The Liberal Anglican Idea of History

THE LIBERAL ANGLICAN IDEA OF HISTORY

Prince Consort Prize Essay 1950

THE

LIBERAL ANGLICAN IDEA OF HISTORY BY

DUNCAN FORBES

Mi T

CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1952

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521050180 © Cambridge University Press 1952 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1952 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN-13 978-0-521-05018-0 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-05018-9 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-02611-6 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-02611-3 paperback

CONTENTS Foreword

page

Vll

I T H E LIBERAL ANGLICANS AND THE PROBLEM OF THE NATURE OF PROGRESS II T H E LIBERAL ANGLICAN SCIENCE OF HISTORY

(a) The Progress of Nations: Social and Political (i) Arnold, Niebuhr and Vico (ii) 'The Social Progress of States' (b) The Progress of Nations: Intellectual and Moral (c) History as a Science (d) The Limitations of a Science of History (e) Transition to the Philosophy of History

I 12

12 12 20 29 39 52 55

III T H E LIBERAL ANGLICAN PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

63

IV PRACTICAL HISTORY

87

(a) Social and Political: The Condition of England (b) The Crisis of Civilization (c) Religion (i) Romanism and Rationalism (ii) History and Theology (d) Education (e) The Nemesis of Practical History

89 95 102 102 108 in 118

V T H E 'HISTORICAL MOVEMENT PROPER' AND THE LIBERAL ANGLICANS

(a) The Nature of the Impartiality of Liberal Anglican History (b) The Romantic Philosophy of Mind

123

123 126

CONTENTS

(c) A Vindication of the Liberal Anglican Science of History (d) A Vindication of the Liberal Anglican Philosophy of History (e) Conclusion

144 149 151

Notes and References

153

Bibliography

201

Index

204

NOTE Figures in brackets in the text and footnotes refer the reader to further notes at the end of the book

FOREWORD have often observed and commented on the strength of the tradition of 18th century Rationalism in England in the first half of the 19th century, and it is not surprising that the outlook of the 'philosophic' century still generally prevailed in historical theory and practice. Hallam, James Mill, Grote, Macaulay and Scott belonged to the tradition of the Rationalist historians of the 18th century. The presuppositions of their historical thinking were Rationalist presuppositions. They believed, for example, that men are everywhere and at all times mentally the same, though this did not prevent them from believing also, paradoxically enough, that history reveals the moral and intellectual progress of the race, the 'March of Mind'. The belief in the uniformity of human nature was the great stumbling-block which prevented the Rationalists from reaching a truly historical outlook. No intellectual epoch is homogeneous, and even during the Triumvirate of Hume, Robertson and Gibbon there had been dissenters, and signs of new attitudes in historical thinking.1 But these signs of change—primitivism, pietism, medievalism, nationalism—cannot be said to represent a decisive break with the Rationalist tradition, which was able to accommodate the new modes, as the Roman Empire accommodated the barbarian tribes, without fundamentally altering the laws of its intellectual existence. Enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, for instance, could exist in Scott alongside the belief in the essential sameness of human nature in all ages. A considerable amount of scene-shifting had already taken place on the Rationalist stage to accommodate the idea of progress, and the conception of the vital contribution of the Medieval Church to civilization. But in spite of these movements, the grounds of the historical thinking of Voltaire, Turgot and

HISTORIANS

1

See T. P. Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760-1830 (1933).

vii

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Condorcet, of Hume, Gibbon, Hallam, James Mill and Scott, remained unshaken. Because Rationalist philosophy and history were so closely allied, there had to be a new philosophy, a new Weltanschauung, before there could be a new history. In Germany the new historical outlook was established by the end of the 18th century, when, significantly enough, Vico began to be appreciated and Vichian ideas to circulate; but in England it was not until the decade 1820-30, or thereabouts, that the attempted construction by Coleridge ofa new system, opposed to everything which the Rationalists held most vital, brought about of necessity a real revolution in historical thinking. The history ofboth Rationalists and Romantics, of the 18th century and the revolt against it, was fundamentally practical, and therefore fundamentally different, because inseparable from contrasting views of man and nature. It was because their history was essentially practical, therefore, and because they challenged the Rationalist tradition at all the vital points, that the disciples and followers of Coleridge, the men who looked to Germany and to Vico for inspiration, the 'GermanoColeridgeans', Thomas Arnold and his friends, played the vital role in England in the development of an attitude to history opposed to that of the Rationalists: one which was in many ways more truly historical, especially in its substitution for the uniformity of human nature of what may be called the Vichian or Romantic philosophy of mind. The Liberal Anglicans, as this group of people [1] may be called, have hitherto been neglected [2] because the history of history in England has tended to deal only with the 'great historians', the Carlyles, Grotes and Macaulays, and also because it has not taken sufficient account of the practical character of the historical thinking of the age, which is the real clue to interpretation. It has studied the Liberal Anglicans in compartments o f classical' and 'ecclesiastical' history, and neglected their idea of history as a whole. It has tended to confine itself to formal 'Histories' and Lectures, which, studied in isolation, may give a misleading impression. The Liberal Anglicans, as will be seen, used the term 'ecclesiastical history' for academic purposes, though they firmly believed (and it was a viii

