The Whig Interpretation Of History Part 1

The Whig Interpretation of History.

by Herbert b.u.t.terfield.

Preface.

The following study deals with "the whig interpretation of history" in what I conceive to be the accepted meaning of the phrase. At least it covers all that is ordinarily understood by the words, though possibly it gives them also an extended sense. What is discussed is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present. This whig version of the course of history is a.s.sociated with certain methods of historical organization and inference certain fallacies to which all history is liable, unless it be historical research. The examination of these raises problems concerning the relations between historical research and what is known as general history; concerning the nature of a historical transition and of what might be called the historical process; and also concerning the limits of history as a study, and particularly the attempt of the whig writers to gain from it a finality that it cannot give.

The subject is treated not as a problem in the philosophy of history, but rather as an aspect of the psychology of historians. Use has been made of words like conjuncture and contingency to describe what appear as such to the observer and to the historian. The present study does not concern itself with the philosophical description or a.n.a.lysis of these. And its theses would be unaffected by anything the philosopher could state to explain them or to explain them away.

H. B.

September 1931

1. Introduction

It has been said that the historian is the avenger, and that standing as a judge between the parties and rivalries and causes of bygone generations he can lift up the fallen and beat down the proud, and by his exposures and his verdicts, his satire and his moral indignation, can punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent. One may be forgiven for not being too happy about any division of mankind into good and evil, progressive and reactionary, black and white; and it is not clear that moral indignation is not a dispersion of one's energies to the great confusion of one's judgement. There can be no complaint against the historian who personally and privately has his preferences and antipathies, and who as a human being merely has a fancy to take part in the game that he is describing; it is pleasant to see him give way to his prejudices and take them emotionally, so that they splash into colour as he writes; provided that when he steps in this way into the arena he recognizes that he is stepping into a world of partial judgements and purely personal appreciations and does not imagines that he is speaking ex cathedra. But if the historian can rear himself up like a G.o.d and judge, or stand as the official avenger of the crimes of the past, then one can require that he shall be still more G.o.dlike and regard himself rather as the reconciler than as the avenger; taking it that his aim is to achieve the understanding of the men and parties and causes of the past, and that in this understanding, if it can be complete, all things will ultimately be reconciled. It seems to be a.s.sumed that in history we can have something more than the private points of view of particular historian; that there are "verdicts of history" and that history itself, considered impersonally, has something to say to men. It seems to be accepted that each historian does something more than make a confession of his private mind and his whimsicalities, and that all of them are trying to elicit a truth, and perhaps combining through their various imperfections to express a truth, which, if we could perfectly attain it, would be the voice of History itself. But if history is in this way something like the memory of mankind and represents the spirit of man brooding over man's past, we must imagine it as working not to accentuate antagonisms or to ratify old party-cries but to find the unities that underlie the differences and to see all lives as part of the one web of life. The historian trying to feel his way towards this may be striving to be like a G.o.d but perhaps he is less foolish than the one who poses as G.o.d the avenger. Studying the quarrels of an ancient day he can at least seek to understand both parties to the struggle and he must want to understand them better than they understood themselves; watching them entangled in the net of time and circ.u.mstance he can take pity on them these men who perhaps had no pity for one another; and, though he can never be perfect, it is difficult to see why he should aspire to anything less than taking these men and their quarrels into a world where everything is understood and all sins are forgiven.

It is astonis.h.i.+ng to what an extent the historian has been Protestant, progressive, and whig, and the very model of the nineteenth-century gentleman. Long after he became a determinist he retained his G.o.dly role as the dispenser of moral judgements, and like the disciples of Calvin he gave up none of his right to moral indignation. Even when he himself has been unsympathetic to the movements of his own generation, as in the case of Hallam[1], who bitterly opposed the Great Reform Bill and trembled to think of the revolutionary ways into which the country was moving, something in his const.i.tution still makes him lean to what might be called the whig interpretation of history, and he refuses historical understandings to men whose att.i.tude in the face of change and innovation was a.n.a.logous to his own. It might be argued that our general version of the historical story still bears the impress that was given to it by great patriarchs of history writing, so many of whom seem to have been whigs and gentlemen when they have been Americans: and perhaps it is from these that our textbook historians have inherited the top hat and the pontifical manner, and the grace with which they hand out a consolation prize to the man who, "though a reactionary, was irreproachable in his private life". But whether we take the contest of Luther against the popes, or that of Philip II and Elizabeth, or that of the Huguenots with Catherine de' Medici; whether we take Charles I versus his parliaments or the younger Pitt versus Charles James Fox, it appears that the historian tends in the first place to adopt the whig or Protestant view of the subject, and very quickly busies himself with dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress. It is true that this tendency is corrected to some extent by the more concentrated labours of historical specialists, but it is remarkable that in all the examples given above, as well in many others, the result of detailed historical research has been to correct very materially what ad been an accepted. Protestant or whig interpretation. Further, this whig tendency is so deep-rooted that even when piece-meal research has corrected the story in detail, we are slow in re-valuing the whole and reorganizing the broad outlines of the theme in the light of these discoveries; and what M. Romier[2] has deplored in the historians of the Huguenots might fairly be imputed to those in other fields of history; that is, the tendency to patch the new research into the old story even when the research in detail has altered the bearings of the whole subject. We cling to a certain organization of historical knowledge which amounts to a whig interpretation of history, and all our deference to research brings us only to admit that this needs qualifications in detail. But exceptions in detail do not prevent us from mapping out the large story on the same pattern all the time; these exceptions are lost indeed in that combined process of organization and abridgement by which we reach our general survey of general history; And so it is over large periods and in reference to the great transitions in European history that the whig view holds hardest and holds longest; it is here that we see the results of a serious discrepancy between the historical specialist and what might be called the general historian.

