Edward Eyre and European Civilization

History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

Edward Eyre and European Civilization J.H. Burns Department of History, University College London, London WC1, UK

Keywords: Edward Eyre; European historiography; Roman Catholicism; Apologetic; Publishing history

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. — P. B. Shelley In 1941 a slim volume of 136 pages entitled The Reformation in England was published by the Oxford University Press. Its author was F. M. Powicke, doyen of English medievalists and, since 1928, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. He explained in his preface the origin of a book lying at, if not beyond, the frontiers of the period in which his reputation as an historian had been established over several decades. It had, he said, ‘been written for the fourth volume of European Civilization: Its Origin and Development, edited by E. Eyre, and published by the Oxford University Press in 1936’. Powicke added that he had been ‘encouraged by the editor to write as I wished’ and that he had ‘adopted no editorial suggestions which were not advisable in the interests of accuracy and clarity’. Then came an intriguing comment: ‘The late Mr Eyre was a man of strong, sometimes of violent, opinions; but I found him a kind and forbearing editor’. Few readers of Powicke’s book (it seems safe to assume) were tempted to go back to the volume in which the text had originally figured. Had they done so they would have found it (all 764 pages of it) on the shelf with no fewer than six others in the series, most of them even longer and one of them twice as long. Publication had taken only 5 years in all, though the editor’s preface to volume I (of which there will be more to say later) referred to gestation ‘over a period of more than ten years’. Here then was a work on a monumental scale: it was not easy to think of anything in the Anglophone historiography of the years between the two World Wars that could compare with it. Cambridge, to be sure, had produced or was producing, as sequels to the original Actonian Modern History, its multi-volume accounts of the ancient and medieval phases in European history. Neither enterprise, however, purported to 0191-6599/02/$ - see front matter r 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 9 1 - 6 5 9 9 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 1 6 - 5

282

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

survey the whole span of European development from its remote prehistoric beginnings down to the troubled decade in which Eyre’s volumes saw the light. Yet who had read them? Who now, over 60 years later, had even heard of European Civilization? What kind of work was it? What purposes motivated the editor, and how were those purposes related to his ‘strong, sometimes y violent opinions’? In attempting to answers some of these and cognate questions, I cannot avoid the introduction of a more personal interest. My father-in-law, Arthur Birnie (1890–1972) contributed to Eyre’s fifth volume a chapter on ‘The growth of industry in Europe from the later Middle Ages to the present day’.1 When inviting him to do so in June 1932, Eyre invoked the name of ‘[o]ur mutual friend Douglas Woodruff’. Now Birnie, so far as I know, had never met Woodruff nor had any contact or correspondence with him. The name was, none the less, a significant clue. Douglas Woodruff (1897–1978), then on the staff of The Times and, from 1936, editor of The Tablet, was the quintessential Prominent Catholic Layman (PCL) of his day. And the appearance, among the contributors to volume V, of Michael de la Bedoyere seemed to confirm the hypothesis that European Civilization was a work conceived from a Roman Catholic perspective.2 Exploration of other volumes tended, at least in some measure, to reinforce this view. Yet matters were not quite so straightforward. To start with, Arthur Birnie, though he was received into the Catholic Church towards the end of his life, was very far from being a Catholic in 1932. Brought up as a Wesleyan Methodist, he had by then become, and was to remain for several years, an elder of the Church of Scotland. Nor is it easy to cast by any means all his fellow-contributors in the role of Catholic apologists. The next chapter in volume V, for example, was written by A. M. Carr-Saunders, then Charles Booth Professor of Social Science at Liverpool, and soon to become Director of the London School of Economics. Other volumes revealed similar cases, including that of Powicke, with which the present enquiry began. Another instance is A. E. Taylor, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, who wrote in the third volume on ‘Ancient and medieval philosophy’ and on ‘Modern philosophy’ in volume VI. Such names as these, again, when set alongside that of Birnie, suggest a further point. Taylor, Powicke and Carr-Saunders were established scholars of the first rank in their respective fields. Birnie, who lectured in economic history at Edinburgh (having previously done so at Aberdeen), could claim no such distinction. He had, by 1932, published the first of two highly successful textbooks, which retained their usefulness for decades, down to and beyond his death. Like other members of Eyre’s team, however, he still had much of his way to make in the academic world. The same could be said of A. W. Gomme, who wrote substantial chapters in the first and second volumes, and of D. C. Douglas, who contributed a notable chapter in volume III on ‘The development of medieval Europe’.3 One point may perhaps be made 1

I am indebted to my wife, Arthur Birnie’s elder daughter, for access to her father’s papers and correspondence. 2 De la Bedoyere (1900–1973) was editor of the Catholic Herald from 1934 to 1962. 3 Gomme (1886–1959) was then lecturer in Greek and Greek History at Glasgow. Douglas (1898–1982) had lectured in history at Glasgow until 1934, when he moved as professor to what was then the University College of the South-West.

