Historical and Political Essays

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In so vast a field there were, no doubt, many subjects which have been
treated with a greater fulness and completeness by other writers.
There are some in which subsequent research has gone far to supersede
what Milman has written, and inaccuracies of detail not unfrequently
crept into his work; but in the truthfulness of its broad lines, in
the sagacity of its estimates both of men and events, it holds a high
place among the histories of the world. Very few historians have
combined in a larger measure the three great requisites of knowledge,
soundness of judgment, and inexorable love of truth. The growth and
modifications of doctrines and the minutiae of religious controversies
were, however, subjects in which he took little interest, and though
they could not be excluded from an ecclesiastical history, they are
dealt with only in a slight and cursory manner. Those who desire to
study in detail this side of ecclesiastical history will find other
histories much more useful. It has been said that his work is
imperfect as a book of reference, for while the great events and
personages are discussed with a fulness that leaves little to be
desired, many of the more insignificant transactions or more obscure
periods are passed over or barely noticed. Critics of different
religious schools have also complained that his mind was essentially
secular; that he had a low sense of the certainty and the importance
of dogma; that there were some classes of ecclesiastical writers who
have been deeply revered in the Church with whom he had no real
sympathy; that the spirit of criticism was stronger in his book than
the spirit of reverence; that he did not do full justice to the
spiritual and inner side of the religion he described. He looked upon
it, they said, too externally. He valued it as a moral revolution, the
introduction of new principles of virtue and new rules for individual
and social happiness. Much of this criticism would probably have been
accepted with but little qualification by Milman himself. He would
have said that what these writers complained of was in the main
inseparable from an historical as distinguished from a devotional
treatment of his subject. He would have added that no form of human
history reveals so clearly as ecclesiastical history the fallibility,
the credulity, the intolerance of the human mind, or requires more
imperatively the constant exercise of independent judgment and of
fearless and unsparing criticism, and that, if the history of the
Church is ever to be written with profit, it must be written in such a
spirit. Of his own deeper convictions he seldom spoke; but in the
concluding page of his 'Latin Christianity' there is a passage of
profound interest. Leaving it, as he says, to the future historian of
religion to say what part of the ancient dogmatic system may be
allowed to fall silently into disuse, and what transformations the
interpretation of the Sacred Writings may still undergo, he adds these
significant words:

'As it is my own confident belief that the words of Christ, and his
words alone (the primal indefeasible truths of Christianity), shall
not pass away, so I cannot presume to say that men may not attain to a
clearer, at the same time more full, comprehensive, and balanced sense
of those words, than has as yet been generally received in the
Christian world. As all else is transient and mutable, these only
eternal and universal, assuredly whatever light may be thrown on the
mental constitution of man, even on the constitution of nature and the
laws which govern the world, will be concentered so as to give a more
penetrating vision of those undying truths.... Christianity may yet
have to exercise a far wider, even if more silent and untraceable
influence, through its primary, all-pervading principles, on the
civilisation of mankind.'

Macaulay, speaking of the 'History of Latin Christianity' in his
Journal, says, 'I was more impressed than ever by the contrast between
the substance and the style: the substance is excellent; the style
very much otherwise.' Looking at it from a purely literary point of
view it had undoubtedly great merits. Milman had an admirable sense of
proportion--a rare quality in history. He was invariably lucid, and it
is easy to cull from his history many characters excellently drawn,
many pages of vivid narrative, or terse and weighty criticism. Still,
on the whole his historic style is on a lower level than that of
Macaulay, Buckle, and Froude, though it will compare, I think, not
unfavourably with that of Hallam and Grote. The points of controversy
are usually relegated to his notes, which contain a great mass of
curious learning and excellent criticism. The reader who turns to them
from works of the German school will be struck by his strong English
common-sense and grasp of facts, and his dislike of subtle far-fetched
ingenuities of explanation. He has the crowning merit of being always
readable, and his strong sane moral sense never left him. He was
probably at his best in the later volumes, when he could treat his
subject like secular history and was free from the embarrassing
theological difficulties of the earlier portion, and he is especially
admirable in those chapters which give scope to his wide literary and
artistic sympathies. He was an excellent Italian scholar and keenly
sensible of the beauties of Italian literature, and his love of the
ancient classics never left him. There was something at once
characteristic and amusing in the delight which he again and again
expressed, after the termination of his History, at being able to
return to them after spending so many years in reading bad Latin and
Greek. In taste and character he was indeed pre-eminently a man of
letters, and as such he ranks in the first line among his
contemporaries.

