biography as history...biography, they are in part refusing to keep bad company of this kind. they...

Biography as History

F R A N C I S W E S T

T H E A N N U A L L E C T U R E

delivered to

r h c Australian Academy of the Humanities

at its Fourth Anmiiil General Meeting at Canberra 011 1 5 May 1973

Australian Academy of the Humanities, Proceedings 4, 1973

E V E N in learned libraries, biography is apt to be regarded as a branch of literaturr or literary criticism, rather than as history. Such a cl:inihc.mon

milst natiirally be rc~ardcci with awe by historians who use tlie libr.iries, even while they remember that Frederic William Maitland's classic work on Anglo- Saxon England, Domesday Book and Beycirid, was once to be found under the catalogiic heailing Eschatoh,qy, the science of Last Things. Still, wlicii famous historians support librarians in the adage 'biography is for gentlemen; history is for scholars', any historian who engages in biography must pause to icflect. before this Academy one reflects in good company. The Past President, Sir Keith Hancock, and his official ancestor as Chairman of the Australian Hii~ixi~ii- tics Research Council, Professor James Auchmuty, have both resiri.leJ biography as the proper concern of an historian. W h o disagrees? Within the last quarter of a century, to go no further back, Sir Lewis Naniier anJ Professor Geoffrey Elton have done so: men who are historians' historians, at the peak of the profession. Having written one biography and bcing presently ctigagcd upon another, this is hardly a view I can share, but obvioi~'ily there is a caie against biography, as a fit occupation for an historian, to be answered.

Namicr's case against biography was put in 1952.~ Biography, lie then wrote, was the ritualistic exercise ofEnglish historians, just as portraits \VUG the ritual for English painters in oils. Biographers, he said, feared the unbounded fields of history and the boundaries of a single life because they lacked creative imagination. They also lacked professional standards. They dubbed in their subject's 'times* from elementary textbooks. They could pick and choose iinong their subject's papers to illuminate the single hnnian being. unlike the historian who must use all the evidence and look at the lives of niiitiy men. Even granted that biography was a proper activity for an historian, biographers still lackcd the essential qualification in normal and abtiorni~l psychology, being rather in the position of the girl who, applying for the post of children's nurse, offereil as her qualification that she herself was once a chili.1.

Elton's case against biography, put with great vigour in 1967 ,~ sliiircs some of. and adds others to, Namier's objections to the study of a single life. Even, said Elton, if a man's death marked the end of an epoch-and how rarely that happened-his birth did not, for the formative years which arc the proper concern of a biographer arc of no significance for the historian of an age which is unaware of them. N o man so completely clominatcs an iige that its history


can be written in terms of him. Biography should not therefore be concerned with history, except in so far as, on very rare occasions, it centres upon, or emanates from the individual whose life is being written. Biography, in Elton's view, should be concerned with the formative years, the private relationships and petty concerns which have little to tell the historian of an age. And if historians ventured outside their own profession into such another discipline as psychology, they usually picked the wrong or out-ofdate school of thought in that profession. They might still call in Dr Freud when psycholo.,' w t s were poised for a mass flight from Vienna.

What both of these distinguished historians have said, in effect, is that con- centration on the life of a single individual means a false perspective on his times, that the background gets out of focus, and that a biography demands other skills than those of an historian which are either difficult or impossiblc to acquire. The strength of this case against the historian as biographer lies precisely in the fact that Naniicr and Elton point to some of the difficulties that any biographer faces: the relation of a man or a woman to his or her times, the need to see the world not only as the man or woman who is the subject of the biography saw it, but also through the eyes of other contemporaries. Yet their case against biography, although it seems in principle to rule it out as a proper activity for an historian, is not on closer examination a matter of principle at all but of practice, as indeed Naniier explicitly admitted when he wrote the biography of Charles Townshend, the character study of King George 111, and collected materials for his own widow to write his own biography ;8 and asElton implicitly admits when his Tudor revolution in government and the practice of Tudor government centre on the work of one man: Thomas Cromwell, whose formal biography Elton has always declined to write. Perhaps Naniier and Elton, as in origin central Europeans, argue the case too strongly through their enjoyment in chastising Ie vice anglais, for even with the major biographical difficulty of the relationship of man or woman to the 'times', their objections would obviously vanish if there were a sufficient body of good historical scholarship into which a single life could be fined and against which a single life can be set in perspective. The existence of such a body of historical scholarship depends, as does the possibility of biography, not on the principles involved but upon the evidence available. Biography, with a single life, like history, with many lives, is not the study of the past, but only the study of the surviving evidence from the past. If there is no evidence, there is no past; it is dead and gone, as if it had never been.

Biography, like history, is the study of the past through the surviving evidence, and the biographer is an historian if he or she examines and tests that evidence by professional historical standards, in order to establish, in

L. B. Namier, Personalities and Powers, London 1955; Charles Twiishend: his character andcareer, London 1959; and with]. Brooke, Charles Toiimshetid, London 1964; J . Namier, Lewis Nainier: a biography, London 1971. G . R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government, Cambridge 1954; and Policy andpolice: the Enforcement ofthe Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell, Cambridge 1972.


