By John Morley
Originally published in the Nineteenth Century,
reprinted in Miscellanies. 4th Series, London, Macmillan, 1908
EVEN those competent students who thought most ill of Comte's attempt to transform his philosophy into a religion, have agreed to praise the Positivist Calendar. This remarkable list of between five and six hundred worthies of all ages and nations, classified under thirteen main heads, from Theocratic Civilisation down to Modern Science and Modern Industry, was drawn up with the design of substituting for the saints of the Catholic Calendar the men whose work marks them out in history as leaders and benefactors in the gradual development of the human race. On Comte's effort to erect a new polity and a new religion, with himself as its high priest and pontiff, nobody has brought to bear, I will not say merely so much hostile criticism, but such downright indignation, as Mr. Mill. His pages on the later speculations of Comte are the only instance in all his works in which he treats a philosopher from whom he differs with the bitterness felt by the ordinary carnal man for the perversities of an opponent, or, what are more provoking still, the aberrations of a friend. Yet Mill has little but praise for the profound and comprehensive survey of the past progress of human society which is the basis of the Calendar, and guides its author's choice of the names to which we are to dedicate the days of the secular year.
'While Comte sets forth,' says Mill, 'the historical succession of systems of belief and forms of political society, and places in the strongest light those imperfections in each which make it impossible that any of them should be final, this does not make him for a moment unjust to the men or to the opinions of the past. He accords with generous recognition the gratitude due to all who, with whatever imperfections of doctrine or even of conduct, contributed materially to the work of human improvement. . . . His list of heroes and benefactors of mankind includes not only every important name in the scientific movement, from Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathematician and Blainville the biologist, and, in the aesthetic, from Homer to Manzoni, but the most illustrious names in the annals of the various religions and philosophies, and the really great politicians in all states of society. Above all, he has the most profound admiration for the services rendered by Christianity and by the Church of the Middle Ages.... A more comprehensive, and, in the primitive sense of the term, more catholic sympathy and reverence towards real worth and every kind of service to humanity, we have not met with in any thinker. Men who would have torn each other to pieces, who even tried to do so, if each usefully served in his own way the interests of mankind, are all hallowed to Comte.
Neither is his a cramped and contracted notion of human excellence, which cares only for certain forms of development. He not only personally appreciates, but rates high in moral value, the creations of poets and artists in all departments, deeming them, by their mixed appeal to the sentiments and the understanding, admirably fitted to educate the feelings of abstract thinkers, and enlarge the intellectual horizon of the people of the world.'
An even weightier judgement than Mill's upon such a question is that of Littré. For Littré, while inferior to Mill in speculative power, as well as in taste and aptitude for actual affairs as they go past us, both travelled more widely over vast fields of human knowledge, and possessed in important departments of it a closer and more special acquaintance with detail. Littré, like Mill, at a critical moment in the growth of his opinions, and about the same time of life, conceived an ardent admiration for Comte's exposition of the positive philosophy, and he became, and remained to the end, its firm adherent. 'Employed,' he says, upon very different subjects—history, language, physiology, medicine, erudition—I constantly used it as a sort of instrument to trace out for me the lineaments, the origin, and the outcome of each question. It suffices for all, it never misleads, it always enlightens.' Like Mill—though less provoked than Mill by Comte's arrogance, his pontifical airs, and his hatred of liberty—Littré rejected utterly and without qualification the later speculations, in which he held Comte to have thrown overboard the method and the principles on which he had built up the system of positive philosophy. Yet Littré declares that the Positivist Calendar deserves a place in the library of everybody who studies history; though we may discuss this admission or that exclusion, yet we must admire the sureness of judgement applied to so many men and over such diversity of matter; finally, it is a powerful means of developing the historic spirit and the sentiment of continuity; it is a luminous manual of meditation and instruction.
The English disciples of Comte have rendered good service to literature and to knowledge by introducing to public attention a performance so commended by such authorities. They have taken their teacher's elaborate list of those who have played an effective part in Western civilisation, and they have clothed each of these five hundred and fifty-eight names with an apparel of' biographical and historical fact, which informs the reader who they were, and what is their title to a place in a great concrete picture of human evolution. If the Calendar itself be worth anything, this illustration of the Calendar was well worth supplying. If, as Littré promises, the picture itself is to quicken meditation and to serve for instruction, then this explanation of each figure in the picture is an indispensable guide, commentary, and handbook. Mr. Harrison tells us with lucidity and precision in his preface what it is that he and his companions have done. The book is not a dictionary, for the names are placed not in alphabetical order, but in historic sequence. They are selected again not with a view to the space they fill in common fame or in literary discussion, but in relation to a definite principle of grouping—namely, the contribution made by the given individual to the progress of mankind. These little biographies constitute, like the skeleton Calendar on which they are built up, a balanced whole, constructed, with immense care, to mark the relative importance of different movements, races, and ages.