The outburst of indignation that in some quarters had greeted the
first appearance of the 'History of the Jews' was not repeated when
that work was republished in an enlarged form. Nor does it appear to
have arisen on the appearance of the two later histories. Newman
reviewed the 'History of Early Christianity' at great length, speaking
with much personal respect of the writer, though he was naturally
extremely hostile to its spirit. The difference between the High
Church sentiment and the mind of Milman was indeed organic. Milman's
own type of thought was formed before the Tractarian movement had
begun; the sacerdotal spirit was thoroughly alien to him, and his
profound study of ecclesiastical history had certainly not tended to
attract him to it. He fully recognised both the abilities and the
piety of Newman, and he described his secession as perhaps the
greatest loss the Church of England had experienced since the
Reformation; but he disliked his opinions, he profoundly distrusted
the whole character of his mind and reasonings, and he early foresaw
that he could never find a permanent resting-place in the English
Church. In the posthumous volume of Essays there will be found a full
and most searching examination of Newman's 'Essay on Development,' in
which these points of difference are clearly shown. For Keble, Milman
entertained warmer feelings. They were contemporaries, and at one time
most intimate friends. In the field of sacred poetry they had been
fellow-labourers. Keble had succeeded Milman as professor of poetry,
and Milman had been one of the few persons who had read the 'Christian
Year' in manuscript. When, after Keble's death, a committee was
appointed to erect a memorial to his memory, Milman was much hurt at
finding that it was determined to give it a distinctly Tractarian
character, and that his own name was deliberately excluded. In
Milman's last years the Oxford movement had begun to assume its
ritualistic form, and questions of vestments and ceremonies and
candles came to the forefront. With all this Milman had no sympathy.
'After the drama,' he said of it, 'the melodrama!'

It was a remarkable coincidence that for some years the two deaneries
of London were both held by brilliant men of letters and by men with
the strongest theological sympathy. A feeling of warm personal
affection united Milman and Stanley, and there was something
peculiarly touching in the almost filial attitude which Stanley
assumed towards his older colleague. In one point, however, they
differed greatly. Stanley was a keen fighter. He threw himself into
the forefront of ecclesiastical controversies, and was never seen to
greater advantage than when leading a small minority, defying
inveterate prejudice, defending an unpopular cause. Milman could
seldom be tempted to follow his example. He pleaded old age and
declining strength, but, in truth, though he never flinched from the
avowal of his own opinions, he had a deep and increasing distaste for
religious controversies and Church politics. He was rarely seen in
Convocation, and he always regarded its revival as a misfortune. He
proposed, however, in it a petition for the discontinuance of the use
of the State services commemorating the martyrdom of Charles I., the
restoration of Charles II., the discovery of the gunpowder plot, and
the Revolution of 1688; and Parliament soon after adopted his view. He
also sat on the Royal Commission in 1864 for considering the subject
of clerical subscription. He took on this occasion a characteristic
line, advocating a complete abolition of the subscription of the
Articles, and desiring that the sole test of membership of the Church
should be the acceptance of the Liturgy and the Creeds. In 1865 he
received an invitation, which greatly gratified him, to preach before
the University of Oxford the annual sermon on Hebrew prophecy. The
sermon was delivered in the pulpit of St. Mary's, where many years
before he had been so vehemently condemned for views on the same
subject, no one of which, as he truly said, he had either recanted or
modified. His sermon was afterwards printed, and would form a worthy
chapter of his 'History of the Jews.' In the Colenso controversy he
had no great sympathy with either side. Many of Bishop Colenso's
arguments appeared to him crude or exaggerated, and he dissented from
many of his conclusions, but he considered that he had been treated
with gross injustice and intolerance, and he accordingly subscribed to
his defence fund. For the rest, he confined his ecclesiastical life as
much as possible to his own cathedral, where he presided over the
State funeral of the Duke of Wellington, and where he introduced the
custom of throwing open the nave to evening services. His last and
unfinished work was his 'Annals of St. Paul's,' investigating its
history and portraying with his old learning and with much of his old
felicity the lives of his predecessors.

