Theodor Mommsen Downloaded From

80 Jan. Theodor Mommsen Downloaded from TJIELIX oppoiiunitate mcn-tis. Barely can these words be applied to a very old man. But when Mommsen died on the first day of last November they were true in a special sense. He had almost reached his eighty-sixth birthday, and bis career had been http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ full of each success and honour as he sought. He had spanned the nineteenth century with gigantic intellectual work. He had lived a long life in health and comfort and had seen his children grow up around him. At the last his eyesight had threatened to fail, and his days were troubled by the illness of his wife, his companion for fifty years : then death came to him, as he desired, suddenly and painlessly. It remains to lay on his grave the customary offering of an attempt to estimate his work. It is a at University of Connecticut on May 11, 2015 kindly custom, but perhaps it is not altogether a good one. Like other great men, great scholars are best judged when time has matured the sense of loss to friendship or to learning, when personal likes and dislikes have faded away and we can stand back, as from a building, distant and dispassionate. Even the age in which Mommsen lived is too much our own to be surely judged at the present. It were foolish now to guess which of itB manifold activities will win most praise from the future. But perhaps the scholar will hold it especially remarkable for that which Mommsen himself represented, the progress of historical studies. That is one of its characteristics almost from the outset. History was, indeed, only one in a crowd of new studies and interests which we owe to the great awakening with which the century commenced. But special causes favoured it. The political developments aided its growth. Napoleon broke Europe into a new order, and therewith came new national consciousness and a zeal in each people for national history. Therewith came also a freer political life, an interest in the history of administra- tion, no longer confined to the few, and an understanding that history dealt with the ruled as well as the rulers. There de- veloped, as the century advanced, a curious individualism of the group rather than of the single person, and this again widened historical inquiry : the smaller units, town, parish, or institution, came within its scope. Intellectual causes told in the same 1904 THEODOB MOMMSEN 81 direction. The scepticism of the eighteenth century matured into a critical method ; the poets, Goethe, Byron, and the rest, awoke the imagination. A little later an antiquarian revival, precursor of our present scientific archaeology, produced local interest and local societies, and in the middle of the century Darwinism added the idea of development. This was the century of Buckle, Grote, and Stubbs, of Niebuhr and Mommsen, of Kanke and Treitschke, and a noble host of colleagues, numerous and active all over Europe. New lines of work, new sources of material, new concep- tions of the meaning of the past, and new possibilities for future Downloaded from research were in quick succession opened out. Certainly it was an age of historians. Across all this period stands the figure of Mommsen. His first book, his doctor's dissertation, appeared in 1848, his first great http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ works in 1850, the first volume of his History in 1854. He continued writing and publishing steadily till the other day. His Strqfrecht was issued in 1899; an edition of the Theodosian Code was almost completed when he died. We have to sum up an activity of sixty continuous years. In the man himself two characteristics are here noteworthy. They are almost contradictory. The first is an intense nervous energy in feeling and emotion. Physically his temperament was at University of Connecticut on May 11, 2015 nervous. He was sensitive to external impressions, excitable even to vehemence, Liable to be betrayed into hasty words, still more apt to display a superb vivacity, an astonishing intellectual alertness. No one could talk with him," no one could read his books or letters, without realising that his brain lived, that his imagination was vivid and awake. But along with this ardent, nervous temper he combined that very different form of genius which is the infinite capacity for taking pains. His control over detail, his aptitude for drudgery were supreme. He could plod unwearyingly through laborious days of indexing and statistic-gathering, and finally reduce to order the million items. In particular his accuracy was almost infallible. The subjects of his work required him to deal with enormous masses of details—more, perhaps, than any scholar who ever wrote—and he rarely erred. Once, by visiting the spot, I accidentally found out that he had placed an obscure Serbian hamlet on the wrong bank of the Danube, and I imagine that others have detected similar little slips.- But they are extraordi- narily scarce. Such accuracy cannot be maintained simply by the use of friends or secretaries : it is genius. This combination of qualities is naturally very rare. Other scholars have felt as keenly and seen as far ; others have attained as unerring a mastery of detail and as tireless a patience. But in Mommsen alone, since Gibbon, the imaginative and the critical really met, and Mommsen surpassed Gibbon in hifl critical faculty. VOL. XEf.—NO, LXXni. O 82 THEODOR MOMMSEN Jan. Judged by an eighteenth-century standard, indeed, Gibbon's command of detail deserves much praise, but it is not the strongest side of his work, and even the progress made in the years between him and Mommsen does not explain his inferiority. Mommsen was not only a Gibbon in his historical insight: he was a Tillemont in his industry, and he was more besides. To find a true parallel we must go back to the sixteenth century, to Joseph Scaliger, himself a student of law, inscriptions, and history, a man who combined immense mastery of detail with keen human feeling, who, like Mommsen also, won affection and provoked hatred. Downloaded from "With his keen feelings this man was not and conld not be purely a man of learning. Throughout life he held strong political views, and he often expressed them no less strongly. In early days he drank deep of national feeling when he fought as a journalist http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ for the German character of his native duchy of Schleswig-Holstein. In 1848 he counted as an enthusiastic liberal, like most con- temporary German scholars, and when the February Btorm had blown itself out he suffered with the rest. He was thought dangerous enough to be ejected from his Breslau professorship and was forced to seek shelter at Zurich. Later in life he sat in the Prussian Landtag at intervals, until his vehement opposition to Bismarck's domestic policy led to a political prosecution and, &s a at University of Connecticut on May 11, 2015 result, his retirement in 1882 from public life. Occasionally too he plunged into foreign politics : quite recently he lifted up his voice to plead for amity between England and Germany. This is not the place to judge him as a politician. But while we review his achievements as a scholar we may not forget that he had gone through real political experiences, had taken part in a revolution and lived in the thick of the struggle. He knew political life at first hand. Most of his critics do not. These qualities and experiences can be traced clearly enough in the characteristics of his work. In the first place his intellectual vigour, his fierce, unflagging speed, produced an astonishing output of books. Great and small together, his publications must have numbered some thirteen or fourteen hundred items. Some, no doubt, were little things, requiring little time or labour. But others are folios as weighty as the Homeric stone, and most of them, large and small alike, are crammed with details which involve more care and labour in a few lines than are needed for pages of ordinary writing. Secondly, his peculiar combination of opposite qualities gave to bis books a peculiar character. It is significant that he took his degree at Kiel in jurisprudence and quickly proceeded to publish, with two friends, a volume of poems. It is more significant that he never dropped, like the ordinary middle- aged lawyer, into prosaic conservatism. The dual nature remained throughout: his books were equally animated by ardour and 1904 THEODOR MOMMSEN 83 enlightened by industry, and even the most technical and laborious of his epigraphic treatises are diversified and humanised by keen criticisms and pungent sayings which well repay collection. That is what supplied their peculiar power to all bis writings. Highly emotional and imaginative passages were based on a foundation of painstaking drudgery : dull and long statistics were found to end in wide and important inductions. And, thirdly, these same contrasted qualities helped him to another characteristic activity. He could organise. He had the capacity to conceive of a great scheme and to plan its details patiently, to combine- many Downloaded from collaborators and to inspire them or relentlessly to coerce them to perform their tasks and to guide the undertaking to final unity. Few scholars, I imagine, and not many practical men of business, have possessed such imperative force and organising power. And in consequence much of his work was based on organisation: many http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ of his most effective operations consisted in organising the work of others. The extent of his actual work is hard to realise for its very vastness.

Load more