"I suppose you are clearing nettles at Eydon"

When last we left our vigilant, cheery Conservatives, they were posturing in the yard, disposed upon a rifle muzzle for a shooting stick, boasting of hiding our concealed handguns from the police. That rarity of cheek deserves, need I say, to be balanced by a nod to the breed's flair for the derivative, which I don't think can be better exposed than by a nifty undergraduate computer scan of their works - never neglecting broadcast transcripts - for quotations handed down to them from the real Augustan age. Or, one could simply plop one of their toadies into a club chair in a lobby bar, and ply his downy maw with trendy physic.

The process of weeding the political garden of nettles - fraudulent authorities and spurious invasions of irrelevancy, i.e., demagoguery - is not worth the bother for its own sake, because as we are advised, nettles do recur. What is advised, is the exorcism of their incubi, as Trevor-Roper put it to Catto, from our own mind. Gardens and politics are inherently nettlesome, the mind is our only resort. Meanwhile the pomposity persists, of poseurs in American Conservatism's clotted patch of precepts, and needs from time to time a virile fork. We'll always have nettles. The notion is to limit their penetration.

    I know of only two ways .. One is sodium chlorate, which

    kills everything in the ground, and seeps, carrying its

    universal death, in all directions, and leaves the ground

    poisoned for six months; the other is digging them up,

    root by root, and all their subterranean tentacles. This

    is by far the best way, and very therapeutic to the mind

    if it is congested by such extraneous matter as Oriel

    College, the Provost, Wyclif, Watergate, etc. Of course

    they come again, but fewer, and then you have the pleas-

    ure of a further spell of therapy.

Trevor-Roper goes on to implore Catto's patience with a number of scholarly questions then confounding him, for lack of genuineness in documents entrusted to his authentication. Then, elegantly, he closes his letter with reference to a lately published denunciation of one pompous poseur by another -- I enjoyed the phrase, 'her ego-ism was a bore'. Here, unwittingly, Trevor-Roper endows our talkshow twits of American Conservatism with a phrase from the satires of Juvenal, which you may rely implicitly on hearing recited very soon, given the recent publication of these letters. A free jpg of my dog's first birthday party, to the intrepid reader who first roots this out. Living in the country, I have no Fox.

Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?

Who could endure the Gracchi

complaining of sedition?

Hugh Trevor-Roper
27 August 1973©

One Hundred Letters

Richard Davenport-Hines

  and Adam Sisman, editors

op. cit.

Saturday commute clxviii: To the angels of the "deep state"

Hitler's struggle with the Army
General Staff is one of the most
interesting features of Nazi his-
tory during the war, for the Gen-
eral Staff was the one centre of
opposition which Hitler, though
he succeeded in ruining it, was
never able to conquer.

The American President's great
struggle with the profession of
law, nicely revealed in the text
of the week, thrusts one back in
memory to the distinction raised
in a similar context, by one of
the gifted teacher-writers of our
time, the late Hugh Trevor-Roper. 

Although a tremendous carnage, to
return the compliment, distinguish-
es the wake of the degenerate Pres-
ident, a conquest has not occurred.

One reads in Trevor-Roper, of in-
formation on events never seeming-
ly relevant to our wondrous age,
framed with such penetration of
their human constancy that it is
impossible to dismiss them from
the mind. It might have happened
in the European Witch Craze, or
in Oliver Cromwell's Parliaments,
even in the bunker of the suicid-
al Führer, but from the stunning
writing and scholarship of Trevor-
Roper, human conduct shows its un-
dying facets with the memorability
it deserves. It strikes one that
it is against this, that the Amer-
ican President's struggle with the
legal profession truly is defined:
in the recognition of what he does.

Hugh Trevor-Roper
  Lord Dacre of Glanton
1914-2003

The Last Days of Hitler
1947
Sixth Edition
1987
Macmillan©

The Crisis of the Seven-
  teenth Century
  Religion, Reformation,
  and Social Change
1967
Harper & Row©

Do some years not yield? The book of the year

  Chiefswood is wonderfully beau-
  tiful. Everything, this year, 
  is a month late, so I see it as 
  it normally is at the end of May. 

No garden flowers are out: their time is not yet; but everything is green, and the green is broken, unexpectedly, here and there, by great red and white rhododend-ron flowers, still in bloom, which appear through cracks of space across the sparkling water of the stream. I thought that I would take out the [tractor] yester-day, but when I saw the long grass full of corn-flowers, I had not the heart to cut them, and deferred my action. I am enjoying being here, though alone and feeding on cold ham, kippers and spring onions.

