activity of a single man. The most personal and popular of Mommsen's
works, the _Roman History till the death of Caesar_, the greatest effort
of his genius though not of his scholarship, was published as far back
as 1854, and carried his name all over the world. He next turned to
special departments of research, pouring forth in rapid succession his
treatises on Chronology, Coinage, the Digest, and above all the
_Staatsrecht_, the largest and in his opinion the most important of his
works, and perhaps the greatest constitutional treatise in historical
literature. Meanwhile the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, which he
edited for the Berlin Academy, was the main occupation and the most
enduring monument of his life. He had devoted himself to Latin epigraphy
and had edited the Sammite and Neapolitan inscriptions before the
publication of the Roman History. The first instalment of the Corpus
appeared in 1863, and the great scholar lived to hail the appearance of
nearly twenty volumes, half of them edited by himself. The Inscriptions
rendered possible a history of the Empire, and the whole world hoped
that the master would write it; but he contented himself with a survey
of the provinces. The closing years of his life were devoted to a
gigantic treatise on Roman Criminal Law, and to editions of Jordanes,
Cassiodorus, the Theodosian Code and the Liber Pontificalis, thus
enlarging the sphere of his operations till Rome was swallowed up in the
Middle Ages. His publications extended over sixty years. There is no
immaturity in his early works and no decline in the later. The
imaginative and critical faculties met and balanced, large vision mating
with a genius for detail. The complete assimilation and reproduction of
a classical civilization of which scholars have dreamed ever since
Scaliger has been achieved by Mommsen alone. Rome before Mommsen was
like modern Europe before Ranke. We may truly say of him, as was said of
Augustus, that he found it of brick and left it of marble.
Mommsen, like Ranke, was the founder of a school; and his inspiration
has been felt by every worker in the field of Roman studies. His
successors naturally confine themselves to some special province or
period. Gaetano de Sanctis is far advanced in the most ambitious history
of the Republic that has been attempted in the last half-century.
Ferrero's _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, though frowned on by
scholars, aroused world-wide interest by interpreting the fall of the
Republic in terms of economics and psychology. The political and social
crises which fill the century from Sulla to Augustus, he argues, were
due to the change of customs caused by the augmentation of wealth,
expenditure, and needs. Of greater value are the attempts to fill in
different sections of the vast canvas of Imperial Rome, such as
Gardthausen's monumental survey of the reign of Augustus, Camille
Jullian's volumes on Gaul, and Professor Haverfield's slender monographs
on Britain. Roman life and culture have been diligently explored; but
the extreme paucity of materials makes the recovery of the atmosphere of
the early Republic almost impossible. The most daring attempt was made
by Fustel de Coulanges in _La Cité Antique_, which offered a complete
interpretation of early society in terms of religion. Less harmonious
but more convincing pictures of religious life have been painted by
Warde Fowler, while the civilization of the Empire has been successively
analysed in the fascinating and authoritative works of Friedländer,
Boissier, and Dill. Meanwhile archaeology contributes a steady stream of
new material. Boni's excavations in the Forum and on the Palatine have
produced sensational results. The unveiling of Pompeii moves slowly
forward, and that of Ostia, the port of Rome, has begun. The
resurrection of Herculaneum should be witnessed by the next generation
if not by our own.
A more difficult because a more controversial problem than the Roman
Empire is its contemporary, the early Christian Church. In the middle
decades of last century Baur treated the rise of Christianity as an
historical phenomenon, leaving his hearers to determine for themselves
whether it was human or divine; but his influence proved more enduring
than his writings. Weiszäcker, his successor at Tübingen, in his
_Apostolic Age_, described with consummate scholarship and passionless
serenity the life and organization of the early Christian communities.
