forms: sometimes the warmth of intimacy, other times cool detachment or even an ironic smile. Similarly, understanding, so often identified with objectivity and abstraction, also operates through insights won at close range and absorbed in the finest detail. Redefined in this way, distance becomes the entire dimension of representation rather than one extremity or limit. This leaves “distancing” or “distantiation” to designate movements toward positions that are comparatively

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7

remote or detached. What matters is to recognize that all historical representations mediate our engagement with the past, though their distances vary both in type and degree. SOME COMPLEXITIES OF DISTANCE AND REPRESENTATION

In exploring problems of mediation and distance we can draw upon those philosophers who have taught us to see history as “a communicative process built on the model of dialogue.”12 In this context, Gadamer’s emphasis on the situatedness of understanding seems an essential starting point for thinking about the conversation with the past that is made possible by language and tradition, just as his positive reformulation of the idea of prejudice transforms what we can say about ideological dimensions of distance.13 And (staying with Gadamer a little longer) his discussion of the regulative features of play brings unexpected illumination to issues of form.14 Like Gadamer’s hermeneutics, the mediatory framework I am adopting obeys a desire “to escape from the alternative between alienating distantiation and participatory belonging.”15 That said, this heuristic has a distinct purpose that sets it apart from the philosophical discussions from which it takes a part of its inspiration. Most obviously, the historical focus of this analytic requires a strenuous inclusiveness with respect to the myriad forms and practices that have served the purposes of historical representation over the centuries. This is not to suggest that historians of historiography should renounce critical judgment in their readings of particular texts or schools. Nonetheless, there is a strong sense in which the heuristic needs to be as ecumenical as possible if it is to avoid reinscribing received ideas of distance. Philosophers like Collingwood or Gadamer have a larger story to tell, for which it may be important to stake out something called “truly historical consciousness,” but this prescriptiveness seems inappropriate for tracing the history of historical thought.16 The heuristic is open to a range of critical insights, including some that in their original context were motivated by quite different goals. Questions of formal distance, for example, have drawn a great deal of attention in literary scholarship, much of it formalist or structuralist rather than hermeneutic in inspiration.17 On a grander scale, there is no more forceful classification of distances than Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life: the monumental with its desire for emulation, the antiquarian, with its posture of reverence, and the critical, with its aspiration to produce a past from which one would be proud to descend. This brilliant attack on the smugness of German historicism has a place in any consideration of ideological distance, but

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its polemical spirit is remote from the combination of comprehensiveness and nonprescriptiveness I am seeking.18 When distance sheds the burdens of prescription, the idea is free to take on a layered complexity that resists rigid and artificial distinctions. In practice, historians call upon all the resources that our modes of representation allow, and the combinations that result are rarely a matter of self-conscious strategy or theoretical principle. Affect and ideology, for example, are often closely entwined, whether what is at stake is the kind of persuasion that takes the form of warm encouragement or deliberate estrangement. Nor can we doubt the extent to which the best-reasoned descriptions are conditioned by affective states or ideological commitments. Form, for its part, holds the whole business of representation in its hands, while understanding has a stake in everything belonging to historical thought and imagination. Other problems need further discussion. One such has to do with the manner in which these mediations orient themselves in time. The formal, being the realm of making, is the dimension of mediation most fully rooted in present time and it carries that knowledge to the reader. In modern circumstances, when aesthetic form is often chosen for historical effect—the antiquated typefaces of nineteenth-century gothic, the Anglo-Saxon meters of Hopkins or Pound, the revival of fresco painting by the Nazarenes—we understand the meaning of such formal gestures precisely because we accept that the act of representation itself lies fully in its own present. Affect, by contrast, seems the realm in which representation most clearly solicits “a willing suspension of disbelief.” As readers, we participate in a special class of historical emotions, whether founded in fictions of unmediated access, or (to the contrary) in the opacity of a past that resists every attempt at familiarization and can never be our own. If the formal is most fully entrenched in the present and affect in negotiating the presence of the past, ideology is the dimension of representation that most explicitly signals an orientation to the future. Only there, where history has not yet happened, can practical action still be envisaged. Stated more broadly, it is in the ideological dimension that we are most aware that all historical representation incorporates a then of futurity as well as praeterity. By the same token, of all the engagements involved in historical representation, the conceptual realm is the one that most clearly traces the circle from past to future and from question to answer. Unsurprisingly, this journey toward understanding has often monopolized the attention of philosophers, while other dimensions of mediation are sublimated or ignored as less respectable modes of encounter with the past. Complexities of another sort arise from the paradoxes of representation itself. By definition, representation gives access to something not present—in portrai-

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ture an individual human life, in politics a constituency. In the striking phrase of a late sixteenth-century churchman and theorist of images, we make representations in order to overcome “the problem of distance”—il difetto della lontananza.19 In the present age, however, this optimistic belief in the abbreviation of distance often gives way to an appreciation of the instabilities of representation, since the same formal devices that give presence to what is absent may also serve to emphasize absence itself. An old photograph, for example, may bring back a lively sense of loved parents or a childhood home, but whether the final effect is one of pleasure or loss is hard to control. It can be observed, however, that when the process of substitution becomes a matter for self-conscious reflection, the weight of representation is more likely to shift toward absence. Take Macaulay’s evocation of the tasks of representation: “to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their oldfashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture.”20 The solid domesticity of ancestral England seems well calculated to evoke the sense of connection Macaulay has in mind. In their plainness and materiality, these “ponderous” objects signal the continuities of living tradition, but it would not take a great deal of manipulation to redistance the image toward nostalgia and loss. A letter you hold in your hand may convey a warm sense of presence, but Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter is clearly a painting about absence. It remains to say something about the work these observations on mediation and distance are meant to perform. As a theoretical structure, the framework proposed has a relatively modest ambition. Crucially, its purpose is heuristic rather than predictive. It does not assume, for example, that particular explanatory structures come attached to particular ideologies, or indeed that some historical schools are ideological and others are not. On the contrary, although it is clear that forms of engagement overlap, making it possible to speak of an overall balance, I am not suggesting a fixed combinatory logic.21 Rather, the plasticity of historical distance produces richly variable designs, and it is only on the level of specific schools or genres that we should expect to find recurrent patterns deriving from historically specific ways of engaging the past. The heuristic lends itself to two kinds of historiographical inquiry, one focusing on changing styles of historiographical practice, the other on comparisons of form and genre. Since norms of distance underpin important aspects of historical practice, periodic revisions of these norms play an important role in the emergence of new schools or approaches. (For historians who came of age in the sixties, the displacement of the Braudelian “histoire globale” by microstoria provides a ready example.) Similarly, genres carry distinctive approaches

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Introduction

to distance, just as expectations about distance give definition to genres. Biographies, for example, are not just abbreviated general histories. Rather the writer of lives is expected to offer a more intimate view and a closer insight into character and motive. In practice, changes in forms and approaches often flow together, so that new genres come into prominence in response to shifts in historical sensibilities. The flowering of microhistory, for example, produced a hybrid form that married the affective attractions of biography to a wider historical outlook. At the same time, as Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg insisted, a mere reduction of scale was not enough. Their choice of close focus made it possible to illuminate lives and experiences previously excluded by adverse standards of evidence—a matter of conceptualization and ideology as well as of form and affect.22 MEDIATION AND METAPHOR

Distance, it is sometimes objected, is really an idea about space—implying that all other distances are merely derivative. This view not only goes against much thoughtful commentary,23 but also finds no confirmation in English etymology. The Oxford English Dictionary cites the earliest usage as “discord” or “quarrel” and follows with a variety of others, including not only intervals of space and time, but also closeness and separation as factors of social hierarchy, temperament, or personal and familial relations. There can be no stigma, in any event, in the fact that one word encompasses so much. Words requiring multiple definitions are those that we rely upon to express our most basic and useful ideas. Surely this broad usage stands as a warning of how much we impoverish the concept if we focus too narrowly on “empty” time without taking into account other frameworks of experience—geography included. Distance is often invoked to express disciplinary ideals, but even within a scholarly context there is room for considerable variety. Witness Lévi-Strauss’s image of the mental and physical withdrawal that conditions the anthropologist’s mission. “The ethnographer,” Lévi-Strauss writes, “while in no wise abdicating his own humanity, strives to know and estimate his fellow-men from a lofty and distant point of vantage: only thus can he abstract them from the contingencies particular to this or that civilization. The conditions of his life and work cut him off from his own group for long periods together; and he himself acquires a kind of chronic uprootedness from the sheer brutality of the environmental changes to which he is exposed. Never can he feel himself ‘at home’ anywhere.”24 In comparison, Georg Simmel’s classic essay on “The Stranger” offers a less lofty idea of distancing. Not only does Simmel propose a more complex balance

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between engagement and detachment, but his “stranger” is a decidedly less heroic figure than Lévi-Strauss’s self-isolating ethnographer. “Another expression of this constellation lies in the objectivity of the stranger,” Simmel writes. “He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and therefore approaches them with the specific attitude of ‘objectivity.’ But objectivity does not simply involve passivity and detachment; it is a particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement.”25 For Simmel, the stranger brings into sharp relief the complex balance of alterity and acceptance found in every human relation. In consequence, the “phenomenon of the stranger” represents both an empirical category of social relations and an analytic device for measuring distance-relations across a broad social spectrum. Thus, though the essay lacks the explicit selfreference of Lévi-Strauss, it is natural to read it as a reflection on Simmel’s own condition, both as a social analyst and as a European Jew. Distance lends itself to the economy of metaphor. “Life” says Charlie Chaplin, “is a tragedy when seen close up, but a comedy in long shot.”26 Macaulay is almost as succinct in his summary of the evolution of historical writing from the colorful narratives of Herodotus or Froissart to the dry analytical writings of his own day. “It may be laid down as a general rule,” he writes, “though subject to considerable qualifications and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends in essay.”27 Oscar Wilde and Lord Acton make an odd pairing, but their thoughts on truthful testimony have something in common. “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,” writes Wilde. “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”28 For Acton, the context is certainly different, but his observations on the deceptions of self-censorship are much the same: “The living do not give up their secrets with the candour of the dead,” he writes; “one key is always excepted.”29 Acton (quoting Seeley) invokes an implicit idea of distance in order to speak about history’s relationship to the practicalities of political life. “Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalized by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relations to politics.”30 And where Simmel is reticent about his own identity as a stranger, the never-reticent Michelet is brimming with energetic self-disclosure. “I speak because no one would speak in my place. . . . As for me, I have always loved. Perhaps I also knew better the antecedents of France; I lived in her grand eternal life and not in her present condition. I was more alive in sympathies and more dead in interests; I came to the questions of the day with the disinterest of the dead.”31 The eighteenth century made distance central to aesthetic commentary, both as a matter of idealized images and disinterested viewing. In Shaftesbury (and later Kant) “disinterestedness” plays a crucial role in forming the emerging

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Introduction

category of the aesthetic. The “mere face painter indeed has little in common with the poet,” writes Shaftesbury; “but, like the mere historian, copies what he sees and minutely traces every feature and odd mark. It is otherwise with men of invention and design.”32 In a different context, Collingwood too argues against unreflective particularity. Since the historian’s knowledge of the past is “mediate or inferential or indirect, never empirical,” Collingwood asserts, if we could build “some Wellesian machine for looking backward through time,” the resulting information would not count as historical knowledge.33 Like Simmel’s stranger, all of these images are figures of distance. Chaplin’s “long shot,” Macaulay’s “novel” versus “essay,” Wilde’s “masks,” Acton’s “mere literature,” Shaftesbury’s “mere face painter,” Michelet’s love of country, and Collingwood’s disdain for the “time machine”: these and any number of similar expressions enrich the language of distance relations in order to give shape to what Simmel calls the “unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation.”34 Even Claude Lévi-Strauss’s heroic self-description as lonely ethnographer becomes a symbolic figure when seen in “long shot.” DISTANCE AND REDISTANCING

If the goal is to revive the capaciousness of a concept that has been reduced to narrow, prescriptive purposes, it is worth asking why we need concepts of distance at all. I have already suggested that Simmel’s idea of the “unity of nearness and remoteness” offers a useful direction. Now I want to conclude with some reflection along the same lines by David Hume. Historical distance encompasses the variety of ways in which we are placed in relation to the past (or—to put the case more fully—to the futures that the past makes possible). In broader terms, this means that historical distance belongs to a family of feelings, judgments, and actions that are bound up with our need to navigate the world around us—whether in relation to gradations of space, time, and affect, or to the rewards and pressures of community. Thus, though historical distance is usually discussed in more restricted contexts, it is clear that the need for conceptions of distance begins in something broader and more elementary. In essence, distances are relational concepts, and much of the work they do addresses the continual need we have to reconcile the claims of something close by—the here and now, the family, the home or community—with the larger structures that surround us. As Hume puts it, “There is an easy reason, why everything contiguous to us, either in space or time, shou’d be conceiv’d with a peculiar force and vivacity, and excel every other object, in its influence on the imagination. Ourself is intimately present to us, and whatever is related

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to self must partake of that quality.”35 As a result, Hume goes on to say, “men are principally concern’d about those objects, which are not much remov’d either in space or time. . . . Talk to a man of his condition thirty years hence, and he will not regard you. Speak of what is to happen to-morrow and he will lend you attention. The breaking of a mirror gives us more concern when at home, than the burning of a house, when abroad, and some hundred leagues distant.”36 Hume rests a great deal of weight upon this elementary recognition that human life is deeply conditioned by the force and vivacity that objects acquire by virtue of being intimate to the self. But if the starting point is “easy,” tracing the consequences certainly is not, since it becomes his task to understand how the powerful preference given to “whatever is related to the self” succeeds in producing life worlds that are socially responsive and cognitively stable. Thus the raw data of sight would grossly distort the size of physical objects depending upon their distance from the eye, leaving us with a very uncertain understanding of the relative size of a far-off mountain or a nearby chair. So too the proper functioning of human affairs depends upon an analogous capacity to resize social objects to bring them closer to their real proportions—in other words, to the way others would perceive them.37 “And tho’ the heart does not always take part with those general notions,” Hume concedes, “or regulate its love and hatred by them, yet are they sufficient for discourse, and serve all our purposes in company, in the pulpit, on the theatre, and in the schools.”38 This is not the place for an extended discussion of Hume’s historical thought, which I will review at some length in Chapter 3. It is enough to note his conviction that attention to distance is key to understanding the dynamics of social relations and the role of the passions. Depending on situation, of course, different distances will be salient. Thus, though space and time are broadly similar in their effects, Hume speculates on the dissimilarities between them, whether these be in the realm of aesthetics, affect, or authority. In more general terms, however, what matters is the invitation he offers to view the play of distances as motivating some of the most fundamental features of social life, coupled with his clearly stated belief that were it not for the human capacity for redistancing, social communication would be all but impossible. No wonder, then, that distance is so frequently a focus in his writing, whether the immediate subject is as trivial as the “breaking of a mirror” or as grandly pathetic as the execution of a king. PLAN OF THE BOOK

I want very briefly to go back to the beginning and restate the core of my concern. In common usage, historical distance refers to a position of detached

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Introduction

observation made possible by the passage of time. Understood in this sense, distance has long been regarded as essential to modern historical practice, but these assumptions narrow the idea of distance and burden it with a regulatory purpose. I argue that distance needs to be reconceived in light of the wider set of engagements that mediate our relations to the past, as well as of the full spectrum of distance-positions from near to far. Reimagined in these terms, the idea of distance sheds its conventional prescriptiveness and becomes a valuable heuristic for examining the history of historical representation. If temporality is conceived in relation to the range of mediations entailed in historical representation, historical distance is freed from its customary linearity. Rather, time is molded by other distances that come from our need to engage with the historical past as (simultaneously) realms of making, feeling, acting, and understanding. To repeat, for every historical work, we need to consider at least four basic dimensions of representation as they relate to the problem of mediating distance: the genres, media, and vocabularies that shape the history’s formal structures of representation; the affective claims made by the historical account, including the emotional experiences it promises or withholds; the work’s implications for action, whether of a political or moral nature; and the modes of understanding on which the history’s intelligibility depends. These overlapping, but distinctive distances—formal, affective, summoning, and conceptual—provide a framework for examining changing modes of historical representation. What is needed now is to put this heuristic into practice and give it the specificity that comes with examples. Part One, “Circa 1500,” sets the pattern of the book as a whole by devoting one chapter apiece to each of the two kinds of analyses I have in mind—one concerned with the evolution of historiographical practice (hence diachronic), the other focused on comparisons of genre, medium, and style (and so isochronic). Both chapters take Machiavelli as their point of reference, but the first views him as the inheritor of two braided strands of Florentine historical writing, while the second positions his greatest work (the Discourses) as part of a rivalry between two antagonistic genres of historical study. The standard approach to Florentine historiography charts a linear evolution through successive phases of intellectual and literary refinement, beginning with fourteenth-century chronicles, continuing with the fifteenth-century humanists, and culminating in the great sixteenth-century narratives of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Chapter 1 questions this linear construct by examining the several distances at work in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Rather than simply building upon the example of his humanist predecessors, Machiavelli

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reaches back into both antecedent traditions to arrive at a synthesis that combines a dramatic particularity derived from the vernacular chronicles with an elevated rhetoricism he inherits from his humanist and classical models. Chapter 2 turns to Machiavelli’s Discourses, his masterpiece of political and historical reflection. Despite its focus on Livy’s History, the Discourses is seldom read in a historiographical context. But when Machiavelli’s commentary on the Roman historian is twinned with Guicciardini’s critique of the work, what emerges is an instructive conflict of historical genres and methods. Machiavelli mines history for notable examples, with little regard for the niceties of time and place. Guicciardini, in turn, sternly opposes this promiscuous use of example and insists on a close account of events—the model he follows in his own historical writing. Since the ostensible subject of one writer is ancient, the other nearly contemporary, there is an obvious difference in temporal frameworks— historical distance in its most conventional terms. But at a deeper level other distances are at issue in a quarrel that pits Guicciardini’s particularized narrative against the speculative freedom of Machiavelli. Part Two, “Circa 1800,” follows the same pattern of longitudinal and horizontal studies, but on a more ample scale so as to afford space for a richer comparison of genres. Chapter 3 is devoted to David Hume, whose writings serve as a model for the complex distances characterizing eighteenth-century histories, as well as a measure of the shift that will come with the Romantic influences belonging to the new century. Hume is generally remembered as an aloof and skeptical historian, as well as a pioneer of Enlightenment philosophical history. Much of this reputation as a distanced and abstracting historian is the legacy of a narrative voice that cultivates balance and detachment. This impression of Hume’s style is only partially true. A wider view reveals a history whose tone is as often sentimental as ironic, while its explanatory framework subordinates the humanist study of character to new modes of social analysis derived from political economy. Affectively, too, Hume offers a more complex balance, as in his treatment of the Civil War. Since both sides in the conflict struggled with blindness, it should be possible to extend sympathy to all, royalists and parliamentarians alike. Paradoxically, the effect of greater temporal and ideological distantiation is to encourage a new, more openly affective connection to the past. Looking back, Hume was anxious to distinguish himself from what he regarded as the narrow partisanship of earlier historians. His would be a postrevolutionary narrative—the work of a writer who was able “to shed a generous tear” for Charles I. But despite the support Hume gave to the role of sentiment in history, his nineteenth-century critics saw his work as crippled by bloodless abstraction. Chapter 4 seeks to resolve this apparent contradiction by recogniz-

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ing that histories work with multiple distances, often in ways that later ages find inconsistent. As a matter both of theory and practice, it is true, Hume places much stress on the need to engage the reader’s emotions. But for Hume the reader’s affective identification with the past remains quite separate from the conceptual framework that gives history its intelligibility. This configuration changes with the Romantics, for whom the new commitment to historical imagination means that the historian, like his reader, comes to know history itself through a process of participatory engagement. Chapter 5 opens a series of chapters that examine distance in several emerging historical genres of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—survey, contrast narrative, literary history, and history painting. Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland (1791–99) enlisted the Scottish clergy in a parishby-parish survey. A pioneering work of political economy and the new science he called “statistics,” Sinclair’s massive survey seems an unlikely place to look for either history or distance. Indeed few of Sinclair’s queries called for historical information as such. Nonetheless, the nine hundred ministers who actually wrote the individual reports responded by composing local histories that traced a genealogy of present conditions through two or three generations of rapid social change. Thus two distinctive distances run through this work. From its editor’s standpoint, the Statistical Account was designed as a grand inventory of the nation, and Sinclair looked forward to the day when the information he had compiled would be condensed into a series of tables and charts. But when we turn to the work of the nine hundred authors, we find a decidedly more historical vision. Whether the difference arose from local attachment or the clergy’s exposure to the teachings of the Scottish universities, what shines through the vast majority of the responses is that the ministers took Sinclair’s invitation as an occasion to write the history of everyday life as it was reflected in the social and economic progress of their own parishes. Chapter 6 moves into the early nineteenth century to discuss an unusual, but influential historical genre, which I am calling the contrast narrative. History is commonly described as a literature built upon comparison of then-and-now. (What one age finds worthy of note in another, as Burckhardt phrases it.) Curiously, the idea that historical thought involves a dialogue between two distinct moments finds no acknowledgment in history’s formal structure, which since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides has favored linear and sequential narratives. This contradiction between history’s conceptual underpinnings and its formal arrangements lends particular interest to a small body of nineteenthcentury histories that experiment with strategies of contrastiveness. In practice, the comparative impulse can take a number of forms, but the best known

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nineteenth-century examples (works like Carlyle’s Past and Present or Pugin’s Contrasts) make use of doubled or ironic narratives for purposes of ideological critique. Their tactic of estrangement gives these histories an unusually polemical edge—a stance that was well suited to nineteenth-century conservatives who were antagonistic to doctrines of progress. But if contrastiveness is rarely a central structure in verbal narratives, it is a major resource in painting, and the chapter ends by examining the varied uses of comparison in a visual context. The last two chapters in this part move a little further from the historian’s customary domain to consider literary history and history painting, two mixed genres where criticism has generally seen history as at best a subordinate concern. Today literary history is regarded as a branch of literary studies, but in an age when boundaries were more flexibly conceived, literary-historical writing responded to historical questions as well as literary ones. Chapter 7 suggests that the vogue for literary histories in this period owes much to a desire for a closer affective engagement with the past. Though other motives were certainly present, readers were attracted to narratives that mediated the past through literary texts and literary lives. Indeed in an epoch when historical sensibilities were increasingly drawn to representations of inward experience, the writings of poets and playwrights provided the best entry into a realm which was otherwise difficult to document or explore. In parallel fashion, Chapter 8 traces the changing understanding of “history” as a genre of painting, taking patterns of distance as a key. For baroque and neoclassical artists, “histories” were identified by formal complexity and moral elevation, rather than by their depiction of historical events as such. In the latter part of the century, however, a silent refashioning was under way, by which history painting took on challenges that brought it much closer to history in the common sense of the word. This realignment challenged painters to find new ways to maintain the moral and stylistic elevation of the genre, while adapting their visual narratives to a range of subjects that required painters (much like historians) to depict the social and sentimental life of the nation. Part Three, “Circa 1968,” mirrors the two-chapter structure of Part One by juxtaposing longitudinal and horizontal approaches. The key feature of the emergent sensibility of the 1960s (as described in Chapter 9) is its legitimation of a strongly affective engagement with the past. Where formerly historians had focused on structures of explanation, the “sentimental” strain (as I wish to call it, though without any negative connotation) seems most concerned with representing experience in all its particularity and ambivalence. The result is a foreshortening of historical perspectives that acknowledges the value of personal histories—those of the historian-author as well as her subjects. In the process,

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Introduction

the expansive horizons and distancing objectivity of Braudelian histoire globale are cast off in favor of the close focus of individualized narratives. Histories of this sort take many forms, ranging from Kaplan’s empathetic study of German Jewish women on the eve of the Holocaust to Christopher Browning’s attempt to understand the experience of “ordinary” German soldiers pressed into the mobile killing squads. The outstanding representative of the new sensibility, however, is surely Carlo Ginzburg, whose studies of early modern peasantry led a whole generation to experiment with intimate narratives. Chapter 10 moves away from formal historical writing to examine the sentimental mode in more popular forms of historical representation. Traditionally, an openly affective approach to the past has been regarded as the sure mark of work written for a popular audience. From this standpoint, one of the striking features of historical representation in the late decades of the twentieth century is the convergence of popular and academic histories on the ground of feeling. This shift brings the two genres into an unusual degree of proximity or even rivalry, including an intense interest among academic publishers in the so-called “cross-over” market. This chapter concerns itself with examples of three “cross-over” sites, all of which reflect the affective intensities of a sentimental sensibility. A telling sign of this convergence is the sheer volume of academic writing devoted to analyzing the phenomenon of popular history. Though many examples might be chosen, none speaks quite so directly to the issue as Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life— an influential book that both studies affective engagement and argues for its value in contemporary culture. A second site is the museum, once a bastion of objectifying distance, but now animated by a combination of immersive and performative displays. Ottawa’s Canadian Museum of Civilization provides a dramatic example of two quite different approaches to affect and ideology in the museum. The first is a national history told as a sentimental journey from east to west and from the origins of the settler society to its multicultural modernity. The second is a hall devoted to aboriginal peoples, where contrasting representations offer an experience of conflict and multivocality. The chapter ends with Philip Roth’s brilliant reworking of history in Plot Against America. Inverting the pattern of history and fiction in the classical historical novel, Roth combines a closely autobiographical history of the Roth family in his childhood with a counterfactual story of an American Holocaust that almost was. Finally, the epilogue. Histories, whatever their genre, can never escape the limitations of representation to become history as such. Much like photography, however, histories draw much of their fascination from the homage they

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pay to our sense of the real. Nowhere, perhaps, is this tension more evident than in the rhetoric of the obituary—a historical form caught up in the contradiction between the honesty demanded of a final reckoning and the charity we owe to the dead. This brief coda to the discussion of the generation of 1968 assembles some of the death notices for Hugh Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who put a stop to the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, the most shameful episode in that shameful war. Looking back to these events a full generation later, the obituarists look to Thompson’s life to recover some sense of humanity, but their flat accounts do little to illuminate the source of his courageous resistance, or to explain the brutalities perpetrated by the men of Charlie Company.

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Part One

Circa 1500: Machiavelli in the Florentine Tradition Chronicle: A detailed and continuous register of events in order of time; a historical record, especially one in which the facts are narrated without philosophic treatment or any attempt at literary style. —Oxford English Dictionary, 1989

Why begin with the Renaissance? More to the point: Why begin before the Renaissance? “Every thinking of history,” writes Benedetto Croce, “is always adequate to the moment at which it appears and always inadequate to the moment that follows.”1 The alteration Croce identifies will be illustrated a number of times in this book, but never again with quite the same force as in the Renaissance, when humanist rhetoricians recast medieval chronicles in the language and image of classical Rome. This displacement of the vernacular genre by a newly revived classicism transformed virtually every dimension of historical writing. The resulting rupture between two successive styles of narrative constitutes a particularly dramatic example of oppositions that, in one form or another, will arise again and again in the development of Western historiographical traditions. In this instance, however, the triumph of history over chronicle seems so complete that we have lost Croce’s sense of a continued evolution—each moment “adequate” to itself, but “inadequate” to the one that follows. Every successful revolution darkens the achievements of previous generations, and the more successful the revolution the more damage is done to the memory of earlier times. The humanists of Quattrocento Florence initiated a classical revival that shaped European ideas for centuries to come, but they also cast a long shadow over earlier traditions, making it correspondingly difficult

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Circa 1500

to retrieve the logic by which their predecessors had constructed their pasts. Even now, we continue to speak about the historical writers of the Middle Ages in ways that unconsciously reproduce the judgments of their humanist successors. Architecture would have its Gothic Revival, art its Nazarenes and pre-Raphaelites, Romantic poetry its popular ballads, but no modern revival of chronicle-writing has emerged to build new feeling for this antiquated genre.2 Reducing chronicles to a mere record of the past—the nonliterary and unphilosophical compilation defined by the dictionary—hardly encourages us to explore chronicles as a rich historical genre with a long pedigree of its own. Unless we appreciate the strengths of a powerful work like Giovanni Villani’s New Chronicle of Florence, however, we cannot reconstruct the ways in which such narratives would come to seem “inadequate” to a later sensibility. In an important sense, we need to take the chronicles more seriously if we want to understand the humanist movement, just as we need to comprehend both the chronicles and the humanists if we are going to measure the accomplishments of the great vernacular writers who followed. This is where Machiavelli is so helpful a figure. In the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli writes as both a continuator and a critic of a lively local tradition, to which he contributes an important new chapter of his own. The result is a complex genealogy that provides new perspectives on the double inheritance of his own work—one part of which reflects the orderliness and elevation of Leonardo Bruni’s humanism, the other the sharp-eyed particularity of Villani’s vernacular chronicle. But there is another side of Machiavelli’s historical thought that reaches beyond the limits of any well-told narrative, whether cast in a classical or vernacular mold. In the Discourses as well as in parts of the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli adopts a comparison of ancient and modern examples in search of a more exacting historical method. This metahistorical side of Machiavelli draws us away from a genealogical use of his work, suggesting instead a comparison with an outstanding contemporary. Francesco Guicciardini was not only the creator of the greatest historical narrative of the age but also the author of a stringent commentary on the Discourses. Unlike many later critics, whose objections were primarily moral, Guicciardini confronted Machiavelli’s politics on the grounds of historical reasoning. For him it was not moral or political scruple but respect for the particularity of historical narrative that left him suspicious of the generalizing ways and speculative ambitions of the Discourses. The conflicting positions of the two great sixteenth-century writers carries echoes of earlier tensions within the Florentine tradition, and in Guicciardini particularly there seems to be a memory of the crowded particularity of the

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Trecento chronicles. Such genealogical comparisons need to be approached cautiously, however, and with a proper awareness of changes in historical practice. Machiavelli’s methodological abstraction in the Discourses, for example, begins from strong conceptual motives. In this way, his mode of distancing seems quite distinct from the aesthetic and ideological idealization so present in Bruni’s writing, as well as in some other dimensions of Machiavelli’s own work.

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MACHIAVELLI BETWEEN HISTORY aND CHRONICLE

Florentine historians can be divided into two broad categories. Most were native sons who wrote chronicle or history out of personal experience and civic commitment, but others, often newcomers to the city, were learned men whose narratives were composed against a background of bureaucratic service and quasi-official patronage. In this admittedly schematic division, Machiavelli occupies a mediating position. Though he came from an old Florentine family (albeit one that had come down in the world), he was also a secretary, a commissioned historian, and a man of letters. This set of employments brings him closer in some respects to professional rhetoricians like Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444) than to citizen-historians like Giovanni Villani (c. 1276–1348). A further complication lies in the fact that his active career proved an obstacle rather than a help in securing literary patronage. For Machiavelli, the fall of Piero Soderini’s anti-Medicean republic brought a period of exile, followed by a long campaign, never entirely successful, to find him a place in the new political order. Thus his 1520 commission from Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici to write the history of Florence came as a late (and still partial) rehabilitation. In such circumstances, Medici sponsorship represented an important opportunity, but also one fraught with considerable difficulties, and Machiavelli had to choose his path with some care.1 In the Proemio to the Florentine Histories Machiavelli offers his reasons for taking his work back to the origins of the city rather than beginning with more recent events in the usual fashion. This enlargement is certainly strategic. By extending his scope, Machiavelli not only makes the period of Medici domination less central, he also places his own account in direct rivalry with his

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fifteenth-century humanist predecessors. His first plan, he admits, had been to begin with Cosimo’s ascendancy in 1434, taking up the story where Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini left off. But on rereading their histories he had found them wanting in one crucial respect. Though they had been diligent in describing Florence’s many wars, they had neglected her “civil strife and internal hostilities,” with the result that readers lost much of the pleasure and instruction history provides. Either his predecessors had thought civic strife an unworthy subject, Machiavelli surmises, or else they glossed the material so briefly out of fear of offending the descendants of the rival parties. “These two causes (with all respect to them) appear to me wholly unworthy of great men, because if anything in history delights and teaches it is what is presented in full detail. If any reading is useful to citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and factional struggles within the city.”2 What is more, “if the experiences of any republic are moving, those of a man’s own city . . . are much more moving and more useful.”3 And if any republic has been notable for its divisions, Machiavelli concludes, it is surely the city of Florence, whose factions have been notabilissime. While other republics have generally rested content with a single factional division—Rome and Athens are the great examples cited—Florence uniquely has continued to foster division after division, to its great cost over the centuries. These remarks suggest the outlines of what was at stake in Machiavelli’s rewriting of the history of Florence. His goal was to challenge the timidity of his humanist predecessors by reintroducing a detailed and realistic portrayal of factional conflict: the central fact, as he saw it, of Florentine history. Accordingly, he rejected Bruni’s decorous preoccupation with external affairs (the evasive middle distance of humanist narrative) in order to recover the sharp edge of violence that marked the city’s internal conflicts.4 Like the humanists, Machiavelli aimed both to “instruct and delight,” but political caution and the restraints of a learned idiom had robbed their work of its full impact. It was better, he believed, to marry the vividness of realistic detail with the sense of engagement that is unique to the history of one’s own country. The result would be to heighten the emotions, so important to historical composition, and provide “those who govern republics” with much-needed lessons. Machiavelli’s plan for his history carried a related consequence that is easily overlooked. His decision to begin with the origins of the city not only represented a challenge to the humanists, but also required him to return to the chronicles on which they too had based their accounts. This unacknowledged debt to his vernacular predecessors has real historiographical interest, since the layering of texts affords a prime opportunity to assess Machiavelli’s place in the evolution of Florentine historiography. Reciprocally, Machiavelli’s dependency

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upon both earlier schools makes the Florentine Histories a valuable point of entry for examining the Florentine tradition as a whole. Following Machiavelli’s admonition about reinstating the importance of faction, I want to examine two outstanding occasions of violent conflict in Trecento Florence: the expulsion of the duke of Athens in 1342, and the revolt of the Ciompi a generation later in 1378. Each of these outbursts was described in detail by the most substantial chronicle of its day—Giovanni Villani for the earlier episode, Marchionne di Coppo Stefani (1336–1385?) for the later—and this in turn made it possible for both Bruni and Machiavelli to compose their own accounts. Their attention to the events of 1342 and 1378 reflects the continued hold of these episodes on Florentine memory, at the same time as it provides an opportunity to examine the two different directions marked out in the Proemio. In his narrative of the expulsion of the duke of Athens, Machiavelli reaches back into Villani’s account to retrieve the sharp note of violence Bruni had muffled. At the same time, Machiavelli sets his stamp on the account by transforming a moment the chronicler had represented as a moral exemplum into a frank drama of human passions, equally pathetic and brutal. Similar passages of cultivated vividness recur in Machiavelli’s reworking of the Ciompi revolt, but here the idealizing rhetoric of humanism seems more central. What Machiavelli owes to Bruni is never more clear than in his portrayal of the Ciompi leader, Michele di Lando. In a history that is not rich in heroes, this barefoot plebeian provides the supreme example of a life framed by the idea that although every republic can offer examples, those belonging to the history of our own country move us more than any other. THE TYRANNY AND EXPULSION OF THE DUKE OF ATHENS, 1342–1343

Walter of Brienne—the curiously named duke of Athens—holds the dubious distinction of being the most unambiguous villain of Florentine history. A French nobleman and adventurer, he exploited civic divisions to raise himself from mercenary captain to tyrant, only to lose power again when resentment against his arbitrary justice and financial rapacity provoked a revolt that eventually spread across all ranks of Florentine society. Though Villani himself played no great part in these events, he underlines the fact that he writes with the authority of an eyewitness. All subsequent histories of this factional crisis depend on Villani’s work, which becomes a base line for examining the reinterpretations introduced by Leonardo Bruni and Niccolò Machiavelli in subsequent centuries.

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A combination of sharp observation and moral seriousness makes this one of the most unsparing and impressive narratives in all of the Nuova cronica. Nowhere, I think, does Villani demonstrate to greater advantage his ability to conduct a detailed and thoroughly grounded narrative against the background of the most expansive moral horizons. Every street or piazza seems to possess its own tangible reality; so too the names of individuals and families. Nor is Villani any less direct in identifying the stratagems of the duke or the schemes of the discontented grandi who helped him to plot his way from hired soldier to arbitrary ruler. This “gentleman,” he writes, at the opening of the account, seeing the city divided, was moved by greed. “Like a wayfarer or pilgrim, he was a man in need of money, and even though he held the title of the duchy of Athens, he did not possess it.”5 Walter’s ambitions were stirred up by certain of the Florentine grandi—the aristocrats who had lost power to the popolo under Giano della Bella’s Ordinances of Justice, the foundation of Florentine government since the last decade of the previous century. Day and night, these men betook themselves to Santa Croce where Walter resided, urging him on, so that “under the pretence of administering justice, he began to follow evil counsel and to act in cruel and tyrannical ways in order to make himself feared and to establish himself as the complete ruler of Florence.”6 Medici, Altoviti, Ricci, Oricellai: members of each of these four great popolano families fell victim to the duke’s arbitrary justice, bringing joy to their enemies among the grandi and the minuti (the aristocracy and the lowest class), and dismay to the popolo (the solid citizens in between). As the proverb of tyrants has it, “He who harms one, threatens many.”7 The members of the governing council (priors) did their best to resist the clamor to acclaim Walter signore for life—“something which our forefathers had never consented to” even in the most difficult times. But the duke seized full authority and put an end to the liberty of the city, suppressing the popolo of Florence, “which had lasted fifty years in great liberty, estate, and authority.”8 And let it be noted, warns Villani, “how God for reasons of our own sins in a brief time inflicted on our city so many scourgings, including floods, shortages, hunger, disease, defeats, mercantile failures, financial losses, bankruptcies, loss of credit and, finally, liberty handed over to tyranny and servitude.” All this, he concludes, addressing himself to Florence’s “beloved citizens, present and future,” is a sign that we must correct our defects and reinstate love and charity, “so that we might please the Most High and not bring down on ourselves the ultimate judgment of his anger.”9 Two centuries later, Remigio Fiorentino, the prolific editor of Renaissance and classical texts, singled out this passage for comment, saying that the author attributed the collapse of Florentine liberty to the sins of the people, but

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“more than anything else it was caused by the disunion and partisanship of the citizens.”10 By contrast, Villani’s providentialist view of history allowed no such separation between the political state of the commune and the moral disorders it was incubating. Luxury, greed, self-regard—these vices had given rise to the spirit of selfishness and division, bringing down on the city a comprehensive list of calamities: not just the loss of liberty, but natural disasters, disease, economic setbacks, and military defeat. But if the duke’s seizure of power reflected God’s judgment on the city, his own sins were subject to the same moral law. To underscore this message, Villani followed his account of Walter’s usurpation by quoting at length a letter from King Robert of Naples, who admonished the duke to play the part of a good leader. If Walter failed to heal the divisions in the city, he would not long hold his position in safety.11 For all the elevation of its moral horizon, Villani’s chronicle stands very far from the other-worldly abstraction we sometimes associate with medieval chronicles. Like Dante, from whom he may have absorbed his providentialist faith, Villani saw earthly happenings as resembling the soft sealing wax on a letter—the visible sign of God’s remote and invisible presence. Theologically, this simplified Augustinianism was a difficult position to hold (as Villani himself was aware) since it seemed to tie God’s unknowable will to the limits of human understanding. But, naïve though it might have been, Villani’s conviction that God is active in history makes every event potentially revelatory. In historiographical terms, the consequence is a narrative that is as closely observed as any to be found in his later, more secular successors—its human dramas all the more vivid for being enacted under the searchlight of Divine judgment.12 The directness and intensity that Villani’s narrative is capable of achieving is evidenced in the conclusion to this episode, when three separate groups of citizens (the leaders of each of which are enumerated by the chronicler) found themselves joined together again in a common purpose. Much to Villani’s pride, the city reasserted its unity and demanded that justice be executed on the bodies of those who had oppressed them: In the end the popolo refused any pact unless the duke gave them the conservadore, his son, and Messer Cerrettieri Visdomini to do justice to them. To this the duke would not agree. But the Burgundian [soldiers] who were besieged in the palace, banded together and told the duke that rather than die of hunger and in torment, they would hand the duke himself over to the popolo, as well as the said three. . . . The duke, seeing himself in such straits, consented. On Friday, the first day of August, at supper hour, the Burgundians took Messer Guglielmo d’Asciesi, the conservadore of the tyranny of the duke of Athens, and his eighteen-year-old son, Messer Gabriele. The

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Circa 1500 latter had been recently knighted by the duke, but he was truly villainous in torturing the citizens. They pushed him out of the gate of the palace into the arms of the enraged popolo, especially the friends and relatives of those his father had executed: Altoviti, Medici, Oricellai, Bettoni Cini, and many others. To increase the father’s pain, the son was shoved out in front, and they dismembered him and cut him into tiny pieces. This done, they pushed out the conservadore and did the same. Some carried a piece on a lance or sword throughout the city. And there were those so cruel and bestial in their fury that they ate the raw flesh. Such was the end of the traitor and persecutor of the popolo of Florence. And note, he who is cruel dies cruelly, saith the Lord. This furious revenge having been accomplished, the anger of the popolo was much quietened, which was the salvation of Messer Cerrettieri. He should have been the third, and well he deserved it. . . . But let us return to our subject of the affairs of the duke.13

As will be seen in Machiavelli’s reworking of this account six generations later, Villani’s unblinking depiction of violence as the direct expression of justice will provide us with a touchstone by which the spirit of subsequent retellings can be assessed. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani (c. 1380) The final books of Villani’s New Chronicle were shadowed by the mounting troubles of the city in the years leading up to the Black Death of 1348. In the decades following this calamity, the story of the duke’s tyranny was taken up again by Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, the outstanding chronicler of the following generation. But though Stefani’s work carried forward important elements of his predecessor’s account, Villani’s combination of localism and universality proved hard to sustain. In this context, the most striking change concerns the harsh moralistic language of the later chronicler, which at first glance seems to echo—even intensify—the moral commitments of the earlier period. Closer examination, however, suggests a hollowing out of moral certainties, leaving Stefani with a rhetorical biblicism that mimics the earlier writer, but conveys little of his faith in a universal moral order. Characteristically, Stefani shifts the focus from the personal villainy of the duke to the ambitions of the grandi who had earlier lost power to the popolani. Where Villani had pointed to Walter’s poverty and greed as motives for his cruelties, Stefani assigns more initiative to the grandi, who were able to win the duke over by promising rewards. Moreover the patricians possessed some strategic advantages, which enhanced their ability to stir trouble. Few in number and naturally respectful of the elders among them, they could organize themselves

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more effectively than the popolani, who were too numerous to be brought together in one place. Consequently, the popolani were credulous and easily led by a “tap on the shoulder” or a suggestion “whispered in the ear.”14 Vivid language and physical gestures of this sort color the moral vocabulary of the chronicle and animate its political observations. The goal of the nobility was to overturn the Ordinances of Justice as well as to avoid paying debts arising from recent bankruptcies. Accordingly (writes Stefani) they sought to aggrandize themselves over the “little sheep” and their shepherds. Like wolves, they wanted to kill the sheep and discard the skin and eat their flesh and make dice of their bones. They were the enemies of humankind (li nemici della humana spezie), the chronicler concludes, but things have always been so. The “vice is not just that of the Florentines, since the big fish have always eaten the smaller.”15 Similar mixings of high moral rhetoric and a late medieval version of realpolitik recur a number of times in this account. Walter’s downfall followed his decision to turn against the grandi and woo the minuti. The tyrant forgot that it was the people that crucified Christ, crying “Let Him die, let Him die.” The duke should have considered that they would serve him no better than they had served Christ, who was a just Signore. Meanwhile the grandi, having been Walter’s greatest supporters, thought they could say “touch me not” and “touch not my anointed.” But they were wrong, since a tyrant usually oppresses those who gave him power.16 Against this background, there is a seeming inevitability to the terms in which Stefani presents the overthrow of the duke—a scene that stands as a palimpsest of Florence’s evolving historical tradition. In its essentials, Stefani’s narrative differs little from Villani’s, but it lacks the earlier chronicle’s insistence on the fitness of the punishment. Instead, Stefani records the death of the eighteenyear-old without any judgment on his guilt or innocence, and in describing the tearing, cutting, and biting of the bodies of the victims, he adds that “according to what one reads, souls in hell do not fare worse; and it was a terrible sight to see.”17 Leonardo Bruni’s “History of the Florentine People” (c. 1415–1442) Stefani’s chronicle left much of Villani’s account still standing, even as it inverted its language by reducing a grand vision of divine providence to a bleak idiom of municipal conflict. The contrast with what was to come next could not be more acute, since the great aim of the humanist school that had its beginnings in the Florentine Quattrocento was to elevate the emerging polity on the

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model of Rome. It took a good deal of work to adapt contemporary realities to ancient convention, with the result that much of what now seems characteristic of the Italian cities was lost in translation. But our regret in this matter is pointless, since it was just such a distancing perspective that the founders of this classical revival wanted to achieve.18 Leonardo Bruni was a native of Arezzo, not Florence, but literary fame won him the patronage of the city’s elite, whom he served as Florence’s chancellor and quasi-official historian. Whatever it meant to be a professional rhetorician (a subject of much recent debate), it is clear that Bruni occupied a very different relation to the Florentine commune than the chronicle-writers from whose works his own History drew its materials. Bruni’s retelling of the duke of Athens episode is a fine example of the intellectual style of the humanist school and how it reshaped the materials inherited from vernacular texts. Bruni brings a new clarity to the narrative by highlighting the political and constitutional core of the crisis.19 For the same reasons, he prunes the crowded narratives of his chronicle sources, while making it possible to focus on the motives of a few well-understood individuals. In Bruni’s hands, Walter becomes a more deliberate figure, whose authoritarian politics are explained by the fact that as a Frenchman he was used to a servile people.20 For parallel reasons, Bruni spotlights the role of a leading churchman, Bishop Acciaioli, who acquires a new prominence as a figure of legitimacy. All these changes direct attention away from the concrete actuality of events and toward an examination of the character and motives of a few selected protagonists. The result is a more shapely narrative that aspires to elevate the Florentine republic by giving it a history as stately and consequent as his sources would permit.21 Without a doubt Bruni pays a certain price for viewing Florence in the mirror of Rome. What this price was (and why he chose to pay it) emerges clearly from his description of the murder of the duke’s henchmen, the climax that Villani had made the most vivid of the story. This scene, described with such sensuous immediacy by Villani, almost disappears in Bruni’s account, while around it grows a constitutional concern unstressed in the chronicle. But this did nothing to pacify the city. The desire for revenge burned in the citizens’ minds, especially in those whose relatives and associates had been killed, and they reckoned they could not expiate the slaughter of their own without spilling the blood of the tyrant. So that the multitude, which had taken to arms with no public decree or legitimate leader, might take on some measure and form, its leaders called for a council for the people to be convened in the church of Santa Reparata. There a board of Fourteen was elected

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with powers to reform the state and set the city in order. Angelo Acciauoli, the bishop, was added to their number, a man of great wisdom and authority, who had effectively been their leader in the recovery of liberty. Meanwhile, the siege went on day and night. The tyrant had with him a strong force of about three hundred soldiers, and the place was well fortified. But these advantages were such that it seemed the danger could only be delayed. . . . So the besieged proceeded, now to ask for parleys with the citizens, now to beg for a safe conduct, and finally were reduced to supplications and solemn vows. Furthermore, to soothe the people’s anger with some act of atonement, they shoved outside the gates the tyrant’s satellites who in former times had run riot tormenting the people, and whom they now heard the people calling for so that they might take their revenge. Thrown on the swords of the inflamed people, these men were instantly torn limb from limb, earning a most fitting reward for their acts of cruelty. After this act, the citizens’ anger abated somewhat, and the bishop and the Fourteen entered into a parley.22

How thoroughly Bruni suppresses the indecorous detail of Villani’s account with its enthusiastic description of popular rage. The Burgundians’ threat to hand over the duke himself to the mob disappears into abstract language about “parleys” and “supplications.” Equally, he expunges Villani’s list of prominent Florentine families who—having lost their own kinsmen to the duke—take the lead in exacting revenge.23 Here the murder of the duke’s henchmen is reduced to a moment of swift justice perpetrated by a nameless mob against equally nameless victims, nor are we subjected to details of cannibalistic fury.24 In all these ways—just as Machiavelli would later insist—Bruni seems much more anxious to protect the dignity of the Florentine republic than to detail the harsh realities of a famous example of factional violence. Indeed, the spectacle of the community in arms—a sight that Villani found stirring—is simply an anxiety to Bruni.25 Accordingly, he does his best to raise up the bishop as a symbol of legitimate authority, giving him a prominence that is unprecedented in the early accounts.26 Machiavelli’s “Florentine Histories” (c. 1524) Machiavelli’s repositioning of the Florentine tradition becomes clear when set against the background of his predecessors’ narratives. Here is his description of the climactic moment of Walter of Brienne’s brief tyranny over Florence: The citizens, to give form to the government, went to Santa Reparata and put in authority fourteen citizens, half nobles and half from the people, who

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Circa 1500 with the Bishop had complete power to reorganize the government of Florence. . . . [Some ambassadors] tried to arrange terms between the duke and the people, but the people refused to discuss any agreement until Messer Guglielmo of Assisi and his son were given into their power, together with Messer Cerrettieri Bisdomini. By no means did the duke wish to agree, but, threatened by the people who were shut up with him, he let himself be compelled. It is evident beyond doubt that hatreds are greater and wounds more serious when liberty is got back than when it is defended. So then Messer Guglielmo and his son were put among thousands of their enemies—his son was not yet eighteen years old; nevertheless not his age, not his beauty, not his innocence could save him from the fury of the multitude—and they who could not wound them when alive wounded them when dead and, not sated by rending them with steel, tore them with their hands and teeth. And that all their senses might be satisfied with revenge, after having first heard their laments, seen their wounds, touched their torn bodies, they let taste also take pleasure in them, so that, since all the outside parts had been sated, those within might also gain satiety.27

Machiavelli’s retelling is unmistakably a combination of elements drawn from both Bruni and Villani. He accepts the constitutional framework Bruni erected, but within it he brings back the scene of violence that Bruni expunged— including the names of the duke’s henchmen, the murder of the young man, and the details of cannibalistic violence. Yet for all the sensuality of his description, Machiavelli establishes a deliberate sense of order absent from Villani’s vivid narration. His observation that the passions run higher in the recovery of liberty than in its defense forecasts and explains the violence to come, but distances us slightly from the scene. Far from expurgating the brutality that follows, Machiavelli seems to relish its immediacy, yet he constrains the most horrifying passions within an orderly sequence of the senses—hearing, seeing, touching, tasting. Most of all, Machiavelli cloaks murder with pathos by transforming the slaughtered boy—“not yet eighteen years old”—into an innocent and beautiful youth. This is a touch of sheer invention that wholly contradicts Villani’s account, ignoring the chronicler’s emphatic conclusion, pronounced on both father and son: “And note, he who is cruel, dies cruelly. Thus saith the Lord.”28 MICHELE DI LANDO AND THE CIOMPI REVOLT OF 1378

As a despotic foreigner, the duke of Athens was easy to hate, and he quickly became the indisputable villain of Florentine history. By contrast, it took several generations for Michele di Lando, the plebeian leader of the Ciompi revolt

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of 1378, to emerge as the most unusual of Florentine heroes, a man whose lowly origins gave all the more luster to his virtù. Plebeian figures were seldom individuated in early modern histories and to the extent that Michele figured at all he lacked the ideal qualities that marked the Renaissance idea of fame. That elevation began with Leonardo Bruni, who first gave this obscure figure the distinctness that fitted him to become a major figure in history. Even so, it remained for Machiavelli to transform the pleb politician into one of the most vivid figures of the Florentine story—a barefoot savior whose quick resolution and selfless bravery rescued Florence from anarchy in a time of extreme danger. Machiavelli’s account of the Ciompi revolt moves in a different direction from his narrative of the expulsion of the duke of Athens. In the earlier episode, what catches the eye is Machiavelli’s rejection of the decorous middle distance of humanist writing. The later chapter, too, provides evidence of his relish for the drama of fleshly violence, but its dominant strain shows Machiavelli working closer to the idealizing bent of the humanist style and transforming Michele into an exemplum of virtue. Indeed, with Michele, Machiavelli’s historical imagination takes flight and—reaching far beyond anything Bruni could credit in a mere plebeian—he raises the lowly wool worker to a notable place in his pantheon of political leadership.29 The Ciompi revolt of 1378 was one of a series of movements of popular protest that swept across Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death and the economic and demographic dislocations that followed.30 In Florence, the immediate background was a war with the Papal States, which cut across the city’s traditional allegiances and caused a severe split between the conservative Guelf party and a more popular faction led by Salvestro de’ Medici. This division within the ruling elite released new pressures to widen the regime. Three new guilds were created for the wool workers, who had previously been subject to the regulatory authority of the large merchants who controlled the Wool Guild; at the same time, the representation of the minor guilds was increased, so that for the first time in its history the Florentine Signoria (the commune’s highest magistracy) came to be dominated by minor guildsmen. Very little is recorded about Michele’s life or what marked him for a key role in the disturbances of 1378. We know that his mother was a washerwoman, that his wife kept a pork butcher’s shop, and that he himself was a wool comber, though a foreman, not an ordinary worker. It is worth noting, too, that he had been a soldier in the recent war with the Papal States, where he had shared command over twenty-eight men. To this meager information the contemporary chronicles add very little, except to register a general astonishment that

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such a man could make his way into the palace and take on the trappings, if not the entire substance, of the commune’s highest office: the Gonfaloniere (or Standard Bearer) of Justice. Nowhere is this simple sense of amazement more evident than in the chronicle attributed to Alamanno Acciaioli, a conservative patrician who was serving in the priorate at the time the communal government collapsed and ceded the palace to the crowd. Significantly, Acciaioli alone amongst the chroniclers presents the crisis as God’s verdict on the city for abandoning its traditional support of the papacy, a view that would have been natural to Villani. “For the sin committed against the sacred church of God,” he writes, “. . . God promised to discipline this city of ours, as is told in this account.”31 The Ciompi Chronicles Acciaioli’s narrative reflects his physical location as much as his conservative ideology. Enclosed in the Palazzo with his fellow priors, Acciaioli observed the abdication of the government more closely than the insurgency of the wool workers. Not surprisingly, he points the blame at what stands closest to him, especially the cowardice of his colleagues and the intrigues of Salvestro de’ Medici, the Standard Bearer. By comparison, Michele di Lando appears as a startling intrusion, an apparition more to be wondered at than condemned as a genuine figure of power: The priors having departed from the palace, the door was open, and the people entered. And one Michele di Lando, wool comber or really foreman of a wool shop in charge of the combers and carders, had the standard of the people in his hand, . . . and he was dressed in rough shoes without stockings. With this standard in hand he entered the palace with all the people who were his followers, and he mounted the stairs as far as the audience chamber of the priors, and there he stopped. By the voice of the people he was given the signoria and they wished him to be Standard Bearer of Justice and lord (signore). . . . And so all that day and on to the next at half past nine one could say that this Michele di Lando, wool comber, was the lord of Florence twentyeight hours and more. This is the result of quarrelsomeness and innovation! O dear Lord, what great miracles you show us!32

Dramatic political differences divide the three writers who left contemporary accounts, but as chroniclers they share a common indifference to the more rounded portrayal of motive and character that eventually emerges in Machiavelli. Though the chronicles often seem crowded with names, individuals make their appearance in relation to office, family, or guild. Stefani’s account, for

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example, reverses Acciaioli’s judgment and places the full blame on the archGuelfs—a faction from whose hostility no one could feel safe, “even if he was more Guelf than Charlemagne.”33 Characteristically, Stefani does not follow up with individual portraits of factional hatred. Rather his impulse is to document the division plaguing the city with a long list of the malefactors, followed by another list enumerating their unfortunate victims. These bare records seem sufficient, since for the native son the names by themselves speak to the specificities of political alliance. Nor is the picture essentially different in the only chronicle written from the Ciompi standpoint (a historiographical rarity as remarkable in its own way as the career of Michele). As a man of the lower classes, the so-called Squittinatore (Electoral Scrutineer) knows more about Michele’s background and gives more space to his actions—especially the accusation that Michele sold out to the elites. Individuals, however, are not his concern. Rather he focuses on the guilds under whose banners the rival factions were gathered: “Many people poured into the piazza from every direction . . . especially the wealthy and the guildsmen, both minor and major, because they knew of the plot that was about to take place. They brought all the banners of the guilds and the militia companies to the Piazza of the Priors; and all the banners of the guilds were placed on the rostrum and all the banners of the companies were fixed in their places on all sides of the piazza.” The Ciompi too were gathered under their own sign, and they resisted bravely until the priors began throwing rocks and missiles from the palace. Then, writes the Squittinatore, their spirits broke. “When they saw that the priors, that is those in whom they had trusted and in whose protection they stood, were betraying them and stoning them, then they felt they were all going to die.”34 Leonardo Bruni and the Emergence of Michele di Lando Bruni’s history transforms this scene, emptying the piazza of its fluttering banners and composing a narrative that presents a new sense of unity and control. Two principal figures now dominate: Salvestro de’ Medici, the patrician who made the near-fatal error of stirring up the mob in order to restrain the arrogance of the Guelfs, and Michele di Lando, the plebeian whose surprising nobility protected the Florentines from the full consequences of their folly. “Indeed, if the virtue and constancy of the Standard-Bearer Michele had not stood in their way, the city would have come to ultimate destruction.” Michele was from the “lowest of the plebs,” but he seemed chosen by the heavens (divina sorte) to direct the city in these turbulent times. He consistently opposed himself to the greed of the multitude, and reined in their spirits by his advice,

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exhortation, and chastisement. Despite his low birth, Michele possessed advantages of character and experience that made him a leader. “He possessed a kind of natural authority and was not ignoble in appearance; in addition, he had spent several years of his youth in military service in Gaul. Thus, though not without a certain crudity in his domestic matters, he was an able man thanks to his experience abroad and was at once well-informed and artful in his conduct of affairs.”35 The chroniclers had tended to see Michele as exercising only a secondary role in the conduct of affairs, the real focus of power remaining with the elites and the powerful council called the Eight of War. With Bruni, however, Michele emerges as a pivotal figure in the defeat of the mob. When a delegation from the plebs boldly confronted the priors in the palace, the others “were afraid and ready to swear, but the Standard-Bearer of Justice angrily drew his sword and rushed at them, slashing and wounding one of them in the face and spearing the other with the point of his weapon. He pursued the rest and threw them down the stairs. The citizens thereupon were aroused and the good men formed themselves into a body, while Michele himself went forth armed, bearing the Standard of Justice and riding a fine horse.”36 For all Michele’s virtues, however, Bruni never quite lets him dominate the scene and a degree of reserve remains mixed in with his praises, leaving the Gonfaloniere something less than the wholly exemplary figure he becomes in Machiavelli. But even if it were possible for Bruni to overlook Michele’s undignified origins, the central lesson of the episode necessitates a different focus. In the face of the crisis precipitated by Salvestro’s rash actions, Michele’s saving presence is remarkable, almost miraculous. Nonetheless, the enduring lessons of 1378 could only be addressed to the political elites, not to anyone lower in the hierarchies of rank. As a matter of ideological summons—the manner in which history addresses the future—the message is clear: “This state of affairs can stand as an eternal example . . . for the city’s leading citizens that they should not allow civil unrest . . . to come down to the whims of the mob. For it cannot be restrained once it begins to snatch the reins and realizes it is more powerful, being more numerous. Most of all, it seems, one should beware of seditious actions which have their origins among the principal citizens, for they end up moving from there to the lower orders.”37 Machiavelli’s Heroic Myth Machiavelli’s account of Michele draws upon both branches of the Florentine tradition. Bruni’s history provides him with the essential outlines of Michele’s role and character, but Stefani’s chronicle supplies incidents that give

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Machiavelli’s narrative its dramatic texture and realistic effect. It is only in Machiavelli’s hands, however, that Michele emerges as a fully elaborated hero, a man who possesses the combination of political cunning and extraordinary virtue required to command the historical stage. And yet, thanks to this double inheritance, even when Michele is elevated and idealized to such an extent, his portrait carries the force of realistic detail. Two of Machiavelli’s innovations are worth reviewing for the sense they give of the way he enlarges Michele without seeming to compromise his historical specificity. One is a speech placed in the mouth of an anonymous plebeian orator, who justifies the plebs’ use of violence against the elites; the other is an incident of mob fury that becomes the occasion for demonstrating Michele’s political skills. (A further element is the extended comparison of ancient and modern class conflict that opens Book 3 of the Histories, but I want to reserve discussion of this dimension of Machiavelli’s historical outlook for the next chapter.) The invention of the anonymous plebeian accomplishes two purposes. Under the cover of a long-standing classical convention, Machiavelli gives the insurgent wool workers an unusually coherent and dramatic voice. At the same time, by inserting this eloquent pleb into the story, Machiavelli effectively splits the historical Michele in two, with each persona playing foil to the other. Two plebeians now stand before us where before there was only one, thus giving the Ciompi insurgents a distinctive sense of purpose, while separating Michele himself from the taint of the mob. For Bruni, there had been little need to explain why the wool workers revolted. Once Salvestro provided them with an opportunity, poverty and greed seemed motivation enough.38 Machiavelli’s orator, in contrast, is a rational, calculating figure, who carefully weighs the costs of either retreating or advancing. There is nothing impulsive in his argument that it would be strategic to step up the violence against the rich: “little faults are punished,” he argues, “great and serious ones are rewarded.”39 Similarly, the orator presents an explicit politics that is entirely absent in the earlier accounts, though the slogans bear some resemblance to contemporary peasant rebellions. “And do not be frightened by their antiquity of blood which they shame us with, for all men, since they had one and the same beginning, are equally ancient. . . . Strip us all naked; you will see us all alike; dress us then in their clothes and they in ours; without doubt we shall seem noble and they ignoble, for only poverty and riches make us unequal.”40 The speech of the anonymous orator has a counterpart in Machiavelli’s account of the murder of Ser Nuto. The outline came from Stefani, who described the unfortunate official as a “cruel bailiff” who was hired to be an executioner, but instead fell victim to the revenge of the Ciompi. In a grisly scene, Ser Nuto

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was lynched by a mob, who (says Stefani) “tore him and cut him to bits, and some took pieces weighing no more than an ounce back to their houses.”41 For his part, Machiavelli spared nothing of the physical description, but embedded its violence in an explanation of Michele’s strategy for calming the city. In this account, Michele deliberately sent his followers in search of Ser Nuto in order “to occupy the minds of the people,” and to buy himself some time to act. “Meanwhile Ser Nuto was carried to the Square by the mob and hanged on the gallows by one foot; and since everybody around cut off a piece of him, in a short time only that foot remained.”42 Despite everything, Bruni could never look past Michele’s origins and rough manners.43 For Machiavelli, however, Michele was above all a “sagacious and prudent man, more indebted to Nature than to Fortune.”44 With this eulogy, Machiavelli erases the stigma of low birth, or rather turns it to Michele’s advantage by making it the test of the hero’s ability to overcome the malice of fortune. This greatness of mind is dramatized in a culminating scene, the details of which could be found in the chronicles, but whose elevation belongs entirely to Machiavelli’s powerful myth of the hero. In Machiavelli’s retelling, some representatives of the Ciompi confronted Michele in the Palazzo and accused him of ingratitude toward those who gave him power. To his enemies, in short, Michele was nothing more than what fortune had made him, a worker raised up by the caprice of the mob. But the Gonfaloniere—“remembering rather the office he held than his humble birth”—was determined to punish this extraordinary insolence by means equally extraordinary.45 Stung to arms, he attacked and defeated the Ciompi—the righteousness of his anger, in effect, demonstrating the virtue which fitted him for office. This is the climax of the narrative and, at the same time, the final triumph of virtue over fortune. Michele’s heroic fury could be set beside many similar moments in literature. But Machiavelli’s heroic myth, though it draws inspiration from traditional literary images, is inescapably political. For Machiavelli it seems insufficient that the great man prove his individual virtue; the man of virtù is also the protector of society and the means of regenerating its corrupted spirits. As the ragged figure we first see, Michele might only be an exemplum of fortune’s capricious powers. But as the protector of Florence he becomes, Michele grows into a representation of the debt society owes its political heroes. In the end, writes Machiavelli, the tumults were composed solely by the abilities of the Gonfaloniere, who in “courage, in prudence, and in goodness . . . surpassed every citizen of his time. He deserves to be numbered among the few who have benefited their native city, because if his spirit had been ei-

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ther wicked or ambitions, the republic would have entirely lost her liberty and would have come under a tyranny more severe than that of the duke of Athens, but Michele’s goodness never let come into his mind a thought opposed to the general good.”46 Only in this leave-taking is it fully apparent why Michele deserves to be ranked among the glorious “few.” More than simple bravery or political skill, Michele’s highest virtue rests in being free of the temptation to exploit his dominating position for private ambitions. The point is crucial because it reveals a central dilemma that Machiavelli is reluctant to acknowledge. Though he exalts charismatic leaders like Michele, Machiavelli cannot finally ignore the dangerous kinship between greatness and tyranny. The unsettling truth is that same virtù that elevates the hero could as easily have made him a tyrant. Only Michele’s goodness (bontà) prevents such an ambition from forming in his mind. Yet as Guicciardini observed in rebuttal, the idea of tyrants who voluntarily surrender their power seems so rare as to be practically impossible to believe. An action so exemplary, one might say, is also unexampled. One of the great themes of Machiavelli’s political writings is the celebration of heroes. The greatest of these are the new princes: those men who founded new states on the strength of their own abilities (virtù) without being beholden to Fortune except for the gift of opportunity.47 Michele did not found a new state (quite the reverse, he rescued an old one), but in other ways his brief rise to power fits the Machiavellian scheme. Like the archetypal heroes of The Prince, Michele seized an opportunity created by an extraordinary crisis. In these circumstances even a despised plebeian could command a following and become his country’s savior. “Fortune, as it were provided the matter but they gave it its form; without opportunity their prowess would have been extinguished, and without such prowess the opportunity would have come in vain.”48 Unlike The Prince, however, the Florentine Histories is not a book of heroes, nor does it end with the cry for Italy’s Redeemer. In the 1520s Machiavelli accepted that he was writing history, not prophesy, and that even as history his narrative would need to observe some carefully chosen limits. With the Medici dominating the later history of the city, there were obvious reasons to return to earlier chapters, where the historian had more liberty to shape the narrative according to the light of his own historical imagination. At the same time, turning to the earlier history of Florence meant returning to the chronicles in an effort to marry the strengths of both schools. The result is a narrative of remarkable elasticity and toughness, where unflinching descriptions of popular violence alternate with occasional irruptions of virtù.