How much diligent and conscientious trouble must have been taken, can only be realised by those who are practised in literary workmanship. Condensation is the hardest of all the requirements of composition of this kind; and these little lives are marvels of condensation. Let anybody try to write about Fénelon or the Architects of the Middle Ages in a single small page; or Mozart, or Roger Bacon, or Bossuet, or Saint Louis in two; or Descartes in three; or Julius Caesar or Pope Hildebrand in four; or Aristotle in five: he will then be able to measure the industry, perspicacity, discrimination, and let us not forget also the self-denial and self-control, which have gone to the production of these little vignettes. The writers make no attempt at literary display, though at least three of them are masters of the arts of style and expression. Some of them may seem to share the just regret expressed by a great historian, that history cannot be treated apart from literature and style, like geometry or chemistry; still as a whole the writing is excellent. The merit could not be expected to be absolutely equal in a team of fifteen; but one can only admire the skill and success with which the unity of the central idea has been preserved, and a real, not a mechanical, harmony attained in bringing into a single fabric under one roof the shrines of the great servants of mankind in science and in philosophy; in painting, sculpture, music, romance, history; lyric, elegiac, and dramatic poetry; in government and religion. The field is enormous; so is the number of individual facts, names, dates, in all languages and all branches; so is the quantity of separate estimates, appreciations, verdicts, and judgements. It is not too much to say—so far as a critic like myself can judge—that a high level of general competency has been attained, though, of course, in a survey of this encyclopaedic magnitude, there are a thousand points for remark, deduction, and objection. In one respect everybody will concur. Even those who are most ready to find Positivism as a creed hard, frigid, repulsive, and untrue, will still recognise and admire the genuine and devoted enthusiasm for purity, nobility, beauty, in art, literature, character, life, and service, that has inspired the present enterprise and marks every page of it.
Nobody must suppose that the book which Mr. Harrison has edited is to be skimmed, or merely dipped into, or even once read through and then dismissed. It is extremely readable, for that matter, but it demands and is intended for digestion and rumination. Two of the most important principles that are now established in all contemporary minds with any pretence to call themselves educated, are, first, the unity of history and the ordered continuity of European civilisation and science; second, that the place and quality of a contribution to thought, feeling, or art is relative to the social conditions of time and place, of country and generation. Unless guided and illuminated by these two ideas, the study of anything like general history is impossible, and for purposes of that popular education which is every day all over the world becoming more and more a leading circumstance of our time, general history is seen to be of growing value and importance, both for its own sake as knowledge, and as a corrective to the crude and narrow tendencies incident to the ever-waxing rule of numbers.
Hardly any collected view of the history of the world is so bad, as not to be better than to have no view at all. Decisively as we may object to much in Comte's spirit and teaching—to the stifling predominance, for instance, which he allowed Order to obtain in his mind over Progress, though he incessantly professed to value Progress and Order alike—still, even his chart, imperfect and avowedly provisional as it is and must be, is better than drifting in a boat over the sea of history without a helmsman or a course. Great minds have felt this. Bossuet, in his famous Discourse on Universal History, insists on 'the concatenation of the universe,' and urges that the true object of history is to observe in connection with each epoch the secret dispositions of events that prepared the way for great changes, as well as the momentous conjunctures which more immediately brought them to pass; and, though Bossuet's history is arbitrary and one-sided enough, he launched effectually a fertile idea. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Turgot, Condorcet, Hegel, and many others, all felt the same intellectual necessity, and made more philosophic attempts to meet it. Comte went far more elaborately and systematically to work than any of them, in uniting concrete to abstract examination of the long movement that ends in the modern world.
Among the competing theories of human history, men will choose their own, or rather in most cases they will let accident choose for them. There is less difference between them for this particular object, than controversial passion might suppose. Bossuet found the key to events in a Divine Providence, controlling and overruling the course of human destinies by a constant exercise of superhuman will. Comte ascribed a hardly less resistible power to a Providence of his own construction, directing present events along a groove cut ever more and more deeply for them by the past, and even pushing the influence of past over present to the singular and soul-destroying paradox that the living are ruled by the dead. Whether you accept Bossuet's theory or Comte's theory of the law and governance of the world, of the social union, of change, progress, and the ebb and flow of civilisation, in either case, whether men be their own Providence, or no more than instruments and secondary agents in the hands and for the purposes of 'die unbekannten höheren Wesen, die wir ahnen,'2 this classification of the operations of either Providence equally deserves study and meditation. Earthly fame, says the poet, is nothing else but a breath of wind, 'the unknown higher beings that we yearn for'; and, as the wind is called Sirocco, Tramontana, Libeccio, Greco, according as it blows from one point or another, so Fame picks out her diverse names to celebrate, and the same wind has different power and is differently known in diverse lands. The merit of such an attempt as this is that it supplies principles by which to bring order into the AEolian confusion, to measure famous names, to restrain random incontinence of praise and blame, and at the same time in a systematic scheme 'to impress on the mind of our age the characteristic qualities of various types of civilisation and of human energy and thought.'
