Our growing unwillingness to understand the past

I was recently reading the works of the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, who at one point mentions a ghost craze that had broken out in Cirencester. The ‘apparition’ was reported to have disappeared with ‘a curious perfume and most melodious twang’. Reading this I unconsciously got ready for a man as wise as Aubrey to pooh-pooh the whole thing, pouring scorn on such superstition. But no; while Aubrey does indeed have a correction, it comes via his friend — one Mr W. Lilly — who ventures that the common view is wrong, for he ‘believes it was a fairy’.

One of the most familiar joys of reading is the moment of recognition, when a hand seems to reach out across the centuries and a voice seems to say: ‘I was there too.’ But an equal shiver of pleasure can come from reminders that people in the past were different. It is a point that the movies can almost never bring themselves to understand. In films today almost all characters from the past think, talk and act as we do. It doesn’t matter whether it is ancient Egypt, 18th-century England or the interwar period (like this year’s BBC version of The Pursuit of Love). The makers don’t realise that people in the past weren’t the same as us. Of course they had the same immutable human passions and flaws. But their preconceptions, preoccupations and priorities were often wholly different. Not least because they didn’t know what we now know.

And therein lies a great temptation for all of us in the present time. We know that today a man of Aubrey’s learning would not have speculated on whether the apparition in Cirencester was a sprite. He would have understood that there are no such things. But from such realisations can come an unsuitable pride.