XIV
RENAN'S "SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE"[17]
[17]
Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse. Par Ernest Renan. Guardian,
18th July 1883.
The sketches which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we should have looked for from the writer of the Vie de Jésus. The story of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal Newman's Apologia, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is, shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M. Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid, contented. He calls his life the "charmante promenade" which the "cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks back on it with thankfulness, and also with amusement It makes a charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education of the Rousseau school—a child of nature, developing, amid the simplest and humblest circumstances of life, the finest gifts and most delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity—brought up by sages whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety, sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time came, passing naturally, and without passion or bitterness, from out of their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air, and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to regret in the schools through which he passed, in the preparations which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his life. He lays down the maxim, "On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu'on aime." There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on what he calls "l'effroyable aventure du moyen âge," and on the march of modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and seriousness—some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up, not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.
The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever studious boy, a true son of old Brittany—the most melancholy, the most tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French provinces, but of all regions in Europe—is passed on from the teaching of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge, full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he passed under the more strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, "the most remarkable person," in his opinion, "whom the French clergy has produced in our days," a "savant and a saint," who had mastered the results of German criticism as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology, carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two are incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma, he gave up revealed religion. He gave it up not without regrets at the distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared to him by old associations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss. He spent some time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length beginning to write. Michel Lévy, the publisher, found him out, and opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous. He has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic ways of looking at life and the world. It is not an easy thing to do with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.
As a mere history of a change of convictions, the Souvenirs are interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the attitude of composure due to the theme of the book. He warns his readers at the outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account. "Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poésie"—the reflection of states of mind and varying humours, not the exact details of fact. "Tout est vrai dans ce petit volume, mais non de ce genre de verité qui est requis pour une Biographie universelle. Bien des choses ont été mises, afin qu'on sourie; si l'usage l'eût permis, j'aurais dû écrire plus d'une fois à la marge—cum grano salis". It is candid to warn us thus to read a little between the lines; but it is a curious and unconscious disclosure of his characteristic love of a mixture of the misty and the clear. The really pleasant part of it is his account, which takes up half the volume, of Breton ways and feelings half a century ago, an account which exactly tallies with the pictures of them in Souvestre's writings; and the kindliness and justice with which he speaks of his old Catholic and priestly teachers, not only in his boyish days at Tréguier, but in his seminary life in Paris. His account of this seminary life is unique in its picturesque vividness. He describes how, at St. Nicolas, under the fiery and irresistible Dupanloup, whom he speaks of with the reserved courtesy due to a distinguished person whom he much dislikes, his eager eyes were opened to the realities of literature, and to the subtle powers of form and style in writing, which have stood him in such stead, and have been the real secret of his own success.
Le monde s'ouvrit pour moi. Malgré sa prétention d'être un asile fermé aux bruits du dehors, Saint-Nicolas était a cette époque la maison la plus brillante et la plus mondaine. Paris y entrait à pleins bords par les portes et les fenêtres, Paris tout entier, moins la corruption, je me hâte de le dire, Paris avec ses petitesses et ses grandeurs, ses hardiesses et ses chiffons, sa force révolutionnaire et ses mollesses flasques. Mes vieux prêtres de Bretagne savaient bien mieux les mathématiques et le latin que mes nouveaux maîtres; mais ils vivaient dans des catacombes sans lumière et sans air. Ici, l'atmosphère du siècle circulait librement…. Au bout de quelque temps une chose tout à fait inconnue m'etait révélée. Les mots, talent, éclat, réputation eurent un sens pour moi. J'étais perdu pour l'idéal modeste que mes anciens maîtres m'avaient inculqué.
And he describes how Dupanloup brought his pupils perpetually into direct relations with himself and communicated to them something of his own enthusiasm. He gained the power over their hearts which a great general gains over his soldiers. His approval, his interest in a man, were the all-absorbing object, the all-sufficient reward; the one punishment feared was dismissal, always inflicted with courtesy and tact, from the honour and the joy of serving under him:—
Adoré de ses élèves, M. Dupanloup n'était pas toujours agréable à ces collaborateurs. On m'a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocèse, les choses se passèrent de la même manière, qu'il fut toujours plus aimé de ses laïques que de ses prêtres. Il est certain qu'il écrasait tout autour de lui. Mais sa violence même nous attachait; car nous sentions que nous étions son but unique. Ce qu'il était, c'était un éveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses élèves la somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'égalait. Chacun de ses deux cents élèves existait distinct dans sa pensée; il était pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours présent, le motif de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la base de la foi. Il répétait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion de sa faculté d'admirer. Son admiration n'était pas toujours assez éclairée par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur d'âme et d'un coeur vraiment possédé de l'amour du beau…. Les défauts de l'éducation qu'il donnait étaient les défauts même de son esprit. Il était trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On eût dit que ses deux cents élèves étaient destinés à être tous poètes, écrivains, orateurs.
St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely philosophic and scientific, places of "fortes études"; and the writer thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so. They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup, than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display, and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting of priests:—
Beaucoup de mes jugements étonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu à Saint-Sulpice, associés à des idées étroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent produire en fait de bonté, de modestie, d'abnégation personelle. Ce qu'il y a de vertu à Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouvé ailleurs.
M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the radical violences of M. Clémenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness. They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician" education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste…. C'est par le caractère que je suis resté essentiellement l'élève de mes anciens maîtres." He is proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:—
Il me plairait d'expliquer par le détail et de montrer comment la gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus cléricales, sans la foi qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les plus divertissantes. J'aimerais à raconter toutes les aventures que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenèrent, et les tours singuliers qu'elles m'ont joués. Après soixante ans de vie sérieuse on a le droit de sourire; et où trouver une source de rire plus abondante, plus à portée, plus inoffensive qu'en soimême? Si jamais un auteur comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur; je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles qu'il pourrait inventer.