Leopold von H~i-ikc's t.iinniis phrase, icie es e&eutIid~ !<firc.'.-ci~. The rules ancl the techniques of the historical profession for drilling with the surviving evidence are well est.ibli-ihei.1, iilthough they may not always be observed when commitment and involvement arc so fashionable that some historians h d it necessary to sit in moral judgement on the p.ist.5 Those historical tccli- i~iqiies arc applied to tlic surviving materials in order to re-crcatc the past as it seemed to the men ami women of the age, to describe what was important to them, not what is important to us. What the 1iistori.in t.lc;ils with, even with the relatively recent past as much as with the more distant, is a diffcrent world from his or her own, an .ilicn world into which he or she nuist take care nut to import alien attitudes and values w that the past is distorted into a reflection o f the present. In short, the piist has to be iinderstooi.1 in its own terms. The historian and the biographer do not differ in this. Both are concerned to test evidence from the past in order to re-create that past, whether it is the lives of many men am1 women o r the life of one. In some ways this task is harder for a biographer than for an historian. If the latter is concerned with institutions, with the social structure of a past society, it is usually not too difficult to recog- nizc that this is diffcrent from the present, that it is to a greater or lesser extent an alien world. A biographer who is concerned with one human being may find this act of imagination more difficult, for it is a common enough assumption in any Christian o r post-Christian society and among psychologists who tlraw their information from many societies over a wide span o f time-for example Erikson with Martin Luther6-that there is a 'psychic unity of nian- kind' or, less scientifically, that human nature docs not much change, that all n e n and women behave much the same in hope or fear, triumph o r disaster. It may be harder for a biographcr to avoid the assumption that he or she understands a man or woman o f the past by the light of nature.

Namier himself is a case in point. N o one who reails the sensitive pottr.iit of him that his widow drew in her biography can fail to be struck by the extent to which Namier, whose great achievement as an historian was to demonstrate that eighteenth-century politics in England could not be interpreted in terms of Mr Gladstone, ncvcrthclcss projected his own psychological experiences and his knowledge of Freudian psychology into Charles Townshend and King George 111.' Take, for example. King George's madness. Naniicr traces tins to his repressed and unhappy childhood, and explains the actual madness :is manic dcprcssion, the rcfiigc of ;I man of mediocre abilities who had a strong sense of duty in the f . 1 ~ of intolerable circuinstances.Vhis predilection for such a psychological explanation of the royal madness conics from N.~iiiicr's


own experiences and from the assumptions of his own society that mental illness was a psychological phenomenon, but in 1967 two psychiatrists, having looked at the same extensive records of King George's illness as had Namier, explained that a modem physician, sitting at the king's bedside, would have had no difficulty in diagnosing a physical disease, not a mental The symptoms, they say, described in those careful records kept by the royal physicians pointed clearly to porphyria. The doctors may be right or wrong, but they have at least exposed the tendency, even of very good professional historians, to project their own personalities into men of the past. It is exactly for this reason that Elton doubts that historians, not being professional psychologists, should attempt biography.

Yet if the professional historian does not attempt biography, who is better equipped to do so? Because history is the study of the surviving evidence from the past and i t s techniques have been developed to test these materials for their reliability as a record ofwhat actually happened, it follows that unless historians are to assess the evidence by the light of their professional skills the amateur, whether it be psychologist, litt&ateur or dilettante, has a free hand with which to write fairy tales anout the past. When Namicr and Elton object to biography, they are in part refusing to keep bad company of this kind. They condemn biography because it has often been the work of non-historians who come to the men and women of the past as strangers from another world. This seems to me no reason for the historian to shun biography. Rather the reverse. The objections to biography as the proper concern of an historian may be raised against history itself. No one can handle all the surviving evidence from the past. In practice i t is carved up into pieces to make it digestible. W e write constitutional or administrative or cconon~ic or social or military history within a limited span of time. There is always the difficulty for an historian of the relation of one aspect or institution to others. T o write biography obviously involves the question of perspective, but so does the isolation of any fragment of the past. Obviously, too, carving up the past into sections means that the study of any one of them becomes specialized to the point at which its experts need to call in the knowledge or the skills of others. Political history attracts so much attention from practitioners because an historian, like any other person, is involved in the politics of family, of clubs, of the organiza- tions he or she works for, so political skill and understanding are, with differing degrees of sophistication, 'built-in'. Other kinds of history need more formally

I. Macalpine and R. Hunter, 'A Clinical Assessment of the Insanity of George I11 and Sonic of its Historical Implications', Bulletin ofllze Institute ofHistorical Research, XL, 1967, pp. i66E They later published a book developing their thesis: George 111 and the Mad Business, London 1969. Not all medical cxpcrts accept their view; e.g. A. H. T. Robb- Smith reviewing the book in the English Historical Review, 85, 1970, pp. 808ff. This ncdical debate has a peculiar point for Gilbert Murray who had an illness which forced him to resign his Glasgow chair in 1899 because of physical symptoms which may or may not have been psychosomatic, and which were variously diagnosed as 'liver', 'neurasthenia', a 'wrong' stomach.

