Historical and Political Essays

W >> William Edward Hartpole Lecky >> Historical and Political Essays

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Milman was, indeed, a man well deserving of commemoration on account
of the works which he produced, yet it is perhaps not too much to say
that to those among whom he lived the man seemed even greater than his
works. For many years he was a central and most popular figure in the
best English literary society, and he reckoned most of the leading
intellects of his day among his friends. He was in an extraordinary
degree many-sided, both in his knowledge and his sympathies. He was an
admirable critic, and the eminent sanity of his judgment, as well as
the eminent kindness of his nature, combined with a great charm both
of manner and of conversation. Few men of his time had more friends,
and were more admired, consulted, and loved.

Mr. Arthur Milman has sketched his father's life in one short
volume,[48] written in excellent English and with uniformly good
taste. We have read it with much interest, yet in laying it down it is
impossible not to be sensible how much of the personal charm which was
so conspicuous in its subject has passed beyond recovery. More than
thirty years have gone by since the old Dean was laid in his grave,
and but few of those who knew him intimately survive. He appears to
have kept no journal. He wrote nothing autobiographical, and he had a
strong sense of the chasm that should separate private from public
life. It was wholly contrary to his unegotistical nature to make the
great public the confidant of his domestic affairs or of his inner
feelings, and he was deeply sensible of the injustice which is so
often done by biographers in printing unguarded, unqualified opinions
and judgments, expressed in the freedom of private correspondence. He
acted sternly on this view. Many of the foremost men in England were
among his correspondents, but he deliberately burnt their letters. 'I
could never bear,' we have heard him say, 'that what was written to me
by dear friends in the most unreserved and absolute confidence should,
through my fault, be one day dragged before the public.' This
reticence and this strong feeling of the sanctity of friendship and
private correspondence, which is now becoming very rare, was one of
his most characteristic traits, but it has necessarily deprived his
biography of many elements of interest.

He was the youngest son of Sir Francis Milman, the well-known
physician of George III. He was born in 1791, and educated at Eton and
Oxford, where he soon distinguished himself as one of the most
brilliant of students. He won the Newdigate in 1812, the Chancellor's
prize for Latin verse in 1813, the prize for English and Latin essays
in 1816. He obtained a first class in classics, and in 1815 he was
elected a Fellow of his college. He was ordained in the following
year, and a year later Lord Eldon, who was then Chancellor of the
university, nominated him to the vicarage of St. Mary at Reading,
where he spent eighteen happy and fruitful years. Like most young and
brilliant men, he first turned to verse, and for several years he
poured out in rapid succession a number of dramas and poems which have
been collected in three substantial volumes. The tragedy of 'Fazio'
was written when he was still at Oxford, and it was speedily followed
by a long and ambitious epic poem called 'Samor, Lord of the Bright
City'; by three elaborate sacred dramas, the 'Fall of Jerusalem,' the
'Martyr of Antioch,' and 'Belshazzar'; and by an historical tragedy on
'Anne Boleyn,' as well as by a few minor poems.

Some of these works had considerable popularity. 'Fazio' for many
years held its place on the stage. Byron, in one of his letters to
Rogers, speaks of its 'great and deserved success' when it was brought
out at Covent Garden. Its heroine was a favourite part of Miss O'Neil
and of Fanny Kemble. It was translated into Italian by Del Ongaro for
Ristori, who acted it with admirable power, and there was also a
French translation or adaptation in which Mademoiselle Mars took part.
The 'Fall of Jerusalem' was never intended for the stage, but it had a
great literary success. Murray, who had given only a hundred and fifty
guineas for 'Fazio,' gave five hundred for the 'Fall of Jerusalem,'
and he gave the same sum both for the 'Martyr of Antioch' and for
'Belshazzar,' which succeeded it. Neither of these, however, proved as
popular as the 'Fall of Jerusalem,' but the 'Martyr of Antioch'
contains that noble funeral ode beginning 'Brother, thou art gone
before us, and thy saintly soul is flown,' which is familiar to
numbers who are probably not aware of its authorship. It is worthy of
notice that as recently as 1880 Sir Arthur Sullivan set the 'Martyr of
Antioch' to music and brought it out at the Leeds Festival, where it
achieved an immediate and brilliant success, and was frequently
performed.[49] On the other hand, 'Samor' and 'Anne Boleyn' were
almost absolute failures, and, on the whole, the longer poems of
Milman have not retained their popularity, and probably now rarely
find a reader.

