Hugh Trevor-Roper might have been a great historian, taking his place in the Pantheon alongside the great historians of the past, from Xenophon to Macaulay. But the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject that he has made his own. By this exacting standard [Trevor-Roper] failed.
Adam Sisman’s assessment, in his compelling new biography (Hugh Trevor-Roper, Weidenfeld, £25), though I dissent from it, is a measured one. It is balanced by recognition of the extent of Trevor-Roper’s achievements. Many of Sisman’s reviewers have been less measured. In the New Statesman, Anthony Howard, after pronouncing ‘the real failure’ of Trevor-Roper’s career to have lain ‘in his inability to produce the great book that was expected of him’, describes him as ‘a superbly gifted journalist and reviewer’ who ‘left no lasting imprint as a historian’. In the Independent, Brendan Simms attributes Trevor-Roper’s ‘scholarly constipation’, and his ‘failure to publish a large-scale work’, partly to his wife’s expensive tastes, which ‘drove him to take on ever more journalistic commissions to pay the bills’, but principally to the waste of his time on ‘academic politics and personal vendettas’. In the same queue, the Economist’s anonymous reviewer writes of ‘tragic failure’, for Trevor-Roper ‘never wrote the great work that everybody expected of him’.
‘Everybody’ cannot include Trevor-Roper himself. He never saw himself as a Macaulay, let alone a Xenophon. He did record, in a youthful notebook, ‘my fond ambition to write a book that someone, some day, will mention in the same breath as Gibbon’, but it was the voice, not the scale, of The Decline and Fall that he emulated. The ambition was soon achieved, for The Last Days of Hitler has often been compared to Gibbon. People who complain that Trevor-Roper never wrote a great book will also tell you that The Last Days is a classic. A ‘great’ book, it seems, must be a long one.
He did write a very long book, on the English civil wars, though it was nowhere near as long as The Decline and Fall. It dissatisfied him and was left unpublished. Among other flaws it resisted the search for perfection of form that prevailed in his shorter books, The Last Days and The Hermit of Peking. It was long, not because he had any ambition to write a long book, but because, more than any other subject he attempted, it seemed to him to demand a large canvas. Literary bulk for its own sake repelled him, as did superfluous claims on the reader’s attention. Writing, he maintained, should be the tip of an iceberg. Much of the essence of the book appeared in Religion, the Reformation and Social Change, the crowning achievement among the many volumes of long essays where conclusions drawn from his arduous scholarship were distilled. It was the genre to which he discovered his talents to be best suited.
Despite his abandonment of the book on the civil wars and of other projects, the extent of his scholarly productions was prodigious. There is no record of under- publication to explain. The principles and habits of his writing were formed long before his marriage, and long before the battles for truths and principles that Simms interprets as ‘personal vendettas’. What Trevor-Roper never pursued was single-minded devotion to a single project. Instead, his mind crowded with competing interests; he cultivated diversity, which he made no less strenuous a virtue. His instincts were with the ‘philosophic historians’ of the 18th century. His mind, like theirs, roamed the centuries for comparative perspectives which can instruct the present and future, and which elude the specialist. His achievement, which marks him out from any other British historian, was to combine his generalising concerns with the imaginative gift that recreates the moods and textures of particular eras or moments.
Writers must follow where their convictions and abilities lead them. The pursuit of a magnum opus would never have bequeathed as much wisdom as the works he did publish. Those who suppose essays to be necessarily shallower than books might reflect — to choose almost at random — on his luminous studies of the influence of Erasmus on Renaissance intellectual and religious history; or on the depth of learning and originality of insight in the recent posthumous collection of essays, History and the Enlightenment; or on his essay ‘The Mind of Adolf Hitler’, which more than half a century afterwards is recognised by historians of Nazism as a historiographical landmark.
In old age he nearly finished another long book, on another subject that demanded one. From daunting documents in six countries and eight languages, Europe’s Physician, which has likewise appeared posthumously, built an interpretation of the last phase of the Renaissance around the life of the Huguenot doctor, Sir Theodore Mayerne. It is hard to say whether failing eyesight or a recurrence of self-dissatisfaction explains its non-completion, but its acknowledged stature, and that of his gathered essays, mock the ignorance of Howard’s claim that Trevor-Roper ‘left no imprint as a historian’. Today there are not many who read, unless from curiosity about bygone writing, his contemporaries A. J. P. Taylor, Christopher Hill and J. H. Plumb. By contrast, posterity is only beginning to get the measure of Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Oh yes, and then there is Robert Harris in the Sunday Times, to whom what matters is not the life of the mind but newspaper sensations. In response to Sisman’s suggestion that the enduring properties of Trevor-Roper’s writing might be of longer significance than his humiliating contribution to the Hitler diaries fiasco, Harris supplies a heavenly illustration of what Trevor-Roper used to call the modern parochialism, one not of place but of time:
Sadly I fear this is rather like claiming that Captain Edward Smith will one day be remembered for his unblemished 32 years’ service with the White Star Line, rather than the regrettable couple of minutes when he steered the Titanic into an iceberg.
In Harris’s and the Sunday Times’s view of the world I suppose it is.
Dr Worden is Hugh Trevor-Roper’s literary executor.
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