46


acquired knowledge: economic theory, statistics o r den~ogr~iphy o r wliatevcr. If the liistori.~n is dealing with the lives of many men ani-1 women, unless they are to be treated as statistic?, he o r she needs psychological knowledge just as much as the biographer. O r he needs the co-operation of those who have such knowledge. Iiut the materials to which such knowledge from other disciplines is applied must first of all be assembled and tested for reliability as an account of the past by the historian. And by the biographer, for biography uses exactly the same tnxeri.ils from the past. All that is different is the Focus of interest.

For an historian who writcs biography thC difficulties are not those of principle, but of practice. When Arnold Toynbee, as Gilbert Murray's executor, invited me to write his biography, the first essential was there: a mass o f surviving evidence. Gilbert Murray, from his undergraduate days in Oxford in the late 1880s until his ~Iditli in 1957, kept most of the letters he received. The names of those who wrote to him regularly over considerable periods of time sound like a roll call of the eminent and influential figures of his society: in classical scholarship Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, A. E. Housman, Mackail; in literature A. C. Bradley, Andrew Lang, Rose Macaulcy; in the theatre Williain Archer, George Bernard Shaw, Harley Granville-Barker; in politics H. A. L. Fisher, Lord Bryce, the Asquiths and Lord Robert Cecil; in public affairs, his mother- in-law, Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, his son-in-law Arnold Toynbcc, his wife's cousin, Bertram! Russell, the Han~monds and Margaret Cole. Murray's long life was deeply involved with the eminent in many spheres, and since for the most part they were men and women bred in the Victorian tradition of commemorative two-volume Lives and Letters, they kept their corresponJence wich a man whom, like Murray, they regarded as eminent or, from his early life, apparently destined for eminence. In his twenties, Gilbert Murray started to suffer from cramp in the hands. He had equipped himself with a typewriter with Greek c11;iracters for his classical scholarship, and when hant.1 writing became pinful , be extended his typing to much of his ordinary corrcspondcnce, itnil so hcuan to keep ciirbon copies. When he died, Itis literary cxeciitors, Arnold Toynbce and Isohel Henderson, and a former secretary, Jean Smith, not only collccteiJ and sorted all of the material for deposit in the Bodleian Library at OxforJ. but also took the trouble to ask his correspott~lents, or their executors, to give or lend Murray's letters to them for this archive. So both siilcs of much of the corresponi.lcncc arc presc~ved.

Tins corr~~s~iondciicc covers Murray's scholarly, theatrical, political and public life in varying degrees o f intimacy with fiiniily, friends and associates. His priv-irc life \MtIitn Ins family is equally well recorded. Apart from letters to Lady Carli\le, 111s confidante as well ai I'm wife's tnotlicr, with whom he discussed h i s idea, and :inibitions, thoughts and feelings, Murray rctainccl the custom, b c p n di.trinS his routtship o f Lady Mitry H o w ~ r d in 1887, o f wr i t~ng

47


to her, whenever they were apart, a t least once a day and sometimes twice. Lady Mary observed the same custom. The result is an unbroken, intimate, correspondence from 1887 until Lady Mary's illness and death in the 1950s. From this bulk of material, it is possible to know something of Gilbert Murray's private and public activities on most days of his life after the age of twenty-one. Not completely, of course, because some letters have certainly perished and others have been irrecoverably scattered, but this is knowledge of a very unusual kind for the life of any man. Many gentlemen, before the invention of the telephone and easy travel, sat down for some hours each day, to their correspondence. Some, like Gilbert Murray, did so even when more frequent contacts were destroying the art of lettcr-writing. With many of those gcntlc- men, this material has vanished. Gilbert Murray's has not, and this is the basic reason for writing his biography, in which the private world of the letters can be re-created beside the public world of his books, articles, lectures, speeches, hundreds of letters to The Times and other newspapers, and the published judgements upon him and his work by classical scholars and reviewers, by critics like T. S. Eliot or Lloyd George, and by more friendly contemporaries. From all of this material emerge the two essentials of any biography: the internal view that a man has of himself and the world; the external views the world has of him.

In historical biography the need is, of course, to establish the truth of each of these two views, which means applying to the evidence the tests historians normally use. Gilbert Murray's private papers and published works comprise, like all historical material, two different types of evidence; what a mediaeval historian would call record evidence and narrative evidence. Record material, as its name suggests, is that which records an action for an immediate purpose, not to impose a view or an interpretation upon posterity, although it may, of course, be intended to deceive its contemporaries. Narrative evidence is that which is deliberately intended for the attention of posterity. Gilbert Murray's letters are of both kinds; sometimes the same letter contains both types of evidence. When, for example, he wrote to his wife that in late September, 1905, George Bernard Shaw and Harley Granville-Barker came to visit him in Oxford so that Shaw could read the draft of his play Major Barbara-in which Murray was the model for Professor Cusins (whom Granville-Barker was to play). Lady Mary for Barbara herself and the Countess of Carlislc for Lady Britomart-this is a matter of fact to be put on record as something that happened, just as he records that on the same day he was also translating the Medea of EuripidesJO But when he goes on, 011 3 October, to tell his wife that their caricatures in Major Barbara were rather tiresome, but, duelling being out

