Sir Ernest Barker
| Author | D. W. Brogan |
| Published date | 01 February 1960 |
| Date | 01 February 1960 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.1960.tb01132.x |
| Subject Matter | Sir Ernest Barker |
SIR
ERNEST
BARKER
D.
W.
BROGAN
Peterhouse,
Cambridge
‘Now is the stately column broke.’ Scott’s metaphor admirably suited Ernest
Barker. He was gravely handsome, carried himself with a spontaneous dignity
that saved his sententiousness from smugness, and his voice was admirably
suited to his physique. ‘The trumpet’s silver sound is still.’ But it would be absurd
to discuss Barker in terms of his physical advantages (which nevertheless were
not unimportant in a public teacher and in a public speaker much in demand).
It
was Barker’s mind that mattered; his mind and what he had stored in it.
Barker was a learned man but much more than a ‘mere’ learned man. He not
only ‘wore his learning lightly like a flower’, but he enjoyed it. One of his most
remarkable and endearing characteristic qualities was the preservation into
advanced old age of curiosity about new things and loyalty and spontaneous
delight in things he had taken and stored up, sixty or more years before. Litera-
ture, especially poetry, remained living for him (and he admitted to having written
a great deal of verse as a young man, for his own private pleasure). In his public
addresses he could
be
rhetorical and even sentimental without causing embarrass-
ment. He could evoke past heroes like Cromwell (or, as he used to say, ‘Oliver’).
He could recall his boyhood and youth; the great men
of
a long-gone Oxford; his
affection for the ‘dark and true and tender’ North. And all of these things were
part of Barker’s
weight.
of the impression he made in any circle he moved in.
But he was more than
a
‘personality’. He was not one
of
those great teachers
who leave nothing but the testimony
of
grateful pupils to suggest their greatness.
Barker had such grateful pupils, Harold Laski and Professor Catlin may be named
among them. But he left much more than memories. He was
a
prolific writer and
a
prolific writer at a high level. Nothing he did was casual or ill-considered.
If
he
was studying a text, he was precise and clear.
If
he was expounding a doctrine, he
was fair and friendly. When he set out his own liberal creed, he was not only
reasonable but conscious of the great changes that made the creed,
if
no less true,
less applicable in its traditional, orthodox form than
it
had been in his youth. He
could assess new doctrines, new criticisms without prejudice and without giving
way to the temptation
to
be up to date just to be
up
to date. Thus he saw what
was living and relevant in pluralism but did not think that it was the universal
solvent of old political problems that the political man had had
to
face for
millennia-and would
go
on having to face.
Barker was eminently
a
‘Greats man’ and while it would be absurd to charge
him with not believing that anything new and good had been added
to
political
I
5540.8.2
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