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COPYRIGHT 2000 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
In seventeenth-century theory of history, the reference to "the eyes of history" ranked as a topos. With that topos, Cellarius and his colleagues alluded to what they considered to be the most important auxiliary sciences of history: chronology and geography. The advancement of these auxiliary sciences was connected with European expansion; between 1500 and 1700, the categories "time" and "space" were in danger of losing their classical and biblical-historical contents. Chronology and geography helped historians to pave a way through a history which proved to be vaster, both in time and in space, than ever presumed.(1)
The metaphor of the eye also occupied a prominent place in Romantic historiography. However, the generation of historians born in the 1790s and which started publishing from 1820 on, among them Augustin Thierry and Jules Michelet in France, Thomas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay in England, Leopold von Ranke and Georg Heinrich Pertz in Germany, William Hickling Prescott and George Bancroft in the United States, used this metaphor in a totally different manner from that of the seventeenth-century historians. At a moment in which, as Stephen Bann noted, history "established itself ... as an autonomous vehicle for imaginative reflection," the "eye of history" no longer reflected the standing of certain auxiliary sciences, but the manner in which the past could be understood.(2)
This shift was evident in Abel-Francois Villemain's Histoire de Cromwell, published in 1819. In the preface to this work, sometimes considered to be the first example of Romantic historiography in France, the author praised two of his forebears, Jacques Benigne Bossuet and Francois Voltaire: "These two great men ... seem to have hit upon the truth on several points, not so much by the precision of their searchings as by that first sight of the genius (cette premiere vue du genie), which does not deceive. Indeed, the wisdom of a higher intelligence holds something that can supplant the painstaking examination of the facts and permits the truth to be divined, awaiting the moment that it is proven." Villemain, in other words, made a distinction between "the first sight" of the genius, which hits upon the truth "at a glance," and the laborious examination (his own) of the sources, proving the truth only in the second instance.(3)
The metaphor of the "eye of history" was developed most extensively by historians who were or became blind, as well as by the admirers, critics, and biographers of these historians. Two examples may serve as an illustration.(4) The first signs of blindness revealed themselves to Thierry, born in 1795 and one of Villemain's proteges, in 1822 and thereafter, as a result of the strain put upon his eyes by the research for the Histoire de la Conquete de l'Angleterre par les Normands [History of the Conquest of England by the Normans]. To edit his opus magnum, published in 1825, Thierry already had to call on the assistance of a secretary. With time, he lost his sight completely. From the 1830s on, after having been struck also by paralysis in 1828, and suffering from insomnia that could be alleviated only with opium pills, the blind historian could only read with the eyes of his wife and write with her hand.(5)
His blindness invested Thierry with an aura of martyrdom. As early as 1825, a reviewer of the Histoire de la Conquete expressed his admiration for a young man "who had used the age of passions and enterprise for unrewarding work, and had exhausted the remainders of his weary sight to decipher snippets from barbarian chronicles." But the greatest contribution to the rhetoric of heroism that would continue to adhere to his work came from Thierry himself. In 1834, having been forced for medical reasons to leave Paris for his "place of exile" in the provinces, in a mood of paranoia and misanthropy, he wrote a brief autobiographical outline in which he compared himself to a "soldier maimed on the battlefield."(6)
When Thierry returned to Paris in 1835 to work on one of Francois Guizot's great source projects and to live, as the librarian of the Duke of Orleans, surrounded by "books without letters" (as another blind librarian would later express it),(7) he had already become a living legend. For his friends and admirers, he had become primarily a "martyr for science." This characterization was canonized by Villemain, who repeated it over and again in his jury report for the Prix Gobert of the Academie Francaise, awarded to Thierry from 1840 to 1855, much to the derision of Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and the Goncourt brothers.(8) At the same time, in the portraits devoted to the "martyr," the contrast between body and mind was continually being emphasized: an elite mind, imprisoned in the dungeon of an ailing body, but never wavering. Thierry himself did everything possible to consolidate that image. During the disturbances following the February Revolution in 1848, when friends advised him to leave Paris, he wrote to one of them: "Behold my design for living and dying. I am a soldier of science, I shall stick to my post, that is to say: Paris, because there is no other place where I could continue my work. And when the ultimate danger knocks at my door, it shall find me as it found Archimedes, that is to say: at work, between a dictated sentence and notes for the next.(9) In 1856, when his time had come, these words still rang in the deathbed scene of the necrologist and the biographer: during the night of his death, Thierry had allegedly woken his servant to dictate a minor correction to the Histoire de la Conquete.(10)
Thierry's fate and fame were shared by Prescott, born in 1796, one of the Romantic "New England historians." In 1813, when still a student, an accident had deprived him of the sight in his left eye. As a consequence, the right eye rapidly became impaired, so that it could no longer be used for reading and writing, and this sometimes resulted in a complete loss of sight for months at a time. This fate, aggravated by lifelong rheumatic pains, prompted Prescott to devote himself to the extension of the New England Asylum for the Blind, founded in Boston in 1829 (as an "unoculus inter caecos" [a one-eyed amongst the blind], so he wrote).(11) For his own work he used, besides a secretary-reader, a "noctograph," a machine that he had bought in London in 1816 and that allowed him to write without seeing.(12)
In both the preface to his first historical work, the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837) and that of The Conquest of Mexico, which appeared six years later, Prescott drew the attention of his readers to the bad state of his eyes and the difficulties he had to overcome when writing.(13) But when a reviewer of The Conquest of Mexico called him a blind historian, he reacted immediately. A letter to his literary agent in London, a letter to the editor of the magazine which had published the review, an erratum in that same magazine, and even a lengthy expose in the preface to his History of the Conquest of Peru (1847), all appeared to make clear that he was not suffering from complete blindness.(14) But it was to no avail: to his readers (and his reviewers) he remained a blind historian, a man, moreover, whose moral courage and integrity were beyond all doubt, and who deserved admiration for his struggle against his physical suffering. It is doubtful whether Prescott regretted this. By explicitly referring to his eye troubles, even in his attempt to end the misunderstanding which had arisen in 1843, he had contributed to that image. His emphasis on the struggle of others--in his essay on Sir Walter Scott, dating from 1838, he pointed no less than three times to Scott's energetic fight against the "agonies of the flesh"(15)--revealed how much that image fascinated him.
In the biography written by the hispanicist George Ticknor at the request of Prescott's widow, this heroism became fully crystallized. Ticknor recognized that his friend, who had died in 1859, had been a drawing-room lion, but above all he highlighted his iron will, self-sacrifice, and passion for the study of history. In short, Prescott's scholarly life had been a heroic struggle against an ever present ailment. When the biography was published in 1864, many people declared themselves convinced. George Bancroft congratulated the biographer: "I had feared that the uniformity of his life would cut off from your narrative the resources of novelty and variety and stirring interest; and here, in the inward struggles of his mind, and his struggles with outward trials, you have brought out a more beautiful and attractive picture than if you had to describe the escapes of a hero or the perils of an adventurer."(16)
Thus Thierry as well as Prescott earned the reputation of being "martyrs for science." As "friends of darkness," they could also see each other as "brothers."(17) It was Ticknor who put them in touch with each other....
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