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

283

without inviting the charge of cynicism: the financial rewards for the work were decidedly handsome. Birnie, for example, was offered a hundred guineas (d105) for a chapter of 35,000 words, to be completed within five months of his acceptance of the commission. The manuscript was delivered just over two weeks late and a cheque was dispatched on 16 December 1932. Now, such a sum would have represented perhaps one-sixth of the author’s annual salary at the time; and even for those higher up the academic ladder payment on that scale in the early 1930s was surely lavish. This was in fact another clue, and by no means an unimportant one, to the nature of the enterprise. Financial gain, however, while it was doubtless one (in no way discreditable) inducement to contribute to European Civilization, can hardly have been among the motives for its conception and execution. Not even the most sanguine editor (and certainly no publisher) could have supposed that a series of this kind would be a ‘money-spinner’. It is time to explore Edward Eyre’s intentions in launching the massive undertaking. On the face of the record, the only evidence available in that regard is to be found in the two-page preface to volume I, which was the editor’s only direct personal contribution to the text. Eyre began by describing what he saw as the prevailing condition of historical writing at the time: The constant accumulation of historical material has led to an age of monograph history, in which it is becoming increasingly difficult to see the wood for the trees. The chief purpose of this work is to exhibit, with the necessary fullness but without detailed narrative, the rise of Europe and the distinctive character of European civilization. He went on to argue that the relatively late development of ‘[h]istory as an organized study’ had meant ‘that the work of historians has been done in an age of exuberant nationalism’. The problem with this, Eyre suggested, was ‘not only y a question of national or religious bias in the accounts of particular events. Such bias’ (he went on—perhaps somewhat disingenuously) ‘can be reduced to a very small thing when there is a genuine desire to establish the truth’. There was, however, ‘a deeper vitiation’: this consisted in the assumption of the inevitability of what in fact took place, and the habit of judging events according to the way they seem to have hastened or delayed the coming of the modern world of sovereign, territorial, democratic states. The unity of Europe has been less vividly appreciated than the divergences of its parts. Such views might, at first glance, seem unexceptionable—perhaps even, in the perspective of European development since the second World War, far-seeing. The first glance, however, is rarely sufficient in such cases. It is not just the thought that counts, but the arri"ere-pensee. Eyre’s rejection of the inevitability of a Europe of nation-states may lead the reader forward in the direction of European integration; but it certainly turns our eyes back to a ‘world we have lost’. (A distinguished reviewer of one of the volumes in fact came close, as we shall see, to anticipating Peter Laslett’s phrase.) We have all lost worlds of one kind or another; but the kind

284

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

of world we have lost depends on the kind of people we are. Establishing the identity of Edward Eyre thus becomes an essential concern. No help in this identification was to be gleaned from such standard works of reference as Who’s Who. The correspondence with Arthur Birnie showed that Eyre had lived in Gloucester House, Park Lane, an address suggesting opulence—or at least ‘easy circumstances’. Powicke’s 1941 reference to ‘the late Mr Eyre’ suggested the possibility of obituary notices. None had appeared in The Times, which did however carry a brief entry on 17 July 1937 under the heading ‘Wills & Bequests’, to the effect that ‘EYRE, Mr Edward of Park Lane, W. and New York’ had left net personal estate amounting to d168,401. (Eyre’s American residence, latterly at least, was in fact in the small South Carolina town of Aiken, near the Georgia state-line and only a few miles north-east of Augusta). Not only wealth, then, but transatlantic wealth was involved. And the American dimension was elucidated by the obituary published in The Tablet on 29 May 1937. (Eyre having died on the 20th.) Edward Eyre, it now emerged, ‘was an Irishman, who went to America as a youth. He had a long and extremely successful business career between the United States and South America, in the family firm of Grace Bros., of which he eventually became the chief’. Since he died ‘in his eighty-seventh year’, he must have been born in 1850 or 1851. His emigration ‘as a youth’ could be dated, approximately, to the late 1860s, and his business career would have lasted until the period of the Great War. It was then, it seems, that ‘[h]e settled in London, and for over twenty years, until the day of his death, he was a leading Catholic layman’. As such, the obituarist added, it was not only on his generosity that ‘the Catholic body’ could count. ‘There was a militant strain in him which rose to the challenge of a society steeped in anti-Catholic culture’. This led, among other things, to ‘a particular interest in securing a revision of the historical teaching given under official auspices by the London County Council’. That interest was rewarded by ‘the withdrawal or modification of many unjustified anti-Catholic assertions and observations in textbooks and other widely circulated histories. It was this work which led him to the great enterprise which became the preoccupation of his later years’. This, then, was the origin of European Civilization. In more specific terms, according to The Tablet, it was conceived because [w]hen statements were challenged, the authors and their publishers would often fall back upon their authorities, the standard historians of the last century, and would say, ‘If these views are out of date, provide us with something authoritative and up-to-date, and we shall be only too pleased’. How pleased they were in the event may be questionable. Certainly they got more than they can have bargained for in the seven volumes, running to over 7800 pages and containing perhaps two and a half million words, which eventually appeared. The undertaking had plainly grown far beyond the task of correcting outmoded school books. Eyre’s preface, as we have seen, looked to wider horizons. Yet the fact remains that his vision was informed (some would say distorted) by a powerful confessional commitment, which he had the means to proclaim, even if—having (as

