The Collected Essays of J.H. Plumb: vol. 1, The Making of an Historian. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 1, 1989 by Joseph Sobran

THE ENGLISH HISTORIAN J.H. Plumb offers two volumes of his collected essays (another volume is due next year). They are pleasant reminders that, in England, readability and academic distinction still go hand in hand,

The Making of an Historian is the more interesting of the two volumes just issued, which is not to disparage The American Experience, but to note the greater range, depth, and personal engagement of the first volume. In it Plumb reviews his own career and the shaping of his mind under the great influences of G. M. Trevelyan and Sir Lewis Namier. He assesses these and several other renowned historians, including Toynbee, Spengler, H.G. Wells, Churchill, Macaulay, Sir Arthur Bryant, Fernand Braudel, A.L. Rowse, and Herbert Butterfield.

For Plumb, history is mainly English history. His other category is "human" history, and there seems not to be much in between. His philosophy is rather unfashionably progressive: he

sees history as essentially the story of man's increasing conquest of the material world. Much as he respects Namier's contribution to historical method-the exhaustive gathering of documentary detail to make it yield a wholly fresh portrait of a given period-he finds it, in the end, "myopic scholarship" that misses larger truths by failing to connect the targeted period to the general life of the nation. Plumb stands firmly with Trevelyan and Macaulay, the great generalizers who were not afraid to make large moral statements about the past and its personages. He thinks their excellence as stylists and their popularity is intrinsically related to their greatness as historians, and holds that this greatness has hardly been diminished by subsequent professional scholarship that has corrected them in many details of fact. History, he contends, may, like poetry and philosopby, have its imperishable masterpieces, and is not doomed by academic refinements to perpetual supersession.

For this reason Plumb is surprisingly favorable to H. G. Wells, whose immensely popular Outline of History he deems essentially sound, despite the contemptuous neglect it has received from academic historians: "Of course, there are mistakes in Wells, errors of fact, misinterpretations, etc., but the broad sweep of his outline is the true story of mankind, and because it is true, his prognostications carry the stamp of truth too." Wells preached not fatuous optimism but "qualified hope": "He knew there would be further tyranny, slaughter, and hatred but he also knew that science and education would persist."