Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [33]
Parkman’s hero was really the forest. Through experience he learned passion for it, and fear, and understood both its savagery and beauty. In those long days of intermittent blindness when he was not allowed to write, his mind must have worked over remembered visions of the forest so that they come through on the page with extra clarity. As a scout paddles across the lake in autumn, “the mossed rocks double in the watery mirror” and sumachs on the shore glow like rubies against the dark green spruce. Or the frontier settler, returning at evening, sees “a column of blue smoke rising quietly in the still evening air” and runs to find the smoldering logs of his cabin and the scalped bodies of his murdered wife and children.
Vision, knowledge, experience will not make a great writer without that extra command of language which becomes their voice. This, too, was Parkman’s. When the English are about to descend the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, they look on the river whose “reckless surges dashed and bounded in the sun, beautiful and terrible as young tigers at play.” In choice of verbs and nouns and images that is a masterpiece. It is only physical description, to be sure, not a great thought, but it takes perfect command of words to express great thoughts in the event one has them.
Steeped in the documents he spent his life collecting, as he was steeped in the forest, Parkman understood the hardship and endurance, grim energy, and implacable combat that underlay the founding of the American nation. He knew the different groups of combatants as if he had lived with each, and could write with equal sympathy of French or Indians, English or colonials. Consider his seventeenth-century French courtiers, “the butterflies of Versailles … facing death with careless gallantry, in their small three-cornered hats, powdered perukes, embroidered coats, and lace ruffles. Their valets served them with ices in the trenches, under the cannon of besieged towns.” In this case the ices in the trenches is a specimen of the historian’s selective insight at work. He has chosen a vivid item to represent a larger whole. It distills an era and a culture in a detail.
Distillation is selection, and selection, as I am hardly the first to affirm, is the essence of writing history. It is the cardinal process of composition, the most difficult, the most delicate, the most fraught with error as well as art. Ability to distinguish what is significant from what is insignificant is sine qua non. Failure to do so means that the point of the story, not to mention the reader’s interest, becomes lost in a morass of undifferentiated matter. What it requires is simply the courage and self-confidence to make choices and, above all, to leave things out.
In history as in painting, wrote the great stylist Macaulay, to put in everything achieves a less, rather than a more, truthful result. The best picture and the best history, he said, are those “which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.” This is such an obvious rule that it is puzzling why so many historians today seem to practice a reverse trend toward total inclusion. Perhaps the reason is timidity: fear of being criticized for having left something out, or, by injudicious selection, of not conforming to the dominant thesis of the moment. Here the independent writer has an advantage over the professional historian: He need not be afraid of the outstuck neck.
Finally, the historian cannot do without imagination. Parkman, intense as always in his effort to make the reader “feel the situation,” chose to picture the land between the Hudson and Montreal as it would look to a wild goose flying northward in spring. He sees the blue line of the river, the dark mass of forests and shimmer of