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causal relation with, the events with which we are ourselves personally familiar. From such border-land no story can be brought to us more romantic as history, or richer in wisdom and inspiration to those who can read and interpret it aright, than that of the regeneration and unification which was wrought for Italy and the Italians within the memory of still living men, and the whole reach of which connects the Congress of Vienna with the present time.

Mr. Thayer has here told this story only as far as the fall of the Venetian Republic in August, 1849, and the extinction, thus, of the experimental movements of 1848. He has very justly regarded this period as "the dawn" of a day to come after. The story is ably told, clear in plan and construction, painstaking and thorough in the mastery of data and material and in the marshaling of details, and fresh and graphic in literary treatment. This much should be said at once. But what of the point of view from which Mr. Thayer writes? If to take a stand at the extremest left to identify oneself in bias with the most radical theories into which Italian patriotism was betrayed by the conditions under which the revolution was first precipitated, with the theories of which he is telling the disastrous failure-be a qualification for treating this subject, none could be better fitted for the task than he. But if a more balanced and impartial judgment be an important qualification for the historian of such an epoch, then there is much to be regretted in the standpoint from which Mr. Thayer writes.

When Pius IX claimed that he was the church, and meant by that claim that Christianity itself was practically involved in loyalty to him and in steadfast resistance to the national movement, his dictum was accepted, not only by those who drew the conclusions at which he aimed, but equally by those who reasoned in the reverse direction and based their theories of action on the assumption that the church and Christianity were natural obstacles to the political freedom and prosperity of Italy. It is from this latter standpoint that Mr. Thayer writes. With Mazzini and Garibaldi, he would seem to confound monarchy with absolutism; and he cannot, therefore, fully sympathize with that trust in constitutional monarchy, as represented by the House of Savoy, which was the vital principle in the constructive statesmanship of Cavour and of the Moderati. Even less is he able to sympathize with the politico-ecclesiastical distinctions and discriminations which can alone interpret that statesmanship in its dealings with the church and with the papacy. For that statesmanship accepted Christianity; it assumed that Latin Christianity,

or Catholicism, was the only genuine Christianity for the Latin race, or Roman Christianity for the Romans; and it referred the ecclesiastical evils which Italy had suffered, not to Latin or Roman Christianity, but to the temporal power which had been superadded to these, and to the feudal papacy which had been built upon them. And even this feudal papacy Milman claimed was the one great moral saving-power in the midst of all the social violence and corruption around it, without which "it is impossible to conceive what would have been the confusion, the lawlessness, the chaotic state of the middle ages." But Mr. Thayer distinctly places "a thousand years of Roman Christianity" in the forefront of the causes of Italy's degradation; and he would seem to hold that to break away wholly from Christianity was an essential part of the modern regeneration of the Italians. Be this as it may, it was certainly not the conviction of those who, politically speaking, made Italy.

This attitude of Mr. Thayer is especially to be regretted, first, because in a large proportion of those who will read these volumes with deepest interest, it will work distrust of a writer subject to so serious a bias; and then, because it would, if carried into his after judgments, really incapacitate him from seeing to the very heart of his subject. But as one reads on, he comes to realize that the first is by far the greater danger. The most accurate estimates of institutions and of the social conditions of the times are, indeed, still and very unnecessarily mingled with slurs upon the truths and faiths which lay back of them; and even deserved censure is rarely relieved by any acknowledgment of the good, the piety, the noble religious spirit of which no candid historian would deny the reality. But either the feeling with which the earlier chapters were written was itself greatly modified as the writer followed sympathetically the progress of events; or else the transition from generalizations to the narration of facts and the characterization of men, removed him from the occasion and from the temptation to yield to it. At all events, the reader does come almost to forget the hostility to Christianity in which the introductory review had been conceived, and so learns to trust as well as to admire the narration little the less.

This is certainly well; for no one who, in an ultra Teutonic spirit, puts institutional Christianity, as such, among the agencies which reduced Italy to moral and political servitude, or who fails to see that a restored and regenerated Catholic Church has shared with Italy in her redemption from the anachronisms of the temporal power and of the papacy, can fully enter into the whole

meaning to the modern world of that regeneration of which he writes. If this was not the faith of a Mazzini, or of a Garibaldi, or of the radical enthusiasts, the story of whose impracticable efforts and most disastrous failures to liberate Italy Mr. Thayer so faithfully records, it was the political judgment of Cavour and most assuredly the patriotic faith of Ricasoli, of D'Azeglio, of Minghetti, and generally of the party which actually achieved the unification of Italy and made possible the regeneration of the Italian people.

Taking leave, then, of Mr. Thayer's summary of the causes of Italy's degradation, there are to be found even in this First Book foreshadowings of sounder and more constructive thinking. On page 43, he most felicitously characterizes the Italians themselves : In no other country in the world, not even in Greece, has a race manifested so varied a sensibility as in Italy. The wonderful keenness, delicacy and energy of the Italian character, responsive to the smallest diversity of place and condition, blossomed in new forms of individuality, each differing from the rest. At a time when England or France had hardly one center from which the national life-blood pulsated through all the members of the people, in Italy there were a score of such centers, each distinct, each throbbing with life.