Its writers will not expect, and do not intend, the present volume to fill the space in men's minds that was once for so many ages occupied by the Menologies and Hagiologies of the Christian Church. Saints crowded into the ecclesiastical calendar with dangerous profusion, and the legends of their lives were worked up into a gigantic system of popular mythology, which, as Gibbon says, so obscured the simple theology of primitive believers as visibly to tend to a restoration of the old reign of polytheism. Yet these legendary biographies, calculated as they were to impair the sublime austerity of monotheism, still had a good side. 'In contrast with the rudeness and selfishness which generally prevailed, they presented examples which taught a spirit of gentleness and self-sacrifice, of purity, of patience, of love to God and man, of disinterested toil, of forgiveness of enemies, of kindness to the poor and the oppressed. The concluding part of the legend exhibited the saint triumphant after his earthly troubles, yet still interested in his brethren, who were engaged in the struggle of life, and manifesting his interest by interpositions in their behalf.'3
We may doubt whether any such place will ever be taken by these new heroes. Nor can one wish the book to be so effective as to induce the general public to date its letters, for example, 28 Descartes (Hume) 103, instead of November 4, 1891. Life is too short for these innovations. Then the competition of the secular romance, as has been caustically remarked, which came in with the seventeenth century, threw hagiography and martyrology into the shade; and we cannot suppose that the rationalised and scientific hagiography of the present volume will compete on equal terms with the vast and exuberant growth of modern fiction. Yet the wonderful spectacle offered by such a narrative, of all the toil, wisdom, love, faith, illumination of intellect and of soul, that have gone to building the social home of the most forward portions of our race, will not be found without an edification and inspiration of its own.
It is not to be expected that everybody will be satisfied with the distribution of the honours of canonisation. Mr. Harrison thinks that, as to at least five hundred names in the whole list, competent authorities would probably agree; and as to the remainder, critics and objectors would differ as much from one another as from Comte. It may be so. The opening division, Theocratic Civilisation, will strike some as being what Cromwell is supposed to have called the law of England—a tortuous and ungodly jumble; but the field is in its nature obscure, and has been opened mainly since Comte's time. This is not the place for discussing the large question whether Comte was right or wrong in excluding the Protestant reformers from his list. To many of us it has always appeared a disastrous omission that the form of faith which has directed, and to this day, in spite of the change in the ancient theological spirit, still directs the lives of so many communities all over the world, should be passed by as a mere solvent and an aberration. 'Protestant theologians, such as Luther and Calvin,' we are told (p. 247), 'are not in this Calendar; since the positive and even the negative results of the Intellectual Revolution in Protestant countries are best exhibited by systematic thinkers like Bacon and Hobbes, and practical statesmen like William the Silent and Cromwell.' We may notice in passing that William Penn and George Fox have a place, and nobody will grudge to either of them his canonisation, or deny the principle on which they are admitted—namely, that the Quaker faith has 'rendered eminent temporary service in England and America.' Even Voltaire, after his memorable visit to England in 1725, did handsome justice to the graces and virtues of Quakerism. But taking the Positivist point of view, can we hold that the Quakers are the only Protestants who have rendered eminent temporary service to society and mankind in Great Britain and in America? If George Fox has a good title, why not John Wesley? A principal claim made for Catholicism throughout this volume is that over many ages, even amid the decline of theology, it has had charge of morals. Perhaps, in any such claim, Catholicism is used in its larger sense for Christianity as a whole; still, in any case, the assertion that the Protestant form of' Christianity has had charge of morals, is just as true in the same sense as the same assertion about the Romish form. If that task, whatever it may amount to, has fallen to one church in Catholic countries, it has fallen in the same sense to other churches in Protestant countries. The precise value of the service may be different, and the exact degree of success may be unequal, if anybody chooses to say so; but the service is in aim and quality the same. Whatever may be the relations of such a doctrine as Justification by Faith to the intellectual revolution of modern times, what is not to be denied is that, with all its divisions and all its defects, the evangelical movement, in which Wesley is the greatest name, unquestionably effected a great moral revolution in England.4 Surely to wage war against the slave-trade was to render a pretty 'eminent service to England and America.' Wesley was one of its earliest and strongest opponents, and the historian must record that both the onslaught upon the slave-trade, and the other remarkable philanthropic efforts towards the last quarter of the last century, arose in, and owed their importance to, the great evangelical movement, of which this Calendar fatally omits to take any account. If Catholicism is to be judged, not as a body of doctrines but as a social force, why not Protestantism also?
