The Historians
The reign of Victoria has been pre-eminently the reign of the historian
in our literature. Greater poets we had seen in the reigns of the
Georges, greater essayists in the reign of Anne. But Grote and Carlyle,
Macaulay and Gardiner, Bishop Stubbs and Dr Freeman, had no counterparts
in an earlier age--always excepting the one great name of Gibbon. Before
them there were chroniclers of contemporary events and pamphleteers
under the guise of historians, but little more. Goldsmith's histories
are the laughing-stock of those to whom the modern methods of research
are familiar, and even Hume had little of the spirit of the genuine
student. Hallam and Lingard were the pioneers in this branch of
literature, although both of them had done their work before Queen
Victoria came to the throne.
=Henry Hallam (1777-1859)= was born at Windsor, where his father held
a canonry. His first great work, entitled "View of the State of Europe
during the Middle Ages," was published in 1818, and his "Constitutional
History of England, from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of
George II.," in 1827. In 1838 he produced his "Introduction to the
Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth
Centuries." Of these three works the first and the last are valuable
mainly for their stimulus to the more philosophical and imaginative work
of later writers, but the "Constitutional History" remains the text-book
for the period which it covers. Macaulay praised it highly, possibly
because of the Whiggism which undoubtedly underlies some of the more
debatable propositions in the book; but Macaulay and many other writers
have disputed the correctness of many of Hallam's judgments. To write
the constitutional history of England from the earliest period to the
year 1485, where Hallam begins, was a far more difficult undertaking
than to deal with the reigns of the Tudors and the Stuarts. This work
devolved on Dr Stubbs.
=William Stubbs (1825- )=, who was appointed Bishop of Oxford in 1889,
was born at Knaresborough, and was educated at Ripon Grammar School and
at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1850 he became vicar of Navestock, in
Essex, and in 1862 he was made librarian at Lambeth Palace. His editions
of mediaeval chronicles were well calculated to smooth the path of any
future historian, and the critical introductions showed the profound
scholarship of the editor. Probably no one man has done so much to throw
light on the obscure by-ways of history, and as Regius Professor of
Modern History at Oxford, a post he accepted in 1866, he gave so great a
stimulus to historical study that many brilliant writers have since been
proud to call him "master." In 1870 he published his "Select Charters,"
of which the "Introductions" are also invaluable, and between 1874 and
1878 he wrote his great work, "The Constitutional History of England in
its Origin and Development," the three volumes of which carry us down to
the death of Richard III. The book is profoundly scientific in its
method, but it is a mistaken, although popular, belief which classes Dr
Stubbs among Dryasdust investigators. The work glows with life and
interest, and is full of suggestive parallels for modern political
society.
The work of tracing the growth of the English constitution, which had
been so worthily begun by Hallam, and continued in so wise and scholarly
a fashion by Bishop Stubbs, was carried on by =Sir Thomas Erskine May
(1815-1886)=, who, a few days before his death, was created Baron
Farnborough. After a long official career in connection with the House
of Commons, he was appointed Clerk to the House in 1871. In addition to
several publications dealing with Parliamentary forms, and a book on
"Democracy in Europe," he wrote a "Constitutional History since the
Accession of George III.," thus continuing the work from the point at
which Hallam had dropped it, and completing a continuous history of the
English Constitution.
When we turn to what is more popularly understood by the history of a
country, the political and social life of peoples, and the wars and
conquests of nations, we are not less fortunate in the results attained.
=John Lingard (1771-1851)= had, it is true, written his great work
before 1837. "The History of England, from the First Invasion by the
Romans to the Commencement of the Reign of William III.," appeared in
eight volumes between 1819 and 1830. Lingard was the son of a Winchester
carpenter. He was for some time the Professor of Moral Philosophy at a
Roman Catholic College. His religious views doubtless affected, in
considerable measure, his judgment of events, especially in the reign of
Henry VIII., but he is a fairly impartial historian. He confesses that
he has been more anxious to arrive at the facts than troubled as to the
garb in which those facts were presented to the public, and his work is
really very dull in consequence. A contemporary of Lingard, who covered
much of the same historic ground, was Sharon Turner (1768-1847), and yet
another was =John Mitchell Kemble (1807-1857)=, whose "Saxons in
England" (1849) still fills a useful place. Another distinguished
writer, of what we may term the earlier school of historical research,
was =Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861)=, one of whose accomplished sons,
Francis Turner Palgrave, is still living (born 1824), whilom Professor
of Poetry at Oxford and the friend of Tennyson, the author of excellent
verse, and, moreover, the editor of that incomparable volume, the
"Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics." Sir Francis was the son of a
Jewish stockbroker named Cohen, and changed his name on becoming a
Christian. His best book, the "History of Normandy and of England," lost
much of its value by the publication of Freeman's monumental work, "The
History of the Norman Conquest."
=Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892)= was born at Harborne, in
Staffordshire, and educated at Trinity College, Oxford. His first work
was a "History of Architecture," published in 1849. In 1863 he issued
the first volume of a "History of Federal Government." The "History of
the Norman Conquest," in five large volumes, appeared between 1867 and
1876, and the "Reign of William Rufus, and Accession of Henry I.," in
1882. His "Old English History" was a most delightful collection of the
primitive stories which have always had a great fascination for
beginners in history. There was scarcely any period of European history
with which the author of the "Norman Conquest" did not show a thorough
familiarity. No historian has had a keener grasp of hard solid facts, or
is more able to make common-sense deductions from them. "I am quite
unable," he candidly confessed, "to appreciate physical or metaphysical
works in any language," and he hated literary discussion, which he
contemptuously termed "Chatter about Harriet," in reference to the
debatable question of Shelley's treatment of his wife. Perhaps this lack
of breadth did not materially spoil him for his work. Of his many
volumes of histories and essays, those on the "Norman Conquest" must be
given the first place. It has been said, indeed, that the work takes as
long to read as the event took to achieve, but it is worth reading
nevertheless. The battle of Hastings, or, as Mr Freeman would say, of
Senlac, was a turning-point in our national history, and we have here
the most complete description of that great struggle. Since Freeman's
death some attempt has been made to question his accuracy and his
scholarship; but it has not amounted to very much. When Dr Stubbs, with
whom difference of political views has in no way impaired a lifelong
friendship, was appointed Bishop of Chester in 1884, Mr Freeman
succeeded him as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, where he
was followed on his death by Mr Froude.
It would be hard to find a greater contrast, both in method and in
manner, than between Edward Freeman and James Anthony Froude. Freeman's
style, though clear and trenchant, was never brilliant; Froude's
language compares with that of the best artists in literature. Freeman
was always scrupulously exact, never at fault in a fact or a date;
Froude was notoriously careless, and slipped at every turn. Freeman
cared nothing for theories; Froude was never so happy as when he stopped
abruptly in a description to discourse on the mysteries of Providence or
the follies of mankind. Between men of such opposite natures no
friendship was possible, and in the _Saturday Review_ and other
periodicals Freeman commented vigorously, and not always fairly, on the
other's inaccuracy.
