1/ 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Ex Libris 
 : C. K. OGDEN 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 t. ' \ 
 
 2^q 
 
 1 ^/ 
 
 — k-
 
 STUDIES IN LITERATURE
 
 STUDIES 
 
 ..--'Is'^t^ 
 
 LIT p^m^^i^^^ E 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN MOELEY 
 
 Honbon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1901 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 ?N5 
 
 Fiu.-ii' Edition, 1s90 
 ReprinUd 1891, 1S97, VMl
 
 NOTE. 
 
 The contents of the present collection have all been 
 in ])rint before, either in the JViueteenth Ceiituri/ and 
 Fortnightly Review, or in some other shape. I have 
 to thank the proprietors of the two periodicals 
 named for sanctioning the reproduction of my 
 articles here. 
 
 J. I\I. 
 Oclober 1S90.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Wordsworth i 
 
 Aphorisms 54 
 
 Maine ox popular government . 103 
 
 A FEW words on French models . 156 
 
 On the study of literature . . 189 
 
 Victor Hugo's ninety-thb.ee . 229 
 
 On tee ring and the book . . 255 
 
 Memorials of a man of letters . 286 
 
 Valedictory ..... 323
 
 WORDSWORTH.^ 
 
 The poet whose works are contained in the 
 present volume was born in the little town of 
 Cockennouth, in Cumberland, on April 7, 1770. 
 He died at Rydal Mount, in the neighbouring 
 county of Westmoreland, on April 23, 1850. 
 In this long span of mortal years, events of 
 vast and enduring moment shook the world. 
 A handful of scattered and dependent colonies 
 in the northern continent of America made 
 themselves into one of the most powerful and 
 beneficent of states. The ancient monarchy of 
 France, and all the old ordering of which the 
 monarchy had been the keystone, was overthrown, 
 and it was not until after many a violent shock 
 of arms, after terrible slaughter of men, after 
 strange diplomatic combinations, after many 
 
 ^ Originally published as an Introduction to the 
 new edition of Wordsworth's Comphte Poetical WorJcs 
 (1888), 
 
 A
 
 2 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 social convulsions, after many portentous muta- 
 tions of empire, that Europe once more settled 
 down for a season into established order and 
 system. In England almost alone, after the loss 
 of her great possessions across the Atlantic Ocean, 
 the fabric of the State stood fast and firm. Yet 
 here, too, in these eighty years, an old order 
 slowly gave place to new. The restoration of 
 peace, after a war conducted with extraordinary 
 tenacity and fortitude, led to a still more wonder- 
 ful display of ingenuity, industry, and enterprise, 
 in the more fruitful field of commerce and of 
 manufactures. Wealth, in spite of occasional 
 vicissitudes, increased with amazing rapidity. 
 The population of England and Wales grew 
 from being seven and a half millions in 1770, 
 to nearly eighteen millions in 1850. Political 
 power was partially transferred from a territorial 
 aristocracy to the middle and trading classes. 
 Laws were made at once more equal and more 
 humane. During all the tumult of the great 
 war which for so many years bathed Europe 
 in fire, through all the throes and agitations 
 i)i Avliich peace brought fortli the new time, 
 Wordsworth for liulf a ccntiiry (1799-1850)
 
 WORDSWORTH. 3 
 
 dwelt sequestered in unbroken composure and 
 steadfastness in his chosen home amid the 
 mountains and lakes of his native region, working 
 out his own ideal of the high office of the Poet. 
 
 The interpretation of life in books and the 
 development of imagination underwent changes 
 of its own. Most of the great lights of the 
 eighteenth century were still burning, though 
 burning low, when Wordsworth came into the 
 world. Pope, indeed, had been dead for six 
 and twenty years, and all the rest of the Queen 
 Anne men had gone. But Gray only died in 
 1771. and Goldsmith in 1774. Ten years later 
 Johnson's pious and manly heart ceased to beat. 
 Voltaire and Rousseau, those two diverse oracles 
 of their age, both died in 1778. Hume had 
 passed away two years before. Cowper was 
 forty years older than "Wordsworth, but Cowper's 
 most delightful work was not produced until 
 1783. Crabbe, who anticipated Wordsworth's 
 choice of themes from rural life, while treating 
 them with a sterner realism, was virtually his 
 contemporary, having been born in 1754, and 
 dying in 1832. The two great names of his own 
 date were Scott and Coleridge, the fir.*t born in
 
 4 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 1771, and the second a year after \rai"ds. Then a 
 generation later came another new and ilkistrious 
 group. Byron was boru in 1788, Shelley in 1792, 
 and Keats in 1795. Wordsworth was destined 
 to see one more orb of the first purity and 
 brilliance rise to its place in the poetic firmament, 
 Tennyson's earliest volume of poems was pub- 
 lished in 1830, and In Memoriam, one of his two 
 masterpieces, in 1850. Any one who realises 
 for how much these famous names will always 
 stand in the history of human genius, may 
 measure the great transition that Wordsworth's 
 eighty years witnessed in some of men's deepest 
 feelings about art and life and " the speaking 
 face of earth and heaven," 
 
 Here, too, Wordsworth stood isolated and 
 apart, Scott and Southey were valued friends, 
 but, as has been truly said, he thought little of 
 Scott's poetry, and less of Southey's. Of Blake's 
 So7igs of Innocence and Experience he said, "There 
 is something in the madness of this man which 
 interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron 
 and Walter Scott." Coleridge was the only 
 member of the shining company with whom he 
 ever had any real intimacy of mintl, for whom
 
 WORDSWORTH. 5 
 
 he ever nourished real deference and admiration 
 as one " uni'elentingly possessed by thirst of 
 greatness, love, and beauty," and in whose 
 intellectual power, as the noble lines in the 
 Sixth Book of the Prelude so gorgeously attest, 
 he took the passionate interest of a man at once 
 master, disciple, and friend. It is true to say, as 
 Emerson says, that Wordsworth's genius was the 
 great exceptional fact of the literature of his 
 period. But he had no teachers nor inspirers save 
 nature and solitude. 
 
 Wordsworth was the son of a solicitor, and 
 all his early circumstances were homely, unpre- 
 tentious, and rather straitened. His mother 
 died when he was eight years old, and when his 
 father followed her five years later, two of his 
 uncles provided means for continuing at Cam- 
 bridge the education which had been begun in 
 the rural grammar-school of Hawkshead. It 
 was in 1787 that he went up to St. John's 
 College. He took his Bachelor's degree at the 
 beginning of 1791, and there his connection 
 with the university ended. 
 
 For some years after leaving Cambridge,
 
 6 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Wordsworth let himself drift. He did not feel 
 good enough for the Church ; he shrank from 
 the law ; fancying that he had talents for com- 
 mand, he thought of being a soldier. Meanwhile, 
 he passed a short time desultorily in London. 
 Towards the end of 1791, through Paris, he 
 passed on to Orleans and Blois, where he made 
 some friends and spent most of a year. He 
 returned to Paris in October 1792. France was 
 no longer standing on the top of golden hours. 
 The September massacres filled the sky with a 
 lurid flame. Wordsworth still retained his ardent 
 faith in the Revolution, and was even ready, 
 though no better than " a landsman on the deck 
 of a ship struggling with a hideous storm," to 
 make common cause with the Girondists. But 
 the prudence of friends at home forced him 
 back to England before the beginning of the 
 terrible year of '93. With his return closed that 
 first survey of its inheritance, which most serious 
 souls are wont to make in the fervid prime of 
 early manhood. 
 
 It would be idle to attempt any commentary 
 on tlie bare facts that we have just recapitulated ; 
 for Wordsworth himself has clothed them with
 
 WORDSWORTH. 7 
 
 their full force and meaning in the Prelude. This 
 record of the growth of a poet's mind, told by 
 the poet himself with all the sincerity of which 
 he was capable, is never likely to be popular. 
 Of that, as of so much more of his poetry, we 
 must say that, as a whole, it has not the musical, 
 harmonious, sympathetic quality which seizes us 
 in even the prose of such a book as Kousseau's 
 Confessions. Macaulay thought the Prelude a 
 poorer and more tiresome ExciLrsion, with the 
 old flimsy philosophy about the effect of scenery 
 on the mind, the old crazy mystical metaphysics, 
 and the endless wilderness of twaddle ; still he 
 admits that there are some fine descriptions and 
 energetic declamations. All Macaulay's tastes 
 and habits of mind made him a poor judge of 
 such a poet as Wordsworth. He valued spirit, 
 energy, pomp, stateliness of form and diction, 
 and actually thought Dry den's fine lines about 
 to-morrow being falser than the former day 
 equal to any eight lines in Lucretius. But his 
 words truly express the eff'ect of the Prelude on 
 more vulgar minds than his own. George Eliot, 
 on the other hand, who had the inward eye that 
 was not among Macaulay's gifts, found the Prelude
 
 6 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 full of material for a daily liturgy, and it is easy 
 
 to imagine how she fondly lingered, as she did, 
 
 over such a thought as this — 
 
 "There is 
 One great society alone on earth : 
 The noble Living and the noble Dead." 
 
 There is, too, as may be found imbedded even in 
 
 Wordsworth's dullest work, many a line of the 
 
 truest poetical quality, such as that on Newton's 
 
 statue in the silent Chapel of Trinity College — 
 
 " The marble index of a mind for ever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of Thought alone." 
 
 Apart, however, from beautiful lines like this, 
 and from many noble passages of high reflection 
 set to sonorous verse, this remarkable poem is in 
 its whole effect unique in impressive power, as a 
 picture of the advance of an elect and serious 
 spirit from childhood and school-time, through 
 the ordeal of adolescence, through close contact 
 with stirring and enormous events, to that 
 decisive stage when it has found the sources of 
 its strength, and is fully and finally prepared to 
 put its temper to the proof. 
 
 The three Books that describe the poet's 
 residence in France have a special and a striking
 
 WORDSWORTH. 9 
 
 value of their own. Their presentation of the 
 phases of good men's minds as the successive 
 scenes of the Ee volution unfolded themselves 
 has real historic interest. More than this, it is 
 an abiding lesson to brave men how to bear 
 themselves in hours of public stress. It portrays 
 exactly that mixture of persevering faith and hope 
 with firm and reasoned judgment, with which I 
 like to think that Turgot, if he had lived, would 
 have confronted the workings of the Revolu- 
 tionary power. Great masters in many kinds 
 have been inspired by the French Revolution. 
 Human genius might seem to have exhausted 
 itself in the burning political passion of Burke, 
 in the glowing melodrama of fire and tears of 
 Carlyle, Michelet, Hugo; but the ninth, tenth, 
 and eleventh Books of the Prelude, by their 
 strenuous simplicity, their deep truthfulness, 
 their slowfooted and inexorable transition from 
 ardent hope to dark imaginations, sense of 
 woes to come, sorrow for human kind, and 
 pain of heart, breathe the very spirit of 
 the great catastrophe. There is none of the 
 ephemeral glow of the political exhortation, none 
 of the tiresome falsity of the dithyramb in history.
 
 to WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Wordsworth might well wish that some dramatic 
 tale, endued with livelier shapes and flinging out 
 less guarded words, might set forth the lessons of 
 his experience. The material was fitting. The 
 story of these three Books has something of the 
 severity, the self-control, the inexorable necessity 
 of classic tragedy, and like classic tragedy it has 
 a noble end. The dregs and sour sediment that 
 reaction from exaggerated hope is so apt to stir 
 in poor natures had no place here. The French 
 Revolution made the one crisis in AVordsworth's 
 mental history, the one heavy assault on his con- 
 tinence of soul, and when he emerged from it all 
 his greatness remained to him. After a long 
 spell of depression, bewilderment, mortification, 
 and sore disappointment, the old faith in new 
 shapes was given back. 
 
 " Nature's self, 
 By all varieties of human love 
 Assisted, led me back through opening day 
 To those sweet counsels between head and heart 
 Whence grew that genuine knowledge, fraught 
 
 with peace, 
 Which, through the later sinkings of this cause, 
 Hath still upheld me and upholds me now." 
 
 It Avas six years after his return from France
 
 WORDSWORTH. 1 1 
 
 before Wordsworth finally settled down in the 
 scenes with which his name and the power of his 
 genius were to be for ever associated. During 
 this interval it was that two great sources of 
 personal influence were opened to him. He 
 entered upon that close and beloved companion- 
 ship with his sister, which remained unbroken 
 to the end of their days ; and he first made the 
 acquaintance of Coleridge. The character of 
 Dorothy Wordsworth has long taken its place 
 in the gallery of admirable and devoted women 
 who have inspired the work and the thoughts 
 of great men. " She is a woman, indeed," said 
 Coleridge, " in mind I mean, and heart ; for her 
 person is such that if you expected to see a pretty 
 woman, you would think her rather ordinary; if 
 you expected to see an ordinary woman, you 
 would think her pretty." To the solidity, sense, 
 and strong intelligence of the Wordsworth stock 
 she added a grace, a warmth, a liveliness pecu- 
 liarly her own. Her nature shines transparent in 
 her letters, in her truly admirable journal, and in 
 every report that we have of her. Wordsworth's 
 own feelings for her, and his sense of the debt 
 that he owed to her faithful afi'ection and eager 
 mind, he has placed on lasting record.
 
 1 2 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 The intimacy with Coleridge was, as has been 
 said, Wordsworth's one strong friendship, and 
 must be counted among the highest examples of 
 that generous relation between great writers. 
 Unlike in the quality of their genius, and unlike 
 in force of character and the fortunes of life, they 
 remained bound to one another by sympathies 
 that neither time nor harsh trial ever extin- 
 guished. Coleridge had left Cambridge in 1794, 
 had married, had started various unsuccessful 
 projects for combining the improvement of man- 
 kind with the earning of an income, and was now 
 settled in a small cottage at Nether Stowey, in 
 Somersetshire, with an acre and a half of land, 
 from which he hoped to raise corn and vegetables 
 enough to support himself and his wife, as well 
 as to feed a couple of pigs on the refuse. Words- 
 worth and his sister were settled at Racedown, 
 near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. In 1797 they 
 moved to Alfoxden, in Somersetshire, their prin- 
 cipal inducement to the change being Coleridge's 
 society. The friendship bore fruit in the pro- 
 duction of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, mainly the 
 work of Wordsworth, but containing no less not- 
 able a contribution from Coleridge than the
 
 WORDSWORTH. 1 3 
 
 Ancient Mariner. Tlie two poets only received 
 thirty guineas for their work, aiul the publisher 
 lost his money. The taste of the country was not 
 yet ripe for Wordsworth's poetic experiment. 
 
 Immediately after the publication of the Lyrical 
 Ballads, the two Wordsworths and Coleridge 
 started from Yarmouth for Hamburg. Cole- 
 ridge's account in Satyrane's Letters, published 
 in the Biographia Liter aria, of the voyage and of 
 the conversation between the tAVO English poets 
 and Klopstock, is worth turning to. The pastor 
 told them that Klopstock was the German Milton. 
 " A very German Milton indeed," they thought. 
 The Wordsworths remained for four wintry 
 months at Goslar, in Saxony, while Coleridge 
 went on to Ratzeburg, Gottingen, and other 
 places, mastering German, and " delving in the 
 unwholesome quicksilver mines of metaphysic 
 depths." Wordsworth made little way with the 
 language, but worked diligently at his own verse. 
 
 When they came back to England, Wordsworth 
 and his sister found their hearts turning with 
 irresistible attraction to their own familiar 
 countryside. They at last made their way to 
 Grasmere. The opening book of the Recluse,
 
 1 4 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 which is published for the first time in the 
 present vokime, describes in fine verse the emo- 
 tions and the scene. The face of this delicious 
 vale is not quite what it was when 
 
 " Cottages of mountain stone 
 Clustered like stars some few, but single most, 
 And lurking dimly in their shy retreats, 
 Or glancing at each other cheerful looks 
 Like separated stars with clouds between." 
 
 But it is foolish to let ourselves be fretted by 
 the villa, the hotel, and the tourist. We may 
 well be above all this in a scene that is haunted 
 by a great poetic shade. The substantial features 
 and elements of beauty still remain, the crags 
 and woody steeps, the lake, " its one green island 
 and its winding shores ; the multitude of little 
 rocky hills." Wordsworth was not the first poet 
 to feel its fascination. Gray visited the Lakes 
 in the autumn of 1769, and coming into the 
 vale of Grasmere from the north-west, declared 
 it to be one of the sweetest landscapes that 
 art ever attempted to imitate, an unsuspected 
 paradise of peace and rusticity. We cannot 
 indeed compare the little crystal mere, set like 
 a gem in tlie verdant circle of tlie liills, witli
 
 WORDSWORTH. 15 
 
 the grandeur and glory of Lucerne, or the 
 radiant gladness and expanse of Como : yet it 
 has an inspiration of its own, to delight, to 
 soothe, to fortify, and to refresh. 
 
 " What want we ? have we not perpetual streams, 
 Warm woods, and sunny hills, and fresh green fields, 
 And mountains not less green, and flocks and herds, 
 And thickets full of songsters, and the voice 
 Of lordly birds, an unexpected sound 
 Heard now and then from morn to latest eve, 
 Admonishing the man who walks below 
 Of solitude and silence in the sky. 
 These have we, and a thousand nooks of earth 
 Have also these, but nowhere else is found. 
 Nowhere (or is it fancy 1) can be found 
 The one sensation that is here ; . . . 'tis the sense 
 Of majesty, and beauty, and repose, 
 A blended holiness of earth and sky. 
 Something that makes this individual spot. 
 This small abiding-place of many men, 
 A termination, and a last retreat, 
 A centre, come from wheresoe'er you will, 
 A whole without dependence or defect, 
 Made for itself, and happy in itself. 
 Perfect contentment, Unity entire." 
 
 In the Grasmere vale Wordsworth lived for 
 half a century, first in a little cottage at the 
 northern corner of the lake, and then (1813) 
 in a more commodious house at Rydal Mount
 
 16 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 at the southern end, on the road to Ambleside. 
 In 1802 he married Mary Hutchinson, of 
 Penrith, and this completed the circle of his 
 felicity. Mary, he once said, was to his ear 
 the most musical and most truly English in 
 sound of all the names we have. The name 
 was of harmonious omen. The two beautiful 
 sonnets that he wrote on his wife's portrait 
 long years after, when " morning into noon had 
 passed, noon into eve," show how much her 
 large heart and humble mind had done for the 
 blessedness of his home. 
 
 Their life was almost more simple than that 
 of the dalesmen their neighbours. " It is my 
 opinion," ran one of his oracular sayings to 
 Sir George Beaumont, " that a man of letters, 
 and indeed all public men of every pursuit, 
 should be severely frugal." Means were found 
 for supporting the modest home out of two 
 or three small windfalls bequeathed by friends 
 or relatives, and by the time that children had 
 begun to come Wordsworth was raised to 
 affluence by obtaining the post of distributor 
 of stamps for Westmoreland and part of Cum- 
 b<'rl;uid. Ilis life was happily devoid of
 
 WORDSWORTH. 1 7 
 
 striking external incident. Its essential part 
 lay in meditation and composition. 
 
 He was surrounded by friends. Southey 
 had made a home for himself and his beloved 
 library a few miles over the hills, at Keswick. 
 De Quincey, with his clever brains and shallow 
 character, took up his abode in the cottage 
 which Wordsworth had first lived in at Gras- 
 mere. Coleridge, born the most golden genius 
 of them all, came to and fro in those fruitless 
 unhappy wanderings which consumed a life 
 that once promised to be so rich in blessing 
 and in glory. In later years Dr. Arnold built 
 a house at Fox How, attracted by the Words- 
 worths and the scenery ; and other lesser lights 
 came into the neighbourhood. " Our intercourse 
 with the Wordsworths," Arnold wrote on the 
 occasion of his first visit in 1832, "was one 
 of the brightest spots of all ; nothing could 
 exceed their friendliness, and my almost daily 
 walks with him were things not to be for- 
 gotten. Once and once only we had a good 
 fight about the Keform Bill during a walk up 
 Greenhead Ghyll to see the unfinished sheep- 
 fold, recorded in Michael. But I am sure that 
 B
 
 18 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 our political disagreement did not at all inter- 
 fere with our enjoyment of each other's society ; 
 for I think that in the great principles of 
 things we agreed very entirely." It ought to 
 be possible, for that matter, for magnanimous 
 men, even if they do not agree in the great 
 principles of things, to keep pleasant terms with 
 one another for more than one afternoon's walk. 
 Many pilgrims came, and the poet seems to 
 have received them with cheerful equanimity. 
 Emerson called upon him in 1833, and found 
 him plain, elderly, whitehaired, not prepossessing. 
 " He led me out into his garden, and showed 
 me the gravel walk in which thousands of his 
 lines were composed. He had just returned 
 from Staifa, and within three days had made 
 three sonnets on Fingal's Cave, and was com- 
 posing a fourth when he was called in to see 
 me. He said, 'If you are interested in my 
 verses, perhaps you will like to hear these lines.' 
 I gladly assented, and he recollected himself 
 for a few moments, and then stood forth and 
 repeated, one after the other, the three entire 
 sonnets with great animation. This recitation 
 was so unlooked for and surprising — he, the old
 
 WORDSWORTH. 1 9 
 
 Wordsworth, standing apart, and reciting to me 
 in a garden-walk, like a schoolboy declaiming — 
 that I at first was near to laugh; but recollecting 
 myself, that I had come thus far to see a poet, 
 and he Avas chanting poems to me, I saw that 
 he was right and I was Avrong, and gladly 
 gave myself up to hear. He never was in haste 
 to publish ; partly because he corrected a good 
 deal. . . . He preferred such of his poems as 
 touched the affections to any others ; for what- 
 ever is didactic — what theories of society, and so 
 on — might perish quickly, but whatever combined 
 a truth with an affection was good to-day and 
 good for ever " (^English Traits, ch. i.), 
 
 Wordsworth was far too wise to encourage the 
 pilgrims to turn into abiding sojourners in his 
 chosen land. Clough has described how, when 
 he was a lad of eighteen (1837), with a mild 
 surprise he heard the venerable poet correct the 
 tendency to exaggerate the importance of flowers 
 and fields, lakes, waterfalls, and scenery. " People 
 come to the Lakes," said Wordsworth, " and are 
 charmed with a particular spot, and build a house, 
 and find themselves discontented, forgetting that 
 these things are only the sauce and garnish of life."
 
 20 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 In spite of a certain hardness and stiffness, 
 Wordsworth must have been an admirable com- 
 panion for anybody capable of true elevation of 
 mind. The unfortunate Haydon says, with his 
 usual accent of enthusiasm, after a saunter at 
 Hampstead, " Never did any man so beguile the 
 time as Wordsworth. His purity of heart, his 
 kindness, his soundness of principle, his informa- 
 tion, his knowledge, and the intense and eager 
 feelings with which he pours forth all he knows, 
 affect, interest, and enchant one " (Aufohiog. i. 
 298, 384). The diary of Crabb Robinson, the 
 correspondence of Charles Lamb, the delight- 
 ful autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, and much 
 less delightfully the autobiography of Harriet 
 Martineau, all help us to realise by many a 
 trait Wordsworth's daily walk and conversation. 
 Of all the glimpses that we get, from these and 
 many other sources, none are more pleasing than 
 those of the intercourse between Wordsworth 
 and Scott. They were the two manliest and 
 most wholesome men of genius of their time. 
 They held different theories of poetic art, but 
 their affection and esteem for one another never 
 Varied, from the early days when Scott and his
 
 WORDSWORTH. 21 
 
 young ■wife visited "Wordsworth in liis cottage 
 at Grasmere, down to that sorrowful autumn 
 evening (1831) when Wordsworth and his 
 daughter went to Abbotsford to bid farewell to 
 the wondrous potentate, then just about to start 
 on his vain search for new life, followed by " the 
 might of tlie whole earth's good wishes." 
 
 Of Wordsworth's demeanour and physical 
 presence, De Quincey's account, silly, coxcombi- 
 cal, and vulgar, is the worst; Carlyle's, as might 
 be expected from his magical gift of portraiture, 
 is the best. Carlyle cared little for Wordsworth's 
 poetry, had a real respect for the antique great- 
 ness of his devotion to Poverty and Peasanthood, 
 recognised his strong intellectual powers and 
 strong character, but thought him rather dull, 
 bad-tempered, unproductive, and almost weari- 
 some, and found his divine reflections and un- 
 fathomabilities stinted, scanty, uncertain, palish. 
 From these and many other disparagements, one 
 gladly passes to the picture of the poet as he 
 was in the flesh at a breakfast-party given by 
 Henry Taylor, at a tavern in St. James's Street, 
 in 1840. The subject of the talk was Literature, 
 its laws, practices, and observances : — " He talked
 
 22 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 well in his way ; with veracity, easy brevity and 
 force ; as a wise tradesman would of his tools 
 and workshop, and as no unwise one could. 
 His voice was good, frank, and sonorous, though 
 practically clear, distinct, and forcible, rather 
 than melodious ; the tone of him business-like, 
 sedately confident ; no discourtesy, yet no anxiety 
 about being courteous : a fine wholesome rusticity, 
 fresh as his mountain breezes, sat well on the 
 stalwart veteran, and on all he said and did. 
 You would have said he was a usually taciturn 
 man, glad to unlock himself to audience sym- 
 pathetic and intelligent, when such offered itself. 
 His face bore marks of much, not always peace- 
 ful, meditation ; the look of it not bland or 
 benevolent, so much as close, impregnable, and 
 hard ; a man mnlta tacere loquive paratus, in a 
 world where he had experienced no lack of 
 contradictions as he strode along ! The eyes 
 were not very brilliant, but they had a quiet 
 clearness ; there was enough of brow, and well 
 shaped ; rather too much of cheek (' horse-face,' 
 I have heard satirists say), face of squarish shape 
 and decidedly longish, as I think the head itself 
 was (its ' length ' going horizontal) ; he was
 
 WORDSWORTH. 23 
 
 large-boned, lean, but still firm-knit, tall, and 
 strong-looking when he stood ; a right good 
 old steel-gray figure, with rustic simplicity and 
 dignity about him, and a vivacious strength 
 looking through him which might have suited 
 one of those old steel-gray Markgrafs [Graf= 
 Graii, ' Steel-gray '] whom Henry the Fowler 
 set up to ward the ' marches,' and do battle with 
 the intrusive heathen, in a stalwart and judicious 
 manner." 
 
 Whoever might be his friends within an easy 
 walk, or dwelling afar, the poet knew how to 
 live his OAvn life. The three fine sonnets headed 
 Personal Talk, so well known, so warmly accepted 
 in our better hours, so easily forgotten in hours 
 not so good between pleasant levities and 
 grinding preoccupations, show us how little his 
 neighbours had to do with the poet's genial 
 seasons of " smooth passions, smooth discourse, 
 and joyous thought." 
 
 For those days Wordsworth was a consider- 
 able traveller. Between 1820 and 1837 he made 
 long tours abroad, to Switzerland, to Holland, to 
 Belgium, to Italy. In other years he visited 
 Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. He was no me-
 
 24 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 chanical tourist, admiring to order and marvelling 
 by regulation ; and he confessed to Mrs. Fletcher 
 that he fell asleep before the Venus de Medici at 
 Florence. But the product of these wanderings 
 is to be seen in some of his best sonnets, such 
 as the first on Calais Beach, the famous one on 
 Westminster Bridge, the second of the two on 
 Bruges, where "the Spirit of Antiquity mounts 
 to the seat of grace within the mind — a deeper 
 peace than that in deserts found " — and in some 
 other fine pieces. 
 
 In weightier matters than mere travel, Words- 
 worth showed himself no mere recluse. He 
 watched the great affairs then being transacted 
 in Europe with the ardent interest of his youth, 
 and his sonnets to Liberty, commemorating the 
 attack by France upon the Swiss, the fate of 
 Venice, tlie struggle of Hofer, the resistance of 
 Spain, give no unworthy expression to some of 
 the best of the many and varied motives that 
 animated England in her long struggle with 
 Bonaparte. The sonnet to Toussaint I'Ouverture 
 concludes with some of the noblest lines in the 
 English language. The strong verses on the 
 expected death of Mr. Fox are alive with a
 
 WORDSWORTH. 25 
 
 magnanimous public spirit that goes deeper than 
 the accidents of political opinion. In his young 
 days he had sent Fox a copy of the Lyrical 
 Ballads, with a long letter indicating his sense 
 of Fox's great and generous qualities. Pitt he 
 admits that he could never regard with com- 
 placency. " I believe him, however," he said, 
 "to have been as disinterested a man, and as 
 true a lover of his country, as it was possible 
 for so ambitious a man to be. His first wish 
 (though probably unknown to himself) was that 
 his country should prosper under his administra- 
 tion ; his next that it should prosper. Could the 
 order of these wishes have been reversed, Mr. 
 Pitt would have avoided many of the grievous 
 mistakes into which, I think, he fell," "You 
 always went away from Burke," he once told 
 Haydon, " with your mind filled ; from Fox with 
 your feelings excited ; and from Pitt with wonder 
 at his having had the power to make the worse 
 appear the better reason." 
 
 Of the poems composed under the influence of 
 that best kind of patriotism which ennobles local 
 attachments by associating them with the lasting 
 elements of moral srrandeur and heroism it is
 
 26 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 needless to speak. They have long taken their 
 place as something higher even than literary 
 classics. As years began to dull the old pene- 
 tration of a mind which had once approached, 
 like other youths, the shield of human nature 
 from the golden side, and had been eager to 
 " clear a passage for just government," Words- 
 worth lost his interest in progress. Waterloo 
 may be taken for the date at which his social 
 grasp began to fail, and with it his poetic glow. 
 He opposed Catholic emancipation as stubbornly 
 as Eldon, and tlie Reform Bill as bitterly as 
 Croker. For the practical reforms of his day, 
 even in education, for wliich he had always 
 spoken up, Wordsworth was not a force. His 
 heart clung to England as he found it. " This 
 concrete attachment to the scenes about him," 
 says Mr. Myers, " had always formed an important 
 element in his character. Ideal politics, whether 
 in Church or State, had never occupied his mind, 
 which sought rather to find its informing prin- 
 ciples embodied in the England of his own day." 
 This flowed, we may suppose, from Burke. In 
 a passage in the seventh Book of the Prelude, he 
 describes, in lines a little prosaic but (juite true,
 
 WORDSWORTH. 27 
 
 how lie sat, saw, and heard, not unthankful nor 
 
 uninspired, the great orator 
 
 " While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth 
 Against all systems built on abstract rights." 
 
 The Church, as conceived by the spirit of Laud, 
 and described by Hooker's voice, was the great 
 symbol of the union of high and stable institution 
 with thought, faith, right living, and " sacred 
 religion, mother of form and fear." As might 
 be expected from such a point of view, the 
 church pieces, to which Wordsworth gave so 
 much thought, are, with few exceptions, such as 
 the sonnet on Seathivaite Chapel, formal, hard, 
 and very thinly enriched with spiritual graces 
 or unction. They are ecclesiastical, not religious. 
 In religious poetry, the Church of England finds 
 her most affecting voice, not in Wordsworth, but 
 in the Lyra Tnnocentium and the Christian Year. 
 Wordsworth abounds in the true devotional cast 
 of mind, but less than anywhere else does it show 
 in his properly ecclesiastical verse. 
 
 It was perhaps natural that when events no 
 longer insjiired him, Wordsworth should have 
 turned with new feelings towards the classic, and 
 discovered a virtue in classic fojin to which his
 
 28 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 own method had hitherto made him a little blind. 
 Towards the date of Waterloo, he read over again 
 some of the Latin writers, in attempting to pre- 
 pare his son for college. He even at a later date 
 set about a translation of the yEneid of Virgil, 
 but the one permanent result of the classic move- 
 ment in his mind is Laodamia. Earlier in life 
 he had translated some books of Ariosto at the 
 rate of a hundred lines a day, and he even at- 
 tempted fifteen of the sonnets of Michael Angelo, 
 but so much meaning is compressed into so little 
 room in those pieces that he found the difficulty 
 insurmountable. He had a high opinion of the 
 resources of the Italian language. The poetry 
 of Dante and of Michael Angelo, he said, proves 
 that if there be little majesty and strength in 
 Italian verse, the fault is in the authors and not 
 in the tongue. 
 
 Our last glimpse of Wordsworth in the full 
 and peculiar power of his genius is the Ode 
 Composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour 
 avd heaidy. It is the one exception to the criti- 
 cal dictum that all his good work was done in 
 the decade between 1798 and 1808. He lived 
 for more than thirty years after this fine com-
 
 WORDSWORTH. 29 
 
 position. But he added nothing more of value 
 to the work that he had already done. The 
 public appreciation of it was very slow. The 
 most influential among the critics were for long 
 hostile and contemptuous. Never at any time 
 did Wordsworth come near to such popularity 
 as that of Scott or of Byron. Nor was this all. 
 For many years most readers of poetry thought 
 more even of Lalla Eookh than of the Excursion. 
 While Scott, Byron, and Moore were receiving 
 thousands of pounds, Wordsworth received no- 
 thing. Between 1830 and 1840 the current 
 turned in Wordsworth's direction, and Avlien he 
 received the honour of a doctor's degree at the 
 Oxford Commemoration in 1839, the Sheldonian 
 theatre made him the hero of the day. In the 
 spring of 1843 South ey died, and Sir Eobert 
 Peel pressed Wordsworth to succeed him in the 
 office of Poet-Laureate. " It is a tribute of 
 respect," said the Minister, "justly due to the 
 first of living poets." But almost immediately 
 the light of his common popularity was eclipsed 
 by Tennyson, as it had earlier been eclipsed by 
 Scott, by Byron, and in some degree by Shelley. 
 Yet his fame among those who know, among
 
 30 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 competent critics with a right to judge, to-day 
 stands higher than it ever stood. Only two 
 writers have contributed so many lines of daily 
 popularity and application. In the handbooks 
 of familiar quotations Wordsworth fills more 
 space than anybody save Shakespeare and Pope, 
 He exerted commanding influence over great 
 minds that have powerfully affected our genera- 
 tion. " I never before," said George Eliot in 
 the days when her character was forming itself 
 (1839), "met with so many of my own feelings 
 expressed just as I should like them," and her 
 reverence for Wordsworth remained to the end. 
 J. S. Mill has described how important an event 
 in his life was his first reading of Wordsworth. 
 " What made his poems a medicine for my state 
 of mind was that they expressed not mere out- 
 ward beauty, but states of feeling and of thought 
 coloured by feeling, under the excitement of 
 beauty. I needed to be made to feel that there 
 was real permanent happiness in tranquil con- 
 templation. Wordsworth taught me this, not 
 only without turning away from, but with 
 greatly increased interest in the common feel- 
 ings and common destiny of human beings "
 
 WUKDSWORTH. 3 1 
 
 (Aufobiog., 148). This effect of Wordsworth on 
 Mill is the very illustration of the phrase of 
 a later poet of our own day, one of the most 
 eminent and by his friends best beloved of all 
 those whom Wordsworth had known, and on 
 whom he poured out a generous portion of his 
 own best spirit : — 
 
 " Time may restore us in his course 
 Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force . 
 But where will Europe's latter hour 
 Again find Wordsworth's healing power ? " 
 
 It is the power for which Matthew Arnold found 
 this happy designation that compensates us for 
 that absence of excitement of which the heed- 
 less complain in Wordsworth's verse — excite- 
 ment so often meaning mental fever, hysterics, 
 distorted passion, or other fitful agitation of the 
 soul. 
 