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

285

The Tablet acknowledged) no claim to be an historical scholar himself—he must engage others to do what he saw as the essential work.4 It is clear that when he embarked (presumably in the mid-1920s) on the planning of European Civilization, Eyre had no mind to have it appear as in any way a product of the by-ways and backwaters of cultural life. It was not an ecclesiastical imprimatur that he sought but serious intellectual consideration. Having perhaps been advised that the Cambridge University Press was already rather heavily committed to enterprises that were at least cognate, if not competitive, with his own—or perhaps having taken advice from Oxford men—it was to the Oxford University Press that he turned.5 There, it seems, the Delegates, or those who acted for them, soon decided that this was not a work meriting the prestigious Clarendon Press imprint. Eyre’s proposal, submitted in November 1931, was passed to Humphrey Milford at the OUP London office, and it was with Milford that negotiations (in which Douglas Woodruff played a key part) were conducted. The proposal was accepted; but at an early stage (and, it must be emphasized, at Eyre’s own suggestion) it was agreed that publication by the Press would be on a commission basis, so that any eventual loss would be borne by Eyre himself. None the less we may assume that his main object had been achieved: European Civilization was to appear with the imprint of one of the two major university presses in the country. Just 3 years after the original proposal, on 1 November 1934, the first volume was published: the print-run was 3000 copies, priced at 18 shillings (90p). The volumeprice later rose to a guinea (d1–5p); but an order for a complete set placed at the start would have cost no more than six guineas (d6–30p). These prices belong, manifestly, to a world we have indeed lost beyond recall. Yet anyone who did place an order for the series may soon have begun to wonder just how wise that investment had been. Disaster of a kind that might have doomed the whole enterprise struck on 13 December 1934. That was the date on which the first review of the first volume of European Civilization was published in the Times Literary Supplement. It was no more than a ‘short notice’ at the end of the week’s issue; but, while by no means wholly negative, it was ultimately devastating. After an opening characterization of the work as a ‘curious compilation’, the reviewer referred in terms of respect—of eulogy, indeed— to ‘two masterly essays’ written by J. L. Myres.6 These were said to ‘make the book indispensable for students’. The opening chapter on ‘Primitive Man’ by Wilhelm Schmidt of Vienna was described as ‘a cautious survey’; those by C. P. Jean of the Louvre on ‘The East’ and by T. E. Peet of Oxford on ‘Ancient Egypt’ were ‘businesslike’; and A. W. Gomme had written ‘an able survey of Greek civilization’. However, ‘more than a third of the volume’ was occupied by ‘an essay on ‘‘The World of the Old Testament and its Historicity’’ by Professor Gruenthauer [sic] of St Louis’; and 4

Eyre would have been flattered, but perhaps also embarrassed, by his entry in the British Library Catalogue—’Eyre, Edward, historian’. 5 I have to thank the Press and in particular Mr Peter Foden for the archival information used here and below. 6 Sir John Myres (1869–1954), Professor of Ancient History at Oxford from 1910 until his retirement in 1939, was perhaps at the time the most distinguished of all Eyre’s contributors.

