© GEORGE FINLAY
HISTORY OF
THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE
FROM DCCXVI TO MLVII
with an introduction by V. R. R.
First Edition .. February 1906
"I would rather," said a former
president of Harvard University, Professor Felton, "be the author of your
histories than Prime Minister of England." This was said in a letter to
Finlay, reassuring and solacing him in his day of dejection. So Atticus once
comforted Cicero; but it is to be feared that Finlay's case was one of another
order, less consolable. His misgivings were due to a sense of disillusion over
that very cause, the renaissance of a new Greece, to which he had devoted his
life with unswerving mind and singleness of purpose. And even that was not all.
For his disappointment coincided with the beginning of his own physical decline,
and with the apparent signs too, for so he read them, that his services to his
day and generation had been in vain.
Now,
we who look back along the steadfast line of his achievement, recognise how
eminent it was, ad how true was the prophecy of his friend Felton, uttered almost
fifty years ago. We see the continuing effects of his labour, forty years long,
as an historian, and the heroic difficulty of his work as an active and practical
Philhellene. To gain an estimate of his force and quality, it is almost enough
to read the books of his Byzantine history that follow; but they ought to be
read with the radiant hope of Finlay's youth and his first great ardour in the
Hellenic cause gleaming upon the page.
Finlay,
who died in Athens in 1875, was born at Faversham, Kent, in 1799; that is a
few months before Macaulay, a very different master of history. His early circumstances
were hardly such as to foster his special qualities. He went to no university
until he was twenty, and had spent some months in a writer's office at Glasgow;
and of his schooldays, three years in a Liverpool boarding-school were, on his
own showing, a lost and uslee period.
But
he was fortunate in having a mother who both loved history herself and had the
art of making it alive to the imagination of her boy. When, then, Finlay went
from Glasgow to Göttingen to study Roman law, he was better primed than the
mere chart of his early years would seem to show. Moreover, he reached Germany
at a time when the promise of the new awakening of Greece was bright, and he
breathed the air of its revolt in a kind of intellectual ecstasy. He drank in
eagerly every word he could of the news of the Greek cause, made friends with
the one Greek student at the college; and at length, in the autumn of 1823,
very shortly after the news of Lord Byron's departure for Greece had been announced,
he too set off thither. He reached Cephalonia in November, and met the poet;
went on to Athens, and then to Missolonghi. Probably it was here tha he, like
Lord Byron, laid the seeds of the fever that afterwards seriously threathened
him. It was in April, 1824, that Byron
died. Finlay had gone on meanwhile to Italy, where and in Sicily he spent some
time, returning to Scotland to pass his examination in civil law. But that accomplished,
he felt the power and the hope of Greece all dominant in his mind. He could
not resist the unsated desire he felt to return and be in the very midst of
the struggle. He left again for its shores in 1825, there to remain for the
rest of his life, nearly half a century in all, with the intermissions only
of a few visits home. In 1829 Greece was able to declare her independence –
thanks to the aid of many enthusiastic adherents, who, like Byron and Finlay,
had been ready to give all they had to her cause. Alas! Finlay lost nearly all
he possessed, and often felt that he had given his days as well as his wealth
in vain in this sacrifice.
But
Finlay, if he doubted at times, and felt that all he had done and spent and
written had been of no real avail, could never have echoed Byron's plaint in
"Childe Harold" for the companion country:
There is the moral of all human tales;
'This but the same rehearsal of the past,
First Freedom, and then Glory – when that
fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption, – barbarism at
last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but oe page!....
Long afterwards, it is true, in 1855, Finlay
wrote in the retrospect: –
"Had
the hopes with which I joined the hopes of Greece in 182 been fulfilled, it
is not probable that I should have abandoned the active duties of life, and
the noble task of labouring to improve the land, for the sterile task of recording
its misfortunes."
But
Finlay was a philosopher in essence, if not always able to ne philosophical
in the common sense about the discrepancy that exists between human and ideal
effort and sheer achievement. We turn back now to the record of his "sterile
task" – his writing Greek history. Its first results appeared in 1836,
when his book on the "Hellenic kingdom and the Greek Nation" was published.
Then in 1844, his "Greece under the Romans" followed in two volumes.
His History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires was completed in 1854. Two years
later came the volumes dealing with the Ottoman and Venetian Domination; and
in 1861, his History of the Greek Revolution. If his life-work then seemed complete,
he still did great service by his letters and articles contributed to the "Athenaeum",
the "Times", "Saturday Review", and other papers and reviews.
