Plodders, second-raters and others
Raymond Carr
HISTORIANS I HAVE KNOWN by A. L. Rowse
Duckworth, £18.95, pp. 208
Ken Dodd maintained that no amount of reading Freud and Bergson would explain what made a joke funny. Only a working comedian who had faced the audience of the Glasgow Empire on a wet Monday night could do that. Only a working historian can explain how readable history comes to be written. A. L. Rowse is a working historian whose output has been prodigious and popular. The interest of this present book lies in his reflections on the methods, achievements and failures of 27 historians as diverse as Lewis Namier, Maurice Powicke, Charles Oman and Arthur Bryant. The reflections are intense- ly personal. How else with Rowse? It is his intrusive presence that makes his books an irritant to his critics but a compulsive read to his admirers.
For Rowse, history is an art. No non- sense about it being a social science. The historian must sense the poetry in the flow of history, practising that leap of the creative imagination by which the past is made to live in the present. Literature and history are inseparable. Shakespeare illuminates the Elizabethan age; only a profound knowledge of its history can lead to an understanding of Shakespeare. The historian must be a 'plodder' after facts and enjoy plodding, but to create what Rowse calls an organic structural whole he must exercise not only poetic imagination, but judgment. For Rowse, in the last analysis, sound judgment is what distinguishes the good historian, capable of reaching a wide public, from the profes- sional academic whose occupational dis- ease is the invention of bogus controversies in order to keep himself and his colleagues gainfully employed.
Poetic response to the past and sound judgment were possessed by G. M. Trevelyan, close friend of Rowse and his model historian. Trevelyan's judgments reflected the moral security of the Victori- an age. His sympathies were wide enough to encompass radicals and rebels like John Bright. 'Any fool can criticise and oppose, but can he do the job of government?' Rowse cannot share with Trevelyan the Victorians' penchant for Puritanism nor their admiration for Carlyle who could write ten volumes on Frederick the Great without spotting that he was 'a pure homo- sexual'.
Too wary a historian to deny that Puri- tanism was a prime element in the back- bone of the nation, Rowse castigates its more extreme manifestations: the sectarian extremism that destroys a civilised, aesthet- ically rich society. He sees himself as a man of the middle, opting for the 'civilised' posi- tion of an unheroic Erasmus. Catholic credulity comes off no better than Puritan sectarianism. 'Fancy', he writes of Cardinal Newman, 'crediting the liquefication of the blood of Saint Januarius.'
If aristocrats, blind to the lessons of his- tory and social realities, get their share of the Rowsian stick, it is middle-class radicals who feel it most frequently. A. J. P. Taylor and Christopher Hill are rapped over the knuckles. Rowse repeats that governing societies is a responsible job and that to propose Utopian alternatives is a fool's game. Why did Christopher Hill waste his talents on 'loonies' like the Muggletonians? But the populist A. J. P. Taylor, posing as the people's Honest John, is more than misguided. He is fatally flawed, his 'snap judgments, snapping like a rat trap' are 'all over the place; his irresponsibility a dis- grace leading him to deal in half-truths, much more dangerous than plain untruths.
Most of the historians Rowse admires have, like himself, written books enjoyed by a wide public. Commercial success has brought upon them the slings and arrows of envious third-raters. This was the case with the productive and popular naval historian, the old salt Samuel Eliot Morison. Not sur- prisingly, Morison became exercised by the `chain reaction of dullness' that had over- come academic history. Professors rose to eminence by writing dull monographs read only by their professional colleagues and then taught their graduate students to go forth and do likewise. Should we waste the taxpayers' money, this seems to suggest, in order to keep this particular show on the road? Rowse is well aware of the contribu- tion of dedicated professionals whose work does not, as his own does, reach a wide public. The Roman historian A. H. M. Jones was a 'dull man' who wrote original and important books.
The most sensitive chapters are devoted to the historian of the 18th century, Richard Pares, whom he loved, and the mediaevalist K. B. McFarlane, a close friend who saved his life by rescuing him from the neglect of `second-rate medicos' — the second-rate crop up in all walks of life. Both were professionals par excellence, yet Pares' books had to be 'excavated' from reams of dry-as-dust research and McFarlane wrote almost nothing. Both shared the Middle-class envy of the aristocracy', from which Rowse, as a proletarian, was spared. The revered socialist historian, R. H. Tawney, was `always in every way against the upper classes', suffering from sentimental Victori- an illusions about 'the working class to which he did not belong'. His pleas for equality get a severe bashing. An egalitari- an society releases envy 'at every stage'; a society of equal pebbles is a wall that will not stand up. This is the voice of Dr John- son and Burke, issuing from the mouth of a one-time Labour candidate who has seen the folly of his ways.
Only a historian who has done much plodding could advise the tyro historian to stop plodding. When a picture emerges, stop and get down to the job of writing a book. Rowse laments the rise of the all- inclusive biography. Selection is all. Selec- tion involves judgment and judgment bias. No matter. The historian who shrinks from being judgmental should not be in business.
All Rowse's familiar demons surface in this book: the hatred of Chamberlain the appeaser in particular and of Germans in general; his dismissal of those who reject his Shakespearean discoveries. Round every corner lurk the third-raters ready to leap out and garrotte the men of talent.
But this book rests secure on its merits. Rowsian raciness enlivens every page of the reflections of one of our most notable historians. And there are some sur- prises. In the penultimate sentence of this book Rowse claims, 'If there is any honour in all the world that I should like, it would be to be an honorary Jewish citizen.'
Previous page