He dwells especially on four of these virtues which were, he thinks, graven ineffaceably on his nature at St. Sulpice. They taught him there not to care for money or success. They taught him the old-fashioned French politeness—that beautiful instinct of giving place to others, which is perishing in the democratic scramble for the best places, in the omnibus and the railway as in business and society. It is more curious to find that he thinks that they taught him to be modest. Except on the faith of his assertions, the readers of his book would not naturally have supposed that he believed himself specially endowed with this quality; it is at any rate the modesty which, if it shrinks into retirement from the pretensions of the crowd, goes along with a high and pitying sense of superiority, and a self-complacency of which the good humour never fails. His masters also taught him to value purity. For this he almost makes a sort of deprecating apology. He saw, indeed, "the vanity of this virtue as of all the others"; he admits that it is an unnatural virtue. But he says, "L'homme ne doit jamais se permettre deux hardiesses à la fois. Le libre penseur doit être réglé en ses moeurs." In this doctrine it may be doubted whether he will find many followers. An unnatural virtue, where nature only is recognised as a guide, is more likely to be discredited by his theory than recommended by his example, particularly if the state of opinion in France is such as is described in the following passage—a passage which in England few men, whatever they might think, would have the boldness to state as an acknowledged social phenomenon:—
Le monde, dont les jugements sont rarement tout à fait faux, voit une sorte de ridicule à être vertueux quand on n'y est pas obligé par un devoir professionnel. Le prêtre, ayant pour état d'être chaste, comme le soldat d'être brave, est, d'après ces idées, presque le seul qui puisse sans ridicule tenir à des principes sur lesquels la morale et la mode se livrent les plus étranges combats. Il est hors de doute qu'en ce point, comme en beaucoup d'autres, mes principes clericaux, conservés dans le siècle, m'ont nui aux yeux du monde.
We have one concluding observation to make. This is a book of which the main interest, after all, depends on the way in which it touches on the question of questions, the truth and reality of the Christian religion. But from first to last it docs not show the faintest evidence that the writer ever really knew, or even cared, what religion is. Religion is not only a matter of texts, of scientific criticisms, of historical investigations, of a consistent theology. It is not merely a procession of external facts and events, a spectacle to be looked at from the outside. It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests. It grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be man. When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him as a serious and importunate reality, when he shows that he is unaffected by those deep movements and misgivings and anxieties of the soul to which religion corresponds, and treats the whole matter as a question only of erudition and criticism, we may acknowledge him to be an original and acute critic, a brilliant master of historical representation; but he has never yet come face to face with the problems of religion. His love of truth may be unimpeachable, but he docs not know what he is talking about. M. Renan speaks of giving up his religion as a man might speak of accepting a new and unpopular physical hypothesis like evolution, or of making up his mind to give up the personality of Homer or the early history of Rome. Such an interior attitude of mind towards religion as is implied, for instance, in Bishop Butler's Sermons on the Love of God, or the De Imitatione or Newman's Parochial Sermons seems to him, as far as we can judge, an unknown and unattempted experience. It is easy to deal with a question if you leave out half the factors of it, and those the most difficult and the most serious. It is easy to be clear if you do not choose to take notice of the mysterious, and if you exclude from your consideration as vague and confused all that vast department of human concerns where we at best can only "see through a glass darkly." It is easy to find the world a pleasant and comfortable and not at all perplexing place, if your life has been, as M. Renan describes his own, a "charming promenade" through it; if, as he says, you are blessed with "a good humour not easily disturbed "; and you "have not suffered much"; and "nature has prepared cushions to soften shocks"; and you have "had so much enjoyment in this life that you really have no right to claim any compensation beyond it." That is M. Renan's experience of life—a life of which he looks forward to the perfection in the clearness and security of its possible denials of ancient beliefs, and in the immense development of its positive and experimental knowledge. How would Descartes have rejoiced, he says, if he could have seen some poor treatise on physics or cosmography of our day, and what would we not give to catch a glimpse of such an elementary schoolbook of a hundred years hence.
But that is not at any rate the experience of all the world, nor does it appear likely ever to be within the reach of all the world. There is another aspect of life more familiar than this, an aspect which has presented itself to the vast majority of mankind, the awful view of it which is made tragic by pain and sorrow and moral evil; which, in the way in which religion looks at it, if it is sterner, is also higher and nobler, and is brightened by hope and purposes of love; a view which puts more upon men and requires more from them, but holds before them a destiny better than the perfection here of physical science. To minds which realise all this, it is more inconceivable than any amount of miracle that such a religion as Christianity should have emerged naturally out of the conditions of the first century. They refuse to settle such a question by the short and easy method on which M. Renan relies; they will not consent to put it on questions about the two Isaiahs, or about alleged discrepancies between the Evangelists; they will not think the claims of religion disposed of by M. Renan's canon, over and over again contradicted, that whether there can be or not, there is no evidence of the supernatural in the world. To those who measure and feel the true gravity of the issues, it is almost unintelligible to find a man who has been face to face with Christianity all his life treating the deliberate condemnation of it almost gaily and with a light heart, and showing no regrets in having to give it up as a delusion and a dream. It is a poor and meagre end of a life of thought and study to come to the conclusion that the age in which he has lived is, if not one of the greatest, at least "the most amusing of all ages."
XV
LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON[18]
[18]
Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson. Edited by Stopford A.
Brooke. Guardian, 15th November 1865.
If the proof of a successful exhibition of a strongly marked and original character be that it excites and sustains interest throughout, that our tastes are appealed to and our judgments called forth with great strength, that we pass continuously and rapidly, as we read, from deep and genuine admiration to equally deep and genuine dissent and disapprobation, that it allows us to combine a general but irresistible sense of excellence growing upon us through the book with an under-current of real and honest dislike and blame, then this book in a great measure satisfies the condition of success. It is undeniable that in what it shows us of Mr. Robertson there is much to admire, much to sympathise with, much to touch us, a good deal to instruct us. He is set before us, indeed, by the editor, as the ideal of all that a great Christian teacher and spiritual guide, all that a brave and wise and high-souled man, may be conceived to be. We cannot quite accept him as an example of such rare and signal achievement; and the fault of the book is the common one of warm-hearted biographers to wind their own feelings and those of their readers too high about their subject; to talk as if their hero's excellences were unknown till he appeared to display them, and to make up for the imperfect impression resulting from actual facts and qualities by insisting with overstrained emphasis on a particular interpretation of them. The book would be more truthful and more pleasing if the editor's connecting comments were more simply written, and made less pretension to intensity and energy of language. Yet with all drawbacks of what seem to us imperfect taste, an imperfect standard of character, and an imperfect appreciation of what there is in the world beyond a given circle of interests, the book does what a biography ought to do—it shows us a remarkable man, and it gives us the means of forming our own judgment about him. It is not a tame panegyric or a fancy picture.