It was however in secular literary society that he was most fitted to
shine, and there he passed many of his happiest hours. The usual
honours of a distinguished man of letters clustered thickly around
him. He was a trustee of the British Museum; an honorary member of the
Royal Academy; a correspondent of the French Institute. He was also a
member of 'The Club'--the small dining-club which was founded in 1764
by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, and which since then has
included in its fortnightly dinners the great majority of those
Englishmen who in many walks of life have been most distinguished by
their genius or their accomplishments. He was elected to it in 1836,
three years before Macaulay, and he became one of its most constant
attendants. In 1841 'The Club' made him its treasurer, and he held
that position for twenty-three years, and presided over the centenary
dinner in 1864. He was also an original member of the Philobiblion
Society, which has brought together many curious and hitherto unknown
documents, and he wrote for it a short paper on Michael Scott the
Wizard, who, as he showed, had been once offered the Archbishopric of
Cashel. He was never a keen politician, but he was intimate with a
long succession of leading statesmen, and he contributed to Sir
Cornewall Lewis's 'Administrations of Great Britain' a full and
valuable letter on the relations of Pitt and Addington, which was
largely based on his own recollections of the latter statesman.

London society in the middle of the nineteenth century was much
smaller and less mixed than at present, and there was then a
distinctively literary or at least intellectual society which can now
hardly be said to exist. The most eminent men of letters came more
frequently together. Criticism was in fewer and perhaps stronger
hands, and was to a larger extent representative of the opinions
expressed in such social gatherings. In this kind of society Milman
was long a foremost figure. He had all the gifts that fit men for
it--not only brilliancy, knowledge, and versatility, but also
unfailing tact, a rare charm of courtesy, a singularly wide tolerance.
He was quick and generous in recognising rising talent, and he had
that sympathetic touch which seldom failed to elicit what was best in
those with whom he came in contact. Few men possessed more eminently
the genius of friendship--the power of attaching others--the power of
attaching himself to others. In the long list of his intimate friends
Macaulay, Sir Charles Lyell, and Sir George Cornewall Lewis were
conspicuous. Like most men of this type, he found the multiplying
gaps around him the chief trial of old age. Not long before he died
there was an exhibition of contemporary portraits, but though Milman
went to it he could not go through it. 'When I found myself,' he said,
'surrounded by the likenesses--often the miserable likenesses--of so
many I had known and loved, it was more than I could bear.'

An admirable portrait by Watts which is now in the National Portrait
Gallery will recall to those who knew him his appearance in old
age--his strong masculine features beaming with intelligence, his
grand shaggy brows, his bright and penetrating eyes. An illness
affecting the spine had bowed him nearly double, and there are still
those who will remember how his bent figure seemed projected, almost
like a bird in its flight, across the dinner-table, while his eager
brilliant talk delighted and fascinated his hearers. In his last years
increasing deafness obliged him to narrow the circle of his social
life, but he retained to the end all the vividness of his mind and
sympathies, and when at length death came in his seventy-eighth year,
it found him in the midst of unfinished work. His life was not of a
kind to win wide popularity and to give him a conspicuous place among
the great masses of his nation, but few English clergymen of his
generation made so deep an impression on those who came in contact
with them or have left works of such enduring value behind them.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] _Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's._ A Biographical
Sketch by his son, Arthur Milman, M.A., LL.D.

[49] Laurence's _Life of Sir A. Sullivan_, p. 310.

[50] Smiles' _Memoirs of John Murray_, ii. p. 300.

QUEEN VICTORIA AS A MORAL FORCE

At a time when the unprecedented increase of gigantic and rapidly
acquired fortunes has deeply infected both English and American
society with the characteristic vices of a Plutocracy, the profound
feeling of sorrow and admiration elicited by the death of Queen
Victoria is an encouraging sign. It shows that the vulgar ideals, the
false moral measurements, the feverish social ambitions, the love of
the ostentatious and the factitious, and the disdain for simple
habits, pleasures, and characters so apparent in certain conspicuous
sections of society, have not yet blunted the moral sense or perverted
the moral perceptions of the great masses on either side of the
Atlantic. To this type, indeed, we could scarcely find a more complete
antithesis than in the life and character of the great Queen who has
passed away. Nothing more deeply impressed all who came in contact
with her than the essential simplicity and genuineness of her nature.

