dowling, 'roman decadence and victorian historiography'.pdf

8/11/2019 Dowling, 'Roman Decadence and Victorian Historiography'.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/dowling-roman-decadence-and-victorian-historiographypdf 1/30

!"#$% '()$*(%)( $%* +,)-".,$% /,0-".,"1.$23456-3".7089 :,%*$ '";<,%1="6.)(9 +,)-".,$% =-6*,(0> +"<? @A> B"? C 7=6##(.> DEAF8> 22? FGEHIJGK6L<,03(* L49 Indiana University Press=-$L<( M!:9 http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827462 .

5))(00(*9 DGNJAN@JDD JA9FA

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Victorian

Studies.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827462?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827462?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress



Linda

Dowling

ROMAN

DECADENCE

AND VICTORIAN

HISTORIOGRAPHY

IN 1881 WILLIAM T.

ARNOLD,

GRANDSON OF THOMAS AND

NEPHEW

OF

Matthew

Arnold,

meditated an

ambitious

plan

to

complete

for

a

new

generation

of readers his

grandfather's

unfinished

History of

Rome

(1838-1842).

"I want," he told his sister Mrs

Humphry

Ward, "to

point

out what

the Germans

think of

the

book,

and

what line

research

has

taken since."'

In

proposing

to

graft

the latest

German

historical schol-

arship upon

his

grandfather's

account of

Rome,

Arnold

was

setting

himself an

impossible

task.

His

efforts, however,

illustrate

some of the

complexities

that beset the British

historiography

of Rome in the later

part

of

the

Victorian

period.

Arnold

himself seems

implicitly

to have

recognized

the

difficulty

of

his

task,

because he abandoned

his

attempt

to complete his grandfather's book and also a later plan simply to pro-

duce

a new edition

of it.

In

the

end,

Arnold

managed

merely

to re-edit

the

chapters dealing

with the Second

Punic War

(1886).

Nor

did his

own work

on Roman

history prosper.

Commissioned

by

a

publisher

to

write a student handbook

on

the earlier

Empire,

Arnold

began

the

project

with

high

enthusiasm.

The

handbook would

help

him

establish

the

historiography

of Rome on a

more

scholarly

basis. "Entre

nous,"

he

told

Mrs

Ward,

"I have come

to

the

conclusion

that we

in

England

know absolutely nothing of the history of the Empire. It has to be

largely

reconstructed

from

epigraphic

sources,

and of these

hardly any-

thing

is known

in this

country"

(Ward, p.

xxxviii).

Yet work on the handbook

faltered,

too. As one

of

Arnold's

friends noted

sadly,

handbooks,

"to be done

at

all,

must be

what an

ex-

pert

feels to

be

rough-and-ready"

(Ward, p.

xxxvii).

And

Arnold,

who

ever

kept

before

himself the

heroic

figure

of

Theodor

Mommsen,

never

Quoted by Mrs Humphry Ward, "Memoir of the Author," in W. T. Arnold, Studies of Roman Im-

perialism,

ed.

Edward Fiddes

(Manchester:

University

of

Manchester

Press,

1906),

xxxviii.

SUMMER

1985



Linda

Dowling

felt his

work

ready,

at least

if it

was to

be

measured

by

Mommsen's

high

standard. Mommsen was the

great pioneer

in Roman

epigraphic

research;

it was

his lifetime labor to

edit the vast

Corpus

Inscriptionum

Latinarum. Guided

by

Mommsen's

example,

Arnold tried to

pack

into

his

handbook

all his own

gatherings

from

inscriptions

as

well

as all the

latest

technical discoveries

gleaned

from

German

monographs

and

spe-

cialist

reviews. In

short,

Arnold's full

scholarship

burst

the narrow ves-

sel, and the handbook, after years of work, was abandoned.

There is

obviously

a

specific

psychopathology

at work in

Wil-

liam Arnold's

pattern

of

postponement

and failure. But we

would

miss

the

real

significance

of his failure

if we

read it

simply

in

psychological

terms.

Arnold's career

as a Roman

historian illustrates

dramatically

and

poignantly

a

larger

conflict

within

Victorian

historiography:

the

conflict between a

providentialist interpretation

based

upon

literature,

and a

newer,

ostensibly objective interpretation

based

upon

the meth-

ods of empirical science. The presiding geniuses of the providentialist

and the

empirical

schools of

Victorian

historiography

were

Thomas

Ar-

nold

and Theodor

Mommsen,

the

two

figures

whose

examples

guided

William

Arnold's fruitless

Roman researches. The

conflict between the

two schools can be

illustrated

by

their

divergent

interpretations

of

Ro-

man

"decadence":

questions

concerning

the

cause,

nature, or,

indeed,

the

very

existence of Roman decadence

raise to

high

visibility

questions

about the

possibility

of

historiography

itself.

I

Any

account of

historiographic

views of Roman

decadence in

the Victorian

period

must

perforce

begin

with

Edward

Gibbon,

whose

depiction

of

Antonine

felicity

endowed

Roman

decadence with a

more

persuasive

glamor

than it

had

yet

possessed.

Gibbon's

History

of

the

Decline

and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788) was the pre-

eminent modern

history

of

Rome,

thanks

less

to

its

startling

thesis

than to

the

superb

literary

and

dialectical

mastery

which

presented

that thesis

and to the

scholarly

accuracy

which so

firmly underlay

it.

To

readers

familiar

only

with such

pedestrian

school-text

histories

as

Oliver

Gold-

smith's

(1769),

in which

forty-one

emperors

are

treated with

remorse-

less

chronology

in

forty-one

successive

chapters,

Gibbon's

powerfully

dramatic and

ingeniously

ordered

narrative

of "the

triumph

of

barba-

rism

and

religion"

came as a

revelation.

Gibbon's

masterpiece

thus

cast

its

long

shadow

over

every

subsequent

attempt

to write

a Roman

histo-

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

580



Linda

Dowling

that "with

regard

to

...

objectionable

passages,

which

do

not

involve

mis-statement

or

inaccuracy,

[I

have]

intentionally

abstained from

di-

recting particular

attention towards

them

by

any

special

protest."2

Even

at

midcentury,

the Reverend

Mr. H.

G.

Bohn

considered it

pru-

dent

to

reassure

prospective

readers that his edition

of

Gibbon

was

the

work

of "an

English

Churchman."3

Thomas Arnold's

attempt

to deal

with Gibbon

was

intellectually

bolder: he turned to the Roman historiography of Niebuhr. Lytton

Strachey's

malicious remark

that Arnold's unfinished

history

was

based

partly

on

the researches of Niebuhr and

partly

on an

aversion to

Gib-

bon is thus not

without its truth. Arnold

declared that his

highest

ambi-

tion was

to

make his own

work "the

very

reverse

of

Gibbon,"

for

he

hoped

to raise

the estimate

of

Christianity

in

his own

account as

unobtrusively

as

Gibbon had

stealthily

lowered it

in

his.4

At the

same

time,

Arnold's

resort to

Niebuhr

for

help against

Gibbon is

ironic.

For

the thorough-going scepticism that Niebuhr's Romische Geschichte

(1812)

displayed

toward

Livy's

account of

early

Roman

history

recalled

to

many

British

readers

Gibbon's own

scepticism

about

received histor-

ical

opinion.

Similarly,

Niebuhr's

expressed

doubts

concerning

certain

aspects

of the

Genesis

story

reminded

many

readers of

Gibbon's

mock-

ing

attitude

towards

theological

dogma.

The

Quarterly

Review,

for

in-

stance,

declared

that

Niebuhr

"is,

what

Mr.

Wordsworth

should

not

have called

Voltaire,

'a

pert,

dull

scoffer,'

"as well

as

being

the

author

of "some of the most offensive paragraphs which have appeared since

the

days

of the

Philosophical

Dictionary

...

pregnant

with

crude

and

dangerous speculations."5

Though

Thomas Arnold

seems to

have had

some

reservations

about

Niebuhr's

work,

his initial

reluctance

to

admit

the

whole of

Niebuhr's

conclusions

gave

way

in

later

years.

According

to

Arnold's

student and

biographer,

A. P.

Stanley,

Arnold's

admiration of

Niebuhr

"rose at last

into a

sentiment

of

personal

veneration,

which

made

him,

as he used to say, at once emulous and hopeless, rendering him jealous

for

Niebuhr's

reputation,

as if

for his

own."

When

Julius

Hare and

2

"Preface

by

the

Editor,"

The

History of

the

Decline

and

Fall

of

the

Roman

Empire:

By

Edward

Gibbon,

ed.

H. H.

Milman,

12

vols.

(London:

John

Murray,

1838-1839),

I,

xxiii.

3

Edward

Gibbon,

The

History of

the

Decline

and

Fall

of

the

Roman

Empire,

With

Variorum

Notes

. . .

by

an

English

Churchman

[ed.

H.

G.

Bohn],

6

vols.

(London:

Henry

G.

Bohn,

1853),

title

page.

4

Arthur

P.

Stanley,

The

Life

and

Correspondence

of

Thomas

Arnold,

D.

D.,

2d

ed.,

2

vols.

(Lon-

don:

B.

Fellowes,

1844),

I,

206.

5

[John

Barlow],

"Russia,"

Quarterly

Review,

39

(January-April 1829),

8n-9n.

J.

C.

Hare and

Con-

nop Thirlwall responded in A Vindication of Niebuhr's History of Rome From the Charges of the

Quarterly

Review

(Cambridge: John

Taylor,

1829).

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

582



ROMAN

DECADENCE

Connop

Thirlwall

decided not

to

translate

Niebuhr's third

volume,

Ar-

nold considered

undertaking

the task

himself,

"from

a desire

'to

have

his name connected with the

translation

of that

great

work,

which

no

one had

studied more or admired

more

entirely'

"

(Stanley,

I,

45).

Why

did

Arnold turn to Niebuhr for aid

against

Gibbon? As

Duncan Forbes and others have

pointed

out,

the two

historians

had

a

great

deal in

common:

a

love of

Edmund

Burke,

a

hatred

of

violent

po-

litical change, a belief in the ethical and patriotic instruction provided

by history.6 Underlying

these

topical

similarities is a shared belief in

the

organic

and

idealist nature

of

history.

