| | | | The choice of a successor to Mr. Goldwin smith in the | chair of Modern History at Oxford must have been a | matter of no slight difficulty, but the hopes which were | excited by the selection of Mr. Stubbs are more than | justified by the Inaugural Lecture which is now before us. | It would be easy indeed to draw a sharp contrast between | the late occupant of the chair and his successor. No two | men could at first sight seem more unlike than the | brilliant epigrammatic politician and the profound, but | comparatively obscure, historian who follows him; but | beneath this outer dissimilarity lie, in fact, strong points | of resemblance, both in temper of mind and in the mode | in which either would view the subject he proposed to | teach. Both are essentially idealists; both are men of deep | and earnest convictions; both are of a temper which ~~ | ardent partisans as they are ~~ raises them high above | what passes for party feeling; both have distinct moral | theories; and both are bold and frank enough to state their | moral theory as the ground of their historic teaching. | Above all, both are larger than the mere chair which they | fill. Each is in different ways admirably fitted to combat | and counteract that narrowness of view which is the | especial bane of University life ~~ whether, like the one, | by linking its studies with the thoughts and hopes and | struggles of the world without it, or, like the other, by | grasping in its whole extend the study which he is himself | pursuing, and by revealing to Oxford the position which | she actually occupies in the general areas, as it were, of | intellectual inquiry. | This is perhaps the first point which strikes the reader in | this Inaugural Lecture. It does not seem to occur to | Professor | | Stubbs to view the study of history from a merely Oxford | point of view. He speaks at once of it as a part of | European culture, as a field of research which is far from | being limited to academic ground. He is, to use his own | emphatic words | He reviews | He points out Germany as busy | with the great collection of Pertz, as France was of old | busy with the bouquet and Mabillon, Italy finding funds | in her utmost need for historic inquiries, Rome unlocking | slowly the jealously-guarded treasures of the Vatican, our | own series of Rolls publications at last justifying the zeal | of Lord Romilly, the Record Offices of England, Venice, | and Spain revealing in letter and dispatch buried intrigues | whose very memory had passed away. Facilities of travel | and communication render it an easier matter than it was | of old for scholars to labour at the arrangement of the vast | mass of materials which has been spread before them by | what Mr. Stubbs picturesquely enough calls | The growth of new literary | sympathies, and the extinction of old literary jealousies, | are knitting together the historical scholars of Europe into | a | and in that republic Oxford | must find its place: ~~ | It is just this broad survey of the world that is needed to | give its due weight and dignity to any branch of study. | Every place of education is necessarily tempted to | estimate the importance of particular departments of | learning rather by accidents peculiar to itself and to their | relation to itself than by their general position in the | minds and interests of man. That elevation above the | local prepossessions of any particular University which | the wanderings of students from Padua to Paris, and from | Paris to Oxford, won for the middle ages, and which the | conception of a Republic of Letters preserved, however | vaguely, for the seventeenth and even eighteenth | centuries, seems difficult to realize now, when | Universities have shrunk into so much smaller parts of | the world's education, and when within them seductive | tests of value are constantly at hand in the different | proportion of rewards, such as fellowships and | professorships, which the institutions of the place attach | to each different branch of intellectual inquiry, Mr. | Stubbs will have done a real service to Oxford if only by | reminding her that her work must ever be estimated by | her relation to the world of letters and education of which | she is but a part. The lofty position which he desires for | his chair must rest rather on the merits of its later | occupants than on the traditions of its earlier history. Mr. | Stubbs has lingered over its origin to do amusing justice | to the House of Hanover. Even Mr. Froude, if we | remember rightly, omitted one real merit in the catalogue | of more doubtful ones on which he based his defence of | Henry VIII,; we mean the steady support he afforded to | historical investigations, his care to rescue the most | important historical manuscripts from the neglected | libraries of the great abbeys, his patronage of Leland and | Polydore Vergil. Mr. Stubbs does not hesitate to fling the | tomes of Eccard and Leibnitz at all heads that refuse to | bow before the Four Georges. However ignorant we may | be of the | the | Annals of the House of Brunswick by Leibnitz may | perhaps suffice to convince us of the historic taste which | from Henry the Lion seems to have descended to the | Hanoverian rulers of even our own day; for to the | patronage of the Kings of Hanover, more than any other | of the German princes, has been owing the successful | undertaking of the greatest historical collection of modern | times ~~ the Monumenta of Pertz. Already the patron of | Leibnitz, of Struve, of Muratori, it is likely enough that it | was from a real love of historic studies that George I. | founded his twin professorships of Modern History at the | two Universities. But if his purpose was the | encouragement of his favourite study, that object was | signally foiled. The Tory University looked coldly on the | Whig Professorship; and the character and attainments of | the Whig Professors did justice to the hostility of their | opponents. The earlier Professors were either dependants | of the Court or men of note in other fields of literature. In | spite of the chivalrous attempt of his successor to rescue | Dr. Nares from the limbo of dullness to which Lord | Macaulay's verdict has consigned the author of the | Life of Lord Burleigh, it is not till we reach the | name of Arnold that the professorship becomes of any | real importance. But Arnold's work was interrupted | almost as soon as it began; the sympathies and interest of | the University were whirled away to questions of a | different order; and the real establishment of Modern | History as a branch of Oxford study dates from the | foundation of a distinct school for its pursuit, and from | the lectures of the late Professor. The school has | undoubtedly taken firm root in Oxford, and Mr. Stubbs | can look round on a brother Professor, a compact body of | historical tutors, and an increasing number of historical | students in justification of his ardent hopes. But in spite | of the distinguished names which the Professor adduces | as already due to his school, such as those of Mr. Kington | and Mr. Bryce, it cannot be said that as yet Oxford forms | any very marked exception to Dr. Shirley's complaint | that | It may be, indeed, that in face of the | singular conception which the powers that be seem to | entertain as to what history is, the efforts even of such | men as Dr. Shirley are ineffective in removing the | impression made upon minds very open to impressions | by the promotion of a popular novelist to the historical | chair at Cambridge, or the elevation of a leading | metaphysician to the chair of Ecclesiastical History at | Oxford. The ground of such appointments is, no doubt, | some vague notion in the minds of those to whom we | owe them, that history is no special or definite study, but | a part of that general mass of things which

