A History of England

Macaulay’s History of England is the book Baryton makes Ferdinand and the others reread chapter by chapter, and it becomes the mirror for his own collapse of purpose. The passage about the Pretender Monmouth’s failing venture gives Baryton a language and shape for his indecision; after confronting it, he breaks with the life he has built around the institute and announces that he will leave.

Use at the Institute

At the beginning of their studies, Baryton and his companions had read the sixteen-volume work too quickly for his liking. Now, as his interest in the administrative affairs of the institute wanes and he increasingly leaves them to Parapine, Baryton orders them back to the book under conditions the narrator calls alarming. They proceed chapter by chapter, turning an earlier course of study into an intense, renewed obligation.

Monmouth as a Mirror

The decisive passage follows Monmouth as he lands on the indistinct shores of Kent and loses his grasp of what he is pretending, what he wants, and why he has come. His venture seems to circle back upon itself; with defeat rising at dawn and the sea carrying away his last ships, he begins to think of escape but cannot see where to go or how to get there. Baryton reads and rereads this passage, then murmurs it again. The stranded Pretender’s uncertainty gives narrative form to Baryton’s own inability to reach the end of his decisions.

Repetition and Rupture

After closing the book, Baryton lies down beside his companions and recites the whole passage from memory, then performs it again in his English accent. The progression—from assigned reading, to repeated reading, to recitation—makes the book’s words seem to pass from historical narrative into Baryton’s own consciousness. In the narrator’s account, this encounter produces vertigo: the spectacle of Monmouth’s absurd and tragic predicament exposes Baryton to a larger vision of human nature, and the slender connection that had kept him among his former companions snaps.

Significance

The book’s role is not simply to supply an example from English history. Its account of a failed undertaking lets Baryton recognize a parallel between Monmouth’s uncertainty and his own, while the act of rereading intensifies that recognition until it becomes a break with his past. The episode thus connects a text studied at the institute to Baryton’s departure from it: after more than thirty years of passionate commitment to his life’s work, he tells Ferdinand that he is leaving, and describes himself as detached from what had kept him there.