Fabricating History: English Writers on the French Revolution

by Barton R. Friedman

Overview

Barton Friedman demonstrates the ways in which English men of letters in the nineteenth century attempted to grasp the dynamics of history and to fashion order, however fragile, out of its apparent chaos. The authors he discusses—Blake, Scott, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Dickens, and Hardy—found in the French Revolution an event more compelling as a paradigm of history than their own "Glorious Revolution." To them the French Revolution seemed universally significant—a microcosm, in short. For these writers maintaining the distinction between "history" and "fiction" was less important than making sense of epochal historical events in symbolic terms. Their works on the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars occupy the boundary between history and fiction, and Fabricating History advances the current lively discussion of that boundary.

At the same time, this work explores questions about narrative strategies, as they are shaped by, or shape, events. Narratives incorporate the ideological and metaphysical preconceptions that the authors bring with them to their writing. "This is not to argue," Professor Friedman says, "that historical narratives are only about the mind manufacturing them or, more narrowly yet, about themselves as mere linguistic constructs. They illumine both the time and place they seek to re-create and, if by indirection, the time and place of the mind thinking them into being."

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691606972
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #896
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)

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Fabricating History

English Writers on the French Revolution

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By Barton R. Friedman

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06729-2

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CHAPTER 1

Fabricating History

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By the River Chebar

"Reasons and opinions concerning acts, are," Blake proclaims in the Descriptive Catalogue to his exhibition of 1809, "not history Acts themselves alone are history." Thus he announces himself a partisan of the movement against Enlightenment historiography in the then budding (and still flourishing) debate over how, or whether, the past can be plausibly represented to those living in the present Acts, Blake adds, "are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echaid, Rapin, Plutarch nor Herodotus" (E, p 534) Reasoning historians all, they twist cause and consequence, and in separating acts from their explanations — proposing chains of cause and effect to rationalize events, order narrative — they distort history

Not by chance does Blake indict reasoning history in a catalog of pictures subtitled "Poetical and Historical Inventions " His pictures become both poetical and historical by incorporating the imagined into the actual, the general into the particular, the abstract into the concrete by being rendered symbolic Blake describes the works of the Asiatic Patriarchs he reports having seen in vision as "containing mythological and recondite meaning, where more is meant than meets the eye." Of Chaucer's Pilgrims, Blake observes that though their names and titles "are altered by time the characters themselves remain unaltered." They have "the physiognomies or hneaments of universal human life" (DC, E, pp. 523–24): they are simultaneously individuals and types.

Coleridge discerns these same physiognomies or lineaments in the figures he encounters in Scripture' "Both Facts and Persons," he insists in The Statesman's Manual (1816), "must ... have a two-fold significance, a past and a future, a temporary and perpetual, a particular and a universal application. They must be at once Portraits and Ideals" (pp. 29–30). To be at once a portrait and an ideal is, in a phrase Blake could have supplied Coleridge, to embody "Divine Humanity" (p. 29).

The process by which humanity is affirmed as divine is epitomized, Coleridge suggests, in the wheels Ezekiel beheld while sitting among the captives by the River Chebar History and political economy, whose eighteenth-and nineteenth-century permutations he dismisses (again Blake-like) as infected with "the general contagion of ... mechanic philosophy," are in Scripture "living educts of the Imagination", and by "living educts of the imagination" he means "that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in the Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors" (p. 29). Incorporating reason in the images of sense, organizing the senses, entails projecting in microcosm the "radical monism" that, M. H. Abrams stresses, the Romantics (Coleridge prominently among them) drew from Plotinus and made the basis of their cosmology. The images emanating from imagination that signify spiritual truth remain one with, that is, are consubstantial with, the truth they signify.

In this metaphysic, Abrams points out, lies the rationale for the circle described by the Greater Romantic Lyric As Coleridge himself wrote in a letter to Joseph Cottle, "The common end of all narrative, nay of all, Poems is to convert a series into a Whole to make those events, which in real or imagined History move in a strait Line, assume to our Understandings a circular motion — the snake with its Tail in it's Mouth." Or as Abrams (with a nod at Einstein?) interprets Coleridge's remarks, history is linear to the shortsighted but circular to the man "who Present, Past, & Future sees."