The necessity of a careful study of the soil out of which Christianity
has grown is now generally recognized, and great scholars such as
Schürer and Pfleiderer have re-created the religious atmosphere into
which Christ was born. The constitution of the primitive Church, too
long hotly discussed by the champions of rival sects, has been studied
with welcome impartiality by Lightfoot and Hatch. But no man, alive or
dead, can boast of such achievements as Harnack. His History of Dogma,
his vast survey of Christian Literature till Eusebius, his narrative of
the Expansion of Christianity before the conversion of Constantine, are
inseparable companions of the student who means business. The treasures
of the catacombs have been revealed by De Rossi, to whom we also owe the
publication of the Christian Inscriptions of Rome. The history of the
early Christian communities in the outlying provinces of the Empire has
been enriched by Ramsay's explorations in Asia Minor. While the best
work naturally goes into monographs, comprehensive narratives are
occasionally attempted by scholars of the first class. Renan's sparkling
volumes have enjoyed immense popularity, and some of them may still be
read with profit; but, like his History of the Jews, they belong rather
to literature than to science. If we desire a readable summary of the
scholarship of the last half-century we may turn to the Volumes of the
Catholic Duchesne or, better still, to those of the late Professor
Gwatkin.
Imperial Rome and the Christian Church meet and blend in the Byzantine
Empire, the later history of which appeared to Gibbon 'a tedious and
uniform tale of weakness and misery'. Its services to civilization and
the greatness of many of its rulers were revealed to the world by
Finlay, whose narrative was acclaimed by Freeman as the most
considerable work of English historical literature since the _Decline
and Fall_. In the half-century that has elapsed since its completion,
the exploration of a thousand years has gone busily forward. The lead
was taken in France by Rambaud, Schlumberger, and Diehl, the latter of
whom was rewarded for his efforts by his appointment as first occupant
of the Chair created in Paris in 1899. Greater than any of the three was
Krumbacher, the prince of German Byzantinists, for whom a Chair was
founded at Munich in 1892, and whose encyclopaedic survey of Byzantine
literature is beyond comparison the most important single work in this
field of historical study. England is worthily represented by Professor
Bury, whose narrative of the Empire has already reached the ninth
century.
Byzantium has emerged from the scholarship of two generations no longer
decadent and inert but the mother of great statesmen and soldiers, the
home of culture while Central and Western Europe was plunged in
darkness, the rampart of Christian Europe for a thousand years against
the Arab and Turk, the educator of the Slavonic races. Freeman truly
remarked that Constantinople was for ages the seat of the only regular
and systematic Government in the world. Its administrative machine was
the most elaborate yet invented by man, and the Court was to mediaeval
Europe what Versailles was to the rulers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. It was indeed a bureaucratic despotism in which
liberty was unknown, and, except in art, its spirit was imitative; but
to preserve Greek culture during the barbarism of the Middle Ages and to
defend it against the repeated assaults of Islam was to deserve well of
civilization.
While the Byzantine Empire carried over important elements from the
classical world, Western and Central Europe passed under the dominion of
ideas which were as foreign to those of Greece and Rome as they are to
the conceptions of to-day. We have outgrown the blind contempt of the
eighteenth century and the gushing enthusiasm of the Romantic Movement;
but it is still a difficult task to form a just estimate of the
character of the thousand years that began with Augustine and ended with
Macchiavelli. It is true that our materials grow from year to year; that
the criticism of original authorities as taught in the École des Chartes
has become something like an exact science; that thanks to Lord Bryce
the Holy Roman Empire has become intelligible; that the structure and
function of institutions have been patiently analysed by Waitz and
Stubbs, Fustel de Coulanges and Vinogradoff, Maitland and Gierke; that
literature and art, scholasticism and the Universities, have found their
chroniclers and interpreters; that every ruler and every State, every
treaty and every council, may be studied in monographs innumerable. But
the Middle Ages were above all the reign of the Catholic Church; and we
are still far from agreement as to the merits and influence of that
venerable institution which, be it human or divine, occupies a unique
place in the story of civilization.