 Pretensions are sometimes advanced as to 
 Wordsworth's historic position, which involve 
 a mistaken view of literary history. Thus, we 
 are gravely told by the too zealous Words- 
 worthian that the so-called poets of the eighteenth 
 century were simply men of letters; they had 
 various accomplishments and great general ability,
 
 32 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 but their thoughts were expressed in prose, or 
 in mere metrical diction, which passed current as 
 poetry without being so. Yet Burns belonged 
 wholly to the eighteenth century (1759-96), and 
 no verse-writer is so little literary as Burns, so 
 little i^rosaic ; no writer more truly poetic in 
 melody, diction, thought, feeling, and spontaneous 
 song. It was Burns who showed AVordsworth's 
 own youth " How verse may build a princely 
 throne on humble truth." Nor can we under- 
 stand how Cowper is to be set down as simply 
 a man of letters. We may, too, if we please, 
 deny the name of poetry to Collins's tender and 
 pensive Ode to Evening; but we can only do 
 this on critical principles, which would end in 
 classing the author of Lycldas and Comus, of the 
 Allegro and Fenseroso, as a writer of various ac- 
 complishments and great general ability, but at 
 bottom simply a man of letters and by no means 
 a poet. It is to Gray, however, that we must 
 turn for the distinctive character of the best 
 poetry of the eighteenth century. With reluc- 
 tance we will surrender the Pindaric Odes, 
 though not without risking the observation that 
 some of Wordsworth's own criticism on Gray is as
 
 WORDSWORTH. 33 
 
 narrow and as much beside the mark as Jeffrey's 
 on the Excursion. But the Ode on Eton College is 
 not to have grudged to it the noble name and 
 true quality of poetry, merely because, as one of 
 Johnson's most unfortunate criticisms expresses 
 it, the ode suggests nothing to Gray which every 
 beholder does not equally think and feel. To 
 find beautiful and pathetic language, set to har- 
 monious numbers, for the common impressions of 
 meditative minds, is no small part of the poet's 
 task. That part has never been achieved by any 
 poet in any tongue with more complete perfec- 
 tion and success than in the immortal Elegy, of 
 which we may truly say that it has for nearly a 
 century and a half given to greater multitudes 
 of men more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry 
 than any other single piece in all the glorious 
 treasury of English verse. It abounds, as John- 
 son says, " with images which find a mirror in 
 every mind, and with sentiments to which every 
 bosom returns an echo." These moving common- 
 places of the human lot Gray approached through 
 books and studious contemplation ; not, as 
 Wordsworth approached them, by daily contact 
 with the lives and haV)it of men and the forces 
 C
 
 34 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 and magical apparitions of external nature. But 
 it is a narrow view to suppose that the men of 
 the eighteenth century did not look through the 
 literary conventions of the day to the truths of 
 life and nature behind them. The conventions 
 have gone, or are changed, and Ave are all glad of 
 it. Wordsworth effected a wholesome deliver- 
 ance when he attacked the artificial diction, the 
 personifications, the allegories, the antitheses, the 
 barren rhymes and monotonous metres, which 
 the reigning taste had approved. But while 
 welcoming the new freshness, sincerity, and 
 direct and fertile return on nature, that is a very 
 bad reason why we should disparage poetry so 
 genial, so simple, so humane, and so perpetually 
 pleasing, as the best verse of the rationalistic 
 century. 
 
 What Wordsworth did was to deal with 
 themes that had been partially handled by pre- 
 cursors and contemporaries, in a larger and more 
 devoted spirit, with wider amplitude of illustra- 
 tion, and with the steadfastness and persistency 
 of a religious teacher. " Every great poet is a 
 teacher," he said ; " I wish to be considered as a 
 teacher or as nothing." It may be doubted
 
 WORDSWORTH. 35 
 
 whether his general proposition is at all true, 
 and whether it is any more the essential business 
 of a poet to be a teacher than it was the business 
 of Handel, Beethoven, or Mozart. They attune 
 the soul to high states of feeling; the direct 
 lesson is often as nought. But of himself no 
 view could be more sound. He is a teacher, or 
 he is nothing. " To console the afflicted ; to add 
 sunshine to daylight by making the happy 
 happier ; to teach the young and the gracious of 
 every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore 
 to become more actively and sincerely virtuous " 
 — that was his vocation ; to show that the 
 mutual adaptation of the external world and the 
 inner mind is able to shape a paradise from the 
 " simple produce of the common day " — that was 
 his high argument. 
 
 Simplification was, as I have said elsewhere, 
 the keynote of the revolutionary time. Words- 
 worth was its purest exponent, but he had one 
 remarkable peculiarity, which made him, in Eng- 
 land at least, not only its purest but its greatest. 
 While leading men to pierce below the artificial 
 and conventional to the natural man and natural 
 life, as Rousseau did, Wordsworth still cherished
 
 36 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 the symbols, the traditions, and the great insti- 
 tutes of social order. Simplification of life and 
 thought and feeling was to he accomplished with- 
 out summoning up the dangerous spirit of de- 
 struction and revolt. Wordsworth lived with 
 nature, yet waged no angry railing war against 
 society. The chief opposing force to Wordsworth 
 in literature was Byron. Whatever he was in 
 his heart, Byron in his work was drawn by all 
 the forces of his character, genius, and circum- 
 stances to the side of violent social change, and 
 hence the extraordinary popularity of Byron in 
 the continental camp of emancipation. Com- 
 munion with nature is in Wordsworth's doctrine 
 the school of duty. With Byron nature is the 
 mighty consoler and the vindicator of the rebel. 
 
 A curious thing, which we may note in passing, 
 is that Wordsworth, who clung fervently to the 
 historic foundations of society as it stands, was 
 wholly indifferent to history; while Byron, on 
 the contrary, as tlic fourth canto of Childe Harold 
 is enough to show, had at least the sentiment of 
 history in as great a degree as any poet that 
 ever lived, and has given to it by far the most 
 magnificent expression. No doubt, it was his-
 
 WORDSWORTH. 37 
 
 tory on its romantic, rather than its philosophic 
 or its political side. 
 
 On Wordsworth's exact position in the hier- 
 archy of sovereign poets, a deep difference of 
 estimate still divides even the most excellent 
 judges. Nobody now dreams of placing him so 
 low as the Edinburgh Reviewers did, nor so high 
 as Southey placed him when he wrote to the 
 author of Philip van Artevelde in 1829 that a 
 greater poet than Wordsworth there never has 
 been nor ever will be. An extravagance of this 
 kind Avas only the outburst of genei'ous friend- 
 ship. Coleridge deliberately placed Wordsworth 
 "nearest of all modern writers to Shakespeare 
 and Milton, yet in a kind perfectly unborrowed 
 and his own." Arnold, himself a poet of rare 
 and memorable quality, declares his firm belief 
 that the poetical performance of Wordsworth 
 is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, un- 
 doubtedly the most considerable in our language 
 from the Elizabethan age to the present time. 
 Dryden, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Goldsmith, Burns, 
 Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats — "Wordsworth's 
 name deserves to stand, and will finally stand, 
 above them all." Mr. Myers, also a poet, and
 
 38 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 the author of a volume on Wordsworth as much 
 distinguished by insight as by admirable literary 
 grace and power, talks of " a Plato, a Dante, 
 a Wordsworth," all three in a breath, as stars 
 of equal magnitude in the great spiritual firma- 
 ment. To Mr. Swinburne, on the contrary, all 
 these panegyrical estimates savour of monstrous 
 and intolerable exaggeration. Amid these con- 
 tentions of celestial minds it will be safest 
 to content ourselves with one or two plain 
 observations in the humble positive degree, 
 without hurrying into high and final compara- 
 tives and superlatives. 
 
 One admission is generally made at the outset. 
 Whatever definition of poetry we fix upon, 
 whether that it is tlie language of passion or 
 imagination formed into regular numbers; or, 
 with Milton, that it should be " simple, sensuous, 
 impassioned ; " in any case there are great tracts 
 in Wordsworth which, by no definition and on 
 no terms, can be called poetry. If we say with 
 Shelley, that poetry is what redeems from decay 
 the visitations of the divinity in man, and is the 
 record of the best and happiest moments of 
 the best and happiest minds, then are we bound
 
 WORDSWORTH. 39 
 
 to agree that Wordswort-h records too many 
 moments that are not specially good or happy, 
 that he redeems from decay frequent visitations 
 that are not from any particular divinity in 
 man, and treats them all as very much on a 
 level. Mr. Arnold is undoubtedly right in his 
 view that, to be receivable as a classic, Words- 
 worth must be relieved of a great deal of the 
 poetical baggage that now encumbers him. 
 
 The faults and hindrances in Wordsworth's 
 poetry are obvious to every reader. For one 
 thing, the intention to instruct, to improve the 
 occasion, is too deliberate and too hardly pressed. 
 " We hate poetry," said Keats, " that has a 
 palpable design upon us. Poetry should be 
 great and unobtrusive." Charles Lamb's friendly 
 remonstrance on one of Wordsworth's poems is 
 applicable to more of them : " The instructions 
 conveyed in it are too direct ; they don't slide 
 into the mind of the reader while he is imagining 
 no such matter." 
 
 Then, except the sonnets and half a score of 
 the pieces where he reaches his topmost height, 
 there are few of his poems that are not too long, 
 and it often happens even that no degree of
 
 40 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 reverence for the teacher prevents one from 
 finding passages of almost unbearable prolixity. 
 A defence was once made by a great artist for 
 what, to the unregenerate mind, seemed the 
 merciless tardiness of movement in one of 
 Goethe's romances, that it was meant to impress 
 on his readers the slow march and the tedium 
 of events in human life. The lenient reader 
 may give Wordsworth the advantage of the 
 same ingenious explanation. We may venture 
 on a counsel which is more to the point, in 
 warning the student that not seldom in these 
 blocks of afflicting prose, suddenly Ave come 
 upon some of the profoundest and most beautiful 
 passages that the poet ever wrote. In deserts 
 of preaching we find, almost within sight of 
 one another, delightful oases of purest poetry. 
 Besides being prolix, Wordsworth is often cum- 
 brous ; has often no flight ; is not liquid, is 
 not musical. He is heavy and self-conscious with 
 the burden of his message. How much at his 
 best he is, when, as in the admirable and truly 
 Wordsworthian poem of Michael, he spares us a 
 sermon and leaves us the story. Then, he is apt 
 to wear a somewhat stiff-cut garment of solem-
 
 WORDSWOBTH. 41 
 
 nity, when not solemnity, but either sternness or 
 sadness, which are so different things, would seem 
 the fitter mood. In truth Wordsworth hardly 
 knows how to be stern, as Dante or Milton was 
 stern ; nor has he the note of plangent sadness 
 which strikes the ear in men as morally inferior 
 to him as Rousseau, Keats, Shelley, or Coleridge ; 
 nor has he the Olympian air with which Goethe 
 delivered sage oracles. This mere solemnity is 
 specially oppressive in some parts of the Excursion 
 — the performance where we best see the whole 
 poet, and where the poet most absolutely identi- 
 fies himself with his subject. Yet, even in the 
 midst of these solemn discoursings, he suddenly 
 introduces an episode in which his peculiar 
 power is at its height. There is no better 
 instance of this than the passage in the second 
 Book of the Ezcursmi, where he describes with 
 a fidelity, at once realistic and poetic, the worn- 
 out almsman, his patient life and sorry death, 
 and then the unimaginable vision in the skies, 
 as they brought the ancient man down through 
 dull mists from the mountain ridge to die. 
 These hundred and seventy lines are like the 
 landscape in which they were composed ; you
 
 42 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 can no more appreciate the beauty of the one 
 by a single or a second perusal, than you can 
 the other in a scamper through the vale on the 
 box of the coach. But any lover of poetry who 
 will submit himself with leisure and meditation 
 to the impressions of the story, the pity of it, 
 the naturalness of it, the glory and the mystic 
 splendours of the indifferent heavens, will feel 
 that here indeed is the true strength which out 
 of the trivial raises expression for the pathetic 
 and the sublime. 
 
 Apart, however, from excess of prolixity and 
 of solemnity, can it be really contended that in 
 purely poetic quality — in aerial freedom and 
 space, in radiant purity of light or depth and 
 variety of colour, in penetrating and subtle 
 sweetness of music, in supple mastery of the 
 instrument, in vivid spontaneity of imagination, 
 in clean-cut sureness of touch — Wordsworth is 
 not surpassed by men who were below him in 
 weight and greatness 1 Even in his own field of 
 the simple and the pastoral has he touched so 
 sweet and spontaneous a note as Burns's Daisy, 
 or the Mouse 1 When men seek immersion or 
 absorption in the atmosphere of pure poesy,
 
 WORDSWORTH. 43 
 
 without lesson or moral, or anything but delight 
 of fancy and stir of imagination, they will find 
 him less congenial to their mood than poets not 
 worthy to loose the latchet of his shoe in the 
 greater elements of his art. In all these com- 
 parisons, it is not merely Wordsworth's theme 
 and motive and dominant note that are different; 
 the skill of hand is different, and the musical ear 
 and the imaginative eye. 
 
 To maintain or to admit so much as this, how- 
 ever, is not to say the last word. The question 
 is whether AVordsworth, however unequal to 
 Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats 
 in imaginative quality, to Burns in tenderness, 
 warmth, and that humour which is so nearly 
 akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, 
 yet possesses excellences of his own which place 
 him in other respects above these master-spirits 
 of his time. If the question is to be answered 
 affirmatively, it is clear that only in one direction 
 must we look. The trait that really places 
 Wordsworth on an eminence above his poetic 
 contemporaries, and ranks him, as the ages are 
 likely to rank him, on a line just short of the 
 greatest of all time, is his direct appeal to will
 
 44 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 and conduct. " There is volition and self- 
 government in every line of his poetry, and his 
 best thoughts come from his steady resistance to 
 the ebb and flow of ordinary desires and regrets. 
 He contests the ground inch by inch with all 
 despondent and indolent humours, and often, 
 too, with movements of inconsiderate and 
 wasteful joy" {E. H. Hutton). That would 
 seem to be his true distinction and superiority 
 over men to whom more had been given of fire, 
 passion, and ravishing music. Those who deem 
 the end of poetry to be intoxication, fever, or 
 rainbow dreams, can care little for Wordsworth. 
 If its end be not intoxication, but on the contrary 
 a search from the wide regions of imagination 
 and feeling for elements of composure deep and 
 pure, and of self-government in a far loftier 
 sense than the merely prudential, then Words- 
 worth has a gift of his own in which he was 
 approached by no poet of his time. Scott's sane 
 and humane genius, Avith much the same aims, 
 yet worked with different methods. He once 
 remonstrated with Lockhart for being too apt to 
 measure things by some reference to literature. 
 " I have read books enough," said Scott, " and
 
 WORDSWORTH. 45 
 
 observed and conversed with enough of eminent 
 and splendidly cultivated minds ; but I assure 
 you. I have heard higher sentiments from the 
 lips of poor uneducated men and women, when 
 exerting the spirit of severe yet gentle heroism 
 under difficulties and afflictions, or speaking their 
 simple thoughts as to circumstances in the lot of 
 friends and neighbours, than I ever yet met with 
 out of the pages of the Bible. We shall never 
 learn to respect our real calling and destiny, 
 unless we have taught ourselves to consider 
 everything as moonshine compared with the 
 education of the heart." This admirable deliver- 
 ance of Scott's is, so far as it goes, eminently 
 Wordsworthian ; but Wordsworth went higher 
 and further, striving not only to move the 
 sympathies of the heart, but to enlarge the 
 understanding, and exalt and widen the spiritual 
 vision, all with the aim of leading us towards 
 firmer and austerer self-control. 
 
 Certain favourers of Wordsworth answer our 
 question with a triumphant affirmative, on the 
 strength of some ethical, or metaphysical, or 
 theological system which they believe themselves 
 to find in him. But is it credible that poets can
 
 46 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 permanently live by systems 1 Or is not system, 
 whether ethical, theological, or philosophical, the 
 heavy lead of poetry 1 Lucretius is indisputably 
 one of the mighty poets of the world, but 
 Epicureanism is not the soul of that majestic 
 muse. So with Wordsv/orth. Thought is, on 
 the whole, predominant over feeling in his verse, 
 but a prevailing atmosphere of deep and solemn 
 reflection does not make a system. His theologj'^ 
 and his ethics, and his so-called Platonical meta- 
 physics, have as little to do with the power of 
 his poetry over us, as the imputed Arianism or 
 any other aspect of the theology of Paradise Lost 
 has to do with the strength and the sublimity of 
 Milton, and his claim to a high perpetual place 
 in the hearts of men. It is best to be entirely 
 sceptical as to the existence of system and ordered 
 philosophy in Wordsworth. When he tells us 
 that " one impulse from a vernal wood may teach 
 you more of man, of moral evil and of good, than 
 all the sages can," such a proposition cannot be 
 seriously taken as more than a half-playful sally 
 for the benefit of some too bookish friend. No 
 impulse from a vernal wood can teach us any- 
 thing at all of moral evil and of good. When
 
 WORDSWORTH. 47 
 
 he says that it is his faith, " that every flower 
 enjoys the air it breathes," and that when the 
 budding twigs, spread out their fan to catch the 
 air, he is compelled to think "that there was 
 pleasure there," he expresses a charming poetic 
 fancy and no more, and it is idle to pretend to 
 see in it the fountain of a system of philosophy. 
 In the famous Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 
 the poet doubtless does point to a set of philo- 
 sophic ideas, more or less complete ; but the 
 thought from which he sets out, that our birth 
 is but a sleep and a forgetting, and that we are 
 less and less able to perceive the visionary gleam, 
 less and less alive to the glory and the dream of 
 external nature, as infancy recedes further from 
 us, is, with all respect for the declaration of Mr. 
 Ruskin to the contrary, contrary to notorious 
 fact, experience, and truth. It is a beggarly 
 conception, no doubt, to judge as if poetry 
 should always be capable of a prose rendering ; 
 but it is at least fatal to the philosophic preten- 
 sion of a line or a stanza if, when it is fairly 
 reduced to prose, the prose discloses that it is 
 nonsense, and there is at least one stanza of the 
 great Ode that tliis doom would assuredly await.
 
 48 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 Wordsworth's claim, his special gift, his lasting 
 contribution, lies in the extraordinary strenuous- 
 ness, sincerity, and insight with which he first 
 idealises and glorifies the vast universe around 
 us, and then makes of it, not a theatre on which 
 men play their parts, but an animate presence, 
 intermingling with our works, pouring its com- 
 panionable spirit about us, and " breathing 
 grandeur upon the very humblest face of human 
 life." This twofold and conjoint performance, 
 consciously and expressly — perhaps only too con- 
 sciously — undertaken by a man of strong inborn 
 sensibility to natural impressions, and system- 
 atically carried out in a lifetime of brooding 
 meditation and active composition, is Words- 
 worth's distinguishing title to fame and gratitude. 
 In " words that speak of nothing more than what 
 we are," he revealed new faces of nature ; he 
 dwelt on men as they are, men themselves ; he 
 strove to do that which has been declared to be 
 the true secret of force in art, to make the trivial 
 serve the expression of the sublime. " Words- 
 worth's distinctive work," Mr. Ruskin has justly 
 said {Modern Piiinfer.% iii. 2i).'5), "was a war with 
 pomp and pretence, and a <lispiay of the majesty
 
 WORDSWORTH. 49 
 
 of simple feelings and humble hearts, together 
 with high reflective truth in his analysis of the 
 courses of politics and ways of men ; without 
 these, his love of nature would have been com- 
 paratively worthless." 
 
 Yet let us not forget that he possessed the 
 gift which to an artist is the very root of the 
 matter. He saw Nature truly, he saw her as she is, 
 and with his own eyes. The critic whom I have 
 just quoted boldly pronounces him " the keenest 
 eyed of all modern poets for what is deep and 
 essential in nature." When he describes the 
 daisy, casting the beauty of its star-shaped 
 shadow on the smooth stone, or the boundless 
 depth of the abysses of the sky, or the clouds 
 made vivid as fire by the rays of light, every 
 touch is true, not the copying of a literary 
 phrase, but the result of direct observation. 
 
 It is true that Nature has sides to which 
 Wordsworth was not energetically alive — Nature 
 " red in tooth and claw." He was not energeti- 
 cally alive to the blind and remorseless cruelties 
 of life and the world. When in early spring he 
 heard the blended notes of the birds, and saw 
 the budding twigs and primrose tufts, it grieved 
 D
 
 50 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 him, amid such fair works of nature, to think 
 "what man has made of man." As if nature 
 itself, excluding the conscious doings of that 
 portion of nature which is the human race, and 
 excluding also nature's own share in the making of 
 poor Man, did not abound in raking cruelties and 
 horrors of her own. " Edel sei cler Mensch," sang 
 Goethe in a noble psalm, " Hiilfreich und gut, 
 Denn das allein unterscheidef ihn, Von alien Wesen 
 die wir Jcennen." " Let man be noble, helpful, and 
 good, for that alone distinguishes him from all beings 
 that we know. No feeling has nattire : to good and 
 bad gives the sun his light, and for the evildoer as for 
 the best shine moon and stars." That the laws 
 which nature has fixed for our lives are mighty 
 and eternal, Wordsworth comprehended as fully 
 as Goethe, but not that they are laws pitiless as 
 iron. Wordsworth had not rooted in him the 
 sense of Fate — of the inexorable sequences of 
 things, of the terrible chain that so often binds 
 an awful end to some slight and trivial beginning. 
 This optimism or complacency in AVordsworth 
 will be understood if we compare his spirit and 
 treatment with that of the illustrious French 
 painter whose subjects and whose life were in
 
 WORDSWORTH. 51 
 
 some ways akin to his own. Millet, like Words- 
 worth, went to the realities of humble life for 
 his inspiration. The peasant of the great French 
 plains and the forest was to him what the 
 Cumbrian dalesman was to Wordsworth. But 
 he saw the peasant differently. "You watch 
 figures in the fields," said Millet, "digging and 
 delving Avith spade or pick. You see one of 
 them from time to time straightening his loins, 
 and wiping his face with the back of his hand. 
 Thou shalt eat thy bread in the sweat of thy 
 brow. Is that the gay lively labour in which 
 some people would have you believe 1 Yet it is 
 there that for me you must seek true humanity 
 and great poetry. They say that I deny the 
 charm of the country ; I find in it far more than 
 charms, I find infinite splendours. I see in it, 
 just as they do, the little flowers of which Christ 
 said that Solomon in all liis glory was not 
 arrayed like one of them. I see clearly enough 
 the sun as he spreads his splendour amid the 
 clouds. None the less do I see on the plain, all 
 smoking, the horses at the plough. I see in 
 some stony corner a man all worn out, whose 
 han han have been heard ever since daybreak —
 
 52 WORDSWORTH. 
 
 trying to straighten himself a moment to get 
 breath." The hardness, the weariness, the 
 sadness, the ugliness, out of which Millet's 
 consummate skill made pictures that affect us 
 like strange music, were to Wordsworth not the 
 real part of the thing. They were all absorbed 
 in the thought of nature as a whole, wonderful, 
 mighty, harmonious, and benign. 
 
 We are not called upon to place great men of 
 his stamp as if they were collegians in a class-list. 
 It is best to take with thankfulness and admira- 
 tion from each man what he has to give. What 
 Wordsworth does is to assuage, to reconcile, to 
 fortify. He has not Shakespeare's richness and 
 vast compass, nor Milton's sublime and unflagging 
 strength, nor Dante's severe, vivid, ardent force 
 of vision. Probably he is too deficient in clear 
 beauty of form and in concentrated power to be 
 classed by the ages among these great giants. 
 We cannot be sure. We may leave it to the 
 ages to decide. But Wordsworth, at any rate, 
 by his secret of bringing the infinite into common 
 life, as he evokes it out of common life, has the 
 skill to lead us, so long as we yield ourselves to 
 his influence, into inner moods of settled peace-
 
 WORDSWORTH. 53 
 
 to touch " the depth and not the tumult of the 
 soul," to give us quietness, strength, steadfastness, 
 and purpose, whether to do or to endure. All 
 art or poetry that has the effect of breathing into 
 men's hearts, even if it be only for a space, these 
 moods of settled peace, and strongly confirming 
 their judgment and their will for good, — ^what- 
 ever limitations may be found besides, however 
 prosaic may be some or much of the detail, — 
 is great art and noble poetry, and the creator of 
 it will always hold, as Wordsworth holds, a 
 sovereign title to the reverence and gratitude of 
 mankind.
 
 APHORISMS.^ 
 
 Since I accepted the honour of the invitation 
 to deliver the opening address of your course, 
 I have found no small difficulty in settling down 
 on an appropriate subject. I half wrote a dis- 
 course on modern democracy, — how the rule of 
 numbers is to be reconciled with the rule of sage 
 judgment, and the passion for liberty and equalit}' 
 is to be reconciled with sovereign regard for law, 
 authority, and order ; and how our hopes for 
 the future are to be linked to wise reverence 
 for tradition and the past. But your secretary 
 had emphatically warned me off all politics, 
 and I feared that however carefull}'" I might 
 be on my guard against every reference to 
 the burning questions of the hour, yet the 
 clever eyes of political charity would be sure 
 
 ^ An Address delivered before the Edinburgh 
 Philosophical Institution, Xomnher 11, 188". 
 54
 
 APHORISMS. 55 
 
 to spy out party innuendoes in the most in- 
 nocent deliverances of purely abstract philosophy. 
 Then for a day or two I lingered over a subject 
 in a little personal incident. One Saturday 
 night last summer I found myself dining with 
 an illustrious statesman on the "Welsh border, 
 and on the Monday following I was seated 
 under the acacias by the shore of the Lake of 
 Geneva, where Gibbon, a hundred years ago 
 almost to the day, had, according to his own 
 famous words, laid down his pen after writing 
 the last lines of his last page, and there under 
 a serene sky, with the silver orb of the moon 
 reflected from the waters, and amid the silence 
 of nature, felt his joy at the completion of an 
 immortal task, dashed by melancholy that he 
 had taken everlasting leave of an old and 
 agreeable companion. It was natural that I 
 should meditate on the contrast that might be 
 drawn between great literary performance and 
 great political performance, between the making 
 of history and the writing of it, — a contrast 
 containing matter enough not only for one, but 
 for a wliole series of edifying and instructive 
 discourses. But there were difficulties here
 
 56 APHORISMS. 
 
 too, and the edifying discourse remains, like 
 many another, incomplete. 
 
 So I am going to ask yon after all to 
 pass a tranquil hour with me in pondering a 
 quiet chapter in the history of books. There 
 is a loud cry in these days for clues that 
 shall guide the plain man through the vast 
 bewildering labyrinth of printed volumes. 
 Everybody calls for hints what to read, and 
 what to look out for in reading. Like all the 
 rest of us, I have often been asked for a 
 list of the hundred best books, and the other 
 day a gentleman wrote to me to give him by 
 return of post that far more difficult thing — 
 a list of the three best books in the world. 
 Both the hundred and the three are a task far 
 too high for me ; but perhaps you will let me try 
 to indicate what, among so much else, is one of 
 the things best worth hunting for in books, and 
 one of the quarters of the library where you 
 may get on the scent. Though tranquil, it will 
 be my fault if you find the hour dull, for this 
 particular literary chapter concerns life, manners, 
 society, conduct, human nature, our aims, our 
 ideals, and all besides that is most animated and
 
 APHORISMS. 57 
 
 most interesting in man's busy chase after 
 happiness and Avisdom. 
 
 What is wisdom? That sovereign word, as 
 has often been pointed out, is used for two 
 different things. It may stand for knowledge, 
 learning, science, systematic reasoning; or it 
 may mean, as Coleridge has defined it, common 
 sense in an uncommon degree; that is to say, 
 the unsystematic truths that come to shrewd, 
 penetrating, and observant minds, from their 
 own experience of life and their daily commerce 
 with the world, and that is called the wisdom of 
 life, or the wisdom of the world, or the wisdom 
 of time and the ages. The Greeks had two 
 words for these two kinds of wisdom : one for 
 the wise who scaled the heights of thought and 
 knowledge; another for those who, without 
 logical method, technical phraseology, or any of 
 the parade of the Schools, whether " Academics 
 old and new, Cynic, Peripatetic, the sect Epi- 
 curean, or Stoic severe," held up the mirror to 
 human nature, and took good counsel as to the 
 ordering of character and of life. 
 
 Mill, in his little fragment on Aphorisms, has 
 said that in the first kind of wisdom every age
 
 58 APHORISMS. 
 
 in which science flourishes ought to surpass the 
 ages that have gone before. In knowledge and 
 methods of science each generation starts from 
 the point at which its predecessor left off; but 
 in the wisdom of life, in the maxims of good 
 sense applied to public and to private conduct, 
 there is, said Mill, a pretty nearly equal amount 
 in all ages. 
 
 If this seem doubtful to any one, let him 
 think how many of the shrewdest moralities of 
 human nature are to be found in writings as 
 ancient as the apocryphal Book of the Wisdom 
 of Solomon and of Jesus the Son of Sirach ; as 
 ^sop's? Fables; as the oracular sentences that 
 are to be found in Homer and the Greek drama- 
 tists and orators ; as all that immense host of 
 wise and pithy saws which, to the number of 
 between four and five thousand, were collected 
 from all ancient literature by the industry of 
 Erasmus in his great folio of Adages. As we 
 turn over these pages of old time, we almost 
 feel that those are right who tell us that every- 
 thing has been said, that the thing that has been 
 is the thing tliat shall be, and there is no new 
 tiling ujuler the sun. Even so, we are happily
 
 APHORISMS. 59 
 
 not bound to Schopenhauer's gloomy conclusion 
 (JVerke, v. 332), that " The wise men of all times 
 have always said the same, and the fools, that is 
 the immense majority, of all times, have always 
 done the same, that is to say, the opposite of 
 what the wise have said; and that is why 
 Voltaire tells us that we shall leave this world 
 just as stupid and as bad as we found it when we 
 came here." 
 
 It is natural that this second kind of wisdom, 
 being detached and unsystematic, should embody 
 itself in the short and pregnant form of proverb, 
 sentence, maxim, and aphorism. The essence of 
 aphorism is the compression of a mass of thought 
 and observation into a single saying. It is the 
 very opposite of dissertation and declamation ; 
 its distinction is not so much ingenuity, as good 
 sense brought to a point; it ought to be neither 
 enigmatical nor flat, neither a truism on the one 
 hand, nor a riddle on the other. These wise 
 sayings, said Bacon, the author of some of the 
 wisest of them, are not only for ornament, but 
 for action and business, having a point or edge, 
 whereby knots in business are pierced and dis- 
 covered. And he applauds Cicero's description
 
 60 APHORISMS. 
 
 of such sayings as saltpits, — that you may extract 
 salt out of them, and sprinkle it where you will. 
 They are the guiding oracles which man has 
 found out for himself in that great business of 
 ours, of learning how to be, to do, to do without, 
 and to depart. Their range extends from pru- 
 dential kitchen maxims, such as Franklin set 
 forth in the sayings of Poor Richard about thrift 
 in time and money, up to such great and high 
 moralities of life as are the prose maxims of 
 Goethe, — just as Bacon's Essays extend from 
 precepts as to building and planting, up to solemn 
 reflections on truth, death, and the vicissitudes of 
 things. They cover the whole field of man as he 
 is, and life as it is, not of either as they ought to 
 be ; friendship, ambition, money, studies, busi- 
 ness, public duty, in all their actual laws and 
 conditions as they are, and not as the ideal 
 moralist may wish that they were. 
 
 The substance of the wisdom of life must be 
 commonplace, for the best of it is the result of 
 the common experience of the world. Its most 
 universal and important propositions must in a 
 certain sense be truisms. The road has been so 
 broadly trodden by the hosts who have travelled
 
 APHORISMS. 61 
 
 along it, that the main rules of the journey are 
 clear enough, and we all know that the secret of 
 breakdown and wreck is seldom so much an in- 
 sufficient knowledge of the route, as imperfect 
 discipline of the will. The truism, however, and 
 the commonplace may be stated in a form so 
 fresh, pungent, and free from triviality, as to 
 have all the force of new discovery. Hence the 
 need for a caution, that few maxims are to be 
 taken without qualification. They seek sharp- 
 ness of impression by excluding one side of the 
 matter and exaggerating another, and most 
 aphorisms are to be read as subject to all sorts 
 of limits, conditions, and corrections. 
 
 It has been said that the order of our know- 
 ledge is this : that we know best, first, what we 
 have divined by native instinct ; second, what we 
 have learned by experience of men and things ; 
 third, Avhat Ave have learned not in books, but 
 by books — that is, by the reflections that they 
 suggest ; fourth, last and lowest, what we have 
 learned in books or with masters. The virtue of 
 an aphorism comes under the third of these heads : 
 it conveys a portion of a truth with such point 
 as to set us thinking on what remains. Mon-
 
 62 APHORISMS. 
 
 taigne, who delighted in Pkitarch, and kept him 
 ever on his table, praises him in that besides his 
 long discourses, "there are a thousand others, 
 Avhich he has only touched and glanced upon, 
 where he only points with his finger to direct us 
 which way we may go if we will, and contents 
 himself sometimes with only giving one brisk hit 
 in the nicest article of the question, from whence 
 ^\^e are to grope out the rest." And this is what 
 Plutarch himself is driving at, when he warns 
 young men that it is well to go for a light to 
 another man's fire, but by no means to tarry by 
 it, instead of kindling a torch of their own. 
 
 Grammarians draw a distinction between a 
 maxim and an aphorism, and tell us that while an 
 aphorism only states some broad truth of general 
 bearing, a maxim, besides stating the truth, en- 
 joins a rule of conduct as its consequence. For 
 instance, to say that " There are some men with 
 just imagination enough to spoil their judgment " 
 is an aphorism. But there is action as well as 
 thought in such sayings as this : " 'Tis a great 
 sign of mediocrity to be always reserved in 
 praise " ; or in this of M. Aurelius, " When thou 
 wishest to give thyself delight, think of the
 
 APHORISMS. 63 
 
 excellences of those who live with thee ; for 
 instance, of the energy of one, the modesty of 
 another, the liberal kindness of a third." Again, 
 according to this distinction of the word, we are 
 to give the name of aphorism to Pascal's saying 
 that " Most of the mischief in the world would 
 never happen, if men would only be content to 
 sit still in their parlours." ^ But Ave should give 
 the name of maxim to the profound and admir- 
 ably humane counsel of a philosopher of a very 
 different school, that " If you would love man- 
 kind, you should not expect too much from 
 them." 
 
 But the distinction is one without much dif- 
 ference ; Ave need not labour it nor pay it further 
 attention. Aphorism or maxim, let us remember 
 that this wisdom of life is the true salt of litera- 
 ture ; that those books, at least in prose, are 
 most nourishing which are most richly stored 
 with it ; and that it is one of the main objects, 
 apart from the mere acquisition of knowledge, 
 which men ought to seek in the reading of books. 
 
 ^ La Bruyere also says : — "All mischief comes from 
 our not being able to be alone ; hence play, luxury, dis- 
 sipation, wine, ignorance, calumny, envy, forgetfulness of 
 one's self and of God. "
 
 64 APHORISMS. 
 
 A living painter has said, that the longer he 
 works, the more does he realise how very little 
 anybody excei)t the trained artist actually per- 
 ceives in the natural objects constantly before 
 him ; how blind men are to impressions of colour 
 and light and form, which would be full of in- 
 terest and delight, if people only knew how to 
 see them. Are not most of us just as blind to 
 the thousand lights and shades in the men and 
 women around us ? We live in the world as we 
 live among fellow-inmates in a hotel, or fellow- 
 revellers at a masquerade. Yet this, to bring 
 knowledge of ourselves and others " home to our 
 business and our bosoms," is one of the most im- 
 portant parts of culture. 
 
 Some prejudice is attached in generous minds 
 
 to this wisdom of the world as being egotistical, 
 
 poor, unimaginative, of the earth earthy. Since 
 
 the great literary reaction at the end of the last 
 
 century, men have been apt to pitch criticism of 
 
 life in the high poetic key. They have felt with 
 
 Wordsworth : — 
 
 " The human nature unto which I felt 
 That I belonged, and reverenced with love, 
 Was not a punctual presence, but a spirit 
 Difl'used through time and space, with aid derived
 
 APHORISMS. 65 
 
 Of evidence from monuments, erect, 
 Prostrate, or leaning towards their common rest 
 In earth, the widely-scattered wreck sublime 
 Of vanished nations." 
 
