the primitive Church. There was the Anglican theory, that it was a
_via media_, the most correct of periods, that its belief is to be
the standard, its institutions the model, its practice the test of
subsequent ages. There was the notion, not formally drawn out, but
diffused through and implied in a hundred books of evidence,—a notion in
opposition to every probability, and utterly at variance with the New
Testament,—that the first converts were sober, hard-headed, cultivated
inquirers,—Watsons, Paleys, Priestleys, on a small scale; weighing
evidence, analysing facts, suggesting doubts, dwelling on distinctions,
cold in their dispositions, moderate in their morals,—cautious in their
creed. We now know that these were not they of whom the world was not
worthy. It is ascertained that the times of the first Church were times
of excitement; that great ideas falling on a mingled world were distorted
by an untrained intellect, even in the moment in which they were received
by a yearning heart; that strange confused beliefs, Millennarianism,
Gnosticism, Ebionitism, were accepted, not merely by outlying obscure
heretics, but in a measure, half-and-half, one notion more by one man,
another more by his neighbour, confusedly and mixedly by the mass
of Christians; that the appeal was not to the questioning, thinking
understanding, but to unheeding, all-venturing emotion; to that lower
class ‘from whom faiths ascend,’ and not to the cultivated and exquisite
class by whom they are criticised; that fervid men never embraced a more
exclusive creed. You can say nothing favourable of the first Christians,
except that they _were_ Christians. We find no ‘form nor comeliness’
in them; no intellectual accomplishments, no caution in action, no
discretion in understanding. There is no admirable quality except that,
with whatever distortion, or confusion, or singularity, they at once
accepted the great clear outline of belief in which to this day we live,
move, and have our being. The offence of Gibbon is his disinclination to
this simple essence; his excuse, the historical errors then prevalent
as to the primitive Christians, the real defects so natural in their
position, the false merits ascribed to them by writers who from one
reason or another desired to treat them as ‘an authority.’
On the whole, therefore, it may be said of the first, and in some sense
the most important part of Gibbon’s work, that though he has given an
elaborate outline of the framework of society, and described its detail
with pomp and accuracy, yet that he has not comprehended or delineated
its nobler essence, Pagan or Christian. Nor perhaps was it to be expected
that he should, for he inadequately comprehended the dangers of the time;
he thought it the happiest period the world has ever known; he would
not have comprehended the remark, ‘To see the old world in its worst
estate we turn to the age of the satirist and of Tacitus, when all the
different streams of evil coming from east, west, north, south, the vices
of barbarism and the vices of civilisation, remnants of ancient cults
and the latest refinements of luxury and impurity, met and mingled on
the banks of the Tiber. What could have been the state of society when
Tiberius, Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Heliogabalus, were the rulers of the
world? To a good man we should imagine that death itself would be more
tolerable than the sight of such things coming upon the earth.’ So deep
an ethical sensibility was not to be expected in the first century; nor
is it strange when, after seventeen hundred years, we do not find it in
their historian.
Space has failed us, and we must be unmeaningly brief. The second head
of Gibbon’s history—the narrative of the barbarian invasions—has been
recently criticised, on the ground that he scarcely enough explains the
gradual but unceasing and inevitable manner in which the outer barbarians
were affected by and assimilated to the civilisation of Rome. Mr.
Congreve has well observed, that the impression which Gibbon’s narrative
is insensibly calculated to convey is, that there was little or no change
in the state of the Germanic tribes between the time of Tacitus and the
final invasion of the empire—a conclusion which is obviously incredible.
To the general reader there will perhaps seem some indistinctness in this
part of the work, nor is a free, confused barbarism a congenial subject
for an imposing and orderly pencil. He succeeds better in the delineation
of the riding monarchies, if we may so term them,—of the equestrian
courts of Attila or Timour, in which the great scale, the concentrated
power, the very enormity of the barbarism, give, so to speak, a shape
to unshapeliness; impart, that is, a horrid dignity to horse-flesh
and mare’s milk, an imposing oneness to the vast materials of a crude
barbarity. It is needless to say that no one would search Gibbon for an
explanation of the reasons or feelings by which the northern tribes were
induced to accept Christianity.