In the middle decades of last century the history of the mediaeval
Church was related from very different standpoints in the widely-read
works of Neander and Milman; but it was only with the opening of the
Vatican archives by Pope Leo XIII in 1881 that it became possible to set
forth the whole story of the Papacy and to understand the working of the
machinery of Catholicism. So vast is the accumulation of official acts
and documents, and such technical training is required for the task,
that we shall have to wait many years till the material is surveyed in
its entirety and its results made available for the use of the
historian. Some idea of the value of the Registers may be gained from
the Master of Balliol's pregnant lectures on Church and State in the
Middle Ages, based on the 8,000 documents of the eleven years of the
rule of Innocent IV in the middle of the thirteenth century. The study
of these documents, he tells us, stirred him to admiration of the
organization of the Papacy, and convinced him of its enormous
superiority over its secular contemporaries as a centre not merely of
religion but of law and government; but he adds that he derived an
equally profound impression of the abuses which ate into the heart of
the system, of the growing bitterness which it inspired, and of the
devastating effects of the passion to erect a powerful principality in
the heart of Italy.
No Protestant historian is tempted to glorify the record of the Papacy
in the last two centuries before the Reformation; but it is generally
agreed that in the earlier half of the Middle Ages the example and
influence of the Church were a bright light shining in a dark world.
This notion has been recently challenged by Mr. Coulton, who, angered by
the special pleading of Cardinal Gasquet and other professional
apologists, hotly denounces the exaltation of the Ages of Faith. The
Middle Ages, he complains, are the one domain of history into which, in
England at any rate, the scientific spirit has not yet penetrated.
Taking as his text the autobiography of the Franciscan Fra Salimbene,
the most precious authority for the ordinary life of Catholic folk at
the high-water mark of the Middle Ages, he draws a sombre picture of
manners and morals and maintains that hideous vices existed in all the
Orders long before the thirteenth century. 'Imagination', he cries,
'staggers at the moral gulf that yawns between that age and ours.' His
condemnation of the life and influence of the Church re-echoes in
somewhat shrill tones the verdict of Henry Charles Lea, whose massive
treatise on the Inquisition was rightly described by Lord Acton as the
most important contribution of the New World to the religious history of
the old, and whose volumes on Sacerdotal Celibacy constitute a
formidable indictment of mediaeval Catholicism.
Next to the origins of Christianity the most controversial of the larger
problems of history is the Reformation; and here Protestants of all
schools are ranged in a solid phalanx against Catholics. That the Church
was in need of reform is agreed by both sides; but the Catholic contends
that the evils to be remedied have been fantastically exaggerated, that
there was no need for a revolt, and that the revolution inaugurated by
Luther left Germany far worse than it found her. Realizing that the
Protestant view most authoritatively presented in Ranke's classical
work on the Reformation held the field, Janssen compiled a cultural
history of the German people from the end of the Middle Ages to the
outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Based throughout on original sources,
and illustrating his thesis from every angle, his eight massive volumes
were hailed with gratitude and enthusiasm by Catholics all over the
world. No Catholic historical work of the nineteenth century, and
certainly no attack on the Reformation since Bossuet's _Variations of
Protestantism_, obtained such resounding success or led to so much
controversy.
Janssen's object was to show that the fifteenth century was not a period
of moral or intellectual decrepitude, with a few 'Reformers before the
Reformation' crying like voices in the wilderness, but an era of healthy
activity and abounding promise. He describes the flourishing state of
religious and secular education, the vitality of art, the comfort of the
peasantry, and the prosperity of the towns. On reaching the sixteenth
century, he denounces the paganism of the Humanists and paints a
terrible picture of the material and moral chaos into which Germany was
plunged by the Lutheran revolt. The later volumes are devoted to the era
of the Counter-Revolution and present a canvas of unrelieved gloom,
immorality and drunkenness, ignorance, superstition and violence. Thus
the story which opened with the bright colours of the fifteenth century
closes in deep shadows, and the moral is drawn that Germany was ruined
not by the Thirty Years War but by the Reformation.