                I am tired of endless committees. 

                Why should I wear out my life sit-
                ting on them, et propter vitam vi- 
                vendi perdere causas? So I wander
                in these delightful glades, and 
                pause to read literature, not agen- 
                da or minutes, and to write to you. 

                We long to see you back. 

An excerpt from what I saw

in the book of the year, a

carrying forward in radiant 

form. I celebrate merely to 

open it.

To Trevor-Roper, Chiefswood
had much in common with Hor-
ace's Tivoli, a retreat for
restoration, from the zenith
of imperial pomp. He writes
to his step-son in America,
regretting his refusal of a
large capital transfer from
his mother, the daughter of
the Earl Field Marshal Haig.
His subjects are the young
man; the distinctions between
practices in pluralism, toler-
ance, faith, and manners in
England and America; and as
we see, the consolations of
onions and the legitimacy of
cornflowers.

Juvenal
55 - 138
Satires
 Book 8
   "and for the sake of
   living, lose what makes
   life worth living"

Willem de Kooning
1904 - 1997

André Kertész
1927

Hugh Trevor-Roper
1914 - 2003
100 Letters from Hugh
  Trevor-Roper
28 June 1969
Richard Davenport-Hines
  and Adam Sisman, editors
Oxford University Press, 2014©

Origins of Wednesday lxi: Navigating 2018

Judging by the books that have 

landed here lately in the hor-

izontal state, I have my work

cut out for me in remedying a

protracted supineness of one's

own. I still very much prefer

to read in printed volumes, by

the way, despite embracing the

sudden cheapness of digital

facsimiles. Having launched

this blog some years ago, how-

ever, I find the digital stor-

age of information to impose a

terrible handicap on recollec-

tion, and I had thought this

was supposed to work the other

way. From this desk, I am un-

interruptedly reminded of com-

prehensive reading lists in the

spines of books arrayed about

me, their verticality confirm-

ing no longer their mass, but

their conditional absorption 

in the past, augmented some-

times by new peers and revi-

sions, gladly. Say what I may,

flicking a finger on a tablet

strikes me as a very primitive

way of traveling through the

contexts and relationships of

reflective assimilation. Yes,

a fashionable child could set

one straight, but I couldn't

spare the time. A speech, for

example, in Shakespeare, might

come to mind in assessing the

new American government, but

why lose track of its illumin-

ation in the commentaries, of

the alert delectation of years?

My college professor on the

revolution in France, Mr Darn-

ton, has given himself such a

second life in the apostleship

of digital libraries, that I

half feel the breeze of a mech-

anical axe against my neck, to

offer this distinction. But at

least I can look up to a shelf

on that revolution, not far at

all from that of Beethoven's,

Bukharin's, and Balanchine's, 

too, and feel I might begin to

revisit what I'd like to grasp.

Beyond all measure, it's the

writers whose perspectives em-

brace a cultivated syllabus,

who account for a place in

print. Probably the leading

exemplar of this is history's

greatest victim of exception's

proof of the rule, Hugh Trevor-

Roper, once fooled by forgery,

but never by shabby argument.

In himself he's a shining city,

besmirched by one phony tweet.

Trevor-Roper was gorgeously good

to his mind, for which the famous

companionship of his Letters is

generally accepted in evidence;

but they are no less infused 

than his Essays by a concert

of information in phenomenally

harmonious orchestration. One

is better off, conditioning

oneself for 2018, to read one

of his essays on the 17th Cen-

tury, than by following contem-

porary hysteria down its well-

bored rabbit hole. In him we

break not merely tautology; we

break its mold, and dine grate-

fully on his civet de lapin.

More than supported, his

style is inspired by the dili-

gent exercise of lifting fine

titles off the tabletop, even-

tually as upright companions -

enablers, yes, but also inter-

locutors of wit one can trust.

The real curse of the nitwit

is his genius for hauling down.

Anyone may denounce him, 

loosed in corridors of power.

To survive his stain is good,

to salvage followers, better.

Letters of love from our lib-

rary, to share in plain sight.

        The fact that Whig resistance broke Stuart despotism

        does not mean either that the Whig theories of the

        constitution and liberty were intellectually right or

        even, in themselves, progressive. Nor does it mean

        that such theories, of themselves, entailed the con-

        sequences which followed the victory of the party 

        professing them. Similarly, the fact that Calvinist

        resistance was necessary to the continuation and de-

        velopment of the intellectual tradition does not en-

        tail any direct or logical connection between them.

