European Morals-Augustus to Charlemagne. 335

ART. VI.—History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne.

History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne. By WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY, M.A. In Two Volumes. Second Edition. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1869.

HIS is an eminently scholarly work. It abounds with the traces of great and laborious research. It is rich in the fruits of a ripe and varied erudition. It lays history, philosophy, paganism, Christianity, ancient and modern literature, under large and easy tribute to its purpose; and, while marshalling with a well skilled and powerful hand whatever they yield up, it ranges along with them those separate and independent results which flow only from profound reflection, and from a deep knowledge of mankind. As the reader traverses the vast field over which it conducts him, he may sometimes stare at the positions it lays down, or question the conclusions it draws, or reject the principles it teaches, or fail to account for its vagueness where it should be definite, and for its weakness in points where it should be strong; but he can scarcely lose the conviction that he is in close contact with a guide most liberally endowed with the culture and the wealth of learning.

Much of the interest created by this important work arises from the style in which it is written. The expression is almost uniformly clear and direct. It flows on with a steady sweep, smooth and graceful, yet lively and vigorous. At one time, it attracts by the rare force with which its sentences are compacted together; at another time, it delights by its felicitous. grouping and presentation of persons and things. In philosophical discussion, it is dignified and free, and addresses itself, rather to the common mass of intelligent people than to those who may be called masters and adepts in that line of things. In pure narration, and in the higher forms of historical delineation, it has many of those qualities which give a singular charm to the pages of Macaulay. And, when treating of moral characteristics at particular times within the period it embraces, and tracing the changes through which these characteristics passed, it proceeds in a strain which is always earnest and well sustained, and which often rises into genuine eloquence. By these means, it engages the reader's attention, and carries him pleasantly along over its wide territory, with the feeling that he is occupied with matters affecting his own highest interests and those of his fellow-men.

The subject, treated of in the manner just indicated, is one of the gravest and most momentous to which a historian can

address himself. It brings him face to face with such questions as these: What is the moral nature of man? Whence came the moral sentiments or principles which men have adopted, and how are they to be analysed? What is the standard or criterion of morality in human feeling and human action, how has that been framed and determined, and what are the changes by which it has been marked? How far has the rule of morals been observed, and to what influences are the degrees to which it has been kept, or departed from, to be ascribed? These are questions of a most searching character, questions which cannot be lightly handled, and which cannot be easily disposed of in connection with any section of human history. But all the importance which attaches to them in any relation in which they may be considered, is intensified by the relation in which they stand in Mr Lecky's volumes. They meet him in connection with people of widely different nationalities, with society in conditions of great dissimilarity, with philosophy of schools not only divergent but antagonistic, with literature, legislation, and government most diverse in their character and tendencies and power, and with outward circumstances favourable and unfavourable to the growth of moral elements. And not only is the period during which they meet him one of great extent, but it is one whose commencement, whose progress, and whose conclusion are marked by features of the most distinctive character, and by some of the most decisive and far-reaching changes which have ever affected the conduct and the welfare of men.

It is obvious that Mr Lecky is alive to the magnitude and difficulty of the task he has undertaken. This must be granted even by those who dissent most explicitly from his views and teaching on points of fundamental importance. For it is apparent in the spirit with which his work is pervaded, in the pains which he has taken to accomplish it well, and in the thoroughness with which he has laid out his strength and resources upon it from the beginning to the close. Had it been otherwise, his work would have lost half its interest, and half its value. And, as it is, the approval which it awakens is not diminished, but increased, by the fact, that the author had to grapple with the most serious questions on ground not a little encumbered, and from points of view often novel and perplexing; and, moreover, that he had to do so throughout one of the longest, most critical, and most eventful periods of buman history. An idea of the arduous nature of what he set himself to do may be gathered from his own simple statement of what he has done, as he draws his history to a close,—

"In pursuing our long and chequered course, from Augustus to Charlemagne, we have seen the rise and fall of many types of charac

From Augustus to Charlemagne.

337

ter, and of many forms of enthusiasm. We have seen the influence of universal empire expanding, and the influence of Greek civilisation intensifying, the sympathies of Europe. We have surveyed the successive progress of Stoicism, Platonism, and Egyptian philosophies, at once reflecting and guiding the moral tendencies of society. We have traced the course of progress or retrogression in many fields of social, political, and legislative life; have watched the cradle of European Christianity, examined the causes of its triumph, the difficulties it encountered, and the priceless blessings its philanthropic spirit bestowed upon mankind. We have also pursued step by step the mournful history of its corruption, its asceticism, and its intolerance, the various transformations it produced or underwent, when the turbid waters of the barbarian invasions had inundated the civilisations of Europe."

Mr Lecky has carried out his plan in five chapters, entitled respectively, The Natural History of Morals; The Pagan Empire; The Conversion of Rome; From Constantine to Charlemagne; and, The Position of Women.

....