The main portion of the book consists of Mr. Robertson's own letters, and his own accounts of himself; and we are allowed to see him, in a great degree at least, as he really was. The editor draws a moral, indeed, and tells us what we ought to think about what we see; but we can use our own judgment about that. And, as so often happens in real life, what we see both attracts and repels; it calls forth, successively and in almost equal measure, warm sympathy and admiration, and distinct and hearty disagreement. At least there is nothing of commonplace—of what is commonplace yet in our generation; though there is a good deal that bids fair to become commonplace in the next. It is the record of a genuine spontaneous character, seeking its way, its duty, its perfection, with much sincerity and elevation of purpose, and many anxieties and sorrows, and not, we doubt not, without much of the fruits that come with real self-devotion; a record disclosing a man with great faults and conspicuous blanks in his nature, one with whose principles, taste, or judgment we constantly find ourselves having a vehement quarrel, just after having been charmed and conciliated by some unexpectedly powerful or refined statement of an important truth. We cannot think, and few besides his own friends will think, that he had laid his hand with so sure an accuracy and with so much promise upon the clue which others had lost or bungled over. But there is much to learn in his thoughts and words, and there is not less to learn from his life. It is the life of a man who did not spare himself in fulfilling what he received as his task, who sacrificed much in order to speak his message, as he thought, more worthily and to do his office more effectually, and whose career touches us the more from the shadow of suffering and early death that hangs over its aspirations and activity. A book which fairly shows us such a life is not of less value because it also shows us much that we regret and condemn.
Mr. Robertson was brought up not only in the straitest traditions of the Evangelical school, but in the heat of its controversial warfare. His heart, when he was a boy, was set on entering the army; and one of his most characteristic points through life, shown in many very different forms, was his pugnacity, his keen perception of the "certaminis gaudia":—
"There is something of combativeness in me," he writes, "which prevents the whole vigour being drawn out, except when I have an antagonist to deal with, a falsehood to quell, or a wrong to avenge. Never till then does my mind feel quite alive. Could I have chosen my own period of the world to have lived in, and my own type of life, it should be the feudal ages, and the life of a Cid, the redresser of wrongs."
"On the other hand," writes his biographer, "when he met men who despised Christianity, or who, like the Roman Catholics, held to doctrines which he believed untrue, this very enthusiasm and unconscious excitement swept him sometimes beyond himself. He could not moderate his indignation down to the cool level of ordinary life. Hence he was wanting at this time in the wise tolerance which formed so conspicuous a feature of his maturer manhood. He held to his own views with pertinacity. He believed them to be true; and he almost refused to allow the possibility of the views of others having truth in them also. He was more or less one-sided at this period. With the Roman Catholic religion it was war to the death, not in his later mode of warfare, by showing the truth which lay beneath the error, but by denouncing the error. He seems invariably, with the pugnacity of a young man, to have attacked their faith; and the mode in which this was done was startlingly different from that which afterwards he adopted."
He yielded, after considerable resistance, to the wishes and advice of his friends, that he should prepare for orders. "With a romantic instinct of self-sacrifice," says his biographer, "he resolved to give up the idea of his whole life." This we can quite understand; but with that propensity of biographers to credit their subject with the desirable qualities which it may be supposed that they ought to have, besides those which they really have, the editor proceeds to observe that this would scarcely have happened had not Mr. Robertson's "characteristic self-distrust disposed him to believe that he was himself the worst judge of his future profession." This is the way in which the true outline of a character is blurred and confused, in order to say something proper and becoming. Self-distrust was not among the graces or weaknesses of Mr. Robertson's nature, unless indeed we mistake for it the anxiety which even the stoutest heart may feel at a crisis, or the dissatisfaction which the proudest may feel at the interval between attempt and achievement.
He was an undergraduate at Brasenose at the height of the Oxford movement. He was known there, so far as he was known at all, as a keen partisan of the Evangelical school; and though no one then suspected the power which was really in him, his party, not rich in men of strength or promise, made the most of a recruit who showed ability and entered heartily into their watchwords, and, it must be said, their rancour. He was conspicuous among the young men of his standing for the forwardness with which he took his side against "Tractarianism," and the vehemence of his dislike of it, and for the almost ostentatious and defiant prominence which he gave to the convictions and social habits of his school He expressed his scorn and disgust at the "donnishness," the coldness, the routine, the want of heart, which was all that he could see at Oxford out of the one small circle of his friends. He despised the Oxford course of work, and would have nothing more to do with it than he could help—as he lived to regret afterwards. Yet even then he was in his tastes and the instinctive tendencies of his mind above his party. He was an admiring reader of Wordsworth and Shelley; he felt the strength of Aristotle and Plato; he is said to have appreciated Mr. Newman's preaching, and to have gallantly defended what he admired in him and his friends. His editor, indeed, Mr. Brooke, appears to be a little divided and embarrassed, between his wish to enforce Mr. Robertson's largeness of mind and heart, and his fear of giving countenance to suspicions that he was ever so little inclined to "High Churchism"; between his desire to show that Mr. Robertson estimated the High Church leaders as much as an intelligent man ought, and disliked their system as much as a sound-thinking Christian ought. We should have thought that he need not be so solicitous to "set at rest the question about Mr. Robertson's High Church tendencies." "I hate High Churchism," was one of his latest declarations, when professing his sympathy with individual High Churchmen. One thing, however, is quite clear—that in his early life his partisanship was thoroughgoing and unflinching enough to satisfy the fiercest and most fanatical of their opponents. Such a representation as this is simply misleading:—
The almost fierceness with which he speaks against the Tract school is proof in him of the strength of the attraction it possessed for him, just as afterwards at Brighton his attacks on Evangelicalism are proof of the strength with which he once held to that form of Christianity, and the force of the reaction with which he abandoned it for ever. Out of these two reactions—when their necessary ultra tendencies had been mellowed down by time—emerged at last the clearness and the just balance of principles with which he taught during 1848 and the following years, at Brighton. He had probed both schools of theological thought to their recesses, and had found them wanting. He spoke of what he knew when he protested against both. He spoke also of what he knew when he publicly recognised the Spirit of all good moving in the lives of those whose opinions he believed to be erroneous.