"every | gentleman is expected to know."

While such an idea | is propagated by such appointments, it is hopeless to | expect that young men will work in earnest at such a | study. It is the first merit in the appointment of an | historian to the chair of History, in the case of Mr. | Stubbs, that it is at any rate a confession that such a study | as that of history exists. | In spite, however, of temporary discouragements such as | these, we think that the very nature of the place itself, and | of the subjects studied there, seem to point out Oxford as | the fittest spot for the foundation of a sound school of | historical inquiry. Although its teachers fail to take | advantage of the fact, there are few places that present so | many attractions to, and helps in, the investigation of our | own national history. Those who remember the great | interest which Buckland excited in the study of geology | will recall the rides in which that interest began. They | will remember how men who would have turned away | with disgust from disquisitions on strata duly delivered in | a lecture-room found an interest in science which they | had never dreamt of as they followed the eccentric | Professor into an actual quarry, or ransacked on the spot | the treasures of the Stonesfield slate. It is hard to see why | the same mode of treatment may not be applied to | history. In a walk through Oxford one would find | illustrations of every period of our annals. The cathedral | still preserves the memory of the Mercian St. Frideswide; | the tower of the Norman Earls frowns down on the waters | of the mill; around Merton hang the memories of the birth | of our Constitution; the New Learning and the | Reformation mingle in Christ Church; a

"grind"

| along the Marston road follows the track of the army of | Fairfax; the groves of Magdalen preserve the living | traditions of the last of the Stuarts. It is hardly credible, | but it is simply true, that Oxford men live for the most | part in the profoundest ignorance of Oxford history; that | no manual of it, or introduction to it, exists; and that any | freshman whose curiosity is roused by the memorable | sights around him can only be referred to the dry-as-dust | folios of Anthony a'Wood. But it is yet more in the | nature of Oxford studies that we see ground for the rise of | an historical school which shall avoid the one error on | which all sound investigation must be wrecked ~~ the | error of parting history into Ancient and Modern at all. It | is an error which we fear the languate of the new | Professor will tend rather to encourage than to dispel. | Perhaps the most brilliant part of his lecture, in a literary | sense, is the elaborate contrast which he draws between | the worlds of classical and of mediaeval history. The | study of the one, he says as compared with the study of | the other, | ~~ | The key to this false contrast ~~ as we hold it to be ~~ | between the world of Greece and Rome and the world of | Germany, England, and France, lies in the exaggerated | importance which Mr. Stubbs attaches to what is no | doubt a fact most important for history, and in a very | common confusion of thought into which he has fallen by | identifying two ideas of really unequal extent. It is an | exaggeration of a truth when Mr. Stubbs tells us that | | It is a confusion of | thought when throughout his lecture he uses the word |

"Church"

as a synonym for the word

| "Christianity."

