Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 328, February, 1843

ARNOLD'S LECTURES ON HISTORY

If any doubt could exist as to the nature of the loss which the premature death of Dr Arnold has inflicted on the literature of his country, the perusal of the volume before us must be sufficient to show how great, how serious, nay, all circumstances taken together, we had almost said how irreparable, it ought to be considered. Recently placed in a situation which gave his extraordinary faculties as a teacher still wider scope than they before possessed, at an age when the vivacity and energy of a commanding intellect were matured, not chilled, by constant observation and long experience—gifted with industry to collect, with sagacity to appreciate, with skill to arrange the materials of history—master of a vivid and attractive style for their communication and display—eminent, above all, for a degree of candour and sincerity which gave additional value to all his other endowments—what but leisure did Dr Arnold require to qualify him for a place among our most illustrious authors? Under his auspices, we might not unreasonably have hoped for works that would have rivalled those of the great continental writers in depth and variety of research; in which the light of original and contemporaneous documents would be steadily flung on the still unexplored portions of our history; and that Oxford would have balanced the fame of Schlösser and Thierry and Sismondi, by the labours of a writer peculiarly, and, as this volume proves, most affectionately her own.

The first Lecture in the present volume is full of striking and original remarks, delivered with a delightful simplicity; which, since genius has become rare among us, has almost disappeared from the conversation and writings of Englishmen. Open the pages of Herodotus, or Xenophon, or Cæsar, and how plain, how unpretending are the preambles to their immortal works—in what exquisite proportion does the edifice arise, without apparent effort, without ostentatious struggle, without, if the allusion may be allowed, the sound of the axe or hammer, till "the pile stands fixed her stately height" before us—the just admiration of succeeding ages! But our modern filosofastri insist upon stunning us with the noise of their machinery, and blinding us with the dust of their operations. They will not allow the smallest portion of their vulgar labours to escape our notice. They drag us through the chaos of sand and lime, and stone and bricks, which they have accumulated, hoping that the magnitude of the preparation may atone for the meanness of the performance. Very different from this is the style of Dr Arnold. We will endeavour to exhibit a just idea of his views, so far as they regard the true character of history, the manner in which it should be studied, and the events by which his theory is illustrated. To study history as it should be studied, much more to write history as it should be written, is a task which may dignify the most splendid abilities, and occupy the most extended life.

Lucian in one of his admirable treatises, ridicules those who imagine that any one who chooses may sit down and write history as easily as he would walk or sleep, or perform any other function of nature,

From the remarks of this greatest of all satirists, it is manifest that, in his days, history had been employed, as it has in ours, for the purposes of slander and adulation. He selects particularly a writer who compared, in his account of the Persian wars, the Roman emperor to Achilles, his enemy to Thersites; and if Lucian had lived in the present day, he would have discovered that the race of such writers was not extinguished. He might have found ample proofs that the detestable habit still prevails of interweaving the names of our contemporaries among the accounts of former centuries, and thus corrupting the history of past times into a means of abuse and flattery for the present. This is to degrade history into the worst style of a Treasury pamphlet, or a daily newspaper. It is a fault almost peculiar to this country.

We are told in one of these works, for instance, that the "tones of Sir W. Follett's voice are silvery"—a proposition that we do not at all intend to dispute; nor would it be easy to pronounce any panegyric on that really great man in which we should not zealously concur; but can it be necessary to mention this in a history of the eighteenth century? Or can any thing be more trivial or offensive, or totally without the shadow of justification, than this forced allusion to the "ignorant present time," in the midst of what ought to be an unbiassed narrative of events that affected former generations? We do not know whether the author of this ingenious allusion borrowed the idea from the advertisements in which our humbler artists recommend their productions to vulgar notice; or whether it is the spontaneous growth of his own happy intellect: but plagiarized or original, and however adapted it may be to the tone and keeping of his work, its insertion is totally irreconcilable with the qualities that a man should possess who means to instruct posterity. When gold is extracted from lead, or silver from tin, such a writer may become an historian. "Forget," says Lucian, "the present, look to future ages for your reward; let it be said of you that you are high-spirited, full of independence, that there is nothing about you servile or fulsome."

