George Macaulay Trevelyan
EXACTLY one hundred years ago, at the :end of . January, 1856, Macaulay went down from the .Albany to Kensington to view Holly Lodge, which he proposed to buy; with him went his devoted sister. Hannah, Lady Trevelyan. A. few weeks earlier the fourth volume of .the History of England had appeared, and the Longman of the day was soon able to present the author with the celebrated cheque for £20,000, explaining, with the engaging candour characteristic of publishers. that otherwise there would be too much money lying about the office. Though only fifty-six, and able to memorise the roll of the House of Lords without difficulty, as well as the Fasti of Oxford and Cambridge, Macaulay looked, and felt himself to be, an old and 'tired man, and in the event he lived for less than four years on Campden Hill.
When he died he had been in production for nearly thirty- five years, dating from the Essay on Milton. There was an interval of sixteen years, during which his nephew,' George Otto Trevelyan, was making his career' and reputation, and then, in 1876, appeared the Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, which many would place third among the great biographies in the langRage. In the same year a month before the book, there appeared also George Macaulay Trevelyan. For forty years thenceforward Sir George, his father, in the midst of .
Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge.
an active public life, which included a spell in Dublin as chief secretary on the morrow of the Phoenix Park murders, continued to publish a series of notable historical works. Before the century was out his son had joined him, and now for fifty years has been a mainstay to his publishers, and latterly also to the Welfare State. Thus for 130 years, or twenty years longer than the duration of the Stuart period, the dynasty of Macaulay has exercised its sway. It is a spectacle without parallel in English literature, perhaps in any literature, and is not rendered less remarkable when we recall that two of the three have been Cabinet Ministers, two members of the Order of Merit. and all three (though in different categories) Fellows of Trinity. It is truly a dynasty of the mind, for all its members have found their home as historians in the golden age of the Whigs between the Revolution and the Reform Bill. Was it Ariel, or Clio herself, who inspired the telephone manager to allot to Dr. Trevelyan, on his return to Cambridge, the magic number 16887 Historians are apt to debate, in their dry academic fashion, the reasons why the books of their colleagues sell. Trevelyan, for his part, has never made a secret of his creed. It is that each generation, in its brief today, longs to know more of its elder brothers and sisters, hid in death's dateless night, how they lived and fought our battles of liberty and made angels weep at their doings—longs for that contact of person with unknown person that poetry achieves on another level. For this, the writer of history must have, besides a love of truth and infinite industry, two instruments, the command of words and the power of narration. Trevelyan once wrote: `The art of history remains always the art of narrative. That is the bed-rock.' To that word he has always been faithful, caring not a whit for the murmurs of soured ancients.
No one may call this a facile kind of history. Behind the trilogy of Garibaldi and the volumes of Queen Anne lie years of travel in Italy, years of work in libraries and the British Museum, and a formidable bibliography; behind the Social History is a lifetime of reading, reflection and experience. Of this the reader sees nothing. He remembers only a hundred pictures : Garibaldi gazing from the heights upon the groves and palaces of Palermo; Shakespeare passing the gunpowder plotters in Welcombe Woods; Marlborough chafing at Eugene's delay before Blenheim; the great storm of 1703 sweeping over Eddystone; the luminaries of Edinburgh's bench and bar lurching down the murky wynd at midnight. assailed by exhalations whizzing from the skies.
But on an eightieth birthday we do not think of books alone, and indeed to those many who have known Dr. Trevelyan either as teacher or friend or Master of Trinity the books mean less than the man. Some have been surprised at first by the brusque manner, the incisive word, or the silence difficult to break; they have soon come to admire a simplicity of life and speech, and an exquisite courtesy of act as well as of word. They have recognised the deep convictions, the respect for liberty, the love of toleration of the great generation of Liberals. The last three lines of Chaucer's characterisation of his Knight might have been written of Trevelyan. It must have come as a surprise to many to learn that he was born in a mansion belonging to his mother, lived as a boy in another belonging to his father, and inherited a third from a relative. They think of him rather as one born in Warwickshire, within a mile of Shakespeare's birthplace, and among the oaks and dingles of Arden. He has loved 'the wind-grieved Apennine' and (unexpectedly) the village folk of Calabria; like Wordsworth, he has wandered for long days 'lonely as a cloud' on Lakeland fells or in the wide spaces of the moors between the Wall and The Cheviot. Somehow his readers know and love this, for when all is said and done, even in this our age, what is elemental and central never fails to attract. Trevelyan has written somewhere that when philosophers talked he admired and was silent; he 'had no philosophy beyond a love of things good and a hatred of things evil.' It is a simple programme—some would call it simpliste—and might well seem a question-begging inanity. Only one 01 Trevelyan's sincerity and intellectual humility could give the words strength, as embodying all that is to be learnt of profit in history or in life.
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