2

A STUDY iN CONTRASTS: MACHIAVELLI, GUICCIARDINI, AND tHE IDEA OF EXAMPLE

I have read somewhere or other—in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think—that history is philosophy teaching by example. —Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, On the Study and Use of History, 1752

Distance has a close cousin in contrast, a distancing device which is both the method and the subject of this chapter.1 And contrast is useful to the student of Florence since its two greatest historical thinkers represent such different methods and sensibilities. Niccolò Machiavelli was a bold synthesizer of historical knowledge, as well as a brilliant stylist and rhetorician. His contemporary, Francesco Guicciardini, stands out as the first of Machiavelli’s critics and the author of one of the greatest and most exacting historical narratives ever written. Politically, both were marked by the collapse of Italian independence in the catastrophic wars of the period. But though their thinking emerged from the same bleak circumstances, the two Florentines responded to the crisis of their times in strikingly different ways. The result is a quarrel over the uses of history that is even more instructive than the work of each writer on its own. Scholars have tended to see their differences as a dispute between politics and history, foreshadowing the disciplinary wrangles of the modern academy.2 On a deeper level, however, what unites the two writers (politicians and historians both) is a debate over historical knowledge and how such knowledge is best mobilized for purposes of political action. Machiavelli’s work expresses a taste for bold speculations, supported by far-reaching comparisons—the mark of a writer who combined a wide range of historical information with a deep admiration for the example of Rome. In Guicciardini, on the other hand, we

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see the work of a cautious, skeptical, lawyer-like mind. Deeply suspicious of generalization (and especially hostile to misplaced analogies with the ancients), he put his trust in a carefully plotted sequence of events out of which he spun a history of the most extraordinary detail and refinement. Of the two writers, it is Machiavelli who most obviously continues the humanist love of antiquity, while Guicciardini’s skepticism puts him at odds with those who argued for following the Roman example—the common signature of Renaissance classicism. In terms of the formal conventions of historical writing, however, Guicciardini’s patiently elaborated narrative puts his Storia d’Italia far closer to the linear structures of ancient historiography as established by Thucydides, Livy, or Tacitus. By contrast, Machiavelli experimented with a variety of modes of historical description, including panegyric, biography, commentary, and treatise. Only the Florentine Histories is relatively linear, even if its conformity to common historical conventions is undercut by a decidedly episodic structure as well as the brief dissertations that introduce each book. In the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, on the other hand—his most powerful and comprehensive meditation on the uses of historical knowledge—his chosen mode is not narrative but commentary. Keeping Livy’s history always open to guide him, Machiavelli gives himself the liberty to zoom in and out of the classical text, roaming across times and places in a manner that conventional narrative would forbid. Working as commentator rather than primary narrator, he can highlight selective examples and build his arguments from a rich vocabulary of comparisons, chosen from a range of histories, ancient and modern. In a famous passage from the preface to the Discorsi, Machiavelli promises a new path of discovery and scorns those who would admire but not imitate the great actions of the past. Far better, he insists, to follow the procedures of the lawyers and physicians, who have systematized the legacies of their ancient predecessors. Yet “in setting up states, in maintaining governments, in ruling kingdoms, in organizing armies and managing war . . . not a single prince or republic now resorts to the examples of the ancients.” Instead, his own work promises “what, according to my knowledge of ancient and modern affairs, I judge necessary for the better understanding of them,” in order that readers “can more easily acquire that profit for which they should seek acquaintance with histories” (“possino più facilmente trarne quella utilità per la quale si debbe cercare la cognizione delle istorie”).3 Imitation, comparison, example: these closely connected concepts lie at the heart of Machiavelli’s historical method, just as they are key to Guicciardini’s protest against everything he finds facile or risky in the Machiavellian approach. Before proceeding with a closer examination of their debate, I want

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to pause for a moment to survey the question of “example,” since Machiavelli’s understanding of this essential but ill-defined concept seems so important to his comparison of ancients and moderns—the very basis, in fact, of the program he describes as “a path not yet trodden by anyone.”4 THE IDEA OF EXAMPLE

Probably no other remark has put history at so lasting a disadvantage as Aristotle’s famous comparison of poetry and history in the Poetics. Aristotle frames the distinction as a matter of conceptual distance. The true difference, he writes, is not that poetry is composed in verse and history in prose, but that “the historian relates what happened, the poet what might happen. That is why poetry is more akin to philosophy than history; poetry deals with general truths, history with specific events.”5 Aristotle’s hierarchical division between truths universal and particular proved especially influential for early modern thought, where it put history into a perennially defensive position in relation to both philosophy and imaginative literature. Philip Sidney, for instance, adopts Aristotle’s language to raise poetry high above history, while Joshua Reynolds follows the same path in exalting “the Grand Style” of painting.6 Similar distinctions are also invoked by Hume, though not to disparage history as such, but rather to turn its attention away from the quirky singularity of chance events and toward general movements of economy or manners.7 Aristotle’s position was not easily countered on its own terms, but historians could take comfort in a celebrated adage of classical rhetoric. “History,” writes Dionysius of Halicarnassus (attributing the idea to Thucydides), “is philosophy teaching by example.”8 Without challenging Aristotle’s hierarchies, Dionysius offers a satisfying rejoinder that plays to the strengths of historical narrative, and in early modern Europe especially it became a commonplace of historical composition.9 The idea of the exemplum is hardly new, but when attached to historical writing “example” serves as a mediating concept that reconciles history’s particularity with philosophy’s elevated vision. Thus history finds a means to raise itself above the mere confusion of passing events (“one damn thing after another”) and to orient its narratives toward more general truths. Properly distanced, history too has a claim to lasting knowledge, with the added advantage that its truths come in more accessible forms and are available to wider audiences. A perfect marriage, in fact, of rhetoric and philosophy. On reflection, however, Dionysius’s compromise seems to raise as many questions as it answers. The sense of the adage is that “example” is particularity made instructive, but this leaves open whether all forms of example are

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equally useful and whether they instruct in much the same way. Still less clear is the relation between example and linear narrative, traditionally regarded as the basic structure of historical composition. Is “example” just another name for anecdote or storytelling, so that the Dionysian formula does little more than restate the customary preference for narrative? Alternately, might the focus on “example” pull away from narrative structures altogether by endowing selected particulars with a special potency of their own? Could reliance on a method of “example” lead historians to loosen their respect for the logic of chronology in favor of other, more resonant ways of describing the past? At its root, example means “something taken out,” a sample or specimen selected from a larger whole. Since there can be a variety of reasons for selection, it follows that there are different types of example, each potentially holding its own relation to narrative structures. Three primary motives stand out: idealization, representativeness, and intensification. Of these, idealization is most prominent in classical and early modern thought, while representativeness (or typicality) becomes a characteristic feature of the empirical methods of modernity. By comparison, the third motive, intensification—the striking example that makes the story seem more real or immediate—enjoys a more varied career, often coming to the fore in periods when an affective engagement with the past is most openly encouraged. In classical and early modern conception, historical writing is closely allied with rhetoric as an instrument of instruction. As magister vitae, history has a special role in the education of young males of a certain rank—heirs-in-waiting to the burdens of state. Appropriately, the life-lessons that history teaches have little to do with day-to-day matters, the supposedly trivial preoccupations of commerce or family life. Rather, since history operates on a public scale, the historian concerns himself with the elevated images that prepare young men for service in the political realm. Skillfully presented, such images spur readers to emulate virtue, just as portraits of vice bring on natural feelings of revulsion.10 In modernity we have learned to select on quite different principles. (Few things, Mark Twain remarks, are harder to put up with than a good example.) As members of an age that is both democratic and scientific, we have grown suspicious of overtly rhetorical language, but are easily persuaded by statistics. Our bent is toward representativeness rather than singularity, the typical and repeatable rather than the ideal. This does not mean that we have banished all heroic aspirations, but finding the right register for a monument has become much harder to do. In modernity, the “unknown soldier” displaces the wellknown general, and elaborate allegories of mourning cede their place to the spare symbolism of a wall of names.

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In this context, the contrast between classical and modern sensibilities is relatively straightforward, but it is less easy to assign a specific epoch to intensification. Nonetheless, there are clearly some periods when historians are drawn to this way of augmenting a sense of actuality. The eighteenth century’s cult of sensibility is such a moment, as is the late twentieth century’s interest in microhistory. Though microhistories vary considerably, all seek to gain from a process of selection and enlargement, whether the goal is to stimulate curiosity or to forge an emotional connection with the past.11 Each of these versions of example carries its own characteristic stance in relation to narrative. Classical texts adopt portraiture as a desirable supplement, which (much like the invented oration) interrupts the action for a stately purpose. Yet from another point of view, such set-piece devices could seem unwelcome distractions—ponderous embellishments that burden the narrative and take on a life of their own. By contrast, examples chosen for reasons of intensification should work in the opposite sense, reinforcing the impact of the narrative, rather than calling attention to themselves. Much depends, however, on the deftness with which the detail is worked into the picture. Thus when Machiavelli transforms the murder of the duke of Athens’s henchmen from an instance of divine justice to a scene of human savagery and pathos, the shocking violence of the mob’s cannibalistic fury lends the whole incident an extra degree of realism.12 But it must also be accepted that there is a danger of lingering too long over such details, so that what begins as a moment of frankness slips into exploitative emotionalism or even voyeuristic indulgence. In a contemporary context, this is a temptation that (though seldom acknowledged) has haunted the project of modern microhistorians.13 Machiavelli’s use of example both for idealization and intensification speaks to his roots in Renaissance eloquence. His most ambitious historical thinking, however, pursues another kind of instruction, arrived at by methods at once more speculative and comparative. In the Discorsi especially his rejection of decorative uses of history in favor of utilità leads to a broader harvest of events, both ancient and modern. The aim is a new manner of generalizing the particular, one which turns away from the singular event to build its claims on a structure that requires repeated comparison. Concentrated, atomized, and made mobile, brief historical narratives are first reduced to their essential elements and then reassembled as parts of a grand archive of case studies. The goal remains to mine history for patterns of instruction, but rather than offering objects for direct imitation (still largely the pattern of the Prince), the Machiavellian metahistorian seeks to uncover the larger designs governing success and failure. The result is a use of example with evident affinities to the modern.

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In practice, comparative use of examples is not entirely absent from the Prince, nor is direct imitation unknown in the Discorsi. Nonetheless, the shift made possible by the wider historical framework of the Discorsi produces a strategic redistancing that marks a very significant difference between the two works. In the Prince the idea of direct imitation stands foremost, while much of the Discorsi subordinates individual cases to a form of imitation that only becomes possible through cumulative study and comprehensive understanding. This strategy supplies the basis of Machiavelli’s most characteristic approach to the idea of example, just as it raises Guicciardini’s fiercest objections.14 But though Machiavelli challenges traditional conventions of linear history, he does not abandon narrative as such. Instead, he redistances historical accounts to fit his new purposes, following a logic that seeks illumination in what is cumulative and comparative, rather than in the vividness or coherence of a single story. In this, more modern regime, comparison, typicality, and repeatability become the watchwords of the idea of example and, for some at least, method will replace eloquence as the basis of historical instruction. In this sense, Machiavelli’s “new way never before trodden” looks ahead to Bodin, Montesquieu, and Bolingbroke. “He who studies History as he would study Philosophy,” writes the latter, “will soon distinguish and collect them, and by so doing will soon form to himself a general system of Ethicks and Politicks on the surest foundations, on the trial of these principles and Rules in all ages, and on the confirmation of them by universal experience.”15 MACHIAVELLI’S “FLORENTINE HISTORIES” AND THE METHOD OF THE “DISCORSI”

Earlier, in reviewing the expulsion of the duke of Athens and the extraordinary career of Michele di Lando, I postponed discussion of the brief introductory essays which are so striking a feature of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories. Much like the Discorsi a decade earlier, these prefaces juxtapose ancient and modern examples largely to measure Roman strength against Italian weakness. Set into the Histories, the comparative frame can only occupy a page or two before it cedes to a more conventionally organized narrative. Brief though they are, however, these prologues define the widest terms for reflecting on the Florentine story and offer a form of mediation quite distinct from those I surveyed in the preceding chapter.16 The introductions reprise themes familiar from the Discorsi, though the more limited scope allowed by the Histories requires Machiavelli to recapitulate his ideas with even greater economy. Histories Book 3, for instance (containing

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the account of the Ciompi revolt), begins with a short discussion of the “natural enmities” that spring up between the nobility and the populace, causing “all the evils which take place in cities.” Such divisions, Machiavelli writes, kept Rome disunited and the same causes—“if small things with great may be compared”—also divided Florence. The comparison, as is evident, will not be to Florence’s advantage, and the remainder of this prologue outlines a series of densely stated contrasts concerning the effects of these conflicts in both cities. In Rome the tensions had generally brought positive consequences, but in Florence the case was otherwise, since the defeat of the nobility deprived the state of much needed military and political talents.17 This discussion takes us back to the early chapters of Book 1 of the Discorsi, where Machiavelli writes that “those who condemn the dissensions between the nobility and the people seem to me to be finding fault with what as a first cause kept Rome free. . . . They are not considering that in every republic there are two opposed factions, that of the people and that of the rich, and that all the laws made in favor of liberty result from their discord.”18 In the narrower Florentine context, however, the emphasis shifts to the negative, since the city’s quarrels brought results quite different from Rome’s, and instead of profiting from an invigorating tension the republic stripped itself of the leadership that only the nobility could provide. In Florence, victory fell to the popolo and the magnates lost access to office. The consequence was that the nobility were forced to shed their distinctiveness and to become as much like the popolani as they could. In time, they lost their military virtue along with their generosity of spirit— qualities the popular class was in no position to supply—and Florence declined into an ever more depressed and abject weakness. Such was the condition of the city, Machiavelli concludes characteristically, that a strong Legislator (uno savio datore di legge)19 might easily have renovated it in any form he chose. The similarities between Book 3 of the Histories and Book 1 of the Discorsi provide an important instance of the carryover between the two works, making it clear to what extent the Florentine narrative can read like a blow-up of selected elements of the earlier and much more comprehensive study. Space should be made, however, to mention one other introductory passage where it is precisely the absence of a prologue that provides the strongest evidence of a continuity which is both thematic and methodological. The Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478 was a plot to overthrow the Medici regime by assassinating the youthful Medici brothers as they celebrated mass in the Duomo. In the event, the Pazzi succeeded in killing Giuliano, but Lorenzo escaped his attacker, with the result that far from losing its grip on the city, the

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regime decisively consolidated its power. The Histories narrates the crisis at some length, but it also begins with a revealing apology. Since Book 8 “lies between two conspiracies”—the Lampugnani in Milan, the Pazzi in Florence— the author’s usual custom would be to open the book by discussing the nature of such events. “I should gladly do so,” Machiavelli continues, “if in another place I had not spoken of them, or if they were matters to be treated with brevity.” Accordingly, he chooses to forgo introductory remarks and press on with the narrative.20 The reference is clearly to Discorsi 3.6—a detailed and comprehensive review of the problem of conspiracy with respect to a variety of types of rulers, assassins, and political circumstances. The complexity and importance of the subject dictate a lengthy discussion, and in fact this chapter is by a considerable margin the longest in the Discorsi, where it amounts to an encyclopedic essay examining the problem of conspiracy from every angle and in every place and period.21 The text is dotted with specific considerations keyed to each type of plot, the injuries that incite it, the numbers of conspirators, the difficulty of preventing discovery, the precautions which can be taken, the problems arising from changes of plans, and similar subjects. All this, as I have said, calls for lengthy discussion, but Machiavelli extends the chapter still further by giving the whole analysis a thoroughly historical character, drawn from both ancient and modern examples. A good portion of his Roman illustrations, naturally enough, comes from Livy, whose work constitutes the spine of the Discorsi, but Tacitus, Plutarch, and other classical historians provide their share. In keeping with his methods, Machiavelli also presents a good number of modern plots for comparison, among them brief narratives of the overthrow of the duke of Athens and the Pazzi Conspiracy.22 When he came to write the Florentine Histories, Machiavelli acquired the scope to expand his account of the Pazzi into a detailed narrative of strong dramatic interest, but even without the “usual custom” of a prologue, he could not forgo entirely his instinct to frame events with some opening generalizations. As long as Medici influence was balanced by that of other families, Machiavelli argues, those who envied their power could oppose them openly without fear of immediate reprisal. “But after the victory of 1466, the government was so completely limited to the Medici . . . that the discontented were forced either with patience to bear that kind of government or, if they did attempt to destroy it, to do so with conspiracies and secretly.” Such plots are seldom successful and they often result in the ruin of those involved. Worse still, the ruler is given every motive for enlarging his authority. “Many times, indeed, having been good,

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he becomes wicked, because these conspiracies . . . give him reasons for being afraid.”23 The lesson, in short, is clear: not only are conspiracies unsuccessful, but they also produce the tyranny they seek to oppose. GUICCIARDINI AND THE EXAMPLE OF ROME: THE “CONSIDERATIONS ON THE DISCOURSES OF MACHIAVELLI” AND THE “RICORDI”

Machiavelli’s lengthy discussion of conspiracy in Book 3 of the Discorsi is unusually dense, incorporating not just multiple examples from Roman and Florentine history, but also a host of other states, both ancient and modern.24 More commonly, his chapters are shorter and, though other histories make their appearance, Rome clearly dominates. In the powerful opening chapters of Book 1, for instance, the Roman example seems nearly exclusive. Nonetheless, for all the weight given to Rome’s progress, these chapters could never be mistaken for a narrative of the founding of the republic. Even when Roman institutions seem most to stand on their own, the purpose is always comparative. It is not Roman history as such we are asked to consider, but rather the Roman example—a distance of another kind.25 Renaissance Italians had long been used to putting everything Roman under a special spotlight. To Guicciardini, however, Machiavelli’s recurrent insistence on the Roman paradigm seems a particular irritant. Not that Guicciardini would wish to diminish Rome’s reputation, but he balks at the impulse to give it exemplarity—a feature of humanist historical writing as well as Machiavelli’s. For Guicciardini it is precisely the distinctive conditions of Rome’s greatness that defeat imitation, revealing the fundamental illogic of attempting to build on such an extraordinary example. Perhaps this is why Guicciardini’s “Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli” (1530) so often goes along with the substance of Machiavelli’s observations (even the most shocking) while utterly rejecting the conclusions that follow.26 A case in point is Machiavelli’s argument (already mentioned) that the disunion of the Senate and the people in Rome made the republic powerful and free. Acknowledging in advance that Rome enjoyed special circumstances, Machiavelli admits that Rome’s success rested on the strength of its army. Even so, Machiavelli argues that Rome’s military discipline reflected its political virtue and that Roman freedom was fostered by the persistent clash of opposing interests. Consequently one should be wary of disparaging a mode of government that showed such remarkable “examples” of virtue.27 Against Machiavelli’s logic, Guicciardini counters that praising disunity is “like praising a sick man’s

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illness because of the virtues of the remedy applied to it.” The clash between the popular and aristocratic factions was a real fault in the constitution and Rome suffered for it. “I do not think [their institutions] were such that those seeking to establish a republic should take them as a model.” The superb military discipline of the Romans compensated for other defects, though these mattered less in a militarized city like Rome “than in those which are ruled by the struggles, ever-changing circumstances, and arts of peace.”28 The clear implication is that modern Florence—a city dependent on peaceable commerce—could do little with the model of ancient Rome. Sometimes Guicciardini’s dissent takes the form of disputing the specifics of particular arguments. (For example, Machiavelli’s discussion of Cosimo de’ Medici in Discourses 1.8 strikes Guicciardini as “pure imagination.”)29 The most interesting cases, however, are those where the disagreement between the two Florentines speaks to deep-seated differences in their ways of addressing the world. One such dispute revolves around Machiavelli’s condemnation of the moral influence of the papacy on Italy as a whole (Discourses 1.12). The question emerges from Machiavelli’s discussion of the importance of Roman piety in fueling the rise of the republic, coupled with parallel observations on the contaminating effects of papal immorality. In fact, the closer people live to the papal court, the less they respect religion; to prove the point (per esperienza certa), just try transplanting the papacy to Switzerland and watch how quickly the people are corrupted. After this brief, but typically bold venture into the distancing effects of counterfactual, Machiavelli shifts his ground from manners to statecraft. The papacy, he argues, has inflicted enormous political damage on Italy because it is the Church that “has kept and still keeps this region divided.”30 No country has ever been united and happy except when brought under a single republic or prince. Unity has made France and Spain the dominant powers of contemporary Europe, just as (implicitly) it built the strength of ancient Rome. As so often, Guicciardini responds by seconding the harsh verdict on contemporary manners, while also resisting Machiavelli’s view of history. As an administrator in service to the Medici popes, Guicciardini knew papal politics at first hand,31 but on this occasion the vehemence of his remarks also reflects the bitterness of his situation, since at the moment of writing he was living as an exile in Rome. “One can never speak ill enough of the Roman court, for it is an infamy, a pattern of all the opprobrium and vituperation of the world.”32 Nonetheless, where Machiavelli found plain-spoken lessons, Guiccardini’s instinct is to emphasize complexity. Even before the days of the Church, he points out, it was never easy to unify Italy because of the strong appetite of its people for

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liberty. In opposing unification, therefore, the Church “has preserved in Italy that manner of life which is most in accord with ancient custom and with its inclination.” It took great skill and violence for the ancient Romans to unify the peninsula, and even they could not prevent frequent invasion by foreigners. Moreover, if as a divided country Italy has suffered calamities that she might have avoided under a single ruler, in all these periods “she has had so many more flourishing cities than she could have had under a single republic, that I think unification would have been more unfortunate than fortunate for her.”33 Guicciardini’s skeptical views on history and politics find even more open expression in the Ricordi, a second work of the same period. In this collection of political maxims one still hears echoes of the debate with Machiavelli, but the terms are set by Guicciardini himself, and the aphoristic style, now freed from the need to respond to the Discorsi, encourages more general formulations. “To judge by example is very misleading. Unless they are similar in every respect, examples are useless, since every tiny difference in the case may be a cause of great variations in the effects. And to discern these tiny differences takes a good and perspicacious eye.”34 The Ricordi is Guicciardini’s masterpiece of second thoughts. A lifelong compilation, revised and refined layer by layer, the aphorisms making up this slim but significant work begin in 1512 with precepts of youthful idealism and ambition, maturing nearly two decades later in a mood of distilled reconsideration.35 Not obviously intended for publication (as in so many examples of this genre, the tone lies somewhere between personal rumination and more open instruction), the little book of political and historical maxims was not printed until the mid-nineteenth century. The timing was unfortunate since it brought the maxims to public notice in the teeth of Risorgimento nationalism—a moment in which Machiavelli’s fervent call for an Italian redeemer met the warmest response, while Guicciardini’s prudential maxims sealed his reputation for cold reason and unswerving self-regard. The result was a climate of reception that pitted Machiavelli against Guicciardini on the basis of national sentiment, but largely ignored other differences which now seem apparent throughout their debate. One of the persistent themes of the Ricordi is the impossibility of formulating rules for politics or history. (As James Thurber is supposed to have said, “there is no exception to the rule that every rule has an exception.”) These maxims amount to rules against generalizing, or generalizations about the folly of making rules. This tension marks the ruminative privacy of the work, limiting its suitability for more public discussion. Whatever their ironies, however, the aphorisms reveal a mind that could never be comfortable with Machiavelli’s

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doctrine of example—just as Guicciardini would also have been skeptical of later nationalisms that dreamed of reviving ancient glories in the circumstances of modern Italy. “How wrong it is to cite the Romans at every turn. For any comparison to be valid, it would be necessary to have a city with conditions like theirs. . . . In the case of a city with different qualities, the comparison is as much out of order as it would be to expect a jackass to race like a horse.”36 GUICCIARDINI’S NARRATIVE QUEST

Guicciardini did not put the Ricordi aside entirely when he turned to writing his vast narrative of the Storia d’Italia. On the contrary, he often drew upon his stock of cautionary maxims, inserting them freely into the text of the history, whether as the narrator’s observations or (more occasionally) in the voice of a speechmaker. Early in the crisis brought on by the French invasion, when the hapless Piero de’ Medici attempted to imitate Lorenzo’s bold journey to the court of his enemies, Guicciardini observes: “But without doubt it is very dangerous to govern oneself by example, unless all the same considerations apply, not only in general but in all the particulars.”37 Given the continuities in Guicciardini’s thought, it is always tempting to allow the suggestive brevity of the Ricordi to substitute for a close reading of a multivolume history. Nonetheless, the historiographical implications of Guicciardini’s critique of his fellow Florentine show themselves most fully in the underlying rhythms and structure of the Storia d’Italia. To pursue the question, it is helpful to set aside the simplistic dichotomy that claims Machiavelli for politics and Guicciardini for history. Instead, we need to recognize that the Discorsi and the Storia d’Italia address many of the same historical issues, even if from different perspectives. Both works are preoccupied with the need to understand the collapse of the Italian powers post-1494, but their explanatory strategies are radically opposed. Machiavelli, as we have seen, holds that history’s utilità rests on a full repertory of example, both ancient and modern. Guicciardini, for his part, is no less political or pragmatic, but his approach to history is cautious, incremental, and close-focused. Speaking in tones that are magisterial and remote, Guicciardini works his way slowly toward a verdict on those he judged responsible for the catastrophe. Step by step and incident by incident, his narrative measures out the cumulative errors by which the Italian powers moved themselves inexorably toward their eventual humiliation. No wonder, then, that despite all his respect for Machiavelli’s brilliant talents, Guicciardini is frequently exasperated by the freedom with which the Discorsi jumps history’s tracks.

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In a notably rhetorical passage early in the Storia d’Italia, Guicciardini marks the first irruption of French arms onto Italian territory and the consequences that followed: “Charles entered Asti on the ninth of September of the year 1494, bringing with him into Italy the seeds of innumerable calamities, of most horrible events and changes in almost the entire state of affairs; for his passage into Italy not only gave rise to changes of dominions, subversion of kingdoms, desolation of countries, destruction of cities and the cruelest massacres, but also new fashions, new customs, new and bloody ways of waging warfare, and diseases which had been unknown up to that time.”38 As much as a single sentence can summarize so long a history, this one does, providing not only a comprehensive catalogue of the disasters of war, but also a schematic narrative of the phases by which successive plagues descended on the populations of Italy. As always with this author, however, the long view gives us only part of the story, so that reading the Storia d’Italia becomes a lesson in following every step with close and continuous scrutiny. A more ordinary writer might have wanted to dramatize Italy’s collapse, but Guicciardini’s instinct is for irony, and it is only in retrospect that 1494 acquires its aura of fatality. In the short term, the real damage done by this first incursion is relatively slight and the recovery comparatively rapid. Piero de’ Medici and Alfonso of Naples both lose their dominions, but Piero is little lamented and the French will soon enough be expelled from their Neapolitan conquest.39 If anything, the opening campaign is a kind of phony war, summed up in Guicciardini’s wry judgment on the triumphant progress of Charles VIII of France: a king who had enjoyed the unheard of happiness, “beyond the example of Caesar,” to have conquered even before he saw.40 By the opening of Book 3 it seems that little has changed; certainly nothing as dramatic as the “desolations of countries,” let alone the predicted onslaught of new customs, new modes of warfare, and unfamiliar diseases. Nonetheless, with the awakening of French ambitions in Italy a troublesome seed has been planted, not to be eradicated by Charles’s subsequent withdrawal. In truth, of all the catastrophes foreshadowed on September 9, 1494, only one has yet made its appearance, but that one change will prove decisive: the destruction of “the instruments protecting Italy’s peace and harmony” such that it has never been possible to reestablish them, leaving Italy open to the destructive ambitions of other barbarian armies and nations.41 With this first cycle of hostilities a repetitive pattern begins to emerge, though considerable time has to pass before we can grasp its significance as an organizing structure. Simply put, Guicciardini gives his history a double rhythm, which alternates between the short-term adventures of Italy’s rulers—each one

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anxious to capitalize on the misfortunes of his neighbors—and the cumulative consequences of unrepentant princely self-interest. Cycle and epicycle would be one way to think of this movement, suggesting a long orbit toward Italy’s predicted calamities, accompanied by shorter revolutions of hope. But given Guicciardini’s bleak view of Italy’s destinies, a more appropriate figure might be a spiraling decline into ever deeper circles of devastation—a dark progress not unlike the stages of Dante’s descent into Inferno. This double structure regulates the essential features of Guicciardini’s narrative, contributing a great deal to its characteristic tensions: its combination of narrow scrutiny and elaborate vision, its stately pace and rapid changes of location, its surprisingly agile narrative carried forward on the legs of Guicciardini’s spidery prose, its sedulous hesitancies about fixing on specific causes of events, combined with its sharply worded indictments of the repeated, disastrous failures of Italy’s princes. Chapter after chapter, events are propelled forward on the alternating pulses of peace and war, the cycles of disappointed hopes not only setting the rhythms of the history, but also revealing its moral purpose and meaning. There is never any doubt about the culpability of the Italian powers, whose blindness and ambition leave the door open to new and more destructive adventures. But though in a sense we know the final verdict from the very first pages, this is far from sufficient. For a writer of Guicciardini’s temperament, there was no real way to measure the rulers’ delinquency short of unrolling the full record of lost opportunities. Ultimately, it is the long time-line of the history—sufficient to have provided for second, third, and fourth chances for peace—that fixes responsibility on the “ill advised measures of rulers.”42 THE “STORIA D’ITALIA” AS THE RECORD OF PRINCELY FOLLY

The first clear indication of the new pattern of Italian affairs comes with the opening of Book 3. With the departure of the French, the narrative appears to have come full circle and Italy “rang with the praises” of Venice and Milan, which had saved the peninsula from servitude to the ultramontanes. Unfortunately, however, neither state was ready to return to seek a balance of power, the wise policy which Lorenzo de’ Medici and Ferdinand of Aragon had once placed at the center of Italian diplomacy.43 Instead, putting self-interest before the common welfare, Venice and Milan were drawn into new adventures out of a desire to profit from Florence’s loss of Pisa (an early consequence of the French invasion). In imitation of his classical models, Guicciardini stages an oration that takes us into the Venetian Senate to hear the question debated. The wisest members plead for restraint now that the ultramontanes have been

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taught the road to Italy, but misguided ambition wins out over prudence. Inevitably, both Venice and Milan are left to learn the difficult truth that from now on the weaker side in any Italian dispute would always have recourse to superior foreign forces. The wars that commenced with these events brought new combatants into the Italian theater. The Spanish and the French struggled over Naples. Swiss mercenaries and even the German emperor pursued the profits of war on Italian soil. Florence, having thrown off Medici rule, remained a republic, and, though racked by internal struggles, carried on its exhausting war against Pisa. This bitter and dragging conflict exhausted the Florentines and at crucial moments kept the flames of war alight, destroying hopes for the return of peace. Most ironic of all, perhaps, was the fate of Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, the restless politician who first stirred up the French invasion in a vain effort to ensure his own security. In the end he was destined to live out his last years in a French prison—a man (comments Guicciardini) whose ambitions all Italy was once too small to contain. This pattern soon establishes itself, as successive books open with new hopes for peace, followed again and again by renewed conflict born of short-sighted greed for power. But though the broad outline becomes depressingly familiar, the tilt of decline is not uniform. The opening of Book 8 marks a new cycle of viciousness. Close to the midpoint of our Dantean journey, having passed through Limbo and then the sins of incontinence, we descend into the circles of violence. Italy had already suffered fourteen years of war, Guicciardini comments, with many destructive changes. Thus far the killing had mostly afflicted the ultramontanes themselves and the peoples of Italy had suffered less than their princes, but the next cycle brought new strife to all Italy and real suffering to her peoples.44 Having opened the door to new disorders, the wars that now spread resulted in the sacking of cities and a mounting toll of death across Italy. In violation of all religious feeling, sacred things were treated with even less respect than profane, and the licentiousness of the soldiers—as destructive to friends as to enemies—becomes a running theme of the history. The reason for these evils was “as almost always” the ambition and cupidity of rulers. But “considering things more particularly” (a characteristic formulation) the fault lay in the insolent actions of the Venetians, who stirred up both France and the Holy Roman Empire.45 Since Venice was the only Italian state powerful enough to aspire to hegemony, the Serenissima was often the target of Guicciardini’s reproach. For different reasons, however, the most memorable example of princely mischief in this period of the history was surely Pope Ju-

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lius II, a tempestuous figure often identified as a “fatal instrument” in Italy’s growing misfortunes.46 In the opening phase of the conflict, the need was for a return to the kind of leadership once exercised by Lorenzo de’ Medici and Ferdinand of Naples— princes whose combined power brought balance and strength to the peninsula. After 1494, however, no such alliance was reconstituted, and eventually both Milan and Naples were lost to foreign domination. In 1511, Julius proclaimed a Holy League, offering himself as the unlikely champion of a coalition to rid Italy of the “barbarians” (Fuori i barbari!). The League, Guicciardini writes, evoked very divided responses. Some were enthusiastic, carried away by the magnificence of the titles and slogans. Others gave the matter closer and more substantial consideration, fearing that wars begun with the intention of liberating Italy would damage her more than those undertaken expressly to subjugate her. It would have been far preferable (he continues) if the disunity and bad counsel of our leaders had not opened the way to foreign arms and led to the loss of Naples and Milan. But accepting the loss, the contrapeso (counterbalance) of Spain and France was essential to defend the liberty of those Italians who remained free, while new wars could only inflict a still more bitter servitude. These warnings were amply fulfilled in the next cycle of hostilities: in due course, the momentous defeat of France at Pavia put an end to the protective balance of European powers, making way for a new kind of peace, more permanent in nature, as Italy was enfolded in the mantle of Hapsburg hegemony. For present purposes, however, there is no need to follow the detail of events any further. Enough has already been said to provide some sense of the twin rhythms of the Storia d’Italia, combining recurrent short cycles of peace and destruction with Italy’s slow transit toward its destiny as a satellite of Spain. TWO TEMPERAMENTS

In the “Considerations,” Guicciardini warns of Machiavelli’s penchant for extraordinary measures, since “violent remedies, though they make one safe from one aspect, yet from another . . . involve all kinds of weaknesses. Hence the prince must take courage to use these extraordinary means when necessary,” but he should also take any opportunity to secure his power through humanity, kindness, and rewards, “not taking as an absolute rule what the author says, who was always extremely partial to extraordinary and violent methods.”47 Modern readers, influenced by Machiavelli’s reputation, are likely to take Guicciardini’s

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views as an early (and perhaps hypocritical) commentary on Machiavelli’s famous immoralism. Guicciardini’s objection, however, has more to do with historical truths than with moral ones. As a political and historical thinker, he had no hesitation about extreme measures when they seemed to be needed. The snare lay in assuming that violence was always the most effective solution. In Guicciardini’s time as in our own, it was conventional to believe that time would clarify events by revealing their causes and motives. Nonetheless, the Storia d’Italia contains numbers of passages where historical retrospect fails to deliver a conclusive judgment and the historian finds no better option than to wrap important actions in a cloud of alternative motives.48 On such occasions, Guicciardini simply picks up the threads of his story, without coming to any resolution beyond the documentable facts. This habit of taking refuge in indeterminacy might be read as a way of offering the reader the full space of interpretation. More fundamentally, however, this habit of studied indecision seems calculated to enforce a distinction between things that are fully visible to a third-party observer and those questions of motive and explanation that inevitably contain a considerable element of conjecture. In the face of so much that is opaque to history, Guicciardini seems to say, all we can rely on is narrative itself—the studiously particularized record of actions and events. Machiavelli’s gift is just the opposite. Lacking any hint of Guicciardinian hesitancy, he knows exactly what essence to extract from every account he collects. This is why he is able to move so swiftly to assemble a body of useful examples derived from his reading of histories, ancient and modern. Each narrative is harvested for its utilità and then recombined with others in a framework of historical comparison. Methodologically, this distancing strategy stands at the opposite pole from Guicciardini’s close-chronicling. Part judge, part healer (his stated models for the study of ancient examples are physicians and jurists) Machiavelli pursues a higher ambition. His instinct is for metahistory, the path of a writer who adventures among narratives already assembled by others. Even when he takes on the more conventional tasks of historical writing, as he does in the Florentine Histories, he is not content with straightforward linear composition. Though the rhetorician in him delights in scenes of heroic or violent struggle—example in its other meanings as precept or intensifier—his most characteristic addition to the work of his predecessors is to reframe the city’s history in terms of brief, but far-reaching comparisons. For those who are capable of seeing it, every chapter of Florence’s past can be studied in the light of much larger patterns. And for those whose vision does not carry that far, the experiences of one’s “own city . . . are much more moving and more useful.”49

Part Two

Circa 1800: History and Its Genres in the Long Eighteenth Century Much discussion of historical distance reflects the assumption that there is an optimum position from which to observe the past. Inevitably, a strong element of prescription finds its way into each of the constituent terms, so that both “history” and “distance” are conceived in relatively restrictive ways. In practice the two concepts seem to be mutually defining, so that a tightly bounded definition of one helps to produce an equally circumscribed view of the other. In short, a properly written history is one that respects the need for distance, while the proper degree of distance is determined by current historiographical norms. The alternative to this sort of prescriptiveness is to embrace a liberal complexity with respect to both “history” and “distance.” In this spirit, I have argued for replacing the customary linear conception with a new emphasis on distance as a complex set of engagements that combines many forms and degrees of relationship. By the same token it is important to entertain a view of history that acknowledges the full range of genres that make up the family of historical representation. Accordingly, a good number of the chapters that follow will be devoted to a project of diversity. Hume’s observation that “everything contiguous to us . . . excel[s] every other object in its influence on the imagination”1 has as its corollary that nothing is harder to historicize than our own commitments. For historians, this means facing the irony that we are least capable of historical perspective when we approach the door of our own discipline. As a starting point, we need to accept the fact that the study of history has passed through endless variations without arriving at definitive forms or methods. On the contrary (to cite Croce again), every age has its own “thinking of history.” Equally, we should give up

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the hopeful fiction that leads us to speak of history in the singular, as though the past reaches us in a single stream, unmediated by rival interpretations or conventions of representation. For certain purposes, of course, it is possible to invoke history as a solitary monolith. We sometimes speak of the judgment of History or the perspective of History, just as we refer to the value of Art, Poetry, or Religion. But these uppercase entities are there to confer consequence on our activities, not to promote critical judgment. For this purpose, a unitary concept of history simply gets in the way. Far better to imagine history as a cluster of competing genres—a crowded Thanksgiving dinner, perhaps, where amid so many cousins the family never speaks in one voice and there are always multiple conversations going on. In practice, issues of historical change and genre formation are closely intertwined since innovation in the system of genres gives a clear signal that a historical outlook is under revision. Often this means that an already established literature was in the process of being reoriented toward a more explicitly historical purpose, as happened with history painting in the time of Benjamin West (see Chapter 8). What results may be a hybrid formation where once disparate genres combine in the interest of pursuing a new object. In conjectural history, for example, the mixture of history and political economy provided historians with the means to represent a distanced past for which more traditional forms of documentation were unavailable. Similarly, the affective attractions of literary history offered eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers a way to explore the rich but difficult terrain of the history of manners and sentiments (see Chapter 7). Formal innovation does not always manifest itself in changes of such magnitude. The same pressures that create full-scale reformation of genres also produce limited experiments that can be incorporated into more traditional histories as substructures of the narrative. It is no small part of Hume’s greatness, for example, that his work manages to combine a wide variety of formal and thematic elements in a complex and harmonious balance (see Chapter 3). The corollary of this achievement, however, is that if we mean to follow the evolution of eighteenth-century historical thought, we need to pay closer attention to the full range of its historical genres, including the minor and eccentric. Taken singly, each represents only one pathway of the period’s “thinking of history,” but collectively they map its historical interests. By comparison, even so extraordinary a work as Hume’s cannot match this breadth of possibility.

3

“THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS PHILOSOPHER AND

HISTORIAN OF THE AGE”: HUME AND THE BALANCES OF ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORY

“I believe that this is the historical Age, and this the historical Nation.”1 Hume’s quiet boast to the publisher William Strahan speaks to his pride in Scotland’s achievements, as well as to his easy acceptance of his own position as the foremost historian of the age. Despite this confidence, however, Hume’s evocation of Scotland’s newfound literary glory carries with it an inescapably ironic echo. After all, the most persistent indictment against the Enlightenment has concerned its alleged failures of historical imagination. The nineteenth century, it has long been said, was the great age of historical mindedness; the eighteenth—an age of reason rather than of history—remained incapable of appreciating any spirit other than its own. Collingwood’s verdict is typical of a long tradition of criticism, lasting well into the second half of the twentieth century: “Hume never shows the slightest suspicion,” he wrote, “that the human nature he is analysing in his philosophical work is the nature of a western European in the early eighteenth century. . . . He always assumes that our reasoning faculty, our tastes and sentiments, and so forth, are something perfectly uniform and invariable, underlying and conditioning all historical changes.”2 In questions of historical thought, as in so many other aspects of eighteenthcentury culture, it has proved remarkably difficult to dispel the disapproving shadow of the century that followed. Even now, when at last it has become possible again to take Hume seriously as a historian, we cannot help but be conscious of pushing against the weight of nearly two centuries of hostile reception.3 In this context, it is difficult to read Hume’s letter to Strahan in the straightforwardly confident spirit in which it was written. Vital though it is to understand Hume’s sense of achievement, it is no less important to probe why

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those who came after found so little to admire and so much to combat in the Enlightenment’s vision of history. At its core, the perennial charge against the Enlightenment was that its rationalist and universalizing psychology ruled out any genuine sense of history. In the simpler forms of Romantic criticism this view became a lament for the unimaginative blandness of modern historians. History had become a remote and argumentative discourse, akin to the abstractions of philosophy and political economy, but with little grasp of the real substance of individual life or everyday experience. Carlyle, for example, mocked the empty wisdom of the philosophical historian as the endless “hoo hoo” of an owl crying from the rooftop, while Dilthey, writing three quarters of a century later, but with hardly less acerbity, charged that “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.”4 Collingwood, too, as we have already seen, arraigned the “narrow conception of reason” which left Hume and his fellow historians with “no sympathy for, and therefore no insight into” any period that did not share their own rationalist spirit. “When one compares, for example, the complete lack of any sympathy for the Middle Ages shown by Hume with the intense sympathy for the same thing which is found in Sir Walter Scott, one can see how this tendency of Romanticism [an interest in cultures unlike one’s own] had enriched its historical outlook.”5 The nineteenth-century critique of Hume figures more fully in the next chapter, but already it should be evident that these strictures constitute an inescapable challenge to any appreciation of Enlightenment historiography, as well as a point of departure for understanding the shift in historical distance that marked the early nineteenth century. THE MOMENT OF HUME’S “HISTORY OF ENGLAND”: TEMPORALITY AND OTHER DISTANCES

Much of Hume’s fame as a historian, as well as the controversy he provoked, begins from two essential commitments: namely, that with respect to the great events of the seventeenth century he takes the position of a postrevolutionary observer, while in relation to some key aspects of the European historiographical tradition he writes from an essentially postclassical vantage. The first is largely a matter of ideological engagements, but it also carries strong affective consequences. The second involves both the aesthetic form and the explanatory structures of the History.

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Hume began his work a scant half-decade from “the ’45,” the second and final uprising of the Scottish clans in favor of the exiled house of Stuart. The brutal military suppression that followed the defeat of the Highlanders at Culloden ended forever the hope of reversing the effects of the revolutions of the previous century. Henceforth, Jacobitism would survive primarily as a politics of nostalgia and a literature of romance—most famously in Walter Scott’s re-creation of these events in the first of his novels, Waverley, or ’Tis Sixty Years Since. Sixty years was also the interval that separated the time of Hume’s writing from the great event that, as the terminus of his History, measured the distance between the living present and its written past. The Revolution of 1688, as Hume writes at the end of volume 6, formed “a new epoch in the constitution” and put its “nature . . . beyond all controversy.”6 Like Waverley, then, Hume’s narrative took the form of a look back on a world that was both recent enough to retain its hold on living memory and distant enough to be past all reclaiming. The difference lay in the fact that while Scott’s decision to write a Scottish fiction allowed him to indulge the romance of the vanquished, Hume interpreted the challenge of becoming Britain’s historian as requiring him to strip bare the myths of the victors. “The Whig party,” he writes in a passage that serves as a summary of his historiographical mission, “for a course of nearly seventy years, has, almost without interruption, enjoyed the whole authority of government: and no honours or offices could be obtained but by their countenance and protection. But this event [the Whig ascendancy], which in some particulars, has been advantageous to the state, has proved destructive to the truth of history, and has established many gross falsehoods, which it is unaccountable how any civilized nation could have embraced . . .” The result, Hume adds, naming the best known works of Whig historiography, has been that the most despicable histories, “both for style and matter, have been extolled, and propagated, and read; as if they had equaled the most celebrated remains of antiquity.”7 Hume’s antagonism to Whig historiographical tradition has often been elided with a hostility to the Whig cause itself, a much more disputable point. In fact, Hume liked to picture himself as an even-handed observer, capable of displaying both analytic detachment and comprehensive sympathies. As he put it in his brief autobiography, not only was he “the only historian that had at once neglected present power, interest, and authority, and the cry of popular prejudice,” but he was also the man who had “presumed to shed a generous tear” for the fate of King Charles I. This defense was undoubtedly sincere, but there is a degree of disingenuousness in the accompanying expressions of surprise and hurt. In important ways, the deepest provocation Hume offered his critics lay

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precisely in assuming that posture which for him was the principal source of his pride, namely the presumption that he could write with a considerable degree of detachment about events and ideas still so present to national memory. Hume, in short, assumed a decidedly postrevolutionary vantage and prided himself on the expanded understanding that this distancing made possible.8 For his opponents, on the other hand, the seventeenth-century remaking of the British state was not yet so much a thing of the past as to permit old instincts to be suspended. Thus the same vantage that nourished Hume’s sense of opportunity to win fame in his new field of literary endeavor also ensured a lasting and bitter response from several generations of Whig critics. If Hume’s historiographical politics were postrevolutionary, in important respects his sense of historical form and explanation was distinctly postclassical. In this camp, however, the deficiencies of British historiography were widely acknowledged, and the same factors that made Hume hopeful of fame disposed his countrymen to pay proper tribute to his accomplishments. Eighteenth-century historiography’s relation to the classical tradition was far from simple, especially when we take into account its conceptual as well as its formal inheritance. Some useful guidance can be taken from the way in which contemporary British commentators celebrated two distinct, but overlapping achievements in historical writing. First, Britons were conscious of lacking a historical literature worthy of their standing in the world, and they welcomed Hume—along with Robertson and (somewhat later) Gibbon—for their outstanding literary achievements.9 At last Britain had produced a school of historians to match the best writers of continental Europe or even the greatest historians of antiquity. Second, contemporaries celebrated the fact that historical writing had expanded its scope considerably beyond the military and political events that preoccupied historians in the classical tradition. History written in the new manner would not, of course, neglect the traditional business of the historian, but it would give older questions new depth and meaning by encompassing manners, commerce, and the history of the arts. At the highest level, in short, history would be not only polite, but also philosophical. The problem of fashioning a polite historical style existed in anticipation— an artifact of Britain’s long tutelage to Italy and France in so many branches of letters. The challenge of rendering history philosophical, on the other hand, only came into focus retrospectively, as historians began to create narratives of a distinctively modern kind and critics turned back to measure the extent of recent achievements against the inadequacies of earlier traditions. This sense of accomplishment is nicely summed up in a review of Sir John Sinclair’s History of the Public Revenue: “History, till of late, was chiefly employed in the recital

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of warlike transactions. . . . The people were not known; the circumstances that affected their domestic prosperity and happiness were entirely overlooked; and the records of many ages might have been perused without obtaining the least information concerning any fact that led to a knowledge of the internal economy of the state, or the private situation of individuals.”10 In essence, classical historiography had accepted the boundaries of the vita activa as determining both its ethical ideal and its literary form;11 but if history continued to define itself as a narrative of public actions, the effect would be to exclude a range of institutions and experiences that eighteenth-century audiences increasingly understood as being essential features of modern life. As Robert Henry put it his widely read History of Great Britain (1771–93), “No apology is necessary for introducing the history of Commerce into the history of Britain, which hath derived so many advantages from that source.”12 Hume would certainly have agreed, and, indeed, it was in recommending this very book that he spoke of the age as “historical.” As a pioneer in the study of political economy, Hume was in the best position to point to the subject’s long neglect. The ancients had completely ignored the question of trade, he noted, and even the Italians (presumably Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and their successors) had barely taken it into account, though it was now a preeminent concern of everyone involved in government.13 Commerce did not stand alone, however, as a marker of the gap separating modern historians from their classical and early modern predecessors. Trade was only the most visible sign of history’s new direction. Manners, opinion, arts, industry—all this and more would need to be included if historians wanted to take on the range of social description indicated by Sinclair’s reviewer. The “philosophical” approach to history conferred an added measure of moral consequence on an art whose dignity had always been a central part of its definition. Enlightenment historians spoke with the confidence of writers who had access to principles previously unknown. It is easy to forget, however, the degree of formal adaptation that would be required to join this new historical approach to older, but still prestigious narrative traditions. Classical conventions of historical writing had been devised to narrate the deeds of warriors and statesmen, not alterations in the balance of trade or changes to the texture of manners, and even those who welcomed this expansion could be made uneasy by the sense that history might overload itself with ponderous abstractions. Adam Smith, for example, though soon to become the foremost political economist of the age, began his teaching career with lectures on rhetoric, in which he mounted a strict defense of history’s adherence to linear narrative. “Long demonstrations,” Smith argues, “as they are no part of the historian’s province

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are seldom made use of by the ancients.” The same objections, he continues, apply to reflections and observations that go on for longer than two or three sentences. The historian who brings in long reflections “withdraws us from the most interesting part of the narration,” interrupting the flow of the action and therefore breaking the train of association that created the reader’s emotional engagement with the narrative.14 Smith’s successor in rhetoric at Edinburgh, Hugh Blair, repeats much the same view, while also applauding just those recent advances that had disturbed the old balances. “But when we demand from the historian profound and instructive views of his subject,” Blair writes, “it is not meant that he should be frequently interrupting the course of his History, with his own reflections and speculations.” What is more, when a historian is “much given to dissertation” we grow suspicious that “he will be in hazard of adapting his narrative of facts to favour some system which he has formed to himself”—an objection that has less to do with Smith’s concern for affective impact than with a fear of excessive ideological coloration.15 Despite these cautions, however, Blair ends his chapter on historical writing with yet another summation of the great conceptual advance that animated historical writing at this time. “I cannot conclude the subject of History without taking notice of a very great improvement which has, of late years, begun to be introduced into Historical Composition; I mean a more particular attention than was formerly given to laws, customs, commerce, religion, literature, and every other thing that tends to show the spirit and genius of nations. It is now understood to be the business of an able Historian to exhibit manners, as well as facts and events.” Assuredly, he continues, “whatever displays the . . . life of mankind, in different periods, and illustrates the progress of the human mind, is more useful and interesting than the detail of sieges and battles.”16 As the tone of Blair’s summary indicates, eighteenth-century historians regarded their expanded horizon as a primary contribution to historical study—a sure mark of their advance over the narrowly political and party-bound interests of earlier writers. Nonetheless, this triumph of a more “philosophic” and democratizing spirit brought with it a tension that Smith was closer to acknowledging than Blair. If writing history was to involve a wider array of experiences, historians would need to rework their customary tools for representing and explaining the past. The result—so characteristic of Enlightenment philosophical histories—was to populate their narratives with broad and often abstract social descriptions, designed to discover the deeper logic of things. And yet, the same desire to exhibit “manners, as well as facts and events” could also lead in the direction of close and affectively heightened description, aimed at evoking a

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sense of familiarity with the textures of other ages. From some points of view these two directions may well seem contradictory. (This was certainly the verdict of a later, more romantic generation.) But in a culture that was sentimental as well as enlightened, they combined with remarkable effect, establishing a crucial balance of distances that characterized the work of some of the leading historians of the age. INTELLIGIBILITY AND INSTRUCTION

Blair’s summary of improvements in historical writing takes us back to Hume’s pioneering efforts in the new historiographical style and particularly to his famous appendices, which were such influential demonstrations of the new program. These interludes were designed to set the political narrative into a wider social framework constituted by concern for manners, commerce, and the arts. At the same time, the placement of the appendices also articulates his history into four broad epochs—roughly Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain, the Middle Ages, the Tudor monarchy, and the crisis of revolution and civil war that followed on the death of James I. The fourth of these appendices (though the first in order of composition, since Hume began with the seventeenth century and then worked his way backward) clearly states the agenda Hume intended to follow. “It may not be improper at this period, to make a pause,” Hume writes, “and to take a survey of the state of the kingdom, with regard to government, manners, finances, arms, trade, learning. Where a just notion is not formed of these particulars, history can be little instructive, and often will not be intelligible.”17 Hume’s list spells out clearly the topics that would emerge as the essential themes of what his age liked to call philosophical history—government, manners, finances, arms, trade, learning. But there is also a subtler indication of a shift in direction implied in the prominence he assigns to the association between intelligibility and instruction, with its hint that earlier histories, lacking such investigations, would have failed such a test entirely. Coming from one of the pioneers of the new historical school, the claim is necessarily partisan; there is some truth, however, in the view that humanist historiography, with its Roman rhetorical roots, had focused most of its attention on the moral effectiveness of historical teaching, while Whiggism imagined a history whose instruction was largely political. In neither case was the intelligibility of history brought into question. In contrast, Hume’s claim marks a higher conceptual ambition—one requiring the temporary suspension (or calculated estrangement) of history’s customary narratives.

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What, then, from Hume’s standpoint, makes history “intelligible”? One answer, to be sure, lies in Hume’s survey of the principal topics of philosophical history. Another resides in the way he organizes those topics according to a repeated and insistent comparison of past and present. “We may safely pronounce,” Hume states, taking up the first of his announced themes, “that the English government, at the accession of the Scottish line, was much more arbitrary, than it is at present; the prerogative less limited, the liberties of the subject less accurately defined and secured.” With respect to religion, Hume notes that the liberty of conscience “which we so highly and so justly value at present” was utterly suppressed, unable to stand up to “the [religious] bigotry which prevailed in that age.” Politically, the principles that “prevailed during that age” were entirely favorable to monarchy, but “by the changes which have since been introduced,” the liberties of individuals have become more secure, while those of the public have become more uncertain.18 Manners, too, were shaped by the “the monarchical government which prevailed,” and they lacked that “strange mixture, which, at present, distinguishes England from all other countries. Such violent extremes were then unknown, of industry and debauchery, frugality and profusion, civility and rusticity, fanaticism and scepticism.”19 Amongst the aristocracy, “high pride of family then prevailed” and the nobility distinguished themselves from the common people by their “dignity and stateliness of behaviour.” Great commercial wealth was “more rare, and had not, as yet been able to confound all ranks of men, and render money the chief foundation of distinction.”20 Often, of course, the contrast of past and present is implied rather than spelled out, but the self-conscious and systematic hunt for intelligibility through then/ now comparisons remains a consistent impulse. As Hume had observed in the Treatise of Human Nature, “the present situation of the person is always that of the imagination, and that ’tis from thence we proceed to the conception of any distant object.”21 When Hume states, for example, that “The expenses of the great consisted in pomp and show, and a numerous retinue, rather than in convenience and true pleasure,” it seems evident that he intends both a temporal and a moral contrast with the present. “Civil honours,” he goes on to say, “which now hold the first place, were, at that time, subordinate to the military. . . . The fury of duels too prevailed more than at any time before or since. This was the turn, that the romantic chivalry, for which the nation was formerly so renowned, had taken.”22 These examples are all drawn from the first two divisions of Hume’s “survey” (i.e. government and manners), but the contrastive habit carries through the broad range of observation that makes up the remainder of the appendix. When

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Hume notes the amount of the king’s revenue “as it stood in 1617,” or remarks on the high rate of interest in James’s reign, or details the relatively meager supplies voted by parliament, or lists the “price of corn during this reign” (“no lower, or rather higher than at present”), or writes of the absence of the “danger and expense of a standing army,” or estimates the number of men in England capable of bearing arms according to a review of 1583, not one of these items stands as an autonomous datum.23 Rather, every statistic, observation, or judgment forms a part of an extended comparison whose chief purpose is to measure the distance between then and now. This repetitive marking of contemporary conditions demonstrates Hume’s awareness of writing from a historical present, coupled with an equally selfconscious view of the essentially contrastive structure of historical understanding.24 For Hume, it is clear, historical thinking implies something more than a factual knowledge of the four previous epochs of the history of Britain; it also requires a critical thinking back from a particular present to an alien past. This vantage—postrevolutionary, Hanoverian, enlightened, skeptical—stands as an unapologetic reference point in the narrative, where it constitutes the fifth and ultimately most crucial epoch of the History of England. DECIPHERMENT AND THE HISTORY OF OPINION

The then/now comparison that is so prominent in the Fourth Appendix is not, of course, the only tool Hume has to hand in his search for intelligibility and instruction. Two passages in the Essays serve as a further guide to problems of social explanation. As Hume writes in the essay on “The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” “What depends upon a few persons, is, in a great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes: What arises from a great number, may often be accounted for by determinate and known causes.”25 Going by this “general rule,” he continues, “the domestic and gradual revolutions of a state must be a more proper subject of reasoning and observation, than the foreign and the violent, which are commonly produced by single persons, and are more influenced by whim, folly, or caprice, than by general passions and interests.” For this reason, the economic factors leading to the rise of the Commons in England are easier to understand than the personal motives that made for the decline of the Hapsburg dynasty in Spain, just as the rise of commerce is more easily accounted for than the progress of learning—avarice being a more universal passion than curiosity for knowledge.26 Hume’s observation is not meant to interdict investigations that demanded recourse to subtler and less obvious causes. Instead, it provides guidance to the

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success with which broader structures of explanation can be invoked in relation to specific situations, some less, some more susceptible to generalization. In practice, after all, a great deal of what he wanted to describe lay in territories that by his own “rule” were necessarily more difficult to assess than the rise of commerce. This challenge is particularly evident if we take note of a second maxim, articulated in the essay “Of the First Principles of Government.” “Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye,” he writes, “than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors having nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded.”27 Elsewhere he puts the point still more sweepingly. “[T]hough men be much governed by interest; yet even interest itself, and all human affairs, are entirely governed by opinion.”28 The historiographical implications of this maxim are as far-reaching as the political ones. After all, the founding impulse of the History was to describe a decisive shift in the terms by which the many would continue to consent to be governed by the few. Considered in this light, even the “gradual and domestic revolutions of the state”—apparently so favorable to general explanation— would ultimately have to be understood in terms of something rather more elusive than the movements of commerce. In fact, though Hume endorsed the Harringtonian view that the “rise of the commons” was owing to a change in the balance of wealth, he could not confine his scope to economic factors alone. Questions of property and power undoubtedly established the grounds for a great constitutional revolution, but it remained the crucial task of the historian to render intelligible what (in a related context) he would call “a sudden and sensible change in the opinions of men.”29 In the next century Hume’s task would become easier. Nineteenth-century writers identified the idea of opinion with public debate and the influence of the press—a view captured in the idea of the “fourth estate.”30 Institutionalized in this way, public opinion would acquire a more tangible sense of agency within the accepted narrative of historical change. By contrast, Hume’s more generalized understanding of the concept may sometimes appear abstract and disembodied, with little of the dramatic interest with which Carlyle or Macaulay could invest their representations of collective sentiment. But whatever its limitations, Hume’s idea of opinion represents a prescient attempt to conceptualize

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an issue that would become increasingly central to any view of history that looked beyond the chronicle of political events.31 Hume possessed a variety of resources for writing such a history. Like his nineteenth-century successors, he did not hesitate to generalize about the “spirit of the age” or to identify crucial shifts in national manners, but less direct strategies were also available. One device, both frequent and characteristic, was the oration, a typical feature of ancient historiography, but one that Hume modified to serve a substantially new purpose. We feel the shadow of the classical tradition when, for example, Hume pairs opposing parliamentary and royalist arguments in order to draw the lines of the coming conflict.32 His usual strategy, however, is to avoid the fiction of direct address, offering instead a catalogue of attitudes and ideas that comes closer to a set of notes and headings than to a polished oration. The consequence is to shift the oration from its traditional roles toward a new, more analytic purpose as an index of conflicting views. In departing from its classical definition as a narrative of public actions, Hume’s history takes on a new concern with tracing the conditions leading to social change. As Hume writes of his aims in depicting the age of Elizabeth, it would be sufficient “to show the genius of that age, or rather the channels in which power then ran.”33 From this perspective, it did not necessarily matter whether an incident resulted in large public consequences. It would be enough that the historical object, whatever it might be—an event, an institution, even something so unself-conscious as a trick of speech—seems indicative of the mental habits of another time. Such habits get particular attention when tracing their detail offers Hume a way to give body to otherwise undocumentable changes in sensibility. “It may not be unworthy of remark,” he writes of the famous jurist and M.P. Sir Edward Coke, that “in the trial of Mrs. Turner, [Coke] told her, that she was guilty of the seven deadly sins. She was a whore, a bawd, a sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon, and a murderer. And what may more surprise us, Bacon, then attorney general took care to observe, that poisoning was a popish trick. Such were the bigoted prejudices which prevailed: Poisoning was not, of itself, sufficiently odious, if it were not represented as a branch of popery.”34 As a matter of history’s intelligibility, we understand, the issue is not the guilt or innocence of the obscure Mrs. Turner. Even Coke and Bacon, in a sense, are nothing more than opinion’s agents. What gives this cameo historical impact is what it reveals about the mind of the English, then and now. Where religious bigotry is the target, Hume is never shy about adding the twist of irony to the thrust of argument. But while the critical tone of his remarks is unmistakable, we are apt to overlook the stylized note of hesitation about things

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“not unworthy of remark.” In a text of such elegant smoothness, however, these introductory apologetics are worth noting. With the self-consciousness of this muted “ahem,” Hume signals his sense of introducing a novel element into the canons of historical composition and of moving beyond the now outmoded proprieties of his predecessors. “MY VIEWS OF THINGS”

Early in his career as a historian, Hume summed up the politics of his History in a way that both acknowledges and rationalizes its tensions. “My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles,” he writes in a typically balanced formulation; “my representation of persons to Tory prejudices. Nothing can so much prove that men commonly regard more persons than things, as to find that I am commonly numbered among the Tories.”35 The reconciliation of opposites seems deceptively easy—a gesture of disavowal that aims to distance himself from the shallow partisanship he thinks typical of English historical writing. At the same time, by ironizing his reputation as a Tory, he not only complicates the ideological issue, but also points to the complex balances of (Tory) affect and (Whig) explanation that characterize the History. Hume’s Whig critics would have scoffed at the notion that his “views” of the British constitution were close to those of their own party, but (as has already been said) we should not confuse his condemnation of the partisanship of Whig historiography with a wholesale rejection of fundamental Whig principles.36 Hume questioned neither the legitimacy nor the desirability of the Hanoverian settlement; what he did oppose was an entrenched historical doctrine about how the mixed constitutional state had come into being—specifically the creed that the Civil War represented the culmination of an old and largely continuous history of British freedoms. Hume’s recasting of British history would ultimately reach back to Roman times, but its most dramatic effects related to the two most recent dynasties and especially to the reigns of Elizabeth I and Charles I. For Hume, the revolutionary crisis of the seventeenth century was rooted in broadly based economic and social changes. Exploration and New World commerce had brought increasing commercial wealth, which had “thrown the balance of property into the hands of the commons” and created a situation in which “the dispositions of men became susceptible of a more regular plan of liberty.”37 From this broad social observation, combining economy and the history of opinion, a more pointed political argument followed. In the constitutional struggle of the times, the real initiative did not come from the efforts of the Crown, seeking (as the Whigs in-

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sisted) to expand its authority at the expense of traditional freedoms. Rather, an increasingly confident Commons overturned the existing balance of the constitution by pressing for political change. In the reign of James’s predecessor—the much beloved Elizabeth—it was obvious that parliaments had been entirely subservient to royal authority and meekly accepted instruction from this extraordinarily imperious monarch. In those earlier times, the arrangement of social forces had been very different from the new disposition that began to manifest itself in the period of the early Stuarts. Commerce, it is true, had already begun to quicken under Elizabeth, but at this stage new wealth served largely to undermine the power of the landed aristocracy without as yet raising the Commons.38 As a result, the monarchy found itself in a position of unrivaled authority, and it exercised an absolute power in England that was very little different (as Hume observes provocatively) from the despotisms of Turkey or Muscovy. Thus far we have an essentially social revolution, but the “domestic and gradual revolutions of the state” appear more complex when the circuitous pathways of opinion have to be taken into account. Witness the absolutist pretensions of the early Stuarts, which for most eighteenth-century observers seemed the clearest justification for a revolution pursued in defense of traditional British freedoms. Hume turned this argument on its head and asserted that the mounting conflict reflected the growing self-confidence of the Commons. In fact, the monarchy had long been close to absolute, but prior to the accession of James I the Commons had showed little disposition to protest. Ironically, the real impetus for royal stridency was dialectical and essentially defensive. It was only at this time that prerogative found itself opposed by contrary doctrines, “which began to be promulgated by the puritanical party.”39 Looking back from the perspective of a later age, Hume repeatedly emphasized the comparative weakness of the seventeenth-century state, with respect both to arms and to revenues. This was a monarchy whose power, though very extensive in theory, rested simply “on the opinion of the people,” which in turn was shaped by “ancient precedent and example.” No wonder then, as Hume went on to say, James and Charles were “so extremely jealous of their prerogative.”40 But if the extreme claims of royal authority were “more speculative than practical,” on the parliamentary side the reverse was true. Supported by the favorable conditions of the time, the Commons succeeded in enlarging their powers, but without as yet codifying their new position in “systematical principles and opinions.”41 No one, in fact, as yet properly understood the new importance of the Commons, which was one reason that Charles I was so often impolitic in his relations with his parliament. History had not prepared

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him for the new realities and “nothing less than fatal experience could engage the English princes to pay a due regard to the inclinations of that formidable assembly.”42 Charles was hardly alone in suffering from such limitations of vision. Of necessity, some degree of historical blindness is the fate of all those who are required to act in the face of new or emergent conditions. For Hume this is a crucial point because it brings with it an invitation to abandon partisanship and to approach individuals on both sides of the conflict with a warmer appreciation of the pathos of their historical situation. The irony of historical judgment, in other words, is that by achieving a measure of ideological distancing suitable to a postrevolutionary age, we open ourselves to the possibility of closer affective engagement: hence the “generous tear” that Hume prides himself on having shed for Charles I or Strafford. On another level, however, Hume’s sensitivity to the changing basis of opinion makes him less interested in individual failures of insight than in the collective ideologies and experiences that condition the perspectives of whole generations. Who in the time of Elizabeth, for example, could have foretold the importance of the Puritans to the history of English liberty? Yet in fact “it was to this sect, whose principles appear so frivolous and habits so ridiculous, that the English owe the whole freedom of their constitution.”43 Following the same logic, Hume also recognized that it would be inappropriate to condemn the arbitrary and haughty conduct of Elizabeth. The “maxims of her reign were conformable to the principles of the times,” and she continued to be the most popular monarch England ever had. It was only the continued growth of the popular party since her day that had “so changed our ideas in these matters” that her autocratic ways now “appear to us extremely curious, and even at first surprising.” Nonetheless, the queen’s views were so unremarkable in her day that “neither Camden . . . nor any other [contemporary] historian has taken any notice of them.”44 The weight of Hume’s statement falls as much on recent changes in the climate of opinion as on the darkness of earlier ages. Nonetheless, Hume has often been derided as a philosopher-historian whose commitment to the uniformities of human nature left no room for a “true” understanding of historical change. By now it should be clear, however, that Hume’s supposed “uniformitarianism” offers no barrier to a sharp awareness of changes in British manners and institutions. Nor does Hume hold back from drawing conclusions regarding the need for appropriate perspective in historical judgment. It “seems unreasonable,” he states (repeating much the same point on a number of occasions) “to judge of the measures, embraced during one period, by the maxims, which prevail in another.”45 Even religion—the form of opinion most resistant to reason—

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required the historian’s best efforts. This did not mean that Hume expressed sympathy for the religious spirit; only that he understood the power of belief and had some respect for its consequences. Though many of the scruples of the Puritans now seem quite “frivolous,” Hume explains with a characteristic mixture of irony and historical insight, we should not think that these issues only troubled those who were small-minded or foolish. “Some men of the greatest parts and most extensive knowledge, that the nation, at this time, produced, could not enjoy any peace of mind; because obliged to hear prayers offered up to the Divinity, by a priest covered with a white linen vestment.”46 Hume’s recognition that history must take into account the condition of opinion in another time should not be elided with later historicist doctrines.47 His view of history was as far from a romantic immersion in past times as it was from Collingwood’s idea of reenactment. Hume envisioned history as a continued comparison of then and now—an operation calculated to sharpen the sense of difference. The consequence was a form of binocularism that often expressed itself in irony, but could also nourish a forgiving spirit of sympathy. By definition this enlarged perspective was unavailable to historical actors, caught up in the blind passions of the present, but it was the historian’s chosen instrument for tracking the complex movements of opinion. “MY REPRESENTATIONS OF PERSONS”

Hume believed that if Britons could accept the fact that the Civil War was well and truly over, they would be able to extend a warmer sympathy to all those who took part in its struggles. The consequence was a narrative that some readers admired for its elegant and pathetic style, while others criticized its apparent bias toward the royalist cause. In fact, just as Hume had predicted, many readers judged the book by its most sentimental feature—a response that would have become all the more seductive after the appearance of Robert Bowyer’s illustrated edition, with its many images of virtue in distress.48 But even in earlier and much plainer printings, Hume’s interest in character gave the book a sentimental coloration which played a considerable part in its political reception. Hume’s predecessors in the humanist tradition regarded history as the pedagogy of public life. Accordingly, they drew as direct a line as possible from character to action. Hume, for his part, loosens this link, which had contributed so importantly to rhetorically conceived ideas of history since ancient Rome. Though he remains deeply interested in individual character and intention, Hume believes that at bottom history responds to deeper causal patterns. As a result, his narrative tends to separate causes from motives in a way that would

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not have appealed to earlier, humanist historians. “What were the reasons,” he writes, “which engaged the king to admit such strange articles of peace, it is vain to enquire: For there scarcely could be any. The causes of that event may admit of a more easy explanation.”49 Hume’s preference for more general forms of explanation is joined to a continued attention to the problem of historical distance—a preoccupation that makes him alert to the blindness of historical actors as well as tolerant of their failings. If human beings have no option but to operate in a world of changeable circumstances and unforeseen consequences, it is hard to construct historical narrative as the direct consequence of individual will and virtue. Nonetheless, though character had lost much of its traditional authority as the prime explanation of human actions, it does not follow that the subject had exhausted its appeal. Instead, as a historian whose literary sensitivities are shaped by a culture of sensibility, as well as a philosopher much concerned with the operations of sympathy, Hume embraces character study for quite different reasons, finding in it an opportunity to engage his readers’ attention with those elements of historical experience that lie closest to their own humanity.50 Unfortunately, British history provided Hume with abundant scope for depicting virtue in distress. “To be oppressed with calamity was at all times sufficient to excite the sympathy of Mr. Hume,” writes an early nineteenth-century commentator. “To rouse his indignation, it was enough to place before his eyes a scene of cruelty, hypocrisy, or injustice.”51 The result is a work whose more somber or skeptical themes find a counterpoint in pathetic tableaux designed to serve as a release for sympathetic emotions. For many of its readers, the History’s real power resided in such scenes as the tribulations of Mary Queen of Scots, the execution of Strafford, and (most famously) the last days of Charles I. Not surprisingly, these moments became the favorites of the illustrators. This shift toward sympathy or pathos carried large consequences for historical representation. In both Roman and Renaissance practice, it had been assumed that history aims to present ideal examples of virtue and vice. The purpose of history, after all, was largely understood in terms of its value in instructing young men in the duties of public life. By Hume’s day, however, this definition was becoming obsolete, as history became the property of a wider class of readers of both genders as well as the vehicle of a much more extensive body of description.52 The consequence was an important redirection of historical writing, as Hume moved away from the neoclassical stress on exemplarity to offer his readers the more vivid and accessible emotions favored by an age of sensibility. Virtue was to be placed nearer, not higher, in a literary culture in which the historian, no less than the novelist, would be judged by his capacity for pathos.