The truth is that there is a tendency for all history to veer over into whig history, and this is not sufficiently explained if we merely ascribe it to the prevalence and persistence of a traditional interpretation. There is a magnet for ever pulling at our minds, unless we have found the way to counteract it; and it may be said that if we are merely honest, if we are not also carefully self-critical. we tend easily to be deflected by a first fundamental fallacy. And though this may even apply in a subtle way to the detailed work of the historical specialist, it comes into action with increasing effect the moment any given subject has left the hands of the student in research; for the more we are discussing and not merely inquiring, the more we are making inferences instead of researches, then the more whig our history becomes if we have not severely repressed our original error; indeed all history must tend to become more whig in proportion as it becomes more abridged. Further, it cannot be said that all faults of bias may be balanced by work that is deliberately written with the opposite bias; for we do not gain true history by merely adding the speech of the prosecution to the speech for the defence; and though there have been Tory as there have been many Catholic partisan histories, it is still true that there is no corresponding tendency for the subject itself to lean in this direction; the dice cannot be secretly loaded by virtue of the same kind of original unconscious fallacy. For this reason it has been easy to believe that Clio herself is on the side of the whigs.

[1] Henry Hallam, 1777-1859, historian, born at Windsor on 9 July 1777, was the only son of John Hallam, canon of Windsor (17751812) and dean of Bristol (1781-1800), a man of high character, and well read in sacred and profane literature. The Hallams had long been settled at Boston in Lincolns.h.i.+re, and one member of the family was Robert Hallam [q.v.], bishop of Salisbury. Later members had been on the puritan side. Hallam's mother, a sister of Dr. Roberts, provost of Eton, was a woman of much intelligence and delicacy of feeling. He was a precocious child, read many books when four years old, and composed sonnets at ten. He was at Eton from 1790 to 1794, and some of his verses are published in the 'Musae Etonenses' (1795). He was afterwards at Christ Church, Oxford, and graduated B.A. in 1799. He was called to the bar, and practised for some years on the Oxford circuit. His father, dying in 1812, left him estates in Lincolns.h.i.+re, and he was early appointed to a commissioners.h.i.+p of stamps, a post with a good salary and light duties. In 1807 he married Julia, daughter of Sir Abraham Elton, bart., of Clevedon Court, Somerset, and sister of Sir Charles Abraham Elton [q.v.]. His independent means enabled him to withdraw from legal practice and devote himself to the study of history. After ten years' a.s.siduous labour he produced in 1818 his first great work, A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages, which immediately established his reputation. (A supplementary volume of notes was published separately in 1848.) The Const.i.tutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II followed in 1827. Before the completion of his next work he was deeply affected by the death of his eldest son, Arthur Henry (see below). 'I have,' he wrote, 'warnings to gather my sheaves while I can-my advanced age, and the reunion in heaven with those who await me.' He fulfilled his purpose by finis.h.i.+ng The Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries, published in 1837-9. During the preparation of these works he lived a studious life, interrupted only by occasional travels on the continent. He was familiar with the best literary society of the time, well known to the whig magnates, and a frequent visitor to Holland House and Bowood. His name is often mentioned in memoirs and diaries of the time, and always respectfully, although he never rivalled the conversational supremacy of his contemporaries, Sydney Smith and Macaulay. He took no part in active political life. As a commissioner of stamps he was excluded from parliament, and after his resignation did not attempt to procure a seat. He gave up the pension of 500l. a year (granted according to custom upon his resignation) after the death of his son Henry, in spite of remonstrances upon the unusual nature of the step. Though a sound whig, Hallam disapproved of the Reform Bill (see Moore's Diaries, vi. 221), and expressed his grave fears of the revolutionary tendency of the measure to one of the leading members of the reform cabinet, in presence of the Duc de Broglie (Mignet). His later years were clouded by the loss of his sons. His domestic affections were unusually warm, and he was a man of singular generosity in money matters. Considering his high position in literature and his wide acquaintance with distinguished persons, few records have been preserved of his life. But he was warmly loved by all who knew him, and his dignified reticence and absorption in severe studies prevented him from coming often under public notice. John Austin was a warm friend, and Mrs. Austin was asked to write his life, but declined the task as beyond her powers (Mrs. Ross, Three Generations of Englishwomen, ii. 118, &c.). During the greater part of his life he lived in Wimpole Street, the 'long, unlovely street' mentioned in Lord Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,' and for a few years before his death in Wilton Crescent. He died peacefully, after many years of retirement, on 21 Jan. 1859. His portraits by Phillips (in oil) and by G. Richmond (in chalk) show a n.o.ble and ma.s.sive head.

Hallam was treasurer to the Statistical Society, of which he had been one of the founders, a very active vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries, honorary professor of history to the Royal Society, and a foreign a.s.sociate of the Inst.i.tute of France. In 1830 he received one of the fifty-guinea medals given by George IV for historical eminence, the other being given to Was.h.i.+ngton Irving.

Hallam seems to have published very little besides his three princ.i.p.al works. Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, sneers at 'cla.s.sic Hallam, much renowned for Greek.' A note explains that Hallam reviewed Payne Knight in the Edinburgh Review, and condemned certain Greek verses, not knowing that they were taken from Pindar. The charge was exaggerated, and the article probably not by Hallam (see Gent. Mag. 1830, pt. i. p. 389). The review of Scott's Dryden in the number for October 1808 is also attributed to him. At a later period he wrote two articles upon Lingard's History (March 1831) and Palgrave's English Commonwealth (July 1832) (see Macvey Napier's Correspondence, p. 73). A character by him of his friend Lord Webb Seymour is in the appendix to the first volume of Francis Horner's Memoirs.

