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Up from the meadows rich with corn,

Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand.

Whittier, too, was dealing in contemporary history. Macaulay, on the other hand, wrote “Horatius at the Bridge” some 2,500 years after the event. Although he was a major historian and only secondarily a poet, would any of us remember anything about Tarquin the Tyrant or Roman history before Caesar if it were not for “Lars Porsena of Clusium/By the Nine Gods he swore,” and the rest of the seventy stanzas? We know how the American Revolution began from Longfellow’s signal lights in the old North Church.

“One, if by land, and two, if by sea,

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm.”

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians, and sometimes they have given history a push. Kipling did it in 1899 with his bidding “Take up the White Man’s Burden,” addressed to Americans, who, being plunged into involuntary imperialism by Admiral Dewey’s adventure at Manila, were sorely perplexed over what to do about the Philippines. “Send forth the best ye breed,” Kipling told them firmly,

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

…

Take up the White Man’s burden,

The savage wars of peace—

Fill full the mouth of Famine

And bid the sickness cease;

…

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Ye dare not stoop to less.

The advice, published in a two-page spread by McClure’s Magazine, was quoted across the country within a week and quickly reconciled most Americans to the expenditure of bullets, brutality, and trickery that soon proved necessary to implement it.

Kipling had a peculiar gift for recognizing history at close quarters. He wrote “Recessional” in 1897 at the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee when he sensed a self-glorification, a kind of hubris, in the national mood that frightened him. In The Times on the morning after, when people read his reminder—

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

—it created a profound impression. Sir Edward Clark, the distinguished barrister who defended Oscar Wilde, was so affected by the message that he pronounced “Recessional” “the greatest poem written by any living man.”

What the poets did was to convey the feeling of an episode or a moment of history as they sensed it. The historian’s task is rather to tell what happened within the discipline of the facts.

What his imagination is to the poet, facts are to the historian. His exercise of judgment comes in their selection, his art in their arrangement. His method is narrative. His subject is the story of man’s past. His function is to make it known.

New York Times Book Review, March 8, 1964.

* See “Campaign Train,” this page.

History by the Ounce

At a party given for its reopening last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York served champagne to five thousand guests. An alert reporter for the Times, Charlotte Curtis, noted that there were eighty cases, which, she informed her readers, amounted to 960 bottles or 7,680 three-ounce drinks. Somehow through this detail the Museum’s party at once becomes alive; a fashionable New York occasion. One sees the crush, the women eyeing each other’s clothes, the exchange of greetings, and feels the gratifying sense of elegance and importance imparted by champagne—even if, at one and a half drinks per person, it was not on an exactly riotous scale. All this is conveyed by Miss Curtis’ detail. It is, I think, the way history as well as journalism should be written. It is what Pooh-Bah, in The Mikado, meant when, telling how the victim’s head stood on its neck and bowed three times to him at the execution of Nanki-Poo, he added