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

Mere antiquarianism, Dr Arnold justly observes, is calculated to contract and enfeeble the understanding. It is a pedantic love of detail, with an indifference to the result, for which alone it can be considered valuable. It is the mistake, into which men are perpetually falling, of the means for the end. There are people to whom the tragedies of Sophocles are less precious than the Scholiast on Lycophron, and who prize the speeches of Demosthenes chiefly because they may fling light on the dress of an Athenian citizen. The same tendency discovers itself in other pursuits. Oxen are fattened into plethoras to encourage agriculture, and men of station dress like grooms, and bet like blacklegs, to keep up the breed of horses. It is true that such evils will happen when agriculture is encouraged, and a valuable breed of horses cherished; but they are the consequences, not the cause of such a state of things. So the disciples of the old philosophers drank hemlock to acquire pallid countenances—but they are as far from obtaining the wisdom of their masters by this adventitious resemblance, as the antiquarian is from the historian. To write well about the past, we must have a vigorous and lively perception of the present. This, says Dr Arnold, is the merit of Mitford. It is certainly the only one he possesses; a person more totally unqualified for writing history at all—to say nothing of the history of Greece—it is difficult for us, aided as our imagination may be by the works of our modern writers, to conceive. But Raleigh, whom he quotes afterwards, is indeed a striking instance of that combination of actual experience with speculative knowledge which all should aim at, but which it seldom happens that one man in a generation is fortunate enough to obtain.

From the sixteenth century, the writers of history begin to assume a different character from that of their predecessors. During the middle ages, the elements of society were fewer and less diversified. Before that time the people were nothing. Popes, emperors, kings, nobles, bishops, knights, are the only materials about which the writer of history cared to know or enquire. Perhaps some exception to this rule might be found in the historians of the free towns of Italy; but they are few and insignificant. After that period, not only did the classes of society increase, but every class was modified by more varieties of individual life. Even within the last century, the science of political economy has given a new colouring to the thoughts and actions of large communities, as the different opinions held by its votaries have multiplied them into distinct and various classes. Modern historians, therefore, may be divided into two classes; the one describing a state of society in which the elements are few; the other the times in which they were more numerous. As a specimen of the first order, he selects Bede. Bede was born in 674, fifty years after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca. He died in 755, two or three years after the victory of Charles Martel over the Saracens. His ecclesiastical history, in five books, describes the period from Augustine's arrival in Kent, 597.

Dr Arnold's dissertation on Bede involves him in the discussion of a question on which much skill and ability have been exercised. We allude to the question of miracles. "The question," says he, "in Bede takes this form—What credit is to be attached to the frequent stories of miracles or wonders which occur in his narrative?" He seizes at once upon the difficulty, without compromise or evasion. He makes a distinction between a wonder and a miracle: "to say that all recorded wonders are false, from those recorded by Herodotus to the latest reports of animal magnetism, would be a boldness of assertion wholly unjustifiable." At the same time he thinks the character of Bede, added to the religious difficulty, may incline us to limit miracles to the earliest times of Christianity, and refuse our belief to all which are reported by the historians of subsequent centuries. He then proceeds to consider the questions which suggest themselves when we read Matthew Paris, or still more, any of the French, German, or Italian historians of the same period:—

"The thirteenth century contains in it, at its beginning, the most splendid period of the Papacy, the time of Innocent the Third; its end coincides with that great struggle between Boniface the Eighth and Philip the Fair, which marks the first stage of its decline. It contains the reign of Frederick the Second, and his long contest with the popes in Italy; the foundation of the orders of friars, Dominican and Franciscan; the last period of the crusades, and the age of the greatest glory of the schoolmen. Thus, full of matters of interest as it is, it will yet be found that all its interest is more or less connected with two great questions concerning the church; namely, the power of the priesthood in matters of government and in matters of faith; the merits of the contest between the Papacy and the kings of Europe; the nature and character of that influence over men's minds which affected the whole philosophy of the period, the whole intellectual condition of the Christian world."—P. 138.

