1839-1907
Sir Spencer Walpole's death in 1907 left a gap in the front rank of
contemporary English Historians. To a volume of his collected essays,
published in the following year, his daughter, Mrs. F. Holland,
prefixed an admirable memoir of his private life and character, with
affectionate reminiscences of her father's 'strenuous work, his
universal kindliness, and his simplicity of soul.' On this personal
subject, therefore, little or nothing remains to be said. I will only
add that during several years of intimacy with him I had every reason
to feel honoured by his friendship, to set high value on his literary
judgments, and to appreciate his scrupulous intellectual integrity.
From that memoir I take the main incidents that belong to Sir Spencer
Walpole's personal biography. After leaving Eton he entered the Civil
Service at an early age, and worked for some time in the War Office,
until he was transferred to a position of larger independence. He was
subsequently appointed to the Governorship of the Isle of Man, where
he remained for about twelve years; and afterwards he became Secretary
to the Post Office until his retirement in 1899. In the discharge of
the duties of these offices he was indefatigable; his services were
fully approved by all with whom he came into public relations; yet
throughout these years he found time for hard and unceasing literary
work. In his earlier days he was a regular contributor to the
periodical press, mainly on questions of finance; he wrote the lives
of two Prime Ministers--his grandfather Spencer Perceval and Lord John
Russell--while from 1876 up to the year of his death he was engaged
upon his _History of England_. Five volumes were published, at
intervals, on the period between 1815 and 1857; and four subsequent
volumes, under the title of the _History of Twenty-five Years_,
brought the whole narrative up to 1880. But the proofs of the two
final volumes had not been revised by his hand, when he was struck
down by a sudden and fatal malady of the brain. Other recent
publications were a small book on the Isle of Man, entitled the _Land
of Home Rule; Studies in Biography_; and the collection of essays to
which I have already referred.
It is upon this History of England from 1815 to 1880 that Sir Spencer
Walpole's lasting reputation, as a man of letters, will rest. To have
combined the writing of such a book with the duties of a very diligent
official is no slight achievement; though one may observe that direct
contact with administration, with political affairs, and with
parliamentary leaders, is for the historian a distinct advantage. It
is worth remarking that his family connections, which brought Walpole
into the Civil Service, in no way biased his judgment on public
questions. The grandson of a high Tory Prime Minister, the son of a
Conservative Secretary of State, he was throughout his life an
advanced Liberal, with an unswerving trust in popular government as
essential to the welfare of his country and to the just and proper
management of its affairs at home and abroad. His literary bent was
evidently taken from hereditary association with politics, and from
his own official training. As an historian he enters with intense
interest into the strife of parties, the parliamentary vicissitudes,
into the swing backward and forward of reform and reaction, into the
exact causes and incidents that affected the rise and the fall of
ministries. In describing the state of manners at certain periods, and
the changes wrought in the national life by the efforts of philosophic
writers and philanthropists, his facts and figures are always ample
and accurate; he pays close attention to financial and economical
movements. As a politician he distrusted the spirited policy that
involved England in the warlike adventures and hazards of an eventful
and stirring time. The Afghan war of 1838-43 was, he said, the most
ruinous and unnecessary war which the English had ever waged. The
Crimean war he evidently regarded as a useless expenditure of blood
and money, which might well have been avoided. On Lord Beaconsfield's
Imperialism he passes severe censure: and the interference of that
statesman in 1877 to protect the Turkish Sultan against Russia is very
sharply condemned. He has even some doubt whether the purchase of the
Suez Canal Shares was a wise stroke of policy. This book, in short, is
a corroboration of the well-known remark that the history of our
country has been mainly written by Whigs and Liberals, with the
exception of a few authors who, like Hume and Alison, have hardly
preserved an historic reputation. Nevertheless, whether we agree or
not with the prudent and pacific views towards which Walpole
manifestly leaned, his narrative, his statements of disputable cases,
his distribution of the arguments for and against his conclusions, are
invariably accurate, fair, and dispassionate. His anxiety to give full
authority for facts and opinions is shown in an almost too copious
supply of foot-notes. Lord Acton, who found the late Bishop Creighton
too economical of these citations, compares his practice to Mr.
