Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [30]
To be a best-seller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication. That the independent writers have done better is hardly surprising, since communicating is their business; they know how. To capture and hold the interest of an audience is their object, as it has been that of every storyteller since Homer. Perhaps the academic historian suffers from having a captive audience, first in the supervisor of his dissertation, then in the lecture hall. Keeping the reader turning the page has not been his primary concern.
My intention is not to exacerbate the distinction between the professional historian and the so-called amateur but to clarify its terms. “Professional”—meaning someone who has had graduate training leading to a professional degree and who practices within a university—is a valid term, but “amateur”—used to mean someone outside the university without a graduate degree—is a misnomer. Graduate training certainly establishes a difference of which I, who did not have it, am deeply aware, sometimes regretfully, sometimes thankfully. But I would prefer to recognize the difference by distinguishing between academics and independents, or between scholars and writers, rather than between professionals and amateurs, because the question is not one of degree of professionalism but which profession. The faculty people are professional historians, we outside are professional writers. Insofar as they borrow our function and we borrow their subject, each of us has a great deal to learn from the other.
An objection often made to the independents is that they are insufficiently acquainted or careless with the facts. An extreme case is the Cortez of Keats, staring at the Pacific with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien. Keats, of course, got the name wrong but the idea right. Through the power of marvelous phrasing and the exercise of a poet’s imagination he immortalized a historic moment. It is possible that his vision of the man on the peak is more important, for conveying history, than the name of the man. Poets aside, historians of course should offer both. There is no need to choose between accuracy and beauty; one should be clothed in the other.
In pockets of survival there may be some historians who still retain the old notion imposed by scientific history that, as another president of the American Historical Association, Walter Prescott Webb, put it, “There is something historically naughty about good writing,” that “a great gulf exists between truth and beauty and the scholar who attempts to bridge it deserves to fall in and drown,” and that “the real scholar must choose truth and somehow it is better if it is made so ugly that nobody could doubt its virginity.” If some still believe this, communication is not for them.
For the first element in communication, Webb gave the perfect triple criterion: a writer’s belief that he has something to say, that it is worth saying, and that he can say it better than anyone else—and, he added, “not for the few but for the many.” For coupled with compulsion to write must go desire to be read. No writing comes alive unless the writer sees across his desk a reader, and searches constantly for the word or phrase which will carry the image he wants the reader to see and arouse the emotion he wants him to feel. Without consciousness of a live reader, what a man writes will die on his page. Macaulay was a master of this contact with the reader. His sister Hannah cried when he read the History of England aloud to her. What writer