Short Studies on Great Subjects

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I am not going into the vexed question whether History or Poetry is the
more true. It has been sometimes said that Poetry is the more true,
because it can make things more like what our moral sense would prefer
they should be. We hear of poetic justice and the like, as if nature and
fact were not just enough.

I entirely dissent from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve
on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself.
Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer
whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is
studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to
have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that
those magnificent speeches of Wolsey are taken exactly, with no more
change than the metre makes necessary, from Cavendish's Life.
Marlborough read Shakespeare for English history, and read nothing else.
The poet only is not bound, when it is inconvenient, to what may be
called the accidents of facts. It was enough for Shakespeare to know
that Prince Hal in his youth had lived among loose companions, and the
tavern in Eastcheap came in to fill out his picture; although Mrs.
Quickly and Falstaff, and Poins and Bardolph were more likely to have
been fallen in with by Shakespeare himself at the Mermaid, than to have
been comrades of the true Prince Henry. It was enough for Shakespeare to
draw real men, and the situation, whatever it might be, would sit easy
on them. In this sense only it is that Poetry is truer than History,
that it can make a picture more complete. It may take liberties with
time and space, and give the action distinctness by throwing it into
more manageable compass.

But it may not alter the real conditions of things, or represent life as
other than it is. The greatness of the poet depends on his being true to
nature, without insisting that nature shall theorise with him, without
making her more just, more philosophical, more moral than reality; and,
in difficult matters, leaving much to reflection which cannot be
explained.

And if this be true of Poetry--if Homer and Shakespeare are what they
are, from the absence of everything didactic about them--may we not
thus learn something of what History should be, and in what sense it
should aspire to teach?

If Poetry must not theorise, much less should the historian theorise,
whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's.
If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws,
because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also
under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be
perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind
of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds and
words of those who act it out, so far is he most successful. His work is
no longer the vapour of his own brain, which a breath will scatter; it
is the thing itself, which will have interest for all time. A thousand
theories may be formed about it--spiritual theories, Pantheistic
theories, cause and effect theories; but each age will have its own
philosophy of history, and all these in turn will fail and die. Hegel
falls out of date, Schlegel falls out of date, and Comte in good time
will fall out of date; the thought about the thing must change as we
change; but the thing itself can never change; and a history is durable
or perishable as it contains more or least of the writer's own
speculations. The splendid intellect of Gibbon for the most part kept
him true to the right course in this; yet the philosophical chapters for
which he has been most admired or censured may hereafter be thought the
least interesting in his work. The time has been when they would not
have been comprehended: the time may come when they will seem
commonplace.

It may be said, that in requiring history to be written like a drama, we
require an impossibility.

For history to be written with the complete form of a drama, doubtless
is impossible; but there are periods, and these the periods, for the
most part, of greatest interest to mankind, the history of which may be
so written that the actors shall reveal their characters in their own
words; where mind can be seen matched against mind, and the great
passions of the epoch not simply be described as existing, but be
exhibited at their white heat in the souls and hearts possessed by them.
There are all the elements of drama--drama of the highest order--where
the huge forces of the times are as the Grecian destiny, and the power
of the man is seen either stemming the stream till it overwhelms him,
or ruling while he seems to yield to it.

It is Nature's drama--not Shakespeare's--but a drama none the less.

So at least it seems to me. Wherever possible, let us not be told
_about_ this man or that. Let us hear the man himself speak; let us see
him act, and let us be left to form our own opinions about him. The
historian, we are told, must not leave his readers to themselves. He
must not only lay the facts before them--he must tell them what he
himself thinks about those facts. In my opinion, this is precisely what
he ought not to do. Bishop Butler says somewhere, that the best book
which could be written would be a book consisting only of premises, from
which the readers should draw conclusions for themselves. The highest
poetry is the very thing which Butler requires, and the highest history
ought to be. We should no more ask for a theory of this or that period
of history, than we should ask for a theory of 'Macbeth' or 'Hamlet.'
Philosophies of history, sciences of history--all these, there will
continue to be; the fashions of them will change, as our habits of
thought will change; each new philosopher will find his chief employment
in showing that before him no one understood anything; but the drama of
history is imperishable, and, the lessons of it will be like what we
learn from Homer or Shakespeare--lessons for which we have no words.

The address of history is less to the understanding than to the higher
emotions. We learn in it to sympathise with what is great and good; we
learn to hate what is base. In the anomalies of fortune we feel the
mystery of our mortal existence, and in the companionship of the
illustrious natures who have shaped the fortunes of the world, we escape
from the littlenesses which cling to the round of common life, and our
minds are tuned in a higher and nobler key.

