MOMMSEN'S HISTORY OF ROME.*

FIVE-AND-TWENTY years ago the Roman History of Niebuhr was dominant at Oxford. An examination in Livy was practically an examination in Niebuhr. If any shrank from the task of getting up Niebuhr himself in the crib-few in those days ventured on the High-Dutch text-to such Arnold acted as the prophet of Niebuhr. Men whom oceans now separate took in those days sweet counsel together, in college gardens or by the banks of canals, strengthening each other's memory in the wars of the Equians and Volscians as mapped out by the great authority. But an University is, beyond all others, the place of change, the place where the wisdom of forefathers, and even of elder brothers, is least regarded. Since those days, generation after generation has passed through the world of Oxford, each knowing less of Niebuhr than the one before it. The fall of Niebuhr was, we believe, followed by a period-shall we call it a period of anarchy or of tyranny?—when no inspired modern interpreter was recognized, but when men fell back on the text of Livy himself. The Commonwealth, in short, was without a master; Sulla had gone, and Cæsar had not yet appeared. Dr. Liddell's attempt at grasping the vacant post came hardly to more than the attempt of Marcus Lepidus. At last Mommsen arose, and, at the time of our last advices, Mommsen ruled in the University without a competitor. We speak cautiously, because of the swift march of all Oxford doings. We never have any certainty whether the brilliant discovery of last term may not be a sign of old fogyism this term. The statutes passed by acclamation a year back are by this time dragged through the dirt like the images of Sejanus. So we do not affirm positively that Mommsen is at this moment the supreme authority on Roman History at Oxford. We only say that he was so the last time that we heard any news upon the subject.

We half regret, but we are not in the least surprised at the position which Mommsen's work has won. It is a position which in many respects is fully deserved. Mommsen has many of the highest qualities of an historian. First of all, he has the qualification which is the groundwork of all others; he is a thorough, a consummate, scholar. We stand aghast at some of his statements and inferences, but we never catch him in a blunder. On the contrary he is thoroughly master-master in a way of which few men ever have been-of the history, the antiquities, the language and philology, of the people of whom he writes. He has worthily won the right to be heard on any point on which he speaks, and the corresponding right, whenever we think him wrong, to be answered. If we hold him, as we do, to be in many ways an untrustworthy guide, it is on grounds poles asunder from any charge of ignorance, carelessness, or inaccuracy.

To this sterling merit Mommsen adds another merit equally sterling. He always tells his story clearly; he often tells it with extraordinary force. We

[This is printed nearly as it was written, merely leaving out one or two sentences whose point was only temporary.]

quarrel with much both in his matter and in his manner, but his book contains many passages of the highest historic power. To take instances from the parts which, coming last, we have last read, it would be very hard to surpass Mommsen's description of the state of Gaul at the time of Cæsar's invasion, of the warfare of the Parthians against Crassus, and, above all, of the whole career, especially the legislation, of Cæsar. We are here fairly carried away in spite of ourselves. We think of another historian of Cæsar, and we try to measure the gap, not by stadia but by parasangs.

In this last quality Mommsen is the exact opposite of Niebuhr. Niebuhr could not tell a story; he could hardly make an intelligible statement. His setting forth of his own opinions is so jumbled up with his citations and his arguments that it is no slight work to know what his opinions are. He pours forth as it were the whole workings of his own mind upon the subject, and we cannot always tell the last stage from the first. Mommsen, on the other hand, without troubling us with the process, gives us the results in the clearest shape. We should very often like to ask him his reason or authority for saying this or that. We never feel any need to ask him, as we should very often like to ask Niebuhr, what it is that he means to say.

Here then are merits real and great, enough of themselves to account for Mommsen's having many and zealous disciples. And, though we have a long bill of indictment to bring against him, most of our charges are charges of faults which have somewhat of the nature of merits, or which at any rate may easily be mistaken for merits. Mommsen has faults, but we cannot say that he has failings. His errors are never on the side of weakness or defect. They are errors on a grand scale. If Mommsen made history instead of writing it, we could fancy him committing a great crime; we could not fancy him playing a shabby trick. He might level a city with the ground; he might behead four thousand prisoners in a day; but he would not vex an unlucky newspaper editor with the small shot of a Correctional Police. There is nothing weak or petty about him from beginning to end. His faults are all of them of a striking, of what to many people is a taking kind. Foremost among