 Then again, there is another cause for the 
 passing eclipse of interest in wisdom of the 
 world. Extraordinary advances have been made 
 in ordered knowledge of the various stages of 
 the long prehistoric dawn of human civilisa- 
 tion. The man of the flint implement and the 
 fire-drill, who could only count up to five, and 
 who was content to live in a hut like a bee- 
 hive, has drawn interest away from the man 
 of the market and the parlour. The literary 
 passion for primitive times and the raw material 
 of man has thrust polished man, the manufac- 
 tured article, into a secondary place. All this 
 is in the order of things. It is fitting enough 
 that we should pierce into the origins of human 
 nature. It is right, too, that the poets, the 
 ideal interpreters of life, should be dearer to us 
 than those who stop short with mere decipher- 
 ing of what is real and actual. The poet has 
 his own sphere of the beautiful and the sublime. 
 But it is no less true that the enduring weight 
 E
 
 66 APHORISMS. 
 
 of historian, moralist, political orator, or preacher 
 depends on the amount of the wisdom of life 
 that is hived in his pages. They may be ad- 
 mirable by virtue of other qualities, by learning, 
 by grasp, by majesty of flight ; but it is his 
 moral sentences on mankind or the State that 
 rank the prose writer among the sages. These 
 show that he has an eye for the large truths 
 of action, for the permanent bearings of conduct, 
 and for things that are for the guidance of all 
 generations. What is it that makes Plutarch's 
 Lives " the pasture of great souls," as they were 
 called by one who was herself a great soul ? 
 Because his aim was much less to tell a story 
 than, as he says, " to decipher the man and his 
 nature " ; and in deciphering the man, to strike 
 out pregnant and fruitful thoughts on all men. 
 Why Avas it worth while for Mr. Jowett, the 
 other day, to give us a new translation of 
 Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War ? 
 And why is it M'orth your while, at least to 
 dip in a serious spirit into its pages ? Partly, 
 because the gravity and concision of Thucy- 
 dides are of specially wholesome example in 
 these days of over-coloured and over-voluminous
 
 APHORISMS. 67 
 
 narrative ; partly, because he knows how to 
 invest the wreck and overthrow of those small 
 states with the pathos and dignity of mighty 
 imperial fall ; but most of all, for the sake of 
 the wise sentences that are sown with apt but 
 not unsparing hand through the progress of 
 the story. Well might Gray ask his friend 
 whether Thucydides' description of the final 
 destruction of the Athenian host at Syracuse 
 was not the finest thing he ever read in his 
 life; and assuredly the man who can read that 
 stern tale without admiration, pity, and awe 
 may be certain that he has no taste for noble 
 composition, and no feeling for the deepest 
 tragedy of mortal things. But it is the saga- 
 cious sentences in the speeches of Athenians, 
 Corinthians, Lacedsemonians, that do most of 
 all to give to the historian his perpetuity of in- 
 terest to every reader with the rudiments of 
 a political instinct, and make Thucydides as 
 modern as if he had written yesterday. 
 
 Tacitus belongs to a diff"erent class among 
 the great writers of the world. He had, beyond 
 almost any author of the front rank that has 
 ever lived, the art of condensing his thought
 
 68 APHORISMS. 
 
 and driving it home to the mind of the reader 
 with a flash. Beyond almost anybody, he 
 suffered from what a famous writer of aphor- 
 isms in our time has described as " the cursed 
 ambition to put a whole book into a page, a 
 whole page into a phrase, and the phrase into 
 a word." But the moral thought itself in 
 Tacitus mostly belongs less to the practical 
 wisdom of life, than to sombre poetic indig- 
 nation, like that of Dante, against the perver- 
 sities of men and the blindness of fortune. 
 
 Horace's Epistles are a mine of genial, friendly, 
 humane observation. Then there is none of 
 the ancient moralists to whom the modern, 
 from Montaigne, Charron, Kalegh, Bacon, down- 
 wards, owe more than to Seneca. Seneca has 
 no spark of the kindly warmth of Horace; he 
 has not the animation of Plutarch ; he abounds 
 too much in the artificial and extravagant para- 
 doxes of the Stoics. But, for all that, he 
 touches the great and eternal commonplaces of 
 human occasion — friendship, health, bereave- 
 ment, riches, poverty, death — Avith a hand that 
 places him high among the wise masters of life. 
 All through the ages men tossed in the beating
 
 APHORISMS. 69 
 
 waves of circumstance have found more abund- 
 antly in the essays and letters of Seneca than 
 in any other secular writer words of good 
 counsel and comfort. And let this fact not 
 pass, without notice of the light that it sheds 
 on the fact of the unity of literature, and of 
 the absurdity of setting a wide gulf between 
 ancient or classical literature and modern, as 
 if under all dialects the jjartakers in Graeco- 
 Roman civilisation, whether in Athens, Rome, 
 Paris, Weimar, Edinburgh, London, Dublin, 
 were not the heirs of a great common stock of 
 thought as well as of speech. 
 
 I certainly do not mean anything so absurd 
 as that the moralities, whether major or minor, 
 whether affecting the foundation of conduct or 
 the surface of manners, remain fixed. On the 
 contrary, one of the most interesting things in 
 literature is to mark the shifts and changes 
 in men's standards. For instance, Boswell tells 
 a curious story of the first occasion on which 
 Johnson met Sir Joshua Reynolds. Two ladies 
 of the company were regretting the death of 
 a friend to whom they owed great obligations. 
 Reynolds observed that they had at any rate
 
 70 APHORISMS. 
 
 the comfort of being relieved from a debt of 
 gratitude. The ladies were naturally shocked 
 at this singular alleviation of their grief, but 
 Johnson defended it in his clear and forcible 
 manner, and, says Boswell, " was much pleased 
 with the mind, the fair view of human nature, 
 that it exhibited, like some of tlie reflections 
 of Kochefoucauld." On the strength of it he 
 went home with Reynolds, supped with him, 
 and was his friend for life. No moralist with 
 a reputation to lose would like to back Reynolds's 
 remark in the nineteenth century. 
 
 Our own generation in Great Britain has 
 been singularly unfortunate in the literature of 
 aphorism. One too famous volume of proverbial 
 philosophy had immense vogue, but it is so 
 vapid, so wordy, so futile, as to have a place 
 among the books that dispense with parody. 
 Then, rather earlier in the century, a clergyman, 
 who ruined himself by gambling, ran away from 
 his debts to America, and at last blew his brains 
 out, felt peculiarly qualified to lecture mankind 
 on moral prudence. He wrote a little book in 
 1820, called Lacon ; or Many Things in Feio 
 Words, addressed to those tvho think It is an
 
 APHORISMS. 71 
 
 awful example to anybody who is tempted to 
 try his hand at au aphorism. Thus, " Marriage 
 is a least where the grace is sometimes better 
 than the dinner." I had made some other 
 extracts from this unhappy sage, but you will 
 thank me for having thrown them into the fire. 
 Finally, a great authoress of our time was urged 
 by a friend to fill up a gap in our literature by 
 composing a volume of Thoughts : the result was 
 that least felicitous of performances, Tlieophrastus 
 Such. One living writer of genius has given us 
 a little sheaf of subtly-pointed maxims in the 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverely and perhaps he will 
 one day divulge to the world the whole contents 
 of Sir Austin Feverel's unpublished volume, 
 The Pilgrim's Scrip. 
 
 Yet the wisdom of life has its full part in our 
 literature. Keen insight into peculiarities of 
 individual motive, and concentrated interest in 
 the play of character, shine not merely in 
 Shakespeare, whose mighty soul, as Hallam says, 
 was saturated with moral observation, nor in 
 the brilliant verse of Pope. For those who love 
 meditative reading on the ways and destinies 
 of men, Ave have Burton and Fuller and Sir
 
 72 APHORISMS. 
 
 Thomas Browne in one age, and Addison, 
 Johnson, and the rest of the Essayists, in 
 another. Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters, 
 written in the Baconian age, are fonnd delight- 
 ful by some ; but for my own part, though I 
 have striven to follow the critic's golden rule, 
 to have preferences but no exclusions, Overbury 
 has for me no savour. In the great art of 
 painting moral portraits, or character-writing, 
 the characters in Clarendon, or in Burnet's 
 History of His Own Time, are full of life, vigour, 
 and coherency, and are intensely attractive to 
 read. I cannot agree with those who put either 
 Clarendon or Burnet on a level with the char- 
 acters in St. Simon or the Cardinal de Retz : 
 there is a subtlety of analysis, a searching 
 penetration, a breadth of moral comprehension, 
 in the Frenchmen, which I do not find, nor, in 
 truth, much desire to find, in our countrymen. 
 A homelier hand does well enough for homelier 
 men. Nevertheless, such characters as those of 
 Falkland, or Chillingworth, by Clarendon, or 
 Burnet's very different Lauderdale, are worth a 
 thousand battle-pieces, cabinet plots, or parlia- 
 mentary combinations, of which we never can
 
 APHORISMS. 73 
 
 be sure tliat the narrator either knew or has 
 told the whole story. It is true that these 
 characters have not the strange quality which 
 some one imputed to the writing of Tacitus, that 
 it seems to put the reader himself and the 
 secrets of his own heart into the confessional. 
 It is in the novel that, in this country, the 
 faculty of observing social man and his peculiar- 
 ities has found its most popular instrument. 
 The great novel, not of romance or adventure, 
 but of character and manners, from the mighty 
 Fielding, down, at a long interval, to Thackeray, 
 covers the field that in France is held, and 
 successfully held, against all comers, by her 
 maxim-writers, like La Rochefoucauld, and her 
 character-writers, like La Bruyere. But the 
 literature of aphorism contains one English name 
 of magnificent and immortal lustre — the name of 
 Francis Bacon. Bacon's essays are the unique 
 masterpiece in our literature of this oracular 
 wisdom of life, applied to the scattered occasions 
 of men's existence. The Essays are known to 
 all the world ; but there is another and perhaps 
 a weightier performance of Bacon's which is less 
 known, or not known at all, except to students
 
 74 APHORISMS. 
 
 here and there. I mean the second chapter of 
 the eighth book of his famous treatise, De Au(j- 
 mentis. It has been translated into pithy English, 
 and is to be found in the fifth volume of the 
 great edition of Bacon, by Spedding and Ellis. 
 
 In this chapter, among other things, he com- 
 poses comments on between thirty and forty of 
 what he calls the Aphorisms or Proverbs of 
 Solomon, which he truly describes as containing, 
 besides those of a theological character, " not a 
 few excellent civil precepts and cautions, spring- 
 ing from the inmost recesses of wisdom, and 
 extending to much variety of occasions." I 
 know not where else to find more of the salt of 
 common sense in an uncommon degree than in 
 Bacon's terse comments on the Wise King's terse 
 sentences, and in the keen, sagacious, shrewd 
 wisdom of the world, lighted up by such 
 brilliance of wit and affluence of illustration, in 
 the pages that come after them. 
 
 This sort of wisdom was in the taste of the 
 time; witness Ralegh's Instructions to his Son, 
 and that curious collection " of political and 
 polemical aphorisms grounded on authority and 
 experience," which he called by the name of the
 
 APHORISMS. 75 
 
 Cabinet Council. Harrington's Political Aphorisms, 
 which came a generation later, are not moral 
 sentences ; they are a string of propositions in 
 political theory, breathing a noble spirit of 
 liberty, though too abstract for practical guidance 
 through the troubles of the day. But Bacon's 
 admonitions have a depth and copiousness that 
 are all his own. He says that the knowledge of 
 advancement in life, though abundantly practised, 
 had not been sufficiently handled in books, and 
 so he here lays down the precepts for what he 
 calls the Architecture of Fortune. They con- 
 stitute the description of a man who is politic 
 for his own fortune, and show how he may best 
 shape a character that will attain the ends of 
 fortune. 
 
 First, A man should accustom his mind to 
 judge of the proportion and value of all things 
 as they conduce to his fortune and ends. 
 
 Second, Not to undertake things beyond his 
 strength, nor to row against the stream. 
 
 Third, Not to wait for occasions always, but 
 sometimes to challenge and induce them, accord- 
 ing to that saying of Demosthenes : " In the 
 same manner as it is a received principle that
 
 7 b APHORISMS. 
 
 the general should lead the army, so should wise 
 men lead affiiirs," causing things to he done 
 which they think good, and not themselves 
 waiting upon events. 
 
 Fourth, Not to take up anything which of 
 necessity forestalls a great quantity of time, but to 
 have this sound ever ringing in our ears : " Time 
 is flying — time that can never be retrieved." 
 
 Fifth, Not to engage one's-self too peremptorily 
 in anything, but ever to have either a window 
 open to fly out at, or a secret way to retire by. 
 
 Sixth, To follow that ancient precept, not 
 construed to any point of perfidiousness, but 
 only to caution and moderation, that we are to 
 treat our friend as, if he might one day be a foe, 
 and our foe as if he should one day be friend. 
 
 All these Bacon called the good arts, as dis- 
 tinguished from the evil arts that had been 
 described years before by Machiavelli in his 
 famous book The Prince, and also in his Discourses. 
 Bacon called Machiavelli's sayings depraved and 
 pernicious, and a corrupt wisdom, as indeed they 
 are. He was conscious that his own maxims, 
 too, stood in some need of elevation and of 
 correction, for he winds up with wise warnings
 
 APHORISMS. 77 
 
 against being carried away by a whirlwind or 
 tempest of ambition ; by the general reminder 
 that all things are vanity and vexation of spirit, 
 and the particular reminder that, " Being without 
 well-being is a curse, and the greater being, the 
 greater curse," and that "all virtue is most 
 rewarded, and all wickedness most punished in 
 itself"; by the question whether this incessant, 
 restless, and, as it were, Sabbathless pursuit of 
 fortune, leaves time for holier duties, and what 
 advantage it is to have a face erected towards 
 heaven, with a spirit perpetually grovelling upon 
 earth, eating dust like a serpent ; and finally, he 
 says that it will not be amiss for men, in this 
 eager and excited chase of fortune, to cool them- 
 selves a little with that conceit of Charles v. in 
 his instructions to his son, that " Fortune hath 
 somewhat of the nature of a woman, who, if she 
 be too closely wooed, is commonly the further oflf." 
 There is Baconian humour as well as a curious 
 shrewdness in such an admonition as that which 
 I will here transcribe, and there are many like 
 it:— 
 
 " It is therefore no unimportant attribute of prudence 
 in a man to be able to set forth to advantage before
 
 78 APHORISMS. 
 
 others, with grace and skill, his virtues, fortunes, and 
 merits (which may be done without arrogance or breed- 
 ing disgust) ; and again, to cover artificially his weak- 
 nesses, defects, misfortunes, and disgraces ; dwelling 
 upon the former and turning them to the light, 
 sliding from the latter or explaining them away by apt 
 interpretations and the like. Tacitus says of Mucianus, 
 the wisest and most active politician of his time, ' That 
 he had a certain art of setting forth to advantage every- 
 thing he said or did.' And it requires indeed some 
 art, lest it become wearisome and contemptible ; but 
 yet it is true that ostentation, though carried to the 
 first degree of vanity, is rather a vice in morals than in 
 policy. For as it is said of calumny, ' Calumniate boldly, 
 for some of it will stick,' so it may be said of ostentation 
 (except it be in a ridiculous degree of deformity), 
 ' Boldly sound your own praises, and some of them will 
 stick.' It will stick with the more ignorant and the 
 populace, though men of wisdom may smile at it ; and 
 the reputation won with many will amply countervail 
 the disdain of a few. . . . And surely no small number 
 of those who are of a solid nature, and who, from the 
 want of this ventosity, cannot spread all sail in pursuit 
 of their own honour, suffer some prejudice and lose 
 dignity by their moderation." 
 
 Nobody need go to such writings as these for 
 moral dignity or moral energy. They have no 
 plac(! in that nobler literature, from Epictetus 
 and Marcus Aurelius downwards, which lights 
 up the young soul with generous aims, and fires
 
 APHORISMS. 79 
 
 it with the love of all excellence. Yet the most 
 heroic cannot do without a dose of circumspection. 
 The counsels of old Polonius to Laertes are less 
 sublime than Hamlet's soliloquy, but they have 
 their place. Bacon's chapters are a manual of 
 circumspection, whether we choose to give to 
 circumspection a high or a low rank in the list 
 of virtues. Bacon knew of the famous city 
 which had three gates, and on the first the 
 horseman read inscribed, "Be bold"; and on 
 the second gate yet again, " Be bold, and ever- 
 more be bold " ; and on the third it was written, 
 " Be not too bold," 
 
 This cautious tone had been brought about 
 by the circumstances of the time. Government 
 was strict ; dissent from current opinions was 
 dangerous ; there was no indifference and hardly 
 any tolerance ; authority was suspicious and it 
 was vindictive. When the splendid genius of 
 Burke rose like a new sun into the sky, the 
 times were happier, and nowhere in our literature 
 does a noble prudence wear statelier robes than 
 in the majestic compositions of Burke. 
 
 Those who are curious to follow the literature 
 of aphorism into Germany, will, with the mighty
 
 80 APHORISMS. 
 
 exceptions of Goetlie and Schiller, find but a 
 parched and scanty harvest. The Germans too 
 often justify the unfriendly definition of an 
 aphorism as a form of speech that wraps up 
 something quite plain in words that turn it into 
 something very obscure. As old Fuller says, the 
 writers have a hair hanging to the nib of their 
 pen. Their shortness does not prevent them 
 from being tiresome. They recall the French wit 
 to whom a friend showed a distich : " Excellent," 
 he said ; " but isn't it rather spun out 1 " 
 
 Lichtenberg, a professor of physics, who was 
 also a considerable hand at satire a hundred 
 years ago, composed a collection of sayings, not 
 without some wheat amid much chaflf. A later 
 German writer, of whom I will speak in a 
 moment or two, Schopenhauer, has some excellent 
 remarks on Self-reflection, and on the difference 
 between those who think for themselves and 
 those who think for other people ; between 
 genuine Philosophers, who look at things first 
 hand for their own sake, and Sophists, who look 
 at words and books for the sake of making an 
 appearance before the world, and seek their 
 happiness in what they hope to get from others :
 
 APHORISMS. 8 1 
 
 he takes Herder for an example of the Sophist, 
 and Lichtenberg for the true Philosopher. It is 
 true that Ave hear the voice of the Self-thinker, 
 and not the mere Book-philosopher, if we may 
 use for once those uncouth compounds, in such 
 sayings as these : — 
 
 "People who never h;ive any time are the people 
 who do least."' 
 
 " The utmost tliat a weak head tan get out of ex- 
 perience is an extra readiness to find out the weaknesses 
 of other people." 
 
 " Over-au,\iously to feel and think what one could 
 have done, is the very worst thing one can do." 
 
 '• He who has less than he desires, should know that 
 he has more than he deserves." 
 
 " Enthusiasts without capacity are the really danger- 
 ous people." 
 
 This last, by the way, recalls a saying of the 
 great French reactionary, De Bonald, which is 
 never quite out of date : " Follies committed by 
 the sensible, extravagances uttered by the clever, 
 crimes jjerpetrated by the good, — there is what 
 makes revolutions." 
 
 Radowitz was a Prussian soldier and statesman, 
 who died in 1853, after doing enough to con- 
 vince men since that the revolution of 1848 
 produced no finer mind. He left among other 
 F
 
 82 APHORISMS. 
 
 things two or three volumes of short fragmentary 
 pieces on politics, religion, literature, and art. 
 They are intelligent and elevated, but contain 
 hardly anything to our point to-night, unless it be 
 this, — that what is called Stupidity springs not at 
 all from mere want of understanding, but from 
 the fact that the free use of a man's understand- 
 ing is hindered by some definite vice : Frivolity, 
 Envy, Dissipation, Covetousness, all these darling 
 vices of fallen man, — these are at the bottom of 
 what we name Stupidity. This is true enough, 
 but it is not so much to the point as the saying 
 of a highly judicious aphorist of my own acquaint- 
 ance, that "Excessive anger against human stu- 
 pidity is itself one of the most provoking of all 
 forms of stupidity." 
 
 Another author of aphorisms of the Goethe 
 period was Klinger, a playwriter, who led a 
 curious and varied life in camps and cities, who 
 began with a vehement enthusiasm for the sen- 
 timentalism of Rousseau, and ended, as such men 
 often end, with a hard and stubborn cynicism. 
 He wrote Thoughts on different Subjects of the 
 World and Literature, which are intelligent and 
 masculine, if they are not particularly pungent
 
 APHORISMS. 83 
 
 in expression. One of them runs — " He who 
 will write interestingly must be able to keep 
 heart and reason in close and friendliest connec- 
 tion. The heart must warm the reason, and 
 reason must in turn blow on the embers if they 
 are to burst into flame." This illustrates what 
 an aphorism should not be. Contrast its clumsi- 
 ness with the brevity of the famous and admirable 
 saying of Vauvenargues, that " great thoughts 
 come from the heart." 
 
 Schopenhauer gave to one of his minor works 
 the name of Aphorismen zu Lehens-fFeiaheit, 
 " Aphorisms for the Wisdom of Life," and he put 
 to it, by way of motto, Chamfort's saying, " Hajipi- 
 ness is no easy matter ; 'tis very hard to find it 
 within ourselves, and impossible to find it any- 
 where else." Schopenhauer was so well read in 
 European literature, he had such natural alert- 
 ness of mind, and his style is so pointed, direct, 
 and wide-awake, that these detached discussions 
 are interesting and most readable; but for the 
 most part discussions they are, and not aphorisms. 
 Thus, in the saying that " The perfect man of 
 the world should be he who never sticks fast in 
 indecision, nor ever falls into overhaste," the force
 
 84 APHORISMS. 
 
 of it lies in what goes before and what follows 
 after. The whole collection, Avinding up with 
 the chapter of Counsels and Maxims, is in the 
 main an unsystematic enforcement of those 
 peculiar views of human happiness and its narrow 
 limits which proved to be the most important 
 part of Schopenhauer's system. "The sovereign 
 rule in the wisdom of life," he said, " I see in 
 Aristotle's proposition {Eth. Nic. vii. 12), o 
 
 cf)pOVLfMO<; TO dXvTTOV Bl(i)K€L, OV TO IjBv '. Not 
 
 pleasure but freedom from pain is what the sen- 
 sible man goes after." The second volume, 
 of Detached though systematically Ordered 
 Thoughts on Various Circumstances, is miscel- 
 laneous in its range of topics, and is full of 
 suggestion ; but the thoughts are mainly philoso- 
 phical and literary, and do not come very close 
 to practical wisdom. In truth, so negative a 
 view of happiness, such pale hopes and middling 
 expectations, could not guide a man far on the 
 path of active prudence, where we naturally take 
 for granted that the goal is really something 
 substantial, serious, solid, and positive.^ 
 
 1 Burke says on the point raised above : " I am satis- 
 fied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those
 
 APHORISMS. 85 
 
 Nobody cared less than Schopenhauer for the 
 wisdom that is dra^vn from books, or has said 
 such hard things of mere reading. In the short 
 piece to which I have already referred (p. 80), 
 he works out the difference between the Scholar 
 who has read in books, and the Thinkers, the 
 Geniuses, the Lights of the World, and Furtherers 
 of the human race, who have read directly from 
 the world's own pages. Reading, he says, is only 
 a succedaneimi for one's own thinkinsr. Reading 
 is thinking with a strange head instead of one's 
 own. People who get their wisdom out of books 
 are like those who have got their knowledge of 
 a country from the descriptions of travellers. 
 Truth that has been picked up from books only 
 sticks to us like an artificial limb, or a false 
 tooth, or a rhinoplastic nose ; the truth we have 
 
 which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, 
 the torments which we may be made to suffer are much 
 greater in their effect on the body and mind, than anj' 
 pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could sug- 
 gest. Nay, I am in great doubt whether any man could 
 be found, who would earn a life of the most perfect satis- 
 faction at the price of ending it in the torments which 
 justice inflicted in a few hours on the late unfortunate 
 regicide in France " {Sublime and Beautiful, pt. i. eec. 
 vii.). The reference is, of course, to Damien.
 
 86 APHORISMS. 
 
 acquired by our own thinking is like the natural 
 
 member. At least, as Goethe puts it in liis verse, 
 
 Was du ererbt von deinen Viitern hast, 
 Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. 
 
 Wliatfrom thy fathers thou dost inherit, he sure thou 
 earn it, that so it may become thine own. 
 
 It is only Goethe and Schiller, and especially 
 Goethe, " the strong, much-toiling sage, with 
 spirit free from mists, and sane and clear," who 
 combine the higher and the lower wisdom, and 
 have skill to put moral truths into forms of words 
 that fix themselves with stings in the reader's 
 mind. All Goethe's work, whether poetry oi 
 prose, his plays, his novels, his letters, his con- 
 versations, are richly bestrewn with the luminous 
 sentences of a keen-eyed, steadfast, patient, in- 
 defatigable watcher of human life. He deals 
 gravely and sincerely with men. He has none 
 of that shallow irony by which small men who 
 have got wrong with the world seek a shabby 
 revenge. He tells us the whole truth. He is 
 not of those second-rate sages who keep their 
 own secrets, externally complying with all the 
 conventions of speech and demeanour, while pri- 
 vately nourishing unbridled freedom of opinion 
 in the inner sanctuary of the mind. He handles
 
 APHORISMS. 87 
 
 soberly, faithfully, laboriously, cheerfully, every 
 motive and all conduct. He marks himself the 
 friend, the well-wisher, and the helper. I will 
 not begin to quote from Goethe, for I should 
 never end. The volume of Spriiche, or aphorisms 
 in rhyme and prose in his collected works, is 
 accessible to everybody, but some of his wisest 
 and finest are to be found in the plays, like the 
 well-known one in his Tasso, " In stillness Talent 
 forms itself, but Character in the great current 
 of the world." 
 
 But here is a concentrated admonition from 
 the volume that I have named, that will do as 
 well as any other for an example of his temper — 
 
 " Wouldst fashion for thyself a seemly hfe ? — 
 Then fret not over what is past and gone ; 
 And spite of all thou mayst have lost behind. 
 Yet act as if thy life were just begun. 
 What each day wills, enough for thee to know ; 
 What each day wills, the day itself will tell. 
 Do thine own task, and be therewith content ; 
 What others do, that shalt thou fairly judge ; 
 Be sure that thou no brother-mortal hate, 
 Then all besides leave to the Master Power." 
 
 If any of you should be bitten with an unhappy 
 passion for the composition of aphorisms, let me 
 warn such an one that the power of observing
 
 88 APHORISMS. 
 
 life is rare, the power of drawing new lessons 
 from it is rarer still, and the power of condensing 
 the lesson in a pointed sentence is rarest of 
 all. Beware of cultivating this delicate art. 
 The effort is only too likely to add one more to 
 that perverse class described by Gibbon, who 
 strangle a thought in the hope of strengthening 
 it, and applaud their own skill when they have 
 shown in a few absurd words the fourth part of 
 an idea. Let me warmly urge anybody with so 
 mistaken an ambition, instead of painfully dis- 
 tilling poor platitudes of his own, to translate the 
 shrewd saws of the wise browed Goethe. 
 
 Some have found light in the sayings of 
 Balthasar Gracian, a Spaniard, who flourished 
 at the end of the seventeenth century, whose 
 maxims were translated into English at the very 
 beginning of the eighteenth, and who was in- 
 troduced to the modern public in an excellent 
 article by Sir M. E. Grant Duflf a few years ago. 
 The English title is attractive, — TJie Art of 
 Pntdence, (»' a Com2Mnion for a Man of Sense. I 
 do not myself find Gracian much of a companion, 
 though some of his aphorisms give a neat turn to 
 a commonplace. Thus;—
 
 APHORISMS. 89 
 
 " The pillow is a dumb sibyl. To sleep upon a thing 
 that is to be done, is better than to be wakened up by 
 one already done." 
 
 " To equal a predecessor one must have twice his 
 worth." 
 
 " What is easy ought to be entered upon as though 
 it were difficult, and what is difficult as though it were 
 easy." 
 
 " Those things are generally best remembered which 
 ought most to be forgot. Not seldom the surest remedy 
 of the evil consists in forgetting it." 
 
 It is France that excels in the form no less 
 than in the matter of aphorism, and for the good 
 reason that in France the arts of polished society 
 were relatively at an early date the objects of a 
 serious and deliberate cultivation, suck as was 
 and perhaps remains unknown in the rest of 
 Europe. Conversation became a fine art. "I 
 hate war," said one; "it spoils conversation." 
 The leisured classes found their keenest relish in 
 delicate irony, in piquancy, in contained vivacity, 
 in the study of niceties of observation and finish 
 of phrase. You have a picture of it in such a 
 play as Moliere's Misanthropist, where we see a 
 section of the polished life of the time — men and 
 women making and receiving compliments, dis- 
 coursing on affairs with easy lightness, flitting
 
 90 APHORISMS. 
 
 backwards and forwards with a thousand petty 
 hurries, and among them one singular figure, 
 hoarse, rough, sombre, moving with a chilling 
 reality in the midst of frolicking shadows. But 
 the shadows were all in all to one another. 
 Not a point of conduct, not a subtlety of social 
 motive, escaped detection and remark. 
 
 Dugald Stewart has pointed to the richness of 
 the French tongue in appropriate and discrimin- 
 ating expressions for varieties of intellectual turn 
 and shade. How many of us, who claim to a 
 reasonable knowledge of French, will undertake 
 easily to find English equivalents for such distinc- 
 tions as are expressed in the following phrases — 
 Esprit juste, esprit 6tendu, esprit fin, esprit d6li6, 
 esprit de lumiere. These numerous distinctions 
 are the evidence, as Stewart says, of the attention 
 paid by the cultivated classes to delicate shades 
 of mind and feeling. Compare with them the 
 colloquial use of our terribly overworked word 
 ** clever." Society and conversation have never 
 been among us the school of reflection, the 
 spring of literary inspiration, that they have 
 been in France. The English rule has rather 
 been like that of the ancient Persians, that the
 
 APHORISMS. 91 
 
 great thing is to learn to ride, to shoot with the 
 bow, and to speak the truth. Thei'e is much in 
 it. But it has been more favourable to strength 
 than to either subtlety or finish. 
 
 One of the most commonly known of all 
 books of maxims, after the Proverbs of Solomon, 
 are the Moral Reflections of La Rochefoucauld. 
 The author lived at court, himself practised all 
 the virtues which he seemed to disparage, and 
 took so much trouble to make sure of the right 
 expression that many of these short sentences 
 were more than thirty times revised. They were 
 given to the world in the last half of the seven- 
 teenth century in a little volume which French- 
 men used to know by heart, which gave a new 
 turn to the literary taste of the nation, and which 
 has been translated into every civilised tongue. 
 It paints men as they would be if self-love were 
 the one great mainspring of human action, and 
 it makes magnanimity itself no better than self- 
 interest in disguise. 
 
 " Interest," he says, " speaks all sorts of tongues and 
 plays all sorts of parts, even the part of the dis- 
 interested." 
 
 " Gratitude is with most people only a strong desire 
 for greater benefits to come."
 
 92 APHORISMS. 
 
 "Love of justice is with most of us nothing but the 
 fear of suffering injustice." 
 
 "Friendship is only a reciprocal conciliation of 
 interests, a mutual exchange of good offices ; it is a 
 species of commerce out of which self-love always 
 intends to make something." 
 
 " We have all strength enough to endure the troubles 
 of other people." 
 
 " Our repentance is not so much regret for the ill we 
 have done, as fear of the ill that may come to us in 
 consequence." 
 
 And everybody here knows the saying that 
 " In the adversity of our best friends we often 
 find something that is not exactly displeasing." 
 
 We cannot wonder that in spite of their 
 piquancy of form, such sentences as these have 
 aroused in many minds an invincible repugnance 
 for what would be so tremendous a calumny on 
 human nature, if the book were meant to be a 
 picture of human nature as a whole. " I count 
 Rochefoucauld's Maxims" says one critic, " a bad 
 book. As I am reading it, I feel discomfort ; I 
 have a sense of suffering which I cannot define. 
 Such thoughts tarnish the brightness of the soul ; 
 they degi-ade the heart." Yet as a faithful pre- 
 sentation of human selfishness, and of you and 
 me in so far as we happen to be mainly selfish,
 
 APHORISMS. 93 
 
 the odious mirror has its uses by showing us 
 what manner of man we are or may become. 
 Let us not forget either that not quite all is 
 selfishness in La Rochefoucauld. Everybody 
 knows his saying that hypocrisy is the homage 
 that vice pays to virtue. There is a subtle truth 
 in this, too, — that to be in too great a hurry to 
 discharge an obligation is itself a kind of in- 
 gratitude. Nor is there any harm in the re- 
 flection that no fool is so troublesome as the 
 clever fool -, nor in this, that only great men 
 have any business with great defects ; nor, 
 finally, in the consolatory saying, that we are 
 never either so happy or so unhappy as we 
 imagine. 
 
 No more important name is associated with 
 the literature of aphorism than that of Pascal; 
 but the Thoughto or Pascal concern the deeper 
 things of speculative philosophy and religion, 
 rather than the wisdom of daily life, and, besides, 
 though aphoristic in form, they are in substance 
 systematic. "I blame equally," he said, "those 
 who take sides for praising man, those who are 
 for blaming him, and those who amuse themselves 
 with him : the only wise part is search for truth
 
 94 APHORISMS. 
 
 — search with many sighs." On man, as he 
 exists in society, he said little ; and what he said 
 does not make us hopeful. He saw the darker 
 side. " If everybody knew what one says of the 
 other, there would not be four friends left in 
 the world." " Would you have men think well of 
 you, then do not speak well of yourself." And so 
 forth. If you wish to know Pascal's theory you 
 may find it set out in brilliant verse in the 
 opening lines of the second book of Pope's Essay 
 on Man. " What a chimera is Man ! " said Pascal. 
 " What a confused chaos ! What a subject of 
 contradiction ! A professed judge of all things, 
 and yet a feeble worm of the earth; the great 
 depository and guardian of truth, and yet a mere 
 huddle of uncertainty ; the glory and the scandal 
 of the universe." Shakespeare was wiser and 
 deeper when, under this quintessence of dust, he 
 discerned what a piece of work is man, how 
 noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form 
 and moving how express and admirable. That 
 serene and radiant faith is the secret, added to 
 matchless gifts of imagination and music, why 
 Shakespeare is the greatest of men. 
 
 There is a smart, spurious wisdom of the world
 
 APHORISMS. 95 
 
 which has the bitterness not of the sahitary tonic 
 but of mortal poison ; and of this kind the 
 master is Chamfort, who died during the French 
 Eevolution (and for that matter died of it), 
 and whose little volume of thoughts is often 
 extremely witty, always pointed, but not seldom 
 cynical and false. "If you live among men," 
 he said, "the heart must either break or turn 
 to brass." "The public, the public," he cried; 
 " how many fools does it take to make a public ! " 
 "What is celebrity'? The advantage of being 
 known to people who don't know you." 
 
 All literatures might be ransacked in vain for a 
 more repulsive saying than this, that "A man 
 must swallow a toad every morning if he wishes 
 to be quite sure of finding nothing still more dis- 
 gusting before the day is over." We cannot be 
 surprised to hear of the lady who said that a 
 conversation with Chamfort in the morning made 
 her melancholy until bedtime. Yet Chamfort 
 is the author of the not unwholesome saying 
 that "The most wasted of all days is that on 
 which one has not laughed." One of his maxims 
 lets us into the secret of his misanthropy. 
 " Whoever," he said. " is not a misanthropist
 
 96 APHORISMS. 
 
 at forty cau never have loved mankind." It 
 is easy to know what this means. Of course if a 
 man is so superfine that he will not love mankind 
 any longer than he can believe them to be 
 demigods and angels, it is true that at forty 
 he may have discovered that they are neither. 
 Beginning by looking for men to be more perfect 
 than they can be, he ends by thinking them 
 worse than they are, and then he secretly plumes 
 himself on his superior cleverness in having 
 found humanity out. For the deadliest of all 
 wet blankets give me a middle-aged man who 
 has been most of a visionary in his youth. 
 