286

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

this was said to ignore ‘both modern criticism and modern knowledge’ to such an extent that ‘it might have been written by a devout pre-Voltairean’. Its main redeeming feature in the reviewer’s eyes lay in its being ‘occasionally amusing as when it speculates whether Adam’s lost rib was replaced or whether he had an extra rib to start with’. Michael Gruenthaner (1887–1962), the son of German emigrants, educated in Buffalo, entered the Society of Jesus in 1905, was ordained in 1920, and took his doctorate in Sacred Scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in 1928. He taught in various colleges, including the Catholic University of America, and helped to found the Catholic Biblical Association of America. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Gruenthaner’s ‘pioneering work contributed much’ to the development of biblical studies in the United States. It seems, however, that his conception of his subject in the early 1930s fell a considerable way short of the critical standards appropriate to such a work as European Civilization was intended to be. The TLS review ended with the words, ‘Six further volumes are planned’. There was presumably never any intention of abandoning the plan, but the situation was evidently critical. A thousand copies had been released, but the remaining 2000 never saw the light. On 9 July 1935 volume I of European Civilization was reissued—shorn of Gruenthaner’s 464-page chapter and (unsurprisingly, no doubt) without any reference to the ‘first state’ of the volume beyond the insertion of the word ‘REISSUE’ on the title-page. A note on some spellings adopted for proper names was added, together with a short list of corrigenda. A certain awkwardness arose from the publication, at much the same time, of the second volume in the series. A. W. Gomme had written chapters in both volumes, and the second of these included a number of cross-references to the first. The page-numbers in these references were now systematically wrong, and a slip had to be affixed to the titlepage of volume II, referring to the ‘quick reissue of Volume I’ and advising readers that the relevant numbers should be corrected by deducting 464 in each case! After this uneasy start, matters improved somewhat when the second volume was made the subject of a substantial front-page review in the TLS of 19 September 1935. It is tempting to speculate (though it can be no more than speculation) that Douglas Woodruff may have used his influence in Printing House Square to secure this treatment. At all events, things for a time went rather more smoothly for the series. Learned journals began to take notice of it. Volume I (in ips truncated form, of course) was reviewed by Harold Mattingly in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1936. Myres’s chapters were again described as ‘masterly’, those by Peet and Gomme as ‘admirable’. Mattingly did, to be sure, question the validity of Eyre’s initial disjunction between ‘detailed’ and ‘general’ history, arguing that ‘[t]he most successful parts of this volume are thoqe in which the command of detail is strongest’. Yet, he also remarked that ‘Mr Eyre’s historical epic gives us much food for thought’.7 7

Journal of Hellenic Studies, 66 (1936), 98–99. Harold Mattingly (1884–1964) was a scholar of distinction in numismatics and ancient history.

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

287

In the Journal of Roman Studies for the same year, Russell Meiggs both reviewed volume II and commented in passing on its predecessor.8 He too questioned Eyre’s approach: ‘The criticisms of contemporary historians are exaggerated, and the purpose set forth by the editor is less distinctive than is implied. This, however, does not prevent much of the writing from being of first-class value’. One particularly interesting verdict is on the chapter by W. E. Brown—’Christianity to the Edict of Milan’—in which, Meiggs said, ‘the more controversial questions are handled with excellent judgment’. Father Eric Brown, a convert from the Church of England, was Roman Catholic chaplain in the University of Glasgow, and seems to have acted as Eyre’s recruiting-sergeant there—and perhaps in Scotland more generally. Three Glasgow lecturers (four if we include Douglas, who—as noted above—left Glasgow for Exeter only in 1934) were among the contributors to the series, in addition to Brown himself, who was also to write in volume IV on ‘The Reformation in Scotland’. Meanwhile, the first three volumes were jointly and briefly noticed towards the end of the 1935–1936 volume of the American Historical Review (the only periodical, as it turned out, to review all seven). The reviewer, J. E. Pomfret of Princeton, seems not to have been moved to much enthusiasm by what he read in the volumes so far published by ‘Professor [sic] Eyre’, in which he found ‘much overlapping, and y far too much tedious detail’.9 Volume III, however, devoted to the Middle Ages, fared rather better, at least up to a point, in the English Historical Review, where it was discussed by V. H. Galbraith (soon to move from Balliol to Edinburgh).10 He found in A. E. Taylor’s chapter ‘a masterpiece of compression’. Still more notably, ‘Professor D. C. Douglas y writes a vivid, well-balanced sketch of a period of seven hundred years, skillfully subordinating detail to his own thesis, the transmission and development of a non-national, Roman, and ecclesiastical culture’. On the other hand, Jean Guiraud of Besanc-on, in the chapters dealing with ‘The religious crisis of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ and with ‘The later Middle Ages’, had written ‘more as a religious apologist than as a historian’ and had shown himself to be, in Galbraith’s view, ‘not very scholarly and not very accurate’. The problem of apologetics could only intensify when, in volume IV, the series moved on to the period of the Reformation. Critics here were unanimous in singling out Powicke’s chapter as (in A. F. Pollard’s words in History) ‘the most independent and historically minded contribution’. The opening chapter (348 pages by L. Cristiani of Lyons) on ‘The Reformation on the Continent’ (in itself an odd title to find in so deliberately Europeocentric a work) was dealt with charitably by Pollard

