Strange and unusual
Alan Watkins
Religion and Public Doctrine In Modern England Maurice Cowling (Cambridge £20) In 1950 it was widely accepted that the 20th century's greatest economist was J.M. Keynes, that its greatest novelist was E.M. Forster and that its greatest philosophers, in mathematical logic and ethics respectively, were Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. All four were products of Cambridge, two of Trinity, two of King's. Three (I am writing of 30 years ago) were still alive. Forster could sometimes be observed perusing a World's Classics volume in the British Restaurant near the Cambridge market square; Moore, less in evidence, lived in a Victorian house on the Chesterton road and let rooms to young graduates and their wives but still attracted a small band of disciples; while Russell, living away from Cambridge, was the recipient of the OM (Moore received his shortly afterwards) and was the principal sage of British broadcasting. The estimate of the pre-eminence of these four was accepted well outside the confines of the university, which is what I mean by saying it was accepted 'widely'. It was accepted, for instance, in the Fabian Society and at the New Statesman even though all four were liberals rather than socialists. It was more than accepted, it was actively promulgated, by the Third Programme, then at its apogee, which carried numerous literate and diverting (though seemingly endless) talks by Mr Noel Annan, Fellow and Senior Tutor of King's, on Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group, Forster and Cambridge, Forster and Keynes, or Forster, Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group: there were various permutations and combinations that could be employed.
But the sharp-eyed observer of the Cambridge of the early Fifties would have noticed two things. He would have noticed, first, that there was an element of humbug not so much about the four individuals mentioned above and their contemporaries as about their successors and laureates:that, for example, their professed love of France was accompanied by a dislike of foreigners, that the aesthetic sense which they claimed was unaccompanied by any strong visual taste or imagination, that a concern for 'standards' usually masked straight, oldfashioned English snobbery and that, in short, they were altogether too pleased with Cambridge, with liberalism and, not least, with themselves. Our sharp-eyed observer would have noticed, secondly, that other people had noticed the same thing.
This coot response to pre-1914 Cambridge liberalism and its after-effects often took the form, though it did not necessarily have to, of straight conservative reaction or, what was slightly different, of the reassertion of another Cambridge tradition, that of political and social scepticism based, in varying proportions, upon Christianity and the study of history. The Cambridge conservative reaction of the 1950s had its tiresome and affected side, to do with Anglo-Catholicism and the wearing of fancy waistcoats. But on the whole it was a respectable movement, worth taking seriously. It could be seen as a revolt of the smaller colleges, notably perhaps Peterhouse and Corpus, against the preeminence of Trinity and King's or, rather, against the idea, what later came to be called the image, of Trinity and King's as imposed on the intelligent reading public by the heralds of Bloomsbury liberalism. This collegiate theme is implicit in Mr Cowling's fascinating but distinctly rum book. However, it is not dealt with consistently.
Nor is his book an account of Cambridge conservatism, or an account of the reaction against liberalism generally, or the recent story of the Cambridge history faculty, or the Life and Times of Herbert Butterfield, or of Michael Oakeshott, come to that, or even the Life and Times of Maurice Cowling. Nor is it very much about religion. All these topics, and many more, come into it; but it is, as I say, a distinctly rum production. It comprises accounts of the lives and writings, chiefly the writings, of (in the order in which Mr Cowling takes them) A.N. Whitehead, Arnold Toynbee, Kenneth Pickthorn, Edward Welbourne, Charles Smyth, Edwyn Hoskyns, T.S. Eliot, David Knowles, R.G. Collingwood, A.D. Nock, G. Kitson Clark, B.L. Manning, A.W. Ward, Harold Temperley, Herbert Butterfield, 'Michael Oakeshott, Winston Churchill, Elie Kedourie, Evelyn Waugh, the third Marquis of Salisbury, Walter Ullmann, Owen Chadwick, Enoch Powell and Edward Norman.
This is, by any standards, a motley crew, some famous, others (Welbourne, Nock) hardly known outside their colleges; some (Butterfield. Oakeshott) intellectually influential, others of hardly any influence at all except on Mr Cowling and the rest of their pupils; some (Smyth, Hoskyns, Knowles, Chadwick, Norman) professional Christians in that they were clergymen of one sort or another, others (Waugh, Salisbury, Eliot, Butterfield) amateur Christians, if one may so put it, others again (Whitehead, Toynbee) believers in some vague 'spiritual force', and others again (Churchill, Oakeshott) of an irreligious cast of mind.