To omit Calvin from the forces of Western evolution is to read history with one eye shut. To say that Hobbes and Cromwell stand for the positive results of the intellectual revolution in Protestant countries, and that Calvin does not, is to ignore what the Calvinistic churches were, and what they have done for moral and social causes in the Old World and in the New. Hobbes and Cromwell were giants in their several ways, but if we consider their powers of binding men together by stable association and organisation, their permanent influence over the moral convictions and conduct of vast masses of men for generation after generation, the marks that they have set on social and political institutions wherever the Protestant faith prevails, from the country of John Knox to the country of Jonathan Edwards, can we fail to see that, compared with Calvin, not in capacity of intellect, but in power of giving formal shape to a world, Hobbes and Cromwell are hardly more than names writ in water? As a learned man with a right to be heard has put it: —'The Protestant movement was saved from being sunk in the quicksands of doctrinal dispute chiefly by the new moral direction given to it in Geneva. The religious instinct of Calvin discerned the crying need of human nature to be a social discipline rather than a metaphysical correctness. The scheme of polity which he contrived, however mixed with the erroneous notions of his day, enforced at least the two cardinal laws of human society—viz. self-control as the foundation of virtue, self-sacrifice as the condition of the common weal. . . . It was a rude attempt, indeed, but then it was the first which the modern times had seen, to combine individual and equal freedom with strict self-imposed law; to found society on the common endeavour after moral perfection. The Christianity of the Middle Ages had preached the base and demoralising surrender of the individual; the surrender of his understanding to the Church; of his conscience to the priest; of his will to the prince. Protestantism, as an insurrection against this subjugation, laboured under the same weakness as all other revolutions. It threw off a yoke and got rid of an exterior control, but it was destitute of any basis of interior life. The policy of Calvin was a vigorous effort to supply that which the revolutionary movement wanted—a positive education of the individual soul. The power thus generated was too expansive to be confined to Geneva. It went forth into all countries. From every part of Protestant Europe eager hearts flocked hither to catch something of the inspiration. The Reformed Communions, which doctrinal discussion was fast splitting up into ever-multiplying sects, began to feel in this moral sympathy a new centre of union. This, and this alone, enabled the Reformation to make head against the terrible repressive forces brought to bear by Spain, the Inquisition, and the Jesuits. Sparta against Persia was not such odds as Geneva against Spain. Calvinism saved Europe. "5
Yet Loyola and Dominic, forsooth, are to count among the great saving forces of the Western world; and Calvin is to be banished into limbo. Surely this is too hard for any canon of historic equity. For my own part, if I may not date my letters Luther, I positively decline to date them Innocent the Third.
The same deliberate limitation of vision—for it would be altogether unjust to ascribe it to constitutional narrowness of mind—that thrusts out even the social services of Protestant heretics in the West, excludes all mention of the services rendered to civilisation by the heretical heirs of the Roman Empire in the East. Mr. Harrison, for instance, describes it as the great glory of Charles Martel that he saved Europe from Islam, and stemmed the torrent of invasion both in North and South from Mussulman and heathen. But this is to leave out of sight what was the real and effective bulwark for many ages against Mussulman invasion. What says a profound and learned historian whose authority Mr. Harrison will be the first to recognise? ' The vanity of Gallic writers has magnified the success of Charles Martel over a plundering expedition of the Spanish Arabs (A.D. 732) into a marvellous victory, and attributed the deliverance of Europe from the Saracen yoke to the valour of the Franks. But it was the defeat of the great army of the Saracens before Constantinople by Leo the Third (718) which first arrested the torrent of Mohammedan conquest, although Europe refuses her gratitude to the iconoclast hero who averted the greatest religious, political, and ethnological revolution with which she has ever been threatened.'6
Nothing but a settled prejudice against the Orthodox Church can explain the exclusion of all reference to the share of the Eastern Empire in saving Western civilisation. Hannibal is admitted, on what principle I do not profess to understand, for the victory of Carthage over Rome would have transformed the face of the world, and ruined that process of civilising incorporation which in Comte's eyes makes the name of Rome blessed for ever in the history of mankind. Why should Hannibal, who would have destroyed this great work, have his day in the Calendar, and Leo and Basil, who sheltered and saved the work, be left to perish from commemoration like the shadow of smoke? 'Without the history of the Eastern Empire of Rome,' says Mr. Freeman, to whom the doctrine of the unity of history as a living truth of daily application owes so much more than to anybody else in England, 'without the Eastern Empire, the main story of the world becomes an insoluble riddle. If there had been Turks at Constantinople in the ninth and tenth centuries, the names Europe and Christendom could never have had so nearly the same meaning as they have had for ages.'7
It may be said that Comte expressly designed his scheme for Western Europe. But then, why insert Haroun-al-Raschid, the immortal caliph of Baghdad, and Abd-al-Rahman, the greatest of the caliphs of Cordoba? Because, we are told, the Arabian culture that flourished in their reigns excited a powerful reaction in the whole progress of Western thought, and because much of the learning, the arts, and the mechanical knowledge of the ancient world was preserved in the Arab university of Cordoba. That is quite true, but nobody knows better than some of the writers of this volume how much more was preserved at Constantinople. The mighty Gibbon did less than justice to the part played by the Byzantine Emperors in saving Christian civilisation for so long from the arms of the Turks, yet he 'trembles at the thought that Greece might have been overwhelmed, with her schools and libraries, before Europe had emerged from the deluge of barbarism, and that the seeds of science might have been scattered on the winds before the Italian soil was prepared for their cultivation.' (Decline and Fall, chap. lxvi.) The Byzantine system of government may have been essentially retrograde, and it may have been so from the cause that it had the fundamental vice of uniting temporal and spiritual power in the same hands. That is no reason, however, why the services of the Byzantines should be left out, nor would they have been, as one must suspect, if they had not been schismatic in the eyes of the Pope of Rome, and if the founder of Positivism had not felt bound to take up the Pope's quarrels along with the rest of his pontifical attributes.
