Two Histories

My humanities reading tonight was better than usual. The reason was an experiment entailing extra-curricular material. The first part of my studies I spent struggling to stay engaged in the textbook's flaccid account of the French Revolution and Napoleon. So, for a change, I pulled my old Churchill off the shelf and read his chapter on the French Revolution. (Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples was one of my highschool history books.) It was like a firm, warm hand-shake after weeks of meeting people who do nothing but hang their limp hands in yours. Churchill's writing was strong and sinewed: his sentences short and direct, his modifiers sparse but descriptive. In a few words he could describe the character of a man or an age. Take, for example, these miniatures of the Revolution's leaders:

Among them was Danton, a figure of tumultuous power and dedicated energy; Robespierre, a ruthless, incorruptible tyrant; Marat, a venemous rabble-rouser of genius; and Carnot, who survived them all, the War Minister and organizer of victory.

Compare the textbook's introduction of Robespierre:

This utterly selfless revolutionary has remained controversial from his day to the present. From the beginning of the revolution, he had favored a republic. The Jacobin Club provided his primary forum and base of power. A shrewd and sensitive politician, Robespierre had opposed the war in 1792 because he feared it might aid the monarchy.

Churchill tells who he was; the textbook tells what he did. To some extent this stems from the different purposes of the authors. Churchill set out to tell a manageable account of English history as he viewed it. The textbook authors meant to present the facts of the situation with as little bias as possible. The fact is, however, that Churchill says more about the characters of those men in a single sentence than the textbook could in long paragraphs about what they did. To me that is more important than the textbook's facts. If we were historians ourselves we might want nothing but the facts, so that we could study them and construct our own interpretations. Most of us, however, read a history book asking not only to learn but to be taught. The great advantage of reading a History is that we gain access to an expert's mind, an authority's interpretation.

All of that is just my opinion, of course. I realize that this debate goes all the way back to Herodotus and Thucydides, and that my siding with one or the other camp isn't going to affect either. All I want to point out, therefore, is the literary quality of Churchill compared with the textbook. The textbook is full of information but ennervated. Churchill writes plainly, but his writing is descriptive and engaging. The textbook says more than Churchll on the page; but when the words reach the mind, Churchill's have more substance.