Under Another Sky (28 page)

In 1938, not yet aged fifty, he suffered a stroke. In some ways this appalling experience was the defining moment of his academic career. It was the first of several; the same complaint had carried off his father. From this point onwards, until his death five years later, Collingwood wrote as if he were living on borrowed time. Granted leave from Oxford, he poured out writings, and it is the work from this period that is now his most influential, including the posthumously published
The Idea of History
, which, although its ideas have been superseded in many respects, still stands as a classic. The year after that first stroke he also produced his rather startling autobiography – not a conventional story of a life at all, but an account, barely concealing the enormous passions stirring beneath its rigorous, donnish prose, of the development of a mind. Distilling his most important ideas, it announced his intention to redeploy his intellectual powers in a single direction: the defeat of Nazism. By turns noble and arrogant, it also accused his fellow philosophers of being stooges of fascism, and condemned the wider establishment and media of an unforgivable indifference to the cause of Spanish republicanism.

Collingwood was a child of the Lakes. Born at Cartmel, he soon moved with his family to Coniston, to a comfortable house called Lanehead, a mile away from Brantwood, where John Ruskin lived. Both houses overlooked the grand heights of the Old Man of Coniston. His father, W. G. Collingwood, a painter, writer, local historian and archaeologist, had been Ruskin’s pupil, biographer and devoted last secretary. His mother, Dorrie, was a painter of miniatures and a wonderful pianist. The young Robin and his sisters would wake up every morning to the sound of her playing Beethoven or Chopin before breakfast. A painting by Burne-Jones –
Two Angels
– hung in the drawing room. Robin was taught at home by his father until the age of thirteen. He read his way through his father’s library. Aged eight, he picked up a copy of Kant’s
Theory of Ethics
, and was ‘attacked by a strange succession of emotions. I felt that things of the highest importance were being said about matters of the utmost urgency … then, with a wave of indignation, came the discovery that I could not understand them … Then, third and last, came the strangest emotion of all. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not
understand it, were somehow my business … I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed.’ By the age of thirteen, he had excellent Greek and Latin and ‘spoke and read French and German almost as easily as English’. He was a prolific writer of stories and poems, and edited a family magazine for private circulation. He was, too, ‘a neat-fingered boy, skilful at making all sorts of things; active in walking, bicycling, or rowing, and thoroughly practised in sailing a boat’. His father wrote a children’s story,
Thorstein of the Mere
, set among the Vikings who settled at Coniston. It was dedicated to his son, with a verse inscription including the lines: ‘Thanks, Robin: for the wide world o’er/ A writer asks no finer flattery,/ No kinder fate of all in store,/ Than Five-years-old’s assault and battery/ Demanding more and more.’ When R. G. advocated home-schooling in his Hobbesian work of political philosophy
The New Leviathan
, published in 1942, one can see why. He was utterly miserable at Rugby, and seemed to regard his undergraduate days at Oxford as an opportunity for long bursts of private reading, relatively undisturbed by actual teaching. Everything that he regarded as important about his education had begun at home.

If his Lakeland upbringing sounds almost too idyllic to be true, at least one outsider was also caught up in its spell. One day, W. G. Collingwood, walking home from a painting trip up on the Old Man, saw what he thought was a body washed up on a wide flat stone in Copper Mines Beck. He called out and was relieved when the apparent corpse lifted its head. The young man in question later recalled: ‘He asked me what I was doing and I told him I had been trying to write poetry. Instead of laughing, he seemed to think it a reasonable occupation, and we walked down to the village together.’ This was the young Arthur Ransome, who had caught the train north ‘with Hazlitt in one pocket, Keats in the other’ to take his first holiday from his job at a London publisher’s. Ransome fell in love with the whole family. His favourite children’s book had been
Thorstein of the Mere
, and he immediately felt that his own literary efforts would be taken seriously by this family of writers, musicians and painters; in his own father, now dead, he had prompted nothing (he felt) but exasperation and disappointment.