But both confusion and exaggeration | alike arise from the unhappy assumption of the existence | of any division at all. If such a division exist, we do not | deny that he has given the best answer that can be given | to the question that follows ~~

"When did ancient | history cease, and when did modern history begin?"

| One famous examiner is said to have asserted his right to | put questions as to any event later than the Call of | Abraham. One Oxford tutor, certainly, was in the habit of | beginning his course of lectures for the Modern History | schools with Shem, Ham, and Japhet. But, putting aside | such extreme claims as would restrict the labours of the | Camden Professor of Ancient History to the world of the | antediluvians, it is certainly better, if any point is to be | fixed, to make it, with Mr. Stubbs, the introduction of | Christianity, rather than the severance of Eastern and | Western Rome, or the coronation of Charles the Great. | But the truth is that no point can be fixed. The division is | an altogether delusive one. The pre-Christian world is not | wholly dead to us, nor is the post-Christian world of | necessity wholly living. It is true that the social and | political institutions around us have for the most part | come into being since the classical world passed away; | but even this is only exclusively true if we restrict our | view to countries of Teutonic blood and speech, and | choose to forget (what we are sure Mr. Stubbs has not | forgotten) the continuance of the great Empire in which | that

"dead past"

came down living through the | ages, and how much of the older conceptions of society | and politics still exist in Romance countries side by side | with the Roman tongue. But is from these outer forms of | the world's life we look at its inner facts ~ at literature, | philosophy, art, science ~~ in all these the earlier world is | more living to us than the later. The institutions of the | Periclean State are indeed dead to us; we are living in a | political constitution identical in all main points with that | of England under Dunstan. But on every deeper subject | of human thought save one, a gulf parts us from the mind | of Dunstan, and no gulf parts us from the mind of | Pericles. That this tradition of thought has been preserved | is mainly, no doubt, owing to Christianity. Christianity | did not create a new world save by renewing the old. It | poured into man, crushed and degraded by imperialism, a | new spirit of manhood; it freed and reinvigorated those | moral and intellectual faculties without whose active | exercise the heritage of the past is worse than lost; its | Fathers, as Villemain has shown, preserved from | extinction the eloquence of Cicero and Demosthenes; its | self-made constitution, its elected rulers, its deliberative | councils kept alive the free democratic traditions of a | world strangled by Caesarism. It is this double fact ~~ the | heritage of the world's thought and literature that had | thus been preserved, the new spiritual influence by which | man had been roused to preserve and to use it ~~ that | blends in the mediaeval conception of the Church. The | Church of the middle ages expresses a far larger notion | than the word Christianity; it means Christianity, and all | that Christianity preserved. The Church was, in a word, | the whole educated society of those ruder ages, their

| "educated classes,"

deriving much of its mode of | handling the treasures of human culture which it | possessed from religious prepossessions, sheltering them | with itself against the brute force round it under religious | sanctions, but, in its essence, the spirit of the old world | veiled under the forms of the new. The Renaissance was | in great measure the throwing off of these forms; in much | of the literature of later times, from Goethe to our own | day, the conflict of the old and new goes on around us | still. This, however, is a subject too large to be treated | incidentally. Our object was rather to point out how this | distinction ~~ unfortunate everywhere ~~ is most | unfortunate at Oxford. A great University suggests of | itself the truer theory of history, for it is the one place | where the apparent opposition vanishes, where, in its very | system of training, the old and the new worlds are | brought every hour together, where men of the nineteenth | century are striving, even if pedantically, to speak the | words of Demosthenes and to think the thoughts of | Aristotle. Of course the results are sometimes very odd. | Still it is possible to get there, manifest to men, a | mingling of our thoughts with the thoughts of the | pre-Christian world, as it is hardly possible elsewhere; and | we cannot but regret that the Regius Professor should | have missed the special opportunity which the place itself | suggests of vindicating the true unity of the history of | man. | We could have wished, too, that in the political remarks | with which his lecture closes Mr. Stubbs had more | carefully guarded himself against misconception. His | doctrine is indeed rather ideal than practical. His view of | the office of history, if we gather it rightly, is that it is not | so much the determining the political direction of its | students' minds as the giving a moral tone to that | direction, whatever it may be. He would not wish to make | Whigs Tories, or Tories Whigs, but to make Whigs | honest and wise Whigs, and Tories wise and honest | Tories. So expressed, we think few will quarrel with the | statement, though it is difficult to see in it much practical | utility. With these slight exceptions, however, the lecture | is throughout admirable in the fullness and ripeness of its | knowledge, the simplicity and eloquence of its style, the | modesty and moral loftiness of its tone. Mr. Stubbs owns, | at the opening, the natural anxiety with which he is about | It will | be the fault of Oxford if the omens are unfavourable.