Tracing

its

source

ultimately

to

Plato,

this view held that

the

"life" of a

nation,

no

less

than

the life

of

a human

being,

was

constituted

by

ideas rather

than

acts,

and was

to be

known at its most characteristic

only

in its "inward"

aspect.

As

Arnold said

in his

inaugural

lecture at Oxford:

[We]

have

another life besides that of outward

action;

and it

is this inward life

after

all

which determines the character of the actions and of the man. And how

eagerly

do we de-

sire

in

those

great

men

whose actions

fill so

large

a

space

in

history,

to know not

only

what

they

did but

what

they

were: how much do we

prize

their letters or their recorded

words,

and

not least such words

as

are uttered

in their

most

private

moments,

which

enable

us to

look as

it

were

into the

very

nature of

that

mind,

whose distant effects we know

to

be

so

marvellous.

But

a

nation has its inward

life no less than

an

individual,

and

from this

its

outward

life also is characterized.7

Such

a view

of

the "inward"

nature of

history

inclined Liberal

Angli-

can and Romantic

idealist historians

such as

Thomas

Carlyle

to

grant

literary texts and other imaginative modes such as ballads and legends

a

special

authority

as historical

evidence.

Although

Arnold

stressed

the

fundamental

importance

of

examining

the

laws

and institutions

of a

nation,

he

laid

great

emphasis

as

well on

its literature.

According

to Ar-

nold,

studying

its laws

and institutions

would

merely

discover a

nation's

outward

identity,

while

studying

its literature

would reveal its

inward

spirit,

as

well as the

spirit

of its

period:

"We

may

arrive

at a

very just

and

full

knowledge

of

the

character

of the

literature of a

peri-

6

I

am

indebted

to

Duncan

Forbes,

The

Liberal

Anglican

Idea

of

History

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

University

Press,

1952),

Robert

Preyer,

Bentham,

Coleridge

and the Science

of

History

(Bochum

Langendreer:

Heinrich

Poppinghaus,

1958),

and

G.

P.

Gooch,

History

and Historians

in the

Nine-

teenth

Century (London:

Longmans,

Green,

1913).

See also Robert

Preyer,

"The Dream

of a

Spiritualized

Learning

and

Its

Early

Enthusiasts:

German,

British and American"

in Geschichte

und

Gesellschaft

in

der

amerikanischen

Literatur,

eds.

Karl Schubert

and Ursula Miiller-Richter

(Heidelberg:

Quelle

and

Meyer,

1975), pp.

62-85. For

a

study emphasizing

Arnold's

debt to

Vico,

see Peter

Dale,

The Victorian Critic

and

the Idea

of

History (Cambridge:

Harvard

University

Press,

1977).

7

Thomas Arnold, "Inaugural Lecture" in Introductory Lectures on Modern History (Oxford: John

Henry

Parker,

1842),

p.

11.

SUMMER

1985

583



Linda

Dowling

od,

and

thereby of

the

period

itself.

.

.

.

And

by

such means .

..

we

may

I

think imbue ourselves

effectually

with

the

spirit

of a

period."8

For idealist

historians such as Thomas Arnold

and

Thomas

Carlyle,

F. A.

Wolf's method of

philological analysis

was

crucial.

Through

a

philological

analysis

of

texts,

Wolf claimed to

establish

ac-

curately

the

primacy,

authenticity,

and,

perhaps

most

important,

the

derivational

relationships among

competing

textual

explanations

of

historical events. Wolf's Prologomena to Homer (1795) thus helped to

open

a new era of

historiography

by

providing

a

method

through

which

historical

explanations

could be established on

"scientific" terms

of

evidence, induction,

and

certainty.

Niebuhr,

who had

thoroughly

assimilated these

methods,

realized

that

philology

preserved

"through

thousands

of

years

an unbroken

identity

with the

noblest and

greatest

nations of the ancient world

.

. .

familiarizing

us,

through

the

medi-

um

of

grammar

and

history,

with the works of their

minds and the

course of their destinies, as if there were no gulf that divided us from

them."9 Armed

with critical

philology,

Niebuhr

was able to

pick

his

way through

the

spurious

documents

relating

to Rome's

early

history

and

seize

upon

the

true. Niebuhr

seems,

moreover,

to have

possessed

what

Novalis called the

essential

requirement

in

a

historian,

an

almost

"divinatory

instinct" which allowed him

rapidly

and

accurately

to dis-

cern

from

internal evidence the

fabulous

elements

incorporated

in

putatively

factual narratives

as well

as

the

genuinely

historical ele-

ments embedded in legends and folklore.

It is

hardly

surprising,

then,

that Thomas

Arnold and

other Lib-

eral

Anglican

historians seized

upon

Niebuhr's

Roman

history

with

such

excitement.

No

longer,

they

believed,

would

the

gulf

between an-

cient and

modern times continue

to

widen

inexorably.

No

longer

were

the

powers

of

historians to

be

diminished

by

the

passage

of

time.

"Do

not the records of

a

Tacitus,"

Carlyle

had

complained, "acquire

a

new

meaning,

after

seventeen

hundred

years,

in

the

hands of a

Montesquieu?

Niebuhr

has

to

reinterpret

for us

at a still

greater

dis-

tance,

the

writings

of a Titus

Livius."'1

But

Niebuhr was

untroubled

by

such doubts.

He believed

instead that

philology

collapsed

the

dis-

tance

between

ancient and

modern

times

by

opening

the

very

minds of

8

Thomas

Arnold,

"Lecture

I"

in

Introductory

Lectures,

pp.

106-107

(my

emphasis).

9

Barthold

Georg

Niebuhr,

"Preface"o

The

Historyof

Rome,

tr.

Julius

Charles

Hare

and

Connop

Thirlwall,

3

vols.

(Philadelphia:

Thomas

Wardle,

1835),

I,

x.

'0

Thomas

Carlyle,

"On

History

Again,"

n

The Works

f

Thomas

Carlyle

CentenaryEdition),

30

vols. (essayorig. pub. 1833;London:ChapmanandHall, 1899;rpt. ed., NewYork:AMSPress,

1969),

XXVIII,

175-176.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

584



ROMAN DECADENCE

vanished

generations

to

modern

understanding.

The

modern historian

of

Rome could

greet

the ancient Romans as

contemporaries,

and

this

Niebuhr

did

with

irresistible verve:

He who

calls

departed ages

back

into

being

enjoys

a bliss

like

that of

creating:

it

were

a

great thing,

if

I

could scatter the mist that

lies

upon

this

most

excellent

portion

of

ancient

story,

and could

spread

a clear

light

over

it;

so that

the

Romans shall stand before the

eyes

of

my

readers,

distinct,

intelligible,

familiar as

contemporaries,

with their institutions and

the

vicissitudes of

their

destiny, living

and

moving.

(Niebuhr,

I,

4).

Quite simply,

Niebuhr's

Romische Geschichte made the

past

live. Hence

Arnold's

impatience

with

Dr.

Johnson's

remark that

"an

account of the

ancient

Romans,

as

it cannot

nearly

interest

any

present

reader,

and

must

be

drawn

from

writings

that have

been

long

known,

can owe

its value

only

to

the

language

in

which it is

delivered,

and the

reflections

with which it

is

accompanied.""

Arnold knew that

Niebuhr

had not only discovered new facts about ancient Rome

-

indeed,

Niebuhr

had made

the

spectacular

discovery

of the Institutes

of

Gaius

-

but

he

had

presented

those

facts

in a

new

light.

Introduced

by

Hare and

Thirlwall,

sponsored

by

Arnold,

Niebuhr's

History

of

Rome thus

became

a classic text

for Victorians

in

the two

decades

before

midcentury,

influencing

even

the school texts

of

Victorian children.12

And

this

despite

his

admittedly

imperfect gift

for

historical

narrative:

Niebuhr,

declared

T.

B.

Macaulay,

was

"a

man

who would

have been the

first

writer

of his

time,

if his talent

for com-

municating

truths

had borne

any proportion

to

his talent

for

investigat-

ing

them."'3

At Oxford

in the

1840s

Niebuhr

was

king

and

Arnold

was

his

ambassador.

Recalling

those

years,

E.

A. Freeman

said,

"the

won-

derful

work of

Niebuhr

.

. .

overthrew

one

creed and

set

up

another.

.

. . Niebuhr's

theory

in fact

acted

like a

spell;

it was not

to

argument

or

evidence

that

it

appealed;

his followers

avowedly

claimed

for him

a

kind of

power

of

'divination.'

"14

Niebuhr's

Romische

Geschichte

did

more,

however,

than

dra-

matically

renew

and

reanimate

the

past.

His

analysis

of

Roman

history

provided

Liberal

Anglican

historians

like Arnold

and

Stanley

with

a

"

[Thomas

Arnold],

"Early

Roman

History," Quarterly

Review,

32

(June

1825),

68. Arnold

is

quoting

from

Johnson's

review

of

Thomas

Blackwell's

Memoirs

of

the Court

of

Augustus.

12

Compare

Thomas

Keightley,

"Preface,"

The

History

of

Rome

(London: Longman,

Rees, Orme,

Brown,

Green

and

Longman,

1836),

p.

iii.

13

Thomas

B.

Macaulay,

"Preface"

to

Lays

of

Ancient Rome

(orig.

pub.

1842;

London:

Longman,

Brown,

Green

and

Longmans,

1852), p.

6.

14

E. A. Freeman, "Mommsen's History of Rome" in Historical Essays, 2d series (essay orig. pub.

1859;

London:

Macmillan,

1873),

p.

241.

SUMMER

1985

585



Linda

Dowling

theory

of historical

development

that

they

could

apply

to the

histories

of

other nations. Because Niebuhr had removed the

early period

of

Ro-

man

history

from

the realm of

myth

and

conjecture

and

established

it

on

an undoubted historical continuum with the

Republic

and the

Em-

pire,

Rome's

history

could be

clearly

traced from first

to last.

And

what

is

more,

it

could be read as a

story,

for

Rome,

uniquely

among

nations,

had

passed through

all

the

stages

of historical

development.