Among the names which Englishmen will be prompt to miss are Elizabeth and Chatham. Yet Elizabeth, by the practice of a patient and longheaded sagacity in which she has not many rivals among statesmen, saved the independence of England, and Englishmen at least may be excused for thinking that such achievement ought to count for something in an ecumenical survey like the book before us. Mr. Beesly's volume on Elizabeth8 is a masterly vindication—and vindication cannot really be needed in the eyes of his associates—of her claim to as high a place as Blanche of Castile, and to one considerably higher than her namesake, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. Then, as to Chatham, it seems hard measure to exalt Frederick the Great to the lofty pinnacle of the presiding genius over a whole month, and yet to grudge even a day of a week to the English minister who prevented Frederick from being cut into mincemeat—not to mention sundry other performances that in their ultimate effects have decided 'the general course of civilisation,' of which our Calendar here is the biographical manual, over the greater part of the habitable globe. Without Chatham the appearance of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin in the Calendar is robbed of half its meaning; and it may be worth adding that Jefferson would have been very much surprised to find himself admitted to Paradise, while the unlucky French philosophers who inspired him with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and all the rest of his principles, are cast without name, without fame, down into the Inferno as negatives, destructives, and revolutionaries.
Few selections are so hard to swallow as that of Frederick the Great as patron saint of Modern Statesmanship. Comte extols Frederick as a practical genius who in capacity comes nearest to Caesar and Charlemagne. This in itself will seem a gross exaggeration to anybody who, with Napoleon's exploits in his mind and the volumes of Napoleon's correspondence before him, has ever realised the incomparable magnitude and strength of practical genius in that colossal man. Baleful as were the purposes to which he put it, who will place Napoleon's practical genius on a level with Frederick's? The best modern opinion of Frederick on this side of his career is that, though a great soldier and an intrepid and skilful diplomatist, he possessed little originality in the fields of administration and organisation. Mirabeau said of Frederick that he was a great character in a great position, rather than a great genius raised by nature high above the common level. To take this measure of him is not to deny that Frederick carried out with heroic courage, persistency, insight, resource, and labour, the work that was then appointed by circumstances for the ruler of the Prussian State. 'He maintained with invincible tenacity his father's idea of defending Prussia by the sustained energy of its people, called out and stimulated by the unsparing rigour of the government.' (Seeley's Stein, i. 175.) All that is true enough. But admire this performance as we may, high as we may place the qualities exhibited in the course of it, yet it was but a small task compared with the stupendous and world-embracing achievements, alike of statesman-like conception and of execution, which justify the writers of the present volume in saying of Caesar that Shakespeare was not wrong in calling him the foremost man of all the world; and of Charlemagne, that he formed the course of human civilisation, re cast a world shattered by barbarian incursion, and founded Europe as an organic whole. Frederick had not been twenty years in his grave before the work of his life was in ruins. Arbitrary energy is always superficially attractive; men overlook the confusion that it mostly leaves behind it. Frederick's ditty was to preserve the independence of a very poor country without a frontier, and he succeeded. But it was Frederick's bad civil administration, and the abuses and defects of his military system, that left Prussia open to the humiliation and overthrow of Jena and Tilsit.