The elder Collingwoods became the ‘touchstones by whom to judge all other people that I met’. This was the life creative and the life of
the mind; a kind of paradise for Ransome. Recalling W. G.’s study, he wrote: ‘I can see it now, the books from floor to ceiling, the enormous long table piled with books and manuscripts, the unfinished canvas on an easel, the small table at which he was writing and, over the fireplace, his lovely portrait of his wife, in a small boat with two of the children.’ Here art was made for its own sake. ‘He wrote and they both painted with complete disregard of possible sales.’ Soon Ransome was out on Coniston Water, sailing with the Collingwood girls, Dora and Barbara. ‘In the afternoon we went down to their boathouse and out in the
Swallow
, a one-time fishing-boat, monstrously heavy to row but not bad under sail, the first of a long dynasty of
Swallows
in my sailing life.’ The two boys, Robin and Arthur, would race
Swallow
, and a friend’s ‘half-decked, sloop-rigged’ boat, the
Jamrach
, across Coniston Water. When Ransome was issued with a writ for libel by Lord Alfred Douglas, after the publication of his
Oscar Wilde: A Critical Study
, R. G., by then a young don, offered up all his savings to his friend. Fortunately his (presumably meagre) resources were not needed, since the jury at the 1913 trial found in Ransome’s favour. Ransome was not the only young man to receive the warm hospitality of the Collingwoods. Wilfred Owen, a devotee of Ruskin, ‘blew in upon them one stormy night’ from Keswick, where he was staying in the summer of 1912, ‘and as soon as I had warmed myself in their geniality, blew out again and over the moors’. He had been ‘a little drunk on Ruskin’, he recalled. Perhaps Owen and the Collingwoods also spoke of their shared love of archaeology.

R. G. Collingwood did his First World War service in London, in naval intelligence. In common with Mortimer Wheeler, he felt a sense of profound responsibility after the conflict. He was the only one of Francis Haverfield’s students to survive, and the great historian himself died in 1919. Haverfield’s work, wrote Collingwood, had to be continued ‘in piety to him’.

Collingwood’s efforts as a practical archaeologist on his home turf of Cumbria are often overlooked, or regarded as a mere vacation pastime compared with his ‘real’ work as a philosopher in Oxford. But his bibliography records publication after publication on archaeological matters, many for the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian Society, for which his father served as president. By Coniston Water and in Eskdale his mind was forged. It was his ‘great
good place’, to borrow Auden’s phrase. It was here that he returned to write his autobiography when invalided out of academic duties; it was here that he died; it was here that one feels he was happiest and most truly himself. ‘Of all the valleys of England there is none lovelier than Eskdale, from its wild beginnings among the precipices of Scafell to its quiet ending in the land-locked harbour of Ravenglass,’ he wrote in his little guidebook,
Roman Eskdale
, published in the late 1920s. Of Hardknott, he wrote: ‘The fort commands a splendid view. To the visitor who cares for magnificence of scenery, the sudden revelation of the Scafell range, as he reaches the edge of the spur and looks over the precipices and the valley below him at the mountains beyond, is an unforgettable experience.’ In the scholarly R. G. there still clung the traces of the schoolboy Robin, romping by the lake and demanding more of his father’s stories. Recalling Camden’s remark that there were some who thought the old bathhouse at Ravenglass to be the court of the legendary King Eveling, Collingwood expanded in his guidebook: ‘… people thought it was the Lyons Garde of the Arthurian romances, the Castle Perilous beside the Island of Avillon, where dwelt the Lady of the Fountain; or they said it was the castle of King Eveling or Avaloc, the husband of the sea-fairy Morgan le Fay, who was king over the island in which lived the blessed dead’.

Collingwood was one of the first to argue that archaeology should be precise and directed. One should dig in order to discover the answer to specific questions, not simply as a speculative exercise or as a search for beautiful things. Intellectually, it was also the place where his academic interests met. His Cumbrian digs became the crucible for his philosophy of history, the place where theory could be put to practical test. At his most likeable – at least in so far as he emerges from his own writings – he was a person who thought matters through in the doing of things: as a violinist, a sailor, a walker, and most importantly as a digger. In his autobiography he described himself as the sort of person who, ‘when I read … the beautifully illustrated handbook that tells me how to look after a certain kind of motor, my brain seems to stop working. But … leave me alone with the motor and a box of tools, and things go better.’ Archaeology was the box of tools that helped him formulate his philosophy of history.

The strongest example, in his view, of the way this worked was through his views on the history of art – here was the
‘rapprochement’ between the two sides of his scholarship, between history and philosophy. His writings on art, he wrote, he would ‘gladly leave as the sole memorial of my Romano-British studies, and the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle’. His particular theory related to what he believed was the suppression of Celtic art during the Roman period and then, as the evidence suggested at the time, its revival after many centuries. The history of man, he argued, was the history of thought, of purposive thought. The job of the historian was to recapture, or re-enact, these past thoughts. The past never truly went away; it lay ‘incapsulated’ in the present. As he saw it, the artistic habit of the Celts had not died out under the Romans, but had been passed down by ‘the transmission by example and precept of certain ways of thinking and acting from generation to generation’. The Celts’ skills and their desire to make art had lain dormant – ‘incapsulated’.

