A Smell of our Native Earth
Parish and Empire : Studies and Sketches. By Jack Simmons. (Collins. I8s.)
LIKE several other things in history, these studies are divided into three parts,—parochial, national and Imperial ; and it says much for Professor Simmons's skill and for the truth of his main argument that we never feel our bump of coherence disturbed or jolted by moving on from Georgian Somerset to the Great Western Railway, or to the early Victorian pioneers of Africa. History in the hands of a scholar with imaginative sympathies, at whatever level he touches it, remains one. If there is anyone who believes that dullness is the necessary product of specialised learning, he may find a remedy in this most agreeable collection ; or garland, as they would once have called it. History sits as the presiding judge. But a nosegay lies
on the desk before her, whose scent drives away dust and aridity, and smells of the native earth that is her home.
Professor Simmons sets off well with a most rare achievement, an . inaugural lecture that is modest, sincere and unplatitudinous. In one sense it is the voice of the shires challenging the placid pro- vincialism of London—a most necessary reminder that the essence of a representative system is not the representative body but what it represents, and that the fine flower of centralisation would be well advised to look to its roots. How well he puts, and how excellently the group of essays on the West Country drives home, the reality, inspiration and concreteness which local history brings ! Without it the history of Parliament and Churches and parties becomes barren dogmas or disembodied bickerings. He is right, again, to insist on using all the visual aids that history can employ, for if there is one concept that all the supposed philosophies of history have ignored, it is the idea of home. Solvitur ambtdando : this historian belongs to the lovely company of historians who are walkers.
The present studies are preliminary, he tells us, to a large co- operative survey he is to edit, on the counties and larger towns of England, which is to absorb all the reams of knowledge piled up by local antiquaries and societies. Sometimes they read like the very best guide-books, yet nothing could be better than his application of local instance to vital national facts. Here it is the grammar school at Billesdon ; not that it need be too proud of having educated James l's favourite, " Steenie " Buckingham—and at once we feel the void in the history of such schools, that could be scholarly without being " educational." Here again, from parish registers and overseers' accounts, he gives us proof of the eighteenth century's benevolence, unjustly decried in many lofty books. The mural memorials in the cloisters at Wells take us from Restoration clergy down to the Peninsular War ; though he would collect a less rosy impression of Bishop Creyghton, if my memory serves, in Arch- bishop Sheldon's papers. The forgotten worthies he has revived or re-created embrace a delightfully eccentric Devonshire parson, a tragic one from Oxfordshire, a Leicester architect and a great civil engineer. Justly he comments on the little space the Dictionary of National Biography gives to industrialists ; one could say the same of Anglo-Indians, and contrast its swollen detail on minor Noncon- formist divines. Sometimes a momentary local enthusiasm makes him ingenuous, and sometimes his profound Englishry leaves him insular ; for" the Highlands give me no twinge of romance," and he finds Scottish history of interest only after the Union.
The least successful of these studies, to my mind, are the last, the two set pieces on the " Victorian Proconsuls " and " The British Imperial Tradition." Perhaps it asks more room than he can allow to get inside the armour of Milner, Cromer and Curzon. But he need not have been surprised at the humanity in Joseph Chamberlain had he recollected more of his home-life and the nature of the Chamberlains descended from the maltsters of Laycock. Something too much here, too, in my (perhaps reprobate) judgement, of the Burke legend of Empire and trusteeship ; exemplified, we must suppose, in the interest shown by Richard Burke in the welfare of the Caribs or the disinterested career of William Burke in Tanjore.
No. Empires return to life when he is writing on the spot at Lanark of Livingstone, or at Truro of Richard Lander, the Cornish boy—he was little more—who tracked the course of the Niger. It is in the life of human beings, their habitat and kindred upbringing, that his gifts find their best expression ; the power to evoke, from an apparently humdrum business career or commonplace arena, the character of a generation, the real impression of a neighbourhood.
Here, I venture to think, is his lode to work, and the vein to follow. A good many people write adequately about Empires. But those who can make Abbot Sampson and Jack of Newbury, and engineers, weavers and husbandmen, come alive again, can be counted on one
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