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As the Whig historian James Mackintosh would later put it, “The effect of the death of Clarissa, or of Mary Stuart on the heart by no means depends on the fact that the one really died, but on the vivacity of the exhibition by the two great pathetic painters, Hume and Richardson.”53 IRONY AND THE BALANCES OF HISTORY

Hume’s mastery of pathos seems to run squarely against his reputation for irony, but in the framework of distance, sentiment and irony may reflect the same historical concerns. Sentiment’s power lies in presenting experiences so immediate that no one could fail to respond. Ironic reflection, on the other hand, marks the limits beyond which sympathy cannot travel, defeating the sentimental quest for a reassuring concordance of the emotions. Thus, if sentimentalism suspends the movement of history with scenes that make the past seem transparent and approachable, irony forces a retreat from this illusion and makes us take account of the ruptures that mark the evolution of opinion. (What better instrument than irony, for instance, to register the divisions that separated eighteenth-century audiences from the harsh religiosity of the previous centuries?)54 From this point of view, sentiment and irony constitute complementary movements in Hume’s construction of distance: the one bringing history forward into virtual contemporaneity, the other returning the past to a time of its own. Ironies of many kinds abound in the History. The largest take us close to what is most vital in the book’s conception, but even the least contribute to that glint of wit that gives the History its characteristic tone. Hume’s irony, of course, is not evenly distributed. Of all the historical phenomena with which he contends, religion is certainly the one that Hume finds most repugnant to either sympathy or explanation; religion, therefore, attracts the widest range of ironic comment. At the simplest, much of Hume’s antireligious wit amounts to little more than ridicule. It seems all too easy, for example, to laugh at those who rebaptized themselves with outlandish names, testifying to their certain belief in their own salvation (“Accepted, Trevor of Northam”).55 Easy, also, to mock the pretensions of the Quaker James Naylor, who in imitation of Christ, rode into Bristol on a horse, “I suppose from the difficulty in that place of finding an ass.”56 More serious-minded is the summation of the paradoxical qualities that made Cromwell both so forceful and so hidden. “The strokes of his character are as open and strongly marked, as the schemes of his conduct were, during the time, dark and impenetrable. . . . A friend to justice, though his public conduct was one continued violation of it; devoted to religion, though he perpetually employed it as the instrument of his ambition.”57

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Misunderstandings of all kinds are a fruitful source of irony. How could contemporaries penetrate the indirections of Cromwell’s policies—indirections that only time and history would clarify? How, on the other side, could the king know that in preventing the emigration of Cromwell and other Puritan leaders he was lengthening the odds against his own survival? How, most of all, could Charles comprehend the emergence of a new configuration of power and opinion that—against all precedent—gave parliament a wholly new role to play and set Charles himself on his own increasingly perilous path? “Unhappily, his fate threw him into a period, when the precedents of many former reigns favoured strongly of arbitrary power, and the genius of the people ran violently toward liberty. . . . Exposed, without revenue, without arms, to the assault of the furious, implacable and bigoted factions, it was never permitted him, but with the most fatal consequences, to commit the smallest mistake.”58 The “fate” of King Charles brings us back to the issue of the balance of irony and sentiment with which this section began. Often it is the fatal blindness of the historical agent that stimulates Hume’s sympathy, encouraging the historian as well as his reader to “shed a generous tear.” In this situation, sentiment and irony seem intimately related—obverse positions, perhaps, but not opposite ones. Witness those typical situations of Hume’s sympathy which I cited in the previous section: the many persecutions visited on Mary Queen of Scots, the execution of Strafford, the trial and execution of Charles I. In all these moments, sympathy for the victim is heightened by the repugnant face of persecution, whether it be that of the dean of Peterborough who harried the Scottish queen right up to her last moment to give up her Catholic faith, or the implacable parliamentarians who forced Charles to sacrifice Strafford and then brought the king himself to the scaffold. In such cases, Hume fixes our gaze on the sufferer and the mood is predominantly sentimental. Conversely, there are other moments—less prominent perhaps, but quite similar in their basic structure—in which obscure innocents fall victim to ruthless persecution. Here what captures us is not so much virtue in distress as bigotry distressing virtue. Often the scope of observation is more general, moving away from the personal framework that is productive of sentiment to something broader, more ironic, and we might say more diagnostic. These changes, however, do not come about because Hume encourages us to “pity the plumage and forget the dying bird.” Rather, with the sufferers all but anonymous, what stands out is the hideousness of power when bigotry acquires a free hand.

4

“WHAT SYMPATHY THEN TOUCHES

EVERY HUMAN HEART!”: EMOTIONAL IDENTIFICATION IN ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTIC HISTORIES

The perusal of a history seems a calm entertainment; but would be no entertainment at all, did not our hearts beat with correspondent movements to those which are described by the historian. —Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1751 Did any one ever gain from Hume’s history anything like a picture of what may actually have been passing, in the minds, say, of Cavaliers or of Roundheads during the civil wars? Does any one feel that Hume has made him figure to himself with any precision what manner of men these were; how far they were like ourselves, how far different; what things they loved and hated, and what sort of conception they had formed of the things they loved and hated: And what kind of a notion can be framed of a period of history, unless we begin with that as a preliminary? —J. S. Mill, Review of Carlyle’s French Revolution, 1837

Both Hume and his critic express a strong commitment to the importance of sympathetic understanding in history, but Mill’s diatribe makes it clear that these two apparently similar declarations conceal a deep disagreement over the place of the emotions in historical writing. More remarkably, the stereotype of an emotionally disengaged eighteenth century did not die away with the first generations for whom it served as a necessary foil. On the contrary, from Dilthey and Collingwood to Hayden White,1 philosophers and historians have repeated the same complaint. Even those more friendly to the Enlightenment

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have interested themselves primarily in its speculative and abstract qualities, neglecting the sympathetic chord so clearly evident in my quotation from Hume. The consequence has been to accentuate the sense of a sharp divide, reinscribing in modern accounts the antagonism between Romantic inwardness and Enlightenment abstraction that is such an important part of the nineteenthcentury reaction against the previous age. It comes as no surprise that the historical consciousness of the early nineteenth century defines itself in opposition to the Enlightenment. What matters here is the extent to which the Romantic polemic rests on a convenient simplification of the concept of historical distance, pitting a new age of vivid historical imagination against an opposing figure of pale rationalism and elegant abstraction. Thus the juxtaposition of Hume and Mill provides an opportunity not simply to reexamine a cherished historiographical topos, but also to observe how powerfully ideas of distance have shaped historical conceptions. Some of the nineteenth century’s most familiar characterizations of history follow Mill’s lead by presenting historical truth as a conflict between immediacy and distantiation. Michelet cries out for a virtual “resurrection” of the past,2 just as Carlyle calls for histories in which the strong pulse of individual life can still be felt—history as “the essence of innumerable biographies.” But it is Macaulay, with his powerful, rolling prose and his talent for popular imagery, who provides the most abundant lexicon of distance-related images. In a wellknown passage from his essay on Hallam, Macaulay returns again and again to the idea that history—once a marriage of intellectual and artistic powers—has suffered itself to be split into opposing but insufficient virtues: “reason” and “imagination,” “philosophy” and “poetry,” “essay” and “romance,” the “map” and the “painted landscape,” “anatomy” and “sculpture.” Only a great historian, Macaulay argues, can restore history to the unity it possessed in the hands of the greatest of the ancients. In the meantime, it is not history itself but the historical novel that has stepped into the space left vacant by the excessive rationalism of the Enlightenment: To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man on an eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language, manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to seat us at their tables, to rummage their old fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the historical novelist. On the other hand, to extract the phi-

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losophy of history, to direct our judgment of events and men, to trace the connections of causes and effects, and to draw from the occurrences of former times general lessons of moral and political wisdom, has become the business of a distinct class of writers.3

For Macaulay, it is clear, the true antagonists are not Hume or Hallam, except insofar as their decorous rationalism had ceded so much territory to the historical novel. The angel he is wrestling with is the “Author of Waverley,” but to write “authentic history” in a way that meets Scott’s challenge would require a dramatic redistancing of narrative.

BRINGING VIRTUE NEARER: IDEAS OF DISTANCE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Though nineteenth-century critics drew a sharp divide between Romantic immediacy and Enlightenment detachment, eighteenth-century practice was far less simple than its critics liked to imagine. Conceptions of historical distance circa 1800 were tugged in at least two different directions. Over time, it was thought, rancor would be replaced by acceptance and prejudice by perspective, so that a new clarity becomes possible for those who see the world from a measured and rational point of view. And yet this desire to define the ideal moment of historical observation cannot be the end of the story. Indeed, the very existence of such rational norms calls attention to anything that is capable of reversing time’s natural order—especially those deeply felt emotional attachments that bring parts of history forward, whatever their chronological age. The opening paragraphs of Allan Maconochie’s article on the Glorious Revolution in the Quarterly Review provide a classic statement of normative distance as it was articulated circa 1800. One of the leading jurists of his day, Maconochie speaks to the period’s typical identification of the philosophical mind with detached and comprehensive understanding. However, even so measured a view of historical perspective would not have been complete without a balancing gesture toward the powerful “interest” generated by so compelling a subject: We have now reached that precise point of distance, from the Revolution of 1688, when the history of it may be written with the greatest advantage. It is sufficiently remote to open all desirable access to every repository of information regarding it: and to sanction the utmost freedom which justice may require, in the delineation of the conduct and characters of the individual actors in it. . . . But what is of far higher importance, the observer is now able to comprehend with his view the whole magnitude of the event, so as to perceive

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Circa 1800 it in its true proportion and genuine aspects, to consider it unobscured by the passions and prejudices of existing factions; and by comparing the age to which it gave birth, form and character, not only with that which produced it, but with every other to which it bears an analogy, to make a just estimate of its real merits, and deduce with certainty the lessons it affords to the legislator, the statesman, and the political philosopher. At the same time the transaction is sufficiently recent to possess every advantage requisite for creating the most lively interest.4

Here historical distance (in the conventional sense) is credited with a multitude of practical advantages, including more open access to information as well as a freedom both to see and to describe once controversial matters without suffering the prejudices of faction. Above all, however, what time gives the historian is the opportunity for the synoptic vision that is the ideal of eighteenthcentury epistemology.5 Nonetheless, Maconochie readily acknowledges that there is something that lies beyond such carefully cultivated detachment. For Britons in 1809 the events of 1688 seem far from remote. On the contrary, the Revolution retains an ideological and affective presence such that a history of these crucial events retains “the most lively interest.” Normative distance could also be given other inflections, as Scott made evident in the subtitle to the first of the Waverley novels: ’Tis Sixty Years Since. The implications of the title—at once so matter of fact and so resonant—were glossed in the famous “Postscript” in which Scott paid tribute to his familiarity with the dwindling generation of Jacobites he knew as a youth. It was his early acquaintance with these “folks of the old leaven,” Scott attested, that enabled him to preserve “some idea of the ancient manners of which I have witnessed the almost total extinction.” As Scott understood, two generations marked the natural limit of living memory. Sixty years was a privileged distance for the kind of history he had in mind—above all in a nation like Scotland, which “within the course of half a century or little more,” had undergone a more complete change than any in Europe.6 In later novels Scott would not always stand so close to the living past, but the interval he chose provided a fitting point of departure for a writer who symbolized the new century’s desire for a warmer historical affect. Scott’s opposite in this respect (as prejudice would have it)7 was David Hume, so it is worth recollecting that Hume’s engagement with historical writing dates from the immediate aftermath of the events commemorated in Waverley. More to the point, Hume’s own temporal distance from the Glorious Revolution—the endpoint of his great History of England—conforms precisely to Scott’s perception of a canonical span of two generations.

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On the level of theory as well as of practice, questions of history and affect were much on Hume’s mind in the decade after the ’45, when he devoted important passages to the subject in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (EPM) and commenced the first volumes of the History of England.8 For him, the comparative remoteness of historical ages did not signify the impossibility of sympathy: only the complexity inherent in traversing these added distances and therefore the dependency of emotional engagement on political circumstances and rhetorical skill. “There is no necessity,” he writes in EPM, “that a generous action, barely mentioned in an old history or remote gazette, should communicate any strong feelings of applause and admiration.” Virtue “placed at such a distance” is like a star; rationally (“to the eye of reason”) we may know that the star is a sun like our own, but it “is so infinitely removed” that our senses feel neither its light nor its heat. “Bring this virtue nearer, by our acquaintance or connexion with the persons, or even by an eloquent recital of the case; our hearts are immediately caught, our sympathy enlivened, and our cool approbation converted into the warmest sentiments of friendship and regard.”9 The most familiar eighteenth-century tropes of distance come from the arts, where a strong association is forged between distance and aesthetic experience—including some of the grander as well as the more intimate emotions. In Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” the adult who surveys the schoolboy scene “from the stately brow / Of windsor’s heights” looks back with nostalgia on the innocence of childhood.10 In Campbell’s “Pleasures of Hope,” the gaze is toward the future, but distance softens that as well. “Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear / More sweet than all the landscape smiling near? ’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view, / And robes the mountains in its azure hue.”11 Collins writes about the music of melancholy, which is sweetened by distance,12 while Blair makes the by now customary connection between distance and the sublime13—a vision of distance that is readily translated into an observation on historical time. “Time, in short, performs the same services to events,” writes an Edinburgh reviewer, “which distance does to visible objects. It obscures and gradually annihilates the small, but renders those that are very great much more distinct and conceivable. If we would know the true form and bearings of a range of Alpine mountains, we must not grovel among the irregularities of its surface, but observe from the distance of leagues the directions of its ridges and peaks, and the giant outline which it traces on the sky.”14 Numbers of writers (including Hume) took up the question of why tragedy pleases and found at least part of the answer in the distancing effect of aesthetic representation. In other contexts, however, distantiation suggested rational

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detachment and reflective judgment: the breadth of mind that this period associated with scholarly wisdom and gentlemanly independence.15 Among eighteenth-century writers on art, the classic statement of this position comes from Joshua Reynolds, for whom the mark of genius is the artist’s capacity to look beyond accidental and outward appearances and discover “an abstract idea . . . more perfect than any one original.” It is only by much experience, he writes, “and a close comparison of objects in nature, that an artist becomes possessed of the idea of that central form . . . from which every deviation is deformity.”16 Even so devout a believer in “the general idea,” however, had to concede the power of particularity to clinch the viewer’s attachment. “I am very ready to allow that some circumstances of minuteness frequently tend to give an air of truth to a piece, and interest the spectator in an extraordinary manner.”17 More surprising, perhaps, is Reynolds’s recognition in another passage that the imaginative associations of style might overcome one’s sense of objective chronology. Speaking in praise of Vanbrugh’s gifts, Reynolds writes that he seems to have “had recourse to some principles of the Gothick Architecture, which though not so ancient as the Grecian, is more so in our imagination.”18 A generation later, the comment was picked up by Hazlitt, who notes that until he met up with this remark “in so circumspect and guarded a writer as Sir Joshua,” he had been afraid of being thought extravagant for entertaining very similar convictions. “The dark or middle ages,” says Hazlitt, “when every thing was hid in the fog and haze of confusion and ignorance, seem, to the same involuntary kind of prejudice, older and farther off, and more inaccessible to the imagination, than the brilliant and well-defined periods of Greece and Rome.” The Gothic seems a witness to events much “more wild and alien to our own time”—so much so that the mind resists any effort “to force it upwards” in the scale of chronology.19 Hazlitt’s investigation of the plasticity of distance echoes Burke’s writing on the sublime, but in a wider view it is part of a broad reorientation that puts moral psychology at the center of the human sciences. Distance, in short, is no longer a property of the object as such, but of its associated passions. For Hazlitt, “that is old (in sentiment and poetry) which is decayed, shadowy, imperfect, out of date, and changed from what it was. That of which we have a distinct idea, which comes to us entire and made out in all its parts, will have a novel appearance, however old in reality; nor can it be impressed with the romantic and superstitious character of antiquity.”20 Among the sciences that provided models for social observation, none was more influential than optics. Both Hume and Smith were impressed by Berke-

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ley’s demonstration that distance perception, rather than being a matter of simple sense impressions, depended upon experience and judgment,21 and they applied the same idea to the operations of judgment in relation to emotions and perceptions.22 The identical object, writes Hume, viewed “at a double distance, really throws on the eye a picture of but half the bulk.”23 Nonetheless the mind compensates, since we know that the difference does not lie in the size of the object itself but in our relative position as observers. “And, indeed, without such a correction of appearances, both in internal and external sentiment, men could never think or talk steadily on any subject; while their fluctuating situations produce a continual variation on objects, and throw them into such different and contrary lights and positions.”24 Distance, in other words, is a condition of daily life as much as of sight, and in both contexts, experience teaches us how to stabilize and order our impressions so that we can live successfully in a world of “fluctuating situations.”25 Even without the example of optics, however, the issue of distance would surely have become an important consideration for Hume since it was so closely connected to two of his central themes as a philosopher: the association of ideas and the power of sympathy. Though one of these fundamental principles was primarily rooted in cognition and the other in affect, both called upon notions of relatedness. Consequently, both doctrines required Hume (and, following him, Smith) to have continual reference to situations that measured degrees of proximity and remoteness. Thus in his introductory discussion of the association of ideas, Hume outlines the various forms of relation upon which association depends. “After identity,” he writes, “the most universal and comprehensive relations are those of Space and Time, which are the sources of an infinite number of comparisons, such as distant, contiguous, above, below, before, after, etc.”26 Crucially, these relations, though in the first instance a matter of cognition, always carry affective and moral implications. Contiguous objects, he observes, have an effect on the will and the passions much greater than distant ones. In common life, people are most concerned with “objects, which are not much remov’d either in space or time.” They enjoy the present and leave what is far off to chance and fortune (or, perhaps, to the considerations of historians and philosophers). For this reason, if you talk to someone about his situation in thirty years’ time, he will pay little heed. “Speak of what is to happen to-morrow, and he will lend you attention.”27 In general, “contiguous objects must have an influence much superior to the distant and remote,”28 but Hume also notes that there are situations in which extended distance, rather than diminishing the effect of an object, enhances its summoning power. Viewing any thing that is great—“whether successive

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or extended”—enlarges the soul and gives it much pleasure. Thus, when a “very distant object is presented to the imagination, we naturally reflect on the interpos’d distance,”29 and are affected by the sense of its greatness. To illustrate this idea, Hume points to the value given to antique medals or coins. These things strongly suggest a feeling of remoteness, and the admiration which arises from that distance, “by another natural transition,” (i.e. by the association of ideas) returns back to the object.30 In general, Hume adds, both temporal and spatial distancing produce this effect, but since the imagination moves more easily through space than through time (and more easily forward than back) this resistance registers itself in the intensity of the psychological effect. “And this is the reason why all the relicts of antiquity are so precious in our eyes, and appear more valuable than what is brought even from the remotest parts of the world.”31 Most people, in short, would prize the antique over the exotic. Sympathy, too, is a relationship that has to be measured along a gradient of distance. Thus, in seeking to establish the deep-seatedness of this fundamental principle of human nature, both Hume and Smith choose to emphasize the range of its natural variation: distance, we might say, tests the mechanisms of fellow feeling, providing a picture of the complexity and variety of sympathetic affections—their responsiveness to kinship and physical proximity, for instance, or to effective literary representation both in history and fiction. So intertwined, in fact, are the ideas of sympathy and distance, that large passages in both the Treatise and the EPM are given over to their interrelations. “The stronger the relation is betwixt ourselves and any object,” Hume writes, “the more easily does the imagination make the transition.” By this means the mind carries over to its object the vivacity which is always present in our feelings for ourselves.32 In normal circumstances, however, other people’s sentiments, “when far remov’d from us,” have little influence, and “require the relation of contiguity to make them communicate themselves entirely.”33 When cemented by relationships of blood or close acquaintance, the combined effect of these relations gives other people’s feelings a force much closer to the impact of our own.34 The consequence is effectively a sliding scale of relatedness. We sympathize more with “persons contiguous to us, than with persons remote from us: With our acquaintance, than with strangers: With our countrymen, than with foreigners.”35 Smith makes much the same point, but turns it toward an examination of the ways in which the closeness of family can be thinned out by distance. “Every man,” he writes, “feels his own pleasures and his own pains more sensibly than those of other people. The former are the original sensations; the latter the reflected or sympathetic images of those sensations.” Next to the self come a

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man’s family and household. He is “more habituated to sympathize with them” than with anyone more removed.36 By the same token, if by some circumstance a son or brother is removed from this intimacy, filial or fraternal feelings may remain proper, but they are unlikely ever to recover “that delicious sympathy” that normally joins intimate relations—a thought that inspires Smith to cry out against the folly of public schooling. “The education of boys at distant great schools, of young men at distant colleges, of young ladies in distant nunneries and boarding schools, seems . . . to have hurt most essentially the domestic morals, and consequently the domestic happiness, both of France and England.”37 If family ties create immediate sympathies, history signifies a position closer to the opposite end of the scale. Accordingly, history serves as a figure of distantiation but also of stabilizing consensus and of reasonableness. “In general,” Hume writes, “all sentiments of blame or praise are variable, according to our situation of nearness or remoteness, with regard to the person blam’d or prais’d, and according to the present disposition of our mind.” But experience teaches us how to correct our sentiments, or at least how to correct our language when our sentiments are incorrigible. “Our servant, if diligent and faithful, may excite stronger sentiments of love and kindness than Marcus Brutus, as represented in history; but we say not upon that account, that the former character is more laudable than the latter. We know that were we to approach equally near to that renown’d patriot, he wou’d command a much higher degree of affection and admiration.” These corrections, Hume concludes, are common to all the senses. In fact, it would be impossible to communicate with one another if we did not “correct the momentary appearances of things, and overlook our present situation.”38 The variability of sympathy is a fact of human nature, but so is the necessity of overcoming these partialities in order “to render our sentiments more public and social.”39 The comparative remoteness of historical ages is only a partial impediment to sympathy. The skillful historian brings renewed animation to distant ages. “A statesman or patriot, who serves our own country in our own time, has always a more passionate regard paid to him, than one whose beneficial influence operated on distant ages or remote nations.” The merit, Hume adds, may be equally great, but “our sentiments are not raised to an equal height, in both cases.”40 But these distances are cut across by other considerations: the contagiousness of sentiment in the theater,41 for example, or the natural resentment that humans feel at witnessing examples of virtue in distress.42 And even if history cannot easily match the pressure of contemporary events, it is capable of touching the most powerful emotions. Thus when Thucydides and Guicciardini lose us in the detail of petty wars, their narratives do nothing to engage our affections.

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On the other hand, the “deep distress of the numerous Athenian army before Syracuse; the danger, which so nearly threatens Venice; these excite compassion; these move terror and anxiety.”43 So too, Suetonius and Tacitus give us essentially the same facts, but the impact is very different. When the latter paints a pathetic scene, “What sympathy then touches every human heart! What indignation against the tyrant, whose . . . unprovoked malice gave rise to so much detestable barbarity.”44 HUME ON TRAGEDY AND HISTORICAL DISTANCE

In a striking passage in his essay “Of Tragedy,” Hume writes that when Clarendon, the great historian of the English Revolution, approaches the execution of the king, he “hurries over the king’s death, without giving one circumstance of it.” Clarendon evidently “considers it as too horrid a scene to be contemplated with any satisfaction, or even without the utmost pain and aversion. He himself, as well as the readers of that age, were too deeply concerned in the events, and felt a pain from subjects, which an historian and a reader of another age would regard as the most pathetic and most interesting, and, by consequence, the most agreeable.”45 It may come as something of a surprise that one of Hume’s most remarkable reflections on distance appears in an essay devoted to a literary subject. The problem of “why tragedy pleases” was a well-established topos, but this passage adds a historical resonance appropriate to an author recently launched on his great History of England.46 Hume’s sympathetic acceptance of Clarendon’s reticence, combined with his understanding that the event that had been most painful to an earlier generation had become most “interesting” to his own, points to an intriguing awareness of the elasticities of historical distance. Hume clearly recognizes that Clarendon did not freely choose his stance in relation to the regicide. Rather the seventeenth-century historian shared with his readers a proximity to events that made a sentimental representation of Charles’s death unthinkable. By the same token, Hume also understands that the passing of time had created new possibilities, opening the way for the kind of detailed and pathetic account of the execution that he would offer his own readers. Hume’s comments acknowledge that distance is both a reflection of external events and a textual construction designed to shape the reader’s response. Clearly, we can only understand the differences between Hume and his predecessor if we take account of the changing outlook and experience dividing their generations. But if Clarendon’s account seems appropriate to its age, later readers would not be satisfied with its hurried, uncircumstantial narrative. On

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the contrary, such readers, attracted to the pathos of the story, would be eager to hear the tragedy unfold in all its evocative detail. For this, they would need to read Hume, not Clarendon. Finally, it is necessary to remind ourselves of the literary context of Hume’s reflections on Clarendon. The question of why tragedy pleases had a long history but Hume’s interlocutors in this essay were Dubos and Fontenelle, two key figures in the French belletrist tradition.47 In short, Hume did not come to Clarendon’s narrative from questions that were strictly historiographical. Instead, he approached the issue from within a tradition of letters that had long interested itself in issues of spectatorship and of literature’s capacity to engage the emotions. Bringing his own preoccupations to a well-established question, he found a fresh opportunity to articulate one of the abiding themes of his historical approach. Working within this familiar context, he added his own speculations as a historical thinker and produced a fresh articulation of a theme we can trace through so much of his work.48 THE COMPLEXITIES OF DISTANCE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NARRATIVES

In keeping with the theme of his essay (why tragedy pleases), Hume puts his emphasis on the emotional impact of historical narrative, but at bottom the stakes are as much ideological as affective. If Clarendon’s avoidance of this “infinitely disagreeable” subject had an evident political meaning for its own time, so does the fact that a later reader might regard the same events as “pathetic” and “agreeable.” This layering of one kind of distance over another stands as a reminder not to think of distance as a unitary dimension. Rather, in exploring the theory and practice of historical writing in the eighteenth century, we need to be alert to the presence of several forms of engagement as well as to the variety of ways in which they combine. Looked at in this way, the problem of understanding eighteenth-century historiography becomes a matter of reconciling some very different postures in relation to the past—postures that often appear in the same author and indeed in the same text. One of the defining impulses of the Enlightenment was its tendency to approach history as a laboratory for establishing a naturalistic science of man. This generalizing spirit became one of the principal targets of Romantic critique, but we should not underestimate the energy that came with this sense of rational discovery. Witness the confident sentiments of the Edinburgh clergyman and minor literary figure John Logan in a brief work entitled Elements of the Philosophy of History (1781). “To common minds every

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thing appears particular,” Logan wrote. “A Philosopher sees in the great, and observes a whole. The curious collect and describe. The scientific arrange and generalize.”49 This side of Enlightenment historiography is well known; less so its other, more sentimental face. There is abundant evidence, however, that historians, much like contemporary novelists or poets, were keenly interested in engaging the reader’s sympathies, especially by presenting scenes of virtue in distress. This dimension of Enlightenment historiography has often been obscured because it has been common to focus on the more abstract and philosophical works of the period. If, however, we turn our attention to belles lettres and literary history it is immediately obvious that audiences were strongly attracted to histories that provided opportunities for sentimental identification. In short, raising the issue of distance leads us to recognize a split between two important features of the historical outlook of the eighteenth century. Much of the best historical work of the period drew its strength from a theory of knowledge that assumed the importance of extensive perspectives and abstract understanding. Only the comprehensive philosophic eye, it was thought, could discern the connecting patterns that structure the development of society. At the same time, if we turn our attention to matters of form and of morals, we have to recognize that the discussion of narrative in this period was strongly concerned with cultivating a sense of immediacy. Histories, it was commonly argued, no less than fiction or verse, should exercise the moral imagination of readers by presenting them with scenes that are as vivid and affecting as possible. “If we bring these subjects nearer,” as Hume put it in his discussion of sympathy and history in the EPM: “If we remove all suspicion of fiction and deceit: What powerful concern is excited, and how much superior, in many instances, to the narrow attachments of self-love and private interest!”50 This interplay of opposing distances gave eighteenth-century historiography some of its most characteristic energies, but it also helps to explain why the work of this period fell out of favor with a subsequent generation of readers, who focused their critique on just one side of the Enlightenment’s legacy. It seems reasonable to suggest that the sentimental strain in Enlightenment writing made a large contribution to the growing desire for immediacy in historical accounts. But in cultivating this taste, Hume and his contemporaries were helping to nourish a new climate of reception by which their own work would come to be judged as excessively cold and detached. What resulted was a second shift in distance, much like the one that Hume recognized as separating his own generation from that of Clarendon.

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EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY INWARDNESS: KAMES’S “ELEMENTS OF CRITICISM”

My attention to Hume might suggest that these tensions between extended and foreshortened distances were peculiar to his outlook—a consequence, perhaps, of his simultaneous engagement with history and philosophy. But this tension was hardly a quirk of one great writer. Only in one respect was Hume truly exceptional, and that was in his ability (as discussed in the previous chapter) to contain such complex balances in a single, harmonious composition. With the possible exception of Robertson, no other historian could approach his elegant modulation of styles. In Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society and his Roman history, for example, or Millar’s Distinction of Ranks and his Historical View, we find similar alternations of sentimental affect and cognitive abstraction. Remarkable though their writings were in so many ways, however, neither one could match Hume’s literary elegance or ease. Amongst those who encompassed both sides of this characteristic mix, Henry Home, Lord Kames provides a particularly energetic and instructive example. In general, scholars have tied Kames’s historical interests to the conjecturalist program of his Historical Law-Tracts (1758) or the Sketches of the History of Man (1774)—one of the most sweeping narratives of its kind. In the Elements of Criticism (1762), however, Kames’s concern is not the progress of humankind, but the psychology of affective and aesthetic response. Kames argues that literary representation has the same power to stir the passions as actual experience, but only if the scene represented carries with it a high degree of vivacity. Immediacy in representation fosters an intentional loss of critical distance, converting the reader’s spectatorship into a kind of “waking dream.” Kames calls this crucial effect “ideal presence” and he claims for it a profoundly important role in moral education. Though literary representation will always have an impact that is weaker than the force of experience itself, “ideal presence” allows the lessons of experience to be prepared for or repeated in ways that account for “that extensive influence which language hath over the heart.”51 As its name implies, ideal presence is an aesthetic principle whose specific concern is the abbreviation of emotional distance. But though Kames’s first concern is with formal and affective proximities, he gives “ideal presence” such wide ramifications that its sphere seems almost as extensive as that of experience itself. “Writers of genius,” he writes, “sensible that the eye is the best avenue to the heart, represent every thing as passing in our sight; and from readers or hearers, transform us, as it were, into spectators: . . . in a word every thing becomes

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dramatic as much as possible.”52 Plutarch, he adds, observes that Thucydides “makes his reader a spectator, and inspires him with the same passions as if he were an eye-witness.” Similarly, in another place he writes: “The force of language consists in raising complete images; which have the effect to transport the reader as by magic into the very place and time of the important action, and to convert him as it were into a spectator, beholding every thing that passes.”53 Ideal presence is fundamental to all literatures, not a special feature of history as such. Nonetheless, Kames clearly delights in the persuasiveness of his chosen example. “To support the foregoing theory, I add what I reckon a decisive argument; which is, that even genuine history has no command over our passions but by ideal presence only; and consequently that in this respect it stands upon the same footing with fable.” Our sympathies vanish as soon as we begin to reflect upon the incidents, whether because we recognize that the persons described are either entirely fictional or “no longer existing.” What impact on our sympathies can there be from the rape of Lucretia, “when she died above 2000 years ago, and hath at present no painful feeling of the injury done her?”54 Kames’s discussion of ideal presence focuses on poetry and theater, but history’s value as a limit case adds an extra measure of persuasion. If writers as sober as Plutarch and Thucydides would lose their moral force unless readers set aside their normal reflective distance, surely poetry and fiction require the same license.55 From another point of view, the idea that history’s impact relies upon a kind of evocative fiction seems a striking departure from older notions of history as magister vitae or “philosophy teaching by example.” In fact, one could hardly ask for language more suggestive of Romantic immediacy than Kames’s description of history as intended to “transport” the reader into “the very place and time” of important events. With notions like this, we seem but a step away from the historical ideas of Godwin or Scott.56 ROMANTIC REACTIONS: THE RECEPTION OF HUME’S “HISTORY”

One of those who carried on Kames’s influence in a younger generation was James Mackintosh, whose comparison of Hume and Richardson—“the two great pathetic painters”—was cited in the previous chapter. In his journals of 1811, written in the enforced idleness of a long voyage to India, Mackintosh composed a cameo portrait of Hume that provides a perfect miniature of eighteenth-century responses, combined with a hint of some changes that would soon transform the climate of reception. Mackintosh was certainly an admirer, and he regarded the History not only as Hume’s greatest work, but as

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one of the greatest histories ever written.57 He praised Hume’s ease of manner and the unforced air with which he was able to bring in his more abstract reflections. But above all Mackintosh admired Hume’s ability to mix pathos and philosophical distance, thereby combining the highest attractions of sensibility and Enlightenment. “No other narrative seems to unite, in the same degree, the two qualities of being instructing and affecting. No historian approached him in the union of the talent of painting pathetic scenes with that of exhibiting comprehensive views of human affairs.”58 Mackintosh’s homage to the balances of Hume’s History offers a valuable summary of the qualities the eighteenth century looked for in historical narrative, but he adds an important qualification that belongs to the new century’s insistence on imaginative insight. It cannot be denied, he writes, that Hume “sometimes trusted to his acuteness to supply the place of industry in the investigation of evidence.” Hume’s preference was for reflection over research, but— more than that—he was too much the rationalist to probe the real depths of earlier times. “He was too habitually a speculator and too little of an antiquary, to have a great power of throwing back his mind into former ages, and of clothing his persons and events in their moral dress; his personages are too modern and argumentative—if we must not say too rational.”59 Mackintosh accepted Hume’s failures of imagination as an important limitation, but not as a crippling weakness. Others, however, took a more categorical view. For writers influenced by Romantic and historicist principles, the historian’s ability to “throw” his mind back into the past came to be the gateway to historical understanding. By this test, even the best of eighteenth-century narratives looked like a bundle of lifeless generalities, incapable of producing a genuine understanding of earlier ages. “The mind of man does not love abstractions,” Godwin declares in his early and prophetic essay “On History and Romance.” “Read on the one hand Thucydides and Livy, and on the other Hume and Voltaire and Robertson.” When we admire the ancient historians, “we simply enter into the feelings with which these authors recorded them.” By contrast, the moderns “neither experience such emotions nor excite them.”60 Here, it is worth noting, the line between reading history and writing it is largely erased; entering into the feelings of another age is something that the historian both experiences and excites. Godwin’s prescient essay gives voice to a fundamental shift that increasingly informs the historical sensibility of the first half of the nineteenth century. John Stuart Mill, for instance (as noted at the start of this chapter), takes Hume’s failure to “throw his own mind” into the minds of men living in other times as a foil for celebrating Carlyle’s narrative of the French Revolution. “If there be

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a person,” Mill argues in 1837, “who, in reading the histories of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon has never felt that this, after all, is not history—and that the lives and deeds of his fellow-creatures must be placed before him in quite another manner, if he is to know them, for them to be real beings; such a person . . . feels no need of a book like Mr. Carlyle’s; the want, which it is peculiarly fitted to supply, does not consciously exist in his mind.”61 George Henry Lewes echoes Mill, but is even more dismissive of the previous age. In an essay on contemporary French historical writing, he holds up Michelet and Carlyle as two historians who share the same “pictorial power of representing the past as present, and exciting the warmest sympathies in persons and events.” If there is anyone who would prefer Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, he adds, “we have nothing more to say.”62 Neither Mill nor Lewes felt it necessary to speak of Hume’s work in detail. A quick backward glance was enough to mark the divide between the outmoded elegance of the previous century and a generation that absorbed its first images of history not from Hume but from the romances of Scott. In Britain, Macaulay’s History of England (1849–61) clearly represented a decisive moment in establishing a new national narrative. It was not just that Macaulay’s Whiggish and well-researched history easily met the political and evidential objections that had been raised by more than a generation of Hume’s critics. Macaulay also possessed a brilliant narrative style capable of suggesting the intense historical presence demanded by the canons of Romantic historiography. Next to such a work, the best historical writing of an earlier era was sure to seem pale. “All the historians we have ever read,” wrote an enthusiastic reviewer, “not excepting Gibbon and Hume,” presented history as a matter for study and “an effort of intellect.” But in Macaulay, we have “pictured to ourselves the living and actual reality of the men, and the times, and the actions he describes—and close the volume as if a vast and glowing pageant had just passed before our eyes.”63 LOCATIONS OF INWARDNESS FROM ENLIGHTENMENT TO ROMANTICISM

In some respects, it seems clear, the Enlightenment’s nineteenth-century critics dramatically overstated the extent of their break from the historical thought of the previous age. Indeed, our image of the historical sensibility of the Enlightenment as wholly abstract and detached was largely a foil created by the Romantics for purposes of their own. As a counterbalance, it is useful to remember that alongside the “philosophical” dimension of Enlightenment historiography, there was also a strong sentimentalist influence which solicits

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the reader’s moral sympathies. In the larger picture, then, we need to balance these two aspects of eighteenth-century historiography, keeping in mind that this period combined a conception of historical knowledge that emphasized generality with a view of narrative that stressed the aesthetic and ethical value of immediacy. When the problem of continuity is stated in this way, some elements of discontinuity also stand out more clearly. The Romantics not only deepened the desire for immediacy in some areas where sentimentalism had already prepared the way, but also brought a new demand for close engagement in places where eighteenth-century historical thought valued a greater degree of distantiation. From this point of view, Romanticism’s stylistic innovations look like an intensification of an already existing movement toward actuality and immediacy. On the other hand, when nineteenth-century historians invited a warmer ideological response or a more thoroughly historicist conceptualization, they were cultivating a relationship to the past that had fewer precedents in the previous century. Both groups of historians, it is clear, sought ways to make the past more vivid, but for eighteenth-century writers the search for immediacy centered on the psychology of reading, rather than the quality of knowing. Their program called for strategies to involve the reader as closely as possible in the narrative, so that he (and sometimes, especially for symbolic purposes, she) would respond as a witness rather than as a detached observer.64 In formal terms, consequently, much thought went into strategies for abridging affective distance. All this, however, was directed at the reader, and the historian’s own framework of understanding was not explicitly at issue. We miss the characteristically historicist principle that equates historical understanding with the quality of insight by which the historian penetrates the alterity of the past. In Hume or Kames, in other words, the abridging effects of sympathy belong to moral psychology and criticism, not to historical understanding as such. When they wrote about historical narrative, both men were writing in a tradition of belles lettres, as was Smith in his remarkable Lectures on Rhetoric.65 From within this sphere they reworked the traditional view that history teaches by presenting ideal examples of character and action, replacing it with a new sense that history might contribute to virtue by providing vicarious exercises for the moral imagination, especially by soliciting sympathy for virtue in distress. But these sentimentalist doctrines did not move beyond issues of affective and ethical engagement, or change the terms in which these Enlightenment philosophers formulated some of their central concerns regarding historical knowledge.

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This was what changes in the new century, in ways that begin to be seen in Mill’s criticism of Hume’s failure to “throw his mind” into the situation of another time. Mill’s attack on the Enlightenment expresses a concept of historical knowledge that is central to nineteenth-century thought and continues to influence the historical profession. The key feature of this way of thinking is the opposition it establishes between distance and insight. On this view, historical understanding is not a matter of simple identification with the past. (Such naivety was the hallmark of the chroniclers, whose work so attracted the Romantic imagination.) Rather, genuine historical understanding begins with a recognition of difference, but strives to overcome the opacity of the past through acts of imaginative identification. More superficial minds (so it was believed) might content themselves with the simplicities of factual knowledge or the abstractions of empty generalization. But when we want to understand the real experience of past times, neither abstract theorizing nor external observation would do. Instead, we need to cultivate special qualities of historical insight and try to see more directly into past experience. This view of historical understanding—strengthened by liberal and nationalist ideologies and codified as a historical epistemology by Dilthey, Croce, Meinecke, and Collingwood—has done a great deal to shape subsequent thinking about the proper forms of historical writing. For the historians of the Enlightenment, who began with quite different ideas about distance and intelligibility, the continuing influence of these views has created a persistently hostile climate of reception. Only now are we beginning to read eighteenth-century historians in the light of more suitable prejudices.

5

NINE HUNDRED SCOTTISH MINISTERS WRITE THE HISTORY OF EVERYDAY LIFE: CONTRASTING DISTANCES IN SINCLAIR’S “STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF SCOTLAND”

But the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has nevertheless, been gradual; and like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made, until we fix our eye on the now distant point from which we have drifted. Such of the present generation as can recollect the last twenty or twenty-five years of the eighteenth century, will be fully sensible of the truth of this statement. —Walter Scott, Waverley, 1814 The idea of comparing one’s own age with former ages, or with our notion of those which are yet to come, had occurred to philosophers, but it never before was itself the dominant idea of any age. —J. S. Mill, “Spirit of the Age,” 1831

Ever since the French Revolution overthrew the ancien régime, the 1790s have been accepted as a watershed in modern historical thought. All across the Continent, the revolutionary years shattered inherited assumptions and left behind a lasting sense of alienation and unease. Whole nations awakened to their increasing separation from a way of life that, once lost, had come to look comfortable and attractive. For the French in particular as well as for nationalists in Germany the result was the birth of a new historical consciousness, along with those alternations of nostalgic recollection and utopian prophecy that have been characteristic of modern ideologies.1

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Though pared down almost to the point of parody, this outline represents what has become the standard account of the emergence of a modern historical consciousness. By contrast, Scott’s observations at the conclusion of Waverley (quoted above) indicate that these same decades also produced another, more gradualist perspective that speaks directly to the experience of Britain, Europe’s most advanced commercial society. Drawing upon revolutions that were primarily economic and social, Scott points to the fact that many of the changes that had reshaped contemporary Scotland had slipped by almost without notice, flowing unremarked beneath the surface of ordinary life. As a historical concept, this perspective too belongs to modernity, because it is only with modernity that historical consciousness embraces realms of experience that are essentially private and social. Such, for example, is the spirit of Hume’s injunction to study the “gradual and domestic revolutions of the state,” displacing the customary focus on the unpredictable accidents of personality and high policy.2 My aim is to explore this gradualist version of historical consciousness in relation to a remarkable record of everyday life in the 1790s. If, as Scott suggests, the memory of the “last twenty or twenty five years of the eighteenth century” provides the “now distant point” from which his countrymen could measure their progress, no better resource can be imagined than Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland, a massive parish-by-parish survey of Scottish demography, economy, and social structures in the last decade of the century. It is not simply that the Statistical Account offers a detailed description of everyday matters, giving us a highly textured description of daily existence in every part of the country. It is also important that though Sinclair launched his project as a comprehensive survey of political economy, it was carried out by nine hundred ministers of the Church of Scotland, who brought their own interests and experience to the individual reports. As a body of social observers, the clergy occupied a strategic location, distinct from the literary travelers and agricultural experts whose narrations provided other sorts of accounts of these same regions. Most had a close acquaintance with their parishes, born of long residence and service to a church that by English standards at least was relatively democratic. Socially their position was middling, and in their responsibility for the welfare of the poor, they were crucial intermediaries between those who gave alms and those who received them. But for all their intimacy with parish life, they were also educated men whose horizons stretched beyond the local. A few were authors in their own right; others—having completed their studies at Glasgow, Edinburgh, or Aberdeen— must have taken away some elements at least of the social and economic concerns of the Scottish Enlightenment. As a result, the clergy’s surveys of parish

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life not only documented the conditions that gave rise to the theoretical insights of David Hume, Adam Smith, and John Millar, but also translated their philosophical inquiries into forms of local description.3 For the clergy, as for their philosophical mentors, questions of property and material life were formative for understanding the manners and morals of their parishioners. Against a background of rapid social and economic change, this twinning of materialities and manners encouraged each minister to transform Sinclair’s project in his own image, so that what had begun as a national inventory of persons and property became a vast repertory of local histories concerned with changing manners and customs. Nor should we overlook the sense of local responsibility that encouraged some of the ministers to make use of the survey to speak out for urgently wanted improvements. Given the semi-official character of Sinclair’s inquiry, the survey must have seemed a fine opportunity to advertise the parish’s need for a new turnpike, protest the miserable wages of the schoolmaster, or detail the woeful effects of the tax on sea coals. To examine the Statistical Account from the point of view of the nine hundred men who actually wrote it is to read against the grain of Sinclair’s stated program as well as the bias of modern commentaries. Two modes of distance operate in this massive compilation, not just the one closest to the heart of its editor. The resulting tensions give the survey its texture and illuminate the ways in which the entire nation participated in Scott’s perception of historical change. SIR JOHN SINCLAIR AND THE “STATISTICAL ACCOUNT”

Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland was a milestone in the Enlightenment’s drive to apply the methods of science to the materials of social life.4 Though not the first effort in Scotland to survey the state of population and economy, it was certainly the most comprehensive, and by the time of its completion in the summer of 1799, after nine years of labor by its indefatigable editor, it amounted to twenty-one large volumes encompassing 938 parishes. In all, some nine hundred ministers of the Scottish Church provided Sinclair with the fruits of their labor, creating (as the modern editor writes) a complete and at that time “unique survey of the state of the whole country, locality by locality.”5 Sinclair’s ambitions for the new science he called “statistics” were very high. In order to secure an adequate proportion of happiness to each individual, it is a duty incumbent on every Government, whatever its form may be, to make minute and regular inquiries, into the circumstances of the people over

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whom it is placed, for the purpose of ascertaining, to what extent they already enjoy the advantages of political society, or in what respects their situation can be ameliorated. To that science, which points out the proper objects of such inquiries, and the surest means of making them effectual; the science consequently, which tends most to promote, both the good of the individual, and the prosperity of a state . . . I have ventured to give the name of statistical philosophy.6

In keeping with his strong commitment to an empirical and utilitarian program, Sinclair aimed to connect his work to the empirical methods that had produced advances in other fields. Chemistry, mechanics, and other branches of the arts and sciences had found their path forward not on the strength of “visionary theory, but on the sure basis of investigation and experiment.” Political knowledge, similarly, would now proceed in the same manner. It would analyze the “real state” of mankind and especially the “the internal structure of society”7—a social focus that Sinclair insisted was quite different from the narrower state-building objectives of earlier discussions of “statistics” in Germany. In a Scottish context, the broad outline for social inquiries of this kind had been set out a half-century before in the list of themes Hume announced at the opening of the Fourth Appendix to his History of England. “It may not be improper . . . ,” he wrote, “to take a brief survey of the state of the kingdom, with regard to government, manners, finances, arms, trade, learning. Where a just notion is not formed of these particulars, history can be little instructive, and often will not be intelligible.”8 Since the midcentury, Hume’s brief “survey” had been elaborated and deepened in many ways, most notably in the more sustained works of political economy pursued by Smith, Millar, and Ferguson, all of whom strengthened the tie, so strongly articulated by Hume, between historical understanding and political and economic analysis. Sinclair’s indebtedness to this tradition of social inquiry is obvious, but it remains to be asked to what extent he shared his predecessors’ commitment to historical understanding, or whether—with his utilitarian motives and political objectives—the M.P. from Caithness had turned Scottish political economy away from its earlier historical orientation. Sinclair is generally regarded as a man whose vision was exclusively economic or geographical, and little of what has been reviewed so far suggests that he viewed material life within a historical framework.9 Rather, Sinclair’s program seems exclusively aimed at investigating the political economy of the present day—a pattern broken only in a concluding suggestion that this first survey should be followed by periodic renewals every half-century, so as to fur-

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nish the best means of ascertaining the progress of national improvement. In this sense, diachrony is not absent from the Statistical Account, but it figures primarily as anticipation, rather than recollection. Thus—if historical understanding is built upon a contrast of “then” and “now”—Sinclair’s grand vision of a statistical science seems more responsive to a “then” of futurity than of retrospection. There is at least one crucial point, however, where Sinclair adopts the unmistakable accents of Scottish philosophical history. In 1793 Sinclair published a preliminary sampling of the work called Specimens of Statistical Reports, Exhibiting the Progress of Political Society, from the Pastoral State, to that of Luxury and Refinement.”10 True to the promise of the title, the “specimen” chapters are arranged in an order that follows the arc of historical progress described in the writings of Smith, Ferguson, and Millar. For each of these thinkers, forms of property relations (as that latter-day Scottish philosopher, Karl Marx, would put it) shape the essential narrative of historical development, taking humanity from its beginnings in the propertyless wanderings of hunter-gatherer tribes, through pastoral nomadism (exemplified for John Millar in the ancient ways of the biblical patriarchs), to the more familiar world of settled agriculture, and finally the opulence of commercial society. So, too, the reader of the Specimens is taken on a journey through Scotland that is more historical than geographical. Our itinerary, in other words, is not organized by the coordinates of the compass, or the topography of coastline, rivers, and mountains, but rather by an abstract historical program built upon a theory of the progress of forms of property from pastoral, to agricultural, to commercial, culminating in “the Statistical Account of a large City,”—Edinburgh—“giving a View of the Progress of Arts, Luxury, and Refinement.” If this was Sinclair’s understanding in 1793, it does not seem to have been sustained. Later outlines of the Statistical Account do not restate the stadial idea— though without further evidence we can only speculate about what this silence means for Sinclair’s understanding of history. Whatever the reasons behind it, stadialism appears to lose its appeal, and by the time Sinclair publishes his later summary of the project, the Analysis of the Statistical Account (1826), there is hardly a trace of the idea. The Analysis opens with an extended outline of Scottish history, including a considerable description of the intellectual and literary achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment. Nonetheless, the later summary shows no sign that Sinclair continued to map his understanding of the political economy of the Scottish parishes along metahistorical lines. Rather, the Analysis prominently displays a very different chart of knowledge called The Pyramid of Statistical Inquiry, in which the “938 Parochial Districts of the Statistical

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Fig. 5.1. The Pyramid of Statistical Inquiry. In Sir John Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland; With a General View of the History of That Country, and Discussions on Some Important Branches of Political Economy (1826).

Account” form the base of a structure whose higher levels are the “33 County Reports” and the “Statistical Analysis of Scotland as One District.” The Pyramid of Statistical Inquiry speaks to the other and seemingly stronger side of Sinclair’s work: its determinedly Baconian emphasis on accumulated information and empirical reasoning, along with a corresponding emphasis on social analysis as a collective and cumulative endeavor.11 The data, he argues, once collected, condensed, and “methodized,” would provide the best guidance for future actions. “knowledge, in an undigested state,” the accompanying text proclaims, “may be compared, to a small portion of gold, dispersed throughout a great quantity of ore. In that rude condition, it is, comparatively speaking, of little value or utility. but if the pure metal be separated from the dross, its real worth is ascertained—it becomes an object of attention—and it may be employed with advantage.”12

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LOCALITY AND HISTORY

Sinclair furnished the ministers with a formidable collection of queries, but his contribution to the success of the Statistical Account was as much practical and political as intellectual. Only someone possessing Sinclair’s combination of social leverage and single-minded energy could have persuaded the Church of Scotland to promote a parish-by-parish survey of the entire country, and since this mobilization of clerical support was essential to the work’s success, it now seems more or less inevitable that the Account should have assumed its present shape as a massive collection of individual reports, supplemented by Sinclair’s many prefaces and appendices. The resulting text is full of rich and varied description, but this was not the way Sinclair originally imagined the publication. As first conceived, the Account would have consisted of the digested results of the investigations, not the original reports. By Sinclair’s own admission, the twenty-one-volume version that we now have was the result of a change of heart, undertaken in homage to the exertions of the clergy. “I found such merit and ability,” he writes, “and so many useful facts and important observations, in the communications which were sent me, that I could not think of depriving the Clergy of the credit they were entitled to derive, from such laborious exertions.”13 It is difficult to know what caused Sinclair to change his mind, but considering how much the added volumes cost in effort and expense, there must have been something persuasive in the ministers’ accounts. And when so determined a systematizer concedes to publishing twenty-one volumes of what he would later call “knowledge in an undigested state,” the reversal seems too significant to ignore. Whatever the reasons, the Statistical Account cannot be understood simply in terms of Sinclair’s own outlook without thought for the impact of the responses he received to his lengthy questionnaire—the “useful facts and important observations” of his nine hundred individual authors. Surely this great project, always so closely identified with its principal projector, was also shaped by the interests of that large assembly of writers on whom the value of the work substantially depended. Sinclair published the reports in the order they were received, so that every volume presents a jigsaw puzzle of Scottish geographies and economies. Nonetheless, if there is any trait that all have in common, it is a sense of heightened awareness of social transformation and a reiterative pattern of comparison between then and now. The result is an elementary, but insistent social chronicle that gives this vast survey of contemporary conditions an undeniably historical dimension. This attention to modernization is striking in itself, but just as

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remarkable is the sheer variety of objects and experiences which require some form of historical description. Every parish, it seems, could provide its own particular version of what Scott calls the “now distant point from which we have drifted.” From a modern perspective, the 160 queries that make up Sinclair’s questionnaire seem more ad hoc than scientific. Even so, their comprehensive curiosity ensures that the reports are solidly ballasted with parish detail, without losing all sense of an orderly inquiry. The general headings, as Sinclair sets them out, are “Geography and Natural History,” “Population,” “Productions of the Parish,” and “Miscellaneous”—a capacious set of themes, but not one that highlights historical considerations. On the contrary, as Sinclair writes in one of his circular letters, “the great object of the Inquiry is to know the present state of the country, and to ascertain what means are the most likely to promote the real interests of its inhabitants, . . . deep researches, into subjects of antiquity, are far from being considered as equally essential.”14 This presentism carries through most of the long list of particular queries. Only rarely does the wording suggest that assessing present-day matters might demand some form of comparison with the past.15 Under the rubric of “Geography and Natural History of the Parish,” Sinclair levels a barrage of questions about the location and physical state of the district. A few of these incorporate an element of diachrony—“What is the ancient and modern name of the Parish? What is the origin and etymology of the name?”16—but the sense of history is weak, while the concern for topography and economy is strong and specific. A second group of questions details the state of the population, bringing us closer to the modern reader’s expectations about the purpose of a statistical survey. Again an element of temporality makes an appearance. “What is the ancient state of the population of the parish,” asks the first question. The second is “What is now the amount of its population?” And the same theme is resumed ten questions later: “Is the population of the parish materially different from what it was 5, 10, or 25 years ago? and to what causes is the alteration attributed?”17 But though these openings to history are not trivial, they are easily lost sight of amongst a flood of particulars. There are questions concerning longevity, marital status, social rank, and occupation—how many farmers? manufacturers? craftsmen? ferrymen? miners? lawyers? physicians? apothecaries? Questions about race or place of origin—how many Jews? negroes? gypsies? foreigners? persons born in England, Ireland, or the British colonies? Others still concern sectarian affiliation, emigration, cases of murder or suicide, unemployment, and housing.

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One might proceed in this way through the remainder of Sinclair’s 160 queries without appreciably altering the balances already observed. Nor is the issue strictly a matter of number. There are some queries, it is true, that raise historical questions of the most conventional sort—questions asking, for example, about Roman, Saxon, Danish, or Pictish sites, castles, camps, altars, roads, forts—but these have an air of miscellaneousness and duty that is confirmed by Sinclair’s offhandedness about antiquarian matters. On the other hand, questions about the “expence of a common labourer, when married” or “the usual wages of male and female servants in the different branches of husbandry” have a weight and specificity that speak to a strongly conceived purpose. The closest Sinclair approaches to addressing history consistently and directly comes in a small sample of additional queries, appended to the original set. After five new questions about the state of the roads, the rent of farms, the number of enclosures, and the famine of 1782 (all of them questions with at least some implication for history), we find a sixth that clearly signals the heritage of Hume, Smith, and Millar. “Are there any curious or important facts,” Sinclair inquires, “tending to prove any great alteration in the manners, customs, dress, stile of living, and c. of the inhabitants of the parish, now, and 20 or 50 years ago?”18 This is the last question in Sinclair’s entire circular letter—the 166th of the list. “’TIS FIFTY YEARS SINCE”

The opening to history in Sinclair’s questions was at best indirect, but it was sufficient to invite a steady stream of historical description, albeit of a kind only tangentially connected to formal historiography. For many of the correspondents (if not perhaps for the statistical philosopher himself), a close-up view of the “internal structure” of their parishes implicitly required an elementary chronicle of changing social conditions. The result is that a book designed as a benchmark for future investigations of progress becomes a retrospect on the half-century just ending. Two ways of marking time crisscross through the Statistical Account. On the one side, there are fragments of history as traditionally conceived, drawn from the accepted narrative of the Scottish past, but given a local habitation by association with objects or places belonging to the parish. On the other side, there is a plain-spoken chronicle that seldom looks beyond the particulars of daily life, or takes a form more complex than a simple before-and-after regarding local changes. “About fifty years ago,” we read; “till about thirty five or forty years;”

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“for thirty years past;” “but now the scene is completely altered and infinitely to the better.”19 Repeated endlessly across the length and breadth of the Statistical Account, these then/now contrasts accumulate with powerful effect, mapping the many tributary themes that make up the narrative of Scotland’s social and economic progress. But it is not just the unself-conscious reiteration that gives this rough, approximative then-and-now its force. Simple as it is, the device serves as a sturdy vehicle for describing the framework of social development. As a view of history, it speaks to an understanding that was still relatively new in European thought and one whose particularities were not easily expressed in terms of more conventional narratives. For some time, to be sure, a number of Scotland’s best minds had been engaged in conjectural reconstructions of this kind of history, though often at a level of generality that was the very opposite of these reports. As a result, this massing of historical observation at ground level provides one of the most impressive monuments we have to the Enlightenment’s awakening to the importance of the everyday. There is not space to show the full range of occasions which evoke the then/now of social observation, but here is a summary example, as given by a Mr. Auld from the Parish of Machline: The manner of living and dress is much altered from what it was about 50 years ago. At that time, and for some time after, there were only two or three families in this parish, who made use of tea daily, now it is done by, at least, one half of the parish, and almost the whole use it occasionally. At that period, good two-penny strong ale, and home-spirits were in vogue: but now even people in the middling and lower stations of life, deal much in foreign spirits, rum-punch and wine. In former times, the gentlemen of the county entered into a resolution to encourage the consumption of their own grain, and, for that purpose, to drink no foreign spirits: But, in consequence of the prevalence of smuggling, and the heavy taxes laid on the home-made liquors, this patriotic resolution was either forgotten or abandoned. As to dress, about 50 years ago, there were few females who wore scarlet or silks. But now, nothing is more common, than silk caps and silk cloaks; and women, in a middling station, are as fine as ladies of quality were formerly. The like change may be observed in the dress of the male sex, though, perhaps, not in the same degree.20

The simple concreteness of such a chronicle carries a natural sense of conviction, since the changes it tallies seem so commonplace that they would not have escaped any person in the parish. It is only the broader narrative of progress—tacitly assumed, but generally unspoken—that might elude observ-

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ers with less education. By contrast, when the ministers offer more conventional forms of historical comment, their writing often acquires an air of second-hand learning. As men of the book, the ministers found it only too natural to buttress their writing with an occasional reference to Buchanan’s History of Scotland or perhaps to more recent literary travelers like Johnson and Tennant. Nor could they be expected to forgo a chance to decorate their reports by touching on the melancholy emotions associated with Gothic ruins. It would be wrong, however, to draw such distinctions too sharply. Though the reports seldom look beyond the boundaries of the parish, a national framework is implied in their assumption that the entire process follows from Scotland’s modernization after the Union.21 Equally, significant events often take on more force by their association with local histories. Mr. Auld’s description of Machline includes a note about religious persecutions that afflicted his parish in an earlier day. On the green, he writes, “at the town head,” there is a tombstone whose inscription tells the story of five men put to death in 1685 “under the unhappy reign of James VII of Scotland”: Bloody Dunbarton, Douglas, and Dundee, Moved by the devil, and the Laird of Lee Dragged these five men to death with gun and sword, Not suffering them to pray, nor read God’s word; Owning the work of God was all their crime; The eighty-five was a saint-killing time.22

Unlike the customary chronicle of social changes, this version of history is explicitly connected to the larger narrative of nationhood—the sort of history that is divided by reigns and punctuated by exact dates. The absence of a formal then/now structure, however, does not signal that the minister is deviating from his usual habit of chronicling local changes. Rather, the “saint-killing time” of the eighty-five is set off from the present day as surely as the time when no one drank tea, wore scarlet or silks, carried a watch, or cultivated turnips. If Mr. Auld does not quite say “that was then, this is now,” his meaning is plain, and the same stress on the growing tolerance of the people is echoed in many of the reports of his colleagues, always in a tone of celebrating the new disposition toward Christian peace. From the point of view of the Church of Scotland (and especially of its dominant Moderate faction), the decline of religious ferocity was one of the strongest signs of their country’s progress toward enlightenment. It was noted almost everywhere that the “ecclesiastic rancor” of an earlier age had ceased, giving way “to the milder dispositions of forbearance, benevolence, and charity.”23 Even in

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the remote island of Skye, among a population of Highland Catholics, the turn to toleration had fully established itself. “The common people, in general, still wear the Highland garb,” reports the minister, “and adhere more closely to ancient customs and manners, than their superiors. All the superstitions and delusive notions, however, which formerly accompanied popery, have entirely vanished; and the people’s ideas of religion and morality, are rational and solid.”24 SCOTLAND, TRANSFORMED AND UNTRANSFORMED

The most tangible symbol of Scotland’s material transformation was Edinburgh’s New Town. Unusually, the description was not provided by one of the clergy. Rather, the author was William Creech, a prominent Edinburgh bookseller and civic leader, who had begun his account of Edinburgh morals and manners well before Sinclair announced his survey. The similarity of interests, however, meant that the bookseller’s observations were easily incorporated into Sinclair’s work, for which Creech (to his cost) also became the publisher. As the culminating chapter of the Specimens volume, Creech’s description of Edinburgh takes pride of place, a clear signal that the sweeping changes transforming the capital marked the direction of progress for the nation as a whole.25 Like Scott a decade later, Creech was impressed by two contradictory appearances in the changes transforming the city. On the one hand, the alterations seemed so complete that they must surely be impossible to overlook; on the other, they had occurred in a manner sufficiently gradual and in relation to things so ordinary that noting their progress required a special effort of recollection. Everyone “who remembers but a few years back, must be sensible of a very striking difference in the external appearance of Edinburgh, and in the mode of living, and manners of the people.” It would be important, Creech continues, offering a programmatic statement that looks back to Hume and forward to Scott, to “state a comparison” between things as they were in 1763 and again in 1783 and then once again in 1793. In this way, “many features of the present time will probably appear prominent and striking, which, in the gradual progress of society, have passed altogether unnoticed, or have been but faintly perceived.”26 True to this plan, much of the text consists of repeated series of dated triplets, each tracing the dotted line of progress as it carries some particular object or custom from initial absence to later stages of increasing fulfillment. Some of these brief narratives concern themselves with matters whose social weight would be apparent to everyone—the physical enlargement of the city beyond its medieval boundaries, the growth of shipping at the port of Leith, the increas-

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ing frequency and rapidity of stage coaches to London, the number of iron foundries or establishments for manufacturing printed cotton, the increasing enrollments in the College. Still more persuasive, perhaps, are some notations on the changes to older neighborhoods following the exit of the higher ranks to the New Town. “In 1763,” Creech reports, “People of quality and fashion lived in houses, which, in 1783, were inhabited by tradesmen, or by people in humble and ordinary life. The Lord Justice Clerk Tinwold’s house was possessed by a French Teacher—Lord President Craigie’s house by a Rouping wife or Sales woman of old furniture.”27 Outside of Edinburgh, no alteration in daily life marked a new era quite so dramatically as this, but though the changes were not on the same scale as in the capital, local observers reported them with an intense alertness to signs of social transformation. “About 50 years ago,” writes William Logan, pastor for the Parish of Symington in Ayrshire, “this parish, like others in the neighborhood, was almost in a state of nature. At that period there were no inclosures, except the glebe and a few acres adjoining. . . . The country in winter was a naked waste, scarce a tree appeared to gratify the wandering eye, except a few adjoining the seats of residing heritors; and the roads were all deep and unformed.”28 Each part of Scotland provided its own versions of the same themes. On the sea coast, for example, the marks of progress were different, but there was an equally strong sense of social and material progress. From Portpatrick on the Irish Sea, Mr. John McKenzie testifies to improvements in ports and shipping. Formerly, he writes, “the harbour was a mere inlet between two ridges of rock which advanced into the sea.” Only flat-bottomed vessels could use this harbor, and when a boat approached “the whole inhabitants, men and women, ran down, and by main force, dragged her up the beach, out of the reach of the waves.” Now, however, “one of the finest quays in Britain” has been erected on this same spot, as well as a fine lighthouse to match an existing one on the Irish shore. Even on the darkest night the passage had now been rendered “convenient and comfortable, like a street well lighted on both sides.”29 The change, adds the minister, is largely attributable to the efforts of a single enterprising individual: whether the scene is “a great capital like Edinburgh, or a provincial town like Portpatrick,” there are a few bold spirits who “seem born for the purpose of rousing the multitude from a state of ignorance and torpor, from which they are too often unwilling to be emancipated.”30 Even in far-off Portpatrick, it seems, Edinburgh acted as a beacon, providing the nation with an exemplary instance of commercial progress and urban polish. By contrast, provincial Scotland was marked by varying degrees of backwardness or incompletion—a tacit comparison that aligned every part of the

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country along the same hypothetical trajectory of development. As a result, even when we turn away from Creech’s report Edinburgh remains in view, but some of the emphasis shifts from the straightforward “now/then” of the capital’s recent history to the “not yet here, not yet now” of most other districts. Progress, in short, had its geography as well as its history, giving every parish a meaningful “here” as well as a “now.” “Agriculture is here just in its infancy,” writes Mr. Alexander Humphrey, from the Parish of Keith, County of Banff; “the long drawling team of 8 or 10 oxen in yokes, sometimes preceded by a couple of horses, is yet often to be seen creeping along, dragging after them an immense log of a clumsy Scotch plough.”31 Other districts were still further in arrears. From remote Orkney, the Reverend James Alison reports that “Improvements in agriculture are, at least, a century later than in the more southern counties of Scotland. A plough with one stilt, corresponding to the Italian, described by Virgil in his first Georgic, is generally used.”32 Mr. Abel in Drumblade, County of Aberdeen, makes the same observation, but in more hopeful terms. “The spirit for industry seems at last to be rousing. Improvements of every kind are progressive in their nature, and require time and encouragement to bring them to any degree of perfection. They are on their progress northward; and he who shall accelerate it, well deserves to be accounted by his country a public benefactor.”33 As with Creech’s description of Edinburgh, provincial chronicles often begin with absence, and in much of the country there is a good deal of absence to report. Most often, however, absence is accompanied by anticipation, shifting the weight of the statement onto its forward leg. “When we consider what has been done in Galashiels etc.,” writes Mr. Arkle, from Castletown in Roxburgh, “. . . it is hoped the time is not far distant, when such advantages as these will attract the attention of the manufacturers either of flax, wool, or cotton.”34 A more jarring assessment of the resources required for progress reaches us from Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, one of a number of literary men who contributed to the Account. Carlyle seems at a loss to explain the backwardness of his district. The parish is “remarkably well situated for manufactures,” he writes. But despite “having command of water, plenty of coals at hand, cheap houses, and a multitude of idle children,” no substantial manufactures have yet been established.35 Lighthouses, plows, new plantings and new fertilizers, schemes for drainage or new canals, the increasing use of horse-drawn carts instead of primitive creels for carrying loads—then as now, tangible economic and mechanical innovations served as a ready method for calibrating change. It was well understood, however, that the institutions of day-to-day life were shaped by forces that carried well beyond the immediate pressure of economic conditions. In the

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dynamics of social progress, the spirit of enterprise, industry, and science was ranged on one side. On the other stood the resistance of habit and prejudice, but also at times the old-fashioned bonds of community and the human need for the comfort of the familiar. A minister whose backward parish was entirely dependent on its sheep added the sympathetic comment that it was hardly to be wondered at that people in such narrow circumstances were reluctant to risk what little they had on untried innovations. Another lamented the emotional losses that were suffered when these small flocks were given up. “The whole family was interested in the business: for every child claimed the property of a ewe-lamb . . . and an emulation prevailed among them, who should possess the handsomest.”36 Numerous reports remark that the decay of the feudal system was contributing to the loss of warmth and “attachment” between landlords and their tenants, and some point to this weakening as a cause of emigration from the Highlands to America—a problem soon to be the subject of Lord Selkirk’s Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of Scotland (1805).37 Another writer, underlining the same loss of ancient bonds of community, protests that the Highlands now suffer “a degree of aristocratical influence entirely incompatible with the liberty of British subjects.”38 The lure of economic development brought a peculiar disappointment to the minister of Roseneath, a parish whose soil was reputed to be inimical to rats. A West Indian planter had gone so far as to carry a quantity of earth to Jamaica to protect his sugarcanes, but the trial had not been a success. “Had the experiment succeeded,” the minister remarks, “this would have been a new and profitable trade for the proprietors, but perhaps, by this time the parish of Roseneath might have been no more.”39 The ironies of progress manifested themselves differently in the Borders, where Dr. Somerville (himself a historian of some note)40 writes that the Union with England hurt the region not only by taking away profitable opportunities for contraband trade, but also by encouraging emigration. When England and Scotland stood as separate and hostile nations, he explains, emigration was neither desirable nor easy, but now Scotsmen are free to follow their personal advantage, “especially if this could be effected without the unpleasing idea of relinquishing home.” Passing from the Borders into Northumberland “was rather like going into another parish than another kingdom.”41 “THE PLAN OF THIS STATISTICAL HISTORY”

Sinclair’s ministers leave it to their editor to speak to the purposes of the survey, and beyond occasional boasting about their own contributions to local farming

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or education, they say little that reflects on their role as keepers of the “annals of the parish.” An intriguing exception is a long footnote from Dr. Thomas Somerville, whose remarks on the changing character of the Borders were quoted just above. Along with his initial report, Somerville also provided another: a description of the nearby Parish of Ancrum, where as a younger man he had learned so much from conversing with the then minister of the parish. After urging his young readers likewise to “court the company and conversation” of men of advanced age and experience, Somerville then goes on to suggest a telling parallel between oral histories gained in this manner and the records preserved in the Statistical Account. If this advice were more closely attended to, Somerville writes, “interesting anecdotes, and valuable information” of the sort that “elude the notice of general history, while they are recent and familiar, would often be conveyed by authentic tradition; and acquiring importance from the rapid and strange vicissitudes they exhibit, as well as from their contacts and connection with modern events and manners, would at length, enter into record, and be rescued from the gulph of oblivion.” Oral memory, in other words, is ignored by historians, who seek out its “traditions” after too much time has gone by to ascertain their accuracy. But such information, properly preserved in written record, has great value, “acquiring importance from the rapid and strange vicissitudes they exhibit, as well from their contrast and connection with modern events and manners.” By accumulating a store of facts, Somerville continues, “our views of past history would become more correct and enlarged; and the speculations of the philosopher and politician, relative to future events, and to measures affecting the interests of posterity, would be founded upon the most solid basis.”42 In just a few sentences, Somerville takes us from an informal exchange with our elders to the more studied kind of social memory preserved by the Statistical Account—all of it, oral as well as written, made especially valuable in a time of rapid social transformation. What fascinates, too, is the easy pivot in the second sentence toward the wider ambitions of the statistical project, understood as a “store of facts” important to the philosopher and statesman. And, as if to confirm the implicit reference to his own work as a statistical recorder, he goes on to bring these reflections home in a second paragraph that once again moves easily between the two perspectives traced in this reading. “The plan of this statistical history,” he writes, giving the Account a title that connects it to history more closely than Sinclair himself ever does, “seems well calculated to supply what has hitherto been a desideratum in literature; and, in the estimation of future generations, the locality and minuteness of the circumstances which it contains, will constitute not the smallest part of its interest

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and utility.” “Enlightened by such instruction,” he goes on to say, shifting to the more remote and scientific language of his editor, “we are enabled to investigate the sources of prejudices and customs, the elements of characters and manners, and the causes of events, of which otherwise, we are utterly at a loss to give any explanation or account.” From here it takes Somerville just one more step to draw everything together in a Burkean reflection on the social importance of the “little platoon.” From a moral and religious point of view, Somerville adds, “knowledge of local facts is important, for enabling us to form a proper estimate of privileges peculiar to our own times.” Better far to compare ourselves to the condition of our own fathers than to imagine “refined and visionary theories of perfection which never existed in any preceding age.43 HISTORICAL DISTANCE AND THE “STATISTICAL ACCOUNT”

Two perspectives operate in the Statistical Account, giving the work both its underlying coherence and its sense of disorderly abundance. One view aspires to scientific observation and practical effect, while the other is shaped by habits that are more immediate and anecdotal. The two perspectives are closely related, and in a sense their differences are simply two elements of a single project of national improvement. Nonetheless, there is an evident tension between the editor’s elevated vision of a future illuminated by hopes for scientific governance and the ministers’ small-scale histories of material conditions and the progress of manners. The result is far from tidy, but thanks to a great deal of hard work and a lack of precise boundaries, Sinclair was able to amass a vast treasury of social description concerned with the recent history and immediate prospects of the northern part of the kingdom. Without question the Statistical Account provides an almost inexhaustible survey of Scottish material life, but the notion that the Account is simply a kind of political economy concerned with material objects and practices seems easiest to maintain if we focus on Sinclair’s own vision of a utilitarian science. In contrast, the repeated before-and-after chronicle of the parish reports seems to move the work toward other contexts that are both social and historical. On this level, the pivot shifts to the immediate past, turning local narratives into vehicles for an unusual kind of history that—if not entirely new—had never before been practiced on such a scale. The parish reports have their origin in Sinclair’s ambition for a scientific survey, but they amount to much more than a simple response to his queries. As local descriptions, they speak to an experience of social change that was felt in every corner of the country, and they give evidence that, to one degree

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or another, reflection on this experience was available to a broad sector of the Scottish people. As they responded to Sinclair’s detailed queries and provided the national account with a needed record of local conditions, a good number of the ministers also strained to address a more fundamental challenge, which was to understand the complex of ideas, energies, and practices that had so thoroughly reshaped the lives of the Scottish people after the ’45. What had awakened this progressive spirit in Scotland? What had been its quirks or its unlooked for consequences? What local customs or attachments, on the other hand, had made change difficult or even impossible in particular locations, despite the triumphs elsewhere of a “spirit of industry and emulation”?44 Viewed from the context of parish life, the economic impact of modernization appears less autonomous than Sinclair’s loftier perspectives suggest. When drawn into local narratives, the evidences of political economy combine with other concerns that are essentially cultural, highlighting questions of meaning and motive rather than materialities alone. In the process, relatively confined practices like improving a minor harbor or inoculating against smallpox (a major index of popular enlightenment)45 could take on much larger significance than can be measured by an economic or demographic calculus. It remained true, nevertheless, that for many people—then as now—the pulses of material life provided the best indication of the pace and direction of social change. In the plain-spoken record of everyday things, Scotsmen could fix their sights on the opposite shore and measure their rapidly increasing separation from the ways of life of their ancestors.