Walpole's if several hundred references to Hansard and the Annual
Register had been struck out from the History of England.
In his preface to the first volume the author explains briefly the
method that he has adopted. History, he says, may be written in two
ways--you may relate each event in chronological order, or you may
deal with each subject in a separate episode--and he tells us that he
has chosen the latter way. This method enabled him to introduce
sketches of the state of English society at different periods, by way
of illustrating his narrative, which are certainly attractive and
impressive. They are composed to a large degree upon the model set by
Macaulay, by grouping together a number of characteristic particulars
to bring out into strong relief the morals and manners of the time.
Walpole's picture of the Eton boy in the early nineteenth century, who
could write admirable Greek and Latin verse but knew not a word of any
modern language--'who regarded the Gracchi as patriots but had only an
obscure notion that Adam Smith was a dangerous character'--is almost a
parody of Macaulay's style. Nevertheless these sketches are on the
whole truthful and instructive, if we allow for some exuberance of
colouring that may have been thought necessary for artistic effect.
But Walpole studied literature, as the measure of intellectual
evolution, with the same interest that he devoted to economical and
administrative developments. His aim was to show how all kinds of
mental and material activity acted and reacted upon each other, how
the feelings and aspirations of the nation were reflected in
philosophy and in poetry, and how literary genius could stir the
imagination of the people. He observes that while English literature
had declined towards the close of the eighteenth century, it rose
again rapidly with the opening of the nineteenth century. For a short
time, indeed, the furious outbreak of the French Revolution had scared
men of letters into recoil from the optimistic speculations of the
preceding age--they abandoned the worship of Liberty. But the storm
blew over; and a general revival of literary animation signalised the
end of the long war-time, with a magnificent efflorescence of poetry.
Walpole records, as notable signs of this intellectual expansion, the
appearance of women in the field of literature, the immediate success
of the two famous reviews, the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, and
the rapid growth of journalism. The whole subject of mental progress
has, indeed, a peculiar charm for him. He insists that 'the history of
human thought is the most comprehensive and the most difficult subject
which can occupy the student's attention, far more interesting and
important than the progress of society.' He would probably have agreed
with Coleridge that knowledge of current speculative opinions is the
surest ground for political prophecy; and he delights in tracing back
to distant sources the religious movements of the nineteenth century.
He declares that the heroic measures introduced by legislation within
our own recollections are the links of a continuous chain extending
from a prehistoric past to an invisible future. We have here a writer
who in one chapter handles complicated statistics and economical
calculations with obvious relish, and turns from them with equal
pleasure to abstruse disquisitions on the filiation of ideas and the
march of mind.
There are at least two chapters in the History that exemplify the
attention given by Walpole to ecclesiastical controversies, and to the
significance of the antagonism between the New Learning and dogmatic
orthodoxy. In his fourth volume the story of the Oxford Tractarians is
related at some length, and he remarks on the singular coincidence,
that almost simultaneously with the secession of the English High
Churchmen the Free Church was established by disrupture from the
Established Church in Scotland. He affirms that both these schisms, so
different in motive and direction, had their origin in events dating
from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The disintegrating
forces of geology, astronomy, and scientific research generally upon
the received tradition are examined; the beginning of modern Church
reform is noted; and in a chapter of the final volume of the _History
of Twenty-five Years_ it is maintained that the great question before
the religious world in the middle of the nineteenth century was the
possibility of resisting the inroads of science. He describes the
vigour with which the polemical campaign was conducted on both sides;
how the orthodox position was assailed by writers of the _Essays and
Reviews_, by the criticism of Bishop Colenso, by Broad Churchmen and
the champions of free thought; how it was defended by prosecutions in
the ecclesiastical courts and in appeals to the Privy Council from
both parties. It was certainly a remarkable epoch in the history of
opinions, when the country was agitated by the ardent zeal of
disputants over questions of ritual and dogma that now seem to have
fallen into cool neglect; and Walpole gives, as usual, a careful array
of the particular cases, with the points in debate, and the
characteristics of the prominent leaders in each party. To estimate
the position of the clergy as a body, and to show, as Walpole
undertakes to do, that in the middle of the nineteenth century they
were losing caste as a class, and that between the middle and end of
that century they had fallen in social status, was a much more
difficult and delicate problem. All generalisations upon the condition
of society in times that have passed away, however recently, are of
doubtful value, because the evidence of documents must always be
incomplete, and even personal recollections are partial and become
indistinct; they are all seen in a fading and uncertain light.
