“As for the individual,
everyone is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in
thoughts. It is just as foolish to fancy that any philosophy can transcend its
present world, as that an individual could leap out of his time or jump over
Rhodes”.
Hegel, Preface to The
Philosophy of Right (1821)
“I confess that he gets on
my nerves. I have admired some of his work. However, the ipse behind the work -
what a lot of that ipse there is!”.
Herbert Butterfield
To describe Rowse as Richard
Ollard does in his book as a man of contradictions is probably the biggest
understatement of both the 20th
century and 21st Century. Ollard’s book is worth reading if only
because of his attempt to place Rowse in the context of his time.
I no intention of studying
Rowse until I wandered into his historical orbit after reading Spirit of
English History published in 1943 at the height of the war with Germany. Hence
the dedication of the book to Winston Churchill.
For a man who dabbled with
Marxist politics in the 1930s, this book is about as far removed from orthodox
Marxism as you could get. It would be correct to say that Rowse was closer to
Hegel than Marx. Hegel, in his book the Philosophy of History, also talked
about a “world Spirit “ in history. Hegel writes. “It is only an inference from
the history that its development has been a rational process; that the history
in question has constituted the rationale necessary course of the world
spirit-that spirit whose nature is always the same but which unfolds this is
one nature in the phenomena of the world’s existence.”[1]
This analysis is echoed by Julia
Stapleton who writes “The very title of one volume, The English Spirit (1945),
would be anathema to a Marxist, despite his somewhat unconvincing attempt at
the same time to include the character of the people in his broad definition of
the underlying (economic) conditions of British history. The English Spirit was
launched with an impressive print-run of 10,000 copies (Ollard, p. 179). In
this collection of essays, Rowse is the epitome of the national intellectual,
depicting and celebrating a unifying national tradition rooted in literature
and life in which the thorny issue of class is completely passed over. Its
inspiration is much more George Santayana - whom Rowse quotes admiringly - than
Marx[2].
Much of Rowse’s patriotism
and defence of the empire would make even the right-wing historian Niall
Ferguson blush. The massive sales of this book tended to reflect the brief outburst
of patriotism during the war, which largely dissipated after 1945, when the
threat of social revolution became a reality.
As Ollard states in his book,
Rowse was not an easy man to live with. Much has been made of his childhood and
the influence his mother and father had on his later life, and this is explored
in the book. While these influences may have impacted his social attitudes
and relationships with the public and other historians, I believe that far more external
forces made Rowse the figure he was. After all most of his life spanned a
century that was shaped by wars and revolutions. Saying this, I am not
belittling Rowse who was a man of some intellect and insight, who had to
struggle to get where he did. This struggle is accurately recorded in the book.
Rowse was the son of a china clay miner, both his parents were semi-literate.
According to Robert Thomas,” Rowse was a brilliant student who learned
to read by the age of 4, became obsessed with speaking precisely correct
English and worked so hard to win the only Cornwall scholarship to Oxford that
it almost ruined his already precarious health”.[3]
In his autobiography Rowse
claims “I owe what I am to the struggle, it isolated me from others, it
concentrated me within the unapproachable tower of my resolve; I was determined
to do what I wanted to do; I was left sufficiently to myself, for nobody was
interested, to carry on what I wanted in my own way and nourish the inner life
of my own imagination”.
Even a cursory read of
Ollards book would show the reader that Rowse’s connection with Marxism was
tenuous, he never joined the Communist Party and rejected dialectical
materialism, and despite reviewing Leon Trotsky’s History of the Russian
Revolution, he had no connection with any Trotskyist group. This one of the
contradictions alluded to in the title. Rowse’s writings were according to Julia
Stapleton “accompanied by a sustained profession of Marxist faith. At its most
elementary level, this took the form of an insistence on the shallowness of any
history which does not see with understanding and sympathy how throughout the
ages the burden has always rested on the people.”.[4]
While Rowse was not overtly
hostile to Marxism, his empathy towards certain aspects of it needs explaining.