Apart from the question of Frederick's practical genius, which assuredly was not second-rate, Comte gives him his prominent place in the Calendar as a dictator who furnishes the best model of modern statesmanship, and who, in accordance with the ideal of Hobbes—a very bad ideal it was from any liberal point of view—'reconciled power and liberty.' If we turn from these rose-coloured abstractions to the actualities of Frederick's government, we can find no proof of any such reconciliation. His rigours may have been justified by the exigencies of his kingdom, but it is idle to cover with fair words the harshness of a government that was in the strictest sense military and despotic. I cannot see how Napoleon was not as good an illustration of the bad ideal of Hobbes as Frederick, nor why Napoleon is to be excluded if Frederick is to be admitted, and not only admitted, but raised to the same high and special eminence as Aristotle, Charlemagne, Descartes, and St. Paul. Dictators have their place in the universal scheme, no doubt; but one can only hold up one's hands in amazement when Frederick, who is more responsible than any one other European ruler of the eighteenth century for the spread of those principles of violence, fraud, and robbery which were only carried further by Napoleon, and were not begun by him, is held up as 'a precious and shining example of what purely human motives can effect when they are not weighted and warped by the rival claims of an imaginary object of love and adoration.' The more highly we appreciate Mr. Beesly's remarkably acute and masculine historic judgement, the harder is this particular eulogy to comprehend.
A very different figure from Frederick is Francia, the dictator of Paraguay, whom Carlyle, carrying his idolatry of force and brute-will to its most perverse height, made the hero of an only too well known essay. Even the defenders of this execrable personage have, 1 believe, been obliged to plead insanity in extenuation of some of his most atrocious doings; and, sane or insane, it would be hard to find a man known to history less worthy of admiration, and he is least worthy of all, exactly from the Positivist point of view. Yet Francia, one of the cruellest of despots, figures in the week of Cromwell along with Algernon Sidney and George Washington! Rather than dedicate a day of the week to Francia, I shall decidedly stick to my old friends the Sun and the Moon, to Wodin and to Thor.
One of the most admirable of these little biographies is that of Byron. Mr. Harrison deals with a justice, courage, generosity, eloquence, and judgement that are more common in foreign than in English critics of this powerful man.
'To judge Byron truly, we must look on him with European and not with insular eyesight. His power, his directness, his social enthusiasm, fill the imagination of Europe, which is less troubled than we are today about his metrical poverty and conventional phrase. To Italians he is almost more an Italian than an English poet; to Greeks he is the true author and prophet of their patriotic sentiments; and in France and in Germany he is now more valued and studied than by his countrymen, in a generation when subtle involution of idea and artful cadence of metre are the sole qualifications for the laurel crown. When this literary purism is over, Byron will be seen as the poet of the revolutionary movement which, early in the nineteenth century, awoke a new Renascence.' (Page 362)
I have not a word to say against this estimate, nor a word to add. Yet it makes one wonder why, if Byron is to be admitted to our pantheon, Rousseau should be excluded. Comte has used some bad language about Rousseau, and some of it is thoroughly deserved. But when you have exposed his sophistries, his delusions, his sentimentalism, his mischievous rhetoric, it still remains at least as true of him as it ever was of Byron, that his glow, his fervour, his power of effective inspiration, his feeling for nature, his sense of the true dignity of man, awoke new aspirations and kindled a purer flame in the life of the affections and the heart. To treat Rousseau as all negative or destructive is to leave out one-half of the sources, and one-half of the results, of his social and popular influence. It is true that he was a revolutionary in Comte's sense, but then nobody could dream of denying, and Mr. Harrison does not deny, that the new element of lyric emotion represented by Byron is 'revolutionary in its origin and in its sympathies.' If Byron then is to have a day of the week to himself, why not Rousseau?
It is curious that, as Rousseau is shut out, the great man who despised Rousseau so intensely, and combated his theories with such persistency and power, should not be allowed to come in. One can see possible grounds in framing a calendar for the exclusion of either Rousseau or Burke, but not of both. We can well suppose that Burke would never have found a day in the terrible months of Ventôse, Nivôse, and Pluviôse. But why not in a Calendar for Positivists? The headless shades of Danton, Robespierre, and the rest of' them may find some solace in knowing that their exclusion is shared by the author of the Reflections on the French Revolution; but that Comte, of all men, should have neglected the greatest conservative force in the literature of the revolutionary crisis, is indeed a surprise and a puzzle.
The equally striking omission of Wordsworth is, I suppose, to be explained by the decision to include no contemporaries. Comte framed his Calendar between 1845 and 1849, and Wordsworth did not die until 1850. Exception, however, was made in favour of Rossini, who died in 1868, and Manzoni, who did not die until 1873; and Wordsworth is certainly a more indispensable name than either. No modern poet has more of the ideas that are in the Comtist scheme religious, and Comte, though his admiration for Dante shows him to have known fine poetry when he could get it, was tolerant even of mediocrity when it expressed his own thought—witness his admiration for the unmelodious oracle of Eliza Mercoeur, 'L'oubli c'est le néant; la gloire est l'autre vie,' which, being interpreted, is that 'to be forgotten is the true annihilation; man's future life lies in being remembered with honour.'