8

Journal of Roman Studies 26 (1936): 93–94. Russell Meiggs (1902–1989) was at this time Fellow and Tutor of Keble College, Oxford. 9 American Historical Review, 41 (1935–1936): 789. Pomfret has not been further identified. 10 English Historical Review, 54 (1937), 148. Galbraith (1889–1976) was professor of history at Edinburgh until 1944 and Director of the Institute of Historical Research in London 1944–1947, before returning to Oxford as Regius Professor of Modern History until his retirement.

288

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

on the ground that its author had been given an ‘impossible task’.11 Another distinguished critic, R. H. Bainton of Yale, took a harsher view in the American Historical Review. Inaccuracies, he found, were ‘not infrequent’; and Cristiani had ‘treated the German Reformation in the style of a Denifle, but without the scholarship’. More generally, Bainton thought the volume was ‘badly proportioned in its European context, even though ‘[t]he British section is better done’.12 We can perhaps see in the fact that three chapters were given over to the Reformation in England, Scotland, and Ireland, followed by a documentary section on ‘Legislation of the change of religion’ in those countries, a reflection of Eyre’s original anxieties over anti-Catholic prejudice in the teaching of history in schools. It is at all events easy enough to see why Powicke, negotiating with the Oxford University Press for the separate reissue of his chapter, not only feared that it would be ‘quite lost’ in ‘Eyre’s curious work’, but added, ‘and I don’t much care for the company it has there’. With volume V, dealing ostensibly with the Economic History of Europe since the Reformation, but in fact ranging more widely than that title would indicate, the series entered somewhat less stormy waters. The English Historical Review did not publish until 1940 its account of a book published in 1937; but when it did so, there were strongly positive features in the assessment by ‘E. H’.13 There were ‘outstanding chapters y by Mr Birnie y by Professor Carr-Saunders [on the growth of population] y by Mr R. G. Hawtrey [on British banking and finance] y and by Professor Ernest Barker [on ‘The development of administration, conscription, taxation, social services, and education’]’. There were, indeed, negative points as well: the reviewer found ‘Mr A. H. Atteridge [on naval and military developments] y guilty of over many elementary mistakes’. The same contrast between Atteridge’s chapter and Barker’s had been drawn by E. F. Heckscher when he reviewed the volume in the Economic History Review.14 Barker’s, he said, was ‘by far the most successful’ contribution, characterized as it was by ‘compact and telling phrases that could hardly be surpassed’. Otherwise Heckscher found the book ‘imposing’ but ‘rather disconcerting’ in the imbalance of its contents and in the fact that some of its chapters were ‘little more than semi-political, semi-religious pamphlets’. A similarly

11 History, n. s. 21 (1936–1937), 266–267. Pollard (1869–1948), then doyen of Tudor historians, had retired in 1931 from his chair at University College London and as Director of the Institute of Historical Research. 12 American Historical Review, 42 (1936–1937), 295–296. Bainton {1894–1984) had been Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the Yale Divinity School since 1936. 13 English Historical Review, 55 (1940), 335–336. The reviewer was perhaps Edward Hughes (1899–1965), Professor of History in the University of Durham from 1939. 14 Economic History Review, 9 (1938–1939), 198–200. Heckscher published an economic history of Sweden of which an English translation appeared in 1954. Sir Ernest Barker (1874–1960) had been Professor of Political Science at Cambridge since 1927. Andrew Hilliard Atteridge had published, besides works on the 17th (Northern) Division and on the Sudan war of 1896, a 72-page pamphlet on The Elizabethan persecution: did its victims suffer for the old faith of England or for treason? (London, 1928). (I have to thank Sir Keith Thomas for identifying Atteridge).