If his ideas seem outmoded, it is still striking to witness the passion with which he wrote, and the absolute urgency of his thinking in the late 1930s. In Collingwood’s philosophy of history, the past was not a distant, dead thing, but stood in the closest possible relation to contemporary life. Science had brought us extraordinary technology, but the primary use to which we had put it was the invention of deadly weapons and the pursuit of war, he argued. History was the true science of human affairs, and must be marshalled to make sense of the present; it was only history that could help put a stop to the disasters that he rightly saw amassing in the immediate future. In the end, it was the ideas forged as R. G. Collingwood dug about in the Roman forts of Cumbria that caused him to break up ‘my pose as a detached professional thinker’ and throw himself, however impotently, however imperfectly, into an open political struggle. In the end, it was his encounter with Roman Britain that made a passionate anti-fascist of him.

Collingwood’s writings also impel us to ask whether it is more appropriate to treat the Roman things brought forth from the British soil as objects of aesthetic veneration, or as the purposive jigsaw fragments of history. He himself developed fierce views on the quality of artistic production in Roman Britain. In his part of the
Oxford History of England
he asserted that ‘the history of Romano-British art
can be told in a couple of sentences. Before the Roman conquest the Britons were a race of gifted and brilliant artists: the conquest, forcing them into the mould of Roman life with its vulgar efficiency and lack of taste, destroyed that gift and reduced their arts to the level of mere manufacture.’ There was more: ‘On any Romano-British site the impression that constantly haunts the archaeologist, like a bad smell or a stickiness on the fingers, is that of an ugliness which pervades the place like a London fog: not merely the common vulgar ugliness of the Roman empire, but a blundering, stupid ugliness that cannot even rise to the level of that vulgarity.’

It is a remarkably extreme sentiment for someone who spent so much of his life among those ‘blundering, stupid’ remains. In truth, the aesthetic qualities of Romano-British art and craftsmanship had often caused anxiety, and still do: are the stubby little walls of Roman ruins in Britain worth admiring, when we have the magnificent, sombre depletions of medieval abbeys? It is these buildings that were officially sanctioned as picturesque by the eighteenth-century lovers of the Gothic, and lovingly depicted by artists such as Turner. Horace Walpole, who realised his Gothic appetite magnificently at Strawberry Hill, his villa near Twickenham, was derisively unequivocal about the taste for Romano-British things. ‘Roman antiquities … such as are found in this island, are very indifferent, and inspire me with little curiosity,’ he wrote in a letter of 1780. ‘I do not say the Gothic antiquities I like are of more importance; but at least they exist. The site of a Roman camp, of which nothing remains but a bank, gives me not the smallest pleasure.’ Not everyone was a Sir John Clerk of Penicuik or a William Stukeley, extolling the beauties of Romano-British things.

In 2010, such questions of aesthetics came into sharp focus when, on the east side of the Lake District, in a field near the hamlet of Crosby Garrett, a metal detectorist pulled out from the mud a piece of crushed metal that he assumed was a Victorian ornament. It was, in fact, a Roman cavalry sports helmet – an ornate and precious thing, which would have been used on the parade ground on ceremonial occasions, too decorative and impractical for wearing on the field of combat. It was a find of immense rarity, and a thing of great visual power: the helmet had a visor cast into the form of a youthful, beautiful face. When news of its discovery was announced, the
Daily
Telegraph
put a photograph of it on its front page. Only two other helmets of this type are known in Britain: the Newstead helmet found in the Scottish borders, now in the National Museum of Scotland; and the Ribchester helmet, which is in the British Museum. The Crosby Garrett helmet was curious in another way. Despite its undoubted rarity, it fell through the cracks of laws designed to protect archaeological finds. Had the helmet come within the legal definition of ‘treasure’, the finder and landowner would have been awarded compensation at a price agreed by a panel of experts, and the helmet would in all likelihood have been privately bought by the Tullie House Museum in Carlisle, the most important Cumbrian museum for Roman antiquities. However, only gold or silver objects, or groups of bronze objects, fall within that definition. The bronze helmet, found on its own, was not ‘treasure’. Which is how it came to be sold on the open market, the star object of Christie’s antiquities sale in London, in autumn 2010.