For the rest, and for those large questions which I touched in
connection with Mr. Buckle, we live in times of disintegration, and none
can tell what will be after us. What opinions--what convictions--the
infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth, if he and it live
out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man
would undertake to conjecture! 'The time will come,' said Lichtenberg,
in scorn at the materialising tendencies of modern thought; 'the time
will come when the belief in God will be as the tales with which old
women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a
gas, and God will be a force.' Mankind, if they last long enough on the
earth, may develope strange things out of themselves; and the growth of
what is called the Positive Philosophy is a curious commentary on
Lichtenberg's prophecy. But whether the end be seventy years hence, or
seven hundred--be the close of the mortal history of humanity as far
distant in the future as its shadowy beginnings seem now to lie behind
us--this only we may foretell with confidence--that the riddle of man's
nature will remain unsolved. There will be that in him yet which
physical laws will fail to explain--that something, whatever it be, in
himself and in the world, which science cannot fathom, and which
suggests the unknown possibilities of his origin and his destiny. There
will remain yet

Those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things;
Falling from us, vanishings--
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realised--
High instincts, before which our mortal nature
Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised.

There will remain

Those first affections--
Those shadowy recollections--
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day--
Are yet the master-light of all our seeing--
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the Eternal Silence.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] It is objected that Geology is a science: yet that Geology cannot
foretell the future changes of the earth's surface. Geology is not a
century old, and its periods are measured by millions of years. Yet, if
Geology cannot foretell future facts, it enabled Sir Roderick Murchison
to foretell the discovery of Australian gold.

[B] February 1864.

TIMES OF ERASMUS AND LUTHER:

THREE LECTURES

DELIVERED AT NEWCASTLE, 1867.

LECTURE I.

Ladies and Gentlemen,--I do not know whether I have made a very wise
selection in the subject which I have chosen for these Lectures. There
was a time--a time which, measured by the years of our national life,
was not so very long ago--when the serious thoughts of mankind were
occupied exclusively by religion and politics. The small knowledge which
they possessed of other things was tinctured by their speculative
opinions on the relations of heaven and earth; and, down to the
sixteenth century, art, science, scarcely even literature, existed in
this country, except as, in some way or other, subordinate to theology.
Philosophers--such philosophers as there were--obtained and half
deserved the reputation of quacks and conjurors. Astronomy was confused
with astrology. The physician's medicines were supposed to be powerless,
unless the priests said prayers over them. The great lawyers, the
ambassadors, the chief ministers of state, were generally bishops; even
the fighting business was not entirely secular. Half-a-dozen Scotch
prelates were killed at Flodden; and, late in the reign of Henry the
Eighth, no fitter person could be found than Rowland Lee, Bishop of
Coventry, to take command of the Welsh Marches, and harry the
freebooters of Llangollen.

Every single department of intellectual or practical life was penetrated
with the beliefs, or was interwoven with the interests, of the clergy;
and thus it was that, when differences of religious opinion arose, they
split society to its foundations. The lines of cleavage penetrated
everywhere, and there were no subjects whatever in which those who
disagreed in theology possessed any common concern. When men
quarrelled, they quarrelled altogether. The disturbers of settled
beliefs were regarded as public enemies who had placed themselves beyond
the pale of humanity, and were considered fit only to be destroyed like
wild beasts, or trampled out like the seed of a contagion.

Three centuries have passed over our heads since the time of which I am
speaking, and the world is so changed that we can hardly recognise it as
the same.

The secrets of nature have been opened out to us on a thousand lines;
and men of science of all creeds can pursue side by side their common
investigations. Catholics, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Lutherans,
Calvinists, contend with each other in honourable rivalry in arts, and
literature, and commerce, and industry. They read the same books. They
study at the same academies. They have seats in the same senates. They
preside together on the judicial bench, and carry on, without jar or
difference, the ordinary business of the country.

Those who share the same pursuits are drawn in spite of themselves into
sympathy and good-will. When they are in harmony in so large a part of
their occupations, the points of remaining difference lose their venom.
Those who thought they hated each other, unconsciously find themselves
friends; and as far as it affects the world at large, the acrimony of
controversy has almost disappeared.

Imagine, if you can, a person being now put to death for a speculative
theological opinion. You feel at once, that in the most bigoted country
in the world such a thing has become impossible; and the impossibility
is the measure of the alteration which we have all undergone. The
formulas remain as they were on either side--the very same formulas
which were once supposed to require these detestable murders. But we
have learnt to know each other better. The cords which bind together the
brotherhood of mankind are woven of a thousand strands. We do not any
more fly apart or become enemies, because, here and there, in one strand
out of so many, there are still unsound places.

If I were asked for a distinct proof that Europe was improving and not
retrograding, I should find it in this phenomenon. It has not been
brought about by controversy. Men are fighting still over the same
questions which they began to fight about at the Reformation. Protestant
divines have not driven Catholics out of the field, nor Catholics,
Protestants. Each polemic writes for his own partisans, and makes no
impression on his adversary.