'0The letter is undated but. from its context, is late September 1905 when Lady Mary was in Switzerland and Gilbert in Oxford. S. F. Albert, 'In More Ways than one: Major Barbara's debt to Gilbert Murray', Educational Theatre Journal, XX, 1968, No. 2, p. 124

is mistaken in his view that Shaw read the play to both Murrays, for he had no oppor- (unity to consult the confidential letters from which this is taken and so had to guess about certain points.


i f fahion, they have no reco~lr'ic but iiuliff>rencc, and that the play, which Shaw had indiscreetly ctillcd 'Murray's Mother-in-Law', was fortunately unlike I.:idy Carlisle, he was putting a gloss on his feelings in order not to disturb his nervously exhausted wife nor to provoke one of those terrifying reactions from the countess which split fiimilics and friendships. In correspondence, in short, the author is selecting, both consciously .id unconsciously, what he o r she rcl.itcs. T o use it for historiciil purposes the reticences and discretions o f any relationship, private or public, oficial o r unofficial, have to be allowed for. And i t must always be borne in mi~n-1 tliiit the accidents of si.irviv:il titn.1 loss, apart from any deliberate intention in the letters, have already pre-selected the eviclci~ce; and that in whilt 'iiirvivcs, even in the quantity in which (iilbcrt Murray's letters survive, there is the xlditional selection that letters arc those o i fricnciship o r at the very Ie.ist, told-.ince, for initagonis~n o r hatrcil does not usu.llly produce extended correspondence.

Murray's published works, by comr;ist with his private letters which arc pre- doininantly record evidence, are hy definition narrative material. Although they somctinies simply record events, they i11e primarily intended for the attention otothers. They put Murray'-i view and Murray's interpretation of himself 2nd the world. He was not a i m n who ever wished deliberately to deceive others but lie recognized that he might do 10 by tricks o f memory, by the limitation ofiiny human testimony about events and experiences. Take, for instance, the fr:igiiient of autobiography which he wrote towards the em1 o f his long life. In it he describes his childhood in Australia, his school and university days in Engliind, and his first years, from the age of twenty-three, in the chair of (;reek at Glasgow University. In his opening sentence he wrote:

The memories of a small child arc like a broken mirror: bright spots and blanks and ccasional r~~isarrangcmcnts.~~

He explains that he might misremcinbcr, tl1.11 he might relate as his own first h;md knowledge things which he hiid really heard at second hand from his step- brotlier, from his two step-sisters, from his own brother, Hubert, and fruni Iiis mother. In parts of his autobiogr .~ph~, tlns is not too difficult to detect. D i i r i n ~ Ins cue and only visit to Australi:~, .zfter he had left it as a boy, he collected 111

1393 v.hatevcr fimily papcrs lie foniiJ to survive. They are prcscrvci.1 wit11 tlic nthcr material, so that his accur.icy in the published account can be chcc-kcd. Most of his recollections, however, were, or were what he believed to be, first I I memories. For importent piirts of his life, before he went up to Oxforil niversity, this autobiography i'i the sole source of information, the only eviilcnce that survives of some fc.itures of his formative years. How can this be tested for rcliiibility?

Gilbert Murray cert,iinly intcniJei.1 to draw a true picture of himself, even \viiile he recognized that he mi+t sonietiines be in error. He wanted other

to know what it \\',is like to be .i child in Austra1i;i. But he also vi'.mte~l


to explain how that 'little boy in the bush', an image which recurs in a number of his writings, had come to be the man he was. How had it happened that a bush child who was struck with wonder when he first heard a speaker who had that almost unbelievable thing, a Master of Arts degrec,'2 came to be so famous a man, the holder oftherare Order of Merit, destined for burial in Westminster Abbey? The fact that he looked at his own past in that way shaped his selection of his memories, memories already polished over the years by his facility as a raconteur. Lady Mary Murray would sometimes protest, as her husband enthralled his guests with story after story told in his beautiful voice: 'Gilbert, you know that's not true'. And he would reply, with a charming smile: 'I may have improved it in my mind'.13 When he set down his memories on paper in his autobiography, the stories had already been polished and re-polished in the telling over the years. And they had gradually come to distort the past. The image of the 'little boy in the hush' does not really represent Murray's Australian childhood. It is true that his father. Sir Terence Murray, was a great landowner in the Canberra-Lake George district. (What is now Government House in Canberra was a Murray household, as was Windcradccn, near Collector, at the northern end of Lake George.) But Sir Terence lost his land and most of his money in 1865," five months before Gilbert Murray was born, the second child of a second wife. Gilbert grew up in an urban political household in Sydney, not in the bush. He may never even have visited the old family stations, although his step-brother and sisters, and his own brother must have told him about them. Gilbert himself thought that he had a clear memory of this pastoral life. Dame Sybil Thorndyke and Arnold Toynhec, for instance, visited Winderadeen because of the vivid way Gilbert had described it to them. Yet the young Murray grew up in a succession of smaller and smaller houses in Sydney. He rememhered that too, as an image of a family whose fortunes had declined,'5 yet the Murrays always had servants while Sir Terence lived on his salary as President of the Legislative Council of New South Wales. These images of the past which Gilbert Murray recorded as his memories were, as he suspected, distorted. In particular, this memory of the bush did not represent more than two years of his childhood, the brief period when he was at school at Moss Vale and then in Mittagong, scarcely a bush town in the mid 1870s. What these memories represent is an intensity of emotion about part of his school life when he was unhappy and about his often retold adventures when, on one occasion, he had the frightening experience of getting lost in the bush.

