Some years ago, the brilliant English historian Herbert Butterfield published a short book entitled The Whig Interpretation of History. It articulated the accumulating doubts of at least two generations, and became a kind of manifesto for modern historians. Butterfield attacked the sort of historian who assumes that all of history has been laboring to produce the present moment, and who values the life of the past only insofar as it can be interpreted as working toward what has emerged in the present. Such a procedure is really a form of power worship. Thus such historians as Macaulay picked through the past to find figures who could be viewed —with some effort—as working toward nineteenth-century progressive democracy.
Some curious discoveries were made. Luther and Elizabeth became progressives; others, like Charles I, Philip II, and Swift were villains: implicitly, they were against the Light. John Milton could be seen as a sort of primitive Woodrow Wilson, and Andrew Jackson was FDR struggling to be born. Ludicrously enough, this attitude permeated even literary and art criticism. That meticulously drawn landscape, there behind the Madonna in Piero’s altar-piece—that, the Madonna in time dropping away, would “become” a nineteenth-century landscape painting. Though they didn’t know it, the commendable statesmen, painters and poets of the past were struggling to produce the ascendant values of the present.
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