Hallam's works helped materially to lay the foundations of the English historical school, and, in spite of later researches, maintain their position as standard books. The 'Middle Ages' was probably the first English history which, without being merely antiquarian, set an example of genuine study from original sources. Hallam's training as a lawyer was of high value, and enabled him, according to competent authorities, to interpret the history of law even better in some cases than later writers of more special knowledge. Without attempting a 'philosophy of history,' in the more modern sense, he takes broad and sensible views of facts. His old-fas.h.i.+oned whiggism, especially in the const.i.tutional history, caused bitter resentment among the tories and high churchmen, whose heroes were treated with chilling want of enthusiasm. Southey attacked the book bitterly on these grounds in the Quarterly Review (1828). His writings, indeed, like that of some other historians, were obviously coloured by his opinions; but more than most historians he was scrupulously fair in intention and conscientious in collecting and weighing evidence. Without the sympathetic imagination which if often misleading is essential to the highest historical excellence, he commands respect by his honesty, accuracy, and masculine common sense in regard to all topics within his range. The Literature of Europe, though it shows the same qualities and is often written with great force, suffers from the enormous range. Hardly any man could be competent to judge with equal accuracy of all the intellectual achievements of the period in every department. Weaknesses result which will be detected by specialists; but even in the weaker departments it shows good sound sense, and is invaluable to any student of the literature of the time. Though many historians have been more brilliant, there are few so emphatically deserving of respect. His reading was enormous, but we have no means of judging what special circ.u.mstances determined his particular lines of inquiry.

Hallam had eleven children by his wife, who died 25 April 1846. Only four grew up, Arthur Henry, Ellen, who died in 1837 (the deaths of these two are commemorated in a poem by Lord Houghton), Julia, who married Captain Cator (now Sir John Farnaby Lennard), and Henry Fitzmaurice. He had one sister, who died unmarried, leaving him her fortune [article by Leslie Stephen, Dictionary of National Biography, 1890].

[2] Lucien Romier (1885-1944), French historian, author of Les Origines politiques des guerres de religion, Paris, Perrin, 1913-14, Les Protestants francais a la veille des guerres civiles, Paris, 1917, La Conjuration d'Amboise. L'Aurore sanglante de la liberte de conscience. Le Regne et la mort de Francois II, Paris, Perrin, 1923, Catholiques et Huguenots a la cour de Charles IX, Paris, Perrin, 1924, L'Ancienne France, des origines a la Revolution, Paris, Hachette, 1948.

2. THE UNDERLYING a.s.sUMPTION.

The primary a.s.sumption of all attempts to understand the men of the past must be the belief that we can in some degree enter into minds that are unlike our own. If this belief were unfounded it would seem that men must be for ever locked away from one another, and all generations must be regarded as a world and a law unto themselves. If we were unable to enter in any way into the mind of a present day Roman Catholic priest, for example, and similarly into the mind of an atheistical orator in Hyde Park, it is difficult to see how we could know anything of the still stranger men of the sixteenth century, or pretend to understand the process of history-making which has moulded us into the world of today. In reality the historian postulates that the world is in some sense always the same world and that even the men most dissimilar are never absolutely unlike. And though a sentence from Aquinas may fall so strangely upon modern ears that it becomes plausible to dismiss the man as a fool or a mind utterly and absolutely alien, I take it that to dismiss a man in this way is a method of blocking up the mind against him, and against something important in both human nature and its history; it is really the refusal to a historical personage of the effort of historical understanding. Precisely because of his unlikeness to ourselves Aquinas is the more enticing subject for the historical imagination; for the chief aim of the historian is the elucidation of the unlikeness between past and present and his chief function is to act in this way as the mediator between other generations and our own. It is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and another, and he is riding after a whole flock of misapprehensions if he goes to hunt for the present in the past. Rather it is his work to destroy those very a.n.a.logies which we imagined to exist. When he shows us that Magna Charta is a feudal doc.u.ment in a feudal setting, with implications different from those we had taken for granted, he is disillusioning us concerning something in the past which we had a.s.sumed to be too like something in the present. That whole process of specialized research which has in so many fields revised the previously accepted whig interpretation of history has set our bearings afresh in one period after another, by referring matters in this way to their context, and so discovering their unlikeness to the world of the present day.

It is part and parcel of the whig interpretation of history that it studies the past with reference to the present; and though there may be a sense in which this is un.o.bjectionable if its implications are carefully considered, and there may be a sense in which it is inescapable, it has often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present. Through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical personages can easily and irresistibly be cla.s.sed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it; so that a handy rule of thumb exists by which the historian can select and reject, and can make his points of emphasis. On this system the historian is bound to construe his function as demanding him to be vigilant for likenesses between past and present, instead of being vigilant for unlikeness; so that he will find it easy to say that he has seen the present in the past, he will imagine that he has discovered a "root" or an "antic.i.p.ation" of the twentieth century, when in reality he is in a world of different connotations altogether, and he has merely tumbled upon what could be shown to be a misleading a.n.a.logy. Working upon the same system the whig historian can draw lines through certain events, some such line as that which leads through Martin Luther and a long succession of whigs to modern liberty; and if he is not careful he begins to forget that this line is merely a mental trick of his; he comes to imagine that it represents something like a line of causation. The total result of this method is to impose a certain form upon the whole historical story, and to produce a scheme of general history which is bound to converge beautifully upon the present all demonstrating throughout the ages the workings of an obvious principle of progress, of which the Protestants and whigs have been the perennial allies while Catholics and tories have perpetually formed obstruction. A caricature of this result is to be seen in a popular view that is still not quite eradicated: the view that the Middle Ages represented a period of darkness when man was kept tongue-tied by authority a period against which the Renaissance was the reaction and the Reformation the great rebellion. It is ill.u.s.trated to perfection in the argument of a man denouncing Roman Catholicism at a street corner, who said: "When the Pope ruled England them was called the Dark Ages".