these faults we reckon his daring dogmatism-the way in which he requires us to believe, on his sole ipse dixit, without the shadow either of argument or of authority, things which we have never before heard of, as if they were things which no man had ever thought of doubting. But we have no doubt that to many people this very daring is attractive. We can fancy its being especially attractive to the present generation of young Oxford men. It gratifies the love of novelty and paradox, and it gratifies it in a grand sort of way. There is a special temptation blindly to follow a man who clearly is not a fool, who no doubt could, if he chose, give a reason for everything that he says, but who deals with things too much in the grand style to stoop to give any reasons. Niebuhr gives you elaborate theories about the early history of Rome, but he also gives you, though in a somewhat clumsy way, his reasons for forming those thoories. In this there is a certain confession of weakness. But when Mommsen gives you theories equally startling in a calm way as if there never had been, and never could be, any doubt about them, his very confidence in himself is apt to breed confidence in a certain class of readers. Mommsen and Niebuhr, in short, remind us of the story of the general who, when appointed to the governorship of a West India island, found that he had

also to act as a judge. As long as he did not give his reasons, his judgements gave universal satisfaction; but when, fancying himself a great lawyer, he ventured to give his reasons, his judgement was at once appealed against. So we suspect that there is a class of readers who never think of appealing from Mommsen, while they would at once appeal from Niebuhr. On ourselves we confess that the effect is different. We see that what Mommsen says is always very clear and very taking; we think it very likely that he has good reasons for what he says; but we certainly should be better pleased if he gave us his reasons and quoted his authorities.

We can fancy again that many tastes are pleased, though our own are distinctly offended, at the way in which Mommsen deals with various matters, and especially with various persons whom other writers have taught us to reverence. Mommsen can be grave and earnest when he chooses, but he too often chooses to treat things and persons in a vein of low sarcasm which we must look upon as altogether unworthy of his subject. Whatever and whoever displeases Mommsen is sure to be set upon by him with a torrent of what we can call nothing but vulgar slang. All sorts of queer compounds, of strange and low allusions, are hurled at the heads of men for whom we are oldfashioned enough to confess a certain respect. Why are Pompeius and Cato always to be called names? Though to be sure, as to Cato Mommsen does not keep on to the end exactly as he begins. At first he does nothing but mock at him; but towards the end of his tale Mommsen seems for once to be impressed with the real grandeur of an honest man. And worse still is his treatment of Cicero. The weaknesses of Cicero's character are manifest, and no honest historian will try to hide them. But surely he is not a man whom it is right or decent to make a mere mark for contemptuous jeers, for his name never to be uttered without some epithet of scorn. This kind of thing seems to us to be bad in every way. It is bad in point of taste and art, and it is thoroughly unfair as a matter of history.

This last point is closely connected with another fault. We mean Mommsen's custom of using strange words, and common words in strange senseswords and senses which often seem still stranger in the English than they do in the German. We believe that it is just allowable in German to call Sulla a 'Regent'; it certainly is not allowable in English. Here, it may be said, the fault lies directly, not with Mommsen, but with his English translator. We do not think so. Mommsen has a way of using words like this' Regent,' words which would pass unnoticed if they came only casually, as if they were technical terms. In fact Mommsen confers titles on his characters out of his own head. If we find Sulla and others systematically called 'Regent,' even in German, much more in English, it is hard for the reader to avoid the notion that Regent' was a real description used at the time. It is still worse when Mommsen constantly speaks of Cæsar as 'Monarch' and even as 'King.' We see what he means; it is meant as a forcible way of saying that Caesar's power was really kingly, that the commonwealth had become a practical monarchy. We suspect also that he means to contrast the despotism of the first Cæsar-certainly the more openly avowed of the two-with the more carefully veiled despotism of the second. Still we cannot think that it is a right way of expressing the truth to call Cæsar, not in a bit of passing rhetoric, but frequently and deliberately, Monarch and even King. It cannot fail to convey a false idea to the reader.

Mommsen too is not free from the fashionable way of personifying this and that, Revolution and Reaction and so forth, though he does not carry the fashion so far as many French writers. And he has throughout a way of using words of his own making or choosing in this sort of technical fashion of which we cannot approve. The Regency of Sulla and the Monarchy of Cæsar are only two cases among many. This tendency can hardly be separated from views of facts which we cannot but look upon as erroneous. Mommsen, with the rise of the coming Empire in his head, goes back as far as the Gracchi, and thinks that Caius contemplated, or at least dreamed of, something like kingship. For this we cannot see a shadow of evidence.