6

PAST AND PRESENT: CONTRASTIVE NARRATIVES IN THE ROMANTIC AGE

Contrast or contrariety is a connexion among ideas, which may, perhaps, be considered as a mixture of causation and resemblance. Where two objects are contrary, the one destroys the other, i.e. is the cause of its annihilation, and the idea of the annihilation of an object implies the idea of its former existence. —Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748 I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers. —Khalil Gibran, “Sand and Foam,” 1926

For two centuries at least, historians and philosophers have been grappling with ways to understand the overlapping temporalities that inform historical thought. The nineteenth century linked history to the alienation that results from modernity’s rupture with tradition. As a result of this distancing, historical perspective is always cross-temporal: a record (to cite Burckhardt once again) “of what one age finds worthy of note in another.”1 The twentieth century, in turn, largely reverses these terms and finds history’s root in the embedding of tradition in language. “History does not belong to us,” says Gadamer; “we belong to it.” Defined in these terms, historical consciousness is not so much a thinking across time as a thinking in time—perhaps time that is thought. “There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself,” writes Gadamer, “than there are historical horizons that have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves.”2

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We are faced with intriguing contradictions. If historical thought is inescapably comparative—a literature of finitude and fusion—historical writing seldom acknowledges the fact. Instead, Western traditions of historical writing are strongly identified with narrative forms that are sequential and continuous. There are occasions, of course, when historians want to emphasize discontinuity as well as progression. Nonetheless, except in the rather limited circumstances that this chapter explores, disjunctive narratives seem remarkably rare. More often, historians embrace conventions of linear narrative, while disparaging genres that seem fragmentary or disjunctive. “Mere” chronicle can never hope to attain the dignity of history. At times, it is true, narrative continuities can be suspended in favor of extended comparative descriptions. Both Hume and Macaulay, for example, interrupt their histories with chapters that outline broad social and governmental changes that are essential to acquiring a perspective on their narratives. (For Hume, it should be recalled, the history of Britain in the seventeenth century would hardly be “intelligible” without the retrospect he provides in the Fourth Appendix.) But crucial as these chapters are on conceptual grounds, their distinctive presence only underscores the curious paradox that history’s fundamental mode of understanding appears to be at odds with its formal arrangements. One consequence is that overtly contrastive works of the kind I want to consider are most fully developed outside of the standard conventions of national historiography among writings of a more speculative, polemical, or poetic character. No one would look to Pugin’s Contrasts for a conventional history of British architecture, or to Carlyle’s Past and Present for a scholarly narrative of provision for the poor. In both works, the eccentricity of design is a deliberate provocation, signaling a thorough hostility to the forms as well as the ideologies of mainstream historical writing. In other experiments, however, the rupture is less sharp or insistent, allowing an author to mask his impatience with the linear orthodoxy behind a somewhat gentler and more “literary” appearance. Southey’s Colloquies, for example, is an extended poetic fiction that mixes cranky politics and political economy with rambles across the picturesque scenery of the Lake District. And if, in the end, his rather prosy dialogue with the ghost of Thomas More seems less compelling than the confrontation of medieval and modern conditions in either Pugin or Carlyle, Southey’s adaptation of the contrastive form retains some fundamental similarities of purpose and method. Comparison takes a different turn in Richard Whately’s Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte, where a pretended skepticism about the evidences for the real historical existence of the French emperor becomes

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the vehicle for reasserting a sincere belief in the authenticity of the early Christian miracles. Thus in a pitch-perfect send-up of Humean prose, Whately reverses what would become the standard strategy of much Romantic historiography, and rather than “bringing the distant near,” estranges the matter-of-fact solidity of the recent past.3 In the broad family of historical genres, these histories constitute no more than a small and quarrelsome clan, and even if we add to their ranks by invoking a list of distinguished ancestors and descendants, the examples remain few, though often illustrious. Still, numbers are not everything, and these unusual texts—both in what they express and what they oppose—call attention to some central features of historical representation. PUGIN’S “CONTRASTS”

To understand an oppositional writer like Pugin, it will help to begin with the kind of conventional celebration of progress he despised and wanted to destroy. My example is drawn from a lecture delivered to a London literary society. Appropriately, its point of reference, like Pugin’s, is as much visual as verbal. “Amidst the crowded and brilliant assemblage which I see before me” the lecturer begins, “there will be many who have recently enjoyed the inspection of the beautiful Cartoons in Westminster Hall, in which some of the more striking incidents of our early history, as a nation, have been powerfully and pleasingly depicted. In looking back to the period to which these incidents belong, and contrasting the present with the past, they cannot fail to have been struck with the amazing difference exhibited.”4 The date was 1843—the same year, coincidentally, as Carlyle’s Past and Present—and the occasion was the inaugural lecture to the British and Foreign Institute by its president, the author and traveler James Silk Buckingham. The cartoons (or preliminary designs) were on exhibit as part of a competition to furnish decorations for the newly rebuilt Houses of Parliament, a national project to which Pugin himself contributed significantly. The full scheme had not yet been decided upon—indeed was still subject to much discussion, both as to the kinds of scenes that should be depicted and the style that would be appropriate in a country better known for portraiture and landscape than for historical painting. Even the medium was a matter of debate, and Charles Eastlake, who presided over the project, summoned a scholarly inquisition to examine whether both the British climate and Britain’s artistic genius would support a program of frescoed wall paintings recently revived by the German Nazarenes.5

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Given the popularity of the exhibition, Buckingham had every reason to believe that his audience was familiar with the cartoons and sympathetic to their patriotic spirit. Visitors to the exhibition would embrace these images of primitive Britain as signs of that “amazing difference” that linked past and present in flattering contrast. The early Britons, Buckingham told his audience, were a nation of savages, “as wild as the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and apparently as unteachable as these are now supposed to be.”6 Indeed, well-informed Romans came to doubt the value of their conquest, thinking the land unwholesome and the inhabitants incorrigibly stupid. If Caesar’s invading army could be transported “in a few hours by the South-eastern railway to London,” they would find it almost impossible to believe the transformation represented by the splendid city of today. The modern nation had passed through many troubles— religious persecution, political tyranny, military carnage—“yet, thank Heaven, we have at length reached a steady landing, where we have securely planted the blessings of Civil and Religious Liberty . . . and where we have attained an eminence in the progress of literature, science, and art, of which the wildest enthusiast of past ages could never have dreamt.”7 True to the spirit of the day, the Westminster cartoons took the superiority of modernity for granted. Pugin, for his part, could not abide these notions and called upon the force of satiric contrast to provide the whole form and meaning of his counterattack. Leaving nothing to chance, he gave his work a long programmatic title: Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; shewing the Present Decay of Taste. Accompanied by Appropriate Text (1836; rev. ed., 1841).8 This slim book is a work of love—and of hate. Prophet and propagandist of the Gothic revival, Pugin was an outstanding draftsman and architect and the renderings that constituted the spine of his work were the product of his own art. To these plates he added a relatively brief and highly polemical text, so that, as the title itself indicates, the text illustrated the engravings, more than the other way round. Pugin then printed the whole at his own expense, a genesis that gave the project something of an air of personal witness.9 In its briefer and ideologically cruder first edition especially, Contrasts consists largely of a series of matched architectural renditions, each depicting a medieval building paired with its modern, neoclassical counterpart. In keeping with his polemical purpose, Pugin pulled no punches about what he disliked among the works of his contemporaries, or why he embraced the Gothic. But the object was not really to encourage a taste for individual examples of the style. Rather, each plate describes not just a building but a building type, and so by extension the qualities of its age. And underscoring all this, the strict pairings

Fig. 6.1. A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasted Episcopal Residences. In A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages, and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day; shewing the Present Decay of Taste. Accompanied by Appropriate Text (Salisbury, 1836; 2d ed., London, 1841).

Fig. 6.2. A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasted Residences for the Poor. In Pugin, Contrasts.

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of Gothic and modern relentlessly juxtapose medieval honesty against contemporary sham. No house, chapel, or market building stands simply for itself. Each represents the virtues or vices that the age expressed in its architecture. Pugin believed that architecture is a symbolic art and that Christianity found its perfect symbolic expression in the Gothic style. “From Christianity has arisen an architecture so glorious, so sublime, so perfect, that all the productions of ancient paganism sink, when compared before it, to a level with the false and corrupt systems from which they originated.”10 Pugin’s quarrel, however, was not with classical art and architecture as such, but with their modern revival. Ever since the fifteenth century, Europe had been swept by a “mania for paganism” that had not just affected churches and palaces, but could be seen in every class of building and even in domestic furniture and ornament. And as in architecture, so in life itself; everything had been corrupted by the spiritual emptiness and pagan sensuality that had driven out the pure Christian style.11 In the first edition of Contrasts, the fall of the Gothic was explained in the simplest possible terms. Since ancient Britain was Catholic and modern Britain Protestant, it followed that the Reformation had been the cause of the decline of true Christian ideals. In the second edition, however, Pugin broadened his sense of the underlying causes. The “destructive or Protestant principle,” he argued, was not so much the cause as the effect of what he called “Catholic degeneracy.” On this view, the losses suffered by Catholic art were the consequence of the Renaissance’s revival of paganism as much as the attacks of the Protestants.12 But in making the argument somewhat more flexible, Pugin did not relax his fundamental conviction that architectural style and religious virtue are one and the same. Before “true taste and Christian feelings” can be revived, all present and popular ideas on the subject must be utterly changed. “Men must learn that the period hitherto called dark and ignorant far excelled our age in wisdom, that art ceased when it is said to have been revived, that superstition was piety, and bigotry faith. The most celebrated names and characters must give place to others at present scarcely known, and the famous edifices of modern Europe sink into masses of deformity by the side of the neglected and mouldering piles of Catholic antiquity.”13 CARLYLE’S “PAST AND PRESENT”

Students of Carlyle’s historical writing have focused most of their attention on the French Revolution (1837), his first and in some respects most radical break with contemporary historiographical tradition. In formal terms, however, Past and Present (1843) is Carlyle’s most fully realized work. It stands as a midpoint

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in his writing of history, somewhere between the copious energy of the French Revolution and the bare bones of the Letters and Speeches of Cromwell (1845). The earlier work is carried by sheer animation and conviction, its exuberance motivated in part by a sense of its own daring, in part by the conviction that no arrangement of words, however extravagant, could match the dangerous energy of the event itself. The later book, on the other hand, registers the intractability of its subject through the author’s retreat into the role of editor—so often before a fictional device, but here an acknowledgment that he could go no further to encompass a man of Cromwell’s passions and contradictions. Carlyle’s work had a massive impact on Cromwell’s subsequent reputation, and to that extent it can be considered a success.14 Still, the fact remains that in an important sense Carlyle was defeated by the life of his hero. Past and Present was written in an interval in the long gestation of Cromwell, and its birth was as rapid as the other’s was protracted. A letter Carlyle wrote to Emerson makes the reasons for this difference clear. One of his “grand difficulties,” he confessed, was that he could not “write two books at once; cannot be in the seventeenth century and in the nineteenth at one and the same moment. For my heart is sick and sore in behalf of my own poor generation; nay, I feel withal as if the one hope of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells and new Puritans: thus do the two centuries stand related to me, the seventeenth worthless except precisely insofar as it can be made the nineteenth; and yet let anybody try that enterprise!”15 The truth is that every one of Carlyle’s histories entailed writing “two books at once”; Past and Present is simply his most deliberate and shapely experiment along these lines. As a tract for the times, it begins and ends in the social struggles of the 1840s—the “condition of England question”—but the work is best remembered for its second section, the description of an industrious twelfthcentury reformer, Abbot Samson, as drawn from the pages of his chronicler, Jocelin of Brakelond. Carlyle’s study of Samson and his “Boswell” is simultaneously a chapter in the Carlylean mythography of hero worship and a serious meditation on how to read a medieval text. Folded into the larger time dialectic of the work as a whole, Book 2 transforms Past and Present from a “political tract” (as Emerson initially calls it) into an unclassifiable mixture of contemporary polemic, medieval historiography, and political prophecy. “The book makes great approaches to true contemporary history,” Emerson writes, “a very rare success, and firmly holds up to daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and European system.”16 Like the conservative historical critiques with which it has much in common, Past and Present questions the dogmas of progress by juxtaposing contem-

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porary illth to the health of earlier times. Carlyle was not Pugin, however—a man whose métier as well as his faith permitted him to dream of resurrecting the past in a much more literal fashion. There is a sense, it is true, in which Carlyle’s hero worship looks like a return to the typological thinking of the Middle Ages—the work might have been called “The Old Samson and the New”—but a more accurate analogue might be Renaissance “mirror of princes” literature, with its assumption that constitutional structures are secondary when compared to the moral education of the magistrate. Carlyle’s political myth is grafted onto a sense of history too complex in its motions to allow for any simple idea of revival. The “new Puritans” Carlyle tells Emerson he is longing for cannot be the strict descendants of Cromwell’s seventeenth-century veterans, much less of Samson’s twelfth-century monks. Rather, as products of new struggles inconceivable either to Jocelin or Ludlow, they must emerge out of a whole new “phasis” (as Carlyle likes to say) of social life. Samson is the perfect governor for his times. As Carlyle repeatedly emphasizes, he is “a practical Abbot,” a hard-working reformer, a careful planner, a jealous guardian of the rights of his abbey, Bury St. Edmunds. Most of all, Samson has the outer quiet and strong inward convictions requisite to a man who would guide others. “Our new Abbot has a right honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or flutter, of what he is and what others are.” To modern eyes, Samson seems a man whose nature is more practical than spiritual. But in Samson this worldliness is another kind of devotion—not the self-conscious questioning and everlasting doubts of modern Methodism, but the genuine faith of an age when true worship is accomplished by honest labor. Indeed, Samson’s silence about religion is the best sign of health in his religious life. His faith is both ordinary and deep. It is “like his daily bread to him”: something which he does not need to talk much about, but feeds upon when needed. This is the character of the Catholicism of the twelfth century, Carlyle concludes, “something like the Ism of all true men in all true centuries, I fancy! Alas, compared with any of the Isms current in these poor days, what a thing!”17 More particulars could be given to fill out the portrait of Samson as a governor of men, but enough has been said to show what Carlyle finds “worthy of note” in the life of the twelfth-century abbot. Just how we are to take note, on the other hand, remains much more difficult to specify. It was one thing for Renaissance orators to glorify Roman models, but quite another when a succession of Enlightenment and Romantic historians had put the past beyond direct imitation by demonstrating that customs, manners, and tradition vary from age to age. One thing to exalt biography when the model was Plutarch, quite

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another when the biographer repeatedly invoked was that hero-worshiping anecdotalist of private life James Boswell. Samson is the hero of Carlyle’s story, but its narrative takes shape around the presence of Jocelin, the indispensable but eccentric mediator whose wayward attention simultaneously promises and frustrates every desire for a closer engagement with his times. “Truly it is no easy matter to get across the chasm of Seven Centuries . . . But here, of all helps, is not a Boswell the welcomest; even a small Boswell?” Jocelin is indeed a lesser Boswell—both his book and its hero are built on a smaller scale—and as a witness to the times he is often sketchy, intermittent, and gossipy. Nonetheless, this obscure monk, whose chronicle had only recently been published when Carlyle seized upon it, seemed to possess just that naïve simplicity that Romantic historians valued in chronicles. He is “an ingenious and ingenuous, a cheery-hearted, innocent, yet withal shrewd, noticing, quick-witted man,” Carlyle writes in praise of Jocelin; “and from under his monk’s cowl has looked out on that narrow section of the world in a really human manner.”18 In a work of fiction, Jocelin might be nothing more than a narrative device. But for Carlyle—a historian of consciousness rather than materialities, despite his protestations about “Work”—it is essential that there be a human presence mediating the remoteness of the historical past. Everything that we know (or cannot know) about Abbot Samson reflects the presence of Jocelin, this less than perfect witness to his times. “Jocelin is weak and garrulous, but he is human. Through the thin watery gossip of our Jocelin, we do get some glimpses of that deep-buried Time; discern veritably, though in a fitful intermittent manner, these antique figures and their life-method, face to face.”19 Carlyle is determined to avoid the romantic touches of conventional medievalism. His Samson is worldly and clear-sighted—“a practical Abbot.”20 His Jocelin, gossipy and garrulous, is at best only a “small Boswell.” His monks— conniving, troublesome, backbiting—are nothing like the creatures described by writers of Gothic fiction. But individuality or eccentricity of detail is not really the issue, which lies in the simple, stern message that the past is not to be treated as a projection of the present, as a figment of its need for the ideal or the imaginative. “The ‘imaginative faculties’? ‘Rude poetic ages’? The ‘primeval poetic element.’ Oh, for God’s sake, good reader, talk no more of all that! It was a Reality, and it is one.”21 It was, we might add in clarification, a separate reality, not easily aligned with modernity. Much emphasis, therefore, is placed on the opacities obstructing our comprehension of the past: the utterly changed conditions that make it so difficult to imagine life lived along very different lines, as well as the lacunae

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or inarticulacies that make Jocelin seem as frustratingly distanced as he is indispensably necessary. The monks are like prehistoric fossils, human “Mastodons” or “Stegosauruses,” creatures of an era long since buried and never to be revived. “Will not the reader peep with us into this singular camera lucida, where an extinct species, though fitfully, can still be seen alive?”22 Jocelin himself, however, is not a mute fossil, but a living soul and a writer, and in many ways it is his humanity that produces the most severe difficulties as well as the greatest rewards. Historian that he is, Jocelin has views of his own about what is noteworthy about his age. Why is it, Carlyle complains, that we know so little of King John, signatory of Magna Carta, since John spent two entire weeks under Jocelin’s eye at St. Edmundsbury? “Jocelin marks down what interests him;” Carlyle observes, “entirely deaf to us.”23 The separation is immense, but not finally absolute. When we stare into the dimly lit world opened up by the pages of Jocelin’s chronicle, here and there “some real figure is seen moving . . . whom we could hail if he would answer;—and we look into a pair of eyes deep as our own, imaging our own, but all unconscious of us; to whom we, for the time, are become as spirits and invisible!”24 This striking reversal by which the living medieval past thrusts the nineteenthcentury present into ghostly futurity expresses a powerful theme of Carlyle’s historical imagination. The past, Carlyle repeatedly assures us, so near to being irrecoverable, is at the same time utterly real and present to itself, and whatever slight possibility remains to later ages of seeing into it again must begin by recognizing that it too was once a living world. This is perhaps the largest lesson Carlyle asks us to contemplate: that there was a past, unlike our own time in almost every way, but just as real to itself as this time is to us. To juxtapose these two realities is not to make them blend into one—that would be giving in to romance—but to force us to stare into the spaces between. SOUTHEY’S “COLLOQUIES”

“The last time I saw Southey was on an evening at Taylor’s,” Carlyle recollected. “We sat on the sofa together; our talk was long and earnest; topic ultimately the usual one, steady approach of democracy, with revolution (probably explosive), and a finis incomputable to man—steady decay of all morality, political, social, individual, this once noble England getting more and more ignoble and untrue in every fibre of it. Our perfect consent [made] the dialogue copious and pleasant.”25 There is something engagingly self-parodying in this listing of well-practiced conservative attitudes, as the two earnest doomsayers pass a pleasant evening sharing a sofa.

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The affinities between the two men seem clearest when Past and Present is brought together with Southey’s Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829). Ideologically, the two works share common ground, especially a powerful anger against the horrific social conditions of early industrial England and a scornful view of the economic orthodoxies that justify such cruelties under the guise of Malthusian or Smithian science. Formally, too, there is an obvious analogy between Southey’s imaginary dialogue with the ghost of Sir Thomas More and Carlyle’s strenuous effort to inhabit the alien world of Jocelin. However, if we examine the uses of contrast in each, significant differences emerge in the ways the two works juxtapose past and present. Southey worked on the Colloquies off and on through much of the 1820s, a time dominated by agitation over Catholic emancipation and electoral reform—both of which Southey vehemently opposed. As early as 1820 he reported that he had made a good beginning. “I have just finished the introduction to such a book as is wanted—a full statement of the existing diseases of society, with a view of the consequences etc. You know how much this has been in my thoughts, and I think I have chosen a good form for rendering it more effectual and more attractive than if it appeared as a direct political essay.” Southey claimed the Consolations of Philosophy as his inspiration, but he also acknowledged that the model would be hard to detect in his finished product.26 The historical intention, in any case, was quite clear. More had lived in the “age of the restoration of letters,” of the beginnings of printing, and of the upheavals of the Reformation. By tracing “the consequences of these things . . . and drawing the parallel between that age and this,” Southey hoped to draw out some important “home truths.” His motto consists of three words taken from St. Bernard (ones that could as easily have served Carlyle): “Respice, aspice, prospice”— Look to the past, look to the present, look to the future!—“and upon this text I hope to preach a stirring sermon.”27 Carlyle’s “contemporary history” (as Emerson calls Past and Present) belongs to no established genre, but the Colloquies loosely continues the classical and early modern tradition of dialogues of the dead—a genre most prominently represented at this time by the “imaginary conversations” of Southey’s friend, Walter Savage Landor.28 With his penchant for travel writing and other relatively relaxed forms of description, Southey moves the genre toward a more naturalistic convention (if talking to a ghost can be regarded as naturalistic). Here, one of the speakers is still alive (and, though given a Spanish name— “Montesinos”—he is clearly a proxy for the author). The two men meet companionably in a variety of well-specified settings. Some of their encounters take place out of doors, accompanied by a good deal of picturesque description of

Plate 1. Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. Oil on canvas, 152.6 × 214.5 cm. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Transfer from the Canadian War Memorials, 1921 (Gift of the 2nd Duke of Westminster, England, 1918). Photo © NGC.

Plate 2. Paul Delaroche, Cromwell ouvrant le cercueil de Charles Ier, 1831. Musée des Beaux Arts, Nîmes / The Bridgeman Art Library. © Pierre Schwartz.

Plate 3. Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up, 1838, 1839. Oil on canvas, 91 × 122 cm. Turner Bequest, 1856. © The National Gallery, London.

Plate 4. Ford Madox Brown, Cromwell on His Farm, 1873–74. Oil on canvas, 143 × 104.3 cm. LL3641. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool. Courtesy National Museums Liverpool.

Plate 5. Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, 1852–55. Oil on panel, 82.5 × 75 cm. Courtesy Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

Plate 6. Gavin Hamilton, The Death of Lucretia (The Oath of Brutus), 1763–67. Oil on canvas, 213.4 × 264.2 cm. Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Plate 7. Benjamin West, Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus, 1768. Oil on canvas, 163.8 × 240 cm. 1947.16. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Louis M. Rabinowitz.

Plate 8. John Singleton Copley, The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782, 1783. Oil on canvas, 302 × 762 cm. Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London.

Plate 9. Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Field of Waterloo, exhibited 1818. Oil on canvas, support, 147.3 × 238.8 cm. Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856, Tate Collection. © Tate, London 2011.

Plate 10. David Wilkie, Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch, 1822. Apsley House, The Wellington Museum, London (Trustees of the V&A). © English Heritage Photo Library.

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the Lake District. Others are staged in Montesinos’s library, permitting the scholar-poet to evoke the literary pleasures that come from rambling through his own well-stocked shelves. Southey took considerable pride in the “lighter matter” which softened the austerity of the dialogue form, but he was deeply offended by the suggestion of his publisher, John Murray, that the book might be more successful if it gave more space to entertainment and less to controversy.29 In fact the easy conversation and naturalistic settings are not irrelevant to the broad question of how well the Colloquies evoke a historical past. Beginning with Southey’s earliest readers, critics have complained that Southey’s dialogues fall flat because there is no real tension between the two speakers. In a famous attack, Macaulay refers to the dialogue as a conversation “between two Southeys, equally eloquent, equally angry, equally unreasonable, and equally given to talking about what they do not understand.”30 Similarly, though a little more temperately, a reviewer for the Monthly Review writes that Southey has “merely adopted the appearance of dialogue. The interlocutors . . . fall almost immediately into the same strain; and rather relieve each other as they happen alternately to be out of breath, (if this may be said of a ghost).” What is the point, the reviewer complains, of bringing back from the dead “the spirit of one of the wisest men that England has ever produced,” merely to make him a kind of “stalking horse?”31 The dialogue would certainly be livelier if Montesinos and More could be brought to quarrel, but the complaint misses one of the central ideas of the book. The close identification between the two speakers (and hence the partial elision of their two historical periods) rests upon Southey’s claim to a special likeness between himself and the man who wrote the Utopia. On his first appearance, the spirit reveals that he has selected the poet for the single purpose of speaking to him about the present condition of England—“these portentous and monster-breeding times.” It is your fate, More insists, as it had been his own, “to live during one of the grand climacterics of the world. And I come to you, rather than to any other person, because you have been led to meditate upon the corresponding changes whereby your age and mine are distinguished.”32 “We have both speculated,” says the ghost of More, “in the joy and freedom of our youth upon the possible improvement of society; and both in like manner have lived to dread with reason the effects of that restless spirit, which . . . insults Heaven and disturbs the earth.”33 Both men, in short, have learned important lessons from the experience of failed ideals—a fact that makes Southey a “fit person” to receive the message brought by Utopia’s author. But Southey also claims to share in More’s historical lineage, since the revolutions of his own day can be traced back to forces that had their origin in More’s lifetime.

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“By comparing the great operating causes in the age of the Reformation and in this age of revolutions,” More insists, “going back to the former age, looking at things as I then beheld them . . . which are now developing their whole tremendous power, you will derive instruction, which you are a fit person to receive and communicate.”34 Clearly Southey approaches the traditions linking past and present in a spirit quite different from Carlyle, who emphasizes the discontinuity between the two eras and the opacities that complicate historical understanding. Fewer barriers, it seems, separate Southey from the times of Thomas More. On the contrary, Southey argues that there is a strong analogy between the two periods and that lines of continuity link them to one another. “This age is as climacteric as that in which [More] lived,” he writes to Landor, in explaining once again the plan of the book; “in fact we are beginning now to perceive the whole effects of the three great events of his age—the invention of printing, the Reformation, and the discovery of America.”35 Equally, Southey’s choice of More as a ghostly interlocutor has the effect of bringing the past right up on stage—or at least into his library and familiar environs. Not, like Jocelin, a remote and often frustratingly elusive witness, More is a lively ghost who is always willing to speak his mind, and the consonance of the dialogue’s two voices—the past chiming in with the present—means that the ideological summons is generally consistent. Little exegetical effort, in short, is required to bring the past to life, only the patience to wait for the ghost’s next appearance. In Carlyle, the stubborn limitations of the mediating witness lend drama to the process of discovery, but may also leave us uncertain about how to work with the fragmentary understanding we have acquired. In Southey, the reverse obtains. Despite any number of well-calculated references to Sir Thomas’s life and works, Southey’s More is not so much a historical figure as a convenient fiction. The resulting concordance of opinions gives Southey’s reading of British history a consistent ideological voice, but the gain in clarity comes at the cost of historical conviction. What Southey sacrifices by his strategy emerges more clearly when we compare the ghostly More of the Colloquies to the same figure as he is presented in another of Southey’s works of the same period, The Book of the Church (1824). Southey wrote this polemical defense of the Protestant Church in part to glorify the heroes of the Reformation. Names like Wycliffe, Tindal, and Latimer, he argues, should be as well known to Englishmen as Blake or Nelson.36 In this company, Thomas More, persecutor of Protestant heretics, is necessarily a problematic figure, as Southey fully acknowledges: “Sir Thomas More is represented, by the Protestant Martyrologists as a cruel persecutor,” Southey writes;

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“by Catholics as a blessed martyr. Like some of his contemporaries, he was both. But the character of this illustrious man deserves a fairer estimate than has been given it, either by his adorers or his enemies. It behooves us ever to bear in mind, that while actions are always to be judged by the immutable standard of right and wrong, the judgment which we pass upon men must be qualified by considerations of age, country, situation, and other incidental circumstances.” The portrait that springs from this beginning is more even-handed and responsible in its sense of history than anything to be found in the dialogues. In any other age, Southey argues, More would have ranked among the wisest and best of men. “One generation earlier, he would have appeared as a precursor of the Reformation, and perhaps have delayed it by procuring the correction of grosser abuses, and thereby rendering its necessity less urgent. One generation later, and his natural place would have been in Elizabeth’s Council, among the pillars of the State, and the founders of the Church of England. But the circumstances wherein he was placed were peculiarly unpropitious to his disposition, his happiness, and even his character in aftertimes.”37 In keeping with its polemical intentions, the Book of the Church seldom makes room for subtlety or complexity, but this is one of its best moments—and nothing like it is to be found in the portrait of More in the Colloquies. RICHARD WHATELY’S “HISTORIC DOUBTS”

None of the historical works we have looked at so far quite prepares us for the reversals of past and present performed by Richard Whately—Oxford don, professor of political economy, and later archbishop of Dublin. As an author, Whately is remembered for some occasional literary essays, as well as his Elements of Logic (1826) and Elements of Rhetoric (1828), but as a younger man he published an anonymous satiric tract called Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819). The title echoes Horace Walpole’s Historic Doubts on Richard the Third (1760), a witty refutation of Shakespeare’s play, but Whately’s target is Hume’s essay Of Miracles—a masterpiece of Enlightenment skepticism. Contra Walpole, Whately’s “doubts” focus on the most recent and best documented chapter in European history, the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. First published anonymously only four years after Waterloo and subsequently elaborated in a series of editions, the work purports to question the historical evidence for the life of the French emperor, then exiled in Elba. Deftly parodying Hume’s genially skeptical arguments, Whately explores a range of reasons why a man of common sense and independent mind might want to question the evidence for so much of what news and rumor attributed to this oversized hero. By

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Hume’s test of truth to experience, a great deal of Napoleon’s life must surely be fiction. Just consider the inconsistencies in the reports of his military exploits, the contradictory assessments of his character, and the flagrant self-interest of newspapers, our major source of information. Suspicion must also fall on the convenient circumstances of the exile, which ensures that “Bonaparte” is isolated on a remote island where no credible authority can speak to him, followed later by the even more convenient report of his death. And behind it all, there is the sheer unlikelihood of such extraordinary events, evidently belonging to the realm of romance rather than of fact: All the events are great, and splendid, and marvelous; great armies, great victories, great frosts, great reverses, “hair-breadth ’scapes” . . .—everything happening in defiance of political calculation and in opposition to the experience of past times. . . . Every event, too, has that roundness and completeness which is so characteristic of fiction; nothing is done by halves; we have complete victories, total overthrows, entire subversion of empires, perfect re-establishments of them, crowded upon us in rapid succession.38

So improbable is all this, Whately concludes, applying Hume’s test for the credibility of testimony, that anybody “not ignorant of history and human nature” surely must wonder “how far they are conformable to Experience, our best and only sure guide.” Whately’s satire on Humean skepticism cleverly estranges the recent past in order to retrieve the historical reality of an ancient one—the past of the Gospels and of the early Church. In this sense, Historic Doubts works in the opposite direction to so much Romantic historiography, whose first impulse is to overcome skepticism by evoking an atmosphere of belief in the most direct and palpable way. Unlike Pugin or Southey, Whately does not attempt to draw the “age of faith” nearer. Rather, while maintaining an apparent affective and ideological detachment, he makes historical testimony itself the subject of historical inquiry, and in the undeniable reality of the life of Napoleon, he finds a way of questioning the “evidential paradigm” by which modern skeptics put narratives of the early Church beyond the credence of history.39

VISUALITY AND CONTRAST: THE CASE OF HISTORY PAINTING

It would be possible to add other titles to this short survey of early nineteenthcentury narratives built on a framework of comparison or disjunction. Southey’s Lake District variant on the dialogue of the dead, for example, might be paired with John Galt’s curious adaptation of the legend of the Wandering Jew—a

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figure who, in this odd marriage of Gothic frame-tale and fictive eyewitness report, is condemned to wander in eternity through the textbook of world history.40 Similarly, the distinctive shape of Past and Present finds an echo in the double narrative of Charles Knight’s The Old Printer and the Modern Press (1855), though here the juxtaposition of medieval and modern is a vehicle for a message of progress rather than corruption.41 And Whately’s brilliant parody of Hume is paralleled in Cornwall Lewis’s Egyptological Method, an amusing take-off on Niebuhr’s speculative treatment of the legends of early Rome.42 But even allowing for a small number of additions—some (like Galt’s) little more than gimmicky experiments and none having the moral seriousness or literary vigor of the principal examples—we would be left with a small and sometimes eccentric body of work. A brief return to Pugin suggests a more profitable avenue. It is testimony to Pugin’s reliance on visual argument that his title seems perfectly chosen. In fact, the sharp fold of pictorial comparison gives the book its distinctive structure; otherwise, the accompanying text proceeds in the largely linear fashion that is customary in historical writing. Remove Pugin’s drawings, in short, and we have something like Cobbett’s diatribe against the social effects of Protestantism in his History of the Reformation in England (1829), or (to take the other side) Southey’s anti-Catholic polemics in his Book of the Church.43 All three books are polemical and all three make the Reformation the hinge of English history. Only Contrasts expresses this view in its formal structure—and then by dint of visual, not verbal narrative.44 As a formal device, contrast is more easily managed in visual images than in verbal texts, with the result that visual contrast is employed across a wider spectrum than its textual cousin. Language seldom produces the quick impact belonging to visual contrast. The slow-paced, cumulative structures of language lend themselves better to dialogue or irony than to the outright oppositions of Pugin’s engravings. Nor is it easy to imagine a writer of Pugin’s temperament carrying out a double-columned verbal comparison that would not dissolve into mere caricature. Pugin could draw a modern house front in full detail, but he would have been hard put to describe one with anything like the same sense of completeness he gave his plates. Pugin’s work drew upon long traditions of paired or contrastive images. Pagan themes like “Sacred and Profane Love” would not have appealed, nor baroque equivalents like “Martha and Mary.” But Pugin’s Catholic spirit might have found an appropriate ancestry in the typological pairings of the Middle Ages (“Christ and the Old Adam,” for example) or perhaps the grandly contrastive scene of the Last Judgment. (Pugin himself alludes to this tradition in one

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of the plates: They Are Weighed in the Balance and Found Wanting.) As a visual satirist, he could have found indirect inspiration among the printmakers of a more recent period, for whom contrast imagery was a useful device, whether the point was to compare French tyranny and English liberty or to attack the two-facedness of well-known politicians.45 Often, however, contrast has less to do with the visual image alone than with a deliberate incongruity between title and image. Witness Gillray’s Dido in Despair (1801) in which a comically plump Emma Hamilton wails by a window as Nelson sets sail in the background, leaving his Queen of Carthage to her lamentations. This masterpiece of snobbery is an inversion of Reynolds’s fashionable portraits in which the painter dressed his women as literary characters or Muses.46 Gillray’s comedy centers on the unfortunate mistress made to seem preposterous by the cruel contrast with high-flown Virgilian passions, as though the comparison were proposed by the famously histrionic heroine herself. Had Gillray moved Nelson to the center, the comedy might have pointed elsewhere, its ironies aimed at the fickleness of heroes, or the artistic pretensions of the “grand style.”

Fig. 6.3. A. W. N. Pugin, They Are Weighed in the Balance and Found Wanting. In Pugin, Contrasts.

Fig. 6.4. James Gillray, Old England, New France: The Contrast, or Things as They Are, 1796. Colored etching. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

Fig. 6.5. James Gillray, Dido in Despair! 1801. Colored etching. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history painting, contrast serves as a counterpart to the aesthetic requirement for formal unity. Neoclassicism’s distaste for multiframed narratives (still occasionally used by Hogarth or Highmore) means that time must be collapsed into a single moment, pregnant not only with the causes and consequences of the action, but also with its full range of emotional and ideological meanings. This degree of compression calls for considerable artistic resources, among them the energies generated by playing off relations of similarity and difference. Here is where contrastive strategies come to the fore. Youth and age, male and female, human and animal, engagement and detachment—these and similar pairings offer ways to animate the visual narrative and give it the formal complexity expected of the grand style. As history painting begins to acquire its modern meaning of the painting of history (see Chapter 8 below), contrast also becomes a way of suggesting the passage of historical time. A case in point is Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (1770) (plate 1), where the dying hero is paired with the grandly impassive image of the Indian—an exotic observer detached from the action, yet a figure whose place in the composition seems as crucial as that of the general himself. (If proof is needed, compare James Barry’s rendering of the same scene, where the Indian, now dead, lies prone at the very front of the picture, a casualty of war rather than a lasting symbol and witness.) The lamentations of the British officers render Wolfe’s death a quasi-religious sacrifice, but West’s Indian shows no such signs. On the contrary, his calm gaze testifies to the way in which an aboriginal warrior would expect to confront his end—not with European sensibilities, but with the stoic bravery of the original possessors of this continent. In short, like a symbolic image on an old map, the Indian is there to tell us this is America and that the young general’s death is all the more pathetic for being a sacrifice made so far from home. But as the painter sees it, something else is taking place under the quiet scrutiny of the native warrior. What is witnessed is not just a brave man’s death (the white men see that too), but the transfer of power in the northern continent, the passing of one way of life and the beginning of another. Like the Death of Wolfe, Paul Delaroche’s searching image of Cromwell Opening the Coffin of Charles I (1831) (plate 2) creates an idea of epochal change around a figure caught in a moment of silent reflection. In this depiction of Cromwell standing in sober contemplation of the body of his enemy, the elements of contrast are stark and insistent: the quick and the dead, the victor and the victim, England’s dynastic past and its parliamentary future. (Indeed, since Delaroche looked back to England’s revolution from the perspective of postrevolutionary France, it is not Britain alone whose history rests in the bal-

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Fig. 6.6. James Barry, The Death of General Wolfe, 1776. Oil on canvas support, 148.1 × 239.1 cm. New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, New Brunswick.

ance.) Cromwell is the protagonist of this story, but shown in a bare setting that leaves him alone with the corpse, he becomes a figure of thought rather than of action—a mute witness to history’s meaning. Earlier portraitists had resorted to emblems to illuminate Cromwell’s notoriously closed character, but in keeping with the realism of his age, Delaroche rejects symbolic devices for a psychological portrait that is more difficult to parse.47 Much of the painting’s impact rests on just this absence of verbal or visual clues to Cromwell’s cast of mind, so that Cromwell’s private thoughts become the true subject of the work. And yet, if there is no way to know what Cromwell is thinking, it is plain that he has no choice but to continue along the path he has chosen, both for himself and for his country. In the stillness of this moment, it seems that Cromwell holds both past and future in his mind, but so too does the artist, for whom the figure of the English regicide is by now a twice-mediated presence.48 Great figures like Cromwell or Wolfe were the natural focus of the “grand style,” leaving smaller lives and private experience as the mark of subordinate genres. From this point of view, genre-contrast is built into any painting of common life—by virtue of theme or formal complexity—that bids to be read as a “history.” David Wilkie made a pioneering move in this direction with the Village Politicians (1806) (figure 8.14), but far more boldly in his Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1822) (plate 10). As the first news of the

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Fig. 6.7. John Landseer and Jagger after Robert Smirke, Portrait of Oliver Cromwell. n.d. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings (in the Line Manner) by the First Artists in the Country, Illustrative of the History of England, Comprizing Historical Subjects, Portraits, Naval and Military Engagements, Ruins of Ancient Castles, Coins, Medals, &c. &c. (London: Printed for the Proprietor, R. Bowyer, 80, Pall Mall; by T. Bensley, Bolt Court, Fleet Street, 1812). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

victory is read out to a diverse group of old soldiers—each one identified by his colors and uniform—Wilkie displaces the scene of painting from action to reception and from history to memory. (See Chapter 8 below.) On a more intimate scale, the Irish painter William Mulready accomplishes something similar in his Convalescent from Waterloo (1822). Though conceived on a far more intimate scale than Wilkie’s painting, Mulready’s depiction of a soldier’s

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Fig. 6.8. William Mulready, R.A., The Convalescent from Waterloo, 1822. Oil on panel, 60.5 × 76.9 cm. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Bequeathed by John Jones, 1882.

family is equally successful in suggesting how ordinary lives are drawn into the flow of history. And if the unself-conscious wrestling of the boys on the beach is a foil for the melancholy thoughts of the adults, so too is the contrast between the quiet English seaside and the memory of an unseen battlefield in Belgium.49 Turner’s Fighting Temeraire (1839) is one of many nineteenth-century narratives in which contrastiveness takes the form of compressing past and future within a carefully chosen moment (plate 3). This is not the place for an extended discussion of Turner’s famous image of the passing of the age of sail, nor is it easy to break through the fog of familiarity that surrounds “Britain’s favourite painting.” Perhaps it will help a little to think of it not only as a companion to Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844)50 or Peace—Burial at Sea (1842),51 but also as the most complete fulfillment of the possibilities projected by Pugin’s title.52 And as in Carlyle’s use of the same contrastive device, the juxtaposition of this onceproud wooden battleship with the smudgy presence of the coal-fired tug directs

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Fig. 6.9. Ford Madox Brown, The Last of England, 1852–55, detail. Oil on panel, 82.5 × 75 cm. Courtesy Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

us neither to the “isolated horizon of the present in itself” (as Gadamer calls it), nor to its supposed counterpart in the past. Instead, the Temeraire calls our attention to an in-between state that forms a necessary part of both horizons. The ease with which visual images lend themselves to comparison seems to pay off in a greater range and adaptability of contrast-effects. In visual narrative, sentiment seems as natural as polemic, earnestness as irony. For nineteenthcentury history painting, one important consequence lies in the invitation that contrast extends to narratives of change—especially those expressions of transformed understanding or awakening feeling which are the hallmarks of Victo-

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rian art. Such scenes are as often domestic as historical, but when the awakened mind belongs to a distracted Oliver Cromwell inspired by a sacred text,53 or even an anonymous pair of impoverished emigrants, staring out to sea and an unknowable future, the result can be a powerful new manner of suggesting the movements of history. Ford Madox Brown’s Cromwell on His Farm (1873–74) and The Last of England (1852–55) present history in two quite different settings, but in both pictures the blank gazes of the protagonists project a sense of an inner state wholly disconnected from the surroundings (plates 4 and 5). Cromwell on His Farm is a conversion narrative in which the major contrast lies between the calling taking hold of the mind of the hero and the this-worldly bustle of life on his farm. In The Last of England, only half of the contrast is shown, but the receding coast of England signals the depressed thoughts welling up behind the staring eyes of the emigrant couple. Hidden too is a young child, whose tiny hand is just visible under the mother’s cloak.54 For all their thematic differences, the two paintings share a common aesthetic. The principal figures remain isolated behind a pane of glassy silence, while the thoughtless energies of common life loose themselves in a centrifuge of restless detail. Like any countercurrent, the polemical contrastiveness of Carlyle or Pugin has to be read against the dominant modes of its age. The nineteenth century is remembered as one of the great ages of narrative history—a reputation that has a great deal to do with the continuing belief in history as a continuous and fully plotted story. Many things came together to reinforce this view, most especially the call of nationalist ideologies, whose faith in the continuities of time, space, and tradition deeply informed historical thought. Indeed, it is clear that narrative historiography was a force for the creation of modern nationhood as much as a publicist for its victories. History’s nearest competitor in this respect was the historical novel, but this rivalry only serves to confirm the premise that— whether dressed as fiction or fact—history would naturally take the form of a totalizing narrative. In a long view, however, history’s identification with linear narrative reaches much farther back than the century of Hallam and Macaulay. Nineteenthcentury historians could summon a long line of ancestors to lend prestige to the writings of their own age. For an era so conscious of its own modernity, to write historical narrative under the eye of Thucydides and Livy was to hope that the greatness of modern nations might be preserved as long as the memory of the ancients. By the same token, writers who despised the comforts of the dominant school saw contrastiveness as a sharp-pointed instrument that might puncture the complacencies of Whiggery and estrange the ideology of progress.

7

“THE VERY WEB AND TEXTURE OF SOCIETY AS IT REALLY EXISTS”: LITERARY HISTORY IN HISTORIOGRAPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

It may, however, be observed, that in civil history, there is to be found a much greater uniformity than in the history of learning and science, and that the wars, negociations, and politics of one age resemble more those of another, than the taste, wit, and speculative principles. —Hume, “Of Eloquence,” 1742 Whoever has lived long enough to compare one race of men with that which has preceded it, will have observed a change, not only in the tastes and habitudes of common life, but in the fashion of their studies, and their course of their general reading. Books influence manners; and manners, in return, influence the taste for books. —Anna Barbauld, Preface to The Spectator, 1804 From the romance we learn what they were; from history what they did; and were we to be deprived of one of these two kinds of information, it might well be made a question, which is most useful or interesting. —Scott, “Southey’s Amadis of Gaul,” 1803

The wonder child among historical genres today is surely the history of science, but until a generation ago (roughly the legacy of Thomas Kuhn) this glamorous offspring of two very different disciplines seemed barely historical at all.1 Something similar could be said of the flowering of literary-historical writing circa 1800, another hybridized historical genre that historians have largely

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been content to ignore. Our business as historians, it seems to be agreed, is with law, politics, and economy, leaving the double helix of literary tradition to those better trained in its elegant mysteries. This self-denying ordinance seems a pity, since historiography can bring illuminations of its own to the intensification of literary-historical interests circa 1800. Historical appetites as well as poetic ones stimulated a fascination with the national past as depicted in Jacobean dramas or early Georgian novels. But it was not the subject matter alone that attracted the attention of readers. In an epoch when historians were increasingly drawn to everyday worlds and private lives, literary writings offered access to dimensions of historical experience that were difficult to capture by other means. Above all, what literary history offered was an appeal to sensibilities more immediately engaged with thoughts and feelings than with the traditional narrative of action—history redistanced for a sentimental age. To approach literary history from this direction requires a wider view of historical writing as well as of literature itself. But as I suggested in the introduction, history should be thought of as circles of overlapping and competing genres that collectively make up the full family of historical representation. Such groupings, of course, are never static. Time brings new interests and transforms old ones, producing changes not only on the level of individual genres, but also in the shape of the whole configuration. This mobility—especially among the so-called “minor genres”—has great historical significance, since it is often an index to the pressures exerted by new audiences. Free of the burden of ancient decorum, the “minor” genres possess the flexibility to question existing conventions and explore new areas of engagement with the past. The result is a fascinating game of maneuver, in which the alleged limitations of the older, more prestigious form (sometimes called “History”) serves as a foil for the selfdefinitions of the new.2 From a historiographical perspective, the distinctive feature of literary history was its privileged access to private experience. This engagement with everyday worlds is crucial because it aligns literary history with the historical horizons of the long eighteenth century. Hume, Smith, Ferguson, and a host of others had broadened the scope of history in ways that made the exclusively public concerns of the classical tradition seem narrow and superficial. The result was a growing recognition that historical change is not confined to the fall of kings or the rise of empires. On the contrary, a ceaseless current works its way through the most commonplace features of language, custom, and manners, with consequences that seem all the more compelling because they are nearly silent. Literary history was not alone in seeking ways to speak about experiences that are intrinsically reticent to narrativization. From the erudite speculations of the

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philosophical historian to humble chronicles of daily life in Scottish parishes, writers grappled with the difficulty of giving shape to a historical sensibility no longer bounded by public transactions. Of all the available witnesses to times past, however, literary lives and literary texts provided the most comprehensive articulation of private experience, permitting an approach to inwardness that to this day remains one of the elusive prizes of historical description. THE VERSATILITY OF LITERARY HISTORY

The attractions of literary history from a historiographical point of view are bound up with the close associations among literature, manners, and what Hume calls “opinion.” In his Specimens of the Early English Poets (1790, 1803), for example, George Ellis cites manners as the chief reason for the popularity of travel narratives, but he adds that readers would find still more to interest them in the poetry of their own ancestors.3 A later poetic anthology, Thomas Campbell’s Specimens of the British Poets (1819), draws a similar response from Francis Jeffrey. Nothing, Jeffrey writes, could be more delightful than the chance to trace the progress of poetry through all its stages, “coloured as it is in every age by the manners of the times which produce it.” Since poetry is “conversant with all that touches human feelings, concerns, and occupations,” its character has been impressed “by every chance in the moral and political condition of society.” Much like the physical world around us, poetry carries with it the “traces” of the amusements and pursuits of the people.4 Jeffrey’s suggestion is that poetry is a kind of immaterial landscape, a topography even more subtle and responsive to all the accidents of human manners, morals, and occupations. Poetry is not unique, however, as a register of changing social experience. In another place, Jeffrey offers a long list of genres that, more effectively than “regular history,” convey a picture of manners and daily life. For earlier ages, these include chivalric romances, chronicles, Shakespeare and the comic dramatists, farces and comedies, polite essays, libels, and satires, as well as private letters, memoirs, and journals. In more recent times, social habits and manners are recorded by satirical novels, caricature prints, newspapers, “and by various minute accounts (in the manner of Boswell’s Life of Johnson) of the private life and conversation of distinguished individuals.”5 As critics, Francis Jeffrey is remembered for his antipathy to the Lake poets, Hazlitt for his deep admiration. But whatever their differences in taste, the two critics agreed about the value of fiction as a record of manners. For Hazlitt, the strong attraction of novels lies in their close and realistic imitation of social life. In them (he writes) we see “the very web and texture of society as it really

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exists,” and if poetry has something more divine in it, the novel “savours more of humanity.” Considered as memorials of social life, novels cannot be matched. No “authentic” document of the period rivals Joseph Andrews as an account of the “moral, political, and religious feeling” of the time of George II.6 “This work, indeed, I take to be a perfect piece of statistics in its kind.”7 Scott, too, is strongly attracted to any form of literary and historical record that evokes the past in familiar terms: among them the medieval romance and its modern counterpart, the novel of manners. “The novels of Fielding and Richardson,” he writes in a discussion of chronicles and romances, “are even already become valuable, as a record of the English manners of the last generation. How much, then, should we prize the volumes which describe those of the era of the victors of Cressy and Poitiers.”8 Romances give us an “intimate knowledge” of another time; they tell us what “our ancestors” thought, the language they used, “their sentiments, manners, and habits.” Narratives of this sort are an essential supplement to “regular” history, but which in the end is valued the highest is difficult to say.9 Behind arguments of this kind stands a conventional image of history, portrayed as a solemn and monumental literature lacking the ease and informality of other routes to the past. The same comparison attracted lovers of literary biography, a genre that competed with “History” by devoting itself to lives valued for private thoughts rather than public actions. “No species of writing combines in it a greater degree of interest and instruction than Biography,” writes Robert Bisset in a passage that strongly evokes the language of distance. “Our sympathy is most powerfully excited by the view of those situations and passions, which, by a small effort of the imagination, we can approximate to ourselves. Hence Biography often engages our attention and affections more deeply than History.”10 Affective proximity of the kind Bisset treasures comes in part from the sympathetic character of the individual around whom the narrative is written (in this case a life of Addison), but it also seems inherent in the genre itself, with its triangular sympathies between a reader and two writers. Like other commentators, Bisset connects literary lives with the identificatory emotions belonging to sentimental reading. When we read the works of great writers, he insists, we “anxiously” desire to know the histories of those from whom we have received so much pleasure and instruction. William Godwin, similarly, thinks that identification is an essential part of the pleasures of reading. “I know not how it is with other men,” he writes; “but for myself, I never felt within me the power to disjoin a great author from his work. When I read with delight the production of any human invention, I pass irresistibly on to learn as much as I am able, of the

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writer’s personal dispositions, his temper, his actions, and the happy or unhappy fortunes he was destined to sustain.”11 No wonder that so many works included a prefatory life of the author. Plutarchan biography complements classical historiography by providing a place to chronicle the private life and character of public men. In contrast, Boswellian literary biography fashions its narrative out of lives that have little to offer in the way of eventfulness or public importance. In a sentimental culture, however, public life often seems remote unless enlivened by what journalists today call “human interest,” causing readers to seek out narratives that soliloquize inward feeling. Hence the eighteenth century’s attraction to the epistolary novel, as well as to biography in the form of the “life and letters”—the latter being an especially attractive proposition when the biographical subject is also a writer fluent in the language of the sentiments. Both of these uses of epistolarity (novelistic and biographical) are on display in Anna Barbauld’s admiring edition of the correspondence of Samuel Richardson. Barbauld is an acute analyst of the advantages and disadvantages of epistolary fiction, but she seems to be equally moved by the ordinary letters of Richardson’s wide circle of correspondents. “Nothing,” she writes with evident pleasure, “tends so strongly to place us in the midst of the generations that are past, as a perusal of their correspondence. To have their very letters, their very handwriting before our eyes, gives a more intimate feeling of their existence, than any other memorial of them.”12 Much of what was recorded in Richardson’s letters had no relationship to authorship, but there was something about literary lives that seemed to provoke sentimental interest. Even those whose connection with literature was no more than commercial might attract an extra measure of curiosity. Witness a Blackwood’s review of The Life and Errors of John Dunton, the autobiography of a London bookseller from the early years of the previous century. Despite all that had been preserved from this period, the reviewer notes, Dunton’s “indefatigable self love” succeeds in adding still more to our picture of those times. If only Dunton’s example would not be lost on his successors: “There are no other traffickers, with whose minutest and most peculiar objects of interest so large a portion of readers must at all times be found to sympathize.” The autobiography of any other tradesman would have no interest to anyone outside of his own particular calling. Yet what would be more amusing for “the great masses of the reading public in 1919 [i.e., a hundred years on] than a Sketch of the Life and Errors of William Blackwood, or Archibald Constable, or John Ballantyne, citizens of Edinburgh,—or of William Davies, or John Murray, citizens of London—written in true Duntonian fulness and freedom.”13

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REVOLUTIONS IN TASTE AND TRADITIONS

The long eighteenth century saw a marked rise in enthusiasm for the Elizabethans, balanced by a waning interest in the Augustans. This revolution in taste reflected this period’s growing interest in the literatures of earlier times, just as the reversal of literary reputations provided evidence of literature’s historicity. In point of fact, however, one needed to look no further than a library of childhood favorites to see that literature, like politics, was subject to moments of upheaval. Eighteenth-century discussions of literature seldom make much of a division between aesthetic pleasures and matters of morals and manners. Addison, for example, continues to be admired as a master of style, but his reputation as a writer is as much social as literary. Johnson, most notably, places Addison in a genealogy that begins with Castiglione and della Casa—writers now suffering neglect precisely because they succeeded in effecting “that reformation which their authors intended.” Before the appearance of the Tatler and the Spectator, however, “England had no masters of common life.” There were no writers, that is, who wrote to instruct Englishmen in the smaller sorts of duties, nor did periodicals themselves (the instruments of this reformation) predate the Civil War.14 Johnson’s narrative of the progress of manners is more fully developed in a work of the first decade of the nineteenth century, Nathan Drake’s Essays, Biographical, Critical, and Historical, Illustrative of the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian (1805). Drake is alert to the problem identified by Johnson, namely that the very success of the reformer makes it difficult for later readers to appreciate his accomplishments. Accordingly, the literary historian has to re-create the lost feeling of distantiation. In this light, Drake suggests that his own survey of literature and manners should impress the reader with an idea of the “value of the instruction which the periodical essay is calculated to afford; and will enable us, likewise, in a succeeding part of our work, clearly to ascertain to what amount we are indebted to these papers [the Tatler and Spectator] for the progress of civilization and the diffusion of learning and morality.”15 Inevitably, Johnson is one of those quoted to give authority to this picture of England’s sometime ignorance and incivility. So, even more revealingly, is the Spectator itself—a nice example of the reciprocity of literary history and manners by which the literature of another age serves to document its social history, while the same social history becomes a context for understanding its literature. The sketches drawn from such sources help Drake to revivify the historical contrasts on which his “retrospect” on English manners relies. Not content,

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however, to leave the lines of temporal recession implicit, he identifies a series of epochs leading up to the stylistic and social achievements of the periodical essayists. In keeping with the new climate of appreciation for the older English writers, he credits the age of Elizabeth with awakening the strength of the language, but (perhaps because his subject is prose rather than dramatic verse) he stops well short of the wholesale admiration with which his contemporaries were beginning to write about their Elizabethan and Jacobean forebears. For Drake, English writing only acquired a proper degree of clarity in the Restoration—a gift, he does not hesitate to say, of the Francophile tastes of the court.16 Still, much was wanting to give the language its proper sense of “systematic correctness,” as well as the force and precision that it had since attained. This improvement was the work of the period that began with the reign of Queen Anne, a time, Drake points out, when “national success and glory” had the effect of adding “fresh nerve and vigour” to literary and scientific pursuits.17 A NEW NATIONAL NARRATIVE: SOUTHEY’S “SPECIMENS”

Drake was as capable as anyone of enlivening his history with patriotic sentiments, but his view of literary progress seems essentially unaffected by the Francophobia that was rife in this age of Anglo-French hostilities. Within the same decade, however, a counternarrative began to emerge, fashioned by writers as disparate as Robert Southey and Francis Jeffrey. Their revision of the long-established outline of literary progress (of which Drake was a late representative) not only presented a strikingly different view of the stages of national literature, but also gave literary history a more overtly ideological summons. A summary of the new narrative of national tradition—compact but essentially complete—is set out in Southey’s preface to Specimens of the Later English Poets (1807). Southey presents his anthology as a continuation of Ellis’s Specimens, but in paying this compliment to the older collection, he endows the earlier volume with a new historical significance. Together, Southey asserts, the two collections “will exhibit the rise, progress, decline and revival of our Poetry, and the fluctuations of our poetical taste, from the first growth of the English language to the present times.”18 Southey’s subject is “taste,” but initially his choices are as much historical as aesthetic. “The taste of the publick may better be estimated from indifferent Poets than from good ones,” he argues. The ordinary poet writes for his own time, the great one for posterity; “Cleveland and Cowley, who were both more popular than Milton, characterise their age more truly.”19 In practice, Southey’s criteria are mixed, but he attempts to give his work consistency by imposing a

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chronological divide at the Restoration. Up to this point, his choices are largely governed by a documentary purpose; afterward, poetic merit becomes a larger factor—albeit for a revealing reason. “Those of later date must stand or fall by their own merits,” Southey argues, “because the sources of information, since the introduction of newspapers, periodical essays, and magazines are so numerous.” The student of later times, in other words, hasn’t the same need for poetry as social documentation, since by then other kinds of record play a larger part. “The Restoration is the great epoch in our annals, both civil and literary: a new order of things was then established, and we look back to the times beyond, as the Romans under the Empire, to the age of the Republick.”20 Even so, Southey’s division of literary history into two distinct epochs goes well beyond temporal distance and the accompanying scarcity of documents. The return of the Stuarts from Continental exile also marked the essential moment of decline, when a native English style gave way to foreign influence. Spurred by the energies of the Reformation, then checked in the reign of Mary, English poetry bloomed under Elizabeth “with the sudden luxuriance of an Arctick summer.”21 In the strife of the Civil War, however, poetry began to suffer, and the great age of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage left no successors. (“The nation was too busy to be amused, and we had now imbibed the barbarizing superstition of Scotland.”)22 At last, the Restoration gave the country back the tranquility required for art, but the return of Charles II proved still more damaging than civic strife had ever been. French tastes were imposed on the country of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, and though the poets who followed might be praised for their versification, their wit, or their reasoning, these things “do not constitute poetry.” In short, Southey concludes, dramatically reversing what had been the conventional narrative of progressive refinement, the “time which elapsed from the days of Dryden to those of Pope, is the dark age of English poetry.”23 Pope “was completely a Frenchman in his taste,” and yet even in Pope’s own day a “Reformation” had begun. Thomson called the nation back to the study of nature, and the growing taste for Shakespeare gradually brought “our old writers” back to notice, helped along by the good work of Warton, and especially of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry. For Southey the latter was “the great literary epocha of the present reign”—hence (even more than Ellis’s Specimens perhaps), the true begetter of Southey’s own collection.24 For all its crudity of outline, Southey’s schematization of British literary history seems too powerful to ignore. Along with a strong dose of anti-French sentiment and the talismanic name of Shakespeare, Southey’s polemical literary history carries the conviction of a completely plotted narrative. And indeed,

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within a very few years this narrative, or one quite similar, was adopted and elaborated by Jeffrey and others, becoming in many ways a conventional (and conventionally Whig) view of British literary tradition. In this context, it is worth noting that Jeffrey’s Edinburgh Review first subjected Southey’s argument to unmitigated scorn. Although this hostility ran along party lines (a matter of poetic tastes as well as political ones) the Edinburgh’s antagonism to Southey’s work illustrates something important in the period’s developing interest in literaryhistorical questions. The author of the attack on Southey was Henry Brougham, one of the mainstays of the Edinburgh and a figure as closely identified with its outlook as any contributor, excepting Francis Jeffrey himself. In reviewing the Specimens, Brougham takes his stand on the grounds of taste against those of history: “It seems to be here directly announced, that the object of the compilation is not to collect a body of valuable poetry, but to afford a key to posterity to judge of the prevailing taste of the British public.”25 In fact, Brougham argues, Southey’s selections in themselves offer no such opportunity, and he goes on to suggest that “the gentle reader of the twentieth century” will have to go to the full expense of buying “the entire works” of Dryden, Thomson, Pope, Akenside, Gray, Cowper, and the rest to remedy what is missing. Brougham is not prepared to push the tension between history and taste so far as to deny any interest in historical illustration, but he insists on the primacy of aesthetic judgment. “If the curious reader should be distressed to know the state of public taste in his father’s or his grandfather’s time, he had assuredly better trust to the good than the bad poets of the age. . . . A few instances of neglected merit, no doubt, will occur; but if he wishes to know the taste of the period of Pope, let him read Pope, not Betterton.”26 What is most striking in all this is its indifference to Southey’s representation of national history. Brougham does not attempt to refute Southey’s narrative or correct his account of the national spirit. Instead, his review turns a blind eye to the historical dimension of Southey’s work, as though it had no bearing on the Specimens’ value as a representation of the literary past. Very likely Brougham simply did not recognize what was at stake in Southey’s rewriting of the narrative of national taste. But thanks in part to the essays of Francis Jeffrey himself, it soon became impossible to overlook the mutual entanglement of literary epochs and national history.27 JEFFREY’S TWO MODES OF LITERARY HISTORY

In the early numbers of the Edinburgh Review, it was far from obvious that literary history would emerge as an important concern. The Edinburgh addressed

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a broad intelligence in the country and was generally scornful of anything that smacked of narrow antiquarian interest, including most literary-historical scholarship. All too typical was the tone of Hallam’s review of Scott’s edition of Dryden: having decried the work of Dryden’s earlier editor, Edmund Malone, as “an eminent instance of that undistinguishing collection of rubbish, which the amateurs of black letter have principally introduced,” Hallam declared that the “painful drudgery” of Malone had left Scott little to do.28 Jeffrey’s criticism often takes literary antiquarianism as its target. In reviewing Francis Douce’s Illustrations of Shakespeare, for example, he adopts a tone modern readers might associate with Edmund Wilson’s “Sins of the MLA.” Certainly the poet’s annotators had been able to provide “little odds and ends of information as to the manners and tastes of our ancestors,” Jeffrey concedes; and occasionally they are able to give a more correct idea of minor passages. “But this petty sort of antiquarianism probably is not the object of any one who takes up the volumes of Shakespeare; and the scanty elucidation which the poet now and then receives, makes us but poor amends for the quantity of trash which is obtruded upon us.” Shakespeare’s name, he complains, sanctifies everything connected to it, “and that miserable erudition” which belongs in the Gentleman’s Magazine or “some county history” is in danger of seeming more worthy when it appears as an illustration of Shakespeare’s writings.29 Similarly, Jeffrey’s early hostility to the Lake poets seems to offer little hope of a future conversion to a historical approach to literature. “Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion,” he writes in an exuberant attack on Southey’s verse: “that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.”30 But if Jeffrey continues to hold up the failings of modern poets against the standards of an inherited canon, in time the canon itself acquires an increasingly historical identity. Indeed, his need to consolidate his criticism of Wordsworth and Southey while remaining open to the achievements of other contemporaries seems to have propelled him toward the more refined and complexly historical view of English literature that becomes a marked feature of the Edinburgh in its second and third decades. The new view of English literary history that Jeffrey and other contributors begin to articulate combines two separate, but compatible programs. The first is a theory about the dilemmas of the modern poet seen as a late-born child of the Muses;31 the other is a narrative of national taste and national spirit as it develops from Elizabethan to modern times, counterpointed against the French and classical influences that dominated Restoration and Augustan England. As an occasional essayist and reviewer, Jeffrey is not compelled to systematize these two approaches, so it is hard to know how completely they come together in

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his mind. Even so, there is clearly a broad area of convergence in the idea that contemporary poets will ultimately be evaluated in terms that are informed by historical considerations, and—more particularly—that the works of the most recent generation must be read as a response to an English tradition whose essential features had taken shape in the time of Elizabeth and James I. Both parts of Jeffrey’s literary history, I want to suggest, the theory of belatedness as well as the narrative of Englishness, are open to a choice of two kinds of readings: one that holds to a relatively restricted literary focus, against another that takes into consideration his historical and historiographical interests, as discussed earlier in this chapter. In its narrower form (“Burns,” 1808), Jeffrey’s commentary on the dilemma of the “after-poets” focuses on the psychology of poetic creation and comes close to adumbrating more recent theories of the “anxiety of influence.” But a later and fuller discussion, much beholden to Hume’s speculations on “The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” moves beyond the psychology of authorship to entertain a broader consideration of the position of the arts in an advanced state of society (“Lady of the Lake,” 1810). In this new perspective, Jeffrey is less inclined to see belatedness as implying a simple loss of creativity. (The age, in fact, is “unusually prolific of original poetry.”)32 Rather, the problem is that the progress of refinement has created an almost irremediable split between popular and refined tastes. The earliest poets “may be said to have got possession of all the choice materials of their art.” But “after-poets” cannot have this same sense of ease and are put to a variety of more self-conscious strategies. Some have responded by seeking greater minuteness and fidelity in observing characters or objects, while others have crafted a more exacting analysis of a limited vein of the emotions. As a result, modern poetry has been “enriched with more exquisite pictures, and deeper and more sustained strains of the pathetic, than were known to the less elaborate artists of antiquity; at the same time that it has been defaced with more affectation, and loaded with far more intricacy.”33 This passage carries obvious echoes of Jeffrey’s critique of Wordsworth and Southey, reviving preoccupations that once stood in the way of a historical approach to literature. In the later formulation, however, something more complex is beginning to emerge, directed toward locating both the strengths and weaknesses of the early Romantic writers within a philosophical history of English sensibilities. The whole brings together Jeffrey’s developing narrative of the evolution of national taste with his Humean speculation on the effects of refinement in the arts. Jeffrey was not the first to sketch the history of English poetry in terms of the suppression and revival of a native tradition, but he did a great deal to establish

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this story as the dominant narrative of English literary history. Much of the force of his account comes from its success in combining a genealogy of successive schools of English verse with wider historical and ideological commitments, so that the history of poetry is subsumed in a narrative of national tradition.34 Thus in a pivotal essay on Jacobean drama (“Ford,” 1811), Jeffrey argues that the English love of Shakespeare is not extravagant or willful, as foreign critics like to think. It is “merely the natural love which all men bear to those forms of excellence that are accommodated to their peculiar character.”35 In attempting “to bespeak some share of favor” for those of Shakespeare’s contemporaries who had suffered neglect in an era when French tastes prevailed, “we are only enlarging that foundation of native genius on which alone any lasting superstructure can be raised, and invigorating that deep-rooted stock upon which all the perennial blossoms of our literature must still be engrafted.”36 It is not Hume alone who presides over this kind of writing. Burke seems equally present, though the contrast between their two approaches to history is as much a matter of distance as of doctrine. Rather than designing a universal inquiry on the nature of taste, Jeffrey approaches the neglected tragedies of John Ford in relation to their roots in the English language and spirit. In this context, literary history acquires a new warmth of attachment that is as much ideological as aesthetic. As the essayist “bespeaks our favor” for the dramatic works of Jacobean England, or forms his repeated contrasts between the natural and the artificial, the native and the foreign, it becomes impossible to say where “purely” literary study leaves off and where national traditions begin. It would be wrong to draw too strict a division between the relative abstraction of a Humean history of opinion and the immersive force of a Burkean evocation of tradition. Elements of both mix in many of the works of this time. (In this same essay, for example, Jeffrey speculates on the “deeper and more general causes” that spurred the invigorating effects of the Reformation, and looks to Taylor, Bacon, and Hooker, as well as to the poets.) Nonetheless, the Burkean strain is not only important in its own right; it also gives us a particularly clear example of the ideological stakes in literary mediation. For those swept along by Burke’s endlessly inventive metaphors of transmission and belonging, there could be no better way to make the past compelling than by appealing to its literary legacy. JUST BOOKS

Hume’s argument that the wars and politics of different ages are more alike than their “taste, wit, and speculative principles” is suggestive of the role that

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literary history might play amongst the genres of historical description.37 As a philosophical historian, Hume begins his inquiries by examining the degree to which different areas of life are susceptible to systematic observation. On this score the arts present considerable difficulties, since the conditions that govern their progress are often difficult to determine. The reverse is true of the history of economy, since the movements of commerce, being relatively stable, are easier to generalize. By the same token, the very conditions that make the arts more difficult to regulate or explain also give them special value as a subtle record of human experience. As Hume writes in another essay, “The great variety of Taste, as well as of opinion, which prevails in the world, is too obvious not to have fallen under every one’s observations.”38 Hume was a pioneer of political economy as well as of the history of manners, but by the beginning of the next century, his abstractly stated observations found echoes in the thoughts of British men and women reflecting on nothing more abstruse than the way that literary fashions had shifted in their own lifetimes. “In my youth the world doted on Sterne!” writes Isaac Disraeli. “Forty years ago, young men in their most facetious humours never failed to find the archetypes of society in the Shandy family—every good-natured soul was uncle Toby, every humorist was old Shandy, every child of Nature was Corporal Trim!” Now, however, Sterne has “passed away to the curious.”39 Jeffrey offers similar observations on the historicity of literary tastes, but provides a more comprehensive history. “By far the most considerable change which has taken place in the world of letters in our days is that by which the wits of Queen Anne’s time have been gradually brought down from the supremacy which they had enjoyed.” In his own student days, it seemed that anyone who had any pretension to education was familiar with these writers. “Allusions to them abounded in all popular discourses and all ambitious conversation; and they and their contemporaries were universally acknowledged as our great models of excellence.”40 Jeffrey looked back on a time when “every young man was set to read Pope, Swift, and Addison,” but Addison’s female readership may have been even more devoted. In 1804, Anna Barbauld published an abridgment of the Spectator, an editorial task that gave her the opportunity to think back to her first acquaintance with the work. In those days, she writes, the Spectator was the favorite item in a young lady’s library and probably the first book after the Bible she would have purchased. “Sir Roger de Coverley and the other characters of the club were ‘familiar in our mouths as household names’; and every little circumstance related of them remained indelibly engraven on our memories. From the papers of Addison we imbibed our first relish for wit; from his criti-

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cism we formed our first standard of taste; and from his delineations we drew our first ideas of manners.” It requires little attention, she adds, turning to the tastes of a new generation, to be convinced that this is no longer true for the young women of the present.41 A less subtle reader might have responded to the change in Addison’s fortunes with simple nostalgia for the times of her youth. Instead, Barbauld examines these revolutions of taste for their wider significance and—like Hume, Johnson, or Drake—finds her answer in the close connections between literature, manners, and opinion. “Books,” she writes, “make a silent and gradual, but a sure change in our ideas and opinions; and as new authors are continually taking possession of the public mind, and old ones falling into disuse, new associations insensibly take place, and shed their influence unperceived over our taste, our manners, and our morals. . . . This new infusion of taste and moral sentiments acts in its turn upon the relish for books.”42 It is true, she adds, that a great book will never truly disappear, since it will live on as a classic. Nonetheless, it will no longer be a book that everyone is expected to know, and to which everyone refers. It “loses the precious privilege of occupying the minds of youth; in short, it is withdrawn from the parlour-window, and laid upon the shelf in honourable repose.”43 The practice of literary history seems calculated to produce moments both of retrospect and prospect, giving writers reason to evoke the manners of earlier ages or to imagine the responses of readers one hundred years on. In Barbauld’s case, the impetus came from her tasks as an editor, though she made the most of what must have begun as a commercial proposition. It is not straining the evidence, however, to see Barbauld’s historical insight as the product of an established habit of looking to the arts as a register of what Hume calls “the variety of Taste and opinion.” When Barbauld rereads the Spectator under the lamp of manners, she is drawn to reflect on the way time had brought such changes “not only in the tastes and habitudes of common life, but in the fashion of their studies, and their course of general reading. Books influence manners; and manners, in return, influence the taste for books.”44 If we want to understand how contemporary readers thought about books and authors as bearers of history, we need to consider the kinds of historical descriptions literary texts made possible. For Barbauld, as for Scott, social change seems a “deep and smooth river,”45 whose powerful current may flow unnoticed until we position ourselves against objects on the opposite shore. To such alterations Barbauld offers herself as a witness of an unusually sophisticated kind, thereby providing new generations of readers with an awareness of histories to

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which they might otherwise have been blind. But though literary texts provided her with rich cultural markers, we should not confuse the signposts for the wider experiences they heralded. No doubt Barbauld’s self-conscious understanding of distance drew deeply upon her talents as a writer, but her precocious historicism extended to much wider domains of language and society.