Those who turn to them will certainly be struck by the command of
language and metre they display. It was shown both in rhyme and in
blank verse. Many fine odes are scattered through them, and in the
octo-syllabic verse Milman always appears to us peculiarly happy. But
his poetry, like most of the poetry that was written under the Byronic
influence, was rather the poetry of rhetoric than of imagination, and
it wanted both the intensity and the concentration of the great
master. Stately, sonorous, fluent, unfailingly lucid, it was too
lengthy and too artificial, and Lockhart was not wholly wrong in
pronouncing that it showed 'fine talents, but no genius,' and in
urging that prose rather than poetry was the vehicle in which its
author was destined to succeed. In addition, however, to the funeral
ode to which we have referred, Milman has written many hymns, and some
of these are of singular beauty. They appeared originally in the
collection of that other great hymn-writer, Bishop Heber, who was one
of his dearest friends, and one of the men to whose memory he looked
back with the fondest affection. The Good Friday hymn, 'Bound upon th'
accursed tree,' the Palm Sunday hymn, 'Ride on, ride on in majesty,'
and perhaps still more that exquisitely pathetic hymn (so often
misprinted in modern hymn-books) beginning

When our heads are bowed with woe,
When our bitter tears o'erflow,

have long since taken their permanent place in devotional literature.

In another and very different field of poetry also he greatly
excelled. He was an admirable example of that highly finished and
fastidious classical scholarship which is, or was, the pride of our
great public schools, and he took great pleasure in translations from
the classics. He translated into verse the 'Agamemnon' of AEschylus,
and the 'Bacchanals' of Euripides, and also a great number of small
and much less known poems. He held the professorship of poetry at
Oxford from 1821 to 1831, and as his lectures, according to the custom
which then prevailed, were delivered in Latin, he had the happy
thought of diversifying them by English metrical translations of the
different poems he treated. They range over a wide field of obscure
Greek poets, as well as of epitaphs, votive inscriptions, and
inscriptions relating to the fine arts, and in addition to these there
are translations from Sanscrit poetry--a branch of knowledge which was
then very little cultivated, and to which Milman was greatly
attracted. These poems the author published in 1865, but the lectures
in which they were produced he committed to the flames. They had, in
his opinion, lost their value through the subsequent publication of
the works on the history of Greek literature by Bode, Ulrici, Otfried
Mueller, and Mure.

In prose his pen was exceedingly active. In 1820 he began his long
connection with the 'Quarterly Review,' which continued, with
occasional intervals, through more than forty years. His articles
extended over a great variety of subjects, but most of them were
essentially reviews and essentially critical. The fact that he was
both a poet and an accomplished critic of verse caused some persons to
ascribe to him the authorship of two articles which had an unhappy
reputation--the criticism which was falsely supposed to have hastened
the death of Keats, and the attack upon the 'Alastor' of Shelley, a
poet for whom Milman had a special admiration. It is now well known
that neither of these articles was by him, but it is characteristic of
his loyalty to his colleagues that he never disclaimed the authorship.
This loyalty was indeed not less conspicuous in his nature than the
singular kindness of disposition with which he ever shrank from giving
pain. After his death a few of his many essays in the 'Quarterly' were
collected in one volume. Among them there is an admirable account of
Erasmus, with whom in mental characteristics he had considerable
affinity.