She was a great ruler, but she was also to the last a true, kindly,
simple-minded woman, retaining with undiminished intensity all the
warmth of a most affectionate nature, all the soundness of a most
excellent judgment. Brought up from childhood in the artificial
atmosphere of a Court, called while still a girl to the isolation of a
throne; deprived, when her reign had yet forty years to run, of the
support and counsel of her husband, she might well have been pardoned
if she often found herself out of touch with large sections of her
people, and had viewed life through a false medium or in partial
aspects. Yet Lord Salisbury probably in no degree exaggerated when he
said that if he wished to ascertain the feelings and opinions of the
English people, and especially of the English middle classes, he knew
no truer or more enlightening judgment than that of the Queen. She
thought with them and she felt with them; she shared their ambitions;
she knew by a kind of intuitive instinct the course of their
judgments; she sympathised deeply with their trials and their sorrows.

She could hardly be called a brilliant woman. It is difficult indeed
to judge the full social capacities of anyone who lives under the
constant restraints of a royal position, but I do not think that in
any sphere of life the Queen would have been regarded as a woman of
striking wit, or originality, or even commanding power. The qualities
that made her so successful in her high calling were of another kind:
supreme good sense; a tact in dealing with men and circumstances so
unfailing that it almost amounted to genius; an indefatigable industry
which never flagged from early youth till extreme old age; a sense of
duty so steady and so strong that it governed all her actions and
pleasures, and saved her not only from the grosser and more common
temptations of an exalted position, but also in a most unusual degree
from the subtle and often half-concealed deflecting influences that
spring from ambition or resentment, from personal predilections and
personal dislikes. It was these qualities, combined with her
unrivalled experience of affairs, and strengthened by long and
constant intercourse with the foremost English statesmen of two
generations, that made her what she undoubtedly was--a perfect model
of a constitutional Sovereign.

The position of a Sovereign under a parliamentary government like ours
is a singular and difficult one. There was a school of politicians who
were much more prominent in the last generation than in the present
one, who regarded the Sovereign, in political life at least, as little
more than a figure-head or a cipher, absolved from all responsibility,
but also divested of all power, and fulfilling functions in the
Constitution which are little more than mechanical. This view of the
unimportance of the Monarchy will now be held by few really
intelligent men. Those take but a false and narrow view of human
affairs who fail to realise the part which sentiment and enthusiasm
play in the government of men; and no one who knows England will
question that the throne is the centre of a great strength of personal
attachment which is wholly different from any attachment to a party or
a parliament.

In India and the Colonies this is still more the case. It is not the
British Parliament or the British Cabinet that there forms the centre
of unity or excites genuine attachment. The Crown is the main link
binding the different States to one another, and the pervading
sentiment of a common loyalty unites them in one great and living
whole. In foreign politics it cannot be a matter of indifference that
a Sovereign is closely related to nearly all the greatest rulers in
the world, and in frequent, intimate, unconstrained correspondence
with them. This is a kind of influence which no Minister, however
powerful, can exercise, and it was possessed by Queen Victoria
probably to a greater degree than by any Sovereign on record, for
there has scarcely ever been one who included among her relations so
many of the Sovereigns of the world. Future historians will no doubt
have ample means of judging how frequently and how judiciously it was
employed in assuaging differences and promoting European peace. All
the great offices in Church and State, all the great distributions of
honours were submitted to her; and though in a large number of cases
this patronage is purely Ministerial or professional, there are many
cases in which the Sovereign had a real voice, and a strong objection
on her part was usually attended to. In Church patronage and in the
distribution of honours she is known to have taken a great interest,
and to have exercised a considerable influence.

The one subject on which the Queen was not always in harmony with her
people was that of foreign politics. She and the Prince Consort took a
keen interest in them, and during his lifetime she followed very
implicitly his guidance. The strong German sympathies she imbued from
her own marriage were much intensified by the marriages of her
children, and especially by that of her eldest daughter to the heir of
the Prussian throne. The influence also of Stockmar, who was the
closest adviser of her early married life, was not wholly for good,
and the theory which the Prince held that the direction of foreign
affairs is in a peculiar degree under the care of the Sovereign, and
that the Prince, her husband, should be regarded as 'her permanent
Minister,' created during many years much friction. In a
constitutional country, where the responsibility of affairs rests
wholly on the Minister, who is doubly responsible to the Cabinet and
to the Parliament, such a theory can only be maintained with great
qualifications.