Modern history is now exclusively to be considered. Modern history, separated from the history of Greece and Rome, and the annals of barbarous emigration, by the event which above all others has influenced, and continues still to influence, after so many centuries, the fate of Europe—the fall of the Western Empire—the boundary line which separates modern from ancient history, is not ideal and capricious, but definite and certain. It can neither be advanced nor carried back. Modern history displays a national life still in existence. It commences with that period in which the great elements of separate national existence now in being—race, language, institutions, and religion—can be traced in simultaneous operation. To the influences which pervaded the ancient world, another, at first scarcely perceptible, for a time almost predominant, and even now powerful and comprehensive, was annexed. In the fourth century of the Christian era, the Roman world comprised Christianity, Grecian intellect, Roman jurisprudence—all the ingredients, in short, of modern history, except the Teutonic element. It is the infusion of this element which has changed the quality of the compound, and leavened the whole mass with its peculiarities. To this we owe the middle ages, the law of inheritance, the spirit of chivalry, and the feudal system, than which no cause more powerful ever contributed to the miseries of mankind. It filled Europe not with men but slaves; and the tyranny under which the people groaned was the more intolerable, as it was wrought into an artificial method, confirmed by law, established by inveterate custom, and even supported by religion. In vain did the nations cast their eyes to Rome, from whom they had a right to claim assistance, or at least sympathy and consolation. The appeal was useless. The living waters were tainted in their source. Instead of health they spread abroad infection—instead of giving nourishment to the poor, they were the narcotics which drenched in slumber the consciences of the rich. Wretched forms, ridiculous legends, the insipid rhetoric of the Fathers, were the substitutes for all generous learning. The nobles enslaved the body; the hierarchy put its fetters on the soul. The growth of the public mind was checked and stunted and the misery of Europe was complete. The sufferer was taught to expect his reward in another world; their oppressor, if his bequests were liberal, was sure of obtaining consolation in this, and the kingdom of God was openly offered to the highest bidder. But to the causes which gave rise to this state of things, we must trace our origin as a nation.

With the Britons whom Cæsar conquered, though they occupied the surface of our soil, we have, nationally speaking, no concern; but when the white horse of Hengist, after many a long and desperate struggle, floated in triumph or in peace from the Tamar to the Tweed, our existence as a nation, the period to which we may refer the origin of English habits, language, and institutions, undoubtedly begins. So, when the Franks established themselves west of the Rhine, the French nation may be said to have come into being. True, the Saxons yielded to the discipline and valour of a foreign race; true, the barbarous hordes of the Elbe and the Saal were not the ancestors, as any one who travels in the south of France can hardly fail to see, of the majority of the present nation of the French: but the Normans and Saxons sprang from the same stock, and the changes worked by Clovis and his warriors were so vast and durable, (though, in comparison with their conquered vassals, they were numerically few,) that with the invasion of Hengist in the one case, and the battle of Poictiers in the other, the modern history of both countries may not improperly be said to have begun. To the student of that history, however, one consideration must occur, which imparts to the objects of his studies an interest emphatically its own. It is this: he has strong reason to believe that all the elements of society are before him. It may indeed be true that Providence has reserved some yet unknown tribe, wandering on the banks of the Amour or of the Amazons, as the instrument of accomplishing some mighty purpose—humanly speaking, however, such an event is most improbable. To adopt such an hypothesis, would be in direct opposition to all the analogies by which, in the absence of clearer or more precise motives, human infirmity must be guided. The map of the world is spread out before us; there are no regions which we speak of in the terms of doubt and ignorance that the wisest Romans applied to the countries beyond the Vistula and the Rhine, when in Lord Bacon's words "the world was altogether home-bred." When Cicero jested with Trebatius on the little importance of a Roman jurist among hordes of Celtic barbarians, he little thought that from that despised country would arise a nation, before the blaze of whose conquests the splendour of Roman Empire would grow pale; a nation which would carry the art of government and the enjoyment of freedom to a perfection, the idea of which, had it been presented to the illustrious orator, stored as his mind was with all the lore of Grecian sages, and with whatever knowledge the history of his own country could supply, would have been consigned by him, with the glorious visions of his own Academy, to the shady spaces of an ideal world. Had he, while bewailing the loss of that freedom which he would not survive, disfigured as it was by popular tumult and patrician insolence—had he been told that a figure far more faultless was one day to arise amid the unknown forests and marshes of Britain, and to be protected by the rude hands of her barbarous inhabitants till it reached the full maturity of immortal loveliness—the eloquence of Cicero himself would have been silenced, and, whatever might have been the exultation of the philosopher, the pride of the Roman would have died within him. But we can anticipate no similar revolution. The nations by which the world is inhabited are known to us; the regions which they occupy are limited; there are no fresh combinations to count upon, no reserves upon which we can depend;—there is every reason to suppose that, in the great conflict with physical and moral evil, which it is the destiny of man to wage, the last battalion is in the field.