8

“A TOPIC THAT HISTORY WILL

PROUDLY RECORD”; OR, WHAT IS THE “HISTORY” IN HISTORY PAINTING?

All this is not falsifying any fact; it is taking an allowed poetical licence. A painter of portraits retains the individual likeness; a painter of history shows the man by showing his actions. —Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, 1781 It is needless to observe, that, whenever it may be thought proper to adorn the large publick buildings of London with Paintings, they will necessarily be filled with patriotic subjects, because no subjects would be proper for them, but such as in some measure appertain to their national purposes. The same would take place in the Hall of each Company. And in these points, whatever might be the merit of the respective Paintings, all would contribute to the general celebrity and renown of their country. They would furnish present honours, by renewing the memory of the past; and in the future pages of history, their records would prove the most valuable documents. —Prince Hoare, Epochs of the Arts, 1813

Burke’s description of society as “a permanent body composed of transient parts” also holds true for genres, which are traditions of discourse and art. Like the social body, artistic and literary genres are engaged in continuous selfrenewal, and the longer they endure, the greater their need to accommodate change. In the process, even the largest mutations may go unremarked, since names have a way of outliving the objects they originally defined. (No one “typing” an email is bothered by the origins of the word, though typewriters are

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already a distant memory and typesetting an arcane art.) Ironically, the sharpest challenge may be for the historian, who—arriving well after the fact—wants to mark the emergence of a new configuration of ideas within the stream of an older tradition. Of all the genres of representation we call “historical,” none bears out these dilemmas better than history painting, which sails through early modern times like the Argo, always under repair and always heroically intact. A moment’s reflection, however, suggests the extent of the changes that accompanied history painting’s voyage into modernity as a genre once identified with Ovidian myth and dynastic allegory emerged, circa 1800, as an art form devoted to secular struggles. Like history proper, but considerably later, history painting shed its loyalty to the idealizations of the “great style” and—without stopping to change its name—found new challenges in depicting social and political actualities. Scholars have generally linked the transformation of British history painting to Benjamin West, who raised recent events to the dignity previously reserved for classical subjects. This emphasis on West’s contemporaneity, however, does not do justice to a complex realignment that has more to do with other distances than with temporality as such. Fundamental changes were required before so traditional a genre could embrace its modern identity and sublimate its poetic and religious inheritance beneath a mantle of secular concerns. Casting aside the symbolic imagery associated with biblical and classical narratives, history painting drew closer to history in the more common meaning of the term. How did history painting come to be redefined as the painting of history? And what were the implications of this change? These questions cannot be addressed to the painter alone, since they have to do with the idea of history, broadly considered, as well as with the meanings and conventions of the visual arts. In this expanded context, the temporal shift on which scholars have focused attention seems just one dimension of a larger process of redistancing that affected all forms of historical representation circa 1800. BENJAMIN WEST AND THE “REVOLUTION OF HISTORY PAINTING”

Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe is generally regarded as a key work in the evolution of British history painting (plate 1). Though West was not the first to paint Wolfe’s death, nor unique in raising recent events to heroic proportions, his decision to present Wolfe in contemporary rather than classical dress is taken as a crucial blow against neoclassical decorum. As the familiar story is told in Galt’s biography of West (1816), the artist responded to a visit from a

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skeptical Joshua Reynolds with a ringing defense of the historical grounds for his artistic choice. The battle for Quebec “took place on the 13th of September, 1758, in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and at a period of time when no such nations, nor heroes in their costume, any longer existed. The subject I have to represent is the conquest of a great province of America by the British troops. It is a topic that history will proudly record, and the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist.”1 West’s identification of his art with historical writing marks a significant revision of neoclassical doctrine,2 but it would be naïve to read Galt’s text as a literal transcription of an encounter that had occurred more than forty years earlier. Like the painting itself, the story is an artful restaging that endows the original event with a luster it can only have acquired in retrospect. Written under the close supervision of West himself, Galt’s biography was composed with West’s later career fully in view and it idealizes this painting as a decisive moment in West’s conquest of reputation. Retrospective though its truths may have been, however, Galt’s account hints at West’s understanding that the definition of history painting was under strain and that any revision would have to confront the powerful authority of neoclassical criticism, as represented by the person of Joshua Reynolds.3 In his classic essay on this picture, Edgar Wind argues that it initiated a “revolution in history painting.” Breaking with neoclassical canons of decorum, the young American demonstrated that an event from the recent past could be depicted with all the elevation that history painting required. Intriguingly, Wind also suggests that a key element of West’s aggiornamento rested in his control of distance: more specifically, his understanding that in the depiction of a modern hero, remoteness in space could stand in for distance in time. Thus by exchanging scenes that were exotic for those that seemed venerable, West was able to bring the necessary dignity to a near-contemporary event. The result was still a relatively conservative treatment that avoided directly attacking neoclassical tastes, but once the rules had been breached to allow this “mitigated realism,” the opening “quickly widened to abolish the academic precept that distance is essential to dignity.”4 And where West had led, Copley soon followed and pressed on to a more open and popular form of realism. I want to return to The Death of Wolfe from a different angle and for reasons that have as much to do with historical sensibilities as with aesthetic ones. In this setting, what makes this moment pivotal is not just the contemporary subject, but the idea of history painting as a historical art. To be more precise, with this work history painting is becoming historical in a new and distinctive sense.

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Fig. 8.1. Benjamin West, Isaac’s Servant Tying the Bracelet on Rebecca’s Arm, 1775. Oil on canvas, 123.8 × 160.5 cm. Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

The issue is not merely contemporaneity—the focus of Wind’s and many subsequent discussions—but what “history” might mean in the context of art. History painting as traditionally understood was not confined to depicting the historical past, since its subjects were as often biblical, mythological, or poetic. From the vantage of distance, the distinguishing feature was not so much that the past was ancient rather than modern, but that it was conceived in exemplary terms and narrated with symbols and allegories. As a result, neoclassical history painting still spoke to a conception of history that had more in common with the idealizing rhetorical prescriptions of seventeenth-century artes historicae than with the mix of social inquiry and sentimental affect that characterized historical writing in the age of Hume and Robertson. In the second half of the eighteenth century these assumptions began to shift, though with curiously little explicit tension. Carried along by a current of national feeling that altered both its affective and its ideological coloration, history painting entered into an increasingly close engagement with the national his-

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tories of Europe. As a result, this most prestigious of artistic genres assumed for the first time its modern identity as a genre of painting committed to the same past that was represented in secular narratives—and this just at a moment when the conception of historical writing was undergoing a profound reformulation. In this framework, the eighteenth-century transformation of history painting becomes a compound movement: one by which history painting moves into closer alignment with the sense of history as conceived by historians of the same era and consequently (like historiography itself) finds itself challenged by new ways of thinking about the subject of historical representation. Only at this point can it really be said with Benjamin West that “the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist.”5 SIR JOSHUA DEMURS

In the vocabulary of neoclassical art, “history” carried meanings that have grown unfamiliar. As painting’s highest form, “history” connoted formal complexity and an elevated subject, rather than historical depiction in the ordinary sense. For the sake of narrative clarity, artists looked to well-known episodes from scripture or from the Greek and Roman classics. But whether the story came from sacred history, classical myth and poetry, or the writings of the Roman historians, the essential requirement was grandeur or dignity, not fidelity to the historical record (plates 6 and 7).6 This breadth of definition is nicely summed up in the words of the late seventeenth-century art critic William Aglionby. “History-Painting is an Assembling of many Figures in one Piece, to Represent any Action of Life, whether True or Fabulous, accompanied with all its Ornaments of Land-skip and Perspective.”7 Such definitions speak to the genre’s formal complexity and narrative purpose, but leave the issue of fact or fable open. Even in this traditional form, history painting shared some common ground with historical writing, especially their joint attachment to matters of public concern. In contrast to portraiture—the genre in which the English were known to excel—history painting reached beyond the private setting of family or household. This was art intended for public display—the “storied wall,” as the poet William Hayley calls it—and to many it seemed obvious that its weakness in Britain would not be remedied until the effects of the Reformation were reversed and painting was welcomed back into churches, palaces, or municipal halls. Historians had no monopoly on public life, however, and when commentators compared visual narratives to verbal ones, they paired painting with poetry, not history. Painting, it had long been traditional to say, is mute poetry,

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and poetry a speaking picture.8 Within this tradition of the “sister arts” there was room for discussion about the degrees of likeness or the contrasting strengths of each medium. But whichever side a critic took, he was unlikely to make history proper a point of comparison, except to underscore the shared freedom of the poet and the painter to rise above the triviality of petty facts to seek out a higher and more philosophical meaning. As Aristotle puts it in the Poetics, “poetry deals with general truths, history with specific events.”9 Art’s pursuit of general truth—the exemplary truth of poetry rather than the particular truth of history—was a central legacy of the sister arts tradition, which encouraged painters to emulate the grander designs of tragedy and epic. In England, the most influential spokesman for these doctrines was Joshua Reynolds, whose Discourses gave the students of the Royal Academy a comprehensive summary of neoclassical ideas. “The Art which we profess has beauty for its object,” writes Reynolds, “. . . but the beauty of which we are in quest is general and intellectual; it is an idea that subsists only in the mind; the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist, which he is always labouring to impart.”10 This affirmation of art as the domain of intellectual or general truths provides the crucial background against which the impact of the supposed “revolution” must be measured. At the most obvious level, history painting is linked to poetry through its subject matter, since mythological and poetic narratives provide so much of the painter’s material. But at bottom neoclassical opinion understands the choice for poetry over history as much in cognitive as in thematic terms. Facts and events, Reynolds writes, “however they may bind the Historian, have no dominion over the Poet or the Painter.” The artist is not restricted by a mere imitative truth; instead he bends history to “his great idea of Art.”11 So insistent is Reynolds’s defense of the history painter’s freedom to “deviate from strict and vulgar historical truth” that at one point he comes close to rejecting altogether the traditional label of “history.” In Discourse IV—his most extended discussion of the genre—Reynolds holds up the example of the Raphael cartoons to argue that artists who pursue “the great stile” must represent their subjects “in a poetical manner,” which cannot be confined to mere questions of fact. “In conformity to custom,” he adds, “I call this part of the art History Painting; it ought to be called Poetical, as in reality it is.”12 Reynolds’s suggested renaming is fully consistent with his emphasis on the high conceptual powers associated with “invention” and his warning that even “Nature herself is not to be too closely copied.”13 And yet there seems to be a hint of defensiveness in what he says as well. Why else this hesitation over terms so long accepted? Why else the impression—despite a stiff bow to “custom”—that to call this art by the

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ambivalent name of “history” might chain it to a lesser sort of truth—the “vulgar” factuality of history, rather than the elevated viewpoint of the poetic? To an earlier generation, Reynolds’s hesitation would hardly have mattered, since there was little chance that the “history” in history painting would be mistaken for the ordinary (i.e. textual) sense of the word. On the contrary, for neoclassical criticism what made a painting a “history” was precisely its distancing of secular realities behind a veil of allegory and ideal truths. Coming when it does, however, Reynolds’s brief spasm of anxiety indicates an unsettling convergence between two quite different meanings of “history.” Would it not be better to avoid any possible confusion by giving the art form a new name that conformed to the Aristotelian distinction between poetic elevation and historical particularity? Reynolds’s wobble marks a curious episode in the evolution of the genre, though one more prophetic of future instabilities than of Reynolds’s own views. More commonly, he maintains his steady confidence in the parallel between painting and poetry, with its implied asymmetry of history painting with historical writing. From this perspective, the real significance of this episode has to do with establishing the chronology of changes yet to come. After all, though British history painting never fully abandons Reynolds’s aspiration to emulate the grand style of Raphael’s stanze, the latter part of the century clearly witnesses a growing engagement with historical truth in a spirit much closer to the particularizing manner that Reynolds is at such pains to reject. POETRY AND HISTORY; POETRY VERSUS HISTORY

Critical vocabularies are slow to change. Despite the increasing attention to historical events in late eighteenth-century art, most artists and critics followed Reynolds in preferring to turn a blind eye to any possible confusion between “history painting” and what might be called the “painting of history”—the idea that “the same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist.” But precisely because most artists were content to leave traditional labels in place, it is worth reviewing the work of two critics who chose to explore the differences between history and poetry—the two elements that eighteenth-century history painting rather loosely combined. For Prince Hoare—playwright, artist, and critic, as well as Honorary Foreign Secretary to the Royal Academy—the reasons for probing the issue were essentially conservative. Hoare set out to distinguish the various tasks of the artist and rank them according to the hierarchies of neoclassical theory. This approach rationalized the preeminence of poetic painting, while consigning

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history (understood in its ordinary, factual sense) to a middling station just above landscape. A very different position was taken by Robert Bromley—a learned clergyman with artistic and antiquarian interests, rather than a painter. In distinguishing poetry from history, Bromley wanted to rid history painting of distracting fancies and confirm its real commitment to history. Once joined to the firm realities of historical truth, history painting would acquire a stronger sense of affective immediacy, far removed from the outdated and abstract allegories of the neoclassical ideal. Prince Hoare’s essay on the “Offices of Painting” (1810) systematizes the traditional hierarchy of genres in terms of a clearly defined ladder of challenges. At the lowest rank he places the “representation of nature,” followed by the “exhibition of the habits and affections of the Mind”—these being the concerns of landscape and of portraiture respectively. The third rung is occupied by history, or more precisely “the exhibition of Historical Events by the representation of facts.” Still higher comes the “mixed representation of History, either by circumstance or fiction,” in which poetic and historical elements are intermixed. This is followed by painting’s highest office, which is the “expression of poetic imagery.” Strictly speaking, Hoare admonishes us, it is only at this level that the traditional idea of the sister arts truly applies. So lustrous, however, is painting when it reaches the height of its ambition that this type of art has drawn most of the attention, leaving critics to believe that poetry and painting are closely linked at every point.14 Ordinarily neoclassical theory defines history as the highest genre of painting, but Hoare modifies this schema, if only to clarify and reinforce its central propositions. For him, “strict history” stands at the precise midpoint of the scale: the highest among art’s lower forms, as well as the basis for the mix of history and imagination that defines the higher genres. Hoare reasons that since historical narrative involves representations of nature along with “the affections of mind,” the history painter combines the skills of the landscape painter with those of the portraitist. On this level, Hoare suggests, the subject matter poses no exceptional challenges. Whatever has been “acted in the scene of life . . . can be exhibited on canvas with precision and truth.” Indeed, it is no more than the common task of the painter to leave a record for the future of the “distinguished actions of illustrious men, or the more extensively awful fate of nations.”15 Hoare’s retrenchment of “history” to its “strict” meaning has the effect of deferring the real complexities of visual representation to painting’s highest order, which he (like Reynolds) conceives as essentially poetic. In fact, even the sort of mixed history achieved by the “union of facts with allegorical machinery” offers relatively few challenges. As the poetic element increases, however, so do

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the difficulties of achieving the unity of imaginative conception that is required by the highest forms of art. On this level, Hoare argues, there is a big difference between the representation of “any confined or precise act” and the treatment of such a grouping of objects as would fill the viewer’s mind “with satisfactory sensations adequate to his idea of the whole event.”16 A precisely factual painting of the death of Nelson, for instance, could hardly be expected to convey a real sense of its meaning or impact—the very things that distinguish Nelson’s death from that of hundreds of other brave officers at sea. What is needed, rather, is to “collect into one spot all the circumstances which conspire to form in the mind an idea of the total event.” Hoare conceives of the work of art as moving from idea to image and back again—an argument that had already been sketched by Reynolds. Since the human mind converts verbal descriptions into visual images, the successful painting is essentially a realization of a conception already present in the minds of viewers. The result is to distance and idealize the image, making it a representation of “general nature” (to use Reynolds’s vocabulary), rather than an expression of individual imagination or particularized circumstances. As Hoare puts it, to represent the full poetic scope of an event requires “nothing less than the art of embodying the thoughts of the spectator, or representing collective images, either already existing in his mind, or easily to be excited in it.” The office of the artist is to give form to the collective sense of what Nelson’s death really means to the nation. At the highest level, the painter’s goal is to express the idealized conception of the hero that already lives in the minds of his countrymen.17 Hoare’s careful clarification of the hierarchy of “offices” is motivated by a conservative impulse to rationalize a traditional practice, but the same process of “explicitation”18 could also lead in the opposite direction. Robert Bromley’s Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts (1793, 1795) devotes a substantial chapter to the “Distinction Between Historic and Poetic Painting” in order to cleanse history painting of poetic ornament while affirming its ties to genuine history. Tellingly, Bromley selects The Death of Wolfe as his focus and (much like West’s own practice) outlines a position that represents a compromise between old and new conceptions of the genre. “What is the first essential of historical writing?” Bromley’s question stakes out an unusual point of departure for this period, while his answer—“perspicuity”— confirms his break with the Albertian stress on invention.19 Would indulging the flights of poetry, he asks, bring a greater measure of clarity to “the truth of history”? Would a historian be regarded as more “chaste and just” for inserting poetic flights in a narrative of historical events? To the contrary, Bromley

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criticizes the liberties usually allowed to history painters and argues against introducing elements of fable where matters of fact should be the principal concern. Equally, the requirements of costume (appropriateness) dictate that the artist should clothe his characters in the dress of their own times and keep clear of “anachronismal fictions,” “visionary allusions,” or “personifications of inanimate nature.”20 Bromley wants to avoid dogmatism and he is even prepared to welcome allegory “where it appears natural and artless.” In The Death of Wolfe, for instance, the combined presence of soldiers in British uniforms, ships, and an Indian warrior indicates the location of the action without intruding on the historical scene. He accepts that strictly speaking some of the detailed description might be considered as fiction, but—like the classical convention of invented orations—the great figure of the aboriginal warrior performs a legitimate historical function. “In allegory, can any thing speak more correctly than these?”21 Restated in more positive terms, Bromley’s cautions about poetic artifice become a defense of the broad capacity of visual representation to depict historical subjects. “What we contend for,” he writes, “is that the powers of the historic pencil in the hands of the scholar . . . are equal to those of the pen in the selection of expression and in the communication of its own life and richness.”22 His confidence in the effectiveness of visual representation runs into a double obstacle, however. Not only have artists failed to understand the differences between historical and poetic subjects, but they have resorted to artificial devices that have no genuine relation to the subject before them. The result is a violation of the “purity of the historic line,” producing a “mungrel-composition” that is neither history nor poetry.23 Bromley argues for painting over writing on the basis of the traditional contrast between the instantaneity of visual images and the seriality necessary to language, but he understands the comparison as equating rapid perception with affective impact. This elision has considerable consequences for how he thinks about both formal composition and moral persuasion. “Where the mind is assailed at once by the whole interest of any important subject,” he asserts, “it will certainly be captivated with the greatest power,” just as a fire that breaks out suddenly is more intense than one that burns more slowly. Conversely, anything that inhibits or divides this “interest” will result in a heavy loss of affective and moral impact. In this context, Bromley’s defense of the “purity of the historic line” seems less a commitment to simple matter-of-factness than a view of the psychology of representation. Poetic embellishments “tend to embarrass and confound; they draw off the mind from the simplicity of the narration to heterogeneous ideas

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which beget improbability.”24 The best advice, rather, is “to place the simplest events in a most interesting view, and to make those facts which are bare of themselves most sentimentally expressive.”25 Bromley’s emphasis on artistic actuality echoes Kames’s theory of affective response, with its view that “ideal presence” simulates lived experience and carries the same moral lessons. While Kames focuses his attention on literature, however, leaving both history and painting as marginal cases, Bromley turns Kamesian moral psychology into an argument for the emerging alignment of history painting with history proper.26 PATRIOTISM AND THE PAINTING OF HISTORY

If, as Kames believed, the passions are strengthened by repetition, a century of Anglo-French conflict created the perfect milieu for a growing spirit of national self-assertion. In the process, history painting not only acquired a more conspicuous place in the national culture, it also became engaged with a specifically British past. The evidence of this transformation took many forms, but it is useful to recall some of the ventures that gave history painting its new prominence: among them, the exhibition of four large histories by Francis Hayman in Spring Gardens,27 followed by Hayman’s abortive project, in collaboration with Nicholas Blakey, of publishing a suite of historical engravings of scenes from English national history; the inception of the Royal Academy in 1764; James Barry’s years of labor on his cycle of paintings on The Progress of Human Culture; the same artist’s Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England (1773); the prescient but abortive scheme of the Royal Academy to decorate St. Paul’s with historical scenes;28 and (now the best-known of all) Alderman Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery—a deft mix of patriotism and commerce that evoked the national past by illustrating the national poet.29 One contemporary witness, William Carey, the Irish art writer and dealer, describes Boydell’s scheme as “the first important attempt to create a national interest in this country for British historical painting.”30 But though the Shakespeare Gallery has tended to overshadow other schemes of this sort, it was by no means unique. One telling new venture was a small private collection (apparently the first of its kind) “consisting wholly of a series of pictures of Historical Subjects, taken from the annals of our own country.”31 The gallery was the initiative of a wealthy merchant and military supplier named Alexander Davison, assisted by the engraver and antiquarian Valentine Green. Davison, who was the close friend and financial agent of Horatio Nelson, intended to build a larger collection along these lines, but hard times forced him to auction his assets, and the gallery has been all but forgotten.32

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Another, more public undertaking was the creation in 1805 of the British Institution to house sale exhibitions of contemporary artists, with special prizes reserved for history painting on British subjects. This scheme (not the first of its kind) was given a fuller elaboration by Martin Archer Shee in a published proposal to the same body for a series of prizes, the highest of which would go to works on “Sacred or British History”—a telling elision. Each picture contending in this category, Shee suggested, should “consist of at least thirteen figures, the size of life; and no picture to exceed the dimensions of the cartoons of Raphael.” Lesser subjects would also be rewarded with smaller prizes, but preference would be given to subjects “more directly sacred and patriotic, and more strikingly impressive upon our concerns, as Christians and as Britons.”33 Shee’s desiderata point to the difficult balances that faced history painting at the turn of the century. Public art still aspired to the formal poise and sense of scale of an earlier age, but it would have to do without the support of the distancing motifs belonging to classical or biblical settings. At the same time, the ideological intensities of an age caught up in wars and revolution drew artists to engage with truths that were less remote than those that Reynolds held up as an ideal. The outcome was a more openly affective approach to art that permitted history painting to shed some of its former austerity and joined feelings for country with emotions of a softer, more domestic sort. This shift from exemplarity to immediacy broadly parallels the similar shift in historical writing that had been pioneered by Hume a half-century before.34 The patriotism evident in Shee’s proposal was a direct response to the conflict with France, where in many respects this reorientation of history painting would prove easier to manage, since the ideological discourse of the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods allowed republican and imperial motifs to retain a vital place in the gestures of contemporary politics. Thus David and Ingres (to name only the most famous exemplars) were able to fashion a new and very public iconography that blended classicism with a striking theatricality in the service of revolutionary and postrevolutionary myth. British painters, on the other hand, seemed more receptive to Greuzian sentiment than to the tense masculinity of David. They populated their histories with unusual numbers of suffering women, and even in scenes of conflict, sorrowing spectators like those who accompany the dying Wolfe provided an opportunity to evoke the softer side of the heroic. In fact there was no real boundary between sentiment and neoclassicism, which was a style that adapted itself gracefully to many moods.35 In relation to the coupling of victory with pity, for example, one ready precedent was the “continence of Scipio”—a familiar theme of baroque history painting and one that had been given a more modern reading in Hayman’s lost depiction of

Fig. 8.2. William Skelton after John Opie, Mary Queen of Scots Previous to Her Execution. June 1795. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings (in the Line Manner) by the First Artists in the Country, Illustrative of the History of England, Comprizing Historical Subjects, Portraits, Naval and Military Engagements, Ruins of Ancient Castles, Coins, Medals, &c. &c. (London: Printed for the Proprietor, R. Bowyer, 80, Pall Mall; by T. Bensley, Bolt Court, Fleet Street, 1812). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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General Amherst feeding his captives in The Surrender of Montreal (1761). Similarly, in John Singleton Copley’s huge canvas of The Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar (1783) the celebration of victory is balanced by the gesture of the commanding general, Lord Heathfield, who directs our attention to the sight of British sailors rescuing their enemies from the sea (plate 8). As Britannia triumphs, the painting tells us, so does humanity.36 Venturing into a darker realm of the pathetic, Turner’s Field of Waterloo (1818) takes us beyond the moment of a great British victory to show a night scene in which indistinct female figures search for the bodies of those they have lost; by now, what army they follow seems to make very little difference (plate 9). William Mulready presents another view of this battle, but displaces the action both in time and space. His Convalescent from Waterloo (1822) (above, figure 6.8) pictures the wounded soldier on a peaceful beachfront accompanied by his sorrowing wife and family. This displacement from the field of conflict introduces a mood of fragile recollection inconceivable in the moment of action. At the same time,

Fig. 8.3. William Woollett after Benjamin West, The Battle at La Hogue, 1781. Etching and engraving. Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery Collection.

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the picture exemplifies the way in which symbolic elements retain their place in history painting, though sublimated and naturalized in a microhistorical vignette. Thus the energetic wrestling of the young boys lends an air of ambiguity to the painting’s perspective on human conflict. Is warfare an inevitable feature of life? Or should we see its ideals as a destructive illusion that only the truly innocent can indulge? Lacking the artistic stature of either David or Turner, West owed a great deal to the opportunities of the moment, especially the rising pitch of national feeling. Even so fervent an admirer as William Carey suggested that a number of West’s paintings on classical subjects surpassed The Death of Wolfe, yet none of them excited so powerful a sensation. “Every British subject,” writes Carey, “sympathized with the fall of the British general, as that of a young hero, in whose loss, England was a sufferer, and in whose glory, each of his countrymen was a sharer.” The picture, he adds, had “the power of an exalted national memorial, which touched all the living interests of the realm.”37 The painting’s popularity was such that West was obliged to produce a series of copies, but even more telling was the huge demand for reproductive prints. “In the matchless engravings of the Death of Wolfe, the Battle of La Hogue, and the Death of Nelson,” Carey recalled, “England fought her battles over again, and will continue to fight and conquer her enemies to the end of time.”38 A NEW HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

West’s Death of Wolfe retains a strong sense of continuity with the traditions of neoclassical history painting. But however conservative this “revolution” might be in matters of style, West’s work establishes a new direction by engaging history in a manner that comes closer to the preoccupations of secular historical thought in its time. As a result, it becomes less plausible than it once was to continue to examine history painting in effective isolation from other forms of historical representation as they were practiced in the period. This is a crucial point, since the “revolution of history painting” took shape at a time when historical thought was undergoing a very significant revision. The Death of Wolfe, it should be remembered, was painted in 1770–71, at the midpoint of two decades of extraordinary importance in European historiography, including not only the final volume of Hume’s History of England (1761) and the first of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall (1776), but also Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Robertson’s Charles V (1769), Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771), and Robertson’s History of America (1777). In short, the late eighteenth century’s rethinking of “history” in art coincided with

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a very remarkable episode in history writing—one which for the two or three generations separating David Hume and Walter Scott placed Britain at the forefront of European historical thought. Two elements of this other revolution helped determine the balance of distances characteristic of historical writing in this period: one largely a question of conceptual frameworks, the other a matter of affect. Hume (among others) relied on broad social explanations to capture the movements of history, even as he used a sentimental style to evoke the intangible influence of manners and opinion. Both of these features of the Humean approach had important consequences for historical writing in this period and it is reasonable to ask whether the same may be true for visual narratives. One of the fundamental elements of the Enlightenment’s interest in history was its conviction that political narratives could only become fully comprehensible when united with broad social explanations concerning changes in economy, manners, and customs. But as history reoriented itself to what Hume called the “domestic and gradual revolutions of the state,” it had to grapple with intangible social movements, often at the expense of events as such. In consequence, the turn to “philosophical history” was far from straightforward. The change shifted the focus of historical description and undercut the pleasures of narrative. Ever since the advent of Romanticism, critics have charged the Enlightenment with neglecting flesh-and-blood realities for bloodless abstraction. This attack gives us only one side of the picture, however, since it emphasizes the period’s bias toward conceptual distancing at the cost of ignoring its taste for affective engagement (see Chapter 4). In truth, the eighteenth century was an age of sentiment as well as enlightenment, and historians (much like poets and novelists) explored the techniques of sentimental narrative to engage historical readers in a sympathetic response to the scenes of the past. The result was a significant redistancing of narrative toward a mood of affective immediacy that has obvious parallels in art. This shift meant much more than a simple alteration of style. Rather, for historians who wanted to evoke the manners and opinions of another age, sentimental narrative provided an affective and formal counterpart to some of the dryer tasks of social analysis. Thus a change that in another context might have seemed purely a matter of style points to a fundamental rethinking of history’s conceptual foundations and ideological summons. ROBERT BOWYER’S HISTORIC GALLERY

The late eighteenth-century convergence of history painting and the historical record found its most literal expression in Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery,

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one of a series of contemporary efforts to foster a school of history painting along national lines. A close cousin to Boydell’s project in terms of artistic and commercial ambition, the gallery assembled a collection of specially commissioned paintings as the basis for an integrated enterprise whose other elements consisted of entrance fees, an exhibition catalogue, and fine reproductive engravings—culminating in a luxurious illustrated edition of Hume’s History of England. In no other case, however, was the new focus on history proper made so literal, since in place of Shakespeare, the Bible, or Milton, Bowyer directed his painters and engravers to illustrate scenes taken from Britain’s greatest historian—a telling adaptation of the long-standing convention that tied history painting to canonical texts.39 Both in their general style and their choice of incidents, Bowyer’s artists present the English past in decidedly sentimental terms, giving history a new sense of narrative fluency, allied to very little in the way of exactness in costume or setting.40 To appreciate the freedoms as well as the limitations of this style, it is helpful to draw a contrast with a similar project launched by an earlier publisher of histories. Houbraken and Vertue’s mid-eighteenth-century illustrations for Paul de Rapin’s History of England41 consist of series of portraits in a rather stiff, late baroque manner. In keeping with the conventions of this style, Houbraken frames the individual portraits with elaborate designs incorporating emblems of character and office. Narrative scenes, on the other hand, hold a secondary position, confined as they are to miniature tableaux framed by the dominant elements. Houbraken’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, for example, (taken from Holbein) incorporates a scene in which Cromwell, just returned from a hurried embassy to Anne of Cleves, shows his royal master the portrait of the future queen. Subordinated in this way, the inserted narrative image functions much like the emblems of bounty and faithful service with which Houbraken frames his portrait of another royal servant, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. Such emblems are a traditional feature of baroque portraiture, but the device was losing its currency, as can be seen in a later image of ministerial duty drawn from Bowyer. Thomas Stothard’s Elizabeth at Tilbury uses the same carefully drawn image of Cecil, but here the queen rallies her soldiers prior to the battle with the Spanish Armada, while the faithful Burleigh follows on foot. Houbraken’s allegorized portraits elevate and distance their heroes, treating them as virtual statuary, complete with emblems and monumental inscriptions. By contrast, Stothard creates an open-air frieze of banners and pikes, meant to stir an Englishman’s pride. The sentimental style of the Historic Gallery solicits fellow feeling rather than baroque emulation. But (much as Adam Smith observed in his famous

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Fig. 8.4. Jacobus Houbraken after Hans Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. In Thomas Birch, Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain, Engraved by Mr. Houbraken and Mr. Vertue (London, J. & P. Knapton, 1743). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

discussion of spectatorship) our emotional identification is not so much with the character of the individual actor as with the situation in which he or so often she finds herself. For this reason, the artists tend to focus on a range of common emotions (such as pity, fear, or filial duty) that are easily typified and widely accessible. In consequence, historical representation (visual as well as verbal) turns away from an emphasis on heroic individuals and gives its energy to creating the sensation of presence. Ideologically as well as affectively, this represents

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Fig. 8.5. Jacobus Houbraken, William Cecil, Lord Burleigh. In Birch, Heads of Illustrious Persons of Great Britain. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

an important expansion of history’s range and audience, since the shift from exemplarity to actuality makes room for viewers with no experience of heroism and very little stake in the privileges or obligations of public life. In tune with a culture of sensibility, Bowyer’s artists take a particular interest in depicting scenes of virtue in distress, and give prominence to female figures not usually associated with the high dignity and masculine cast of history. In part, this must have been a tribute to the text itself, since Hume’s love of pathos was much praised by contemporary critics. Nonetheless, it is striking how uniform the illustrations are in comparison to the variety displayed by the history. We know Hume as an ironist as well as a sentimentalist, as a master of

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Fig. 8.6. James Parker after Thomas Stothard, Elizabeth at Tilbury. January 1, 1805. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings . . . Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

wide philosophical surveys as well as a touching painter of pathetic detail, as a political analyst skeptical of the dominant Whig shibboleths as well as a writer committed to confirming a postrevolutionary political order. Little of this balance or versatility, however, finds its way into the work of the artists who built a picture of British history around his text. Irony, for instance, though it plays so large a part in Hume’s control over both affective and ideological distance, finds no echo in his illustrators, as for example in the scene in which Cromwell

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Fig. 8.7. C. Jagger after Henry Tresham, The Emigration of Cromwell Prevented. September 1798. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings . . . Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

and other Puritan leaders are prevented in their plans to flee from England. Henry Tresham illustrates the scene, but though there is an attempt at drama, there is no shadow of the alternate history that might have been if the Puritan discontents had been allowed to go to America where, as Hume puts it, “they might enjoy lectures and discourses of any length or form which pleased them.”42

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Similarly, there is a strong tendency among the artists of this school to assimilate all those who suffer to the same condition, no matter what the historical cause or the ideological valence. Witness John Opie’s Death of Archbishop Sharpe, where much of our attention goes to the central figure of the archbishop’s daughter, who is vainly attempting to shield the elderly cleric.

Fig. 8.8. Thomas Holloway after John Opie, Death of Archbishop Sharpe. March 1799. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings . . . Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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By this means Opie gives the encounter much the same feeling as a painting like James Northcote’s depiction of the two doomed innocents in the Tower, from the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, though one concerns the deaths of the two young princes at the hands of a ruthless king, the other the assassination of a worldly archbishop by religious zealots. Similarly, the shared innocence

Fig. 8.9. Francis Legat after James Northcote, Shakspeare, King Richard III: Act IV Scene III. In Collection of Prints, From Pictures Painted for the Purpose of Illustrating the Dramatic Works of Shakespeare, by the Artists of Great-Britain (London: John and Josiah Boydell, 1805). Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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Fig. 8.10. William Bromley after Thomas Stothard, Charles I Taking Leave of His Children. June 4, 1794. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings . . . Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

of women and children plays a prominent part in scenes of departure or loss. Accordingly, there is little to distinguish the emotional impact of a father’s last words, whether the man awaiting execution is the royal martyr Charles I or the Whig hero Lord William Russell. What the painters offer is an easy access to the sentiments, diminished by a seeming blindness to all questions of historical or ideological difference.

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Fig. 8.11. George Noble after Robert Smirke, Lord W. Russell’s Last Interview with His Family. October 1796. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings . . . Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

A second failure is even more striking in terms of what dimensions of Hume’s History could and could not be translated into visual images. Hume impressed readers with his ability to combine two very different standpoints in a single work—what James Mackintosh spoke of as his “union of the talent of painting pathetic scenes with that of exhibiting comprehensive views of human affairs.”43 Clearly, Bowyer’s artists were at home with pathetic narrative, but they struggled

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Fig. 8.12. Thomas Holloway after Robert Smirke, Portraits of Eminent Architects. April 10, 1801. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings . . . Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

to find an appropriate style for illustrating Hume’s famous appendices on art and manners. Their choice, carried out by Robert Smirke, John Landseer, and others, was a thoroughly insipid program of commemoration displaying the great names who had contributed to progress in the various fields of arts and letters. Though lighter and more graceful than the antiquarian efforts of Houbraken and Vertue, the illustrations have little to recommend them beyond a return to familiar conventions of monumental inscription and allegorical representation. It can come as no surprise that, despite the importance of this material to Hume’s text, the plates seem to have had little of the afterlife that sustained the narrative scenes. Bowyer’s Historic Gallery testifies that historical depiction circa 1800 still succeeded best when it could represent its subject in terms of the actions or sufferings of known individuals. But in the age of David Hume and John Millar, of Edmund Burke and Walter Scott, historical thought had begun to encompass

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Fig. 8.13. John Landseer after Newton and Robert Smirke (medallions by Newton), English Poets. May 20, 1795. In A Series of One Hundred and Ninety-six Engravings . . . Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

a ramified body of experiences intrinsically difficult to render as a traditional narrative of character and action. Even so cautious a critic as Prince Hoare was alert to the expanding domain which now challenged both the historian and the artist. “The history of commerce,” he writes, “is less lofty, but is still more extensive than that of Freedom. It contains memorials, the most valuable and most interesting, of the world and of mankind. It presents to view, not only the heroic, the martial, the ambitious prowess of men, but their domestic enjoyments also and refinements; their peaceful triumphs, their abodes, their agriculture, their pastures, their manufactures, their studies, their learning, their arts.”44

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With the flowering of history painting in the nineteenth century, painters would be challenged by an array of new historical ideas that resisted conventional modes of narrativization: the slow working of tradition and opinion, the growth of the national spirit, the mass experience of emigration to new worlds in Canada or Australia, work, and the transformation of daily life by commerce and industry. Themes like these need not have troubled the young artists who attended Reynolds’s Fourth Discourse, but as a new definition of history painting emerged, alongside of new perceptions of the motors of change, historical representation shifted its focus to the social and sentimental life of the nation.45 What once would have seemed a detraction from the dignity of history painting now became an important element of its value. “A TOPIC THAT HISTORY WILL PROUDLY RECORD”

Despite the complex layerings of text and image brought together by Bowyer, a purist might still be inclined to dismiss the Historic Gallery as an exercise in illustration. In an important sense, however, history painting always had an illustrative purpose. As a narrative art committed to public subjects, it looked to stories that were already known through other sources—traditionally the great narratives provided by biblical or classical history or the canonical literatures of ancient Greece and Rome. As Reynolds puts it, the grand style demands an object “in which men are universally concerned, and which powerfully strikes upon the public sympathy. . . . Such are the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history, which early education, and the usual course of reading, have made familiar and interesting to all of Europe. . . . Such too are the capital subjects of scripture history, which, besides their general notoriety, become venerable by the connection with our religion.”46 As so often, Reynolds provides a powerful summary of a tradition on the verge of radical revision, but he also helps us to see what had changed and what fundamentally had not. The “revolution” in narrative art that began to emerge in his lifetime did not alter the viewer’s need for prior exposure to the story; that kind of foreknowledge would remain crucial for history painting to communicate its meaning. What was in the process of changing was the source of the narrative’s intelligibility, which was now less likely to be tied to a single canonical text than to narratives or experiences that were the common property of national memory and experience. In this context the Historic Gallery seems less predictive of the future of history painting than The Death of Wolfe a generation earlier. In an era of strong national feeling, organizing a program of history painting around a great work

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of history was as natural as Boydell’s choice of Shakespeare. In the long view, however, Bowyer’s venture looks like an impossible attempt to square the circle. On this scheme, history painting would continue its allegiance to canonical texts, but rather than a story from Ovid or Livy, the narrative would come from the best of the modern historians. But however important Bowyer and Boydell were as pioneers of a new form of patronage, their mediation of national history through canonical authors remained too restrictive to encompass the subject’s true variety. If painting was to continue its drift toward “strict history,” it would need to find other means of incorporating secular narratives without doing excessive violence to the essential decorum of this genre. This too might be called a “revolution” were it not that the genre retains such a close alliance with language. As history painting moves away from illustrating specific chapter and verse, it continues to draw on public narratives whose outlines at least are already familiar. In this setting, texts remain a crucial partner to the artist’s creation, shaping the viewer’s response to visual images that—if stripped of titles and other verbal traces—would seem radically insufficient. Indeed, in a genre now increasingly concerned to depict the handing on of tradition, texts and text-like messengers are often thematized within the body of the work—a central feature of the final pair of paintings I want to discuss. In 1806—the year Bowyer published his folio edition of Hume—no one thinking of the future direction of history painting in Britain would have singled out a small genre scene painted in the Dutch manner by a very young Scottish painter, recently arrived in London. David Wilkie’s Village Politicians shows a group of Scottish peasants engaged in a heated political discussion, a radical newspaper spread out between them. The painting was a popular success when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy, where it was greeted as a depiction of rustic life, but one edged with political satire. One reviewer spoke of it as evincing “an intimate knowledge of vulgar nature” while another—making the same point in more openly ideological terms—described it as demonstrating “the conceit which a little knowledge produces on vulgar minds.”47 Thirty years later, Allan Cunningham, Wilkie’s friend and biographer, characterized the painting in much larger terms. “As the painter’s mind expanded,” Cunningham suggested, “the subject expanded also; and before he arrived in London it had assumed, in his fancy at least, a character of national interest, and took its rank with historical compositions.”48 How had such a change occurred? How did a small genre piece become a historical composition? Much has to do with the epochal character of the French Revolution, which, with the passing of time, gave an air of historical interest to everything connected to it.49 But the years had not only preserved the memory of the great

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Fig. 8.14. Abraham Raimbach after Sir David Wilkie, Village Politicians, 1814. Engraving and etching, 50.8 × 62.2 cm (plate). Courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

revolution; they had also transformed the concept of history painting twice over—first by bringing painting closer to secular histories, then by offering both historians and painters the challenge of a new, more social conception of the historical process. History, it was now understood, is more than a set of events; it is also a texture of experience. The great challenge was to break free of the elevated conventions of the neoclassical genre and reconceive history as it is experienced in common life. This is where Wilkie was a pioneer of an emerging conception of history painting, and if it is hard to agree with Cunningham that Wilkie already possessed this vision fully in 1806, there can be no doubt that two decades later he gave it lasting expression—once again in a work where a newspaper figures as the vector of history. In Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch (1822) Wilkie found an inventive new way to give witness to a great battle (plate 10). Bypassing the event itself, he depicted the impact of war on a mixed body of old soldiers hearing the news of victory for the first time. This is a multigenerational portrait of the ordi-

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nary British soldier, and for anyone who cared to probe its detail, an engraved key identifies the uniforms of every veteran stretching back to Bunker Hill. Like Village Politicians or Mulready’s Convalescent from Waterloo, Chelsea Pensioners turns away from portraying the battle itself. Instead, it presents history indirectly: not in its place and moment, but in a more democratized context and as a form of social witness. This time, however, there is no doubt that Wilkie’s intention was to create an “historical composition,” and even so conservative a hero as the great Duke was delighted by the result.

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Part Three

Circa 1968: Sentimental Histories

Sentiment: A thought or reflection coloured by or proceeding from emotion. Sentimental: Of persons, their dispositions and actions: Characterized by sentiment. Originally in favourable sense: Characterized by or exhibiting refined and elevated feeling. In later use: Addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion; apt to be swayed by sentiment. —Oxford English Dictionary, 1989

The historical sensibilities closest to ourselves are always the hardest to name. “Cultural history” would be safely neutral. “Microhistory,” “thick description,” or “historical anthropology” have obvious applications. But as informative as they are, these methodological labels go only part way toward identifying the pressures that have reshaped historical narrative post-1968. What seems central is a politics of feeling belonging to a generation that found its identity in the struggles of the New Left and second-wave feminism. Instinctively antihierarchical and grounded in a fundamental optimism about human nature, the New Left embraced the belief that “the personal is the political.” As Stuart Hall recalled, “We raised issues of personal life, the way people live, culture, which weren’t considered the topics of politics on the Left. We wanted to talk about the contradictions of this new kind of capitalist society in which people didn’t have a language to express their private troubles, didn’t realize that these troubles reflected political and social questions which could be generalized.”1 It is clearly too late in the day to persuade modern readers to return “sentiment” to the unreservedly positive sense it carried for much of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, I can think of no better way to characterize the

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preoccupation with affective experience and everyday life that runs through so much of the historical thought of the late twentieth century. Equally, none of the more conventional designations is as frank about the traps and temptations that accompanied this same program. But however we assess the strengths and weaknesses of the period, there is no mistaking history’s pride in new beginnings, post-1968. Not only did writing the story of “the way people live” enormously extend the social horizons of historical study, it also brought a renewed sense of the moral and political relevance of historical scholarship.2 And if to call this approach “sentimental” risks associating the sobriety of academic prose with moods more often found in popular or commercialized genres, this too may be a reason to hold on to the ambiguities of the word. For many historians, the most visible consequence of the turn toward affective history was a rejection of the austere methods of the Annales in favor of the close focus and human satisfactions of microhistory. The impact of this change makes the rise of microhistory a forceful example of distance-shift within the academic canon, but it also carries implications for the wider family of historical genres. The foregrounding of affect meant entry into a domain that has long been associated with popular histories, especially those genres that cultivate the promise of greater immediacy with the past. Living history museums, immersive displays, restaged battles and other reenactments, computer simulations in cinema or television, the immense popularity of genealogy and family history— these are just a sampling of the historical genres that have won contemporary audiences to a beguiling mixture of curiosity, nostalgia, and entertainment. Academics still regularly insist that “the past is a foreign country” (we hold the passports after all), but even the most confident historian must sometimes envy the vividness and adventure of popular representation. “History and memory” has become one of the commonplaces of historiographical discussion. With deceptively simple economy, this pairing identifies two modes of understanding that seem to divide the sphere of the past between them, giving a name to a tension that has animated historical discussion for a generation. But behind its apparent oppositions, the distinction designates areas that, now more than ever, are shared as well as contested. In the way we speak of them, history and memory are in fact mutually defining, two forms of historical distance that have to be understood in relational terms. This being the case, what most needs examination is not just their evident differences of emphasis, but also the convergences that, by bringing competing claims into closer proximity, have generated discomfort on both sides.

9

ON THE ADVANTAGE AND DISADVANTAGE OF SENTIMENTAL HISTORY FOR LIFE

“What was it really like?” To the common sense of the lay reader, this question seems to be the foundation of all historical work, the very core of our curiosity about the past. Ironically, however, in the long history of historical writing, the idea that the ambition of history is to reenter the feelings and experiences of the past is a relative latecomer and, even then, it has seldom taken precedence over other, seemingly more disciplined reasons for examining the past. Recently, however, the lay reader’s question has found its way to the front, animating the most ambitious historians of the past four decades. What was it really like (such historians have been asking) to be a sixteenth-century French peasant woman? How was it to live in a thirteenth-century community of Cathar heretics? to be a follower of a peasant cult that continued to practice pre-Christian fertility rituals? to work as a midwife in eighteenth-century New England? From the earliest days, history has been written in the service of memory. “These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus,” the Father of History begins, “which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory.” What has changed, almost beyond recognition, is what we want to remember. Herodotus’s view that history concerns itself only with “great and wonderful actions” belongs to an age of heroes, remote from the populism of modern cultural politics. Nor would it be easy to agree that history’s purpose is necessarily to record “what men have done.” Gender aside, the focus of many histories today has more to do with feelings than doings. Traditionally, history has been thought of as combining the desire to record events with the need to explain them. In recent decades, however, this way of 189

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engaging with the past has lost some ground to narratives of another sort—ones that often seem content to bypass much of the business of events and explanations while exercising the closest scrutiny in retracing the textures of ordinary life and inward feeling. But the empathetically re-created past presents enormous challenges. Not only does it concern people who remain largely invisible to history, but also physical or mental experiences traditionally regarded as lying beyond the reach of historical change: the growth and decay of the body, the life of the senses, childhood, sexuality, madness, death. Though much has been written about the theoretical demands that come with this sort of history, we have been reticent about another sort of complication: namely, the fact that academic historians have been drawn into closer engagement with an interest in which popular audiences and popular representation have an important presence. In the process, “high” and “low” histories have come into a closer proximity than at any other time in recent scholarship—sometimes with uncomfortable results. In a time when the resurrection of physical and emotional experience has become so prized, where does the past exercise its greatest affective impact? For some the prompt may come from a visit to New York’s Tenement Museum, a list of family names preserved at Ellis Island, or the reperformance of Cook’s South Sea voyages in the cramped living space of a replica eighteenth-century sailing ship. If what historians want is to retrace the contours of experience in groups usually silent at the table of history, even the most gifted historian might feel at a loss. Is there not greater richness in a collection of family photo albums, more inwardness in the confidences of fiction, more immediacy in the unrivaled actuality of film or television, beyond anything we can wring from an academic manuscript?1 BETWEEN DIGNITY AND DESPAIR

Let me begin with just one example of recent work in the mode I have in mind. The book is Marion Kaplan’s Between Dignity and Despair, a study of the daily lives of Jewish women in Germany after the Nazi takeover. It is not altogether easy, I think, to say how this exploration of the feelings of ordinary German Jewish women relates to the traditional idea of history as a narrative of events, but no one can deny that in tracing the confused and painful emotions of that time, Kaplan touches something that draws all of us deeply, seriously, and repeatedly to an interest in history. “I wanted to fill in the missing stories,” Kaplan writes: “to try to understand how Jews like my parents grasped the meaning of Nazism. How did they react? How did they negotiate the ever-building

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tensions? What were their options?” Disavowing any intention of studying Nazi politics and ideology or “the causes of fascism and genocide,” Kaplan takes daily life and feelings as her object, asking how Jews (and especially Jewish women) “coped with the loss of their friends, careers, and businesses, the defeat of their hopes, dreams, and futures. What combination of energy, foresight, and luck did it take to get out in time? What role did gender play in assessing Nazism or reacting to it? Personal incidents and unfolding realizations set against a backdrop of social disintegration may, I believe, give us insight into later startling and cataclysmic events.”2 In retrospect, we know that those “startling and cataclysmic events” would not be long in coming and that, when they did, they would proceed with unimaginable brutality and speed. For the victims of Nazi violence, however, this clarity was often tragically lacking. As Kaplan demonstrates, the swiftness with which the brutalities mounted, combined with brief moments of apparent reprieve, bred a mixture of uncertainty and desperate hope that left Jews unsure of their fate until for most it was too late to save themselves or their families. Kaplan keeps future trials on the margin of the account, however, while she focuses her attention on the experiences and anxieties—despair, numbness, hope—that belonged to the time before the cataclysm. Much of what makes this history so compelling is its chronicling of common emotions in a setting where even the most ordinary responses acquire such extraordinary resonance. But thematics alone do not account for the powerful current of feeling that animates this book. An important contribution is also made by the deliberate narrowing of horizons—a narrowing that from another point of view might be seen as the book’s major limitation. These restrictions help to give this work a quality of intimacy that we generally look for in novels or memoirs, but seldom associate with history proper. The result is an account which by virtue of its structure as much as its themes is calculated to invite a strong sense of identification with the women whose lives it details. Empathy, as we all know, can lead to some dangerous paths. When the sufferer is someone to whom we have no direct or demonstrable connection, identification may seem unearned and can easily degenerate into self-indulgence or even prurience—a temptation that has not always been handled well by historians of the Holocaust. But if the dangers are avoided—as Kaplan does by virtue of exercising a combination of stylistic and moral restraint—the effect is to offer the reader an unusual sense of closeness to historical experience. The consequence is that, alongside the expected detail of historical investigation, this history also gives weight to broader, less technical inquiries that are very compelling. “In exploring the most basic and quotidian aspects of Jewish lives,”

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Kaplan writes, “—their homes, families, and communities—we can begin to answer the complex questions that have not paled in the past fifty years: What did it feel like to be a Jew in Nazi Germany? What kind of Jewish life was there in Germany after 1933? Why did German Jews not leave sooner? What did nonJewish Germans do, and what did they know?”3 Kaplan frames her research in terms that are suitably restrained and rests her answers on a firm foundation of documentation. But—as the passage just quoted makes evident—this is a book that allows historical inquiry to open out onto a range of untutored questions that all of us might wish that someone would ask. “How much did you really know?” we want to say, “and when did you finally give up hope?” Most of all perhaps, there remains that implicit question which is at once so subjective and so universal—what would I have done in their circumstances? To this last question, of course, the historian can provide no answer, other than whatever hints might be offered by an honest and compassionate narrative. Nevertheless, the question echoes through the book, bringing the reader closer than ever to a generation of women whose experiences in many other ways seem impossible to imagine. A SENTIMENTAL HISTORY

I will return to debates about the ethics of empathy and the Holocaust at the end of this chapter, but I have chosen to begin with Kaplan’s book for reasons that have little to do with the specifics of her tragic subject. The most obvious feature of this history is the unashamed prominence it gives to the emotional lives of its subjects—the feelings that accompanied events, rather than the events themselves. But (as has already been noted) the explicit foregrounding of the emotions is only one part of the character of Kaplan’s work; more distinctive, in some respects, is the particular way that her narrative calls upon the feelings of the reader: a matter of evoking sympathy rather than (as classically) of inspiring emulation. In reading about the lives of these Jewish women, we are not called upon to idealize their courage or model ourselves after their actions, the pedagogical ideal of what Nietzsche called “monumental” history. What is asked for, rather, is the involuntary movement of compassion that anyone might experience when placed in the situation of the onlooker in the face of suffering—an altogether less heroic and more democratized emotion. In the eighteenth century, works that heightened the reader’s compassion were called “sentimental,” and though the term soon lost its respectability, it still seems the most appropriate way to describe a culture that favors this view of the moral powers of narrative. Given the weight of prejudice against it, how-

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ever, some discussion will be needed to retrieve a nonpejorative idea of sentiment for twenty-first-century uses. Conventionally, sentimentalism has been seen as a kind of shallow or excessive emotionalism, but this seems too facile a verdict on a movement that mobilized such powerful forces, most notably in a series of moral campaigns from antislavery to women’s rights. The real mark of the sentimentalist is not that he or she feels things more acutely (this is just the caricature), but that he takes feelings more seriously—others’ as well as his own. In his social sympathies as well as in matters of self-scrutiny, the sentimentalist trusts himself to an ethical gauge drawn in part from reflection on his own inward state. The first consequence may be to enlarge the sphere of the emotions in personal life, but this is followed by a wider recognition of affect’s role in social communication and moral judgment.4 On these matters we can get some help from a number of present-day philosophers who have reasserted the centrality of affect to moral theory. None, to my knowledge, has gone as far as Hume’s provocative argument that “reason is and ought to be a slave of the passions,” but that is in part because those who now want to argue for the passions are also keen to break down the strict separation between rationality and emotion. “What must be shown is that the emotions do not and should not play an inferior role in deliberations about justice,” Robert Solomon writes in a book with the deliberately provocative title In Defense of Sentimentality. It is false, he argues, that the emotions are more primitive and more dangerous than reason. “Reason and emotion are not two conflicting and antagonistic aspects of the soul. Rational emotions constitute justice, which is neither dispassionate nor merely emotional.”5 The same move away from traditional suspicion of the emotions motivates Martha Nussbaum’s exposition of the ethics of compassion in Upheavals of Thought. “What positive contribution,” she asks, outlining the program of her book, “do emotions, as such, make to ethical deliberation, both personal and public?. . . . Why should a social order cultivate or appeal to emotions, rather than simply creating a system of just rules, and a set of institutions to support it?”6 For Nussbaum, emotions are “judgments of value” and as judgments they have an important cognitive component.7 Thus she can say of compassion that it, “like other major emotions, is concerned with value: it involves the recognition that the situation matters for the flourishing of the person in question.” As an emotion, compassion requires us to take on the point of view of the onlooker and make our best judgment about “what is really happening to the person”8— even if our own judgment departs from the views of the person herself.9 It is not for the historian to evaluate these arguments on philosophical grounds. However, when Solomon writes that justice “is first of all a personal

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virtue, a certain sense of proportion and appropriateness and a feeling of fairness,” we recognize that he is writing in conscious tutelage to the age of Rousseau, Hume, and Smith.10 What draws the two eras together (despite their many differences) is a shared seriousness about the emotions, combined with an (intermittent) distrust of the more abstract propositions of pure Reason. Sentimentalism in eighteenths-century Britain was the mark of a society recoiling from a period of acute ideological trauma.11 Similarly, the second half of the twentieth century saw a sharp reaction against the extremist ideologies and political brutalities of the first. The result has been a deep skepticism about the grand abstractions that guided earlier debates and a greater willingness to place one’s trust in thoughts and feelings that seem more immediate and local. “The personal is the political” sums up the deeply felt instincts of sentimental politics, going well beyond the women’s movement alone, and much the same can be said of the environmentalist injunction to “think globally, act locally.” Against the background of a skepticism toward the grand, emancipatory claims of earlier ideologies, much political thought has accepted the need to rein in its theoretical ambitions and keep to a relatively confined and defensible terrain. Where political philosophers have ventured to outline more positive versions of the good life, however, their programs have often carried with them a new emphasis on the importance of inward states and intersubjective exchange. Charles Taylor’s communitarian analysis of the “politics of recognition,” for example, identifies a broad arena where liberalism’s traditional interest in protection of individual legal rights has been overtaken by a new demand for acknowledgment of the shared experiences and identities of the group.12 This shift towards intersubjective issues has been perfectly demonstrated in the recent debate over gay marriage; here, after all, is an issue that depends on a demand for the legitimations of language rather than (as traditionally) on securing individualistic legal or economic entitlements. As the “record of what one age finds worthy of note in another,” history closely reflects what the present finds most absorbing (or most troubling) in itself. From this perspective, it cannot be surprising that historical thought has followed where philosophical reflection and political agitation have led. REDEMPTIVE HISTORY: RESCUING THE “POOR STOCKINGER”

In essence, the sentimentalist believes that by enlarging our sympathies we cultivate our own humanity. Hence the proper domain of the sentimental consists of scenes of common life, where the sympathizing spectator has the wid-

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est scope for acts of identification. Witness the streetscapes, shop fronts, and domestic interiors that have become so prominent in history museums, or the fashion of narrativizing the past through the adventures of commonplace commodities like salt, cod, or glass. Witness, too, the memorials to the Holocaust or Vietnam where a simple heap of shoes or an endless alphabet of names gives the sheer massing of private grief a meaning beyond any public statement. Scenes such as these carry with them a sense of immediacy—a presence so compelling that it seems not to involve mediation. For sentiment to have this effect, a degree of vividness, of course, is required, but in the end the availability of the emotions is the real goal, not their dramatic heightening. The need, in short, is less to make the past powerful—the intention of romantically or ideologically charged narratives—than to bring the past near. That is why when we wish to exercise the compassionate imagination, “ordinary men” and commonplace objects are so often the channel of feeling. Sentimental histories, to put it another way, bring us possible brothers and sisters, not impossible heroes. Actuality, not exemplarity provides their pedagogical program. Since sympathy is something we extend most readily to those who have been hurt, denied, or pushed aside, sentimentalism has been one of the forces that have expanded history’s social horizon. The lives of women and children— sentiment’s most reliable themes—have attracted a great deal of attention, and it is clear that the reciprocity between feminist ideology and sentimental affect has been one of the defining features of these times. But the late twentieth century has also extended its reach to many others who are marginal to power, starting perhaps with Edward Thompson’s famous inventory of the dispossessed of industrialism: “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand loom weaver, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott.”13 As feminist scholars soon pointed out, the range of Thompson’s historical sympathies was more limited than it seemed at the moment of writing.14 But— more fully than any others I can think of—his words go to the heart of our unacknowledged sentimentalism. By “rescuing” lives such as these from the “enormous condescension of posterity,” many historians hoped to give their work a sense of moral witness that transcended mere professionalism. History became—though we didn’t yet have the phrase—the scholarship of truth and reconciliation, offering the dignity of narrative as compensation for lifetimes of oppression and exclusion.15 Thompson’s redemptive mission brought with it a strong commitment to the idea of experience as a place where the political consciousness of ordinary people grappled with the material and political conditions governing their lives. Experience, in other words, bridged the gap between material realities

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and intersubjective feeling—between structure and consciousness. On one level, this appeal to experience was intended as a protest against the triumphalism of conservative historians for whom it seemed self-evident that history belongs to the winners. But the claim to primacy over our own life experience also challenges Marxian theory when its zeal for a proletarian future obscures the cold inhumanity of its politics. “Their crafts and traditions may have been dying,” Thompson wrote in reference to the artisanal workers who were the victims of the rise of the industrial order. “Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideas may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not.” However imperfect it might be as a category, Thompson insisted, experience “is indispensable to the historian, since it comprises the mental and emotional response, whether of an individual or of a social group, to many inter-related events or to many repetitions of the same kind of event.”16 Thompson’s views have been criticized by poststructuralist critics for whom his stress on experience amounts to an attempt to anchor history in an “originary” prediscursive reality.17 But if Thompson’s emphasis on experience carries unacknowledged strains of empiricism, this takes away nothing from the influence of work that set a direction for a generation intent on describing the interpenetration of lived realities and intersubjective understandings. As Geoff Eley writes in tribute, Thompson pursued “a politics of empathy, borne by an intense and vehement valuing of the lives and histories of ordinary people. Identifying with the people in such a manner presupposed a readiness for entering their mental worlds, for getting inside past cultures, for suspending one’s own context-bound assumptions.”18 This pursuit of experience carries immeasurable importance for the way history has been written and read in recent decades. Most obviously, it advanced the place of affect among the grounds for our interest in history, calling attention to a range of human characteristics and events that have generally been considered as too private or too universal to lie within the historian’s orbit. More subtly, perhaps, when we shift our focus from “things done” to “things experienced,” we turn our attention from the actions themselves to the states of mind and heart that give those actions meaning. Under these conditions, the study of history may be motivated less by the need to plot the sequence of events than by questions about perceptions and responses—not so much by “what happened?” as by “what did it feel like to be there?” This question, too, has its bearing on problems of explanation, since at its best, it provides the cultural understandings without which it is impossible to interpret the meanings of human actions.