 To correct all this, let us recall Helvetius's 
 saying that I have already quoted, which made 
 so deep an impression on Jeremy Bentham : 
 " In order to love mankind, we must not expect 
 too much from them." And let us remember 
 that Fenelon, one of the most saintly men that 
 ever lived, and whose very countenance bore 
 such a mark of goodness that when he was 
 in a room men found they could not desist from 
 looking at him, wrote to a friend the year before 
 he died, " I ask little from most men ; I try 
 to render them much, and to expect nothing
 
 APHORISMS. 97 
 
 in return, and I get very well out of the 
 bargain." 
 
 Chamfort I will leave, with his sensible dis- 
 tinction between Pride and Vanity. "A man," 
 he says, " has advanced far in the study of 
 morals who has mastered the difference between 
 pride and vanity. The first is lofty, calm, im- 
 movable ; the second is uncertain, capricious, 
 unquiet. The one adds to a man's stature ; the 
 other only puflFs him out. The one is the source 
 of a thousand virtues; the other is that of 
 nearly all vices and all perversities. There is 
 a kind of pride in which are included all the 
 commandments of God; and a kind of vanity 
 which contains the seven mortal sins." 
 
 I will say little of La Bruyere, by far the 
 greatest, broadest, strongest, of French character- 
 writers, because his is not one of the houses 
 of which you can judge by a brick or two taken 
 at random. For those in whom the excitements 
 of modern literature have not burnt up the 
 faculty of sober meditation on social man. La 
 Bruyere must always be one of the foremost 
 names. Macaulay somewhere calls him thin. 
 But Macaulay has less ethical depth, and less 
 G
 
 98 APHORISMS. 
 
 perception of ethical depth, than any writer that 
 ever lived with equally brilliant gifts in other 
 ways ; and thin is the very last word that 
 describes this admirable master. If one seeks 
 to measure how far removed the great classic 
 moralists are from thinness, let him turn from 
 La Bruyere to the inane subtleties and meaning- 
 less conundrums, not worth answering, that do 
 duty for analysis of character in some modern 
 American literature. We feel that La Bruyere, 
 though retiring, studious, meditative, and self- 
 contained, has complied with the essential con- 
 dition of looking at life and men themselves, and 
 with his own eyes. His aphoristic sayings are 
 the least important part of him, but here are one 
 or two examples : — 
 
 "Eminent posts make great men greater, and little 
 men less." 
 
 " There is in some men a certain mediocrity of mind 
 that helps to make them wise." 
 
 "The flatterer has not a sufficiently good opinion 
 either of himself or of others." 
 
 " People from the provinces and fools are always 
 ready to take offence, and to suppose that you are 
 laughing at them : we should never risk a pleasantry, 
 except with well-bred people, and people with brains." 
 
 " All confidence is dangerous, unless it is complete .
 
 APHORISMS. 99 
 
 there are few circumstances in -which it is not best 
 either to hide all or to tell all." 
 
 " When the people is in a state of agitation, we do 
 not see how quiet is to return ; and when it is tranquil, 
 we do not see how the quiet is to be disturbed." 
 
 '•' Men count for almost nothing the virtues of the 
 heart, and idolise gifts of body or intellect. The man 
 who quite coolly, and with no idea that he is ofiFending 
 modesty, says that he is kind-hearted, constant, faith- 
 ful, sincere, fair, grateful, would not dare to say that 
 he is quick and clever, that he has fine teeth and a 
 delicate skin." 
 
 I will say nothing of Rivarol, a caustic wit of 
 the revolutionary time, nor of Joubert, a writer 
 of sayings of this century, of whom Mr, Matthew 
 Arnold has said all that needs saying. He is 
 delicate, refined, acute, but his thoughts were 
 fostered in the hothouse of a coterie, and have 
 none of the salt and sapid flavour that comes to 
 more masculine spirits from active contact with 
 the world. 
 
 I should prefer to close this survey in the 
 sunnier moral climate of Vauvenargues. His 
 own life was a pathetic failure in all the aims of 
 outer circumstance. The chances of fortune and 
 of health persistently baulked him, but from 
 each stroke he rose up again, with undimmed
 
 100 APHORISMS. 
 
 serenity and undaunted spirit. As blow fell upon 
 blow, the sufferer held firmly to his incessant 
 lesson, — Be brave, persevere in the fight, struggle 
 on, do not let go, think magnanimously of man 
 and life, for man is good and life is affluent and 
 fruitful. He died a hundred and forty years 
 ago, leaving a little body of maxims behind him 
 which, for tenderness, equanimity, cheerfulness, 
 grace, sobriety, and hope, are not surpassed in 
 prose literature. " One of the noblest qualities 
 in our nature," he said, " is that we are able so 
 easily to dispense with greater perfection." 
 
 "Magnanimity owes no account to prudence of its 
 motives." 
 
 " To do great things a man must live as though he 
 had never to die." 
 
 " The first days of spring have less grace than the 
 growing virtue of a young man." 
 
 " You must rouse in men a consciousness of their 
 own prudence and strength if you would raise their 
 character." 
 
 Just as Tocqueville said : " He who despises 
 
 mankind will never get the best out of either 
 
 others or himself." ^ 
 
 ^ The reader who cares to know more about Vauve- 
 nargues will find a chapter on him in the present 
 writer's Miscellanies, vol. ii.
 
 APHORISMS. 101 
 
 The best known of Vauvenargues' sayings, as 
 it is the deepest and the broadest, is the far- 
 reaching sentence already quoted, that " Great 
 thoughts come from the heart." And this is the 
 truth that shines out as we watch the voyagings 
 of humanity from the " wide, grey, lampless 
 depths " of time. Those have been greatest in 
 thought who have been best endowed Avith faith, 
 hope, sympathy, and the spirit of eflFort. And 
 next to them come the great stern, mournful 
 men, like Tacitus, Dante, Pascal, who, standing 
 as far aloof from the soft poetic dejection of some 
 of the moods of Shelley or Keats as from the 
 savage fury of Swift, watch with a prophet's 
 indignation the heedless waste of faculty and 
 opportunity, the triumph of paltry motive and 
 paltry aim, as if we were the flies of a summer 
 noon, which do more than any active malignity 
 to distort the noble lines, and to weaken or to 
 frustrate the strong and healthy parts, of human 
 nature. For practical purposes all these com- 
 plaints of man are of as little avail as Johnson 
 found the complaint that of the globe so large a 
 space should be occupied by the uninhabitable 
 ocean, encumbered by naked mountains, lost
 
 102 APHORISMS 
 
 under barren sands, scorched by perpetual heat 
 or petrified by perpetual frost, and so small a 
 space be left for the production of fruits, the 
 pasture of cattle, and the accommodation of 
 men. 
 
 When we have deducted, said Johnson, all the 
 time that is absorbed in sleep, or appropriated 
 to the other demands of nature, or the inevitable 
 requirements of social intercourse, all that is torn 
 from us by violence of disease, or imperceptibly 
 stolen from us by languor, we may realise of how 
 small a portion of our time we are truly masters. 
 And the same consideration of the ceaseless and 
 natural pre-occupations of men in the daily 
 struggle will reconcile the wise man to all the 
 disappointments, delays, shortcomings of the 
 world, without shaking the firmness of his own 
 faith, or the intrepidity of his own purpose.
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERN- 
 MENT.^ 
 
 " If the government of the Many," says the dis- 
 tinguished author of the volume before us, " be 
 really inevitable, one would have thought that 
 the possibility of discovering some other and 
 newer means of enabling it to fulfil the ends 
 for which all governments exist would have 
 been a question exercising all tlie highest powers 
 of the strongest minds, particularly in the com- 
 munity which, through the success of its popular 
 institutions, has paved the way for modern De- 
 mocracy. Yet hardly anything worth mention- 
 ing has been produced on the subject in England 
 or on the Continent." To say this, by the way, 
 is strangely to ignore three or four very remark- 
 able books that have been published within the 
 last twenty or five-and-twenty years, that have 
 excited immense attention and discussion, and 
 
 1 February 1886. 
 
 lOS
 
 104 MAINE ON I'Ol'ULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 that are the work of minds that even Sir Henry 
 Maine would hardly call weak or inactive. We 
 are no adherents of any of Mr. Hare's proposals, 
 but there are important public men who think 
 that his work on the Election of Representatives 
 is as conspicuous a landmark in politics as the 
 Principia was in natural philosophy. J. S. Mill's 
 volume on Representative Government, which ap- 
 peared in 1861, was even a more memorable 
 contribution towards the solution of the very 
 problem defined by Sir Henry Maine, than was 
 the older Mill's article on Government in 1820 
 to the political difficulties of the eve of the 
 Reform Bill. Again, Lord Grey's work on 
 Parliamentary Government failed in making its 
 expected mark on legislation, but it was worth 
 mentioning because it goes on the lines of the 
 very electoral law in Belgium which Sir Henry 
 Maine (p. 109) describes as deserving our most 
 respectful attention — an attention, I suspect, 
 which it is as little likely to receive from either 
 of our two political parties as Lord Grey's 
 suggestions. Nor should we neglect Sir G. C. 
 Lewis's little book, or Mr. Harrison's volume 
 on Order and Progress, which abounds in im-
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 105 
 
 portant criticism and suggestion for the student 
 of the abstract politics of modern societies. In 
 the United States, too, and in our own colonies, 
 there have been attempts, not without merit, to 
 state and to deal with some of the drawbacks 
 of popular government. 
 
 Nothing has been done, however, that makes 
 the appearance in the field of a mind of so high 
 an order as Sir Henry Maine's either superfluous 
 or unwelcome. It is hardly possible that he 
 should discuss any subject within the publicist's 
 range, without bringing into light some of its 
 less superficial aspects, and adding observations 
 of originality and value to the stock of political 
 thought. To set people thinking at all on the 
 more general and abstract truths of that great 
 subject which is commonly left to be handled 
 lightly, unsystematically, fragmentarily, in obedi- 
 ence to the transitory necessities of the day, by 
 Ministers, members of Parliament, journalists, 
 electors, and the whole host who live intellectu- 
 ally and politically from hand to mouth, is in 
 itself a service of all but the first order. Service 
 of the very first order is not merely to propound 
 objections, but to devise working answers, and
 
 106 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 this is exactly what Sir Henry Maine abstains 
 from doing. 
 
 No one will think the moment for a serious 
 political inquiry ill chosen. We have just 
 effected an immense recasting of our system of 
 parliamentary representation. The whole con- 
 sequences of the two great Acts of 1884 and 
 1885 are assuredly not to be finally gauged 
 by anything that has happened during the 
 recent election. Yet even this single election 
 has brought about a crisis of vast importance 
 in one part of the United Kingdom, by forcing 
 the question of an Irish constitution to the front. 
 It is pretty clear, also, that the infusion of a 
 large popular element into the elective House 
 has made more difficult the maintenance of its 
 old relations with the hereditary House. Even 
 if there were no others, these two questions 
 alone, and especially the first of them, will 
 make the severest demands on the best minds 
 in the country. We shall be very fortunate 
 if the crisis produces statesmen as sagacious 
 as those American publicists of whom Sir Henry 
 Maine rightly entertains so exalted an opinion. 
 
 Whether or not we are on the threshold of
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 107 
 
 great legislative changes, it is in any case cer- 
 tain that the work of government will be carried 
 on under new parliamentary and social condi- 
 tions. In meeting this prospect, we have the 
 aid neither of strong and systematic political 
 schools, nor powerful and coherent political 
 parties. No one can pretend, for instance, that 
 there is any body of theoretic opinion so com- 
 pact and so well thought out as Benthamism 
 was in its own day and generation. Again, 
 in practice, there are ominous signs that Par- 
 liament is likely to break up into groups ; and 
 the substitution of groups for parties is certain, 
 if continental experience is to count for any- 
 thing, to create new obstacles in the way of 
 firm and stable government. Weak government 
 throws power to something which usurps the 
 name of public opinion, and public opinion as 
 expressed by the ventriloquists of the news- 
 papers is at once more capricious and more 
 vociferous than it ever was. This was abund- 
 antly shown during the last five years by a 
 variety of unfortunate public adventures. Then, 
 does the excitement of democracy weaken the 
 stability of national temperament 1 By setting
 
 108 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 up what in physics would be called a highly 
 increased molecular activity, does it disturb 
 not merely conservative respect for institu- 
 tions, but respect for coherence and continuity 
 of opinion and sentiment in the character 
 of the individual himself? Is there a fluidity 
 of character in modern democratic societies 
 which contrasts not altogether favourably with 
 the strong solid types of old? Are English- 
 men becoming less like Romans, and more like 
 disputatious Greeks 1 These and many other 
 considerations of the same kind are enough 
 to secure a ready welcome for any thinker who 
 can light up the obscurities of the time. 
 
 With profound respect for Sir Henry Maine's 
 attainments, and every desire to profit by illumi- 
 nation wherever it may be discerned, we cannot 
 clearly see how the present volume either makes 
 the problems more intelligible, or points the way 
 to feasible solutions. Though he tries, in perfect 
 good faith, to be the dispassionate student, he 
 often comes very close to the polemics of the 
 hour. The truth is that scientific lawyers have 
 seldom been very favourable to popular govern- 
 ment, and when the scientific lawyer is doubled
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 109 
 
 with the Indian bureaucrat, we are pretty sure 
 beforehand that in such a tribunal it will go 
 hard with democracy. That the author ex- 
 tremely dislikes and suspects the new order, 
 he does not hide either from himself or us. 
 Intellectual contempt for the idolatries of the 
 forum and the market-place has infected him 
 with a touch of that chagrin which came to 
 men like Tacitus from disbelief in the moral 
 government of a degenerate world. Though 
 he strives, like Tacitus, to take up his parable 
 nee amore et sine odio, the disgust is ill con- 
 cealed. There are passages where we almost 
 hear the drone of a dowager in the Faubourg 
 Saint-Germain. It was said of Tocqueville that 
 he was an aristocrat who accepted his defeat. 
 Sir Henry Maine in politics is a bureaucrat 
 who cannot bear to think that democracy will 
 win. He is dangerously near the frame of 
 mind of Scipio Emilianus, after the movement 
 of the Gracchi and the opening of the Roman 
 revolution. Scipio came to the conclusion that 
 with whichever party he took sides, or whatever 
 measures a disinterested and capable statesman 
 might devise, he would only aggravate the evil.
 
 J 10 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 Sir Henry Maine would seem to be nearly as 
 despondent. Hence his book is fuller of appre- 
 hension than of guidance, more plausible in 
 alarm than wise or useful in direction. It is 
 exclusively critical and negative. There is, 
 indeed, an admirable account of the constitu- 
 tion of the United States. But on the one 
 great question on which the constitution of the 
 United States might have been expected to 
 shed light — the modification of the House of 
 Lords — Sir Henry Maine explicitly admits (p. 
 186) that it is very difficult to obtain from 
 the younger institution, the Senate, any lessons 
 which can be of use in the reconstruction of 
 the older. At every turn, the end of the dis- 
 cussion lands us in a philosophical cul-de-sac, 
 and nothing is so depressing as a cul-de-sac. 
 The tone is that of the political valetudinarian, 
 watching with uneasy eye the ways of rude 
 health. Unreflecting optimism about Popular 
 Government is sickening, but calculated pessi- 
 mism is not much better. 
 
 Something, no doubt, may often be gained 
 by the mere cross-examination of catchwords 
 and the exposure of platitudes. Popular govern-
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. Ill 
 
 ment is no more free from catchwords and 
 platitudes than anj^ other political, religious, 
 or social cause which interests a great many 
 people, and is the subject of much discussion. 
 Even the Historical Method has its own clap- 
 trap. But one must not make too much of 
 these things. " In order to love mankind," 
 said Helv^tius, " one must not expect too much 
 from them." And fairly to appreciate institu- 
 tions you must not hold them up against the 
 light that blazes in Utopia ; you must not 
 expect them to satisfy microscopic analysis, nor 
 judge their working, which is inevitably rough, 
 awkward, clumsy, and second-best, by the fasti- 
 dious standards of closet logic. 
 
 Before saying more as to the substance of 
 the book, we may be allowed to notice one or 
 two matters of literary or historical interest 
 in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open 
 to criticism. There is an old question about 
 Burke which was discussed by the present 
 writer a long time ago. A great disillusion, 
 says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to 
 him to separate the Thoughts on the Present 
 Discontents and the Speech on Taxation from the
 
 112 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 magnificent panegyric on the British Consti- 
 tution in 1790. "Not many persons in the 
 last century could have divined from the pre- 
 vious opinions of Edmund Burke the real sub- 
 structure of his political creed, or did in fact 
 suspect it till it was uncovered by the early 
 and comparatively slight miscarriage of French 
 revolutionary institutions." This is, as a state- 
 ment of fact, not at all correct. Lord Chatham 
 detected what he believed to be the mischievous 
 Conservatism in Burke's constitutional doctrines 
 at the very outset. So did the Constitutional 
 Society detect it. So did Mrs, Macaulay, Bishop 
 Watson, and many other people. The story of 
 Burke's inconsistency is, of course, as old as 
 Sheridan, Hazlitt declared that the Burke of 
 1770 and the Burke of 1790 were not merely op- 
 posite persons, but deadly enemies. Mr. Buckle, 
 who is full of veneration for the early writings, 
 but who dislikes the later ones, gets over the 
 difficulty by insisting that Burke actually went 
 out of his mind after 1789. We should have 
 expected a subtler judgment from Sir Henry 
 Maine. Burke belonged from first to last to 
 the great historic and positive school, of which
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 113 
 
 the founder was Montesquieu. Its whole method, 
 principle, and sentiment, all animated him with 
 equal force whether he was defending the 
 secular pomps of Oude or the sanctity of 
 Benares, the absolutism of Versailles, or the 
 free and ancient Parliament at Westminster.^ 
 
 Versailles reminds us of a singular overstate- 
 ment by Sir Henry Maine of the blindness of the 
 privileged classes in France to the approach of 
 the Revolution. He speaks as if Lord Chester- 
 field's famous passage were the only anticipation 
 of the coming danger. There is at least one 
 utterance of Louis xv. himself, which shows that 
 he did not expect things to last much beyond his 
 time. D'Argenson, in the very year of Chester- 
 field's prophecy, pronounced that a revolution 
 was inevitable, and he even went so close to the 
 mark as to hint that it would arise on the first 
 occasion when it should be necesosary to convoke 
 the States General. Rousseau, in a page of the 
 Confessions, not only divined a speedy revolution, 
 but enumerated the operative causes of it with 
 
 * It is satisfactory to have the authority of Mr. 
 Lecky on the same side. England in the Eighteenth 
 Century, vol. iii. chap. ix. p. 209.
 
 114 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 real precision. There is a striking prediction in 
 Voltaire, and another in Mercier de la Riviere. 
 Other names might be quoted to the same effect, 
 including Maria Theresfii, who described the 
 ruined condition of the French monarchy, and 
 only hoped that the ruin might not overtake her 
 daughter. The mischief was not so much that 
 the privileged classes were blind as that they were 
 selfish, stubborn, helpless, and reckless. The 
 point is not very important in itself, but it is 
 characteristic of a very questionable way of read- 
 ing human history. Sir Henry Maine's readiness 
 to treat revolutions as due to erroneous abstract 
 ideas naturally inclines him to take too narrow 
 a view both of the preparation in circumstances, 
 and of the preparation in the minds of observant 
 onlookers. 
 
 In passing, by the way, we are curious to 
 know the writer's authority for what he calls the 
 odd circumstance that the Jacobins generally 
 borrowed their phrases from the legendary history 
 of the early Roman Republic, while the Girondins 
 preferred to take metaphors from the literature 
 of Rousseau (p. 75). There was plenty of 
 nonsense talked about Brutus and Scaevola by
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 115 
 
 both parties, and it is not possible to draw the 
 line with precision. But the received view is 
 that the Girondins were Voltairean, and the 
 Jacobins Rousseauite, while Danton was of the 
 school of the Encyclopaedia, and Hubert and 
 Chaumette were inspired by Holbach. 
 
 The author seems to us greatly to exaggerate 
 the whole position of Rousseau, and even in a 
 certain sense to mistake the nature of his 
 influence. That Jean-Jacques was a far-reach- 
 ing and important voice the present writer is 
 not at all likely to deny ; but no estimate of 
 his influence in the world is correct which does, 
 not treat him rather as moralist than publicist. 
 Bmilius went deeper into men's minds in France 
 and in Europe at large, and did more to quicken 
 the democratic spirit, than the Social Contract. 
 Apart from this. Sir Henry Maine places 
 Rousseau on an isolated eminence which does 
 not really belong to him. It did not fall within 
 the limited scope of such an essay as Sir Henry 
 Maine's to trace the leading ideas of the Social 
 Contract to the various sources from which they 
 had come, but his account of these sources is, 
 even for its scale, inadequate. Portions of
 
 116 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 Rousseau's ideas, he says truly, may be dis- 
 covered in the speculations of older writers; 
 and he mentions Hobbes and the French Econo- 
 mists. But the most characteristic of all the 
 elements in Rousseau's speculation were drawn 
 from Locke. The theoretic basis of popular 
 government is to be found in more or less 
 definite shape in various authors from Thomas 
 Aquinas downwards. But it was Locke's 
 philosophic vindication of the Revolution of 
 1688, in the famous essay on Civil Government, 
 that directly taught Rousseau the lesson of the 
 Sovereignty of the People. Such originality as 
 the Social Contract possesses is due to its remark- 
 able union of the influence of the two antagonistic 
 English Thinkers. The differences between 
 Hobbes and Rousseau were striking enough. 
 Rousseau looked on men as good, Hobbes looked 
 on them as bad. The one described the state 
 of nature as a state of peace, the other as a state 
 of war. The first believed that laws and institu- 
 tions had depraved man, the second that they 
 had improved him. In spite of these differences 
 the influence of Hobbes was important, but only 
 important in combination. " The total result is,"
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 117 
 
 as I have said elsewhere, " a curious fusion 
 between the premises and the temper of Hobbes, 
 and the conclusions of Locke. This fusion pro- 
 duced that popular absolutism of which the 
 Social Contract was the theoretical expression, 
 and Jacobin supremacy the practical manifesta- 
 tion. Eousseau borrowed from Hobbes the true 
 conception of sovereignty, and from Locke the 
 true conception of the ultimate seat and original 
 of authority, and of the two together he made 
 the great image of the Sovereign People. 
 Strike the crowned head from that monstrous 
 figure which is the frontispiece of the Leviathan, 
 and you have a frontispiece that will do ex- 
 cellently well for the Social Contract." ^ 
 
 One more word may be said by the way. The 
 very slightest account of Rousseau is too slight 
 to be tolerable, if it omits to mention Calvin. 
 Rousseau's whole theory of the Legislator, which 
 produced such striking results in certain transi- 
 tory phases of the French Revolution, grew up in 
 his mind from the constitution which the great 
 reformer had so predominant a share in framing 
 for the little republic where Rousseau was born. 
 ^ Rousseau, chap. xii.
 
 1 1 8 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT, 
 
 This omission of Locke and Calvin again exem- 
 plifies the author's characteristic tendency to look 
 upon political ideas as if speculative writers got 
 them out of their own heads, or out of the heads of 
 other people, apart from the suggestions of events 
 and the requirements of circumstance. Calvin 
 was the builder of a working government, and 
 Locke was the defender of a practical revolution. 
 Nor does the error stop at the literary sources 
 of political theories, A point more or less in an 
 estimate of a writer or a book is of trivial im- 
 portance compared with what strikes us as Sir 
 Henry Maine's tendency to impute an unreal 
 influence to writers and books altogether. There 
 is, no doubt, a vulgar and superficial opinion 
 that mere speculation is so remote from the real 
 interests of men, that it is a waste of time for 
 practical people to concern themselves about 
 speculation. No view could be more foolish, 
 save one ; and that one is the opposite view, 
 that the real interests of men have no influence 
 on their speculative opinions, and no share either 
 in moulding those opinions or in causing their 
 adoption. Sir Henry Maine does not push 
 things quite so far as this. Still he appears to
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 119 
 
 US to attribute almost exclusive influence to 
 political theories, and almost entirely to omit 
 what we take to be the much more important 
 reaction upon theory, both of human nature, and 
 of the experience of human life and outward 
 affairs. He makes no allowance among innova- 
 ting agencies for native rationalism without a 
 formula. His brilliant success in other applica- 
 tions of the Historic Method has disposed him 
 to see survivals where other observers will be 
 content with simpler explanations. The reader 
 is sometimes tempted to recall Edie Ochiltree's 
 rude interruption of Mr. Oldbuck's enthusiasm 
 over the prsetorium of the immortal Roman 
 camp at Monkbarns. "Praetorian here, Prae- 
 torian there ! I mind the bigging o 't." 
 
 Sir Henry Maine believes that the air is thick 
 with ideas about democracy that were conceived 
 a priwi, and that sprung from the teaching of 
 Rousseau. A conviction of the advantages of 
 legislative change, for example, he considers to 
 owe its origin much less to active and original 
 intelligence, than to " the remote effect of words 
 and notions derived from broken-down political 
 theories" (p. 171). There are two great
 
 1 20 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 fountains of political theory in our country, 
 according to the author : Rousseau is one, and 
 Bentham is the other. Current thought and 
 speech is infested by the floating fragments of 
 these two systems — by loose phrases, by vague 
 notions, by superstitions, that enervate the 
 human intellect and endanger social safety. 
 This is the constant refrain of the pages before 
 us. We should have liked better evidence. We 
 do not believe that it is a Roman prsetorium. 
 Men often pick up old phrases for new events, 
 even when they are judging events afresh with 
 independent minds. When a politician of the 
 day speaks of natural rights, he uses a loose 
 traditional expression for a view of social equities 
 which has come to him, not from a book, but 
 from a survey of certain existing social facts. 
 Now the phrase, the literary description, is the 
 least significant part of the matter. When 
 Mr. Mill talks of the influence of Bentham's 
 writings, he is careful to tell us that he does 
 not mean that they caused the Reform Bill or 
 the Appropriation Clause. " The changes which 
 have been made," says Mill, "and the greater 
 changes which will be made, in our institutions
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 121 
 
 are not the work of philosophers, but of the 
 interests and instincts of large portions of society 
 recently grown into strength " {Dissertations, i. 
 332). That is the point. It is the action of 
 these interests and instincts which Sir Henry 
 Maine habitually overlooks. Nor is the omis- 
 sion a mere speculative imperfection. It has 
 an important bearing on the whole practical 
 drift of the book. If he had made more room 
 for " the common intellect rough-hewing political 
 truths at the suggestion of common wants and 
 common experience," he would have viewed 
 existing circumstances with a less lively ap- 
 prehension. 
 
 It is easy to find an apposite illustration of 
 what is meant by saying that this talk of the 
 influence of speculation is enormously exaggerated 
 and misleading. When Arthur Young was in 
 France in the autumn of 1787, he noticed a 
 remarkable revolution in manners in two or 
 three important respects. One of them was a 
 new fashion that had just come in, of spending 
 some weeks in the country : everybody who had 
 a country seat went to live there, and such as 
 had none went to visit those who had. This
 
 122 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 new custom, observed the admirable Young, is 
 one of the best that they have taken from England, 
 and "its introduction was effected the easier 
 being assisted by the magic of Eousseau's writ- 
 ings." The other and more generally known 
 change was that women of the first fashion were 
 no longer ashamed of nursing their own children, 
 and that infants were no longer tightly bound 
 round by barbarous stays and swaddling clothes. 
 This wholesome change, too, was assisted by 
 Rousseau's eloquent pleas for simplicity and the 
 life natural. Of these particular results of his 
 teaching in France a hundred years ago the 
 evidence is ample, direct, and beyond denial. 
 But whenever we find gentlemen with a taste 
 for country life, and ladies with a fancy for 
 nursing their own children, we surely need not 
 cry out that here is another proof of the extra- 
 ordinary influence of the speculations of Jean- 
 Jacques Rousseau. We need not treat it as a 
 survival of a broken-down theory. " Great 
 Nature is more wise than I," says the Poet. 
 Great Nature had much more to do with mould- 
 ing men and women to these things than all the 
 books that have ever been printed.
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 123 
 
 We are entirely sceptical as to the proposition 
 that "men have at all times quarrelled more 
 fiercely about phrases and formulas than even 
 about material interests" (p. 124). There has 
 been a certain amount of fighting in the world 
 about mere words, as idle as the faction fights 
 between Caravats and Shanavests, or Two- Year- 
 Olds and Three- Year-Olds in Ireland. But the 
 more carefully we look into human history, the 
 more apparent it becomes that underneath the 
 phrase or the formula there is usually a material 
 or a quasi-material, or a political, or a national, or 
 an ecclesiastical interest. Few quarrels now 
 seem so purely verbal as those which for several 
 centuries raged about the mysteries of the faith 
 in the Western and the Eastern Churches. Yet 
 these quarrels, apparently as frivolous as they 
 were ferocious, about the relations of mind and 
 matter, about the composition of the Trinity, 
 about the Divine nature, turned much less on 
 futile metaphysics than on the solid competition 
 for ecclesiastical power, or the conflict of rival 
 nationalities. The most transcendental heresy 
 or orthodoxy generally had business at the 
 bottom of it.
 
 124 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 In limiting the parentage of Modern English 
 Liberalism of a Radical or democratic type to 
 Rousseau and Bentham, the author has left out 
 of sight what is assuredly a much more important 
 factor than any speculative, literary, or philosophic 
 matter whatever. " Englishmen," he says truly, 
 " are wont to be content with the rough rule of 
 success or failure as the test of right or wrong 
 in national undertakings." The same habit of 
 mind and temper marks the attitude of English- 
 men towards their national institutions. They 
 look to success and failure, they take the measure 
 of things from results, they consult the practical 
 working of the machine, they will only go to 
 school with experience. We cannot find the 
 proof that a priori Radicalism ever at any time 
 got a real hold of any considerable mass of the 
 people of this country, or that any of the great 
 innovations in domestic policy since the end 
 of Lord Liverpool's administration have been 
 inspired or guided by Rousseauite assumptions. 
 Godwin, whose book on Political Justice was for 
 a long time the great literary fountain of English 
 Radicalism, owed quite as much to the utilitarian 
 Helv6tius as to the sentimental Rousseau. Nor
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 125 
 
 can either William Cobbett or Joseph Hume 
 be said to have dealt largely in a priori. What 
 makes the Radical of the street is mostly mother- 
 wit exercising itself upon the facts of the time. 
 His weakness is that he does not know enough 
 of the facts of other times. 
 
 Sir Henry Maine himself points to what has 
 had a far more decisive influence on English 
 ways of thinking about politics than his two 
 philosophers, put together. "The American 
 Republic," he says (p. 11), "has greatly in- 
 fluenced the favour into which popular govern- 
 ment grew. It disproved the once universal 
 assumptions that no Republic could govern a 
 large territory, and that no strictly Republican 
 government could be stable." Nothing can be 
 more true. When Burke and Chatham and 
 Fox persistently declared that the victory of 
 England over the colonists would prove fatal 
 in the long run to the liberties of England itself, 
 those great men were even wiser than they 
 knew. The success of popular government 
 across the Atlantic has been the strongest in- 
 centive to the extension of popular government 
 here. We need go no further back than the
 
 126 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT, 
 
 Reform Bill of 1867 to remind ourselves that 
 the victory of the North over the South, and 
 the extraordinary clemency and good sense with 
 which that victory was used, had more to do 
 with the concession of the franchise to house- 
 holders in boroughs than all the eloquence of 
 Mr. Gladstone and all the diplomacies of Mr. 
 Disraeli. 
 
 To the influence of the American Union must 
 be added that of the British colonies. The 
 success of popular self-government in these 
 thriving communities is reacting on political 
 opinion at home with a force that no statesman 
 neglects, and that is every day increasing. 
 There is even a danger that the influence may 
 go too far. They are solving some of our pro- 
 blems, but not under our conditions, and not 
 in presence of the same difficulties. Still the 
 effect of colonial prosperity — a prosperity alike 
 of admirable achievement and boundless pro- 
 mise — is irresistible. It imparts a freedom, an 
 elasticity, an expansiveness, to English political 
 notions, and gives our people a confidence in 
 free institutions and popular government, which 
 they would never have drawn from the most
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 127 
 
 eloquent assumptions of speculative system - 
 mongers, nor from any other source whatever, 
 save practical experience carefully observed and 
 rationally interpreted. This native and inde- 
 pendent rationality in men is what the jealous 
 votary of the historic method places far too 
 low. 
 
 In coming closer to the main current oi the 
 book, our first disappointment is that Sir Henry 
 Maine has not been very careful to do full 
 justice to the views that he criticises. He is 
 not altogether above lending himself to the 
 hearsay of the partisan. He allows expres- 
 sions to slip from him which show that he 
 has not been anxious to face the problems of 
 popular government as popular government 
 is understood by those who have best right 
 to speak for it. "The more the difficulties 
 of multitudinous government are probed," he 
 says (p. 180), "the stronger grows the doubt 
 of the infallibility of popularly elected legis- 
 latures." We do not profess to answer for all 
 that may have been said by Mr. Bancroft, 
 or Walt Whitman, or all the orators of all 
 the Fourths of July since American Inde-
 
 128 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 pendence. But we are not acquainted with 
 any English writer or politician of the very- 
 slightest consideration or responsibility who 
 has committed himself to the astounding pro- 
 position, that popularly elected legislatures are 
 infallible. Who has ever advanced such a 
 doctrine ? Further, " It requires some atten- 
 tion to facts to see how widely spread is the 
 misgiving as to the absolute wisdom of 
 popularly elected chambers." We are not 
 surprised at the misgiving. But after reason- 
 able attention to facts, we cannot recall any 
 publicist, whom it could be worth while to 
 spend five minutes in refuting, who has ever 
 said that popularly elected chambers are ab- 
 solutely wise. Again, we should like the 
 evidence for the statement that popularly 
 elected Houses "do not nowadays appeal to 
 the wise deduction from experience, as old as 
 Aristotle, which no student of constitutional 
 history will deny, that the best constitutions 
 are those in which there is a large popular 
 element. It is a singular proof of the wide- 
 spread influence of the speculations of Rousseau 
 that although very few First Chambers really
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 129 
 
 represent the entire community, nevertheless 
 in Europe they almost invariably claim to 
 reflect it, and as a consequence they assume 
 an air of divinity, which if it rightfully be- 
 longed to them would be fatal to all argument 
 for a Second Chamber." That would be very 
 important if it were true. But is it true that 
 First Chambers assume an air of divinity '{ 
 Or is such an expression a burlesque of the 
 real argument? A reasonable familiarity with 
 the course of the controversy in France, where 
 the discussion has been abundant, and in 
 England, where it has been comparatively 
 meagre, leaves me, for one, entirely ignorant 
 that this claim for divinity, or anything like 
 it, is ever heard in the debate. The most 
 powerful modern champion of popular govern- 
 ment was Gambetta. Did Gambetta consider 
 First Chambers divine 1 On the contrary, 
 some of the most strenuous pleas for the 
 necessity of a Second Chamber are to be 
 found precisely in the speeches of Gambetta 
 {e.g. his speech at Grenoble, in the autumn 
 of 1878, Discours viii. 270, etc.). Abstract 
 thinking is thinking withdrawn from the con- 
 I
 
 I 30 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 Crete and particular facts. But the abstract 
 thinker should not withdraw too far. 
 
 Sir Henry Maine speaks (p. 185) of "the 
 saner political theorist, who holds that in secular 
 matters it is better to walk by sight than by 
 faith." He allows that a theorist of this kind, 
 as regards popularly elected chambers, " will be 
 satisfied that experience has shown the best 
 Constitutions to be those in which the popular 
 element is large, and he will readily admit that, 
 as the structure of each society of men slowly 
 alters, it is well to alter and amend the organi- 
 sation by which this element makes itself felt." 
 Sir Henry Maine would surely have done better 
 service in this grave and difficult discussion, 
 if he had dealt with views which he mistrusts, 
 as the)^ are really held and expressed by sane 
 theorists, and not by insane theorists out of 
 sight. In France, a hundred years ago, from 
 causes that are capable of explanation, the 
 democracy of sentiment swept away the de- 
 mocracy of utility. In spite of casual phrases 
 in public discussion, and in spite of the incen- 
 diary trash of Red journalists without influence, 
 it is the democracy of reason, experience, and
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 131 
 
 utility that is now in the ascendant, both in 
 France and elsewhere. 
 