Such tricks of memory and imagination are common enough. After all, King George IV convinced himself that he had led a cavalry charge at the battle of Waterloo. This is no more than the storyteller who assigns himself a

l a Speech in Christ Church hall, Oxford, 1936, upon the presentation to him ofcommemora- tivc volumes ofcssays.

l3 e relatione Margery Murray, wife of Gilbert's nephew Patrick, Hubert's younger son. " G. Wilson, Murray of Yarraliinila, Oxford, 1968; F. West, Hubert Murray; the Australian Pro-Consul, Oxford 1968.

l6 Murray, Unfinished Autobiography, p. 33.

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pan in the tlr;uiiatic or animing events lie describes. But Gilbcrt Murray's anto- biography is more seriously inisleading as evidence about his past, for he looked back into Ins cliilclhood to explain tiit' roots of two of his firm convictions. The first was his liberalism. He grew up in a liberal household. His father, although an Irishman and a Catholic, was not a bigot or a sectarian. By the standards of the day, his Catholicism as liberal to the point of eccentricity. O f this there is iiulepmlent evi~lcncc. Certainly his household had on its bookshelves the works o f John S t i~ i r t Mill, Charles Darwin, Rousscau and a collection of romantic and cuntcrnpor:iry poetry. Gilbert's mother, a cousin o f Sir Williani Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan, made sure that in her houschold no one took governments or c:tablishmcnts very seriously. Yet the particular influences Murray cites in h i~au tob iugr~p l iy as evi~lcnce of the liberal opinions in which he was rcarci-l by his f,ithcr, a clominant majestic figure w h o m he conceived as clxl in white ducks, arc illusory. The boy undoubtedly heard stories within the family o f his father's kindly relations with his Aboriginal labour on his stations, but this was not a first hand memory. Gilbcrt reinforces the point about Ifis father's lilicral .utitudcs, as illustrated by his relations with coloured races, by recalling that Cakobau, the king o f Fiji, was entertained to dinncr by Sir Tcrcncc, and told his host that he had been a cannibal, but had not enjoyed white man's flesh: they are too much salt.I6 This dinncr party could never have happened. Cakobau visited New South Wales only once, t w o years after Sir Tcrencc Murray's death in 1873. What Murray learned from his father was a hatred of injustice .md oppression, for his father's family had fought and died against the English for King lames at the Boyne and i n the great rebellion of 1798, although his gr.iiulfatI~er's generation had fought for the English in the Napoleonic wars. He was not brought up to reject the use o f force. He recalled his father telling him that he hail once canght one of his convict servants stealing his books to sell for grog, and had laid the man senseless with a blow. Terence Murray bad been afraid that he had killed him, and that, he told his son, 'was a great lesson to me. I never struck them after that. 1 always took them by the t l i r ~ a t . " ~

The scconi.1 firm conviction ag.ii11st organized religion Gilbert Murray also ascribed to his childhood. Knowing, he said, that the priests of his fiithcr's Catholic church (hnined his Aiislic,iti mother, while his mother's clergy t.litinnrd his f .~ t l~er , niai-It.' liini i.lisgi.istcJ \vitli organized it was cruel; it could not therefore be true. There i, n o independent evidence that within the family there wa-i any such religious tension. O n the contrary, his fathcr hail ~a r r i e t . l his mother in a11 Anglican as well as a Catholic ceremony. He had not insistcil on the chiklrcn's baptism in the C.ithulic faith, and whcn a relation lixl arranged that the baptism cif Hubert iind Gilbcrt should take place in the Catholic college of St John :it SvJncy University whcn Gilbcrt was three years old, hacl not even been prcvnt. Sir Tcrcncc's will left the spiritiitil fortunes o f

" lbi~i., pp. 4s-O. " 1b,<i., ,>. 37. I" Ihui.. p. 8 3 .


his children to his Anglican wife. Neither was brought up in the regular practice of any religion.

