instructive, sometimes very elevating, almost always very touching. The
life which they describe greatly wanted discipline, self-restraint, and
the wise and manly fear of overrating one's own novelties. But we see
in it a life consecrated to duty, fulfilled with much pain and
self-sacrifice, and adorned by warm and deep affections, by vigour and
refinement of thought, and earnest love for truth and purity. No one
can help feeling his profound and awful sense of things unseen, though
in the philosophy by which he sought to connect things seen and things
unseen, we cannot say that we can have much confidence. We have only
one concluding remark to make, and that is not on him but on his
biographer. An exaggerated tone, as we have said, seems to us to
pervade the book. There is what seems to us an unhealthy attempt to
create in the reader an impression of the exceptional severity of the
sufferings of Mr. Robertson's life, of his loneliness, of his
persecutions. But in this point much may fairly be pardoned to the
affection of a friend. What, however, we can less excuse is the want of
good feeling with which Mr. Brooke, in his account of Mr. Robertson's
last days, allows himself to give an _ex parte_, account of a dispute
between Mr. Robertson and the Vicar of Brighton, about the appointment
of a curate, and not simply to insinuate, but distinctly declare that
this dispute with its result was the fatal stroke which, in his state
of ill-health, hastened his death. We say nothing about the rights of
the story, for we never heard anything of them but what Mr. Brooke
tells us. But there is an appearance of vindictiveness in putting it on
record with this particular aspect which nothing in the story itself
seems to us to justify. In describing Mr. Robertson's departure from
Cheltenham, Mr. Brooke has plainly thought right to use much reticence.
He would have done well to have used the same reticence about these
quarrels at Brighton.
XVI
LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN[19]
[19]
_A Memoir of Baron Bunsen_. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. _Saturday
Review_, 2nd May 1868.
Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago
than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in
which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet
succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating
English interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and
exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely
important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in
allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal
peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who
has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more
splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But
few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the
_droit de cité_ in England than Bunsen.
It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though
Bunsen's life was a very full and active one in all matters of
intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we
cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater
exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether
too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between
what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and
what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which
biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is
in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving
correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map,
they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other
people's letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end
to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes
advisable. We want types and specimens of a man's letters; and when the
specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for
its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen's early letters are
printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs
were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were
the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself
in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young
man of thought and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we
do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that
Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in
this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less
cost to the reader.
Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little principality of
Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal
German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He
became in time Heyne's pupil at Göttingen, and very early showed the
qualities which distinguished him in his after life--restless eagerness
after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and
ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of
religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the
cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the
excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme
interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then
received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished
man's youth by his friends after he has become distinguished--which are
seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy--are the contemporary
records of the impressions made on _him_ in his youth by those who were
distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen's letters we
have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:--
Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Göttingen]. Heyne
received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in
himself the example of a high and noble energy, and indefatigable
activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit
entitled him. He might have superintended and administered and
maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet
greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was
too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of
mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more
distinguished in every other way than in this.... And what has he
established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties?
Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first
submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost
the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of
him and will not perish--the one, the tribute left by his free
spirit to the finest productions of the human mind; and what he
felt, thought, and has immortalised in many men of excellence gone
before. Read his explanations of Tischbein's engravings from
Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on
the death of Müller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak
not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the
public and private life of the ancients. The other memorial which
will subsist of him, more warm in life than the first, is the
remembrance of his generosity, to which numbers owe a deep
obligation.
And of Schelling, about the same time, whom he had just seen in Munich:--
Schelling before all must be mentioned as having received me well,
after his fashion, giving me frequent occasions of becoming
acquainted with his philosophical views and judgments, in his own
original and peculiar manner. His mode of disputation is rough and
angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible. Once he
undertook to explain animal magnetism, and for this purpose to
give an idea of Time, from which resulted that all is present and
in existence--the Present as existing in the actual moment; the
Future, as existing in a future moment. When I demanded the proof,
he referred me to the word _is_, which applies to existence, in
the sentence that "this _is_ future." Seckendorf, who was present
(with him I have become closely acquainted, to my great
satisfaction), attempted to draw attention to the confounding the
subjective (i.e. him who pronounces that sentence) with the
objective; or, rather, to point out a simple grammatical
misunderstanding--in short, declared the position impossible.
