Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [156]
Ironically, Roosevelt was guilty of writing this kind of history himself. His first book, The Naval War of 1812, had been so dense with logistics that it read like a manual in places. He had boasted at the time that the first two chapters were “so dry they would have made a dictionary seem light reading by comparison.” But having proved that he could match modern historians fact for fact, he had gone on to write The Winning of the West in the light of his own experience of the frontier, and with all the creativity he could legitimately apply to the study of sources. And the great Parkman had praised him.
He was less concerned, now, with the passing of the amateur historian—somebody he was not sorry to see go—but with the prejudice growing in academe against any prose that did not sound scientific. None of the members of the American Historical Association, he suspected, believed any more that history was a branch of literature. If their attitude held, historical writing was doomed as a civilizing influence. It would degenerate into the kind of sterile jargon that only professors fed on. He proceeded to say just that, undeterred by stony stares and occasional titters among his audience.
Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because of both its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For a great work of literature there is the same demand now that there has always been; and in any great work of literature the first element is imaginative power. The imaginative power demanded for a great historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real and vivid, presentation of the past can come only from one in whom the imaginative gift is strong.
Imagination, Roosevelt argued, did not have to be invention. In nonfiction writing, it should be no more than the ability to see and feel intensely what was there to be seen and felt. “No amount of self-communion and of pondering the soul of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely extended study.” Repeatedly he declared that color—authentic color—was not an embellishment of truth: it was truth. Modern scientists were dazzled by their discoveries, but apologetic, not to say perverse, in failing to communicate the beauty of revelation. Modern historians should beware of going the same way.
“Do not misunderstand me,” he said. “In the field of historical research an immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power whatever.” As the discipline developed to keep pace with technology, so must a new type of “investigator”—as opposed to narrative historian—arise and be accepted as indispensable. Roosevelt compared the relationship of the two types to that of the stonemason and the architect. Just as religious faith had had to square itself with Darwin, so must history adjust to the immense proliferation of proven fact. “So far from ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do nothing unless he is steeped in science.… He must accept what we now know to be man’s place in nature.” As Romance died, he must illumine the usual as well as the unusual.… “If he possesses the highest imaginative and literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting peaks.”
Except to deaf ears, Roosevelt had so far presented a plausible case. But what his friend Owen Wister called “the preacher militant” in him caused him to add that history should teach morality. It could not record the best and worst of human behavior