“Do you know C.S. Lewis? In case you don’t, let me offer a brief character-sketch. Envisage (if you can) a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century, preoccupied with meditations of inelegant theological obscenity: a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry, and directed by a positive detestation of such profane frivolities as art, literature and (of course) poetry: a purple-faced bachelor and misogynist, living alone in rooms of inconceivable hideousness, secretly consuming vast quantities of his favourite dish – beefsteak-and-kidney-pudding; periodically trembling at the mere apprehension of a feminine footfall; and all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity and such reactionary nihilism as is indicated by the gleeful title, The Abolition of Man. Such is C.S. Lewis, whom Magdalen College have now put up to recapture their lost monopoly of the chair of Poetry. “

This is a quotation from a letter of Hugh Trevor-Roper to a fellow historian, the American Wallace Notestein, and, depending on your point of view, a specimen of his satirical style at its best – or its worst. Laura Cumming, reviewing HTR’s Letters from Oxford to the art historian Bernard Berenson, has barely a good word to say for him. See her Observer article of 6th August, 2006

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/aug/06/biography.historybooks

If Cumming is right, HTR has hardly a redeeming feature – other than apparently having written acutely about the differences between East and West Germany. He is variously described as exemplifying the viciousness of high-table Oxford, as being obsessed with status, as being parochial, philistine, grossly unobservant, patronizingly superior, gratuitously controversial, insufferably vain, humourless and entirely lacking in compassion, proportion, open-mindedness and a capacity for introspection. There is a grain of truth in this– HTR himself admitted to being a social snob – but he wasn’t that awful. A more balanced and intelligent appraisal is to be found in Neil Ascherson’s review, published last year in The London Review of Books, of Adam Sisman’s biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n16/neal-ascherson/liquidator

Ascherson rightly focuses on HTR as stylist who felt a close kinship with the Enlightenment historians Hume and Gibbon, and admired the satirical and ironical style so dear to the eighteenth century. He had no time for Scots nationalism (not so many did, in the 50’s) but felt a natural affinity for the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment. In one of his letters to Berenson he deplores the shifting of the centre of Scotch life “from the clear, dry, skeptical, eighteenth century city of Edinburgh to the morose, metaphysical, fuliginous air of Glasgow”. This is consistent with his general advocacy of clarity, openness and reason, and his chronic impatience with all that betrays those values whether it came from right or left – political demagoguery as exemplified by Lloyd George and Nye Bevan, political muddle as exemplified in that “vain, ineffectual man of Blood” Anthony Eden – whose folly over Suez in 1956 was endorsed by “the half-baked semi-fascist lower middle class (represented by the Queen and half the aristocracy”.

The redeeming feature of HTR’s acerbic barbs, apart from their high value as sheer entertainment (see the passage on CS Lewis, above) is that they are distributed without fear or favour to all and sundry. The gruesomely reactionary dons at Peterhouse, Cambridge, discovered to their dismay that in appointing him master they had mistaken their man. (Those gentlemen apparently dressed up in black on the anniversary of Franco’s death). Years earlier, writing to Berenson, HTR had concluded “that there is in England, as in other countries, a fascist world: the world of lower-middle-class conservatives who have no intelligence but a deep belief in violence as a sign of self-importance; who hate foreigners, especially if they come from ‘inferior’ races; and who, gratified with the spectacle of such violence against such people, even if it fails in its object, are prepared to shout, in unison, ‘il Duce ha siempre ragione’. In ordinary times, and given good politics by their leaders, these people remain below the level of public notice, quietly reading the Daily Telegraph and cultivating their gardens. But these are not ordinary times and the politics of our leaders are not good; and so out of frustration this extraordinary and disquieting spirit breaks forth.”

As Michael Postan intimated, HTR is indeed more Whig than Tory, ever ready to take on entrenched orthodoxies, whether of the left or right, anti-clerical (in the Enlightenment manner), ever ready to prick the bubble of clerical mumbo-jumbo (denouncing Jesuit charlatanism or as on TV ironically consoling a young man assailed by religious doubts), or messianic self-esteem (as in the case of Arnold Toynbee). It’s altogether characteristic that after briefly dabbling with Freemasonry he should have dropped his Masonic kit off a bridge.

There’s no denying that HTR had a special line in vitriolic invective – though that invective is sometimes curiously reminiscent of earlier models, as when in the manner of Byron he complains about the slovenliness of the Portuguese compared with “the ancient gravitas of even the poorest Spanish peasant.” And his invective is more qualified and nuanced than Cumming would have us believe. Take his use of the epithet “provincial” as a term of abuse which he seems to dish out de haut en bas to the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh as if from the lofty elevation of the Oxford high table. Nor does he simply have it in for the Celtic fringe. Helsinki is “this miserable parochial peasant-come-to-town northern backwater”. The Estonians and the Letts are “I suppose a sort of Welsh of the Baltic shores.”

But then, on closer inspection, the stance is ambivalent. What does it say about Oxford when it excludes the work of the French historian Fernand Braudel and the Annales school? It says – or rather HTR says - that it is a retrograde provincial backwater. The invective, too, is qualified. Just as there are Edinburgh Scots and Glasgow Scots, so there are on the one hand “the Black Welsh” (demagogues like Lloyd George and Bevan) and the presumably un-black, like King Arthur, and the poets George Herbert and Henry Vaughan.

It appears then, though one would hardly guess it from reading Laura Cumming’s review, that HTR held certain figures in very high esteem – people like the economist JM Keynes, the historian Braudel, the Hispanophile Gerald Brenan, and of course Bernard Berenson himself. Whether he was right to do so is another matter - Keynes is on record as remarking that Berenson – whom Ascherson drolly describes as “the maestro of highly paid authentication” was “rather a bad man”. Whether he was or wasn’t, one can well imagine that Berenson’s reprise of de Maistre grated somewhat on Keynes:

“As for men in the lump, the mass, they are about as rational as a drove of oxen or a stampede of buffaloes, and woe to him who tries to lead them by means of intelligible speech instead of brutish sounds and the skilful use of the lasso.”

HTR was less despairing of intelligible speech. To say that he was overflowing with the milk of human kindness would be overstating it, but he was certainly possessed of gaiety, an ancillary quality that entitles even those who administer vitriol to associate membership of the human race. The remarks on CS Lewis may not be impartial, but when did fun ever have much to do with impartiality? One is reminded of HTR’s comment on Keynes’s essay on Lloyd George “which for sheer irresponsible gaiety and brilliant euphoria out-logans Logan”. Logan Pearsall Smith, that is. It is this very same gaiety and euphoria that make HTR himself such an entertaining letter writer, whether he is describing the contest for the Regius chair of history at Oxford (which he eventually won) or the contest some years later for the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford which was won by HTR’s candidate, Harold Macmillan.

What he had to say about that contest shows not only that HTR had a heart, but that his heart was in the right place.

“Altogether, I am convinced that the real division, as it worked out was not political: it was a battle between the Establishment and the Rebels, between, on one hand, the solemn, pompous, dreary, respectable Times reading world which hates elections (indeed, hates life) and thinks that everything should be left to the experts, the professionals, themselves and, on the other hand, the gay, irreverent, genial, unpompous world which holds exactly opposite views, the world of the educated laity who do not see why they should be excluded from politics because they are not politicians, nor from intellectual matters because they are not scholars, nor from the university because they are not academics.”