A Man of Contradictions by Richard Ollard

Author:Richard Ollard [Richard Ollard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571302864
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2013-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

The English Spirit, by contrast, shows Rowse’s range, his curiosity, his sensibility, at its most charming. The piece on the Public Record Office discussed in Chapter 18 is here. The sketch of Queen Elizabeth at Rycote, evoked by a visit in the company of Bruce McFarlane, exemplifies his visual and poetic quality, its haunting overtones reminiscent of Kipling. ‘The Spanish College at Bologna,’ like all the best topographical writing, lets the place observed make the reader aware of the person observing it. The portrait of Sarah Churchill in Old Age, brilliant, sympathetic, witty, has more than a look of its author at any age. Yet for all its marked and agreeable idiosyncrasies the book is free from egotistic rant. A review of his clerical colleague at All Souls, F. E. Hutchinson’s1 edition of George Herbert is notable in its perceptions and mercifully free from cheap gibes about the irrationality of religious belief. High spirits, vivacity and love of life are not vitiated, as in some later works, by vulgarity and spleen. In a word the book is generous, not least to Leslie Hotson ‘and his faithful accomplice, Miss O’Farrell’ who was later to devil indefatigably for Rowse in the British Museum and at the Public Record Office.

That the book, for all its rewarding by-ways, marked a stage on the main road is made clear by its dedication to G. M. Trevelyan, by giving pride of place to an understandably adulatory essay on Churchill and by the tone and content of the preface. Like the dedication it may call to mind Rowse’s remarks on the kind of history one should write if one wishes to be honoured by the Order of Merit. Perhaps the irreverence of youth is giving way to the sober judgment of maturity. Perhaps, like the elder Pitt, Rowse knew that he could save the country and that no one else could. He had seen the country led by false political doctrine from the apparent strength of a world power to within a hairsbreadth of ruin. To be heard at last, to be respected at last, after a decade of Cassandra-dom, must stimulate any but the most inert, and Rowse was never that. He had resigned his Parliamentary candidacy in 1943 so that route was closed. But he might still influence events if he could establish himself as a public figure.

Such considerations probably played a part in his decision, against Veronica Wedgwood’s advice, to move to a larger publisher. He had flirted briefly with Collins but Macmillan won the day. On 5 January 1944 Rache2 Lovat Dickson, the Canadian-born chief executive of the firm wrote to say how much he was enjoying A Cornish Childhood and it was from Macmillan that The English Spirit was launched the following December in a generous edition of 10,000 copies. For wartime, and for the years of paper-rationing that lasted until the early fifties, this was big stuff. Rowse, never a tranquil and rarely a grateful author, had been constantly complaining to Cape that they were letting his books go out of print.

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