BOOKS The Good Old Cause
By J. H. PLUMB
TN spite of the battering at the hands of 'historiographers as diverse in their attitude to life as Herbert Butterfield and Peter Geyl, the Whig view of English history still dominates our conception of our past, and rightly so, for the narrative of English history is as Whiggish as that of America is democratic. This does not mean, of course, that English and American governments have always been imbued with a sense of liberty or democracy; or that they have pursued with missionary zeal the fulfilment in the world at large of those concepts which have found such nourishment within the growing structures of their own societies. But viewed as a story, there can be no convincing Tory history of modern England.
Clarendon could write Tory history because he could genuinely .feel that Charles I should have won the Civil War or, alternatively, that it should never have taken place. Hume was still near enough to the seventeenth century to cast urbane Tory sympathy, like a miasma, over the• events of his own immediate past. But, viewing the last three centuries, in what would a Tory have to take regret or delight? Delight in Cromwell's failure, but regret Exclusion; praise James II, yet condemn the Revolution of 1688; sorrow for the Pretender, but sneer at the Hanoverian succession; despise the Reform Bills and the spreading franchise of nineteenth-century England, yet take refuge in the hypocrisies of Tory democracy or the false pageantry of the Empire in India; gloat over the long delay of Ireland's freedom; connive at Carson's dabbling with treason; grow purple at the thought of the Lords' reform; rail against the welfare state and the dissolution of Empire. It would be a weird society that read with avidity a history that re- gretted three centuries of its past. One need search no further for the continuing success of Macaulay and Trevelyan or why they are still read by tens of thousands of Englishmen. Nor, perhaps, as to why most Tory historians despise or evade narrative history or, if they should ever try to write it, as Churchill did, then proceed to write not like a Tory but like a Whig grandee of Holland House. And think of the galaxy of Tory heroes—mainly phonies or failures— Charles II, Danby, Anne, Bolingbroke, Eldon, Liverpool, Disraeli. What a fine, trumpeting, annihilating essay Macaulay could have written on this theme—biased, exaggerated, insensitive, evasive, yet polemically right.
That, as H. R. Trevor-Roper indicates, in a brilliant introductory essay to a new collection of Macaulay's essays,* is the essence of Macaulay. His faults are brazen. He lacked insight into human character, could ignore motive, ride roughshod over facts that might trip up his interpretation, and belabour his antagonists with the vulgarity of an intellectual fishwife. His characterisation of Bacon is as ludicrous as his characterisation of Marlborough: unable to resist the dramatic antithesis of what he con- sidered to be the two sides of Bacon's nature— the corrupt, sycophantic worshipper of absolute kingship with the progressive, scientific philo- sopher, he presents a travesty of interpretation,
a wild exaggeration that distorts the truth except in its final equation, where the essence of truth remains. Bacon was prepared to back the authority of kingship to a point which would have endangered that extension of the political establishment which Macaulay regarded,, perhaps rightly, as one of the great triumphs of seventeen- century England. The same is true of so much of Macaulay: his greatness rests not only on the vigour of his narrative, nor on the immense read- ability of his prose, nor even in the quality of Olympic grandeur that infuses everything that he wrote. It goes deeper than that. He embodies an attitude which must seem true to the majority of those who read him : his belief in progress, not only material, but moral; and that belief chimes with an essential optimism that, in spite of the cloud of Jeremiahs that infest our intel- lectual life, is implicit in modern life. Such claims are too vast to be argued here, but they underlie the Whig interpretation of history, expressed in its broadest sense.