The pretensions and corruptions of the Church are undoubtedly the chief object to which, at this period, the attention of the reader must be attracted. "Is the church system of Innocent III. in faith or government the system of the New Testament?" Is the difference between them inconsiderable, such as may be accounted for by the natural progress of society, or does the rent extend to the foundation? "The first century," says Dr Arnold, "is to determine our judgment of the second and of all subsequent centuries. It will not do to assume that the judgment must be interpreted by the very practices and opinions, the merits of which it has to try." As a specimen of the chroniclers, he selects Philip de Comines, almost the last great writer of his class. In him is exemplified one of the peculiar distinctions of attaching to modern history the importance of attending to genealogies.

"For instance, Comines records the marriage of Mary, duchess of Burgundy, daughter and sole heiress of Charles the Bold, with Maximilian, archduke of Austria. This marriage, conveying all the dominions of Burgundy to Maximilian and his heirs, established a great independent sovereign on the frontiers of France, giving to him on the north, not only the present kingdoms of Holland and Belgium, but large portions of what is now French territory, the old provinces of Artois and French Flanders, French Hainault and French Luxemburg; while on the east it gave him Franche Comté, thus yielding him a footing within the Jura, on the very banks of the Saône. Thence ensued in after ages, when the Spanish branch of the house of Austria had inherited this part of its dominions—the long contests which deluged the Netherlands with blood, the campaigns of King William and Luxembourg, the nine years of efforts, no less skilful than valiant, in which Marlborough broke his way through the fortresses of the iron frontier. Again, when Spain became in a manner French by the accession of the House of Bourbon, the Netherlands reverted once more to Austria itself; and from thence the powers of Europe advanced, almost in our own days, to assail France as a republic; and on this ground, on the plains of Fleurus, was won the first of those great victories which, for nearly twenty years, carried the French standards triumphantly over Europe. Thus the marriage recorded by Comines has been working busily down to our very own times: it is only since the settlement of 1814, and that more recent one of 1830, that the Netherlands have ceased to be effected by the union of Charles the Bold's daughter with Maximilian of Austria"—P. 148.

Again, in order to understand the contest which Philip de Comines records between a Frenchman and a Spaniard for the crown of Naples, we must go back to the dark and bloody page in the annals of the thirteenth century, which relates the extinction of the last heir of the great Swabian race of Hohenstauffen by Charles of Anjou, the fit and unrelenting instrument of Papal hatred—the dreadful expiation of that great crime by the Sicilian Vespers, the establishment of the House of Anjou in Sicily, the crimes and misfortunes of Queen Joanna, the new contest occasioned by her adoption—all these events must be known to him who would understand the expedition of Charles VIII. The following passage is an admirable description of the reasons which lend to the pages of Philip de Comines a deep and melancholy interest:—

"The Memoirs of Philip de Comines terminate about twenty years before the Reformation, six years after the first voyage of Columbus. They relate, then, to a tranquil period immediately preceding a period of extraordinary movement; to the last stage of an old state of things, now on the point of passing away. Such periods, the lull before the burst of the hurricane, the almost oppressive stillness which announces the eruption, or, to use Campbell's beautiful image—

'The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below,'—

are always, I think, full of a very deep interest. But it is not from the mere force of contrast with the times that follow, nor yet from the solemnity which all things wear when their dissolution is fast approaching—the interest has yet another source; our knowledge, namely, that in that tranquil period lay the germs of the great changes following, taking their shape for good or for evil, and sometimes irreversibly, while all wore an outside of unconsciousness. We, enlightened by experience, are impatient of this deadly slumber; we wish in vain that the age could have been awakened to a sense of its condition, and taught the infinite preciousness of the passing hour. And as, when a man has been cut off by sudden death, we are curious to know whether his previous words or behaviour indicated any sense of his coming fate, so we examine the records of a state of things just expiring, anxious to observe whether, in any point, there may be discerned an anticipation of the great future, or whether all was blindness and insensibility. In this respect, Comines' Memoirs are striking from their perfect unconsciousness: the knell of the middle ages had been already sounded, yet Comines has no other notions than such as they had tended to foster; he describes their events, their characters, their relations, as if they were to continue for centuries. His remarks are such as the simplest form of human affairs gives birth to; he laments the instability of earthly fortune, as Homer notes our common mortality, or in the tone of that beautiful dialogue between Solon and Crœsus, when the philosopher assured the king, that to be rich was not necessarily to be happy. But, resembling Herodotus in his simple morality, he is utterly unlike him in another point; for whilst Herodotus speaks freely and honestly of all men, without respect of persons, Philip de Comines praises his master Louis the Eleventh as one of the best of princes, although he witnessed not only the crimes of his life, but the miserable fears and suspicions of his latter end, and has even faithfully recorded them. In this respect Philip de Comines is in no respect superior to Froissart, with whom the crimes committed by his knights and great lords never interfere with his general eulogies of them: the habit of deference and respect was too strong to be broken, and the facts which he himself relates to their discredit, appear to have produced on his mind no impression."