=James Anthony Froude (1818-1894)= was one of three gifted brothers,
another being William Froude (1810-1879), the mathematician and
engineer; and the third, Richard Hurrell Froude (1803-1836), a leader of
the Tractarian movement, whose "Literary Remains" were published after
his death by Keble and Newman. Froude was educated at Oriel College,
Oxford, and for a time came under the influence of the movement of which
his elder brother was a leading spirit, but ultimately he abandoned
supernatural Christianity altogether, substituting for it a kind of
poetic Theism which he partly adopted from Carlyle. In 1847 he published
anonymously two novels, "The Spirit's Trials" and "The Lieutenant's
Daughter," which contained some not very generous criticisms on his
brother and former friends. His "Nemesis of Faith," which appeared in
1848, was a further criticism of the doctrines which he had abandoned.
Between the years 1856 and 1869 he published the twelve volumes of his
great work, "The History of England, from the Fall of Wolsey to the
Defeat of the Spanish Armada," which achieved a great and, in many
respects, a well-deserved popularity. Rarely indeed has history been
written with so much brilliancy and picturesque power. The earlier
volumes have been much discredited among historical students: yet we
would not willingly miss such delightful word-painting as his
description of the Pilgrimage of Grace and other scenes in the career of
the Eighth Henry, whom he selected for rehabilitation. It was, of
course, a vain and impossible task to remove the odium which has settled
upon the name of Henry VIII.; but it was as well that the attempt should
be made. Henry had appeared to the mass of modern Englishmen as an
old-world ogre, and Mr Froude has at least enabled them to see that he
was after all a man. Mr Freeman, himself the most conscientious and
laborious of writers, expressed his hearty contempt for an author who
professed in the preface to his history that he took up the subject
because he had "nothing better to do." As, however, Froude warmed to his
work his book increased in value, and there are few who will deny the
most sterling worth to his "Edward VI.," "Mary," and "Elizabeth." His
escape from Tractarianism had made him unfriendly to all kindred
movements, and his views of the struggle between Catholicism and
Evangelicalism in the sixteenth century are more worthy of a Puritan
divine than of an academic writer of our own day. But we can forgive all
this, and much more, to one who has described with so much delicate
fancy the adventurous life of Drake and Hawkins, the intrigues of the
Scottish Queen, and the restless fickleness and untruthfulness of
Elizabeth. His exquisite literary style and general breadth of sympathy
are shown in such passages as his sketch of the rise of Protestantism
and the execution of More and Fisher:--
"Whilst we exult in that chivalry with which the Smithfield martyrs
bought England's freedom with their blood, so we will not refuse our
admiration to those other gallant men whose high forms, in the sunset of
the old faith, stand transfigured on the horizon, tinged with the light
of its dying glory."[11]
Inaccuracy and tactlessness, however, seemed to haunt Mr Froude like
evil spirits. He wrote a series of articles on Thomas a Becket, but the
numerous mistakes and misstatements brought down on him once again the
strictures of Mr Freeman. He wrote a biography of Carlyle, to whom he
acted as literary executor, and the whole of the literary world was in
arms at the revelations of Carlyle's somewhat unamiable relations with
his wife, and of his too contemptuous sentiments about many personal
friends. Still, Mr Froude's great literary faculty will secure to this
biography a far greater permanence than will fall to the lot of the
thousand-and-one memoirs which have appeared during the reign. Even
should Carlyle's writings cease to be generally studied, it is not
improbable that Froude's "Life of Carlyle" will always be read as an
important chapter in literary history. In this connection I cannot do
better than quote from an unpublished letter from Sir Fitz James
Stephen, Mr Froude's co-executor, to Mr Froude:--
"For about fifteen years I was the intimate friend and constant
companion of both you and Mr Carlyle, and never in my life did I see any
one man so much devoted to any other as you were to him during the whole
of that period of time. The most affectionate son could not have acted
better to the most venerated father. You cared for him, soothed him,
protected him as a guide might protect a weak old man down a steep and
painful path. The admiration you habitually expressed for him both
morally and intellectually was unqualified. You never said to me one
ill-natured word about him down to this day. It is to me wholly
incredible that anything but a severe regard for truth, learnt to a
great extent from his teaching, could ever have led you to embody in
your portrait of him a delineation of the faults and weaknesses which
mixed with his great qualities.
"Of him I will make only one remark in justice to you. He did not use
you well. He threw upon you the responsibility of a decision which he
ought to have taken himself in a plain, unmistakable way. He considered
himself bound to expiate the wrongs which he had done to his wife. If he
had done this himself it would have been a courageous thing; but he did
not do it himself. He did not even decide for himself that it should be
done after his death. If any courage was shown in the matter, it was
shown by you, and not by him. You took the responsibility of deciding
for him that it ought to be done. You took the odium of doing it, of
avowing to the world the faults and weaknesses of one whom you regarded
as your teacher and master. In order to present to the world a true
picture of him as he really was, you, well knowing what you were about,
stepped into a pillory in which you were charged with treachery,
violation of confidence, and every imaginable base motive, when you were
in fact guilty of no other fault than that of practising Mr Carlyle's
great doctrine that men ought to tell the truth."
Mr Froude has other claims to remembrance. In his "Short Studies on
Great Subjects," many of them essays written for _Fraser's Magazine_, of
which he was for a long time editor, are some very wise and thoughtful
papers, particularly one on the Book of Job. His "Life of Bunyan" is
characteristic, as is also his "Life of Caesar." Carlyle taught him
hero-worship, and from Carlyle also he learnt the disposition which
inspired his powerful book, "The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth
Century."
He also wrote two picturesque books of travel, and three volumes of
lectures[12] delivered at Oxford during his occupancy of the chair of
history, which had been previously held in succession by his two great
rivals, Bishop Stubbs and Dr Freeman.
The historian who devoted himself most earnestly to Mr Froude's chief
historical period, and whose writings were in some measure a reply to
his, was the =Rev. John Sherren Brewer (1810-1879)=, who for many
years was Professor of English Literature at King's College, London.
Brewer's chief work, a "Calendar of Letters and Papers, Foreign and
Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII.," comes down, however, to 1530,
the year in which Mr Froude's history commences, and thus Brewer stands
alone as an authority on Henry's early reign. A compressed work in one
volume, "The Reign of Henry VIII.," was published after his death. Mr
Froude concludes his narrative at the year 1588, the year of the Spanish
Armada, but no recent writer of mark has treated of the closing years of
Elizabeth's reign in any detail, although we owe to Major Martin Hume a
well-written study entitled "The Year after the Armada." Major Hume, who
is the best living authority upon this period, has also written upon
"The Courtships of Queen Elizabeth," and has edited for the Public
Record Office the Calendar of Spanish State Papers of Elizabeth.