Protestant historians fell upon the audacious iconoclast with fierce
cries of anger, and had no difficulty in exposing his uncritical use of
authorities, his habit of generalizing from isolated particulars, and
his suppression of facts damaging to his own side. But though it was a
dexterous polemic, not a work of disinterested science, Janssen's book
has made it impossible for any self-respecting Protestant to write on
the Reformation without knowing and weighing the Catholic side. Of
similar tendency though of far higher value is the monumental work in
which Pastor is narrating the story of the Renaissance and
sixteenth-century Popes from the Vatican archives, which neither Ranke
nor Creighton had been able to employ. No really objective picture of
the Reformation can be painted by Catholic or Protestant; but a good
deal of firm ground has been won, and the writings of Kawerau, the
greatest of Lutheran scholars, inspire us with a confidence that no
writings of the last generation deserved.
Though Ranke's chief works had been published before the period to which
this lecture is confined, his influence can be traced in almost every
writer on modern history during the last half-century. His greatest
service to scholarship was to divorce the study of the past from the
passions of the present, and, to quote the watchword of his first book,
to relate what actually occurred. A second was to establish the
necessity of founding historical construction on strictly contemporary
authorities. When he began to write in 1824 historians of high repute
believed memoirs and chronicles to be trustworthy guides. When he laid
down his pen in 1886 every scholar with a reputation to make had learned
to content himself with nothing less than the papers and correspondence
of the actors themselves and those in immediate contact with the events
they describe. A third service was to found the science of evidence by
the analysis of authorities, contemporary or otherwise, in the light of
the author's temperament, affiliations, and opportunity of knowledge,
and by comparison with the testimony of other writers. There can be no
better preparation for the perils and responsibilities of authorship
than to study the critical analyses of Guicciardini and Sarpi,
Clarendon, Saint-Simon, and many another, scattered through the sixty
volumes of the master. And finally he taught by precept and practice the
necessity of exploring the relations of States to one another and of
measuring the interaction of foreign and domestic policy.
These sound principles have been applied by the scholars of all
countries who have jointly built up the history of the last four
centuries. We may study the Tudors under the guidance of Pollard, the
Stuarts under Gardiner and Firth, the Hanoverians under Lecky, without
fear that we are being misled or that essential facts are being withheld
from our notice. We continue to admire the literary brilliance of
Macaulay and Carlyle, Motley and Froude; but we are instinctively aware
that their partisanship is out of date. The same cooling process has
taken place in France, where the passions and tempers of Thiers and
Michelet have tended to yield place to the calm lucidity of which Mignet
and Guizot were the earliest masters. There is, it must be confessed, a
good deal of the old Adam in Taine's elaborate study of Jacobinism, in
Masson's innumerable volumes on Napoleon, and even in Aulard's priceless
contributions to our knowledge of the French Revolution; but such works
as Lavisse's full-length portrait of Louis XIV, Ségur's volumes on
Turgot and Necker, Sorel's massive treatise on Europe and the
Revolution, and Vandal's incomparable presentation of the Consulate rank
as high in scholarship as in literature.
The unification of Germany after fierce struggles within and without
naturally deflected historical scholarship from the path marked out by
Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation
following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was
deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively
known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the
principal duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to
their fellow-countrymen in the national and international problems of
the time. In his gigantic work on the History of Prussian Foreign
Policy, Droysen, the eldest of the Triumvirate, calls four centuries to
witness that the Hohenzollerns alone, from their unswerving fidelity to
German interests as a whole, were fitted to restore the Empire. He
worked exclusively from Prussian archives, and history seen exclusively
through Prussian spectacles was bound to be one-sided. No student of
European history would contest the value of his researches; but his
interpretation of Prussian policy in terms of German nationalism was at
once recognized as a fundamental error, and has long been abandoned. The
second member of the group, Sybel, himself one of the three favourite
pupils of Ranke, revolted in middle life, and in his two great treatises
on the era of the French Revolution and the foundation of the German
Empire championed the policy of the Hohenzollerns and delivered slashing
attacks on France and Austria, their rivals and antagonists.