In 1829 appeared his first historical work, the 'History of the Jews,'
a work which excited a violent storm of theological indignation. The
crime of Milman was that he applied to Jewish history the usual canons
of historical criticism--sifting evidence, discriminating between
documents, pointing out the parallelisms between Jewish conditions and
those of other Oriental nations, and attempting to separate in the
sacred writings the parts which were essential and revealed from those
which were merely human and fallible. In a remarkable preface to a
revised and enlarged edition of this work, which was published thirty
years later, he laid down very clearly the principles that had guided
him. The Jewish writers, in his opinion, were 'men of their age and
country who, as they spoke the language, so they thought the thoughts
of their nation and their time.... They had no special knowledge on
any subject but moral and religious truth to distinguish them from
other men, and were as fallible as others on all questions of science,
and even of history, extraneous to their religious teaching.... Their
one paramount object being instruction and enlightenment in religion,
they left their hearers uninstructed and unenlightened as before in
other things.... In all other respects society, civilisation,
developed itself according to its usual laws. The Hebrew in the
wilderness, excepting as far as the law modified his manners and
habits, was an Arab of the desert. Abraham, except in his worship and
intercourse with the one true God, was a nomad Sheik.... The moral and
religious truth, and this alone, I apprehend, is "the word of God"
contained in the sacred writings.'

It must also, he contended, be always remembered that the Semitic
records are of an 'essentially Oriental, figurative, poetical cast,'
and that it is therefore wholly erroneous to suppose that every word
can be construed with the precision of an Act of Parliament or of a
simple modern historical narrative.

His attitude towards the miraculous was carefully defined. He observed
the absolute impossibility of evading the conclusion that the Jewish
writers, whether eye-witnesses or not, implicitly believed in 'the
supernaturalism, the divine or miraculous agency almost throughout the
older history of the Jews,' and that it is 'an integral, inseparable
part of the narrative.' Sometimes it is possible 'with more or less
probability to detect the naked fact which may lie beneath the
imaginative or marvellous language in which it is recorded; but even
in these cases the solution can be hardly more than conjectural.' In
other cases 'the supernatural so entirely predominates and is so of
the intimate essence of the transaction that the facts and the
interpretation must be accepted together or rejected together.' In
such cases it is the duty of the historian simply 'to relate the facts
as recorded, to adduce his authorities, and to abstain from all
explanation for which he has no ground.'

The distinction between the providential and the strictly miraculous
appears to him impossible to draw. 'Belief in Divine Providence, in
the agency of God as the Prime Mover in the Natural world as in the
mind of Man, is an inseparable part of religion. There can be no
religion without it.' But in numerous cases, to distinguish between
the simply providential and the strictly miraculous implies a
knowledge of the working of natural causes greater than we possess;
and in certain stages of civilisation, and very eminently in the
Jewish mind, there is a marked tendency to suppress secondary causes,
and to attribute not only the more extraordinary but also the common
events of life to direct divine agency. The possibility and the
reality of the miraculous he emphatically asserts.

'The palmary miracle of all, the Resurrection, stands entirely by
itself. Every attempt to resolve it into a natural event, a delusion
or hallucination in the minds of the disciples, the eye-witnesses and
death-defying witnesses to its truth, or to treat it as an allegory or
figure of speech, is to me a signal failure. It must be accepted as
the keystone--for such it is--and seal to the great Christian doctrine
of a future life, as a historical fact, or rejected as a baseless
fable.'

But great numbers of what were deemed miracles may be explained by
natural causes, by figurative modes of expression which were common in
Oriental nations, by the tendency of the human mind to embellish or
exaggerate surprising facts, or invent supernatural causes for what it
is unable to explain, by the retrospective imagination which seeks to
dignify the distant past with a supernatural halo. The early annals of
all nations are strewn with pretended miracles which no one will now
maintain, and Milman shows in a powerful passage how the idea of the
miraculous has been steadily contracting and receding; how dangerous
it is to base the defence of Christianity on the evidence of miracles
rather than on appeals to the conscience, the moral sense, the innate
religiousness, the deep spiritual cravings of human nature.