The next great period of English history, that of the Stuart kings, is
dealt with by Professor Gardiner. =Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829- )=
was born at Ropley, in Hampshire, and was educated at Winchester and at
Christ Church, Oxford. His whole life has been devoted to the most
laborious research in the annals of the reigns of James I., Charles I.,
and the Protectorate of Cromwell. He has not, like Mr Froude, taken up
history as a pleasant literary recreation, but has given years of
unremitting labour to the production of each separate volume. He is now
well into the study of the Protectorate, the first volume of his history
of which appeared in 1894. He has written many minor books, one dealing
with "The Gunpowder Plot," and another with "Cromwell's Place in
History." Mr Gardiner will not perhaps be counted a brilliant writer. He
gives us none of the fire and eloquence, almost bordering on poetry,
which we find so abundantly in Froude; but he has been described by Sir
John Seeley as the only historian who has trodden the controversial
ground of seventeenth-century English political history with absolute
fairness and impartiality. James and Charles, Buckingham and Bristol,
Strafford and Pym, stand out in clear and well-defined lineaments. There
is no hero-worship to blind us; no flowing rhetoric to atone for
insufficient knowledge. We see these men in their weakness and in their
strength, neither side monopolising the virtue and the patriotism, but
each, on occasion, acting from noble or ignoble motives. It may be urged
that too much attention is devoted to the follies of princes and the
intrigues of courtiers, and certainly of the inner life of the nation we
get all too little in Mr Gardiner's pages: but it may be fairly said
that these books are the safest and best of guides to one of the most
important and critical periods in our political history. It is
impossible to avoid contrasting Mr Gardiner with a far more popular and
more brilliant historian, Lord Macaulay, and the contrast is, in some
respects, in favour of the former. Mr Gardiner sees that in dealing
with the complexities of human motives we are on very uncertain and
delicate ground. We need to pause step by step to weigh probabilities
and to qualify our every statement, although such hesitancy and
qualification is not conducive to brilliant writing.
The importance of this rhetorical principle was fully grasped by =Thomas
Babington Macaulay, (1800-1859)= and, accordingly, in his writings a
single definite and distinct motive is seized upon as the guiding
principle of every action, and, by the simple plan of ignoring
complexities in human character, we are carried along in an easy manner
to positive and undoubting opinions. "I wish," said Lord Melbourne,
"that I were as cock-sure of _anything_ as Tom Macaulay is of
everything;" and the remark hit off an undoubted failing, at least from
the standpoint of sound and trustworthy workmanship. Macaulay, whose
father was a distinguished philanthropist and slavery abolitionist, was
born at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire. From a private school he went
to Trinity College, Cambridge. His earliest efforts in literature were
articles for Knight's _Quarterly Magazine_, and contributions to the
_Edinburgh Review_, the first of which, on "Milton," drew from Lord
Jeffrey the remark, "The more I think the less I can conceive where you
picked up that style." Perhaps Macaulay's essays have been more popular
even than his history. The extraordinary knowledge they display, the
discursive familiarity with all poetry and fiction, ancient and modern,
and their enthusiastic interest in historical events, make them a kind
of education to men whose reading has been slight, or who are beginners
in the art of reading--an art at which Macaulay was such an adept. In
1830 Macaulay entered Parliament as member for Calne, and four years
later received the post of member of the Indian Council at Calcutta,
with a salary of L10,000 a year. He left India in 1838, having rendered
great service to that country by assisting to frame the Indian penal
code. After his return to England he sat in Parliament for many years as
member for Edinburgh, and for a short time held a seat in Lord
Melbourne's Cabinet. Some of his speeches in the House were among the
most eloquent and successful to which that assembly has listened. In
1849 the first two volumes of his "History of England from the Accession
of James II." were published. The great success of these and the
succeeding volumes made him one of the most popular authors of his day.
In 1857 Macaulay was made a Peer, but he never spoke in the House of
Lords. He died in December 1859, before he had finished the "Reign of
William III.," and was buried in Westminster Abbey. During the later
years of Macaulay's life, and for many years after his death, he
received the unstinted praise, not only of the great mass of readers,
but even of cultured brother authors. Of late years this has changed; a
reaction has set in, and perhaps the time has not yet come to assign to
him his true place in literature. When Sir George Trevelyan's admirable
life of his uncle appeared in 1876, a number of eminent writers based
upon that book a criticism of Macaulay's work. Mr Gladstone wrote in the
_Quarterly Review_, Mr Leslie Stephen in the _Cornhill Magazine_, and Mr
John Morley in the _Fortnightly Review_. In each separate case the
review was unfavourable. All alike agreed as to his high qualities as a
man; his sincerity, generosity, kindliness, and purity, his love of
children and his brotherly devotion; but each in turn found matter for
censure in his work. One condemned his style, another his Whig
partialities, another his boundless optimism, and another his errors of
judgment or alleged misstatements of facts. It is true that Macaulay is
sometimes inaccurate, that he is not seldom unjust to the characters
whom he paints so vividly. It is now a commonplace to say that his
history was written, as Carlyle said, "to prove that Providence was on
the side of the Whigs." It is clear that he was a man of strong literary
prejudices, and he undoubtedly owes much of his popularity to the fact
that he expresses in grandly rhetorical language the average sentiment
of his day, its belief in material prosperity, and its delight in being
told that there has been no age of the world so happy as our own. All
this is true, and yet it is also true that Macaulay's real services to
literature are lost sight of when such an estimate is propounded too
harshly.
In spite of obvious deficiencies, Macaulay's history is a great work. It
fills up a gap in historical literature, and such incidents as the trial
of the seven bishops and the siege of Londonderry excel both in
picturesqueness and in accuracy. But Macaulay has claims far beyond his
merits as a historian. The critics who condemn him so freely seem to
have forgotten their own early years. "If I am in the wrong," said
Macaulay of his history, "I shall at least have set the minds of others
at work." He has set the minds of others at work. What cultivated man or
woman lives, with whom Macaulay's writings have not been among the first
books read, who has not been made to feel that all the great poetry, and
fiction, and history to which he alludes so freely must be well worth
careful study? What matter if in after-years we discover that Macaulay
was unjust to Bacon the man, and was entirely ignorant of Bacon the
philosopher; or understand clearly what he meant by saying that such
critiques as Lessing's "Laocoon" "filled him with wonder and despair?"
If we have been encouraged by him to desire a wider knowledge, if we
have learnt from him to admire so many great writers, so many famous
statesmen, we may surely forgive him much, if indeed there be anything
to forgive.
=Earl Stanhope (1805-1875)=, who did most of his historical work when,
as an expectant peer, he was known as Lord Mahon, was a great friend of
Macaulay's. In 1870 he published a "History of the Reign of Queen Anne,"
which began at the year 1701, and thus served as a connecting link
between Macaulay's history and his own larger work--the "History of
England, from the Peace of Utrecht down to the Peace of Versailles
(1713-1783)." The continuation of Earl Stanhope's narrative may be found
either in Mr Lecky's "Eighteenth Century," or in =William Nathaniel
Massey's (1809-1881)= "History of England under George III." Mr Massey
brings us down to the Peace of Amiens in 1801, from which date Harriet
Martineau leads us to 1846 in a work ("History of the Peace") which is
quite unworthy of her abilities. The reign of Victoria has been written
by many hands, not the least successful being the "History of England,
1830-1873" of the =Rev. William Nassau Molesworth (1816-1890)= of
Rochdale, the author also of a "History of the Church of England."
Equally popular is the "History of Our Own Time, 1830-1897," of =Justin
MacCarthy (1830- )=, who has also written a "History of the Four
Georges," and many popular novels. Nor must we forget the brilliant
literary effort of =Alexander William Kinglake (1811-1891)= who, in
his "History of the War in the Crimea," has made a younger generation
familiar with a struggle in which their fathers took so brave a part. Mr
Kinglake was for some years the Liberal member for Bridgewater. His
first literary effort, "Eothen," a volume of travels, is scarcely less
popular than his history. By far the most important work, however, on
English history, in a period subsequent to that dealt with by Macaulay,
is Lecky's "History of England in the Eighteenth Century," a work of
great thoroughness and thoughtfulness, the eighth and concluding volume
of which was published in 1890. =William Edward Hartpole Lecky
(1838- )=, who was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, which he now
represents in Parliament, is one of the most brilliant and suggestive
writers of our age. His "Rise and Influence of the Spirit of
Rationalism," and "European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne," as
well as the "History of the Eighteenth Century," are justly popular.