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

289

negative view was taken by C. W. Cole of Amherst College in the American Historical Review.15 True, the first ten chapters (those dealing with strictly economic issues) were said to ‘present useful summaries of the most accessible secondary material’. Even so, they were ‘truncated and provincial’; and ‘[t]hroughout the volume, the role of England is overemphasized’. Again, as Cole saw matters, ‘[m]ost of the chapters’ were ‘written from a Catholic point of view’—though he qualified this by adding that this was ‘obtrusively so only on occasion’. He found ‘relatively few factual errors’; but ‘[s]ome of the errors of interpretation are more serious’. One illustrative instance is cited from Arthur Birnie’s chapter: ‘The only causes given for the industrial revolution are the opening up of new markets and the development of ‘‘more modern methods of production’’’. Cole also thought that ‘the whole volume suffers from a lack of synthesis’: ‘[t]he first ten essays should be of use to the reader interested in the topics treated rather than in a broad synthetic survey’. As for the rest—’The editor may have had his own reasons for including the last five [chapters] (539 pages, 42% of the book)’. It is of some interest to note that both the American reviewers cited so far took up the issue of editorial policy (or the lack of a clearly defined policy) for the series. And it will be useful to pause at this point to enquire into Eyre’s editorial role. In his preface to the first volume he said that there had been, on his part, ‘no attempt to impose upon the work any unity of outlook beyond that common to all scholars’. From Powicke, writing after the event, we learn that Eyre was ‘a kind and forbearing editor’; but we may also infer that he did suggest changes in the texts submitted, even if only those that were ‘advisable in the interests of accuracy and clarity’ were—at least in Powicke’s case—adopted. Bearing in mind what Powicke says of the strength of Eyre’s opinions, together with what we know of the purposes he had in mind in launching the enterprise, we can hardly doubt that he would at least have tried to secure such modifications in what was written as were consonant with his own outlook. Yet he was not, apparently, disposed to enforce such modifications. At the same time, he seems to have been equally reluctant—perhaps indeed doubting his own competence as a non-professional—to exercise much editorial control over the structure and balance of the work. It is noteworthy that, from the very outset, in the December 1934 TLS ‘short notice’, critical readers were aware of the lack of ‘evidence of the ‘‘direction’’ to which the title page refers’. Again and again one has the impression of an enterprise that is running to seed, with little effort being made to ensure that the contents of the successive volumes conformed to the original intention ‘to exhibit y without detailed narrative’ the broad themes of ‘the rise of Europe and the distinctive character of European civilization’. A difficulty arising here is that we do not know to what extent Eyre had and took advice in the planning and editing of European Civilization. It is clear that Douglas Woodruff played a significant part: it has even been suggested that he ‘was perhaps the real editor of the series’.16 Unfortunately, the correspondence preserved in the 15 American Historical Review, 43 (1937–1938), 368–370. Cole (1906–1978) taught at Amherst, where he became professor of economics, from 1935. He published a major work on Colbert in 1939. 16 Letter from Peter Foden, Oxford University Press, 12 September 1994.

290

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

Oxford University Press archives is concerned largely with commercial rather than editorial matters. It must also be borne in mind that Eyre died in 1937, before publication was complete. Volumes V and VI were both published in that year: Arthur Birnie received the offprint of his chapter in volume V on 23 January 1937, but it seems likely that volume VI was not published until after Eyre’s death in May.17 The final volume did not appear until 1939. It is perhaps a reasonable hypothesis that Woodruff, given the degree of his earlier involvement, would have played a large part in seeing the later volumes through the press: his own direct contribution was the opening chapter in volume VII, on ‘The European frontier’. It would, obviously, be useful to know more about Eyre’s advisers and collaborators— the more so because the later volumes, and perhaps especially the sixth, may be seen as manifesting some falling away from the standards that had been (however uncertainly) achieved earlier. Certainly volume VI of European Civilization struck some critics as being distinctly problematic. Devoted to The Political and Cultural History of Europe since the Reformation, it was, with its 1624 pages, easily the longest book in the series. This was owing largely to the fact that the volume opened with an extraordinary ‘Chronicle of social and political events from 1640 to 1914’ by Dom Henry [sic] M. Leclercq, OSB, which took up no less than 717 pages and bore an odd appearance in a work committed to handling its subject ‘without detailed narrative’. Henri Leclercq (1869–1945), monk of Solesmes but later of Farnborough, has been described as ‘an indefatigable scholar, who spent the major part of his career in the British Museum’.18 Much, though by no means all of his work had the early Christian centuries as its focus: his ‘Chronicle’ for Eyre’s series lay rather on the periphery of his scholarly field. It may be harsh to say that the history deployed there by Leclercq ‘would not pass GCSE’;19 but it must certainly be acknowledged that the massive compilation laid an insecure foundation for the volume in which it appeared. That volume, to a much greater extent than its predecessors, reflects in the names of its contributors the cultural world of English (and Irish) Catholicism in the 1930s. Besides Dom Leclercq’s blockbuster, there are two chapters by Father Martin D’Arcy, SJ and an essay on ‘The Catholic Church and modern civilization’ by Dom Cuthbert Butler, OSB, former abbot of Downside, to say nothing of a discussion of ‘The education of peoples since the Reformation’ by T. Corcoran of University College, Dublin. It is true that the defense of the faith was not committed exclusively to Roman Catholic hands: the discussion of ‘The scientific method of modern times’ was undertaken by no less a person than Sir Ambrose Fleming (1849–1945), the

