But I seem this term to have in a measure waked out of a long trance, partly caused by my own gross inconsistencies, and partly by the paralysing effects of this Oxford-delusion heresy, for such it is I feel persuaded. And to know it a man must live here, and he will see the promising and ardent men sinking one after another in a deadly torpor, wrapped up in self-contemplation, dead to their Redeemer, and useless to His Church, under the baneful breath of this accursed upas tree. I say accursed, because I believe that St. Paul would use the same language to Oxford as he did to the Galatian Church, "I would they were even cut off which trouble you"; accursed, because I believe that the curse of G.o.d will fall on it He has denounced it on the Papal hereby, and he is no respecter of persons, to punish the name and not the reality.
May He forgive me if I err, and lead me into all truth. But I do not speak as one who has been in no clanger, and therefore cannot speak very quietly. It is strange into what ramifications the disbelief of external justification will extend; _we will_ make it internal, whether it be by self-mortification, by works of evangelical obedience, or by the sacraments, and that just at the time when we suppose most that we are magnifying the work of the Lord.
Mr. Brooke rather likes to dwell, as it seems to us, in an unreal and disproportionate way, on Mr. Robertson"s sufferings, in the latter part of his life, from the bitter and ungenerous attacks of which he was the object. "This is the man," he says in one place, "who was afterwards at Brighton driven into the deepest solitariness of heart, whom G.o.d thought fit to surround with slander and misunderstanding." He was, we doubt not, fiercely a.s.sailed by the Evangelical party, which he had left, and which he denounced in no gentle language; he was, as we can well believe, "constantly attacked, by some manfully, by others in an underhand manner, and was the victim of innuendoes and slander." We cannot, however, help thinking that Mr. Brooke unconsciously exaggerates the solitariness and want of sympathy which went with all this. Mr. Robertson had, and knew that he had, his ardent and enthusiastic admirers as well as his worrying and untiring opponents.
But what we remark is this. It was the measure which he had meted out to others, in the fierceness of his zeal for Evangelicalism, which the Evangelicals afterwards meted out to him. They did not more talk evil of what they knew not and had taken no real pains to understand, than he had done of a body of men as able, as well-instructed, as deep-thinking, as brave, as earnest as himself in their war against sin and worldliness. The stupidity, the perverse ill-nature, the resolute ignorance, the audacious and fanatical application of Scripture condemnations, the reckless judging without a desire to do justice, which he felt and complained of so bitterly when turned against himself, he had sanctioned and largely shared in when the same party which attacked him in the end attacked the earlier revivers of thoughtful and earnest religion. Nor do we find that he ever expressed regret for a vehemence of condemnation which his after-knowledge must have shown him that he had no business to pa.s.s, because, even if he afterwards adhered to it, he had originally pa.s.sed it on utterly false and inadequate grounds. He only became as fierce against the Evangelicals as he had been against the followers of Mr. Newman. He never unlearnt the habit of harsh reprobation which his Evangelical friends had encouraged. He only transferred its full force against themselves.
He left Oxford and began his ministry, first at Winchester, and then at Cheltenham, full of Evangelical _formulae_ and Evangelical narrow zeal.
It does not appear that, except as an earnest hard-working clergyman, he was in any way distinguished from numbers of the same cla.s.s, though we are quite willing to believe that even then his preaching, in warmth and vigour, was above the average. But as he, or his biographer, says, he had not yet really begun to think. When he began to think, he did so with the rapidity, the intensity, the impatient fervid vehemence which lay all along at the bottom of his character. His Evangelical views appear to have snapped to pieces and dissolved with a violence and sudden abruptness entirely unaccounted for by anything which these volumes show us. He read Carlyle; but so did many other people. He found the religious world at Cheltenham not so pure as he had imagined it; but this is what must have happened anywhere, and is not enough to account for such a complete revolution of belief. He had a friend deeply read in German philosophy and criticism who is said to have exercised influence on him. Still, we repeat, the steps and processes of the change from the Evangelicalism of Cheltenham to a condition, at first, of almost absolute doubt, are very imperfectly explained:--
These letters were written in 1843. In the following year doubts and questionings began to stir in his mind. He could not get rid of them. They were forced upon him by his reading and his intercourse with men. They grew and tortured him. His teaching in the pulpit altered, and it became painful to him to preach. He was reckoned of the Evangelical school, and he began to feel that his position was becoming a false one. He felt the excellence and earnestness, and gladly recognised the work of the n.o.bler portion of that party, but he felt also that he must separate from it. In his strong reaction from its extreme tendencies, he understood with a shock which upturned his whole inward life for a time, that the system on which he had founded his whole faith and work could never be received by him again. Within its pale, for him, there was henceforward neither life, peace, nor reality. It was not, however, till almost the end of his ministry at Cheltenham that this became clearly manifest to him. It had been growing slowly into a conviction. An outward blow--the sudden ruin of a friendship which he had wrought, as he imagined, for ever into his being--a blow from which he never afterwards wholly recovered--accelerated the inward crisis, and the result was a period of spiritual agony so awful that it not only shook his health to its centre, but smote his spirit down into so profound a darkness that of all his early faiths but one remained, "It must be right to do right."
