Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [34]
Great as this is, the more necessary use of imagination is in application to human behavior and to the action of circumstance on motive. It becomes a deliberate effort at empathy, essential if one is to understand and interpret the actions of historical figures. With antipathetic characters it is all the more necessary. The historian must put himself inside them, as Parkman put himself inside the wild goose, or as I tried to do inside Sir John French in an effort to understand the draining away of his will to fight. As soon as the effort was made, the explanation offered itself. I could feel the oppression, the weight of responsibility, the consciousness of the absence of any trained reserves to take the place of the BEF if it were lost. The effort to get inside is, obviously enough, a path to insight. It is the Einfühlung that Herder demanded of historians: the effort to “feel oneself into everything.” The interpreter of the Hebrew scriptures, as he put it, must be “a shepherd with shepherds, a peasant in the midst of an agricultural people, an oriental with the primitive dwellers of the East.”
To describe the historian’s task today in terms of narrative history and two romantic practitioners, Parkman and Trevelyan, will seem old-fashioned at a time when interdisciplinary techniques, and horizontal subjects such as demography, and the computerized mechanics of quantification are the areas of fresh endeavor. These are methods of research, not of communication, for one reason because the people who use them tend to lose contact with ordinary language; they have caught the jargon disease. Their efforts are directed, I take it, toward uncovering underlying patterns in history and human behavior which presumably might help in understanding the past and managing the future, or even the present. Whether quantification will reveal anything which could not have been discerned by deduction is not yet clear. What seems to be missing in the studies that I have seen is a certain element of common sense.
The new techniques will, I am sure, turn up suggestive material and open avenues of thought, but they will not, I think, transform history into a science, and they can never make it literature. Events happen; but to become history they must be communicated and understood. For that, history needs writers—preferably great writers—a Trevelyan who can find and understand the cost poetica in a soldier’s letter and make the right use of it, a Parkman who can see and feel, and report with Shakespeare’s gift of words; both, I need not add, assemblers of their own primary material. To be a really great historian, Macaulay said, “is the rarest of intellectual distinctions.” For all who try, the opportunity is now and the audience awaits.
Address, American Historical Association, December 1966. Saturday Review, February 25, 1967.
Problems in Writing the Biography of General Stilwell
I have to begin with a disclaimer. My book on Stilwell is not really a military biography even though the protagonist is a soldier. The book is really two-in-one, like an egg with two yolks: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, with the man chosen to represent the experience—to serve, as I stated in the Foreword, as vehicle of the theme, which is not military. The larger theme is the Sino-American experience. For purposes of making it comprehensible to the reader and writing