Murray's unfinished autobiography, subjected to this kind of analysis such as any historian would apply to narrative evidence, is obviously a distorted reflection of the past in some important instances because Murray, in searching for the origins of his life and its significance, had projected his present back into the past. This coloured his selection and statements of fact. Still more it coloured his interpretation ofwhat he thought were thefacts. His father died when he was seven years old. His mother, to provide for her children in the face of financial hardship, ran a successful school for young ladies, first in Sydney, then in London. Agnes Murray was ambitious for her two children, for Hubert and, especially, for Gilbert whom she designed to be Prime Minister of Engla~~d. '~ Gilbert loved and admired his mother, but when he looked back at his school and student days he thought that he had been searching for a father figure. It is true that at ~ e r c h a n t Taylors School he made few enduring friendships with his classmates, but the great influence upon him was not the in~pressive headmaster, Dr Baker, who taught him the classics which were the foundation of his career but another more sympathetic master, Francis Storr, who introduced him to Liberalism. At Oxford, again, his close friendships were not with his contemporaries but with dons such as Arthur Sidgwick, D. S. Margoliouth and Charles Gore. Still, h e made friends with a few of his outstanding contemporaries: with H. A. L. Fisher, with Walter Ashburner and with Leonard Hobhouse. And he was discriminating about the older men who taught him, or who were his seniors. Charles Gore, for example, who dominated the spiritual life of the university from Pusey House, was an entertaining companion whom Murray regarded as something of a saint, but in their relationship the barrier of Gore's Christian religion was an absolute boundary.20 If Gilbert Murray was, as he said in his autobiography, looking for a father figure,21 it was a father made in his own image, like the Greek gods whom, after Durkheim, he came to believe were created by their own worshipper^.^^

As historical testimony, Murray's autobiography is good evidence of what he believed when he wrote it, but it is not evidence about the past. On some points of fact it is certainly true; but as an interpretation of them it is only evidence of what Murray believed later: invaluable for a biographer-but not history. That is why narrative evidence, for the historian, is always more doubtful than record evidence of contemporary events: it is why Gilbert Murray's letters ate vital, not simply as a cross check on those parts of his memories to which they can be related, but as the real basis for re-creating the man without the distorting prism of hindsight.

l9 Wilson, Murray of Yarralwnla, p. 312. 'O Gore to Murray, 14 August 1886.

Murray, Unfinished Autobiography, p. 89. For his connection with Jane Hamison and F. M. Comford who were much influenced by Durkheim, see R. Ackernwn, 'Some Letters of the Cambridge Ritualists', Creek, Roman andByzantine Studies, ia, No. I, 1971, pp. 115-16.


In writing Murray's biography, the major practic.il difficulty is the sheer bulk of the surviving letters covering so long a span of life. The difficulty is not unique. Sir Winston Churchill's biographer has an even greater problem. So does George Bernard Shaw's. But it is uncommon. An historian, being con- cerncd not to import alien standards into the past, to avoid anachronistic judgcn~ents, must read all of these letters to draw from them what was important to their author at any given time, to see the world as Gilbert Murray himself saw it when he wrote them, 2nd to use Mtirray's own criteria of relevance anti importance to organize and select from this bulk of surviving material. If a biographer is to be an historian, he or she must let this record evidence suggest the questions it can answer. He or she must read it not, in G. M. Young's famous phrase, until he can hear the man speak, but, in Geoffrey Elton's improved version, until he knows what the man will say next.23

If it is to be good historical biography the subject's will not be the only voice to be listened for. It is a debating trick to define biography as a single life. Bad biography may indeed identify with the hero or the heroine, may take his or her side in the disputes in which he or she was involved, may, in short, be actively partisan. It is tempting, even for the professional historian, to depict the subject of his biography as fully and as sympathetically as possible and to be content with sketches or caricatures or the shadows of those with whom the subject w ~ s involved. When both sides of the correspondence are preserved, there is n o excuse to do so, no excuse not to read such letters as the Gilbert Murray correspondence in order t o try to know what others beside Murray are really like, what they will say next. The personality of Murray is most clearly displayed in relation to his wife, Lady Mary, and to his mother-in-law, Lady Carlisle. Gilbert met his future wife when he was first invited, as ,1 brilliant undergraduate with the right radical Liberal opinions about Home Rule for Ireland, women's rights and temperance, to Castle Howard, one of the scats of the earls of Carlisle, in the summer of 1887. He found there a heroine who might have been created by Shelley and fell in love at once. Lady Carlisle approved, for she encouraged talented middle-class sons-in-law, but her daughter doubted and hesitated. She judged Gilbert to be weak, aimless, lacking in clear ideals. He defended himself:

1 have other ideals besides the winning of your love. . . 1 was a soldier in the service i f man before I entered yours. But the others arc ideals of duty only, this is of happi- ness too. Deny it to me and I shall do my life's work much the same as before; that will engross me as it did before I met you; only half the force would be gone and all the brighmess.24

The Lady Mary agreed to allow Gilbert to know her better, and two years later accepted his proposal of marriage. She still had some doubts, chiefly now that she would be leaving a family dominated by the force and energy of Lady Carlisle for an unknown outside which she rather feared. Gilbert had

' The Practice of History, p. 17.

24 Gilbert to Mary, 22 September 1887.

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constantly to reassure her that he too loved and admired her mother. But once Lady Mary had accepted Gilbert, she contemplated marriage as a perfect union which 'must have something in common with the mystics and Christ; it must take self awayS.25 And 50 at first it did.

