Why are scholars so prone to melancholy? According to the expert, Robert Burton of Christ Church, it is because ‘they live a sedentary, solitary life…
Why are scholars so prone to melancholy? According to the expert, Robert Burton of Christ Church, it is because ‘they live a sedentary, solitary life… free from bodily exercise and those ordinary disports that other men use.’ Not this one. The most remarkable characteristic of the young and maturing Trevor-Roper was his frenzied pursuit of foxes and hares on horse and foot, and his capacity for long marches through Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire and the Borders in search of spiritual refreshment or a rendez-vous with a horse. Riding to hounds several days a week, or once a week in wartime, occupied many daylight hours. Driving like a demon and drinking insane quantities of claret and brandy by night, in raucous company, excluded gloom. The wonder is that none of this blunted his wits or his industry, or cost him his life and health in tumbles from Rubberneck, his favourtie mount. A weaker man would have drowned in his own port, but this was a regime of 18th century dissipation, which supported a 20th century work-ethic.
He was not the only academic who lived like that during the inter-war period. Even Joad, the professor of the Brains Trust, rode to hounds; but the increasingly Dryasdust habits of the historians, or ‘professionalism’ as they liked to think, made the combination of physical and mental recklessness rarer and rarer, even at Oxford. There are probably not more than four foxhunters among the thousands and thousands crammed into the colleges and faculties nowadays. Even sixty years ago, the contrast between Trevor-Roper’s way of life and that of most colleagues earned him suspicion, mistrust and depreciation, whatever contribution he made to the study of history; all the more so, when he mocked the narrow specialism, insularity and apparent torpor of the dons not included in the ‘Party of Light’.
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