I have discovered a lurking monster in the minds of the semi-academic people who popularise history. The assumption is so enormous and so absurd that I cannot describe it as anything else; for when one cannot make a head or tail of something, it may have a hundred heads and a thousand tails. Indeed, its great bellowing vaunt is that it does have a thousand tales; and the only reason I am bold enough to oppose it is that I know of a monster that has a Thousand and One. The assumption is this: that history is about people. You will see the veneer of plausibility that has lured the best minds of our age to their ideological destruction. It is true that occasionally, when the moon is blue and restless seas foam against far cliffs, an individual will rise from the dark like an omen and stride mysteriously across the page of history. It is true that these moments often seem to be the most exciting moments; and even the most important. Likewise there come upon us inexplicable moods where it seems for all the world as though people were the most important thing in the present. For a moment one is ready to gamble the stars for the face of a man or a woman. The whole universe seems slighter than a hair on a human head, and nothing that has happened in the past matters the slightest bit when compared to the people it happened to. This mood, confirmed and preserved, represents the basic assumption of the popular historians of our day. Like all who write for the common folk, they are mystics. And every human being on the planet is a mystic – including the person who said to me but of late, ‘I do not believe in dreams’ – so I myself cannot reply on any but mystical grounds. For it seems to me that there is one thing in the universe that is, on any reasonable philosophy, more important than people: and that is other people. I too would toss away galaxies and nebulae for the sake of a person, if I could; but I would cast off at least one particular person’s soul for the sake of other people’s souls. Let me lord it over creation, which in all its immensity is but a puppet theatre for my imagination; but as soon as the merest stranger drops something, I will prostrate myself to pick it up. Were I the fiercest democrat, who would rather yield my head than tip it to a king, I would bow without blinking before a clumsy bumbler. I will annihilate the most vividly present personality I know for the sake of another person I do not know. They are a heartless individual who would never do the same; and yet even them, we tolerate, because they fall under that sacred category of ‘other people’. To say that altruism is more important than individuals perhaps allows too much to the treacherous Latin language; but at any rate it is more important to be personable than to be a person, or to be selfless than to be a self.
This is a matter of high philosophy, and I shall have to leave it there. With regard to the present, one thing is more important than people, and that is the love of people. But with regard to history, we can take it further, and say that there are so many things more important than people that people are but the smallest part. One day someone will prove this by writing a biography that is strictly and entirely biographical: that is, it says nothing that is not directly and entirely about its hero. I envisage it as a kind of narrative medical report, detailing all the vicissitudes of the protagonist’s material fortunes, and, if the author is of a speculative cast, some guesses at their introspective reflections too. Every inch of height, every case of the flu, every exertion, would be carefully catalogued, until, with laconic triumph, the writer writes, ‘Then Abraham Lincoln died’. Then they will quietly shelve their pen. What this exercise would prove, I suppose, is that the life of Abraham Lincoln is about as relevant to Abraham Lincoln as the price of peas. Until the biographer starts wandering into the topics of liberty and valour and America, or at the very least finance and fighting, the Life of Abraham Lincoln is dead. It is senseless to write a book entirely about Abraham Lincoln, when Abraham Lincoln was entirely about politics and powers and the policies he pursued. The point is general: history cannot be entirely about people when people are entirely about everything else. The proposition that history is all about people collapses in on itself – and great is its implosion. If it is true, then history is as much about people’s ideals and ideas and dreams and nightmares as about their lives. Their lives pale in comparison with their speculations and imaginations. Heaven and hell can scarce contain all the vast heavens and hells than have sprung from the mind of man. Thus my gripe against the popular historians – against whom I have nothing else, for my shelves are full of their work – is that they have sold us short by giving us nothing but the small talk of history; who won what battle and whether the Romans ate fish. They will tell us all about the people who did not find El Dorado, and what they wore and how they felt when they set out and how they felt when they returned; but they will not tell us about the El Dorado people did not find. All this is about as good as the Morte D’Arthur without the Holy Grail. El Dorado is the truth of the matter: the people, by their own account, are the mere accidents of history. For though, on the deck of the Atlantic ship, or in the fatal chaos of a final battle, a conquistador might think of his career, what he did of good and ill, what he achieved or failed to achieve, that is but the froth of the matter. When in the darkness of the forest, by their lonely fire, their eyes glowed red with the greed of gold, and the spectre of shimmering walls and blinding streams rose up before them, they hit the heart of the matter. Their disappointment was not half so vast as their dream: and if it was, it must have been far more vast than themselves. The feverish dignity of believing in El Dorado alone almost justifies whatever pains they endured to find it.
It seems like romantic nonsense to say that history is full of dragons and elves and gods and demons. But if they do not belong to history, where do they belong? And what is history without them? What distinguishes a Persian magus from an English gleeman? Is it not as much as anything that one told stories about the garden of Paradise and the other told stories about the meadhall of Heorot? And would it not be infinitely more enlightening to know whether his dread majesty Pharaoh Nectanebo II ever had the discourtesy to snigger at the goddess Taweret, who was, after all, a pregnant hippopotamus in a wig – than to know everything we do know about the rocky careen of his reign? Recently I saw an extravagant example of the topsy-turvy ‘small-talk’ approach to history. I cite it, in part, lest I get too carried away with my convictions – for it has its positive side. It was full and lengthy description of Aristotle, which detailed everything from his unprepossessing appearance to his pretentious sartorial habits – I read it through, to my astonishment it taught me a great deal I had never thought to ask. Almost incidentally it grazed the surface of his philosophy with a few quotes. I do not think the author understood what Aristotle stood for. For all I know they had never asked, just as I had never asked what kind of shoes he wore – I confess it to my shame; but I feel it is only reasonable to add that Aristotle’s philosophy was somewhat important to him, and, perhaps for different reasons, to all those poor Macedonian striplings who had to sit exams for him. Without preferencing one or the other of these two weighty matters, how Aristotle curled his moustache, and to what philosophical end he grew a moustache in the first place, I assert that the latter has as much right to be regarded as history as the former. And by extension the historian who occasionally takes an afternoon off to muse on the futility of earthly empire might with equal respectability spend that afternoon meditating on the flaming hair of the seraphim in that splendid little lyric of the tenth century that begins with the inimitable words ‘Angelic plebeians.’
There is a further consideration. It seems to me that there is enough to feed the grisliest dreams of hell in the political annals of, say, the Persian empire, that the better thoughts of history must be recognised too, if only make it digestible. The small talk of history by itself is saddening. The general approach is to justify and mitigate; to explain the motives and culture of those in power, and brighten the picture that way. It is effective, for those who do not stop to think too deeply about what they read. In truth almost all the princes of the world are traitors to their cultures, for few of them leave their cultures unstained. Seldom does a dream come true in history except as a dark or dreary reality in the hands of those who carry it out. When history is about people, too often it is about error and evil. But that is only half the story. There are always many more uncrowned heads than crowned ones. The contents of the least of those heads is far greater than the girth of the crown; and what is more, it is far and away more historic.
theparsnipoftime 