It is impossible to enumerate all the important contributions to
historical study of the past few years, but the "History of Scotland,
from the Invasion of Agricola to the Revolution of 1688," by =John Hill
Burton (1809-1881)=, and the "Life and Reign of Richard III.," by
James Gairdner must not be forgotten, nor the "History of the War in
the Peninsula," by Sir Charles Napier (1786-1860). Many writers have
embodied the main conclusions of the historians we have named, in brief,
but useful, histories for the use of the more advanced schools. The more
successful of these are the Rev. James Franck Bright and the late John
Richard Green. =James Franck Bright (1832- )= is master of University
College, Oxford, and his "English History for the use of Public Schools"
is a work so lucidly and carefully written, that it is entitled to be
lifted out of the category of mere text-books, and to take rank as good
literature. Still more is this true of Green's "Short History of the
English People." =John Richard Green (1837-1883)= was born at Oxford,
and educated at Magdalen College School and at Jesus College. For some
time he was vicar of St Philip's, Stepney. His "Short History,"
published in 1874, was speedily adopted in schools, and had an enormous
sale among general readers. It was immediately recognised that a
brilliant writer had appeared, one who had assimilated all that was
worthy in the work of laborious contemporary historians, had himself
made much study of original documents, and had welded all together by
the power of real genius. A critic here and there devoted himself to
discovering the errors, mainly of dates, which, owing to the illness of
the author, disfigured the first edition. But the popular instinct
which declared this to be a great work, was a sound one. In the main its
conclusions are just. There is not a line of cheap sentiment or
rhetorical clap-trap in the book. Mr Green soon afterwards enlarged his
work, and published it in four handsome volumes, which he dedicated to
his friends--"My Masters in the Study of English History,"--Bishop
Stubbs and Professor Freeman. Later on appeared "The Making of England,"
and, after his decease, another volume, "The Conquest of England,"
written on his deathbed, was published by his widow, Alice Stopford
Green, who has written "Town Life in the Fifteenth Century." Sir
Archibald Geikie, the geologist, once rendered a tribute to Green for
endeavouring to bring geological science to the aid of historical
research; but on the question of the Teutonic element in our nation, it
has been urged that Green follows his friends, Stubbs and Freeman, all
too readily, and ignores the evidence from anthropology in favour of the
very great prevalence of Celtic blood in the English-speaking race.
I regret that my space will not permit me to write at length of the men
who have studied so thoroughly sciences which have so much bearing upon
history, and who have written delightful books upon them. I must be
content merely to mention the names of William Boyd Dawkins, who has
written "Cave-hunting" and "Early Man in Britain;" and Sir John Lubbock,
banker and member of Parliament, who has written "Pre-historic Times"
and "The Origin of Civilization and the Primitive Condition of Man,"
also various books on natural science, and some very inadequate literary
essays. Nor must I forget Edward Burnett Tylor's "Primitive Culture" and
"Anthropology," Grant Allen's "Anglo-Saxon Britain," and Edward Clodd's
"Childhood of the World," "Childhood of Religion," and "Pioneers of
Evolution." From such works as these it is but a very short step to the
writings of Max Mueller. =Friedrich Max Mueller (1823- )=, son of the
German poet, Wilhelm Mueller, was educated at the University of Leipzig,
and made a special study of philosophy in Germany for many years before
he came to the land of his adoption, in 1846. Appointed an Oxford
professor, first of modern languages and later of comparative philology,
a science which he may almost be said to have created, he has become an
Englishman both in speech and in writing. Max Mueller's most popular
works are his interesting "Lectures on the Science of Language," and his
"Chips from a German Workshop," in which he deals not only with the
common origin of the world's leading languages, but in a skilful and
almost startling manner reconstructs, by the aid of language alone, the
conditions out of which have risen the various religious and social
systems of the early nations. The writers who have most prominently
followed in Max Mueller's footsteps, as elucidators of primitive
religious belief, are Professor Sayce and the Rev. Sir George Cox.
=Archibald Henry Sayce (1846- )=, who succeeded Max Mueller in the
chair of comparative philology at Oxford, has written numerous books and
treatises dealing with the Chaldean and other ancient nations, and has
also published an annotated edition of Herodotus, noticeable chiefly for
its unfavourable verdict on the "Father of History." =Sir George Cox
(1827- )=, whose "Mythology of the Aryan Nations" has provoked much
adverse criticism from its extreme application of the "Solar" theory to
the interpretation of myth, epic, and romance, has also written an
interesting "History of Greece" in two volumes.
The "History of Greece" which may be considered one of the most
satisfactory achievements of the Victorian era, is that by Grote,
published in twelve volumes. =George Grote (1794-1871)= was born at
Clay Hill, near Beckenham, and was educated at the Charterhouse School.
He early went into the banking-house in Threadneedle Street, of which
his father was one of the partners, but found time to devote himself to
philosophy and history, and to write for the _Westminster Review_, the
organ of philosophical Radicalism. It was as a representative of this
phase of thought that he was returned as member of Parliament for the
city of London in 1833. He sat in the House as one of a small body of
philosophical Radicals until 1841, bringing forward annually a
resolution in favour of the ballot. He retired from Parliamentary life
to devote himself more energetically to his "History of Greece," the
first two volumes of which appeared in 1846; the twelfth, and last,
which takes us to the death of Alexander the Great, was published in
1856. During the same years, but unknown to Grote, =Connop Thirlwall
(1797-1875)=, Bishop of St David's, a former schoolfellow of his, was
engaged upon the same task. Each acknowledged the superiority of his
rival's work, and Grote said that he should never have written his had
Thirlwall's book appeared a few years earlier; but there can be little
hesitation in assigning the higher place to Grote. Of Thirlwall it may
be said, however, that but for Grote his history would have taken high
rank, and would have been a welcome relief from the foolish but once
popular work of William Mitford. Thirlwall is also interesting for
having translated, in 1825, Schleiermacher's "Essay on St Luke," and
thus first introduced German theology into England. Grote's history is a
book of high educational value. In it we have all that is best in
Herodotus, Thucydides, and the other ancient historians, added to the
sound and weighty judgment of a clear-sighted modern critic,
exceptionally free from prejudice. It was Grote's great destiny to free
the English mind from the erroneous impressions which had so long
prevailed as to the real character of the Athenian democracy, and we
cannot find elsewhere a truer or juster picture of Athens at the height
of her power. A great work on Greek history in later aspects than those
of Grote and Thirlwall is "A History of Greece, from its Conquest by the
Romans to the Present Time," by =George Finlay (1799-1875)=. Finlay
fought in the Greek War of Independence, and lived for the greater part
of his life in Athens.
A number of clergymen besides Dr Thirlwall have shown an able grasp of
classical history. Dr Arnold wrote a "History of Rome," based on
Niebuhr, which, although interesting, is scarcely worthy of so great a
man. =Charles Merivale (1808-1893)=, Dean of Ely, wrote an admirable
summary of Roman history from the foundation of the city in B.C. 753 to
the fall of Augustulus in A.D. 476; but his great work is the "History
of the Romans under the Empire," which is indispensable for a thorough
appreciation of Gibbon. =Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868)=, Dean of St
Paul's, did good service to historical scholarship by his edition of
Gibbon's pre-eminent work, and by his own "History of the Jews,"
"History of Christianity under the Empire," and "Latin Christianity."