The course to be adopted by the student of modern history is pointed out in the following pages; and the remarks of Dr Arnold on this subject are distinguished by a degree of good sense and discrimination which it is difficult to overrate. Vast indeed is the difference between ancient and modern annals, as far as relates to the demand upon the student's time and attention. Instead of sailing upon a narrow channel, the shores of which are hardly ever beyond his view, he launches out upon an ocean of immeasurable extent, through which the greatest skill and most assiduous labour are hardly sufficient to conduct him—

Instead of a few great writers, the student is beset on all sides by writers of different sort and degree, from the light memorialist to the great historian; instead of two countries, two hemispheres are candidates for his attention; and history assumes a variety of garbs, many of which were strangers to her during the earlier period of her existence. To the careful study of many periods of history, not extending over any very wide portion of time, the labour of a tolerably long life would be inadequate. The unpublished Despatches of Cardinal Granvelle at Besançon, amount to sixty volumes. The archives of Venice (a mine, by the way, scarcely opened) fill a large apartment. For printed works it may be enough to mention the Benedictine editions and Munatoris Annals, historians of the dark and middle ages, relating to two countries only, and two periods. All history, therefore, however insatiable may be the intellectual boulimia that devours him, can never be a proper object of curiosity to any man. It is natural enough that the first effect produced by this discovery on the mind of the youthful student should be surprise and mortification; nor is it before the conviction that his researches, to be valuable, must be limited, forces itself upon him, that he concentrates to some particular period, and perhaps to some exclusive object, the powers of his undivided attention. When he has thus put an end to his desultory enquiries, and selected the portion of history which it is his purpose to explore, his first object should be to avail himself of the information which other travellers in the same regions have been enabled to collect. Their mistakes will teach him caution; their wanderings will serve to keep him in the right path. Weak and feeble as he may be, compared with the first adventurers who have visited the mighty maze before him, yet he has not their difficulties to encounter, nor their perils to apprehend. The clue is in his hands which may lead him through the labyrinth in which it has been the lot of so many master-spirits to wander—

But it is time to hear Dr Arnold:—

"To proceed, therefore, with our supposed student's course of reading. Keeping the general history which he has been reading as his text, and getting from it the skeleton, in a manner, of the future figure, he must now break forth excursively to the right and left, collecting richness and fulness of knowledge from the most various sources. For example, we will suppose that where his popular historian has mentioned that an alliance was concluded between two powers, or a treaty of peace agreed upon, he first of all resolves to consult the actual documents themselves, as they are to be found in some one of the great collections of European treaties, or, if they are connected with English history, in Rymer's Fœdera. By comparing the actual treaty with his historian's report of its provisions, we get, in the first place, a critical process of some value, inasmuch as the historian's accuracy is at once tested: but there are other purposes answered besides. An historian's report of a treaty is almost always an abridgement of it; minor articles will probably be omitted, and the rest condensed, and stripped of all their formal language. But our object now being to reproduce to ourselves so far as it is possible, the very life of the period which we are studying, minute particulars help us to do this; nay, the very formal enumeration of titles, and the specification of towns and districts in their legal style, help to realize the time to us, if it be only from their very particularity. Every common history records the substance of the treaty of Troyes, May 1420, by which the succession to the crown of France was given to Henry V. But the treaty in itself, or the English version of it which Henry sent over to England to be proclaimed there, gives a far more lively impression of the triumphant state of the great conqueror, and the utter weakness of the poor French king, Charles VI., in the ostentatious care taken to provide for the recognition of his formal title during his lifetime, while all real power is ceded to Henry, and provision is made for the perpetual union hereafter of the two kingdoms under his sole government.

"I have named treaties as the first class of official instruments to be consulted, because the mention of them occurs unavoidably in every history. Another class of documents, certainly of no less importance, yet much less frequently referred to by popular historians, consists of statutes, ordinances, proclamations, acts, or by whatever various names the laws of each particular period happen to be designated. That the Statute Book has not been more habitually referred to by writers on English history, has always seemed to me a matter of surprise. Legislation has not perhaps been so busy in every country as it has been with us; yet every where, and in every period, it has done something. Evils, real or supposed, have always existed, which the supreme power in the nation has endeavoured to remove by the provisions of law. And under the name of laws I would include the acts of councils, which form an important part of the history of European nations during many centuries; provincial councils, as you are aware, having been held very frequently, and their enactments relating to local and particular evils, so that they illustrate history in a very lively manner. Now, in these and all the other laws of any given period, we find in the first place, from their particularity, a great additional help towards becoming familiar with the times in which they were passed; we learn the names of various officers, courts, and processes; and these, when understood, (and I suppose always the habit of reading nothing without taking pains to understand it,) help us, from their very number, to realize the state of things then existing; a lively notion of any object depending on our clearly seeing some of its parts, and the more we people it, so to speak, with distinct images, the more it comes to resemble the crowded world around us. But in addition to this benefit, which I am disposed to rate in itself very highly, every thing of the nature of law has a peculiar interest and value, because it is the expression of the deliberate mind of the supreme government of society; and as history, as commonly written, records so much of the passionate and unreflecting part of human nature, we are bound in fairness to acquaint ourselves with its calmer and better part also."

