The Press. — London, England, 1854-07-29 00:00:00

JULY 29, 1854• yittraturt. History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires, from 1057 to 1453. By George Finlay, Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Literature. London : Blackwoods. WE have no small reason for congratulation on observing the success of our English histo rical school. Its vigorous growth is one of the most marked facts in the higher literature of our age. Nearly every department of oar rative has found its appropriate author. If in poetry or moral philosophy the present age cannot boast of many great bards or deep thinkers, it is certain that no previous period in our national progress could point to so many contemporary historians with performances deserving high applause. To be ranked with the best historians of the day Mr. Finlay has just pretensions ; but he is not a " popular " writer. He thinks, appa rently, that the Historic Muse should be painted with a severe countenance, as if con temning rhetorical frippery and ingenious artifices. We judge by his style that he is deliberately averse to following the example of those historians who have unconsciously intruded upon the province of the novelist ; and we think it is likely that his mind has gone too far in its antagonism to showy models of composition. It is certainly very difficult to attain in narrative the golden mean between a dry and declamatory style. Good taste for bids the severely cold, as much as it recoils from the extravagantly florid. The history of decline is, for obvious rea sons, not the most promising for a historian's pen. Byzantine annals are not intrinsically interesting, for the events recorded in them were not directly progressive in moral impor tance, and the Eastern civilisation must be pronounced unsuccessful. They do not pre sent those enduringly-attractive features which rivet attention, like the ancient Greek and Roman records. We feel, in short, that we are perusing the history of failure on a great scale, and, though instructive for example, there is always something cheerless in the spectacle of degeneracy. In his present volume, concluding the whole work, Mr. Finlay traverses about four centu ries within the compass of less than seven hundred pages. He does not take the tone of a mere commentator, but preserves through out the style of narrative, never allowing his pen to stray into the devious paths of the essayist, or to linger lovingly upon topics sug gesting speculative dissertation. Mr. Finlay indicates the absolutism of the Byzantine government as a potent cause of its decline. Referring to the policy of Leo VI., Constantine VII., and Romanus 11., he says : The emperors themselves must be held responsible for the decline of the imperial administration in the Byzantine empire. The Basilian dynasty, which ruined the political edifice, was an inferior race of men to the Isaurian princes who repaired it. Basil I. was ignorant of civil business, and ill-fitted by education to appreciate the value of the system of which accident constituted him the head. Leo 1., Constantine VII., and Romanus 11. never appeared as leaders of the Roman armies. It was, therefore, not unnatural that these princes, alarmed by the repeated rebellions, seditious, and conspiracies of the great officers of state and commanders-in-chief, should feel extremely jealous of the territorial aristocracy, which had secured to themselves the possession of the highest posts in the government of the empire. In order to avoid the danger of entrusting the nobility with official power, these emperors established a board, consisting of their own private secretaries, which controlled the acts of the ministers of state ; and they gradually filled the highest offices in the administration, as well as in the court, with persons belonging to their private house holds. One of the strongest arguments against ab solutism, considered solely with reference to the executive, is the difficulty of finding a succession of imperial rulers fit to bear the toils of state. Rarely does history tell of a Mazarin following a Richelieu, and the rule applicable to al solutist ministers is even more marked in the case of irresponsible sovereigns. On the other hand, in aristocracies there is a wide field for selection, and a fair chance for a supply of adequate administrators. The fol lowing remarks on "governing by clerks" are extremely interesting just now : The practice of conducting public business through the medium of a cabinet of private secretaries led to many -F THE PRESS. evils. Councils of the ministers and great officers of state were laid aside, and the authority of established usages and systematic rules was diminished. Each minister and general received his orders directly from the emperor, and communicated with the imperial secretary charged with the correspondence of the particular depart ment to which the affair in question might relate ; and, consequently, subserviency to power became the surest means of advancing the fortunes of all public servants. Wealth was attained and ambition was gratified by afiected devotion to the person of the emperor, by mean servility to the court favourite, and by active intrigue among the members of the imperial household, much more surely and rapidly than by attention to professional duties or by patriotic services. Several illustrations from the modern his tory of Europe could be adduced to exemplify the evil of governing nations "through the " medium of a cabinet of private secretaries ;" and in a period when we are threatened with the creation of a gigantic bureaucracy it is interesting to observe how the philosophic historian traces the decline "f the Byzantine empire to the fallacy of confounding the func tions of statesmanship with the duties of mere secretaries. When four centuries are discussed in a single volume, we cannot expect that the writer should give us detailed pictures, or delineations of courts and cabinets. In com pressed narrative Mr. Finlay excels, and he studiously avoids treating of questions which have been explored by other historians. Thus we find him avowing that " the influence of " the Crusades on the civilisation of Europe offers too wide a field " ere► for cursory notice " (pp. 113-14) in his volume. We could have desired, however, that he had treated the subject of manners at greater length, and that he had more deeply probed the question of the deterioration of the Greek character. We recollect how Gibbon particularised some of the incipient signs of degeneracy in the character of Constantine, and social manners are extremely illustrative of the mode in which institutions are accepted by a people. Mr Finlay's remarks on the general causes of Byzantine decline are careful and judicious, though his analysis might be carried even further. He lays most stress on the corruption of the administration by igno rant and venal