Born in 1838 near Dublin, was educated at Trinity College, where he graduated B.A. in 1859 and M.A. in 1863. He was always prominently studious and something of a recluse. In 1865 appeared “The History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe,” and “The History of European Morals” was published in 1869. Both books established his reputation as a historian of wide research, lucid style, and scientific selection of facts. Yet it must be confessed that the impression given by both works is of a writer whose views lacked depth or a sense of philosophic comparison. “The History of England in the XVIIIth Century,” published in 1878–90, was a work with claims to higher distinction. A volume of “Poems” appeared in 1891; “Democracy and Liberty” in 1896; and the “Map of Life” in 1899.

Personal

  The House holds no man to-day who is worthier to sit in the seat that Gibbon occupied a century and a quarter ago than Mr. W. E. H. Lecky. It is only as historians, however, that the two can be compared. No contrast could be greater than that between the chronicler of the “Decline and Fall” and the author of “England in the Eighteenth Century,” as respects the outward man. It is the contrast between the Epicurean and the Stoic, between the England of Horace Walpole and the England of Herbert Spencer. The two seem somehow to be incommensurable with the incommensurability of the Indulgent Uncle and the Maiden Aunt. Eminent respectability and a considerable consciousness of it is writ large on every feature of Mr. Lecky’s rugged face. As he sits in his place, softly stroking his silk hat while the debate drags its slow length along, the onlooker feels a comfortable assurance that the British Matron can never withhold her taxes as America was fain to do on the ground of lack of representation. There is something almost lugubrious in the regard which Mr. Lecky seems to cast on men and events. He instinctively reminds us of one of his own frequent verses, which sums up life’s tragedy in the apostrophe:

  It is a rare thing for a stenographer to make a correct report of what the member representing Trinity University really said on a subject before the House, for Mr. Lecky could not be called an orator, nor, as Cicero once said of a certain speaker, was his speech dulciora melle. His strength lay in his profound and practical thought, and in his variegated language, which was rich in both beauty and vigor, but it flowed right on from beginning to end, without pause or break, and nothing but a phonograph could reproduce it with literary justice…. As he sat in the chair chatting so pleasantly, I hardly realized his stature, until he rose to invite me into the dining room, where Mrs. Lecky and three other ladies, one a visitor from Holland, were standing. Then I saw that he was over six feet high, large-shouldered, but spare rather than portly, with a high forehead, his hair brushed back, a blond in appearance, and in the full power of intellectual manhood, being then in his fifty-fourth year. Mr. Lecky’s marriage was a very happy one, and my first impressions of Mrs. Lecky confirmed the pleasant reports I had heard about her as the intellectual companion of her husband. I can honestly say that the toothsome delights of the dainty and satisfying luncheon, and the tasteful equipment and service of the table, gave me a high idea also of her domestic abilities, while as a talker she was delightful.

General

  He has prepared himself for its [“Rationalism in Europe”] production by an unusual amount of well-directed reading; he has chosen his facts and quotations with much judgment; and he gives proof of those important moral qualifications—impartiality, seriousness, and modesty. This praise is chiefly applicable to the long chapter on the history of magic and witchcraft, which opens the work, and to the two chapters on the antecedents and history of persecution, which occur, the one at the end of the first volume, the other at the beginning of the second. In these chapters Mr. Lecky has a narrower and better-traced path before him than in other portions of his work; he is more occupied with presenting a particular class of facts in their historical sequence, and in their relation to certain grand tide-marks of opinion, than with disquisition; and his writing is freer than elsewhere from an apparent confusedness of thought and an exuberance of approximate phrases, which can be serviceable in no other way than as diluents needful for the sort of reader we have just described.

  A book of much reading and candour, but which does not reach my ideal standard of either. It is an old commonplace, unfortunately too true, that theologians and apologists colour and soften; but I must add that the propensity is not a bit less apparent in philosophical historians, though they are often just as well intentioned.