Moreover the chronicler of disputations over ritual and articles, and
of matters concerning churches and the clergy, may be said to move
over the surface of the spiritual waters; and Walpole draws nearer to
the deeper undercurrents when he appeals to the higher literature for
signs of alternating tendencies of religious thought in that
generation; though the famous stanzas from Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,'
which he quotes at the end of his chapter, represent rather the poetic
than the philosophic conclusions of thinkers in the nineteenth
century.
But Walpole was quite aware of the difficulties that beset any writer
who endeavours to relate the history of a very recent period,
especially of that part to which his own lifetime belongs, and to pass
judgments on the conduct or opinions of statesmen and writers who may
be still living, or have only lately departed. Yet, as Lord Acton has
said, the secrets of our own time cannot be learnt from books, but
from men; and Walpole's social relations, his personal popularity, his
familiarity with official business, and his literary culture, provided
him with valuable opportunities for composing his last four volumes
from direct impressions of his subject, for preserving the right
atmosphere. His studies in biography show an aptitude for personal
delineation; and in one of his earlier volumes there is a full-length
portrait of Sir Robert Peel, executed with much skill and
comprehension. Therein lay the artistic quality of his work; he aimed
at the presentation of individual character and action; he laid stress
on the influence of remarkable men on their country's fortunes; for
true historical art is concerned with bringing prominent figures into
formal relief, and with arranging a mass of disorderly facts under
some scheme that produces a definite impression. Otherwise Walpole's
style was clear, level, and straightforward; with no pretence to be
ornamental. Perhaps the best example of his talent for well-ordered
and compact narrative is found in two chapters of the fifth volume of
the History, which contain an excellent summary of the rise and
expansion of British dominion in India during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, with a very correct appreciation of the causes
and circumstances to which that memorable episode in the annals of the
British Empire is due.
Walpole lived just long enough to bring his historical work, which
occupied him for about thirty years, to the end which he had assigned
to it. In traversing such an extensive and varied field of arduous
labour some errors and shortcomings were inevitable, for the history
of England in the nineteenth century is the history of the British
Empire at its climacteric, of moral and material changes and
developments more numerous and perhaps more important than in any
former century. Nor did he limit his survey to the particular period
that he had chosen; for his theory, as he has stated it, of the
function of history, was that it shall not merely catalogue events but
shall go back to an analysis of their causes, and of the general
progress of the human family. He believed, with Lord Acton, that the
recent past contained the key to the present time. It has been said
that Walpole undertook to do for the nineteenth century what Lecky did
for the eighteenth century: and we may agree that both historians have
filled up, with distinguished merit and ability, large vacant spaces
in the history of our country. Perhaps Lecky had more of the
philosophic mind, while the distance of time that lay between that
writer and his period enabled him to see men and things in their true
proportion, and to judge of events by their outcome. Walpole, on the
other hand, wrote under the disadvantages as well as the advantages of
close proximity to the scenes which he described; and the conclusion
of his history marks the fall of the curtain on a drama of which the
final acts are still to be played out.