Sir Lewis Namier
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SIR LEWIS NAMIER was the greatest British historian that the twentieth century has yet produced. That he was not recognised as such by the public was his own fault. He never shared Macaulay's ambition to displace the latest novel on the tables of young ladies with a book of his own, and he never produced a work of easy narrative that would appeal to the book-buying and library-borrowing public. That he was also not fully recognised and rewarded in the aca- demic world was the fault of the University of Oxford, which evidently thought pre-eminent scholarship a positive bar to its highest honours: In its churlish treatment of a historian of eighteenth-century England the university was harking back to its best eighteenth-century tradi- tion HY origin a Polish Jew, Namier had a pro- found admiration for the great families of England and their political achievements (liberty, he was fond of saying, was the child of aris- tocracy). Conservative though he was in outlook, he was revolutionary as a historian: in his great Works The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George Ill and England in the Age of the American Revolution he upset all the prevailing ideas and inherited attitudes about eighteenth- century politics and ahout George III. Later, in his Revolution of the Intellectuals he was to per- form the same service for 1848, and for much of European history in the nineteenth century. Nearly all of his shorter essays on a variety of subjects displayed a similar originality and power.
Interested in the whys of history rather than the hows, and relying always upon original sources and his own researches, Namier's output been his great industry—would never have °een conspicuously large; but it would have been 1,_tilleh greater than it was if it had not been for_ ms work for Zionism and his interest in con- temporary affairs—particularly his hatred of the policy of appeasement. Even, the most convinced Zionists might regret that his enthusiasm for Zionism kept a number of great works unwritten; but his collection of Judaica in his various books of essays leaves no doubt as to how important the subject was to him, and they'are probably the most moving and eloquent pleas for Zionism that have ever been written.
If Namier's great achievement was to prevent People looking at the eighteenth century through twentieth-century eyes, he himself solortimes looked at the twentieth century through eighteenth-century eyes. His opinion of current events was always worth hearing, but his judg- ment became less reliable. He produced some memorable denunciations of the pre-war policy appeasement and its apologists, and he was merciless in his treatment of those Germans who published books after the war explaining that it had been everybody else's fault but their own; but he never fully adjusted his mind to absorb the tremendous changes of the post-war world. Believing with Meredith that the connection be- tween men's utterances and their real thoughts and desires is at best tenuous, he was ruthlessly entertaining when demolishing politicians' pre- tensions and rationalisations of their behaviour; he looked elsewhere for the real explanation of their actions—an attitude which in his books led to him being accused of having taken the mind out of history. The accusation is imprecise, al- though Nam ier certainly rejected the intellectual- ist fallacy, and in doing so could be said to be in the line of Marx, Freud and Graham Wallas.
Over the last few years 'The History of Parlia- ment' increasingly monopolised his time and he became ever more reluctant to write on anything outside his central task. Although several times tempted to write articles for this journal on foreign policy in the Thirties, he always in the end decided not to on the ground that it would take too long to get the subject up again, and he confined his contributions to the Spectator to eighteenth-century subjects. But he became more and more sure that he would not live either' to complete 'The History of Parliament' or to write the full biography of Charles Townshend on which he had set his heart.
Namier was generous in encouragement and help to others—and not only to those who were working in his own field. To those who dislike a conversation being educative, and who prefer it to be in sentences, not in paragraphs, Namier's company demanded too great an effort. To everybody else he was a most stimulating and engaging companion.
IAN GILMOUR
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