It is absurd to say, because he sometimes spoke of the "danger" he had been in from "Tractarianism," that he had felt in equal degree the "strength of attraction" towards the one school and towards the other, and it is equally absurd to talk of his "having probed both to their recesses." He read, and argued, and discussed the pamphlets of the controversy—the "replies," Mr. Brooke says, with more truth probably than he thought of in using the word—like other undergraduates who took interest in what was going on, and thought themselves fit to choose their side. With his tutor and friend, Mr. Churton, he read Taylor's Ancient Christianity, carefully looking out the passages from the Fathers. "I am reading the early Church history with Golightly," he says, "which is a very great advantage, as he has a fund of general information and is a close reader." But we must doubt whether this involved "probing to the recesses" the "Tractarian" side of the question. And we distrust the depth and the judgment, and the impartiality also of a man who is said to have read Newman's sermons continually with delight to the day of his death, and by whom no book was more carefully studied and more highly honoured than The Christian Year, and who yet to the last could see nothing better in the Church movement as a whole than, according to the vulgar view of it, a revival of forms partly useful, partly hurtful It seems to us the great misfortune of his life, and one which exercised its evil influence on him to the end, that, thrown young into the narrowest and weakest of religious schools, he found it at first so congenial to his vehement temperament, that he took so kindly to certain of its more unnatural and ungenerous ways, and thus was cut off from the larger and healthier influences of the society round him. Those were days when older men than he took their side too precipitately; but he found himself encouraged, even as an undergraduate, to dogmatise, to be positive, to hate, to speak evil. He learnt the lesson too well. This is the language of an undergraduate at the end of his university course;—
But I seem this term to have in a measure waked out of a long trance, partly caused by my own gross inconsistencies, and partly by the paralysing effects of this Oxford-delusion heresy, for such it is I feel persuaded. And to know it a man must live here, and he will see the promising and ardent men sinking one after another in a deadly torpor, wrapped up in self-contemplation, dead to their Redeemer, and useless to His Church, under the baneful breath of this accursed upas tree. I say accursed, because I believe that St. Paul would use the same language to Oxford as he did to the Galatian Church, "I would they were even cut off which trouble you"; accursed, because I believe that the curse of God will fall on it He has denounced it on the Papal hereby, and he is no respecter of persons, to punish the name and not the reality. May He forgive me if I err, and lead me into all truth. But I do not speak as one who has been in no clanger, and therefore cannot speak very quietly. It is strange into what ramifications the disbelief of external justification will extend; we will make it internal, whether it be by self-mortification, by works of evangelical obedience, or by the sacraments, and that just at the time when we suppose most that we are magnifying the work of the Lord.
Mr. Brooke rather likes to dwell, as it seems to us, in an unreal and disproportionate way, on Mr. Robertson's sufferings, in the latter part of his life, from the bitter and ungenerous attacks of which he was the object. "This is the man," he says in one place, "who was afterwards at Brighton driven into the deepest solitariness of heart, whom God thought fit to surround with slander and misunderstanding." He was, we doubt not, fiercely assailed by the Evangelical party, which he had left, and which he denounced in no gentle language; he was, as we can well believe, "constantly attacked, by some manfully, by others in an underhand manner, and was the victim of innuendoes and slander." We cannot, however, help thinking that Mr. Brooke unconsciously exaggerates the solitariness and want of sympathy which went with all this. Mr. Robertson had, and knew that he had, his ardent and enthusiastic admirers as well as his worrying and untiring opponents. But what we remark is this. It was the measure which he had meted out to others, in the fierceness of his zeal for Evangelicalism, which the Evangelicals afterwards meted out to him. They did not more talk evil of what they knew not and had taken no real pains to understand, than he had done of a body of men as able, as well-instructed, as deep-thinking, as brave, as earnest as himself in their war against sin and worldliness. The stupidity, the perverse ill-nature, the resolute ignorance, the audacious and fanatical application of Scripture condemnations, the reckless judging without a desire to do justice, which he felt and complained of so bitterly when turned against himself, he had sanctioned and largely shared in when the same party which attacked him in the end attacked the earlier revivers of thoughtful and earnest religion. Nor do we find that he ever expressed regret for a vehemence of condemnation which his after-knowledge must have shown him that he had no business to pass, because, even if he afterwards adhered to it, he had originally passed it on utterly false and inadequate grounds. He only became as fierce against the Evangelicals as he had been against the followers of Mr. Newman. He never unlearnt the habit of harsh reprobation which his Evangelical friends had encouraged. He only transferred its full force against themselves.