The treatment of Ancient Poetry leaves something to be desired; and the days of the month of Homer are not nearly so genial as the days and weeks of' Dante and Shakespeare. If there is a man in all the world who deserves a gracious, gentle, and affectionate hand, it is Horace. One is shocked to find this truehearted and delightful poet sniffed at and scolded almost as if he were one of the impostors of letters. 'Having smothered his republican zeal with a hollow enthusiasm for the triumphant empire, his purely Roman work was reduced to opening the doors of the Pantheon to the cults and philosophies of all the world. He emphasised the eclecticism which was the groundwork of the imperial sociocracy.' This, is surely no way of writing about a lyric poet. He is 'the polished poet of expediency for all ages'; smooth and shallow is his poetry of love; his code is one of harmless selfishness; his love, 'like the rest of his faculties, lacked the fire of a devotion welding the fragments of morality into religion.' All this sermonising makes but a stale and weedy chaplet to adorn a poet's bust, and such a poet as Horace too—the very genius of friendship, of gaiety, of pleasant dalliance, of those social delights which Milton declared to be not unwise if we but spare to interpose them oft; and who, besides these infinitely graceful effusions of a lighter muse, yet could strike a grave and thrilling note when he praised Regulus or the just and tenacious man, and who, in his Satires and Epistles, takes a place among the first of those who have set forth the wisdom of life, including that vitally important part of wisdom which consists in not expecting too much either from life or from your fellow-creatures. How could it ever be the business of such a poet as this to 'weld the fragments of morality into religion'?
The same writer, one must add, who is so ungenial in raising Horace to his pedestal, does excellently by Ovid and Tibullus. But why did Comte make no room for Catullus in this most agreeable week? He is a far finer poet than Tibullus. Half a dozen pieces of Catullus are the very gems of the lyric muse in the ancient world, if we may not add the modern world as well. The omission may have been a slip, and, after all, I am much more inclined to wonder at the completeness and comprehensiveness of Comte's lists than to complain of an exclusion.
Virgil receives a fine and glowing tribute, alike for his merits as a master of the poet's art and instrument, and for his vast influence over the mind and imagination of Europe during the whole of the Catholic period. But Lucretius, on the other hand, gets in comparison a somewhat curt and frigid portion; though, in sublimity, in boldness, in strength and sweep of imagination, and, I must even say, notwithstanding Mr. Harrison's talk of Virgil's 'matchless hexameters'—and matchless they are in finish, grace, and elaboration—yet in grand and solemn majesty of verse, and, above all, in penetrating insight into the awful realities of things through all time and all creation, Lucretius seems in many a passage to be as far above Virgil as Milton is above Spenser.
Some will be struck by the large number of names in the three months dedicated to poetry; but under the general head of 'Poetry' are included all modes in which the creative faculty of man expresses imaginative thought. Poetry covers epic, lyric, and romantic poetry; romances, chronicles, or meditations; even painting and sculpture. This wide comprehension explains the fact that the Calendar contains no fewer than 127 names in the sphere of creative art, or very little short of one-quarter of the whole 558. 'Such is the large part which Comte assigned to the imagination in the evolution of human society.' This shows a far wiser appreciation of the true proportion among the shaping influences of the world than the ordinary political historian, or even the actual politician, is wont to dream of. Comte himself, as it happens, was not conspicuously endowed with imagination, though in this we cannot expect all his disciples to agree.
On this head, by the way, it is not easy to see why Froissart and Joinville should be placed under Modern Poetry, while Herodotus goes not into Ancient Poetry, but into Ancient Philosophy. Nor do I understand why Saint-Simon is left out, while Guicciardini is put in. Voltaire is admitted, but only to a subordinate place, as the author of' plays like Zaïre and Mahomet. Nothing is said of his Essai sur les Moeurs, though it was not merely negative, but a truly positive contribution to the conception of history, and nothing is said of his sleepless humanity, or of his strenuous, lifelong protest against intolerance. So, in the case of Locke, surely we should have heard more about his writings on civil government and toleration. Locke's political or social liberalism was a more important factor in 'the concrete evolution of humanity' than his Essay. Hallam truly says, whatever we may think of Locke's doctrine on government, it opened a new era of political opinion in Europe. 'While silently spreading the fibres from its root over Europe and America, it prepared the way for theories of political society from which the great revolutions of the past and present age have sprung' (Literary History, pt. iv. ch. 4). Of course Comte had a right to frame his Calendar in his own way; still it is perplexing to find the principles of tolerance and freedom on which the modern world, and in an increasing degree, subsists, coolly despatched as mere solvents, just as if they had made no positive difference, and no difference for good, in the elements of moral and social life.