Lady Mary was an ardent, high-principled woman, with an aristocratic sense ofher obligation to do good to the less fortunate. Her marriage was to be in the service of others. On this public duty she and her husband agreed. But into his life of classical scholarship, of the theatre and of literature she could not enter. She felt inadequate because of this. And she felt jealous of that part of Gilbert's life and the friendships it brought him, even that with Lady Carlisle which she saw as a reflection of her own inadequacy. These strains in the marriage were serious, but public duties which both Mary and Gilbert Murray acknowledged, and private duties to the five children born to them between 1890 and 1908, kept the marriage together for sixty-seven years as a partnership in the service of others. This relationship with his wife and children which can be traced as it developed in the private correspondence, throws the features of Gilbert Murray into relief. In the face of his wife's strong views and the sometimes vigorous, sometimes troubled actions she took upon them; in the face, later, of the tragic deaths of three of his children, he cultivated detachment; he was able not to allow himself to be emotionally involved, although intellectually he might signify his involvement. For example, he was deeply hurt and distressed by his daughter Rosalind Toynbee's conversion to Catholicism in 1933, where the death of his vivid daughter Agnes a decade earlier had elicited a reflective sadness for the waste ofsuch a life. This characteristic of Murray was one shared by his elder brother Hubert. In writing Hubert's biography some years ago, I described in him this same quality of aloofness and dctachn~cnt in the facc of personal and public and in writing Gilbert's it has been necessary to avoid reading the elder brother into the younger. That they both display this character in their relationships with others is in part a matter of family up- bringing. Manly virtues, Sir Terence insisted, had to be practised in the facc of adversity. But it is also a matter of education. Both brothers were trained at Oxford in the classics. Both of them took from this education a stoic philosophy that justified and confirmed the family background.

The personality of Gilbert Murray, as it emerges from his private, family papers, is the same as that depicted in the letters which contain the material for his public career. Looking at the 'public' lettcrs to discover what was important to Murray, the most striking thing is extent to which his personal, professional and public friendships rest on political sympathy. Not necessarily political sympathy in a party sense, although the majority of his friends were Liberals, but in the sense of what Murray regarded, at any particular time, as progressive political views. His close and enduring friendships were all with people whose political and public opinions were never to the right of his. Murray's own views

Mary to Gilbert, 1 3 November 1889. F. West, Hubert Murray, pp. 20-1; see also F. West (ed.), SelectedLetters aJHubert Murray, Oxford 1970, pp. 35 , 50-1, 188.

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chitnged over his life time. In the end, he votccl Conservative, although for the slightly eccentric reason that Winston Churchill was the hole survivor o f Asc1uith's great Libcr:tl c;ibinet, :ind defended Eden's Suez policy, but these things are, as I shall explain, consistent with much earlier opinions. They canset.1 a breach with some of his old friends, on their initiative, but the breaches Gilbert Murray himself allowed to occur were those which happened when a friend's opinion moved to the rixht of his own. Herbert Fishcr, a contcniporary of Murray's as an i~ndcr~radt t t~ te , a friend when they were elected to fellowships at New College, Oxford, on the S ~ I I I C day, and a rcgiilar correspondent, ceased to be so clo-ie when he accepted office in Lloyd George's government; to Gilbert he became an untrue Libcr.11, and the relationship cooled until Murray's own views changed. Murray i.lii.1 not, of course, like o r admire or befriend every progressive; he had no great liking for Laski and still less for the Wcbbs. But the basis of professional and personal fiietn-lships was political compatibility.

Because this intellectual a i u l politi~iil sympathy as the basis of any relationship is Gilbert Murray's most striking characteristic as it emerges from his 'public' papers, it is an obvious theme around which to order the mass o f material. So the biography is called Classic Liberal27 For, Murray's classical scholarship, his devotion to Hellenism, were subordinate to his political views and the actions he believed must follow from them. He had formed this attitude at Mcrchatlt Taylors School under the influence of Francis Storr, where he had come t o believe that John Stuart Mill offered the means of jucising rightly o n m y particular question. His opinions were strengthened at Oxford where those classical scholars with w h o m he had close relationships were all Liberals. W h e n lie retired from his chair in Glasgow because of ill-health in 1899, at the age o f thirty-three, he declared to Lady Carlisle:

I am averse, as you know, to mcrr learning- Bur I think rhat a large history of Greek literature would not only exercise all my powers in a very full way, but also might be of value to "Humanity which is on the whole my great object. Grcc-cc has a profound and permanent message to mankind, a message quite untouched by "super-naturalness" and revealed religion,; it is human and rational and progressive, and affects not Art only bin the whole of life . . . I should be partly carrying on the work of Grotc, who always had Humanity and Progress in his iiii~id while writing about Greece . . . I have sot a faith and a message. . . and I want to speak them (KIC . . .

Greek literature contains the gcrn~s of almost everything, so you can treat of almost all tendencies in trcating of it.^8

The belief that the past is cliicctly relevant to the present ancl to be studied for that reason is the ccntr.il tenet of the Whig view of the past. It led Gilbert Murray, a Whig by intellectual conviction and by marriage, as it has led other scholars and historians, t o discover in the past things that were not really there, to ignore other things that were but which have no niessage o r only a bad

7Commissioncd under that title by Oxford University Press, for 1974. Tlie British Aca- demy, the Ford Foundation and ilic Rockefeller Foundation of New York have each

contributed to the research work. "Gilbert to Lady Carlisle, 3 1 Jamiary rwo.