The whig historian stands on the summit of the twentieth century, and organized his scheme of history from the point of view of his own day; and he is a subtle man to overturn from his mountain-top where he can fortify himself with plausible argument. He can say that events take on their due proportions when observed through the lapse of time. He can say that events must be judged by their ultimate issues, which, since we can trace them no farther, we must at least follow down to the present. He can say that it is only in relation to the twentieth century that one happening or another in the past has relevance or significance for us. He can use all the arguments that are so handy to men when discussion is dragged into the market place and philosophy is dethroned by common sense; so that it is no simple matter to demonstrate how the whig historian, from his mountaintop, sees the course of history only inverted and aslant. The fallacy lies in the fact that if the historian working on the sixteenth century keeps the twentieth century in his mind, he makes direct reference across all the intervening period between Luther or the Popes and the world of our own day. And this immediate juxtaposition of past and present, though it makes everything easy and makes some inferences perilously obvious, is bound to lead to an over-simplification of the relations between events and a complete misapprehension of the relations between past and present.

This att.i.tude to history is not by any means the one which the historical specialist adopts at the precise moment when he is engaged upon his particular research; and indeed as we come closer to the past we find it impossible to follow these principles consistently we may have accepted them verbally. In spite of ourselves and in spite of our theories we forget that we had set out to study the past for the sake of the present, we cannot save ourselves from tumbling headlong into it and being immersed in it for its own sake; and very soon we may be concentrated upon the most useless things in the world Marie Antoinette's ear-ring or the adventures of the Jacobites. But the att.i.tude is one which we tend to adopt when we are visualizing the general course of history or commenting on it, and it is one into which the specialist himself often slides when he comes to the point of relating his special piece of work to the larger historical story. In other words it represents a fallacy and an unexamined habit of mind into which we fall when we treat of history on the broad scale. It is something which intervenes between the work of the historical specialist and that work, partly of organization and partly of abridgement, which the general historian carries out; it inserts itself at the change of focus that we make when we pa.s.s from the microscopic view of a particular period to our bird'-eye view of the whole; and when it comes it brings with it that whig interpretation of history which is so different from the story that the research student has to tell.

There is an alternative line of a.s.sumption upon which the historian can base himself when he comes to his study of the past; and it is the one upon which he does seem more or less consciously to act and to direct his mind when he is engaged upon a piece of research. On this view he comes to his labours conscious of the fact that he is trying to understand the past for the sake of the past, and though it is true that he can never entirely abstract himself from his own age, it is none the less certain that this consciousness of his purpose is very different one from that of the whig historian, who tells himself that he is studying the past for the sake of the present. Real historical understanding is not achieved by the subordination of the past to the present, but rather by our making the past our present and attempting to see life with the eyes of another century than our own. It is not reached by a.s.suming that our own age is the absolute to which Luther and Calvin and their generation are only relative; it is only reached by fully accepting the fact that their generation was as valid as our generation, their issues as momentous as our issues and their day as full and vital to them as our day is to us. The twentieth century which has its own hairs to split may have little patience with Arius and Athanasius who burdened the world with a quarrel about a diphthong, but the historian has not achieved historical understanding, has not reached that kind of understanding in which the mind can find rest, until he has seen that that diphthong was bound to be the most urgent matter in the universe to those people. It is when the emphasis is laid in this way upon the historian's attempt to understand the past that it becomes clear how much he is concerned to elucidate the unlikeness between past and present. Instead of being moved to indignation by something in the past which at first seems alien and perhaps even wicked to our own day, instead of leaving it in the outer darkness, he makes the effort to bring this thing into the context where it is natural, and he elucidates the matter by showing its relation to other things which we do understand. Whereas the man who keeps his eye on the present tends to ask some such question as, How did religious liberty arise? while the whig historian by a subtle organization of his sympathies tends to read it as the question, To whom must we be grateful for our religious liberty? the historian who is engaged upon studying the sixteenth century at close hand is more likely to find himself asking why men in those days were so given to persecution. This is in a special sense the historian's question for it is a question about the past rather than about the present, and in answering it the historian is on his own ground and he is making the kind of contribution which he is most fitted to make. It is this sense that he is always forgiving sins by the mere fact that he is finding out why they happened. The things which are most ourselves are the very object of his exposition. And until he has shown why men persecuted in the sixteenth century one may doubt whether he is competent to discuss the further question of how religious liberty has come down to the twentieth.

But after this attempt to understand the past the historian seeks to study change taking place in the past, to work out the manner in which transitions are made, and to examine the way in which things happen in this world. If we could put all the historians together and look at their total cooperative achievement they are studying all that process of mutation which has turned the past into our present. And from the work of any historian who has concentrated his researches upon any change or transition, there emerges a truth of history which seems to combine with a truth of philosophy. It is nothing less than the whole of the past, with its complexity of movement, its entanglement of issues, and its intricate interactions, which produced the whole of the complex present; and this, which is itself an a.s.sumption and not a conclusion of historical study, is the only safe piece of causation that a historian can put his hand upon, the only thing which he can positively a.s.sert about the relations.h.i.+p between past and present. When the need arises to sort and disentangle from the present one fact or feature that is required to be traced back into history, the historian is faced with more unravelling than a mind can do, and finds the network of interactions so intricate, that it is impossible to point to any one thing in the sixteenth century as the cause of any one thing in the twentieth. It is as much as the historian can do to trace with some probability the sequence of events from one generation to another, without seeking to draw the incalculably complex diagram of causes and effects for ever interlacing down to the third and fourth generations. Any action which any man has ever taken is part of that whole set of circ.u.mstances which at a given moment conditions the whole ma.s.s of things that are to happen next. To understand that action is to recover the thousand threads that connect it with other things, to establish it in a system of relations; in other words to place it in its historical context. But it is not easy to work out its consequences, for they are merged in the results of everything else that was conspiring to produce change at that moment. We do not know where Luther would have been if his movement had not chimed with the ambitions of princes. We do not know what would have happened to the princes if Luther had not come to their aid.