"Well," replied Schelling drily, "you have not understood me." Two
Professors (his worshippers), who were present, had meanwhile
endeavoured by their exclamations, "Only observe, all _is_, all
_exists_" (to which the wife of Schelling, a clever woman,
assented), to help me into conviction; and a vehement beating the
air--for arguing and holding fast by any firm point were out of
the question--would have arisen, if I had not contrived to escape
by giving a playful turn to the conversation. I am perfectly aware
that Schelling _could_ have expressed and carried through his real
opinion far better--i.e. rationally. I tell the anecdote merely
to give an idea of his manner in conversation.
At Göttingen he was one of a remarkable set, comprising Lachmann,
Lücke, Brandis, and some others, thought as much of at the time as
their friends, but who failed to make their way to the front ranks of
the world. Like others of his countrymen, Bunsen began to find "that
the world's destinies were not without their effect on him," and to
feel dissatisfied with the comparatively narrow sphere of even German
learning. The thought grew, and took possession of him, of "bringing
over, into his knowledge and into his fatherland, the solemn and
distant East," and to "draw the East into the study of the entire
course of humanity (particularly of European, and more especially of
Teutonic humanity)," making Germany the "central point of this study."
Vast plans of philological and historical study, involving, as the only
means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and
long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature,
the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and
thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe,
drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge
which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide
and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has
formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the
first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point. In
1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life--his acquaintance, and
the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and
from this time he felt himself a Prussian. "That State in Northern
Germany," he writes to Brandis in 1815, "which gladly receives every
German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus
entering as a citizen born, is _the true Germany_":--
That such a State [he proceeds, in the true Bismarckian spirit]
should prove inconvenient to others of inferior importance, which
persist in continuing their isolated existence, regardless of the
will of Providence and of the general good, is of no consequence
whatever; nor even does it matter that, in its present management,
there are defects and imperfections.... We intend to be in Berlin
in three weeks; and there (in Prussia) am I resolved to fix my
destinies.
After reading Persian for a short time in Paris with De Sacy, and after
the failure of a plan of travel with Mr. Astor of New York, Bunsen
joined Niebuhr at Florence in the end of 1816, and went on with him to
Rome, where Niebuhr was Prussian envoy. There, enjoying Niebuhr's
society, "equally sole in his kind with Rome," he took up his abode,
and plunged into study. He gave up his plans of Oriental travel,
finding he could do all that he wanted without them. Too much a
student, as he writes to a friend, to think of marrying, which he could
not do "without impairing his whole scheme of mental development," he
nevertheless found his fate in an English lady, Miss Waddington, who
became his wife. And, finally, when the health of his friend Brandis,
Niebuhr's secretary in the Prussian Legation, broke down, Bunsen took
his place, and entered on that combined path of study and diplomacy in
which he continued for the greater part of his life.
It may be questioned whether Bunsen's career answered altogether
successfully to what he proposed to himself, or was in fact all that
his friends and he himself thought it; but it was eminently one in
which from the first he had laid down for himself a plan of life which
he tenaciously followed through many changes and varieties of work,
without ever losing sight of the purpose with which he began. He piqued
himself on having early seen that a man ought to have an object to
which to devote his whole life--"be it a dictionary like Johnson's or a
history like Gibbon's"--and on having discerned and chosen his own
object. And at an early time of his life in Rome he draws an outline of
thought and inquiry, destined to break off into many different labours,
in very much the same language in which he might have described it in
the last year of his life:--
_The consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in
and through that consciousness He has accomplished, especially in
language and religion_, this was from the earliest time before my
mind. After having awhile fancied to attain my point, sometimes
here, sometimes there, at length (it was in the Christmas holidays
of 1812, after having gained the prize in November) I made a
general and comprehensive plan. I wished to go through and
represent heathen antiquity, in its principal phases, in three
great periods of the world's history, according to its languages,
its religious conceptions, and its political institutions; first
of all in the East, where the earliest expressions in each are
highly remarkable, although little known; then in the second great
epoch, among the Greeks and Romans; thirdly, among the Teutonic
nations, who put an end to the Roman Empire.