This seems to have been in 1846, and in the beginning of the next year he had already taken his new line. The explanation does not explain much. We have no right to ask for more than his friends think fit to tell us of this turning-point of his life. But we observe that this deeply important pa.s.sage is left with but little light and much manifest reticence. That the crisis took place we have his own touching and eloquent words to a.s.sure us. It left him also as firm in his altered convictions as he had been in his old ones. What caused it, what were its circ.u.mstances and characteristics, and what affected its course and results, we can only guess. But it was decisive and it was speedy. He spent a few months in Germany in the end of 1846, and in the beginning of 1847 the Bishop of Oxford was willing to appoint him to St. Ebbe"s. But his stay there was short. Three months afterwards he accepted the chapel at Brighton which he held till his death in August 1853.
He was now the Robertson whom all the world knows, and the change was a most remarkable one. It seems strictly accurate to say that he started at once into a new man--new in all his views and tastes; new in the singular burst of power which at once shows itself in the keen, free, natural language of his letters and his other writings; new in the deep concentrated earnestness of character with which he seemed to grasp his peculiar calling and function. All the conventionalities of his old school, which hung very thick about him even to the end of his Cheltenham life, seem suddenly to drop off, and leave him, without a trace remaining on his mind, in the full use and delight of his new liberty. We cannot say that we are more inclined to agree with him in his later stage than in his earlier. And the rapid transformation of a most dogmatic and zealous Evangelical into an equally positive and enthusiastic "Broad Churchman" does not seem a natural or healthy process, and suggests impatience and self-confidence more than self-command and depth. But we get, without doubt, to a real man--a man whose words have a meaning, and stand for real things; whose language no longer echoes the pale dreary commonplaces of a school, but reveals thoughts which he has thought for himself, and the power of being able "to speak as he will." His mind seems to expand, almost at a bound, to all the manifold variety of interests of which the world is full. His letters on his own doings, on the books and subjects of the day, on the remarks or the circ.u.mstances of his friends, his criticism, his satire, his controversial or friendly discussions, are full of energy, versatility, refinement, boldness, and strength; and his remarkable power of clear, picturesque, expressive diction, not unworthy of our foremost masters of English, appears all at once, as it were, full grown. It is difficult to believe, as we read the later portions of his life, that we are reading about the same man who appeared, so short a time before, at the beginning, to promise at best to turn into a popular Evangelical preacher, above the average, perhaps, in taste and power, but not above the average in freedom from cramping and sour prejudices.
Mr. Robertson had hold of some great truths, and he applied them, both in his own thoughts and self-development and in his popular teaching, with great force. He realised two things with a depth and intensity which give an awful life and power to all he said about religion. He realised with singular and pervading keenness that which a greater man than he speaks of as the first and the great discovery of the awakened soul--" the thought of two, and two only, supreme and luminously self-evident beings, himself and the Creator." "Alone with G.o.d,"
expresses the feeling which calmed his own anxieties and animated his religious appeals to others. And he realised with equal earnestness the great truth which is spoken of by Mr. Brooke, though in language which to us has an unpleasant sound, in the following extract:
Yet, notwithstanding all this--which men called while he lived, and now when he is dead will call, want of a clear and well-defined system of theology--he had a fixed basis for his teaching. It was the Divine-human Life of Christ. It is the fourth principle mentioned in his letter, "that belief in the human character of Christ must be antecedent to belief in His divine origin." He felt that an historical Christianity was absolutely essential; that only through a visible life of the Divines in the flesh could G.o.d become intelligible to men; that Christ was G.o.d"s idea of our nature realised; that only when we fall back on the glorious portrait of what has been, ran we be delivered from despair of Humanity; that in Christ "all the blood of all the nations ran," and all the powers of man were redeemed. Therefore he grasped as the highest truth, on which to rest life and thought, the reality expressed in the words, "the Word was made Flesh." The Incarnation was to him the centre of all history, the blossoming of Humanity. The Life which followed the Incarnation was the explanation of the Life of G.o.d, and the only solution of the problem of the Life of man. He did not speak much of loving Christ; his love was fitly mingled with that veneration which makes love perfect; his voice was solemn, and he paused before he spoke His name in common talk; for what that name meant had become the central thought of his intellect and the deepest realisation of his spirit. He had spent a world of study, of reverent meditation, of adoring contemplation, on the Gospel history.