Blake's Bard present, past, and future sees And Blake too detects in the shape of history the snake with its tail in its mouth, perceived variously by "corporeal" eyes, accurately, univocally, only "in vision." Types of "all ages and nations," Chaucer's Pilgrims manifest the recurrence of the eternal in man Though they may, age after age, assume appearances "different to mortal sight," they remain "to immortals only the same, for we see the same characters repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals, and in men" (DC, E, 523)

The problem that mortal eyes perceive askew what immortal eyes alone can see truly also vexes Carlyle The historian, he concedes in "On History" (1830), manages merely "a poor approximation," at best glimpsing "mysterious vestiges of Him whom History indeed reveals, but only all History, and in Eternity, will clearly reveal" (CME 2 89) Because he stands not at the end of history but within it, and thus knows nothing of the future, if something of the past, the historian is blind to what Louis O Mink, borrowing from Boethius, labels the to turn simul the visionary's clear revelation of the God behind history, God's complete comprehension of the world in space-time, and the ideal configuration — universal history — to which, for Carlyle, as for Blake and Coleridge, narrative history had, however vainly, to aspire

The inescapable myopia Carlyle ascribed to historians continues to trouble both writers and readers of history Entering, occupying, and leaving the world always, as Frank Kermode puts it, "in the middest," men are locked into narrow and necessarily distorted perspectives, which they seek to overcome by fabricating what Kermode calls "fictive concords" — causal sequences that proceed coherently from definite beginnings to definitive endings and enable men to claim order, significance for their lives 4 Michael Ryan, in his attempt to wed Marx with Derrida, similarly claims something fictive (though hardly concordant) about narratives of events, which, he insists, can never be fully realized — in his Derndaean phrase, "made present" to the reader The conclusion he draws from this insistence rebuts Kermode's To Ryan, making sense of history requires eschewing beginnings and endings, translating increments of historical time into constructs other than dramatized "middests" that evolve from original crises and move toward ultimate resolutions

Though Carlyle's narrative practice aligns him much more nearly with Kermode's critical, and ideological, principles than with Ryan's, he too recognizes a Active element, even in narratives that are seemingly factual Recalling in "On History" Sir Walter Raleigh "looking from his prison-window, on some street tumult, which afterwards three witnesses reported in three different ways, himself differing from them all," he warns that "the most gifted man can observe, still more can record, only the series of his own impressions his observation, therefore, to say nothing of its other imperfections, must be successive, while the things done were often simultaneous, the things done were not a series, but a group" [CME 2 87–88) Carlyle's concern with the inability of narrative to represent events as simultaneously occurring is shared by Ryan, who complains that circumstances in history, made to seem one-dimensional on the printed page, invariably disclose multiple dimensions to the enlightened eye Ryan might, however, have been surprised to find his views anticipated not only by Carlyle but by Coleridge, developing the interdependence of metaphysics and poetic structure for Cottle, and dissecting rationalistic epistemology in Biographia Literana (1817)

Whenever we feel several objects at the same time, the impressions that are left (or in the language of Mr Hume, the ideas) are linked together Whenever therefore any one of the movements, which constitute a complex impression, are renewed through the senses, the others succeed mechanically It follows of necessity therefore that Hobbs [sic], as well as Hartley and all others who derive association from the connection and interdependence of the supposed matter, the movements of which constitute our thoughts, must have reduced all its forms to the one law of time (BL, pt 1, p 96)

The reduction of all forms of association to one law of time — series causally explained by documentary evidence — is precisely the constrictive mold into which Martin Heidegger, well over a century after Coleridge, accused rationalism, scientific method, of forcing historiography As early as 1793, Godwin had denied, if not the possibility, at least the probability of multiple causes as "contrary to the experienced operation of scientifical improvement," and described the universe as "a body of events in systematical arrangement," in which, for every human being, "there is a chain of events going on in regular procession through the whole period of his existence "

Carlyle, thirty-seven years later, set out to dismantle Godwin's model "Narrative is linear, Action is solid Alas for our 'chains,' or 'chainlets,' of 'causes and effects,' which we so assiduously track through certain handbreaths of years and square miles, when the whole is broad, deep Immensity, and each atom is 'chained' and complected of all'" (CME 2 89) Rejecting chains of cause and effect as reductive, Carlyle, like Blake, demands of historians the what ("some picture of things acted"), implying that he can find the why and how himself This insistence on what, to the exclusion of why and how, partly underlies Carlyle's famous definition of history as "the essence of innumerable Biographies" (p 86) History is what men do

Carlyle does not suggest that true history, universal history, need consist of as many histories as there are men doing — that the field of history must be construed metonymically, to borrow an epithet from Hayden White History is also what God writes Carlyle, that is, offers no aid or comfort to Ryan, who reduces all discourse to images of images, departures from the reality they would evoke, and thus all efforts at historical reconstruction to stages in an infinite regress Nor does he support Michel Foucault, who replaces universal history ("total history" as he terms it) with "general history" — in effect, histories To Carlyle, history is finally a "complex [and coherent] Manuscript," a "Palimpsest" of prophecies, "still dimly legible" and in fragments decipherable (p 89)

His analogy of history to a palimpsest anticipates Dernda's of language, in dream and discourse, to inscriptions on a child's toy, the "Mystic Writing-Pad," which leaves traces of what has been erased detectable beneath the fresh figures drawn on its surface But to Derrida, these traces are presences only in the minds of their perceivers, shadows of shadows, reflections of reflections, to Carlyle, they are presences in the world, coalescing into tangible unity in the mind of God