We now enter upon a period which may be called the modern part of modern history, the more complicated period, in contradistinction to the more simple state of things which, up to this moment, has occupied the student's attention. It is impossible to read, without deep regret, the passage in which Dr Arnold speaks of his intention—"if life and health be spared him, to enter into minute details; selecting some one country as the principal subject of his enquiries, and illustrating the lessons of history for the most part from its particular experience."

He proceeds, however, to the performance of the task immediately before him. After stating that the great object, the τελειοτατον τελος, of history is that which most nearly touches the inner life of civilized man, he pauses for a while at the threshold before he enters into the sanctuary, and undoubtedly some external knowledge is requisite before we penetrate into its recesses: we want some dwelling-place, as it were, for the mind, some local habitation in which our ideas may be arranged, some topics that may be firmly grasped by the memory, and on which the understanding may confidently rest; and thus it is that geography, even with a view to other purposes, must engross, in the first instance, a considerable share of our attention. The sense in which Dr Arnold understands a knowledge of geography, is explained in the following luminous and instructive commentary:—

"I said that geography held out one hand to geology and physiology, while she held out the other to history. In fact, geology and physiology themselves are closely connected with history. For instance, what lies at the bottom of that question which is now being discussed every where, the question of the corn-laws, but the geological fact that England is more richly supplied with coal-mines than any other country in the world? what has given a peculiar interest to our relations with China, but the physiological fact, that the tea-plant, which is become so necessary to our daily life, has been cultivated with equal success in no other climate or country? what is it which threatens the permanence of the union between the northern and southern states of the American confederacy, but the physiological fact, that the soil and climate of the southern states render them essentially agricultural, while those of the northern states, combined with their geographical advantages as to sea-ports, dispose them no less naturally to be manufacturing and commercial? The whole character of a nation may be influenced by its geology and physical geography. But for the sake of its mere beauty and liveliness, if there were no other consideration, it would be worth our while to acquire this richer view of geography. Conceive only the difference between a ground-plan and a picture. The mere plan geography of Italy gives us its shape, as I have observed, and the position of its towns; to these it may add a semicircle of mountains round the northern boundary to represent the Alps, and another long line stretching down the middle of the country to represent the Apennines. But let us carry on this a little further, and give life and meaning and harmony to what is at present at once lifeless and confused. Observe, in the first place, how the Apennine line, beginning from the southern extremity of the Alps, runs across Italy to the very edge of the Adriatic, and thus separates naturally the Italy proper of the Romans, from Cisalpine Gaul. Observe again, how the Alps, after running north and south, where they divide Italy from France, turn then away to the eastward, running almost parallel to the Apennines, till they too touch the head of the Adriatic, on the confines of Istria. Thus between these two lines of mountains there is enclosed one great basin or plain; enclosed on three sides by mountains, open only on the east to the sea. Observe how widely it spreads itself out, and then see how well it is watered. One great river flows through it in its whole extent, and this is fed by streams almost unnumbered, descending towards it on either side, from the Alps on the one side, and from the Apennines on the other. Who can wonder that this large and rich and well-watered plain should be filled with flourishing cities, or that it should have been contended for so often by successive invaders? Then descending into Italy proper, we find the complexity of its geography quite in