BIOGRAPHY: History Man: The Life of RG CollingwoodBy Fred Inglis Princeton University Press, 385pp, €27.95 The densely packed life of a prolific philosopher, historian and idealist
THE AUTHOR’S classification of the eminent pre-War Oxford Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy, Robin George Collingwood (1889-1943), as “History Man” is as deliberate as the photograph of a footpath leading to Coniston Old Man (“a benign and powerful crag”) chosen for the cover of his book. This shows the clouds knowledgeably described by Collingwood’s childhood neighbour, the ageing art critic John Ruskin, and evocatively drawn by his (and Ruskin’s) favourite painter, JMW Turner, scudding above a timelessly trodden track in their beloved English Lake District.
As the ancient way rises up before the walker approaching the brow of the hill, this image implies the beholder is part of a continuum, carrying all the experience of having reached this point, aware that there are significant archaeological and topographical landmarks which flank and lie beneath the path, and with the prospect of further geological wonders appearing beyond the horizon. Past, present, future synthesised in time, as part of the experience of an ancient, still unfathomed landscape, offer the sense of history and the prospect of the question-and-answer logic (rather than the received “cut-and-paste” approach) which were basic tenets of the lines of enquiry of a man considered by many as the “last and greatest British idealist philosopher”.
Collingwood’s belief that the past may be found living, “encapsulated” in the present, “releasing its force into the later moment from within that capsule”, that “all history is the history of the mind in action . . . made and remade by the thoughts of innumerable people thinking . . . consequently and collectively” evolved throughout his all-too-short lifetime of ceaseless intellectual, moral and physical questing.
Although the author, Fred Inglis, the cultural and political historian, gamely (if over-digressively) pursues the continuing legacy of his hero by examining the theoretical nature and contexts of Collingwood's prolific output of meticulously handwritten and delivered lectures, papers, articles and books, it is his biography that principally concerns him. Inglis sets out to track the "line of force" which drove the story of his "stern and formidable" subject's life and thoughts, and to retrieve him from what he calls "the parlour gaming prison-house of philosophy". Undaunted by Collingwood's derogatory remarks on the "gossip-value" of the biography as "a device for stimulating emotion" in his unfinished, "torrential" masterpiece, The Principles of History(1938-9), and his necessary dependence on the philosopher-historian's Autobiography(his best-known book, continuously in print since 1939), the author adopts a deliberately chronological account of a densely packed life tempered by its relentless thought processes.
The only son of Ruskin's friend, disciple and biographer, William Gershom Collingwood, he grew up at Lanehead, idyllically set across the lake from Ruskin on Coniston Water, in a loving, hard-working, self-sufficient and liberal home-educated family. He and his three artistic sisters learned music, painting, reading, poetry, story-telling, model-making, sailing, ancient, modern and local history, Greek, Latin, archaeology, folklore and the importance of duty and nature from their resourceful parents. Inglis stresses the influence of his father's admiring fictional reconstructions of Northumbrian post-Roman tradition and his popular guide to The Lake Counties, which would lead to his own practical archaeological excavations, and to the family's virtual adoption of Arthur Ransome, the youthful future author of Swallows and Amazons.
An injury to his knee at Rugby, his Spartan public school, enabled him to abandon sport and instead devour literature and history, play music, adopt responsibility and, always a somewhat solitary insomniac, to think deeply. A scholarship enabled him to read Classics and engage with idealist philosophy at Oxford, on whose architectural virtues and social variegations Inglis waxes enthusiastically. The budding philosopher became as rooted within the distinguished academic tradition of this venerable city as to his native landscape as he embarked on “the long journey to make philosophy and history synonymous” with a Ruskinian blend of art, religion, archaeology and science. Elected a Fellow of Pembroke College in 1912, he began lecturing brilliantly, balancing ceaseless intellectual enquiry related to the “re-enactment” of past thoughts expressed in the historian’s own lifetime with hands-on archaeological digs, drawings and rubbings of Roman inscriptions (5,000 of them).
Although a volunteer in Admiralty Intelligence, the second World War signified for him the hideous triumph of science over the human intellect. After the war, sympathetic Oxford colleagues included his contemporary, TS Eliot, whose metaphysical poetry Inglis compares aptly with Collingwood’s own questing writings, JRR Tolkien, Isaiah Berlin, and a growing phalanx of admiring, subsequently distinguished, students.
Marriage to a staunch fellow archaeology enthusiast from Scotland resulted in two children, and domestic activities such as bee-keeping. His prodigious written output, translations and heavy tutorial load eventually led to a decline in his health in 1931, although his travelling and publishing continued unabated. His Essay on Philosophical Method(1933) appeared the same year as Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus, with which Inglis compares it illuminatingly. Like Eliot, Collingwood was becoming increasingly disturbed by the irrational degeneration of culture and the increasing menace of Fascism in Germany and Italy but, just before the outbreak of the second World War, and the publication of his major discussion on The Principles of Art, he had a stroke. His response was to commission a yacht and sail away for three months.
A further stroke, a series of psychoanalytical sessions, and his love for a young actress, a former student, led to a moral crisis and his deliberately provocative Autobiography. As his health deteriorated, he took to the seas again, cruising to Java, constantly writing, re-writing and preparing his great (unfinished) theoretical study, The Principles of History.
Back in Oxford, aged 50, his marriage and health broken, he sailed again in jovial student company on a final self-searching odyssey to Greece at the outbreak of war. On his return, he abandoned Oxford, his professorship, his wife and, some believed, his sanity for his beloved, who bore their child a year before he died in 1943.
Nicola Gordon Bowe, associate fellow, NCAD and visiting professor, school of art and design, University of Ulster, is a past recipient of a research award from Ruskin’s Guild of St George