The Roman and the Teuton: A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge. By CHARLES KINGSLEY, M.A., Professor of Modern History. Cambridge and London: Macmillan & Co.
Mr. Kingsley is a vivid and entertaining mediator between Carlyle and commonplace. In his younger days and writings he mediated between his master and commonplace radicalism,—representing the great Scot's antagonism to existing institutions, his sympathy with man as man, and his hope of a more human society, but representing it with sufficient admixture of vague fancy, Chartist catchword, weak passionateness, and spasmodic audacity, based, as such ever is, on moral cowardice. Of late he has gone to the other side of his master, and now mediates between him and the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Hanover family,—representing Carlyle's passionate craving for supereminent persons, his passionate abhorrence of democracy, his admiration of strong character, his disposition to work from historical bases rather than from absolute principles, but representing them at once with a prudence of common sense and a prudence of self-seeking and timidity which are alike foreign to his master's spirit.
We prefer the second phase of the man. It belongs more properly to him. He is ambitious; and the rôle which he first assumed is one which ambition can only spoil. He has but a weak faith in principles, and flinches and flies off to "Prester John," or somewhere into the clouds, when at last principle and sentiment must either fly off or fairly take the stubborn British taurus by the horns. And in truth, his early creed was in part merely passionate and foolish, and with courage and disinterestedness to do more he would have professed less. His present position is better,—that is, sounder and sincerer. Better for him, because more limited and British, leaving him room still to toil at good work, and not calling upon him to break with Church and State, which he really has not the heart to do. As head of the hierarchy of beadles, he is an effective and even admirable man, pious, zealous, and reformatory; but institutions are more necessary to him than principles, and any attempt to plant himself purely on the latter places him in a false position.
Mr. Kingsley has fine gifts and good purposes. He has a rare power of realizing scenes and characters,—a power equally rare of presenting them in vivid, pictorial delineation. He must be a very engaging lecturer, imparting to his official labor an interest which does not always belong to labors of like kind.
For discoursing upon history he has important qualifications, which it would be uncandid not to acknowledge. Of these it is the first that he clings manfully, despite the tendencies of our time, to the human, rather than the extra-human stand-point. He respects personality; he treats of men, not of puppets; he is old-fashioned enough to believe that men may be moved from within no less than from without, and does not attempt, as Quinet has it, to abolish human history and add a chapter to natural history instead. Here, too, he follows Carlyle, but in a way which is highly to his credit. The enthusiasm for science which marks these later centuries breeds in many minds a powerful desire to establish "laws" for the history of man,—that is, to establish for man's history an invariable programme. To this end an effort is made to render all results in history dependent on a few simple and tangible conditions. The intrepid prosaic logic of Spencer, the discursive boldness of Buckle, the rigid dogmatism of Draper are all engaged in this endeavor. But, while eager to make history simple and orderly, they forget to make it human. There is an order and progress, perhaps, but an order and progress of what? Of men? Of human souls, self-moved? No, of sticks floating on a current, of straws blown by the wind! Men, according to this theory, are but ninepins in an alley which Nature sets up only to bowl them down again; and what avails it, if Nature makes improvement and learns to set them up better and better? The triumphs are hers, not theirs. They are but ninepins, after all. Progress? Yes, indeed; but wooden progress, observe.
Mr. Kingsley recognizes human beings, and recognizes them heartily,—loves, hates, admires, despises; in fine, he deals with history not merely as a scientist or theorist, but first of all as a man. There are those who will think this weak. They are superior to this partiality of man for himself, they! They would be ashamed not to sink the man in the savant. But Mr. Kingsley refuses to dehumanize himself in order to become historian and philosopher. He does well.
Again, it is partly Mr. Kingsley's merit, and partly it expresses his limitation, that he is treating history more distinctively as a moralizer than any other noted writer of the time. He assumes in this respect the Hebraistic point of view, and looks out from it with an undoubting heartiness which in these days is really refreshing. He believes in the Old Testament, and doubts not that riches and honors are the rewards of right-doing. And in this, too, there is a vast deal of truth; and it is truly delightful to find one who affirms it, not with perfunctory drawl, but with hearty human zest, a little red in the face.
It adds to the color of Mr. Kingsley's pages, while detracting from his authority, that he is always and inevitably a partisan. He must have somebody to cry up and somebody to cry down. In "Sir Amyas Leigh," his hatred of the Spanish and admiration of the English were like those of a man who had suffered intolerable wrongs from the one and received invaluable rescue from the other. The same element appears powerfully in the volume above named. The Teuton stands for all that is best, and the Roman for all that is worst in humanity. He makes no secret, indeed, of his deliberate belief that the whole future of the human race depends upon the Teutonic family. Deliberate, we say; but in truth Mr. Kingsley is little capable of believing anything deliberately. He is always precipitate. His opinions have the force which can be given them by warm espousal, vivid expression, a certain desire to be fair, and a constant appeal to the moral nature of man; but the impression of hasty and heated partisanship goes with them always, and two words from a broad and balanced judgment might overturn many a chapter of this red-hot advocacy.
The present volume derives an interest for Americans from its relation to our great contest. Mr. Kingsley has been represented as intensely hostile to the North, and as using all his endeavor to infect his pupils with his opinions. These lectures, however, hardly sustain such representations. He is, indeed, anti-democratic in a high degree. He is so as a disciple of Carlyle, as a prosperous Englishman, not destitute of flunkyism, and also as a man whose very best power is that of passionately admiring individual greatness. He is a believer in natural aristocracy, in the British nobility, and in Carlyle; and democracy could, of course, find small place in his creed. Hence he has a sentimental sympathy with the South, and once in a foot-note speaks of "the Southern gentleman" in a maudlin way. There is also another passage in which he makes the South stand for the Teuton, whom he worships, and the North for the Roman, whom he abhors. Yet this very passage occurs in connection with a denunciation of deserved doom upon the Southern Confederacy. He had been describing the last great battle of the Eastern Goths, after which they literally disappeared from history. And the reason of their defeat and destruction, he avers, was simply this, that they were a slaveholding aristocracy. As such they must perish; the earth, he declares, will not and cannot afford them a dwelling-place. Indeed, he repeatedly lays it down as a law of history that slaveholding aristocracies must go down before the progress of the world, and must go down in blood.
The Small House at Allington. By ANTHONY TROLLOPE. New York: Harper & Brothers.