Liberal Epic: The Victorian Practice of History from Gibbon to Churchill

Epilogue

EPILOGUE the warm and visible hand of liberal epic War had been the severest test of political and social character, laying bare whatever was feeble, and calling out whatever was strong; and the effect of removing such a test was an untried problem. —Henry Adams, History of the United States of America And I detect that most men who serve in armies recruited in liberal states are disturbed by the inconsistencies of defending a free society by an institution that is its ideological antithesis—dictatorial, unrepresentative, and often extremely unjust. —John Keegan, “The Historian and Battle” This study’s focus on the persistence of epic makes it logical to conclude before the cultural change wrought by World War II, the so-called Best War Ever, which reenergized the belief in war as a positive solution and war leaders as powerful agents.¹ Since my argument has demonstrated how effectively epic survived despite the cultural and historical forces arrayed against it in 1688, 1815, 1851, or 1914–18, it seems superfluous to continue the argument once 1939–45 rendered epic’s task so much easier. Nonetheless, beneath this story of the confident revival of epic history in the bright light of World War II (from which was born, decades later, the History [alias Hitler] Channel with its unflinching view of history as war) bubbles a counterplot of doubting the heroic and, worse yet, fearing that this greatest of liberal victories encoded the deepest self-betrayal. For, it was dreaded, maybe the West prevailed precisely because it was more coolly scientific, less likely to surrender itself to the warm embrace of some martial hero, and more prone to rely on the productivity of its vast factories in Detroit. A survey of key figures from the three liberal nations central to this study—France, America, and England—will grant final insight into the price liberalism willingly paid, in its intellectual coherence and sympathetic humanity, to remain heroically agential. In 1946 H. G. Wells died convinced by the return of war (and unmoved by final victory) that his high hopes for scientific history to educate the world’s citizens to see beyond their borders, beyond liberal nationalism 284 EPILOGUE and its inevitable descents into competitive warfare, had failed. (Contrast the heady 1922 conclusion to his shortened Outline of History [“Can we doubt that presently our race . . . will achieve unity and peace”] to his “Adapt or Perish”—with strong emphasis on the latter—conclusion to the 1945 edition.)² Before suffering this personal, authorial, and racial tragedy, however, Wells, with his more usual upbeat confidence, had often best summed up my study’s key themes: “Winston Churchill [and] George Trevelyan . . . remained puerile in their political outlook because of its [war fantasy’s] persistence” (Experiment in Autobiography 76). In the larger passage, Wells restates the liberal anxieties of Milton, Locke, Vico, and Rousseau from which this study commenced: “I think there is no natural bias toward bloodshed in imaginative youngsters, but the only vivid and inspiring things that history fed me with were campaigns and conquests” (75). Such a late reiteration of a long-standing article of liberal faith dramatizes the fundamental liberal epic paradox. If there is no natural pleasure in such matter, why did liberal societies and individuals for so long prove unwilling to forgo it? Why did they continue to devote some of their best energies to producing and consuming new versions of it from Pope and Gibbon to Macaulay and Churchill? Indeed why did Wells take till 1914, when his fictional uncle Edward Ponderevo was able to articulate so pithily the basic objection in 1908: “He became in those days the terror of eminent historians. ‘Don’t want your drum and trumpet history, no fear’” (Tono-Bungay 214)? Finally, why did liberalism so eagerly interpret the lessons of World War II to rejuvenate war history? In his 1908 novel, six years before the Great War, and in his 1934 memoir, six years before the greater one, Wells mocks his own adolescent pleasures in imagining battle and his dreams of heroic agency. He then extends that mockery to Hitler—and Churchill. Within a decade, however , Churchill’s triumphs had exploded such sarcastic equivalencies. His leadership and his histories had dramatically redeemed wars, heroes, and their agency. In the early twenty-first century, Niall Ferguson, once in The Pity of War (1999) a historian of the horrific consequences of military solutions, became an ardent disciple of Churchillian...