17

One curious fact is that neither of these volumes was reviewed in the TLS. F. X. Murphy used the phrase quoted here in his entry on Leclercq in the New Catholic Encyclopedia. He also observed that some of Leclercq’s scholarship ‘has been severely criticized’. The fullest account is by Theodor Klauser, Henri Leclercq 1869–1945: vom Autodidakten zum Kompilator grossen Stils (Munster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1977); the subtitle embodies a characterization of Leclercq’s work as telling as it is concise. (I am indebted to Professor David Wright for drawing my attention to Klauser’s work.) 19 Dr Mark Goldie in a letter dated 12 September 1994. 18

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

291

inventor of the thermionic valve, but also a stout upholder of biblical fundamentals against such challenges as that posed by evolutionary biology. Two reviews, one from each side of the Atlantic, give some indication of the critical response to all this. In History, volume VI of European Civilization was considered by Gavin B. Henderson in a tone of some indignation.20 He could find ‘no apparent scheme or order’ in the book. Some contributors—Butler; Joseph Bonsirven (on the Jews); Desmond McCarthy (on literature); A. E. Taylor (on philosophy); and J. W. C. Wand, later bishop of London (on ‘non-papal Christianity’)—had indeed written ‘with clarity and learning’, so that ‘all their essays will repay study’. It was a very different story with others, who had produced what ‘must be classed as Roman Catholic propaganda, not as history’. Writing on ‘The decline of authority in the nineteenth century’, D’Arcy (we are told) ‘displays pro-Fascist sympathies’. The reviewer’s hottest indignation, however, was reserved for Corcoran and his Dublin colleague W. J. Williams (on ‘Ireland’s place in European civilization’). Corcoran, among his other offences, had ‘gravely rebuked’ Hilaire Belloc—an ‘example of the pot calling the kettle black’ which (Henderson thought) ‘may well cause hilarity among historians’.21 In the same year the American Historical Review published a substantial account of Eyre’s sixth volume by a reviewer of considerable distinction and authority. Carl Becker of Cornell was indeed one of the most outstanding scholars to consider any part of European Civilization. He adopted a measured approach to reach a verdict that was, for that very reason, all the more damaging. In Becker’s view, ‘this work is in organization conventional, in emphasis distorted, and in interpretation limited to the authoritative Catholic point of view’. He acknowledged that the ‘version of the Catholic attitude towards modern history’ presented in the book was ‘nonpolemical’ and even ‘fairly liberal’. It was still, however, ‘frankly dogmatic’. Becker’s judgments, relying on irony rather than indignation, were no less damning: ‘as Bagehot said of Gibbon that the style of his autobiography indicated that he could not distinguish between himself and the Roman Empire, so we may say of Mr [sic] D’Arcy that in his treatment of authority he fails to distinguish between God and the pope’.22 What remained for volume VII was potentially the most interesting and forwardlooking topic of all: The Relations of Europe with non-European Peoples. Drawing particularly upon the unrivalled missionary experience of the Catholic Church, the chapters in this final volume may at least be said to treat in extenso an aspect of 20

History, n. s. 23 (1938–1939), 163. Gavin Burns Henderson (1909–1945), senior lecturer in the University of Glasgow, was killed in an air crash in 1945: Crimean War Diplomacy, and other historical essays, edited by his elder brother W, O, Henderson (himself an economic historian of modern Germany), was published in 1947 in the series Glasgow University Publications. (I am again indebted to Keith Thomas for an identification that had eluded me.) 21 Belloc (1870–1953) had published Europe and the Faith in 1920, The Catholic Church and History in 1927, and his 4-volume History of England between 1925 and 1931 (with a one-volume version in 1934). 22 American Historical Review, 44 (1938–1939), 346-348. Carl Becker (1873–1945) was Professor of European History at Cornell from 1916 to 1941: his most celebrated work, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers had been published in 1931.