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But there is no doubt that sentiment also carries possibilities for facile pathos, or even more disturbingly, for a kind of fellow feeling that becomes the cover for respectable forms of learned voyeurism. In common with other disciplines, history has responded to changes in the political climate by which some of the dominant ideological beliefs of the first half of the twentieth century (socialist as well as liberal) lost their force, to be replaced by a new politics of identity focused on considerations of gender, ethnicity, and community. In North America and Western Europe, new groups found their way upon the public stage, democratizing the theater of political participation. But even more profoundly, perhaps, the search for “recognition” implied a consensus on the primacy of felt experience over externally constructed ideas of rights. There was a growing agreement, it seemed, to measure the value of public actions and institutions by the test (however it was to be judged) of authentic feeling. This reorientation from a concern with social structures to “structures of feeling” offered historians the exhilaration of a new, if often elusive subject. But there were concomitant tensions as well, which came from entering an arena customarily associated with places of popular display rather than the sobriety of the academy. Not since Macaulay arraigned the fictions of Walter Scott for usurping the territory that “properly” belonged to history has it been so easy for historians to point to other modes of historical representation as foils for their own more decorous practices. Heritage, memory, reenactment—these more populist versions of history owe the breadth of their appeal to an erasure of the analytic distancing that academic historians continue to claim is central to their own, more judicious forms of historical representation. The late twentieth century has seen a huge expansion of institutions and technologies promising a new sense of immediacy, often in the form of “immersive” or sensory experience, but there is also a continuity of experiment that leads from the late eighteenth-century invention of the panorama to cinemascope, IMAX, and CGI. From this point of view, the crucial thing to notice about recent decades is not so much the extension of popular sentimentalism as its convergence for a time with the sensibility of elite knowledge. This convergence— partial, uncomfortable, but also energizing—matters a good deal because if sentiment designates the area of human experience we have worked hardest to historicize, it also names the type of historicization we are most careful to disavow. This doubleness is essential to my subject and plays a considerable part in its complexities—including, when left unconfessed, the evasions that have sometimes blurred the ethical responsibilities of historical writing. The truth is that sentimentalism is not something we can separate from academic writing.

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On the contrary, a strong emotional pulse animates our histories, giving vitality to so much of what our age finds “worthy of note” in others. MICROHISTORY, BETWEEN AFFECT AND IDEOLOGY

Sentimental history had its characteristic politics as well as its affective intensities, but it was a formal innovation that first captured readers’ attention. For a historian who came of age in the sixties and early seventies, there was no more graphic example of the impact of shifting distances than the arrival of Italian microstoria, with its challenge to the methodological doctrines of the Annales as well as to old-fashioned positivism. In 1967, I well remember, when I began graduate studies, the first book that thumped down on our desks was Braudel’s Mediterranean, an encyclopedic survey of this central region of European history in the time of Philip II of Spain. Famously, Braudel taught us to value the oxymoronic notion of l’histoire immobile, the slow-paced evolution of geographical, demographic, and social structures, leaving the short time-scale of “eventful history” to seem comparatively trivial. Backed by the massed research of Annaliste colleagues (our second assignment, if I recall correctly, was Goubert’s equally weighty Beauvais et le Beauvaisis), Braudel’s aspiration to write history built on long time-cycles and careful, cumulative measurement was enormously influential. Unknowingly, however, we were on the brink of a remarkable shift and it soon became clear that even within the high precincts of French historiography the reign of eventless history was under challenge, to be replaced by a new generation devoted to the rhythms of small-scale narratives, with the opportunity this gave to explore individual experience in close focus, yet free from the taint of old-fashioned biography. In fact, microhistory’s program continued the concerns of the Annales in a number of ways, especially in their shared interest in everyday practices and peasant societies. But the formal innovation that gave microhistory its name is crucial, since the reduction of scale encouraged historians to give close attention to traces of individual experience excluded by the methods of the earlier paradigm. In place of long-durational accounts of prices and goods, the microhistorians turned their minds to Inquisition records and other legal testimony in order to explore the elusive evidence of popular belief. Admittedly, the documentation was often fitful, but that too was part of its draw, and in the hands of the most talented historians, it was sufficient to bring to life the mental worlds of men and women whom traditional historiography had regarded as “inarticulate.”

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The dramatic results of the move from long view to close focus make microhistory a textbook demonstration of the impact of redistancing on historiographical practice. Like the first readers of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, we could now visit worlds populated by creatures we hardly knew were there, and the excitement of encountering life forms as exotic as the benandanti deepened our pleasure in the arcana of early modern scholarship. In some respects, indeed, the effect of the formal shift was almost too dazzling, since it led to a view of microhistory as a single, undifferentiated school. In fact, though all microhistories shared a common formal characteristic, the genre was capable of considerable variation in the other engagements I have named. Italian microstoria was the pioneer and is generally regarded as the model, but it is distinguished by its emphasis on combining the affective attractions revealed by close focus with other ideological and conceptual engagements. “The unifying principle behind all microhistorical research, “ writes Giovanni Levi, “is the belief that microhistorical observation will reveal factors previously unobserved.”19 Most notably, the microhistorical lens gives us the ability to observe what Levi calls “the irreducibility of individual persons to the rules of large-scale systems.”20 Similarly, Ginzburg argues for exhaustive analysis of individual documents as a counter to the straightjacket of “serial history”—the Annales insistence on studying long-term and repetitive phenomena. “To select as a cognitive object only what is repetitive, and therefore capable of being serialized, signifies paying a very high price in cognitive terms.” Since documentation follows the contours of power, Ginzburg argues, this sort of methodological purism interdicts the historian’s access to the lives of the powerless. By necessity, insight into the lives of the poor or the marginal demands imaginative use of the “documentarily unique” or “anomalous.”21 These commitments have shaped the practice of microstoria at its best. Ginzburg’s Cheese and the Worms, for example, combines exotic detail and human closeness in the manner that gives the genre as a whole so much of its affective attraction. As in all the best works of this school, Ginzburg makes the strange world of premodernity remarkably palpable, and for all its opacity, its mysterious ordinariness becomes all the more graphic in consequence. Even so, as closely as we approach the mind of Menocchio as he reads and misreads the books that inform his bizarre cosmology, his mental and emotional world is never really open for us to inhabit. Instead, the history is largely constructed out of a series of alien silences: the space between Menocchio and his eclectic reading; the space between the questions of the inquisitors and the answers of their victim; the space (never finally overcome) between the historian and his elusive

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subject. As a result, though the story loosely hinges on a sequence of events (first trial, second trial, execution), chronology does not give us its sense of forward motion. Instead, the narrative emerges from the processes of detection itself, just as the mind we get to know best is not Menocchio’s, but that of his untiring historian. But however remote or elusive, Menocchio retains his reality as a historical person, never becoming (as Ginzburg the antipostmodernist would see it) a pawn in a skeptical fiction.22 The result is an unusually compelling combination of affective pleasures and cognitive distantiation, braced by Ginzburg’s refusal of the totalizing understanding he associates with the nineteenthcentury novel. “The obstacles interfering with the research,” he writes, “were constituent elements of the documentation and thus had to become part of the account; the same for the hesitations and silences of the protagonist in the face of his persecutor’s questions—or mine.”23 Ginzburg’s combining of affective closeness and conceptual distance stands out more clearly in comparison with another celebrated example of the genre. Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou offers many parallels to Italian microstoria and they are often classed together. The parallels include his exploitation of a rich inquisitorial record, his concern for popular religious mentalities, and the small-scale focus itself. Nonetheless, we should note some important contrasts that bear on the multiple dimensions of distance. As Lawrence Stone rightly said when microhistory first broke upon the scholarly world, Montaillou “does not tell a straightforward story—there is no story—but rambles around inside people’s heads.”24 Because of its colorful anecdotalism, much given to details of sex and hygiene, the history won praises for its novelistic attractions, and in France it became a best-seller. In formal terms, however, the book lacks a narrative structure, including the kind of hermeneutic narrative that shapes Ginzburg’s tale of historical detection, where our knowledge of the strange cosmology of Menocchio is always twice mediated—first by the interrogations of the inquisitors, second by the detective-historian. Montaillou, by contrast, offers the impression that in the trial records of the Inquisition we hear “the direct testimony of the peasants themselves,”25 while the powerful presence of the inquisitor is rendered transparent. Yet this man—Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers, the future Benedict XII—is the indispensable figure at the heart of this history. His was the intelligence that guided the trial and preserved the testimony of Montaillou’s heretical peasants. Le Roy Ladurie makes brilliant use of this evidence, but his focus on the peasant community comes at the cost of veiling the presence of his principal witness. This strongly ideological choice marks a critical difference separating Montaillou from the conceptual distancing demanded by Levi and Ginzburg.

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One more example, American this time, and richly sentimental in the positive sense I intend it. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale (1990) is a warmly engaging study of the life and community of a New England midwife named Martha Ballard. Here the abbreviation of distance produced by close description has little to do with the conceptual challenges stressed by the Italian microhistorians. Rather, Ballard’s meticulous diary-keeping from 1785 to 1813 provides the basis for a vivid picture of daily life in the early American republic, especially those aspects of family and health most closely related to women. As a historical document, Ballard’s diary is certainly precious, but as a record belonging to a society of widespread literacy, the diary is far from anomalous in the sense that matters to Levi and Ginsburg. It would be hard to assert, for example, that Ballard’s medical practices can only be deciphered in the detail of close-up study. In fact, Ulrich’s investigations often work in the opposite direction, reading the known practices of the day (as described in widely distributed medical manuals) to make sense of the particular remedies of this provincial healer. Affectively, too, Ballard is far more accessible. In its outlines at least, her life as an American woman of the early nineteenth century is not fundamentally opaque to us. And since she is both the heroine of the tale and its recorder, there is no hostile intermediary standing between. This is not to say that Ulrich effaces all traces of distancing between us and the early American scene she brings so vividly to life. On the contrary, each chapter begins with a sizeable excerpt from the diary, in which the vagaries of eighteenth-century grammar and orthography are carefully preserved, estranging the language of the past just sufficiently to warrant the affective pleasures that come from discovering elements of familiarity in times unlike our own. “Juxtaposing the raw diary and the interpretative essay in this way,” Ulrich writes, “I have hoped to remind readers of the complexity and subjectivity of historical reconstruction, to give them some sense of both the affinity and the distance between history and source.”26 SENTIMENT: ITS USE AND ABUSE

In a sentimental age, sensationalism is a particular temptation, and though its excitements are commonly associated with popular media, they are open to academic audiences as well. The attractions of sensation are nicely ironized by a recent New Yorker review of a book carrying the give-away title of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time. “The Black Death,” the reviewer writes, “is like a disaster movie: a menace stalks the land; cries go up in the streets; millions of people die, not

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including you and me. Therefore, like disaster movies, the Black Death is very popular.”27 Even the Black Death, however, cannot compete in popularity with Jack the Ripper, one of the two male presences that haunt Judith Walkowitz’s much praised City of Dreadful Delight. Walkowitz’s important study is centrally concerned with problems of representation and trauma that so often accompany the sentimental approach. Indeed, I cannot think of any history that so effectively reveals the double life of such narratives—the mix of dread and delight that drew audiences to the reformative writings of Victorian social crusaders and remains a troubling feature of these narratives today. From the start, the book’s title announces its interest in the excitements that accompany the horrors of violence.28 So too the introduction, where Madame Tussaud’s “Jack the Ripper Street” (opened, we are told, in April 1980) is described in some detail. As she will do in other situations, Walkowitz sets the tone by quoting sensationalist journalistic descriptions of the Tussaud montage, and then follows with her own more moderate academic translation. “The Ripper street transports the visitor back into a Victorian Carnival of the Night of mean streets, menacing obscurity, and drunken raucous laughter. Newspaper accounts of Tussaud’s street represent it as a movie set designed from the male point of view. . . . As the spectator abruptly observes the prone body of the murdered Catherine Eddowes, he/she becomes complicit in the act of looking, forced into an uneasy alliance with the disappearing shadow of the Ripper.”29 This complicity is a central thread in the chapters that follow as Walkowitz weaves together narratives of reform and sexual predation. “A powerful streak of voyeurism marked all these activities;” she writes in the opening chapter (“Urban Spectatorship”); the “zeal for reform” was often accompanied “by a prolonged, fascinated gaze” from the bourgoisie.30 The prime exhibit in this story of mixed motive is W. T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, whose sensational revelations about child prostitution, entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” created a stir that led to the passage of laws on the age of consent. Walkowitz analyzes the manner in which Stead’s “new journalism” made use of sexual strategies already familiar in popular entertainments and grafted “pornographic scenarios” onto the codes of melodrama. In fact, to pursue his investigations, Stead himself became a traveler in the dark world he wanted to expose. In this way he made himself “a tourist guide and social observer for the reader, outlining the moral and social landscape of the Labyrinth.”31 Transforming himself into the predatory “Minotaur” he sought to expose, Stead demonstrated how easy it was to procure a young girl, with results that were exemplified in an episode entitled, “Why the Cries of the Victims are

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Not Heard,” where Stead reported that the brothel keeper spoke confidentially to him (and therefore to the reader) as a potential customer for her services. “In my house . . . you can enjoy the screams of the girl with the certainty that no one hears them but yourself.’’ 32 Walkowitz easily persuades us that Stead’s sensational writing “not only mapped out the same social geography as late-Victorian pornography; it also replicated, in a moralizing frame, many of the sadistic scenarios that filled pornography’s pages.”33 One’s unease must be aroused, however, by an inquiry that is so acute regarding the complex motives of the writers and readers of another age, but eludes confronting the danger that it too participates in the same complicity. Granted much time has passed since Stead’s time and the Ripper’s, but temporal distance alone does not determine our engagement with the past— least of all in a book which by opening with Madame Tussaud’s “Ripper Street” and closing with a chapter on the Yorkshire Ripper strains to enhance the emotional actuality of its narrative.34 I do not mean to suggest that the problem I am pointing to is easily solved. On the contrary, what Mieke Bal calls “the complicity of critique” is inherent in many forms of representation. The critic, Bal writes, “cannot help being the expository agent, the pointing subject who shows the image, even if the image is the object of this subject’s negative analysis. You can show and critique, but the gesture of showing itself is constative and bears no modal qualification; it cannot say ‘no’ to its own object.”35 Mieke Bal’s particular concern is with visual quotation, where the power of images so often breaks through the critical cautions of the surrounding text. But her caveat has important bearing for a sentimentalist scholarship as well, concerned as it often is to broaden the audience for history as well to explore the widest range of bodily and psychic experiences. Given our favored modes of attention to the past, the “impossibility of showing and saying ‘no’”36 poses a challenge to historians that will need much more discussion than it has yet received. Let me turn now to a second, rather different example, Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. In the conventional (and pejorative) sense in which we ordinarily use the term, Browning’s work is far from sentimental. Strict in its use of evidence, restrained in its emotions, never unduly graphic, the book is exemplary in its avoidance of sensationalism, even though it deals with one of the most horrific chapters of the Holocaust. Browning’s subject is the mobile killing units that accompanied the German army in Poland and Russia and did the work of extermination not in the distanced, mechanized way we have generally associated with the Nazi genocide, but in enormous numbers

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nonetheless, and by the old-fashioned methods of “Jew hunts” and pistols fired at close range. All the more reason, one might say, for the historian to exercise restraint; but in what sense, then, is Ordinary Men sentimental? The answer has to lie in one’s assessment of the book’s most fundamental impulse. Was it to document a particularly vicious chapter of the Final Solution, a chapter previously overshadowed by the more visible history of the extermination camps? Or was it primarily an exercise in empathetic understanding that transferred the methods of Alltagsgeschichte to a new and more difficult setting?37 The first intention gives us something close to the traditional strengths of history as res gestae; the second promises a most unusual witness to experience and a sense of what it was like to be there. Both impulses, in fact, are present in the book and both are outlined in its preface, but they are articulated in a sequence that suggests that in the course of his research the author was led in good measure from the first to the second. For us, the book’s readers, this is certainly the itinerary that we travel, from an opening series of detailed narratives to a final chapter that seeks the widest human explanations possible, among them psychological findings drawn from Milgram’s famous experiments on “obedience to authority.” The result is an approach to mass murder that has been called “situationalist”—a matter of understanding what “ordinary men” might do once placed in this extraordinary situation.38 This combination of historical empathy and laboratory psychology first draws us into uncomfortable proximity to the motives and choices of these killers and then explains their actions in universalizing terms. The resulting mix of distances has proved potent, giving the book its unusual personal impact on many readers, while for others it has raised an ethical alarm. Both morally and emotionally, Ordinary Men addresses the question that so many readers will bring to an account of such atrocities: What would I have done in such a situation? Would I have been one of the few who had the courage or quickness required to stand aside? This gives the book a power that is particularly notable in so restrained an account. At the same time, it is precisely this universalization that has some critics concerned, since it might seem to exculpate those trapped in a real-life psychological experiment calculated to make them indifferent to the sufferings of others. Ordinary men or ordinary Germans? Daniel Goldhagen’s fierce attack on Browning’s approach seeks to establish a sharp choice between an ideological and an empathetic/sentimental reading of the evidence. “I simply do not believe that the evidence supports a universalistic reading of the perpetration of the Holocaust according to which an ‘ordinary’ man, that transhistorical, acul-

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tural being, would be willing to kill as these men did, simply for the asking.”39 Framed by Goldhagen as a matter of Hitler’s “willing executioners,” the story of the Order Police becomes a demonstration of the power of racist doctrine in a population primed by a long history of anti-Semitism. In this ideologically charged reading, we are so estranged from the perpetrators that no exchange of understanding seems thinkable. Browning, for his part, insists that even with killers it may be necessary to find a degree of empathy for understanding to be possible. Ultimately, he writes, the Holocaust took place because “at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time.”40 It is not for me to adjudicate. Rather, I want to point to something in this debate that goes beyond the questions of evidence or argument articulated by the two historians. Goldhagen seems right to insist that the line between him and Browning has to do with one’s willingness to enter into what he calls “a universalistic reading,” but he says nothing about the historical sensibility that makes such a reading possible at this moment. On the one side we find Goldhagen’s ideologically constructed Nazi, that “willing executioner” whose racist brutality has put him beyond normal conversation. On the other side stands Browning’s “ordinary man,” the subject of Milgram’s experiments on American undergraduates, as well as the historian’s own research on the Nuremberg trials. But for Browning’s narrative to work, something more is required than scientific or historical evidence alone. If the Holocaust in all its horror is to be made more approachable—the work of humans, not robots or monsters—then Browning needs a reader who is attracted to the opportunity to exercise this form of understanding, even in the most demanding of settings. This person—we might call him the “willing reader”—belongs to the sensibility of these times. THE HISTORICITY OF HISTORICAL DISTANCE

As with any new movement, the sentimental moment in historiography emerged as a reaction to previous schools, much of whose work had come to seem excessively detached from the real conditions of ordinary lives, when not actively engaged in reproducing oppressive structures of power. This shift was most clearly formalized in microhistory, a narrative device that liberated historians to engage with sparsely documented lives in the manner usually reserved for the privileged.41 But if microhistory grew out of a reaction against previous historical regimes, the dynamics of cultural change ensure that further revolutions must follow. The sentimentalist’s tendency to reduce all questions to their ethical dimension lays him open to the charge of embracing the local and the

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personal at the expense of engagement with larger public and political issues. Inevitably, therefore, the sentimental approach will be criticized for lacking the aspiration to uncover larger structures of explanation that are essential to understanding the world and so to changing it. As Geoff Eley has rightly put it, “Why should the earlier concerns of social historians be forgotten, as opposed to fruitfully re-engaged? Why should embracing the possibilities of microhistory require leaving the ‘macro’ entirely behind?” Not to do so, Eley warns, only leaves the field open to “the latest pack of recklessly and hubristically aggrandizing master narratives [that] will continue enlisting popular imaginations, shaping the political common sense, and generally sweeping the globe.”42 It is not my purpose to pursue these questions, which I deliberately bracketed in order to explore the ethical tensions that I believe are inherent in the sentimental approach. I raise the issue only to make a point of a different kind concerning the historicity of these mediatory frameworks. Inevitably, the distance shift which gave us the close focus of microhistory and the inwardness of the sentimental has been challenged by other ways of engaging the past and will come under an increasing pressure of criticism. It would be premature, no doubt, to say that the sentimental impulse in historiography has had its day, and in the environmental conscience that is an increasing force in all Western societies it may be that we are now seeing the emergence of a new and powerful force for a renewed politics of sentiment. Unmistakably, however, there is also a growing interest in grand narratives and large explanatory schemes, especially those that can be modeled on Darwinian frameworks. If in time these evolutionist narratives begin to shape historical explanation in the same manner that they already dominate a number of other disciplines, a rising generation might well choose to turn away from the current fascination with affect to embrace programs that seem to offer historians grander prospects or more rigorous designs. In that event, my own discussion here would surely seem sentimental in the negative sense I have tried to correct, and even the best historical work of the past generation could find itself dismissed as little more than an indulgent interlude between Marx and Darwin.

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ALTERNATIVE HISTORIES IN THE PUBLIC REALM: FAMILIARIZING AND DEFAMILIARIZING THE PAST

“Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are—although they never occurred.” —Elie Wiesel, Legends of Our Time, 1968 I wasn’t at all like Sandy, in whom opportunity had quickened the desire to be a boy on the grand scale, riding the crest of history. I wanted nothing to do with history. I wanted to be a boy on the smallest scale possible. I wanted to be an orphan. —Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, 2004

Historical writing, it hardly seems necessary to say, has largely been a story about power—who has it, how it is organized and contested, how new formations arise and older ones decline, combined with all the ways that these processes have expressed themselves in philosophy, literature, and art. Less obvious, perhaps, is the fact that while the centripetal operations of power lend themselves to coherent narratives, our growing engagement with stories of experience refocuses history on relations that are harder to circumscribe. The effect—both daunting and exhilarating—has been to leave us increasingly unsure of the boundaries of our discipline, since it no longer seems possible to say just what sort of persons or types of activity it encompasses. This being the case, a question that initially seems liberal and inclusive acquires the strongest potential for critique. “What was it like to be there?” persists, but in newly radicalized terms. What more was going on that we didn’t give the attention it needed? Who else wanted to speak, whose voice was suppressed or ignored? 207

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The roots of the shift from the organization of power to what Raymond Williams calls “the structure of feeling”1 are complex beyond anything I can discuss here, but some of its effects on changes in historical representation are plain to see. In the space of a generation, history has expanded its reach toward ever more democratized horizons while beginning to explore inward states traditionally regarded as the domain of fiction. Moving rapidly from rescuing the “poor stockinger” or recognizing the presence of “Eve” in the New Jerusalem, the historical discipline has gone on to encompass “subaltern histories,” “women on the margins,” “queer studies,” and cultures of childhood, youth, and death— until it seems ready to leap over the boundary between species entirely and take in the nonhuman as well. Even more remarkably, perhaps, this ingathering of genders, classes, and peoples has brought with it a parallel shift of attention to forms of experience that once seemed marginal, commonplace, or fixed by biology. Fear, leisure, sexuality, childhood, trauma: so much that would once have been set aside as simply timeless now takes its place in an ever widening anthropology of experience. Academic historians might like to exempt themselves from a merely sentimental interest in the past, but if this characterization is accepted in the nonpejorative sense I intend, there is no need for defensiveness. On the contrary, I believe that taking a serious interest in “structures of feeling” has been the signature of recent decades and that it has shaped microhistory (for example) no less than immersive displays in museums or the biographical fictions of some recent historical novels. This being the case, what distinguishes extra-academic forms of history is not so much a difference of sensibility as a repertory of representational media and genres that print-bound historians can only watch in envy. As John Crowe Ransom says of poetry, “No belly and no bowels, / Only consonants and vowels.”2 In peaceful times, histories presented as the sum of collective experience appear invitingly liberal; add a few touches of populist theater—a stroll through the streets of colonial Williamsburg, for example, or the whiff of realism in battlefield reenactments—and history museums take on the democratic appeal of an activity that merges family entertainment with pleasant instruction. But if history museums have become populist tabernacles, why have they been struck by violent controversy? The answer, I think, is that where “structures of feeling” become history’s focus, the process of de-centered inclusion is not easily limited to consensual partners. Instead, the radical possibilities inherent in the call to experience become available to all those who feel themselves overlooked or excluded. Most obviously, the identity politics of recent times have made recognition the essential prize in campaigns for representation.3 In these circum-

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stances, outsider demands are not easily integrated into the liberal narratives of those who see themselves as speaking for society at large; indeed, given the outsider’s determination to test the good faith of those who hold the power of representation, the counternarrative is often expressly unassimilable. In turn, as the quest for experience radicalizes itself, the liberal center grows increasingly uneasy at finding itself confronted with forces that refuse its consensus and deny its representativeness. The resulting problems of representation (in both senses of the word) are the focus of this chapter. To explore the twin potentials of experiential representation, I begin with two articulations of the consensual view, before moving on to paired instances of contrastive narratives as carried out in visual and verbal media. The first example of the consensual view is Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s wellknown survey of popular historical attitudes in the United States, The Presence of the Past (1998). Though the book aims to document the participatory nature of American interest in the past, it is as much an argument for affective engagement as a study of its popularity with the American public. The same spirit of liberal inclusiveness lies behind two of the earlier installations at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Quebec, Canada’s national museum of history and anthropology, where Canadian history (Native and non-Native) is presented in panoramic views of the country as a peaceable kingdom. There follows a second visit to the Canadian Museum, where the First Peoples Hall gives witness to a more recent and more confrontational representation of Native peoples. In place of earlier harmonies, the newer installation leaves the visitor with opposing images and texts that face one another in blank disagreement: the science of archaeology on one side, Native myth, art, and identity on the other. A very different way of creating counternarrative is to be found in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004). Unlike the strategy of juxtaposition followed in the museum, this brilliant imagining of a potential Nazification of America follows an ostensibly linear narrative in the traditional manner of histories. Yet from the opening paragraphs of this counterfactual fiction, the reader knows that this is a history that did not happen. We are forced back on memory and a constant comparison of discordant truths. My primary concern is to extend the earlier discussion of contrast narratives to a more recent period and a more popular domain, where, as already suggested, issues of representation are writ (or imaged) large. Among other things, the prominence of visual media in the popular arena allows for a fuller exploration of word and image in relation to this distancing device. Clearly, the immediacy of visual perception invites strategies of contrast impossible to the slower accretions of meaning available through language. The moderated pace

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of verbal narrative, for its part, offers incomparable detail and range of perspectives—here combined with the imaginative freedoms of a gifted novelist. Roth’s Plot Against America joins together two stories of very different scope, a lovingly detailed inner world of childhood emotions within a counterfactual public narrative of the broadest historical reach. THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s Presence of the Past offers a valuable witness to the place of affect in recent historical sensibilities. In response to the “history wars” of the previous decade, the study sets out to test the conservative accusation that ordinary Americans show little knowledge of earlier times and not much interest. What Rosenzweig and Thelen discover is that what most people dislike is not history as such but the formalities of the schoolbook. When ordinary citizens are asked in detail about a broad range of “past-related” activities “their responses impress us with the presence of the past—its ubiquity and its connection to current-day concerns—rather than its frequently bemoaned absence.”4 With its central concern for participatory and experiential uses of history, The Presence of the Past speaks directly to the sentimental mood in contemporary approaches to history. As Thelen puts it in summing up: “I’m much more certain that respondents participate actively and use the past intimately than I am that the pasts they use are intimate or private. The central issue in a fundamentally historical culture is participation or passivity. . . . To find the common ground among respondents, then, we should look for occasions when they participated voluntarily and enthusiastically, situations where they felt invited to use the past on their own terms.”5 Within this participatory framework, the study pursues a view of what it calls “popular history making” that is very broad-based, if only loosely connected to a conventional understanding of history as a public narrative. Americans “reach into history by reaching out of their own lives. As they build bridges between personal pasts and larger historical stories, Americans—especially white Americans—tend to personalize the public past. African Americans, American Indians, and evangelical Christians sometimes construct a wider set of usable pasts, building ties to their communities as well as their families.”6 In the final analysis, however, the authors conclude that there is no fundamental division in the way Americans experience their history since family remains the essential link that provides connection to the past.

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The survey method involves a mix of quantifiable and “open-ended” inquiries relating to the general framework.7 In the case of African Americans and other minorities the “open” variety introduces some questions that break with the consensual tone of the general survey: “How much of a common history do you think you share with other Americans?” “Is the past of any other place in the world more important to you than the past of the United States?” “Do you feel more connected to the past on the 4th of July or on Martin Luther King’s Birthday?” Questions of this kind are obviously intended to give space for alternative views and to encourage a more open conversation with the telephone interviewer. Nonetheless, as ventures into dissent, the questions seem bland, as well as disconnected from the survey as a whole. Indeed, if we return to the core list of “activities related to the past,” it is striking how little place there is for any “past-related activity” that does not fit the familial model. Watching movies or television, making a family tree, looking at photos with family and friends, writing in a diary, attending a reunion, participating in a hobby or making a collection, visiting museums and historic sites—it is in this homespun atmosphere that the core issue of historical participation is examined and assessed. Within this strongly affective framework, the survey tests degrees of participation, but seems blind to the idea that some Americans might experience their histories through other, perhaps less comfortable or consensual forms of engagement. It would be jumping the gun to speculate too far on what kinds of questions would suit the two chief examples of oppositional narrative I discuss later. Still, it might be worth imagining for a moment what such a survey would look like. Is suing the Canadian government a “past-related activity,” when undertaken by those who suffered sexual and cultural abuses in residential schools? Should a survey of historical experiences include fear of violence because of racial or religious bigotry? In what circumstances would joining peace marches, protest groups, rallies, and petitions constitute forms of historical participation? THE HISTORY OF A HISTORY MUSEUM: FROM THE PICTURESQUE TO THE EDGE OF CONTRAST

As you enter the new First Peoples Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC), the museum’s largest installation concerned with Indigenous life, you are confronted by a panel bearing words of greeting superimposed over an image of the Ottawa River.8 The statement is given in three languages, English, French, and Algonquin.

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Fig. 10.1. Welcome panel, First Peoples Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization, Gatineau, Quebec. Photo: Ruth Phillips.

You have arrived on Algonquin land. The Creator put the Algonquin here to occupy this land. The Creator also gave the Algonquins a language to communicate with. It was told to our ancestor that: “As long as the sun will shine As long as the rivers will flow As long as the grass will grow” The Anishinabe life would continue to circle forever. This is what was given to the Anishinabe. And this is as it should be.

This welcome is not issued in the name of the CMC or the Canadian nation, but of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabe Circle of Elders, representatives of the Indigenous First Nation recognized as the traditional owner of the land on which the museum sits. The greeting is part of a contemporary movement to reassert Aboriginal sovereignty, but the picture over which this text is printed ex-

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presses a more complex reality. It is a computer-generated image which merges two views of the same site. In the lower half—taken from an early nineteenthcentury watercolor—we see a group of Aboriginal people dressed in the clothing of the period. They stand on the banks of a river, their backs to the viewer, and look across at the opposite shore. Following their gaze, the visitor is invited to see the landscape from the Aboriginal point of view. But the upper half of the picture shows something that no spectator of that time could have seen: the neo-Gothic buildings of the Canadian parliament, which were not completed until the next century. It appears that the site where we stand—which of course is that of the museum itself—cannot be reduced either to its Aboriginal past or its settler present. Like so many places in Canada, it carries two histories and is subject to rival and conflicting claims. I will return to the contrastive mode of the introductory panel and the complex process of identification and distancing it suggests. But the First Peoples Hall, completed in 2003, is only the most recent of the CMC’s three galleries concerned with Indigenous histories. The Grand Hall and the Canada Hall predate the First Peoples Hall by a decade and a half, and their quite different approach to the problem of representing Native life in Canada brings into relief some of the deeply felt changes that have overtaken museum anthropology in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In Canada, as elsewhere, a potent combination of national assertion and tourism has contributed to an extraordinary growth of museums in recent decades. In the early 1980s, the government of Pierre Trudeau allocated funds for impressive new buildings to house the National Gallery of Canada and what was then called the National Museum. The government chose two facing sites on opposite sides of the Ottawa River—the National Museum on the Quebec side, the National Gallery on the Ontario side, adjacent to Parliament Hill. Once completed, the project established a new monumental landscape that articulated the Trudeau government’s strong federalist stance in relation to the continuing threat of Quebec separatism. In the case of the National Museum (now renamed the Canadian Museum of Civilization) the architectural and curatorial programs were informed by the visions of two men: its director, George MacDonald, and its architect, Douglas Cardinal, a member of the Metis and Blackfoot nations.9 MacDonald’s approach was influenced by his passionate admiration for the arts and cultures of the Northwest Coast (his own specialization) and the populist communication theories of his early mentor, Marshall McLuhan.10 These influences are readily seen in the two major exhibitions installed for the CMC’s official opening in 1989: the Grand Hall, with its spectacular tableau of Northwest Coast arts, and the Canada Hall, an immersive

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environment that invites the visitor to experience Canada’s past as a journey of nation building. The Grand Hall is an enormous curving space, roughly three hundred feet long by fifty feet wide, located at the lower level of the CMC’s sloping site. The bank of windows which forms the long outside wall provides views of the broad river at the museum’s doorstep as well as the parliament buildings crowning the high bluffs on the opposite shore. Along the opposite wall a raised platform suggests a kind of boardwalk overlooking the water. Six re-created Northwest Coast houses occupy this extended stage, joined by an impressive array of monumental totem poles. Though the carefully researched house fronts reproduce the styles of six different peoples of the coast, their placement suggests the form of a single village. This synthetic vision elides the considerable differences among the nations of the coast, presenting them as one peaceable gathering, despite their linguistic diversity and histories of conflict.11 Northwest Coast houses are traditionally oriented to face bodies of water. The polished surface of the floor—much in use for entertainments of all kinds and therefore a considerable source of cash for the museum—becomes symbolic of riverfront or beach. Behind the houses rises a scrim with images of British Columbia’s dense rain forest, animated by the sounds of crashing waves, bird song, and Native music. This backdrop creates a dramatic sense of place, but also runs some risk of reinscribing traditional stereotypes of the Native as “natural man.” Early plans for the Grand Hall included a European sailing ship anchored off shore—a historical gesture that would have linked the exhibit to the time of the fur trade. The decision to eliminate this feature avoided a common museological trope, which associates the historical significance of Indigenous peoples with their early contacts with Europeans, but its omission further increases the sense of timeless sublimity that infects the exhibit.12 The Grand Hall was conceived in the mode of the panorama—a vast, curving, but essentially two-dimensional tableau displaying the art of the Northwest Coast in all its glory. Originally, only one house was intended to be built with a full interior; the others would simply be left as house fronts. The village would also have been without signage, which MacDonald considered a technologically outdated way to communicate with visitors in the age of the “information society.” The aim of the Grand Hall, he wrote, is to “make an impression on visitors through their senses and their emotions.”13 Museum visitors would have to make their way to the adjoining First Peoples Hall (which remained unbuilt for a further decade and a half) in order to find the kind of informational signage that conventionally accompanies such displays. During the planning process both of these positions were modified, and all six houses now have interiors

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Fig. 10.2. Grand Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Mark Salber Phillips.

that contain both didactic installations and information on Native life, past and present. Physical constraints, however, have limited some of them to a relatively shallow space. The concept for the Grand Hall also provides for the animation of the exhibition through live performances and interpreters. Despite these modifications, however, the overwhelming impression remains that of a scene viewed from the water—something like Turner’s views of Venice translated to an unfamiliar shore. On encountering this miniature village, the visitor’s first thought is not to explore whatever goes on behind the house fronts, but to stand in admiration of a picturesque spectacle that manages to be both dazzling and approachable. The Canada Hall, situated two stories above, confronts the visitor with affective pleasures of another kind. Here too the curators and designers were given a vast stage for their work, but rather than gathering up the whole into a single tableau, they chose a more intimate approach. The installation consists of a series of enclosed areas and close-up views, artfully arranged along a winding path that is simultaneously a geographical journey across Canada and a chronological journey through its history. Thus as we travel from east to west (the “path of Empire” as the eighteenth century saw it), we also progress through a series of moments in the growth of the nation. What is represented,

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Fig. 10.3. House fronts and totems, Grand Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Mark Salber Phillips.

however, is a series of typical scenes rather than specific events: Basque whalers, a town square in Nouvelle France, nineteenth-century Ontario storefronts, a Metis encampment, a railway station ready to receive immigrants, a Chinese laundry, a prairie grain elevator—until once again we reach the fishing villages of the Pacific coast.14 The Canada Hall is an extended version of the streetscapes that became popular in history museums in this period. As MacDonald himself explains, one part of their attraction lies in the fact that “they offer a change of scale” from traditional displays, another in the fact that (given the familiarity we all have with city streets) “people feel comfortable in this type of environment.” All the spaces here are small, enclosed, and intimate, and—in keeping with the CMC’s strongly stated goal of making the museum a place of experience rather than a treasure house of artifacts—the exhibits work to make the past seem as accessible as possible. Whereas old-fashioned display cases “place a barrier between visitor and artifact,” MacDonald writes, “environmental reconstructions allow visitors to penetrate the exhibit, thus increasing the potential for that participation and interactivity which enhances both the enjoyment and the learning process.”15

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Fig. 10.4. Chinese laundry, History Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Mark Salber Phillips.

With their invitation to peer into bedrooms, taverns, and churches, immersive exhibitions of this kind offer the sweet flavor of nostalgia, as well as a hint of voyeurism. Such impressions of intimacy with life in other times are also intensified by the reduced scale of the reconstructed buildings, a device borrowed from theme parks such as the Epcot Center at Disneyworld, which was an important source of ideas for MacDonald when the CMC’s exhibits were being planned. Curiously, the architects and designers seem disinclined to draw analogies with other forms of historical representation; nonetheless, there is an obvious parallel with contemporary experiments in historiography—especially with those forms of microhistory where the desire for affective presencing is most salient. If the Grand Hall is a magnificent panorama, the Canada Hall is a sentimental journey. The intimacy of its individual settings offers the visitor a cumulative sense of participation and belonging. At any given stage of the narrative, the scene may seem exotic, but over time and space Canada’s progress from coast to coast unfolds as a journey of identification. The museum’s itinerary takes us through a liberal sample of Canada’s diverse population, seeking to provide points of attachment for visitors of varying geographies and ethnicities.

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As we tread the cobbled path, we are kept aware of following a trail, and if we happen to look up, we may catch a glimpse of the next or the previous stops—a rooftop or a ship’s mast projecting above the horizon. No scene, in fact, stands wholly unto itself. Instead a gentle compulsion moves the visitor forward along the journey of unity and progress that the museum was built to celebrate and promote. Despite some difference in affect, the same picturesque aesthetic governs both the Grand Hall and the Canada Hall. The variation is largely a matter of scale. Any of the Northwest Coast houses could be transferred to the narrativized space of the Canada Hall, just as a number of the Canada Hall’s scenes could be enlarged to create a panoramic spectacle closer to the one magnificently elaborated two stories below; all that would be needed (but is purposely not granted) is the space to stand back in admiration. Given Canada’s regionalism, for instance, one could imagine a sectional revolt among the curators in which the Grand Hall would be cleared of its totems to be refurbished with the lanky wood walls of prairie grain elevators. Tenderly restored and brought to Ottawa, these icons of western settlement would serve a new purpose as a lieu de mémoire of an urbanized nation. CONTRAST AND CRITIQUE

The picturesque, as the name implies, is an aesthetic (and especially an affect) closely tied to visual perception. Though it is possible to approach the same result through language, the painter’s eye moves with an immediacy that the writer’s ear can only aspire to. Museums, of course, have always had both verbal and visual media at their disposal, though not always in the same balance. On the contrary, post-1968 there has been a notable tilt in the direction of the visual as museums everywhere have shifted their emphasis from the objectifying and classificatory regimes of earlier institutions toward a more open appeal to affect and experience. The shift has affected all stripes of museum. Art museums, for example, generally bastions of traditional display, once labeled their treasures with little more than the artists’ dates and the venerated names of the donors. Today every label is likely to become a brief ekphrastic exercise: a verbal description of what the eye should see and, by implication, an instruction about how the visitor should respond. From another quarter, history museums have vastly increased in number, and many have added a performative element, thereby translating an orderly collection of things into an active body of experience. More radically, “museums of conscience” (New York’s Tenement Museum, for instance)

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not only provide immersive displays that encourage the visitor to reexperience the harsh conditions of life in an earlier generation, but also point to the continuance of very similar abuses in the present day. Taken as a mode of formal distance, reenactment often lends itself to nostalgia, but in the museum of conscience, performativity becomes active and critical. At the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the First Peoples Hall offers a strong contrast with the mood of its predecessors. Against the panoramic harmonies of the Grand Hall and the journey of inclusion in the Canada Hall, the newer installation aims at effects that are often deliberately disparate and jarring. Here the curators make good use of one of the perennial strengths of visual perception. The same rapidity, after all, that gives images their potential for immediate pleasures can also be a vehicle for juxtapositions that jangle and disturb. As I have already noted, the first indication of this contrastive strategy comes with the initial greeting panel showing superimposed images of Indigenous life and the neo-Gothic parliament. Once inside the Hall, we come to a display dedicated to the theme “We Are Diverse,” where we encounter a variety of items assembled with cheerful luxuriance, but little respect for art history’s aesthetic clarity or anthropology’s classifications by culture areas and object types. In a further section, called “Ways of Knowing,” the same idea is extended and given sharper definition by juxtaposing various expressions of Indigenous belief with Western ethnology and archaeology. The clear message is to demand respect for the equal authority of traditional knowledge and the findings of Western science. This rebalancing is achieved by changing the space ordinarily devoted to each body of knowledge. Thus the main archaeological installation is surrounded by an array of Indigenous storytelling forms—Norval Morisseau’s painted account of Ojibwa cosmology (A Separate Reality); Shelly Niro’s sculpture of the Iroquois creation story (Sky Woman); a storytelling booth; and a large theater in which Stephen Augustine—a CMC curator and Mi’kmaq elder— narrates part of the Glooscap trickster-hero cycle. In all this the message of contemporary archaeological findings is not erased. Through glass floor panels we see and walk over the re-created deposits of artifacts that museum archaeologists have excavated at Bluefish Caves in the Yukon Territory, a twenty-five-thousand-year-old site containing Canada’s oldest deposits of human tools. There are also text panels explaining the standard theories regarding climate change and human migration across the Bering Straits. But this information constitutes just one side of an argument about the origin of human habitation in North America. Another panel, entitled “Our Origins,” states the Native view: “Scientific research and our own traditions confirm that we, the First Peoples, have an ancient presence on this continent. We are not

Fig. 10.5. “Ways of Knowing,” First Peoples Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Mark Salber Phillips.

Fig. 10.6. “Our Origins,” juxtaposed with archaeological exhibits. First Peoples Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization. Photo: Mark Salber Phillips.

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the first immigrants; we are the Native inhabitants of the land. We have been here since before the world took its present form.” There is no gesture toward adjudicating these differences; as in the introductory panel with which I began, two contradictory images simply occupy the same space, without any apparent resolution.16 CONTRAST NARRATIVE AND COUNTERFACTUAL

It is a truism of contemporary scholarship that comparative study is a powerful tool of historical understanding. Curiously, however, histories that adopt comparison as a formal structure are relatively rare.17 In this sense, we have done little to soften the intriguing irony that although history’s conceptual framework is often described in contrastive terms (“what one age finds worthy of note in another”) its formal conventions continue to be linear and sequential (see Chapter 6). I do not know of any discussion that examines contrastive narrative as a specific historical genre,18 but it is worth repeating the point made in an earlier chapter that a small but notable body of histories has taken this exceptional form—among them texts as different from one another as Plutarch’s Lives, Machiavelli’s Discorsi, Carlyle’s Past and Present, and Tocqueville’s Old Regime and the French Revolution.19 The comparative impulse can serve a variety of purposes, but a common theme has been to set present weakness against the attractions or achievements of another age. Thus if narratives of progress are by nature affirmative and inclusive, narratives of estrangement tend to revisit the past for critical or even openly polemical purposes. Such narratives have continued to be written post-1968, but in tracing this type of composition into recent times I want to confine myself to one distinctively modern variant, namely the counterfactual.20 In this increasingly prominent genre, a historical episode is rewritten to give a plausible account of something that might have happened, but did not. What if Charles Martel had not turned back the Muslim army at Tours in 732? What if Germany had defeated Britain in 1940? By comparison to structures of juxtaposition such as Carlyle’s Past and Present, this strategy of overwriting seems a more radical disruption of the standard narrative. In an important sense, however, the violence done to history is somewhat deceptive, since by definition counterfactuals remain alternative accounts. For the contrast to do its work, the established narrative must remain present in the reader’s mind. Consequently, though the counternarrative thrusts itself forward, its ultimate function is supplementary. Less a history in its own right, it serves as a comment on its double.

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While historical juxtapositions vary markedly in the balance given to each element, comparison-by-superimposition cannot be even-handed. Rather, it lavishes attention on what did not happen, while underscoring the significance of what did. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the genre tends to seek out history’s most familiar moments—often great events that have already acquired the reputation of being “turning points.” In fact, only events with the most secure hold on memory can survive the full weight of superimposition, which may be the reason why counterhistories of Nazism and the Second World War have attracted so many writers and film makers. Like other contrastive techniques, counterfactuals redistance history in order to jar our perceptions of the past. This encourages a speculative impulse that historians normally veil. Nonetheless, among the more conventional works in this genre, firm limits remain on how far the imagination is permitted to roam. Considered as histories, counterfactuals are bound to respect the framework of fact, while deliberately inserting a new condition sufficiently important to produce an unexpected chain of events, all the while remaining careful not to overstep the boundaries of credibility or the logic of historical causation. In this way, counterfactuals not only make predictable choices about what events are important, but also tend to confirm customary modes of historical understanding, even as they extrapolate new outcomes from twists in a familiar narrative. The result is a sort of historical thought experiment, but (unlike its philosophical counterpart) one in which speculation is more likely to be directed toward issues of affect and ideology than those of logic and explanation. PHILIP ROTH’S “PLOT AGAINST AMERICA”

Among historians, a small body of opinion has endorsed counterfactual narrative as a device that encourages a healthy sense of contingency, but in practice most of these experiments seem trapped by their reductive premises.21 Novelists, for their part, have a natural attraction for historical reimagining, but their narratives in this genre, however engaging as fictions, rarely hold closely enough to historical circumstances to trouble the historian’s sense of what is plausible. (I have in mind inventive creations like Ragtime, where historical figures roam freely through fully fictional plots.) The same cannot be said, however, of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—a dark, even paranoid fiction in which Franklin Roosevelt is defeated in his bid for a third term by the dashing aviator and confirmed anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh, followed by an escalating series of dangers for the Jews of America. “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear,” the novel begins. “Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been

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a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.”22 With a simple economy, these sentences present the two central “facts” of the story: the Lindbergh presidency and the narrator’s own frightened Jewishness—or, more precisely, his life as a child (as the wording suggests) who happens to have been born into a Jewish family. Jewishness, like Lindbergh’s election, seems to be a circumstance that is at once external and unconditional—not a religious devotion to be embraced or rejected, but a plain, unchosen fact around which young Philip’s world proceeds to turn. The speed and directness of the opening does away with any need for suspense. The story is simply too important to brook delay, its consequences too alarming to require the artful hesitations of fiction. “We were a happy family in 1940,” the narrator recalls on page two, but only three pages later we come upon the expected reversal: “Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.” To tell his story, the narrator (“Philip Roth”) moves with easy fluency between adult recollection and the time of childhood memory, just as the tone shifts between the flat, reportorial style that is suited to public events and the more intimate observations that play back images of a child’s understanding. The boy at the center is the seven-year-old Philip, son of Hermann and Bess Roth and brother to Sandy: a fictional character, but one whose parentage and upbringing exactly match those of the author himself as described in his autobiographical writings.23 Thus the novel not only follows the conventions of a memoir, but also seems accurate in its details, presenting itself as a truthful account of the dramatic political events of 1940–42 as they shaped the life of a Jewish family in the Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Except, of course, the Republicans did not in fact nominate Lindbergh in 1940; they nominated Wilkie. And rather than being swept from office by the simplistic messages and barnstorming tactics of the isolationist, anti-Semitic Lindbergh, Roosevelt actually won a comfortable victory, opening the way for a series of measures that gradually brought American industrial power to the support of a struggling Britain. In short, though isolationism remained a powerful force in American politics until Pearl Harbor, without the fiction of Lindbergh’s election, there was no American entente with Hitler’s Germany, no Office of American Absorption directing a campaign of forced Jewish assimilation (shipping off young Sandy Roth to experience farm life in Kentucky and relocating a near neighbor to company offices in the same state), no home-grown version of the horrors of Kristallnacht, no round up of prominent Jews and Jewish sympathizers—Governor Lehman, Justice Frankfurter, the financier Bernard Baruch, or the colorful, half-Jewish mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia.

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Readers for whom names like these are no longer current can brush up by consulting the novel’s ample postscript. There (stepping outside the protections of fiction) Roth provides a substantial historical apparatus, including a bibliography of historical works from which he has drawn his material, “a true chronology of the major figures,” as well as briefer summaries of the lives and opinions of others who play a smaller part in his narrative. Factual though the appendix is, its purpose is as much polemical as matter-of-fact, since much of it is devoted to documenting the now largely forgotten anti-Semitism of key figures of the time—Henry Ford, Burton Wheeler, Father Coughlin, and especially Lindbergh himself. Tellingly, Roth also reproduces the full text of Lindbergh’s flagrantly anti-Jewish speech to the America First rally in Des Moines in September 1941, portions of which are also embedded in the opening pages of the novel. Inverting the classical convention, which put invented orations into the mouths of real-life heroes, Roth supports his fictionalized portrait with an authentically historical speech. Clearly this is a novel that demands to be read in the context of history, but the relationship between its fictions and history is by no means straightforward. “The Plot Against America is a work of fiction,” Roth writes at the opening of his postscript, adding that the appendix “is intended as a reference for readers interested in tracking where historical fact ends and historical imagining begins.”24 Whether this invitation is disingenuous it is difficult to say, but it would be odd for a writer who has worked so hard to complicate these categories to let the matter rest here. On the contrary, the way in which the “true chronology” combines reportorial style with forceful persuasion only adds a further complexity to the question of how history functions in a novel whose opening premise runs counter to the accepted narrative of the period. Critics have generally classed The Plot Against America as a counterfactual, or (what amounts to the same thing) an “alternative” history. The description has an obvious application, but taken by itself it is most easily attached to thinly textured narratives (whether histories or science fictions) where simple plot inversion is the defining feature. To fix the label on Roth’s work, on the other hand, highlights a single plot device, thereby prejudging the key issue of just how “fact” relates to “imagining.” If we want to hold open the question of history and fiction, it seems best to begin on the wider terrain of the historical novel—long a home to such hybridities—before turning to the special issues that are raised by Roth’s experimentation with contrastive structures combined with a deeply sentimental re-creation of the Jewish family. At the core of The Plot Against America is its evocation of the tensions and insecurities of life in the Jewish neighborhoods of Newark in 1940–42. This close-up interest in the emotional experience of ordinary people has clear par-

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allels in recent historiography,25 but it also gives Roth’s narrative a shape that nicely inverts the structure of the classic historical novel. In Scott’s works, for example, a public setting establishes the broad conditions of social and political life, while an intimate inner realm (often a romance) addresses the heart. The resulting combination of extended and foreshortened perspectives is one of the attractions of this hybrid genre, in which the irrefutable authority of the historical past lends a sense of moral consequence and seeming inevitability to the inner spaciousness which fiction permits. Roth’s history of the Jews of Newark, it is evident, follows a similar pattern, though one that is complicated by the novel’s autobiographical particularity. The history of the Roth family carries the strongest aura of verisimilitude, while the jarring inventions of the public narrative vigorously advertise its departure from the historical record.26 The combination of two great narrative forms gives the historical novel its distinctive richness, but it also places special burdens on the writer, for whom so much depends upon the integrity with which the work mediates the differing requirements of fiction and history. (Manzoni, having completed I promessi sposi, notoriously declared the union impossible.) Unfortunately, much of the critical response to Roth’s novel shies away from having to deal with these tensions, choosing instead to give selective emphasis to one side or another of its double structure. Some critics, for example, have focused on the intimate portrait of family life in Weequahic, thus savoring the affective pleasures of Roth’s fiction, while turning away from the distancing perplexities generated by his imaginary history. The danger is that the Lindbergh coup becomes little more than a dramatic plot device, something like those private catastrophes that regularly initiate the novels of Ian McEwan. On this reading, Roth’s creation could seem little more than a richly sentimental portrait of the time and place of his origins, rather than a serious attempt to capture the historical dimensions of Jewish life in America. On the other hand, critics more sympathetic to Roth’s wider politics have tended to read the novel against the background of more recent American conflicts, seeing its real purpose as a gesture of protest against the degradation of democracy under the government of George W. Bush. Notably, this reading allegorizes the ideological dimension of the novel, on the assumption that a narrative estranged by such blatant historical fictions is not really intended as a representation of the events it purports to describe. Thus the seriousness of the novel’s attention to public matters is preserved, but only by displacing them to another time, once again weakening the double structure that characteristically gives the historical novel its special force. There is nothing out of the ordinary in the thought that Roth’s imagining owes something important to the paranoid atmosphere of the Bush presidency, with its “War on Terror” and its sacrifice of democratic institutions to the cause

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of internal security. Like other sorts of history, the historical novel too must be a record of “that which one age finds worthy of note in another.” Nonetheless, there are strong reasons to credit the strength of Roth’s engagement with the forties, a time that encompasses the earliest memories of this obsessively autobiographical writer, as well as a crucial passage in the history of American Jews, the great subject of his fiction. “I am not pretending to be interested in [the years 1940 to 1942],” he has written, “. . . I am interested in those two years.”27 Puzzlingly, however, it is just this conjunction that the opening pages seem both to invite and resist. After all, though we can take “Philip’s” word for it that he grew up fearful, we are sure that Lindbergh never became president and that there was no isolationist entente with Hitler. No narrative that opens on this note intends to be taken as a “true history,” but if we are going to read The Plot Against America in the tradition of the historical novel, it remains essential to ask what historical purpose is served by its counterfactual inventions. By way of analogy, we know that Pericles’ funeral oration was largely Thucydides’ own composition, yet readers have no trouble in accepting that such orations hold a legitimate place in this great and sober account of the Peloponnesian War. In this context, the differences between the ancient historian and the modern novelist are a matter of ideological distance as well as formal convention. Thucydides’ creation is both elevated and affirmative, reflecting back to Athenians an idealized view of their own best selves. Roth’s invention, on the other hand, is polemical and estranging, calling out of hiding an image of America that has become repulsive to memory. Like Pericles, Roth’s narrator “Philip” both participates in events and comments on their meanings, but the narrators of modern novels are permitted an extraordinary fluidity not available to classical orators. Key passages often begin from the frightened eye of the child, only to broaden insensibly into the recollective perspectives of the adult narrator. “A new life began for me,” says “Philip,” on the eve of the return of his cousin Alvin, who has lost a leg as a volunteer in the Canadian forces. I’d watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was now away all day working for Hahne . . . and the father who’d defiantly serenaded all those callow cafeteria anti-Semites in Washington was crying aloud with his mouth wide open—crying like both a baby abandoned and a man being tortured—because he was powerless to stop the unforeseen. And as Lindbergh’s election couldn’t have made clearer to me, the unfolding of the unforeseen was everything. Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as

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“History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into epic.28

Removed from context, there would be little to distinguish Roth’s critique of standard “History” from the case made for counterfactuals in a half-dozen historical anthologies. We are not drawn to the novelist, however, for the originality of his historical thinking, abstractly considered.29 What matters is the force and eloquence of his language, which speaks to convictions in which it would be difficult to separate narrator from author. The Plot Against America writes a history that contradicts one of America’s treasured illusions about itself, a conflict all the more acute because the ordinary Jews whose lives Roth chronicles are themselves so keenly American in character. In fact, the overwhelming characteristic of the good people of Weequahic is their unquestioning sense of themselves as Americans, but in the historical circumstances of 1940 this is also what betrays them. “It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me more than religion. Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skull-cap. . . . By 1940 Jewish parents and their children at the southwestern corner of New Jersey’s largest city talked to one another in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson by our counterparts in the five boroughs.”30 And when from time to time (as the narrator recalls) a man dressed in just that antiquated, Old World style did come round, asking for a contribution toward establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, the coins that Philip and Sandy dropped in the charity box simply registered their parents’ desire “not to hurt the feelings of a poor old man who from one year to the next, seemed unable to get it through his head that we’d already had a homeland for three generations.”31 The burden of the story is its relentless peeling away of this unquestioning sense of identity with the American republic—“that huge endowment of personal security,” “Philip” recalls, “that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.”32 In keeping with the double structure of historical fiction, the novel traces the process of Jewish disenfranchisement through a political chronicle that is relentlessly single-minded and personal histories that are anything but. In the face of mounting oppression, some, like the deeply self-infatuated Rabbi Bengelsdorf, will collaborate with oppression or otherwise embrace illusion. Families are splintered by bitter disputes that can tip over into shocking displays of violence. Others plan an escape to Canada,

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while many, like Hermann and Bess, are caught up in a blind, instinctive resistance that Roth pictures as stubborn to the point of heroic. The consequence is a history both extreme and sentimental, an intensely flavored stew that tastes equally of sweet and sour. In no other novel does Roth put himself forward so lovingly on the side of his principal characters, men and women unironically depicted as magnificent in their simple integrity and straightforward ordinariness.33 But as vividly as our narrator recalls the anxieties of his early years, his recollective perspective brings with it continuous reminders that he speaks from a later time—one quite different from the period he remembers with such warmth and alarm. As far as I can tell, the precise moment from which these adult recollections take their bearing is never specified, inviting the association that critics have made with the presidency of Bush.34 A vivid contrast between the two eras can certainly be built on the level of high politics: FDR against George W. Bush, but also the age of Felix Frankfurter versus that of Caspar Weinberger and the Jewish neocons. Roth’s most enduring concerns, however, belong to private rather than public life. Here the changes are more subtle, though pervasive, and their foreshadowing in the prewar narrative is largely felt by implication. Take the following description of Hermann Roth and his Jewish associates at Metropolitan Life, the giant insurance company for which they all work, meeting together in anxious consultation when their employer serves notice that they will be relocated to various offices across the hinterland of America: They were very similar people at the core; they raised their families, budgeted their money, attended to their elderly parents, and cared for their modest homes alike. . . . These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language. . . . Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be “proud” of. What they were was what they couldn’t get rid of—what they couldn’t even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences.35

For these men and their families, the immediate danger springs from the racist policies of the Office of American Absorption, but it is hardly possible to read such passages without looking ahead to the long arc of disillusionment described in American Pastoral (1997), Roth’s great novel of postwar prosperity and confusion. When the two novels are placed side by side, a more extended

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history comes into view, revealing new threats to a way of life that had once seemed as natural as “having arteries and veins.” Here (Roth seems to be telling us) is what would become of all that anxiety and stubborn resistance. “Swede” Lvov and his troubled daughter—they are the future that was preserved when Hermann Roth chose not to flee to Canada and President Lindbergh’s plane mysteriously vanished into thin air. As an art of retrospect, history is built upon the ironies that come from the reader’s knowing what the characters cannot. (We don’t need Thucydides to tell us who is going to win the Peloponnesian War.) Roth describes American Jews at their moment of peril, but he speaks to a reader who knows the America the “Roths” inherited, as described so bleakly in American Pastoral. For Plot Against America, however, this foreknowledge is anything but distancing. On the contrary, looking back across the divide of postwar suburban prosperity—a divide impossible to imagine amidst the pressures of 1940–42—Roth infuses the image of that earlier time with an extra measure of tenderness, though one tinged with sad premonitions. In The Plot Against America (unlike American Pastoral), the longer, intergenerational perspective remains largely in the background of the narrative, a source of irony and nostalgia; the sharp edge of the counterfactual, on the other hand, hits with immediate force and its consequences carry right through the novel. Here contrastiveness goes beyond a simple juxtaposition of before and after to overwrite the historical record entirely, thus producing a relationship to the common narrative that seems inherently more violent and polemical. And yet Roth’s use of contrast-narrative also involves a seeming hesitation that has not yet been sufficiently discussed. The book tells a story of mounting danger to the Jews, but unlike most examples of the genre, Roth’s version leaves the Nazification of America a near miss—a threat averted (however narrowly) by the disappearance of Lindbergh and the emergence of his wife as an unexpected champion of the Constitution. The design is certainly eccentric since the usual expectation of counterfactuals is that their consequences will be extrapolated to their logical conclusions. Roth, on the other hand, holds back from carrying his speculative fiction all the way to its end and attempts (not altogether convincingly) to stitch his imagined history back into the proper sequence of events. The details are few, but we learn that Burton K. Wheeler’s coup fails and that FDR—president once again—dies “in office . . . only weeks before the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allies marked the end of World War Two in Europe.”36 Why hesitate like this just on the brink, only to turn away from the full consequences of a story that Roth has risked so much credibility to set in motion? And

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why, having worked so hard to make imaginary dangers feel convincing, close the novel by seeming to reinstate the old boundary between fact and fiction? At first glance, the collapse of the counterfactual premise looks like nothing so much as a capitulation to realism—a retreat (too long delayed, some would say) from the extravagant burdens of “historical imagining.” Another reading is also possible, however, and I would like to explore its implications. If, as I have suggested, Roth’s alternative history overwrites the standard narrative, it may seem natural to assume that it also replaces it. On this view, the counternarrative presents a version of events that is not only substantially different from the accepted history, but also one that is incommensurable with it. But contrast, like other redistancing devices, can operate in many registers, so it may be more productive to think in terms of a wider spectrum of possibilities. Something similar, after all, has already been canvassed in connection with the recollective structure of this novel, where the narrator’s adult consciousness does not displace his memories of childhood, but revisits them in the light of later experiences, creating a temporal consciousness that is not anchored entirely in either the present or the past. This, of course, is a fluency that comes more easily to the novelist than to the historian. I began by calling Roth’s novel a “paranoid history,” since from the opening it is charged with an atmosphere of sharp anxiety and an equally intense, but defensive attachment.37 But if the label is at all appropriate, it can be so only if we resist the commonsense view that would equate paranoia with thorough derangement. Rather, Roth appears to offer us an account of American life whose relationship to the straightforward appearance of things is considerably more ambiguous. Paranoia (if that is what it is) yields nothing like the whole truth. Crucially, it does not wait for events to disclose their full consequences— something historians ought to do, though witnesses and participants cannot. Rather, it dwells excessively on harmful potentials, confronting the world with the alertness of a fearful child (especially a watchful seven-year-old who is “the offspring of Jews”). But as the joke has it, even paranoids have enemies, and in certain circumstances, an exacerbated attentiveness to hidden meanings may amount to a more penetrating form of attention. As “Philip” announces at the start of the book, The Plot Against America is a story about fear. Fear generates the vision of America that the counterfactual makes visible. And fear is what joins the two layers of the novel together, fusing the sentimental family narrative to the paranoid factuality of the history. The result may be the sort of history that most historians turn away from in search of a perspective that is more distanced and reliable. But even the most sober historian might be brought to admit that there are also moments when the

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matter-of-fact seems dangerously insufficient, and childlike fears or paranoid imaginings may correct the reassuring voices of common sense. In Europe, at least, the Holocaust was certainly such a time; the question of the book is how far something similar was imaginable in America. Much has been made of the use of counterfactuals to imagine compensatory narratives. Unreality is an important element of such counterfactuals, whose purpose is to offer consolations not present in history itself.38 From the historian’s point of view, however, Roth’s work accomplishes something more unusual by showing the reality of events that did not occur. Thankfully, much of what is imaginable never comes to be (and disappointingly, too, when the expectation is emancipatory). But if, like so many historians today, we ask “what was it like to be there?” Philip Roth gives us his answer in a form that although fully historical, requires some assistance from fiction. My juxtaposition of The Plot Against America and the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s First Peoples Hall raises some questions about historical representation that academic history might find awkward, since they spring from possibilities that don’t have a precise equivalent within academic writing. What Roth’s novel and the CMC have in common is that both write histories of oppression using a combination of sentimental and contrastive techniques, the first of these being a way to attach us to a story that is not happening to us, the second a device to jar us into a reconsideration of dangers threatening to them. In both, too, an important part of the ideological estrangement comes from a willingness to strain commonsensical beliefs. Roth’s counterfactual narrative is an obvious case in point, but so too is the CMC’s refusal to subordinate Aboriginal oral tradition to archaeological evidence of migrations across the Bering Strait. There are clear differences as well. Roth’s counterfactual imagines calamities that (on the American continent at least) existed only as potentials. By contrast, the First Peoples Hall responds to a climate of oppression that was undeniably real, its program instituted by the joint agency of the state, the Church, and the educational system. On these grounds there is an obvious distinction to be made between the Office of American Absorption, which sent Sandy Roth to an imaginary farm in Kentucky to strip him of his Jewishness, and the anything but imaginary Residential Schools, which imposed alien religion, language, and culture on thousands of Aboriginal children who had been torn from their families. Is it history’s job to speak about things that did not happen as well as those that did? A generation ago, the answer to this question would have been fairly

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straightforward, leaving a novelist like Roth to stand on the side of imaginative freedom and historians to defend the sobriety of fact. Today, however, the response has to be more complicated and nuanced—not because we see no distinction between history and fiction, but because of the kinds of questions we choose to ask of the past. Downplaying the traditional focus on explaining events, many historians have looked for their subject amongst states of experience or structures of feeling. But here, as it happens, academic history finds itself competing with some formidable rivals, including museums, reenactments, cinema, and the novel. The result is a pattern of affective engagement that we recognize as characteristic of these times. Each generation, of course, has to redefine history’s territories for itself, creating new alliances and rivalries as a consequence. Indeed, the current interest in evolutionary anthropology and cognitive science provides good evidence that a considerable revision of distance is well under way in the human sciences. What is important to recognize is that “what one age finds worthy of note in another” is generally what the age finds noteworthy in itself. But this is only to rephrase Croce’s maxim and to admit that every telling of history (and the kinds of distance it engages) is adequate to its own time and inadequate to the next.

