THE EXCITEMENT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH
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and admirers, and greatly when viewed
through those of his numerous enemies; the
motives that these men perceived in him run
the gamut from whole-souled concentration
on winning the war to pride, vanity, and a
love for the fleshpots of power. The historian
must move cautiously through testimony that
is colored by the likes and dislikes of those
who created it, and must weigh and evaluate, select and discard, to reach an opinion
of his own. He can at most hope that that
opinion, though fallible, will be better informed and more dispassionate than those of
the men who provide him with his data.
All this may sound as if historical research were merely a system of guesswork,
which might be defined, like the famous
definition of logic, as "an organized method
of going wrong with confidence." There is,
however, another side to the coin. If the historian does not know the truth about the
past-and he certainly does not-he should
have a better approximation of the truth
than contemporaries had. They were imprisoned in their time as we are in ours, and
they could not fully grasp the significance of
what was happening before their eyes; they
were also imprisond in space, and could not
grasp the significance of distant events. Take
Clinton for illustration. He never spoke of
the American Revolution because he did not
know that there was one; he could not see
the rebellion as revolutionary. Neither could
he see the far-away troubles in Whitehall
that impeded the war effort; he believed that
the government was willfully neglecting him.
The historian does not wear such blinders
but has a broad perspective, and it reveals to
him developments in time and space that
were hidden from the men with whom he is
dealing. He can never be entirely sure of
what they did, let alone of why they did it;
yet he can have a deeper understanding than
they had.
Understanding, which comes in part from
the historian's remoteness in time, comes
also from the nature of his concern with the
past. That concern is a blend of involvement
and detachment, and the first is harder to
achieve than the second. Involvement means
using his imagination to become engaged
with the people he is studying, so that as far
as he can he sees through their eyes and
views their controversies as they viewed
them. He rarely takes sides, if only because
he sees both sides at once; but the issues and
the protagonists are almost as real to him as
those of his own day. Unless he can achieve
this feat of imagination, can enter into his
period even while he is remote from it, his
perspective upon it may be worse than useless. Suppose, for instance, that he is utterly
incapable of imagining himself into another
era; he must then impose upon it, faute de
mieux, the presuppositions, values, and standards of judgment of his own society. These
are certain to be inapplicable, and any conclusions to which they lead him are certain
to be askew.
Detachment without involvement, in such
an extreme case, leads the historian to distort the past by fitting it to the measure of
his present, much as Procrustes distorted
guests by fitting them to the measure of his
bed. But involvement without detachment
can also lead to distortion, although of a
different kind; and here the biographer is in
particular danger. No man, the saying goes,
is a hero to his valet; neither should any man
be a hero to his biographer, who ought to
know him as well as the valet does. The
man's foibles and complexities, virtues and
shortcomings, should become so familiar to
the biographer that he sees his subject not
primarily as great or small but as alive, a
person in his own right. When a biographer
succumbs instead to hero-worship (or, more
rarely, the inverted form that might be called
villain-worship), his involvement has triumphed over his detachment. Where he
should have assessed the evidence in its entirety, with all its shadings from white to
black, he has selected in a way to bring out
only the whites or blacks; and the resultant
picture has the unreality of the oversimplified. This is the art of the cartoonist, not
of the historian.
Research is not the only way to discover
how to blend detachment with involvement;
a few historians understand their discipline
by instinct. Most, however, acquire understanding through research. They learn that
they cannot work their way laboriously into
a period without discarding many of their
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