courtiers, and on the cousoli dation of arbitrary power in the Basilian dy nasty. Possibly he attributes too much to the union between the Greek Church and the Roman Administration ; yet, as it is the best written passage in his volume, we extract a passage marked by broad views and unaf fected writing: — The twelfth century did much to improve the condition of the Western nations, but nothing to improve that of the Greeks. The consequence was that the arbitrary power of tie Byzantine emperors was exercised without any civil or ecclesiastical restraint; for the Greeks repudiated every principle of civil liberty, and every ecclesiastical declara tion in favour of the rights of humanity, as heretical and revolutionary innovations introduced by the popes to fur ther their own ambitious projects. It must be remem bered that the Papal Church was at this time often actively engaged in defending freedom, in establishing a machinery for the systematic administration of justice to the people, and in impressing men with the full value of fixed laws for the purpose of restraining the abuses of the temporal power of princes. In short, the Papal Church was then the great teacher of social and political reform, and those who scorned to listen to its words and study its policy could hardly perceive the changes which time was producing in the Christian world. The Byzantine Greeks immediately rejected the idea of progress; the Papal Church would have fain arrested the progressive impulse it had given to society a century or two later. The Greeks prided themselves on their conservative, or, as they called it, their Roman, spirit. By clinging superstitiously to antiquated formulas, they rejected the means of alleviating the evils of a ruinous political fabric, and refused to better their condition by entering on paths of reform indicated by the Western nations, who were already emerging from their social degradation. While the rest of Europe was actively striving to attain a happier future, the Greeks were gazing backward on what tbey considered a more glorious past. This habit of appropriating to them selves the vanished glories of the Roman empire, or of ancient Greece, created a feeling of self sufficiency which repudiated reform in the latter days of the Byzantine empire, and which has ever since retarded the progress of the modern Greeks in the career of European civilisation. This passage has no notes from Mr. Finlay, though it would require comment. " The " religious hatred" of the Greeks "towards " those " who acknowledged the Papal supre macy is of deep significance in Christian his tory, as showing how earnest was the resist ance against the arrogance of Popery long before our modern "Reformation " was heard of. The object of the Papal Church in fur- - 711 thering " the progress " which it would after wards have retarded might also have been more plainly indicated. History shows that that Church has always been ready to adopt either aristocracy, or democracy, or bureau craey, or any other political form most con ducive to its passing convenience and fixed purpose. On the whole, Mr. Finlay's work deserves warm praise as a careful and conscientious performance. General readers might desire that their taste for " interesting " details should have been provided for by the author. But the judicious and the scholarly will ad mire the severe abstinence that imparts a Doric severity to this manly and most credit able historical performance, which must confer no small distinction ou its author's name. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands. By Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. London: Low and Son. HE must be a sour critic who would take up this book ungraciously. Mrs. Stowe was de lighted with her reception in England. She was received with kindness and sympathy by the religious world of all denominations, from the Primate of England down to Mr. Sherman, of Surrey Chapel ; was hailed with one of Mr. Rogers's blandest smiles and one of Mr. Ma caulay's best miniature essays; was an equally welcome guest at the board of her Quaker friends and at the Lord Mayor's state banquet; lunched with the Duchess of Sutherland, and drank tea with two thousand of the good people of Glasgow ; found friendly faces gather round her wherever she moved or sojourned ; and—the not least certain sign of popularity—had her carriage followed (especially in Scotland) by crowds of urchins in the streets, crying, " Hoo ray ! hooray ! That's her ! Look at her cowls!" She had even the pleasing duty of acknow ledging the liberality of publishers, who pre sented her with sums from the profits of " Uncle Tom" to which she had no legal claim, and beheld a solid proof of the esteem in which her work was held in the thousand sovereigns displayed on a salver at the Edin burgh meeting—the produce mainly of a penny subscription collected among the hum blest of her admirers. It is no wonder, then, that she saw English life on its " sunniest " side, or that her book should reflect the gratification she experienced. Besides, she seems to be of a kind and grateful nature, personally unassuming, easily pleased, and quite free from that irritable susceptibi lity often the attendant of literary fame. In a word, she c'ime here in a pilgrim-like spirit of reverence and love, prepared to acknowledge how deeply she was indebted to the merits of her ancestry. Yet the book is not the kind of work which we expected from her pen, and, on the whole, it had better have been left unpublished. It is all surface—a mere daily record of movement and sight-seeing—most space being given to those topics which she was certainly least capable to judge of. She has great talent for the observation of society, but none for art; and it is provoking that, while we haNe here page after page given to the expression of her raw judgment on the great artists of the world, we have scarcely a sketch of the actual life we thought her so well fitted to describe. Her health was delicate; and perhaps the sleek, comfortable friends in dissenting parsonages and Quaker villas, to whose guidance she seems to have implicitly trusted herself, might have thought Dulwich Gallery, Exeter-hall, and the Rev. Mr. Binney's soirees the places best calculated to show off social England to advantage. These very respectable people, who conceive that the highest spiritual beati tude is to be combined with the utmost bodily comfort—who fancy that there is no harm in indulgence apart from excitement—that turtle may be blamelessly washed down with water — may have wished to present our society to her from their own point of view, and delight her with the aspect of the little well-ordered charity-school sections of humani under itr ity their own peculiar care, kept, like their villa gardens, in admirable trim, not shocking her feelings with a view of the wide waste which in all our great seats of industry proves that -~-r