accordance with its manifold political division. It is not one simple central ridge of mountains, leaving a broad belt of level country on either side between it and the sea, nor yet is it a chain rising immediately from the sea on one side, like the Andes in South America, and leaving room, therefore, on the other side for wide plains of table-land, and rivers with a sufficient length of course to become at last great and navigable. It is a back-bone thickly set with spines of unequal length, some of them running out at regular distances parallel to each other, but others twisted so strangely that they often run for a long way parallel to the back-bone, or main ridge, and interlace with one another in a maze almost inextricable. And, as if to complete the disorder, in those spots where the spines of the Apennines, being twisted round, run parallel to the sea and to their own central chain, and thus leave an interval of plain between their bases and the Mediterranean, volcanic agency has broken up the space thus left with other and distinct groups of hills of its own creation, as in the case of Vesuvius, and of the Alban hills near Rome. Speaking generally then, Italy is made up of an infinite multitude of valleys pent in between high and steep hills, each forming a country to itself, and cut off by natural barriers from the others. Its several parts are isolated by nature, and no art of man can thoroughly unite them. Even the various provinces of the same kingdom are strangers to each other; the Abruzzi are like an unknown world to the inhabitants of Naples, insomuch, that when two Neapolitan naturalists, not ten years since, made an excursion to visit the Majella, one of the highest of the central Apennines, they found there many medicinal plants growing in the greatest profusion, which the Neapolitans were regularly in the habit of importing from other countries, as no one suspected their existence within their own kingdom. Hence arises the romantic character of Italian scenery: the constant combination of a mountain outline and all the wild features of a mountain country, with the rich vegetation of a southern climate in the valleys. Hence too the rudeness, the pastoral simplicity, and the occasional robber habits, to be found in the population; so that to this day you may travel in many places for miles together in the plains and valleys without passing through a single town or village; for the towns still cluster on the mountain sides, the houses nestling together on some scanty ledge, with cliffs rising above them and sinking down abruptly below them, the very 'congesta manu præruptis oppida saxis' of Virgil's description, which he even then called 'antique walls,' because they had been the strongholds of the primæval inhabitants of the country, and which are still inhabited after a lapse of so many centuries, nothing of the stir and movement of other parts of Europe having penetrated into these lonely valleys, and tempted the people to quit their mountain fastnesses for a more accessible dwelling in the plain.

"I have been led on further than I intended, but I wished to give an example of what I meant by a real and lively knowledge of geography, which brings the whole character of a country before our eyes, and enables us to understand its influence upon the social and political condition of its inhabitants. And this knowledge, as I said before, is very important to enable us to follow clearly the external revolutions of different nations, which we want to comprehend before we penetrate to what has been passing within."

This introductory discussion is followed by a rapid sketch of the different struggles for power and independence in Europe during the three last centuries. The general tendency of this period has been to consolidate severed nations into great kingdoms; but this tendency has been checked when the growth of any single power has become excessive, by the combined efforts of other European nations. Spain, France, England, and Austria, all in their turns have excited the jealousy of their neighbours, and have been attacked by their confederate strength. But in 1793 the peace of Europe was assailed by an enemy still more dangerous and energetic—still more destructive—we doubt whether in the English language a more vivid description is to be found of the evil, its progress, and its termination, than Dr Arnold has given in the following passage:—

