Clio among the Muses: Essays on History and the Humanities

4. History and Literature

72 > 73 the royal judge’s yearbooks, as Maitland seeks evidence of the wholeness of English law: Beyond . . . there lie six other centuries that are but partially and fitfully lit, and in one of them a great catastrophe, the Norman Conquest, befell England and the law of England. However, we never quite lose the thread of the story. Along one path or another we can trace back the footprints, which have their starting-place in some settlement of wild Germans who are invading the soil of Roman provinces, and coming in contact with the civilization of the old world. Here the trail stops, the dim twilight becomes darkness; we pass from an age in which men seldom write their laws, to one in which they cannot write at all. Or open The Education of Henry Adams and find the turn-of-the-twentieth -century American historian of medieval art just back from England, reveling in New York City’s energy: “A traveler in the highways of history looked out of the club window on the turmoil of Fifth Avenue and felt himself in Rome, under Diocletian, witnessing the anarchy, conscious of the compulsion, eager for the solution, but unable to conceive whence the next impulse was to come, or how it was to act. The two thousand years failure of Christianity roared up from Broadway, and no Constantine the Great was in sight.” I am tempted to reduce this chapter to a string of such quotes, conceding how inadequate my own prose is to convey this artistry. As the prize-winning historian James Goodman explained in his call for submissions to Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, the best history was “history written by writers who, whether composing the most complex theory or the simplest narrative, are attentive to the ways that form and style shape substance, content, and meaning.”1 Modern academic historical writing, striving for the plaudits of fellow academics, sometimes mistakes pedantic jargon for prose. For example, consider this apology for jargon written in jargon: “[A]s with other disciplines , art history has developed meta-languages, special ways of communicating with other people in the group. Within such meta-languages 74 > 75 from the personal archives of the Marquis de Montcalm, France’s premier commander in the French and Indian War. Of Montcalm’s letters home, Parkman wrote, “No translation can give an idea of the rapid, abrupt, elliptical style of this familiar correspondence, where the meaning is sometimes suggested by a single word, unintelligible to any but those for whom it was written.” Though this might seem the very definition of jargon, Parkman’s description of Montcalm’s prose was anything but jargon. And how typical this is of our letters to loved ones, for the code that bonds husband to wife and brother to brother, and father to child needs little elucidation and offers none to strangers. Note how Parkman captured the elusive style by matching it with his own, departing here from the ornate longwinded prose of most (including his own) Victorian histories. In a single passage, a work of art in itself, he captured the essential character of one of military history’s most enigmatic figures.4 Where Parkman’s sense of fairness failed, his pen did not. Consider his account of the Canadian Huron Indians. He who entered [a Huron Indian longhouse] on a winter night beheld a strange spectacle. [The Hurons would not have found it strange at all—for them it was home, and a more sensitive historian would have realized this.] The bronzed groups . . . eating, gambling, or amusing themselves with badinage: shriveled squaws, hideous with threescore years of hardship ; grisly old warriors, scarred with Iroquois war-clubs . . . damsels gay with ochre and wampum; restless children pellmell with restless dogs. Now a tongue of resinous flame painted each wild figure in vivid light; now the fitful gleam expired, and the group vanished from sight, as their nation has vanished from history. He thought that the Hurons were superior to other Algonquians because of “the size . . . of their brains” (Parkman subscribed to the emerging pseudo-science of phrenology), but they were incapable of intellectual abstraction. Indian religion, for example, was “a chaos of degrading, ridiculous and incoherent superstitions.” Finally, Indian 76 > 77 Throughout his account of that critical episode, “Macaulay’s habit of constructing his...