"Few

na-

tions," Niebuhr said, "have, like the Romans, completed a life never

cut

short

by

the

power

of

strangers;

none

among

these few with

such

strength

and

fullness. No other state has existed

so

long

without

any

principle

of its

life

being

stifled"

(quoted

in

Preyer,

Bentham,

Cole-

ridge,

p.

31).

That there

were

distinct

stages

of

historical

development

was,

of

course,

an

ancient

assumption.

What Plato had

merely posited,

howev-

er,

Niebuhr

sought

to

prove by

adducing

literary

evidence. That the

early period of Rome represented the "youth" of the nation he assumed

on

the

basis

of

the folk

ballads characteristic

of the

early period

-

po-

etry,

according

to

the theories

of

Johann

Gottfried von

Herder

and

F.

A.

Wolf,

representing

the first

literary

expression

of a

people.

The

pat-

tern of

youth, maturity,

and old

age

that Niebuhr traced in

Roman

his-

tory

became,

in

one

form or

another,

the

Romantic

historicist

para-

digm

for all

historical

change.

In

Arnold's

phrase,

"the

History

of

Rome

must be

in

some sort the

History

of the World"

(Stanley,

I,

203).

There was a difficulty, however, in Niebuhr's schema of nation-

al

youth, maturity,

and

decline for an

Anglican priest

and

teacher

such

as

Arnold,

and it

lay,

obviously,

in

the

schema's

apparent

determinism.

If,

as Arnold

said,

history

could

not show "in

any

instance"

that the

old

age

of nations

had been followed

by

anything

other than their

dissolu-

tion,15

then

it

would be

difficult

to defend the

idea of free will

in

histo-

ry.

Indeed,

it would be

difficult to

defend the

study

of

history,

for

the

historicist claim

that the

newly

revealed

patterns

in

history

could

pro-

vide

lessons for

the

future

was simply confounded by the very existence

of such

patterns.

Historians could

hardly

instruct

people

how to

choose

if

there

were

in

fact no

choices. On

one

level,

then,

the

lesson

taught

by

Niebuhr's

new

historiography

was

no

more than the

lesson

of the old:

acquiescence

in

the

inevitable.

Duncan

Forbes

has

provided

the

classic

account of the

Liberal

Anglican

solution

to this

dilemma,

a

solution

involving

what

was

in

ef-

'5

Thomas Arnold, "The Social Progress of States" in Miscellaneous Works (essay orig. pub. 1830;

New

York:

Appleton, 1845),

pp.

322-323.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

586



ROMAN

DECADENCE

feet

a

two-tier

model of historical

development.

According

to

the Lib-

eral

Anglican

view,

the

decay

and dissolution manifest

in

Gibbon's

Roman

Empire

and

in

every past

instance

of

national

development

oc-

curred on a

lower level of national

life;

Rome and all

past

societies

were redeemed

by

being

incorporated

on a

higher

level

as

a

necessary

part

of

the

unfolding

of God's

providence

(see

Forbes,

pp.

65-66).

Lib-

eral

Anglican

historians,

moreover,

were

particularly

insistent about

the power of individual action to alter things for good or ill even on the

lower

plane

of historical action. This is

the

emphatic

theme

of

Stanley's

1840

Oxford

Prize

Essay,

"Whether

States,

Like

Individuals,

After

a

Certain

Period of

Maturity,

Inevitably

Tend

to

Decay."

The Liberal

Anglican interpretation

of

history

thus

asserted the

intelligibility

and

hence the moral

significance

of

historical

patterns

without

conceding

to those

patterns

any

deterministic coerciveness.

In

Liberal

Anglican

texts,

historical

sequence

was moralized and became

historical plot. And because they argued that the three-part plot of

youth, maturity,

and

age

recurred

in different nations at different

times,

the

idea

that

national

history

formed a distinct and articulated

narrative

received additional

emphasis.

It is this recurrence of

the

plot

that

allowed

Arnold to make

his

most

cherished

claim for historical

study

-

namely,

that it

taught

valuable,

because

genuinely

applica-

ble,

lessons

to the

men and women

of

his own

day.

The recurrence

of

the historical

plot

also

brought

parallel phases

of

history

into vivid con-

junction. Niebuhr's historiography thus explained to Arnold why he

felt so

intensely

that

Thucydides spoke

to

him

as

a

living

contempo-

rary,

with

"a wisdom more

applicable

to us

politically

than

the wisdom

even

of

our own

countrymen

who

lived

in

the middle

ages"

("Social

Progress,"

pp.

325-326).

In

its

turn,

Arnold's

historiography

explained

to

a

generation

of

young

readers,

including

his son

Matthew,

why

Mar-

cus

Aurelius

spoke

to

them "not as

a

Classical

Dictionary

hero,

but

as

a

present

source

from which

to

draw

'example

of

life,'

and

'instruction

of

manners.'

"16

When

Thomas

Arnold described

the

plot

of

history,

he

placed

special

emphasis

on

the last

act of the

plot. Though

he

concerned

him-

self

with

the earlier

Roman

period

in

his

history,

in other works

Arnold

(as

Peter

Dale has

stressed)

dwelled

with an

obsessive

pessimism upon

the

imminence

and

significance

of the

last

phase

in the

life of nations.

In his

Oxford

inaugural

lecture,

for

instance,

he declared

that "modern

6 Matthew Arnold, "Marcus Aurelius," in Complete Prose Works, ed. R. H. Super, 9 vols. (essay

orig. pub.

1863;

Ann Arbor:

University

of

Michigan

Press,

1962),

III,

136.

SUMMER

1985

587



ROMAN

DECADENCE

tus to the

Death

of

Heraclius

(1853),

with its unselective inclusiveness

and

disregard

of

causality,

narrative,

and human

action.17

At

the

same

time,

the

underlying

conflict

between scientific

and

literary

elements

in

Liberal

Anglican historiography

was

effectively

masked

from

its

practitioners by

the

apparently

"scientific" sanction

bestowed

by

textual

philology

upon

Niebuhr's

work

and works

like Ar-

nold's which derived

from Niebuhr.

Niebuhr's

work,

after

all,

had

demonstrated that literary evidence could have genuine historical val-

ue,

and

this

apparent

indulgence

towards

literature on the

part

of a

"scientific" historian

encouraged

the Liberal

Anglicans

to maintain

a

number of

essentially

literary

attitudes

-

particularly

a fondness

for

the

biographical

mode

of

Carlyle.

At

any

rate,

Arnold,

who

loved

Carlyle's

"inimitable

living pictures,"

was

inclined

to

furnish his

own

historical

writing

with

vivid scenes

and

personalities

and to

judge

his-

torians

by

literary

standards.

The reliable

historian,

he told

his stu-

dents, will be known by his prose style: "The mere language of an his-

torian

will furnish us with

something

of a

key

to

his

mind,

and

will tell

us,

or

at least

give

us cause to

presume,

in

what

his main

strength

lies,

and

in what

he is deficient"

("Lecture

VIII,"

p.

384).

The

literary

bias

in Arnold's

work

thus

brought

the new scientif-

ic

historiography

of

Niebuhr close

to the

older belletristic

sort.

It also

suggested

the

hidden and

insuperable

difficulty

that Wolf's

philologi-

cal

method

posed

to

the Liberal

Anglican

enterprise.

Though

Wolf's

philological analysis seemed at first to bestow scientific certainty upon

the Liberal

Anglicans'

text-dependent

and

textually

plotted

interpreta-

tion of

history,

in fact

its

support

was

illusory.

For even

though

Wolf's

methods

could

be

applied

with

great

success

to

literary

texts,

they

could

not

ratify

literary

values.

Instead,

the two

ways

of

judging

texts

remained

utterly

distinct.

Simply

put,

in

philological

analysis,

the de-

cisive

standards

were

temporal

priority

and

authenticity,

not truth

and

beauty.

The scientific force of Wolf's methods in historical research,

moreover,

always

depended

upon

their

faithful

application:

only

phil-

ological

conclusions

based

on

the

widest

range

of

evidence,

for

exam-

17

Hayden

White,

in a

brilliantly suggestive

essay

entitled

"The Value

of

Narrativity

in the

Represen-

tation

of

Reality"

(Critical

Inquiry,

7

[1980-81],

5-27),

has

argued

that,

for all the

secular

historiographical

prejudice

against

moralizing

histories

like Arnold's

and

Kingsley's,

it is

precisely

the desire

for the

establishment

of

a moral

authority

that

finds

expression

in the

"hypotactic"

ordering,

closed

sequences,

and

plots

of the

"highest"

mode

of historical

writing,

namely,

nar-

rative

history.

White observes

the

standard

historiographical

distinction

betweeen the

two

"lower"

forms

of

annal and

chronicle,

a distinction

elided

here.

For the

Christian-apologist

basis

of

chronologies before Gibbon's Decline, see James William Johnson, "Chronological Writing: Its

Concepts

and

Development,"

History

and

Theory,

2

(1962-63),

124-145.

SUMMER

1985

589



Linda

Dowling

pie,

could claim to be scientific.

In the same

way,

only

a historical

sci-

ence that

acknowledged

its

obligation

to

let the evidence

dictate

its

conclusions

could

make a similar

claim.

Liberal

Anglican historiog-

raphy

seemingly

had

little

to

fear

from

such

concessions to

the

princi-

ples

of

scientific induction.

And

yet,

once claimed

by

the

Liberal

Angli-

cans,

the scientific method

continued

to work

independently

of

their

idealist

assumptions,

at last

subverting

them as

completely

as Rome

it-

self had once been subverted by its own invited and domesticated foes.

II

Niebuhr's

providentialism,

his treatment

of

sources,

and

his

style

("no

Roman lives

in

his

pages")

were

criticized

by

G.

H.

Lewes as

early

as

1843,

while Niebuhr's

divinatory

method,

his

"ballad

theory,"

and his arrogant dogmatism were directly challenged by G. Cornewall

Lewis in

his

Inquiry

into

the

Credibility of

the

Early

Roman

History

(1855).18

Less

immediately

apparent

to

Victorians,

however,

was

the

challenge

to

Niebuhr's methods

posed

by

his

successor

Theodor

Mommsen,

whose Roman

history

began

appearing

in the

1850s.