Such views, though now sufficiently commonplace, seemed very novel in
England when Milman wrote. Dean Stanley described his work as 'the
first decisive inroad of German theology into England; the first
palpable indication that the Bible could be studied like another book;
that the characters and events of sacred history could be treated at
once critically and reverently.' But though Milman was very well
acquainted with German theology, he resented the notion that he was
its interpreter or representative. He contended that in restricting
the province of inspiration to the direct inculcation of religious
truth he was following a sound Anglican tradition. He quoted the
authority of Paley and Warburton, of Tillotson and Secker. In such
principles of interpretation he said he had found 'a safeguard during
a long and not unreflective life against the difficulties arising out
of the philosophical and historical researches of his time.' They had
enabled him 'to follow out all the marvellous discoveries of science,
and all those hardly less marvellous, if less certain, conclusions of
historical, ethnological, linguistic criticism, in the serene
confidence that they are utterly irrelevant to the truth of
Christianity.' 'If on such subjects,' he concluded, 'some solid ground
be not found on which highly educated, reflective, reading, reasoning
men may find firm footing, I can foresee nothing but a wide, a
widening--I fear, an irreparable--breach between the thought and the
religion of England. A comprehensive, all-embracing, truly Catholic
Christianity which knows what is essential to religion, what is
temporary and extraneous to it, may defy the world.'

These words are taken from the later preface to which we have
referred. In the same preface, and also in his 'History of
Christianity,' may be found some interesting remarks on the German
school of Biblical criticism, the greater portion of which has arisen
since the original publication of the 'History of the Jews.' In many
of its conclusions he had anticipated it, and he was quite as sensible
as the German writers of the hopelessness of seeking scientific
revelations in the Biblical narrative; of the worthlessness of most of
the common schemes for reconciling science and theology; of the
untrustworthy character of Jewish chronology and Jewish figures; of
the grave doubts that hang over the authorship and the date of some of
the books; of the necessity of making full allowance, when reading
them, for human fallibility and inaccuracy. At the same time, his
admiration for the German critics was by no means unqualified. While
fully admitting their extraordinary learning, industry, and ingenuity,
he complained that their too common infirmity was 'a passion for
making history without historical materials,' basing the most dogmatic
and positive statements upon faint indications, or upon ingenious
conjectures that could not legitimately go beyond a very low degree of
probability. The assurance with which these writers undertook by
internal evidence to decompose ancient documents, assigning each
paragraph to an independent source; the decisive weight they were
accustomed to give to slight improbabilities or coincidences, and to
small variations of style and phraseology; the confidence with which
they put forward solutions or conjectures which, however ingenious or
plausible, were based on no external evidence as if they were proved
facts, appeared to him profoundly unhistorical.

It must have been somewhat irritating to one who clung so closely to
University life, and who had been justly regarded as one of the most
brilliant of Oxford scholars, to find that his own University was
prominent in the condemnation of the 'History of the Jews.' Only two
years before he had preached with general approbation the Bampton
Lectures in defence of Christianity. His new work was again and again
condemned from the University pulpits, and among others by the
Margaret Professor of Divinity and by the Hulsean lecturer for 1832.
The clamour was naturally taken up in many other quarters, and
especially by the religious newspapers. It was noticed that 'Milman's
History' appeared in the window of Carlisle, the infidel bookseller.

'I only wish,' wrote Milman, when the fact was brought to his notice,
'all Carlisle's customers would read it. A noble lord once wrote to
the bishop of a certain diocese to complain that a baronet who lived
in the same parish brought his mistress to church, which sorely
shocked his regular family. The bishop gravely assured him that he was
very glad to hear that Sir ---- brought his naughty lady to church,
and hoped that she would profit by what she heard there and amend her
ways. So say I of Carlisle's customers.'[50]

The opinions expressed in this, as in his later works, no doubt in
some degree obstructed the promotion of Milman in the Church, but he
had no reason to regret it. Of all men, he once said, he thought he
owed most to Bishop Blomfield, for there was once a question of
offering him a bishopric, and it was a remonstrance of the Bishop of
London that prevented it. 'I am _afraid_,' he said, 'that if it had
been offered me I should have accepted it, and I should then never
have written my "Latin Christianity."' But, though he escaped the fate
which has cut short the best work of more than one distinguished
historian, his conspicuous position among the scholars and writers in
the Church was widely recognised, and he was soon transferred from a
provincial town to a central position in the Metropolis. In 1835 Sir
Robert Peel made him Rector of St. Margaret's, Westminster, and
Prebendary in the Abbey. Though continuing without intermission his
historical work, he appears to have discharged with exemplary vigour
the duties of a large and poor parish until 1849, when Lord John
Russell appointed him Dean of St. Paul's. The position was exactly
suited to him. It was one of much dignity, but also of much leisure,
and it gave him ample opportunities of pursuing the studies which were
the true work of his life.

