[Sidenote: _In Memoriam_ W. Stubbs.]
§ 1. I trust you will not think it inappropriate if I begin these
lectures by paying my humble tribute of reverence and gratitude to the
memory of the great historian who, since my appointment to this post
of Ford’s Lecturer, has been taken from us. I believe that to him I am
very largely indebted for the honour of appearing before you to-day[1];
and if that were so, it would only be of a piece with the many acts of
kindness and encouragement which he showed me; encouragement sometimes
couched in that humorous form which he loved, and which was occasionally
misunderstood by those who had not, like himself, the saving gift of
humour. It is not easy to measure the greatness of his loss. He was
unquestionably one of the most learned men in Europe; one of the few who
could venture to assert an historical negative. If he declared ‘there
is no authority for such a view or statement,’ you knew that there was
nothing more to be said. But even more wonderful than the extent of his
learning was the way in which he could compress it, and bring it all to
bear upon the particular point with which he was dealing. I daresay it
has happened to you, as it has often happened to myself, to read other
books and authorities, and to fancy that one had gained from them fresh
facts and views, and then to go back to Stubbs and find that all our new
facts and views were there already; only, until we had read more widely
ourselves, we had not eyes to see all that was written there.
§ 2. But with all this, history was never to him mere erudition. It
was, on the one hand, the record of human experience, a record ‘written
for our learning,’ and rich with unheeded lessons; on the other, it was
the gradual unfolding to human view of the purposes of God, working
themselves out not only in spite of, but often by means of the weakness
and waywardness of the human agents. And so he views the characters and
the course of history, not, as so many historians do, merely from the
outside, but, if I may so speak, from within. The characters of history
are no mere puppets, to be dressed in picturesque costumes, and made
to strut across the stage of the world; they ‘are men of like passions
with’ us, tempted and sinning, and suffering, as we are tempted, sin,
and suffer; aspiring and achieving, as we too might aspire and achieve.
‘History,’ he says, ‘cannot be well read as a chess problem, and the
man who tries to read it so is not worthy to read it at all[2].’ And
so we have in the Prefaces to Hoveden, Benedict of Peterborough, the
Itinerarium Ricardi, and Walter of Coventry, those wonderful studies of
the characters of Henry II, Richard I, and John, which must always remain
as masterpieces of historical portraiture. In the same way the course of
history at large is no mere complex of material and mechanical laws; it
yields no countenance to that ingenious philosophy which is ‘so apt,’
as he contemptuously says, ‘to show that all things would have been
exactly as they are if everything had been diametrically opposite to
what it was[3].’ ‘The ebb and flow of the life of nations is seen,’ he
says, ‘to depend on higher laws, more general purposes, the guidance of a
Higher Hand[4].’ And so we have those wonderful summaries which conclude
the second and third volumes of his Constitutional History, the finest
specimens I know of historical generalisations controlled by an absolute
mastery of all the facts.
§ 3. And here we find the secret of his unfailing hopefulness. The last
words of that same second volume must, I think, have dwelt in the hearts
of all who have ever read them; where, after speaking of the luxury,
the selfishness, the hardness of the fourteenth century, and the lust,
the cruelty, the futility of the fifteenth, he concludes: ‘Yet out of
it emerges, in spite of all, the truer and brighter day, the season
of more general conscious life, higher longings, more forbearing,
more sympathetic, purer, riper liberty.’ While those who remember the
Commemoration Sermon which he preached at the late Queen’s first jubilee
will know that he brought the same wise spirit of hopefulness to the
history of our own day. There was much in the tendencies of modern
thought and of modern society which, to a man of his strong convictions
as a Christian and a Churchman, was justly repugnant. But in his case
‘experience,’ and history, the record of experience, had ‘worked hope.’
Some of us may perhaps remember how in one of his public lectures he
himself quoted the Psalmist’s words: ‘I said, It is mine own infirmity:
but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most Highest.’
§ 4. It is only of his character as an historian that I have a right to
speak to you from this place; but perhaps you will forgive me if, as a
Churchman, I just briefly put on record my sense of the loss which the
Church of England has suffered in his death; though only the rulers of
the Church can fully estimate the value to the Church in these anxious
days of that ripe judgement, based on so unique a mastery of the history
both of Church and State. We should be false to his own wise spirit of
sober hopefulness if we did not trust that others may be raised up in
turn to take his place.
With these few words of introduction, I turn to the proper subject of
these present lectures.