The Collected Essays of J.H. Plumb: vol. 2, The American Experience.

THE ENGLISH HISTORIAN J. H. Plumb offers two volumes of his collected essays (another volume is due next year). They are pleasant reminders that, in England, readability and academic distinction still go hand in hand,

The Making of an Historian is the more interesting of the two volumes just issued, which is not to disparage The American Experience, but to note the greater range, depth, and personal engagement of the first volume. In it Plumb reviews his own career and the shaping of his mind under the great influences of G.M. Trevelyan and Sir Lewis Namier. He assesses these and several other renowned historians, including Toynbee, Spengler, H.G. Wells, Churchill, Macaulay, Sir Arthur Bryant, Fernand Braudel, A. L. Rowse, and Herbert Butterfield.

For Plumb, history is mainly English history. His other category is "human" history, and there seems not to be much in between. His philosophy is rather unfashionably progressive: he

sees history as essentially the story of man's increasing conquest of the material world. Much as he respects Namier's contribution to historical method-the exhaustive gathering of documentary detail to make it yield a wholly fresh portrait of a given period-he finds it, in the end, "myopic scholarship" that misses larger truths by failing to connect the targeted period to the general life of the nation. Plumb stands firmly with Trevelyan and Macaulay, the great generalizers who were not afr.aid to make large moral statements about the past and its personages. He thinks their excellence as stylists and their popularity is intrinsically related to their greatness as historians, and holds that this greatness has hardly been diminished by subsequent professional scholarship that has corrected them in many details of fact. History, he contends, may, like poetry and philosopby, have its imperishable masterpieces, and is not doomed by academic refinements to perpetual supersession.

For this reason Plumb is surprisingly favorable to H.G. Wells, whose immensely popular Outline of History he deems essentially sound, despite the contemptuous neglect it has received from academic historians: "Of course, there are mistakes in Wells, errors of fact, misinterpretations, etc., but the broad sweep of his outline is the true story of mankind, and because it is true, his prognostications carry the stamp of truth too." Wells preached not fatuous optimism but "qualified hope": "He knew there would be further tyranny, slaughter, and hatred but he also knew that science and education would persist."

On the other hand, Plumb is withering in his scorn for Toynbee and Spengler, whom he considers a pair of dangerous quacks for their failure to appreciate the reality of material progress. He believes devoutly in what Butterfield called (misleadingly, according to Plumb) "the Whig interpretation of history." He has little use for conservatism; Burke's political philosophy is "utter rubbish, and completely unhistorical. . . . Burke clothed in the eloquent language of religion and ethics the nakedness of private greed and public oppression."

But such dyspeptic moments are rare. As a rule Plumb is fair-minded and ready to appreciate writers he disagrees with, and his appreciation is alert to

idiosyncratic virtues. He admires the pageantry and narrative power of Churchill and Bryant, though he thinks their "patrician" history lacks the dimension of sympathy for or even interest in the stuff of common men's existences; theirs is history as experienced by the people who wield power.

His criticisms may be just, but Plumb himself, to my mind, is disappointing. He is a sprightly writer, incapable of a dull sentence, but his wide knowledge somehow never seems to take him far from home. History seems to have yielded up no secrets to him, no surprising perspectives, no serious challenges to the rather humdrum liberalism he has apparently held from the start. He is entitled to reply that the truth of human progress is, after all, obvious, and that may be so. But he gives the impression of knowing the moral before he tells the story, of living in a mental universe that is a little too complete and of seeing no mysteries in human experience. His outlook is as complacent as Churchill's, in its way, and less colorful.

Like most progressive historians, Plumb has learned nothing from the past but what he already knew in principle. The only wonder is thatthe twentieth century was so long in getting here; we-we progressive-minded moderns-are the natural culmination of the whole story, and what can come after us (unless disaster) except more of the same?

But this is only a general limitation that doesn't prevent him from making acute observations on whatever subject he addresses. He is especially discerning as a judge of character, and even when his opinions aren't profound they are consistently fresh. In The American Experience he ventures reconsiderations of Washington, George III, Franklin, and Disraeli, as well as a series of essays on the problem of slavery. Plumb lived here for some years and has a strong affection for this country, especially New York: "It is not a cruel city, on the contrary it might be argued that it is too benevolent," he says, though one afternoon, on Brooklyn Bridge, "I had a bayonet put to my throat and I was relieved of $50 by an elegant young black wearing a hat like a cardinal's biretta." He calls the Big Apple "the most remarkable city built by man, and as day turns to night one of the most beautiful cities in the world." I

won't argue with the first judgment, and I might agree with the second if all I had to go on were his eloquent description.

Plumb's views on Vietnam and Watergate are what might be expected, but without the irritating attitudinizing of most liberals. He frets that Watergate has caused people to lose faith in government-a faith they should never have had in the first place. Plumb seems not to understand the American Constitution any better than most native liberals; that is, he all but identifies it with a certain interpretation of the Bill of Rights and feels it is seriously menaced by such practices as government wiretapping, though not, apparently, by federal inroads against private property.

Plumb's essays combine the virtues of first-class scholarship and good conversation, highly informed, often opinionated, always agreeable. I closed these two volumes looking forward to Volume Three.