Nothing comes forward more frequently in his letters than the way in which he had entered into the human life of Christ. To that everything is referred--by that everything is explained.
In bringing home these great truths to the feelings of those who had lived insensible to them lay the chief value of his preaching. He awakened men to believe that there was freshness and reality in things which they had by use become dulled to. There are no doubt minds which rise to the truth most naturally and freely without the intervention of dogmatic expressions, and to these such expressions, as they are a limit and a warning, are also felt as a clog. Mr. Robertson"s early experience had made him suspicious and irritable about dogma as such; and he prided himself on being able to dispense with it, while at the same time preserving the principle and inner truth which it was intended to convey. But in his ostentatious contempt of dogmatic precision and exactness, none but those who have not thought about the matter will see any proof of his strength or wisdom. Dogma, accurate, subtle, scientific, does not prevent a mind of the first order from breathing freshness of feeling, grandeur, originality, and the sense of reality, into the exposition of the truth which it represents. It is no fetter except to those minds which in their impulsiveness, their self-confidence, and their want of adequate grasp and sustained force, most need its salutary restraint. And no man has a right, however eloquent and impressive his speech may be, to talk against dogma till he shows that he does not confound accuracy of statement with conventional formalism. Mr. Robertson lays down the law pretty confidently about the blunders of everybody about him--Tractarian, Evangelical, Dissenter, Romanist, and Rationalist. We must say that the impression of every page of his letters is, that clear and "intuitive"
as he was, he had not always understood what he condemned. He was especially satisfied with a view of Baptism which he thought rose above both extremes and took in the truth of both while it avoided their errors. But is it too much to say that a man who, not in the heat of rhetoric, but when preparing candidates for Confirmation, and piquing himself on his freedom from all prejudice, deliberately describes the common Church view of Baptism as implying a "magical" change, and actually ill.u.s.trates what he means by the stories of magical changes in the _Arabian Nights_--who knowing, or able to read, all that has been said by divines on the subject from the days of Augustine, yet commits himself to the a.s.sertion that this is in fact what they hold and teach--is it too much to say that such a man, whatever may be his other gifts, has forfeited all claim to be considered capable of writing and expressing himself with accuracy, truth, and distinctness on theological questions? And if theological questions are to be dealt with, ought they not to be dealt with accurately, and not loosely?
But we have lingered too long over these volumes. They are very instructive, sometimes very elevating, almost always very touching. The life which they describe greatly wanted discipline, self-restraint, and the wise and manly fear of overrating one"s own novelties. But we see in it a life consecrated to duty, fulfilled with much pain and self-sacrifice, and adorned by warm and deep affections, by vigour and refinement of thought, and earnest love for truth and purity. No one can help feeling his profound and awful sense of things unseen, though in the philosophy by which he sought to connect things seen and things unseen, we cannot say that we can have much confidence. We have only one concluding remark to make, and that is not on him but on his biographer. An exaggerated tone, as we have said, seems to us to pervade the book. There is what seems to us an unhealthy attempt to create in the reader an impression of the exceptional severity of the sufferings of Mr. Robertson"s life, of his loneliness, of his persecutions. But in this point much may fairly be pardoned to the affection of a friend. What, however, we can less excuse is the want of good feeling with which Mr. Brooke, in his account of Mr. Robertson"s last days, allows himself to give an _ex parte_, account of a dispute between Mr. Robertson and the Vicar of Brighton, about the appointment of a curate, and not simply to insinuate, but distinctly declare that this dispute with its result was the fatal stroke which, in his state of ill-health, hastened his death. We say nothing about the rights of the story, for we never heard anything of them but what Mr. Brooke tells us. But there is an appearance of vindictiveness in putting it on record with this particular aspect which nothing in the story itself seems to us to justify. In describing Mr. Robertson"s departure from Cheltenham, Mr. Brooke has plainly thought right to use much reticence.
He would have done well to have used the same reticence about these quarrels at Brighton.
XVI
LIFE OF BARON BUNSEN[19]
[19]
_A Memoir of Baron Bunsen_. By his Widow, Baroness Bunsen. _Sat.u.r.day Review_, 2nd May 1868.
