Exploring the historical imagination
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 31: Ways of Seeing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Cochrane
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Peter Cochrane's biography and other articles by this writer
IT has been said of George Macaulay Trevelyan that he was gifted with a ‘vivid pictorial sense’.
True enough, but consider for instance an extract from the opening to his biography of Earl Grey, Grey of Fallodon (1937):
Fallodon has no rare and particular beauty. It is merely a piece of unspoilt English countryside – wood, field and running stream. But there is a tang of the north about it; the west wind blows through it straight off the neighbouring moors, and the sea is visible from the garden through a much-loved gap in the trees. The whole region gains dignity from the great presence of the Cheviot and the Ocean. Eastward, beyond two miles of level fields across which [Grey] so often strode, lie the tufted dunes, the reefs of tide-washed rock, and the bays of hard sand; on that lonely shore he would lie, by the hour, watching the oystercatchers, turnstones and dunlin, or the woodcock immigrants landing tired from their voyage.
Vivid and haunting, yes, and most certainly pictorial, but the passage is much more than this. In these few lines we are introduced to a life of aristocratic distinction. The paragraph suggests the magnificence of the estate, and even the nomenclature of nature – the hardworking creatures, the oystercatchers and ‘woodcock immigrants’ – hints at class and privilege, as do Grey’s leisurely hours in the dunes, and the juxtaposition of the vista from the garden with the moors and the ocean. And yet we may note that vigorous word ‘strode’, for all this will later form the backdrop to the vigour ofGrey’s long and ferociously committedpoliticalcareer inLondon.
So much is achieved here in so few words, embedded, seamlessly, in the so-called vivid pictorial sense that distinguishes Trevelyan’s work. It reaffirms the way in which the historical imagination is an amalgam of literary finesse and historical vision, the oneness of the part and the whole. But if vision is the informing purpose or master metaphor or Big Idea that holds a fine work of history together, then imagination is the reflective eye that knows the territory framed within the vision and ranges freely over it. It is the eye that holds both the vision and its episodic content in a kind of continual focus and fluency. It is an eye of reason; it both apprehends and comprehends. It is the hold on an intricate design. And more.
HISTORY ESTABLISHED ITSELF as a professional, university-based discipline partly by disowning its age-old association with literature; by declaring itself a systematic branch of knowledge based on rigorous scholarship; and by branding imagination, dramatisation and good storytelling as practices best consigned to the peddlers of fairytales, romances and mythologies, or to perjurers at law. A particular kind of academic authority was asserted at the expense of more creative possibilities, though not without challenges from within academic history and beyond – exemplified, respectively, by Trevelyan and his great-uncle Thomas Babington Macaulay.
At the same time literature was also inclined to a more exclusive idea of itself. Romanticism associated imagination with ‘feeling’, sentiment, nature, the passions, rapture even; with the business of transcending ‘reason’. Mary Wollstonecraft identified imagination with the rebellious, Promethean character of mankind and contrasted it with reason-centred humanity. ‘Imagination,’ she wrote, ‘is the true fire stolen from heaven to animate this cold creature of clay.’ Imagination was about life energy, but life energy of a particular kind: the inner self, the finer sentiments, the higher self that transcends all material concerns.
Wollstonecraft’s views were in part shaped by the course of the French Revolution. Her hopes for the revolution were dashed. Her belief in the possibilities of revolutionary action was gone. She was recoiling, repulsed by the ‘extreme, calculating rationalism’ of the Jacobins. She would remain ever the social rebel, but her faith in public action was now supplanted by a belief that social progress would have to come through individual change, through searching out the enduring truths of the heart.
As Richard Holmes reported in Footsteps: The Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), Wollstonecraft’s miniature manifesto on the powers of the imagination prophesied the creative works of the next generation of Romantics, notably those of Coleridge and Shelley.
Coleridge, too, would write a passage on the imagination that would become famous and, in a way, help to lock the concept of the imagination into that binary position – opposite reason, calculation and analysis.
Coleridge’s famous reverie on the imagination is nothing more than a quick word sketch scrawled in a notebook in the midst of a bumpy journey. It was November 1799. The poet was on board a coach, coming home from his first enchanting encounter with the Lakes District. He and Wordsworth had hiked about and gazed in wonder. On the journey home the all-night coach was not so rough as to prevent sleep and Coleridge hardly stirred until dawn, when he looked out the window and hurriedly reached for the notebook, jotting down a description of birds in formation over the wintry landscape:
Starlings in vast flights drove along like smoke, mist, or any thing misty without volition – now a circular area inclined in an Arc – now a Globe – now from complete Orb into an Ellipse and Oblong – now a balloon with the car suspended, now a concaved Semicircle – and still it expands and condenses, some moments glimmery & shivering, dim & shadowy, now thickening, deepening, blackening!
The image haunted him for years to come. He pondered its symbolic mystery. He recalled it while climbing over Scafell Pike in 1802 and he reworded it twice in his Notebooks in 1803. In effect he adopted the image, took it on as a powerful metaphor for his own imagination – a protean, pulsing, spontaneous thing, given to ‘vast flights’, signifying, presumably, the gamut of emotions and associated images; all, he says, ‘without volition’.
