Haunted Historian

To his classmates at Harrow, George Macaulay Trevelyan seemed, as he himself tells it, like "a 'swot' of the worst kind . . . socially [a] misfit . . . a complete muff at cricket, and clumsy at football." He was "wrapped in literary and historical imaginings," and he was also a crashing bore. "I never had dreams of being a general, or a statesman or an engine-driver, like other aspiring children . . . I wanted to be [a] historian."

In time, George Trevelyan's dream came true. His monumental England Under Queen Anne and his three-volume study of Garibaldi's Italy were definitive works on their periods. His History of England became a standard text on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally, at 73, "too old to write another serious history book," spindly, white-haired George Trevelyan wrote a little history of himself. By last week, from his brief Autobiography and Other Essays, now on British book counters, readers could learn just what makes a renowned historian tick.

Roundheads & Rome. The ticking began almost at birth. The son of Historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan and grandnephew of Lord Macaulay, young George grew up in a rambling mansion in Shakespeare's Warwickshire. He was a "queer, happy little boy," who would play soldier ("Napoleonic period") by the hour, and could recite the Lays of Ancient Rome by heart. At school, he was happiest arguing the Roundhead cause against his pro-Cavalier school chums, or wandering about some nearby battlefield with his history-minded house master ("O boy, you oughtn't to have a hot bath twice a week; you'll get like the later Romans, boy").

At Cambridge, it was much the same. There were trips to old abbeys and castles that "haunted me like a passion." There was flashing talk in the common rooms, deep conversations with young Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead; and there were frequent visits to that master historian, Lord Acton.

In 1927, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin appointed Trevelyan to Acton's old Cambridge professorship. By that time, Trevelyan was married (to the daughter of Mrs. Humphry Ward, novelist niece of Matthew Arnold), had became famous as a historian himself. Thirteen years later, Winston Churchill made him Master of Trinity College. There he reigns, the "Grand Old Man" of Trinity Lodge.

Science & Poetry. "I have been," writes Trevelyan, "not an original but a traditional kind of historian." Unlike Arnold Toynbee, he saw no pattern in the past, evolved no sweeping philosophy of history. "Philosophy must be brought to history, it cannot be extracted from it. And I have no philosophy of my own to bring, beyond a love of things good and a hatred of things evil."

Actually, Trevelyan brought a good deal more. Good history, he believed, was never all science; it had to be literature, too. To be read, it had to be fascinating; it was the duty of the historian to make it so. He could not do this without being himself part poet. For "in that strange relation of past and present, poetry is always inherent, even in . . . Greek potsherds and Roman stones, in Manor rolls and Parliamentary reports."

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