There is no reason why any author should either confine himself to or concentrate on the famous or influential. Indeed, Mr Cowling's most interesting passages, to me, are about the individuals, chiefly Cambridge historians, whom he knew or knows personally. He is excellent on Welbourne, for a long time since Senior Tutor and then Master of Emmanuel, a conservative who, before the age of 30, wrote a history of the Durham miners and thereafter hardly anything else; Welbourne, with his Military Cross gained with the Durham Light Infantry in the first World war, his modest background and his own brand of English nationalism, based partly on a belief in a conspiracy (the word is not too strong) by Celts, Jews and intellectuals-on-the-make to persuade the English working class that they had been shamefully exploited in the 19th century. Welbourne's brand of conservatism is, with Pickthorn's, and Powell's too, that brand with which Mr Cowling seems to feel the greatest sympathy. Mr Cowling's favourite words of approbation are 'tough', 'bloody' (occasionally with `-minded' appended to either or both, as the case may be) and 'reactionary': thus 'bloody-minded reaction' as exemplified or practised by, say. Pickthorn, a noted Conservative backbencher in his day, as well as a Corpus historian arouses Mr Cowling's particular approval. Mr Cowling is a man who resolutely, perhaps only too resolutely, refuses to be fooled. Like Pickthorn, he has a contempt for the pieties of liberalism: conscience may be an uncertain, even a fraudulent guide. He is in the strained intellectual position of disliking the rebel against the conventions celebrated by liberal mythology but of approving the awkward customer, the character who sees through things. The position is strained because the difference between a foolish rebel and an admirable reactionary is pretty arbitrary. Thus, on late and early Knowles, monk, historian, Fellow of Peterhouse: The Knowles of 1939-40, then, made large claims which ran into difficulty with the decent, natural sensibleness of Benedictine piety. Thereafter, the claim to religious leadership was transformed into a literary personality which, despite its content, reflected the secular normality of life in London, Wimbledon, Peterhouse and Hampshire where one opinion is as good as another and anything goes, provided it is recognised to be an aid to culture, scholarship or self-expression. It is difficult not to prefer the early Knowles: thetself-willed Napoleonic monk whose living doctrine permeated everything he wrote in the build-up to The Monastic Order, 'Build-up', by the way, is, like 'flip' as applied to the early Mr Edward Norman, an example either of a certain insensitivity to language on Mr Cowling's part or of a wish to enliven his style by the use of colloquialisms in the same way as Mr A.J.P. Taylor and others enliven their styles. It is difficult to be sure. It is difficult to be sure also of the degree to which he holds blandness, compromise and tolerance in contempt (another of Mr Cowling's favourite words, along with `sneering', which he employs, unusually, in a non-pejorative sense, as if these were times when good men jolly well ought to sneer). He can be quite kind, even though a trifle patronising, to the urbane Professor Owen Chadwick: 'Chadwick is not without histrionic capability; but, on the whole, he does not obtrude. He has a retreating literary personality which, despite passages of eloquence, achieves its effects by stealth.'
In all these discussions Mr Cowling gives himself a walk-on part, as he might put it in one of his demotic moods. His first book was an attack on the Fabian liberal or socialist bias of much of what passed as 'political science': it anticipated, from a very different angle, much of what was subsequently written, chiefly by Americans, on 'value-free' political studies, and contained a broadly justified attack on my old mentor William A. Robson. His second book tried to show that J.S. Mill was really a pretty intolerant chap. Then followed three major works of English political history: on 1867, on 1920-24 and on 1933-40. Mr Cowling has now finished with straight history and is turning his attention to religion.
The blurb tells us that, before Cambridge and War Service, he was at Battersea Grammar School. He himself tell us that: As a child, the author was not really introduced to Anglicanism. His mother went to church occasionally, but he did not often go with her. His father believed in God but not in organised religion. He [presumably Cowling senior] believed in education as both social ladder and cultural enrichment. He was also a pessimist and an admirer of Winwood Reade's Book, The Martyrdom of Man. His piety was of a rational, socially uneasy, politically conservative anti-church type which was very common amongst thoughtful people in the lower middle-class London suburbs.
I should have liked more about Mr Cowling. In particular, I should have liked to know whether, as is widely believed, he really spent 18 months on the Daily Express Without having a line printed in the paper. If he did, he beat Evelyn Waugh by a long Way. As we are on Waugh, I should also have liked to know (this is not a rhetorical Inquiry) on what evidence, for he provides no reference, Mr Cowling asserts, as he does, that Waugh early admired Churchill. The dedication to Randolph Churchill of Put Out More Flags is little more than Conventionally civil about Winston, as one Would have expected it to be. However, the references to Churchill in Brideshead, in Men at Arms and elsewhere are uniformly scornful. Whether Cowling provides a satisfactory answer or not, I look forward to his second volume. But I realise that, in doing so, I am gratifying a strange and unusual taste.
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