How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (31 page)

With all the careful rules of evidence, and cross-examination besides, have you ever been absolutely sure, as a member of a jury, that you really knew what happened?

The law assumes that you will not be absolutely sure. It assumes that there will always be some doubt in a juror's mind.

As a matter of practice, in order that trials may be decided one way or the other, it says that the doubt must be "reasonable" if it is to be allowed to affect your judgment. The doubt must be, in other words, sufficient to trouble your conscience.

A historian is concerned with events that occurred, most of them, a long time ago. All the witnesses to the events are usually dead. What evidence they give is not given in a courtroom-that is, it is not governed by stringent and careful rules.

Such witnesses as there are often guess, hypothecate, estimate, assume, and suppose. We cannot see their faces in order to judge whether they are lying (if we ever really can know that about anybody). They are not cross-examined. And there is no guarantee whatever that they know what they are talking about.

If, then, it is difficult to be sure that one knows about the truth of a relatively simple matter, such as is decided by a jury in a court of law, how much more difficult it is to know what really happened in history. A historical fact, though we may have a feeling of trust and solidity about the word, is one of the most elusive things in the world.

Of course, about some kinds of historical fact we can be pretty certain. America was involved in a Civil War that began with the firing on Fort Sumter, on April 12, 1861, and ended with the surrender of General Lee to General Grant at Appomattox Court House, on April 9, 1865. Everyone agrees about those dates. It is not likely (though it is not totally impossible) that every American calendar was incorrect at that time.

But how much have we learned if we know exactly when the Civil War started and when it ended? Indeed, those dates have been disputed-not on the grounds that the calendars were wrong, but that the war really started with the election of Lincoln in the fall of 1860 and ended with his assassination five days after Lee's surrender. Others have claimed that the war started even earlier-as much as five or ten or twenty years before 1861-and we know that it was still actually being fought in outlying parts of the United States, to which word had not yet come of the Northern triumph, as late as May, June, and July, 1865. And there are those, too, who feel that the Civil War is not over yet, that it will never be over until black Americans are completely free and equal, or until the South manages to secede from the Union, or until the right of the federal government to control all the states is finally established and accepted by every American everywhere.

At least we do know, one might say, that whether or not the firing on Fort Sumter started the Civil War, it did occur on April 12, 1861. That is true-within the limits of possibility we referred to before. But why was Sumter fired on? That is an obvious next question. And could war still have been avoided after the attack? If it had been, would we care that such and such an assault occurred on such and such a spring day more than a century ago? If we did not care-and we do not care about many attacks on forts that have doubtless occurred, but about which we know nothing whatever-would the firing on Sumter still be a significant historical fact?

Theories of History

We class history, the story of the past, more often under fiction than under science-if it must be affiliated with one or the other. If not, if history, that is, is allowed to rest somewhere in between the two main divisions of the kinds of books, then it is usually admitted that history is closer to fiction than to science.

This does not mean that a historian makes up his facts, like a poet or story teller. However, we might get into trouble if we insisted too strongly that a writer of fiction makes up his facts. He creates a world, as we have said. But this new world is not totally different from our own-indeed, it had better not be-and a poet is an ordinary man, with ordinary senses by and through which he has learned. He does not see things that we cannot see (he may see better or in a slightly different way) . His characters use words that we use (otherwise we could not believe in them). It is only in dreams that human beings create really strange new worlds-yet even in the most fantastic dream the events and creatures of the imagination are made up out of elements of everyday experience. They are merely put together in strange new ways.

A good historian does not, of course, make up the past.

He considers himself responsibly bound by some concept or criterion of accuracy or facts. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the historian must always make up something.

He must either find a general pattern in, or impose one on, events; or he must suppose that he knows why the persons in his story did the things they did. He may have a general theory or philosophy, such as that Providence rules human affairs, and make his history fit that. Or he may abjure any such pattern, imposed as it were from the outside or above, and instead insist that he is merely reporting the real events that have occurred. But in that case he is likely to be forced to assign causes for events and motivations for actions. It is essential to recognize which way the historian you are reading is operating.

The only way to avoid taking either one or the other position is to assume that men do not do things for a purpose, or that the purpose, if it exists, is undiscoverable -in other words, that there is no pattern to history at all.

Tolstoy had such a theory about history. He was not a historian, of course; he was a novelist. But many historians have held the same view, particularly in modern times. The causes of every human action, Tolstoy thought, were so manifold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened.

Because theories of history differ, and because a historian's theory affects his account of events, it is necessary to read more than one account of the history of an event or period if we want to understand it. Indeed, this is the first rule of reading history. And it is all the more important if the event in which we are interested has practical significance for us. It is probably of practical significance to all Americans that they know something about the history of the Civil War. We still live in the backwash of that great and sorry conflict; we live in a world it helped to make. But we cannot hope to understand it if we look at it through the eyes of only one man, or one side, or one faction of modern academic historians. The other day we opened a new Civil War history and noted that its author offered it as "an impartial, objective history of the Civil War from the point of view of the South." The author appeared to be serious. Maybe he was; maybe such a thing is possible. At any rate, we would admit that every narrative history has to be written from some point of view. But to get at the truth, we ought to look at it from more than one viewpoint.

