Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs/Seeley
SIR JOHN R. SEELEY
SIR JOHN R. SEELEY
EELEY was essentially a Cambridge mind. Lucidity, sound judgment, accurate knowledge, wide outlook, were his. But there was an absence of élan, an avoidance of the personal note, a refusal to appeal to the emotions or to be moved by them, which left his readers cold. He could convince, but not charm. His light, to use the expression of another great Cambridge man, was a dry one. It has been said that Cambridge produces great men, Oxford great movements, or, as another variant puts it, 'Cambridge breeds men; Oxford, Oxford men.' In other words, the great ones of Cambridge have not that personal charm which leads to widespread influence, taking the form of 'movements.' Seeley strikes one as having more intellectual calibre than either Jowett or Pater, yet he has left nothing like the stamp of a similar influence on Cambridge to that wielded at the other university by either of the latter names. Seeley as an historical writer had no charm; as a Cambridge man might put it, he could not gush. I should digress too much if I discussed how far this was due to the influence of the Cambridge ἦθος. Perhaps I may summarise by saying that we of Cambridge woo Truth, not Art, forgetful that the highest truth can only be expressed by art. Be this as it may, the fact remains that Seeley failed to reach the highest, because of the absence of that personal appeal which charms us in many Oxford men of much inferior gifts.
Yet withal what an achievement was his in the realm of pure intellect! Putting aside for a moment his theological 'excursions and alarms,' consider what he did for the modern history of the three greatest European nations. For Germany he wrote the best life of the creator of modern Germany. If his biography of Stein fails to attract, it is mainly because Stein is not an attractive personality. The best parts of the book are where he is not dealing with Stein at all, but with some great movement of European feeling, like the national protest of Spain. What lends the book, however, an almost epic note, is the rôle played by Napoleon as the Satan of the action. This he also treated separately in his monograph on the great condottiere, as he regarded him. This was an artful book, in more senses than one. It might be described as a brief for the Devil's advocate. From the choice of a frontispiece to the last page, nothing is left undone to depreciate the man and his work. He declared that his plan precluded him from dealing at length with Napoleon's campaigns, and by this artifice was enabled to leave out of account that side of his activity to which he could not have denied greatness. One cannot help thinking that a survival of the old English feeling against 'Boney' animated his pen, and gave the work a personal tone somewhat lacking elsewhere. Yet he gave for France in it a clearer account, in shorter compass, of the rise of her modern institutions than is to be found elsewhere.
Original as was his work on modern Germany and France, it was little less than epoch-making on modern England. By the earlier historians England was mainly regarded as a majestic mother of Parliaments. Seeley felt that from this point of view the interest of English history ceased with Macaulay's period, the English Revolution. He set himself to show that after this period England had taken up a far greater, a world-important task. He proved to conviction that the eighteenth century was for history memorable, as containing the conflict of England and France for world-empire. It was in vain that Mr. Morley attempted to prove that Carlyle, by his perpetual insistence, in the Frederick, on Jenkins's ears, had anticipated Seeley in giving due importance to the expansion of England. We felt that Seeley had succeeded in what he had set out to do, in giving an epic unity to the last two centuries of English history. Surely since Sieyès no pamphlet—for it was little more in point of size—ever had such immediate and wide-reaching influence. Our Imperialism of today is the combined work of Beaconsfield and of Seeley, a curious couple of collaborators. Seeley's K.C.M.G. was a fit reward for services done to the empire.
Seeley's work as historian and as teacher of history at Cambridge was diplomatic in a double sense. He aimed at giving a more definite conception to the meaning of history by confining it to the study of the State and its development. Your development of literature and science, your Culturgeschichte, your social position of the people, were not for him as historian. Unless they got into State documents they had nothing to do with history as he conceived it, following in this the school of Ranke. For his period, and for his purposes, the documents that were of chief interest and importance were those of the diplomatists. It is to be hoped that sufficient remains of the work on which he was engaged during the past few years to give him his due rank as the historian of England's foreign policy.
Of Seeley's work at his post in Cambridge I know but little. The Historical Tripos was his creation, but it has yet to win its spurs. I attended one of his professorial courses, and went to one or two of his 'Friday evenings,' at which Seeley played the rôle of Socrates. His lectures were clear, but cold; there was an air of the higher mathematics about them, congenial to the spot, perhaps, but hardly fascinating. There was a curious resemblance to Renan in his appearance, but Seeley had none of Renan' s wit, still less had he any of Renan's diablerie. Yet both men, as is well known, gained their greatest success by their treatment of the life of Jesus.
Ecce Homo was, above all, an historian's conception of Jesus. In fact, it was Seeley's answer to Gibbon's problem in the celebrated fifteenth chapter. Gibbon wished to explain the remarkable spread and success of the early Church; Seeley tried to trace it back to the personal influence of the Founder. In doing this he had naturally to lay stress on Jesus's personal influence as man upon men, and thereby raised the ire of the Evangelicals. Curiously enough, it was on the historical side of his work that Seeley was most wanting. He failed to show from the Gospel records that the conscious aim of Jesus's life was the formation of a Society of Humanity. He could find no text for his refrain 'L'Église, c'est moi.' Yet his insistence on the social side of Jesus's work has done more for Christian union than any theological utterance of the past third of a century. Here, at any rate, is common ground.
He attempted a similar eirenicon in his Natural Religion, with reference to the conflict between religion and science. Religion is the pursuit of the ideal in any sphere, was his teaching. Thus science and art are both religious in tendency, if not in aim. How far the book served its purpose it is difficult to say. Science and religion are no longer at loggerheads, but that result, I fancy, has been produced rather by a process of exhaustion than by any direct influence of Seeley's. Yet Natural Religion was fully as original as Ecce Homo, and was much more attractive in style.
Not much need be said about Seeley's incursions into literary criticism. His contributions to English Lessons, so far as we can trace them, are lucid, but wanting in imaginative insight. Milton he treated rather as an historian than a critic. His little book on Goethe is somewhat commonplace, and fails to do justice to the Titanic side of the poet.
Seeley's light was a dry one, I have said, but it was pure and steady, and illumined every branch of thought on which he turned it. There are those who prefer this species of illumination to the more iridescent glare and more fantastic shadows cast by the feu follet of imagination. Truth has its triumphs no less than Fancy, and of these were Seeley's. The votaries of Veracity need, above all things, restraint and repression; Imagination must be their servant, not their master. Throughout Seeley's work, so original in so many directions, one feels that he never brought out all that was in him. Of Gray—another Cambridge man, and Seeley's predecessor in his chair—it was said that he never spoke out. May we not say of Seeley that he never let himself go? Yet in this restraint and repression Seeley was English of the English. I have called his a Cambridge mind. Should I not supplement this by saying that the Cambridge mind, in all its strength, with all its limitations, is the characteristic English mind?
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press