 The same spirit of what we must call parody 
 is shown in such a statement as that (p. 78) 
 "an audience composed of roughs or clowns 
 is boldly told by an educated man that it has 
 more political information than an equal number 
 of scholars." By " roughs " Sir Henry Maine 
 explains that he means the artisans of the towns. 
 The designation is hardly felicitous. It is not 
 even fashionable ; for the roughs and clowns 
 are now by common consent of Tories and 
 Liberals alike transformed into capable citizens. 
 Such a phrase gives us a painful glimpse of 
 the accurate knowledge of their countrymen 
 that is possessed by eminent men who write 
 about them from the dim and distant seclusion 
 of college libraries and official bureaux. If Sir 
 Henry Maine could spare a few evenings from 
 dispassionate meditations on popular government 
 in the abstract, to the inspection of the govern- 
 ing people in the concrete, he would be the 
 first to see that to dispatch an audience of 
 skilled artisans as an assembly of roughs is as 
 unscientific, to use the mildest word, as the
 
 1 32 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 habit in a certain religious world of lumping 
 all the unconverted races of the earth in every 
 clime and age in the summary phrase, the 
 heathen. A great meeting of artisans listening 
 to Mr, Arthur Balfour or Sir Henry Roscoe 
 at Manchester, to Sir Lyon Playfair at Leeds 
 (the modern democrat, at any rate, does not 
 think the Eepublic has no need of chemists), 
 or to anybody else in a great industrial centre 
 anywhere else, is no more an assemblage of 
 roughs than Convocation or the House of 
 Lords. Decidedly, an enemy of the unverified 
 assumptions of democracy ought to be on his 
 guard against the unverified assumptions of 
 pedantocracy. 
 
 As for the particular bit of sycophancy which 
 educated men wickedly dangle before roughs and 
 clowns, we should like to be sure that the pro- 
 position is correctly reported. If the educated 
 man tells his roughs (if that be the right name 
 for the most skilful, industrious, and effective 
 handicraftsmen in the world) that they have as 
 much of the information necessary for shaping 
 a sound judgment on the political issues sub- 
 mitted to them, as an equal number of average
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 133 
 
 Masters of Arts and Doctors of Laws, then we 
 should say that the educated man, unless he has 
 been very unlucky with his audience, is perfectly 
 right. He proves that his education has not 
 confined itself to books, bureaux, and an ex- 
 clusive society, but has been carried on in the 
 bracing a"ir of common life. I will not add 
 anything of my own on this point, because any 
 candidate or member of Parliament is suspect, 
 but I will venture to transcribe a page or so 
 from Mr. Frederic Harrison. Mr. Harrison's 
 intellectual equipment is not inferior to that of 
 Sir Henry Maine himself; and he has long had 
 close and responsible contact with the class of 
 men of whom he is speaking, which cannot be 
 quite a disqualification after all. 
 
 " No worse nonsense is talked than what we are told 
 as to the requisites for the elective franchise. To listen 
 to some people, it is almost as solemn a function as to 
 be a trustee of the British Museum. What you want 
 in a body of electors is a rough, shrewd eye for men of 
 character, honesty, and purpose. Very plain men know 
 who wish them well, and the sort of thing which will 
 bring them good. Electors have not got to govern the 
 country ; they have only to find a set of men who will 
 see that the Government is just and active. . . . All 
 things go best by comparison, and a body of men may
 
 134 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT, 
 
 be as good voters as their neighbours without b<jing the 
 type of the Christian hero. 
 
 " So far from being the least fit for political influence 
 of all classes in the community, the best part of the 
 working class forms the most fit of all others. If any 
 section of the people is to be the paramount arbiter in 
 public afiairs, the only section competent for this duty 
 is the superior order of workmen. Governing is one 
 thing ; but electors of any class cannot or ought not to 
 govern. Electing, or the giving an indirect approval of 
 Government, is another thing, and demands wholly 
 different qualities. These are moral, not intellectual ; 
 practical, not special gifts — gifts of a very plain and 
 almost universal order. Such are, firstly, social sym- 
 pathies and sense of justice ; then openness and plain- 
 ness of character ; lastly, habits of action, and a practical 
 knowledge of social misery. These are the qualities 
 which fit men to be the arbiters or ultimate source 
 (though certainly not the instruments) of political 
 power. These qualities the best working men possess 
 in a far higher degree than any other portion of the 
 community ; indeed, they are almost the only part of 
 the community which possesses them in any perceptible 
 degree." ^ 
 
 The worst of it is that, if Sir Henry Maine is 
 right, we have no more to hope from other 
 classes than from roughs and clowns. He 
 can discern no blue sky in any quarter. " In 
 politics," he says, " the most powerful of all 
 ^ Order and Progress, pp. 149-54, and again at p. 174.
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 135 
 
 causes is the timidity, the listlessness, and the 
 superficiality of the generality of minds " (p. 73). 
 This is carrying criticism of democracy into an 
 indictment against human nature. What is to 
 become of us, thus placed between the devil of 
 mob ignorance and corruption, and the deep sea 
 of genteel listlessness and superficiality 1 After 
 all, Sir Henry Maine is only repeating in more 
 sober tones the querulous remonstrances with 
 which we are so familiar on the lips of Ultramon- 
 tanes and Legitimists. A less timid observer of 
 contemporary events, certainly in the land that 
 all of us know best and love best, would judge 
 that, when it comes to a pinch. Liberals are 
 still passably prudent, and Conservatives quite 
 sufficiently wide-awake. 
 
 Another of the passages in Sir Henry Maine's 
 book, that savours rather of the party caricaturist 
 than of the " dispassionate student of politics," is 
 the following : — 
 
 "There is some resemblance between the period of 
 political reform in the nineteenth century and the period 
 of reUgious reformation in the sixteenth. Now as then 
 the multitude of followers must be distinguished from 
 the smaller group of leaders. Now as then there are a 
 certain number of zealots who desire that truth shall
 
 136 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 prevail. . . . But behind these, now as then, there 
 is a crowd which has imbibed a deliijht in change for 
 its own sake, who would reform the Suffrage, or the 
 House of Lords, or the Land Laws, or tlie Union with 
 Ireland, in precisely the same spirit in which the mob 
 behind the reformers of religion broke the nose of a 
 saint in stone, made a bonfire of copes and surplices, or 
 shouted for the government of the Church by presby- 
 teries" (p. 130). 
 
 We should wish to look at this remarkable 
 picture a little more closely. That there exist 
 Anabaptists in the varied hosts of the English 
 reformers is true. The feats of the Social 
 Democrats, however, at the recent election 
 hardly convince us that they have very formid- 
 able multitudes behind them. Nor is it they 
 who concern themselves with such innovations as 
 those which Sir Henry Maine specifies. The 
 Social Democrats, even of the least red shade, go 
 a long way beyond and below such trifles as 
 Suffrage or the Upper House. To say of the 
 crowd who do concern themselves with reform of 
 the Suff'rage, or the Land Laws, or the House of 
 Lords, or the Union with Ireland, that they are 
 animated by a delight in change for its own sake, 
 apart from the respectable desire to apply a 
 practical remedy to a practical inconvenience, is
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 137 
 
 to show a rather highflying disregard of easily 
 ascertainable facts. The Crowd listen with in- 
 terest to talk about altering the Land Laws, 
 because they suspect the English land system 
 to have something to do with the unprosperous 
 condition of the landlord, the farmer, and the 
 labourer ; with the depopulation of the country 
 and the congestion in the towns ; with the bad 
 housing of the poor, and with various other evils 
 which they suppose themselves to see staring 
 them daily in the face. They may be entirely 
 mistaken alike in their estimate of mischief and 
 their hope of mitigation. But they are not 
 moved by delight in change for its own sake. 
 When the Crowd sympathises with disapproval 
 of the House of Lords, it is because the legis- 
 lative performances of that body are believed to 
 have impeded useful reforms in the past, to be 
 impeding them now, and to be likely to impede 
 them in the future. This may be a sad misread- 
 ing of the history of the last fifty years, and a 
 painfully prejudiced anticipation of the next fifty. 
 At any rate, it is in intention a solid and practical 
 appeal to experience and results, and has no 
 affinity to a restless love of change for the sake of
 
 138 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 change. No doubt, in the progress of the contro- 
 versy, the assailants of the House of Lords attack 
 the principle of birth. But the principle of birth 
 is not attacked from the a priori point of view. 
 The whole force of the attack lies in what is 
 taken to be the attested fact that the principle 
 of a hereditary chamber supervising an elective 
 chamber has worked, is working, and will go on 
 working, inconveniently, stupidly, and danger- 
 ously. Finally, there is the question of the Irish 
 Union. Is it the English or Scottish Crowd 
 that is charged with a wanton desire to recast 
 the Union 1 Nobody knows much about the 
 matter who is not perfectly aware that the 
 English statesman, whoever he may be, who 
 undertakes the inevitable task of dealing with 
 the demand for Home Rule, will have to make 
 his case very plain indeed in order to make the 
 cause popular here. Then is it the Irish Crowd 1 
 Sir Henry Maine, of all men, is not likely to 
 believe that a sentiment which the wisest people 
 of all parties in Ireland for a hundred years have 
 known to lie in the depths of the mind of the 
 great bulk of the Irish population, to whom we 
 have now for the first time given the chance of
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 139 
 
 declaring their wishes, is no more than a gratui- 
 tous and superficial passion for change for its 
 own sake. The sentiment of Irish nationality 
 may or may not be able to justify itself in the 
 eye of prudential reason, and English statesmen 
 may or may not have been wise in inviting it to 
 explode. Those are different questions. But 
 Sir Henry Maine himself admits in another con- 
 nection (p. 83) that "vague and shadowy as are 
 the recommendations of what is called a National- 
 ity, a State founded on this principle has generally 
 one real practical advantage, through its oblitera- 
 tion of small tyrannies and local oppressions." 
 It is not to be denied that it is exactly the ex- 
 pectation of this very practical advantage that 
 has given its new vitality to the Irish National 
 movement which seems now once more, for good 
 or for evil, to have come to a head. When it is 
 looked into, then, the case against the multitudes 
 who are as senselessly eager to change institu- 
 tions as other multitudes once were to break otf 
 the noses of saints in stone, falls to pieces at 
 every point. 
 
 Among other vices ascribed to democracy, we 
 are told that it is against science, and that " even
 
 140 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT 
 
 in our day vaccination is in the utmost danger" 
 (p, 98). The instance is for various reasons not 
 a happy one. It is not even precisely stated. I 
 have never understood that vaccination is in 
 much danger. Compulsory vaccination is per- 
 haps in danger. But compulsion, as a matter 
 of fact, was strengthened as the franchise went 
 lower. It is a comparative novelty in English 
 legislation (1853), and as a piece of effectively 
 enforced administration it is more novel still 
 (1871). I admit, however, that it is not endured 
 in the United States ; and only two or three 
 years ago it was rejected by an overwhelming 
 majority on an appeal to the popular vote in the 
 Swiss Confederation. Obligatory vaccination 
 may therefore one day disappear from our statute 
 book, if democracy has anything to do with it. 
 But then the obligation to practise a medical rite 
 may be inexpedient, in spite of the virtues of the 
 rite itself That is not all. Sir Henry Maine 
 will admit that Mr. Herbert Spencer is not against 
 science, and he expresses in the present volume 
 his admiration for Mr. Spencer's work on Man 
 and the State. Mr. Spencer is the resolute op- 
 ponent of compulsory vaccination, and a resolute
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 141 
 
 denier, moreover, of the pretension that the 
 evidence for the advantages of vaccination takes 
 such account of the ulterior effects in the system 
 as to amount to a scientific demonstration. 
 Therefore, if science demands compulsory vaccina- 
 tion, democracy in rejecting the demand, and 
 even if it went further, is at least kept in coun- 
 tenance by some of those who are of the very 
 household of science. The illustration is hardly 
 impressive enough for the proposition that it 
 supports. 
 
 Another and a far more momentous illustration 
 occurs on another page (37). A very little con- 
 sideration is enough to show that it will by no 
 means bear Sir Henry Maine's construction. 
 "There is, in fact," he says, "just enough evidence 
 to show that even now there is a marked anta- 
 gonism between democratic opinion and scientific 
 truth as applied to human societies. The central 
 seat in all Political Economy was from the first 
 occupied by the theory of Population. This 
 theory . . . has become the central truth of 
 biological science. Yet it is evidently disliked 
 by the multitude and those whom the multitude 
 permits to lead it."
 
 1 42 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 Sir Henry Maine goes on to say that it has 
 long been intensely unpopular in France, and 
 this, I confess, is a surprise to me. It has usually 
 been supposed that a prudential limitation of 
 families is rooted in the minds and habits of 
 nearly, though not quite, all classes of the French 
 nation. An excellent work on France, written 
 by a sound English observer seven or eight years 
 ago, chances to be lying before me at the moment, 
 and here is a passage taken almost at random. 
 '' The opinions of thoughtful men seem to tend 
 towards the wish to introduce into France some 
 of that improvidence which allows English people 
 to bring large families into the world without 
 first securing the means of keeping them, and 
 which has peopled the continent of North 
 America and the Australian colonies with an 
 English-speaking race" (Richardson's Corn and 
 Cattle Producing Districts of France, p. 47, etc.). 
 Surely this is a well-established fact. It is 
 possible that denunciations of Malthus may 
 occasionally be found both in Clerical and Social- 
 istic prints, but then there are reasons for that. 
 It can hardly be made much of a charge against 
 French democracy that it tolerates unscientific
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 143 
 
 opinion, so long as it cultivates scientific 
 practice. 
 
 As for our own country, and those whom the 
 multitude permits to lead it, we cannot forget 
 that by far the most popular and powerful man 
 infcece Romuli — as Sir Henry Maine insists on 
 our putting it in that polite way — was tried 
 and condemned not many years ago for publish- 
 ing a certain pamphlet which made a limitation 
 of population the very starting-point of social 
 reform. It is not necessary to pronounce an 
 opinion on the particular counsels of the pam- 
 phlet, but the motives which prompted its 
 circulation (motives admitted to be respectable 
 by the Chief-Justice who tried the case), and the 
 extraordinary reception of the pamphlet by the 
 serious portion of the workmen of the towns, 
 would make a careful writer think twice before 
 feeling sure that popular bodies will never listen 
 to the truth about population. No doubt, as Sir 
 Henry Maine says in the same place, certain 
 classes now resist schemes for relieving distress 
 by emigration. But there is a pretty obvious 
 reason for that. That reason is not mere aver- 
 sion to face the common sense of the relations
 
 144 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 between population and subsistence, but a grow- 
 ing suspicion — as to the reasonableness of which, 
 again, I give no opinion — that emigration is 
 made into an easy and slovenly substitute for a 
 scientific reform in our system of holding and 
 using land. In the case of Ireland, other political 
 considerations must be added. 
 
 Democracy will be against science, we admit, 
 in one contingency : if it loses the battle with 
 the Ultramontane Church, The worst enemy of 
 science is also the bitterest enemy of democracy, 
 c'est le cUrkalisme. The interests of science and 
 the interests of democracy are one. Let us take 
 a case. Suppose that popular Government in 
 France were to succumb, a military or any other 
 more popular Government would be forced to 
 lean on Ultramontanes. Ultramontanes would 
 gather the spoils of democratic defeat. Sir Henry 
 Maine is much too well informed to think that 
 a clerical triumph would be good for science, 
 whatever else it might be good for. Then are 
 not propositions about democracy being against 
 science very idle and a little untrue 1 " Modern 
 politics," said a wise man (Pattison, Sermons, 
 p. 191) "resolve themselves into the struggle
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 145 
 
 between knowledge and tradition." Democracy 
 is hardly on the side of tradition. 
 
 We have dwelt on these secondary matters, 
 because they show that the author hardly brings 
 to the study of modem democracy the ripe pre- 
 paration of detail which he gave to ancient law. 
 In the larger field of his speculation, the value of 
 his thought is seriously impaired by the absence 
 of anything like a philosophy of society as a 
 whole. Nobody who has studied Burke, or 
 Comte, or Mill — I am not sure whether we should 
 not add even De Maistre — can imagine any of 
 them as setting to work on a general political 
 speculation without reference to particular social 
 conditions. They would have conducted the 
 inquiry in strict relation to the stage at which 
 a community happened to be, in matters lying 
 outside of the direct scope of political govern- 
 ment. So, before all other living thinkers, 
 should we have expected Sir Henry Maine to 
 do. It is obvious that systems of government, 
 called by the same name, bearing the same 
 superficial marks, founded and maintained on 
 the same nominal principles, framed in the same 
 verbal forms, may yet work with infinite 
 K
 
 146 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 diversity of operation, according to the variety 
 of social circumstances around them. Yet it is 
 here inferred that democracy in England must 
 be fragile, diflficult, and sundry other evil things, 
 because out of fourteen Presidents of the Bolivian 
 Republic thirteen have died assassinated or in 
 exile. If England and Bolivia were at all akin 
 in history, religion, race, industry, the fate of 
 Bolivian Presidents would be more instructive 
 to English Premiers. 
 
 One of the propositions which Sir Henry 
 Maine is most anxious to bring home to his 
 readers is that Democracy, in the extreme form 
 to which it tends, is of all kinds of government 
 by far the most difficult. He even goes so far 
 as to say (p. 87) that, while not denying to 
 Democracies some portion of the advantage 
 which Bentham claimed for them, and " putting 
 this advantage at the highest, it is more than 
 compensated by one great disadvantage," namely, 
 its difficulty. This generalisation is repeated 
 with an emphasis that surprises us, for two 
 reasons. In the first place, if the proposition 
 could be proved to be true, we fail to see that it 
 would be particularly effective in its practical
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 147 
 
 bearings. Everybody whose opinions are worth 
 consideration, and everybody who has ever come 
 near the machinery of democratic government, 
 is only too well aware that whether it be far the 
 most difficult form of government or not, it is 
 certainly difficult enough to tax the powers of 
 statesmanship to the very uttermost. Is not 
 that enough 1 Is anything gained by pressing 
 us further than that 1 " Better be a poor fisher- 
 man," said Danton as he walked in the last hours 
 of his life on the banks of the Aube, " better be 
 a poor fisherman, than meddle with the governing 
 of men." We wonder whether there has been a 
 single democratic leader either in France or Eng- 
 land who has not incessantly felt the full force of 
 Danton's ejaculation. There may, indeed, be 
 simpletons in the political world who dream that 
 if only the system of government were made still 
 more popular, all would be plain sailing. But 
 then Sir Henry Maine is not the man to write 
 for simpletons. 
 
 The first reason, then, for surprise at the 
 immense stress laid by the author on the pro- 
 position about the difficulty of popular govern- 
 ment is that it would not be of the first order of
 
 148 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 importance if it were true. Our second reason 
 is that it cannot be shown to be true. You 
 cannot measure the relative difficulty of diverse 
 systems of government. Governments are things 
 of far too great complexity for precise quantifica- 
 tion of this sort. Will anybody, for example, 
 read through the second volume of the excellent 
 work of M. Leroy-Beaulieu on the Empire of the 
 Czars (1882), and then be prepared to maintain 
 that democracy is more difficult than autocracy ? 
 It would be interesting, too, to know whether 
 the Prince on whose shoulders will one day be 
 laid the burden of the German Empire will read 
 the dissertation on the unparalleled difficulties 
 of democracy with acquiescence. There are 
 many questions, of which the terms are no 
 sooner stated than we at once see that a certain 
 and definite answer to them is impossible. The 
 controversy as to the relative fragility, or the 
 relative difficulty, of popular government and 
 other forms of government, appears to be a con- 
 troversy of this kind. We cannot decide it until 
 we have weighed, measured, sifted, and tested a 
 great mass of heterogeneous facts ; and then, 
 supposing the process to have been ever so
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 149 
 
 skilfully and laboriously performed, no pro- 
 position could be established as the outcome, 
 that would be an adequate reward for the pains 
 of the operation. 
 
 This, we venture to think, must be pronounced 
 a grave drawback to the value of the author't-> 
 present speculation. He attaches an altogether 
 excessive and unscientific importance to form. 
 It would be unreasonable to deny to a writer on 
 democracy as a form of government the right of 
 isolating his phenomenon. But it is much more 
 unreasonable to predicate fragility, difficulty, or 
 anything else of a particular form of government, 
 without reference to other conditions which 
 happen to go along with it in a given society 
 at a given time. None of the properties of 
 popular government are independent of surround- 
 ing circumstances, social, economic, religious, 
 and historic. All the conditions are bound up 
 together in a closely interdependent connection, 
 and are not secondary to, or derivative from, the 
 mere form of government. It is, if not im- 
 possible, at least highly unsafe to draw inferences 
 about forms of government in universals. 
 
 No writer seems to us to approach Machiavelli
 
 1.'50 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 in the acuteness with which he pushes behind 
 mere political names, and passes on to the real 
 differences that may exist in movements and 
 institutions that are covered by the same desig- 
 nation. Nothing in its own way can be more 
 admirable, for instance, than his reflections on 
 the differences between democracy at Florence 
 and democracy in old Rome — how the first began 
 in great inequality of conditions, and ended in 
 great equality, while the process was reversed in 
 the second ; how at Rome the people and the 
 nobles shared power and oflBce, while at Florence 
 the victors crushed and ruined their adversaries ; 
 how at Rome the people, by common service 
 with the nobles, acquired some of their virtues, 
 while at Florence the nobles were forced down 
 to seem, as well as to be, like the common people 
 {Isiwie Fiorentine, bk. iii.). 
 
 This is only an example of the distinctions 
 and qualifications which it is necessary to intro- 
 duce before we can prudently affirm or deny 
 anything about political institutions in general 
 terms. Who would deny that both the stability 
 and the degree of difficulty of popular govern- 
 ment are closely connected in the United States
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 151 
 
 with the abundance of accessible land 1 Who 
 would deny that in Great Britain they are closely 
 connected with the greater or less prosperity of 
 our commerce and manufactures 1 To take 
 another kind of illustration from Mr. Dicey's 
 brilliant and instructive volume on the Law of the 
 Constitution. The governments of England and 
 of France are both of them popular in form ; but 
 does not a fundamental difference in their whole 
 spirit and working result from the existence in 
 one country of the droit administratif, and the 
 absolute predominance in the other of regular 
 law, applied by the ordinary courts, and extend- 
 ing equally over all classes of citizens? Dis- 
 tinctions and differences of this order go for 
 nothing in the pages before us ; yet they are 
 vital to the discussion. 
 
 The same fallacious limitation, the same 
 exclusion of the many various causes that co- 
 operate in the production of political results, is 
 to be discerned in nearly every argument. The 
 author justly calls attention to the extraordinary 
 good luck which has befallen us as a nation. 
 He proceeds to warn us that if the desire for 
 legislative innovation be allowed to grow upon
 
 152 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 US at its present pace — pace assumed to be very 
 headlong indeed — the chances are that our luck 
 will not last. We shall have a disaster like 
 Sedan, or the loss of Alsace Lorraine (p. 151). 
 This is a curiously narrow reading of con- 
 temporary history. Did Austria lose Sadowa, 
 or was the French Empire ruined at Sedan, 
 in consequence of the passion of either of those 
 Governments for legislative innovations ; or 
 must we not rather, in order to explain these 
 striking events, look to a large array of military, 
 geographical, financial, diplomatic, and dynastic 
 considerations and conditions ? If so, what 
 becomes of the moral ? England is, no doubt, 
 the one great civilised power that has escaped an 
 organic or structural change within the last 
 five-and-twenty years. Within that period, the 
 American Union, after a tremendous war, has 
 revolutionised the social institutions of the 
 South, and reconstructed the constitution. The 
 French Empire has foundered, and a French 
 Republic once more bears the fortunes of a great 
 State over troubled waters. Germany has 
 undergone a complete transformation; so has 
 the Italian peninsula. The internal and the
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 153 
 
 external relations alike of the Austrian Power 
 are utterly different to-day from what they were 
 twenty years ago. Spain has passed from 
 monarchy to republic, and back to monarchy 
 again, and gone from dynasty to dynasty. But 
 what share had legislative innovation in pro- 
 ducing these great changes] No share at all in 
 any one case. What is the logic, then, of the 
 warning that if we persist in our taste for 
 legislative innovation, we shall lose our immunity 
 from the violent changes that have overtaken 
 other States — changes with which legislative 
 innovation had nothing to do 1 
 
 In short, modern societies, whether autocratic 
 or democratic, are passing through a great trans- 
 formation, social, religious, and political. The 
 process is full of embarrassments, diflBculties, and 
 perils. These are the dominant marks of our era. 
 To set them all down to popular government is 
 as narrow, as confused, and as unintelligent as 
 the imputation in a papal Encyclical of all modem 
 ills to Liberalism. You cannot isolate govern- 
 ment, and judge it apart from the other and 
 deeper forces of the time. Western civilisation 
 is slowly entering on a new stage. Form of
 
 154 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 
 
 government is the smallest part of it. It has 
 been well said that those nations have the best 
 chance of escaping a catastrophe in the obscure 
 and uncertain march before us, who find a way 
 of opening the most liberal career to the aspira- 
 tions of the present, without too rudely breaking 
 with all the traditions of the past. This is what 
 popular government, wisely guided, is best able 
 to do. 
 
 But will wise guidance be endured? Sir 
 Henry Maine seems to think that it will not 
 Mill thought that it would. In a singularly 
 luminous passage in an essay which for some 
 reason or another he never republished, Mill 
 says — 
 
 " We are the last persons to undervalue the power 
 of moral convictions. But the convictions of the mass 
 of mankind run hand in hand with their interests or 
 their class feelings. We have a strong faith, stronger 
 than either politicians or philosophers generally have, in 
 the influence of reason and virtue over men's minds ; but 
 it is in that of the reason and virtue of their own side 
 of the question. We expect few conversions by the 
 mere force of reason from one creed to the other. Men's 
 intellects and hearts have a large share in determining 
 what sort of Conservatives or Liberals they will be ; but 
 it is their position (saving individual exceptions) which 
 makes them Conservatives or Liberals."
 
 MAINE ON POPULAR GOVERNMENT. 155 
 
 This double truth points to the good grounds 
 that exist why we should think hopefully of 
 popular government, and why we should be slow 
 to believe that it has no better foundation to build 
 upon than the unreal assumptions of some bad 
 philosophers, French or others.
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH 
 MODELS.^ 
 
 Nunquamne reponam, 
 Vexatus toties rauci Theseide Codri ? 
 
 Historians are only too fond of insisting on 
 the eflfect of the French Revolution in checking 
 English reform. One of the latest of them 
 dwells on the fatal influence of this great event 
 in our own country, in checking, blighting, and 
 distorting the natural progress of things. But 
 for that influence, he says, the closing years of 
 the century would probably have seen the aboli- 
 tion of the English Slave Trade, the reform of 
 Parliament, and the repeal of the Test Act.^ 
 The question of the precise degree of vitality 
 in sectarian pride, and of tenacity in a great 
 material interest, a hundred years ago or at any 
 time, is not very easy to settle. It is quite 
 possible that the Slave Trade and the Test Act 
 
 J March 1888. ^ Lecky, vi. 297- 
 
 156
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 157 
 
 might have died nearly as hard, if there had been 
 no French Revolution. In any case, it is a 
 curious implication that underlies all writing in 
 this familiar vein, that France ought to have 
 gone on with a bad government, in order to 
 secure to England the advantages of a good 
 one. 
 
 As to one disservice, however, there can be no 
 doubt. The French Revolution has furnished 
 the enemies of each successive proposal of reform 
 with a boundless supply of prejudicial analogies, 
 appalling parallels, and ugly nicknames, which 
 are all just as conclusive with the unwise as if 
 they were the aptest arguments. Sydney Smith 
 might well put " the awful example of a neigh- 
 bouring nation " among the standing topics of 
 the Noodle's Oration. The abolition of rotten 
 boroughs brought down a thousand ominoua 
 references to noyades, fusillades, and guillotines. 
 When Sir Robert Peel took the duty oflF corn, 
 Croker warned him with great solemnity that he 
 was breaking up the old interests, dividing the 
 great families, and beginning exactly such a 
 castastrophe as did the Noailles and the Mont- 
 morencis in 1789. Cobden and Bright were
 
 158 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 promiscuously likened to Baboeuf, Chaumette, 
 and Anacharsis Clootz. Baboeuf, it is true, was 
 for dividing up all property, and Chaumette was 
 an aggressive atheist; but these were mere 
 nuances, not material to the purposes of obloquy. 
 Robespierre, Danton, Marat have been mercilessly 
 trotted forth in their sanguinary shrouds, and 
 treated as the counterparts and precursors of 
 worthies so obviously and exactly like them as 
 Mr. Beales and Mr. Odger ; while an innocent 
 caucus for the registration of voters recalls to 
 some well-known writers lurid visions of the 
 Cordeliers and the Jacobin Club. 
 
 A recent addition has been made to the stock 
 of nicknames drawn from the terrible melodrama 
 of the last century. The Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer at Dublin described the present very 
 humble writer as " the Saint-Just of our Revolu- 
 tion." The description was received with lively 
 applause. It would be indelicate to wonder how 
 many in a hundred, even in that audience of the 
 elect, had ever heard of Saint-Just, how many in 
 five hundred could have spelt his name, and how 
 many in a thousand could have told any three 
 facts in his career. But let us muse for a
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 159 
 
 moment upon the portrait. I take down the 
 first picture of Saint-Just that comes to my hand. 
 M. Taine is the artist : — 
 
 "Among these energetic nullities we see 
 gradually rising a young monster — with face 
 handsome and tranquil— Saint- Just ! A sort of 
 precocious Sulla, who at five-and -twenty suddenly 
 springs from the ranks, and hy foi'ce of atrocity 
 wins his place ! Six years before, he began life 
 by an act of domestic robbery : while on a visit 
 at his mother's, he ran away in the night with 
 her plate and jewels ; for that he was locked up 
 for six months. On his release, he employed his 
 leisure in the composition of an odious poem. 
 Then he flung himself head foremost into the 
 Revolution. Blood calcined by study, a colossal 
 pride, a conscience completely unhinged, an 
 imagination haunted by the bloody recollections 
 of Rome and Sparta, an intelligence falsified and 
 twisted until it found itself most at its ease in 
 the practice of enormous paradox, barefaced 
 sophism, and murderous lying — all these perilous 
 ingredients, mixed in a furnace of concentrated 
 ambition, boiled and fermented long and silently 
 in his breast."
 
 160 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 It is, no doubt, liard to know ourselves. One 
 may entertain demons unawares, and have cal- 
 cined blood without being a bit the wiser. Still, I 
 do not find the likeness striking. It would have 
 done just as well to call me Nero, Torquemada, 
 lago, or Bluebeard. 
 
 Whether the present writer does or does not 
 deserve all the compliments that history has 
 paid to Saint-Just, is a very slight and trivial 
 question, with which the public will naturally 
 not much concern itself. But as some use is 
 from time to time made of the writer's imputed 
 delinquencies to prejudice an important cause, it 
 is perhaps worth while to try in a page or two to 
 give a better account of things. It is true that 
 he has -written on revolutionists like Kobespierre, 
 and destructive thinkers like Rousseau and 
 Voltaire. It is true that he believes the two 
 latter to have been on the whole, when all 
 deductions are made, on the side of human 
 progress. But what sort of foundation in this 
 for the inference that he " finds his models in the 
 heroes of the French Revolution," and " looks for 
 his methods in the Reiajn of Terror " 1 It would
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 161 
 
 be equally logical to infer that because I have 
 written, not without sympathy and appreciation, 
 of Joseph de Maistre, I therefore find my model 
 in a hero of the Catholic Reaction, and look for 
 my methods in the revived supremacy of the 
 Holy See over all secular and temporal authorities. 
 It would be just as fair to say that because I 
 pointed out, as it was the critic's business to do, 
 the many admirable merits, and the important 
 moral influences on the society of that time, of 
 the New Heldisa, therefore I am bound to think 
 Saint Preiix a very fine fellow, particularly fit to be 
 a model and a hero for young Ireland. Only on the 
 principle that who drives fat oxen must himself 
 be fat, can it be held that who writes on Danton 
 must be himself in all circumstances a Dantonist. 
 The most insignificant of literary contributions 
 have a history and an origin ; and the history of 
 these contributions is short and simple enough. 
 Carlyle with all the force of his humoristic genius 
 had impressed upon his generation an essentially 
 one-sided view both of the eighteenth century as 
 a whole, and of the French thinkers of that 
 century in particular. His essay on Diderot, his 
 lecture on Rousseau, his chapters on Voltaire, 
 L
 
 162 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 with all their brilliance, penetration, and incom- 
 parable satire, were the high- water mark in this 
 country of the literary reaction against the French 
 school of Revolution. Everybody knows the 
 famous diatribes against the Bankrupt Century 
 and all its men and all its works. Voltaire's 
 furies, Diderot's indigestions, Rousseau's nauseous 
 amours, and the odd tricks and shifts of the 
 whole of them and their company, offered ready 
 material for the boisterous horseplay of the 
 transcendental humourist. Then the tide began 
 to turn. Mr. Buckle's book on the history of 
 civilisation had something to do with it. But it 
 was the historical chapters in Comte's Positive 
 Philosophy that first opened the minds of many 
 of us, who., five-and-twenty years ago, were 
 young men, to a very different judgment of the 
 true place of those schools in the literary and 
 social history of Western Europe. We learnt to 
 perceive that though much in the thought and 
 the lives of the literary precursors of the Revolu- 
 tion laid them fairly open to Carlyle's banter, yet 
 banter was not all, and even grave condemnation 
 was not all. In essays, like mine, written from 
 this point of view, and wath the object of trying
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 163 
 
 to trim the balance rather more correctly, it may 
 well have been that the better side of the thinkers 
 concerned was sometimes unduly dwelt upon, and 
 their worse side unduly left in the background. 
 It may well have been that an impression of 
 personal adhesion was conveyed which only very 
 partially existed, or even where it did not exist 
 at all : that is a risk of misinterpretation which 
 it is always hard for the historical critic to 
 escape. There may have been a too eager tone; 
 but to be eager is not a very bad vice at any 
 age under the critical forty. There were some 
 needlessly aggressive passages, and some sallies 
 which ought to have been avoided, because they 
 gave pain to good people. There was perhaps 
 too much of the particular excitement of the time. 
 It was the date when Essays and Reviews was 
 still thought a terrible explosive; when Bishop 
 Colenso's arithmetical tests as to the flocks and 
 herds of the children of Israel were believed to 
 be sapping not only the inspiration of the Penta- 
 teuch but the foundations of the Faith and the 
 Church; and when Darwin's scientific speculations 
 were shaking the civilised world. Some excite- 
 ment was to be pardoned in days like those, and I
 
 164 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 am quite sure that one side needed pardon at least 
 as much as the other. For the substantial sound- 
 ness of the general views which I took of the 
 French revolutionary thinkers at that time, I feel 
 no apprehension ; nor — some possible occasional 
 phrases or sentences excepted and apart — do I 
 see the smallest reason to shrink or to depart 
 from any one of them. So far as one particular 
 reference may serve to illustrate the tenour of 
 the whole body of criticism, the following lines, 
 which close my chapter on the " Encyclopaedia," 
 will answer the purpose as well as any others, 
 and I shall perhaps be excused for transcribing 
 them : — 
 
 " An urgent social task lay before France and 
 before Europe : it could not be postponed until 
 the thinkers had worked out a scheme of phi- 
 losophic completeness. The thinkers did not 
 seriously make any effort after this completeness. 
 The Encyclopaedia was the most serious attempt, 
 and it did not wholly fail. As I replace in my 
 shelves this mountain of volumes, ' dusky and 
 huge, enlarging on the sight,' I have a presen- 
 timent that their pages will seldom again be 
 disturbed by me or by others. They served a great
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 165 
 
 purpose a hundred years ago. They are now a 
 monumental ruin, clothed with all the profuse 
 associations of history. It is no Ozymandias of 
 Egypt, king of kings, whose wrecked shape of 
 stone and sterile memories we contemplate. We 
 think rather of the grey and crumbling walls of 
 an ancient stronghold, reated by the endeavour 
 of stout hands and faithful, whence in its own 
 day and generation a band once went forth 
 against barbarous hordes, to strike a blow for 
 humanity and truth." ^ 
 
 It is gratifying to find that the same view of 
 the work of these famous men, and of its relation 
 to the social necessities of the time, commends 
 itself to Mr. Lecky, who has since gone diligently 
 and with a candid mind over the same ground.^ 
 Then where is the literary Jacobin 1 
 
 Of course, it is easy enough to fish out a sen- 
 tence or a short passage here and there which, if 
 taken by itself, may wear a very sinister look, 
 and carry the most alarming impressions. Not 
 many days ago a writer addressed a letter to the 
 Times which furnishes a specimen of this kind of 
 controversy. He gave himself the ambiguous 
 
 ^ Diderot, i. 247. ' See his vol. vi. 305 et seq.
 