Bunsen was really one of those persons, more common two centuries ago than now, who could belong as much to an adopted country as to that in which they were born and educated. A German of the Germans, he yet succeeded in also making himself at home in England, in appreciating English interests, in a.s.similating English thought and traditions, and exercising an important influence at a critical time on one extremely important side of English life and opinion. He was less felicitous in allying the German with the Englishman, perhaps from personal peculiarities of impatience, self-a.s.sertion, and haste, than one who has since trodden in his steps and realised more completely and more splendidly some of the great designs which floated before his mind. But few foreigners have gained more fairly, by work and by sympathy, the _droit de cite_ in England than Bunsen.
It is a great pity that books must be so long and so bulky, and though Bunsen"s life was a very full and active one in all matters of intellectual interest, and in some of practical interest also, we cannot help thinking that his biography would have gained by greater exercise of self-denial on the part of his biographer. It is altogether too prolix, and the distinction is not sufficiently observed between what is interesting simply to the Bunsen family and their friends, and what is interesting to the public. One of the points in which biographers, and the present author among the number, make mistakes, is in their use of letters. They never know when to stop in giving correspondence. If we had only one or two letters of a remarkable map, they would be worth printing, even if they were very much like other people"s letters. But when we have bundles and letter-books without end to select from, selection, in a work professedly biographical, becomes advisable. We want types and specimens of a man"s letters; and when the specimen has been given, we want no more, unless what is given is for its own sake remarkable. A great number of Bunsen"s early letters are printed. Some of them are of much interest, showing how early the germs were formed of ideas and plans which occupied his life, and what were the influences by which he was surrounded, and how he comported himself in regard to them. But many more of these letters are what any young man of thought and of an affectionate nature might have written; and we do not want to have it shown us, over and over again, merely that Bunsen was thoughtful and affectionate. A wise and severe economy in this matter would have produced at least the same effect, at much less cost to the reader.
Bunsen was born in 1791, at Corbach, in the little princ.i.p.ality of Waldeck, and grew up under the severe and simple training of a frugal German household, and with a solid and vigorous German education. He became in time Heyne"s pupil at Gottingen, and very early showed the qualities which distinguished him in his after life--restless eagerness after knowledge and vast powers of labour, combined with large and ambitious, and sometimes vague, ideas, and with depth and fervour of religious sentiment. He entered on life when the reaction against the cold rationalistic theories of the age before him was stimulated by the excitement of the war of liberation; and in his deep and supreme interest in the Bible he kept to the last the stamp which he then received. More interesting than the recollections of a distinguished man"s youth by his friends after he has become distinguished--which are seldom quite natural and not always trustworthy--are the contemporary records of the impressions made on _him_ in his youth by those who were distinguished men when he was young. In some of Bunsen"s letters we have such impressions. Thus he writes of Heyne in 1813:--
Poor and lonely did I arrive in this place [Gottingen]. Heyne received me, guided me, bore with me, encouraged me, showed me in himself the example of a high and n.o.ble energy, and indefatigable activity in a calling which was not that to which his merit ent.i.tled him. He might have superintended and administered and maintained an entire kingdom without more effort and with yet greater efficiency than the University for which he lived; he was too great for a mere philologer, and in general for a professor of mere learning in the age into which he was cast, and he was more distinguished in every other way than in this.... And what has he established or founded at the cost of this exertion of faculties?
Learning annihilates itself, and the most perfect is the first submerged; for the next age scales with ease the height which cost the preceding the full vigour of life. Yet two things remain of him and will not perish--the one, the tribute left by his free spirit to the finest productions of the human mind; and what he felt, thought, and has immortalised in many men of excellence gone before. Read his explanations of Tischbein"s engravings from Homer, his last preface to Virgil, and especially his oration on the death of Muller, and you will understand what I mean. I speak not of his political instinct, made evident in his survey of the public and private life of the ancients. The other memorial which will subsist of him, more warm in life than the first, is the remembrance of his generosity, to which numbers owe a deep obligation.
And of Sch.e.l.ling, about the same time, whom he had just seen in Munich:--
Sch.e.l.ling before all must be mentioned as having received me well, after his fashion, giving me frequent occasions of becoming acquainted with his philosophical views and judgments, in his own original and peculiar manner. His mode of disputation is rough and angular; his peremptoriness and his paradoxes terrible. Once he undertook to explain animal magnetism, and for this purpose to give an idea of Time, from which resulted that all is present and in existence--the Present as existing in the actual moment; the Future, as existing in a future moment. When I demanded the proof, he referred me to the word _is_, which applies to existence, in the sentence that "this _is_ future." Seckendorf, who was present (with him I have become closely acquainted, to my great satisfaction), attempted to draw attention to the confounding the subjective (i.e. him who p.r.o.nounces that sentence) with the objective; or, rather, to point out a simple grammatical misunderstanding--in short, declared the position impossible.
