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because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens. We know a
lot about what fifth-century Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen; but hardly anything about what it
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looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a Theban — not to mention a Persian, or a slave or other non-
citizen resident in Athens. Our picture has been preselected and predetermined for us, not so much by
accident as by people who were consciously or unconsciously imbued with a particular view and thought
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the facts which supported that view worth preserving. In the same way, when I read in a modem history of
the Middle Ages that the people of the Middle Ages were deeply concerned with religion, I wonder how
we know this, and whether it is true. What we know as the facts of medieval history have almost all been
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selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were professionally occupied in the theory and practice
of religion, and who therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded everything relating to it, and
not much else. The picture of the Russian peasant as devoutly religious was destroyed by the revolution of
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1917. The picture of medieval man as devoutly religious, whether true or not, is indestructible, because
nearly all the known facts about him were preselected for us by people who believed it, and wanted others
to believe it, and a mass of other facts, in which we might possibly have found evidence to the contrary,
100 has been lost beyond recall. The dead hand of vanished generations of historians, scribes, and chroniclers
has determined beyond the possibility of appeal the pattern of the past.
In the first place, the facts of history never come to us "pure", since they do not and cannot exist in a
105 pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a
work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts which it contains but with the historian who
wrote it.
If, as Collingwood says, the historian must re-enact in thought what has gone on in the mind of his
110 dramatis personae, so the reader in his turn must re-enact what goes on in the mind of the historian. Study
the historian before you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse. It is what is already
done by the intelligent undergraduate who, when recommended to read a work by that greatscholar Jones of
115 St. Jude's goes round to a friend at St. Jude's to ask what sort of chap Jones is , and what bees he has in his
bonnet. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either
120 you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's
slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian
catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what
125 tackle he chooses to use — these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind offish he wants to
catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation. Indeed,
if, standing Sir George dark on his head, I were to call history «a hard core of interpretation surrounded by
130 a pulp of disputable facts», my statement would, no doubt, be one-sided and misleading, but no more so, I
venture to think, than the original dictum.
The second point is the more familiar one of the historian's need of imaginative understanding for the
135 minds of the people with whom he is dealing, for the thought behind their acts: I say "imaginative
understanding", not "sympathy" lest sympathy should be supposed to imply agreement. The nineteenth
century was weak in medieval history, because it was too much repelled by the superstitious beliefs of the
140 Middle Ages, and by the barbarities which they inspired, to have any imaginative understanding of
medieval people. Or take Burckhardt's censorious remark about the Thirty Years War: «It is scandalous for
a creed, no matter whether it is Catholic or Protestant, to place its salvation above the integrity of the
145 nation». It was extremely difficult for a nineteenth-century liberal historian, brought up to believe that it is
right and praiseworthy to kill in defence of one's country, but wicked and wrong-headed to kill in defence
of one's religion, to enter into the state of mind of those who fought the Thirty Years War.
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The third point is that we can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only through the
eyes of the present. The historian is of his own age, and is bound to it by the conditions of human
existence. The very words which he uses — words like democracy, empire, war, revolution — have
155 current connotations from which he cannot divorce them. Ancient historians have taken to using words like
polis and plebs in the original, just in order to show that they have not fallen into this trap. This does not
help them. They, too, live in the present, and cannot cheat themselves into the past by using unfamiliar or
160 obsolete words, any more than they would become better Greek or Roman historians if they delivered their
lectures in a chlamys or a toga. The name by which successive French historians have described the
Parisian crowds which played so prominent a role in the French revolution — les sans-culottes, Ie peuple,
165 la canaille, les bras-nus — are all, for those who know the rules of the game, manifestos of a political
affiliation and of a particular interpretation. Yet the historian is obliged to choose: the use of language