It was almost inevitable, considering the purpose and inspiration of the work, that it should often have a note sounding rather like a note of excess. The object is naturally to magnify and to exalt, not to be balanced, measured, or merely judicious. The Divine Comedy, for instance, is hailed as 'the foundation of the Bible that is to be,' and we have no right to wonder, therefore, that Comte should extol it as 'the incomparable epic, which still forms the highest glory of human art.' In the region of Taste wise men should not waste time in quarrelling with other people's superlatives. But to those who know Homer, AEschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare, the sentence just quoted will prove a terribly hard saying. When Mr. Harrison pronounces Dante to be the peer of all poets in profound insight into character and life; to stand supreme in the 'sublime range of his theme the sum-total of humanity and nature, the past, the present, and the future—in the profound synthesis of all knowledge, and the ideal co-ordination of human society as a whole'—I cannot but remember that even so admiring and competent a student of Dante as Mr. Symonds finds it necessary to admit the presence of 'an irreducible element of prose in the very essence of the poem,' and to say, in irreverent language, that the great poet was terribly limited by 'the exigencies of his frost-bitten allegory and his rigid methodistical theology.' Why not be content to love Dante for his exquisite observation of the most beautiful things in nature; for the incomparable directness and intensity that enables him to make 'his verse hold itself aright by mere force of noun and verb without an epithet'; for the sort of geometric reality with which, as Sainte-Beuve says, he renders the invisible, and by which he recalls some of the austere genius of Pascal; for his sublimity; his mixture of tenderness and pity, with a rhadamanthine severity, not seldom deserving to be called by a harsher name; for his ethical integrity? For all this mankind, who may be said in this century to have rediscovered Dante, will take care not to lose him again from among the objects of their perpetual gratitude and affection. But if we praise him above all other men and poets for his insight 'into the sum-total of humanity,' what is there left for us to say about Shakespeare? This demurrer to an aesthetic overestimate is not presumptuously to disparage Dante's supreme place as the noblest monument of the Middle Age. Shelley puts Homer as the first, Dante as the second, of epic poets; 'that is, the second poet the series of whose creations have a defined and intelligible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and religion of the age in which he lived and of the ages which followed it.' This defined and intelligible relation undoubtedly exists in the work of Dante, and amply warrants Mr. Harrison's description of the 'Vision' as summing up the spirit, the knowledge, the religion of the mediaeval epoch, and bringing the whole range of Catholic Feudalism before our eyes.
In connection with Dante's 'Vision' a remark may be made on another work of fame as wide, and of far more nearly universal popularity and acceptance, the Imitatio Christi. This memorable product of the piety of some devout, strong, and sincere soul in the fifteenth century is one of the sacred books of the Positivist library, 'The conclusive test of experience,' said Comte, 'induces us to recommend above all the daily reading of the sublime, if incomplete, effort of à Kempis, and the incomparable epic of Dante. More than seven years have passed since 1 have read each morning a chapter of the one, each evening a canto of the other, never ceasing to find new beauties previously unseen, never ceasing to gather new fruits, intellectual or moral.'
It is true, as is said here, that the Imitatio is a book available for all men; but does the reason given quite accurately hit the mark? It partly depends on our definition of Religion. Mr. Harrison has said somewhere that 'the substance and crown of religion is to answer the question, What is my duty in the world? Duty, moral purpose, moral improvement is the last word and deepest word of Religion. Religion is summed up in Duty.' One could not undertake to examine this overwhelming little sentence in less than a volume. Meanwhile Goethe appears to come nearer the truth. ' All religions have one aim: to make man accept the inevitable.' Resignation and Renunciation—not sullen nor frigid, nor idle nor apathetic, but open, benign, firm, patient, very pitiful and of tender mercy—is not this what we mean by piety? Duty does not cover nor comprehend it. Duty is more, and it is less. We are told that, historically considered, the Imitatio is to be viewed as a final summary of the moral wisdom of Catholicism; that it is a picture of man's moral nature; that it continually presents personal moral improvement as the first and constant aim for every individual. I do not say that any of this is untrue, but is moral the right word? Is not the sphere of these famous meditations the spiritual rather than the moral life, and their aim the attainment of holiness rather than moral excellence? As, indeed, another writer under the same head better expresses it, is not their inspiration 'the yearning for perfection—the consolation of the life out of self'? By Holiness do we not mean something different from virtue? It is not the same as duty; still less is it the same as religious belief. It is a name for an inner grace of nature, an instinct of the soul, by which, though knowing of earthy appetites and worldly passions, the spirit, purifying itself of these, and independent of all reason, argument, and the fierce struggles of' the will, dwells in living, patient, and confident communion with the seen and the unseen Good. In this region, not in ethics, moves the Imitatio. But we are being drawn into matters that are too high for a mere causerie like this, and far too high for the present writer either here or anywhere.
1 The New Calendar of Great Men Edited by Frederic Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co.
3 Robertson's History of the Church, Bk. iv. Chap. ix,
4 Lecky, Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. Ch. ix.
6 Finlay's History of Greece, ii. 19.
7 Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, p. 111.