"Well," replied Sch.e.l.ling drily, "you have not understood me." Two Professors (his worshippers), who were present, had meanwhile endeavoured by their exclamations, "Only observe, all _is_, all _exists_" (to which the wife of Sch.e.l.ling, a clever woman, a.s.sented), to help me into conviction; and a vehement beating the air--for arguing and holding fast by any firm point were out of the question--would have arisen, if I had not contrived to escape by giving a playful turn to the conversation. I am perfectly aware that Sch.e.l.ling _could_ have expressed and carried through his real opinion far better--i.e. rationally. I tell the anecdote merely to give an idea of his manner in conversation.
At Gottingen he was one of a remarkable set, comprising Lachmann, Lucke, Brandis, and some others, thought as much of at the time as their friends, but who failed to make their way to the front ranks of the world. Like others of his countrymen, Bunsen began to find "that the world"s destinies were not without their effect on him," and to feel dissatisfied with the comparatively narrow sphere of even German learning. The thought grew, and took possession of him, of "bringing over, into his knowledge and into his fatherland, the solemn and distant East," and to "draw the East into the study of the entire course of humanity (particularly of European, and more especially of Teutonic humanity)," making Germany the "central point of this study."
Vast plans of philological and historical study, involving, as the only means then possible of carrying them out, schemes of wide travel and long sojourn in the East, opened on him. Indian and Persian literature, the instinctive certainty of its connection with the languages and thought of the West, and the imperfection of means of study in Europe, drew him, as many more were drawn at the time, to seek the knowledge which they wanted in foreign and distant lands. With Bunsen, this wide and combined study of philology, history, and philosophy, which has formed one of the characteristic pursuits of our time, was from the first connected with the study of the Bible as its central point. In 1815 came a decisive turning-point in his life--his acquaintance, and the beginning of his close connection, with Niebuhr, at Berlin; and from this time he felt himself a Prussian. "That State in Northern Germany," he writes to Brandis in 1815, "which gladly receives every German, from wheresoever he may come, and considers every one thus entering as a citizen born, is _the true Germany_":--
That such a State [he proceeds, in the true Bismarckian spirit]
should prove inconvenient to others of inferior importance, which persist in continuing their isolated existence, regardless of the will of Providence and of the general good, is of no consequence whatever; nor even does it matter that, in its present management, there are defects and imperfections.... We intend to be in Berlin in three weeks; and there (in Prussia) am I resolved to fix my destinies.
After reading Persian for a short time in Paris with De Sacy, and after the failure of a plan of travel with Mr. Astor of New York, Bunsen joined Niebuhr at Florence in the end of 1816, and went on with him to Rome, where Niebuhr was Prussian envoy. There, enjoying Niebuhr"s society, "equally sole in his kind with Rome," he took up his abode, and plunged into study. He gave up his plans of Oriental travel, finding he could do all that he wanted without them. Too much a student, as he writes to a friend, to think of marrying, which he could not do "without impairing his whole scheme of mental development," he nevertheless found his fate in an English lady, Miss Waddington, who became his wife. And, finally, when the health of his friend Brandis, Niebuhr"s secretary in the Prussian Legation, broke down, Bunsen took his place, and entered on that combined path of study and diplomacy in which he continued for the greater part of his life.
It may be questioned whether Bunsen"s career answered altogether successfully to what he proposed to himself, or was in fact all that his friends and he himself thought it; but it was eminently one in which from the first he had laid down for himself a plan of life which he tenaciously followed through many changes and varieties of work, without ever losing sight of the purpose with which he began. He piqued himself on having early seen that a man ought to have an object to which to devote his whole life--"be it a dictionary like Johnson"s or a history like Gibbon"s"--and on having discerned and chosen his own object. And at an early time of his life in Rome he draws an outline of thought and inquiry, destined to break off into many different labours, in very much the same language in which he might have described it in the last year of his life:--
_The consciousness of G.o.d in the mind of man, and that which in and through that consciousness He has accomplished, especially in language and religion_, this was from the earliest time before my mind. After having awhile fancied to attain my point, sometimes here, sometimes there, at length (it was in the Christmas holidays of 1812, after having gained the prize in November) I made a general and comprehensive plan. I wished to go through and represent heathen antiquity, in its princ.i.p.al phases, in three great periods of the world"s history, according to its languages, its religious conceptions, and its political inst.i.tutions; first of all in the East, where the earliest expressions in each are highly remarkable, although little known; then in the second great epoch, among the Greeks and Romans; thirdly, among the Teutonic nations, who put an end to the Roman Empire.