The last chapter should have been omitted. We say so after most careful consideration, and with the strongest emphasis we can utter. It is evident that Mr Lecky himself had serious misgivings about the propriety of its introduction. For he says, "Of all the many questions that are treated in this work, there is none which I approach with so much hesitation, for there is probably none which it is so difficult to treat with clearness and impartiality, and at the same time without exciting any scandal or offence. . . . . The first duty of an historian, however, is to truth, and it is absolutely impossible to present a true picture of the moral condition of different ages, and to form a true estimate of the moral effects of different religions, without adverting to the department of morals which has exhibited most change, and has probably exercised most influence." And, after describing a particular aspect of Greek life, he says, "My task has been an eminently unpleasing one, and I should certainly not have entered upon even the baldest and most guarded disquisition on a subject so difficult, painful, and delicate, had it not been absolutely indispensable to a history of morals, to give at least an outline of the progress that has been effected in this sphere." We regret that he has allowed what we think to be a mistaken sense of what he owes to his theme, to prevail over the judgment to which he would otherwise have come on this matter. We do so, notwithstanding the interesting character of much of the information he has supplied, notwithstanding the skill with which he has arranged his facts, and the power with which he has condensed them, notwithstanding the quiet vein of reflection and comment with which he has accompanied them, notwithstanding the

evidence he has adduced of general elevation towards a higher standard in one of the great departments of moral life, and notwithstanding the testimony which he bears indirectly against one of the most demoralising influences sanctioned by the Church of Rome, a testimony which, coming from such a quarter, specially deserves to be held up before the eyes of Englishmen at this present time:

"Nowhere, it may be confidently asserted, does Christianity assume a more beneficial or a more winning form, than in those gentle clerical households which stud our land, constituting, as Coleridge said, 'the one idyll of modern life,' the most perfect type of domestic peace, and the centres of civilisation in the remotest villages. Notwithstanding some class narrowness and professional bigotry, notwithstanding some unworthy but half unconscious mannerism, which is often most unjustly stigmatised as hypocrisy, it would be difficult to find in any other quarter so much happiness at once diffused and enjoyed, or so much virtue attained with so little tension or struggle. Combining with his sacred calling a warm sympathy with the intellectual, social, and political movements of his time, possessing the enlarged practical knowledge of a father of a family, and entering with a keen zest into the occupations and the amusements of his parishioners, a good clergyman will rarely obtrude his religious convictions into secular spheres, but yet will make them apparent in all. They will be revealed by a higher and deeper moral tone, by a more scrupulous purity in word and action, by an all-pervasive gentleness, which refines, and softens, and mellows, and adds as much to the charm as to the excellence of the character in which it is displayed. In visiting the sick, relieving the poor, instructing the young, and discharging a thousand delicate offices for which a woman's tact is especially needed, his wife finds a sphere of labour which is at once intensely active and intensely feminine, and her example is not less beneficial than her ministrations."

Our objections to this part of Mr Lecky's work may be stated in the following order; and, with this statement of them, we pass from it.

In the first place; it carries the author far beyond the express limits of his history, taking him, on the one side, into ages long anterior to the times of Augustus, and taking him, on the other side, into ages long subsequent to the times of Charlemagne, even to the state of French and English society at the present day.

In the second place; the separate and very prominent treatment which he has given to this does not accord with the general method in which he has treated other branches of his great subject; and it might have been dealt with in better proportion, and with greater advantage, if it had been taken up in connection with other aspects of the period over which the history extends.

From Augustus to Charlemagne.

339

In the third place; it is neither wise, nor salutary, nor right, to draw forth from the obscurity of a most degenerate past specific habits of the most immoral character, and present them, in fine language, to modern English readers, in the light in which they were regarded at the time, without almost anything to correct the natural tendency of such an exhibition.

In the fourth place; it indicates a disposition in favour of a lower tone, and a laxer code of morals in the particular relation in question, than those which it should be the aim of all truly enlightened moralists to recommend and sustain. Here, indeed, are what we hold to be some of the greatest blemishes in the work, which are the more likely to prove pernicious by reason of the coolness with which they are set down, and by reason, of the indefinite and irresolute form in which they are occasionally presented to the reader's eye.

In the fifth place; it fails to distinguish, as it should, between the purely Christian criterion of the morals of domestic society, and the standard which Roman Catholicism has set up, and the legislation to which the Roman Catholic Church has given rise. The confusion thus made is sometimes very glaring and distressing; and the evil likely to arise from it can hardly be less than that which is likely to proceed from an apparent unwillingness to uphold the normal or dominant type of such morality, on the basis of the law of nature, and to strengthen, and hallow, and dignify that basis by the law of divine revelation and the explicit teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And, in the sixth place; it contains an apology for a system which Romanism has encouraged to the fearful detriment of good morals, and pronounces that there is no fact in modern history more deeply to be deplored than that the Reformers, who in matters of doctrinal innovations were often so timid, should have levelled to the dust, instead of attempting to regenerate, the whole conventual system of Catholicism; while, on the other hand, it hints darkly at a certain kind of theological teaching which inverts all the normal principles of judgment, and absolutely destroys intellectual diffidence. It should have told plainly where that teaching is, and by whom it is encouraged, especially when, in reference to theological questions generally, it goes on in a strain of such representation as this:

"Unfaltering belief being taught as the first of duties, and all doubt being usually stigmatised as criminal or damnable, a state of mind is. formed to which we find no parallel in other fields. Many men and most women, though completely ignorant of the very rudiments of biblical criticism, historical research, or scientific discoveries; though they have never read a single page, or understood a single proposition of the writings of those whom they condemn, and have absolutely no rational