STUBBS'S LECTURES ON MEDDEVAL AND MODERN HISTORY,

IF the historians of the future do not improve upon the methods of their predecessors, it will not be for lack of counsellors. A few weeks ago we reviewed in these columns Mr. Freeman's Methods of Historic Study; we have now before us the lectures delivered from the same chair by the Bishop of Chester. They were delivered, as the author repeatedly informs us with much playful humour, not willingly, but "under statutory obligation ;" and he hints that a like unwillingness was shown to attend them. Perhaps we are not to take quite seriously the author's description of his public lectures as "ceremonies of humilia- tion," intended to prevent the Professor from thinking of himself more highly than he ought to think, or of the hurt he felt in having to deliver lectures to two or three listless men, while tutors' classes were well attended ; but we must confess our- selves unable to spare any sympathy for the Professor, the list- less bearers, or the absentees. A Professor should be willing as well as able to deliver lectures, and public lectures, on the sub- ject of his chair. No reader of these lectures will dispute Dr. Stubbs's ability ; and if the exigencies of examinations sent the students into the class of the Junior Assistant Tutor instead of into the class of a Professor of European fame, we can only regret that the power of examinations is so great, and the love of learning so small. The obnoxious statute which compelled Dr. Stubbs to produce two public lectures twice a year is now a thing of the past ; but the readers of his lectures will congratu- late themselves that it existed during his incumbency, for we owe to it lectures which will certainly find a wider and more appreciative audience than they did on their first delivery.

The first lecture was inaugural, and was delivered in the year 1867. It was said of it at the time by a not unfriendly critic, that it showed that the new Professor would take a some- what clerical view of history,—a very inaccurate description of Dr. Stubbs's usual treatment of history, but intelligible enough as a criticism of this lecture, which contains an explicit denial of

• Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern Hisbry. Delivered at Oxford. under Statutory Obligation, in the years 1867.1881. By William Stubbs, D.D. Oxford : Clarendon Prese. 1886.

Mr. Freeman's favourite doctrine of the unity of history, and separates antiquity from modern times by an almost impassable gulf. According to Dr. Stubbs, when we deal with the history of Greece and Rome, we have to do with a dead world; while in medimval and modern history we come into contact with a world connected by a continuity of life with our own for there is hardly a point even in the earliest Middle Ages which can be touched without awakening some chord in the present. He ascribes the difference to the presence of the Church during the medimval and modern periods. Is not this a one-sided view ? The presence of the Church does unquestionably form a strong bond of sympathy, although mediaeval religion differed greatly from modern faiths; bat although religiously separated from antiquity, we are united to it by the best part of our in- tellectual civilisation. Classicism has exercised as great an influence upon modern life as media3valism, and there have been periods in modern European history—the eighteenth century, for example—during which antique thought and traditions were distinctly the dominating influences. Even at present it may be doubted whether a cultivated modern man—an Oxford Pro- fessor, say—might not find that he had more in common with Cicero or Marcus Aurelius than with a medimval monk. In the first, and also in the second lecture, Dr. Stubbs describes his own attitude to his work. He proposed, he said, to accept the facts that men are born with constitutional inclinations, some to order and some to change, and that about an equal number of good and bad, wise and un- wise, are to be found in both parties. It was not his inten- tion to attempt to alter the proportion, but simply to use his office as a teacher of historical facts, and of the right way of using them. Not to make Whigs Tories, or Tories Whigs, but to make both Whigs and Tories good and intelligent, was his object. While neutral in the political debate of history, he did not propose to be neutral in its moral debates ; and he hoped to do equal justice to the good and true men of all parties, and to encourage his hearers to admire Fairfax, as well as Strafford. There is room for historians who assume a neutral attitude towards political conflicts, and Dr. Stubbs has given in his own person an admirable example of a historian equally trusted by both parties ; but it is not the only attitude which a historian may legitimately take up. The parties of order and change have always existed, and it is for the advantage of society that they should continue to exist ; but in many cases the one party was clearly wrong and the other right ; and a historian is not to be debarred from showing his sympathy with the cause which was for the time that of righteousness and reason, against injustice and stupidity, although he should seek to do justice to the good men who were unfortunately on the wrong side. We have nothing but praise for Dr. Stabbes earnest recognition of the supremacy of moral principle, and we fully sympathise with his declaration that in national as in individual life, success is certain to the pure and true ; while success to falsehood, corrup- tion, and aggression, is only the prelude to a greater and more irremediable fall. It is true that the adherents of this creed in history, as in life, have more often to walk by faith than by sight ; but it may be none the less true on that account.

Lecture V. deserves special attention on account of the dis- cerning observations which it contains on the art of history. This art, according to the lecturer, is not one, but manifold. If a historian desires to produce a historical statue or group of statuary, he must look at his subject all round, form a complete idea of the object he wishes to reproduce, and while aiming at statuesque unity and perfection, he must make truth and reality his first object. The method is specially suitable for historical bio- graphy. If the object is to produce a historical picture, the subjects must be presented with background and foreground, scenery and perspective. How they looked rather than what they were, or how they came to be what they were, is the picturesque writer's principal object. The picturesque writing of history is extremely attractive, and has its value; but it is apt to corrupt and destroy the more valuable features of painstaking and conscientious truthfulness. The third and highest form of historic art borrows its analogue from another art, and may be called dramatic, as it attempts to read not only character and situation, but plot. It has all the unity of the statuesque, the vividness of the picturesque, and a continuity of life and argument that are its own. It is pleasant to find Dr. Stubbs, who is pre-eminently a man of research, dwelling with such emphasis upon the art of history, for true history can never dispense with the Muse. The historians of the future will possess great advantages over their predecessors in the mass of well-arranged material at their disposal ; but they must not forget that the interest of history may be destroyed more surely by the introduction of superfluous details than by jejuneness. Never was it more needful to remember the maxim of the great master of common-sense, Voltaire, who once wrote :—" Details which lead to nothing are

in history what baggage is to an army, impedimenta ; for we must look at things in large, for the very reason that the human mind is small and sinks under the weight of nzinutice."