The nine volumes of this last were called by Dean Stanley "a complete
epic and philosophy of mediaeval Christianity." Milman is said to have
described himself as "the last learned man in the Church," but in the
presence of so eminent a scholar as =Mandell Creighton (1843- )=,
Bishop of London, the statement is meaningless. Dr Creighton's great
work, "A History of the Papacy From the Great Schism to the Sack of
Rome," is of the highest value in the consecutive study of European
history; and so also is the work of another clergyman, =George William
Kitchin (1827- )=, Dean of Durham, whose "History of France previous
to the Revolution," is very attractively written.
A writer who generalises freely from the facts of history, and whose
generalisations were once very popular, and, according to Sir Mackenzie
Wallace, are still widely read in Russia, was =Henry Thomas Buckle
(1821-1862)=, who published in 1857 the first volume of the "History of
Civilisation in England;" a second volume appeared in 1861, but the
author died before he had completed his intended undertaking. Buckle
unduly emphasises the influence of national and moral laws upon the
progress of civilisation, minimises the influence of individuals, and
overlooks the momentous action of heredity. A writer of equal importance
with Buckle was =John Addington Symonds (1840-1893)=, whose
"Renaissance in Italy" is a work of great literary merit, and whose
translation of Cellini's "Autobiography" has superseded Roscoe's.
Passing from historic Italy to Germany we may note that "The Holy Roman
Empire" of =James Bryce (1838- )= created quite a _furore_ as a prize
essay at Oxford, and, in its enlarged shape, forms the only English
sketch of German history of great literary merit. Mr Bryce was, some
years ago, announced to write a "History of Germany" of more formidable
dimensions, but the glamour of parliamentary life and a seat in the
Cabinet have robbed us of a capable historian. Although we are without a
satisfactory German history we possess two very solid contributions to
such a work. With one of these, Carlyle's "Frederick II.," I shall deal
later; the other is =Sir John Robert Seeley's (1834-1895)= "Life and
Times of Stein; or, Germany and Prussia in the Napoleonic Age." When
this work appeared it was received with high commendation in Germany,
but in England with the qualification that it had none of the literary
charm of the author's earlier efforts. To such criticism Professor
Seeley--he received the professorship of modern history at Cambridge on
Kingsley's resignation in 1869--replied in a series of papers entitled
"History and Politics," wherein he practically contended that it was the
business of historians to be dull, and that brilliant history-writing
was, as a matter of fact, little other than fiction. Still, in his
lectures on "The Expansion of England" (1883) and "A Short History of
Napoleon" (1886) he succeeded in making himself entirely interesting.
The books which gave Sir John Seeley his greatest fame--he received a
knighthood in 1893--were not, however, historical, but, in a sense,
theological; and with him we find ourselves in the midst of the great
religious controversies of the reign. "Ecce Homo; a Survey of the Life
and Work of Jesus Christ," was published anonymously in 1865. While
censured on many sides on account of its alleged heterodoxy, it drew
from opponents unstinted admiration on account of its perfect literary
workmanship. One of these opponents was Mr Gladstone, who ventured the
prophecy that the author would at a later period write something from a
more orthodox standpoint. The prediction was not verified, for in 1882 a
further work, "Natural Religion," by the Author of "Ecce Homo," showed
still less sympathy with the supernatural side of religion.
Mr Gladstone, who flung himself into this as into so many other
controversies, has a fame quite apart from any literary achievement. But
whatever posterity may say of his influence on the destinies of the
nation which he has helped for so many years to rule, it is certain that
his powers as an author would have made the reputation of a man of less
versatility.
=William Ewart Gladstone (1809- )=, the son of a Lancashire merchant,
was born at Liverpool. Into his political career it is not my province
to enter. His first literary work, "The State in its Relations with the
Church," was made famous through a review by Macaulay. Later in life he
indulged in theological controversy, publishing an "Essay on Ritualism"
and "The Vatican Decrees." Mr Gladstone's chief work is, however, his
"Studies in Homer," in which he argues for the unity of the poem, for
the foundation in fact of its main incidents, and for the definite
personality of the author. His contributions to periodical literature
have been innumerable, and only a few--and those non-controversial and
non-classical--have been republished in his five volumes of "Gleanings."
Mr Gladstone's chief opponent in theological controversy, Cardinal
Newman, has profoundly influenced his religious views. "In my opinion,"
wrote Mr Gladstone many years after Newman had become a Roman Catholic,
"his secession from the Church of England has never yet been estimated
among us at anything like the full amount of its calamitous importance.
It has been said that the world does not know its greatest men; neither,
I will add, is it aware of the power and weight carried by the words and
the acts of those among its greatest men whom it does know. The
ecclesiastical historian will perhaps hereafter judge that this
secession was a much greater event even than the partial secession of
John Wesley, the only case of personal loss suffered by the Church of
England since the Reformation which can be at all compared with it in
magnitude."
=John Henry Newman (1801-1890)= was born in London, and educated at a
private school at Ealing and at Trinity College, Oxford. Inclined at
first to the liberal Christianity which men like Whately and Milman were
furthering among churchmen, he was, he says, "rudely awakened by two great
blows--illness and bereavement"; and he devoted himself to a life-long
opposition to what he has called "the great apostasy--liberalism in
religion." "My battle," he writes, "was with liberalism; by liberalism I
mean the anti-dogmatic principle and its developments." From 1828 to
1843 he held the incumbency of St Mary's Church, Oxford, and the
influence which he then exerted was of the deepest moment for the future
of religious life in England. "Who," says Matthew Arnold, himself, like
his father before him, one of the leaders of the movement which Newman
has hated so intensely, "who could resist the charm of that spiritual
apparition, gliding in the dim afternoon light through the aisles of St
Mary's, rising into the pulpit, and then, in the most entrancing of
voices, breaking the silence with words and thoughts which were a
religious music--subtle, sweet, mournful? I seem to hear him still,
saying: 'After the fever of life, after wearinesses and sicknesses,
fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and
succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled,
unhealthy state,--at length comes death, at length the white throne of
God, at length the beatific vision.'" During these years at St Mary's
what is called the Tractarian movement sprang to life--a movement, as we
have said, against Broad-Churchism. It was at the beginning of the
movement, on his way home from Sicily in 1833, whilst pondering over the
difficulties of the task he had undertaken, that Newman wrote the hymn
"Lead, kindly Light," which is now as popular in the most advanced and
liberalized churches as it can be in those nearest to its author's
religious standpoint. The "Tracts for the Times," whence Tractarians
derived their name, were written by Newman, Hurrell Froude, Pusey, and
others. Bishop Bloomfield said that the whole movement was nothing but
Newmania. The writers argued now in short papers, now in elaborate
treatises, for the Divine mission of the Anglican Church. Not till
"Tract XC." was reached did the alarm of the Protestant party manifest
itself in any practical form. In that Tract Newman declared that
subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was not inconsistent with the
acceptance of Roman Catholic teaching on purgatory, on the invocation of
saints, and on the mass. The Hebdomadal Council of the University
condemned the Tract. Two years later Newman resigned his position at St
Mary's, and in 1845 formally joined the Church of Rome. According to
Disraeli, Anglicanism "reeled under the shock," and Dean Stanley
remarked to a friend that the fortunes of the English Church might have
been very different "had Newman been able to read German."[13]
In 1848 he was appointed head of the Birmingham Oratory, and there he
resided--with one short break as rector of the Roman Catholic University
at Dublin--for nearly forty years. In 1879 he was created a cardinal,
and his visit to Rome and installation as a Prince of the Sacred College
excited much attention in England. Although by temperament and
inclination one of the least combative and most retiring of men,
Cardinal Newman found himself again and again in the thick of the
argumentative fray. At one time he was involved in a libel action by an
ex-priest and ultra-Protestant lecturer named Father Achilli, and this
cost Newman and his friends twelve thousand pounds; at another time he
was arguing with the foremost English statesman, Mr Gladstone, as to the
probable loyalty of English Roman Catholics if the Papacy and the
English Government were brought into collision. In one great controversy
of his life he was generally admitted to have achieved a success, and
this success is associated with an enduring literary work, the
autobiography which he calls his "Apologia pro Vita Sua." Reviewing
Froude's "History of England" in _Macmillan's Magazine_ (January 1864),
Charles Kingsley charged Newman with being careless about truth, and
with teaching that cunning and not truth-seeking was the acceptable
method of the Roman Catholic clergy. Brought to bay by Newman, Kingsley
contradicted himself in an amazing fashion, and even the most
enthusiastic Protestants were compelled to admit that the clever
novelist was no match for the trained dialectician. Mrs Kingsley, in her
charming life of her husband, practically admits that he was worsted in
the conflict, and J. A. Froude, his brother-in-law, wrote: "Kingsley
entirely misunderstood Newman's character. Newman's whole life had been
a struggle for truth. He had neglected his own interests; he had never
thought of them at all. He had brought to bear a most powerful and
subtle intellect to support the convictions of a conscience which was
superstitiously sensitive. His single object had been to discover what
were the real relations between man and his Maker, and to shape his own
conduct by the conclusions at which he arrived. To represent such a
person as careless of truth was neither generous nor even reasonable."