The last and greatest of the triumvirate, Treitschke, the Bismarck of
the Chair, devoted his life to a history of Germany in the nineteenth
century which occupies the same unique place in the affections of German
readers as Macaulay's unfinished masterpiece enjoys throughout the
English-speaking world. Unlike the works of Droysen and Sybel, the
_German History_ was far more than a political narrative, and presented
an encyclopaedic picture of national development. His theme was the
conflict of the forces which were promoting and opposing the
transformation of his country into a powerful Empire, and he judges men
and states by the measure in which they promoted or obstructed that
purpose. On the one side stands Prussia, feeling her way to the
realization of her historic task, on the other the middle and smaller
states, aided and abetted by the arch-enemy Austria and deeply infected
with the doctrinaire liberalism of France. Treitschke's stage is a
battlefield, with the historian looking down and encouraging his friends
with loud cries of applause. Such methods could not survive the
realization of the aim which they had done so much to assist, and with
Treitschke's death in 1896 the Prussian School disappeared. Its members
were the political schoolmasters of Germany at a time of uncertainty and
discouragement, and they braced their countrymen to the efforts which
culminated in the creation of a mighty Empire. If the purpose of history
is to stir a nation to action, Droysen, Sybel, and Treitschke are among
the greatest masters of the craft. If its supreme aim is to discover
truth and to interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim to a
place in the first class. The stream, temporarily deflected by their
powerful influence, began to return to the channel which Ranke had
marked out for it. Such works as Moriz Ritter's narrative of the
Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Koser's biography of
Frederick the Great, Max Lehmann's biographies of Scharnhorst and Stein,
and Erich Marcks' studies of Bismarck and his master are as notable for
their judgement as for their erudition.
The cooling process noted in the Old World has also occurred in the New,
and America of the twentieth century smiles at Bancroft's complacent
idealization of the Puritan colonies. Even the slavery struggle, the
ashes of which are scarcely yet cold, has found in James Ford Rhodes a
historian who can do justice to Jefferson Davis and Lee no less than to
Lincoln and Grant. But no American scholar compares in world-wide
influence with Mahan, whose study of Sea-Power in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, published in 1889, not only founded a school of
naval history but was inwardly digested by distinguished pupils in both
hemispheres, among them the Emperor William II and Theodore Roosevelt.
The Admiral's writings owe their importance not to research, for few new
facts are brought to light, but to the new angle from which familiar
events are envisaged. Occasionally, perhaps, the element of sea-power in
the determination of a particular result is over-emphasized at the
expense of other factors; but he was the first to seize the wider
bearings of naval history and to make the general reader aware of its
momentous significance.
The scope of history has gradually widened till it has come to include
every aspect of the life of humanity. No one would now dare to maintain
with my old master Seeley that history was the biography of States or
with Freeman that it was merely past politics. The growth of nations,
the achievements of men of action, the rise and fall of parties remain
among the most engrossing themes of the historian; but he now casts his
net wider and embraces the whole opulent record of civilization. The
influence of nature, the pressure of economic factors, the origin and
transformation of ideas, the contribution of science and art, religion
and philosophy, literature and law, the material conditions of life, the
fortunes of the masses--such problems now claim his attention in no less
degree. He must see life steadily and see it whole. We must master such
revealing works as Lecky's histories of Rationalism and Morals,
Burckhardt's and Symonds' interpretations of the Italian Renaissance,
Sainte-Beuve's full-length portrait of the Jansenists, Morley's studies
of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists, Dean Church's sketch of
the Oxford Movement, and Merz's survey of European Thought in the
nineteenth century, if we are to understand the throbbing life of the
human spirit. We must measure the operation of economic factors and
forces and profit by the faithful labours of Schmoller and Thorold
Rogers, Cunningham and Kovalevsky, the Webbs and the Hammonds, if we are
to visualize the life of the unnumbered and the unknown who have done
the routine work of the world.