Mommsen's work

made

much less

of an

impression

upon

nonspecialist

British readers

than

Niebuhr's

had,

not

least

because the

Niebuhr-

Arnold

tradition in

Roman

historiography

was

carried

on so

vigorously

in the second half of the century by the widely popular work of Charles

Merivale,

Charles

Kingsley,

and

Thomas

Hodgkin.

In

A

History of

the

Romans Under

the

Empire

(1850-1864),

Merivale,

for

instance,

located

himself in

the

processional

line of

Niebuhr

and Arnold.

Acknowledging

his

indebtedness,

he

declared

that had

Arnold lived

to finish his

History

of

Rome,

"it

is

needless to

say

that

my

ambition

would have been

di-

rected

elsewhere."19 If

Merivale

lacked the

rigorous

moral

standards

of

Arnold

in

judging

historical

figures,

his

volumes

nonetheless

resound

with

the

major

Arnoldian

themes:

the

contemporaneity

of the

Roman

past,

the

centrality

of ideas in

shaping history,

the vital

teaching

func-

tion

of

history

and

historians,

and

the

special

relevance

of

Roman

his-

tory

for the

English.

Even

Merivale's

reluctant decision

to break

off

his

18

[G.

H.

Lewes],

"Charges Against

Niebuhr,"

Westminster

Review,

40

(December 1843),

335-349.

For a

history

of

reactions to Niebuhr's

ballad-theory,

see

Renate

Bridenthal,

"Was There

a

Roman

Homer?:

Niebuhr's Thesis

and Its

Critics,"

History

and

Theory,

11

(1972),

193-213.

19

Charles Merivale, "Preface" to A History of the Romans Under the Empire, 7 vols. (London:

Longman,

Brown,

Green

and

Longmans,

1850-1864),

I,

viii.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

590



ROMAN

DECADENCE

history

before the end of the Western

Empire

participates

in

an

Arnoldian

sorrow that the field must once

again

be left

to

Gibbon.

Charles

Kingsley aggressively

continued Arnold's

emphasis

on

the

providential design

of

history

without

sharing any

of Arnold's

scholarly

care. Where

Arnold in

his

Oxford lectures treated

history

as

an

intellectual

discipline,

a science

whose laws were

just beginning

to

emerge, Kingsley

treated

history

as a fund

of

morally

renewing

anec-

dote. Indeed, one feels when reading his Cambridge lectures, The Ro-

man and the Teuton

(1864),

that

Kingsley

does

not

so much elicit his

lessons

from

history

as

busily

embed them

there.

So,

for

instance,

he

pauses

over

-

not the sack of

Rome

by

Alaric in 410

A.D.

-

but

the

historically

far less

significant plundering

by

Totila

in 546-549

A.D.:

"Gentlemen,

I

make

no

comment.

I

know no more awful

page

in

the

history

of

Europe. Through

such facts

as these God

speaks.

Let

man

be

silent;

and

look on

in

fear

and

trembling,

knowing

that

it was written

of old time - The wages of sin are death."20

Arnold's

providentialism

and

scholarship

are unified

in the work

of a

third

successor,

Thomas

Hodgkin.

Hodgkin's eight-volume

history

of the barbarian

incursions

upon

Rome,

Italy

and

Her Invaders

(1879-1899),

was the

delight

of novelists

and scholars

alike:

George

Gissing

quarried

material

for his unfinished

historical novel

Veranilda

(1904)

from

it,

and

the

great

scholar

of

the later

Empire, J.

B.

Bury,

gave

it

repeated

praise. Hodgkin

illuminated

his vivid

narrative with

the benign light of Arnold's providentialism:

It was time

for the Teutonic

nations to

rejuvenate

the

world,

to

bring

their

noisy energy

into

those

silent

and

melancholy

countries,

peopled

only

by

slaves and

despots.

It was

time

to exhibit

on the arena

of the world

the ruder

virtues and

the more

vigorous

vices

of a

peo-

ple

who,

even in their

vices,

showed that

they

were still

young

and

strong;

it was

time

that

the

sickly

odour

of

incense

offered to imbecile

Emperors

and

lying

Prefects should

be

scat-

tered

before

the

fresh moorland-air

of

liberty.

In

short,

both as

to the

building up,

and as

to

the

pulling

down of

the

world-Empire

of

Rome,

we have

a

right

to

say,

"It

was,

be-

cause the Lord God

willed

it

so."21

In Hodgkin's somewhat plaintive appeal to his "right" to speak

thus, however,

we

hear an

embattled

cry.

Plainly,

the

grounds

of

historiography

had shifted in the

years

since Arnold

wrote.

By

1879

the

20

Charles

Kingsley,

The Roman

and the

Teuton:

A

Series

of

Lectures

Delivered

Before

the Univer-

sity

of

Cambridge

(London:

Macmillan,

1864), p.

161.

Kingsley's

militant

providentialism

was

in-

fluenced

by Carlyle's

French

Revolution,

which

taught

him,

as

it

taught

his fictional

hero

Alton

Locke,

"to see

in

history

not

the mere

farce-tragedy

of

man's

crimes and

follies,

but

the

dealings

of

a

righteous

Ruler

of

the universe"

(Charles Kingsley,

Alton

Locke,

Tailor and Poet:

An

Auto-

biography

[1850;

rpt.

ed.,

New

York:

Oxford

University

Press,

1983],

p.

97).

21

Thomas Hodgkin, Italy and Her Invaders, 2d ed., 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892-1899),

II,

532.

SUMMER

1985

591



ROMAN

DECADENCE

or

despised,

was

in

fact an

appropriate

and even

admirable

model for

Britain:

I

may

add,

that

not

merely

the

Roman

Empire,

but

that

every

large

political society

...

to make

my

meaning

clear,

all such states

as the

larger

kingdoms

of modern

Europe,

with

no

exception

as to our own

country,

are

not fit

subjects

for

the

constitutional

system.

That

system,

with its fictions and indirect

action,

may

offer

advantages

at certain

times

.

.

but,

on

the

whole,

I think

it alien to

good

government.

It has ever

failed

...

it is

failing

you

now,

in

the

presence

of

real

dangers

and

war.23

Congreve's

advocacy

of

dictatorship

("A protector

or

dictator,

if

you

like to call

him

so

-

the

name

is

unimportant"

[Congreve,

p.

62])

pro-

voked

a

crushing

rebuttal from Goldwin

Smith,

who called the Positiv-

ists "an

advanced

and

slightly

terrorist school of

philanthropists."24

But

it also

persuaded

Congreve's

student

Beesly

to

champion

such

unlikely

heroes as

Catiline

and Tiberius.

Such

unabashed

Caesarism

finds its source in

Comte

and the re-

habilitation

of

Julius

Caesar

begun

by

Napoleon.

It

is,

at

the same

time,

a

deeply

"literary"

motive,

for it

represents

in

part

an emotional

response

to

heroic

character,

and thus

resembles the

hero-worship

of

such Romantic historians as

Carlyle

and

Kingsley.

Hence,

it is

particu-

larly

striking

that the Positivists'

defense of Caesarism should

involve at

the same time an attack

upon

the

literary

bias of Liberal

Anglican

historiography, though

this

is

perhaps

no more than to

say

that

like

so

many programmatic

reformers,

the

Comteans

did

not detect

contra-

dictions

in

their

program.

In

any

case,

Beesly

did not

dispense

with

the

literary category

of heroic character even as he mocked the modern his-

torian

for

being

so

"accustomed

to

the voluminous materials

from

which modern

history

is

drawn,

[that

he]

frets at the obscure

and

mea-

gre

narratives

which have descended

to us from

the

ancient

world."

Even

worse,

according

to

Beesly,

modern

historians are

guided

almost

entirely

by

the

literary

bias of traditional

historiography.

They

prefer

the written to

the

non-written,

and the

better

written,

or

writing

which

approximated

the

higher

literary

forms,

to

the less well-written:

Our wretched

classical

education

does

not even introduce

its victims to

more

than

a

small

fraction of the

scanty,

but

precious,

remains

of

ancient

history.

How do

they

know that

Velleius

[biographer

of

Tiberius]

is

a

toady?

Because

they

are told so

by

the

literary

men,

who

can

just

see

that either

he

or Tacitus

must

be

utterly wrong

about

Tiberius,

and,

of

course,

decide

for the

finest

[sic]

writer.25

23

Richard

Congreve,

The Roman

Empire

of

the West:

Four Lectures

Delivered at

the

Philosophical

Institution,

Edinburgh,

February

1855

(London:

John

Parker,

1855),

pp.

60-61.

24

See Goldwin

Smith,

"Review of

Mr.

Congreve's

'Roman

Empire

of the

West,'

"

in

Oxford Essays

(London:

n.p.,

1856),

p.

295.

25

E. S. Beesly, "Clodius" [orig. pub.1866] in Catiline, Clodius and Tiberius (London: Chapman and

Hall,

1878),

p.

40;

"Tiberius:

Part

I"

[orig. pub.

1867]

in

Catiline,

pp.

105n-106n.

SUMMER

1985

593



Linda

Dowling

It is at

this

point

that

English

Positivist

historiography

verges

up-

on the scientific

historiography

of

Mommsen and

Leopold

von

Ranke.

Mommsen

himself,

of

course,

was

notorious

for

his

passionate

Caesar-

ism,

and if

this failed to convict

him as a "terrorist

philanthropist,"

it

at

least raised

persistent questions

about the moral

tendency

of his

work.

According

to

E. A.

Freeman:

It

seems

perfectly

indifferent to

[Mommsen]

whether

Caesar,

or

anybody

else,

was moral-

ly

right

or

wrong.

It is

enough

for him

that Caesar was a man of

surpassing

genius,

who

laid

his

plans

skilfully

and

carried them out

successfully.

The

only

subject

on

which

Mommsen

ever seems to

be

stirred

up

to

anything

like moral

indignation

is

one

not

very

closely

connected with his

immediate

subject,

namely

American

slavery.

It is

however

some

comfort that

he

does

not,

like

Mr.

