The Fate of the Historian

Mark Pattison,'Gregory of Tours' in Essays, ed. by Henry Nettleship, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), I, 1-29 (p. 1):

The fate of the historian is like those of the dynasties he writes of; they spring up and flourish, and bear rule and seem established for ever; but time goes on, their strength passes away, and at last some young and vigorous usurper comes and pushes them from their throne. It is not because new facts are continually accumulating, because criticism is growing more rigid, or even because style varies; but because ideas change, the whole mode and manner of looking at things alters with every age; and so every generation requires facts to be recast in its own mould, demands that the history of its forefathers be rewritten from its own point of view.

The Middle Ages

The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves.

Brian Stock, ‘The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism’, New Literary History, 5.3 (1974), 527-47 (p. 543).

The Traditional Novel

 The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, having started at point A and having undergone experiences B and C and D, ends up at point Z. Like history, the novel is thus an exercise in making the past coherent. Like history, it explores the respective contributions of character and circumstance to forming the present. By doing so the novel suggests how we may explore the power of the present to produce the future. That is why we have this thing, this institution, this medium called the novel.

J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003), p. 38-39.

Verdict of History

There is no ‘verdict of history,’ other than the private opinions of the individual. And no one historian can possibly see more than a fraction of the truth; if he sees all sides, he will probably not see very deeply into any one of them.

George Macaulay Trevelyan, ‘Clio, A Muse’, in Clio, a Muse, and Other Essays (London: Longmans, Green and co., 1949; 1913), pp. 140-176 (pp. 172-73).

Thucydides Trap

Paul Cartledge, Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece (New York: Abrams Press, 2020), p. 134:

The old problems of why the Atheno-Peloponnesian War – or wars – broke out, in 431 BCE, and of which side was really or chiefly responsible for the outbreak, have had a recent infusion of oxygen from Graham Allison’s coinage of the phrase ‘the Thucydides trap’. This notion, which postulates that an established power will be tempted, perhaps irresistibly, even ‘inevitably’, to go to war in an attempt to nip in the bud any rising power that threatens it (for example, the United States and China today and in the foreseeable future) has been applied or rather misapplied to relations between Sparta and Athens between the 470s and the 430s, and used – quite wrongly – to ‘explain’ the war’s outbreak. But by 431 both those powers – each of them had substantial permanent alliances behind them, if of very different kinds – had definitively and long since ‘risen’. Arguably, it was the older-established of the two alliances (the Spartan) that felt the more threatened by the other, and Sparta that started the war – that is, made the difference as to whether or not there would be a war at all (it did not in fact make the first attacking move). But the war was in no sense ‘inevitable’, and Thucydides does not say that it was.

Idle Gossip

Gore Vidal, Julian: A Historical Novel (London: The Reprint Society, 1965; 1962), p. 417:

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, 7^th ed (London: Macmillan Press, 1995; 1947), p.xxi.

   Anyone who undertakes an inquiry of such a kind is soon made aware of one important fact: the worthlessness of mere human testimony. It is a chastening thought to a historian to consider how much history is written on the basis of statements no more reliable than those of Admiral Doenitz, Dr Spaeth and Carmen Mory. If such statements had been made and recorded with reference to the disputed death of the Czar Alexander I in 1825, plenty of historians would have been ready to take them seriously. Fortunately in this case they were made by contemporaries, and it was possible to check them.

We Live in the Past

Why prostrate reason your Reason to meer Nature? We live off the Past: it is in our Words and our Syllables.  It is reverberant in our Streets and Courts, so that we can scarce walk across the Stones without being reminded of those who walked there before us; the Ages before our own are like an Eclipse which blots out the Clocks and Watches of present Artificers and, in that Darkness, the Generations jostle one another. It is the dark of Time from which we come and to which we will return.

Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor (London: Penguin Books, 1993; 1985), p. 178.

History is Always Something Else

'[Orhan Pamuk:] The duty of the novelist, if he or she is going to be ethical, is to see the world through a character’s point of view rather than obeying some theoretical inevitability. And believe me, those inevitabilities in history never work out. It’s always something else.’

Pankaj Mishra, ‘Interview: Orhan Pamuk on Taksim Square, the Effects of “Breaking Bad,” and Why the Future of the Novel Is in the East’, New Republic, 29 July 2013.

Neurotic History

Bernard Lewis, Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (New York: Viking, 2012), p. 8:

We live in a time when great energies are being devoted to the falsification of history—to flatter, to deceive or to serve some sectional purpose. No good can come of such distortions, even when they are inspired by unselfish motives. History is the collective memory and if we think of the social body in terms of the human body, no history means amnesia, distorted history means neurosis.

Enthusiam about the Past

Also, it is so much easier to be enthusiastic about what exists than about what doesn’t. The future doesn’t exist. The past does. For, whereas all men can learn the gift of prophecy has died out.

Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson or an Oxford Love Story (London: William Heinemann, 1949),  pp. 86-87.