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

Six: Liberal Epic Before the Great War

SIX LIBERAL EPIC BEFORE THE GREAT WAR hardy, trevelyan, tolstoy, and keynes Lausanne In Gibbon’s Old Garden: 11–12 p.m. 27 June 1897 (The 110th anniversary of the completion of the ‘Decline and Fall’ at the same hour and place) A Spirit seems to pass, Formal in pose, but grave withal and grand: He contemplates a volume in his hand, And far lamps fleck him through the thin acacias, Anon the book is closed, With “It is finished!” And at the alley’s end He turns, and when on me his glances bend As from the Past comes speech—small, muted, yet composed. —Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy’s epic-drama The Dynasts, published in three parts in 1904, 1906, and 1908, and G. M. Trevelyan’s Garibaldi Trilogy, published similarly in 1907, 1909, and 1911, represent the self-conscious acme of the liberal epic tradition—one rooted in the stylistic, narrative, and cultural achievement of Gibbon: “The English aristocracy had not one centre but hundreds, scattered all over the country in ‘gentlemen’s seats’ and provincial towns. . . . Patronage had passed into thousands of other hands— though not yet into the hands of millions. Oxford University had done nothing for Gibbon, and royalty had nothing to say to him except, ‘Hey, what Mr. Gibbon, scribble, scribble, scribble!’ But the reading public of the day was just of the size and quality to give proper recognition to his greatness the moment his first volume appeared (1776)” (Trevelyan, English Social History 414). The Garibaldi Trilogy and The Dynasts foreground this idealized vision of England as a liberal aristocratic nation-state fighting heroically not just in defense of its own freedom, but to further that LIBERAL EPIC BEFORE THE GREAT WAR 221 of Europe, even humankind. The former stands as a particularly strong exemplar insofar as it knowingly inverts Carlyle’s reactionary Frederick the Great. Trevelyan deeply admired Carlyle, particularly his evocative and poetic early style, as against his “doctrinaire” editorializing of the 1850s, but Trevelyan’s history championed the liberal nationalism that Carlyle opposed with a Hegelian-Prussian alternative of patriarchal domination. While laboring over Frederick, Carlyle specifically mocked what would become Trevelyan’s great theme: “Mazzini’s presence . . . turned the conversation to Progress and ideal subjects, and Carlyle was fluent in invectives on ‘rosewater imbecilities .’ Mazzini, after some efforts to remonstrate, became very sad.” Mrs. Carlyle said to Mrs. Fuller: “These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped to bring his friends to the scaffold in pursuit of such objects, it is a matter of life and death.” All Carlyle’s talk that evening (she goes on) was a defence of mere force, success the test of right. If people would not behave well, put collars round their necks. Find a hero, and let them be his slaves. (Froude 1:402) Republican Italy’s subsequent repudiation of its liberal revolution for a Carlylean, imperial, and “successful” model under Mussolini appalled Trevelyan—and further dramatized the tenuous nature of his Edwardian epic history—as, indeed, did the dramatic collapse of the Liberal Party during the course of its composition.¹ Finally, it is worth noting that Carlyle colluded with Ruskin to expose the pretensions of the refined Gibbonian style so admired by Hardy and Trevelyan: “I am . . . reading you, and Gibbon! alternately—on Mahomet! I am going to stigmatize Gibbon’s as the worst style of language ever invented by man—its affectation and platitude being both consummate” (Ruskin to Carlyle, June 23, 1878, Correspondence 241). In sum, Trevelyan’s history further refined liberal epic in the face of influential preexisting attacks on both its theme and its style by an author he much admired—and was itself answered by the liberal disasters of 1911, World War I, and European fascism. Hardy’s epic-drama similarly represents the momentary ascendancy in a writer noted for his lyric and novelistic pessimism of an optimistic, progressive ideology: a triumph framed, like Trevelyan’s, by ironic negations, here Jude the Obscure (1895) and Time’s Laughingstocks (1909). This chapter thus will survey the Indian summer of this tradition on debacle’s verge. But the concluding chapter will take up my last and definitive example of how resilient epic has been in its liberal form—since World War I did not, as often main- 222 LIBERAL EPIC BEFORE...