Beesly, go

in

for Catilina.26

If

Mommsen

resisted

moralizing,

he

also

appeared

to

resist the

lure

of

literariness. To

Victorians familiar with

such vivid

treatments

of

Ro-

man

history

as those of

Gibbon

and

Arnold,

Mommsen seemed

color-

less.

Mommsen

"understands,"

wrote

Freeman,

"but he

does

not

al-

ways

feel;

his

narrative

constantly

seems cold and

tame after

that

of

Arnold."27

Freeman missed

"the

brilliant

picture

.

..

the

awful

vision

. . .

the

pictures"

of

Arnold;

he

set

parallel

passages

from the

two au-

thors beside

each other and

lamented "how

different a strain "

(Free-

man,

p.

255).

Mommsen's volume

on

Roman

provincial

history

during

the

Empire,

moreover,

made his

earlier work

on Caesar

and the

Republic

seem

by

comparison

picturesque

and colorful.

Here

we

approach

the

difference between the British Positivist and the German

positivist

his-

torians of Rome

which

most

struck

their

Victorian

contemporaries.

For

despite

all

the

pro-Caesar,

anti-Cicero

prejudice

he

shared with

Beesly,

Mommsen's first

allegiance

was

declaredly

to

historical

objectivity,

to

Ranke's

famous dictum

that

the

historian must

concern

himself

only

with "how

it

actually

was"

(wie

es

eigentlich

gewesen ist).

Such

objec-

tivity

required

not

merely

setting

aside

personal

prejudices

and

allow-

ing only

the

available

evidence to

determine one's

conclusions;

it meant

widening the base of evidence wherever possible. Thus Mommsen, for

instance,

in

studying

the

history

of

the

Empire

found

he had

to

consid-

er

the

provinces

as

well

as the

capital.

If the

nature

of

the

historical

evidence

changed,

then

so

too,

Mommsen

declared,

must the

treatment

which

presented

that evi-

26

E.

A.

Freeman,

"Mommsen's

History of

Rome:

Appendix

from

Saturday

Review,

March

28,

1868"

in

Historical

Essays,

2d

series

(London:

Macmillan,

1873),

p.

270.

27

Freeman, pp.

254-255.

Mommsen's literary powers impressed others more favorably: G. B. Shaw

undertook to

dramatize "the

Mommsenite

view of

Caesar" in

Caesar

and

Cleopatra

(1901).

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

594



ROMAN DECADENCE

dence. The

scientific historian

could

not

rely

upon

continuous

narra-

tive

or vivid

biographical

accounts

in

writing

the

history

of the Roman

provinces.

Instead,

Mommsen had

to

tease

his

history

out

of the

Corpus

Inscriptionum

Latinarum,

the vast

collection

of over

150,000

inscrip-

tions, coins,

and other

epigraphic

material

he

spent

most

of

his

lifetime

editing.

Such

non-literary

evidence

simply

did not

permit

the

historian

to

indulge

a

literary

taste

for brilliant

pictures

or awful visions:

"Charms of detail, pictures of feeling, sketches of character, it has none

to

offer;

it is

allowable

for

the

artist,

but not for the

historian,

to

repro-

duce the

features of

Arminius. With

self-denial this book has been

writ-

ten;

and with self-denial let

it

be

read."28

In

Mommsen's

view,

history

bestowed a moral

rigor

-

not

upon

life,

as

Arnold had

supposed

-

but

upon

historiography.

Mommsen's

positivist

attention

to historical evidence seemed

to

some Victorians to

separate

him

decisively

from Positivists

such

as

Beesly and Congreve, who like their mentor Comte so frequently be-

lied their

scientific

claims.

T. H.

Huxley charged,

for

instance,

that the

Positivists

were

anti-scientific

precisely

to

the

degree

that

they

were

anti-empirical.29

So

too,

as

we shall

see in the

case

of

J.

B.

Bury,

respect

for

empirical

evidence

undermined

the

authority

of the Positivist anal-

ysis

of

history by questioning

the

teleology

of the

three

stages.

Mommsen

thought

it futile

(and

Bury

worse than

futile)

that

a

literary

appetite

for

pattern

should

prompt

historians

to

link

"into a

semblance

of chronological order fragments that do not fit each other"

(Mommsen,

I,

5).

The evidence

of

the

Corpus

overwhelmingly

resisted

plot.

Ironically,

Mommsen,

possessed

of

great

narrative

gifts,

subvert-

ed

the

idea of historical

plot,

while

Niebuhr,

who

so

conspicuously

lacked those

gifts,

established

the

plot

of

Roman

history

as

the recur-

rent

story

of

the

world.

Mommsen's most

immediate

impact upon

historiography,

however,

was his transformation

of

ideas

about Roman

decadence.

By

focusing on the Roman provinces, Mommsen diverted attention

from

the

Roman

capital

and

from the

emperors

who,

from Nero

to

Augustulus,

had

traditionally

been

seen

as

precursors

or embodiments

of Rome's

decline. To focus

upon

the

provinces

was

to

show

that "the

cruelties and

eccentricities

of the

monarch

had but

little effect

28

Theodor

Mommsen,

The

Provinces

of

the Roman

Empire

from

Caesar to

Diocletian,

tr. William

P.

Dickson,

2 vols.

(London:

Richard

Bentley,

1886),

I,

6.

29 See T. H. Huxley, "The Scientific Aspects of Positivism" in Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews,

4th

ed.

(essay orig. pub.

1869;

London:

Macmillan,

1872),

pp.

147-173.

SUMMER

1985

595



Linda

Dowling

throughout

the boundless

expanse

of

the

Roman world"

(Gooch,

p.

462),

and

so to

suggest

the

relatively

limited influence of

individual

ac-

tions

upon

the

decadence of

the

Empire.

Mommsen's

researches

com-

pelled

Victorians

to

see

that

the

greater

Roman world

beyond

the

capi-

tal

enjoyed prosperity

and a

lingering peace

during

the

period

of its

supposed

decadence.

As he detailed the

complex

and

triumphantly

effi-

cient

functioning

of

Roman administration in the

provinces,

Mommsen

described the vitality and continuity of Roman institutions. "For the

tradition of

an

age

of

despotism

and

decay

he substituted

the

picture

of

a stable order from

which Western civilisation was to arise"

(Gooch,

p.

462).

Mommsen's

revision of

later

Roman

history deeply

influenced

the transvaluation

of Roman decadence carried out

by

late Victorian

avant-garde

writers;

it

also

more

obviously

influenced the work

of the

historian

H. F.

Pelham,

who

expressed

his

special gratitude

to the Ger-

man historian in Outlines of Roman History (1893), a school-text ex-

pansion

of his 1887

Encyclopaedia

Britannica

article on Rome.

Pelham

maintained

the distinction Mommsen made between

emperors

im-

portant

to

literary

memory

and

emperors

of

consequence

to

Roman

history:

Caligula,

Nero,

Commodus,

and their

like,

filled

a

place

in

the

literary

gossip

which to so

great

an extent did

duty

for

rational

history

in the first

three centuries after

Christ,

which

was

altogether disproportionate

to

their

real

importance.

We have now learnt

to look

up-

on the reigns of Augustus, of Hadrian, of Septimus Severus, and of Diocletian as marking

the decisive

epochs

in the annals of the

Empire,

and their

significance

for

the

histo;ry

of

the

imperial

city

is

equally

great.30

Pelham

perceived

that

the

thorough-going application

of

Mommsen's

methods had

opened

a new era in

the

historiography

of Rome. As

J.

B.

Bury

declared,

"The first

volume of Mr.

Pelham's

history

of the Em-

pire,

which

is

expected shortly,

will

show,

when

compared

with

Merivale,

how

completely

our

knowledge

of Roman

institutions

has

been transformed within a very recent

period."31

Mommsen's stress

upon

the

stability

and

continuity

of

Roman

institutions

during

the

Empire

found

an echo in

Pelham,

who

pointed

to "the

peculiarity

which is so

distinctive of

Roman

history

in

gener-

30

H.

F.

Pelham,

"Discoveries t

Rome,

1870-89"

n

Essays,

ed.

F.

Haverfield

essay

orig. pub.

1889;

Oxford:

Clarendon

Press,

1911),

p.

263.

For the

in-de-siecle

transvaluation f

Roman

decadence,

see Linda

Dowling,

"Neroand

the Aesthetics f

Torture,"

Victorian

Newsletter,

66

(Fall 1984),

1-5.

31

Bury, "Introduction" to Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-

pire,

ed.

J.

B.

Bury,

7

vols.

(London:

Methuen,

1896-1900),

,

In-lin.

VICTORIAN STUDIES

596



ROMAN

DECADENCE

al

-

its

unbroken

continuity"

(Pelham,

p.

238).

Where

the

Liberal

Anglican

historian Merivale

spoke

of a

continuity

of

moral

conscious-

ness

expressed

and

preserved

in a

literary

tradition

("There

is

not

one,

perhaps,

of

the

whole

number of

statesmen and warriors who

fills an

important

place

in

the

period,

whose moral lineaments are not

pre-

served

for us

in vivid relief

by

our

remaining

historians and

biogra-

phers"

[Merivale,

I,

xiii]),

Pelham

saw a

continuity

of

physical

evi-

dence, even of stone: "From the time when the earliest graves were dug

in the native rock of the

Esquiline

down to

the

age

of

Theodoric,

the

city

has

undergone

a continuous

process

of

superimposition,

and

the

successive strata

thus

formed

have

preserved

a

unique

record

of

its

growth"

(Pelham,

p.

238).

Such

physical

evidence

supplied

Pelham

with

a

useful material

analogue

for historical

developments:

"The

gradual

centralization

of

all

authority

and administrative

energy

in

Caesar

has its

counterpart

in

the growing monopoly of the actual soil of the city as revealed by a

study

of its monuments. The

private

houses which clothed the

slopes

and

spread

over the

crown

of

the Palatine

hill

were

buried

deep

below

the

vast

piles

which the Caesars

raised above

them"(Pelham,

pp.

263-264).

As Pelham

realized,

the

physical

evidence

also reached

fur-

ther

back into

the

past

than

could

literature.

