V. Conclusion

Extract

When we salute a historian as master of his craft, we recognize in him a combination of four outstanding qualities. First, he has made himself thoroughly cognizant of all the evidence, written or otherwise, with which to interpret his period, and he has the skill to evaluate it. Secondly, he possesses the imaginative insight to transmute this evidence into a living experience of the society he describes, so that the reader can enter into the conditions of life and understand the psychology of the people of the time. Thirdly, he has the intellectual capacity to recognize historical patterns of evolution or change, to relate individual incidents and individual careers to this process of historical development; thus historiography becomes more than the description of a series of static situations, for the historian becomes the moving camera which fuses them. Finally, our ideal historian will have the requisite literary talent to channel his skills with clarity and strength, so as to imprint his interpretation indelibly on the reader’s mind.