292

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

European development of which the importance has been heavily underlined by the history, over the past 60 years, of relations between the developed and the developing (or ‘third’) world. It is true that the treatment in European Civilization of the earlier phases in those relations is less than comprehensive and not altogether well balanced. Relations with Africa are the subject of nine out of fifteen chapters, each of the European powers which had, or had had, colonial dealings in that continent rating a chapter to itself. In contrast, a single chapter (admittedly of over two hundred pages) had to suffice for ‘Europe and the Far East’. And strangely, not a single chapter dealt with Latin America (though there had been a short and somewhat anomalous chapter in volume VI on ‘The Paraguay missions’). On the other hand, an important chapter on ‘Negro slavery’ was the work of the most interesting contributor to this final volume—Carter G. Woodson, Director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and editor of The Journal of Negro History.23 With the final volume the TLS resumed its interest in the series in a short but favourable notice. The only other review so far examined, however, in the American Historical Review, by Halford L. Hoskins of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, took a largely hostile view of the coping-stone of Eyre’s huge edifice.24 To what extent had visitors other than reviewers entered the building since its opening at the end of 1934? This is not, obviously, a question to be answered with any degree of precision. Some evidence as to sales is available and could be said to show that the enterprise was not a total failure. The truncated volume I (1935) had a print-run of 2600 copies; and matters proceeded more cautiously than had been the case six or seven months previously, before the amputation of Gruenthaner’s disastrous chapter: only 200 copies were bound, while the quires for a further 400 were sent to New York for binding there. Eight hundred of the remaining 2000 copies were ‘wasted’ in 1942, and all quires still unbound were ‘pulped’ in 1948.25 Figures for the rest of the series are similar, and sales have been described as ‘plodding on y until stocks were exhausted’. The later volumes remained in print until the early 1960s; but when, sometime during that decade, a Bristol bookseller offered a set to Downside Abbey, it was priced at d70 (just over 11 times the 1934 subscription price) and described as ‘very scarce when complete’.26 What is even harder to ascertain than the circulation of the work is the extent to which it was consulted and cited. There is one piece of evidence to suggest that the volumes were not totally neglected by serious historians. Edward Eyre has at least the distinction of being mentioned in the index of R. G. Collingwood’s New Leviathan. When discussing the Albigensian heresy (‘The Second Barbarism’), Collingwood cited Jean Guiraud’s chapter in volume III of European Civilization as 23

Woodson (1875–1950), the son of former slaves, is regarded as the ‘Father of Negro History’. American Historical Review, 45 (1939–1940), 848-849. Hoskins (1891–1967) had taught in the Fletcher School since 1933. 25 It may be noted that copyright in the series had passed, in 1940, to Campion Hall, Oxford— presumably under the terms of Edward Eyre’s will. 26 Letter from Dom Philip Jebb, OSB, 20 September 1994. The volumes were purchased for the Abbey library. 24

J.H. Burns / History of European Ideas 28 (2002) 281–293

293

the work of one who had ‘evidently devoted special attention to the records of the Holy Office’. Collingwood commented dryly on the fact that there is no mention in this connection of the relevant material in J. B. Bury’s Appendix to Gibbon, noting that there would have been some ‘inexpediency’ in making such a reference ‘in a work of Roman Catholic Apologetics’.27 That dismissive description is a sorry commentary on Eyre’s vision of a work in which confessional bias would be ‘reduced to a very small thing’. By the time Downside acquired its ‘very scarce’ complete set of European Civilization in the 1960s, the world (including, emphatically, the world of the Catholic Church) was almost unrecognizably different from the world in which Eyre had launched his ambitious enterprise. Even so, the extent to which the series seems to have sunk almost without trace remains remarkable. After all, Europe after the Second World War—Europe west of the Iron Curtain at least—could be said to have become more conscious of the common identity Eyre’s series had sought (albeit clumsily enough) to emphasize. On the other hand, there was in Eyre and in many of his authors a backward-looking tendency that did not match the post-war mood. The Europe of ‘Christian democracy’ (for all the disenchantment that so swiftly overtook it) was at any rate not the Europe of Salazar, of Franco, or of Pe! tain. And if the Church of Pius XII had some way to go before it became the Church of John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, it was already the seedbed of changes that would call in question what had seemed to be rigid and embattled orthodoxies. European Civilization may not have issued, like Hume’s Treatise, ‘dead-born from the press’; but it did come haltingly into a changing world already hostile to many of its preconceptions. Carl Becker may have come very close to the truth when he summed up his view of Eyre’s sixth volume—the volume in which the series confronted most directly that unfriendly modern Europe—by observing that ‘in understanding the world in which we live, it helps us little to be told that another one, now irretrievably lost, was better’.

27

R. G. Collingwood, The New Leviathan or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942; revised edn, ed. D. Boucher, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 361–362.