It is not easy to give an adequate idea of the lectures devoted to special periods, which are full of curious learning and contain admirable morsels of criticism. There are two lectures on "Learn- ing and Literature at the Court of Henry II.," in which will be found an explanation of the disappointing character of the epistolary correspondence of the Middle Ages, as well as a charming fragment from a letter of John of Salisbury, one of

Becket's correspondents, in which the writer gives an account of his experience on the "Mount of Jove," the Great St. Bernard,— an experience which drew from him the prayer : "Lord, restore

me to my brethren, that 1 may tell them, that they come not into this place of torment."

There is an interesting lecture on the little-known history of the medixval Kingdoms of Cyprus and Armenia, which con- tains an eloquent, although to our thinking a oue-sided, vindi- cation of the Crusades, as the first great effort of mediawal life to go beyond the pursuit of selfish and isolated ambitions. There are also lectures on the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII.; and the description given of the Parliament of the former monarch, whose demands for lamp-sums and taxes were made by means of Scripture texts and Latin sermons, suggests the idea that an English Member of Parliament of our day would probably have found himself less at home in it than in the Roman Senate.

We cannot part with the book without calling attention to some of its historical portraits. Very brief they mostly are, but they show all the cunning of hand which the writer has displayed on larger canvas. Henry IV. of France is happily described as a man of ideas, a man of sentiment, a man of force ; not much of law and right. The Emperor Frederick III.

is described as a splendid old gipsy, sitting in his study elaborating a horoscope with destiny of universal dominion for his grandchildren,—a dreamer about whom the strange thing is that so many of his dreams came true. There is a companion picture of the Emperor Maximilian, "the most delightfully un- principled hero of the age of transition," who never forfeits our affection, although he never merits respect. We have also a reading of the much-debated character of our own Henry VIII. His character is illustrated, by an expression which George IV. was in the habit of using when writing to his Ministers. "If I were an individual," wrote the accomplished

King," I won]. I do so-and-so." Henry VIII. was never an in- dividual. What would have been theft in another, was no theft

in him ; all property is the King's, and he can take it, and he takes it ; all that proceeds from his mouth is law ; the King's heart is in the hand of the Lord, therefore all that comes from the King's heart is the Lord's doing. The remarkable thing, however, as Dr. Stubbs says, is not the idea, which George IV. may have had as strongly as Henry VII., but the force of character which made Warham, More, Crammer, Gardiner, and Cromwell the faithful administrators of the idea. There is a carefully limned portrait of Henry VII., which throws some light upon the character of that great but somewhat un- interesting monarch. After admitting the immense progress which England made during his long reign, and the debt which it owed to his unfailing sagacity, Dr. Stubbs writes as follows of his personal character :—

"If we look rather on the moral of the reign, we may somewhat modify our opinion. We look in vain for anything that would consti- tute him a hero or a benefactor. We End no great fault, except his avarice ; but even that cannot be regarded as the vulgar appetite for hoarding ; and avarice in a king who keeps within the letter of the law and the constitution is perhaps really, and certainly in a land which had suffered from royal prodigality for three centuries, a less fault than extravagance. Even avarice is not always fatal to the heroic character, if there be the rudiments of the true heroic char- acter there at all. Henry VII. was a virtuous man, sober, temperate, and chaste, withstanding great temptations to vice and an abundant store of loose example. His household was kept frugally and severely; all his advisers, except Etnpson and Dudley, were men of character unstained, if not energetic for good. For one better or greater king, there are in European history fifty smaller and worse. But atill, is there any of that self-denying devotion which gives itself for the people ? Is there any true conception of the duty of a shepherd of the host ? Is there any impulsive well-doing ? I see none. I see a cold, steady, strongly-purposed man, patient, secret, circumspect ; with not many scruples, yet not regardless of men's opinions ; very clear-sighted, very willing to wait for reconciliation where there is a chance, and not hasty where vengeance is the only course, but ruthless where his own purpose is directly endangered, and sparing neither friend nor foe where he is not strong eaough to rely on himself alone. It may have been a nature too cold to care for popular love, or too self- contained to condescend to court it ; there is no evidence that Henry VII. ever dreamed of winning it. I said in the former lecture there is nothing attractive about him, with all his virtues and all the great consequences of his work. There is surely always something attrac- tive about either greatness or goodness, unless they fall in an age BO lOBB to itself as to be unable to appreciate either. And the opening century, whilst to some extent it shared the king's character, was scarcely so lost as that."

The last statutory lecture has, as the author says, something of the character of an apologia and a symposium. He reviews his work in Oxford with modest dignity, and calls to mind many friends and fellow-workers, living and dead, whose presence and help had cheered his life. With delightful frankness and good humour, he confesses his failings as an Oxford Professor. Some of them were serious, especially his admitted inability to recon- cile himself with smoking, late hours, dinner parties, Sunday breakfasts, and University sermons. We can cordially com- mend the statutory public lectures to our readers. They will find them learned and thoughtful, as was to be expected ; and they will also find them amusing, which was perhaps less to be expected.