LA CONFORMACION DEL SISTEMA PRESIDENCIAL
3.3 LA CONFIGURACION DE LA INSTITUCION PRESIDENCIAL
Thomas Carlyle was one of the most important figure who influenced Trevelyan during the twentieth-century. He was a close friend of his father Sir George Otto. They often went for long walks together on Hampstead Heath, talking and arguing about history and literature. Trevelyan appreciated Carlyle's works even after his death and when he went to Cambridge he studied his On heroes and Hero-Worship, a sage work about the past. He taught Heroes and Hero-Worship at the Working Men's College.
Carlyle was a prophet on Trevelyan's thoughts. He regarded The French Revolution as the greatest history of Carlyle who gave memorable pictures of the scenes and actors in that strange drama. He was moved by Carlyle's influence, in Past and Present, of the machine age of the 1830s and 1840s and by his hostility to the utilitarian profit and loss philosophers. Also Carlyle's Cromwell was a one-sided book that lacked interest in institutions. In this work Carlyle's preoccupation with heroes was degenerating into an obsession with despots. The last Carlyle's works were not to Trevelyan's taste; in fact Latter day Pamphlets and Frederick the Great were the expression of a misanthropic authoritarian, hostile to parliamentary government Carlyle.
But coming back to the fundamental principles of Carlyle doctrine such as the Stakhanovite injunction Produce!Produce! There were no doubt that Trevelyan was really influenced by his social interest and the belief that history was
The essence of innumerable biographies.79
Trevelyan admiration for French revolution was due to Carlyle's passion and the same was for the portrait of Cromwell in his England Under The Stuarts.
Trevelyan, as Carlyle owned the capacity of writing history from the inside of the actors.
Carlyle was unsurpassed in his imaginative grasp of persons, situations and events, and this essentially poetic sense of the past- tender as Shakespeare in his loving pity for all men- touched a responsive chord in Trevelyan's own nature. For like Carlyle, Trevelyan had boundless sympathy and compassion for the individual men and women of the poor, struggling human race.80
79 Thomas Carlyle. Selected Writings, Mass Market Paperback Penguin Classic, 1980, p. 3 80 David Cannadine, A life in History, op,cit., p.31
Like Carlyle Trevelyan studied the heroes of past as a noble doctrine. But his heroes were on the side of liberty and freedom instead those of Carlyle were on the side of tyranny and despotism. We have to remember the figure of Garibaldi who was depicted as a poet and as a man of action and also the biographies of John Bright, of Lord Grey of the reform Bill, of Grey of Fallodon and the study of Manin in 1848.
Another literary figure who influenced Trevelyan was the poet George Meredith. When Trevelyan was at Cambridge, he studied his poetry and novels. In 1906 he published the only book of a living person: The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith. For the centenary of Meredith's birth he wrote a gratefully essay in 1928.
Trevelyan was convinced that Meredith was a appreciated poet but also a philosopher and teacher. Like Wordsworth and our historian, he loved the English countryside and believed that man was at his best when communing with nature. He was the first poet of nature to consider Darwin's theories. Trevelyan was captivated from Meredith's combination of visionary ideals with practical wisdom. Meredith was an optimistic poet who believed in serviceableness to successor and at the same time he was the poet of common sense who celebrated the ordinariness of normal character.
In accordance with his Autobiography, he was appreciated from Trevelyan also for his political beliefs. He was a Liberal and he believed in democracy and education and in the emancipation of women. Like Trevelyan he admired the French Revolution and he regarded Italian unification as the main historical fact of the nineteenth century.
Trevelyan also shared with him a passionate patriotism believing in the fact that the nation must rearm in the face of the German threat.
Merredith influenced significantly the Trevelyan's work on Garibaldi with his books on Italy. In his Vittoria the character of the Italian revolution was evoked at best, in fact it provided a detailed and accurate analysis of people and of that period.
Both Meredith and Carlyle was very relevant for the artistic and historical life of Trevelyan but they are only two of a large variety of English poets and writers who conditioned his thinkings, ideals and writings. In fact among Trevelyan's earliest memories wwere visits to the theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon to see Shakespeare, learning Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. At Harrow he read Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and at Cambridge he discovered Meredith and Carlyle. Only there he realised that history and not poetry was his vocation.
But we have to remember that he continued to keep his passion for literature during the age and
He never wavered from his belief that history and literature were inseparable: no historian could write about the English past ignorant of what novelists and poets had said; and no critic could write about literature if he was unaware of the circumstances in which it had been created.81
In fact this connubio between history and literature remained an important symbol of the Trevelyan's artistic life. His devotion to English literature was in everything that he wrote. In his historical works he celebrated the writing of many poets and writers, especially of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Keats. In his polemical writings he felt the necessity of reunifying the study of history and literature.
He admitted that his love for poetry had affected the character and in places the style of his historical writings had dictated his choice of subjects. He held a poetic view of the past which brought a boundless compassion for men and women, the same loving pity for all men owned by Shakespeare.
Among Trevelyan's earliest memories were visits to the theatre at Stratford to see Shakespeare, learning Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, and electrifying for Scotts' historical romances. At Harrow, he read Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and Keats with passionate delight.82
At Cambridge he definitely decided that his vocation was history not poetry even if his passion for literature never abandoned him. It was in this period that he convinced himself that history and literature were inseparable.
No historian could write about the English past ignorant of what novelists and poets had said; and no critic could write about literature if he was unaware of the circumstances in which it had been created.83
The best expression of the sense of poetry had been written by Carlyle in the following sentence:
History after all is the true poetry; Reality, if rightly interpreted, is grander than Fiction; nay even, in the right interpretation of Reality and History, does genuine Poetry lie.84
81 David Cannadine, A life in history,op.cit. p.33 82 G.M. Trevelyan, Autobiography, op.cit., p.12 83 David Cannadine, G.M.Trevelyan,op.cit., p.33 84 G.M. Trevelyan, Autobiography, op.cit., p.60
The devotion to English literature helped Trevelyan all along his historian's career to dictate his choice of subjects. He explained to have chosen Garibaldi because his life seemed to him the most poetical of all true stories and Grey of Fallodon because his own life and fate were a prose poem. He continued to hold a poetic view of the past that analysed the tragedy of the human life by emerging a boundless compassion for all the human beings. He wanted to remind to his readers that on the earth previous generations had lived and died and that the same fate involved the men who came after them.