He left Oxford and began his ministry, first at Winchester, and then at Cheltenham, full of Evangelical formulae and Evangelical narrow zeal. It does not appear that, except as an earnest hard-working clergyman, he was in any way distinguished from numbers of the same class, though we are quite willing to believe that even then his preaching, in warmth and vigour, was above the average. But as he, or his biographer, says, he had not yet really begun to think. When he began to think, he did so with the rapidity, the intensity, the impatient fervid vehemence which lay all along at the bottom of his character. His Evangelical views appear to have snapped to pieces and dissolved with a violence and sudden abruptness entirely unaccounted for by anything which these volumes show us. He read Carlyle; but so did many other people. He found the religious world at Cheltenham not so pure as he had imagined it; but this is what must have happened anywhere, and is not enough to account for such a complete revolution of belief. He had a friend deeply read in German philosophy and criticism who is said to have exercised influence on him. Still, we repeat, the steps and processes of the change from the Evangelicalism of Cheltenham to a condition, at first, of almost absolute doubt, are very imperfectly explained:—
These letters were written in 1843. In the following year doubts and questionings began to stir in his mind. He could not get rid of them. They were forced upon him by his reading and his intercourse with men. They grew and tortured him. His teaching in the pulpit altered, and it became painful to him to preach. He was reckoned of the Evangelical school, and he began to feel that his position was becoming a false one. He felt the excellence and earnestness, and gladly recognised the work of the nobler portion of that party, but he felt also that he must separate from it. In his strong reaction from its extreme tendencies, he understood with a shock which upturned his whole inward life for a time, that the system on which he had founded his whole faith and work could never be received by him again. Within its pale, for him, there was henceforward neither life, peace, nor reality. It was not, however, till almost the end of his ministry at Cheltenham that this became clearly manifest to him. It had been growing slowly into a conviction. An outward blow—the sudden ruin of a friendship which he had wrought, as he imagined, for ever into his being—a blow from which he never afterwards wholly recovered—accelerated the inward crisis, and the result was a period of spiritual agony so awful that it not only shook his health to its centre, but smote his spirit down into so profound a darkness that of all his early faiths but one remained, "It must be right to do right."
This seems to have been in 1846, and in the beginning of the next year he had already taken his new line. The explanation does not explain much. We have no right to ask for more than his friends think fit to tell us of this turning-point of his life. But we observe that this deeply important passage is left with but little light and much manifest reticence. That the crisis took place we have his own touching and eloquent words to assure us. It left him also as firm in his altered convictions as he had been in his old ones. What caused it, what were its circumstances and characteristics, and what affected its course and results, we can only guess. But it was decisive and it was speedy. He spent a few months in Germany in the end of 1846, and in the beginning of 1847 the Bishop of Oxford was willing to appoint him to St. Ebbe's. But his stay there was short. Three months afterwards he accepted the chapel at Brighton which he held till his death in August 1853.
He was now the Robertson whom all the world knows, and the change was a most remarkable one. It seems strictly accurate to say that he started at once into a new man—new in all his views and tastes; new in the singular burst of power which at once shows itself in the keen, free, natural language of his letters and his other writings; new in the deep concentrated earnestness of character with which he seemed to grasp his peculiar calling and function. All the conventionalities of his old school, which hung very thick about him even to the end of his Cheltenham life, seem suddenly to drop off, and leave him, without a trace remaining on his mind, in the full use and delight of his new liberty. We cannot say that we are more inclined to agree with him in his later stage than in his earlier. And the rapid transformation of a most dogmatic and zealous Evangelical into an equally positive and enthusiastic "Broad Churchman" does not seem a natural or healthy process, and suggests impatience and self-confidence more than self-command and depth. But we get, without doubt, to a real man—a man whose words have a meaning, and stand for real things; whose language no longer echoes the pale dreary commonplaces of a school, but reveals thoughts which he has thought for himself, and the power of being able "to speak as he will." His mind seems to expand, almost at a bound, to all the manifold variety of interests of which the world is full. His letters on his own doings, on the books and subjects of the day, on the remarks or the circumstances of his friends, his criticism, his satire, his controversial or friendly discussions, are full of energy, versatility, refinement, boldness, and strength; and his remarkable power of clear, picturesque, expressive diction, not unworthy of our foremost masters of English, appears all at once, as it were, full grown. It is difficult to believe, as we read the later portions of his life, that we are reading about the same man who appeared, so short a time before, at the beginning, to promise at best to turn into a popular Evangelical preacher, above the average, perhaps, in taste and power, but not above the average in freedom from cramping and sour prejudices.
Mr. Robertson had hold of some great truths, and he applied them, both in his own thoughts and self-development and in his popular teaching, with great force. He realised two things with a depth and intensity which give an awful life and power to all he said about religion. He realised with singular and pervading keenness that which a greater man than he speaks of as the first and the great discovery of the awakened soul—" the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, himself and the Creator." "Alone with God," expresses the feeling which calmed his own anxieties and animated his religious appeals to others. And he realised with equal earnestness the great truth which is spoken of by Mr. Brooke, though in language which to us has an unpleasant sound, in the following extract:
Yet, notwithstanding all this—which men called while he lived, and now when he is dead will call, want of a clear and well-defined system of theology—he had a fixed basis for his teaching. It was the Divine-human Life of Christ. It is the fourth principle mentioned in his letter, "that belief in the human character of Christ must be antecedent to belief in His divine origin." He felt that an historical Christianity was absolutely essential; that only through a visible life of the Divines in the flesh could God become intelligible to men; that Christ was God's idea of our nature realised; that only when we fall back on the glorious portrait of what has been, ran we be delivered from despair of Humanity; that in Christ "all the blood of all the nations ran," and all the powers of man were redeemed. Therefore he grasped as the highest truth, on which to rest life and thought, the reality expressed in the words, "the Word was made Flesh." The Incarnation was to him the centre of all history, the blossoming of Humanity. The Life which followed the Incarnation was the explanation of the Life of God, and the only solution of the problem of the Life of man. He did not speak much of loving Christ; his love was fitly mingled with that veneration which makes love perfect; his voice was solemn, and he paused before he spoke His name in common talk; for what that name meant had become the central thought of his intellect and the deepest realisation of his spirit. He had spent a world of study, of reverent meditation, of adoring contemplation, on the Gospel history. Nothing comes forward more frequently in his letters than the way in which he had entered into the human life of Christ. To that everything is referred—by that everything is explained.
