Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Henry Hallam

XI

HALLAM, Henry, the celebrated English historian, was born at Windsor in the year 1777, some authorities make the date one year later, and he died at Pickhurst, Kent, on the 21st of January 1859. Notwithstanding his great fame and recent death very little seems to be known of the personal history of Hallam. He was the son of a dean of Bristol, and was educated at Eton, and afterwards went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1799. He was called to the bar by the Inner Temple, and afterwards became a bencher of that society, but he does not appear to have at any time attempted to obtain practice. Early in life he devoted himself to literary work, and became connected with the brilliant band of authors and politicians who then led the Whig party. A com- missionership of audits, obtained through that connexion, together with some private means, made him independent in point of worldly fortune, and enabled him to devote himself entirely to the studies of Ids life. He took no active part in practical politics, and was in fact unsuited by nature for the rough work of party polemics. But he was an active supporter of many popular movements particularly of that which ended in the abolition of the slave trade ; and he was throughout his entire life sincerely and profoundly attached to the political principles of the Whigs, both in their popular and in their aristocratic aspect. Hallam s earliest literary work was undertaken in connexion with the great organ of the Whig party, the Edinburgh Revieiv, where his review of Scott s Dryden attracted much notice. His first great work, The View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ayes, was produced in 1818, and was followed nine years later by the Constitutional History of England. In 1838-39 appeared the Iniroduc* tion to the Literature of Europe in the bth, Qth, and th Centuries. These are the three works on which the fame- of Hallam rests. They at once took a place in English literature which has never been seriously challenged. A volume of supplemental notes to his Middle Ages was pub lished in 1848. These facts and dates represent nearly all the events of Hallam s career. The strongest personal interest in his life was the affliction which befell him in the loss of his children, one after another. His eldest son, Arthur Henry Hallam, the "A. H. H." of Tennyson s In Memoriam, and by the testimony of his contemporaries a man of the most brilliant promise, died in 1833 at the age of twenty-two. Seventeen years later, his second son, Henry Fitzmaurice Hallam, was cut off like his brother at the very threshold of what might have been a great career. The premature death and high talents of these young men, and the association of one of them with the most popular poem of the age, have made Hallam s family afflictions better known than any other incidents of his life-. He survived wife, daughter, and sons by many years. In 1834 Hallam published The Remains in Prose and Verse of Arthur Henry Hallam, ivith a Sketch of his Life. In 1852 a selection of Literary Essays and Characters from the Literature of Europe was published. Hallam was a fellow of the Royal Society, and a trustee of the British Museum, and. enjoyed many other appropriate distinctions. In 1830 he received the gold medal for history, founded by George III.

The Middle Ages is described by Hallam himself as a series of historical dissertations, a comprehensive survey of the chief circumstances that can interest a philosophical inquirer during the period from the 5th to the 15th ceiir tury. The work consists of nine long chapters, each of which is a complete treatise in itself. The history of France, of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, and of the Greek and Saracenic empires, sketched in rapid and general terms, is the subject of five separate chapters. Others deal with the great institutional features of mediaeval society the development of the feudal system, of the ecclesiastical, system, and of the free political system of England. The last chapter sketches the general state of society, the growth of commerce, manners, and literature in the Middle Ages-. The book may be regarded as a general view of early modern history, preparatory to the more detailed treatment of special lines of inquiry carried out in his subsequent works, although Hallam s original intention was to continue the work on the scale on which it had been begun.

