Studying Revenge

Ten years ago I was invited to Cornwall by Raleigh Trevelyan, executor of the historian A. L. Rowse, who had died a few months earlier, leaving Trenarren, the large house on which he had had a forty-year lease, with more than ten thousand books. He had bequeathed a hundred of them to the University of Exeter, to be selected by the Librarian, and one copy of each of his own books was similarly reserved. The whole library needed to be valued for probate, a formidable task which had to be done in double-quick time. This involved various inevitable short cuts and I had to take most of the inscribed or annotated copies on trust. When I returned a few months later, two fellow-booksellers joined me to help with the massive sorting operation. In a couple of days we had made a fair division, with three tons of books, as I was later told by the removal men, coming to Heywood Hill and four tons going to Howes of Hastings. Several catalogues followed, an entertaining illustration of Rowse’s friendships and rivalries, of a life devoted to an astonishing range of reading and writing.

At the time, his copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was never catalogued: a glance at the mass of his pencilled markings suggested that it deserved a great deal more than a two-sentence entry. Rowse had bought it in 1942, the first revised edition, published a year after its initial appearance. The names of its editors are not revealed on the title-page; it was presumably a team effort with donnish specialists making individual contributions and a general editor marshalling them into a balanced whole. Bernard Darwin was chosen to write the introduction, an elegant essay which he concluded by calling the Dictionary ‘a great book’. Nonetheless, ‘it is safe to say that there is no single reader who will not have a mild grievance as to what has been put in and what has been left out.’ Rowse’s grievances were far from mild. There were large numbers of writers, admittedly minor, whom he would have excluded altogether: I listed them as far as Mary Coleridge but there was no overall pattern, like a prejudice against women poets or hymn-writers, and I began to concentrate more on the authors of whom he approved. On page 1 he noted the omission of Lord Acton (‘power corrupts etc’) and ten pages later he criticized the sparseness of John Aubrey’s entry, which might be explained by the absence of Brief Lives in a standard edition: both Oliver Lawson Dick’s and Anthony Powell’s editions post-date the Dictionary of Quotations by several years. But this is nothing compared to his entry for Jane Austen: ‘Less than a column and a half. Fantastic! She should have 3 pp.’ While still in the As, he hadn’t much time for Matthew Arnold: like a fussy schoolmaster, he comments ‘exagg’ in the margin, or ‘Humbug’, or ‘Vic. prig’, or even ‘Silly’, but he also puts ‘Q’ against two quotations as worth using himself: ‘Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the human spirit’ and ‘the great apostle of the Philistines, Lord Macaulay’. If the editors had consulted him over their selection, he would have insisted on several poets – Donne, Coleridge, Shelley, A. E. Housman and G. K. Chesterton – having their entries better balanced: ‘Too much verse,’ he said, ‘not enough prose.’ In his view a whole host of writers had been undervalued: William Barnes and Max Beerbohm; Jeremy Bentham and J. A. Froude; Lord Clarendon and Oliver Cromwell; Edith Wharton and Logan Pearsall Smith; Sir Walter Raleigh and Edward Gibbon. He noted that Winston Churchill was only represented by a single quotation, from a speech he had made in the House of Commons in 1906; presumably the editors at Oxford would have felt that his speeches in 1940 were all too recent to be considered. Despite his own admiration for Shakespeare he thought sixty-seven pages, more than 250 columns, were ‘Far, far too much.’ Rowse’s crosses of disapproval were as common as his approving ticks. The columns devoted to Samuel Johnson were generally praised, but he put very strong crosses against two well-known sayings: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money’, and ‘We would all be idle if we could.’ There the ever-industrious Rowse was taking a personal view: it was as if he knew his copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations would be examined in the distant future for biographical evidence. Elsewhere he even scribbled his initials against quotations which particularly applied to him: ‘I was never less alone than by myself ’ (Gibbon); ‘I am resolved to write on, if it were only to spite them’ (Oliver Goldsmith); and Johnson’s remark when asked why Pope had written ‘Let modest Foster, if he will, excel/ Ten Metropolitans in preaching well’: ‘Sir, he hoped he would vex somebody.’ Francis Bacon was also highly approved, with three quotations highlighted: ‘A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green’; ‘A crowd is not company, and faces but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love’; and ‘Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man and working an exact man.’ To me this combination conjured up the picture of Rowse in his last ten years as graphically described by his housekeeper. He spent days and nights in his bedroom reading and rereading. When he wanted another book, he called to her and gave her precise instructions as to where she could find it, in a particular room on a particular shelf. He was often reminded by his earlier annotations of his original feelings about an author, but he could easily change his mind. He continued to harbour his grievances and thoroughly agreed with Oscar Wilde that ‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ Each generation promotes different writers and the Oxford editors should reflect these changes of taste. In 1941 Kipling and Tennyson were highly rated, Jane Austen and Trollope less so. Rowse’s viewswere not exactly typical of his contemporaries and they are unlikely to have come to the same damning conclusion on the contents as he did: ‘Thoroughly inadequate – one can never find what one needs.’ But his copy was heavily used and he doubtless enjoyed the constant process of annotation. He would have been disappointed that the current edition carries not a single word of his.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 14 ©  John Saumarez Smith 2007