It is on the story of Constantinople that the popularity of Gibbon rests.
The vast extent of the topic; the many splendid episodes it contains;
its epic unity from the moment of the far-seeing selection of the city
by Constantine to its last fall; its position as a link between Europe
and Asia; its continuous history; the knowledge that through all that
time it was, as now, a diadem by the water-side, a lure to be snatched by
the wistful barbarian, a marvel to the West, a prize for the North and
for the East;—these, and such as these ideas, are congenial topics to a
style of pomp and grandeur. The East seems to require to be treated with
a magnificence unsuitable to a colder soil. The nature of the events,
too, is suitable to Gibbon’s cursory, imposing manner. It is the history
of a form of civilisation, but without the power thereof; a show of
splendour and vigour, but without bold life or interior reality. What
an opportunity for an historian who loved the imposing pageantry and
disliked the purer essence of existence! There were here neither bluff
barbarians nor simple saints; there was nothing admitting of particular
accumulated detail; we do not wish to know the interior of the stage;
the imposing movements are all which should be seized. Some of the
features, too, are curious in relation to those of the historian’s life:
the clear accounts of the theological controversies, followed out with
an appreciative minuteness so rare in a sceptic, are not disconnected
with his early conversion to the scholastic Church; the brilliancy of
the narrative reminds us of his enthusiasm for Arabic and the East; the
minute description of a licentious epoch evinces the habit of a mind
which, not being bold enough for the practice of license, took a pleasure
in following its theory. There is no subject which combines so much of
unity with so much of variety.
It is evident, therefore, where Gibbon’s rank as an historian must
finally stand. He cannot be numbered among the great painters of
human nature, for he has no sympathy with the heart and passions of
our race; he has no place among the felicitous describers of detailed
life, for his subject was too vast for minute painting, and his style
too uniform for a shifting scene. But he is entitled to a high—perhaps
to a first place—among the orderly narrators of great events; the
composed expositors of universal history; the tranquil artists who have
endeavoured to diffuse a cold polish over the warm passions and desultory
fortunes of mankind.
The life of Gibbon after the publication of his great work was not very
complicated. During its composition he had withdrawn from Parliament and
London to the studious retirement of Lausanne. Much eloquence has been
expended on this voluntary exile, and it has been ascribed to the best
and most profound motives. It is indeed certain that he liked a lettered
solitude, preferred easy continental society, was not quite insensible
to the charm of scenery, had a pleasure in returning to the haunts of
his youth. Prosaic and pure history, however, must explain that he went
abroad to _save_. Lord North had gone out of power. Mr. Burke, the
Cobden of that era, had procured the abolition of the Lords of Trade;
the private income of Gibbon was not equal to his notion of a bachelor
London life. The same sum was, however, a fortune at Lausanne. Most
things, he acknowledged, were as dear; but then he had not to buy so many
things. Eight hundred a year placed him high in the social scale of the
place. The inhabitants were gratified that a man of European reputation
had selected their out-of-the-way town for the shrine of his fame; he
lived pleasantly and easily among easy, pleasant people; a gentle hum
of local admiration gradually arose, which yet lingers on the lips of
erudite _laquais de place_. He still retains a fame unaccorded to any
other historian; they speak of the ‘hôtel Gibbon:’ there never was even
an _estaminet_ Tacitus, or a _café_ Thucydides.
