The genius of the place
Robert Blake
Essays in English History A. J. P. Taylor (HaMish Hamilton £6.50)
Mr Taylor is the Dr Johnson of the Left. He Writes as admirably, though of course in the idiom of the twentieth not the eighteenth century. His judgments are as confident and as devastating. He does not suffer from doubts or misgiving, and yet, like the great doctor, he recognises the limits of human understanding. The opening essay in this volume, 'Fiction in History', is the most Perceptive study I have ever read of what the historian can and cannot achieve—particularly what he cannot.
• . . We should not be ashamed to admit that history at bottom is simply a form of story-telling. Historians nowadays have higher aims. They analyse past societies, generalise about human nature, or seek to draw morals about political or economic behaviour that will provide lessons for the present. Some of them even claim to foretell the future. These are admirable ambitions which have produced work of high quality. But there is no escaping the fact that the original task of the historian is to answer the child's question: 'What happened next?'
And in the same piece he quotes the man vy, hom he regards as the greatest of English aistorians', Maitland: 'It is very difficult to remember that events now in the past were ?lice far in the future'. Like all good historian S Mr Taylor never forgets this important truth.
There are thirty-one essays collected in !his book, most of which have been published in earlier volumes. Four of them, including the first and the last, which is a wonderful description of Manchester twenty Years ago, have not previously appeared in book form. Another (which has only appeared hitherto in the New York Times Magazine)is perhaps the best of the lot= Daddy, What was Winston Churchill ?' Written to 'nark the hundredth anniversary of Churchill's birth, it is the best brief corrective to the school of historians who maintain that the Second World War need not have been ,Orught. It may well be true that the war led to 'Ile destruction of the British empire and the er.rnergence of Soviet Russia as the greatest 'toPean power; but most political choices ate between evils.
When we consider the barbarities of Nazi rule—the tyranny, the gas chambers, the mass exterminations—we must agree that Hitlerism had to be destroyed, whatever the Price. . . Future generations may dismiss the Second World War as 'just another war'. Those who experienced it know that it was a war justified in its aims and successful in accomplishing them. Churchill defined his policy once and for all when he said : 'Victory at all costs'. The British people agreed with him. How right they were.
There is something so persuasive and confident about Mr Taylor's style that one is liable to overlook the occasional non sequitur. Take this parenthesis in the essay on Lord Salisbury : 'he was the last prime minister to sit in the Lords and I don't suppose we shall have another, the peerage is not likely to produce a man of Salisbury's genius in centuries'. Set aside the question whether a prime minister has to be a genius (clearly not, I would have thought) and look simply at the British—or, as Mr Taylor would say, English—constitution. Surely the basic reason why no peer has been a prime minister since Salisbury is that, within nine years of his retirement, the powers of the House of Lords were reduced so greatly by the Parliament Act of 1911 that it ceased to be in any sense a chamber co-equal with the Commons. Even so, Curzon and Halifax nearly made it and the Peerage Renunciation Act in 1963 enabled Lords Hailsham and Home to be among the principal contenders for the succession to Mr Macmillan, and enabled Lord Home to win it. Perhaps Mr Taylor meant that it would take centuries for the old English aristocracy to produce a genius like Salisbury. In that case what about Winston Churchill, in his youth only a heart-beat away from a dukedom, and at least as much of a genius as Salisbury ?
But in a display of fireworks one must expect the occasional spark to go in the wrong direction. What makes Mr Taylor's essays so absorbing to read is his fascination with people. His approach stands at the opposite end of the spectrum to that of the social and economic historians fashionable today. 'History' (he writes regretfully), is no longer the record of extraordinary men. Our historians accumulate the bio graphical details of a thousand forgotten figures, and the great men, if brought in at all, merely provide decorative symbols for the prevailing outlook. Napoleon becomes a shorthand sign for the profiteers of the French Revolution; Hitler for the German capitalists or for the German middle classes who have lost their savings.
And he goes on to point out that 'reality has a perverse way of going against the pattern that it ought to follow. The leader strays wildly from the class that he is supposed to symbolise and bears little resemblance to a composite Picture of his followers'. He is writing about Disraeli who certainly illustrates the point—'the oddest great man in our public life by a long chalk', as Mr Taylor calls him.
These essays vary in length. The longest is a reprinted piece from the English Historical Review, entitled 'Prelude to Fashoda'. If anyone can make diplomatic history interesting, Mr Taylor is the man to do it. Even so the essay is stiff going, but it shows, if anyone doubted the matter, that Mr Taylor is not only a master of the short, brilliant piece d'occasion, but also an academic historian of the highest level—a real professional. But to describe Mr Taylor as the Dr Johnson of the Left is perhaps misleading. He is, rather, the Dr Johnson of those who are against 'the Establishment'—a noun which he claims to have invented before Mr Henry Fairlie launched it many years ago in the Spectator. The Left, after all, has its own Establishment and no one could dislike that more than Mr Taylor, who has little use for Wykehamists, civil servants and Vice-Chancellors. Johnson himself was no lover of the Whig Establishment of his own day. Those whom Mr Taylor admires are the buccaneers, the Disraelis, Beaverbrooks, Churchills, Northcliffes, Lloyd Georges of this world. Two of the best and longest pieces in the book are about Lloyd George—the Raleigh Lecture of 1959 which I heard and the Leslie Stephen Lecture of 1961, which [wish I had heard.
One is not surprised to find an admirable essay on Cobbett who was as fervent an enemy as one could find of the Establishment which he called the 'THING':
Cobbett's political programme was simple: government should cease to exist and the THING along with it. The National Debt should be repudiated—with some compensation to small holders; the army disbanded; the civil service wound up. Then taxes could be ended and everyone would be prosperous. It is only our unconscious allegiance to the THING which makes these ideas preposterous. In reality they are the politics of every natural man ... If we did not have to carry the incubus qf the gentry, the clubs and bishops, The Times—Cobbett's 'bloody old Times'— and the pub! ic schools, we should be nearly as prosperous as Cobbett wanted us to be.
Does Mr Taylor really believe this ? It does not matter. He has notably added to the gaiety of nations. What fun these essays are to read; and what fun they must have been to write!
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