Controversy has kept alive a certain quantity of bitterness; and that, I
suspect, is all that it would accomplish if it continued till the day of
judgment. I sometimes, in impatient moments, wish the laity in Europe
would treat their controversial divines as two gentlemen once treated
their seconds, when they found themselves forced into a duel without
knowing what they were quarrelling about.

As the principals were being led up to their places, one of them
whispered to the other, 'If you will shoot your second, I will shoot
mine.'

The reconciliation of parties, if I may use such a word, is no
tinkered-up truce, or convenient Interim. It is the healthy, silent,
spontaneous growth of a nobler order of conviction, which has conquered
our prejudices even before we knew that they were assailed. This better
spirit especially is represented in institutions like this, which
acknowledge no differences of creed--which are constructed on the
broadest principles of toleration--and which, therefore, as a rule, are
wisely protected from the intrusion of discordant subjects.

They exist, as I understand, to draw men together, not to divide
them--to enable us to share together in those topics of universal
interest and instruction which all can take pleasure in, and which give
offence to none.

If you ask me, then, why I am myself departing from a practice which I
admit to be so excellent, I fear that I shall give you rather a lame
answer. I might say that I know more about the history of the sixteenth
century than I know about anything else. I have spent the best years of
my life in reading and writing about it; and if I have anything to tell
you worth your hearing, it is probably on that subject.

Or, again, I might say--which is indeed most true--that to the
Reformation we can trace, indirectly, the best of those very influences
which I have been describing. The Reformation broke the theological
shackles in which men's minds were fettered. It set them thinking, and
so gave birth to science. The Reformers also, without knowing what they
were about, taught the lesson of religious toleration. They attempted to
supersede one set of dogmas by another. They succeeded with half the
world--they failed with the other half. In a little while it became
apparent that good men--without ceasing to be good--could think
differently about theology, and that goodness, therefore, depended on
something else than the holding orthodox opinions.

It is not, however, for either of these reasons that I am going to talk
to you about Martin Luther; nor is toleration of differences of opinion,
however excellent it be, the point on which I shall dwell in these
Lectures.

Were the Reformation a question merely of opinion, I for one should not
have meddled with it, either here or anywhere. I hold that, on the
obscure mysteries of faith, every one should be allowed to believe
according to his conscience, and that arguments on such matters are
either impertinent or useless.

But the Reformation, gentlemen, beyond the region of opinions, was a
historical fact--an objective something which may be studied like any of
the facts of nature. The Reformers were men of note and distinction, who
played a great part for good or evil on the stage of the world. If we
except the Apostles, no body of human beings ever printed so deep a mark
into the organisation of society; and if there be any value or meaning
in history at all, the lives, the actions, the characters of such men as
these can be matters of indifference to none of us.

We have not to do with a story which is buried in obscure antiquity. The
facts admit of being learnt. The truth, whatever it was, concerns us all
equally. If the divisions created by that great convulsion are ever to
be obliterated, it will be when we have learnt, each of us, to see the
thing as it really was, and not rather some mythical or imaginative
version of the thing--such as from our own point of view we like to
think it was. Fiction in such matters may be convenient for our
immediate theories, but it is certain to avenge itself in the end. We
may make our own opinions, but facts were made for us; and if we evade
or deny them, it will be the worse for us.

Unfortunately, the mythical version at present very largely
preponderates. Open a Protestant history of the Reformation, and you
will find a picture of the world given over to a lying tyranny--the
Christian population of Europe enslaved by a corrupt and degraded
priesthood, and the Reformers, with the Bible in their hands, coming to
the rescue like angels of light. All is black on one side--all is fair
and beautiful on the other.

Turn to a Catholic history of the same events and the same men, and we
have before us the Church of the Saints fulfilling quietly its blessed
mission in the saving of human souls. Satan a second time enters into
Paradise, and a second time with fatal success tempts miserable man to
his ruin. He disbelieves his appointed teachers, he aspires after
forbidden knowledge, and at once anarchy breaks loose. The seamless robe
of the Saviour is rent in pieces, and the earth becomes the habitation
of fiends.

Each side tells the story as it prefers to have it; facts, characters,
circumstances, are melted in the theological crucible, and cast in
moulds diametrically opposite. Nothing remains the same except the names
and dates. Each side chooses its own witnesses. Everything is credible
which makes for what it calls the truth. Everything is made false which
will not fit into its place. 'Blasphemous fables' is the usual
expression in Protestant controversial books for the accounts given by
Catholics. 'Protestant tradition,' says an eminent modern Catholic, 'is
based on lying--bold, wholesale, unscrupulous lying.'