FOREWORD

belief involving practical consequences of fundamental importance for their whole outlook on Church and State) that there was no such thing in the academic sense of the word: that secular and ecclesiastical history were one and indivisible. Thomas Arnold, too, in his lectures at Oxford, deliberately modified his conception of history to fit the prevailing academic divisions of'Ancient' and 'Modern', though all the other evidence shows that these divisions had no real meaning for him. The history of history must break through the artificial crust of historical narrative and the cake of academic custom to the living thought beneath. In the first half of the 19th century, then, one sees the development in England of an attitude to the past more truly historical than that of the Rationalists—at least one sees this development carried so much further, so much more systematically and consciously, as to constitute an intellectual revolution. It is the object of this study to examine the Liberal Anglican share in the unfolding of the new historical outlook, to try to find out how far the Liberal Anglicans may be said to have brought about a revolution in historical thinking in England, to examine the relation between their ideas and their practice, and to estimate how far these ideas may be said to be truly historical from the critical point of view of the modern observer. It is so easy to misinterpret the written word that I have tried to let Thomas Arnold and his friends speak for themselves as much as possible.

My thanks are due to the editor of The Quarterly Review for answering my queries as to the authorship of articles in the early numbers, and to Mr A. J. Hunt for showing me MSS of Arnold and Stanley in the possession of Rugby School. I am grateful to Professor Butterfield for his interest and encouragement. Also, I would like to thank the Cambridge University Press for helping to prepare the MS for publication; in particular, for carrying out a surgical operation of some delicacy in severing the notes from the references. Essential references in footnotes have been cut to the minimum, and notes (marked in the text by square ix

FOREWORD

brackets), which support and, it is hoped, enrich the argument haye been relegated to the end of the volume. The work which is now published is substantially the same as a Prize Essay which was awarded a Prince Consort Prize in 1950. D U N C A N FORBES CAMBRIDGE

November 1950

CHAPTER I

THE LIBERAL A N G L I C A N S A N D T H E P R O B L E M OF T H E N A T U R E OF P R O G R E S S T H E years in which the Liberal Anglican idea of history took shape were critical in the social history of modern England. This background of social crisis in the first half of the 19th century, which hardly affected Macaulay's attitude to the past, made a deep impression on the Liberal Anglicans and is a vital factor in the interpretation of their historical thought, as it is also in the historical thought of Carlyle. This means that the search for the origins of Liberal Anglican thought must begin on the plane of ideas and temperament, because the social matrix of Thomas Arnold and his friends was that of Macaulay. Why was the historical outlook of the Liberal Anglicans not typical of the prosperous, rising middle class? The Liberal Anglicans were in revolt against the 18th century, against that world of optimism, of utilitarianism and individualism which, in the words of Cobban,1 came finally into its own in England in the 19th century. All the signs of the Romantic revolt against the 18th century are present in the ideas of the Liberal Anglicans: their political thought was in the direct line of descent from Burke and Coleridge; their philosophy was Coleridgean, opposed to the mechanical, materialistic epistemology of the Lockian tradition; they looked to the historians and philosophers of the 'German Movement', rather than to the French liberal thinkers, for inspiration; their religion was not an external form, an affair of 'evidences' and rational proofs, but an inward conviction and belief in God's providential government of the world. In short, they belonged to the 'Germano-Coleridgean' school, as John Mill called it. It is the Romantic strain in their minds which is significant for the history of history. Whately, it is true, the 'typical Noetic',2 1

A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the 18th Century. V. F. Storr, The Development of English Theology in the igth Century (1913), p. 96. Whately 'appreciated the logic rather than the poetry of life'. 2

THE LIBERAL ANGLICAN IDEA OF HISTORY

can hardly be called a Romantic; he, too, alone of the group, remained ignorant of German. He was nevertheless the friend and mentor of Arnold, and he claimed that he was the first to stress the importance of the imagination in the study of history.1 In Milman also there are obvious marks of the 18th century. His piety was 'rational, articulate, objective, confident, robust . . . neither sensitive nor subtle'.2 Alone among the Liberal Anglicans he admired Gibbon greatly, in the History of the fetus there are traces of what Milman himself called Gibbon's 'covert sneer', [3] and the edition of the Decline and Fall which he prepared remained the standard edition until that of Bury. He has been called 'a survivor from the Age of Reason, a kind of Christian Gibbon, without the indecency and without the fun'.3 But in his poetic youth Milman was compared with Byron.4 Later, under the influence of the Schlegels, he was attracted to the poetry of India and published a translation of the Mahabharata. What is more to the point, he admired Vico and possessed a copy of the Scienza Nuova. Julius Hare and Thirlwall were the champions of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and translators not only of Niebuhr's History of Rome, but of tales by Tieck and Fouque. Tieck's object, wrote Carlyle, was 'to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination', to seize and adapt to the feelings of modern minds 'the true tone of that ancient time when man was in his childhood, when the universe within was divided by no walls of adamant from the universe without'. Thomas Arnold was the friend of Wordsworth (politics notwithstanding) and made his home, the beloved Fox How, among the mountains of Cumberland. He was, in a sense, a Lakist, an aspect of the man which has lately received attention.5 He used to take pupils from Rugby to Fox How, because mountains and dales were, he said, 'a great point in education'. A. P. Stanley was Arnold's pupil and intellectual heir, and his thought is dominated by that of the master. He was a romantic in biblical interpretation, 1

Life and Correspondence ofR. Whately, vol. n, p. 211. Charles Smyth, Dean Milman (1949), p. 19. 3 Smyth, Dean Milman, p. 19. 4 C. H. Herford, The Age of Wordsworth, p. 4