The final outcome of the controversy was the publication of the
"Apologia," a work which, alike in beauty of style and devotion of
spirit, must be assigned a very high place in religious literature. My
space is too limited to pass in review, or even to name, the thirty-six
volumes which contain the writings of this eloquent preacher and
teacher. His "Dream of Gerontius" and "Verses on Various Occasions" show
his high qualities as a poet; his "Apologia," "Callista," and "Essay in
aid of the Grammar of Assent," display his genius as a prose stylist. In
"Callista: a Sketch of the Third Century," he pictures a beautiful Greek
girl, who becomes a convert to Christianity after a severe struggle
between human affection and religious faith. The "Grammar of Assent" is
an apology for Christianity, far above the narrow controversies in which
the author took so distinguished a part.
The question whether Cardinal Newman or Carlyle has been the most
influential personality in Victorian literature will be largely decided
by the temperament of the critic. Mr Swinburne, looking at them both
from a standpoint of antagonism to the priestly proclivities of the one
and to the tyrannical proclivities of the other, apostrophised them
jointly in the well-known lines:--
"With all our hearts we praise you whom ye hate,
High souls that hate us; for our hopes are higher,
And higher than yours the goal of our desire,
Though high your ends be as your hearts are great."
Newman, indeed, left England more dominated by ritual than in any other
period of its history, the Roman Church more powerful than ever before,
the new High Church party in the Establishment a great institution, with
the rival Prime Ministers, Mr Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, among its
supporters, and a taste for ritual conspicuous in the chapels of the
Nonconformists. And yet with all this Carlyle was the more dominant
personality.
=Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)= was born at Ecclefechan, in
Dumfriesshire, on the 4th of December 1795. His father was a stonemason,
at whose death Carlyle thus tenderly wrote in his Diary:--"I owe him
much more than existence. I owe him a noble inspiring example. It was he
_exclusively_ that determined on educating me; that from his small
hard-earned funds sent me to school and college, and made me whatever I
am and may become. Let me not mourn for my father, let me do worthily of
him. So shall he still live, even here in me, and his worth plant itself
honourably forth into new generations." From Annan Grammar School the
young Carlyle went to Edinburgh University, where he became a voracious
reader, although never a great classical scholar. He then took the post
of mathematical tutor at Annan school, and afterwards at Kirkcaldy,
where he was friendly with Edward Irving, afterwards the famous
preacher. Disgusted with this life he flung up his appointment, and
determined to study for the law. For some time he eked out a scanty
subsistence in Edinburgh by writing biographies for Brewster's
_Encyclopaedia_. It was at this period that he obtained some measure of
mental and moral stimulus from his German studies. Goethe opened a new
world to him. He began to study German in 1819, induced thereto by
Madame de Stael's interesting account of the German poets and
philosophers. Goethe was seventy-five years old when in 1824 he received
from Carlyle an English translation of "Wilhelm Meister," with a letter,
saying, "Four years ago, when I read your 'Faust' among the mountains of
my native Scotland, I could not but fancy I might one day see you, and
pour out before you, as before a father, the woes and wanderings of a
heart whose mysteries you seemed so thoroughly to comprehend, and could
so beautifully represent." Two years later Carlyle sent Goethe his "Life
of Schiller," and once again he expressed his intense devotion to one
"whose voice came to me from afar, with counsel and help, in my utmost
need." "For if," he continues, "I have been delivered from darkness
into any measure of light, if I know aught of myself and my destination,
it is to the study of your writings more than to any other circumstance
that I owe this; it is you more than any other man that I should always
thank and reverence with the feeling of a disciple to his Master, nay,
of a son to his spiritual Father." In the meantime Carlyle had married
Jane Welsh, the daughter of a doctor in Haddington, and had settled at
the lonely farm-house of Craigenputtock, in Dumfriesshire. There he was
visited by Emerson, and there he remained for six years, before removing
to London. Not only had Carlyle then translated "Wilhelm Meister" and
written the "Life of Schiller," but he had made numerous translations
from Musaeus, Tieck, and Richter, and had published essays on these and
other German authors. Jean Paul Richter had a peculiar attraction for
him, and there can be no doubt that Carlyle owed his extraordinary
style, in some degree, to his study of the German humorist.
The forty-seven years of Carlyle's London life (1834-1881) were years of
incessant literary activity. The thirty volumes which came from his pen
during that time not only secured for him a permanent place amongst the
historians, biographers, and essayists of our literature, but they
kindled for him a glow of intense personal enthusiasm amongst the best
of his contemporaries, such as, perhaps, no other English author has
enjoyed. At his death on the 5th of February, 1881, the world knew
Carlyle, apart from his books, as a man of simple tastes, content, in
spite of the wealth which literary success had brought, to reside amidst
unostentatious surroundings, ever ready to help the distressed and
needy, refusing a title and the like official recognitions, and carrying
out to the letter the reverence, earnestness, and unobtrusive manliness
which he had inculcated in his writings; devotedly attached to his wife,
whom he described on her tombstone as having "unweariedly forwarded him
as none else could, in all of good that he did or attempted;" and, in
short, worthy of the address presented to him on his eightieth birthday,
by nearly all the men of literary and scientific eminence in England,
including, amongst others, Lord Tennyson and George Eliot, Robert
Browning and Professor Huxley. "A whole generation has elapsed," they
said, "since you described for us the hero as a man of letters. We
congratulate you and ourselves on the spacious fulness of years which
has enabled you to sustain this rare dignity amongst mankind in all its
possible splendour and completeness." The publication of Mr Froude's
nine volumes of memorials caused a considerable revulsion of feeling.