Readers could no worse than examine what the historian Robert Ashton had to say
when writing about the English Revolution, Ashton makes an interesting point on
why some historians while not being Marxist did use Marxist ideas.
Ashton said “The idea of
religious, political and constitutional issues as an ideological superstructure
based on foundations of material and class interests has been influential far
beyond the ranks of Marxist historians. It has indeed been adopted, in part at
least and with a radically different emphasis, by some of their more formidable
and determined opponents.
Julia Stapleton in her
review makes the point “he exemplified the wider tensions in British
intellectual life in the middle decades of the twentieth century: a residual
English nationalism and liberalism bequeathed by a declining but still
seductive Whig ideal and a Marxism which posed a serious challenge to, but
never entirely succeeded in displacing the latter This was certainly true of '
formative years in the 1930s. Such tensions were bound to become accentuated in
a writer whose own personality was perpetually under the strain of oppositional
forces. However, there is surely further scope for exploring these and other
intellectual currents which informed ' work. For example, another historian who
felt the charms of both Marxism and Whiggism in the 1930s and 40s was
Butterfield himself. ‘Anti-intellectualism married to a vehement patriotism was
also not exclusive to him, but was shared by other contemporary writers such as
Arthur Bryant and Francis Brett Young, as well as Betjeman”.
Rowse’s attitude towards Trotsky
is worth examining. Ollard only mentions Trotsky once in the book to tell us
that Rowse read his Literature and Revolution book. Rowse has a certain sympathy
towards the Russian revolution but only to a certain point. Moreover, you cannot compare his review to the
large number of hatchet jobs on Trotsky from several current historians who
have written on Trotsky.
Rowse writes “For the real
claim of this book is not that it is an impersonal, a scientific history;
though, indeed, it is a brilliant example of a very rare species, a history
that is inspired by the conception of society and the forces at work in it,
implied by historical materialism. This, in short, is a Marxist history, but
not the Marxist history of the Revolution; for that we shall have to wait for
some future Pokrovsky, altogether more impersonal, more objective; but, no
doubt, that will be a much duller affair whereas this is alive and tingling in
every nerve. It has all the brilliant qualities, and the defects, of its
author’s personality. It has extreme definiteness of outline, a relentlessness
towards his enemies that go with it, dramatic sense and visual power, a
remarkable sympathy for the moods of the masses with a gift for vividly
portraying them – the qualities we should expect from a great orator; and, in
addition, the political understanding of a first-rate political figure”.[5]
Rowse seems to hold a
respect for the writer, and this can be seen in this quote “It was impossible
to expect Trotsky to suppress his own personality in the book; not only for the
reason that he is Trotsky, but because, after all, he played such an important
part in the Revolution. To have suppressed him would be a falsification of
history. However, he does go much further towards impersonality than one would
have thought possible from one of his temperaments. He writes throughout in the
third person; he keeps himself in the background of the picture. The book gives
an impression of a highly exciting personality, but not one of egoism; and, with
one notable exception, it leaves an impression of fairness, at least not of
unfairness. In the light of events, he seems justified in his merciless
characterisation of the Tsar and Tsarina, Miliukov, Kornilov, Kerensky, and
many of the Socialists. The exception is, of course, Stalin”.[6]
This part of the review ends
Rowse’s attempt at an ‘objective’ review. Rowse clearly did not understand the
political divisions that separated Trotsky from Stalin. Contained within
Trotsky’s writing after the death of Lenin is his irreconcilable political differences
with Stalin. This does not really interest Rowse.