The volume and complexity of historical research are at the same time the result and the demonstration of the fact that the more we examine the way in which things happen, the more we are driven from the simple to the complex. It is only by undertaking an actual piece of research and looking at some point in history through the microscope that we can really visualize the complicated movements that lie behind any historical change. It is only by this method that we can discover the tricks that time plays with the purposes of men, as it turns those purposes to ends not realized; or learn the complex process by which the world comes through a transition that seems a natural and easy step in progress to us when we look back upon it. It is only by this method that we can come to see the curious mediations that circ.u.mstances must provide before men can grow out of a complex or open their minds to a new thing. Perhaps the greatest of all the lessons of history is this demonstration of the complexity of human change and the unpredictable character of the ultimate consequences of any given act or decision of men; and on the face of it this is a lesson that can only be learned in detail. It is a lesson that is bound to be lost in abridgement, and that is why abridgements of history are sometimes calculated to propagate the very reverse of the truth of history. The historian seeks to explain how the past came to be turned into the present but there is a very real sense in which the only explanation he can give is to unfold the whole story and reveal the complexity by telling it in detail. In reality the process of mutation which produced the present is as long and complicated as all the most lengthy and complicated works of historical research placed end to end, and knit together and regarded as one whole.

The fallacy of the whig historian lies in the way in which he takes his short cut through this complexity. The difficulty of the general historian is that he has abridge and that he must do it without altering the meaning and the peculiar message of history. The danger in any survey of the past is lest we argue in a circle and impute lessons to history which history has never taught and historical research has never discovered lessons which are really inferences from the particular organization that we have given to our knowledge. We may believe in some doctrine of evolution or some idea of progress and we may use this in our interpretation of the history of centuries; but what our history contributes is not evolution but rather the realization of how crooked and perverse the ways of progress are, with what wilfulness and waste it twists and turns, and takes anything but the straight track to its goal, and how often it seems to go astray, and to be deflected by any conjuncture, to return to us if it does return by a back-door. We may believe in some providence that guides the destiny of men and we may if we like read this into our history; but what our history brings to us is not proof of providence but rather the realization of how mysterious are its ways, how strange its caprices the knowledge that this providence uses any means to get to its end and works often at cross-purposes with itself and is curiously wayward. Our a.s.sumption do not matter if we are conscious that they are a.s.sumptions, but the most fallacious thing in the world is to organize our historical knowledge upon an a.s.sumption without realizing what we are doing, and then to make inferences from that organization and claim that these are the voice of history. It is at this point that we tend to fall into what I have nicknamed the whig fallacy.

The whig method of approach is closely connected with the question of the abridgement of history; for both the method and the kind of history that results from it would be impossible if all the facts were told in all their fullness. The theory that is behind the whig interpretation the theory that we study the past for the sake of the present is one that is really introduced for the purpose of facilitating the abridgement of history; and its effects is to provide us with a handy rule of thumb by which we can easily discover what was important in the past, for the simple reason that, by definition, we mean what is important "from our point of view". No one could mistake the aptness of this theory for a school of writers who might show the least inclination to undervalue one side of the historical story; and indeed there would be no point in holding it if it were not for the fact that it serves to simplify the study of history by providing an excuse for leaving things out. The theory is important because it provides us in the long run with a path through the complexity of history; it really gives us a short cut through that maze of interactions by which the past was turned into our present; it helps us to circ.u.mvent the real problem of historical study. If we can exclude certain things on the ground that they have no direct bearing on the present, we have removed the most troublesome elements in the complexity and the crooked is made straight. There is not doubt that the application of this principle must produce in history a bias in favour of the whigs and must fall unfavourably on Catholics and tories. Whig history in other words is not a genuine abridgement, for it is really based upon what is an implicit principle of selection. The adoption of this principle and this method commits us to a certain organization of the whole historical story. A very different case arises when the historian, examining the sixteenth century, sets out to discover the things which were important to that age itself or were influential at that time. And if we could imagine a general survey of the centuries which should be an abridgement of all the works of historical research, and if we were then to compare this with a survey of the whole period which was compiled on the whig principle, that is to say, " from the point of view of the present ", we should not only find that the complications had been greatly over-simplified in the version, but we should find the story recast and the most important valuations amended; in other words we should find an abridged history which tells a different story altogether. According to the consistency with which we have applied the principle of direct reference to the present, we are driven to that version of history which is called the whig interpretation.

Seeing Protestant fighting Catholic in the sixteenth century we remember our own feelings concerning liberty in the twentieth, and we keep before our eyes the relative positions of Catholic and Protestant today. There is open to us a whole range of concealed inference based upon this mental juxtaposition of the sixteenth century with the present; and, even before we have examined the subject closely, our story will have a.s.sumed its general shape; Protestants will be seen to have been fighting for the future, while it will be obvious that the Catholics were fighting for the past. Given this original bias we can follow a technical procedure that is bound to confirm and imprison us in it; for when we come, say, to examine Martin Luther more closely, we have a magnet that can draw out of history the very things that we go to look for, and by a hundred quotations torn from their context and robbed of their relevance to a particular historical conjuncture we can prove that there is an a.n.a.logy between the ideas of Luther and the world of the present day, we can see in Luther a foreshadowing of the present. History is subtle lore and it may lock us in the longest argument in a circle that one can imagine. It matters very much how we start upon our labours whether for example we take the Protestants of the sixteenth century as men who were fighting to bring about our modern world, while the Catholics were struggling to keep the medieval, or whether we take the whole present as the child of the whole past and see rather the modern world emerging from the clash of both Catholic and Protestant. If we use the present as our perpetual touchstone, we can easily divide the men of the sixteenth century into progressive and reactionary; but we are likely to beg fewer questions, and we are better able to discover the way in which the past was turned into our present, if we adopt the outlook of the sixteenth century upon itself, or if we view the process of events as it appears to us when we look at the movements of our own generation; and in this case we shall tend to see not so much progressive fighting reactionary but rather two parties differing on the question of what the next step in progress is to be. Instead of seeing the modern world emerge as the victory of the children of light over the children of darkness in any generation, it is at least better to see it emerge as the result of a clash of wills, a result which often neither party wanted or even dreamed of, a result which indeed in some cases both parties would equally have hated, but a result for the achievement of which the existence of both and the clash of both were necessary.