At first I thought of Christianity only as something which every
one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not
as the object of a peculiar study. But in January 1816, when I for
the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my
plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as God
had caused the conception of Himself to be developed in the mind
of man in a twofold manner, the one through revelation to the
Jewish people through their patriarchs, the other through reason
in the heathen; so also must the inquiry and representation of
this development be twofold; and as God had kept these two ways
for a length of time independent and separate, so should we, in
the course of the examination, separate knowledge from man, and
his development from the doctrine of revelation and faith, firmly
trusting that God in the end would bring about the union of both.
This is now also my firm conviction, that we must not mix them or
bring them together forcibly, as many have done with well-meaning
zeal but unclear views, and as many in Germany with impure designs
are still doing.
The design had its interruptions, both intellectual and practical. The
plan was an ambitious one, too ambitious for Bunsen's time and powers,
or even probably for our own more advanced stage of knowledge; and
Bunsen ever found it hard to resist the attractions of a new object of
interest, and did not always exhaust it, though he seldom touched
anything without throwing light on it. Thus he was drawn by
circumstances to devote a good deal of time, more than he intended, to
the mere antiquarianism of Rome. By and by he found himself succeeding
Niebuhr as the diplomatic representative of Prussia at Rome. And his
attempt to meet the needs of his own strong devotional feelings by
giving more warmth and interest to the German services at the embassy,
"the congregation on the Capitoline Hill," led him, step by step, to
those wider schemes for liturgical reform which influenced so
importantly the course of his fortunes. They brought him, a young and
unknown man, with little more than Niebuhr's good word, into direct and
confidential communication with the King of Prussia, who was then
intent on plans of the same kind, and who recognised in Bunsen, after
some preliminary jealousy and misgivings, the man most fitted to assist
in carrying them out. But though Bunsen, who started with the resolve
of being both a student and a scholar, was driven, as he thought
against his will, into paths which led him deeper and deeper into
public life and diplomacy, his early plans were never laid aside even
under the stress of official employment. Perhaps it may be difficult to
strike the balance of what they lost or gained by it.
The account of his life at Rome contains much that is interesting.
There is the curious mixture of sympathy and antipathy in Bunsen's mind
for the place itself; the antipathy of a German, a Protestant, and a
free inquirer, for the Roman, the old Catholic, the narrow, timid,
traditional spirit which pervaded everything in the great seat of
clerical and Papal government; and the sympathy, scarcely less intense,
not merely, or in the first place, for the classical aspects of Rome,
but for its religious character, as still the central point of
Christendom, full of the memorials and the savour of the early days of
Christianity, mingling with what its many centuries of history have
added to them; and for all that aroused the interest and touched the
mind of one deeply busy with two great religious problems--the best
forms for Christian worship, and the restoration, if possible, of some
organisation and authority in Protestant Germany. For a long time
Bunsen, like his master Niebuhr, was on the best terms with Cardinals,
Monsignori, and Popes. The Roman services were no objects to him of
abhorrence or indifference. He saw, in the midst of accretions, the
remains of the more primitive devotion; and the architecture, the art,
and the music, to be found only in Rome, were to him inexhaustible
sources of delight. As may be supposed, letters like Bunsen's, and the
recollections of his biographer, are full of interesting gossip;
notices of famous people, and of things that happened in Rome in the
days of the Emancipation and Reform Bills, Revolutions of Naples in
'20 and France in '30, during the twenty years, from 1818 to 1838, in
which the men of the great war and the restorations were going off the