This agreeable scene, like many other agreeable scenes, was broken by a
great thunderclap. The French revolution has disgusted many people; but
perhaps it has never disgusted any one more than Gibbon. He had swept
and garnished everything about him. Externally he had made a neat little
hermitage in a gentle, social place; internally he had polished up a
still theory of life, sufficient for the guidance of a cold and polished
man. Everything seemed to be tranquil with him; the rigid must admit his
decorum; the lax would not accuse him of rigour; he was of the world, and
an elegant society naturally loved its own. On a sudden the hermitage
was disturbed. No place was too calm for that excitement; scarcely
any too distant for that uproar. The French war was a war of opinion,
entering households, disturbing villages, dividing quiet friends. The
Swiss took some of the infection. There was a not unnatural discord
between the people of the Pays de Vaud and their masters the people of
Berne. The letters of Gibbon are filled with invectives on the ‘Gallic
barbarians’ and panegyrics on Mr. Burke; military details, too, begin to
abound—the peace of his retirement was at an end. It was an additional
aggravation that the Parisians should do such things. It would not have
seemed unnatural that northern barbarians—English, or other uncivilised
nations—should break forth in rough riot or cruel license; but that the
people of the most civilised of all capitals, speaking the sole dialect
of polished life, enlightened with all the enlightenment then known,
should be guilty of excesses unparalleled, unwitnessed, unheard of, was
a vexing trial to one who had admired them for many years. The internal
creed and belief of Gibbon was as much attacked by all this as were his
external circumstances. He had spent his time, his life, his energy,
in putting a polished gloss on human tumult, a sneering gloss on human
piety; on a sudden human passion broke forth—the cold and polished world
seemed to meet its end; the thin superficies of civilisation was torn
asunder; the fountains of the great deep seemed opened; impiety to meet
its end; the foundations of the earth were out of course.
We now, after long familiarity and in much ignorance, can hardly read
the history of those years without horror: what an effect must they have
produced on those whose minds were fresh, and who knew the people killed!
‘Never,’ Gibbon wrote to an English nobleman, ‘did a revolution affect to
such a degree the private existence of such numbers of the first people
of a great country. Your examples of misery I could easily match with
similar examples in this country and neighbourhood, and our sympathy is
the deeper, as we do not possess, like you, the means of alleviating in
some measure the misfortunes of the fugitives.’ It violently affected his
views of English politics. He before had a tendency, in consideration of
his cosmopolitan cultivation, to treat them as local littlenesses, parish
squabbles; but now his interest was keen and eager. ‘But,’ he says,
‘in this rage against slavery, in the numerous petitions against the
slave-trade, was there no leaven of new democratical principles? no wild
ideas of the rights and natural equality of man? It is these I fear. Some
articles in newspapers, some pamphlets of the year, the Jockey Club, have
fallen into my hands. I do not infer much from such publications; yet I
have never known them of so black and malignant a cast. I shuddered at
Grey’s motion; disliked the half-support of Fox, admired the firmness of
Pitt’s declaration, and excused the usual intemperance of Burke. Surely
such men as ——, ——, ——, have talents for mischief. I see a club of reform
which contains some respectable names. Inform me of the professions, the
principles, the plans, the resources of these reformers. Will they heat
the minds of the people? Does the French democracy gain no ground? Will
the bulk of your party stand firm to their own interest and that of their
country? Will you not take some active measures to declare your sound
opinions, and separate yourselves from your rotten members? If you allow
them to perplex Government, if you trifle with this solemn business,
if you do not resist the spirit of innovation in the first attempt, if
you admit the smallest and most specious change in our parliamentary
system, you are lost. You will be driven from one step to another; from
principles just in theory to consequences most pernicious in practice;
and your first concession will be productive of every subsequent
mischief, for which you will be answerable to your country and to
posterity. Do not suffer yourselves to be lulled into a false security;
remember the proud fabric of the French monarchy. Not four years ago it
stood founded, as it might seem, on the rock of time, force, and opinion;
supported by the triple aristocracy of the Church, the nobility, and the
parliaments. They are crumbled into dust; they are vanished from the
earth. If this tremendous warning has no effect on the men of property
in England; if it does not open every eye, and raise every arm,—you
will deserve your fate. If I am too precipitate, enlighten; if I am too
desponding, encourage me. My pen has run into this argument; for, as much
a foreigner as you think me, on this momentous subject I feel myself an
Englishman.’
The truth clearly is, that he had arrived at the conclusion that he was
the sort of person a populace kill. People wonder a great deal why very
many of the victims of the French revolution were particularly selected;
the Marquis de Custine, especially, cannot divine why they executed _his_
father. The historians cannot show that they committed any particular
crimes; the marquises and marchionesses seem very inoffensive. The fact
evidently is, that they were killed for being polite. The world felt
itself unworthy of them. There were so many bows, such regular smiles,
such calm superior condescension,—could a mob be asked to endure it? Have
we not all known a precise, formal, patronising old gentleman—bland,
imposing, something like Gibbon? Have we not suffered from his dignified
attentions? If _we_ had been on the Committee of Public Safety, can we
doubt what would have been the fate of that man? Just so wrath and envy
destroyed in France an upper-class world.