        A philosopher, in a time of crisis, may have to put

        on a suit of armour .. but that does not make the ar-

        mour the source of his philosophy.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

The Crisis of the Seventeenth

  Century: Religion, Reformation,

  and Social Change

    The Religious Origins of the Enlightenment

Harper & Row, 1967©

Lines for breakfast

Victoria is back, Paul 
is not, which has been 
an obdurate suspension. 
Here I interlineate, in
the company of almost
too many extraordinary
counselors and confi-
dants in printed form.

A poet I've cited sever-
al times and an essayist
of similar frequency con-
verged for me without war-
ning, other than by traits
they observe in common.

   Penser c'est l'homme. They aren't
   heedless flowers that blow and
   perish; they have thought their
   lives into shape, a shape worthy
   of survival. Dust and heat, blood
   and tears, thought and vigil cre-
   ated the art of Keats, as his let-
   ters show; and Achilles was an in-
   tellectual, the only intellectual
   among the heroes of Homer.. And 
   the rest of life, the interstices
   of this grand design - well, it is
   enough, by the pleasures of society,
   and the taste of divine solitude, to
   keep melancholy at bay.

  

   You can't tell anything much about who you are
   By exercising on the Romantic bars.
   What are the wild waves saying? I don't know.

   And Shelley didn't know, and knew he didn't.
   In his great poem, "Ode to the West Wind," he
   Said that the leaves of his pages were blowing away.


In May of 1944 the British Army major's 
journal entry confides a resolution to 
write a great work of history, some day; 
and I think, to all of those who knew him 
(I've been close with several who did), 
his framing of stirring ambition in terms 
of Homer's unexemplary hero must suggest 
certain regrets of his subsequent life, 
which to me is radiantly companionable.

The excerpt from David Ferry comes from
a work collected in his superlative Be-
wilderment, "Ancestral Lines." Studying
Schumann, Shelley, a friend and a dog, 
the expansion of ancestry enriches exact-
ly as it did for Trevor-Roper, the ques-
tion he's addressing - And who it is I am
because of them.

Here nothing so grand is at stake. I also
go less far in attribution to others, than
Ferry's figurative "I" speculates here, on
going. What immortal warmth there is to be
distributed in this language, comes dialec-
tically, I suppose, but somehow in a timely
way, in the candour of good company. Doubt
will see one through, and an English dog.






















Hugh Trevor-Roper
Lord Dacre of Glanton
The Wartime Journals
op. cit.

David Ferry
Bewilderment
op. cit.

Dominik Sadoch
  Louis Cattelat photography

One fellow to another

I shall venture to defend Gibbon to you.
I don't find him smug. It seems to me
that, behind the genuine belief in prog-
ress there is always, in Gibbon, a sub-
tlety, a sensitivity, occasionally a mel-
ancholy, which is totally absent from
(say) Voltaire. I suppose I have, by now,
got so used to the formal style that I
hardly notice it, and I enjoy all the 
more the urbanity, the irony, the human-
ity, which underlies it. Also I love the
marvelous precision of language, the ex-
act choice of words to convey such del-
icate shades and ambiguities of meaning.

   Do write again: I love
   your letters, and I      long to hear from you.    Do keep well. I wish I    could see you.


        yours ever
        Hugh

































Hugh Trevor-Roper
Regius Professor of History
  Oxford
Master of Peterhouse
  Cambridge
Lord Dacre of Glanton 
Letter to Gerald Brenan
  [fragment]
11 March 1968

Richard Davenport-Hines
  and Adam Sisman, editors
One Hundred Letters from
  Hugh Trevor-Roper
Oxford University Press, 2014©

Tassos Paschalis
Northern Greece
2013

Class in a very small place

  With apologies to the historian

  of Dien Bien Phu, a cul de sac

  we go on plagiarising, the sec-

  ret lives of academics somehow

  go on fascinating us all, given

  their mode of turning up, as if

  to concentrate original lessons.

  In Britain, the mortar is minus-

  cule, the pestle seldom absent.

  From central New Jersey to Lang-

  ley or the Cosmos Club, a lunch

  can be attended, any given day.

        I do feel our Government is making

        rather a fuss over the Falklands.

        As I am having lunch in the H of C

        on Tuesday with Chris Patten - a 

        former pupil and I think no great 

        friend of Mrs T - no doubt I'll

        learn more.

Richard Cobb

Fellow of Balliol

My Dear Hugh

  Letters from Richard Cobb

  to Hugh Trevor-Roper 

  and others
    20 May 1982

Tim Heald, editor

Frances Lincoln, Ltd., 2011©