In bringing home these great truths to the feelings of those who had lived insensible to them lay the chief value of his preaching. He awakened men to believe that there was freshness and reality in things which they had by use become dulled to. There are no doubt minds which rise to the truth most naturally and freely without the intervention of dogmatic expressions, and to these such expressions, as they are a limit and a warning, are also felt as a clog. Mr. Robertson's early experience had made him suspicious and irritable about dogma as such; and he prided himself on being able to dispense with it, while at the same time preserving the principle and inner truth which it was intended to convey. But in his ostentatious contempt of dogmatic precision and exactness, none but those who have not thought about the matter will see any proof of his strength or wisdom. Dogma, accurate, subtle, scientific, does not prevent a mind of the first order from breathing freshness of feeling, grandeur, originality, and the sense of reality, into the exposition of the truth which it represents. It is no fetter except to those minds which in their impulsiveness, their self-confidence, and their want of adequate grasp and sustained force, most need its salutary restraint. And no man has a right, however eloquent and impressive his speech may be, to talk against dogma till he shows that he does not confound accuracy of statement with conventional formalism. Mr. Robertson lays down the law pretty confidently about the blunders of everybody about him—Tractarian, Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist. We must say that the impression of every page of his letters is, that clear and "intuitive" as he was, he had not always understood what he condemned. He was especially satisfied with a view of Baptism which he thought rose above both extremes and took in the truth of both while it avoided their errors. But is it too much to say that a man who, not in the heat of rhetoric, but when preparing candidates for Confirmation, and piquing himself on his freedom from all prejudice, deliberately describes the common Church view of Baptism as implying a "magical" change, and actually illustrates what he means by the stories of magical changes in the Arabian Nights—who knowing, or able to read, all that has been said by divines on the subject from the days of Augustine, yet commits himself to the assertion that this is in fact what they hold and teach—is it too much to say that such a man, whatever may be his other gifts, has forfeited all claim to be considered capable of writing and expressing himself with accuracy, truth, and distinctness on theological questions? And if theological questions are to be dealt with, ought they not to be dealt with accurately, and not loosely?
But we have lingered too long over these volumes. They are very instructive, sometimes very elevating, almost always very touching. The life which they describe greatly wanted discipline, self-restraint, and the wise and manly fear of overrating one's own novelties. But we see in it a life consecrated to duty, fulfilled with much pain and self-sacrifice, and adorned by warm and deep affections, by vigour and refinement of thought, and earnest love for truth and purity. No one can help feeling his profound and awful sense of things unseen, though in the philosophy by which he sought to connect things seen and things unseen, we cannot say that we can have much confidence. We have only one concluding remark to make, and that is not on him but on his biographer. An exaggerated tone, as we have said, seems to us to pervade the book. There is what seems to us an unhealthy attempt to create in the reader an impression of the exceptional severity of the sufferings of Mr. Robertson's life, of his loneliness, of his persecutions. But in this point much may fairly be pardoned to the affection of a friend. What, however, we can less excuse is the want of good feeling with which Mr. Brooke, in his account of Mr. Robertson's last days, allows himself to give an ex parte, account of a dispute between Mr. Robertson and the Vicar of Brighton, about the appointment of a curate, and not simply to insinuate, but distinctly declare that this dispute with its result was the fatal stroke which, in his state of ill-health, hastened his death. We say nothing about the rights of the story, for we never heard anything of them but what Mr. Brooke tells us. But there is an appearance of vindictiveness in putting it on record with this particular aspect which nothing in the story itself seems to us to justify. In describing Mr. Robertson's departure from Cheltenham, Mr. Brooke has plainly thought right to use much reticence. He would have done well to have used the same reticence about these quarrels at Brighton.
XVI
LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN[19]
[19]
A Memoir of Baron Bunsen. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. Saturday
Review, 2nd May 1868.
Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating English interests, in assimilating English thought and traditions, and exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal peculiarities of impatience, self-assertion, and haste, than one who has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the droit de cité in England than Bunsen.
It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though Bunsen's life was a very full and active one in all matters of intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map, they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other people's letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes advisable. We want types and specimens of a man's letters; and when the specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen's early letters are printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young man of thought and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less cost to the reader.
Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little principality of Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He became in time Heyne's pupil at Göttingen, and very early showed the qualities which distinguished him in his after life—restless eagerness after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished man's youth by his friends after he has become distinguished—which are seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy—are the contemporary records of the impressions made on him in his youth by those who were distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen's letters we have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:—
Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Göttingen]. Heyne received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in himself the example of a high and noble energy, and indefatigable activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit entitled him. He might have superintended and administered and maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more distinguished in every other way than in this…. And what has he established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties? Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of him and will not perish—the one, the tribute left by his free spirit to the finest productions of the human mind; and what he felt, thought, and has immortalised in many men of excellence gone before. Read his explanations of Tischbein's engravings from Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on the death of Müller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the public and private life of the ancients. The other memorial which will subsist of him, more warm in life than the first, is the remembrance of his generosity, to which numbers owe a deep obligation.
And of Schelling, about the same time, whom he had just seen in Munich:—
Schelling before all must be mentioned as having received me well, after his fashion, giving me frequent occasions of becoming acquainted with his philosophical views and judgments, in his own original and peculiar manner. His mode of disputation is rough and angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible. Once he undertook to explain animal magnetism, and for this purpose to give an idea of Time, from which resulted that all is present and in existence—the Present as existing in the actual moment; the Future, as existing in a future moment. When I demanded the proof, he referred me to the word is, which applies to existence, in the sentence that "this is future." Seckendorf, who was present (with him I have become closely acquainted, to my great satisfaction), attempted to draw attention to the confounding the subjective (i.e. him who pronounces that sentence) with the objective; or, rather, to point out a simple grammatical misunderstanding—in short, declared the position impossible. "Well," replied Schelling drily, "you have not understood me." Two Professors (his worshippers), who were present, had meanwhile endeavoured by their exclamations, "Only observe, all is, all exists" (to which the wife of Schelling, a clever woman, assented), to help me into conviction; and a vehement beating the air—for arguing and holding fast by any firm point were out of the question—would have arisen, if I had not contrived to escape by giving a playful turn to the conversation. I am perfectly aware that Schelling could have expressed and carried through his real opinion far better—i.e. rationally. I tell the anecdote merely to give an idea of his manner in conversation.
