Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [32]
A historian tries to be objective in the sense of learning as much as possible, and presenting as sympathetically as possible the motives and conditions of both sides, because to do so makes the drama more intense—and more believable. But let us not pretend that this is being without bias—as if historians were mere recorders who have given up the exercise of judgment. Bias means a leaning which is the exercise of judgment as well as a source of insight. Admittedly, it is usually helped by emotional conditioning, but that is what makes for commitment. The great historians more often than not have been passionately committed to a cause or a protagonist, as Mommsen was to Julius Caesar or Michelet to the glorious power of the people.
How commitment can generate insight and heighten communication is nowhere better shown than in G. M. Trevelyan’s Garibaldi and the Thousand, one of the finest works of history, I think, both for investigation and narrative, produced in this century. Trevelyan’s commitment to his hero is explicit. Describing the foot track from the Villa Spinola down to the embarkation point in Genoa, he writes in a footnote, “I had the honor of going down it” with a veteran of the Thousand. There is no doubt where he stands. His feeling of personal involvement led Trevelyan to visit every place connected with the Garibaldini, to walk in their footsteps, to interview those still living, until he knew the persons, terrain, view, sounds, smells, sights, distances, weather—in short, the feel—of every scene of action he was to write about.
As the Thousand marched to the Battle of Calatafimi, Trevelyan writes, “Their hearts were light with the sense that they were enviable above all Italians, that their unique campaign was poetry made real.” The quality of emotion here is not, as so often, created out of the historian’s feelings and foisted onto his characters, but drawn from the evidence. A footnote gives the original from a letter of one of the Garibaldini to his mother, telling her, “Quest a spedizione è così poetica.” (“This expedition is a poetical thing.”) Approaching the battle, they pass through a green valley at early morning. “In the bloom of the early Sicilian summer,” Trevelyan writes, “the vale fresh from last night’s rain, and sung over by the nightingale at dawn, lay ready to exhale its odors to the rising sun. Nature seemed in tune with the hearts of Garibaldi and his men.” Here, too, he worked from evidence in diaries and letters that it had rained the night before and that the nightingale had sung. In these two passages he has conveyed the sense of miraculous freshness and noble enterprise which the Garibaldi expedition signalized for the liberal spirit of the nineteenth century. He could accomplish this, first, because of his quick sensitivity to source material, and, second, because he himself was in tune with the hearts of Garibaldi and his men.
Again, when Garibaldi’s bugler blew reveille, “the unexpected music rang through the noonday stillness like a summons to the soul of Italy.” In the verb of sound, “rang,” the reader hears the bugle and in the phrase “like a summons to the soul of Italy” feels the emotion of the listener. Without knowing that he is being told, he has learned the meaning to history of the expedition.
To visit the scene before writing, even the scene of long-dead adventures, is, as it were, to start business with money in the bank. It was said of Arthur Waley, the great Orientalist who died a few months ago, that he had never visited Asia, explaining that he was content with the ideal image of the East in his imagination. For a historian that would be a risky position. On the terrain motives become clear, reasons and explanations and origins of things emerge that might otherwise have remained obscure. As