On the other hand, the government of the country was carried on in the
name of the Queen. Foreign despatches were addressed to her and could
only be answered with her sanction. The right of the English
Sovereigns to be present at the Cabinet Councils of their Ministers
was abdicated when George I. came to the throne, but every important
departure in policy was submitted to the Queen and required her
assent. The testimony of Ministers of all shades of policy supports
the belief that this was no idle form. The Queen, though always open
to argument and tolerant of contradiction, had her own decided
opinions; she exercised her undoubted right of expressing and
defending them, and even apart from her royal position, her great
experience and her singular clearness and rectitude of judgment made
her opinion well worth listening to.

The claim put forward by the Queen in her famous memorandum of August
1850, can, I think, hardly be pronounced excessive. She demanded only
that before a line of policy was adopted and brought before her she
should be distinctly informed of the facts of the case and of the
motives that inspired it; that when she had given her sanction to a
measure it should not be arbitrarily altered or modified by the
Minister; that she must be kept acquainted with all important
communications between foreign Ministers and her own Foreign
Secretary, and that the drafts of foreign despatches must be sent to
her for her approval in sufficient time for her to make herself
acquainted with them. She complained that Lord Palmerston was
accustomed to send despatches to the Continent without submitting
them, in their last revise, to the Sovereign; that in one case he
retained without her knowledge a passage which the Prince Consort had
deleted; that he paid little or no attention to the numerous memoranda
which were drawn up by the Prince for his instruction; that he of his
own will and without any consultation committed his Government, in a
conversation with the French Ambassador, to an approbation of the
_coup d'etat_ of Napoleon III. If the general line of his policy had
been in accordance with the royal wishes, indiscretions of detail
could probably have been overlooked, but the Queen and Prince were
both undoubtedly on many occasions--and especially in 1848 and
1849--strongly opposed to the policy of Lord Palmerston. In the
interests of peace they objected to the remarkably provocative
character of his despatches, which excited a degree of animosity and
resentment among the Governments of the Continent that has rarely been
paralleled--on two, if not three, occasions it brought England into
grave danger of a war with France--and which aroused a very widespread
indignation among statesmen of his own party at home.

The widely different tone which was adopted by Lord Clarendon and Lord
Granville, the open breach between Palmerston and Lord John Russell on
account of the way in which the former conducted his foreign policy
without consultation with the Cabinet, and the refusal of Lord Grey,
in a most critical moment, to take office in a Government in which
Lord Palmerston held the seals of the Foreign Office, show how fully
in this respect the sentiments of the Queen accorded with those of
many of Lord Palmerston's own colleagues. But in addition to mere
questions of manner and procedure, there was much in the substance of
the policy of Palmerston to which the Queen objected. Her dislike to
the Revolutionary element on the Continent, which Lord Palmerston
either encouraged or viewed with indifference, her sympathy with the
old governments and dynasties, that were so gravely shaken in the year
of the Revolution, were very marked. In the disputes between Germany
and Denmark on the Schleswig-Holstein question her sympathies, unlike
those of her people, were decidedly with Germany, and although she was
fully sensible of the misgovernment of some of the Italian States, she
was not favourable to that cause of Italian unity which Lord John
Russell and Lord Palmerston so strenuously upheld. Her nature, which
was very frank, made it impossible for her, even if she desired it, to
conceal her opinions, and she devoted much time and pains to making
herself acquainted with the details of every question as it arose. She
made it a rule to sign no paper that she had not read. She did not
hesitate fully to apprise her Ministers of her views when they
differed from their own, and she enforced her views by argument and
remonstrance. She more than once drew up memoranda of her dissent from
the opinions of her Foreign Minister, and insisted on their being
brought before the Cabinet for consideration. In the formation of a
new Ministry she more than once exercised her power of deciding to
whom the succession of the first places should be offered. After an
adverse vote of the House of Commons, she considered herself fully
authorised to decide whether she would accept the resignation of a
Minister or submit the issue to the test of a dissolution, and there
were occasions on which she remonstrated with her Ministers on their
too ready determination to resign.

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