EPILOGUE MY LAI AND MORAL LUCK; OR, ’TIS FORTY YEARS SINCE

Hugh Thompson was one of the heroes of the Vietnam War, though a troubled and damaged hero too. Here is an account given by the New York Times obituary, under a headline that reads “Hugh Thompson, 62, Who Saved Civilians at My Lai, Dies”: On March 16, 1968, Chief Warrant Officer Thompson and his two crewmen were flying on a reconnaissance mission over the South Vietnamese village of My Lai when they spotted the bodies of men, women and children strewn over the landscape. Mr. Thompson landed twice in an effort to determine what was happening, finally coming to the realization that a massacre was taking place. The second time, he touched down near a bunker in which a group of about 10 civilians were being menaced by American troops. Using hand signals, Mr. Thompson persuaded the Vietnamese to come out while ordering his gunner and his crew chief to shoot any American soldiers who opened fire on the civilians. None did. Mr. Thompson radioed for a helicopter gunship to evacuate the group, and then his crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, pulled a boy from a nearby irrigation ditch and their helicopter flew him to safety. Mr. Thompson told of what he had seen when he returned to his base. “They said I was screaming quite loud . . . I threatened never to fly again. I didn’t want to be a part of that. It wasn’t war.”1

Thompson suffered the common fate of whistle blowers. According to the BBC News account: “He returned to headquarters, angrily telling his commanders what he had seen. They ordered soldiers in the area to stop shooting. But Mr. Thompson was shunned for years by fellow soldiers, received death

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Epilogue

threats, and was once told by a congressman that he was the only American who should be punished over My Lai.”2 Later Lt. William Calley, commander of one of the platoons that had been involved, was court-martialed and sentenced to life in prison, but his sentence was commuted by President Nixon to three years of house arrest. Thompson himself was largely forgotten, and his private life after My Lai was troubled by alcohol and several failed marriages. He even changed his name, calling himself “Buck,” to avoid identification with the memory of My Lai. Eventually a campaign was mounted on his behalf and, after thirty years, he was decorated. The Guardian reported: “The US army had initially wanted his Soldier’s Medal, the military’s highest award for bravery in peacetime, to be presented quietly, preferring to keep what happened at My Lai in the background. But Thompson resisted. He wanted a ceremony at the Vietnam memorial in Washington, DC, and the bravery of his fellow crew members recognised as well. In March 1998, he finally got his wish.”3 What had given Thompson such courage and clarity of mind? The obituaries have relatively little to say about his motives, preferring to dwell on his continued trials and eventual vindication, rather than to speculate on the inner resources that allowed one ordinary man to make so costly a stand. The Guardian, however, hints at a number of possible avenues: “Thompson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to strict Episcopalian parents, and moved to nearby Stone Mountain when he was three years old. His father served with both the US army and navy during the second world war and spent 30 years with the naval reserve. His paternal grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee . . . , forced off tribal land in North Carolina in the 1850s and resettled in Georgia. Thompson joined the US navy in 1961, and spent three years in a Seabees construction unit. After a brief return to civilian life in 1964 . . . he re-enlisted in the army, as it was becoming engaged in Vietnam.” A religious upbringing, his father’s military career and his own commitment to the military life, perhaps a residual identification with his Native American ancestry, with its own history of forced removals and genocidal violence against civilians: it would be entirely plausible if any or all of these played a part in Thompson’s response that day, enabling a readiness to act that seems quite different from the slower awakening and retrospective regret that so often troubles our moral lives. There is also a further question to consider in relation to Thompson’s dissident bravery—a circumstance that (combining with the other influences already mentioned) may have contributed something important to his strength of mind that day. As a reconnaissance pilot, Thompson had a different job to do in My Lai than did the infantrymen of Charlie Company, and he

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and his crew observed events from a different physical and intellectual vantage. Their war was no less dangerous—Thompson himself was shot down five times and one of his crew was killed only a few weeks later—but surely they had seen a different sort of war. Indeed, as the Times obituary makes clear, seeing was very much the issue, and in the initial stages Thompson had trouble simply making sense of the picture that emerged below. It was only by taking off and landing a second time that he became convinced that the dozens of bodies that littered the village formed a pattern that belonged to no concept of warfare he could accept—whether the revulsion was owing to his military training, religious upbringing, Cherokee ancestry, or some other feature of simple humanity we do not know or cannot name. Considered as a kind of parable, the story I have assembled from the obituaries speaks strongly for a variety of ways in which forms of distance may operate to shape our moral capacities. In his most critical moment, Thompson was not merely a pilot flying above the carnage. He was also a reconnaissance officer with both military and human duties to perform. His training as well as his physical location gave him possibilities for judgment that set him apart from the men on the ground. By the same token, his situation was very different from that of the military brass and congressmen, whom he angered by caring more about the atrocity he had witnessed than for the reputation of the American forces. On this account, the view from the hovering aircraft confronted the pilot with a disturbing cognitive challenge, but one that could only be resolved in moral action by coming right down to ground level. The result was a lifechanging decision that left Thompson both a hero and a victim. Presented in isolation, Thompson’s life easily assumes the form of what Nietzsche calls “monumental history”—the kind of history that is built on the conviction that the “past must be described as something worthy of imitation.”4 In the context of Vietnam, such an approach has deep attractions since it retrieves a moment of hopefulness in one of the worst episodes in a shameful war. And yet, as Nietzsche rightly insists, for all its comforts, the monumental approach gives us only a selective understanding of history. What, then, has been left out? No historian will ever “walk a mile in the shoes” of those who murdered the civilians of My Lai, but neither can we claim for ourselves the physical and moral elevation of Thompson’s helicopter without considering the very different vantage of those who fought on the ground against soldiers who seemed indistinguishable from ordinary peasants. What were the realities for them? Even the obituaries, focused though they are on Thompson’s courage and conscientiousness, gave indications of another, much less edifying, but equally human narrative: “On March 16 1968,” the Guardian

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reported, Thompson “was flying his H-23 scout helicopter, with its three man crew, over a part of Quang Ngai province known as Pinkville, supporting a three company search-and-destroy assault on several villages, which faulty intelligence had indicated were heavily defended by Vietcong troops. . . . Charlie Company was bent on revenge; days earlier several of its members had been killed by Vietcong mines and booby traps. Without a shot being fired against them, Calley’s men began slaughtering anyone they could find.” The “faulty intelligence” may have been the consequence of mistakes made at some remove from the battlegrounds, but the deadly booby traps of Quang Ngai were experienced at all too close a range, and the men of Charlie Company responded with dreadful consequences for both the perpetrators and their victims. It is not easy to join Hugh Thompson’s experience with Charlie Company’s under a unified view of American warfare. The problem goes beyond balancing the moral bravery of the one and the murderous violence of the other. To understand their intersecting fortunes we may need the help of another relational concept with some affinity to distance. I have in mind Bernard Williams’s oxymoronic idea of moral luck—the sense that even moral life, traditionally regarded as a realm of autonomy, is subject to the accidents of situation. Certainly it takes nothing away from the admiration that is owing to Thompson and his crew to say that March 16, 1968, was a good day to be airborne. And what of the vantage of the historian, whose acts of reconnaissance can no longer be thought of as a straightforward search for detachment? History’s first task may be to fashion a responsible narrative of events, but its larger ambitions encompass complexities that could not have been visible to those who were caught up in the fray. How to grapple with this sort of challenge is impossible to prescribe in the abstract. (The problem has been the subject of far too much prescription already.) But once we are able to set aside the notion of a clear line from temporal recession to “objective distance,” it becomes easier to honor the many-sided character of historical engagement. Only then will we be able to make the most of Simmel’s perception of “the unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation.”

NOTES

Introduction 1. Eric Hobsbawm, “Un historien et son temps présent,” in Ecrire l’histoire du temps présent: En hommage à François Bédarida. Actes de la journée d’études de l’IHTP, Paris, CNRS, 14 mai 1992 (Paris: Editions CNRS, 1992), 98. 2. “Instead of dealing with temporal phenomena, and causing time to stop,” he adds, “they [i.e. the humanities] penetrate into a region where time has stopped of its own accord, and try to reactivate it.” “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,” in Meaning and the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 24. The classic work on history and temporal perspective is David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Carlo Ginzburg has examined the idea of distance in set of virtuoso essays, though with purposes rather different from the ones I am pursuing. See Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance, trans. M. Ryle and K. Soper (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). See also John Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 1 (2010): 87–110. 3. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Hallam’s Constitutional History,” in Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays and Poems, vol. 1 (New York: Albert Cogswell, 1880), 310. First published in the Edinburgh Review, September 1828. 4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 12. 5. The classic statement of this historicist view is Friedrich Meinecke, Historism, trans. J. E. Anderson (London: Routledge, 1972). The widely discussed emergence of a sensitivity to anachronism in the Renaissance is well summarized in Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969). 6. See for example Collingwood’s condemnation of the historical outlook of the Enlightenment: “a truly historical view of human history sees everything in that history as having its own raison d’être. . . . Thus the historical outlook of the Enlightenment

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7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

Notes to Pages 5–7 was not genuinely historical.” The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 77. Meinecke, similarly, though elevating Rousseau above Hume, speaks of the latter’s “failure to achieve a fully historical attitude.” Historism, 300. J. S. Mill, “Grote’s History of Greece,” in Collected Works, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1978), 11:273. Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Alberto Coll (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 168. For a present-day articulation of this tension, see Andreas Huyssen: “Given a selective and permanently shifting dialogue between the present and the past, we have come to recognize that our present will inevitably have an impact on what and how we remember. It is important to understand that process, not to regret it in the mistaken belief that some ultimately pure, complete, and transcendent memory is possible.” Twilight Memories (New York: Routledge, 1999), 250. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 306. The best summary remains Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past. In earlier work I referred to the fourth category of distance under the rubric of cognition. I had in mind Louis Mink’s “narrative form as cognitive instrument,” where narrative becomes a mode of comprehension, or Michael Baxandall’s idea of a “cognitive style” that contributes to what he calls the “period eye.” This usage now seems likely to invite misunderstanding and it seems more appropriate to my purpose to speak about these issues (as here) in terms of modes of understanding or conceptualization. I am aware, of course, that the idea of “conceptual schemes” has also generated a great deal of discussion. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “The Problem of Historical Consciousness,” in Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look, ed. Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 87. Charles Taylor has often acted as an interpreter of Gadamer. See, for instance, “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on Conceptual Schemes,” in Gadamer’s Century, ed. J. Malpas et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). His most comprehensive critique of positivist positions is “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in his Philosophy and the Human Sciences, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). These issues run through Gadamer’s work, but the most relevant sections are to be found in Truth and Method, part 2, section 2. On play, see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 101–20. I take the phrase from Paul Ricoeur’s commentary on Gadamer. See “The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation,” in From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 75–76. Ricoeur’s discussion is partly framed as a criticism of what he sees as an antinomy expressed in the title of Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Ricoeur rejects this choice and seeks to overcome it through an analysis of “the text,” which he claims “reintroduces a positive and . . . productive notion of distanciation.” In my view, this is too narrow a view of Gadamer’s work. Warnke puts the issue more fairly in

Notes to Pages 7–11

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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saying that for Gadamer “hermeneutics is not as much a counterforce to methodical science as, instead, a reflection on the scope and meaning of its results.” See Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987) 137. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, 305. Questions of estrangement, focalization, and authorial distance, for example, have an evident relevance to matters of formal distance. On estrangement, the classic reference is Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Device,” in Theory of Form, trans. Benjamin Sher (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 1–14. For focalizing, see Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, trans. Jane Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), and Mieke Ball, Narratology, 2d ed. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1985). On fiction and narrative inwardness, see especially Dorit Cohn, Transparent Minds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). For an illuminating but much less technical discussion, see James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Much the same can be said of Johannes Fabian’s powerful critique of anthropology, Time and the Other, a book that has done so much to expose the oppressive force of distance assumptions surrounding primitivism. Though often sharply critical, the writings of Carlo Ginzburg are less polemical in their tone, but no contemporary historian has done more to illuminate issues of proximity and distance. Amongst a long series of remarkable histories, see especially Wooden Eyes, and his earlier Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle imagine sacre e profane (1582), in Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento, ed. Paola Barocchi, vol. 2 (Bari: Laterza, 1961), 142. Paleotti was a Counter-Reformation churchman engaged in turning back the tide of the Reformation and spreading the Word to the corners of the earth. Macaulay, “Hallam’s Constitutional History,” 310. The expectation that theoretical analysis should yield fixed combinatory logics seems to me an important and characteristic weakness of Hayden White’s Metahistory. On distance and microhistory, see my “Histories Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 211–29, and Chapter 9 below. See Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1912). Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, quoted in Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 36. Simmel, “The Stranger,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 402–4. Cited from Jennifer Wallace, The Cambridge Introduction to Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 211. Chaplin’s cinematic metaphor can be compared to that of the seventeenth-century French moralist Jean de la Bruyère, who wrote that “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think.” Selected Thoughts from the French: XV Century–XX Century, with English Translations, ed. James Raymond Solly (New York: Dutton, 1913), 132–33.(Also attributed to

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

Notes to Pages 11–25 Horace Walpole.) The juxtaposition confirms the customary association of feeling with closeness, rationality with distance. Macaulay, “History,” originally published in the Edinburgh Review, May 1828, in Miscellaneous Writings, I, 270. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 4: Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, the Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 185. Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power, ed. G. Himmelfarb (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), 26. See Acton’s “Inaugural Lecture” (delivered 1895) in Lectures on Modern History (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 3–4. Michelet, The People, trans. J. McKay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 20. Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 66–67. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 252, 282. Simmel, “The Stranger,” 402. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 274. Ibid., 274. Adam Smith provides a particularly clear statement of this idea: “As to the eye of the body, objects appear great or small, not so much according to their real dimension, as according to the nearness or distance of their situation; so do they likewise to what may be called the natural eye of the mind: and we remedy the defects of both these organs pretty much in the same manner.” Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. Raphael and A. L. Macafie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 134–35. Hume, Treatise, 385.

Part One. Circa 1500 1. Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (New York: Harcourt, 1921), 201. 2. Isaac Disraeli’s comment is typical. “Chronicles were written when the science of true history had yet no existence.” Disraeli, Amenities of Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Whiddleton, 1866), 1:283. Paradoxically, however, Croce deepened the injury by turning “chronicle” into a term of art, though one confusingly given the same name as the typical product of the medieval historian. “History is living chronicle, chronicle is dead history; history is contemporary history, chronicle is past history.” “History and Chroncle,” in History: Its Theory and Practice, trans. D. Ainslie (New York: Russell & Russell, 1960), 19.

Chapter 1. Machiavelli Between History and Chronicle 1. For the circumstances of the commissioning of the History, see Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine,” in Gilbert, History, Choice and Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). It is a pleasure to have this chance to acknowl-

Notes to Pages 26–29

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

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edge my debt to Felix Gilbert, who was my mentor in studies of Renaissance historiography. For the historical background to this chapter, see especially Gene Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1348–1378 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), and John Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Machiavelli, “Istorie fiorentine, Proemio,” in Tutte le opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Francesco Flora and Carlo Cordiè, 2 vols. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1967), 2:5. For English translation, see Machiavelli, History of Florence, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 3:1031. For the sake of uniformity I have used the Gilbert translation for both the Istorie and the Discorsi while introducing occasional modifications as needed to clarify a point. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 3:1031. It may be worth noting that Machiavelli does not connect Bruni’s decorousness or his own freedom to represent these incidents to the passage of time, with the greater distances that result. By contrast, see Hume’s comments on Clarendon’s discomfort with narrating the execution of Charles I in Chapter 3, below. Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica: Edizione critica, ed. Giuseppe Porta, 3 vols. (Parma: Fondazione Bembo, 1990–91) 3:292. Translations are my own. Limited selections in English can be read in the abbreviated version of Philip Wicksteed, Villani’s Chronicle, trans. Rose E. Selfe (London: Constable, 1906). For a very useful overview and brief translations, see also Paula Clarke’s contribution to Chronicling History: Chronicles and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Sharon Dale et al. (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2007). Villani, Nuova cronica, 292. Ibid., 293. Prominent among those named are the two men who will figure in the mob’s revenge that ends the duke’s rule: “messer Cerritieri de’ Visdomini suo scudiere e famigliare” and “messer Guiglielmo d’Asciesi allora capitano del popolo, il quale rimase poi collui per suo bargello e carnefice, diletttandosi di fare crudele giustizie d’uomini.” Ibid., 298. Ibid., 299. Remigio Fiorentino, in Historie universali de suoi tempi di Giovan Villani Cittadino fiorentino (Venice, 1559), marginal comment 121: “L’autore attribuisce la servitù di Firenze ai peccati de popoli, ma più che niuna altra cagione è stata la disunione, e partialità dei cittadini.” Villani, Nuova cronica 3:301. In the later stages of the chronicle, Villani becomes increasingly preoccupied by the corruption of Florentine manners as a falling off from an earlier piety and a spirit of charity. See, for example, 3:348–49. It is no coincidence that Villani chooses to follow King Robert’s letter with what looks like the most minor of issues: the “vicious” new style of dress that Florentine youths had picked up from the French accompanying the duke—though in the past their dress had been “il più bello, nobile e onesto” of any nation. It stands as an interesting sign of Florentine historical mindedness that Remigio points out to his reader that this form of dress, so repugnant to Villani, can be viewed in paintings in the Church of

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19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

Notes to Pages 30–33 Santissima Annunziata:”Di questi habiti se ne vedono alcune reliquie nelle antiche imagini della Nuntiata, preso alla capella maggiore.” Villani, Nuova cronica, 3:338–40. Note that those at the center of the fury of revenge are not unnamed minuti, but rather some of the great popolano families. Marchionne di Coppo Stefani, Cronaca fiorentina, ed. Niccolò Rodolico, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. 30, part 1 (Città di Castello: Lapi, 1903), 194. Ibid., 194. (“come sempre fu, che non è questo vizio de’ Fiorentini solo, fu che sempre i pesci maggiori mangiano li minori.”) Ibid., 199. Ibid., 209. (“che, secondoche si legge, in inferno non si fa peggio di un’anima.”) James Hankins makes a strong case for Bruni’s work as a historian, especially his pioneering use of chancery documents (See his introduction to Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). All translations of Bruni are taken from the Hankins edition and translation. Jacob Burckhardt’s verdict on the change of language is worth quoting: “A superficial comparison of the histories of this period with the earlier chronicles, especially with works so full of life, colour, and brilliancy as those of the Villani, will lead us loudly to deplore the change. How insipid and conventional appear by their side the best of the humanists, and particularly their immediate and most famous successors among the historians of Florence, Leonardo Aretino and Poggio!” Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Oxford: Phaidon, 1981), 145–46. Burckhardt adds acutely that in the classical phrases of the humanists “the best local and individual colouring and the full sincerity of interest in the truth of events have been lost.” Ibid, 145. Note, for example, his separation of the Duke’s successes in foreign relations from his blunders at home. Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 2:273. Ibid., 263. In his preface, Bruni draws attention to the importance and difficulty of historical narration: “It is not hard . . . to write a slim volume or a letter. History, however, requires at once a long and connected narrative, causal explanation of each particular event, and the public expression of one’s judgment about every issue. With the unending burden of the task overwhelming the pen, a history is as dangerous a thing to promise as it is hard to perform.” Ibid., 1:5. Ibid., 2:279. The individuals are listed earlier in the chapter, however, where—as also in Villani’s account—their names serve as a sign of Walter’s deliberate campaign to intimidate the popolani. There is no mention of the son of Guglielmo d’Ascesi, whose fate becomes a matter of such pathos in Machiavelli. Similarly, the escape of the third of Walter’s henchmen, Messer Cerritieri, goes unremarked. Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 2:279. Villani writes with evident pride of the spectacle of freedom regained: “e più di Xm cittadini armati a corazze e barbute come cavalieri, sanza l’altro minuto popolo tutto in arme, sanza alcuno foreestiere, o contadino; il quale popolo fu molt amirabile a vedere, a possente, e unito.” Villani, Nuova cronica, 3:335.

Notes to Pages 33–39

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26. Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 2:279–81. Bruni’s magnification of the role and dignity of Bishop Acciaioli is striking. Villani and Marchionne Stefani had depicted him as weak and vacillating and, for much of the story, a willing supporter of the tyrant. 27. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1131–32. 28. Villani, Nuova cronica, 3:339. 29. It has to be admitted that the pantheon is rather eccentrically populated, but though Michele is no Moses or Solon, he seems not less worthy than Agathocles of Syracuse or his modern equivalents, Cesare Borgia and Castruccio Castracane. 30. My narrative of these events is largely based on the fine studies of Gene Brucker, who first introduced me to the subject. See “The Ciompi Revolution,” in Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, ed. Nicolai Rubenstein (London: Faber, 1968), 314–356. For the larger context, see especially Brucker’s Florentine Politics and Society, and John Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280–1400 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Among specialized studies, see Najemy, “Audiant Omnes Artes: Corporate Origins of the Ciompi Revolution,” in Il tumulto dei Ciompi: Un momento di storia fiorentina ed europea. Atti del Convegno Firenze 1979 (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 59–93; Richard Trexler, “Follow the Flag: The Ciompi Revolt Seen from the Streets,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 46 (1984): 357–92; Samuel Cohn, The Laboring Classes in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), esp. 129–54. 31. Alamanno Acciaioli, “Cronaca,” in Il tumulto dei Ciompi: Cronache e memorie, ed. Gino Scaramella, Rerum Italicarum scriptores, n.s., vol. 18, part. 3 (Bologna: Zanicelli, 1917), 18 (my translation). 32. Ibid., 32–33. 33. Stefani, Cronaca, 315. For the events of 1378, unlike those of 1342, Stefani’s chronicle is one of the primary accounts. 34. “Cronaca prima di anonimo conosciuta sotto il nome di Cronaca dello squittinatore,” in Il tumulto dei Ciompi: Cronache e memorie, 81–82. 35. Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 3:9–11. 36. Ibid., 13. 37. Ibid., 9. 38. Typical is Bruni’s recitation of the lesson of Salvestro’s miscalculation: “Thus, while intending to succor a few men who have been ‘warned’ [i.e. proscribed by the Guelfs], he despoiled of its social position his own family and all others like it, subjecting it to the rashness of an aroused mob. For there was no bridling the uncontrollable willfulness of the impoverished criminals who took up arms, raging with desire for the fortunes of rich and honorable men. Their only goal was plunder, slaughter and the exile of citizens.” Ibid., 9. 39. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1159–60. 40. Ibid., 1160. The English peasants famously questioned the pretended rights of their superiors, chanting, “When Adam dug and Eve span, Who was then the gentle man”? But it was Cosimo de’ Medici, neither a pleb nor an ideologue, who remarked that five yards of fine cloth make a gentleman.

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Notes to Pages 40–44

41. Stefani, Cronaca, 325: “lo ’mpiccarono, e sbranarono, e tagliarono a bocconi, che tale ne portò a casa per parte meno d’un’oncia, peso.” Bruni also notes the event, but his account is much less vivid. The victim is not named nor (more importantly) is his death attributed to Michele’s diversionary stratagem. See Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 3:7. 42. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1166. Bruni also notes the event, but his account of the lynching is generalized rather than vivid and lacks Machiavelli’s suggestion that the violence was an act of policy on Michele’s part. See Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 3:7. 43. “Thus, though not without a certain crudity in his domestic manners, he was an able man thanks to his experience abroad and was at once well-informed and artful in his conduct of affairs.” Bruni, History of the Florentine People, 3:11. 44. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1166. It could be said that the formula applies to Machiavelli as well. 45. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1167. 46. Ibid., 1168. 47. The classic formulation is in The Prince 6: “quelli che per propria virtù e non per fortuna sono diventati principi.” Il principe e Discorsi, ed. S. Bertelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), 30. 48. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 50.

Chapter 2. A Study in Contrasts 1. On contrastive structures in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories, see below, Chapter 6. 2. See particularly Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). My own views are set out at greater length in Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1977), and The Memoir of Marco Parenti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 3. Machiavelli, Discorsi, in Il principe e Discorsi, ed. Sergio Bertelli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), 125. For the English translations, I cite the Discourses, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), here 1:191 (modified). 4. Machiavelli, Discourses, 190. 5. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. Francis Fergusson, trans. S. H. Butcher (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 68. Aristotle goes on to say that “general truths are the kind of thing which a certain type of person would probably or inevitably do or say.” 6. Philip Sidney writes: “The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example. But both, not having both, do both halt. For the philosopher, setting down with thorny argument the bare rule, is so hard of utterance and so misty to be conceived, that one that hath no other guide but him shall wade in him till he be old before he shall find sufficient cause to be honest. . . . On the other side, the historian, wanting the precept, is so tied, not to what should be but to what is, to the particular truth of things and not to the general

Notes to Pages 44–47

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

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reason of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence, and therefore a less fruitful doctrine.” Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), 3d rev. ed., ed. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 89–90, see also 94. For Reynolds’s distinction between the Grand Style and the “vulgar” factuality of history, see Chapter 8, below. See below, Chapter 6. Quoted from George H. Nadel, “Philosophy of History Before Historicism,” History and Theory 3 (1964): 301. “I have read somewhere or other—in Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I think—that history is philosophy teaching by example.” Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke, Letters on the Study and Use of History (London, 1738), Letter 2. Other early modern writers echo the same view, including Degory Wheare and John Dryden. Dryden, for example, writes: “All history is only the precepts of moral philosophy reduced into examples.” See Works of John Dryden, ed. Walter Scott, rev. George Saintsbury, vol. 17 (London: William Paterson, 1892), 61. On Renaissance ideas of exemplary history, see Nadel, “Philosophy of History,” as well as Timothy Hampton: Writing from History; The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). Hampton’s study is wide-ranging and helpful, but for reasons outlined just below, I find his discussion of Machiavelli and Guicciardini misdirected. See Chapter 9, below. On the sentimental bias of much eighteenth-century historiography, see my Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740– 1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). On microhistory and distance, see my “Histories Micro- and Literary,” New Literary History 34 (2003): 211–29, as well as John Brewer, “Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life,” Cultural and Social History 7 (2010): 87–109. Commenting on Romantic historiography, Ann Rigney notes: “Details help heighten the realism of an account and hence its status as a representation of real events.” See her engaging study, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). For more on this theme, see Chapter 9, below. My view is at odds with Hampton’s reading of Machiavelli, which “brings [Machiavelli] quite close to the extreme scepticism of . . . Francesco Guicciardini” (Writing from History, 72). This interpretation involves a considerable over-reading of Machiavelli’s work and, in my view, produces at least three difficulties. First, we miss the distinction I have drawn between direct imitation and comprehensive imitation and thus a significant difference between the Prince and the Discorsi. Second, by bringing Machiavelli so close to Guicciardinian skepticism, Hampton in effect makes Guicciardini a very poor reader of his contemporary, though we have every reason to believe that Guicciardini understood very well what divided his own views from Machiavelli’s. Third, in order to save some differences between the two men, Hampton (influenced by Pocock) takes the view that Guicciardini was trapped in “passivity” (ibid., 73). In my view, this is a fundamental misreading, which confuses prudence with passivity. To the contrary, what Machiavelli and Guicciardini share is precisely

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15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28.

Notes to Pages 47–51 the sense that in the crisis of the Italian states, historical understanding is always conditioned by the necessity of action. See Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, as well as my Francesco Guicciardini. Bolingbroke, Letters, Letter 4, 12–13. Quoted from Nadel, “Philosophy of History,” 311. All but two chapters begin with these introductions. The two exceptions are Books 1 and 8. Book 2 opens with an excursus on colonies; Book 3 treats domestic discords between the nobility and the people; Book 4 deals with license and slavery as the peculiar defects of republican government; Book 5 with the cyclical change from order to confusion and back to a state of order again—or more fully, from virtue and repose to disorder and ruin and back to virtuous repose; Book 6 with the object of war and the use of victory, with comparison of “ancient and well-ordered republics” to the disorders of modern warfare; Book 7 begins “according to my habit” with a discussion of the impossibility of avoiding internal dissensions and how they may sometimes be beneficial and other times harmful (a return, more or less to the subject of Book 3, but now turned to the question of public versus private methods); Book 8 finally points to the custom of introductory considerations and notes that the book should rightly begin with a discussion of conspiracy, only to say that this has been done elsewhere. On the importance of these chapter introductions, see the illuminating article of Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine: an Essay in Interpretation,” in History, Choice and Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). Machiavelli, History of Florence, in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan Gilbert, 3 vols. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 3:1140. Machiavelli, Discourses, in Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, 1:4. Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, in Tutte le opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Francesco Flora and Carlo Cordiè, 2 vols. (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1967), 2:123. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1383. Walker calculates that this chapter is three times the length of the next longest chapter and eight times the length of the average. See Lesley J. Walker, The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 2:154–55. Machiavelli, Discorsi, 3.6. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1384. Locations include Sparta, Syracuse, Macedonia, and Carthage, as well as Venice, Siena, Naples, Milan, and France. Often multiple examples are crammed into a very short chapter; equally the chapter title and opening may indicate the comparative frame. For example, the topic of 1.28 is: “Why The Romans Were Less Ungrateful to Their Citizens Than the Athenians.” This is followed by 1.29: “Which Is More Ungrateful: A People or a Prince.” Walker’s notes in the second volume of his edition of the Discorsi are attentive to Guicciardini’s criticisms and offer a good guide to his specific differences with Machiavelli. Machiavelli, Discorsi, 1.4. “Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli,” in Selected Writings, ed. Cecil Grayson, trans. Margaret Grayson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), IV. The

Notes to Pages 51–55

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

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Italian text is edited by Roberto Palmarocchi in Scritti politici e Ricordi (Bari: Laterza, 1933), 3–65. Guicciardini, “Considerations,” VIII. Machiavelli, Discorsi, 1.12. This hatred is expressed most vehemently in Ricordi, C 28: “I know of no one who loathes the ambition, the avarice and the sensuality of the clergy more than I—both because each of these vices is hateful in itself and because each and all are hardly suited to those who profess to live a life dependent upon God.” Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman: Ricordi, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Harper, 1965). Guicciardini, “Considerations,” XII. Ibid. Guicciardini, Ricordi, C 117. The authoritative Italian text prints the final form of each of the Ricordi, along with the previous redactions. See Guicciardini, Ricordi, Edizione critica, ed. R. Spongano (Florence: Sansoni, 1951). In some cases, this means being able to trace the evolution of a thought across five versions, identified by Spongano as Q1, Q2. A, B, and the final version, C. For my own exploration of this text, building upon the opportunities provided by its multiple layers, see Phillips, Francesco Guicciardini, 61–80. Guicciardini, Ricordi, C 110. Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, ed. Costantino Panigada, 5 vols. (Bari: Laterza, 1967) 1:83–84. He adds that it is necessary that affairs be governed by the same prudence and enjoy the same good fortune. Guicciardini’s reuse of his maxims in this way is both frequent and flexible. Often, as here, the observation is conveyed by the voice of the narrator, but we also find them embedded in orations attributed to men who are actors in the drama. These borrowings occur frequently enough that, on the model of Spongano’s remarkable edition of the Ricordi, one could assemble yet another redaction of this slow-growing work from the pages of the Storia d’Italia. Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, 1:67; History of Italy, trans. Sidney Alexander (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 48. For the English versions, I have generally made use of Alexander’s abridged translation of the History, but with occasional corrections. In my view, Alexander’s version is more reliable as a translation than as an abridgment. In this opening phase, Guicciardini paints most of the principal combatants with the same ironic distance. Charles VIII is treated to a grotesque physical description and an unflattering comparison with Hannibal, while the Italians are depicted as half-hearted and duplicitous. One of their princes, for example, though himself bound to fight on the side of Naples, offers his son to the French as a condottiere. The French were amazed, the historian remarks gravely, not being accustomed to the subtlety of the Italians. Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, 1:13. Ibid., 67. “Thus numerous examples (per innumerabili essempli) will make it plainly evident how mutable are human affairs . . . and how pernicious, almost always to themselves but always to the people, are those ill-advised measures of rulers.” Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia 1:1; Guicciardini, History of Italy, 3.

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Notes to Pages 55–61

43. The idea of the balance of power was not yet formalized in the historical or diplomatic vocabulary, but Guicciardini is generally credited with one of its earliest articulations. At the opening of the history, he attributes the peace and prosperity of Italy to the careful diplomacy of Lorenzo, who ensured that a balance would be maintained (“procurava con ogni studio che le cose d’Italia in modo bilanciate si mantenessino”). Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, 1:3. The deaths of Lorenzo and his ally Ferdinand of Aragon, followed by the elevation of their reckless sons, Piero de’ Medici and Alfonso of Naples, tip Italy into a new and dangerous moment. 44. Ibid., 2:245. 45. Ibid., 245–46. 46. When, for example, Julius returns to action after a near-fatal illness, Guicciardini comments that his revival was owed, either to the robustness of his constitution or to his being reserved by the Fates to be the author and principal cause of still longer and greater calamities for Italy (“o dall’ essere riservato da’ fati come autore e cagione principale di più lunghe e maggiori calamità di Italia.” Ibid., 3:120. 47. Guicciardini, “Considerations,” XXVI. 48. A particularly elaborate instance of this kind of uncertainty concerns Pope Leo X’s uncharacteristic and strategically dangerous decision to risk the consequences of a resumption of war in 1521. Having offered no less than six motives, Guicciardini simply concludes that whichever of these reasons applied or all of them together (“o una o più o tutte insieme”), Leo turned all his thoughts to war. Storia d’Italia, 4:79–80. 49. Machiavelli, History of Florence, 1031.

Part Two. Circa 1800 1. See above, Introduction, note 35.

Chapter 3. “The Most Illustrious Philosopher and Historian of the Age” 1. David Hume, Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:232. The purpose of the letter to Strahan was to recommend Robert Henry’s proposal for his new History of England, “written on a new plan.” On the significance of Henry’s extraordinary idea of writing history in seven simultaneous narratives, see my Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–7. 2. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83. 3. For the reception of Hume’s history in Britain, see my “Canonization and Critique: Hume’s Reputation as a Historian,” (with Dale Smith) in The Reception of David Hume in Europe, ed. Peter Jones (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2005); for the American reception, see Mark G. Spenser, David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005).

Notes to Pages 62–69

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4. Thomas Carlyle, “Biography,” in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, 5 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 3:47; W. Dilthey, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 162. 5. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 87. 6. David Hume, History of England, ed. William S. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 6:531. 7. Ibid., 533. 8. Even more offensive was Hume’s stance of philosophic detachment in relation to both Catholic and Protestant religions, but in this case Hume recognized the danger in which this put him and excised two considerable passages from the History. For the outraged reactions of his critics Daniel McQueen and Joseph Towers, see my Society and Sentiment, 58–59. 9. Philip Hicks, Neoclassical History and English Culture (New York: St. Martins Press, 1996). 10. Monthly Review, 2d ser., 3 (1790): 93–94. 11. For the continuance of these assumptions in the neoclassical teachings of Joshua Reynolds, see Chapter 8 below. 12. Henry, History of Great Britain, 6 vols. (London: Cadell, 1771–93), 6:255. 13. Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 88–89. 14. Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 102. Historians have given surprisingly little attention to the remarkable discussion of historical narrative presented in these lectures. Unpublished in Smith’s lifetime, the lectures were reconstructed from student notes in the twentieth century. On the historiographical interest of the Lectures, see my “Adam Smith, Belletrist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith, ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),57–78. 15. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. H. F. Harding, 2 vols. (London, 1783; reprint, Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1965), 2:270–71. 16. Ibid., 288. 17. Hume, History of England, 5:124ff. 18. Ibid., 129; emphasis added. 19. Ibid., 132; emphasis added. 20. Ibid.; emphasis added. 21. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 276. 22. Hume, History of England, 5:132–33; emphasis added. 23. Ibid, 135–41. For the revenue, see 135; interest rates, 136; supplies, 137–38; corn prices, 138; standing army, 140; men capable of bearing arms, 141. 24. For more on the contrastive structure of historical understanding, see below, Chapter 6. 25. Hume, Essays, 112; emphasis in original. 26. Ibid., 112–13.

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Notes to Pages 70–76

27. Ibid., 32. 28. Ibid., 51. 29. The text deserves to be quoted at greater length: “though men be much governed by interest; yet even interest itself, and all human affairs, are entirely governed by opinion. Now, there has been a sudden and sensible change in the opinions of men within these last fifty years, by the progress of learning and of liberty. Most people, in this island have divested themselves of all superstitious reverence to names and authority.” See “Whether the British Government Inclines More to Absolute Monarchy or to a Republic,” ibid. This passage belongs to the first part of the essay, which was published in 1742; in 1777 it was combined with the second part, originally published in 1752 in Political Essays. 30. See J. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queens University Press, 1983). 31. A fuller account would need to incorporate parallel terms such as “manners and customs” or “ancient precedent and example”—terms which later usage would subsume under the idea of tradition. This meaning of tradition, however, was not yet available in Hume’s time or even that of Edmund Burke. For “ancient precedent,” see for example, History of England, 5:128. 32. Ibid., 93–94. 33. Ibid., 14. 34. Ibid., 62. 35. Hume, Letters, 1:237; emphasis in original. 36. On varieties of Whiggism, see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 37. Hume, History of England, 5:40. 38. Ibid., 4:383–84. 39. Ibid., 5:127; emphasis in original. 40. Ibid., 128. 41. Ibid., 45. 42. Ibid., 170. 43. Ibid., 4:146. 44. Ibid., 144–45. 45. Ibid., 5:240. 46. Ibid., 159. 47. For all its real strengths, Donald Livingston’s Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) appears to be in danger of making such a claim. Simon Blackburn mounts a strong defense of Hume against the traditional accusation that he lacks a historicist understanding and claims for Hume a manner of rendering the unfamiliar familiar that is “superior to the Verstehen tradition.” See Simon Blackburn, Truth: A Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 213. 48. On sentimental representation in Bowyer’s edition, see Chapter 8, below. 49. Hume, History of England, 5:267. On a broader scale, such notions could be applied not just to the irrationality of the single individual, but to the irrationality of a whole culture, producing precisely the kind of exclusion from history for which Hume and

Notes to Pages 76–81

50.

51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

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other Enlighteners have been much blamed. See his comment on the Anglo-Saxons: “The convulsions of a civilized state usually compose the most instructive and the most interesting part of its history; but the sudden, violent, and unprepared revolutions, incident to Barbarians, are so much guided by caprice, and terminate so often in cruelty that they disgust us by the uniformity of their appearance; and it is rather fortunate for letters that they are buried in silence and oblivion.” Ibid., 1:3–4. See J. C. Hilson, “Hume: The Historian as Man of Feeling,” in Augustan Worlds: Essays in Honour of A. R. Humphreys, ed. J. C. Hilson, M. Jones, and J. Watson (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1978), 205–22; Mark Salber Phillips, “Relocating Inwardness: Historical Distance and the Transition from Enlightenment to Romantic Historiography,” PMLA 118 (2003): 436–49. John Allen, “Review of John Lingard, A History of England” (1825), reprinted in James Fieser, Early Responses to Hume’s History of England, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002), 4. I have discussed Hume’s gendering of history in “If Mrs. Mure Be Not Sorry for Poor King Charles: History, the Novel and the Sentimental Reader,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 111–32, and in Society and Sentiment, 101–5, 110–22. James Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. R. Mackintosh, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1853) 2:127–35. Witness Hume’s repeated stress on the narrow prejudices of ancestral England—the “bigotry which prevailed in that age.” History of England, 5:129. Ibid., 6:62. Ibid., 145. Ibid., 5:450. Ibid., 543.

Chapter 4. “What Sympathy Then Touches Every Human Heart!” 1. According to White, “Hume viewed the historical record as little more than the record of human folly, which led him finally to become as bored with history as he had become with philosophy.” Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 55. For Collingwood’s hostility to Enlightenment historiography, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, rev. ed., ed. Jan van der Dussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 71–85. 2. “They who come forward imbued with the sap of the people bring, nonetheless a new degree of life and rejuvenation. . . . Let that be my contribution for the future: not to have attained but to have marked the aim of history, to have given it a name that no one had conceived. Thierry called it narration, and Guizot analysis. I have named it resurrection, and this name will last.” Michelet, The People, trans. J. P. McKay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 19. 3. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Hallam’s Constitutional History,” in Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays and Poems, vol. 1 (New York: Albert Cogswell, 1880), 310.

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Notes to Pages 82–83

4. “Observations on the Historical Work of the late Rt. Honourable Charles James Fox. By the Right Honourable George Rose,” Quarterly Review (November 1809): 233. The anonymous author has been identified as Allan Maconochie, Lord Meadowbank, who had been Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nations at the University of Edinburgh. See Jonathan Cutmore, Contributors to the Quarterly Review (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 108. 5. As Adam Smith puts it, common observation shows us the world in all its particularity and incoherence, but philosophy is “the science of the connecting principles of Nature.” See “History of Astronomy,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. Ian S. Ross (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 45. Similarly, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith pays tribute to the improvements brought about by the concentrated intelligence of artisans, but counterposes their contribution to “those who are called philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything; and who, upon that account, are often capable of combining together the powers of the most distant and dissimilar objects.” An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 1:21. The idea of increasing abstraction also becomes a principle of historical development. Both Smith and Blair apply it to the evolution of language, while Millar speaks of increasing abstraction as a feature of the law. See Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric, and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 10; Hugh Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (1763; reprinted in The Poems of Ossian, ed. Howard Gaskill [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996]), 354–55. “In a rude age,” Millar writes regarding medieval law, “the observation of mankind is directed to particular objects; and seldom leads to the formation of general conclusions.” Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, ed. M. S. Phillips and D. Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 368. 6. Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), 340. The first, abortive draft of the novel carried the subtitle “’Tis Fifty Years Since.” Scott’s adjustment of the number when he resumed work on the book speaks both to his typical pragmatism and his continued commitment to the idea of two generations as a privileged distance. For a further discussion of Scott’s sense of historical change in relation to Sir John Sinclair and the Statistical Account of Scotland, see Chapter 5 below. 7. Collingwood makes a direct comparison. Commenting on the Enlightenment’s tendency to denigrate the past as against the Romantic period’s extension of sympathy, he writes: “When one compares, for example, the complete lack of any sympathy for the Middle Ages shown by Hume with the intense sympathy for the same thing which is found in Sir Walter Scott, one can see how this tendency of Romanticism had enriched its historical outlook.” Idea of History, 87. Though Collingwood’s comment is aimed specifically at the question of the Middle Ages, it is clear that Hume’s view of this period is to be understood as the extreme case of a general posture in respect to pre-Enlightenment Europe. 8. For a longer discussion of Hume’s historiographical practices and especially the balance between affective and cognitive elements, see my Society and Sentiment: Genres

Notes to Pages 83–85

9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

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of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), chaps. 1 and 2, as well as Chapter 3 above. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 117; emphasis added. Roger Lonsdale, ed., The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith (London: Longmans, 1969), 60. Thomas Campbell, Complete Poetical Works, ed. J. Logie Robertson (London: Oxford University Press, 1907), 2. Lonsdale, The Poems of Thomas Gray, 483. “And from her wild sequester’d Seat, / In Notes by Distance made more sweet.” Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric, ed. Harold F. Harding, 2 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 1:51. “In general,” he observes, “all objects that are greatly raised above us, or far removed from us, either in space or in time, are apt to strike us as great. Our viewing them, as through the mist of distance or antiquity, is favourable to the impressions of their Sublimity.” Edinburgh Review 60 (September 1818): 278. On the aesthetic ramifications of this theme, see especially John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). Reynolds, Discourses on Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), Discourse III, 44–45. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 141. William Hazlitt, “On Antiquity” (originally published May 1821); in Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, vol. 12 (London: Dent, 1931), 253–54. More typically, Hazlitt writes in opposition to Reynolds’s views on art and aesthetics. Ibid., 253–54. See for example Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 32. “’Tis commonly allow’d by philosophers, that all bodies which discover themselves to the eye, appear as if painted on a plain surface, and that their different degrees of remoteness from ourselves are discover’d more by reason than by the senses. . . . We must form a parallel supposition concerning the objects of our feeling.” Ibid., 42. Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 115. Ibid., 115. Adam Smith, similarly, drew an analogy between what he called “the eye of the body” and the “natural eye of the mind” to make the point that in ethical matters as well as in physical ones we learn by experience to judge the genuine proportions of things, so that something trivial but near to us does not finally seem more important than something great but distant. “In the same manner, to the selfish and original passions of human nature, the loss or gain of a very small interest of our own, appears to be of vastly more importance, excites a much more passionate joy or sorrow, . . . than the greatest concern of another with whom we have no particular connexion.” Before a proper comparison can be made, Smith argues, we must mentally shift places,

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26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

Notes to Pages 85–88 viewing the situation neither with our own eyes, nor with his, but “with the eyes of a third person.” See Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. Raphael and A. L. Macafie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 135. Hume, Treatise, 15. Ibid., 274–75; and see my introduction above. Ibid. Ibid., 277. Ibid. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 207. Ibid. Ibid., 318. Ibid., 371. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 219. Ibid., 222. Hume, Treatise, 372. “Sympathy, we shall allow, is much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and sympathy with persons remote from us, much fainter than that with persons near and contiguous; but for this very reason, it is necessary for us, in our calm judgments . . . to neglect all these differences, and render our sentiments more public and social.” Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 116. Ibid., 115. “A man who enters the theatre, is immediately struck with the view of so great a multitude, participating of one common amusement; and experiences, from their very aspect a superior sensibility or disposition of being affected with every sentiment, which he shares with his fellow creatures.” Ibid., 110. “Where any event crosses our wishes, and interrupts the happiness of the favourite characters, we feel a sensible anxiety and concern. But where their sufferings proceed from the treachery, cruelty, or tyranny of an enemy, our breasts are affected with the liveliest resentment against the author of these calamities.” Ibid., 111. Ibid., 112. Hume chooses two notable moments of pathos in great historical narratives that were generally known for their austerity: Guicciardini’s reputation, in particular, had been the butt of a literary joke about a prisoner who, when given a choice between the galleys and reading his account of the Pisan wars, eventually preferred the galleys. Ibid. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 223–24. Earl Wasserman’s “The Pleasures of Tragedy” remains an excellent review of this theme. Hume’s comments on the subject of distance trace the arc of his historical work. The Treatise was published in 1739–40; the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals in 1751, by which time he had long been engaged in writing essays concerned with matters political and historical. The essay “Of Tragedy” was published in the Four Dissertations of 1757.

Notes to Pages 89–93

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47. Fontenelle’s solution to the problem—one which Hume largely accepts—is one that involves a kind of distantiation: “We weep for the misfortune of a hero, to whom we are attached. In the same instant we comfort ourselves, by reflecting, that it is nothing but a fiction.” Reflexions sur la poétique, as quoted by Hume in Essays, 218n. 48. Along with the better-known essays on “Refinement in the Arts,” the “Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” and the “Standard of Taste,” the essay “Of Tragedy” points to the interconnectedness of Hume’s interest in literary history and his other historical concerns. On literary history as a historiographical genre, see Chapter 7 below. 49. John Logan, Elements of the Philosophy of History (Edinburgh, 1781), 190. 50. Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 112; emphasis added. 51. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, ed. Peter Jones, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1:74. 52. Ibid., 2:633. 53. Ibid., 614. Similarly, Smith writes: “When we read in history concerning actions of proper and beneficent greatness of mind, how eagerly do we enter into such designs? . . . In imagination we become the very person whose actions are represented to us: we transport ourselves in fancy to the scenes of those distant and forgotten adventures, and imagine ourselves acting the part of a Scipio or a Camillus, a Timoleon or an Aristides.” Theory of Moral Sentiments, 75. 54. Kames, Elements, 1:71. 55. It is worth noting Kames’s disagreement with Fontenelle. Where Kames wished to discourage any kind of reflection that might interrupt the sense of immediacy, Fontenelle—stressing the moral and aesthetic importance of distancing—saw the consciousness of fiction as a necessary and useful attenuation of the impact of tragedy. 56. Curiously, for all the warmth with which Kames argues his critical doctrine, he seems hardly aware of the changes that it implies for the spirit of historical writing. In a writer who is never shy about pressing his own claims to originality, such silence seems uncharacteristic. It may just be, however, that he recognized how closely his own view of history’s moral psychology echoes the affective stress so evident in Hume’s EPM or (still more elaborately) in the remarkable discussion of indirect narrative in Smith’s early and unpublished rhetoric lectures. I have discussed historiographical themes in Smith’s rhetoric lectures in “Adam Smith, Belletrist,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adam Smith. ed. K. Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 57. The priority Mackintosh gave to the History amongst Hume’s works is worth underscoring, since, of all British historians, he was the one best versed in philosophical writings and would later publish a history of ethical philosophy. But Mackintosh believed that Hume’s metaphysical writings “are too remote from the affairs of men, to claim much place in history.” Nonetheless, he judged that “in the history of speculation these works will, indeed, occupy a large space; they may be regarded as the cause, either directly or indirectly, of almost all the metaphysical writings in Europe for seventy years.” Sir James Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. R. Mackintosh, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown 1853), 2:167–70. The younger Mackintosh culled passages from his father’s extensive manuscript

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58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

Notes to Pages 93–98 journals, which are a rich source of comment on his literary and historical reading. See BL Add mss. 52436A and B (1804) On Mackintosh as reader of history and fiction, see my Society and Sentiment, 122–26, 196–202. Mackintosh, Memoirs, 2:168. Ibid., 169. Godwin, “History and Romance,” in Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are (1794; New York: Penguin Classics, 1988), 365–66. Mill, “Review of Carlyle’s French Revolution” (1837), in Mill, Collected Works, ed. J. Robson and J. C. Cairns, vol. 20 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 135. G. H. Lewes, “State of Historical Science in France” (1844), British and Foreign Review 18 (1844): 111. Edinburgh Review (1849): 251. For female reading of history, see among a growing literature, Daniel Woolf, “A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review 102, no. 3 (June 1997): 645–79, and his Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History, 1670–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). My own contributions to this discussion emphasize (as here) that the female reader functions as a potent symbol of new historical directions as well as a simple fact about changing audiences. See “If Mrs Mure Be Not Sorry for Poor King Charles,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 11–31, and Society and Sentiment, chap. 4. For reasons of space, I have made only passing reference to Smith’s Lectures on Rhetoric, but the same considerations clearly apply. See my “Adam Smith, Belletrist.”

Chapter 5. Nine Hundred Scottish Ministers Write the History of Everyday Life 1. For a recent, comprehensively illustrated reiteration of this view, see Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present; Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For obvious reasons, the assumption that 1789 serves as the pivot of modern historical consciousness has special appeal in French historical thought. By extension (as in Fritzsche’s book) the focus on German responses to the events in Paris continues a long-standing view of modern historical consciousness as an essentially German contribution, ignoring the social experience of Britain and the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment. On historical consciousness in Britain and especially Scotland, see my Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 2. Hume, “Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 112. “To judge by this rule, the domestic and gradual revolutions of a state must be a more proper subject of reasoning and observation, than the foreign and the violent, which are commonly produced by single persons, and are more influenced by whim, folly, or caprice, than

Notes to Pages 99–102

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4.

5.

6.

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8. 9.

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by general passions and interests.” For a longer discussion of the British (and especially Scottish) contribution to historical thought and writing, see my Society and Sentiment. On the Scottish Church in this period, see especially Richard Sher’s Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). On Sinclair’s intellectual and political career, see Rosalind Mitchison, Agricultural Sir John: The Life of Sir John Sinclair of Ulster, 1754–1835 (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962). Donald Withrington, “General Introduction,” in The Statistical Account of Scotland, 1791–1799, new ed., ed. I. R. Grant and D. J. Withrington, 20 vols. (East Ardsley: E. P. Publishing, 1975), 1:ix. This edition reflects the primary interests of social and economic historians, for whom the Statistical Account (and its successors) have long served as an important resource. In contrast to Sinclair’s procedure of publishing the parish surveys in the order he received them, the modern edition rearranges the reports along sensible geographical lines, making it far easier to trace local and regional histories. Sinclair, Specimens of Statistical Reports Exhibiting the Progress of Political Society, from the Pastoral State, to That of Luxury and Refinement (London: T. Cadell 1793): vii–viii. Though the word has its origin in a related usage in German, as Sinclair indicates, he is the first to introduce the term into English. Ibid., ix. The emphasis on statistics as an investigation of internal structures of society is part of Sinclair’s Humean legacy. His outline also reflects the strongly ideological valence of these ideas in the 1790s by juxtaposing this view of solid and lasting ideas of improvement with the “delusive” theories of the French republicans. Hume, History of England, ed. William S. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:124. On the Fourth Appendix, see Chapter 3, above. For the geographical context, see chap. 4 of Charles Withers, Geography, Science and National Identity: Scotland Since 1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On this volume, see Withrington, “General Introduction,” xv, and Ian Grant, “Note on Publicity for Distribution and Management of the Statistical Account,” in Sinclair, Statistical Account, 1:liii. Curiously, neither of these very informative essays comments on the historical structure of Sinclair’s selection. Withrington simply remarks that “six [sic] parishes were selected, with some care, in order to give examples of very different localities.” Locality seems to be the issue, not the stages of development. “Indeed, founding systems of political economy, on minute and extensive investigations of local facts, is following the example of Bacon, who rested the basis of natural philosophy, on minute inquiries, accurate experiments, and inferences deduced from them. . . . It is well known, that since improvements in the arts and sciences have depended on the sure basis of research and experiment, they have been carried to a height, which formerly was supposed unattainable.” Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland, 2 vols. in 1 (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1831), 2:60.

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Notes to Pages 102–8

12. Ibid., vii–viii. 13. “History of the Origin and Progress of the Statistical Account,” in Sinclair, Statistical Account, 20:xii. 14. “Appendix D. Third printed Circular Letter to the Clergy, announcing the Royal Donation of L.2000” [signed Dec. 5, 1791], ibid., 20:xxxix. Sinclair’s main concern seems to be to avoid the impression that he is asking for learned dissertations on local antiquities. 15. “What may be the causes of depopulation?” one question asks, but it is not clear that history, rather than more elementary questions of physical well-being, is at the forefront. “Are there any destructive epidemical distempers? Have any died from want: Have any murders or suicides been committed? Have many emigrated from the parish?” The queries are listed in Appendix B, “Copy of the queries drawn up for the purpose of elucidating the Natural History and Political State of Scotland, which were inclosed in the preceding letter,” ibid., 20:xxviii–xxx. 16. Ibid., xxvii. 17. Ibid., xxxiv. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., 1:75, 2:98. 20. Mr. Auld, Minister of the Parish of Machline, County of Ayr. Ibid., 2:113; see also 5:403–4. 21. The contrast too is left largely unspoken, but it is there in the frequent references to “those ages of violence and hostility, when life and property was not, as now, secured by law, and protected by government.” Parish of Morham, ibid., 2:334. The other significant national-historical moment is the last rising of the clans in the ’45. “Since the year 1745, a fortunate epoch for Scotland in general, improvements have been carried on with great ardour and success. At that time, the state of this country was rude beyond conception.” Parish of Meigle, ibid., 1:513. 22. Ibid., 2:115. 23. Kilmarnock, County of Ayr, ibid., 90. Similarly, see the Parish of Kinross, where the minister, the Reverend Andrew Grant, reports that “This violence has now disappeared, and people of different persuasions live together in the utmost harmony and peace.” Ibid., 4:165. See also: “And it gives him [the incumbent] much pleasure to find a spirit of forbearance and toleration universally prevailing, among all ranks and denominations in the parish.” Ibid., 2:316. 24. Ibid., 557. 25. As the seventh chapter of Specimens it bears the title “Specimen of the Statistical Account of a large City, giving a View of the Progress of Arts, Luxury and Refinement.” In addition, Creech’s contribution appears in volume 6 of the Statistical Account. It was also published independently as Letters Addressed to Sir John Sinclair, Respecting the Mode of Living, Arts, Commerce, Literature, Manners etc of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1793), as well as in Creech’s Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (1791). Regarding this publication, Henry Cockburn, the memorialist of Edinburgh, commented that it carried an absurd title, but interesting and “generally correct” content. Memorials of

Notes to Pages 108–14

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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His Time (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1856), 169. On the frictions between Sinclair and his printer, see Ian Grant’s very useful account in “Note on Publicity.” Letters Addressed to Sir John Sinclair 6. Creech’s summary is much like Scott’s view of the pace of change in Scotland as a whole: “So remarkable a change is not perhaps to be equaled, in so short a period, in any city of Europe, nor in the same city for two centuries, taking all the alterations together.” His choice of 1763 and 1783 marked the end points of two wars—arbitrary dates in relation to the changing manners of Edinburgh. Ibid., 7. Sinclair, Statistical Account, 5:396. McKenzie’s view was not simply a matter of unreflective belief in progress. “These were times of misery,” he wrote about the earlier epoch, “though the inhabitants were the happiest of mortals. Their continued exertions in launching and drawing up their vessels, excited wonderful spirits, which they knew how to recruit when exhausted. Every day that a vessel either sailed or arrived was a festival.” Ibid., 1:39. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 5:416. Ibid., 409. Ibid., 4:62. Ibid., 16:75. Ibid., 13. Alexander [“Jupiter”] Carlyle, a leader of the Moderate faction in the Church, is now remembered principally for his memoir, The Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle; Containing Memorials of the Men and Events of His Time (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1861). Mr. John Naismith, Parish of Hamilton, Lanark. Sinclair, Statistical Account, 2:184. Scott remarks in the Postscript to Waverley, “The political and economic effects of these changes have been traced by Lord Selkirk with great precision and accuracy.” Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), 340. The passage is suggestive from the standpoint of distance since Selkirk’s investigation of the political economy of the Highlands serves Scott as a foil to his own novelization of this history. Sinclair, Statistical Account, 10:363–66. “While the mutual attachment of the chieftains and their clans subsisted, this evil was neither felt nor complained of. The chief reigned in the hearts of his vassals, who bore his exactions, and followed his fortunes with zeal and alacrity. At that time his object was men, now it is money.” Ibid., 4:76. See Thomas Somerville, The History of Political Transactions, and of Parties, from the Restoration of King Charles the Second, to the Death of King William (London: A. Strachan and T. Cadell, 1792). Sinclair, Statistical Account, 1:6–7. Somerville, Ancrum. Ibid., 10:296–97n. Somerville, Ancrum. Ibid. Ibid., 322. Ibid., 5:396.

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Notes to Pages 115–24 Chapter 6. Past and Present

1. Jacob Burckhardt, Judgments on History and Historians, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Alberto Coll (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999), 168. 2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d rev. ed., translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G Marshall (New York: Continuum, 2004), 306. 3. For an earlier example of contrastive narrative, see my discussion of Machiavelli’s Discorsi in Chapter 2. For later uses, see Chapter 10 below. 4. J. S. Buckingham, Inaugural Lecture Written for the Opening of the British and Foreign Institute and Delivered, in an Abridged Form, Before the Members and Friends of that Association, on Wednesday, the 2nd of August, 1843 at the Hanover Square Rooms, 2d ed. (London: Fisher and Son), 8. Buckingham was an energetic traveler, author, lecturer, and journalist, as well as a campaigner for social reform. 5. On Eastlake and the Fine Arts Commission see David Robertson, Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 58–77; Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon, Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World (London: National Gallery Company, 2011), 38–44, 48–49. 6. Ibid., 9. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. For Pugin’s life, see the fine biography by Rosemary Hill, God’s Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 9. On Contrasts, see Margaret Belcher, “Pugin Writing,” in Pugin; A Gothic Passion, ed. P. Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainright (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994): 105–16; Phoebe Stanton, “The Source of Pugin’s Contrasts,” in Concerning Architecture: Essays on Architectural Writers and Writing Presented to Nikolaus Pevsner, ed. J. Summerson (London: Allen Lane, 1968), 120–39. 10. A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts, 2d ed. (1841; New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 2. 11. As Pugin puts it, “in palaces, in mansions, in private houses, in public erections, in monument for the dead; even furniture and domestic ornaments for the table.” Ibid., 9. 12. Ibid., 15. 13. Ibid., 17. 14. See Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002). 15. Carlyle to Emerson, August 29, 1842 (The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883–84]), 2:10. This was written just before Past and Present. 16. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Past and Present,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion 4 (July 1843): 96. 17. Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. Richard Altick (New York: New York University Press, 1977), 116–17. 18. Ibid., 41. 19. Ibid., 49–50. Among the many strengths of her fine study of Romantic historiography, Ann Rigney’s chapter on the “aesthetic of historical ignorance” in Carlyle is very relevant here. See Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

Notes to Pages 124–30 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37. 38.

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Carlyle, Past and Present, 116. Ibid. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 50. Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (London: Dent, 1932), 355. Southey suggests that the inspiration came originally from Boethius: “the plan was suggested by Boethius, which however nobody would discover . . .” Southey to John Rickman, January 14, 1820, in New Letters, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 2:211. Southey to John Rickman, January 14, 1820, ibid. On dialogues of the dead in a wide literary context, see Jurgen Pieters, Speaking with the Dead: Explorations in Literature and History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). See his letter to John Murray, June 1829, in New Letters, 2:336–38. “My dear Sir, ask your self how was it possible that politics and religion should be excluded from a work upon the Progress and Prospects of Society. . . . Remember, I pray you, that these are not ingredients introduced, as a matter of taste to flavour the food; they are not the condiment, but the solid food itself. . . . It is as a moral and political writer that I come before the public with those Colloquies.” Macaulay’s review was originally published in the Monthly Review, n.s. 119 (January 1829): 382–95; see Lionel Madden, ed., Robert Southey: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1972), 350. Monthly Review, n.s. 109 (1829): 336. Southey, Sir Thomas More: or Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1829), 1:18. Notwithstanding some points of disagreement, More continues, “there are certain points of sympathy and resemblance which bring us into contact, and enable us at once to understand each other.” To which Montesinos replies, “Et in Utopia ego”—“I too am in Utopia.” Ibid. Ibid., 1:19. Ibid. Southey to Walter Savage Landor, May 27, 1822, in Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, ed. John Wood Warter, 4 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856), 3:311. “So many of our countrymen would not be ungrateful for these benefits, if they knew how numerous and how great they are. . . . I offer, therefore, to those who regard with love and reverence the religion which they have received from their fathers, a brief but comprehensive record, diligently, faithfully, and conscientiously composed, which they may put into the hands of their children.” Southey, Book of the Church, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1824), 1:1. On the Book of the Church and more generally on Southey’s religious and political development, see Geoffrey Carnall, Southey and His Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), appendix A. Southey, Book of the Church, 2:24. Richard Whately, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (1819), ed. Ralph Pomeroy (Berkeley, CA: Scolar Press, 1985), 24–25.

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Notes to Pages 130–35

39. I take the phrase “evidential paradigm” from Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on “Clues.” See Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 96–125. 40. Galt, The Travels and Observations of Hareach, the Wandering Jew. Comprehending a View of the Most Distinguished Events in the History of Mankind Since the Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, Interspersed with Anecdotes of Eminent Men of Different Periods, 2d ed. by the Rev. T. Clark [i.e. John Galt] (London: John Souter, 1820). 41. Knight was publisher of the Penny Magazine and printer to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. In his case the divided narrative serves a progressive ideology. 42. Sir George Cornwall Lewis, Suggestions for the Application of the Egyptological Method to Modern History (London: Parker, Son and Bourn, 1862). 43. Southey, The Book of the Church (London: John Murray, 1824); William Cobbett, History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland. 2 vols. (London, published by the author, at no 183 Fleet St., 1829). 44. In fact, there is almost no reference in the written text to the specific buildings shown in the plates. The two narratives are almost entirely separate. See Margaret Belcher, “Pugin Writing,” in Pugin: A Gothic Passion, ed. Paul Atterbury and Clive Wainwright (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 106. 45. Another satirical genre of some interest is the divided or split image, in which the left and right halves of two faces, for example, might be joined to score a political point. See Amelia Rauser’s Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth Century English Prints (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont Publishing, 2008) and Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 46. Reynolds painted numerous portraits of actresses and other beauties, of which the best known is Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, California. 47. This portrait of Cromwell in Bowyer’s Historic Gallery is surrounded with lightning bolts, a mask, and a tiger—symbols of power, hypocrisy, and ferocity. In comparison, Delaroche makes Cromwell a figure of thought, as is clearly expressed in an entry in a near contemporary response: “M. Delaroche has been often charged with sacrificing his principal subject to the accessories by his excessive care in the rendering of them, but here the attention is at once arrested by the thoughtful head of the Protector, directed to the lifeless form he is brooding over, and it never wanders from the victim and the victor. The sombre colour and gloomy shades are entirely in unison with the prevalent impression. Simple as is the idea of the picture, it would perhaps be difficult to name another modern painting which so thoroughly succeeds in carrying the mind of the spectator into the very presence of the man represented.” Charles Knight, Biography, or Third Division of The English Cyclopedia, vol. 2 (London: Bradbury, Evans & Co., 1867), 542. 48. Cromwell’s stance and expression have provoked different readings. The poet Heine observes: “In the face of this Cromwell there is not the least expression of astonishment, wonder, or any other storm of the soul; on the contrary, the beholder is shocked

Notes to Pages 137–39

49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

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by this frightful, horrible calmness in the man’s countenance. There he stands, a form as firm as earth, ‘brutal as fact,’ powerful without pathos. . . .” (quoted in Stephen Bann, Paul Delaroche; History Painted [London: Reaktion Books, 1997], 114). Bann, the foremost interpreter of Delaroche, suggests that Heine’s account “underplays the element of violence in Cromwell’s stance” (ibid., 108). This is possible, but I think Bann is closer to the mark in a second observation where he speaks of a preliminary drawing “which closely parallels the finished painting,” as “an exceptionally fine study for the attentive face of Cromwell” (ibid., 108). It is this quality of attentiveness I want to emphasize. See also Stephen Bann and Linda Whitely, Painting History: Delaroche and Lady Jane Grey (London: National Gallery, 2010), 74. As Stephen Bann points out, Chateaubriand and Guizot had accustomed the French to thinking of the English Revolution as a forerunner to their own. Delaroche’s painting of Cromwell was exhibited in 1831, a year following the July Revolution, but it had been commissioned before these events. In addition to the works already cited, see Bann, “This Man Is Cromwell. Paul Delaroche’s Painting of 1831 and Its Critical Reception,” in Between Two Heads, ed. P. Seddon (Nîmes: Musée des Beaux Arts de Nîmes, 2007), 27–37. An earlier painting of Mulready employs the same motif of wrestling boys, but without the historical resonances of Waterloo. See The Fight Interrupted (exhibited 1816), Victoria and Albert Museum, London. National Gallery, London. Tate Gallery, London. On Turner’s many experiments with the theme of steam, see William S. Rodner, “Humanity and Nature in the Steamboat Paintings of J M W Turner,” Albion 18 (1886): 455–74. More broadly, see John Gage, Turner: Rain, Steam, and Speed (New York: Viking Press, 1972). Two texts written in the frame of Cromwell on His Farm articulate the arc of Cromwell’s calling. The first is from Psalm 89, verse 46, in the Book of Common Prayer, which Cromwell marks with his finger. It reads: “Lord, how long wilt thou hide thyself— forever?” The second is an extract from Cromwell’s speech to the First Protectorate Parliament on September 12, 1654: “Living neither in any considerable height, nor yet in obscurity . . . I did endeavour to discharge the duty of an honest man.” Brown’s vision of Cromwell is much influenced by Carlyle’s Letters and Speeches (1845). See Julian Treuherz, Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2011), 230–33. One of the unspoken differences between the two paintings—relevant to the issues discussed in Chapter 8—is the sense in which each painting earns its title as a history painting. By virtue of its moral seriousness as well as its historical subject, Cromwell on His Farm (Lady Lever Gallery, Liverpool) is indisputably a “history.” The same cannot be said of the boat full of anonymous commoners on their way to Australia depicted in The Last of England (1852–55), (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery). Despite the dignity conferred by the tondo format, the painting would not have been hung as a history in Joshua Reynolds’s Royal Academy. Ford Madox Brown’s catalogue description of 1865 is therefore worth quoting at some length. “The picture is in the

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Notes to Pages 140–43 strictest sense historical. It treats of the great emigration movement which attained its culminating point in 1852. The educated are bound to their country by quite other ties than the illiterate man, whose chief consideration is food and physical comfort. I have, therefore, in order to present the parting scene in its fullest tragic development, singled out a couple from the middle classes, high enough, through education and refinement, to appreciate all they are now giving up, and yet depressed enough in means, to have to put up with the discomforts and humiliations incident to a vessel ‘all one class.’ The husband broods bitterly over blighted hopes and severance from all he has been striving for. The young wife’s grief is of a less cantankerous sort, probably confined to the sorrowing of parting with a few friends of early years. The circle of her love moves with her.” Quoted in Kenneth Bendiner, The Art of Ford Madox Brown (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998), 136. The contrasts that animate the painting are evidently a matter of class and gender, as well as of home and away. On Ford Madox Brown, see especially Tim Barringer, Men at Work; Art and Labor in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

Chapter 7. “The Very Web and Texture of Society as It Really Exists” 1. With Thomas Kuhn and his successors, it seems fair to say, the history of science acquired a broad new significance for its imaginative understanding of how our culture transmits and reworks its most treasured forms of knowledge. 2. Novelists of this period were particularly fond of this device, but so were writers working in a range of other parahistorical genres for whom History was a convenient instrument of self-definition. These genres include biography, literary biography and literary history, history of manners, and philosophical history. For parallelisms in history and fiction in this period, see Karen O’ Brien, “History and the Novel in EighteenthCentury Britain,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), 389–406. 3. George Ellis, Specimens of the Early English Poets, 3d ed. (London, 1803) 1–2. 4. Francis Jeffrey, review of “Thomas Campbell, Specimens of the British Poets” (1819), in Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 2d ed., 4 vols. (London: Longman, 1846), 2:10–11. 5. Jeffrey, review of “Memoirs of Samuel Pepys” (1825), ibid., 1:478–79. 6. Hazlitt, “Lectures on the English Comic Writers,” in Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–34), 6:106. “As a record of past manners and opinions,” Hazlitt writes, “such writings afford the best and fullest information.” Notwithstanding their shared interest in literary history and manners, there are certainly important differences as well, especially Hazlitt’s stronger emphasis on the power and intensity of the imaginative faculty. 7. Hazlitt uses “statistics” in the manner of his times, when the word had a much wider social meaning without the modern-day reference to number. Presumably, Hazlitt has in mind Sir John Sinclair’s Statistical Account, discussed in Chapter 5. 8. Walter Scott, Periodical Criticism of Sir Walter Scott, 5 vols. (Edinburgh, 1835) 1:3.

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9. “The one teaches what our ancestors thought; how they lived; upon what motives they acted, and what language they spoke; and having attained this intimate knowledge of their sentiments, manners and habits, we are certainly better prepared to learn from the other the actual particulars of their annals.” Review of “Ellis’s Specimens” (first published in 1806), ibid., 17–18. See also John Murray’s “Of Some Memoirs Written in the Fifteenth Century,” Blackwood’s Magazine (1819): 407–11. Strout indicates an anonymous author, though submitted by “Mr. Murray.” A. L. Strout, “The Authorship of Articles in Blackwood’s Magazine, Numbers xvii–xxiv (August 1818–March 1819),” Library, s5-XI (3) (1956): 187–201. 10. Robert Bisset, “Life of Addison,” in The Spectator, with Illustrative Notes to Which are Prefixed the Lives of the Authors . . . with Critical Remarks on Their Respective Writings. A New Edition, 2 vols. (London: Cawthorn, 1799), vii–viii; emphasis added. 11. William Godwin, The Lives of Edward and John Phillips, Nephews and Pupils of Milton, Including Various Particulars of the Literary and Political History of Their Times (London: Longman, 1815), vi. 12. Anna Barbauld, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, to Which Are Prefixed a Biographical Account of the Author, and Observations on His Writings (London, 1804), ccx. 13. Blackwood’s Magazine (1819): 24. 14. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Addison,” in Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 2:92–93. 15. Nathan Drake, Essays, Biographical, Critical and Historical, Illustrative of the Tatler, Spectator and Guardian, 3 vols. (London, 1805), 1:40. The first collection of essays was followed by a second set, “illustrative of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler” (1809– 10)—“constructed, so as, I trust, to afford a clear, and distinctly arranged, retrospect of Periodical Literature for the last hundred years.” 16. Of the Elizabethans, Drake writes: “the public mind was awakened to a sense of the copiousness, the energy, and strength of its native tongue.” Drake, Essays, 2:4. But it remained for the Restoration to polish English prose: “At a time when composition in this island was singularly pompous, stiff, and harsh, the introduction of the lighter graces and more perspicuous arrangement of French periods could not fail of proving eminently serviceable.” Ibid., 39. 17. Ibid., 79–80. 18. Robert Southey, Specimens of the Later English Poets, with Preliminary Notices (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807), vi. 19. Ibid., vi. 20. Ibid., vii. 21. Ibid., xxi. 22. Ibid., xxv. 23. Ibid., xxix. 24. In the “Essay Supplementary to the Preface” to his 1815 collected works, Poems by William Wordsworth, Including Lyrical Ballads . . . [and] a Supplementary Essay, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1815), 1:vii–xlii. Wordsworth echoed this sentiment, saying that every poet of his generation was indebted to Percy.