The Carlyle of these "Letters" and "Reminiscences" appeared to be
over-censorious in his estimate of his contemporaries, not too
considerate in his relations with his wife, and, however admirable he
might find contentment in Richter or Heyne, not content without much
murmuring to accept a life of restricted means.
To give too much emphasis to this view of Carlyle's character is to
ignore certain peculiarities of Mr Froude's biographical and historical
style, to which reference has already been made. It will suffice to
point out here that there are other sources of information about Carlyle
than the books of his accredited biographer. Sir Henry Taylor, Mrs
Oliphant, Mr Charles Eliot Norton, Mrs Gilchrist, and other friends of
Carlyle's later life have published much additional matter, and have
shown, as it were, the other side of the shield. To Sir Henry Taylor,
who knew him well, he seemed "the most faithful and true-hearted of
men," and from many sources we learn that Mr Froude's picture is not
that of the true Carlyle; that he was not a selfish husband, that his
married life was not unhappy, that he was not altogether dumb to the
heroes living, whilst eloquent over heroes dead, and that, in spite of
many faults, he was a noble high-minded man, a "kingly soul," as
Longfellow called him. Writing in his Diary during his second visit to
England in 1847, Emerson says:--"Carlyle and his wife live on beautiful
terms. Their ways are very engaging, and in her bookcase all his books
are inscribed to her as they came from year to year, each with some
significant lines."
The letters which Carlyle wrote to his wife at the time she lost her
mother are most touchingly affectionate. This is what she wrote to a
friend at that time:--"In great matters he is always kind and
considerate, but these little attentions which we women attach so much
importance to, he was never in the habit of rendering to anyone. And,
now, the desire to replace the irreplaceable makes him as good in little
things as he used to be in great." And to Carlyle himself she
writes:--"God keep you, my dear husband, and bring you safe back to me.
The house looks very desolate without you, and my mind feels empty too.
I expect, with impatience, the letter that is to fix your return."
On another occasion, writing to her husband's mother, she says:--"You
have others behind and I have only him--only him in the whole wide world
to love me and take care of me--poor little wretch that I am. Not but
that numbers of people love me, after their fashion, far more than I
deserve, but then his fashion is so different from theirs, and seems
alone to suit the crotchety creature that I am." And then her pride in
her husband is well exemplified by an experience related in a letter to
him, which shows also how wide and deep is that mysterious impersonal
influence of great authors on men who are totally unknown to them:--"A
man of the people mounted the platform and spoke; a youngish,
intelligent-looking man, who alone, of all the speakers, seemed to
understand the question, and to have feelings as well as notions about
it. He spoke with a heart-eloquence that left me warm. I never was more
affected by public speaking.... A sudden thought struck me: this man
would like to know you. I would give him my address in London. I
borrowed a piece of paper and handed him my address. When he looked at
it he started as if I had sent a bullet into him, caught my hand, and
said, 'Oh, it is your husband! Mr Carlyle has been my teacher and
master! I have owed everything to him for years and years!' I felt it a
credit to you really to have had a hand in turning out this man, was
prouder of that heart-tribute to your genius than any amount of
reviewers' praises or aristocratic invitations to dinner."
It is because the spirit which breathes in the words of this young
workman has been the guiding moral force of numbers of men and women in
all stations of life, during the last sixty years, that I have devoted
so much space to Carlyle. It is of the greatest importance to literature
that the man whose eloquent preaching of justice, sincerity, and
reverence has turned the hearts of thousands of his fellowmen towards
nobility and simplicity of life, should not himself have been out of
harmony with all that he taught. "The world," says Thackeray's gifted
daughter, "has pointed its moral finger of late at the old man in his
great old age, accusing himself in the face of all, and confessing the
overpowering irritations which the suffering of a lifetime had laid upon
him and upon her he loved. That old caustic man of deepest feeling, with
an ill-temper and a tender heart, and a racking imagination, speaking
from the grave, and bearing unto it that cross of passionate remorse
which few among us dare to face, seems to some of us now a figure nobler
and truer, a teacher greater far than in the days when all his pain and
love and remorse were still hidden from us all."[14]
Of the "Reminiscences" which excited so much criticism on account of
their references to persons still living, Carlyle wrote on the last
page:--"I still mainly mean to _burn_ this book before my own departure,
but feel that I shall always have a kind of grudge to do it, and an
indolent excuse. 'Not _yet_; wait, any day that can be done!' and that
it is possible the thing _may_ be left behind me, legible to interested
survivors--_friends_ only, I will hope, and with _worthy_ curiosity, not
_un_worthy! In which event, I solemnly forbid them, each and all, to
_publish_ this bit of writing _as it stands here_, and warn them that
_without fit editing_ no _part_ of it should be printed (nor so far as I
can order _shall_ ever be), and that the 'fit editing' of perhaps
nine-tenths of it will, after I am gone, have become _impossible_."[15]
The only editing which Mr Froude deemed "fit" was the omission of this
paragraph from his edition of the work. And yet to read, with the
"worthy curiosity" of which he speaks, of his love for father and wife,
and of his kindly solicitude for brothers and sisters, whom he
constantly assisted, is to make him nearer and dearer to those who care
to remember that he was after all but human. Carlyle spoke with too
little kindness, it must be owned, of Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and
Lamb, because he saw only the palpable weaknesses of their characters,
and was blinded by forbidding externals to the sterling worth of these
great men; but he loved Emerson, and Tennyson, and Ruskin, and he
profoundly revered Goethe, who, after all, was the only one of his
contemporaries who could take rank anywhere near him.[16] Carlyle
recognised that Goethe was incomparably his superior in every way; that
he was, as Matthew Arnold calls him, "the greatest poet of the present
age, and the greatest critic of all ages," the one man of transcendent
genius whom Europe has produced since Dante and Shakspere. To have first
led England to appreciate Goethe is not the least of Carlyle's many
services to his country. To have acted as an inspiring and helpful
prophet is perhaps his greatest. "Sartor Resartus" first appeared in
_Fraser's Magazine_ for 1833, where it met with but scanty recognition,
and, indeed, half-ruined the editor, whose subscribers anxiously asked
when the "tailor sketches" were coming to an end. It is surely something
more than a passing fashion in literature which leads us now to take up
these well-worn pages with so much of tenderness and sympathy. "There is
in man," he says, "a Higher than Love of Happiness; he can do without
Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness! Was it not to preach
forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the Poet and the Priest,
in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony, through life
and through death, of the Godlike that is in Man, and how, in the
Godlike only, has he Strength and Freedom?" How can it be said that
Carlyle did not love humanity when we read the lines in which he
expresses reverence for the "toilworn Craftsman that, with earth-made
Implement, laboriously conquers the Earth and makes her man's?"
"Venerable to me," he continues, "is the hard Hand; crooked, coarse;
wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of
the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face, all
weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude intelligence; for it is the face
of a Man living manlike. O, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and
even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly entreated
Brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and
fingers so deformed; thou wert our Conscript on whom the lot fell, and
fighting our battles wert so marred."