The Constitutional History of England takes up the sub

ject at the point at which it had been dropped in the Vieiv of the Middle Ages, viz., the accession of Henry VII.,^[1] and carries it down to the accession of George III. Hallam stopped here for a characteristic reason, which it is impos sible not to respect and to regret. He was unwilling to excite the prejudices of modern politics which seemed to him to run back through the whole period of the reign of George III. As a matter of fact they ran back much further, as Hallam soon found. The sensitive impartiality which withheld him from touching perhaps the most interesting period in the history of the constitution did not save him from the charge of partisanship. The Quarterly 394 H A L L A M Revieiv for 1828 contains an article on the Constitutional History, written by Southey, full of railing and reproach. The work, he says, is the " production of a decided partisan," who " rakes in the ashes of long-forgotten and a thousand times buried slanders, for the means of heaping obloquy on all who supported the established institutions of the country." No accusation made by a critic ever fell so wide of the mark. Absolute justice is the standard which Hallam set himself and maintained. His view of consti tutional history was that it should contain only so much of the political and general history of the time as bears directly on specific changes in the organization of the state, includ ing therein judicial as well as ecclesiastical institutions. But while abstaining from irrelevant historical discussions, Hallam dealt with statesmen and policies with the calm and fearless impartiality of a judge. It was his cool treat ment of such sanctified names as Charles, Cranmer, and Laud that provoked the indignation of Southey and the Quarterly, who forgot that the same impartial measure was extended to statesmen on the other side. If Hallam can ever be said to have deviated from perfect fairness, it was in the tacit assumption that the 19th century theory of the constitution was the right theory in previous centuries, and that those who departed from it on one side or the other were iti the wrong. He did unconsciously antedate the consti tution, and it is clear from incidental allusions in his last work that he did not regard with favour the democratic changes which he thought to be impending. Hallam, like Macaulay, ultimately referred alt political questions to the standard of Whig constitutionalism. This prepossession may be connected with the legal tone that runs through all his political writings. The spirit of the English lawyer is as strong in Hallam as in Bentham, who, like him, was never a practising lawyer. It is no doubt owing to this quality that the Constitutional History has become one of ths text-books of English politics. Hallam, like Black- stone, has become an authority to whom men of all parties appeal. The origin of English institutions has since been explored with greater elaborateness by Professor Stubbs, but our leading guide to the constitution in its maturity is still Hallam. Like the Constitutional History, the Introduction to the Literature of Europe continues one of the branches of inquiry which had been opened in the View of the Middle Ages. In the first chapter of the Literature, which is to a great extent supplementary to the last chapter of the Middle Ages, Hallam sketches the state of literature in Europe down to the end of the 14th century : the extinc tion of ancient learning which followed the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Christianity ; the preserva tion of the Latin language in the services of the church ; and the slow revival of letters, which began to show itself soon after the 7th century " the nadir of the human mind " had been passed. For the first century and a half of his special period he is mainly occupied with a review of classical learning, and he adopts the plan of taking short decennial periods and noticing the most remarkable works which they produced. The rapid growth of literature in the 16th century compels him to resort to a classification of subjects. Thus in the period 1520-1550 we have separate chapters on ancient literature, theology, speculative philosophy and jurisprudence, the literature of taste, and scientific and miscellaneous literature ; and the subdivision of subjects is carried further of course in the later periods. Thus poetry, the drama, and polite literature form the subjects of separate chapters. One inconvenient result of this arrangement is that the same author is scattered over many chapters, according as his works fall within this category or that period of time. Names like Shakespeare, Grotius, Bacon, Hobbes, appear in half a dozen different places. The individuality of great authors is thus dis sipated except when it has been preserved by an occasional sacrifice of the arrangement and this defect, if it is to be esteemed a defect, is increased by the very sparing references to personal history and character with which Hallam was obliged to content himself. His plan excluded biographical history, nor is the work, he tells us, to be regarded as one of reference. It is rigidly an account of the books which would make a complete library of the period, 1 arranged according to the date of their publication and the nature of their subjects. The history of institutions like univer sities and academies, and that of great popular movements like the Reformation, are of course noticed in their imme diate connexion with literary results ; but Hallam had little taste for the spacious generalization which such subjects sug gest. The great qualities displayed in this work have been universally acknowledged conscientiousness, accuracy, judgment, and enormous reading. Not the least striking testimony to Hallam s powers is his mastery over so many diverse forms of intellectual activity. In science and theology, mathematics and poetry, metaphysics and law, he is a competent and always a fair if not a profound critic. The bent of his own mind is manifest in his treatment of pure literature and of political speculation, which seems to be inspired with stronger personal interest and a higher sense of power than other parts of his work display. Not less worthy of notice in a literary history is the good sense by which both his learning and his tastes have been held in control. Probably no writer ever possessed a juster view of the relative importance of men and things. The labour devoted to an investigation is with Hallam no excuse for dwelling on the result, unless that is in itself important He turns away contemptuously from the mere curiosities of literature, and is never tempted to make a display of trivial erudition. Nor do we find that his interest in special studies leads him to assign them a disproportionate place in his general view of the literature of a period. Hallam is generally described as a " philosophical his torian." The description is justified not so much by any philosophical quality in his method as by the nature of his subject and his own temper. Hallam is a philosopher to this extent that both in political and in literary history he fixed his attention on results rather than on persons. His conception of history embraced the whole movement of society. Beside that conception the issue of battles and the fate of kings fall into comparative insignificance. " We can trace the pedigree of princes," he reflects, " fill up the catalogue of towns besieged and provinces desolated, describe even the whole pageantry of coronations and festivals, but we cannot recover the genuine history of mankind." But, on the other hand, there is no trace in Hallam of anything like a philosophy of history or society. Wise and generally melancholy reflexions on human nature and political society are not infrequent in his writings, and they arise naturally and incidentally out of the subject he is discussing. His object is the attainment of truth in matters of fact. Sweeping theories of the movement of society, and broad characterizations of particular periods of history, seem to have no attraction for him. The view of mankind on which such generalizations are usually based, taking little account of individual character, was highly distasteful to him. Thus he objects to the use of statistics because they favour that tendency to regard all men as mentally and morally equal which is so unhappily strong in modern times. At the same time Hallam by no means assumes the tone of the mere scholar. He is even solicitous to show that his point of view is that of the cultivated gentleman and not of the specialist of any order. Thas 1 Technical subjects like painting or English law have been ex-= eluded by Hallam, and history and theology only partially treated* he tells us that Montaigne is the first French author whom an English gentleman is ashamed not to have read. In fact, allusions to the necessary studies of a gentleman meet us constantly, reminding us of the unlikely erudition of the schoolboy in Macaulay. Hallam s prejudices, so far as he had any, belong to the same character. His criticism is apt to assume a tone of moral censure when he has to deal with certain extremes of human thought, scepticism in philosophy, atheism in religion, and democracy in politics. Hallam s style is singularly uniform throughout all his writings. It is sincere and straightforward, and obviously innocent of any motive beyond that of clearly expressing the writer s meaning. In the Literature of Europe there are

many passages of great imaginative beauty.

(e. r.)

1. Lord Brougham, overlooking the constitutional chapter in the Middle Ages, censured Hallam for making an arbitrary beginning at this point, and proposed to write a more complete history himself.