The whig historian has the easier path before him and his is the quicker way to heavy and masterly historical judgements; for he is in possession of a principle of exclusion which enables him to leave out the most troublesome element in the complexity. By seizing upon those personages and parties in the past whose ideas seem the more a.n.a.logous to our own, and by setting all these out in contrast with the rest of the stuff of history ready-made and has a clean path through the complexity. This organization of his history will answer all questions more clearly than historical research is studied anything very deeply, to arrive at what seem to be self-evident judgements concerning historical issues. It will enable him to decide irrevocably and in advance, before historical research has said anything and in the face of anything it might say, that Fox, whatever his sins, was fighting to save liberty from Pitt, while Pitt, whatever his virtues, cannot be regarded as fighting to save liberty from Fox. But it is the thesis of this essay that when we organize our general history by reference to the present we are producing what is really a gigantic optical illusion; and that a great number of the matters in which history is often made to speak with most certain voice are not inferences made from the past but are inferences made from a particular series of abstractions from the past abstractions which by the very principle of their origin beg the very questions that the historian is pretending to answer. It is the thesis of this essay that the Protestant and whig interpretation of history is the result of something much more subtle than actual Protestant or party bias; the significant case arises when the very men who opposed votes for women until the vote could be with-held no longer, are unable to see in the opponents of the Great Reform Bill anything but the corrupt defenders of profitable abuses; and it is this kind of limitation to the effort of historical understanding which requires to be explained. The whig interpretation of history is not merely the property of whigs and it is much more subtle than mental bias; it lies a trick of organization, an unexamined habit of mind that any historian may fall into. It might be called the historian's "pathetic fallacy". It is the result of the practice of abstracting things from their historical context and judging them apart from their context and judging them apart from their context estimating them and organizing the historical story by a system of direct reference to the present.

It may be argued that this whig principle which is under discussion is seldom applied by any historian with prolonged consistency; and one might go further and say that it could not conceivably be applied with perfect completeness. Its logical conclusion, if it had any, would be the study of the present without reference to the past; a consummation which is indeed approached, if we can judge by some of the best specimens of the fallacy the case of some popular views in regard to the dark ages, for example. This whig principle accounts for many of the common misconceptions concerning the past, but its application is by no means restricted to the region of popular error; witness the fact that it can be put forward as a definite theory by historians. It represents a kind of error into which it is very difficult for us not to fall; but, more than this, it is the very sum and definition of all errors of historical inference. The study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, the anachronism. It is the fallacy into which we slip when we are giving the judgements that seem the most a.s.suredly self-evident. And it is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical". It describes the att.i.tude by which the men of the Renaissance seem to have approached the Middle Ages. It describes the att.i.tude of the eighteenth century to many a period of the past. It accounts for a good deal of the plausibility of that special form of the whig interpretation which expounded the history of England in the light of the theory of primitive Germanic freedom. It explains a hundred whig and Protestant versions of history that have been revised by the work of specialists. And though it might be said that in any event all errors are corrected by more detailed study, it must be remembered that the thesis itself is one that has the effect of stopping inquiry; as against the view that we study the past for the sake of the past, it is itself an argument for the limitation of our aims and our researches; it is the theory that history is very useful provided we take it in moderation; and it can be turned into an apology for anything that does not tally with historical research. A more intensive study can only be pursued, as has been seen, in proportion as we abandon this thesis. And even so, even in the last resort, though a further inquiry has correct so many of the more glaring errors that result from this fallacy, there is a sense in which, if we hold to the whig thesis, historical research can never catch up, for it can never break into the circle in which we are arguing. The specialist himself is cheated and he cries out to us to no purpose, if we re-cast his work from what we call the point of view of the present-still selecting what we call conforms to our principle, still patching the new research into the old story.

3. THE HISTORICAL PROCESS.

The whig method of approach is bound to lead to an over-dramatization of the historical story; it tends to make the historian misconceive both parties to any struggle that takes place in any given generation. The party that is more a.n.a.logous to the present is taken to be more similar, more modern than close examination would justify, for the simple reason that the historian is concentrating upon likenesses and is abstracting them from their context and is making them his points of emphasis. The result is that to many of us the sixteenth-century Protestants or the whigs of 1800 seem much more modern than they really were, and even when we have corrected this impression by closer study we find it difficult to keep in mind the differences between their world and ours. At worst some people seem willing to believe that Luther was a modern Protestant fighting for a broader and more liberal theology against the religious fanaticism of Rome; although heaven itself might bear witness that it was anything but drove Luther to exasperation. Matters are not very much improved when we come to the historian who qualifies all this by some such phrase as that "Luther how-ever was of an essentially medieval cast of mind"; for this parenthetical homage to research is precisely the vice and the delusion of the whig historian, and this kind of after-thought only serves to show that he has not been placing things in their true context, but has been speaking of a modernized Luther in his narration of the story. But if one party is misconceived through this method of historical approach, it would seem that opposing party is even more gravely maltreated. It is taken to have contributed nothing to the making of the present day, and rather to have formed an obstruction; it cannot by the process of direct reference be shown to have stood as a root or a foreshadowing of the present; at worst it is converted into a kind of dummy that acts as a better foil to the grand whig virtues; and so it is often denied that very effort of historical understanding which would have helped to correct the original fallacy. In all this we tend to undo by our process of abstraction and our method of organization all the work which historical research is achieving in detail; and we are overlooking the first condition of historical inquiry, which is to recognize how much other ages differed from our own. If Protestants and Catholics of the sixteenth century could return to look at the twentieth century, they would equally deplore this strange mad modern world, and much as they fought one another there is little doubt that they would be united in opposition to us; and Luther would confess that he had been wrong and wicked if it was by his doing that this liberty, this anarchy had been let loose, while his enemies would be quick to say that this decline of religion was bound to be the result of a schism such as his. The issue between Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth century was an issue of their world and not of our world, and we are being definitely unhistorical, we are forgetting that Protestantism and Catholicism have both had a long history since 1517, if we argue from a rash a.n.a.logy that the one was fighting for something like our modern world while the other was trying to prevent its coming. Our most secular historian, and the ones who are most grateful for that "process of secularisation", that "break-up of medievalism", of which so much has been traced to the Reformation, are inclined to write sometimes as though Protestantism in itself was somehow const.i.tuted to a.s.sist that process. It is easy to forget how much Luther was in rebellion against the secularisation of Church and society, how much the Reformation shares the psychology of religious revivals, and to what an extent Luther's rebellion against the Papacy helped to provoke that very fanaticism of the Counter-reformation against which we love to see the Protestant virtues s.h.i.+ne. And it is not easy to keep in mind how much the Protestantism that we think of today and the Catholicism of these later times have themselves been affected in turn, though in different ways, by the secularisation that has taken place in society and by the dissolution of medieval ideals.