At first I thought of Christianity only as something which every one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not as the object of a peculiar study. But in January 1816, when I for the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as G.o.d had caused the conception of Himself to be developed in the mind of man in a twofold manner, the one through revelation to the Jewish people through their patriarchs, the other through reason in the heathen; so also must the inquiry and representation of this development be twofold; and as G.o.d had kept these two ways for a length of time independent and separate, so should we, in the course of the examination, separate knowledge from man, and his development from the doctrine of revelation and faith, firmly trusting that G.o.d in the end would bring about the union of both.
This is now also my firm conviction, that we must not mix them or bring them together forcibly, as many have done with well-meaning zeal but unclear views, and as many in Germany with impure designs are still doing.
The design had its interruptions, both intellectual and practical. The plan was an ambitious one, too ambitious for Bunsen"s time and powers, or even probably for our own more advanced stage of knowledge; and Bunsen ever found it hard to resist the attractions of a new object of interest, and did not always exhaust it, though he seldom touched anything without throwing light on it. Thus he was drawn by circ.u.mstances to devote a good deal of time, more than he intended, to the mere antiquarianism of Rome. By and by he found himself succeeding Niebuhr as the diplomatic representative of Prussia at Rome. And his attempt to meet the needs of his own strong devotional feelings by giving more warmth and interest to the German services at the emba.s.sy, "the congregation on the Capitoline Hill," led him, step by step, to those wider schemes for liturgical reform which influenced so importantly the course of his fortunes. They brought him, a young and unknown man, with little more than Niebuhr"s good word, into direct and confidential communication with the King of Prussia, who was then intent on plans of the same kind, and who recognised in Bunsen, after some preliminary jealousy and misgivings, the man most fitted to a.s.sist in carrying them out. But though Bunsen, who started with the resolve of being both a student and a scholar, was driven, as he thought against his will, into paths which led him deeper and deeper into public life and diplomacy, his early plans were never laid aside even under the stress of official employment. Perhaps it may be difficult to strike the balance of what they lost or gained by it.
The account of his life at Rome contains much that is interesting.
There is the curious mixture of sympathy and antipathy in Bunsen"s mind for the place itself; the antipathy of a German, a Protestant, and a free inquirer, for the Roman, the old Catholic, the narrow, timid, traditional spirit which pervaded everything in the great seat of clerical and Papal government; and the sympathy, scarcely less intense, not merely, or in the first place, for the cla.s.sical aspects of Rome, but for its religious character, as still the central point of Christendom, full of the memorials and the savour of the early days of Christianity, mingling with what its many centuries of history have added to them; and for all that aroused the interest and touched the mind of one deeply busy with two great religious problems--the best forms for Christian worship, and the restoration, if possible, of some organisation and authority in Protestant Germany. For a long time Bunsen, like his master Niebuhr, was on the best terms with Cardinals, Monsignori, and Popes. The Roman services were no objects to him of abhorrence or indifference. He saw, in the midst of accretions, the remains of the more primitive devotion; and the architecture, the art, and the music, to be found only in Rome, were to him inexhaustible sources of delight. As may be supposed, letters like Bunsen"s, and the recollections of his biographer, are full of interesting gossip; notices of famous people, and of things that happened in Rome in the days of the Emanc.i.p.ation and Reform Bills, Revolutions of Naples in "20 and France in "30, during the twenty years, from 1818 to 1838, in which the men of the great war and the restorations were going off the scene, and the men of the modern days--Liberals, High Churchmen, Ultra-montanes--were coming on. Those twenty years, of course, were not without their changes in Bunsen"s own views. The man who had come to Rome, in position a poor and obscure student, had grown into the oracle of a highly cultivated society, whose acquaintance was eagerly sought by every one of importance who lived at Rome or visited it, and into the diplomatic representative of one of the great Powers. The scholar had come to have, not merely theories, but political and ecclesiastical aims. The disciple of Niebuhr, who at one time had seen all things very much as Niebuhr saw them in his sad later days of disgust at revolution and cynical despair of liberty, had come since under the influence of Arnold, and, as his letters to Arnold show, had taken into his own mind much of the more generous and hopeful, though vague, teaching of that equally fervid teacher of liberalism and of religion. These letters are of much interest. They show the dreams and the fears and antipathies of the time; they contain some remarkable antic.i.p.ations, some equally remarkable miscalculations, and some ideas and proposals which, with our experience, excite our wonder that any one could have imagined them practicable. Every one knows that Bunsen"s diplomatic career at Rome ended unfortunately. He was mixed up with the violent proceedings of the Prussian Government in the dispute with the Archbishop of Cologne about marriages between Protestants and Catholics, and he had the misfortune to offend equally both his own Court and that of Rome. It is possible that, as is urged in the biography before us, he was sacrificed to the blunders and the enmities of powers above him. But, for whatever reason, no clear account is given of the matter by his biographer, though a good deal is suggested; and in the absence of intelligible explanations the conclusion is natural that, though he may have been ill-used, he may also have been unequal to his position.
