Violence and Gusto
IN collecting together twenty-five of his essays and occasional pieces Dr. Plumb has provided succulent fare for the historical fine bouche.
His book is divided into three parts, 'The Eighteenth Century,' African Studies' and 'Men and Books.' Without exception their subject- matter is instructive and entertaining. Dr. Plumb's style is crisp and pointed, his judgments on people and events full of good sense and humanity, so that it is a pleasure to follow him even along well-trodden paths. His brief por- traits of Rhodes or Livingstone, Pope or Defoe are models of the art of combining concision with grace. In a moving essay he pays tribute to his Cambridge supervisor, G. M. Trevelyan, and tells how Trevelyan would ply a vigorous pencil on the prose of his weekly essay. Dr. Plumb had a good master and has proved a good pupil. The vigour of word and observation exactly match one another. His sketches of well-known figures are executed with a fresh and fearless eye. In a few sen- tences he can suggest a pungent case for a reversal or revision of accepted opinion. He presents, for example, a touching picture of George Ill, plagued by his madness, his com- pulsive talking and his terrible children. `For nine years he roamed his palace, a pathetic figure in a purple dressing-gown, with wild white hair and beard, blind, deaf, a Lear-like figure playing to himself on his harpsichord and talk- ing, talking, talking of men and women long since dead. . . . There have been many worse kings to exercise rule over America and Britain. If he is to be blamed, it must not be for what he did but for what he was—an unbalanced man of low intelligence. And if he is to be praised, it is because he attempted to discharge honourably tasks that were beyond his powers.'
The cream of the first and longest section of the book is an extended study of Sir Robert Walpole and his father, Colonel Walpole. This is to be read in conjunction with two short essays on Sir Robert Walpole's predilections in the matter of food and drink, and as a pendant to the author's now celebrated two-volume biography of that notorious grandee. The essay on drink is facinating. We learn that Walpole preferred claret to burgundy and would buy his Margaux four hogsheads at a time and his Lafite at the rate of a hogshead a month. He drank
his claret young. He did not favour port, but had a great taste for 'White Lisbon,' another unfortified table wine. He liked champagne and hock, and a bill of 1715 refers to a purchase of six dozen 'Hoghmer [i.e., Hochheimer] of the Year 1706,' the oldest reference to a vintage wine of this area sold in England. Further de- tails reveal that wines sold in bulk were usually bottled in the customer's cellar by the mer- chant, who charged 4s. for drawing a hogshead, 2s. 6d. a dozen for bottles (2d. a dozen on the empties), and 2s. 6d. a gross for long French corks. Dr. Plumb points out that wine was not cheap in the early eighteenth century: yet in a single year, 1733, Walpole spent nearly £8,000 in modern money with two wine merchants alone, returning 552 dozen bottles to one of them.
It is interesting to note Dr. Plumb's ambivalent attitude towards the century about which he writes so brilliantly. In his opening essay he speaks of life in the eighteenth century as being `fierce, savage and uncertain'; and in his essay on Fielding of 'this riotous, rich, rough, ruthless society.' It is his very fair-mindedness that puts him on the rack. He cannot bear to contemplate the vile slums and fearful diseases which were the reverse side of the eighteenth-century medal. This drives him into adopting a general position which I find strangely timid and despairing for an historian who is in other respects so robust. Thus at the end of his essay on Macaulay, whom he stigmatises as insensitive, unimaginative, in- curious, unsubtle, intellectually opaque and `lacking in doubt,' he none the less arrives at a conclusion that strikes me as being very odd. `Yet Macaulay was quite right, incontrovertibly right. The material progress of mankind is the one certain, glorious triumph which no one can deny. Man's prime reason for self-congratulation is his triumph over the material universe.' It is sad that Dr. Plumb can reach no farther than this shallow, empirical conclusion; sad that he rates the authors of The Hay Wain and The Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot far, far lower in the scheme of things than some latter-day road- research expert or pill-mixer. Nor does he state his grey conclusion with Macaulay's nineteenth- century optimism, but only with twentieth-cen- tury dubiety.
Elsewhere he writes that although life in the eighteenth century was 'hard and cruel, often violent, always shadowed by death, yet it was full, too, of light and laughter and wonder.
May not one speculate whether the light, the laughter and the wonder were not in fact products of the violence and the shadow of death? Do we ourselves not pay an inescapable price in terms of the zest and savour of life
for our increasing security, which is necessarilY dependent upon an increasing conformity? Is it really the profoundest purpose of existence that everyone should live to be a hundred, if in order to attain one's four score years and twenty one must finish as either a slave or a dullard? What matters is surely not how ancient or healthy one is, but what one does with the years that are given one Fielding was dead in his forties: but his short career was very much more vivid and significant than that of most of the people who die at ninety. In the mid-eighteenth cen- tury, writes Dr. Plumb, 'they knew that the future belonged to Britain.' In the mid-twentieth century, if we cease for ‘a moment to congratu- late ourselves on our glorious triumphs over the material universe, we can see only that the future belongs to us no longer. Speaking for myself, I know which century I should like to have lived in.
JON MANCIIIP WHITS
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