White identifies the mode of Carlylean history as metaphor, synthesis, though he adds that Carlyle reacts against Enlightenment skepticism by discovering meaning to human life wholly in human life. Yet if the record of human life is inscribed on a palimpsest of prophecies, its meaning must be traced ultimately to Providence. Carlyle shares the general Romantic perception of history as a drama by a hidden dramatist, who promises a millennial denouement. This drama is the fictive concord Kermode attributes to the yearning for total order human beings inherit as denizens of an uncertain "middest." What makes Kermode's fiction concordant is the inevitable complementarity it projects between origin and end, creation and apocalypse

The middest, everything between origin and end, is determined by that complementarity. Indeed, origin and end are embedded in the events that comprise the middest, which is why Carlyle can claim that, in the palimpsest, "some letters, some words, may be deciphered, and if no complete Philosophy, here and there an intelligible precept, available in practice, be gathered" (CME 2 89–90). Or as he declares in his afterthought to "On History," entitled "On History Again" (1833), written as the idea for an epic about the French Revolution was beginning to grip him, "History is the Letter of Instruction, which the old generations write and posthumously transmit to the new" (CME 3: 167)

History, that is, as Carlyle iterates and reiterates in his meditations on the uses of the past, "is philosophy teaching by experience." This conception of history links him to the Enlightenment historiography he professed to loathe. He has quietly, and with only slight alteration, lifted his aphorism from Lord Bolingbroke, who in his Letters on the Study and Use of History (1752) defines history as "philosophy teaching by example." Carlyle shares the conviction that history teaches not only with Bolingbroke but with Edmund Burke. "In history," Burke declares, "a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind" (RRF, p. 173).

Burke's didacticism reflects a view of history that Carlyle's exact contemporary, Leopold von Ranke, was firmly, if gently, to repudiate in the preface to his study of the early Latin and Germanic nations: "To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It only wants to show what actually happened." But judging the past and instructing the present sum up the office to which William Gordon aspires in his History of the Rise, Progress and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America (1788), a work that boasted among its subscribers Richard Price and one William Blake, Esq. "It should oblige all, who have performed any distinguished part on the theatre of the world," Gordon announces in his preface, "to appear before us in their proper character, and to render an account of their actions at the tribunal of posterity, as models which ought to be followed, or as examples to be censured and avoided."

* * *

Theater of the World

Gordon's trope of history as a play, ongoing from eternity to eternity in the theater of the world, seems also to be the trope implicit in Blake's parade of Chaucerian characters, in each age appearing different to mortal eyes but to immortal eyes always the same. Those immortal eyes looking down on the stage of history will a century later have become the Spirit audience at Hardy's vast "historical Drama," The Dynasts (1904–1908). As Frances Yates points out, analogizing the world to a cosmic theater was a rhetorical stratagem widely employed in the Renaissance "All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players" This analogy reappears in the biographies of Napoleon by Scott and Hazlitt. The battle of Leipzig is, for Scott, "the last act of the grand drama, so far as the scene lay in Germany" (3 57). The return from Elbe is an "extraordinary drama," in which Napoleon plays "the part destined for him" (3' 201), presumably by the hidden dramatist. The allies' entrance into Pans in 1814 is, for Hazlitt, also a "drama," which might have proved "tragical" but turns out merely "sentimental."

Hazlitt ascribes the sentimental (read "farcical") turn taken by this drama to France's refusal to play its proper role "The French are a people who set almost as much store by words as by things, and who very much prefer the agreeable to the disagreeable: they therefore took the word of the allies that nothing was meant but to oblige" (15: 200). Indeed, he and Scott, who almost never agree about Napoleon, agree that the instinct of his subjects is to eschew any role at all, to behave not as actors but as audience. Scott explains the fervor to which Napoleon's rhetoric raises his troops as a manifestation of French national character "they are willing to take everything of a complimentary kind in the manner to which it seems to be meant. They appear to have made that bargain with themselves on many points, which the audience usually do in a theatre, — to accept the appearance of things for the reality" (1: 312). Hazlitt explains the Parisians' docility before the allied invasion, and despite Napoleon's heroic resistance, by their detachment' "They had been accustomed to sit, as in a theatre, and enjoy the roar of victory at a safe distance, but when this grand drama of war was turned to serious earnest and brought home to themselves, they did not at all know what to make of it" (15 174).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• A Note on Texts, pg. xi
• Introduction, pg. 1
• ONE Fabricating History, pg. 12
• TWO. Through Forests of Eternal Death: Blake and Universal History, pg. 38
• THREE. Lives of Napoleon: Scott and Hazlitt at Pens7 Points, pg. 67
• FOUR. At the Conflux of Two Eternities: Carlyle's French Revolution, pg. 109
• FIVE. Antihistory: Dickens’ ATale of Two Cities, pg. 145
• SIX. Proving Nothing: Hardy’s The Dynasts, pg. 172
• Conclusion (Mainly about Conclusions), pg. 199
• Notes, pg. 209
• Index, pg. 229