Even

comparative philol-

ogy,

the

new

science of

language

for

which vast claims

had

been made

by

Max

Muller,

could

not

surpass

the backward

reach of

archaeology

into the past. As J. W. Burrow has noted, the traces of human con-

sciousness

represented

by

the

hypothetical

reconstructions

of

Proto-

Indo-European

soon

paled

into

insignificance

beside the

kitchen

middens

of

Sumer.32

Mommsen's

emphasis upon

the

importance

of

non-literary

and

physical

evidence,

moreover,

was

reinforced

by

an

English

tradition

in

historiography begun

by

George

Finlay.

Finlay,

a

Philhellene

and

younger

friend of

Byron,

fought

for

Greek

independence

and

farmed

Greek land before abandoning in frustration "the active duties of life,

and the noble

task of

labouring

to

improve

the

land,

for the sterile

oc-

cupation

of

recording

its

misfortunes."33

Finlay's experience

in

the

32

See

J.

W.

Burrow,

"The Uses of

Philology

in

Victorian

England"

in Ideas

and Institutions

of

Vic-

torian

Britain:

Essays

in Honour

of

George

Kitson

Clark,

ed.

Robert

Robson

(New

York:

Barnes

and

Noble,

1967),

pp.

180-240.

33

George

Finlay,

"Dedicatory Epistle

to his

Brother"

in

A

History

of

Greece,

From Its

Conquest

by

the Romans to the Present Times, B.C. 146-A.D. 1864, ed. H. F. Tozer, 7 vols. (orig. pub. 1856;

Oxford:

Clarendon

Press,

1877),

I,

ix.

SUMMER

1985

597



Linda

Dowling

world of

practical

concerns made him attend to

a kind of

historical

causation

-

namely,

economic

-

which most

"literary"

historians

chose to

ignore:

"[Finlay's]

great

merit in

tracing

the

course of

events

consists in his

looking

below

the

surface,

and

endeavouring

to

discover

the

secret influences that were

at

work.

In numerous

instances

of

the

decline of

a race

or

community,

where it

would have been

easy

to

talk

vaguely

of deterioration of

national

character,

he

has shown

that

the

effect has been produced by some external cause, such as the alteration

of lines of traffic

or

injudicious

taxation."34

Of

great

significance

for late Victorian

explanations

of

Roman

decadence was

Finlay's

attention to the

Eastern

Empire.

So well

estab-

lished now are the

outlines of

Byzantine

history

that

it is

difficult to

re-

call how recent

its

study

is and

how much it owes

to

late

Victorian

scholars,

especially

Finlay.

Dismissing

the sneers of

Voltaire and

Gib-

bon,

he labored

to

understand

Byzantium

afresh,

tracing

back link

by

link, as John Morley said,

the

long

chain

of

political,

social,

ecclesiastical,

racial,

and

above all

economic

events,

that

explained

the

Attic

peasant

of

to-day

and

of all

the

ages

intervening

since the

peasant

of

Alexander

the

Great.

...

[H]e

could not tell

the

Greek

story

without the

Byzantine sto-

ry,

and it is

Finlay

who first

unfolded what

the

Byzantine

Empire

was,

and

first

vindicat-

ed

its

share in the

growth

of Western

civilisation

and the

forms of

the

modern

world.35

Finlay

portrayed

the

transformation of

ancient

times

into

modern. In

following

the

particular

fortunes of

Greece,

he

came

to

see the

later

Roman

Empire

not as

a

"declining"

into

"death"

but

as a

long process

of

evolution. So

continuous

was the

process

that he

hesitated

to

mark it

off

into

historical

stages

or

acts: the

dissolution of

the

Roman

Empire

was,

he

said,

"so

gradual,

that the

new

state

was

created

by

the

trans-

formation of

the

old."36

Finlay's

portrayal

of

the

persistence

of

Roman

institutions

was

crucial for

the

late

Victorian

revaluation of

Roman

decadence,

and

powerfully

influenced E. A.

Freeman,

who

made

that

persistence

a

central

message

in

his

books

and

popular

articles

for the

Saturday

Re-

view:

"Ask

for

the

last

despatch

and

the

last

telegram,

and

it will

tell

us

34

H.

F.

Tozer,

"Note

by

the

Editor"

n

Finlay,

History,

I,

xlvii.

35

John

Morley,

"Mr.

[Frederic]

Harrison's

Historical

Romance

Theopano:

The

Crusade

of

the

Tenth

Century],"

Nineteenth

Century,

56

(October

1904),

577.

Finlay's

was one

of

the

accounts

W. B.

Yeatsread

before

writing

his

Byzantium

poems.

36

GeorgeFinlay,GreeceUnder he Rornans:A HistoricalViewof the Conditionof the GreekNa-

tion,

B.C. 146-

A.D. 717

(Edinburgh:

William

Blackwood,

1844),

p.

442.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

598



ROMAN

DECADENCE

that

the

history

of Rome has not

yet

reached its end. It is in

Rome that

all

ancient

history

loses

itself;

it

is out

of

Rome

that

all

modern

history

takes its source"

(Freeman,

p.

237).

Like

Thomas Arnold before

him,

Freeman

believed

that the

"history

of

Rome is in

truth the same as

the

history

of

the

world"

(Freeman, p.

234).

But we

may

also invoke the

statement to measure his

distance from

Arnold,

because Freeman

means in

a

quite

literal

sense

that the

history

of Rome

continues;

Ro-

man institutions, however transformed, continue to exist beneath or

among

or

within

the

forms of modern

life.

For

Arnold,

however,

the

statement

that

"the

History

of

Rome

must be

in

some

sort

the

History

of

the World"

derived its

authority

from its

analogical

power:

Rome

per-

sisted in modern times as a

pattern

of national

development,

a

plot.

To

Arnold,

Freeman's

meaning

would

have

seemed

trivial;

to

Freeman,

Arnold's

was

merely

fanciful.

The

extensive researches into

the Eastern and

provincial Empire

pursued by Finlay, Mommsen, and such successors as Pelham and J. B.

Bury

could

not be accommodated

within Arnold's

shapely

plot

of Ro-

man

infancy,

adolescence,

and

decline.

Even

more

menacing

to the

Liberal

Anglican

thesis,

the newer

research

seemed to

suggest

"very

different conclusions

-

that the

Empire

was,

in the

main,

a

sound

and

healthy

State

until the barbarians attacked

it,

and that

even at the last

its

civilisation

and

political

order

possessed

a

vitality

which

precludes

the

notion

of a

protracted organic

decay

commencing

from

within."37

Thus overwhelmed by disconfirming evidence, Arnold's metaphor col-

lapsed;

drawn

out

and

gradually

incorporated

into

modern

times,

the

all-important

final act

of

Arnold's

historical

drama had

disappeared.

With the

disappearance

of Roman

decay

as

the final

act of Roman his-

tory,

the

moral

significance

of

Roman decadence

disappeared

as well.

Even historians

who

were

willing

for the

moment to

grant

the

premise

of

"decay"

now declined to

invest

it with the

traditional

moral

expla-

nations.

Sir

John

R.

Seeley,

for

example, pointed

out

that such

expla-

nations,

when

they

were

not

entirely literary

in

origin, applied only

to

a small

group

of

aristocrats

in the Roman

capital.

Moral

degeneration

simply

could

not

explain

the erosion

of

Roman

strength

long

before

the

barbarians

reached

Rome.

Instead,

he

argued,

"the immediate

cause

to

which

the

fall

of the

Empire

can

be traced

is a

physical,

not

a

moral de-

cay.

...

Men

were

wanting;

the

Empire

perished

for want of men."38

37

Francis

J.

Haverfield,

"The

Fall

of the

Western Roman

Empire,"

Edinburgh

Review,

190

(July

1899),

172.

38

John R. Seeley, "Roman Imperialism II: The Fall of the Roman Empire," Macmillan's,

20

(August

1869),

287.

SUMMER

1985

599



Linda

Dowling

Seeley

anticipated

the

demographic

emphasis

of

twentieth-

century

Annaliste

and

"cliometric"

historiography

in

drawing

atten-

tion

to

the

devastating

effect

upon

Roman

population

of the Aurelian

plague.

Such

"events"

as

the

plague,

he

pointed

out,

resisted

tradi-

tional

historiography

because

they

could

not be

described

through

the

usual

literary

means.

Nonetheless,

Seeley

realized,

they

were

crucial

to

an

understanding

of

historical

causation: "We are

in

danger

of

attach-

ing too little importance to occurrences of this kind. The historian

devotes but a few

lines

to

them

because

they

do not

often

admit

of

being

related

in

detail. The battle

of

Cressy occupies

the historian more

than

the

Black

Death,

yet

we

now

know that

the Black

Death

is

a

turning-point

in

mediaeval

English

history"

(Seeley,

p.

290).

Seeley

might

think

of

himself

as

a

"scientific"

historian,

but he

was not one

in

practice.39

His

career

displays

the

same

cleavage

be-

tween

literary

and

scientific

historiographical

modes that

characterizes

William Arnold's. It is only fair to say, however, that Arnold's failure

to

reconcile

Liberal

Anglican assumptions

with those

of Mommsen and

his

school

provides

no

adequate

measure of

the

difficulty

of his under-

taking.

After

all,

even

historians

unencumbered

by

Arnold's

historiographical

ambitions

regularly

failed to

finish their

histories of

Rome: William

Arnold

joined

the

honorable

company

of

Niebuhr,

Hare

and

Thirlwall,

Thomas

Arnold,

Pelham,

and

Mommsen,

all

of

whom left their

histories of

Rome

unfinished. But

Arnold's

failure

may

nevertheless be

seen as representing an instance of that characteristic

fin-de-siecle

phenomenon:

the

breakdown

of

the

Victorian

gift

for

compromise.

What

Arnold

could not

unite

-

the

older

literary

with

the

newer

scientific

historiography

-

his brilliant

contemporary, J.

B.

Bury,

did

not

try

to unite. For

Bury,

whose least

achievement

it

was to

finish

Arnold's own

hopelessly

abandoned

handbook

(1893),

attempted

no

such

compromise

as Arnold's

between

"literary"

and

"scientific,"

but

stood forth

unmistakably

as the

perfect

Mommsenite and also

as

that

new

thing,

the

professional

historian.

