Peter Clarke

‘Most of the great positive evils of the world,’ John Stuart Mill asserted in 1863, ‘are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced to within narrow limits.’ This sort of confidence in the reality and efficacy of progress now seems to set the 19th century distinctively apart from our own. In calling his study of Victorian Liberalism The Optimists Ian Bradley seeks to make good a more specific claim. He is writing about Liberalism with a big L – the creed of the British Liberal party as expressed by its leading politicians, publicists and men of ideas. And of all these men, it is the Grand Old Man who uniquely commands attention, the pre-eminence with which he awed his contemporaries hardly diminished with the passing of time. It still seems slightly presumptuous not to refer to him as Mr Gladstone. Like Dr Johnson, Colonel House, or Professor Joad, he has laid peculiar claim from beyond the grave to a conventional style of address.

It is odd that Lytton Strachey did not manage to strike up much fellow-feeling for Prospero. In an essay of 1904 on Shakespeare’s final period we find the puncturing remark (uncharacteristic of later deflationary measures only in the diffidence of the opening phrase): ‘To an irreverent eye, the ex-Duke of Milan would perhaps appear as an unpleasantly crusty personage, in whom a twelve years’ monopoly of the conversation had developed an inordinate propensity for talking.’ Yet Strachey shared with the ex-Duke a notable penchant for working his designs by command over light and air. The specific illuminating detail and the general atmospheric effect constituted his medium. Deadly in observation, lively in exposition, his biographical portraits made an irresistible impression upon his contemporaries.

There is sometimes rather a fine distinction between a paradox and a fallacy. It has often been remarked upon as a paradox that, in the great age of British expansion during the Industrial Revolution, the classical economists, especially Ricardo, should have taken such a dim view of the prospects for economic growth. But what if it can be demonstrated that this is a misreading of what Ricardo meant about the natural progression towards a stationary state? Such a revision is, in fact, one achievement of Maxine Berg’s exemplary study. By putting Ricardo’s contentions in context she offers a truly historical account of his thought, which shows that his model of ‘natural tendencies’ was a counterfactual or limiting case, intended precisely to identify the avenues of escape. One way out was via foreign trade. The other was via technical change.

It is doubly true these days that the experts are the last people we can rely on. We rely on them because the compartmentalisation of knowledge in every field means that they are the only guides left. The last people, however, because they have retreated into their specialised enclaves, content to communicate with each other rather than a lay public. It never was any use putting a mathematician on the spot for a nimble piece of mental arithmetic. Likewise, if you want to know the time, the day is long gone when you could ask a policeman. We have now reached the stage when it is impossible to get a straight answer out of so humble a practitioner as a historian. ‘Not my period’ has become proverbial as an attempt to pass off ignorance as professionalism. So where can we get the facts? Historians are voracious consumers of reference works and it is wholesome that they should occasionally produce volumes like these, serving common needs in an unpretentious way.

The intellectual in politics has often been tortured by the dilemma of his role. Either he has attempted to turn himself into a real politician, adopting the posture of his new travelling companions as men of action and decision, and jettisoning his bookish lumber as ‘not wanted on voyage’. Alternatively, he has minced around like a political eunuch, uneasily conscious that something is missing, but anxious that people should not suspect that it is his integrity. The career of Richard Crossman refuted these stereotypes rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached to the habits and training of an academic milieu without ever forgetting that it was as an intellectual in politics that he had a peculiar usefulness.