"Ten years afterwards there broke out by far the most alarming danger of universal dominion, which had ever threatened Europe. The most military people in Europe became engaged in a war for their very existence. Invasion on the frontiers, civil war and all imaginable horrors raging within, the ordinary relations of life went to wreck, and every Frenchman became a soldier. It was a multitude numerous as the hosts of Persia, but animated by the courage and skill and energy of the old Romans. One thing alone was wanting, that which Pyrrhus said the Romans wanted, to enable them to conquer the world—a general and a ruler like himself. There was wanted a master hand to restore and maintain peace at home, and to concentrate and direct the immense military resources of France against her foreign enemies. And such an one appeared in Napoleon. Pacifying La Vendée, receiving back the emigrants, restoring the church, remodelling the law, personally absolute, yet carefully preserving and maintaining all the great points which the nation had won at the Revolution, Napoleon united in himself, not only the power, but the whole will of France; and that power and will were guided by a genius for war such as Europe had never seen since Cæsar. The effect was absolutely magical. In November 1799, he was made First Consul; he found France humbled by defeats, his Italian conquests lost, his allies invaded, his own frontier threatened. He took the field in May 1800, and in June the whole fortune of the war was changed, and Austria driven out of Lombardy by the victory of Marengo. Still the flood of the tide rose higher and higher, and every successive wave of its advance swept away a kingdom. Earthly state has never reached a prouder pinnacle than when Napoleon, in June 1812, gathered his army at Dresden—that mighty host, unequalled in all time, of 450,000, not men merely, but effective soldiers, and there received the homage of subject kings. And now, what was the principal adversary of this tremendous power? by whom was it checked, and resisted, and put down? By none, and by nothing, but the direct and manifest interposition of God. I know of no language so well fitted to describe that victorious advance to Moscow, and the utter humiliation of the retreat, as the language of the prophet with respect to the advance and subsequent destruction of the host of Sennacherib. 'When they arose early in the morning, behold they were all dead corpses,' applies almost literally to that memorable night of frost, in which twenty thousand horses perished, and the strength of the French army was utterly broken. Human instruments, no doubt, were employed in the remainder of the work; nor would I deny to Germany and to Prussia the glories of the year 1813, nor to England the honour of her victories in Spain, or of the crowning victory of Waterloo. But at the distance of thirty years, those who lived in the time of danger and remember its magnitude, and now calmly review what there was in human strength to avert it, must acknowledge, I think, beyond all controversy, that the deliverance of Europe from the dominion of Napoleon was effected neither by Russia, nor by Germany, nor by England, but by the hand of God alone."

The question, whether some races of men possess an inherent superiority over others, is mooted by Dr Arnold, in his dissertation on military science. Without laying down any universal rule, it may be stated that such a superiority can be predicated of no European nation. Frederick the Great defeated the French at Rosbach, as easily as Napoleon overcame the Prussians at Jena. If Marlborough was uniformly successful, William III. was always beaten by Luxembourg, and the Duke of Cumberland by D'Etrées and Saxe. It seems, therefore, a fair inference, that no civilized European nation possesses over its neighbours that degree of superiority which greater genius in the general, or greater discipline in the troops of its antagonists, will not be sufficient to counteract. The defeat of the Vendéans in France, by the soldiers of the garrison of Mentz; and the admirable conduct of our own Sepoys under British generals, are, no doubt, strong instances to show the prodigious importance of systematic discipline. Still, we cannot quite coincide with Dr Arnold's opinion on this subject. We are quite ready to admit—who, indeed, for a moment would deny?—in military as well as in all other subjects, the value of professional attainments and long experience. We cannot, however, consider them superior to those great qualities of our nature which discipline may regulate and embellish, but which it can never destroy or supersede. As every man is bound to form his own opinion on religious matters, though he may not be a priest, every man is obliged to defend his country when invaded, though he may not be a soldier. Nor can the miseries which such a state of things involves, furnish any argument against its necessity. All war must be attended with misfortunes, which freeze the blood and make the soul sick in their contemplation; but these very misfortunes deter those who wield the reins of empire from appealing wantonly to its determination. The resistance of Saragossa was not the less glorious, it does not the less fire the heart of every reader with a holy and passionate enthusiasm, because it was not conducted according to the strict forms of military tactics, because citizens and even women participated in its fame. The inextinguishable hatred of the Spanish nation for its oppressor—which wore down the French armies, which no severities, no violence, no defeat, could subdue—will be, as long as time shall last, a terrible lesson to ambitious conquerors. They will learn that there is in the fury of an insulted nation a danger which the most exquisite military combinations cannot remove, which the most perfectly served artillery cannot sweep away, before which all the bayonets, and gunpowder, and lines of fortification in the world are useless—and compared with which the science of the commander is pedantry, and strategy but a word. They will discover that something more than mechanical power, however great—something more than the skill of the practised officer, or the instinct of well-trained soldiers, are requisite for success—where every plain is a Marathon, and every valley a Thermopylæ.