III

A

precociously

gifted

classicist,

trained

(as

was

Oscar

Wilde)

by

J.

P.

Mahaffy,

Bury

won

a double

first

at

Trinity,

Dublin,

where he

be-

39

See

Deborah

Wormell,

Sir

John

Seeley

and the

Uses

of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press,

1980),

pp.

110-133.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

600



ROMAN

DECADENCE

came

Regius

Professor of

Greek and

later Professor of

Modern

History.

In 1902

he followed

Lord

John

E.

E.

Acton as

Regius

Professor of

Mod-

ern

History

at

Cambridge.

Bury

began

as

a

philologist

and

was

early

remarkable

for his

keen

sensitivity

to

language,

which

might

have

giv-

en

his

historical studies a

literary

slant.

"Words in

poetry,

like

stars,

create

atmospheres

around

them which

cannot be

displayed

in

a

dic-

tionary."40

Students

remembered

him

with

his delicate head

thrown

back, chanting in the approved Aestheticist manner the lines of Wil-

liam Morris.

Even in

the historical

work that in 1889

brought

Bury

an

international

reputation

at the

age

of

twenty-eight,

we catch an

unmis-

takably

Aestheticist

note.

The transitional nature of

the

Roman

fourth

and fifth centuries

A.

D.,

he

wrote,

"lends to the

study

of such

a

period

a

peculiar

interest,

or

we

might

say

an aesthetic

pleasure.

We

see a

number

of

heterogeneous

elements

struggling

to

adjust

themselves

into

a

new order

-

ingredients

of

divers

perfumes

and colours

turning

swiftly round and blending in the cup of the disturbed spirit,"4' an im-

age

taken

from

Swinburne's

"Triumph

of

Time"

("All

senses

mixed

in

the

spirit's

cup"),

just

as

surely

as the diction

is taken from Pater.

Yet

Bury's

aesthetic

sensitivity

was

firmly

controlled

by

his

phil-

ological training,

and this seems

to have

made him

sceptical

about

the

sort

of

imaginative

historicism

which the

Liberal

Anglicans

and such

"literary"

historians as

Carlyle

had

pursued.

In

an

important

early

es-

say,

"Anima Naturaliter

Pagana"

(the

title alludes not

only

to

Tertullian but to the last chapter of Marius the Epicurean), Bury

questioned

whether even

the

most

sympathetic

student,

a

complete

"modern

pagan,"

could

ever

truly

accomplish

the

historicist

project

and

"realis[e]

the Hellenic

temper."

For

words stood

in the

way:

"Eve-

ry

word

of

spiritual significance

has its

history;

and

whether

we know

that

history wholly

or

in

part,

or

not,

the emotion

which it

awakens in

us is a result of that

history"42

The

Greeks

had no exact

equivalent

to

the

English

"world" or

"heart";

correspondingly,

English

had no word

to render

X0aQK

or aQETr. Twenty centuries of Christian experience

fell between.

Bury's scepticism

did not

extend

so far as to

say

that

no

imaginative

effort could

ever

grasp

the

Greek

experience.

At the same

time,

his estimate

of

the time

required

for what

he called the

"histori-

40

Bury quoted

by

Norman

H.

Baynes,

A

Bibliography

of

the Works

of

J.

B.

Bury,

Compiled

with

a

Memoir

(Cambridge:

Cambridge

University

Press,

1929),

p.

57.

41

J.

B.

Bury,

"Preface"

to

A

History of

the

Later

Roman

Empirefrom

Arcadius

to

Irene,

395

A.D.

to

800

A.D.,

2

vols.

(London:

Macmillan,

1889),

I,

2.

42

J. B. Bury, "Anima Naturaliter Pagana: A Quest of the Imagination," Fortnightly Review, 49

(January

-

June 1891),

108.

SUMMER

1985

601



Linda

Dowling

cal

methods

of

aesthetic" to

accomplish

their

task is

sufficiently

sober-

ing:

"The

processes

of

analysis

are

slow,

and our

race shall have

seen

many generations

of historians

pass" ("Anima,"

p.112).

Patient,

exacting,

Bury

became

pre-eminently

the

historian

of

the

age

of

Mommsen.

Though

apparently

he

only slowly

appreciated

the

great change

wrought by

Mommsen

and

his

school,

Bury

absorbed

its

significance completely;

a

posthumous

estimate of

Bury's

work

on

the law and administration of the later Empire ranked it equal to

Mommsen's

own

work on the

Republic

and

the

Principate.43

The

Mommsen

that

Bury

himself

preferred

was not the

dazzling champion

of

Caesar but the consummate

epigraphic

scholar and

editor of

the

Corpus.

This

was

the

authority

that

Bury

implicitly

invoked

when he

did

battle with such

"literary"

judges

of

history

as

Benjamin

Jowett.

Writing

of

Thucydides

in

1881,

Jowett

declared

that the Greek

histori-

an

had

to

be

judged by

standards internal to his

work,

because the

ever-diminishing truth and ever-increasing fictions of a later genera-

tion

could

provide

no

reliable

gauge:

"When,

as in

modern

histories of

ancient

Greece,

the

good

cloth of

Herodotus

or

Thucydides

or

Xenophon

is

patched

with

the

transparent

gauze

of

Diodorus and

Plu-

tarch,

the

whole

garment

becomes

unequal

and

ragged"

(Baynes,

p.

106).

To

this

Bury

made

a

devastating

reply:

Mr.

Jowett's

view

is the

view of a man of

letters,

who

judges

history

altogether

from

a lit-

erary standpoint,

and who does

not care to

hear

what

happened

for its own

sake, but only

when

it

is told

with

literary

effect. Nor

is

it

the

case,

as he

seems to

imply,

that

literary

merit and

truth are

always

united.

...

The

power

of

appreciating

evidence from

whatev-

er

quarter

it comes is

assured

by

a

quality

which it is

absolutely

necessary

for a

historian

to

possess

-

we

might

also

say

that it

is

his

essential

quality.

He

may

possess many

other

val-

uable

qualities,

but if this

be

wanting,

he

will not

be

a

true

historian.

And,

on the

other

hand,

he

may

lack

many qualities

which one

would

willingly

see in a

historian,

and

yet

if

he

possess

this he

will be

entitled

to bear

that name.

(Baynes,

p.

107).

Bury's

mistrust

of

"literary"

historiography

found

its

most fa-

mous

expression

in

his

inaugural

lecture

at

Cambridge,

"The

Science

of

History"

(1903),

which

was

widely

discussed

and

perhaps

even

more

widely

misunderstood.44

Yet even

in

his

first

book,

the

young

man

who

delighted

in

the

poetry

of

Rossetti

and

Swinburne

did

not

hesitate to

43

"J.

B.

Bury,"

Dictionary

of

National

Biography:

1922-1933,

ed.

J.

R.

H.

Weaver

(London:

Oxford

University

Press,

1937),

p.

145.

44

DorisGoldstein,"J.B. Bury'sPhilosophyf

History:

AReappraisal,"

merican Historical Review,

82

(1977),

896-919.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

602



ROMAN DECADENCE

chasten his

pen:

the social

life

and

manners of

the later

Empire

were

treated there in brief

chapters

of

"jottings"

which,

he

said,

"could not

be

conveniently

introduced into the

narrative,

and were

too character-

istic to be

omitted"

(Bury,

"Preface," I,

xi-xii).

As his

biographer

notes,

Bury

"would

never

have

spoken

thus

casually

of the

'characteristic'

fea-

tures of the

life

of

the

Roman

State"

(Baynes, p.

70).

Convinced of the

uninterrupted

continuity

of

European

history by

Freeman,

Bury

inter-

ested himself not in the lives of individuals but of institutions, especial-

ly political

institutions,

for it was there that the

continuity

of Rome

was

to

be seen

most

unmistakably. Bury's

strict scientific conscience

limited his aims. To it he sacrificed continuous

narrative,

historical

portraiture,

and even

his own

personal

voice:

"Lord

Morley

observed

that

Bury

did

not 'cast his

shadow

on

the

page';

and the observation

was not all

praise" (DNB,

p.

147).

As

Bury's

biographer

observes,

"He

played

the

game

in

its utmost

rigour.

'With

self-denial this book has

been written, with self-denial it must be read': the words of Mommsen

could stand as a motto for the historical work of

Bury" (Baynes,

p.

48).

Bury's

work

represents

the

full

triumph

of

Mommsen's scientific

historiography

over the

providentialism

of the

Liberal

Anglicans.

The

most

dramatic evidence for this view

is

found

in the

undergraduate

lec-

tures

Bury

gave

at

Cambridge

when

he,

like

Kingsley,

was Professor of

Modern

History

there. Whereas

Kingsley

called

upon

his

young

men

to

read

history

and

change

their

lives,

Bury,

recounting

to their

grandsons

Totila's sack of Rome, said merely this: "I cannot include the story of

the fall of the

Ostrogothic

kingdom,

and the

resumption

of

Italy

under

the immediate

government

of

the

emperor,

within

the

compass

of

these

lectures."45

What had been a breathless

climax,

a moral

turning-point

in

Kingsley ("Through

such facts as

these God

speaks")

has become

flat

summary

in

Bury.

The most "awful

page

in the

history

of

Europe"

has

slipped

from

Bury's

book.

Scientific

historiography

transformed

the

public

role

of

the

histo-

rian from sage to specialist. A historian-sage such as Thomas Arnold had

inhabited

a world

of

providential design

where

"decadence" was a

pattern

produced by

moral choice.

Standing

at

the

end of the

rationalist-

45

J.

B.

Bury,

The Invasion

of

Europe

by

the Barbarians:

A

Series

of

Lectures

(London:

Macmillan,

1928),

pp.

206-207. In

his own

inaugural

lecture

at

Cambridge,

"The Science of

History,"

Bury

seems

deliberately

to

have been

answering

Kingsley's inaugural

lecture,

"The Limits of Exact

Science as

Applied

to

History" (1860),

a

work

which,

according

to

Beesly,

showed

Kingsley

"decry-

ing

the

science

he

professes

. . .

demonstrating

its

uselessness,

and,

as

far as lies in

him,

deterring

sensible men from wasting their time and attention upon it" ("Mr. Kingsley on the Study of

History,"

Westminster

Review,

75

o.s.,

19 n.s.