Chapter V, on Dante, is a monograph-an admirable presentation of the prophetic relation of the great Florentine to the great risorgimento which was to come so long after. In Chapter IX, the bugle blast of Alfieri is heard, giving the first signal for the actual reawakening. From this forward, beginning with the Second Book, the reader is in the presence of living men and a witness of real events. In vividly and forcibly describing episodes and in characterizing great and representative personalities, Mr. Thayer is at his best.

The long past closed with Buonaparte, making the opening years of the new century a period of inspirations, as their era-making fellow-countryman, again and again, for however selfish a purpose, told them that they were Italians and breathed into them the first stirrings of a national spirit. And then our point of political departure is found in the graphic account which Mr. Thayer gives us of the Congress of Vienna and in his characterization of Prince Metternich. Understanding that congress and "knowing him, we shall know the nature of the resistance which checked every patriotic impulse, every effort towards progress in Italy, between 1815 and 1848"; and why it was an inexorable necessity of the situation that Italy should not be suffered to become other than "a merely geographical expression." For fifteen years more then, it was politically

speaking, yet night. Not even the dawn had come; and nowhere can we get a better idea of what that night was to Italy, than in this Second Book.

But - not to go into further detail- the story of that dawning, when it was come; its aspirations, its theories, its conspiracies, its disasters, its lessons and preparatory training for the day itself,is a rich storehouse of narrative, of description and of portraiture. The clear account of the Papal Conclave at the election of Pius IX, with which the second volume opens; the appreciative analysis of the attempted statesmanship of Gioberti; the brilliant story of "The Five Glorious Days of Milan " these are only the more conspicuous among the episodes of the narrative. The admirable studies of Gioberti himself, of Mazzini, of Pope Pius and especially of Charles Albert, are illustrations of Mr. Thayer's genius for characterization. That of the almost martyr King of Sardinia is perhaps alone in its thoroughly just estimate of the man and in the true explanation of his strange and, to most writers, inexplicable course.

No one can close these two volumes without earnestly looking forward to the continuance of the work, in an account, by the same author, of the finally successful unification of Italy. But it is to be as earnestly hoped that, in meeting this expectation, Mr. Thayer may be able to rise wholly above the unworthy religious level on which he began that now before us. For the story of the unification. of Italy is a religious story; its action is on the spiritual uplands of modern history; its results were the triumphs of genuine faith and spiritual insight. WM. CHAUNCY LANGDON.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Civilization during the Middle Ages. Especially in Relation to Modern Civilization. By GEORGE BURTON ADAMS, Professor of History in Yale University. New York, Charles Scribner's

Sons, 1894. 8vo, viii, 463 pp.

One of the most serious deficiencies in the mass of modern historical literature in English is the dearth of books which present in accessible and readable form the results of the researches which have been prosecuted in Europe with extraordinary activity for the last two or three generations. In this volume Professor Adams has made a most valuable contribution to supply this want in regard to a general view of the middle ages. Covering so broad a field as it does, it is largely a comment on the movement of history; but a comment which is the outgrowth of wide study, arranged so as to be

It

serviceable to the student as a guide or supplement to class work, to the teacher as an outline to be expanded and illustrated, and to the general reader as a substitute for the help of an instructor. Το prepare a work of this kind requires not only sound scholarship, but also a well poised judgment and a decided pedagogical skill. seems to me that the author has met these requirements in an uncommon degree. Certainly, it is an unusual experience to read with so little dissent a work in which judgment is expressed on so many subjects. There is no attempt at novel or hazardous generalizations, while traditional "verdicts of history" are often discussed and sometimes rejected in a way which increases the reader's confidence in the author's candor and historical insight.

Professor Adams suggestively notes the effect of the Roman legal spirit upon theology. The idea might well have been a little more fully developed and illustrated from the penitential and indulgence regulations.

He draws a sharp distinction between Christianity as a religion, the church as an organization and Christian theology as a body of doctrines, and continues:

But neither the dogmatic system nor the ecclesiastical system of any given time or place, is Christianity. The causes which have created the one are not those which have created the other, and the one set of causes must not be held responsible for results which have followed from the other. So completely indispensable is this distinction that absolutely no trustworthy reasoning about Christian history is possible if it is lost sight of. [Pages 111-112.]

Now this is in the main true, yet it seems to me that we may easily exaggerate the practical separability of the three, or the separability of their causes and effects. Such separation is largely a philosophical or ideal process. Christian theology apart from the church or from Christian faith has even less existence than the "economic man," or perhaps about the same kind of existence. The separation is carried out in thought to facilitate scientific analysis, but historically the separation is practicable only in a limited degree. Only minds trained in analysis can do it; the overwhelming majority of Christians cannot realize to themselves a Christian who neither accepts the dogmas nor belongs to a church.

Possibly an over-emphasis of this separability has led the author to make a further statement which is misleading, if not erroneous. He says of the struggle with Gnosticism that it ended, "as the earlier strife had done, in the preservation in all essential points of the

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