Johan Huizinga, ‘‘The Task of Cultural History (1926 [1929]),’’ in The Course of Civilizations, tr. James S. Holmes & Hans van Marie (Providence: Cluny, 2018), 39-43 (footnotes omitted):
Permit me to digress for a moment on that extraordinary trait of our age, the pretense of vice. It is in a certain sense a modern repetition of the sentimentalism of the eighteenth century, but in a completely different form. The old sentimentalism felt itself to be intimately bound to the respect for virtue. It tended to balance passion and virtue in what was often a neck-breaking fashion. Nowadays this is no longer necessary. Passion alone, or what figures for it, is enough. In every depiction of reality in either word or image (I am here speaking of literature in general) the element of passion must be played up. Moral norms definitely may not be praised. Virtuous people assure themselves of their halo of the modern by means of a eulogy of immorality. Such a eulogy is as much a form of cultural hypocrisy as a sancti monious display of virtue was ever able to be.
Sentimentalism and the passionate are both nurtured in the soil of the plebeian intellectual attitude that captured the fields of literature and culture in the course of the eighteenth century. If one removes the sting of disdain from the word ‘‘plebeian,’’ the term ‘‘democratic’’ can be reserved for political and social fields, and the concept plebeian (including ‘‘bourgeois’’) can be placed in antithesis to aristocratic in the field of culture. An aristocratic culture does not advertise its emotions. In its forms of expression it is sober and reserved. Its general attitude is stoic. In order to be strong it wants to be and needs to be hard and unemotional, or at any rate to allow the expression of feelings and inclinations only in elegant forms. Ernest Seillière has repeatedly expounded these things excellently.
The populace is always anti-stoic. Great waves of emotion, floods of tears, and excesses of feeling have always been breaks in the dikes of the popular soul, which then usually swept along the spirit of the upper classes. With Rousseau, ‘‘the bitter plebeian,’’ as Faguet called him, the anti-stoic intellectual attitude triumphed for good. Its name is romanticism. With it came that immodest interest in the grimaces of love and hatred which was to find uncurbed expression in the film. The intellectual difference between the literary display of vice and the conversation of two wenches talking about a sickness in a back alley is small.
History may become democratic, but it must remain stoic. Jules Laforgue says somewhere in his letters that he cannot look upon all history as anything but one endless series of misery. But he was a poet. If the historian yielded to his sympathy with all the misery in the world he would be rendered unsuitable for his task.
Soberness, restraint, a certain skeptical reserve in investigating the deepest emotions of the heart—all of which are the duty of true historical writing—do not please the contemporary reader. At this point enters the second genre of historical belles-lettres we have in mind. The romanticized biography has in recent years become an international fashion as a genre. It frequently appears as one in a series under a general title. This indicates the role played in the phenomenon by publishing interests. There is a demand for a new sort of Vitæ, based on a thorough knowledge of the sources and half meant as genuine history, but with the express intention that that history should be exaggerated, prepared for a market primarily literary. If the author is of a sober turn, the demand gives rise to works that exceed the bounds of history only slightly, such as Andre Maurois’s Disraeli. At other times the literary is completely dominant, as in Joseph Delteil’s Jeanne a’Arc. Emil Ludwig has become world famous in a few short years. Wilhelm Hausenstein instructs us in the conjugal secrets of Rembrandt and Saskia. And last year Dutch literature was given a remarkable specimen of the genre from the hand of Felix Timmermans: Pieter Brueghel, zoo heb ik U uit Uw werken geroken [literally, ‘‘Pieter Brueghel: Thus Have I Smelled You in Your Works’’]. In it a well-known writer lent his name to a double novelty: the vocative book-title and olfactory historiography (though the latter had already been practiced by others before him).
More striking than all these names is the fact that the scholar most at home in French history of the fifteenth century, Pierre Champion, felt called upon, after his excellent works Charles d’Orléans, François Villon, and Histoire poétique du XVie siècle, to follow the path of romantic biography and literary effect in his Louis XI.
Anyone with the true historical spirit, whether he is the most academic scholar or the simplest cultured reader, reacts negatively to this whole genre, for the same reason that a connoisseur despises crusted wine. He can taste the adulteration. No literary effect in the world can compare to the pure, sober taste of history. He does not want his history dry, but he does want it sec. For him the first authentic historical document that comes to hand—whether a chronicle or a verdict, a deed, a letter, or a resolution—will be enough to wash away the scented taste of the hybrid genre.
The writer of historical belles-lettres will retort: But do you historians not recognize the strongly subjective element in all historical cognition—in the formulation of the question, in the selection and sifting of the material, in the interpretation and synthesis of the data ascertained? What is the difference between my work and yours, except the liveliness and the ingeniousness of the fantasy, which is also indispensable for you? The answer is that the difference lies in the intellectual preoccupation from which the work derives. Take one of the best representatives of the form I am objecting to, Guy de Pourtalès’s life of Liszt, the first volume in the series of Vie des hommes illustres. What the author provides from the very first page is literature, not history. Everything he describes the historian will only suspect, and everything the historian would like to have described is obscured by the literary image. The utterly sincere need to understand the past as well as possible without any admixture of one’s own is the only thing that can make a work history. Judgment has to rest on an absolute conviction that what is described must have been that way. And as soon as the past is converted into the language of the novel, into the form of an imaginative literary work, the sacred essence of history has been adulterated, although the author may still believe that he is writing history. In this way one abandons the form of perception natural to one’s sustaining culture, and smothers in the well-meaning reader the genuine historical sense.
No borders can be defined. It is a question of conscience, humility, and subservience. Goethe said to Eckermann: ‘‘When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. . . .’’ If this is true, our time must ask itself where it stands. ‘‘The retreat of historical knowledge in the last decade,’’ is, according to Rothacker, ‘‘certainly not accidental.’’
. . . Carlyle saw as the fundamental characteristics of his heroes their utter seriousness, their deep sincerity toward themselves and the world. Not everyone can be a hero, but everyone can strive toward a heroic sincerity.
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