Now, depend upon it, there is some human account of the matter different
from both these if we could only get at it, and it will be an excellent
thing for the world when that human account can be made out. I am not so
presumptuous as to suppose that I can give it to you; still less can you
expect me to try to do so within the compass of two or three lectures.
If I cannot do everything, however, I believe I can do a little; at any
rate I can give you a sketch, such as you may place moderate confidence
in, of the state of the Church as it was before the Reformation began. I
will not expose myself more than I can help to the censure of the divine
who was so hard on Protestant tradition. Most of what I shall have to
say to you this evening will be taken from the admissions of Catholics
themselves, or from official records earlier than the outbreak of the
controversy, when there was no temptation to pervert the truth.

Here, obviously, is the first point on which we require accurate
information. If all was going on well, the Reformers really and truly
told innumerable lies, and deserve all the reprobation which we can give
them. If all was not going on well--if, so far from being well, the
Church was so corrupt that Europe could bear with it no longer--then
clearly a Reformation was necessary of some kind; and we have taken one
step towards a fair estimate of the persons concerned in it.

A fair estimate--that, and only that, is what we want. I need hardly
observe to you, that opinion in England has been undergoing lately a
very considerable alteration about these persons.

Two generations ago, the leading Reformers were looked upon as little
less than saints; now a party has risen up who intend, as they frankly
tell us, to un-Protestantise the Church of England, who detest
Protestantism as a kind of infidelity, who desire simply to reverse
everything which the Reformers did.

One of these gentlemen, a clergyman, writing lately of Luther, called
him a heretic, a heretic fit only to be ranked with--whom, do you
think?--Joe Smith, the Mormon Prophet. Joe Smith and Luther--that is the
combination with which we are now presented.

The book in which this remarkable statement appeared was presented by
two bishops to the Upper House of Convocation. It was received with
gracious acknowledgments by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and was placed
solemnly in the library of reference, for that learned body to consult.

So, too, a professor at Oxford, the other day, spoke of Luther as a
Philistine--a Philistine meaning an oppressor of the chosen people; the
enemy of men of culture, of intelligence, such as the professor himself.

One notices these things, not as of much importance in themselves, but
as showing which way the stream is running; and, curiously enough, in
quite another direction we may see the same phenomenon. Our liberal
philosophers, men of high literary power and reputation, looking into
the history of Luther, and Calvin, and John Knox, and the rest, find
them falling far short of the philosophic ideal--wanting sadly in many
qualities which the liberal mind cannot dispense with. They are
discovered to be intolerant, dogmatic, narrow-minded, inclined to
persecute Catholics as Catholics had persecuted them; to be, in fact,
little if at all better than the popes and cardinals whom they were
fighting against.

Lord Macaulay can hardly find epithets strong enough to express his
contempt for Archbishop Cranmer. Mr. Buckle places Cranmer by the side
of Bonner, and hesitates which of the two characters is the more
detestable.

An unfavourable estimate of the Reformers, whether just or unjust, is
unquestionably gaining ground among our advanced thinkers. A greater man
than either Macaulay or Buckle--the German poet, Goethe--says of Luther,
that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries,
by calling in the passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which
ought to have been left to the learned. Goethe, in saying this, was
alluding especially to Erasmus. Goethe thought that Erasmus, and men
like Erasmus, had struck upon the right track; and if they could have
retained the direction of the mind of Europe, there would have been more
truth, and less falsehood, among us at this present time. The party
hatreds, the theological rivalries, the persecutions, the civil wars,
the religious animosities which have so long distracted us, would have
been all avoided, and the mind of mankind would have expanded gradually
and equably with the growth of knowledge.

Such an opinion, coming from so great a man, is not to be lightly passed
over. It will be my endeavour to show you what kind of man Erasmus was,
what he was aiming at, what he was doing, and how Luther spoilt his
work--if spoiling is the word which we are to use for it.

One caution, however, I must in fairness give you before we proceed
further. It lies upon the face of the story, that the Reformers
imperfectly understood toleration; but you must keep before you the
spirit and temper of the men with whom they had to deal. For themselves,
when the movement began, they aimed at nothing but liberty to think and
speak their own way. They never dreamt of interfering with others,
although they were quite aware that others, when they could, were likely
to interfere with them. Lord Macaulay might have remembered that Cranmer
was working all his life with the prospect of being burnt alive as his
reward--and, as we all know, he actually was burnt alive.

When the Protestant teaching began first to spread in the
Netherlands--before one single Catholic had been illtreated there,
before a symptom of a mutinous disposition had shown itself among the
people, an edict was issued by the authorities for the suppression of
the new opinions.

The terms of this edict I will briefly describe to you.

The inhabitants of the United Provinces were informed that they were to
hold and believe the doctrines of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. 'Men
and women,' says the edict, 'who disobey this command shall be punished
as disturbers of public order. Women who have fallen into heresy shall
be buried alive. Men, if they recant, shall lose their heads. If they
continue obstinate, they shall be burnt at the stake.

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