 166 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 designation of " Catholicus " ; but his style bore 
 traces of the equivocally Catholic climate of Mu- 
 nich. His aim was the lofty and magnanimous 
 one of importing theological prejudice into the 
 great political dispute of the day ; in the interest, 
 strange to say, of the Irish party who have been 
 for ages the relentless- oppressors of the Church 
 to which he belongs, and who even now hate and 
 despise it with all the virulence of a Parisian Red. 
 This masked assailant conveys to the mind of the 
 reader that I applaud and sympathise with the 
 events of the winter of 1793, and more particu- 
 larly with the odious procession of the Goddess of 
 Reason at Notre Dame. He says, moreover, that 
 I have " the effrontery to imply that the horrible 
 massacres of the Revolution . . . were ' a very 
 mild story compared with the atrocities of 
 the Jews or the crimes of Catholicism.'" No 
 really honest and competent disputant would 
 have hit on " effrontery " as the note of the 
 passage referred to, if he had had its whole spirit 
 and drift before him. The reader shall, if he 
 pleases, judge for himself After the words just 
 quoted, I go on to say : — 
 
 "Historical recriminations, however, are not
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 167 
 
 erlifying. It is perfectly fair, when Catholics 
 talk of the atheist Terror, to rejoin that the re- 
 tainers of Anjou and Montpensier slew more men 
 and women on the first day of the Saint Bartho- 
 lomew, than perished in Paris through the Years 
 I. and 11. But the retort does us no good beyond 
 the region of dialectic. Some of the opinions of 
 Chaumette were full of enlightenment and hope. 
 But it would be far better to share the super- 
 stitious opinions of a virtuous and benignant 
 priest, like the Bishop in Victor Hugo's Mis4rables, 
 than to hold these good opinions of Chaumette, 
 as he held them, with a rancorous intolerance, a 
 reckless disregard of the rights and feelings of 
 others, and a shallow forgetfulness of all that 
 great and precious part of our nature that lies 
 out of the domain of the logical understanding. 
 ... In every family where a mother sought 
 to have her child baptised, or where sons and 
 daughters sought to have the dying spirit of the 
 old consoled by the last sacrament, there sprang 
 up a bitter enemy to the government which had 
 closed the churches and proscribed the priests. 
 How could a society whose spiritual life had 
 been nourished in the solemn mysticism of the
 
 168 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 Middle Ages suddenly turn to embrace a gaudy 
 paganism 1 The common self-respect of humanity 
 was outraged by apostate priests ... as they 
 filed before the Convention, led by the Arch- 
 bishop of Paris, and accompanied by rude acolytes 
 bearing piles of the robes and the vessels of 
 silver and gold with which they had once served 
 their holy office." ^ 
 
 Where is the effrontery, the search for methods 
 in the Eeign of Terror, the applause for revolu- 
 tionary models 1 Such inexcusable perversion of 
 a writer's meaning for an evanescent political 
 object — and a very shabby object too — is enough 
 to make one think that George III. knew what 
 he was talking about, when he once delivered 
 himself of the saying that " Politics are a trade 
 for a rascal, not for a gentleman." 
 
 Let me cite another more grotesque piece of 
 irrelevancy with a similar drift. Some months 
 ago the present writer chanced to express an 
 opinion upon Welsh Disestablishment. Wales, 
 at any rate, would seem to be far enough away 
 from Emile, Candide, the Law of Prairial, and 
 the Committee of Public Safety. The Times, 
 J Misc. i. 77-79.
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 169 
 
 however, instantly said ^ that it would be aflfecta- 
 tion to express any surprise, because my un- 
 fortunate " t/heories and principles, drawn from 
 French sources and framed on French models, 
 all tend to the disintegration of comprehensive 
 political organisations and the encouragement of 
 arrangements based on the minor peculiarities of 
 race or dialect." Was there ever in the world 
 such prodigious nonsense ? What French sources, 
 what French models ? If French models point 
 in any one direction rather than another, it is 
 away from disintegration and straight towards 
 centralisation. Everybody knows that this is 
 one of the most notorious facts of French history 
 from the days of Lewis XL or Cardinal Richelieu 
 down to Napoleon Bonaparte. So far from 
 French models encouraging " arrangements based 
 on the minor peculiarities of race and dialect," 
 France is the first great example in modern 
 history, for good or for evil, of a persevering 
 process of national unification, and the firm sup- 
 pression of all provincial particularismus. This 
 is not only true of French political leaders in 
 general : it is particularly true of the Jacobin 
 1 Nov. 3, 1886.
 
 170 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 leaders. Rousseau himself, I admit, did in one 
 place point in the direction of confederation ; 
 but only in the sense that for freedom on the 
 one hand, and just administration on the other, 
 the unit should not be too large to admit of the 
 participation of the persons concerned in the 
 management of their own public affairs. If the 
 Jacobins had not been overwhelmed by the 
 necessity of keeping out the invaders, they might 
 have developed the germ of truth in Rousseau's 
 loose way of stating the expediency of decentral- 
 isation. As it was, above all other French 
 schools, the Jacobins dealt most sternly with 
 particularist pretensions. Of all men, these sup- 
 posed masters, teachers, and models of mine are 
 least to be called Separatists. To them more 
 than to any other of the revolutionary parties 
 the great heresy of Federalism was most odious ; 
 and if I were a faithful follower of the Jacobin 
 model, I should have least patience with nation- 
 alist sentiment whether in Ireland, Scotland, or 
 Wales, and should most rigorously insist on that 
 cast-iron incorporation which, as it happens, in 
 the case of Ireland T believe to be equally hope- 
 less and undesirable. This explanation, therefore,
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 171 
 
 of my favour for Welsh Disestablishment is as 
 absurdly ignorant as it is far-fetched and irrele- 
 vant. 
 
 The logical process is worth an instant's ex- 
 amination. The position is no less than this, — 
 that to attempt truly to appreciate the place and 
 the value in the history of thought and social 
 movements of men who have been a hundred 
 years in their graves, and to sympathise with 
 certain sides and certain effects of their activity 
 under the peculiar circumstances in which French 
 society then found itself, is the same thing as 
 binding yourself to apply theii" theories and to 
 imitate their activity, under an entirely hetero- 
 geneous set of circumstances, in aditFerent country, 
 and in a society with wholly dissimilar require- 
 ments. That is the argument if we straighten it 
 out. The childishness of any such contention 
 is so obvious, that I should be ashamed of re- 
 producing it, were it not that this very contention 
 has made its appearance at my expense several 
 times a month for the last two years in all sorts 
 of important and respectable prints. 
 
 For instance, it appears that T once said some- 
 where that Danton looked on at the doings of his
 
 172 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 bloodier associates with " sombre acquiescence." 
 Argal, it was promptly pointed out — and I espy 
 the dark phrase constantly adorning leading 
 articles to this day — the man who said that 
 Danton sombrely acquiesced in the doings of 
 Billaud, Collot, and the rest, must of necessity, 
 being of a firm and logical mind, himself sombrely 
 acquiesce in moonlighting and cattle-houghing in 
 Ireland. Apart from the curious compulsion of 
 the reasoning, what is the actual state of the case 1 
 Acquiescence is hardly a good description of the 
 mood of a politician who scorns delights and lives 
 laborious days in actively fighting for a vigorous 
 policy and an eff'ective plan which, as he believes, 
 would found order in Ireland on a new and 
 more hopeful base. He may be wrong, but 
 where is the acquiescence, whether sombre or 
 serene ? 
 
 The equally misplaced name of Fatalism is 
 sometimes substituted for acquiescence, in criti- 
 cisms of this stamp. In any such sense anybody 
 is a fatalist who believes in a relation between 
 cause and effect. If it is fatalism to assume that, 
 given a certain chain of social or political ante- 
 cedents, they will inevitably be followed by a
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 173 
 
 certain chain of consequences, then every sensible 
 observer of any series of events is a fatalist 
 Catholic Emancipation, the extension of the 
 franchise, and secret ballot, have within the last 
 sixty years completely shifted the balance of 
 political power in Ireland. Land legislation has 
 revolutionised the conditions of ownership. 
 These vast and vital changes in Ireland have 
 been accompanied by the transfer of decisive 
 power from aristocracy to numbers in Great 
 Britain, and Great Britain is arbiter. Is it 
 fatalism, or is it common sense, to perceive that 
 one new effect of new causes so potent must be 
 the necessity of changing the system of Irish 
 government? To dream that you could destroy 
 the power of the old masters without finding new, 
 and that having invited the nation to speak you 
 could continue to ignore the national sentiment 
 was and is the very height of political folly, and 
 the longer the dream is persisted in the ruder 
 will be the awakening. Surely the stupidest 
 fatalism is far more truly to be ascribed to those 
 who insist that Ireland was eternally predestined 
 to turmoil, confusion, and torment ; that there 
 alone the event defies calculation ; and that, how-
 
 1 74 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 ever wisely, carefully and providently you modify 
 or extinguish causes, in Ireland, though nowhere 
 else, effects will still survive with shape unaltered 
 and force unabated. 
 
 No author has a right to assume that any- 
 body has read all his books or any of them, 
 but he may reasonably claim that he shall not 
 be publicly classified, labelled, catalogued, and 
 placed in the shelves, on the strength of half 
 of his work, and that half arbitrarily selected. 
 If it be permitted to me without excess of 
 egotism to name the masters to whom I went 
 to school in the days of early manhood, so far 
 from being revolutionists and terrorists, they 
 belonged entirely to the opposite camp. Austin's 
 Jurisprudence and Mill's Logic and Utilitarianism 
 were everything, and Rousseau's Social Contract 
 was nothing. To the best of my knowledge 
 and belief, I never said a word about " Natural 
 Rights" in any piece of practical public busi- 
 ness in all my life ; and when that famous 
 phrase again made its naked appearance on the 
 platform three or four years ago, it gave me as 
 much surprise and dismay as if I were this after- 
 noon to meet a Deinotherium shambling down
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 175 
 
 Parliament Street. Mill was the chief influence 
 for me, as he was for most of my contemporaries 
 in those days. Experience of life and indepen- 
 dent use of one's mind — which he would have 
 been the most ready of men to applaud — have 
 since, as is natural, led to many important correc- 
 tions and deductions in Mill's political and philo- 
 sophical teaching. But then we were disciples, 
 and not critics ; and nobody will suppose that 
 the admirer of Wordsworth, the author of the 
 Essay on Coleridge, and of the treatise on Re- 
 presentative Government, the administrator in 
 the most bureaucratic and authoritative of public 
 services, was a terrorist or an unbridled demo- 
 crat, or anything else but the most careful 
 and rationalistic of political theorisers. It was 
 Mill who first held up for my admiration the 
 illustrious man whom Austin enthusiastically 
 called the "godlike Turgot," and it was he 
 who encouraged me to write a study on that 
 great and inspiring character. I remember the 
 suspicion and the murmurings with which Louis 
 Blanc, then living in brave and honourable 
 exile in London, and the good friend of so 
 many of us, and who was really a literary
 
 176 A FKW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 Jacobin to the tips of his fingers, remonstrated 
 against that piece of what he thought grievously 
 misplaced glorification. Turgot was, indeed, a 
 very singular hero with whom to open the 
 career of literary Jacobin. So was Burke, — 
 the author of those wise sentences that still 
 ring in our ears : " The question with me is, not 
 whether you have a right to render your people 
 miserable, but whether it is not your interest to 
 make them happy. It is not wJw.t a lawyer tells 
 me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and 
 justice tell me I ought to do. Nobody shall per- 
 suade me, where a whole people are concerned, that 
 acts of lenity are not means of omciliation." Burke, 
 Austin, Mill, Turgot, Comte — what strange 
 sponsors for the " theories and . principles of 
 the Terror " ! 
 
 What these opinions came to, roughly speak- 
 ing, was something to this effect : That the 
 power alike of statesmen and of publicists over 
 the course of affairs is strictly limited ; that 
 institutions and movements are not capable of im- 
 mediate or indefinite modification by any amount 
 of mere will ; that political truths are always 
 relative, and never absolute ; that the test of
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 177 
 
 practical, political, and social proposals is not 
 their conformity to abstract ideals, but to con- 
 venience, utility, expediency, and occasion ; that 
 for the reformer, considerations of time and 
 place may be paramount; and finally, as Mill 
 himself has put it, that government is always 
 either in the hands, or passing into the hands, 
 of whatever is the strongest power in society, 
 and that what this power is, and shall be, 
 depends less on institutions than institutions 
 depend upon it. If I were pressed for an illus- 
 tration of these principles at work, inspiring 
 the minds and guiding the practice of respon- 
 sible statesmen in great transactions of our own 
 day and generation, I should point to the sage, 
 the patient, the triumphant action of Abraham 
 Lincoln in the emancipation of the negro slaves. 
 However that may be, contrast a creed of this 
 kind with the abstract, absolute, geometric, 
 unhistoric, peremptory notions and reasonings 
 that formed the stock in trade of most, though 
 not quite all, of the French revolutionists, alike 
 in action and in thought. It is plain that they 
 are the direct opposite and contradictory of one 
 another. 
 
 M
 
 178 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 To clench the matter by chapter and verse, 
 I should like to recall what I have said of 
 these theories and principles in their most per- 
 fect and most important literary version. How 
 have I described Rousseau's Social Contract 1 It 
 placed, I said, the centre of social activity else- 
 where than in careful and rational examination 
 of social conditions, and careful and rational 
 effort to modify them. It substituted a retro- 
 grade aspiration for direction, and emotion for 
 the discovery of law. It overlooked the crucial 
 diflficulty — namely, how to summon new force, 
 without destroying the sound parts of a structure 
 which it has taken many generations to erect. 
 Its method was geometric instead of being 
 historic, and hence its " desperate absurdity." 
 Its whole theory was constructed with an im- 
 perfect consideration of the qualities of human 
 nature, and with too narrow a view of society. 
 It ignored the great fact that government is 
 the art of wisely dealing with huge groups of 
 conflicting interests, of hostile passions, of hardly 
 reconcilable aims, of vehemently opposed forces. 
 It "gives us not the least help towards the 
 solution of any of the problems of actual govern- 
 ment."
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODKLS. 179 
 
 Such language as all this is hardly that of a 
 disciple to a master, in respect of theories and 
 principles which he is making his own for the 
 use of a lifetime. " There has been no attempt " 
 [in these pages], I said in winding up, " to 
 palliate either the shallowness or the practical 
 mischievousness of the Social Contract. But 
 there is another side to its influence. We 
 should be false to our critical principle, if we 
 do not recognise the historical effect of a 
 speculation scientifically valueless." Any writer 
 would have stamped himself as both unfit for 
 the task that I had undertaken, and entirely 
 below the level of the highest critical standard 
 of the day, if he had for a moment dreamed 
 of taking any other point of view. 
 
 As for historical hero-worship, after Carlyle's 
 fashion, whether with Jacobin idols or any 
 other, it is a mood of mind that must be un- 
 congenial to anybody who had ever been at all 
 under the influence of Mill. Without being so 
 foolish as to disparage the part played by great 
 men in great crises, we could have no sympathy 
 with the barbaric and cynical school, who make 
 greatness identical with violence, force, and mere
 
 180 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 iron will. Cromwell said, in vindication of 
 himself, that England had need of a constable, 
 and it was true. The constable, the soldier, the 
 daring counsellor at the helm, are often neces- 
 sities of the time. It is often a necessity of 
 the time that the energy of a nation or of a 
 movement should gather itself up in a resolute 
 band or a resolute chief; as the revolutionary 
 energy of France gathered itself up in the greater 
 Jacobins, or that of England in Oliver Cromwell. 
 Goethe says that nature bids us " Take all, hut 
 pay." Kevolutions and heroes may give us all, 
 but not without price. This is at the best, and 
 the best is the exception. The grandiose types 
 mostly fail. In our own day, people talk, for 
 example, with admiration of Cromwell's govern- 
 ment in Ireland, — as if it were a success, instead 
 of being one of the worst chapters in the whole 
 history of Irish failure. It was force carried to 
 its utmost. Hundreds were put to the sword, 
 thousands were banished to be slaves of the 
 planters in the West Indies, and the remnant 
 were driven miserably off into the desolate wilda 
 of Connaught. But all this only prepared the way 
 for further convulsions and deadlier discontent.
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 181 
 
 It is irrational to contrast Carlyle's heroes, 
 Cromwell. Mirabeau, Frederick, Napoleon, with 
 men like Washington or Lincoln. The circum- 
 stances were different. The conditions of public 
 use and of personal greatness were different. 
 But if we are to talk of ideals, heroes, and models, 
 I, for one, should hardly look to France at all. 
 Jefferson was no flatterer of George Washington ; 
 but his character of Washington comes far nearer 
 to the right pattern of a great ruler than can be 
 found in any of Carlyle's splendid dithyrambs, 
 and it is no waste of time to recall and to tran- 
 scribe it: — 
 
 " His mind was great and powerful, without being 
 of the very first order ; his penetration strong, though 
 not so acute as that of a Newton, Bacon, or Locke ; 
 and as far as he saw, no judgment was ever sounder. 
 It was slow in operation, being little aided by inven- 
 tion or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence 
 the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he 
 derived from councils of war, where, hearing all sug- 
 gestions, he selected whatever was best ; and certainly 
 no general ever planned his battles more judiciously. 
 But if deranged during the course of the action, if any 
 member of his plan was dislocated by sudden circum- 
 stances, he was slow in a readjustment. He was 
 incapable of fear, meeting personal dangers with the 
 calmest unconcern. Perhaps the strongest feature in
 
 182 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 his character was prudence, never acting until every 
 circumstance, every consideration, was maturely 
 weighed ; refraining if he saw a doubt, but when 
 once decided, going through with his purpose, whatever 
 obstacles opposed. His integrity was most pure, his 
 justice the most inflexible I have ever known ; no 
 motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or 
 hatred, being able to bias his decision. He was, indeed, 
 in every sense of the word, a wise, a good, and a great 
 man. His temper was naturally irritable and high 
 toned ; but reflection and resolution had obtained a 
 firm and habitual ascendency over it." 
 
 In conclusion, the plain truth is that all 
 parallels, analogies, and similitudes between the 
 French Revolution, or any part or phase of it, 
 and our affairs in Ireland are moonshine. For 
 the practical politician his problem is alwaJ^s 
 individual. For his purposes history never 
 repeats itself. Human nature, doubtless, has a 
 weakness for a precedent ; it is a weakness to be 
 respected. But there is no such thing as an 
 essential reproduction of social and political 
 combinations of circumstance. To talk about 
 Robespierre in connection with Ireland is just 
 as idle as it was in Robespierre to harangue 
 about Lycurgus and Brutus in Paris. To 
 compare the two is to place Ireland under a
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 1 83 
 
 preposterous magnifying-glass of monstrous di- 
 mension. Nor is disparity of scale the only 
 difference, vital as that is. In no one of the 
 leading characteristics of a community in a state 
 of ferment, save the odium that surrounds the 
 landlords, and that not universal, does Ireland 
 to-day really resemble the France of a hundred 
 years ago. Manners, ideas, beliefs, traditions, 
 crumbling institutions, rising aspirations, the 
 ordering of castes and classes, the rivalry of 
 creeds, the relations with the governing power — 
 all constitute elements of such radical divergence 
 as to make comparison between modern Ireland 
 and revolutionary France for any more serious 
 purpose than giving a conventional and familiar 
 point to a sentence, entirely worthless. 
 
 It is pure dilettantism, again, to seek the 
 moral of Irish commotions in the insurrection of 
 La Vendue. That, as somebody has said, was 
 like a rising of the ancient Gauls at the voice of 
 the Druids, and led by their great chiefs. It will 
 be time enough to compare La Vendue with 
 Ireland when the peasantry take the field 
 against the British Government with Beresfords, 
 Fitzgeralds, and Bourkes at their head. If the
 
 184 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 Vend^ans had risen to drive out the Charettes, 
 the Bonchamps, the Larochejacquelins, the 
 parallel would have been nearer the mark. 
 The report of the Devon Commission, the green 
 pamphlet containing an account of the famous 
 three days' discussion between O'Connell and 
 Butt in the Dublin Corporation in 1843, or half 
 a dozen of Lord Clare's speeches between 1793 
 and 1800, will give a clearer insight into the 
 Irish problem than a bushel of books about the 
 Vend^an or any other episode of the Revolution. 
 Equally frivolous is it, for any useful purpose 
 of practical enlightenment, to draw parallels 
 between the action of the Catholic clergy in 
 Ireland to-day and that of the French clergy 
 on the eve of the Revolution. There is no 
 sort of force in the argument that because the 
 French clergy fared ill at the Revolution,^ 
 therefore the Irish clergy will fare ill when 
 self-government is bestowed on Ireland. Such 
 talk is mere ingenious guess-work at best, with- 
 
 * The Church did not fare so very ill, after all. The 
 State, in 1790, undertook the debts of the Church to 
 the tune of 130,000,000 livres, and assured it an annual 
 Budget of rather more than that amount. — Boiteau'a 
 Etat de la France, p. 202.
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 185 
 
 out any of the foundations of a true historical 
 analogy. The differences between the two cases 
 are obvious, and they go to the heart of the 
 matter. For instance, the men who came to the 
 top of affairs in France were saturated both with 
 speculative unbelief for one thing, and with active 
 hatred of the Church for another. In Ireland, 
 on the contrary, there is no speculative unbelief, 
 as O'Connell used so constantly to boast; and 
 the Church being poor, voluntary, and intensely 
 national and popular, has nourished none of 
 those gross and swollen abuses which provoked 
 the not unreasonable animosity of revolutionary 
 France. In truth, it is with precisely as much 
 or as little reason that most of the soothsayers 
 and prognosticators of evil take the directly 
 opposite line. Instead of France these persons 
 choose, as they have an equally good right to do, 
 to look for precedents to Spain, Belgium, or 
 South America. Why not? They assure us, 
 in their jingling phrase, that Home Rule means 
 Rome Rule, that the priests will be the masters, 
 and that Irish autonomy is only another name 
 for the reign of bigotry, superstition, and obscu- 
 rantism. One of these two mutually destructive
 
 1S6 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 predictions has just as much to say for itself 
 as the other, and no more. We may leave 
 the prophets to fight it out between them 
 while we attend to our business, and examine 
 facts and probabilities as they are, without the 
 aid of capriciously adopted precedents and fan- 
 tastical analogies. 
 
 Parallels from France, or anywhere else, may 
 supply literary amusement ; they may furnish a 
 weapon in the play of controversy. They shed 
 no light and do no service as we confront the 
 solid facts of the business to be done. Lewis the 
 Fourteenth was the author of a very useful 
 and superior commonplace when he wrote : " No 
 man who is badly informed can avoid reasoning 
 badly. I believe that whoever is rightly in- 
 structed, and rightly persuaded of all the facts, 
 would never do anything else but what he 
 ought." Another great French ruler, who, even 
 more than Lewis, had a piercing eye for men and 
 the world of action, said that the mind of a 
 general ought to be like a field-glass, and as 
 clear ; to see things exactly as they are, et 
 jamais se favre des tableaux, — never to compose 
 the objects before him into pictures. The same
 
 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 187 
 
 maxim is nearly as good for the man who has 
 to conquer difficulties in the field of government; 
 and analogies and parallels are one way of sub- 
 stituting pictures for plans and charts. Just 
 because the statesman's problem is individual, 
 history can give him little help. I am not so 
 graceless as to depreciate history or literature 
 either for public or for private persons. " You 
 are a man," Napoleon said to Goethe ; and there 
 is no reason why literature should prevent the 
 reader of books from being a man ; why it 
 should blind him to the great practical truths 
 that the end of life is not to think but to will ; 
 that everything in the world has its decisive 
 moment, which statesmen know and seize; that 
 the genius of politics, as a great man of letters 
 truly wrote, has not "All or Nothing" for its 
 motto, but seeks on the contrary to extract the 
 greatest advantage from situations the most 
 compromised, and never flings the helve after 
 the hatchet. Like literature the use of history 
 in politics is to refresh, to open, to make the 
 mind generous and hospitable ; to enrich, to 
 impart flexibility, to quicken and nourish 
 political imagination and invention, to instruct
 
 188 A FEW WORDS ON FRENCH MODELS. 
 
 in the common difficulties and the various ex- 
 periences of government ; to enable a statesman 
 to place himself at a general and spacious stand- 
 point. All this, whether it be worth much or 
 little, and it is surely worth much, is something 
 wholly distinct from directly aiding a statesman 
 in the performance of a specific task. In such a 
 case an analogy from history, if he be not sharply 
 on his guard, is actually more likely than not 
 to mislead him. I certainly do not mean the 
 history of the special problem itself. Of that he 
 cannot possibly know too much, nor master its 
 past course and foregone bearings too thoroughly. 
 Ireland is a great standing instance. There is 
 no more striking example of the disastrous results 
 of trying to overcome political difficulties without 
 knowing how they came into existence, and where 
 they have their roots. The only history that 
 furnishes a clue in Irish questions is the history 
 of Ireland and the people who have lived in it 
 or have been driven out of it.
 
 ON THE 
 STUDY OF LITERATURE.^ 
 
 When my friend Mr. Goschen invited me to 
 
 discharge the duty which has fallen to me this 
 
 afternoon I confess that I complied with many 
 
 misgivings. He desired me to say something on 
 
 the literary side of education. Now, it is almost 
 
 impossible — and I think those who know most of 
 
 literature will be readiest to agree with me — to 
 
 say anything new in recommendation of literature 
 
 in a scheme of education. I have felt, however, 
 
 that Mr. Goschen has worked with such zeal and 
 
 energy for so many years on behalf of this good 
 
 cause, that anybody whom he considered able to 
 
 render him any co-operation owed it to him in 
 
 its fullest extent. The Lord Mayor has been kind 
 
 enough to say that I am especially qualified to 
 
 ^ The annual address to the students of the London 
 Society for the Extension of University Teaching, 
 •delivered at the Mansion House, February 26t]i, 1887. 
 
 189
 
 190 UN THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 Speak on English literature. I must, however, 
 remind the Lord Mayor that I have strayed from 
 literature into the region of politics ; and I am 
 not at all sure that such a journey conduces to 
 the aptness of one's judgment on literary subjects, 
 or adds much to the force of one's arguments on 
 behalf of literary study. Politics are a field 
 where action is one long second-best, and where 
 the choice constantly lies between two blunders. 
 Nothing can be more unlike in aim, in ideals, 
 in method, and in matter, than are literature 
 and politics. I have, however, determined to do 
 the best that I can; and I feel how great an 
 honour it is to be invited to partake in a move- 
 ment which I do not hesitate to call one of the 
 most important of all those now taking place in 
 English society. 
 
 What is the object of the movement ? What 
 do the promoters aim at ? I take it that what 
 they design is to bring the very best teaching 
 that the country can aflFord, through the hands of 
 the most thoroughly competent men, within the 
 reach of every class of the community. Their 
 object is to give to the many that sound, sys- 
 tematic, and methodical knowledge, which has
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 191 
 
 hitherto been the privilege of the few who can 
 afford the time and money to go to Oxford and 
 Cambridge; to diffuse the fertilising waters of 
 intellectual knowledge from their great and 
 copious fountain-heads at the Universities by a 
 thousand irrigating channels over the whole 
 length and breadth of our busy, indomitable land. 
 Gentlemen, this is a most important point. 
 Goethe said that nothing is more frightful than 
 a teacher who only knows what his scholars are 
 intended to know. We may depend upon it 
 that the man who knows his own subject most 
 thoroughly is most likely to excite interest about 
 it in the minds of other people. We hear, per- 
 haps more often than we like, that we live in a 
 democratic age. It is true enough, and I can 
 conceive nothing more democratic than such a 
 movement as this, nothing which is more calcu- 
 lated to remedy defects that are incident to 
 democracy, more thoroughly calculated to raise 
 modern democracy to heights which other forms 
 of government and older orderings of society 
 have never yet attained. No movement can be 
 more wisely democratic than one which seeks. to 
 give to the northern miner or the London artisan
 
 192 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 knowledge as good and as accurate, though he 
 may not have so much of it, as if he were a 
 student at Oxford or Cambridge. Something of 
 the same kind may be said of the new frequency 
 with which scholars of great eminence and con- 
 summate accomplishments, like Jowett, Lang, 
 Myers, Leaf, and others, bring all their scholar- 
 ship to bear, in order to provide for those who 
 are not able, or do not care, to read old classics 
 in the originals, brilliant and faithful renderings 
 of them in our own tongue. Nothing but good, 
 I am persuaded, can come of all these attempts to 
 connect learning with the living forces of society, 
 and to make industrial England a sharer in the 
 classic tradition of the lettered world. 
 
 I am well aware that there is an apprehension 
 that the present extraordinary zeal for education 
 in all its forms — elementary, secondary, and 
 higher — may bear in its train some evils of its 
 own. It is said that before long nobody in 
 England will be content to practise a handicraft, 
 and that every one will insist on being at least a 
 clerk. It is said that the moment is even already 
 at hand when a great deal of practical distress 
 does and must result from this tendency. I
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 193 
 
 remember years ago that in the United States I 
 heard something of the same kind. All I can 
 say is, that this tendency, if it exists, is sure to 
 right itself. In no case can the spread of so 
 mischievous a notion as that knowledge and 
 learning ought not to come within reach of handi- 
 craftsmen be attributed to literature. There is 
 a familiar passage in which Pericles, the great 
 Athenian, describing the glory of the community 
 of which he was so far-shining a member, says, 
 *' We at Athens are lovers of the beautiful, yet 
 simple in our tastes; we cultivate the mind 
 without loss of manliness." But then remem- 
 ber that after all Athenian society rested on a 
 basis of slavery. Athenian citizens were able 
 to pursue their love of the beautiful, and their 
 simplicity, and to cultivate their minds without 
 loss of manliness, because the drudgery and 
 hard work and rude service of society were 
 performed by those who had no share in all 
 these good things. With us, happily, it is 
 very different. We are all more or less upon 
 a level. Our object is — and it is that which 
 in my opinion raises us infinitely above the 
 Athenian level — to bring the Periclean ideas 
 N
 
 194 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 of beauty and simplicity and cultivation of the 
 mind within the reach of those who do the 
 drudgery and the service and rude work of the 
 world. And it can be done — do not let us be 
 afraid — it can be done without in the least 
 degree impairing the skill of our handicrafts- 
 men or the manliness of our national life. It 
 can be done without blunting or numbing the 
 practical energies of our people. 
 
 I know they say that if you meddle with 
 literature you are less qualified to take your 
 part in practical affairs. You run a risk of 
 being labelled a dreamer and a theorist. But, 
 after all, if we take the very highest form of 
 all practical energy — the governing of the 
 country — all this talk is ludicrously untrue, I 
 venture to say that in the present Government 
 [1887], including the Prime Minister, there are 
 three men at least who are perfectly capable 
 of earning their bread as men of letters. In 
 the late Government, besides the Prime Min- 
 ister, there were also three men of letters, and I 
 have never heard that those three were greater 
 simpletons than their neighbours. There is a 
 Commission now at work on that very im-
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 195 
 
 portant and abstruse subject — the Currency. I 
 am told that no one there displays so acute 
 an intelligence of the difficulties that are to 
 be met, and so ready an apprehension of the 
 important arguments that are brought forward, 
 and the practical ends to be achieved, as the 
 chairman of the Commission, who is not what 
 is called a practical man, but a man of study, 
 literature, theoretical speculation, and university 
 training.^ Oh no, gentlemen, some of the best 
 men of business in the country are men who 
 have had the best collegian's equipment, and 
 are the most accomplished bookmen. 
 
 It is true that we cannot bring to London, 
 with this movement, the indefinable charm that 
 haunts the grey and venerable quadrangles of 
 Oxford and Cambridge. We cannot take you 
 into the stately halls, the silent and venerable 
 libraries, the solemn chapels, the studious old- 
 world gardens. We cannot surround you with 
 all those elevated memorials and sanctifying 
 associations of scholars and poets, of saints 
 and sages, that march in glorious procession 
 through the ages, and make of Oxford and 
 ' Mr. Arthur Balfour.
 
 196 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 Cambridge a dream of music for the inward 
 ear, and of delight for the contemplative eye. 
 We cannot bring all that to you; but I hope, 
 and I believe, it is the object of those who are 
 more intimately connected with the society 
 than I have been, that every partaker of the 
 benefits of this society will feel himself and 
 herself in living connection with those two 
 famous centres, and feel conscious of the links 
 that bind the modern to the older England. 
 One of the most interesting facts mentioned 
 in your report this year is that last winter 
 four prizes of £10 each were offered in the 
 mining district of Northumberland, one each to 
 the male and female student in every term 
 who should take the highest place in the ex- 
 amination, in order to enable them to spend 
 a month in Cambridge in the long vacation for 
 the purpose of carrying on in the laboratories 
 and museums the work in which they had been 
 engaged in the winter at the local centre. That 
 is not a step taken by our society ; but the 
 University of Cambridge has inspired and worked 
 out the scheme, and I am not without hope that 
 from London some of those who attend these
 
 ON THE STtTDY OF LITERATURE, 197 
 
 classes may be able to realise in person the 
 attractions and the associations of these two 
 great historic sites. One likes to think how 
 poor scholars three or four hundred years ago 
 used to flock to Oxford, regardless of cold, 
 privation, and hardship, so that they might 
 satisfy their hunger and thirst for knowledge. 
 I like to think of them in connection with this 
 movement. I like to think of them in connec- 
 tion with students like those miners in North- 
 umberland, whom I know well, and who are 
 mentioned in the report of the Cambridge Ex- 
 tension Society as, after a day's hard work in 
 the pit, walking four or five miles through 
 cold and darkness and rough roads to hear a 
 lecture, and then walking back again the same 
 four or five miles. You must look for the 
 same enthusiasm, the same hunger and thirst 
 for knowledge, that presided over the founda- 
 tion of the Universities many centuries ago, to 
 carry on this work, to strengthen and stimulate 
 men's faith in knowledge, their hopes from it, 
 and their zeal for it. 
 
