With Measured Strains

FEW PEOPLE who have read the opening passage of Barbara Tuchman's epic The Guns of August will soon forget the grandeur of Edward VII's funeral procession. The vision of nine European monarchs--braided, plumed, with "crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun," riding abreast through the palace gates--is so splendid that the reader, like the crowd, waits in hushed and admiring awe. This is history at its best, some say--a vision so powerful and majestic it transports the reader to the streets of London on that crisp May morning, 1910. Through her detailed and evocative narrative, Tuchman turns history into a tale, invading a province largely abandoned to the writers of historical fiction.

Students of history find themselves confronting a rift among modern historians. Many, following the school of the great English historian Arnold Toynbee, attempt to systematize history, fitting it into a series of patterns and cycles with scientific elegance. Others, like Sir Charles Oman, contend that the human record is illogical, that history is a series of happenings with no inevitability about it. As Leon Trotsky once observed, cause in history "refracts itself through a natural selection of accidents."

Tuchman leaves no doubt as to where she stands. In both her major historical works and 45 years worth of collected essays, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner displays a sharp scepticism of easy solutions. "Prefabricated systems make me suspicious, and science applied to history makes me wince," Tuchman writes in her opening piece.

When history, wickedly disobliging, pops up in the wrong places, the systematizers hurriedly explain any such aberrant behavior by the climate. They need not reach so far; it is a matter of people.

In a later essay, entitled "Is History a Guide to the Future?," Tuchman returns to this theme, calling man the "Unknown Variable" and comparing the "large organizing idea" to an iron chain mat pulled behind a tractor to smooth out a plowed field:

I see the professor climbing up on the tractor seat and away he goes, pulling behind his large organizing idea over the bumps and furrows of history, until he has smoothed it out to a nice, neat, organized surface--in other words, into a system.

As an alternative to this brand of historiography, Tuchman offers narration--and what she calls "history by the ounce." A historian should focus on a particular event and collect all of the evidence relating to it. "We can never be certain that we have recaptured it as it really was. But the least we can do is stay within the evidence." Often in this process of arranging the facts in narrative form, a theory or historical generalization will emerge of its own accord. It may be a modest one, she admits, "but my size."

At the root of Tuchman's debate with the "genus Toynbee," is their fundamental difference in philosophy: "I am a disciple of the ounce," Tuchman writes,

because I mistrust history in gallon jugs whose purveyors are more concerned with establishing the meaning and purpose of history than with what happened. Is it necessary to insist on a purpose?... Why cannot history be studied and written and read for its own sake, as the record of human behavior, the most fascinating subject of all?

TUCHMAN'S TALENT FOR bringing historic episodes into sharp, dramatic focus has few rivals among modern writers. The words James Thurber once wrote of E.B. White could apply to Tuchman too: her sentences are "silver and crystal"; her ear "not only notes the louder cosmic rhythms, but catches the faintest ticking sounds."

Her collected essays place keys to Tuchman's skill as on or best in the context of her intellectual growth. Tracing her own inspiration to one professor of history and two of literature, Tuchman recalls that their common characteristic wan an unbounded, almost torrential zeal for knowledge. (Of the historian, a classicist and anti-romantic, she writes: "His contempt for zeal was so zealous, so vigorous and learned, pouring out in a great organ fugue of erudition, that it amounted to enthusiasm in the end.") Passionate fervor, Tuchman observes, is one quality indispensable to a good historian; the other is ability--innate or trained--to write.

It soon becomes apparent whence Tuchman's own inspiration comes. "Poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians, and sometimes they have given history a push," she writes in her opening piece. Throughout the collection, she turns again and again to poetry, quoting Emerson, Kipling, Longfellow, Tennyson and Poe. In the end she concludes, "What the poets did was to convey the feeling of an episode or a moment of history as they sensed it. The historian's task is rather to tell what happened within discussion of facts."

But Tuchman is not satisfied with this duty; repeatedly she describes her efforts to get a feeling out of the events she narrates. To heighten the reader's suspense, she writes of the time, without using the benefit of hindsight. ("I went back and cut all references but one of the Battle of the Marne, in the chapters leading up to the battle. Though it may seem absurd, I even cut out all references to the ultimate defeat of Germany. I wrote as if I did not know who would win.") An advocate of "corraborative detail," she uncovers and utilizes insignificant facts to crystallize the details of a scene and make the reader feel a part of it. ("When I was investigating General Mercier, the Minister of War who was responsible for the original condemnation of Dreyfus and who in the course of the Affair became the hero of the Right, I discovered that at parties of the haut monde ladies rose to their feet when General Mercier entered the room. That is the kind of detail which to me is worth a week of research.") The result of her research, her patience and talent is history, but history that often "evokes" as much as it "tells."

PRACTICING HISTORY makes no attempt to prove a thesis: a random collection of essays on a random collection of topics, it rambles over almost 50 years. Yet Tuchman is a purist of sorts, and the freshness of her vision shines through. The book is a product of this vision. It speaks eloquently for a brand of history many historians seem to have forgotten.