Barry Lyndon Explains the Seven Years' War (or Doesn't)

William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon is, by his admission, no intellectual, preferring the arts, sciences and pastimes befitting the "gentleman" he claims to be--such that if he is not wholly without a taste for literature (in his own native language, none of that Greek and Latin thank you very much) and "natural philosophy," it is above all "riding, music, leaping, the small-sword, the knowledge of a horse . . . and the manners of an accomplished gentleman and a man of fashion" that interest him.

Still, he does give us to understand that he did take an interest in the history of the Seven Years' War in which he was a less than willing soldier--and did not get very far, partly because of the genuinely "complicated" nature of the conflict's causes, partly because "the books written about it so amazingly hard to understand, that I have seldom been much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning."

And it seems to me that he does not disgrace himself in saying so, but the contrary. The Seven Years' War was a complicated affair--like most of the "general" wars of history a matter not of a single conflict breaking out but of different conflicts, each with their own tangled origins, merging into one big mess that sees allegiances shift and goals redefined. (In America we speak of the "French and Indian War," which actually went on for nine years rather than seven--1754-1763--during which the Anglo-French competition for colonies became connected with the competition between an expanding Prussia and its neighbors for position on the continent, all carrying the baggage of the preceding not-far-distant rounds of war behind them.)

However, it also seems to me that the historiography that can leave even an intelligent reader "seldom . . . much wiser at the end of a chapter than at the beginning" seems worth a mention. Barry had to make do with the historiography of an era before historiography as we know it--historiography before it was remade by the Rankes, and Mommsens, and others--all as in the centuries since many a historian has continued to resist the insights into the "secret motions of things" in human affairs that might make explanation possible in favor of glorifying so-called "Great Men," the lie of whose greatness is one of Barry's most important truths.