  Mr. Lecky has probably more of the philosophic mind than any of his contemporaries. He has treated history on a large scale and in the philosophical spirit. He has taken a wide and liberal survey of the progress of thought and of morals as a whole, and then has brought the knowledge and observation thus acquired to the practical purpose of illustrating certain passages of history and periods of human development. His “History of England in the Eighteenth Century” is not more remarkable thus far for the closeness and fulness of its details than for its breadth of view and its calmness of judgment. Mr. Lecky is always the historian, and never the partisan. His works grow on the reader. They do not turn upon him all at once a sudden glare like the flash of a revolving light, but they fill the mind gradually with a sense of their justice, their philosophic thought, and the clear calmness of their historical observation.

  A work [“European Morals”] abounding in important facts and suggestive thought. To all but students in philosophy the first chapter, “The Natural History of Morals,” is likely to be found somewhat tedious, though it has great intrinsic merits. One of the most valuable chapters is the fourth—that on the period from Constantine to Charlemagne—in which, however, the weaknesses of the various monastic orders, are probably given a somewhat undue prominence. The second volume concludes with a valuable but rather depressing chapter on the position of woman. The work is very scholarly, and may be read with profit by every student. It is, however, subject to one criticism. In dealing with the ecclesiastical phases of the period, the author cannot resist the temptation to indulge in innuendoes and sarcasm. A little less contempt or pity for the religious zeal of the early monks, and a somewhat larger allowance for the turbulence of the times, would have improved the work…. A very able and interesting historical study [“Rationalism in Europe”]. It is an effort to trace the historical development of that method of reasoning which, since the Reformation, has been steadily gaining an ascendency in Europe…. The work abounds in facts and discussions of extreme interest. The author’s style is always attractive. His learning is extensive, though he seems not to have made much use of the numerous German authorities on the subject. His sympathies are obviously rationalistic, though he usually succeeds in maintaining a moderate and judicious spirit.

  It is a strange thing that so able a prose writer as Mr. Lecky should, when unfortunately laid low through an attack of versifying fever, contentedly abuse common sense, and even good grammar. In his profoundly interesting and valuable philosophical and historical works, he writes with vigour, lucidity, and a native directness which is often of singular charm; with serene judgment and logical foresight, he marshals his words and phrases with all the wise economy and tactical skill of a veteran…. Mr. Lecky’s mistake has been in making public that which should have been reserved for a private circle. When he appears as a poet he must be judged accordingly, and without respect to his high achievement in other departments of letters. It would be insincere for the present writer to say that he finds anywhere in Mr. Lecky’s verse that particular magic which is the outcome of the transforming imagination—in a word, that essential breath of poetic life without which all is vanity.

  We find in Mr. Lecky a historical writer whose works are among the most interesting and significant literary products of his time. His place is neither with the annalists nor with the political historians, but with those for whom the philosophy of history has had a perennial fascination. And while it is pre-eminently with such literary historians as Macaulay and Froude and Green,—in so far as he has written to the end of being read, in a style which has merits of its own comparing favorably with theirs,—he is widely separated from these respectively: with less continuity than Macaulay, far less dramatic energy than Froude, and nothing of Green’s architectonic faculty. But few historians have excelled his diligence or carefulness, or chosen greater themes, or handled them with a more evident desire to bring the truth of history to bear upon our personal and social life.

  “Liberty and Democracy” is a Book of Lamentations over the decadence of “the old belief, or prejudice, or superstition, that the administration of government ought to be chiefly intrusted to gentlemen,” and by the last word the author means the land aristocracy, for the “doctrine that the men to whom the land belonged were the men who ought to govern it” appears to him fundamental…. It assumes, what seems to Mr. Lecky too plain to require argument, that the right of property in land is superior to the right of property in anything else. While he might not admit this, the distinction which is always present in his mind rests upon the fact that the right of property in land runs back to the gentlemanly art of conquest, and takes its starting-point from the sword, while the rights of property in nearly all other things rest upon so humble and servile a thing as labor, and start from the right of every man to himself and to the work of his own hands…. Indeed, we do not need to go back of this century, or outside of “Liberty and Democracy,” to see what government was when it was carried on by gentlemen. Mr. Lecky quotes Paley’s statement that “about one-half of the House of Commons obtain their seats in that assembly by the election of the people, the other half by purchase or by nomination of single proprietors of great estates.”… Mr. Lecky’s conception of the purposes of our political activity are as inadequate as his ideas about our political methods are erroneous. Nothing could be more superficial than the remarks of this historian and philosopher that there is “no country in the world in which the motives that inspire them (political contests) are purely or more abjectly sordid” than in the United States.