The great subject of the history of Christianity was, indeed,
continually before him. Among other things, he studied minutely both
the text and the authorities of Gibbon, for whom he had a deep and
growing admiration. An excellent edition of Gibbon was one of the
first results. Milman's notes have been included in Smith's later
edition, and, though a large proportion of them were naturally
somewhat controversial, being devoted to refuting some of the
conclusions of the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters, it is impossible
to read them without recognising the candour as well as the learning
and the acumen of the critic. Few things that Milman has written are
finer than the preface in which, in ten or twelve masterly pages, he
sums up his estimate of his great predecessor.

The three volumes of the 'History of Christianity,' dealing with its
early history up to the period of the abolition of Paganism in the
Roman Empire, appeared in 1840, and they were followed by the six
large volumes of the 'History of Latin Christianity,' carrying the
history of the Western Church to the end of the Pontificate of
Nicholas V. in 1455. This great work was published in two
instalments--the first three volumes in 1854, and the remaining three
in the following year--and it gave its author indisputably the first
place among the ecclesiastical historians of England and a high place
among the historians of the nineteenth century. He possessed, indeed,
in an eminent degree some of the qualities that are most rare, and at
the same time most valuable, in ecclesiastical history. A large
proportion of the most learned ecclesiastical historians have been men
who have devoted their whole lives to this single department of
knowledge, who derived from it all their measures of probability and
canons of criticism, and who, treating it as an isolated and mainly
supernatural thing, have taken very little account of the intellectual
and political secular influences that have largely shaped its course.
Most of them also have been men who undertook their task with
convictions and habits of thought that were absolutely incompatible
with real independence and impartiality of judgment in estimating
either the events or the characters they described. Milman was wholly
free from these defects. His wide knowledge, his cool, critical,
admirably trained judgment, were never better shown than in the many
pages in which he has pointed out the analogies or resemblances
between Jewish and other Oriental beliefs; the manner in which
national characteristics or secular intellectual tendencies affected
theological types; the countless modifications in belief or practice
which grew up, as the Church accommodated itself to the conditions of
successive ages and entered into alliance or conflict with different
political systems; the many indirect, subtle, far-reaching ways in
which the world and the Church interacted upon each other in all the
great departments of speculation, art, industry, social and political
life. A certain aloofness and coldness of judgment in dealing with
sacred subjects was the reproach which was most frequently brought
against him. As he himself said, he wrote rather as an historian than
a religious instructor, and he dealt with his subject chiefly in its
temporal, social, and political aspects. Justice and impartiality of
judgment to friend and foe he deemed one of the first moral duties of
an historian, and Dean Church was not wrong in ascribing to him a
quite 'unusual combination of the strongest feeling about right and
wrong with the largest equity.' 'What a delightful book, so tolerant
of the intolerant!' was his characteristic eulogy of the work of
another writer, and it truly reflects the turn of his own mind.
Provost Hawtrey, who was no mean judge of men, said, after an intimacy
of nearly fifty years, that he had never known a man who possessed in
a greater degree than Milman the virtue of Christian charity in its
highest and rarest form. It was a gift which stood him in good stead
in dealing with the very blended characters, the tangled politics, the
often misguided enthusiasms of ecclesiastical history. While he was
constitutionally extremely averse to the moral casuistry which
confuses the boundaries of right and wrong, he had too sound a grasp
of the evolution of history to fall into the common error of judging
the acts of one age by the moral standards of another. His history was
eminently a history of large lines and broad tendencies. The growth,
influence, and decline of the Papacy--the distinctive characteristics
of Latin and Teutonic Christianity; the effect of Christianity on
jurisprudence; the monastic system in its various phases; the rise and
conquests of Mohammedanism; the severance of Greek from Latin
Christianity; Charlemagne, Hildebrand, the Crusades, the Templars, the
Great Councils; the decay of Latin and the rise of modern languages;
the influence of the Church on literature, painting, sculpture, and
architecture--are but a few of the great subjects he has treated,
always with knowledge and intelligence, often with conspicuous
brilliancy.

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