But his ill-success or his ill-usage at Rome was more than compensated by the results to which it may be said to have led. Out of it ultimately came that which gave the decisive character to Bunsen"s life--his settlement in London as Prussian Minister. On leaving Rome he came straight to England He came full of admiration and enthusiasm to "his Ithaca, his island fatherland," and he was flattered and delighted by the welcome he received, and by the power which he perceived in himself, beyond that of most foreigners, to appreciate and enjoy everything English. He liked everything--people, country, and inst.i.tutions; even, as his biographer writes, our rooks. The zest of his enjoyment was not diminished by his keen sense of what appear to foreigners our characteristic defects--the want of breadth of interest and boldness of speculative thought which accompanies so much energy in public life and so much practical success; and he seems to have felt in himself a more than ordinary fitness to be a connecting link between the two nations--that he had much to teach Englishmen, and that they were worth teaching. He thoroughly sympathised with the earnestness and strong convictions of English religion; but he thought it lamentably dest.i.tute of rational grounds, of largeness of idea and of critical insight, enslaved to the letter, and afraid of inquiry. But, with all drawbacks, his visit to England made it a very attractive place to him; and when he was appointed by his Government Envoy to the Swiss Confederation, with strict injunctions "to do nothing," his eyes were oft on turned towards England. In 1840 the King of Prussia died, and Bunsen"s friend and patron, the Crown Prince, became Frederic William IV. He resembled Bunsen in more ways than one; in his ardent religious sentiment, in his eagerness, in his undoubting and not always far-sighted self-confidence and self-a.s.sertion, and in a combination of practical vagueness of view and a want of understanding men, with a feverish imperiousness in carrying out a favourite plan. In 1841 he sent Bunsen to England to negotiate the ill-considered and precipitate arrangement for the Jerusalem bishopric; and on the successful conclusion of the negotiation, Bunsen was appointed permanently to be Prussian Minister in London. The manner of appointment was remarkable.
The King sent three names to Lord Aberdeen and the English Court, and they selected Bunsen"s.
Thus Bunsen, who twenty-five years before had sat down a penniless student, almost in despair at the failure of his hopes as a travelling tutor, in Orgagna"s _loggia_ at Florence, had risen, in spite of real difficulties and opposition, to a brilliant position in active political life; and the remarkable point is that, whether he was ambitious or not of this kind of advancement--and it would perhaps have been as well on his part to have implied less frequently that he was not--he was all along, above everything, the student and the theologian. What is even more remarkable is that, plunged into the whirl of London public life and society, he continued still to be, more even than the diplomatist, the student and theologian. The Prussian Emba.s.sy during the years that he occupied it, from 1841 to 1854, was not an idle place, and Bunsen was not a man to leave important State business to other hands. The French Revolution, the German Revolution, the Frankfort a.s.sembly, the question of the revival of the Empire, the beginnings of the Danish quarrel and of the Crimean war, all fell within that time, and gave the Prussian Minister in such a centre as London plenty to think of, to do, and to write about. Yet all this time was a time of intense and unceasing activity in that field of theological controversy in which Bunsen took such delight. The diplomatist entrusted with the gravest affairs of a great Power in the most critical and difficult times, and fully alive to the interest and responsibility of his charge, also worked harder than most Professors, and was as positive and fiery in his religious theories and antipathies as the keenest and most dogmatic of scholastic disputants, he was busy about Egyptian chronology, about cuneiform writing, about comparative philology; he plunged with characteristic eagerness into English theological war; and such books as his _Church of the Future_, and his writings on Ignatius and Hippolytus, were not the least important of the works which marked the progress of the struggle of opinions here.
