Is
there a happy medium between anchorage in history and ahistoricity?
Everyone
views history through her or his own prism of knowledge and experience. In
1888, Henry James expressed his own sense of personal history as he reflected
on what he experienced twenty years earlier when he arrived in England and
travelled to London. In the English Hours,
he remembered staying at the Morley Hotel and thinking about the ghostly tales
of “The Ingoldsby Legends,” and the next day and seeing Queen Anne’s statue
looking down on the pedestrians and carriages struggling up Ludgate Hill. He stated
that, “it was a thrilling thought that the statue had been familiar to the hero
of the incomparable novel (Henry Esmond). All history appeared to live again,
and the continuity of things to vibrate through my mind. To this hour, as I
pass along the Strand, I take again the walk I took there that afternoon.”[1]
Henry
James not only knew the history of England and specifically London, but he
understood the historical perspective or context of what transpired there.
Years ago, at Antietam, I walked across Burnside’s Bridge several times. I
remember that after several crossings I decided to count the steps because it
became to symbolize more to me than a simple bridge over Antietam Creek. On
that day in September 1862, Union soldiers repeatedly tried to cross it to
strike at the Confederate right flank which was strategically located in the
bluffs above the river. They were repulsed at great loss. As I crossed and
re-crossed the bridge, I thought of those men following orders to charge across
it into a withering fire that was guaranteed suicide and yet they charged. For
me it symbolized the contrasting bridge concepts between real and imaginary,
life and death, but for many of the soldiers trying to get across it that day,
it represented only the reality of death.
Most
historians considered that it ended in a draw with lost opportunities perhaps
on both sides, but maybe more on the Union side. There was plenty of blame
assigned. It is interesting reading about it today to learn how the “truth” of
what happened will never be completely known and how writers on the event
sometimes accidentally and sometimes intentionally fail to do the necessary
research to fully describe what happen, recording only what supports their
view.[2]
From
a historical perspective, the outcome of the battle appeared to give President
Lincoln the necessary support to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. This act
anchors the battle in the broader context of what the Civil War was about.
Henry James would have understood that because as he stood surveying London
from different angles at different times, he understood how important it was to
the British Empire.
Don, I'll bet I'd enjoy an afternoon with you at Stones River. At the risk of sounding like a codger, or sounding my age, I don't get the impression that "kids these days" are as moved by a sense of history and place as you and I, or Henry. "All history appeared to live again, and the continuity of things to vibrate in my mind"-Henry had to go to England to feel that, apparently, and maybe I'd have felt the same a century ago. But so much has happened since!
ReplyDeleteTo reiterate more of the preamble to this question, "Emerson famously rejected the Old World and challenged Americans to create anew. Pragmatism prides itself on being forward-looking." My thought is that a proper balance between a sense of history and a sense of pure possibility must look both forward and back. And then of course, there's the other Henry (Thoreau) and his quest to "toe the line" between those two "eternities."
Great post. Pragmatism to me seems that you can look beyoond and ahead. I being a historian pride myself with the fact that history is based on facts not opinions
ReplyDelete