 Speaking now of the particular kind of know- 
 ledge of which I am going to say a few words —
 
 198 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 how does literature fare in these important 
 operations ? Last term, out of fifty-seven courses 
 in the Cambridge scheme, there were ten on • 
 literature : out of thirty-one of our courses, seven 
 were on literature. I am bound to say I think 
 that such a position for literature in the scheme 
 is very reasonably satisfactory. I have made 
 some inquiries, since I knew that I was going to 
 speak here, in the great popular centres of in- 
 dustry in the North and in Scotland as to the 
 popularity of literature as a subject of teaching, 
 I find very much what I should have expected. 
 The professors all tell very much the same story, 
 and this is, that it is extremely hard to interest 
 any considerable number of people in subjects 
 that seem to have no direct bearing upon the 
 practical work of everyday life. There is a dis- 
 inclination to study literature for its own sake, or 
 to study anything which does not seem to have a 
 visible and direct influence upon the daily work 
 of life. The nearest approach to a taste for 
 literature is a certain demand for instruction in 
 history with a little flavour of contemporary 
 politics. In short, the demand for instruction in 
 literature is strictly moderate. That is what
 
 ON. THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 199 
 
 men of experience tell me, and we have to 
 recognise it, nor ought we to be at all surprised. 
 Mr. Goschen, when he spoke some years ago, 
 said there were three motives which might 
 induce people to seek the higher education. 
 First, to obtain greater knowledge for bread- 
 winning purposes. From that point of view 
 science would be most likely to feed the classes. 
 Secondly, the improvement of one's knowledge of 
 political economy, and history, and facts bearing 
 upon the actual political work and life of the day. 
 Thirdly, was the desire of knowledge as a luxury 
 to brighten life and kindle thought. I am very 
 much afraid that, in the ordinary temper of our 
 people, and the ordinary mode of looking at life, 
 the last of these motives savours a little of self-in- 
 dulgence, and sentimentality, and other objection- 
 able qualities. There is a great stir in the region 
 of physical science at this moment, and it is 
 likely, as any one may see, to take a chief and 
 foremost place in the field of intellectual activity. 
 After the severity with which science was for 
 so many ages treated by literature, we cannot 
 wonder that science now retaliates, now mightily 
 exalts herself, and thrusts literature down into
 
 200 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 the lower place. I only have to say on the 
 relative claims of science and literature what Dr 
 Arnold said : — " If one might wish for im- 
 possibilities, I might then wish that my children 
 might be well versed in physical science, but in 
 due subordination to the fulness and freshness of 
 their knowledge on moral subjects. This, how- 
 ever, I believe cannot be ; wherefore, rather than 
 have it the principal thing in my son's mind, I 
 would gladly have him think that the sun went 
 round the earth, and that the stars were so many 
 spangles set in the bright blue firmament" 
 (Stanley's Life of Arnold, ii. 31). It is satisfactory 
 that one may know something of these matters, 
 and yet not believe that the sun goes round the 
 earth. But if there is to be exclusion, I, for one, 
 am not prepared to accept the rather enormous 
 pretensions that are nowadays sometimes made 
 for physical science as the be-all and end-all of 
 education. 
 
 Next to this we know that there is a great stir 
 on behalf of technical and commercial education. 
 The special needs of our time and country compel 
 us to pay a particular attention to this subject. 
 Here knowledge is business, and we shall never
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 201 
 
 hold our induvstrial pre-eminence, with all that 
 hangs upon that pre-eminence, unless we push on 
 technical and commercial education with all our 
 might. But there is a third kind of knowledge, 
 and that too, in its own way, is business. There 
 is the cultivation of the sympathies and imagina- 
 tion, the quickening of the moral sensibilities, 
 and the enlargement of the moral vision. The 
 great need in modern culture, which is scientific 
 in method, rationalistic in spirit, and utilitarian 
 in purpose, is to find some eff'ective agency for 
 cherishing within us the ideal. That is the 
 business and function of literature. Literature 
 alone will not make a good citizen ; it will not 
 make a good man. History affords too many 
 proofs that scholarship and learning by no means 
 purge men of acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, 
 of a murderous tenacity about trifles. Mere 
 scholarship and learning and the knowledge of 
 books do not by any means arrest and dissolve 
 all the travelling acids of the human system. 
 Nor would I pretend for a moment that literature 
 can be any substitute for life and action. Burke 
 said, " What is the education of the generality of 
 the world ? Reading a parcel of books ? No !
 
 202 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 Restraint and discipline, examples of virtue and 
 of justice, these are what form the education of 
 the world." That is profoundly true ; it is life 
 that is the great educator. But the parcel of 
 books, if they are well chosen, reconcile us to 
 this discipline; they interpret this virtue and 
 justice; they awaken within us the diviner mind, 
 and rouse us to a consciousness of what is best 
 in others and ourselves. 
 
 As a matter of rude fact, there is much to 
 make us question whether the spread of litera- 
 ture, as now understood, does awaken the diviner 
 mind. The numbers of the books that are taken 
 out from public libraries are not all that we 
 could wish. I am not going to inflict many 
 figures on you, but there is one set of these 
 figures that distresses booklovers, — I mean the 
 enormous place that fiction occupies in the books 
 that are taken out. In one great town in the 
 North prose fiction forms 76 per cent of all the 
 books lent. In another gi'eat town prose fiction 
 is 82 per cent; in a third 84 per cent ; and in 
 a fourth 67 per cent. I had the curiosity to see 
 what happens in the libraries of the United 
 States ; and there — supposing the system of
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 203 
 
 cataloguing and enumeration to be the same — 
 they are a trifle more serious in their taste than 
 we are ; where our average is about 70 per 
 cent, at a place like Chicago it is only about 60 
 per cent. In Scotland, too, it ought to be said 
 that they have a better average in respect to 
 prose fiction. There is a larger demand for 
 books called serious than in England. And I 
 suspect, though I do not know, that one reason 
 why there is in Scotland a greater demand for 
 the more serious classes of literature than fiction, 
 is that in the Scotch Universities there are what 
 we have not in England — well-attended chairs 
 of literature, systematically and methodically 
 studied. Do not let it be supposed that I at all 
 underrate the value of fiction. On the contrary, 
 when a man has done a hard day's work, what 
 can he do better than fall to and read the novels 
 of Walter Scott, or the Brontes, or Mrs Gaskell, 
 or some of our living writers. I am rather a 
 voracious reader of fiction myself. I do not, 
 therefore, point to it as a reproach or as a source 
 of discouragement, that fiction takes so large a 
 place in the objects of literary interest. I only 
 suggest that it is much too large, and we should
 
 204 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE, 
 
 be better pleased if it sank to about 40 per cent, 
 and what is classified as general literature rose 
 from 13 to 25 per cent. 
 
 There are other complaints of literature as an 
 object of interest in this country. I was reading 
 the other day an essay by the late head of my 
 old college at Oxford, that very learned and 
 remarkable man Mark Pattison, who was a 
 booklover if ever there was one. He complained 
 that the bookseller's bill in the ordinary English 
 middle class family is shamefully small. It 
 appeared to him to be monstrous that a man 
 who is earning £1000 a year should spend less 
 than £1 a week on books — that is to say, less 
 than a shilling in the pound per annum, I 
 know that Chancellors of the Exchequer take 
 from us 8d. or 6d, in the pound, and I am not 
 sure that they always use it as wisely as if they 
 left us to spend it on books. Still, a shilling in 
 the pound to be spent on books by a clerk who 
 earns a couple of hundred pounds a year, or by 
 a workman who earns a quarter of that sum, is 
 rather more, I think, than can be reasonably 
 expected. A man does not really need to have 
 a great many books. Pattison said that nobody
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 205 
 
 who respected himself could have less than 1000 
 volumes. He pointed out that you can stack 
 1000 octavo volumes in a bookcase that shall be 
 13 feet by 10 feet, and 6 inches deep, and that 
 everybody has that small amount of space at 
 disposal. Still the point is not that men should 
 have a great many books, but that they should 
 have the right ones, and that they should use those 
 that they have. We may all agree in lamenting 
 that there are so many houses — even some of 
 considerable social pretension — where you will 
 not find a good atlas, a good dictionary, or a 
 good cyclopaedia of reference. What is still 
 more lamentable, in a good many more houses 
 where these books are, they are never referred 
 to or opened. That is a very discreditable fact, 
 because I defy anybody to take up a single copy 
 of the Times newspaper and not come upon 
 something in it, upon which, if their interest in 
 the affairs of the day were active, intelligent, 
 and alert as it ought to be, they would consult 
 an atlas, dictionary, or cyclopaedia of reference. 
 
 No sensible person can suppose for a single 
 moment that everybody is born with the ability 
 for using books, for reading and studying
 
 20G ON THE STTJDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 literature. Certainly not everybody is born 
 with the capacity of being a great scholar. 
 All people are no more born great scholars 
 like Gibbon and Bentley, than they are all bom 
 great musicians like Handel and Beethoven. 
 What is much worse than that, many come into 
 the world with the incapacity of reading, just as 
 they come into it with the incapacity of dis- 
 tinguishing one tune from another. To them I 
 have nothing to say. Even the morning paper 
 is too much for them. They can only skim the 
 surface even of that. I go further, and frankly 
 admit that the habit and power of reading with 
 reflection, comprehension, and memory all alert 
 and awake, does not come at once to the natural 
 man any more than many other sovereign virtues 
 come to that interesting creature. What I do 
 venture to press upon you is, that it requires no 
 preterhuman force of will in any young man or 
 woman — unless household circumstances are more 
 than usually vexatious and unfavourable — to get 
 at least half an hour out of a solid busy day for 
 good and disinterested reading. Some will say 
 that this is too much to expect, and the first 
 persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE, 207 
 
 those who waste their time most. At any rate, 
 if I cannot get half an hour, I will be content 
 with a quarter. Now, in half an hour I fancy 
 you can read fifteen or twenty pages of Burke ; 
 or you can read one of Wordsworth's master- 
 pieces — say the lines on Tintern ; or say, one- 
 third — if a scholar, in the original, and if not, 
 in a translation — of a book of the Iliad or the 
 ^neid. I do not think that I am filling the 
 half-hour too full. But try for yourselves what 
 you can read in half an hour. Then multiply 
 the half-hour by 365, and consider what treasures 
 you might have laid by at the end of the year ; 
 and what happiness, fortitude, and wisdom they 
 would have given you during all the days of 
 your life. 
 
 I will not take up your time by explaining 
 the various mechanical contrivances and aids to 
 successful study. They are not to be despised 
 by those who would extract the most from books. 
 Many people think of knowledge as of money. 
 They would like knowledge, but cannot face the 
 perseverance and self-denial that go to the ac- 
 quisition of it. The wise student will do most 
 of his reading with a pen or a pencil in his hand.
 
 208 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 He will not shrink from the useful toil of making 
 abstracts and summaries of what he is reading. 
 Sir William Hamilton was a strong advocate 
 for underscoring books of study. " Intelligent 
 underlining," he said, '* gave a kind of abstract of 
 an important work, and by the use of different 
 coloured inks to mark a difference of contents, 
 and discriminate the doctrinal from the historical 
 or illustrative elements of an argument or ex- 
 position, the abstract became an analysis very 
 serviceable for ready reference."^ This assumes, 
 as Hamilton said, that the book to be operated 
 on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elabo- 
 rate a counsel of perfection for most of us. 
 Again, some great men — Gibbon was one, and 
 Daniel Webster was another, and the great Lord 
 Strafford was a third — always before reading a 
 book made a short, rough analysis of the ques- 
 tions which they expected to be answered in it, 
 the additions to be made to their knowledge, and 
 whither it would take them. 
 
 " After glancing my eye," says Gibbon, " over the 
 design and order of a new book, I suspended the per- 
 usal until I had finished the task of self-examination ; 
 
 » Veitch's Life of Hamilton, pp. 314, 392.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 209 
 
 till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or 
 believed or had thought on the subject of the whole 
 work or of some particular chapter : I was then qualified 
 to discern how much the author added to my original 
 stock ; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the agree- 
 ment, I was sometimes armed by the opposition, of our 
 ideas." ^ 
 
 I have sometimes tried that way of steadying 
 
 and guiding attention ; and I commend it to you. 
 
 I need not tell you that you will find that most 
 
 books worth reading once are worth reading 
 
 twice, and — what is most important of all — the 
 
 masterpieces of literature are worth reading a 
 
 thousand times. It is a great mistake to think 
 
 that because you have read a masterpiece once 
 
 or twice, or ten times, therefore you have done 
 
 with it. Because it is a masterpiece, you ought 
 
 to live with it, and make it part of your daily 
 
 life. Another practice is that of keeping a 
 
 common-place book, and transcribing into it 
 
 what is striking and interesting and suggestive. 
 
 And if you keep it wisely, as Locke has taught 
 
 us, you will put every entry under a head, 
 
 division, or subdivision. ^ This is an excellent 
 
 1 Dr. Smith's Gibhon, i. 64. 
 
 '^ " If I would put anything in my Common-place 
 Book, I find out a head to which I may refer it. Each 
 O
 
 210 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 practice for concentrating your thought on the 
 passage and making you alive to its real point 
 and significance. Here, however, the high 
 authority of Gibbon is against us. He refuses 
 "strenuously to recommend." "The action of 
 the pen," he says, " will doubtless imprint an 
 idea on the mind as well as on the paper; but 
 I much question whether the benefits of this 
 laborious method are adequate to the waste of 
 time ; and I must agree with Dr. Johnson {Idler, 
 No. 74) that 'what is twice read is commonly 
 better remembered than what is transcribed.' "^ 
 
 Various correspondents have asked me to say 
 something about those lists of a hundred books 
 that have been circulating through the world 
 within the last few months. I have examined 
 some of these lists with considerable care, and 
 whatever else may be said of them — and I speak 
 of them with deference and reserve, because men 
 for whom one must have a great regard have 
 
 head ought to be some important and essential word to 
 the matter in hand" (Locke's Works, iii. 308, ed. 1801). 
 This is for indexing purposes, but it is worth while to 
 go further and make a title for the passage extracted, 
 indicating its pith and purport. 
 1 Dr. Smith's Gibbon, i. 51.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 211 
 
 compiled them — they do not seem to me to be 
 calculated either to create or satisfy a wise taste 
 for literature in any very worthy sense. To fill 
 a man with a hundred parcels of heterogeneous 
 scraps from the Mahabharata, and the Sheking, 
 down to Pickwick and fFkite's Selborne, may pass 
 the time, but I cannot perceive how it would 
 strengthen or instruct or delight. For instance, 
 it is a mistake to think that every book that has 
 a great name in the history of books or of thought 
 is worth reading. Some of the most famous 
 books are least worth reading. Their fame was 
 due to their doing something that needed in their 
 day to be done. The work done, the virtue of the 
 book expires. Again, I agree with those who say 
 that the steady working down one of these lists 
 would end in the manufacture of that obnoxious 
 product — the prig. A prig has been defined as 
 an animal that is overfed for its size. I think 
 that these bewildering miscellanies would lead to 
 an immense quantity of that kind of overfeeding. 
 The object of reading is not to dip into every- 
 thing that even wise men have ever written. In 
 the words of one of the most winning writers of 
 English that ever existed — Cardinal Newman —
 
 212 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 the object of literature in education is to open 
 the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it 
 to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give 
 it power over its own faculties, application, 
 flexibility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, 
 address, and expression. These are the objects 
 of that intellectual perfection which a literary 
 education is destined to give. I will not venture 
 on a list of a hundred books, but will recommend 
 you instead to one book well worthy of your 
 attention. Those who are curious as to what 
 they should read in the region of pure literature 
 will do well to peruse Mr. Frederic Harrison's 
 admirable volume, called The Choice of Books. 
 You will find there as much wise thought, 
 eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any volume 
 of its size and on its subject, whether it be in the 
 list of a hundred or not. 
 
 Let me pass to another topic. We are often 
 asked whether it is best to study subjects, or 
 authors, or books. Well, I think that is like 
 most of the stock questions with which the 
 perverse ingenuity of mankind torments itself 
 There is no universal and exclusive answer. My 
 own answer is a very plain one. It is sometimes
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 213 
 
 best to study books, sometimes authors, and 
 sometimes subjects; but at all times it is best 
 to study authors, subjects, and books in connec- 
 tion with one another. Whether you make your 
 first approach from interest in an author or in a 
 book, the fruit will be only half gathered if you 
 leave off without new ideas and clearer lights 
 both on the man and the matter. One of the 
 noblest masterpieces in the literature of civil and 
 political wisdom is to be found in Burke's three 
 performances on the American war — his speech 
 on Taxation in 1774, on Conciliation in 1775, 
 and his letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in 1777. 
 I can only repeat to you what I have been saying 
 in print and out of it for a good many years, and 
 what I believe more firmly as observation is en- 
 larged by time and occasion, that these three pieces 
 are the most perfect manual in all literature for 
 the study of great affairs, whether for the purpose 
 of knowledge or action. " They are an example," 
 as I have said before now, " an example without 
 fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether 
 a theorist or an actor, of great political situations 
 should strive by night and by day to possess. If 
 their subject were as remote as the quarrel
 
 214 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the 
 war between Rome and the Allies, instead of a 
 conflict to which the world owes the opportunity 
 of one of the most important of political experi- 
 ments, we should still have everything to learn 
 from the author's treatment ; the vigorous grasp 
 of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumina- 
 tion from great principles of human experience, 
 the strong and masculine feeling for the two 
 great political ends of Justice and Freedom, the 
 large and generous interpretation of expediency, 
 the morality, the vision, the noble temper." No 
 student worthy of the name will lay aside these 
 pieces, so admirable in their literary expression, 
 so important for history, so rich in the lessons 
 of civil wisdom, until he has found out something 
 from other sources as to the circumstances from 
 which such writings arose, and as to the man 
 whose resplendent genius inspired them. There 
 are great personalities like Burke who march 
 through history with voices like a clarion trumpet 
 and something like the glitter of swords in their 
 hands. They are as interesting as their work. 
 Contact with them warms and kindles the mind. 
 You will not be content, after reading one of these
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 215 
 
 pieces, without knowing the character and person- 
 ality of the man who conceived it, and until you 
 have spent an hour or two — and an hour or two 
 will go a long way with Burke still fresh in your 
 mind — over other compositions in political litera- 
 ture, over Bacon's civil pieces, or Machiavelli's 
 Prince, and others in the same order of thought. 
 
 This points to the right answer to another 
 question that is constantly asked. We are con- 
 stantly asked whether desultory reading is among 
 things lawful and permitted. May we browse at 
 large in a library, as Johnson said, or is it 
 forbidden to open a book without a definite 
 aim and fixed expectations'? I am for a com- 
 promise. If a man has once got his general point 
 of view, if he has striven with success to place 
 himself at the centre, what follows is of less con- 
 sequence. If he has got in his head a good map 
 of the country, he may ramble at large with im- 
 punity. If he has once well and truly laid the 
 foundations of a methodical, systematic habit of 
 mind, what he reads will find its way to its 
 proper place. If his intellect is in good order, 
 he will find in every quarter something to assimi- 
 late and something that will nourish.
 
 216 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE, 
 
 Next I am going to deal with another question, 
 with wliich perhaps I ought to have started. 
 What is literature 1 It has often been defined. 
 Emerson says it is a record of the best thoughts. 
 " By literature," says another author, " we mean 
 the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent 
 men and women arranged in a way that shall 
 give pleasure to the reader." A third account is 
 that "the aim of a student of literature is to 
 know the best that has been thought in the 
 world." Definitions always appear to me in 
 these things to be in the nature of vanity. I 
 feel that the attempt to be compact in the defini- 
 tion of literature ends in something that is rather 
 meagre, partial, starved, and unsatisfactory. I 
 turn to the answer given by a great French 
 writer to a question not quite the same, viz. 
 " What is a classic 1 " Literature consists of a 
 whole body of classics in the true sense of the 
 word, and a classic, as Sainte-Beuve defines him, 
 is an " author who has enriched the human mind, 
 who has really added to its treasure, who has got 
 it to take a step further ; who has discovered 
 some unequivocal moral truth, or penetrated to 
 some eternal passion, in that heart of man where
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 217 
 
 it seemed as though all were known and explored, 
 who has produced his thought, or his observation, 
 or his invention under some form, no matter 
 what, so it be great, large, acute, and reasonable, 
 sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to 
 all in a style of his own, yet a style which finds 
 itself the style of everybody, — in a style that 
 is at once new and antique, and is the contem- 
 porary of all the ages." Another Frenchman. 
 Doudan, who died in 1872, has an excellent 
 passage on the same subject : — 
 
 "The man of letters properly so called is a ratl^er 
 singular being : he does not look at things exactly with 
 his own eyes, he has not impressions of his own, we 
 could not discover the imagination with which he 
 started. 'Tis a tree on which have been grafted 
 Homer, Virgil, Milton, Dante, Petrarch ; hence have 
 grown peculiar flowers which are not natural, and yet 
 which are not artificial. Study has given to the man of 
 letters something of the reverie of Rene ; with Homer 
 he has looked upon the plain of Troy, and there has 
 jemained in his brain some of the Ught of the Grecian 
 sky ; he has taken a little of the pensive lustre of VirgU, 
 as he wanders by his side on the slopes of the Aventine ; 
 he sees the world as Milton saw it, through the grey 
 mists of England, as Dante saw it, through the clear 
 and glowing light of Italy. Of all these colours he 
 composes for himself a colour that is unique and his 
 own ; from all these glasses by which his life passes on
 
 218 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 its journey to the real world, there is formed a special 
 tint, and that is what makes the imagination of men of 
 letters." 
 
 At a single hearing you may not take all that 
 in ; but if you should have any opportunity of 
 recurring to it, you will find this a satisfactory, 
 full, and instructive account of what is a classic, 
 and will find in it a full and satisfactory account of 
 what those who have thought most on literature 
 hope to get from it, and most would desire to 
 confer upon others by it. Literature consists of 
 all the books — and they are not so many — where 
 moral truth and human passion are touched with 
 a certain largeness, sanity, and attraction of form. 
 My notion of the literary student is one who 
 through books explores the strange voyages of 
 man's moral reason, the impulses of the human 
 heart, the chances and changes that have over- 
 taken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of 
 conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes 
 of great conceptions of truth and virtue. Poets, 
 dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction, 
 the great preachers, the character-writers, the 
 maxim-writers, the great political orators — they 
 are all literature in so far as they teach us to 
 know man and to know human nature. This is
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 219 
 
 what makes literature, rightly sifted and selected 
 and rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling 
 that it is so often and so erroneously supposed to 
 be, but a proper instrument for a systematic 
 training of the imagination and sympathies, and 
 of a genial and varied moral sensibility. 
 
 From this point of view let me remind you 
 that books are not the products of accident and 
 caprice. As Goethe said, if you would under- 
 stand an author, you must understand his age. 
 The same thing is just as true of a book. If 
 you would fully comprehend it, you must know 
 the age. There is an order; there are causes 
 and relations between great compositions and 
 the societies in which they have emerged. Just 
 as the naturalist strives to understand and to 
 explain the distribution of plants and animals 
 over the surface of the globe, to connect their 
 presence or their absence with the great geolo- 
 gical, climatic, and oceanic changes, so the 
 student of literature, if he be wise, undertakes 
 an ordered and connected survey of ideas, of 
 tastes, of sentiments, of imagination, of humour, 
 of invention, as they affect and as they are 
 affected by the ever changing experiences of
 
 220 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 human nature, and the manifold variations that 
 time and circumstances are incessantly working 
 in human society. 
 
 Those who are possessed, and desire to see 
 others possessed, by that conception of literary 
 study must watch with the greatest sympathy 
 and admiration the efforts of those who are 
 striving so hard, and, I hope, so successfully, 
 to bring tlie systematic and methodical study 
 of our own literature, in connection with other 
 literatures, among subjects for teaching and ex- 
 amination in the Universities of Oxford and 
 Cambridge. I regard those efforts with the 
 liveliest interest and sympathy. Everybody 
 agrees that an educated man ought to have a 
 general notion of the course of the great out- 
 ward events of European history. So, too, an 
 educated man ought to have a general notion 
 of the course of all those inward thoughts and 
 moods which find their expression in literature. 
 I think that in cultivating the study of litera- 
 ture, as I have perhaps too laboriously endea- 
 voured to define it, you will be cultivating 
 the most important side of history. Know- 
 ledge of it gives stability and substance to
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 221 
 
 character. It furnishes a view of the ground 
 we stand on. It builds up a solid backing of 
 precedent and experience. It teaches us where 
 we are. It protects us against imposture and 
 surprise. 
 
 Before closing I should like to say one word 
 upon the practice of composition. I have 
 suflFered, by the chance of life, many things 
 from the practice of composition. It has been 
 my lot, I suppose, to read more unpublished 
 work than any one else in this room. 
 
 There is an idea, and, I venture to think, a 
 very mistaken idea, that you cannot have a 
 taste for literature unless you are yourself an 
 author. I make bold entirely to 'demur to 
 that proposition. It is practically most mis- 
 chievous, and leads scores and even hundreds 
 of people to waste their time in the most un- 
 profitable manner that the wit of man can 
 devise, on work in which they can no more 
 achieve even the most moderate excellence than 
 they can compose a Ninth Symphony or paint 
 a Transfiguration. It is a terrible error to 
 suppose that because one is happily able to 
 relish *' Wordsworth's solemn -thoughted idyll,
 
 222 ON THK STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 or Tennyson's enchanted reverie," therefore a 
 solemn mission calls you to run off to write 
 bad verse at the Lakes or the Isle of Wight. 
 I beseech you not all to turn to authorship. 
 I will even venture, with all respect to those who 
 are teachers of literature, to doubt the excellence 
 and utility of the practice of over-much essay- 
 writing and composition. I have very little faith 
 in rules of style, though I have an unbounded 
 faith in the virtue of cultivating direct and 
 precise expression. But you must carry on the 
 operation inside the mind, and not merely by 
 practising literary deportment on paper. It is 
 not everybody who can command the mighty 
 rhythm of the greatest masters of human speech. 
 But every one can make reasonably sure that he 
 knows what he means, and whether he has found 
 the right word. These are internal operations, 
 and are not forwarded by writing for writing's 
 sake. Everybody must be urgent for attention 
 to expression, if that attention be exercised in 
 the right way. It has been said a million times 
 that the foundation of right expression in speech 
 or writing is sincerity. That is as true now as 
 it has ever been. Right expression is a part of
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 223 
 
 character. As somebody has said, by learning 
 to speak with precision, you learn to think with 
 correctness ; and the way to firm and vigorous 
 speech lies through the cultivation of high and 
 noble sentiments. So far as my observation has 
 gone, men will do better if they seek precision by 
 studying carefully and with an open mind and a 
 vigilant eye the great models of writing, than by 
 excessive practice of writing on their own account. 
 Much might here be said on what is one of 
 the most important of all the sides of literary 
 study. I mean its effect as helping to preserve 
 the dignity and the purity of the English lan- 
 guage. That noble instrument has never been 
 exposed to such dangers as those which beset it 
 to-day. Domestic slang, scientific slang, pseudo- 
 aesthetic afiectations, hideous importations from 
 American newspapers, all bear down with horrible 
 force upon the glorious fabric which the genius 
 of our race has reared. I will say nothing of my 
 own on this pressing theme, but will read to you 
 a passage of weight and authority from the 
 greatest master of mighty and beautiful speech. 
 
 "Whoever in a state," said Milton, "knows how 
 wisely to form the manners of men and to rule them
 
 224 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 at home and in war with excellent institutes, him in 
 the first place, above others, I should esteem worthy 
 of all honour. But next to him the man who strives 
 to establish in maxims and rules the method and 
 habit of speaking and writing received from a good 
 age of the nation, and, as it were, to fortify the same 
 round with a kind of wall, the daring to overleap 
 which let a law only short of that of Romulus be 
 used to prevent. . . . The one, as I believe, supplies 
 noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy 
 invading the territory. The other takes to himself the 
 task of extirpating and defeating, by means of a 
 learned detective police of ears, and a light band 
 of good authors, that barbarism which makes large 
 inroads iipon the minds of men, and is a destructive 
 intestine enemy of genius. Nor is it to be considered 
 of small consequence what language, pure or corrupt, 
 a people has, or what is their customary degree of 
 propriety in speaking it. . . . For, let the words of 
 a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in 
 themselves, in part debased by wear and wrongly 
 uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light 
 indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an 
 indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long 
 prepared for any amount of servility ? On the other 
 hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state, 
 did not at least flourish in a middling degree as long as 
 its own liking and care for its language lasted." ^ 
 
 The probabilities ai-e that we are now coming 
 to an epoch of a quieter style. There have been 
 
 ' Letter to Bonmattei, from Florence, 1638.
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 225 
 
 in our generation three strong masters in the art 
 of prose writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, 
 there was Macaulay, and there is Mr. Kuskin. 
 These are all giants, and they have the rights of 
 giants. But I do not believe that a greater mis- 
 fortune can befall the students who attend classes 
 here, than that they should strive to write like 
 any one of these three illustrious men. I think 
 it is the worst thing that can happen to them. 
 They can never attain to the high mark which 
 they have set before themselves. It is not every- 
 body who can bend the bow of Ulysses, and most 
 men only do themselves a mischief by trying to 
 bend it. If we are now on our way to a quieter 
 style, I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet. 
 Milton's phrase ever lingers in our minds as one 
 of imperishable beauty — where he regrets that 
 he is drawn by I know not what, from beholding 
 the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and 
 still air of delightful studies. Moderation and 
 judgment are, for most purposes, more than the 
 flash and the glitter even of the genius. I hope 
 that your professors of rhetoric will teach you 
 to cultivate that golden art — the steadfast use 
 of a language in which truth can be told ; a 
 P
 
 226 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 speech that is strong by natural force, and not 
 merely effective by declamation ; an utterance 
 without trick, without aflfectation, without man- 
 nerisms, without any of that excessive ambition 
 which overleaps itself as disastrously in prose 
 writing as in so many other things. 
 
 I will detain you no longer. I hope that I 
 have made it clear that we conceive the end of 
 education on its literary side to be to make a 
 man and not a cyclopaedia, to make a citizen and 
 not an album of elegant extracts. Literature 
 does not end with knowledge of forms, with in- 
 ventories of books and authors, with finding the 
 key of rhythm, with the varying measure of the 
 stanza, or the changes from the involved and 
 sonorous periods of the seventeenth century down 
 to the staccato of the nineteenth, or all the rest of 
 the technicalities of scholarship. Do not think 
 I contemn these. They are all good things to 
 know, but they are not ends in themselves. The 
 intelligent man, says Plato, will prize those 
 studies which result in his soul getting soberness, 
 righteousness, and wisdom, and he will less value 
 the others. Literature is one of the instruments, 
 and one of the most powerful instruments, for
 
 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 227 
 
 forming character, for giving us men and women 
 armed with reason, braced by knowledge, clothed 
 with steadfastness and courage, and inspired by 
 that public spirit and public virtue of which it 
 has been well said that they are the brightest 
 ornaments of the mind of man. Bacon is right, 
 as he generally is, when he bids us read not to 
 contradict and refute, nor to believe and take for 
 granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to 
 weigh and to consider. Yes, let us read to weigh 
 and to consider. In the times before us that 
 promise or threaten deep political, economical, 
 and social controversy, what we need to do is to 
 induce our people to weigh and consider. We 
 want them to cultivate energy Avithout impatience, 
 activity without restlessness, inflexibility without 
 ill-humour. I am not going to preach to you 
 any artificial stoicism. I am not going to preach 
 to you any indifference to money, or to the 
 pleasures of social intercourse, or to the esteem 
 and good-will of our neighbours, or to any other 
 of the consolations and necessities of life. But, 
 after all, the thing that matters most, both for 
 happiness and for duty, is that we should strive 
 habitually to live with wise thoughts and right
 
 228 ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. 
 
 feelings. Literature helps us more than other 
 studies to this most blessed companionship of 
 wise thoughts and right feelings, and so I have 
 taken this opportunity of earnestly commending 
 it to your interest and care
 
 VICTOR HUGO'S "NINETY-THREE." 
 
 " History has its truth, Legend has its truth. 
 Legendary truth is of a difiPerent nature from 
 historic truth. Legendary truth is invention 
 with reality for result. For the rest, history 
 and legend have the same aim — to paint under 
 the man of a day eternal humanity." These 
 words from his new and latest work (ii. 4) 
 are a repetition of what Victor Hugo had already 
 said in the introduction to his memorable Legend 
 of the Ages. But the occasion of their application 
 is far more delicate. Poetry lends itself naturally 
 to the spacious, distant, vague, highly general- 
 ised way of present and real events. A prose 
 romance, on the other hand, is of necessity 
 abundant in details, in special circumstances, 
 in particularities of time and place. This leaves 
 all the more room for historic error, and historic 
 
 ^ The references are to the "Edition Definitive" in 
 two volumes. 
 
 229
 
 230 VICTOR HUGO'S " NINETY-THREE." 
 
 error in a work of imagination dealing with 
 actual and known occurrences is obviously fatal, 
 not only to legendary truth, but to legendary 
 beauty and poetic irapressiveness. And then 
 the pitfalls which lie about the feet of the 
 Frenchman who has to speak of 1793, — the 
 terrible year of the modern epoch ! The delirium 
 of the Terror haunts most of the revolutionary 
 historians, and the choicest examples in all 
 literature of bombast, folly, emptiness, political 
 immorality, inhumanity, formal repudiation of 
 common sense and judgment, are to be found 
 in the rhapsodies which men of letters, some of 
 them men of eminence, call histories of the 
 Eevolution, or lives of this or that actor in it. 
 
 It was hardly a breach, therefore, of one's 
 allegiance to Hugo's superb imaginative genius, 
 if one had misgivings as to the result of an 
 attempt, even in his strong hands, to combine 
 legend with truth on a disastrous field, in which 
 grave writers with academic solemnity had con- 
 founded truth with the falsest kind of legend. 
 The theme was so likely to emphasise the defects 
 incident to his mighty qualities; so likely to 
 provoke an exaggeration of those mannerisms 
 of thought no less than of phrase, which though
 
 VICTOR Hugo's "ninety-three." 231 
 
 never ignoble nor paltry, yet now and then take 
 something from the loftiness and sincerity of the 
 writer's work. Wisdom, however, is justified of 
 her children, and M. Hugo's genius has justified 
 his choice of a difficult and perilous subject. 
 Quatrevingt-treize is a monument of its author's 
 finest gifts ; and while those who are happily 
 endowed with the capacity of taking delight in 
 nobility and beauty of imaginative work will 
 find themselves in possession of a new treasure, 
 the lover of historic truth who hates to see abs- 
 tractions passed oflF for actualities and legend 
 erected in the place of fact escapes with his 
 sensibilities almost unwounded. 
 
 The historic interlude at the beginning of the 
 second volume is undoubtedly open to criticism 
 from the political student's point of view. As 
 a sketch of the Convention, the scene of its 
 sittings, the stormful dramas that were enacted 
 there one after another for month after month, 
 the singular men who one after another rode 
 triumphant upon the whirlwind for a little space, 
 and were then mercilessly in an instant swept 
 into outer darkness, the commoner men who 
 cowered before the fury of the storm, and were 
 like "smoke driven hither and thither by the
 
 232 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 
 
 wind," and laboured hard upon a thousand 
 schemes for human improvement, some admir- 
 able, others mere frenzy, while mobs filed in 
 and danced mad carmagnoles before them — 
 all this is a magnificent masterpiece of accurate, 
 full, and vivid description. To the philosophy 
 of it we venture to demur. The mystic, super- 
 natural view of the French Revolution, which 
 is so popular among French writers who object 
 to the supernatural and the mystical every- 
 where else, is to us a thing most incredible, most 
 puerile, most mischievous. People talk of '93, 
 as a Greek tragedian treats the Tale of Troy 
 divine, or the terrible fortunes of the house of 
 Atreus, as the result of dark invincible fate, 
 as the unalterable decree of the immortal gods. 
 Even Victor Hugo's strong spirit does not quite 
 overcome the demoralising doctrine of a certain 
 revolutionary school, though he has the poet's 
 excuse. Thus, of the Convention : — 
 
 " Minds all a prey to the wind. But this wind was 
 a wind of miracle and portent. To be a member of the 
 Convention was to be a wave of the ocean. And this 
 was true of its greatest. The force of impulsion came 
 from on high. There was in the Convention a will, 
 which was the will of all, and yet was the will of no
 
 VICTOR Hugo's "ninety-three." 233 
 
 one. It was an idea, an idea resistless and without 
 measure, which breathed in the shadow from the high 
 heavens. We call that the Revolution. As this idea 
 passed, it threw down one and raised up another ; it 
 bore away this man in the foam, and broke that man to 
 pieces upon the rocks. The idea knew whither it went, 
 and drove the gulf of waters before it. To impute the 
 Revolution to men is as one who should impute the tide 
 to the waves. The revolution is an action of the Un- 
 known. ... It is a form of the abiding phenomenon 
 that shuts us in on every side and that we call 
 Necessity. ... In presence of these climacteric cata- 
 strophes which waste and vivify civilisation, one is slow 
 to judge detail. To blame or praise men on account 
 of the result, is as if one should blame or praise the 
 figures on account of the total. That which must 
 pass passes, the storm that must rage rages. The eternal 
 serenity does not suflfer from these boisterous winds. 
 Above revolutions truth and justice abide, as the starry 
 heaven abides above the tempests" (i. 188-189). 
 