  It is an attempt [“Map of Life”] made by a man of eminence, to impress once more upon the world the importance of testing the conduct of life by the standard of philosophic common sense. His book is easy to read; it is interesting in itself; it is still more interesting as a sketch (and a perfectly truthful sketch) of the view of the world taken by a man of letters who, though a student, has mixed with society, and, though devoted to the study of history, has always shown a keen interest in public life. But, after all, the main interest of the book, to a thoughtful reader, will be found to lie in its suggesting the question: How far does the improvement of society arise from adherence to the maxims of common sense; or how far is it due, in the main, to those bursts of feeling or enthusiasm which, at particular eras, lift sometimes individuals and sometimes whole societies above the level of their ordinary every-day existence?… It is impossible to deny that the precepts it contains are sound, and the reflections which it suggests are true. Open it anywhere at chance and you will find something which it is just as well should be said about some topic of practical importance.

  He has brought to it an erudition that renews the surprise which the world of scholars felt when, as a young man of seven and twenty, he published his “History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe.” Any one who has investigated the wealth of his footnotes and followed some of them into the by-paths of curious literature, must bear glad witness to the keenness of his historic sense. His manifest purpose to be fair is worthy of all praise. Between the lines of his work we can seem to read something of his desire to cultivate an attitude of detachment and to regard his material as objectively as Maupassant or Henry James regards the material of fiction. It would probably be unjust to say that he has formed himself upon German models; but his kinship with the academic German is manifest enough, and it was a part of the eternal fitness of things that Dr. Jolowicz should translate all his principal works and that the “History of European Morals” should become a text-book in German Universities.

  Mr. Lecky was a moralist in the eighteenth-century sense. In the turmoil of our rapidly shifting civilization, he was distinctly the enlightened man. He attained as early as his undergraduate years at Dublin that serenity and impartiality of spirit which the Encyclopedists regarded as the most desirable possession, but hardly achieved. In other respects, also, he was of the eighteenth century. Before that appalling mass of evidence which crushes the generalizing spirit back to the journeyman work of heaping up facts, he remained unruffled. As a young man he undertook “A History of European Morals” with the cheerful curiosity of Bayle compiling a Universal Dictionary. This poised and indomitable spirit, which he maintained in the face of constant invalidism, brings him perhaps nearer to Spencer than to any man of his time. It certainly removes him as far from the class of documented athletes of Freeman’s kind as it does from the eloquent special pleaders of the Gibbon-Macaulay-Carlyle dispensation. In the fearless mind which he brought to the great task of interpreting history through philosophy, Mr. Lecky distinctly recalls Hume, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Voltaire. His superiority in method and his essentially modern quality lay in a truer sense of the difficulties that invested his problems. To read his books is to be instructed in the complexity of historical causes. One feels that he has moved more cautiously and patiently among his facts than those soaring minds who were his constant admiration and study.

  It is probable that as the historian of “European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne” Mr. Lecky anchored his fame to the ages. There was another fresh and delightful surprise to the whole world when his brace of portly volumes appeared in 1869. The book showed the same philosophic grasp and the ease of an intellectual giant in handling mighty material. Quickly translated into German, it has become a text-book in the universities of the Fatherland. I remember delightful days in far-off Japan, when, fresh from the press, his book on the “History of European Morals” reached me, carried over the mountains by Japanese runners. I read it amid the autumn glories and beautiful scenery of Echizen and the Japanese Mont Blanc in Kaga. Besides digesting the rich food of thought, I could not but liken the style to that of autumn ripeness and mellowness, and the legitimate rhetorical decoration seemed as brilliant as that of the gold and colors on a Kaga vase. With thousands of Americans, I own in Lecky a true intellectual teacher.