The truth is much more faithfully summarized if we forgo all a.n.a.logies with the present, and, braving the indignation of the whig historian together with all the sophistries that he is master of, count Protestants and Catholics of the sixteenth century as distant and strange people as they really were whose quarrels are as unrelated to ourselves as the factions of Blues and Greens in ancient Constantinople. In other words, it is better to a.s.sume unlikeness at first and let any likenesses that subsequently appear take their proper proportions in their proper context; just as in understanding an American it is wrong to a.s.sume first that he is like an Englishman and then quarrel with him for his unlikeness, but much better to start with him as a foreigner and so see his very similarities with ourselves in a different light. Taking this view we shall see in the sixteenth century the clash of two forms of religion which in those days could not know how to be anything but intolerant; and from this clash we shall see emerging by more complicated paths than we should a.s.sume, indeed by paths almost too intricate to trace, some of our religious liberty, perhaps some of our religious indifference, and that whole tendency which the historian likes to call the process of secularisation. We shall see Protestant and Catholic of the sixteenth century more like one another and more unlike ourselves than we have often cared to imagine each claiming that his was the one true religion upon which both church and society should exclusively be established. We shall see that it was in fact precisely because they were so similar , in the exclusiveness of their claims, that they presented the world with one of the most fertile problems it has ever had to face. They presented the world with the fact which, though all men sought to close their eyes to it, ultimately proved inescapable the coexistence of two forms of religion in one society; and they presented the world with the problem of how to make life possible and bearable in the face of such an unprecedented anomaly. Neither Protestant nor Catholic but precisely the fact that there were the two parties is the starting-point of the developments which took place.

It is here that we reach the second fault in the whig method of approach; for by its over-dramatization of the story it tends to divert our attention from what is the real historical process. The whig historian too easily refers changes and achievements to this party or that personage, reading the issue as a purpose that has been attained, when very often it is a purpose that has been marred. He gives an over-simplification of the historical process. The whig historian is fond of showing how much Calvinism has contributed to the development of modern liberty. It is easy to forget that in Geneva and in New England, where Calvinism founded its New Jerusalem, and so to speak had the field to itself, and was in a position to have its own way with men, the result was by no means entirely corroborative of all that is a.s.sumed in the whig thesis. Whether our subject is Calvinism or anything else, it is often easy to state practically the converse of what the whig historian too readily believes; and instead of being grateful to Calvinism for our liberty we are just as reasonable if we transfer our grat.i.tude to those conjunctures and accompanying circ.u.mstances which in certain countries turned even Calvinism, perhaps in spite of itself, into the ally of liberty. By all means let us be grateful for the Puritans of seventeenth-century England, but let us be grateful that they were for so long in a minority and against the government; for this was the very condition of their utility.

There is a common error into which the whig historian is bound to fall as a result of his misconceptions concerning the historical process. He is apt to imagine the British const.i.tution as coming down to us by virtue of the work of long generations of whigs and in spite of the obstructions of a long line of tyrants and tories. In reality it is the result of the continual interplay and perpetual collision of the two. It is the very embodiment of all the balances and compromises and adjustments that were necessitated by this interplay. The whig historian is apt to imagine the British const.i.tution as coming down to us safely at last , in spite of so many vicissitudes; when in reality it is the result of those very vicissitudes of which he seems to complain. If there had never been a danger to our const.i.tution there never would have been a const.i.tution to be in danger. In the most concrete sense of the words our const.i.tution is not merely the work of men and parties; it is the product of history. Now there is a sense in which the whig historian sometimes seems to believe that there is an unfolding logic in history, a logic which is on the side of the whigs and which makes them appear as co-operators with progress itself; but there is a concrete sense in which it might be said that he does not believe there is an historical process at all. He does not see whig and tory combining in virtue of their very antagonism to produce those interactions which turn one age into another. He does not see that time is so to speak having a hand in the game , and the historical process itself is working upon the pattern which events are taking. He does not see the solidity with which history is actually embodied in the British const.i.tution and similarly in the modern world. He points out all the things which would never happened if Luther had not raised the standard of the Reformation; and he does not realize the fundamental fallacy that is involved when this is inverted and all these things are counted as the work and achievement of Luther himself. In reality they are the result of interaction; they are precipitated by complex history.