[April

1861],

305-306).

SUMMER

1985

603



Linda

Dowling

materialist

line of

explanation

begun by

Finlay,

applauding

his

pred-

ecessors,

Bury

dismissed traditional moral

explanations

of

Roman

decadence:

To

derive the decline of the

Empire

from the dinners

of

Apicius

and the

orgies

of Nero

is

a

fallacy

too

simple

to

deceive,

too

edifying

to be

easily

surrendered. As a matter of

fact,

lux-

ury

and

immorality

do

not

constitute,

and

need

not

be

symptoms

of,

a

disease that

is

fatal

to the life

of

States. But

even

if

the

argument

were

free from this

defect,

it

is,

like all

rea-

soning

founded

on historical

analogy,

futile.46

Bury's

sense of

the

pointlessness

of

historical

parallels

led him

to avoid

William

Arnold's

analogizing.

Where

Arnold

hoped

to

weight

his

newspaper

articles on British

imperialism

with

insights

from

Mommsen,

Bury

wrote

for the

periodical

press

only

to

say

that

any

analogy

with the Roman

Empire

was

absurd:

"One

day

tells

not anoth-

er

day,

and

history

declines to

repeat

herself."47

Given

Bury's

successful

routing

of

Liberal

Anglican

premises

and partisans, it is not surprising that he should serve as the admiring

editor of

their

old

enemy

Gibbon.

Bury brought

Gibbon's

Decline

up

to

date with continental

scholarship, just

as William

Arnold

had

hoped

to

do

for his

grandfather's history. Bury

the

scientific

professional

rejoiced

in the

improvement

that had taken

place

in

Roman

historiography:

"We

have

now to

be

thankful for

many

blessings

denied to Gibbon

and

-

so recent

is

our

progress

-

denied to Milman

and

Finlay"

(Bury,

"Introduction,"

p.

xlix).

New

methods and

materials had

trans-

formed both

the

study

of Rome

and

its

scholars. For

as Charles

Pearson

had noted in

his

gloomy

(and

hence

remarkably

accurate)

forecast of

British

life,

what

happens

in

physical

science will

have its

counterpart

in

scientific

history.

The

succes-

sors

of

Gibbon,

[that is]

Mr.

Finlay

and

Mr.

Bury,

are

inevitably

less

capable

of

giving pic-

torial

effect

to their

narrative,

because it is more

circumstantial and

minute. The mere

hesitations of a man

balancing

evidence are

against

effect in

style;

and as

the scientific

spirit

takes

nothing

on

trust,

it

would

not

allow

even

a Gibbon in the

present day

to

pres-

ent

his

conclusions more or

less

positively

in a

flowing

narrative.48

With this

estimate

Bury

concurred;

if

Gibbon wrote in the

1890s,

his

manner "would not be

that of

sometimes

open,

sometimes

transparent-

46

J.

B.

Bury,

"The British

and the

Roman

Empire,"

Saturday

Review

(27

June 1896),

645.

47

Bury,

"The

British and the

Roman

Empire," p.

645.

Compare Raymond

F.

Betts,

"The

Allusion to

Rome

in British

Imperialist

Thought

of the

Late-Nineteenth

and

Early-Twentieth

Centuries,"

Vic-

torian

Studies,

15

(1971),

149-159. But

see also Howard

Erskine-Hill,

The

Augustan

Idea

in

English

Literature

(London:

Edward

Arnold,

1983),

p.

354.

48

Charles

Pearson,

National

Life

and

Character:

A

Forecast

(London:

Macmillan,

1893),

p.

313.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

604



ROMAN

DECADENCE

ly

veiled,

dislike;

he

would

rather assume

an

attitude

of

detachment.

He would

be

affected

by

that

merely

historical

point

of

view,

which is a

note of

the

present

century

and its

larger

tolerances"

(Bury,

"Introduc-

tion,"

p.

xxxix).

If Gibbon wrote in the

1890s,

in

short,

he

would write

very

much like

Bury,

who

did

not

cast his shadow

on

the

page.

Bury's

verdict

upon

Gibbon

would

seem to

mark the

ultimate

"triumph of positivism and scepticism" over the idealist historiography

of the

Liberal

Anglicans.

At the same

time,

we should observe that

Bury's scepticism appears

ultimately

to have

triumphed

over even

his

positivism,

severely

qualifying

his

own firm belief

in

progress.

Bury

had

criticized

Thomas Arnold's

view

of modern

history

as the

last

phase

in

human

history, objecting

that Arnold's

argument

rested

on

unproven

assumptions

and insufficient

data.

By taking

relatively

short

views,

both Arnold

and Comte

had

been able

to

construct

closed

teleo-

logical systems of historical explanation. Yet the only truly adequate

data

for

such

explanations,

insisted

Bury,

were the data

furnished

by

cosmic

science:

"The

unapparent

future

.

..

bids us

consider

the whole

sequence up

to

the

present

moment

as

probably

no

more than

the

be-

ginning

of a social

and

psychical

development,

whereof

the end is

with-

drawn

from our

view

by

countless

millenniums

to come ...

We must

see our

petty

periods

sub

specie perennitatis."49

Though

Bury

himself believed

that

the

general

pattern

of

hu-

man history was marked by progress, he knew at the same time that

progress

was

inescapably

a time-bound

idea: "Does

not

Progress

itself

suggest

that its

value

as a

doctrine

is

only

relative,

corresponding

to

a

certain

not

very

advanced

stage

of

civilisation;

just

as

Providence,

in its

day,

was

an idea

of relative

value,

corresponding

to

a

stage

less

ad-

vanced?"50

The

idea of

progress

seemingly

accorded

with the

vastly

ex-

tended

viewpoint

of

cosmic

or

astrophysical

science

better than such

te-

leological

notions

as

Arnold's

providence

or

Comte's

third

stage.

None-

theless, it was no more than an interim hypothesis. Thus Bury came,

in

time,

to

see Gibbon's

Decline

less

as

evidence

of

progress

in

historiography

than

simply

as

a

masterly

personal

achievement.

He

came

to believe

that

it was

not

Gibbon's

"zealous

distrust of zeal"

that

established

the

superiority

of

the

Decline

over

other

histories

of

Rome;

49

J.

B.

Bury,

"The

Science of

History"

in Selected

Essays,

ed. Harold

Temperley

(Cambridge:

Cam-

bridge

University

Press,

1930),

p.

15.

50 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth (London: Macmillan,

1920),

p.

351.

SUMMER

1985

605



Linda

Dowling

it was instead that

very

unprogressive

element,

Gibbon's

immortal

"spite,"

that colored his

page

and made

it,

amidst

the

relativity

of

all

judgments,

a work

of

lasting

value.51

More than

this,

Bury's

growing

scepticism

at last made even

the

possibility

of

historiography,

of whatever

kind,

seem

radically

prob-

lematic.

Bury's

study

of the later

Empire

slowly

convinced him of

the

importance

of

contingency

or

chance

in historical

causation:

"The

gradual collapse of the Roman power in [the western] section of the

Empire

was the

consequence

of

a series

of contingent

events.

No

gener-

al causes can be

assigned

that made

it inevitable."52 Because chance

played

a

greater

role

in

simpler

than

in

more

complex

societies,

Bury

considered it

unwise for the scholar of

ancient

history

to

impose

any

ex-

planatory

scheme

upon

the

evidence: it was better "to leave the

facts

a

mere

sequence

than

present

them

as

points

in a

logical development

which,

however

probable,

cannot be

proved" (DNB,

p.

146).

Many of Bury's colleagues considered that to forego the search

for

general

causes was

to

abandon

historiography

as

a

discipline

and

to

yield

the

study

of historical

evidence to

that most unambitious

drudge,

the mere

chronologist.

As his

biographer

concludes

sorrowfully,

"The

first-fruits of

Bury's

doctrine of

contingency

do not raise

our

hopes

for

the future of

historiography

based

upon

that

theory"

(Baynes, p.

76).

Others such as

E.

H. Carr

have contended that

Bury's

final belief in

the

importance

of chance was

symptomatic

of a

larger

European

mood of

cultural uncertainty and apprehension. And in the view of twentieth-

century

idealist historians

like R.

G.

Collingwood, Bury's

radical

scep-

ticism about the

scope

of

historiographical

explanation represents

a

"failure,"

a

betrayal,

a "final

collapse."53

Bury's

position

as the

culminating figure

in

the

story

I

have been

telling

of the

Victorian

historiography

of Rome

is ironic

because

his

own work

finally

subverts

the

assumptions

of

Thomas

Arnold and

Theodor Mommsen

alike.

But to

see

Bury

this

way

is to view

him

from

the

teleological perspective

he

denied. If we

were

to consider

his

place

from

a

Buryan

point

of

view,

we should

have to

say

that

Bury

is

simply

51

Bury,

"A

Letter on the

Writing

of

History"

in

Selected

Essays, pp.

70-71.

The

letter

was written

to

the

London

Mornting

Post

in

1926,

less

than

a

year

before

Bury's

death.

Baynes

emphasizes

the

decisive

break

between

Bury's

earlier

and

later

years;

Goldstein

says,

"What is

puzzling,

if

not

jar-

ring,

in

Bury's

conclusion here is

his

negation,

in

effect,

of

his own

lifework"

(Goldstein,

p.

911).

52

J.

B.

Bury,

History of

the

Later

Ronman

Empire

From the

Death

of

Theodosius I

to the

Death

of

Justinian

(A.D.

395

-

A.D.

565),

2

vols.

(London:

Macmillan,

1923),

II,

311.

53

See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp.

147-151.

VICTORIAN

STUDIES

606



ROMAN

DECADENCE

what

happened

next

in

the Victorian

historiography

of

Rome,

and

ad-

mit that the shadow he did

not cast

upon

his own white

page

is written

down here to color this.

University of Cologne

607

dowling, 'roman decadence and victorian historiography'.pdf

Documents