More than a century later, when describing Coleridge, Virginia Woolf was happy to rely on the poet’s own symbolism, associating birds and flight with imagination and creativity. He was ‘not a man, but a swarm, a cloud, a buzz of words, darting this way and that, clustering, quivering, and hanging suspended’. The essence here is ancient: ‘The poet is a light and winged and holy thing,’ wrote Plato. The idea persists today. We still speak of ‘flights of fancy’ and ‘flights of the imagination’. And with that, of course, we seem to have moved an awfully long way away from the business or the practice of history.
Talk of flight or wings suggests both freedom and power, protean vision, spectacular movement of mind, mental aerobatics – mastery of imagery, language and narrative reach – all, no doubt, associated with the status we give to the novelist, the playwright or the poet: elevated, sighted like a hawk, unanchored, unearthed in ways most cannot manage (or imagine). Flight is what we ordinary mortals cannot do and, as a metaphor, it measures the kudos we extend to those world-makers, the fabulous storytellers, the fictive or filmic imaginations at whom we marvel.
Shakespeare’s hymn to the ‘poet’s eye’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes no mention of wings or flight, and yet that eye, it seems, moves like Coleridge’s starlings:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And, as imagination bodies forth
The form of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Both poets recognised an apparently contradictory feature of their imaginative work – it was, to a point, spontaneous and perhaps even unwilled, yet it was also disciplined, systematic and ultimately deliberate in its transformation of thought into words or word pictures. And we must not miss the centrality of wordplay here – ‘the poet’s pen...gives to airy nothing’, something out of ‘nothing’ – the way it comes down to literary art.
Coleridge used the phrase ‘without volition’ to describe the spectacle of wild flight. What exactly does ‘without volition’ mean? Such a craft as poetry can hardly be ‘without volition’. The poet’s note on starlings evoked untamed movement (like Shakespeare’s ‘fine frenzy rolling’), yet that flight was supremely co-ordinated by some majestic affinity that creative minds – teaming with narrative schemata, images and their word equivalents – seem to share. The creative imagination unites spontaneous creativity with the deliberate work and reworking of composition, with a mastery that is anything but spontaneous. It is a mergence, an effervescing fusion, of memory, emotion and intellect. As Dickens noted: ‘My own invention or imagination, such as it is...would never have served me as it has but for the habit of commonplace, humble, patient, daily, toiling, drudging attention.’
In the modest, slightly mocking self-praise that Shakespeare gives to Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost we glimpse, I suspect, something of the Bard’s sense of his own powers, the workings of that extraordinary mind:
This is a gift I have, simple, simple;
a foolish, extravagant spirit full of forms,
fissures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions,
motions, revolutions: these are begot in the
ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of
pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing
of occasion. But the gift is good in those in
whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.
The pia mater is the transparent covering of the brain. The term, which also figures in Twelfth Night, is a reminder of what a remarkable knowledge Shakespeare had of the anatomy and physiology of the brain, and of medicine in general. There are some seven hundred references to medicine and mental states in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry; they are – even by our own standards, says one writer in the New Scientist of 20 January 1990 – remarkable for their accuracy. And Shakespeare was a generalist. His medical knowledge was but a small fragment of a vast store of memory covering vocations, customs, law and the legal process, sex, love, the royal courts, aristocracy and diplomacy, as well as a great familiarity with low life, and a prodigious knowledge of the Bible and mythology. His store of memory teamed with general knowledge, with the language to do it justice, with the vision to see the story and the creative power to put it all together on the page. This was ‘the gift’.
It was the flight, the ‘airy nothing’, the ‘without volition’, the free association, the ‘motions’, the wildness of the literary imagination – the Romantics so timely in their insistence – that scared historians off, affirming their attachment to the hard facts to be found in the archives and encouraging them, until recently, to see their discipline as a social science rather than a branch of literature.
The rift settled into a sharp though not unchallenged distinction, a set of binary opposites – fiction and non-fiction, hot and cold, heart and head, fancy and reality, emotion and reason – literature and history. Historians were better loaded up with weights than liberated by wings and so, for well over a century, the weighted keepers of objective knowledge held the centre. But their authority rested, finally, on propositions about objectivity that were riddled with self-deception and denial. The centre could not hold. Twentieth-century historians were constantly wondering whether their discipline was a humanity or a social science. In the first half of that century they were inclined to think the latter; by the closing decades, the former. As Ann Curthoys and John Docker argue in Is History Fiction? (UNSW Press, 2006), ‘the 1980s and 1990s would become a kind of Herodotean period of extended thinking about history as literary form; and of historians engaging in literary experimentation in imaginative and innovative ways.’ This ‘extended thinking’ must surely extend all the way to the much saluted but rarely interrogated concept of historical imagination.
What are we doing when we imagine as historians? How does imagining differ from cold hard analysis, grilling the documents, pattern-spotting, critiquing rivals? Is it just the soft fringe of a hard discipline – here a few emotional insights into character, there a bit of scenery-evoking (atmospherics, that ‘vivid pictorial sense’, the novelist’s empathy on loan), flounce and frills, stuff best consigned to narrative history for the trade market? Or is it in some cognitive sense a form or a part of analysis in its own right? Is the historical imagination fundamental to the practice of history?