It is impossible to exaggerate the effect upon the younger minds of his
age of Carlyle's stirring words, inciting to worthy and ever worthier
effort:--"Do the duty which lies nearest to thee, which thou knowest to
be a duty. In all situations out of the pit of Tophet, wherein a living
man has stood, there is actually a prize of quite infinite value placed
within his reach, namely a duty for him to do; this highest of Gospels
forms the basis and worth of all other gospels whatever." "Brother," he
says elsewhere, "thou hast possibility in thee for much, the possibility
of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic life. Is not
every man, God be thanked, a potential hero? The measure of a nation's
greatness, of its worth under the sky to God and to man, is not the
quantity of bullion it has realised, but the quantity of heroisms it has
achieved, of noble pieties and valiant wisdoms that were in it, that
still are in it."
Little less valuable than "Sartor Resartus" is "Past and Present," which
was published in 1843. The reverence and delicacy with which it touches
the monasticism of a bygone age are as remarkable as the prophetic
vision with which it deals with the social problems of our latter-day
life. State-aided emigration, co-operation and national education, are
some of the many changes advocated here and elsewhere. Not till the
"Latter-day Pamphlets" (1850) did Carlyle become an eloquent advocate of
"force" as a guide in politics, thereby alienating John Stuart Mill and
many of his old friends. His language then seemed to degenerate into
mere shrieking and scolding. The world must be governed, he declared, by
men of heroic mould, who know what is good for the inferior natures
around them. Let such inferior natures, if need be, be scourged into
silence. Parliaments he spoke of contemptuously as "talking shops," and
his sympathies went out heartily to Governor Eyre at the time of the
Jamaica riots, and to the Southern States at the time of the American
Civil War. An admiration for "heaven-sent heroes" had always been
strong in Carlyle, although it certainly had not its after meaning when
he wrote in early life, "Not brute force, but only persuasion and faith
are the kings of this world." In "Heroes and Hero-worship," a course of
lectures delivered in 1840, he had waxed eloquent over Mahomet, Luther,
and Napoleon, and three years earlier, in 1837, he had published in his
"French Revolution" a brilliant eulogy of Mirabeau. His vindication of
Cromwell was brought about perhaps mainly by his appreciation of the
Protector's high-handed resoluteness, and his "Life of Frederick II. of
Prussia" was the apology for a man who was the very embodiment of
despotic ideals.
But quite apart from Carlyle's worth as a moral teacher or as a
controversialist, his place in literature is very high. His short
biography of Schiller was an epoch-making book, because of the influence
it has exercised upon the study of German literature: but it bears
little evidence of the genius of its author, and, in consequence of the
abundance of Schiller correspondence subsequently brought to light, it
has been superseded by the biographies of Palleskie and Duntzer.
Carlyle's "Life of John Sterling" is, however, a work of great power, a
kind of prose "Lycidas," which, like that great elegy, has rescued from
oblivion a man in whom the world would soon have ceased to be
interested. Carlyle, again, was an essayist of striking individuality.
Few literary sketches are more picturesque than his "Count Cagliostro"
and "The Diamond Necklace," and the essays on Johnson and Burns are
models of generous human insight. With literary insight, however,
Carlyle was not too well endowed, at least, when purely imaginative
literature was concerned, and he once expressed the opinion that
Shakspere had better have written in prose. "It is part of my creed," he
wrote to Emerson, "that the only poetry is history could we tell it
right." His method of telling it gives him a place by himself among
historians, a place so singular that it is impossible to classify him.
"Carlyle's 'French Revolution,'" said John Stuart Mill, "is one of those
productions of genius which is above all rule, and is a law to itself."
The deathbed of Louis XV., the taking of the Bastille, and the execution
of Danton, are never-to-be-forgotten descriptions, and the poetical
passage which follows the relation of the bloody horrors of 1789 cannot
be too often quoted:--"O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy
beams fall slant on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women
spinning in cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on Balls at
the Orangerie of Versailles, where high-rouged Dames of the Palace are
even now dancing with double-jacketed Hussar-Officers;--and also on this
roaring Hell-porch of a Hotel-de-Ville!"
The scientific history of the French Revolution has yet to be written;
and even to appreciate Carlyle's prose epic adequately we should know
something of Mignet, Thiers, Morse Stephens, and von Sybel, but neither
the accumulation of fresh facts, nor a philosophical deduction from such
facts, can impair the value of Carlyle's work. That, in spite of all his
fire and passion, Carlyle could delineate character with most judicial
fairness, may be demonstrated by turning to Mr John Morley's essays on
Robespierre and the other revolutionists, and observing how his calm and
unprejudiced intellect has pronounced judgments in every way endorsing
Carlyle's.
Carlyle's "Cromwell" has less attraction for us to-day than the "French
Revolution"; but the service to historical study was even greater.
Opinions will always differ as to the wisdom of the Protector's policy
and the righteousness of his deeds, but since the publication of these
letters and speeches, "edited with the care of an antiquarian and the
genius of a poet,"[17] Cromwell's sincerity and genuine piety have been
unimpugned. There are others beside Mr Froude who esteem the "History of
Frederick II." Carlyle's greatest work. The humour of the book is
wonderful, for Carlyle is the greatest humorist since Sterne, and
nowhere is this humour more conspicuous than in "Frederick." The
splendid portraits of all the most important figures in the eighteenth
century fix themselves indelibly in the memory, and it is even said that
German soldiers study the art of war from the descriptions of
Frederick's campaigns. Nevertheless, the book has much in it that is
unsatisfying to Englishmen. Frederick and his father could not easily
excite the hero-worshipping inclinations of a free people, and even
Carlyle became disillusioned as he proceeded with his task, and finally
admitted that Frederick was not worth the trouble he had given to him.
He commenced it as a "History of Frederick the Great," and concluded it
as a "History of Frederick, _called_ the Great."
Carlyle is surely the greatest figure in our modern literature. He wrote
no poetry worth consideration, it is true. His verse would long since
have been forgotten had it not been for his effectiveness as a prose
writer. But although we are accustomed to the claim for poetry that it
ranks higher than prose, it must be conceded that in Victorian
literature this is not the case, and that Carlyle's enormous
personality, his capacity for influencing others for good and ill, have
made him the greatest moral and intellectual force of his age. To him we
owe the indifference to mere political shibboleths, the lull in party
warfare, which is the note of our age. He gave no definite answer to any
question, but he gave us the impetus which led others to seek for
solutions. His literary influence on Froude and Mill, Mr Ruskin and Mr
Lecky, and numbers of others was tremendous. The place which was
occupied by Swift in the eighteenth century is held by Carlyle in the
nineteenth, and though every line that he has written should cease to be
read, he will still be remembered as the greatest of literary figures in
an age of great men of letters.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Froude's "History of England," vol. ii. chap. ix.
[12] "Lectures on the Council of Trent," "English Seamen in the
Sixteenth Century," and "Life and Letters of Erasmus."
[13] "Memoirs of Mark Pattison."
[14] Mrs Thackeray-Ritchie, _Harper's Magazine_ (1883).
[15] "Reminiscences," by Thomas Carlyle. 2nd Edition. Edited by C. E.
Norton (1887).
[16] When George Eliot read Carlyle's eulogy on Emerson in introducing
his essays to the British public, she wrote:--"I have shed many tears
over it: this is a world worth abiding in while one man can thus
venerate and love another."--Cross's "Life of George Eliot."
[17] Green's "Short History of the English People."