HERBERT BUTTERFIELD (1900-1979) The Whig Interpretation of History

5. The Art of the Historian

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We go to the past to discover not facts only but significances. It is necessary that we should go with instinct and sympathy alive and all our humanity awake. It is necessary that we should call up from the resources of our nature all the things which deflect the thought of the scientist but combine to enrich the poet's.

It cannot be denied that the whig historian has performed this part of his function admirably, but he has done it for what might be described as only one side of the historical story. His own assumptions have on many occasions given him the incentive to seek historical understanding; his own view of the course of history has provided him with those sympathies that waken imagination; the theses he has been inclined to defend have driven him to ingenuity, and he has learned to put himself in another man's place and to think himself into the conditioning circumstances that governed other men's lives. The whig historian is an example of the emotional drive that is necessary to make us question conclusions that seem foregone. He is an example of the fact that prejudice and passion itself can make a contribution to historical understanding. But it has happened that Protestants have been able to search their minds for a defence and an understanding of the persecution that Luther favoured, and have not realized that the very arguments they were using were part of the armoury of defence which Papal persecution has had at its command. The case against the whig historian lies in the fact that he brings the effort of understanding to a halt. He stops the work of imaginative sympathy at a point that could almost be fixed by a formula. It would not be untrue to say that, apart from specialist work of recent date, much greater ingenuity and a much higher imaginative endeavour have been brought into play upon the whigs, progressives and even revolutionaries of the past, than have been exercised upon the elucidation of tories and conservatives and reactionaries. The whig historian withdraws the effort in the case of the men who are most in need of it.

History would be for ever unsatisfying if it did not cast a wider net for the truth; for if in one aspect it is the study of change, in another aspect it is the study of diversity. The historian like the novelist is bound to be glad that it takes all sorts of men to make a world. Like the novelist he can regret only one kind - the complete bore - and take care not to describe him with too great verisimilitude. For the rest, all is grist to his mill. His greatest limitation would be a defect of imaginative sympathy, whether it were the refusal to go out to understand a Scotsman or the refusal to put all his humanity into the effort to understand a Jesuit, a tyrant or a poet. The fervour of the whig historian very often comes from what is really the transference into the past of an enthusiasm for something in the present, an enthusiasm for democracy or freedom of thought or the liberal tradition. But the true historical fervour is the love of the past for the sake of the past. It is the fervour that was awakened in Gibbon and Gregorovius by the sight of the ruins of ancient Rome. And behind it is the very passion to understand men in their diversity, the desire to study a bygone age in the things in which it differs from the present. The true historical fervour is that of the man for whom the exercise of historical imagination brings its own reward, in those inklings of a deeper understanding, those glimpses of a new interpretative truth, which are the historian's achievement and his aesthetic delight.

6. MORAL JUDGEMENTS IN HISTORY

It is the natural result of the whig historian's habits of mind and his attitude to history - though it is not a necessary consequence of his actual method - that he should be interested in the promulgation of moral judgements and should count this as an important part of his office. His preoccupation is not difficult to understand when it is remembered that he regards himself as something more than the inquirer. By the very finality and absoluteness with which he has endowed the present he has heightened his own position. For him the voice of posterity is the voice of God and the historian is the voice of posterity. And it is typical of him that he tends to regard himself as the judge when by his methods and his equipment he is fitted only to be the detective. His concern with the sphere of morality forms in fact the extreme point in his desire to make judgements of value, and to count them as the verdict of history.

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It may be easy for the moralist of the twentieth century to discuss the ethics of persecution, to say perhaps that religious persecution would be wrong today, perhaps that it was wrong in all the ages. It may be easy to judge the thing, to condemn the act, but how shall the historian pass to the condemnation of people, and apply his standards to the judgement of a special incident at any particular moment? Shall he say that in the sixteenth century all men are absolved, because the age took persecution for granted and counted it a duty; or shall he condemn men for not being sufficiently original in their thoughts to rise above the rules and standards of their own day?

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The truth is that the historian, whose art is a descriptive one, does not move in this world of moral ideas. His materials and his processes, and all his apparatus exist to enable him to show how a given event came to take place. Who is he to jump out of his true office and merely announce to us that it ought never to have happened at all?

Source: www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/900/butterfield/chap_5.html