scene, and the men of the modern days--Liberals, High Churchmen,
Ultra-montanes--were coming on. Those twenty years, of course, were not
without their changes in Bunsen's own views. The man who had come to
Rome, in position a poor and obscure student, had grown into the oracle
of a highly cultivated society, whose acquaintance was eagerly sought
by every one of importance who lived at Rome or visited it, and into
the diplomatic representative of one of the great Powers. The scholar
had come to have, not merely theories, but political and ecclesiastical
aims. The disciple of Niebuhr, who at one time had seen all things very
much as Niebuhr saw them in his sad later days of disgust at revolution
and cynical despair of liberty, had come since under the influence of
Arnold, and, as his letters to Arnold show, had taken into his own mind
much of the more generous and hopeful, though vague, teaching of that
equally fervid teacher of liberalism and of religion. These letters are
of much interest. They show the dreams and the fears and antipathies of
the time; they contain some remarkable anticipations, some equally
remarkable miscalculations, and some ideas and proposals which, with
our experience, excite our wonder that any one could have imagined them
practicable. Every one knows that Bunsen's diplomatic career at Rome
ended unfortunately. He was mixed up with the violent proceedings of
the Prussian Government in the dispute with the Archbishop of Cologne
about marriages between Protestants and Catholics, and he had the
misfortune to offend equally both his own Court and that of Rome. It is
possible that, as is urged in the biography before us, he was
sacrificed to the blunders and the enmities of powers above him. But,
for whatever reason, no clear account is given of the matter by his
biographer, though a good deal is suggested; and in the absence of
intelligible explanations the conclusion is natural that, though he may
have been ill-used, he may also have been unequal to his position.
But his ill-success or his ill-usage at Rome was more than compensated
by the results to which it may be said to have led. Out of it
ultimately came that which gave the decisive character to Bunsen's
life--his settlement in London as Prussian Minister. On leaving Rome he
came straight to England He came full of admiration and enthusiasm to
"his Ithaca, his island fatherland," and he was flattered and delighted
by the welcome he received, and by the power which he perceived in
himself, beyond that of most foreigners, to appreciate and enjoy
everything English. He liked everything--people, country, and
institutions; even, as his biographer writes, our rooks. The zest of
his enjoyment was not diminished by his keen sense of what appear to
foreigners our characteristic defects--the want of breadth of interest
and boldness of speculative thought which accompanies so much energy in
public life and so much practical success; and he seems to have felt in
himself a more than ordinary fitness to be a connecting link between
the two nations--that he had much to teach Englishmen, and that they
were worth teaching. He thoroughly sympathised with the earnestness and
strong convictions of English religion; but he thought it lamentably
destitute of rational grounds, of largeness of idea and of critical
insight, enslaved to the letter, and afraid of inquiry. But, with all
drawbacks, his visit to England made it a very attractive place to him;
and when he was appointed by his Government Envoy to the Swiss
Confederation, with strict injunctions "to do nothing," his eyes were
oft on turned towards England. In 1840 the King of Prussia died, and
Bunsen's friend and patron, the Crown Prince, became Frederic William
IV. He resembled Bunsen in more ways than one; in his ardent religious
sentiment, in his eagerness, in his undoubting and not always
far-sighted self-confidence and self-assertion, and in a combination of
practical vagueness of view and a want of understanding men, with a
feverish imperiousness in carrying out a favourite plan. In 1841 he
sent Bunsen to England to negotiate the ill-considered and precipitate
arrangement for the Jerusalem bishopric; and on the successful
conclusion of the negotiation, Bunsen was appointed permanently to be
Prussian Minister in London. The manner of appointment was remarkable.
The King sent three names to Lord Aberdeen and the English Court, and
they selected Bunsen's.