After his return to England, Gibbon did not do much or live long. He
completed his _Memoirs_, the most imposing of domestic narratives, the
model of dignified detail. As we said before, if the Roman empire _had_
written about itself, this was how it would have done so. He planned
some other works, but executed none; judiciously observing that building
castles in the air was more agreeable than building them on the ground.
His career was, however, drawing to an end. Earthly dignity had its
limits, even the dignity of an historian. He had long been stout; and
now symptoms of dropsy began to appear. After a short interval, he died
on the 16th of January 1794. We have sketched his character, and have
no more to say. After all, what is our criticism worth? It only fulfils
his aspiration, ‘that a hundred years hence I may still continue to be
abused.’
_BISHOP BUTLER._[2]
(1854.)
About the close of the last century, some one discovered the wife of
a country rector in the act of destroying, for culinary purposes, the
last remnants of a box of sermons, which seemed to have been written
by Joseph Butler. The lady was reproved, but the exculpatory rejoinder
was, ‘Why, the box was full once, and I thought they were my husband’s.’
Nevertheless, when we first saw the above announcement of unpublished
remains, we hoped her exemplary diligence had not been wholly successful,
and that some important writings of Butler had been discovered. In this
we have been disappointed. The remains in question are slight and rather
trivial; the longest is an additional letter addressed to Dr. Clarke;
and in all the rest there is scarcely anything very characteristic,
except the remark, ‘What a wonderful incongruity it is for a man to see
the doubtfulness in which things are involved, and yet be impatient out
of action, or vehement in it. Say a man is a sceptic, and add what was
said of Brutus, _quicquid vult valde vult_, and you say there is the
greatest contrariety between his understanding and temper that can be
expressed in words:’—an observation which might be borne in mind by some
English writers who panegyrise Julius Cæsar, and the many French ones who
panegyrise Napoleon.
The life of Butler is one of those in which the events are few, the
transitions simple, and the final result strange. He was the son of
a dissenting shopkeeper in Berkshire, was always of a meditative
disposition and reading habit—grew to manhood—was destined to the
Dissenting ministry—began to question the principles of Dissent—entered
at Oriel College—made valuable acquaintances there—rose in the Church by
means of them—obtained, first the chaplaincy of the Rolls, then a decent
living—then the rectory of Stanhope, the ‘golden’ rectory, one of the
best in the English Church—was recommended by his old friends to Queen
Caroline—talked philosophy to her—pleased her (this being her favourite
topic)—was made Bishop of Bristol, and thence translated to the richest
of Anglican dignities—the prince-bishopric of Durham, and there died.
These are the single steps, and there is none of them which is remote
from our ordinary observation. We should not be surprised to see any of
them every day. But when we look on the life as a whole, when we see
its nature, when we observe the son of a dissenting tradesman, a person
of simple and pious disposition, of retiring habits, and scrupulous and
investigating mind—in a word, the least worldly of ecclesiastics—attain
to the most secular of ecclesiastical dignities, be a prince as well as
a bishop, become the great magnate of the North of England, and dispense
revenues to be envied by many a foreign potentate, we perceive the
singularity of such a man with such beginnings attaining such a fortune.
No man would guess from Butler’s writings that he ever had the disposal
of five pounds: it is odd to think what he did with the mining property
and landed property, the royalties and rectories, coal dues and curacies,
that he must have heard of from morning till evening.
It is certainly most strange that such a man should ever have been made
a bishop. In general we observe that those become most eminent in the
sheepfold, who partake most eminently of the qualities of the wolf.
Nor is this surprising. The Church is (as the Article defines it) a
congregation of men, faithful indeed, but faithful in various degrees.
In every corporation or combination of men, no matter for what purpose
collected, there are certain secular qualities which attain eminence
as surely as oil rises above water. Attorneys are for the world, and
the world is for attorneys. Activity, vigour, sharp-sightedness, tact,
boldness, watchfulness, and such qualities as these, raise a man in the
Church as certainly as in the State; so long as there is wealth and
preferment in the one, they will be attained a good deal as wealth and
office are in the other. The _prowling_ faculties will have their way.