Mommsen's style, strictly so called, is a matter rather for German than for English critics; yet the interest which we take in a noble and kindred tongue, a tongue whose European importance is daily growing, compels us to say a few words. We are doubtless behind the age when we pronounce Mommsen to be one of the worst corrupters of our common Teutonic speech. High-Dutch, like English, is just now exposed to an inroad of Latin, or rather French, words, which it seems to be looked on as high-polite to prefer to the tongue of our common fathers. And there is a difference between the two cases which makes the fault on the part of our continental brethren still more unpardonable than it is among ourselves. An Englishman cannot speak perfectly pure Teutonic, if he wishes; a High-Dutchman may. First of all, owing to early events in our history, there is a certain class of Romance words which have been naturalized in English for ages, and against which no one wishes to say anything. Secondly, our language seems to have to a great degree lost its flexibility and power of throwing off new words, so that the stoutest Teutonic purist cannot forbid the use of Romance words to express ideas which are at all technical or abstract. We are of course using them freely as we now write. But neither of these necessities is laid on the High-Dutchman. There is nothing in his tongue answering to what we may call the Norman, as opposed to the Latin or French, infusion into our language, and the number of the purely Latin words introduced at an earlier date is not very large. And as for new words, the High-Dutch tongue, unlike our own, can make them as readily now as it could a thousand years back. If a German wants a new word for a new thought, he has nothing to do but to make it in his own tongue. Yet, in defiance of all this, the German language is being flooded with every kind of absurd French invention, orientiren, bornirt, nobody knows what; we look for a speedy day when mangiren and diren will supplant essen and sagen. No one is a greater sinner in this way than Mommsen; he seems to take a distinct delight in corrupting the speech of his fathers to the extremest point. Why talk about Insurgenten' and 'Concurrenten' and 'Proclamationen' and 'Patrouillen'? why give us such foul compounds as 'Coteriewesen' and 'Rabulistenart'? We have not come across any German writer of the same pretension as Mommsen who is in this respect so guilty as Mommsen. His fellow-worker in the series in which his history is published, Ernst Curtius, the historian of Greece, writes a language which, though perhaps not quite the language of a hundred years past, is at any rate Dutch and not Welsh. Lond uns tütsch blyben,' said the old Swabian; 'die wälsch Zung ist untrü.' But Mommsen at least acts on quite another principle.

At the same time we must add in fairness that Mommsen's style, allowing

for his strange words and strange uses of words, is singularly clear, and often forcible. One has not with him, as with some German writers, to wander up and down a sentence in hopeless ignorance where one is, and to seek for the verb among thickets and quagmires miles away from its nominative case. But then this is equally true of Curtius, without the sad drawback of Mommsen's language. Dr. Dickson's translation, as far as we have compared it with the original, which we have done through many pages, is carefully and accurately done. He very seldom mistakes his author's meaning, and he commonly expresses it with all clearness. His fault is rather that he sticks so closely to the words of his author that his own sentences are rather German than English. This makes the English translation a little unpleasant to read.

But there is a fault in Mommsen's work, far graver than any of which we have spoken, and one which we think is of itself enough to make the book unfit for the position which it now holds at Oxford. It is not too much to say that Mommsen has no notion whatever of right and wrong, It is not so much that he applauds wrong actions, as that he does not seem to know that right and wrong have anything to do with the matter. No one has set forth more clearly than Mommsen the various stages of the process by which Rome gradually reduced the States round the Mediterranean to a state of dependence -what he, by one of the quasi-technicalities of which we complain, calls a state of clientship. It is, for clear insight into the matter, one of the best parts of the book. But almost every page is disfigured by the writer's unblushing idolatry of mere force. He cannot understand that a small state can have any rights against a great one, or that a patriot in such a state can be anything but a fool. Every patriotic Greek, every Roman philhellen, is accordingly brought upon the stage to be jeered at only less brutally than Cicero himself. His treatment of Cæsar is also characteristic in this way. Cæsar's still more famous biographer gives himself great trouble to justify every action of his hero, to prove that Cæsar was throughout a perfect patriot, unswayed by any motive save the purest zeal for the public good. All this is ridiculous enough; still it is, after all, a certain homage paid to virtue. Mommsen is intellectually above any such folly; at any rate he never trifles with facts, and it seems perfectly indifferent to him whether Cæsar, or anybody else, was morally right or wrong. It is enough for him that Cæsar 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.

We need not review in detail a book which every one who cares for its subject is likely to have read already. We admire Mommsen's genius, his research, his accuracy, as warmly as any of his followers can. We hold that his book is most valuable for advanced scholars to compare with other books, to weigh his separate statements, and to come to their own conclusions. But a book which gives no references, which puts forth new theories as confidently as if they were facts which had never been doubted-above all, a book which seems perfectly indifferent to all considerations of right and wrong, seems to us, when put alone into the hands of those who are still learners, to be thoroughly dangerous and misleading.