The consequences of his fundamental misconception are never more apparent than in the whig historian's quest for origins; for we subject to great confusion if we turn this quest into a search for a.n.a.logies , or if we attempt to go too directly to look for the present in the past. The very form of our question is at fault if we ask, To whom do we owe our religious liberty? We may ask how this liberty arose, but even then it takes all history to give us the answer. We are in error if we imagine that we have found the origin of this liberty when we have merely discovered the first man who talked about it. We are wrong if we study the question in that over-simplified realm which we call "the history of ideas", or if we personify ideas in themselves and regard them as self-standing agencies in history. We are the victims of our own phraseology if we think that we mean very much when we say that religious liberty "can be traced back to" some person or other. And if we a.s.sert that "but for Luther" this liberty would never have come down to us as it did come, meaning to suggest that it has come down to us as the glory and the achievement of Luther, we are using a trick in text-book terminology which has become the whig historian's sleight-of-hand. It may be true to a.s.sert that there are many things in history and in the present day which would never happened in the way they have happened if Martin Luther had not defied a Pope; there are equally many things which would not have taken place as they have done if Columbus had not discovered America; but it is as fallacious to ascribe paternity to Luther in the one case as it is to make Columbus responsible for modern America; we can only say that both men added a conditioning circ.u.mstance to a whole network of other conditioning circ.u.mstances more than four centuries ago. In reality we can no more work out what religious liberty owes to Luther than we can calculate what proportion of the price of a man's suit in 1930 ought to be divided between the inventor of the spinning-jenny, the inventor of the steam-engine, and the firm which actually wove the cloth. It is meaningless to trace liberty along a line which goes back to Luther merely because Luther at one time and in a world of different connotations put forward some principles of freedom, from which as a matter of fact he shrank when he saw some of the consequences that we see in them. It is not by a line but by a labyrinthine piece of network that one would have to make the diagram of the course by which religious liberty has come down to us, for this liberty comes by devious tracks and is born of strange conjunctures, it represents purposes marred perhaps more than purposes achieved, and it owes more than we can tell to many agencies that had little to do with either religion or liberty. We cannot tell to whom we must be grateful for this religious liberty and there is no logic in being grateful to anybody or anything except to the whole past which produced the whole present; unless indeed we choose to be grateful to that providence which turned so many conjunctures to our ultimate profit.

If we see in each generation the conflict of the future against the past, the fight of what might be called progressive versus reactionary, we shall find ourselves organizing the historical story upon what is really an unfolding principle of progress, and our eyes will be fixed upon certain people who appear as the special agencies of that progress. We shall be tempted to ask the fatal question, To whom do we owe our religious liberty? But if we see in each generation a clash of wills out of which there emerges something that probably no man ever willed, our minds become concentrated upon the process that produced such an unpredictable issue, and we are more open for an intensive study of the motions and interactions that underlie historical change. In these circ.u.mstances the question will be stated in its proper form: How did religious liberty arise? The process of the historical transition will then be recognized to be unlike what the whig historian seems to a.s.sume much less like the procedure of a logical argument and perhaps much more like the method by which a man can be imagined to work his way out of a "complex". It is a process which moves by mediations and those mediations may be provided by anything in the world by men's sins or misapprehensions or by what we can only call fortunate conjunctures. Very strange bridges are used to make the pa.s.sage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the a.n.a.lysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.

Luther, precisely because he so completely a.s.sumed that the lay prince would be a G.o.dly prince, precisely because he so completely shared the a.s.sumption of medieval society, attributed to rulers some of the powers of Old Testament monarchs, and impressed upon them the duty of reforming the church. He was so sure that the ruler should be the servant of religion that he forgot the necessity of those safeguardings upon which the Papacy insisted in its dealings with temporal powers, and by calling rulers to his help at that particular moment he did something that helped kings and princes to become lords of everything and even masters of the church. If the Middle Ages had an inhibition against the control of spiritual matters by secular princes, Luther himself, at bottom, shared that inhibition to the utmost. Yet unawares and without liberating his own mind he helped how much or how little would be too intricate for the historian to trace to short-circuit the medieval argument and dissolve the complex that his generation laboured under. Yet perhaps he did not do even so much as this; perhaps at any other period his course of action would have had no such result; for kings in other ages had stepped in to reform the church without gaining dominion over it. Perhaps there was some still deeper movement in the time which was turning everything to the advantage of the lay prince and secular state, taking this and anything else as a bridge to its own end. All the same it is by intricate mediations such as this that the religious society of the Middle Ages came ultimately to transform itself into the secular society of modern times; and it is important to realize that such a transition as this process of secularisation is one that could only come by mediation, by the subtle removal of what were complexes and inhibitions. It implied in men's minds deep changes that could not have been reached by logical argument, and it implied in the world a whole series of movements that could not have been made by a mighty volition. It implied new ideas that could only come through the quiet dissolving of prejudices, through the influence of new conditions that give rise to new prepossessions, through sundry pieces of forgetfulness in the handing of a tradition from one generation to another, and through many a process of elision by which men can slide into new points of view without knowing it. It implied the overthrow of Martin Luther's idea of the religious society, the destruction of the Calvinist's new Jerusalem, and the dissolution of the medieval and papal ideal; it represented the history making that was going on over men's heads, at cross-purposes with all of them. It is well that our minds should be focused upon that historical process which so cheats men of their purposes that providence which deflects their labours to such unpredictable results. But the whig historian, driven to his last ditch, will still ascribe everything to Martin Luther. It is part of his verbal technique to make it still an added virtue in Luther that he worked for purposes greater than those of which he was conscious; as though the same were not true of the enemies of Luther, and equally true for the matter in the case of every one of us. The whig historian is interested in discovering agency in history, even where in this way he must avow it only implicit. It is characteristic of his method that he should be interested in the agency rather than in the process. And this is how he achieves his simplification.

When the large map of the centuries is being traced out and the mind sweeps over broad ranges of abridged history, the whig fallacies become our particular snare, for they might have been invented to facilitate generalization. The complexity of interactions can be telescoped till a movement comes to appear as a simpl