He speaks of Cæsar’s “chequered and oragious political career.”
He tells us of himself, “I was one of those exceptionals.” You have only to open any single page of any single book Professor Oman has written to realize that he either knows nothing of or cares nothing at all for the art of writing prose. I admit that it is easy enough to find, and print, faults in the writings of any one, even, here and there, in the work of a Master. I was re-reading Oceana the other day, and noticed that Froude has written, “there was no undergrowth, no rocks or stones, only fresh green grass.” ... But an error such as this is exactly like a musical discord, inadmissible in the exercise of a student of harmony, but as nothing in the composition of a Master.
I do not wish to say whether, in my opinion, Professor Oman’s views of history are generally sound or if they are not. He would not be where he is, I suppose, were he not credible and generally accurate. But what I do know, and what I have a right to say, is that his prose is turgid, clumsy and without flexibility. He can only tell us that something has happened, he cannot make that happening live and pulse within the brain. He is without the first quality of the true historian, the knowledge and mastery of the medium in which he expresses his thoughts, and lacking all kinetic power he does not even know of what wood to make a crutch.
Mr. Oman and all his school are the legitimate descendants of their Master, Stubbs—the Great Cham of the Historicides. It is a mournful fact that the incredibly vicious style of William Stubbs has had a most malign influence over that of lesser men.
The samples of it that I give here will amaze those people who have not read the learned Bishop, and who have been in the habit of regarding him as a literary man as well as a historian.
“The steam plough,” Stubbs writes at p. 636, vol. iii. of The Constitutional History of England, “and the sewing machine are less picturesque, and call for a less educated eye than that of the plough-man and the seamstress, but they produce more work with less waste of energy; they give more leisure and greater comfort; they call out, in the production and improvement of their mechanism, a higher and more widespread culture. And all these things are growing instead of decaying.” With what is the historian comparing the steam plough and sewing machine? And does a sewing machine “call out” a higher culture? and do the things that are “growing instead of decaying” include a steam plough?
We are also told on page 634, that religion ... “has sunk on the one hand into a dogma fenced about with walls which its defenders cannot pass either inward or outward, on the other hand into a mere war-cry.... Between the two lies a narrow borderland.” Religion, therefore, “sinks into a war-cry.” Between the war-cry and the dogma is a narrow borderland. The dogma is “fenced about with walls.”
The recurring word is a constant phenomenon. In paragraph 498, for instance, we find the sequence “evil,” “debased,” “noble,” “beautiful,” “good,” “noble,” “beautiful,” “evil,” “debased,” “evil,” “good,” “good,” “great,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “noble,” “greatness,” “great,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “greatness,” “evil,” “good,” “evil,” “good,” “evil,” “evil,” “good,” “good,” “evil,” “good,” “good.”
It is true that the devoted and determined fellowship of Oxford men who are destroying the last position of the Historicides have long known that Bishop Stubbs was nothing more than a writer of slovenly text-books. But the general public has not known, and, occupied with wider interests, has been forced to take the statements of the pedants on trust.