At Göttingen he was one of a remarkable set, comprising Lachmann, Lücke, Brandis, and some others, thought as much of at the time as their friends, but who failed to make their way to the front ranks of the world. Like others of his countrymen, Bunsen began to find "that the world's destinies were not without their effect on him," and to feel dissatisfied with the comparatively narrow sphere of even German learning. The thought grew, and took possession of him, of "bringing over, into his knowledge and into his fatherland, the solemn and distant East," and to "draw the East into the study of the entire course of humanity (particularly of European, and more especially of Teutonic humanity)," making Germany the "central point of this study." Vast plans of philological and historical study, involving, as the only means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature, the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe, drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point. In 1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life—his acquaintance, and the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and from this time he felt himself a Prussian. "That State in Northern Germany," he writes to Brandis in 1815, "which gladly receives every German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus entering as a citizen born, is the true Germany":—
That such a State [he proceeds, in the true Bismarckian spirit] should prove inconvenient to others of inferior importance, which persist in continuing their isolated existence, regardless of the will of Providence and of the general good, is of no consequence whatever; nor even does it matter that, in its present management, there are defects and imperfections…. We intend to be in Berlin in three weeks; and there (in Prussia) am I resolved to fix my destinies.
After reading Persian for a short time in Paris with De Sacy, and after the failure of a plan of travel with Mr. Astor of New York, Bunsen joined Niebuhr at Florence in the end of 1816, and went on with him to Rome, where Niebuhr was Prussian envoy. There, enjoying Niebuhr's society, "equally sole in his kind with Rome," he took up his abode, and plunged into study. He gave up his plans of Oriental travel, finding he could do all that he wanted without them. Too much a student, as he writes to a friend, to think of marrying, which he could not do "without impairing his whole scheme of mental development," he nevertheless found his fate in an English lady, Miss Waddington, who became his wife. And, finally, when the health of his friend Brandis, Niebuhr's secretary in the Prussian Legation, broke down, Bunsen took his place, and entered on that combined path of study and diplomacy in which he continued for the greater part of his life.
It may be questioned whether Bunsen's career answered altogether successfully to what he proposed to himself, or was in fact all that his friends and he himself thought it; but it was eminently one in which from the first he had laid down for himself a plan of life which he tenaciously followed through many changes and varieties of work, without ever losing sight of the purpose with which he began. He piqued himself on having early seen that a man ought to have an object to which to devote his whole life—"be it a dictionary like Johnson's or a history like Gibbon's"—and on having discerned and chosen his own object. And at an early time of his life in Rome he draws an outline of thought and inquiry, destined to break off into many different labours, in very much the same language in which he might have described it in the last year of his life:—
The consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in and through that consciousness He has accomplished, especially in language and religion, this was from the earliest time before my mind. After having awhile fancied to attain my point, sometimes here, sometimes there, at length (it was in the Christmas holidays of 1812, after having gained the prize in November) I made a general and comprehensive plan. I wished to go through and represent heathen antiquity, in its principal phases, in three great periods of the world's history, according to its languages, its religious conceptions, and its political institutions; first of all in the East, where the earliest expressions in each are highly remarkable, although little known; then in the second great epoch, among the Greeks and Romans; thirdly, among the Teutonic nations, who put an end to the Roman Empire.
At first I thought of Christianity only as something which every one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not as the object of a peculiar study. But in January 1816, when I for the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as God had caused the conception of Himself to be developed in the mind of man in a twofold manner, the one through revelation to the Jewish people through their patriarchs, the other through reason in the heathen; so also must the inquiry and representation of this development be twofold; and as God had kept these two ways for a length of time independent and separate, so should we, in the course of the examination, separate knowledge from man, and his development from the doctrine of revelation and faith, firmly trusting that God in the end would bring about the union of both. This is now also my firm conviction, that we must not mix them or bring them together forcibly, as many have done with well-meaning zeal but unclear views, and as many in Germany with impure designs are still doing.
The design had its interruptions, both intellectual and practical. The plan was an ambitious one, too ambitious for Bunsen's time and powers, or even probably for our own more advanced stage of knowledge; and Bunsen ever found it hard to resist the attractions of a new object of interest, and did not always exhaust it, though he seldom touched anything without throwing light on it. Thus he was drawn by circumstances to devote a good deal of time, more than he intended, to the mere antiquarianism of Rome. By and by he found himself succeeding Niebuhr as the diplomatic representative of Prussia at Rome. And his attempt to meet the needs of his own strong devotional feelings by giving more warmth and interest to the German services at the embassy, "the congregation on the Capitoline Hill," led him, step by step, to those wider schemes for liturgical reform which influenced so importantly the course of his fortunes. They brought him, a young and unknown man, with little more than Niebuhr's good word, into direct and confidential communication with the King of Prussia, who was then intent on plans of the same kind, and who recognised in Bunsen, after some preliminary jealousy and misgivings, the man most fitted to assist in carrying them out. But though Bunsen, who started with the resolve of being both a student and a scholar, was driven, as he thought against his will, into paths which led him deeper and deeper into public life and diplomacy, his early plans were never laid aside even under the stress of official employment. Perhaps it may be difficult to strike the balance of what they lost or gained by it.