More narrowly, of course, the Whig inter- ' Pretation is the history of how the British political structure, its political nation, has adapted and changed itself to meet new social conditions and so both evaded revolution or the loss of power. Whig and grandee are not entirely incom- patible terms, and Whig history has never been radical history. Indeed, the most effective criticism of Whig history derives from the left rather than the right. Macaulay had no love for the masses, nor his great-nephew, Trevelyan, any delight in industrial society. Essentially Whig his- tory is the story of success, of awareness of political reality, of capacity to adapt in order to survive; from which emerged a morality of liberalism capable, until very recently, of carrying the masses with it. This being so, it is easy to see why Macaulay judged character by the sim- plicity of events. William III brought about the Revolution of 1688, which succeeded, therefore he was praiseworthy. Milton opposed Charles I, supported Oliver Cromwell, ergo. In the flood- tide of early nineteenth-century confidence, it was easier to believe such simplicities than in the early twentieth, when G. M. Trevelyan was writing. The core of Trevelyan's beliefs about British society and British history differed little from Macaulay's, but the eupeptic confidence was gone; the world of the Whig aristocracy was too threatened for simple white and black : and in Trevelyan's pages black has become grey. Turn to anything that Macaulay found so easy to judge; for example, the execution of Charles I, in Trevelyan's pages, and the difference in tune is immediately apparent. Sympathy for Charles I, sympathy for the doomed 'cavaliers at Oxford, pervades his pages; a sense of tragic ineluctable destiny now replaces the brassy, triumphant note of justice meted out by Macaulay to those too stupid to comprehend the tide of history.
And so, in Trevelyan's work there is an extra dimension, an imaginative sympathy for the losers, stimulated doubtless by Trevelyan's pro- found conviction that the Whig world of benevo- lent grandeur was about to pass into oblivion, but this tenderness to the failures in history never
submerges Trevelyan's fundamental belief that British society had been triumphant, glorioo and wise and that the history of ninteenth-cea tury England was, taken by and large, a moo' as well as material triumph. A Whig attitude provides the anatomy of his work. Of Course there are personal differences, too, between these two historians. Macaulay's life was curiously na. shadowed by personal pain, Trevelyan's was darkened by it; Macaulay's temperament was almost unbearably sunny, Trevelyan's borders on the morose. Macaulay took immense delight in society, Trevelyan' longed for solitude. BO both were supreme craftsmen, both could write narrative history as no other historians of their generations could. They are still immensely read' able; indeed, Trevelyan's British History in III! Nineteenth Century and A ftert is still unmatched' dated in some details of scholarship and interpre' tation, it nevertheless remains a great history, s, great synthesis. Indeed, after re-reading it, and comparing his qualities of character and scholar' ship with Macaulay's, one is puzzled why he remains inferior to Macaulay, but he does. The answer partly lies in the 'fact that Macaulai always wrote at the maximum extension of ha powers and with entire conviction: he can coil; vey, right or wrong, an Olympian sense 0 grandeur. Also he wrote about political action 111 with supreme virtuosity: his knowledge, ' insight, his deep practical sense ran deeper os this theme than any English historian who has ever written about it; not the motivation of poll' titian, that scarcely interested him, but politic in action, politicians at the moment of decisiori.
Trevelyan was a writer of great gifts, a marl of deep conviction and natural poetic feelings, but he was essentially a spectator; his tempera: ment drew him away from the active battle Ul life. He was never a politician at any level, a°,t even collegiate, and so the political history wine' he wrote in such quantities lacks a certala authority. There is greater power in his descrIP' five histories of English social life, a theme which engaged his whole temperament, for there 0, fading sense of greatness in British life mirrored his own tragic sense.
But Macaulay and Trevelyan are the great masters of the Whig tradition: in the hands of textbook expositors it became much cruder and much more distorted. It had never been strong on the interpretation of detail, of particular situations, or even capable of sharp insight into the growth of those institutions for which 11, felt a special responsibility. And so at the text' book level, the Whig interpretation jars intoler ably, on anyone with a wider professional knoo" ledge of history; and nowhere is it more mistak,arl than when dealing with eighteenth-century pouts' cal developments, so Mr. Jarrett's volume 15, particularly welcome. He has banished all the 01' Whig myths--cabinet government and the Pre' miership coming in with George I because be could speak no English; the Tory intentions of George III go the same way. He has assimilarco all the recent research on eighteenth-centIA, politics and produced what is by far the most balanced account of this period; neither W11,1°, nor Tory, but just good history. His literary 810; may not match Macaulay's or Trevelyan's, blj his facts are more accurate and his interprets' tions (of detail at least) more reliable.
* MACAUL AY'S ESSAYS. Selected and introduced by Hugh Trevor-Roper. (Fontana/Collins, 8s. 6d.) 0. t BRITISH HISTORY IN THE NINETEENTH CENT,t),. 1782-1919 AND AFTER. By G. M. Trevelyan. guin, 8s. 6d.) t BRITAIN, 1688-1815. By Derek Jarrett. (Long' mans, 25s.)
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