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message for the present. To this Whig belief Gilbert Murray devoted his life. It is the connecting thread that runs through all of his many different activities.

It resolves a paradox. Gilbert Murray, even before he met Lady Carlisle, was a radical Liberal. He disliked Rosebery and the Liberal Imperialists Asquith and Grey. He ended his life supporting Anthony Eden over Suez. The explanation of this apparent change derives from that constant desire to use the ancient world of fifth-century Athens in the service of humanity and progress. For Murray came to identify what he saw as the humane and civilized Greek society with his own civilized liberal Victorian England. Knowing that Greek civilization had perished, he found the causes, in his book of 1897, in a failure of nerve; he wrote, 'mistrusting reason, the world Hung itself passionately under the spell of authoritative r eve l a t i~n ' .~~ Greece fell, believed Murray, because she ceased to do her mission, to proclaim the 'call to Truth, to Beauty, to Political Freedom and Justice*. Western Europe might, he feared, fall in the same way. World War I had so damaged civilization that it was peculiarly exposed to threats from the uncivilized. Murray had supported that war effort with great vigour, regarding the Germans as the betrayers of civilization. Before World War I1 he was an early opponent of Fascism and Nazism which he saw in the same light. At the timc of the Munich agreement he thought that there should have been a closer understanding with Russia when her help was needed, but during the war he had grave doubts about the Russians whom lie saw as an Asian threat to European civilization. After World War I1 he saw Britain and Western Europe as being in the Hellenistic situation: the real Hellenic nation had been too small and the scmi-barbarous masses had had the strcngth.30 Suez therefore seemed to him not only a clear case of the breaking of an international agreement but of a threat to Western civilization by uncivilized backed by the Russian barbarians, which must, for once, be resisted by the heirs of Greek civilization. His stand shocked those who, like Philip Noel-Baker, had long been associated with Murray in progressive good causes, but it was consistent with his view that Greek civilization in the fifth century BC was progressive, and that liberal western democracy inherited the tradition which must be defended, if it was to survive.

Classical scholarship in the service of progress and humanity: this is the great theme of Gilbert Murray's life, the theme around which the extensive materials can be organized without the importation of anachronistic judgements of his significance. Such a broad outline of course needs modification in the detail the evidence permits in order to allow subtleties, and some inconsistences of attitude and behaviour from time to timc appear. For this broad outline of a man of firm convictions who early made up his mind, as he used to say, on most of the major issues of life, also needs to incorporate his acute sense of the realities of power in any private or public situation. He could temper his ideals in action to gain part of what he wanted, whether in his relations with Lady

lo Gilbert Murray, History ofAncient GreekLiterature London 1897, p. 404. 30 Gilbert to Arnold Toynbee, 14 November 1952,

Same to same, 19 November 1956.

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Carlisle, or with such a person as the Italian Fascist Mini-iter Rocco who was his colleiigiic in the League of N i ~ i o n s Committee for Intellectnal Co-opcration. When lie thought it his duty to liberal civilization, he could forger his dislike and contempt for Lloyd George, and those whom he thought had deserted true Liberalism, by accepting a post diiringWorld W a r I under Fisher at the Board of Education: although he refused two honours from the hands o f Lloyd George for this work. It was this realisin, this flexibility, th;it accounts for the placc Gilbert Murray came to occupy in British life. Although a man of strong convictions, with a strong sense of his mission, he was nor unbending or difficult in the practical business of tryins to achieve his ideals. And so he wiis used: to make the radio speech that marked the em! of the General Strike, to write the occasional Royal message or speech, to awaii.1 the King's Medal for Poetry. He might at one time have become British ambassador in Washington as thc appointee o f the second Labour government. When the main charactcr- istics of Murray in his own eyes arc flashed out with clct.iil o f what he actually did, and both looked at through the eyes of others, the eyes of his wife, of his children, of friends and o f enemies, the core of historical biography is there.

I had rhonuht to begin this lecture with a text, but I reflected that in the first of these Anniial Academy Lectures, Professor A. D. Hope showed us that all the best sermons should rather end with one. My text was taken from the words of a great German classical scholar, Ulrich von Wilainowitz-Moellendorf, translatei.1 by Gilbert Murray, before the University of Oxford in 1908.~' Wila~iiowitz had been speaking about Greek historical writing which he had argued was very far from genuine history, itself a modern invention less than a century old when he spoke, an invention which, although he was too discreet actually to say so to his Oxford audience, he implied was German, possibly even invented in his own University ofG6ttingcn where von Ranke had taiisht. Gilbert Murray heeded only part of the text he translated into his own style. The part he heeded is his fame. The other part is his biographer's burden. ' W e know', said Wilamowitz, 'that ghosts cannot speak until they have drunk blood; arii:! the spirits which we evoke demand the blood of our hearts. W e give it to them gladly; but if they then abide our questions, soincthing from us has entered into them; something alien that must be cast out, cast out in the name of truth.'


biography as history...biography, they are in part refusing to keep bad company of this kind. they...

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