The account of his life at Rome contains much that is interesting. There is the curious mixture of sympathy and antipathy in Bunsen's mind for the place itself; the antipathy of a German, a Protestant, and a free inquirer, for the Roman, the old Catholic, the narrow, timid, traditional spirit which pervaded everything in the great seat of clerical and Papal government; and the sympathy, scarcely less intense, not merely, or in the first place, for the classical aspects of Rome, but for its religious character, as still the central point of Christendom, full of the memorials and the savour of the early days of Christianity, mingling with what its many centuries of history have added to them; and for all that aroused the interest and touched the mind of one deeply busy with two great religious problems—the best forms for Christian worship, and the restoration, if possible, of some organisation and authority in Protestant Germany. For a long time Bunsen, like his master Niebuhr, was on the best terms with Cardinals, Monsignori, and Popes. The Roman services were no objects to him of abhorrence or indifference. He saw, in the midst of accretions, the remains of the more primitive devotion; and the architecture, the art, and the music, to be found only in Rome, were to him inexhaustible sources of delight. As may be supposed, letters like Bunsen's, and the recollections of his biographer, are full of interesting gossip; notices of famous people, and of things that happened in Rome in the days of the Emancipation and Reform Bills, Revolutions of Naples in '20 and France in '30, during the twenty years, from 1818 to 1838, in which the men of the great war and the restorations were going off the scene, and the men of the modern days—Liberals, High Churchmen, Ultra-montanes—were coming on. Those twenty years, of course, were not without their changes in Bunsen's own views. The man who had come to Rome, in position a poor and obscure student, had grown into the oracle of a highly cultivated society, whose acquaintance was eagerly sought by every one of importance who lived at Rome or visited it, and into the diplomatic representative of one of the great Powers. The scholar had come to have, not merely theories, but political and ecclesiastical aims. The disciple of Niebuhr, who at one time had seen all things very much as Niebuhr saw them in his sad later days of disgust at revolution and cynical despair of liberty, had come since under the influence of Arnold, and, as his letters to Arnold show, had taken into his own mind much of the more generous and hopeful, though vague, teaching of that equally fervid teacher of liberalism and of religion. These letters are of much interest. They show the dreams and the fears and antipathies of the time; they contain some remarkable anticipations, some equally remarkable miscalculations, and some ideas and proposals which, with our experience, excite our wonder that any one could have imagined them practicable. Every one knows that Bunsen's diplomatic career at Rome ended unfortunately. He was mixed up with the violent proceedings of the Prussian Government in the dispute with the Archbishop of Cologne about marriages between Protestants and Catholics, and he had the misfortune to offend equally both his own Court and that of Rome. It is possible that, as is urged in the biography before us, he was sacrificed to the blunders and the enmities of powers above him. But, for whatever reason, no clear account is given of the matter by his biographer, though a good deal is suggested; and in the absence of intelligible explanations the conclusion is natural that, though he may have been ill-used, he may also have been unequal to his position.
But his ill-success or his ill-usage at Rome was more than compensated by the results to which it may be said to have led. Out of it ultimately came that which gave the decisive character to Bunsen's life—his settlement in London as Prussian Minister. On leaving Rome he came straight to England He came full of admiration and enthusiasm to "his Ithaca, his island fatherland," and he was flattered and delighted by the welcome he received, and by the power which he perceived in himself, beyond that of most foreigners, to appreciate and enjoy everything English. He liked everything—people, country, and institutions; even, as his biographer writes, our rooks. The zest of his enjoyment was not diminished by his keen sense of what appear to foreigners our characteristic defects—the want of breadth of interest and boldness of speculative thought which accompanies so much energy in public life and so much practical success; and he seems to have felt in himself a more than ordinary fitness to be a connecting link between the two nations—that he had much to teach Englishmen, and that they were worth teaching. He thoroughly sympathised with the earnestness and strong convictions of English religion; but he thought it lamentably destitute of rational grounds, of largeness of idea and of critical insight, enslaved to the letter, and afraid of inquiry. But, with all drawbacks, his visit to England made it a very attractive place to him; and when he was appointed by his Government Envoy to the Swiss Confederation, with strict injunctions "to do nothing," his eyes were oft on turned towards England. In 1840 the King of Prussia died, and Bunsen's friend and patron, the Crown Prince, became Frederic William IV. He resembled Bunsen in more ways than one; in his ardent religious sentiment, in his eagerness, in his undoubting and not always far-sighted self-confidence and self-assertion, and in a combination of practical vagueness of view and a want of understanding men, with a feverish imperiousness in carrying out a favourite plan. In 1841 he sent Bunsen to England to negotiate the ill-considered and precipitate arrangement for the Jerusalem bishopric; and on the successful conclusion of the negotiation, Bunsen was appointed permanently to be Prussian Minister in London. The manner of appointment was remarkable. The King sent three names to Lord Aberdeen and the English Court, and they selected Bunsen's.
Thus Bunsen, who twenty-five years before had sat down a penniless student, almost in despair at the failure of his hopes as a travelling tutor, in Orgagna's loggia at Florence, had risen, in spite of real difficulties and opposition, to a brilliant position in active political life; and the remarkable point is that, whether he was ambitious or not of this kind of advancement—and it would perhaps have been as well on his part to have implied less frequently that he was not—he was all along, above everything, the student and the theologian. What is even more remarkable is that, plunged into the whirl of London public life and society, he continued still to be, more even than the diplomatist, the student and theologian. The Prussian Embassy during the years that he occupied it, from 1841 to 1854, was not an idle place, and Bunsen was not a man to leave important State business to other hands. The French Revolution, the German Revolution, the Frankfort Assembly, the question of the revival of the Empire, the beginnings of the Danish quarrel and of the Crimean war, all fell within that time, and gave the Prussian Minister in such a centre as London plenty to think of, to do, and to write about. Yet all this time was a time of intense and unceasing activity in that field of theological controversy in which Bunsen took such delight. The diplomatist entrusted with the gravest affairs of a great Power in the most critical and difficult times, and fully alive to the interest and responsibility of his charge, also worked harder than most Professors, and was as positive and fiery in his religious theories and antipathies as the keenest and most dogmatic of scholastic disputants, he was busy about Egyptian chronology, about cuneiform writing, about comparative philology; he plunged with characteristic eagerness into English theological war; and such books as his Church of the Future, and his writings on Ignatius and Hippolytus, were not the least important of the works which marked the progress of the struggle of opinions here. But they represented only a very small part of the unceasing labour that was going on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace. All this time the foundations were being laid and the materials gathered for books of wider scope and more permanent aim, too vast for him to accomplish even in his later years of leisure. It is an original and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen who still carry on the great traditions of scholarship, and give room in their minds for the deeper and more solemn problems of religion and philosophy, they are not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously their public business and their classical or scientific studies, and at any rate they do not attack the latter with the devouring zeal with which Bunsen taxed the efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more of the most abstruse materials of knowledge.