But they represented only a very small part of the unceasing labour that was going on in the early morning hours in Carlton House Terrace.
All this time the foundations were being laid and the materials gathered for books of wider scope and more permanent aim, too vast for him to accomplish even in his later years of leisure. It is an original and instructive picture; for though we boast statesmen who still carry on the great traditions of scholarship, and give room in their minds for the deeper and more solemn problems of religion and philosophy, they are not supposed to be able to carry on simultaneously their public business and their cla.s.sical or scientific studies, and at any rate they do not attack the latter with the devouring zeal with which Bunsen taxed the efforts of hard-driven secretaries and readers to keep pace with his inexhaustible demands for more and more of the most abstruse materials of knowledge.
The end of his London diplomatic career was, like the end of his Roman one, clouded with something like disgrace; and, like the Roman one, is left here unexplained. But it was for his happiness, probably, that his residence in England came to a close. He had found the poetry of his early notions about England, political and theological at least, gradually changing into prose. He found less and less to like, in what at first most attracted him, in the English Church; he and it, besides knowing one another better, were also changing. He probably increased his sympathies for England, and returned in a measure to his old kindness for it, by looking at it only from a distance. The labour of his later days, as vast and indefatigable as that of his earlier days, was devoted to his great work, which was, as it were, to popularise the Bible and revive interest in it by a change in the method of presenting it and commenting on it. To the last the Bible was the central point of his philosophical as well as his religious thoughts, as it had been in his first beginnings as a student at Gottingen and Rome. After a life of many trials, but of unusual prosperity and enjoyment, he died in the end of 1860. The account of his last days is a very touching one.
We do not pretend to think Bunsen the great and consummate man that, naturally enough, he appears to his friends. We doubt whether he can be cla.s.sed as a man in the first rank at all. We doubt whether he fully understood his age, and yet it is certain that he was confident and positive that he did understand it better than most men; and an undue confidence of this kind implies considerable defects both of intellect and character. He wanted the patient, cautious, judicial self-distrust which his studies eminently demanded, and of which he might have seen some examples in England. No one can read these volumes without seeing the disproportionate power which first impressions had with him; he was always ready to say that something, which had just happened or come before him, was the greatest or the most complete thing of its kind.
Wonderfully active, wonderfully quick and receptive, full of imagination and of the power of combining and constructing, and never wearied out or dispirited, his mind took in large and grand ideas, and developed them with enthusiasm and success, and with all the resources of wide and varied knowledge; but the affluence and ingenuity of his thoughts indisposed him, as it indisposes many other able men, to the prosaic and uninteresting work of calling these thoughts into question, and cross-examining himself upon their grounds and tenableness. He tried too much; the multiplicity of his intellectual interests was too much for him, and he often thought that he was explaining when he was but weaving a wordy tissue, and "darkening counsel" as much as any of the theological sciolists whom he denounced. People, for instance, must, it seems to us, be very easily satisfied who find any fresh light in the attempt, not unfrequent in his letters, to adapt the Lutheran watchword of Justification by faith to modern ideas. He was very rapid, and this rapidity made him hasty and precipitate; it also made him apt to despise other men, and, what was of more consequence, the difficulties of the subject likewise. Others did not always find it easy to understand him; and it may fairly be questioned if he always sufficiently asked whether he understood himself. He was generous and large-spirited in intention, though not always so in fact.
Doubtless so much knowledge, so much honest and unsparing toil, such freshness and quickness of thought, have not been wasted; there will always be much to learn from Bunsen"s writings. But his main service has been the moral one of his example; of his ardent and high-souled industry, of his fearlessness in accepting the conclusions of his inquiries, of his untiring faith through many changes and some disappointments that there is a way to reconcile all the truths that interest men--those of religion, and those of nature and history. The sincerity and earnestness with which he attempted this are a lesson to everybody; his success is more difficult to recognise, and it may perhaps be allowable to wish that he had taken more exactly the measure of the great task which he set to himself. His ambition was a high one.
He aspired to be the Luther of the new 1517 which he so often dwelt upon, and to construct a theology which, without breaking with the past, should show what Christianity really is, and command the faith and fill the opening thought of the present. It can hardly be said that he succeeded. The Church of the Future still waits its interpreter, to make good its pretensions to throw the ignorant and mistaken Church of the Past into the shade.
XVII
COLERIDGE"S MEMOIR OF KEBLE[20]
[20]
_A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble_. By the Right Hon. Sir J.T.
Coleridge. _Sat.u.r.day Review_, 20th March 1860.