To him, the political
struggle was just a personal feud with Stalin. Rowse claims this has “has prevented him(Trotsky) from recognising
Stalin’s part in the Revolution. Whenever he comes near the subject, the
history tends to turn into a political pamphlet; and one is tempted to think
that Trotsky writes history, as the celebrated Dr Clifford was said to offer
extemporary prayer, for the purpose of scarifying his enemies. Nobody would
guess from his account that in the October Revolution, though Trotsky was the
President of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviet, which
organised the insurrection, Stalin was responsible for the organisation of the
Bolshevik Party, apart from the Soviet in which other parties were included, to
the same end. Over the struggle within the party in October, when Lenin was
forcing them into insurrection, and the party was divided in opinion, it seems
needless to attack Stalin, as the editor of Pravda, for trying to tone down the
differences: it is the function of a party organ to gloss over the differences
within the party, before the eyes of the outside world. Nor, though Trotsky allows
that Stalin’s defects are not due to lack of character, as in the case of
Kamenev and Zinoviev, the two opponents of the insurrection, is it reasonable
to attack him on the ground of his caution. There are leaders and leaders. It
is true that Stalin is not of the tempestuous, romantic type of revolutionary
like Trotsky, but he is nonetheless a great leader. He reminds one rather of
Burghley in our own history, who had a great gift for taking cover. But that
did not prevent him from being bold and courageous in policy, as in the case of
the great leap in the dark of 1559 when this country was committed finally and
decisively to the Protestant Reformation. And so, too, Stalin is the man, after
all, who have taken the plunge of committing Russia to the Five Years’ Plan”.
This glorification of Stalin
would not look out of place with other more modern ones carried out by historians
such as Ian Thatcher and Robert Service. His review of Leon Trotsky's book
does expose Rowse‘s own political agenda he was after all a member of the
Labour Party. Despite Rowse’s empathy
towards Trotsky, he shared the Labour Party’s inbuilt hostility to Trotsky and
Trotskyism.
Philosophy
There are many problems with
Ollards book. Perhaps the most serious is his blindness to Rowse’s indifference
to the philosophy of history. According to Edward Hallett Carr Dr A. L. Rowse, more justly
critical, wrote of Sir Winston Churchill's The World Crisis -- his book about
the First World War -- that, while it matched Trotsky's History of the Russian
Revolution in personality, vividness, and vitality, it was inferior in one
respect: it had "no philosophy of history behind it." British
historians refused to be drawn, not because they believed that history had no
meaning, but because they believed that its meaning was implicit and
self-evident. The liberal nineteenth-century view of history had a close
affinity with the economic doctrine of laissez-faire - also the product of a
serene and self-confident outlook on the world. Let everyone get on with his
particular job, and the hidden hand would take care of the universal harmony.
The facts of history were themselves a demonstration of the supreme fact of beneficent and apparently infinite progress towards higher things. This was the
age of innocence, and historians walked in the Garden of Eden, without a scrap
of philosophy to cover them, naked and unashamed before the god of history.
Since then, we have known Sin and experienced a fall; and those historians who
today pretend to dispense with a philosophy of history are merely trying,
vainly and self-consciously, like members of a nudist colony, to recreate the
Garden of Eden in their garden suburb. Today the awkward question can no longer
be evaded”.
To conclude Ollards book
provides the reader with a kind but basic introduction to A. L. Rowse. Two significant
failings of the book are that it does not address Rowse’s political perspectives
in any great detail and does not examine his lack of interest in the philosophy
of history.
Julia Stapleton adds “There is much self-indulgence in language and
imagery, and the footnoting is slipshod, even allowing for an understandable
contempt for the dry-as-dust nature of modern scholarship. At one point, for
example, the reader is referred to the already sizeable literature on the
subject without any further details (p. 68). Nevertheless, this is an extremely
rewarding book, and it has undoubtedly set the framework for any future studies
of Rowse”.
[1] Philosophy of History,
G Hegel, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm
[3] A. L. Rowse, Masterly
Shakespeare Scholar, Dies at 93-.OCT. 6, 1997- www.nytimes.com/1997/10/06/world/a-l-rowse-masterly-shakespeare-scholar-dies-at-93.html
[5] An Epic of Revolution:Reflections
on Trotsky’s History(The History of the Russian Revolution)
Published:
The End of an Epic: Reflections on Contemporary History, Macmillan, 1947
[6] An Epic of
Revolution:Reflections on Trotsky’s History(The History of the Russian
Revolution)
Published:
The End of an Epic: Reflections on Contemporary History, Macmillan, 1947