The inner life of a nation will be determined by its end, that end being the security of its highest happiness, or, as it is "conceived and expressed more piously, a setting forth of God's glory by doing his appointed work." The history of a nation's internal life is the history of its institutions and its laws. Here, then, it is that we shall find the noblest lessons of history; here it is that we must look for the causes, direct and indirect, which have modified the characters, and decided the fate of nations. To this imperishable possession it is that the philosopher appeals for the corroboration of his theory, as it is to it also that the statesman ought to look for the regulation of his practice. Religion, property, science, commerce, literature, whatever can civilize and instruct rude mankind, whatever can embellish life in its more advanced condition, even till it exhibit the wonders of which it is now the theatre, may be referred to this subject, and are comprised under this denomination. The importance of history has been the theme of many a pen, but we question whether it has ever been more beautifully described than in the following passage:—

"Enough has been said, I think, to show that history contains no mean treasures; that, as being the biography of a nation, it partakes of the richness and variety of those elements which make up a nation's life. Whatever there is of greatness in the final cause of all human thought and action, God's glory and man's perfection, that is the measure of the greatness of history. Whatever there is of variety and intense interest in human nature, in its elevation, whether proud as by nature, or sanctified as by God's grace; in its suffering, whether blessed or unblessed, a martyrdom or a judgment; in its strange reverses, in its varied adventures, in its yet more varied powers, its courage and its patience, its genius and its wisdom, its justice and its love, that also is the measure of the interest and variety of history. The treasures indeed are ample, but we may more reasonably fear whether we may have strength and skill to win them."

In passing we may observe, after Dr Arnold, that the most important bearing of a particular institution upon the character of a nation is not always limited to the effect which is most obvious; few who have watched the proceedings in our courts of justice can doubt that, in civil cases, the interference of a jury is often an obstacle, and sometimes an insurmountable obstacle, to the attainment of justice. Dr Arnold's remarks on this subject are entitled to great attention:—

"The effect," he says, "of any particular arrangement of the judicial power, is seen directly in the greater or less purity with which justice is administered; but there is a further effect, and one of the highest importance, in its furnishing to a greater or less portion of the nation one of the best means of moral and intellectual culture—the opportunity, namely, of exercising the functions of a judge. I mean, that to accustom a number of persons to the intellectual exercise of attending to, and weighing, and comparing evidence, and to the moral exercise of being placed in a high and responsible situation, invested with one of God's own attributes, that of judgment, and having to determine with authority between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, is to furnish them with very high means of moral and intellectual culture—in other words, it is providing them with one of the highest kinds of education. And thus a judicial constitution may secure a pure administration of justice, and yet fail as an engine of national cultivation, where it is vested in the hands of a small body of professional men, like the old French parliament. While, on the other hand, it may communicate the judicial office very widely, as by our system of juries, and thus may educate, if I may so speak, a very large portion of the nation, but yet may not succeed in obtaining the greatest certainty of just legal decisions. I do not mean that our jury system does not succeed, but it is conceivable that it should not. So, in the same way, different arrangements of the executive and legislative powers should be always regarded in this twofold aspect—as effecting their direct objects, good government and good legislation; and as educating the nation more or less extensively, by affording to a greater or less number of persons practical lessons in governing and legislating."

History is an account of the common purpose pursued by some one of the great families of the human race. It is the biography of a nation; as the history of a particular sect, or a particular body of men, describes the particular end which the sect or body was instituted to pursue, so history, in its more comprehensive sense, describes the paramount object which the first and sovereign society—the society to which all others are necessarily subordinate—endeavours to attain. According to Dr Arnold, a nation's life is twofold, external and internal. Its external life consists principally in wars. "Here history has been sufficiently busy. The wars of the human race have been recorded when every thing else has perished."