Those who hunger and thirst after riches will have riches, and those who
hunger not, will not. Still to this there are exceptions, and Butler’s
case is one of them. We might really fancy the world had determined to
give for once an encouraging instance of its sensibility to rectitude, of
the real and great influence of real and great virtue.
The period at which Butler’s elevation occurred certainly does not
diminish the oddness of the phenomenon. We are not indeed of those,
mostly disciples of Carlyle or Newman, who speak with untempered contempt
of the eighteenth century. Rather, if we might trust our own feelings, we
view it with appreciating regard. It was the age of substantial comfort.
The grave and placid historian (we speak of Mr. Hallam), going learnedly
over the generations of men, is disposed to think that there never was
so much happiness before or since. Employment was plentiful; industry
remunerative. The advantages of material civilisation were enjoyed, and
its penalties scarcely foreseen. The troubles of the seventeenth century
had died out; those of the nineteenth had not begun. Cares were few;
the stir and conflict in which we live had barely commenced. It was not
an age to trouble itself with prospective tasks; it had no feverish
excitement, nor over-intellectual introspection; it lived on the fat
of the land; _quieta non movere_, was its motto. Like most comfortable
people, those of that time possessed a sleepy, supine sagacity, they had
no fine imaginings, no exquisite fancies; but a coarse sense of what
was common, a ‘large roundabout common sense’ (these are Locke’s words),
which was their guide in what concerned them. Some may not think this
romantic enough to be attractive, and yet it has a beauty of its own.
They did not ‘look before or after,’ nor ‘pine for what was not;’ they
enjoyed what was; a solid homeliness was their mark. Exactly as we like
to see a large lazy animal lying in the placid shade, without anxiety for
the future and chewing the cud of the past, we like to look back at the
age of our great-grandfathers, so solid in its habits and placid in the
lapse of years. Nevertheless—and this is what is to our purpose—we must
own at once that the very merits of that age are of the earth, earthy;
there was no talk then of ‘obstinate questionings,’ or ‘incommunicable
dream;’ heroism, enthusiasm, the sense of the supernatural, deep feeling,
seem in a manner foreign to the very idea of it. This is the point of
view in which the Tractarian movement was described as ‘tending towards
the realisation of something better and nobler than satisfied the last
century.’ For the clergy, the time was indeed evil. The popular view
of the profession seems accurately expressed in a well-known book of
memoirs. ‘But if this was your opinion, how came you not to let your
friend Sherlock,’ the well-known bishop, ‘into the secret? Why did
you not tell him that half the pack, and those you most depended on,
were drawn off, and the game escaped and safe, instead of leaving his
lordship there to bark and yelp by himself, and make the silly figure
he has done?’ ‘Oh,’ said Lord Carteret, ‘he talks like a parson, and
consequently is so used to talk to people who do not mind him, that I
left him to find it out at his leisure, and shall have him again for all
this, whenever I want him.’
The fact of Butler’s success is to be accounted for, as we have said,
by his personal excellence. Mr. Talbot liked him, _Bishop_ Talbot liked
him, the Queen liked him, the King liked him. He says himself in these
Remains, ‘Good men surely are not treated in this world as they deserve,
yet ’tis seldom, very seldom, their goodness makes them disliked, even
in cases where it may seem to be so; but ’tis some behaviour or other
which, however excusable, perhaps infinitely overbalanced by their
virtues, yet is offensive, possibly wrong, however such, it may be, as
would pass off very well in a man of the world.’ And he must have been
alive to the fact in practice. He had every excuse for making virtue
detestable. He was educated a Baptist, and brought up at a dissenting
academy. He was born in the vulgarest years of English Puritanism,
when it had fallen from its first estate, when it had least influence
with the higher classes, when the revival which dates from John Wesley
had not begun, and the very memory of gentlemen such as Hutchinson or
Hampden had passed away. A certain instinctive refinement, a ‘niceness’
and gentleness of nature, preserved him not only from the coarser
consequences of his position, but even from that angularity of mind
which is not often escaped by those early trained to object to what is
established.