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25. Henry Brougham, “Southey’s Specimens,” Edinburgh Review 11 (1807): 32. 26. Ibid., 32. Note that Brougham too adopts the stance, seemingly natural to reviewers of anthologies, of projecting himself forward by a century to those who will need to look back on this time with yet greater distance. 27. Jeffrey later offered some grudging recognition of this historical dimension (“there is some cleverness in the introduction”), along with continued antagonism. See Jeffrey’s review of “Thomas Campbell, Specimens of the English Poets,” in Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, 2nd Edition, 3 vols. (London: Longman, 1846) 2:9. 28. Henry Hallam, “Scott’s Dryden,” Edinburgh Review 13 (1808): 116. 29. Francis Jeffrey, “Douce’s Illustrations of Shakespeare, and of Antient Manners,” ibid., 12 (1808): 449–50. 30. Jeffrey, “Southey’s Thalaba,” Edinburgh Review 1 (1802): 63–83. 31. On Jeffrey’s theory of belatedness in English poetry, see Walter Jackson Bate’s classic extended essay on literary history, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970). 32. Jeffrey, “Scott’s Lady of the Lake,” Contributions, 2:237. 33. Ibid., 244. Jeffrey does not mention Schiller’s famous distinction between naïve and sentimental poetry (1794–95), but the influence (whether direct or indirect) seems apparent. 34. An earlier version of this narrative, less articulated and less national, can be found in Jeffrey’s essay on the French poet Jacques De Lille, in Edinburgh Review 3 (1803): 26–42. The essay is an important marker, showing that Jeffrey’s eventual conception had early seeds. It may be characteristic too that it is articulated even at this earliest of stages as a thesis about French poetry, not English. 35. The passage continues: “and which will always return, and assert its power over their affections, long after authority has lost its reverence, fashions have been antiquated, and artificial tastes [i.e. French classicism] passed away.” Contributions, 2:50. 36. Ibid. 37. David Hume, “Of Eloquence,” in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. E. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 97. 38. Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” ibid., 226. 39. Isaac Disraeli, “Of Sterne,” in Literary Character of Men of Genius, ed. the Earl of Beaconsfield (London: Frederick Warne, 1850), 333. 40. Jeffrey, “Wits of Queen Anne’s Time,” Contributions, 1:159. 41. Barbauld, Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian and Freeholder, with a Preliminary Essay, by Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London: J. Johnson, 1804), iv. 42. Ibid., 1. 43. Ibid., iii. 44. Ibid., 1. How much subtler in this instance are Barbauld’s conclusions than those reached by Jeffrey: “There are but two possible solutions for phenomena of this sort. Our taste has either degenerated—or its old models have been fairly surpassed.” Jeffrey, “Wits of Queen Anne’s Time,” 159. 45. Sir Walter Scott, Waverley; or ’Tis Sixty Years Since, ed. Claire Lamont (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1991), 340.

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Chapter 8. “A Topic That History Will Proudly Record” 1. John Galt, The Life, Studies and Works of Benjamin West, Esq., Subsequent to His Arrival in This Country (1816; reprint, London, 1820), 47–48. He continues, “I want to mark the date, the place, and the parties engaged in the event; and if I am not able to dispose of the circumstances in a picturesque manner, no academical distribution of Greek or Roman costume will enable me to do justice to the subject” (49). West had provided Galt with much of his material, so—as Prown notes—Galt’s inclusions and omissions are indicative. See Jules David Prown, Art as Evidence: Writings on Art and Material Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 276 n. 4. See also Susan Rather, “Benjamin West, John Galt, and the Biography of 1816,” Art Bulletin 86, no. 2 (June 2004): 324–45. 2. See the discussion of Joshua Reynolds and neoclassical ideas of history painting below. It is worth noting that the same identification between history as written and painted was put forward in visual form by Gilbert Stuart in his portrait of West (1783–84) where West is shown holding Hume’s History. The painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, London. 3. More than most genres, eighteenth-century history painting presents us with problems of discourse as much as of practice. By definition, this was a self-consciously literary style, much caught up in issues of prescription and learned ideals, and in Britain particularly history painting long enjoyed a firmer existence as a critical ideal than as an aesthetic practice. Indeed, a substantial literature sprang up lamenting the nation’s failure to produce a native school in this most prestigious department of art. 4. “Exotic naturalism,” Wind writes, “is the twilight of the grand style of history painting. It represents marvels as matters of fact.” Edgar Wind, “The Revolution of History Painting,” in Hume and the Heroic Portrait: Studies in Eighteenth Century Imagery, ed. J. Anderson (1938; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 91–92. For the continued currency of Wind’s influential proposal, see David Bindman’s fine essay, “Americans in London: Contemporary History Painting Revisited,” in English Accents: Intersections in British Art c. 1776–1855, ed. Christiana Payne and William Vaughan (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 9–28. 5. This revision might seem like nothing more than a recapitulation of Edgar Wind’s narrative of a movement from mitigated to full-scale realism—a substitution, in effect, of “history” for “realism.” In truth, however, “history” does not so much substitute for “realism” as reveal one of realism’s primary motives, since in the “revolutions” of history—both political and historiographical—we can locate a potent source for the desire for new modes of expression in art. 6. “Invention in Painting,” wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds, “does not imply the invention of the subject; for that is commonly supplied by the Poet or the Historian.” Reynolds, Discourses on Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), Discourse IV, 57. 7. William Aglionby, Choice Observations Upon the Art of Painting (London: R. King, 1719) (Variant title: Painting Illustrated in Three Dialogues), unpaginated: the definition appears in a preliminary list of terms. Note the several emphases: complexity of form, narrative of actions, ornament, and dignity.

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8. The traditional point of reference for this discussion is Lessing’s Laocoon (1766). On the tradition of the “sister arts,” see Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). See also W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), as well as W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., The Language of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 9. Aristotle, On Poetry and Style, trans. G. M. A. Grube (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 18. 10. Reynolds, Discourses, Discourse IX, 171. Like the poet, the history painter was required to exercise the power of Invention—that “exertion of mind,” as Reynolds calls it, that ennobles painting and “gives the superiority to the Painter of History over all others of our profession.” See ibid., Discourse IV, 57n. The passage quoted was altered in later reworkings, but without this sense being changed. 11. Ibid., Discourse XIII, 244. 12. Ibid., Discourse IV, 60. 13. Ibid., Discourse III, 41. 14. Prince Hoare, “Examination of the Various Offices of Painting,” in The Artist, ed. Hoare, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1809–10). The essay appeared in several numbers among the several contributions bound together in this work. Prince Hoare describes his aim as showing the steps “by which the art gradually ascends to take its station in the regions of poetry.” Ibid., part 3, 2:256. 15. Every great epoch of human existence, Hoare argues, “can be marked by the pencil [i.e. the brush] with distinctness, and with truth proportionate to our knowledge of the facts.” “Offices of Painting,” ibid., 1:14. 16. Ibid., 17. 17. Ibid., 18–19. 18. I take this useful concept from Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 19. Bromley, Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts, 2 vols. (London: T. Cadell, 1793–95; reprint, New York: Garland Publications, 1971), 1:45. In the preface to the second volume, Bromley makes a strong claim for the originality of this discussion. What remains unclear, however, is whether he sees the originality as lying in the comparison itself, or in the conclusions it enables him to reach. Bromley, it should be added, is a fairly obscure figure. Other than the Philosophical and Critical History, Bromley’s publications are restricted to some sermons and a collection of hymns. There is no entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 20. “All arbitrary circumstances, visionary allusions, and extrinsic adoptions, all intermixed of fable where the painting has assumed a known matter of fact, all personifications of inanimate nature, are illicit in his hands.” Bromley, Philosophical and Critical History, 1:46. 21. “What language or resource of the art could have told us so much as those ships have done. . . . And is not that savage-warrior every way as just as the crocodile on the Nile?” Without him, Bromley concludes, it is impossible to think of another symbol that could communicate the location of the country so effectively—or at least none

Notes to Pages 164–65

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

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that “could speak with so much precision, and so much in tone with the subject.” Ibid., 57. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 47. Reynolds—by necessity—makes a cautious allowance for particularity in description. For Kames on “ideal presence” in history and painting, see Chapter 4, above, as well as my Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 107ff. Bromley holds that visual representations are much more direct in their impact than verbal ones and therefore model themselves closely on lived experience. Why is it, he asks, that we are more affected by a speech “delivered immediately from the lips” of an orator than we are by the same speech printed in a book? “It is, because the scene itself is before us: we behold the image and the animation of the speaker, and the images and animation of the surrounding audience: from thence we catch the fire ourselves, and become involuntarily affected” (Philosophical and Critical History 1:14). Since the painting remains a silent representation, we miss out on the sound of the words. Nonetheless, because the eye carries a far stronger “impression” than the ear, the same principle obtains as if we were watching the orator in person. Whether the figure stands before us in reality or only on the canvas, the essential criterion is whether “the passion be preserved, and given in its own energy.” If it is, the same “effect” is obtained and “the instruction” received is as potent as if it came from Nature” (ibid., 17). See Brian Allen, Francis Hayman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 64ff. The paintings have been lost and only one was engraved: The Triumph of Britannia, completed in 1762 and engraved by S. F. Ravenet and published by John Boydell in 1765. The others were The Surrender of Montreal to General Amherst (1761); Lord Clive Receiving the Homage of the Nabob, which pictured the aftermath of Clive’s victory at the battle of Plassey on June 23, 1757; and Britannia Distributing Laurels to the Victorious Generals, probably completed in 1764. Thus two of the large paintings were narratives of battle or its aftermath, and two were allegories of victory on land and sea. The proposal was vetoed by the bishop of London on religious grounds. On Hayman, see Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). For Barry’s polemical writing, see John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986). On Barry as painter there are now a number of important sources. See William Pressly, The Life and Art of James Barry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981); Tom Dunne, ed., James Barry; The Great Historical Painter (Cork: Crawford Art Gallery, 2005); David Allan, ed., The Progress of Human Knowledge (London: Calder Walker Associates, 2005). Holger Hoock has given us a detailed history of the Royal Academy in The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). On the Boydell Shakespeare, see

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two works by Stuart Sillars on Shakespeare illustrations: Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) and The Illustrated Shakespeare, 1709–1875 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 30. It is worth noting that Carey goes on to suggest that the eventual sale of the collection by Christie’s offers strong evidence of the popularity of patriotic and historical themes. By referring to the printed catalogue, Carey argues, where the prices and the names of the purchasers are recorded, one can see that “the striking events of English history, possessed, with a few exceptions, the strongest interest, produced the greatest competition, and brought the highest prices, at the sale.” William Carey, Variae: Historical Observations on Anti British and Anti Contemporarian Prejudices (London: Published for the author, by James Macauley Carey, 1822), 57. 31. On the novelty of Davison’s gallery, see Prince Hoare’s brief report in The Artist, 1:5–6. Charles Mitchell makes reference to an earlier precedent, citing Edward Edwards’s Anecdotes in his brief life of George Carter. See Mitchell, “Benjamin West’s ‘Death of Wolfe’ and the Popular History Piece,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 32. As Edwards describes it, however, Carter’s exhibition on Pall Mall in 1785 was not specifically concerned with modern English history, though the account does give titles for nine paintings (out of thirty-five) which are indeed concerned with English literary and historical themes: these include The Siege of Gibraltar, The Death of Cook, The Death of Philip Sidney, The Floating Batteries, and The Death of Captain Farmer of the Quebec. See Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters Who Have Resided in or Been Born in England; With Critical Remarks on their Productions (London: Leigh, 1808), 235–36. In his life of Nicholas Blakey, Edwards also mentions Francis Hayman’s projected series of prints on English subjects by Hayman and Blakey for Knapton (already mentioned). Edwards writes that this “set of prints may be considered as the first attempt that was made in England to produce a regular suite of engravings from our national history.” Ibid., 3–4. The prints were published by Knapton in 1751 and 1752, but there is no mention of historical paintings as such. On this venture, see Allen, Hayman, and below. More generally, Mitchell’s essay provides an excellent summary of the patriotic impulse behind the acceptance of West’s painting. He endorses Wind’s idea of a revolution of history painting, but gives the real credit to Boydell and his engraver, William Woollett, for making The Death of Wolfe so widely known. 32. Despite his prominence as military supplier and financial agent of Nelson, Davison has received surprisingly little notice from art historians, but see now Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination (London: Profile Books, 2010), 155. My information on Davison’s gallery comes from the brief reference in Prince Hoare’s The Artist, as well as from the very rare, but informative catalogue. (Copies are at Yale and the Bodleian; a later auction catalogue is in the British Library.) See Alexander Davison, Descriptive Catalogue of the Series of Pictures, Formed on Subjects Selected from the History of England Painted by British Artists, for Alexander Davison, Esquire (London: W. Bulmer and Co., Cleveland Row, St. James, 1807). Though Davison left the details to Valentine Green, the catalogue makes clear that he wished to set his own stamp on what he regarded as a personal and distinctive contribution to British art. A prefatory

Notes to Pages 166–68

33.

34. 35.

36.

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letter addressed to Valentine Green sets out Davison’s desire “of giving some encouragement to the talents of our Native Artists, and to bring them fairly in contrast with those of Foreign Schools, by employing a select part of them on some interesting Historical Subjects.” The artists were called upon to “to submit each a List of three Subjects from English History,” from which Davison would then make the final selection. The catalogue adds further that “Intending to mark this Collection distinctly from others of their works, it was made a condition, that each Artist should introduce his own Portrait in the Picture he painted.” The catalogue lists the paintings “in the order in which they are arranged, at his house in St. James Square, London.” Davison, Descriptive Catalogue, unpaginated. It is worth noting, too, the large dimensions of the catalogue in comparison with the cheaper catalogues for use in commercial galleries like Bowyer’s. Martin Archer Shee, Letter to the President and Directors of the British Institution; Containing the Outline of a Plan for the National Encouragement of Historical Painting (London: William Miller, 1809) 45, 52, 54. In the second category Shee specified that “[n]o picture of this class, to be under the dimension of the Death of Wolfe by the President, West.” Ibid, 45. Shee’s proposal built upon an already existing scheme for giving premiums to history painting. See A Prospectus etc. of the British School: His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, Patron (London? 1802?) This publication, disbound in the copy held by the Yale Center for British Art, is closely related to a second one, Prospectus and Catalogue of the British School (London: Rickaby for the British School, 1802). The latter, however, lacks the outline of the premiums. This was not the first prize giving for British art, which was also a feature of the earlier Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. On this society and its scheme of awarding “premiums” for history painting and landscape, see Matthew Hargraves, Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 25. See also M. G. Sullivan, “Historiography and Visual Culture in Britain, 1660–1783” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Leeds, 1998), chap. 3. I am grateful to Dr. Sullivan for generously sharing his work with me. For an extended discussion of this fundamental shift of distance in Hume and his successors, see Chapters 3 and 4 above, and my Society and Sentiment, chaps. 4–6. On neoclassicism’s adaptability, see Robert Rosenblum’s classic study, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. On Greuze, see Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The sentimental orientation of this vast painting is indicated in a published key, which directs the viewer’s attention to Sir Roger Curtis and a detachment of British seamen who, at the hazard of their own lives, are rescuing their vanquished enemies from destruction. “Several of the seamen are seen at the stern of one of the battering Ships, striking the Spanish Ensign; while others generously relieve a number of the unfortunate Spaniards from a sinking wreck.” See Proposal for publishing by subscription, an engraving from the historical picture painted by John Singleton Copley, RA: and now exhibiting in a pavilion, erected through the gracious permission of the King

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37.

38.

39. 40.

Notes to Pages 169–71 for the purpose, in the Green Park: this work . . . is to be placed in the council chamber of Guildhall as a testimony of respect to the late Lord Heathfield, then Governor of Gibraltar, Commander of the fleet . . . for their gallant conduct displayed in the defence and relief of that important fortress (London: printed by H. Reynell, Piccadilly, near the Haymarket, n.d.), 1–4. On neoclassicism and the sentimental, see especially Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), chap. 1. Variae, 53. Carey’s observations on the living interest of certain paintings and the power that gives them closely resemble Hume’s more general discussions of distance and sentiment. Carey makes no mention of the fact that the same subject was attempted by several major artists, most notably Romney. But even if the theme alone cannot account for the impact of the painting, Carey was on safe ground in emphasizing the close connection between nationalistic emotions and West’s celebrity. Romney’s version was exhibited at the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in 1763, where it was initially voted the second premium for history painting, only to have the selection committee’s verdict overthrown by the society as a whole, so that a stung Romney ended with only a consolation prize. See Alex Kidson, George Romney, 1734–1802 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 13–15. Edward Penney followed shortly with another image. Earlier, Francis Hayman painted a series of monumental narrative paintings of the Seven Years War for Spring Gardens, while Louis-François Roubillac was commissioned to provide sculpture. William Carey, The National Obstacle to the Public Style Considered: Observations on the Probable Decline or Extinction of British Historical Painting, from the Effects of the Church Exclusion of Painting (London, 1825), 62–63. Carey once again uses commercial success as an indicator of reception. He writes that the prints of Wolfe and La Hogue sold for unprecedented sums and that Alderman Boydell had stated that his “receipts” on the Wolfe alone amounted to fifteen thousand pounds. Believing that more recent events should also be illustrated, Bowyer also commissioned a continuation of Hume’s narrative. The work is fully described in Cynthia Ellen Roman: “Pictures for Private Purses: Robert Bowyer’s Historic Gallery and Illustrated Edition of David Hume’s History of England” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1997). My discussion here is much indebted to this fine dissertation and to subsequent discussions with Dr. Roman. Among the artists represented are Smirke, Tresham, Opie, Northcote, Landseer, and de Loutherberg. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any specific evidence on the impact of Bowyer’s edition, beyond a tantalizing remark in Dibdin, author of Bibliomania and other works on book collecting, regarding its loss of value. In surveying the illustrated editions of Hume Dibden writes: “The royal folio edition, published by Bowyer, and embellished with elaborate engravings by our principal artists, has of late (I know not wherefore) hung down its head in the market.” He adds that the most coveted octavo edition, “for the sake of the copper plates, is that of 1789. The portraits are here

Notes to Pages 171–83

41.

42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

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first impressions.” See Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Library Companion, or the Young Man’s Guide and Old Man’s Comfort in the Choice of a Library (London: Harding, Triphook and Lepard, 1824), 234–35. It is worth noting that Rapin was a French Huguenot and Houbraken a Netherlander. On Rapin and his illustrators, see M. G. Sullivan, “Rapin, Hume, and the Identity of the Historian in Eighteenth-Century England,” History of European Ideas 28 (2002): 145–62. Hume, History of England, ed. William S. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), 5:241–42. Sir James Mackintosh, Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh, ed. R. Mackintosh, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown 1853), 2:168. For a longer discussion of Mackintosh’s view, see Chapter 4, above. Prince Hoare, Epochs of the Arts; Including Hints on the Use and Progress of Painting and Sculpture in Great Britain (London: John Murray, 1813), 331–32. Above all, writes Prince Hoare, the history of commerce is England’s story and properly the subject of her artists. “Every shore that has been visited by the navigator, every treasure that has been brought to his home, is here the object of record. Every benefit that has been derived to mankind, every good that has been communicated, every varied wealth that has been imported, increases the claim of this country to renown. And what praises can be recorded of Commerce, which do not enrich the fame of England?” For more on this theme, see my Society and Sentiment, chaps. 5 and 6. Reynolds, Discourses, Discourse IV, 57–58. Morning Post, May 6, 1806, and La Belle Assemblée, May 1806: both quoted in Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie: Painter of Everyday Life (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2002). Allan Cunningham, Life of Sir David Wilkie, With His Journals, Tours, and Critical Remarks on Works of Art, and a Selection from His Correspondence (London: John Murray, 1843), 112. For an extended description of the inspiration and historical interest of Wilkie’s Village Politicians see ibid., 112–14. Recent studies of Wilkie include David Solkin’s Painting Out of the Ordinary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Lindsay Errington, Tribute to Wilkie (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2008); and Nicholas Tromans, David Wilkie: The People’s Painter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007). On Cunningham as interpreter of British art, see William Vaughan, “The Englishness of English Art,” Oxford Art Journal 13, no. 2 (1990): 11–23. See also Hoock, The King’s Artists, 77–78. This was Cunningham’s view: “To those who are old enough to remember those times when the yeast of the French Revolution was working in almost every mind; disturbing the calmest hearts, and filling every city and town and village with clubs which speculated on free constitutions, and societies which settled over the punchbowl the rights of mankind, no explanation of the picture need be offered: nor will those require it who have seen during an evening the change-house of a Scottish clachan, filled with rustics eager to dispute and tipple, while the rejoicing landlord supplies them with news as well as liquor.” Cunningham, Wilkie, 112–13.

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Notes to Pages 187–93 Part Three. Circa 1968

1. Hall’s reference here is to the traditional or “Old Left.” Stuart Hall, quoted from Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 19. See also Eley’s testimony to the same point in relation to the impact of Edward Thompson on Eley’s generation. An “important part of Thompson’s foregrounding of culture was a kind of populism, a politics of empathy, borne by an intense and vehement valuing of the lives and histories of ordinary people. Identifying with the people in such a manner presupposed a readiness for entering their mental worlds, for getting inside past cultures, for suspending one’s own context-bound assumptions.” Ibid., 56. 2. For this sense of generational change and renewed relevance, as well as much else that I have only touched upon, Eley’s testimony is very valuable. “How would I distill Edward Thompson’s importance in the late 1960s and early 1970s for my personal sense of the generational breakthrough then occurring? . . . The desiccated and hollowed-out learning of the Oxford Modern History School was leaving me cynically unconvinced that becoming a historian was still a future I wanted to acquire. Discovering Thompson’s book allowed me to reconstruct my sense of history’s importance. It was so inspiring because it provided access to a potential counternarrative that was different from the story of national stability and successful consensus, of gradualist progression towards a naturalized present, that everything in the insidiously assimilative intellectual culture of postwar Britain invited me to accept. Thompson’s book showed me the instabilities in that account, which could be told against the grain in some very different ways.” Ibid., 54.

Chapter 9. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of Sentimental History for Life 1. The literature on history and memory is far too large to cite meaningfully in short form, but Annette Wievorka’s arguments about the priority of witnessing have a special relevance here. See The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). See also the essays in Lauren Berlant, ed., Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). 2. Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), viii. 3. Ibid., 3. 4. The philosopher Robert Solomon writes: “I take sentimentality to be nothing more nor less than the ‘appeal to tender feelings,’ and though one can manipulate and abuse such feelings (including one’s own) and though they can on occasion be misdirected or excessive, there is nothing wrong with them as such. . . . Sentimentality implies no deficiency in one’s rational faculties.” Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4. 5. Ibid., 23.

Notes to Pages 193–95

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6. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 298. 7. In a summary passage, Nussbaum writes: “This view holds that emotions are appraisals or value judgments, which ascribe to things and persons outside the person’s own control great importance for that person’s own flourishing. It thus contains three salient ideas: the idea of a cognitive appraisal or evaluation; the idea of one’s own flourishing . . . ; and the idea of the salience of external objects as elements in one’s own scheme of goals. Emotions typically combine these ideas with information about events in the world; they are our way of registering how things are with respect to the external . . . items that we view as salient for our well-being.” Ibid., 4; emphasis in original. 8. Ibid., 307, 309. 9. Though she does not specifically invoke the idea of sentimentalism, Nussbaum’s focus on compassion is a marker of this reformative tradition. As Nussbaum sees it, compassion involves us in a series of important cognitive assessments. First, we judge that the suffering is weighty rather than trivial. Second, we have the belief that the person does not deserve the suffering (ibid., 306). Third, there is what Nussbaum calls the “eudaimonistic judgment,” the view that the suffering involved is related to “human flourishing”—which is to say that the alleviation of suffering will produce a better condition of life (ibid., 321). 10. Solomon, Defense, 47; emphasis in original. 11. The mid-seventeenth century was marked by regicide and civil war, followed by the milder but still profound upheavals of 1688—traumas that were accompanied by a radicalization of the debate about human nature. In the following century, Hume and Smith—reacting against the “selfish system” of Hobbes and Mandeville—argued for the naturalness of humanity’s more benevolent and sociable affections, especially the innate response of sympathy and the more complex call of justice and benevolence. 12. See Taylor’s illuminating essay “The Politics of Recognition,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 225–56, as well as Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and many other works. 13. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), 12. 14. See Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994). See also Carolyn Steedman, “The Price of Experience: Women and the Making of the English Working Class,” Radical History Review 59 (Spring 1994): 108–19. 15. Carolyn Dean’s comments on Holocaust historiography are particularly apt: ‘The notion that historians of the Holocaust undertake their task partially to restore to victims their dignity . . . seems to be embedded quietly but forcefully in the aims of Anglo-American historical scholarship and the historian’s mission.” At the same time, she goes on to say, “the emotional power of these commitments and the force with which a certain kind of historical narrative is thereby animated are difficult to locate in any specific source because dignity and empathy have become nothing less than

276

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

Notes to Pages 196–201 synecdoches for the properly human. The commitment to these ideals thus imperceptibly frames our relationship to ourselves and to others in both the past and present.” Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 43–44. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 7. On Thompson’s understanding of experience, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern European and American Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 205–6. Jay’s study of the idea of experience has powerful implications for the subject of this chapter. Scott, “Experience,” 377. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 56. Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, 2d ed., ed. P. Burke (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 101. Ibid., 101. Carlo Ginzburg, “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know About It,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 21. If Ginzburg’s first critical impulse was directed against the methodological inflexibility of Braudelian history, much of his subsequent writing has been redirected with increasing vehemence against skeptical and relativistic views associated with Hayden White, Frank Ankersmit, or Foucault. Refusing to accept a simple choice between positivism and antipositivism, he has pursued an unfashionable insistence on the importance of traditional philological tools and their power to uncover “the right meaning of a text or a work of art.” See Keith Luria and Romulo Gandolfo, “Carlo Ginzburg: An Interview,” in Radical History Review 35 (1986): 89–111; quote, 100. Ginzburg, “Microhistory,” 28. Here Ginzburg contrasts his own interest in fragmentary histories and the totalizing vision of nineteenth-century fiction. “Tolstoy’s extraordinary capacity to communicate to the reader the physical, palpable certainty of reality seems incompatible with the wholly twentieth-century idea that I have placed at the core of microhistory, namely, that the obstacles interfering with research in the form of lacunae or misrepresentations in the sources much become part of the account. In War and Peace just the opposite happens” (ibid.). “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” in The Past and the Present (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 90. The essay was first published in 1979. Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou; The Promised Land of Error, trans. B. Bray (New York: Vintage, 1979,) vii. Comparison should be made with Ginzburg’s discussion of the dialogical character of inquisitorial language in “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 156–64. Ginzburg quotes Roman Jakobson, who states that “two cardinal traits of verbal behavior” are that “inner speech is appropriated and remolded by the quoter” (ibid., 159). Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1990), 34.

Notes to Pages 202–8

277

27. Joan Acocella, “The End of the World,” New Yorker, March 21, 2005, 82. Review of John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death (New York, 2005). 28. The title is an adaptation from a description quoted from Henry James, whose “affectionate portrait of London, that ‘dreadfully delightful city,’ is dominated by the flaneur’s attention to the viewer’s subjectivity.” Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 17. The transformation of James’s ambiguous phrase to one that points in the direction of Tussaud’s waxworks is a telling one. 29. Ibid., 1. 30. Ibid., 16. 31. Ibid., 99. 32. Ibid., 101. 33. Ibid., 99. 34. There is no equivalent for historians of the ethical consent forms that have become a standard feature of research on human subjects. But we would all be unhappy with a set of scholarly ethics that simply lapses when the subject is no longer alive. 35. Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), 195–97. 36. Ibid., 195. 37. Browning accepts the identification of his own work as a form of Alltagsgeschichte, though of an unusual sort. See Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), xix. 38. See the valuable commentary of Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 92–94, as well as his response to Goldhagen’s polemic against Browning. See Bartov, “Reception and Perception,” in The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism— Facing the German Past, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000) esp. 52–53. 39. Daniel Goldhagen, “Ordinary Men or Ordinary Germans?” in The Holocaust in History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 306. 40. Browning, Ordinary Men, xvii. 41. For a longer discussion of the variety of the different balances of affect, ideology, and understanding in some prominent microhistorical works, see my essay “Histories, Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance,” New Literary History 34, no. 2 (2003): 211–29. 42. Geoff Eley, Crooked Line, 197–98.

Chapter 10. Alternative Histories in the Public Realm 1. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35.

278

Notes to Pages 208–13

2. John Crowe Ransom, “Survey of Literature,” in The Oxford Book of American Light Verse, ed. William Harmon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 351. 3. I am using “recognition” in the strong sense given it by Charles Taylor. See his illuminating essay “The Politics of Recognition,” in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 225–56. 4. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 18–19. For a valuable critique, see Michael Kammen, “Carl Becker Redivivus; or, Is Everyone Really a Historian?” History and Theory 39, no. 2 (May 2000): 230–42. 5. Rosenzweig and Thelen, The Presence of the Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 195. The results of any survey inevitably reflect the initial questions. Here the emphasis is strongly participatory. “Asked whether they had participated in pastrelated activities during the previous year, more than half said that they had looked at photos with family and friends, taken photos or videos to preserve memories, watched movies or TV programs about the past, attended a reunion, visited a history museum, or read a history book. Between one and two fifths told us that they had joined a historical group, written in a journal or diary, investigated their family’s history, or participated in a hobby or worked on a collection related to the past. . . . Almost no one (only 7 of the 808 people interviewed in our national sample) reported that they did none of the ten activities we asked about” (ibid., 19). The authors also report that they asked the respondents to use a ten-point scale to describe the intensity of their engagement with the past. “If we decide that a choice of 8, 9, or 10 indicates a close association with the past, then more than half of our respondents felt very strongly connected to the past on holidays, at family gatherings, and in museums.” The numbers were lower in relation to three other activities about which the respondents were questioned: “Reading a book about the past; Watching a movie or television program about the past: Studying history in school” (ibid., 20). 6. Ibid., 13. 7. The four general areas of questioning are as follows: “Activities Related to the Past,” “Trustworthiness of Sources of Information,” “How Connected to the Past People Feel on Certain Occasions,” “Importance of Various Pasts.” See ibid., appendix 1, 209–31. The full survey is also available on the web: http:/chnm.gmu.edu/survey/ activities.htm. 8. My discussion here and in the following section closely follows my longer treatment in an article jointly authored with Ruth B. Phillips. See “Contesting Time, Place and Nation in the First Peoples’ Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization,” in Contested Histories in Public Space, ed. D. J Walkowitz and L. M. Knauer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 49–70. 9. For the architecture of Douglas Cardinal (who later designed the smaller, but similarly conceived Museum of the American Indian on the Mall in Washington) see Trevor Boddy, ed., The Architecture of Douglas Cardinal (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1998). 10. MacDonald was also influenced by the displays installed during the 1970s at the Royal British Columbia Museum (then the British Columbia Provincial Museum) and the

Notes to Pages 214–21

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

279

University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology. For MacDonald’s vision of the CMC see George MacDonald, “Crossroads of Cultures: The New Canadian Museum of Civilization,” in Towards the 21st Century, ed. Leslie Tupper (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1989), 30–40; George MacDonald, “Change and Challenge; Museums in the Information Society,” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. Ivan Karp et al. (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992); MacDonald, Stephen Alsford, and R. A. J. Phillips, eds., A Museum for the Global Village (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1989). On the Grand Hall, see Andrea Laforet, The Book of the Grand Hall (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1992). For a detailed discussion of the Grand Hall and the construction of the individual houses, see Judith Ostrowitz, Privileging the Past: Reconstructing History in Northwest Coast Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 47–82. See Laforet, “Time and the Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization,” Museum Anthropology 17 (1993) 22–32. Macdonald, “Change and Challenge,” 166. On the Canada Hall, see Peter Rider, “Presenting the Public’s History to the Public: The Case of the Canadian Museum of Civilization,” in Studies in History and Museums, ed. Peter Rider, Mercury Series, History Paper No. 47 (Hull, QC: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1994), 77–102. MacDonald et al., A Museum for the Global Village, 94–96. For the curatorial perspective on the First Peoples Hall, see Andrea Laforet and Gloria Cranmer Webster, “The First Peoples Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization,” paper delivered at the Native American Art Studies Association, Salem, MA, November 2003. Some prominent examples are Peter Burke, Venice and Amsterdam (London: Temple Smith, 1974); R. J. B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: Historical Writing and the Second World War, 1945–1990 (London: Routledge, 1993); Marshall Sahlins, Apologies to Thucydides (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For an interesting parallel discussion regarding textual and visual representation, see Frank Ankersmit, “Statements, Texts, and Pictures,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. F. Ankersmit and H. Kellner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 212–40. On Machiavelli’s Discorsi as a contrastive text, see Chapter 2 above. On Carlyle’s Past and Present and similar nineteenth-century experiments, see Chapter 6 above. Among discussions of this genre, see Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (New York: Macmillan, 1997). Ferguson includes wide-ranging reference to historians’ work in this arena. A similar but more focused collection is Philip E. Tetlock, Richard New Lebow, and Geoffrey Parker, eds., Unmaking the West (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). In a more theoretical vein, see Geoffrey Hawthorne, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), as well as Catherine Gallagher, “What Would Napoleon Do? Historical, Fictional and Counterfactual Characters,” New Literary History 42 (2011): 315–36.

280

Notes to Pages 222–28

21. From the standpoint of distance, there is a parallel here with reenactment. For the most part, counterfactuals, like reenactments, have won little respect from professional historians, for whom both practices—the counterfactual and the ultrafactual— seem to substitute naïve literalism for longer, more measured perspectives. Even the argument that explanation is simply impossible without a rigorous consideration of alternative possibilities has done little to overcome the feeling that “what if?” is a question that is best left to amateurs and enthusiasts. 22. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 1. Note that in this opening statement the narrator does not identify himself simply and straightforwardly as a Jew but as “the offspring of Jews.” The effect, I think, slightly distances the question of personal identity, placing emphasis instead on something collective: his upbringing, parentage, and community, rather than his own individuality or character. 23. See Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1988). Also Philip Roth, Patrimony (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991). 24. Roth, “Postscript,” in Plot, 364. 25. See Chapter 9 above. 26. This means that some of the burden of believability, normally carried by the heavy scaffold of public history, shifts to the family drama, while the story of mounting persecutions in proto-Nazi America becomes more real because its effects are so vividly witnessed through the eyes of the boy narrator. 27. Philip Roth, “The Story Behind ‘The Plot Against America,’” New York Times Book Review, September 19, 2004, 11. 28. Roth, Plot, 113–14. 29. Another passage involving direct commentary on history has been cited as a key to Roth’s views. “‘Because what’s history?’ he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. ‘History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in this house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday’” (ibid., 180). The speaker is a family friend, Shepsie Tirchwell, whose political views reflect his occupation as the projectionist at the Newsreel Theater. Understood as quoted speech, the passage seems more guarded by ironies than the one quoted above. Whether either or both represent Roth’s own views, there is no way of knowing, but the latter especially offers little more than a historical commonplace and should not be cited as anything more. For a contrary view, see Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (London: Routledge, 2010), 178–79. 30. Roth, Plot, 4. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 7. 33. I am speaking here about Roth’s novels, not his writings as a whole. If we turn to Roth’s nonfictional memoirs, The Facts and especially Patrimony, we find a familiar story, not just because all three books build on family history, but because they share this same atmosphere of loving recollection.

Notes to Pages 228–35

281

34. In the hurried wrap-up of the plot, there is reference to the publication in 1946 of a book by Bengelsdorf regarding the inside story of the Lindbergh presidency, leading to controversy that has lasted “for over half a century” (Roth, Plot, 327). This would bring the supposed time of writing to at least 1996. 35. Ibid., 219–20. 36. Ibid., 327. 37. I came to J. M. Coetzee’s incisive essay on The Plot Against America after completing this chapter. Nonetheless, I am glad to find similarities on a number of ideas, including this reference to paranoia. See Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000–2005 (New York: Viking, 2007), 228–43. For a wider context in Roth’s work, see Ross Posnock, Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). 38. The reparative uses of counterfactuals have been of particular interest to students of law and literature. See Catherine Gallagher, “Undoing,” in Time and the Literary, ed. K. Newman, J. Clayton, and M. Hirsch (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11–29.

Epilogue 1. 2. 3. 4.

New York Times, January 7, 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4589486.stm (January 6, 2006). The Guardian, January 10, 2006. Nietzsche, Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1980), 17.

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INDEX

Acciaioli, Alamanno, 36–37 Addison, Joseph, 145, 152–53 aesthetic domain, 11–12, 62, 91–92, 140–85, 211–18, 253n19 affective domain: ethical dimension of, 190–94, 197, 205–10; historical distance and, 1–4, 6–10, 79–99, 187–88, 253n19; Hume and, 15–16, 62–67, 75–78, 92–97, 173–76, 193–94, 254n43, 255n56; ideology and, 171–76, 194, 196–201, 205–6, 210–18, 225–26, 233–36; literary history and, 17, 60, 91–92, 140–54; representation and, 60, 66–67, 155–85, 201–6; sensationalism and, 201–5. See also tragedy Aglionby, William, 159–61 Alison, James, 110 alterity, 3–4. See also anachronism; historical distance America, 128, 221–36 America First (organization), 224 American Pastoral (Roth), 228–29 anachronism, 3–4. See also historical distance; historiography Analysis of the Statistical Account (Sinclair), 101 Anglo-Saxons, 67 Anishinabe, 212 Ankersmit, Frank, 276n22

Annales, 188, 198–99 Anne (of England), 146, 152 Aristotle, 160, 244n5 art. See aesthetic domain; affective domain; history painting; specific painters and paintings Asciesi, Guglielmo d’, 29, 241n8, 242n24 Augustine, Stephen, 219 Bacon, Francis, 71, 102, 257n11 Bal, Mieke, 203 Ballard, Martha, 201 Barbauld, Anna, 140, 144, 152–53, 266n44 Barry, James, 134, 135, 165 Baruch, Bernard, 223 Battle at La Hogue (West), 168 Baxandall, Michael, 238n11 Beauvais et le Beauvaisis (Goubert), 198 Between Dignity and Despair (Kaplan), 190–92 biography, 142–44, 156 Bisset, Robert, 143 Blackburn, Simon, 250n47 Black Death (plague), 30–31, 34–35, 201 Blackwood’s (periodical), 144 Blair, Hugh, 66, 83 Blakey, Nicholas, 165 Bodin, Jean, 47

283

284

Index

Boethius, 126, 261n26 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John (Viscount), 42, 47, 245n9 Book of the Church (Southey), 128–29, 131, 261n36 Boswell, James, 124, 142, 144 Bowyer, Robert, 170–82, 262n47 Boydell, John (Alderman), 165, 177, 183 Bracciolini, Poggio, 22, 26 Braudel, Fernand, 9, 18, 198, 276n22 Britain: Britons in, 117–18; Civil War of, 15, 63, 72, 75, 77–78, 145, 147; commercial advances of, 73, 181–82, 273n44; France and, 147, 165–69; Glorious Revolution in, 81; historical writing of, 62–67, 69–72, 169–70; Reformation in, 126–31, 159; Restoration in, 62–63, 147–49, 265n16. See also Hume, David; Scotland; Scott, Walter; Sinclair, John; specific people and periods Bromley, Robert, 162–65, 178, 268n19, 269n26 Brougham, Henry, 148 Brown, Ford Madox, 138–39 Browning, Christopher, 18, 203, 205, 277n37 Brucker, Gene, 243n30 Bruni, Leonardo, 21–27, 31–37, 39–40, 241n4, 242nn18–21, 243n26, 243n38 Bruyère, Jean de la, 239n26 Buchanan, George, 107 Buckingham, James Silk, 117–18 Burckhardt, Jacob, 5, 16, 242n18 Burke, Edmund, 84, 113, 151, 180–81, 250n31 Bush, George W., 225, 227–28 Calley, William, 234 Campbell, Thomas, 83, 142 Canada, 210–18 Canada Hall (of CMC), 217–18 Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC), 18, 209, 211–21, 231–32, 279n16 Cardinal, Douglas, 213

Carey, William, 165, 270n30, 272n37 Carlyle, Alexander, 110 Carlyle, Thomas, 3, 17, 62, 70, 79–80, 93–94, 116–17, 121–26, 131, 137, 221 Castiglione, Baldassare, 145 Catholic Church, 50–55, 126, 128–29, 131, 249n8 Cecil, William (Lord Burleigh), 171 character, in historical explanation, 28–41, 65–69, 75–77, 81–88, 90, 92–97, 125–29, 161–65, 173 Charles I (of England), 15, 63, 72–73, 78, 88–89, 178 Charles I Taking Leave of His Children (Stothard), 178 Charles II (of England), 147 Charles V (Robertson), 169 Charles VIII (of France), 54, 247n39 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 147 Cheese and the Worms (Ginzburg), 199 Chelsea Pensioners Reading the Waterloo Dispatch (Wilkie), 135, 184–85 chronicles, 21–23, 25–41, 105–8, 115–16, 122 Church of Scotland, 98–99, 103, 107 Ciompi revolt, 25–41, 47–50 City of Dreadful Delight (Walkowitz), 202 Civil War, English, 15, 72, 75, 77–78, 145, 147 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Lord, 88–90 Cockburn, Henry, 258n25 Coetzee, J. M., 281n37 Coke, Edward, 71 Collingwood, Robert George, 2, 4, 7, 11–12, 61–62, 75, 96, 252n7 Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (Southey), 116, 125–29 Commons, Hume’s view of, 69–73 comparison (methodology), 46–55, 108, 115–39, 209–10, 219–32. See also contrast narratives concepts and the conceptual. See understanding “Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli” (Guicciardini), 50–53, 57–58

Index Consolations of Philosophy (Boethius), 126, 261n26 conspiracies, 48–49 Contrasted Episcopal Residences (Pugin), 119 Contrasted Residences for the Poor (Pugin), 120 contrast narratives, 16–17, 115–39, 209–10, 219–32 Contrasts (Pugin), 17, 117–21, 131 Convalescent from Waterloo (Mulready), 136, 137, 168, 185 Copley, John Singleton, 157, 168 counterfactual history and fiction, 221–32 Creech, William, 108–11, 259n26 Croce, Benedetto, 21, 59, 96, 232 Cromwell, Oliver, 77–78, 122, 134–35, 139, 174–75, 262n47 Cromwell on His Farm (Brown), 139, 263nn53–54 Cromwell Opening the Coffin of Charles I (Delaroche), 134 cultural history, 187–88. See also affective domain; historiography; ideology; microhistories Cunningham, Allan, 183–84, 273n49 Dante Alighieri, 29, 55 Darwin, Charles, 206 Davison, Alexander, 165, 270n32 Dean, Carolyn, 275n15 Death of Archbishop Sharpe (Opie), 176 Death of General Wolfe (West), 134, 135, 156–57, 163–64, 169, 182 Decline and Fall (Gibbon), 169 Defeat of the Floating Batteries at Gibraltar (Copley), 168 Delaroche, Paul, 134–35, 262n47 della Bella, Giano, 28 della Casa, Giovanni, 145 Dido in Despair (Gillray), 132, 133 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 2–4, 62, 79, 96 Dionysus of Halicarnassus, 44–45 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 3

285

Discourses (Machiavelli), 14–15, 22, 43, 46–47, 49–50, 53–55, 221, 245n14 Discourses on Art (Reynolds), 155, 160 Disraeli, Isaac, 152, 240n2 distance: definitions of, 1, 6–7; historical, 1–2; mediation of, 4–7, 81–88; perspective and, 81–88; plasticity of, 3, 84; spatiotemporal tropes and, 3–4, 10–12, 83, 140–43; visual tropes and, 3–4. See also historical distance; historiography Distinction of Ranks (Millar), 91 Douce, Francis, 149 Drake, Nathan, 145–46, 153, 265n16 Dryden, John, 147, 149, 245n9 duke of Athens. See Walter of Brienne, duke of Athens Eastlake, Charles, 117 Edinburgh, 108–11, 258n25 Edinburgh Review, 148–49 Egyptological Method (Lewis), 131 Elements of Criticism (Kames), 91 Elements of Logic (Whately), 129 Elements of Rhetoric (Whatley), 129 Elements of the Philosophy of History (Logan), 89–90 Eley, Geoff, 196, 206, 274n1 Elizabeth I (of England), 71–74, 129, 145–47, 149–50 Elizabeth at Tilbury (Stothard), 171, 174 Ellis, George, 142, 146 Ellis Island, 190 Emigration of Cromwell Prevented (Tresham), 175 Enlightenment: affective domain and, 77–79, 96, 169–70; historical distance in, 3–4, 81–88; Hume and, 61, 69–75, 250n49, 252n7; rationality and universality in, 4, 61–62, 72–75, 79–80, 94–97, 194, 237n6; tragedy and, 88–90. See also historical distance; Hume, David; understanding Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Hume), 79, 83, 86, 90, 115, 254n39, 254n46, 255n56

286

Index

epistemology, 2, 61–62, 82, 88–90, 92–102, 155–60, 189–201, 219. See also historical distance; understanding Epochs of the Arts (Hoare), 155 Essay on the History of Civil Society (Ferguson), 91, 169 Essays (Hume), 69 Essays, Biographical, Critical, and Historical (Drake), 145 examples and the exemplary: art’s representations of, 43–47, 161–65; chroniclers and, 21–23, 25–28, 123; formal structures and, 33–47, 192–93; Guicciardini on, 41–58; historical distance and, 14–16, 28–47, 75–77, 81–90, 92–97; Hume on, 75–77, 81–88; Machiavelli and, 14–15, 33–41, 47–50 Fabian, Johannes, 239n18 Facts (Roth), 280n33 feeling (term). See affective domain; sentimentalism feminism, 190–92, 195 Ferdinand of Aragon, 55–57 Ferguson, Adam, 91, 100–101, 141, 169 fiction. See counterfactual history and fiction; specific works Fielding, Henry, 143 Field of Waterloo (Turner), 168 Fighting Temeraire (Turner), 137–38 Fiorentino, Remigio, 28 First Peoples Hall (of CMC), 209, 211– 21, 231–32, 279n16 Florence (city-state), 21–23, 25–55. See also Guicciardini, Francesco; Machiavelli, Niccolò Florentine Histories (Machiavelli), 21–23, 33–41, 43, 57–58 Ford, Henry (playwright), 224 Ford, John, 151 formal structures of historiography: affective domain and, 90–97, 100–102, 189–98, 201–6; character and sympathy, 30–31, 65–66, 81–90, 92–97, 116, 125–29,

161–65, 173; chronicle structure and, 25–33, 115–16; contrast narratives and, 16, 115–39, 209–10, 219–32; counterfactual histories and, 221–32; definitions of, 1–10, 242n21; examples and the exemplary in, 33–47, 192–93; ideological dimensions of, 194–98, 207–10; irony and difference in, 50–57; metaphor and, 10–14; microhistories and, 9–10; nationalisms and, 105–8, 150–51; painting and, 130–39, 159–85; understanding and, 16, 140–54, 249n14. See also narrative; rhetoric Foucault, Michel, 3, 276n22 Fournier, Jacques (Pope Benedict XII), 200 France, 53–56, 64, 88–89, 94, 97, 134, 147, 151, 241n12 Frankfurter, Felix, 223, 228 French Revolution, 2–3, 11, 80, 94, 97, 183, 221, 273n49 French Revolution (Carlyle), 121–22 future. See historical distance; ideology Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 2, 5, 7, 115, 138, 238n15 Galt, John, 130–31, 156–57, 267n1 gender, 3, 189–92, 195, 256n64 generality: Enlightenment’s relation to, 4; Machiavelli and, 14–15; understanding and, 1, 6 Gentleman’s Magazine, 149 Germany, 7–8, 56, 97, 190–92, 194–95, 203–5. See also specific thinkers Gibbon, William, 64, 94, 169 Gilbert, Felix, 240n1 Gillray, James, 132, 133 Ginzburg, Carlo, 10, 18, 199–200, 237n2, 239n18, 276n22 Glorious Revolution (1688), 63, 81, 88–89 Godwin, William, 92–93, 143 Goldhagen, Daniel, 204–5 Gothic period, 84, 107, 117–21, 124, 131 Goubert, Pierre, 198 Grand Hall (of CMC), 213, 215–16, 217 grandi (of Florence), 30–31

Index Gray, Thomas, 83 Great Mortality (Kelly), 201 Greece, 5 Green, Valentine, 165, 270n32 Guicciardini, Francesco: affective domain and, 87–88; exemplarity in history and, 41, 50–55, 247n37, 254n43; ideology and, 53–55; Machiavelli and, 14–15, 22, 42, 57–58, 65, 245n14. See also “Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli”; Ricordi; Storia d’Italia Hallam, Henry, 80–81, 139, 149 “Hallam’s Constitutional History” (Macaulay), 1 Hampton, Timothy, 245n10 Hankins, James, 242n18 Hayley, William, 159 Hayman, Francis, 165, 270n31 Hazlitt, William, 84, 142, 253n19, 264n6 Heine, Heinrich, 262n48 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4 hermeneutical method, 7, 238n15 Herodotus, 16, 189 historical distance: affective domain of, 4–10, 15–16, 62–67, 155–85, 187–98; chroniclers and, 21–23, 25–33, 36–37, 105–8, 115–16, 122; comparison and contrast and, 50–55, 67–69, 108, 115–39, 209–10, 219–32; contemporary history and, 121–26; definitions of, 1–3, 5–7, 10–14; epistemological concerns and, 2, 12–13, 57–58, 169–70; ethical implications of, 190–98, 205–10; examples and the exemplary in, 14–16, 28–41, 43–47, 75–77, 81–90, 92–97; formal structures and, 4–10, 65–66, 211–18; hermeneutics and, 7; Hume on, 68–69, 81–88, 151–54, 255n47; ideal presence and, 91–97, 269n26; ideology and, 4–10, 158, 210–18, 222–36; imagination and, 222–32; immediacy and, 189–201, 207–18, 237n2; literary history and, 17, 140–54; Machiavelli and, 21–23, 25–41, 57–58;

287

metaphor and, 10–14, 62–67; museums and, 211–21; particularism and, 100–105, 108–14; perspective and blindness in, 3–4, 73–74, 78, 81–92, 98–99, 115–17, 229, 233–36, 239n17, 240n37, 253n25; Romanticism and, 92–99; sentimentalism and, 187–88; spatio-temporal tropes and, 4–12, 62–67, 83; statistical approaches to, 99–105; understanding and, 4–10, 18, 57–59, 67–69, 238n11 historical imagining, 222–32 Historical Law-Tracts (Kames), 91 historical novels, 80 Historical View of the English Government Millar), 91 Historic Doubts on Richard the Third (Walpole), 129 Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte (Whately), 116–17, 129–30 Historic Gallery, Bowyer’s, 170–82 historiography: affect and, 3–4, 6, 62–67, 79–97, 189–98; chronicle structure and, 21–23, 25–33, 36–37, 105–8, 115–16, 122; counterfactural history and, 221–32; evidentiary rules and, 9–10, 69–72, 76; formal structures and, 1, 3–10, 16, 65–66, 140–54, 211–18, 249n14; historical novels and, 80; ideal distance and, 91–92; ideological dimension of, 1, 3–10, 42, 222–32; literary history, 16–17, 91–92, 140–54; Machiavelli and, 21–23, 25–41; microhistory and, 9–10, 18, 189–98; narrative and, 1, 21–23, 30–33, 41–58, 65–66, 100–108, 141–54, 211–18; nationalism and, 3, 100–108, 113–14, 139, 150–51, 159, 165–69; particularism and, 100–105, 108–14; perspective and, 3–4, 99–102, 115–17; politics and, 26–42, 57–58, 70–71, 189–237; representation and, 1–2, 91–92, 155–85; spatio-temporality and, 4–7, 62–67, 187–88; virtue in, 28–41, 65, 67–69, 75–77, 92–97, 116, 125–29 History Hall (of CMC), 217 History of America (Robertson), 169

288

Index

“History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (Panofsky), 1 History of England (Hume), 62, 67–78, 82, 88–89, 100, 179, 255n57 History of England (Macaulay), 94 History of Scotland (Buchanan), 107 History of the Florentine People (Bruni), 31–33 History of the Public Revenue (Sinclair), 64–65 History of the Reformation in England (Cobbett), 131 history painting, 17, 130–39, 155–85, 267n3, 268n10 Hitler, Adolf, 205 Hoare, Prince, 155, 161–63, 181, 268n14, 270n31, 273n44 Hobbes, Thomas, 275n11 Hobsbawm, Eric, 2 Holocaust, 190–92, 194–95, 203–5, 222–32, 275n15 Holy League, 57 Hooke, Robert, 199 Houbraken, Jacobus, 171, 172–73 humanism, 14–15, 21–23, 25–43, 50, 67, 72 Hume, David: abstraction and, 16, 44, 59, 69–72, 105, 150, 249n8, 250n49, 257n7; affective domain and, 15–16, 62–67, 79–97, 158, 166, 173–76, 180–81, 193–94, 255n56, 275n11; Enlightenment and, 61, 74–75, 98; An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 79, 83, 86, 90, 115, 254n39, 254n46, 255n56; Essays, 69; historical distance and, 12–13, 83–88, 115–16, 251n1, 255n47; History of England, 62, 72–75, 82, 88–89, 100, 169, 171, 179, 255n57; individuals’ depictions and, 75–77; influence of, 150–51; “Of Eloquence,” 140; Of Miracles, 129; political history and, 62–67, 151–54; “The Rise and Progress of the Arts and the Sciences,” 69, 150; Romantic reception of, 92–97; tragedy and, 88–89; A Treatise

of Human Nature, 68, 86; Whately on, 129–31 Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Livingston), 250n47 Huyssen, Andreas, 238n8 ideal presence (Kames), 91–92, 200, 269n26 ideology: affective domain and, 171–76, 189–201, 205–6, 210–18, 225–26, 233–36; definitions of, 8; Guicciardini and, 42, 53–55; historical distance and, 1, 3, 6–10, 97–99, 158, 171–76, 172, 233–36; history painting and, 158–85; literary history and, 150–54; microhistories and, 9–10, 194–98; moral language and, 33–58, 64–65; nationalisms and, 100–108, 113–14, 139, 158. See also historical distance Illustrations of Shakespeare (Douce), 149 In Defense of Sentimentality (Solomon), 193 intelligibility, 1, 6, 67–69 intensification, 43–47. See also examples and exemplary art inwardness, 79–80, 94–97, 205–6. See also Romanticism irony, 77–78, 229 Isaac’s Servant Tying the Bracelet on Rebecca’s Arm (West), 158 James I (of England), 67–69, 73, 107, 150 Jeffrey, Francis, 142, 148–52, 266n27, 266nn33–34 Jews and Jewishness, 190–92, 194–95, 203–5, 222–32, 275n15, 280n22 Jocelin of Brakelond, 122, 124–25, 128 John (of England), 125 Johnson, Samuel, 153 Julius II (Pope), 56–57, 248n46 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 91–92, 95, 165, 255n55, 269n26

Index Kant, Immanuel, 11–12, 62 Kaplan, Marion, 18, 190–92 Knight, Charles, 131 Kristallnacht, 223 Kuhn, Thomas, 140, 264n1 Ladurie, Le Roy, 200 La Guardia, Fiorello, 223 Lampugnani Conspiracy, 49 Landor, Walter Savage, 126, 128 Landseer, John, 180 Last of England (Brown), 138, 139 Lectures on Rhetoric (Smith), 95–96 Legends of Our Time (Wiesel), 207 Leo X (pope), 248n48 Letters and Speeches of Cromwell (Carlyle), 122 Levi, Giovanni, 9–10, 199–200 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 10–12 Lewes, George Henry, 94 Lewis, Cornwall, 131 Life and Errors of John Dunton (Dunton), 144 Life of Johnson (Boswell), 142 Lindbergh, Charles, 222–25, 281n34 literary history, 17, 60, 140–54, 264n6 Lives (Plutarch), 221 Livingston, Donald, 250n47 Livy, 15, 43, 49, 93, 183 Locke, John, 62 Logan, John, 89–90 Logan, William, 109 Lord W. Russell’s Last Interview with His Family (Smirke), 179 Macaulay, T. B., 1–2, 9, 70, 81, 94, 115–16, 127, 139, 197 MacDonald, George, 213, 216 Machiavelli, Niccolò: Discourses, 14–15, 22, 43, 47, 49–50, 53–55, 221, 245n14; the exemplary and, 14–15, 33–43; Florentine Histories, 21–23, 33–41, 43, 57–58; methodology of, 21–23, 25, 27–28, 47–50,

289

57–58, 241n4, 242n24; politics and, 53–55, 65; The Prince and, 41, 46–47, 245n14 Mackintosh, James, 77, 92, 179, 255n57 Maconochie, Allan, 81–82 Magna Carta, 125 “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (Stead), 202 making (term). See formal structures of historiography Malone, Edmund, 149 Malthus, Thomas, 126 Marx, Karl, 101, 196, 206 Mary Queen of Scots, 76–78 Mary Queen of Scots Previous to Her Execution (Skelton), 167 McKenzie, John, 109, 259n29 mediations of distance, 4–7, 67–69, 189–98. See also historical distance; representation Medici, Salvestro de’, 36–38 Medici family, 21–23, 25–41, 48–49, 51, 55–57, 243n40 medieval period, 21, 117–21, 131 Mediterranean (Braudel), 198 Meineke, Friedrich, 96, 237n5 memory, 3, 187–88. See also historical distance metaphor, 10–14, 62–67. See also historical distance; narrative; rhetoric Metis, 213, 216 Michele di Lando, 27, 34–41, 47–50 Michelet, Jules, 2–3, 11, 80, 94 Micrographia (Hooke), 199 microhistories, 9–10, 18, 144–45, 187, 190–201, 205–6, 237n2 Midwife’s Tale (Ulrich), 201 Mi’kmaq , 219 Milan (city-state), 56–57 Milgram, Stanley, 204–5 Mill, John Stuart, 5, 79, 93–94, 96–97 Millar, John, 91, 100–101, 105, 180–81 Milton, John, 147

290

Index

Mink, Louis, 238n11 Mitchell, Charles, 270n31 Montaillou (Ladurie), 200 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de, 47 Monthly Review, 127 monumental history, 7, 192, 235 More, Thomas, 116, 126–29 Morisseau, Norval, 219 Mulready, William, 136, 137, 168, 185 Murray, John, 144, 261n29 museums, 211–18 My Lai massacre, 19, 233–36 narrative: chronicle structure and, 21–23, 115–16; contrast narratives and, 16, 209–10, 219–32; historical distance and, 1, 65–66, 211–18; literary history and, 140–54; moral language and, 30–33, 41–58, 65–66; national progress and, 100–102, 105–8, 113–14, 150–51, 165–69; painting and, 130–39, 156–59. See also formal structures of historiography; historical distance; historiography nationalisms, 2, 100–102, 105–8, 113–14, 139, 150–51, 158, 165–69 Naylor, James, 77 Nelson, Horatio, 165 neoclassicism, 134, 156–57, 159–66, 169–70 New Chronicle of Florence (Villani), 22, 27–30, 31, 33, 34, 36 New Left, 187 New Town (of Edinburgh), 108–11 New York Tenement Museum, 190, 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 192, 235 Niro, Shelly, 219 Nixon, Richard, 234 normative distance, 82 Northcote, James, 177 Nuova cronica (Villani). See New Chronicle of Florence Nussbaum, Martha, 193, 275n7, 275n9

“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (Gray), 83 “Of Eloquence” (Hume), 140 “Offices of Painting” (Hoare), 162 Of Miracles (Hume), 129 “Of the First Principles of Government” (Hume), 70 Ojibwa, 219 Old England, New France (Gillray), 133 Old Printer and the Modern Press (Knight), 131 Old Regime and the French Revolution (Tocqueville), 221 “On History and Romance” (Godwin), 93 On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Nietzsche), 7 On the Study and Use of History (Bolingbroke), 42 Opie, John, 176 opinion, 69–72, 74–75, 142, 151–53, 170. See also Hume, David Ordinary Men (Browning), 203–4 Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Millar), 91, 169 Ovid, 183 paintings, 9, 16–17, 130–39, 155–85. See also specific painters and paintings Pall Mall Gazette, 202 Panofsky, Erwin, 1–2 paranoia, 222, 225, 230–31, 281n37 particularism, 46–47, 98–108, 111–14, 252n5. See also examples and the exemplary; microhistories past. See historical distance Past and Present (Carlyle), 17, 116–17, 121–26, 131, 221 Patrimony (Roth), 280n33 Pazzi Conspiracy, 48–49 Peloponnesian War, 226, 229 Percy, Thomas, 147 perspective, 3–4, 73–74, 78, 81–92, 115–17, 209, 225, 239n17, 240n37, 253n25; in historical scholarship, 3–4

Index Philip II (of Spain), 198 Phillips, Ruth B., 278n8 Philosophical and Critical History of the Fine Arts (Bromley), 163 Pisa (city-state), 55–57 “Pleasures of Hope” (Campbell), 83 “Pleasures of Tragedy” (Wasserman), 254n46 Plot Against America (Roth), 18, 207, 209–10, 222–32 Plutarch, 49, 92, 123–24, 144, 221 Poetics (Aristotle), 160, 244n5 poetry, 161–65 political history, 26–42, 62–67, 70–71, 73, 151–54, 187–88, 194–98, 207–18 Pope, Alexander, 147–48, 152 popular history, 18, 150 Portraits of Eminent Architects (Smirke), 180 poststructuralism, 196, 199–200 Presence of the Past (Rosenzweig and Thelen), 18, 209–18, 278n5 Prince (Machiavelli), 41, 46–47, 245n14 Progress of Human Culture (Barry), 165 Protestant Church, 128, 131, 249n8. See also Reformation providentialism, 29–30 Pugin, A. W. N., 17, 116–21, 123, 131, 137, 260n11 Puritans, 74–75, 78, 122–23, 175 Pyramid of Statistical Inquiry (Sinclair), 101–2, 102 Quarterly Review, 81 Rain, Steam, and Speed (Turner), 137 Ransom, John Crowe, 208 Raphael, 161 rationalism. See Enlightenment Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England (Barry), 165 recognition, 194, 197

291

reenactment (distance concept), 2, 190, 197, 217, 280n21 Reformation, 126–29, 131, 159 Renaissance, 5, 21–23, 25–41, 76 representation: affective domain of, 1–10, 60, 75–77, 81–89, 91–92; contrastive methods and, 14–16, 117–21, 209; definitions of, 8–9; examples of virtue and, 14–16, 43–47, 125–29, 161–65, 173; formal structures of, 4–7, 66–67; history and, 1, 4–10, 59–60, 155–85; ideology and, 5–10, 207–10; intelligibility and, 3–4, 7–10; literary, 91–92; metaphor and, 10–14; painting and, 9, 130–39. See also formal structures of historiography; historical distance; mediations of distance Restoration, 62–63, 147, 149, 265n16 resurrection (distance concept), 2 Reynolds, Joshua, 44, 84, 132, 155–57, 160–63, 166, 182, 253n19, 262n46, 267n2 rhetoric, 1, 21, 25, 27, 95. See also formal structures of historiography; historical distance Richardson, Jonathan, 77 Richardson, Samuel, 143–44 Ricordi (Guicciardini), 52–53 Ricouer, Paul, 238n15 Rigney, Ann, 245n12, 260n19 “Rise and Progress of the Arts and the Sciences” (Hume), 69, 150 Robert of Naples, 29 Robertson, William, 64, 91, 93–94, 169 Roman, Cynthia Ellen, 272n40 Romanticism: affective domain and, 16, 77–78, 170, 245n12, 260n19; comparative methods in, 115–39; Enlightenment’s rationalism and, 61–62, 194, 252n7; Hume and, 77–78, 92–97; inwardness of, 79–88 Rome, 5, 32–33, 42–43, 48, 50–55, 67, 72, 76, 91, 118, 123 Roosevelt, Franklin, 222, 228–29 Rosenzweig, Roy, 18, 209–18, 278n5 Roth, Philip, 18, 207, 209–10, 222–32, 280n22, 280n33

292

Index

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 194 Russell, William, 178 Samson, Abbot, 123–25 Schiller, Friedrich, 266n33 Scotland, 16, 61–63, 82, 97–102, 105–11, 258n21 Scott, Walter, 62–63, 92–99, 104, 108, 140–43, 149, 153, 180–81, 197, 225, 252nn6–7 Scottish Enlightenment, 98–99, 101, 105–14, 256n1 sensationalism, 201–5 sentimentalism, 2, 77–78, 91–97, 158, 187–98, 201–6, 274n4, 275n9 Separate Reality (Morisseau), 219 Sforza, Lodovico, 56 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st earl of, 11–12 Shakespeare, William, 2, 147, 151 Shakespeare Gallery, Boydell’s, 165, 177 Shee, Martin Archer, 166, 271n33 Sidney, Philip, 44, 244n6 Simmel, Georg, 10–12, 236 Sinclair, John, 16, 64–65, 98–108, 111–14, 252n6, 257n7 skepticism, 129–30 Sketches of the History of Man (Kames), 91 Sky Woman (Nero), 219 Smirke, Robert, 179, 180 Smith, Adam, 65–66, 84–87, 95–96, 100–101, 141, 171, 194, 240n37, 249n14 Soderini, Piero, 21, 25 Solomon, Robert, 193, 274n4 Somerville, Thomas, 111–13 Southcott, Joanna, 195 Southey, Robert, 116, 125–29, 131, 146–50, 261n26 “Southey’s Amadis of Gaul” (Scott), 140 Specimens of Statistical Reports (Sinclair), 101, 108 Specimens of the British Poets (Campbell), 142

Specimens of the Later English Poets (Southey), 146 Spectator, 145, 152–53 Spenser, Edmund, 147 Statistical Account of Scotland (Sinclair), 16, 98–108, 111–14, 252n6, 257n5 Stead, W. T., 202–3 Stefani, Marchionne di Coppo, 27, 30–31, 36–39, 243n26 Stone, Lawrence, 200 Storia d’Italia (Guicciardini), 43–58 Stothard, Thomas, 171, 174, 178 Strafford, Wentworth, Lord, 76 “Stranger” (Simmel), 10–11 Stuart, Gilbert, 267n2 Suetonius, 88 summoning (term). See ideology Surrender of Montreal (Hayman), 168 Swift, Jonathan, 152 Switzerland, 51, 56 Tacitus, 43, 49, 88 Tatler, 145 Taylor, Charles, 194 Thelen, David, 18, 209–18, 278n5 They Are Weighed in the Balance and Found Wanting (Pugin), 132 thick description, 187–88. See also cultural history; microhistories Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex (Houbraken), 171, 172 Thompson, Edward, 3, 195, 274n1 Thompson, Hugh, 19, 233–36 Thucydides, 16, 43, 87, 92–93, 226, 229 Thurber, James, 52 time. See distance; historical distance Time and the Other (Fabian), 239n18 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 221 tradition (distance concept), 2 tragedy, 88–89, 190–92 trauma, 3 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 68, 86

Index Tresham, Henry, 175 Trudeau, Pierre, 213 Truth and Method (Gadamer), 238n15 Turner, J. M. W., 137, 168–69, 215 Twain, Mark, 45 Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, 201 understanding: aesthetics and, 11–12; formal structures and, 16, 23, 25–41, 115–16; generality and, 1, 6–7, 18, 46–47, 59–60, 79–80; literary history and, 140–54; mediation and, 4–10, 67–69; microhistories and, 9–10; perspective’s benefits for, 88–90. See also Enlightenment; epistemology; historical distance; Romanticism United States. See America Upheavals of Thought (Nussbaum), 193 Utopia (More), 127 Venice (city-state), 56–57 Vermeer, Johannes, 9 Verstehen (distance concept), 2 Vico, Giambattista, 4 Vietnam War, 195, 233–36 Village Politicians (Wilkie), 135, 183, 184, 185 Villani, Giovanni, 21–22, 25–36, 241n12, 242n25, 243n26 Virgil, 110

293

Visdomini, Cerrettieri de’, 29, 241n8 Voltaire, 93 Walkowitz, Judith, 202–3 Walpole, Horace, 129 Walter of Brienne, duke of Athens, 25–41, 46–50, 242n23 War on Terror, 225–26 Wasserman, Earl, 254n46 Waverley (Scott), 63, 82, 97–99, 259n37 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 252n5 Weinberger, Caspar, 228 West, Benjamin, 60, 134, 156–59, 163–64, 168, 169, 182 Whately, Richard, 116–17, 129–31 Wheare, Degory, 245n9 Wheeler, Burton, 224, 229 Whig party, 64, 67, 72 White, Hayden, 79, 251n1, 276n22 Wiesel, Elie, 207 Wilkie, David, 135–36, 183–84, 185, 223 William Cecil, Lord Burleigh (Houbraken), 173 Williams, Bernard, 236 Williams, Raymond, 208 Wilson, Edmund, 149 Wind, Edgar, 157–58, 267nn4–5, 270n31 Woman Reading a Letter (Vermeer), 9 Woolf, Daniel, 256n64 Wordsworth, William, 149–50 World War II, 190–92, 194–95, 221–32