NORMAN VANCE Niebuhr in England: History, Faith, and Order
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NORMAN VANCE Niebuhr in England: History, Faith, and Order in BENEDIKT STUCHTEY AND PETER WENDE (eds.), British and German Historiography 1750-1950. Traditions, Perceptions and Transfers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) pp. 83–98 ISBN: 978 0 19 920235 5 The following PDF is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND licence. Anyone may freely read, download, distribute, and make the work available to the public in printed or electronic form provided that appropriate credit is given. However, no commercial use is allowed and the work may not be altered or transformed, or serve as the basis for a derivative work. The publication rights for this volume have formally reverted from Oxford University Press to the German Historical Institute London. All reasonable effort has been made to contact any further copyright holders in this volume. Any objections to this material being published online under open access should be addressed to the German Historical Institute London. DOI: 5 Niebuhr in England: History, Faith, and Order NORMAN V ANGE In the earlier nineteenth century it was a surprisingly contro- versial undertaking to subject Roman history to critical scrutiny, an endeavour particularly associated with the German diplomat and pioneer Roman historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) and his British disciple Thomas Arnold (1795-1842), Headmaster of Rugby School and a prominent liberal churchman. British commen.tators tended to feel that this revisionist historiography had a powerful if indirect bearing on contemporary political and religious issues. Conservatives, worried by any challenge to traditional authority, resorted to alarm and despondency, reminding themselves that nothing but trouble could come from German scholarship. (Had not Ovid long ago described 'Germania' as 'rebellatrix', Tristia 3. 12. 47 ?) But progressives such as Arnold and Niebuhr's English translators Hare and Thirlwall saw in · Niebuhr encouragement for their own visions of a more generous and liberal social order and a more enlightened understanding of God, man, and nature. In the normal course of things heavy consumption of the roast beef of Old England and the sturdy maintenance of traditional faith and order were the English antidotes to the crisis of authority stemming from revolutionary France. Clerical schoolmasters, though often mean about the roast beef, had their own ways of supporting the status quo and making sure that the teaching of history in particular was never in any danger of becoming somewhat too sensational. Modern history was often largely ignored in the schoolroom as too political; ancient history was preferred because it could be read, largely apolitically, as a safe repository of NORMAN VANCE timeless moral example, not really very different from Holy Scripture. This view of the matter was not confined to conservative clerical schoolmasters. William Godwin, radical author of Political justice, wrote to his new disciple Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 that it is universally agreed that, next to the history of our own country, the histories of Greece and Rome most deserve to be studied. Why? Because in them the achievements of the human species have been most admirable: in Rome, in high moral and social qual- ities; in Greece, both in them, and also in literature and art.1 But this view was becoming old-fashioned, at least in rela- tion to Roman history, even before Niebuhr's influence was felt in England. It was already accepted that there was little that was admirable or exemplary at an individual level in Roman imperial history after the death of Augustus, and even less after the passing of the Antonines, and there was much for schoolmasters to skate over as quickly as possible. There was more interest, and more edification, in the earlier books of Livy dealing with the foundation of Rome and the achievements of early civic heroes such as Horatius on the bridge or the grimly impartial Lucius Junius Brutus. But even the history of republican Rome, periodically tumul- tuous, was tainted for some by French revolutionary appro- priations of the land-reforming Gracchi and the oath-swearing Horatii celebrated by Jacques-Louis David and Roman libertas ruthlessly approximated to liberté, not to mention égalité and fraternite. This was so much the case that in 1808 the Anglo-Irish educational theorist Richard Lovell Edgeworth, father of the novelist Maria Edgeworth, was of the opinion that Roman history need not be taught in Irish charity schools in case it gave the pupils politically inconve- nient ideas: 'to inculcate democracy and a foolish hankering after undefined liberty is not necessary in Ireland. ' 2 The challenges to established authority represented by ' Godwin to Shelley, 10 Dec. 1812, quoted in a note in The Letters ofPercy Bysshe Shelf.ey, ed. Frederick L.Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1964), i. 340-1. • Quoted in David Fitzpatrick, 'The Futility of History: A Failed Experiment in Irish Education', in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Ideology and the Historians (Historical Studies 17; Dublin, 1991), 170. Niebuhr in England sceptical interrogations of already sometimes inflammatory history were bound to cause alarm to conservative critics looking for trouble. This had been happening since the seventeenth century. It is tempting to dismiss such criticism as hysterical, making unwarranted connections between purely historical and antiquarian matters and the sensitive political and religious issues of the day. But Niebuhr made the connections himself, reading ancient history as a north European liberal in politics (or so it seemed in Britain) and a liberal Protestant in religion. For him, political freedom had mattered throughout history. If popular enthusiasms were problematic in the aftermath of the French Revolution he made no secret of his interest in and enthusiasm for popu- lar beliefs, perceptions, and traditions in the ancient world, perhaps more revealing, he claimed, than the views of the philosophers, and the basis of the largely mythic history of early Rome. Such democratic preferences did not always go down well in self-consciously counter-revolutionary Britain. The son of a pioneering Arabian explorer, Carsten Niebuhr, Niebuhr belongs with nineteenth-century explor- ers, inventors, and scientists as much as with scholars. The pioneer geologist Charles Lyell quoted with approval his comment that 'he who calls what has vanished back into being, enjoys a bliss like that of creating' .3 Niebuhr was a romantic adventurer embarked on a voyage of discovery, a quest for origins, with a courageous, perhaps reckless disre- gard for the dangers in store. The danger from hostile British critics was not immediately apparent. The first German edition of the Römische Geschichte (1811-12) was hardly noticed in Britain, partly because from the point of view of most Oxford and Cambridge ancient historians it was veiled in the decent obscurity of a learned language which they did not know or even want to know. There is no copy of this first edition in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In July 1822 a reviewer of other books on early Roman history in the Quarterly Reviewcommended Niebuhr in passing but gave it as his opinion that in Britain 'not half a dozen persons have 3 Charles Lyell, The PrinciplP.s of Geology, 2 vols. (London, 1830-3), i. 74, quoted in S.J. Gould, Time'.sArrow, Time'.s Cycle (Harmondsworth, 1988), 155. 86 NORMAN VANCE read him' .4 It was not until 1827 that a slightly rugged English translation appeared, only to be rendered instantly obsolete by the substantially revised second edition of the German text (1827-32) which was rapidly translated into rather better English by Julius Hare and Connop Thirlwall, with a third volume by William Smith, between 1828 and 1842. Both editions opened with a lengthy discussion of the ulti- mate, probably multiple origins of the Italian people, neces- sarily inconclusive because it engaged with doubtful matters of myth, legend, and prehistory. Perhaps comparisons would help. Even in the terser first edition Niebuhr risked some coat-trailing comparisons with the Old Testament, less star- tling in Germany than they would have been in England or even in Scotland, often more intellectually adventurous. In discussing conflicting accounts of the possible origins of the Oenotrians, who might or might not have been descended from one Oenotrius, he claims that 'no sober-minded man can treat these genealogies as historical narratives', explicitly compares them with genealogies offered in the tenth and eleventh chapters of Genesis, and says of the latter as of a matter beyond argument that 'they are palpably grounded upon very false assumptions' .s Nobody in Britain seems to have worried about this, or even noticed, for seventeen years, but in the second edition, soon available in translation, the comparisons were more wide-ranging and detailed and this time they did not pass without comment. Many societies, Niebuhr insisted, preserved stories of ancient giants or monsters swept away by catastrophe to make room for their ancestors: So the later Jews dreamt of giants before the deluge; so the Greeks of the Titans of Phlegra, and of those who perished in the flood of Deucalion or of Ogyges: so the savages of North America fable of the Mammoth, that the devastated world had invoked the light- nings of heaven, and not in vain, against the reason-gifted monster, the man of the primitive age. So Italy in its popular legends had the Campanian giants.6 4 'Early History of Rome', Qy,arterly Review, 27 Quly 1822), 281. 5 B. G. Niebuhr, The Roman History, trans. F. A. Walters, 2 vols. (London, 1827), i. 35f. 6 B. G. Niebuhr, The History of Rome, 3 vols., trans. J. C. Hare, C. Thirlwall, and (vol. iii) W. Smith (Cambridge, 1828, 1832; London, 1842), i. 145. Niebuhr in England 87 Noah and Deucalion, biblical and classical traditions, were old friends in the popular historical imagination but it was audacious if not positively naughty to bring in the Shawnee and Delaware Indians.