We have seen already that his own feeling in these later years was one of much
discouragement. He had seen the light of a new and regenerate Greece wax, and
then wane: and the decline was a more serious one, viewed under his gravely
human, philosophical estimate, than the outer world could perceive. Then his
own stock of vitality was beginning to run low, and his faith in the validity
of his life-work – considered purely as a literary and scholarly accomplishment
and apart from the good or evil fortune of his chosen and adopted country –
had been weakened, in spite of the encouragements of his peers and fellow-scholars
– men like the President of Harvard and Professor Müller. Probably, living away
in Athens as he did, he did not realise the full measure of his influence. But
his was an order of work that could not hope to attain a great vogue. Sound
and show, without the surface brilliancy that made a Macaulay enormously popular,
it has power to affect the circle of scholars and men who were the inner public
of the time. It is not readily to be known, however, if this has been achieved, amd, at any rate, the signs were not
so deciphered by Finlay from his watch-tower at Athens.
But
of the total value of his historical work there is, there can be, no question.
He was the pioneer of the new movement which in England led at last to the re-writing
of history with an eye to human development and social and economic change,
as it was re-written for us by Green in his "History of the English People".
But Finlay, long before Green, had come to the same sense of the true function
of history. One passage, and a very remarkable one it is, may be quoted to show
how he confronted his great task: –
"
The vicissitudes which the great masses of the nations of the earth have undergone
in past ages hitherto received very little attention from historians, who have
adorned their pages with the records of kings, and the personal exploits of
princes and great men, or attached their narrative to the fortunes of the dominant
classes, without noticing the fate of the people. History, however, continually
repeats the lesson that powers, numbers and the highest civilisation of an aristocracy
are, even when united, insufficient to ensure national prosperity, and establish
the power of the rulers on so firm and permanent a basis as shall guarantee
the dominant class from annihilation.... It is that portion only of mankind,
which eats bread raised from the soil by the sweat of its brow, that can form
the basis of a permanent material existence."
In
this passage we have Finlay's idea of the philosophy of history, and of the
historian's exemplification of it in practice. It was an idea that was present
and that was most devotedly pursued to the end in Finlay's own books. The test
of a man's performance in this, as in other forms of literature, is in the reading;
and Finlay's readers, here and in other pages of his, will decide what his final
place is in the common ground where literature and history meet.
We
might have added a word from the tribute paid to him by a Greek contemporary
on his death, who spoke of him as only Byron among foreigners had been spoken
of previously. But more to the purpose here is that of the "Athenaeum"
to which he had contributed for some thirty-six years in all, at his death.
In its obituary notice, it spoke o the great los caused to history and to English
literature by the death of this last of the old generation of Philhellenes who
had followed Byron's lead. And the loss to Greece itself, if pointed out, was
none the less, since the people needed a Mentor so much and so unwillingly endured
one.
"To
Finlay," continued the writer in the "Athenaeum", his researches
taught "the practical lesson that the regeneration of Greece was not to
be sought in the reproduction of classic forms, but in te rational development
of the poeple as they are... It was with this view that he contributed to the
'Times' a remarkable series of letters from Greece... which appear to have produced
a revolution in the Greek mind."
What,
we cannot but ask, would Finlay have said had he witnessed the melancholy sequel
of the Greek war, with its exhibition of even deeper infirmities – with evidence
of a far graver disorder of state and people, than those he knew and those he
anticipated?
Finlay's
last publication was an edition, printed in Paris, of the journal kept by Brue,
interpreter to the French embassy, who accompanied the Grand Vizier, Ali, in
the Morean campaign of 1715. Finlay had purchased the MS. in 1843, and had drawn
from it freely in his "Greece under the Ottoman and Venetian Domination".
Another
passage from the poet who helped to kindle and inspire his Hellenic ardour is
the best epilogue both to Finlay's sanguine first hopes and his last troubled
decline. It occurs in "The Siege of Corinth":–
The waters murmured of their name;
The woods were peopled with their fame.
The silent pillar, lone and grey,
Claimed kindred with their sacred clay;
Their spirits wrapped the dusky mountain,
Their memory sparkled o'er the fountain;
The meanest rill, the mightiest river,
Rolled mingling with their fame forever.
Despite of every yoke she bears
That land is Glory's still and theirs!
'Tis still a watchword to the earth:
When man would do a deed of worth
He points to Greece...
V.
R. R.
The
Hellenic Kingdom and the Greek Nation, 1836. Remarks
on the Topography of Oropia and Diacria, 1838. jEpistolh;
pro;" tou;" jAqhnaivou" (and other pamphlets
on Greek finance), 1844. Greece under
the Romans, 1844. On the Site of the
Holy Sepulcre, 1847. Greece to its
Conquest by the Turks, 1851. Greece
under Ottoman and Venetian Dominion, 1856. The
Greek Revolution, 1861. jAntikeivmena eujreqevnta ejn JEllavdi, 1869. Parathrhvsei" ejpi; th'"
ejn JElbetiva/ /etc., 1869. The French Narrative of Benjamin Brue, 1870. A History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time,
B. C. 146- A. D. 1864; 1877 [Clarendon Press reissue of his History, revised
by himself, and edited by Tozer].
Finlay
also contributed to the "Times" (1864-70), "Athenaeum" and
"Saturday Review".