The Universal in History

We are not always able to read more than one history of an event. When we are not, we must admit that we do not have much chance of learning the truth of the matter in question-of learning what really happened. However, that is not the only reason to read history. It might be claimed that only the professional historian, the man who is writing a history himself, is required to cross-examine his sources by exhaustively checking one against the other. He must leave no stone unturned if he is to know what he ought to know about his subject. We, as lay readers of history, stand somewhere between the professional historian, on the one hand, and the irresponsible amateur, on the other hand, who reads history only for amusement.

Let us take the example of Thucydides. You may be aware that he wrote the only major contemporary history of the Peloponnesian War at the end of the fifth century B.C. In a sense, there is nothing to check his work against. What, then, can we expect to learn from it?

Greece is now a tiny country; a war that occurred there twenty-five centuries ago can have little real effect on our life today. Everyone who fought in it is long dead, and the specific things for which they fought are long dead, too. The victories are now meaningless, and the defeats without pain. The cities that were taken and lost have crumbled into dust. Indeed, if we stop to think of it, almost all that remains of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides' account of it.

Yet that account is still important. For Thucydides' story -we might as well use that word-has had an influence on the subsequent history of man. Leaders in later eras read Thucydides. When they found themselves in situations that even faintly approximated that of the tragically divided Greek city-states, they compared their own position to that of Athens or Sparta.

They used Thucydides as an excuse and a justification, and even as a pattern of conduct. The result was that by ever so little, perhaps, but perceptibly, the history of the world was changed by the view held of a small portion of it by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. Thus we read Thucydides not because he described perfectly what happened before he wrote his book, but because he to a certain extent determined what happened after. And we read him, strange as this may seem, to know what is happening now.

"Poetry is more philosophical than history," wrote Aristotle.

By this he meant that poetry is more general, more universal.

A good poem is true not only in its own time and place, but in all times and places. It has meaning and force for all men.

History is not quite so universal as that. It is tied to events in a way that poetry is not. But any good history is also universal.

Thucydides himself said that he was writing his history so that men of the future would not have to repeat the mistakes he had seen made and from which he had suffered personally and through the agony of his country. He described the kinds of human mistakes that would have meaning to men other than himself, to men other than Greeks. Yet some of the very same errors that the Athenians and the Spartans made 2,50 years ago, or at least very similar ones, are being made now, as they have been made over and over again since Thucydides' time.

If your view of history is limited, if you go to it to discover only what really happened, you will not learn the main thing that Thucydides, or indeed any good historian, has to teach. If you read Thucydides well, you may even decide to give up trying to discover what really happened in the past.

History is the story of what led up to now. It is the present that interests us-that and the future. The future will be partly determined by the present. Thus, you can learn something about the future, too, from a historian, even from one who like Thucydides lived more than two thousand years ago.

Let us sum up these two suggestions for reading history.

The first is: if you can, read more than one history of an event or period that interests you. The second is : read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular time and place in the past, but also to learn the way men act in all times and places, especially now.

Questions to Ask of a Historical Book

Despite the fact that most histories are closer to fiction than to science, they can be read as expository works, and therefore they should be. Hence, we must ask the same questions of a historical book that we ask of any expository book.

Because of the special nature of history, we must ask those questions a little differently and must expect to receive slightly different kinds of answers.

As far as the first question is concerned, every history has a particular and limited subject. It is surprising, then, how often readers do not trouble to find out what this is. In particular, they do not always note carefully what limitations the author sets for himself. A history of the Civil War is not a history of the world in the nineteenth century. It probably will not be a history of the American West in the 1860's. It could, though perhaps it should not, ignore the state of American education in that decade, or the movement of the American frontier, or the progress of American freedom. Hence, if we are to read a history well, it is necessary to know precisely what it is about and what it is not about. Certainly, if we are to criticize it, we must know the latter. An author cannot be blamed for not doing what he did not try to do.

With regard to the second question, the historian tells a story, and that story, of course, occurred in time. Its general outlines are thus determined, and we do not have to search for them. But there is more than one way to tell a story, and we must know how the historian has chosen to tell his. Does he divide his work into chapters that correspond to years or decades or generations? Or does he divide it according to other rubrics of his own choosing? Does he discuss, in one chapter, the economic history of his period, and cover its wars and religious movements and literary productions in others? Which of these is most important to him? If we discover that, if we can say which aspect of the story he is telling seems to him most fundamental, we can understand him better. We may not agree with his judgment about what is basic, but we can still learn from him.

Criticism of history takes two forms. We can judge-but only, as always, after we understand what is being said-that a historian's work lacks verisimilitude. People just do not act that way, we may feel. Even if the historian documents his statements by giving us access to his sources, and even if to our knowledge they are relevant, we can still feel that he has misunderstood them, that he has judged them in the wrong way, perhaps through some deficiency in his grasp of human nature or human affairs. We tend to feel this, for example, about many older historians who do not include much discussion of economic matters in their work. People, we may be inclined to think now, act out of self-interest; too much nobility ascribed to the "hero" of a history may make us suspicious.

On the other hand, we may think, especially if we have some special knowledge of the subject, that the historian has misused his sources. We may be indignant to discover that he has not read a certain book that we have read. And he may be misinformed about the facts of the matter. In that case, he cannot have written a good history of it. We expect a historian to be informed.