 As a lyric passage, full of the breath of in- 
 spiration; as history, superficial and untrue; 
 as morality, enervating and antinomian. The 
 author is assuredly far nearer the mark in 
 another place when he speaks of " that immense 
 improvisation which is the French Revolution" 
 (ii. 35) — an improvisation of which every step 
 can be rationally explained. 
 
 After all, this is no more than an interlude.
 
 234 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 
 
 Victor Hugo only surveys the events of '93 as a 
 field for the growth of types of character. His 
 instinct as an artist takes him away from the 
 Paris of '93, where the confusion, uproar, human 
 frenzy, leave him no background of nature, with 
 nature's fixity, sternness, indiflference, sublimity. 
 This he found in La Vendue, whose vast forests 
 grow under the pencil of this master of all the 
 more terrible and majestic effects, into a picture 
 hardly less sombre and mighty in its impressive- 
 ness than the memorable ocean pieces of the 
 Toilers of the Sea. If the waves are appalling in 
 their agitation, their thunders, their sterility, the 
 forest is appalling in its silence, its dimness, its 
 rest, and the invisibleness of the thousand kinds 
 of life to which it gives a shelter. If the violence 
 and calm and mercilessness of the sea penetrated 
 the romance of eight years ago with transcendent 
 fury, so does the stranger, more mysterious, and 
 in a sense even the more inhuman life of the 
 forest penetrate the romance of to-day. From 
 the opening chapter down to the very close, even 
 while the interlude takes us for a little while to 
 the Paris caf6 where Danton, Robespierre, and 
 Marat sit in angry counsel, even while we are on
 
 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 235 
 
 the sea with the royalist Marquis and Halraalo, 
 the reader is subtly haunted by the great Vendean 
 woods, their profundity, their mystery, their 
 tragic and sinister beauties. 
 
 *' The forest is barbarous. 
 
 " The configuration of the land counsels man in many 
 an act. More than we suppose, it is his accomplice. 
 In the presence of certain savage landscapes, you are 
 tempted to exonerate man and blame creation ; you 
 feel a silent challenge and incitement from nature ; 
 the desert is constantly unwholesome for conscience, 
 especially for a conscience without light. Conscience 
 may be a giant ; that makes a Socrates or a Jesus : it 
 may be a dwarf ; that makes an Atreus or a Judas. The 
 puny conscience soon turns reptile ; the twilight thickets, 
 the brambles, the thorns, the marsh waters under 
 branches, make for it a fatal haunting place ; amid all 
 this it undergoes the mysterious infiltration of ill sugges- 
 tions. The optical illusions, the unexplained images, 
 the scaring hour, the scaring spot, all throw man int© 
 that kind of afi'right, half-religious, half-brutal, which 
 in ordinary times engenders superstition, and in epochs 
 of violence, savagery. Hallucinations hold the torch 
 that lights the path to murder. There is something 
 like vertigo in the brigand. Nature with her prodigies 
 has a double effect ; she dazzles great minds, and blinds 
 the duller souL When man is ignorant, when the desert 
 ofi'ers visions, the obscurity of the solitude is added to 
 the obscurity of the intelligence ; thence in man comes 
 the opening of abysses. Certain rocks, certain ravines, 
 certain thickets, certain wild openings of the evening
 
 236 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 
 
 sky through the trees, drive man towards mad or mon- 
 strous exploits. We might almost call some places 
 criminal" (ii. 21). 
 
 With La Vend6e for background, and some 
 savage incidents of the bloody Vendean war for 
 external machinery, Victor Hugo has realised his 
 conception of '93 in three types of character: 
 Lantenac, the royalist marquis ; Cimourdain, the 
 puritan turned Jacobin ; and Gauvain, for whom 
 one can as yet find no short name, he belonging 
 to the millenarian times. Lantenac, though 
 naturally a less original creation than the other 
 two, is still an extremely bold and striking 
 figure, drawn with marked firmness of hand, 
 and presenting a thoroughly distinct and co- 
 herent conception. It is a triumph of the poetic 
 or artistic part of the author's nature over the 
 merely political part, that he should have made 
 even his type of the old feudal order which he 
 execrates so bitterly, a heroic, if ever so little 
 also a diabolic, personage. There is everything 
 that is cruel, merciless, unflinching, in Lantenac ; 
 there is nothing that is mean or insignificant. 
 A gunner at sea, by inattention to the lashing of 
 his gun, causes an accident which breaks the ship
 
 VICTOR Hugo's " NINETY-THREE." 237 
 
 to pieces, and then he saves the lives of the crew 
 by hazarding his own life to secure the wandering 
 monster. Lantenac decorates him with the 
 cross of Saint Lewis for his gallantry, and in- 
 stantly afterwards has him shot for his care- 
 lessness. He burns homesteads and villages, 
 fusillades men and women, and makes the war 
 a war without quarter or grace. Yet he is no 
 swashbuckler of the melodramatic stage. There 
 is a fine reserve, a brief gravity, in the delineation 
 of him, his clear will, his quickness, his intre- 
 pidity, his relentlessness, which make of him 
 the incarnation of aristocratic coldness, hatred, 
 and pride. You might guillotine Lantenac with 
 exquisite satisfaction, and yet he does not make 
 us ashamed of mankind. Into his mouth, as he 
 walks about his dungeon, impatiently waiting to 
 be led out to execution, Victor Hugo has put 
 the aristocratic view of the Revolution. Some 
 portions of it (ii. 224-226) would fit amazingly 
 well into M. Kenan's notions about the moral 
 and intellectual reform of France. 
 
 If the Breton aristocrat of '93 was fearless, 
 intrepid, and without mercy in defence of God 
 and the King — and his qualities were all shared,
 
 238 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 
 
 the democrat may love to remember, by the 
 Breton peasant, whether peasant follower or 
 peasant leader — the Jacobin was just as vigorous, 
 as intrepid, as merciless in defence of his Re- 
 public. " Pays, Patrie," says Victor Hugo, in 
 words which perhaps will serve to describe many 
 a future passage in French history, " ces deux 
 mots r^sument toute la guerre de Vendue ; 
 querelle de I'id^e locale contre I'id^e universelle ; 
 paysans contre patriotes" (ii. 22).^ Certainly 
 the Jacobins were the patriots of that era, the 
 deliverers of France from something like that 
 process of partition which further east was con- 
 summated in this very '93. We do not mean 
 the handful of odious miscreants who played fool 
 and demon in turns in the insurrectionary 
 Commune and elsewhere: such men as Collot 
 d'Herbois, or Carrier, or Panis. The normal 
 Jacobin was a remarkable type. He has been 
 excellently described by Louis Blanc as some- 
 thing powerful, original, sombre ; half agitator 
 and half statesman ; half puritan and half monk ; 
 
 ^ In corroboration of this view of the Vendean rising 
 as democratic, see Mortimer-Ternaux, Hist, de la Terreur, 
 vol. vi. bk. 30.
 
 VICTOR HUGO'S "NINETY-THREE." 239 
 
 half inquisitor and half tribune. These words of 
 the historian are the exact prose version of the 
 figure of Cimourdain, the typical Jacobin of the 
 poet. " Cimourdain was a pure conscience, but 
 sombre. He had in him the absolute. He had 
 been a priest, and that is a serious thing. Man, 
 like the sky, may have a dark serenity ; it is 
 enough that something should have brought night 
 into his soul. Priesthood had brought night into 
 Cimourdain. He who has been a priest is one 
 still. What brings night upon us may leave the 
 stars with us. Cimourdain was full of virtues, 
 full of truths, but they shone in the midst of 
 darkness " (i. 123). If the aristocrat had rigidity, 
 so had the Jacobin. " Cimourdain had the blind 
 certitude of the arrow, which only sees the mark 
 and makes for it. In revolution, nothing so 
 formidable as the straight line. Cimourdain 
 strode forward with fatality in his step. He 
 believed that in social genesis the very extreme 
 point must always be solid ground, an error 
 peculiar to minds that for reason substitute 
 logic" (i. 127). And so forth, until the char- 
 acter of the Jacobin lives for us with a precision, 
 a fulness, a naturalness, such as neither Carlyle
 
 240 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 
 
 nor Michelet nor Quinet has been able to clothe 
 it with, though these too have the sacred illumina- 
 tion of genius. Victor Hugo's Jacobin is a poetic 
 creation, yet the creation only lies in the vivid 
 completeness with which the imagination of a 
 great master has realised to itself the traits and 
 life of an actual personality. It is not that he 
 has any special love for his Jacobin, but that he 
 has the poet's eye for types, politics apart. He 
 sees how much the aristocrat, slaying hip and 
 thigh for the King, and the Jacobin, slaying hip 
 and thigh for the Republic, resembled one 
 another. " Let us confess," he says, " these two 
 men, the Marquis and the priest [Lantenac and 
 Cimourdain], were up to a certain point the self- 
 same man. The bronze mask of civil war has 
 two profiles, one turned towards the past, the 
 other towards the future, but as tragic the one 
 as the other. Lantenac was the first of these 
 profiles, Cimourdain was the second ; only the 
 bitter rictus of Lantenac was covered with 
 shadow and night, and on the fatal brow of 
 Cimourdain was a gleaming of the dawn" 
 (ii. 91). 
 
 And let us mark Victor Hugo's signal distinc-
 
 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 241 
 
 tion in his analysis of character. It is not mere 
 vigour of drawing, nor acuteness of perception, 
 nor fire of imagination, though he has all these 
 gifts in a singular degree, and truest of their 
 kind. But then Scott had them too, and yet we 
 feel in Victor Hugo's work a seriousness, a signifi- 
 cance, a depth of tone, which never touches us in 
 the work of his famous predecessor in romance, 
 delightful as the best of that work is. Balfour 
 of Burley is one of Scott's most commanding 
 figures, and the stern Covenanter is nearly in the 
 same plane of character as the stern heroic 
 Jacobin. Yet Cimourdain impresses us more 
 profoundly. He is as natural, as human, as 
 readily conceivable, and yet he produces some- 
 thing of the subtle depth of eflfect which belongs 
 to the actor in a play of ^schylus. Why is this 1 
 Because Hugo makes us conscious of that tragedy 
 of temperament, that sterner Necessity of char- 
 acter, that resistless compulsion of circumstance, 
 which is the modern and positive expression for 
 the old Destiny of the Greeks, and which in some 
 expression or other is now an essential element 
 in the highest presentation of human life. Here 
 is not the Unknown. On the contrary, we are 
 Q
 
 242 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 
 
 in the very heart of science ; tragedy to the 
 modern is not tv'^t], but a thing of cause and 
 effect, invariable antecedent and invariable con- 
 sequent. It is the presence of this tragic force 
 underlying action that gives to all Hugo's work 
 its lofty quality, its breadth, and generality, and 
 fills both it, and us who read, with pity and 
 gravity and an understanding awe. 
 
 The action is this. Cimourdain had the young 
 Gauvain to train from his earliest childhood, and 
 the pupil grew up with the same rigid sense of 
 duty as the master, though temperament modified 
 its form. When the Revolution came, G-auvain, 
 though a noble, took sides with the people, but 
 he was not of the same spirit as his teacher. 
 " The Kevolution," says Victor Hugo, " by the 
 side of youthful figures of giants, such as Danton, 
 Saint-Just, and Robespierre, has young ideal 
 figures, like Hoche and Marceau. Gauvain was 
 one of these figures" (ii. 34). Cimourdain has 
 himself named delegate from the Committee of 
 Public Safety to the expeditionary column of 
 which Gauvain is in command. The warmth of 
 affection between them was undiminished, but 
 difference in temperament lired difference in their
 
 VICTOR HUGO'S " NINETY-THREE." 243 
 
 principles. They represented, as the author says, 
 with the candour of the poet, the two poles of 
 the truth ; the two sides of the inarticulate, sub- 
 terranean, fatal contention of the year of the 
 Terror. Their arguments with one another 
 make the situation more intelligible to the 
 historic student, as they make the characters of 
 the speakers more transparent for the purposes 
 of the romance. 
 
 This is Cimourdain : — 
 
 " Beware, there are terrible duties in life. Do not 
 accuse what is not responsible. Since when has the 
 disorder been the fault of the physician ? Yes, what 
 marks this tremendous year is being without pity. 
 Why ? Because it is the great revolutionary year. 
 This year incarnates the revolution. The revolution 
 has an enemy, the old world, and to that it is pitiless, 
 just as the surgeon has an enemy, gangrene, and is 
 pitiless to that. The revolution extirpates kingship in 
 the king, aristocracy in the noble, despotism in the 
 soldier, superstition in the priest, barbarity in the 
 judge, in a word whatever is tyranny in whatever is 
 tyrant. The operation is frightful, the revolution per- 
 forms it with a sure hand. As to the quantity of sound 
 flesh that it requires, ask Boerhave what he thinks 
 of it. What tumour that has to be cut out does not 
 involve loss of blood ? . . . The revolution devotes itself 
 to its fated task. It mutilates but it saves. ... It has 
 the past in its grasp, it will not spare. It makes in'
 
 244 VICTOR Hugo's " NiNpyrv-THREE." 
 
 civilisation a deep incision whence shall come the 
 safety of the human race. You suffer ? No doubt. 
 How long will it last? The time needed for the 
 operation. Then you will live," etc. (ii 65-66). 
 
 " One day," he adds, " the Revolution will 
 
 justify the Terror." To which Gauvain retorts 
 
 thus : — 
 
 " Fear lest the Terror be the calumny of the Revolu- 
 tion. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, are dogmas of 
 peace and harmony. Why give them an aspect of 
 alarm ? What do we seek 1 To win nations to the 
 universal public. Then why inspire fright ? Of what 
 avail is intimidation ? It is wrong to do ill in order to 
 do good. You do not pull down the throne to leave 
 the scaffold standing. Let us hurl away crowns, let us 
 spare heads. The revolution is concord, not affright. 
 Mild ideas are ill-served by men who do not know pity. 
 Amnesty is for me the noblest word in human speech. 
 I will shed no blood save at hazard of my own. ... In 
 the fight let us be the enemies of our foes, and after the 
 victory their brothers " (ii. 67). 
 
 These two together, Cimourdain and Gauvain, 
 make an ideal pair of the revolutionists of '93. 
 Strip each of them of the beauty of character 
 with which the poet's imagination has endowed 
 them, add instead passion, violence, envy, egoism, 
 malice ; then you understand how in the very 
 face of the foreign enemy Girondins sharpened
 
 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 245 
 
 the knife for the men of the Mountain, H6bertists 
 screamed for the lives of Eobespierrists, Robes- 
 pierre struck off the head of Dantou, Thermi- 
 dorians crushed Robespierre. 
 
 Victor Hugo has given to this typic historical 
 struggle of '93 the qualities of nobleness and 
 beauty which art requires in dealing with real 
 themes. Lantenac falls into the hands of the 
 Blues, headed by Cimourdain and Gauvain, but 
 he does so in consequence of yielding to a heroic 
 and self- devoting impulse of humanity. Cimour- 
 dain, true to his temperament, insists on his 
 instant execution. Gauvain, true also to his 
 temperament, is seized with a thousand mis- 
 givings, and there is no more ample, original, 
 and masterly presentation of a case of conscience, 
 that in civil war is always common enough, 
 than the struggle through which Gauvain passes 
 before he can resolve to deliver Lantenac. This 
 pathetic debate — " the stone of Sisyphus, which 
 is only the quarrel of man with himself" — turns 
 on the loftiest, broadest, most generous motives, 
 touching the very bases of character, and reach- 
 ing far beyond the issue of '93. The political 
 question is seen to be no more than a superficial
 
 246 VICTOR Hugo's "ninety-three." 
 
 aspect of the deeper moral question. Lantenac, 
 the representative of the old order, had performed 
 an exploit of signal devotion. Was it not well 
 that one who had faith in the new order should 
 show himself equally willing to cast away his 
 life to save one whom self-sacrifice had trans- 
 formed from the infernal Satan into the heavenly 
 Lucifer ? 
 
 " Gauvain saw in the shade the sinister smile of the 
 sphinx. The situation was a sort of dread crossway 
 where the conflicting truths issued and confronted one 
 another, and where the three supreme ideas of man 
 stood face to face — humanity, the family, the fatherland. 
 Each of the voices spoke in turn, and each in turn 
 declared the truth. How choose? Each in turn 
 seemed to hit the mark of reason and justice, and said, 
 Do that. Was that the thing to be done ? Yes. No. 
 Eeasoning counselled one thing ; sentiment another ; 
 the two counsels were contradictory. Reasoning is 
 only reason ; sentiment is often conscience ; the one 
 comes from man, the other from a loftier source. That 
 is why sentiment has less distinctness, and more might. 
 Yet what strength in the severity of reason ! Grauvain 
 hesitated. His perplexity was so fierce. Two abysses 
 opened before him : to destroy the marquis, or to save 
 him. Which of these two gulfs was duty ? " 
 
 The whole scene (ii. 206-219) is a master- 
 piece of dramatic strength, sustention, and flexi- 
 bility — only equalled by the dramatic vivacity
 
 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 247 
 
 of the scene in which Cimourdain, sitting as 
 judge, orders the prisoner to be brought forward, 
 to his horror sees Gauvain instead of Lantenac, 
 and then proceeds to condemn the man whom he 
 loves best on earth to be taken to the guillotine. 
 
 The tragedy of the story, its sombre tone, the 
 overhanging presence of death in it, are prevented 
 from being oppressive to us by the variety of 
 minor situation and subordinate character with 
 which the writer has surrounded the central 
 figures. No writer living is so consummate a 
 master of landscape, and besides the forest we 
 here have an elaborate sea-piece, full of the weird, 
 ineflFable, menacing suggestion of the sea in 
 some of her unnumbered moods ; and there is a 
 scene of late twilight on a high solitary down 
 over the bay of Mont Saint-Michel, to which a 
 reader blessed with sensibility to the subtler 
 impressions of landscape will turn again and 
 again, as one visits again and again some actual 
 prospect where the eye procures for the inner 
 sense a dream of beauty and the incommensur- 
 able. Perhaps the palm for exquisite workman- 
 ship will be popularly given, and justly given, tc
 
 248 VICTOR HUGO'S "NINETY-THREE," 
 
 the episode humorously headed The Massacre of 
 Saint Bartholomew, at the opening of the third 
 volume. It is the story of three little children, 
 barely out of infancy, awaking, playing, eating, 
 wondering, slumbering, in solitude through a 
 summer day in an old tower. As a rule the 
 attempt to make infancy interesting in literature 
 ends in maudlin failure. But at length the 
 painters have found an equal, or more than an 
 equal, in an artist whose medium lends itself less 
 easily than colour and form to the reproduction 
 of the beauty and life of childhood. In his 
 poetry Victor Hugo had already shown his 
 passing sensibility to the pathos of the begin- 
 nings of our life; witness such pieces as Chose 
 vue un Jour de Printemps, Les Fauwes Gens, the 
 well-known pieces in VAnrde Terrible, and a 
 hundred other lively touches and fragments of 
 finished loveliness and penetrating sympathy. 
 In prose it is a more difficult feat to collect the 
 trivial details which make up the life of the tiny 
 human animal into a whole that shall be im- 
 pressive, finished, and beautiful. And prose can 
 only describe by details enumerated one by one. 
 This most arduous feat is accomplished in the
 
 VICTOR HUGO'S " NINETY-THREE." 249 
 
 children's summer day in the tower, and with 
 enchanting success. Intensely realistic, yet the 
 picture overflows with emotion — not the emotion 
 of the mother, but of the poet. There is infinite 
 tenderness, pathos, love, but all heightened at 
 once and strengthened by the self-control of 
 masculine force. A man writing about little 
 ones seems able to place himself outside, and 
 thus to gain more calmness and freedom of vision 
 than the more passionate interest or yearning 
 of women permits to them in this field of art. 
 Not a detail is spared, yet the whole is full of 
 delight and pity and humour. Only one lyric 
 passage is allowed to poetise and accentuate the 
 realism of the description. Georgette, some 
 twenty months old, scrambles from her cradle 
 and prattles to the sunbeam. 
 
 "What a bird says in its soncj, a child says in its 
 prattle. 'Tis the same hymn ; a hymn indistinct, 
 lisping, profound. The child has what the bird has 
 not, the sombre human destiny in front of it. Hence 
 the sadness of men as they listen, mingling with the 
 joy of the little one as it sings. The sublimest canticle 
 to be heard on earth is the stammering of the human 
 soul on the lips of infancy. That confused chirruping 
 of a thought, that is as yet no more than an instinct,
 
 250 VICTOR Hugo's "ninety-three." 
 
 has in it one knows not what sort of artless appeal to 
 the eternal justice ; or is it a protest uttered on the 
 threshold before entering in, a protest meek and 
 poignant ? This ignorance smiling at the Infinite com- 
 promises all creation in the lot that shall fall to the 
 weak defenceless being. Ill, if it shall come, will be an 
 abuse of confidence. 
 
 " The child's murmuring is more and is less than 
 words ; there are no notes, and yet it is a song ; there 
 are no syllables, and yet it is a language. . . . This 
 poor stammering is a compound of what the child said 
 when it was an angel, and of what it will say when it 
 becomes a man. The cradle has a Yesterday as the 
 grave has a Morrow ; the Morrow and the Yesterday 
 mingle in that strange cooing their twofold mys- 
 tery. . . ." 
 
 " Her lips smiled, her eyes smiled, the dimples in her 
 cheeks smiled. There came forth in this smile a 
 mysterious welcome of the morning. The soul has 
 faith in the ray. The heavens were blue, warm was 
 the air. The fragile creature, without knowing any- 
 thing, or recognising anything, or understanding any- 
 thing, softly floating in musings which are not thought, 
 felt itself in safety in the midst of nature, among those 
 good trees and that guileless greenery, in the pure and 
 peaceful landscape, amid the rustle of nests, of flowing 
 springs, of insects, of leaves, while over all there glowed 
 the great innocency of the sun" (ii. 104). 
 
 As an eminent man has recently written about 
 Wordsworth's most famous Ode, there may be
 
 VICTOR HUGO'S "NINETY-THREE." 251 
 
 some bad philosophy here, but there is assuredly 
 some noble and touching poetry. 
 
 If the carelessness of infancy is caught with 
 this perfection of finish, there is a tragic 
 companion piece in the horror and gnawing 
 anguish of the wretched woman from whom her 
 young hav'^e been taken — her rescue from death, 
 her fierce yearnings for them like the yearnings 
 of a beast, her brute-like heedlessness of her 
 life and her body in the cruel search. 
 
 And so the poet conducts us along the strange 
 excursive windings of the life and passion of 
 humanity. The same hand which draws such 
 noble figures as Gauvain — and the real Lan- 
 juinais of history was fully as heroic and as 
 noble as the imaginary Gauvain of fiction — is 
 equally skilful in drawing the wild Breton 
 beggar who dwells underground among the 
 branching tree-roots; and the monstrous 
 Iml,nus, the barbarous retainer of the Lord of 
 the Seven Forests ; and Radoub, the serjeant 
 from Paris, a man of hearty oaths, hideous, 
 heroic, humoursome, of a bloody ingenuity in 
 combat. And the same hand which described 
 the silent sundown on the sandy shore of the
 
 252 VICTOR HUGO'S " NINETY-THREE." 
 
 bay, and the mysterious darkness of the forests, 
 and the blameless play of the little ones, gives 
 us the prodigious animation of the night surprise 
 at D61, the furious conflict at La Tourgue, and, 
 perhaps most powerful of all, the breaking loose 
 of the gun on the deck of the Claymore. You 
 may say that this is only melodrama ; but if we 
 turn to the actual events of '93, the melodrama 
 of the romancer will seem tame compared with 
 the melodrama of the faithful chronicler. And 
 so long as the narrative of melodramatic action 
 is filled with poetry and beauty, there is no 
 reproach in uncommon situation, in intense 
 passion, in magnanimous or subtle motives that 
 are not of every day. Of Hugo's art we may 
 say what Dr. Newman has said of something 
 else : Stick work is always open to criticism and it is 
 always above it. 
 
 There is poetry and beauty, no doubt, in the 
 common lives about us, if we look at them with. 
 imaginative and sympathetic eye, and we owe 
 much to the art that reveals to us the tragedy of 
 the parlour and the frockcoat, and analyses the 
 bitterness and sorrow and high passion that may 
 underlie a life of outer smoothness and decorum.
 
 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three." 253 
 
 Still, criticism cannot accept this as the final and 
 exclusive limitation of imaginative work. Art 
 is nothing if not catholic and many-sided, and it 
 is certainly not exhausted by mere domestic 
 possibilities. Goethe's fine and luminous feeling 
 for practical life, which has given such depth of 
 richness and wisdom to his best prose writing, 
 fills us with a delightful sense of satisfaction and 
 adequateness ; and yet why should it not leave 
 us with a mind eagerly open for the larger and 
 more inventive romance, in which nature is 
 clothed with some of that awe and might and 
 silent contemplation of the puny destinies of 
 man, that used to surround the conception of the 
 supernatural? Victor Hugo seeks strong and 
 extraordinary effects ; he is a master of terrible 
 image, profound emotion, audacious fancy ; but 
 then these are as real, as natural, as true to fact, 
 as the fairest reproduction of the moral poverties 
 and meannesses of the world. And let it be 
 added that while he is without a rival in the 
 dark mysterious heights of imaginative efi"ect, he 
 is equally a master in strokes of tenderness and 
 the most delicate human sympathy. His last 
 book seems to contain pieces that surpass every
 
 254 VICTOR Hugo's " ninety-three.' 
 
 other book of Hugo's in the latter range of 
 qualities, and not to fall at all short in the 
 former. And so, in the words of the man of 
 genius who last wrote on Victor Hugo in these 
 pages,^ " As we pity ourselves for the loss of 
 poems and pictures which have perished, and 
 left of Sappho but a fragment and of Zeuxis but 
 a name, so are we inclined to pity the dead who 
 died too soon to enjoy the great works we have 
 enjoyed. At each new glory that 'swims into 
 our ken,' we surely feel that it is something to 
 have lived to see that too rise." 
 1 Mr. Swinburne.
 
 ON ''THE RING AND THE 
 BOOK." 
 
 When the first volume of Mr. Browning's new 
 poem came before the critical tribunals, public 
 and private, recognised or irresponsible, there 
 was much lamentation even in quarters where 
 a manlier humour might have been expected, 
 over the poet's choice of a subject. With facile 
 largeness of censure, it was pronounced a murky 
 subject, sordid, unlovely, morally sterile, an ugly 
 leaf out of some ancient Italian Newgate Calen- 
 dar. One hinted in vain that wisdom is justified 
 of her children, that the poet must be trusted 
 to judge of the capacity of his own theme, 
 and that it is his conception and treatment of 
 it that ultimately justify or discredit his choice. 
 Now that the entire work is before the world, 
 this is plain, and it is admitted. When the 
 second volume, containing Giuseppe Caponsacchi, 
 
 266
 
 256 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 appeared, men no longer found it sordid or 
 ugly ; the third, with Fompilia, convinced them 
 that the subject was not, after all, so incurably 
 unlovely; and the fourth, with The Pope, and 
 the passage from the Friar's sermon, may well 
 persuade those who needed persuasion, that 
 moral fruitfulness depends on the master, his 
 eye and hand, his vision and grasp, more than 
 on this and that in the transaction which has 
 taken possession of his imagination. 
 
 The truth is, we have for long been so de- 
 bilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation 
 of the Arthurian legend for drawing-rooms, by 
 idylls, not robust and Theocritean, by verse 
 directly didactic, that a rude blast of air from 
 the outside welter of human realities is apt 
 to give a shock, that might well show in what 
 simpleton's paradise we have been living. The 
 ethics of the rectory parlour set to sweet music, 
 the respectable aspirations of the sentimental 
 curate married to exquisite verse, the everlast- 
 ing glorification of domestic sentiment in blame- 
 less princes and others, as if that were the 
 poet's single province and the divinely-appointed 
 end of all art, as if domestic sentiment included
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 257 
 
 and summed up the whole throng of passions, 
 emotions, strife, and desire ; all this might 
 seem to be making valetudinarians of us all. 
 Our public is beginning to measure the right 
 and possible in art by the superficial probabili- 
 ties of life and manners within a ten - mile 
 radius of Charing Cross. Is it likely, asks the 
 critic, that Duke Silva would have done this, 
 that Fedalma would have done that 1 Who 
 shall suppose it possible that Caponsacchi acted 
 thus, that Count Guido was possessed by devils 
 so 1 The poser is triumphant, because the 
 critic is tacitly appealing to the normal stand- 
 ard of probabilities in our own day. In the 
 tragedy of Pompilia we are taken far from 
 the serene and homely region in which some 
 of our teachers would fain have it that the 
 whole moral universe can be snugly pent up. 
 We see the black passions of man at their 
 blackest ; hate, so fierce, undiluted, implacable, 
 passionate, as to be hard of conception by our 
 simpler northern natures ; cruelty, so vindic- 
 tive, subtle, persistent, deadly, as to fill us 
 with a pain almost too great for true art to 
 produce ; greediness, lust, craft, penetrating a 
 R
 
 258 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 whole Stock and breed, even down to the 
 
 ancient mother of " that fell house of hate,"- 
 
 " The gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke, 
 The hag that gave these three abortions birth, 
 Unmotherly mother and unwomanly 
 Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame, 
 Womanliness to loathing : no one word, 
 No gesture to curb cruelty a whit 
 More than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelps 
 Trying their milk-teeth on the soft o' the throat 
 0' the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes, 
 Flat in the covert ! How should she but couch, 
 Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw, 
 Catch 'twixt her placid eyewinks at what chance 
 Old bloody half-forgotten dream may flit. 
 Born when herself was novice to the taste. 
 The while she lets youth take its pleasure " (iv. 40). 
 
 But, then, if the poet has lighted up for 
 
 us these grim and appalling depths, he has 
 
 not failed to raise us too into the presence of 
 
 proportionate loftiness and purity. 
 
 " Tantum vertice in auras 
 Aetherias quantum radice in Tartara tendit." 
 
 Like the gloomy and umbrageous grove of 
 which the Sibyl spake to the pious ^Eneas, 
 the poem conceals a golden branch and golden 
 leaves. In the second volume, Guido, servile 
 and false, is followed by Caponsacchi, as noble
 
 ON "THE RING AND THE BOOK." 259 
 
 alike in conception and execution as anything 
 that Mr. Browning has ever achieved. In the 
 third volume, the austere pathos of Pompilia's 
 tale relieves the too oppressive jollity of Don 
 Giacinto, and the flowery rhetoric of Bottini ; 
 while in the fourth, the deep wisdom, justice, 
 and righteous mind of the Pope, reconcile us 
 to endure the sulphurous whiff from the pit in 
 the confession of Guido, now desperate, naked, 
 and Satanic. From what at first was sheer 
 murk, there comes out a long procession of 
 human figures, infinitely various in form and 
 thought, in character and act; a group of men 
 and women, eager, passionate, indifferent ; tender 
 and ravenous, mean and noble, humorous and 
 profound, jovial with prosperity or half-dumb 
 with misery, skirting the central tragedy, or 
 plunged deep into the thick of it, passers-by 
 who put themselves off with a glance at the 
 surface of a thing, and another or two who 
 dive to the heart of it. And they all come 
 out with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vivid- 
 ness, directness. Above all, they are every one 
 of them men and women, -with free play of hu- 
 man life in limb and feature, as in an antique
 
 260 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 sculpture. So much of modern art, in poetry 
 as in painting, runs to mere drapery. " I 
 grant," said Lessing, " that there is also a 
 beauty in drapery, but can it be compared 
 with that of the human form 1 And shall he 
 who can attain to the greater, rest content with 
 the less? I much fear that the most perfect 
 master in drapery shows by that very talent 
 wherein his weakness lies." This was spoken 
 of plastic art, but it has a yet deeper meaning 
 in poetic criticism. There too, the master is 
 he who presents the natural shape, the curves, 
 the thews of men, and does not labour and 
 seek praise for faithful reproduction of the 
 mere moral drapery of the hour, this or another ; 
 who gives you Hercules at strife with Antaeus, 
 Laocoon writhing in the coils of the divine 
 serpents, the wrestle with circumstance or 
 passion, with outward destiny or inner charac- 
 ter, in the free outlines of nature and reality. 
 The capacity which it possesses for this pre- 
 sentation, at once so varied and so direct, is 
 one reason why the dramatic form ranks as 
 the highest expression and measui'e of the 
 creative power of the poet ; and the extra-
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 261 
 
 ordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has 
 availed himself of this double capacity is one 
 reason why we should reckon The Ring and the 
 Book as one of his masterpieces. 
 
 We may say this, and still not be blind to 
 the faults of the poem. Many persons agree 
 that they find it too long, and if they find it 
 so, then for them it is too long. Others, who 
 cannot resist the critic's temptation of believing 
 that a remark must be true if it only look acute 
 and specific, vow that the disclosure in the first 
 volume of the whole plan and plot vitiates sub- 
 sequent artistic merit. If one cannot enjoy what 
 comes, for knowing beforehand what is coming, 
 this objection may be allowed to have a root 
 in human nature ; but then two things might 
 perhaps be urged on the other side, — first, that 
 the interest of the poem lies in the development 
 and presentation of character, on the one hand, 
 and in the many sides which a single transaction 
 offered to as many minds, on the other; and 
 therefore that this true interest could not be 
 marred b}- the bare statement what the trans- 
 action was or, baldly looked at, seemed to be ; 
 and, second, that the poem was meant to find
 
 262 ON " THE RING AND THE IJOOK." 
 
 its reader in a mood of mental repose, ready 
 to receive the poet's impressions, undisturbed 
 by any agitating curiosity as to plot or final 
 outcome. A more valid accusation touches the 
 many verbal perversities, in which a poet has 
 less right than another to indulge. The com- 
 pound Latin and English of Don Giacinto, not- 
 withstanding the fun of the piece, stJU grows 
 a burden to the flesh. Then there are harsh 
 and formless lines, bursts of metrical chaos, 
 from which a writer's dignity and self-respect 
 ought surely to be enough to preserve him. 
 Again, there are passages marked by a coarse 
 violence of expression that is nothing short of 
 barbarous (for instance, ii. 190, or 245). The 
 only thing to be said is, that the countrymen 
 of Shakespeare have had to learn to forgive 
 uncouth outrages on form and beauty to fine 
 creative genius. If only one could be sure 
 that readers, unschooled as too many are to 
 love the simple and elevated beauty of such 
 form as Sophocles or as Corneille gives, would 
 not think the worst fault the chief virtue, and 
 confound the poet's bluntnesses \vith his admir- 
 able originality. It is certain that in Shake-
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 263 
 
 speare's case his defects are constantly fastened 
 upon, by critics who have never seriously studied 
 the forms of dramatic art except in the litera- 
 ture of England, and extolled as instances of 
 his characteristic mightiness. It may well be, 
 therefore, that the grotesque caprices which Mr. 
 Browning unfortunately permits to himself may 
 find misguided admirers, or, what is worse, even 
 imitators. It would be most unjust, however, 
 while making due mention of these things, to 
 pass over the dignity and splendour of the 
 verse in many places, where the intensity of 
 the writer's mood finds worthy embodiment in 
 a sustained gravity and vigour and finish of 
 diction not to be surpassed. The concluding 
 lines of the Caponsacchi (comprising the last 
 page of the second volume), the appeal of the 
 Greek poet in The Pope, one or two passages 
 in the first Guido (e.g. vol. ii., p. 156, from 
 line 1957), and the close of the Fompilia, ought 
 to be referred to when one wishes to know 
 what power over the instrument of his art Mr. 
 Browning might have achieved, if he had chosen 
 to discipline himself in instrumentation. 
 
 When all is said that can be said about the
 
 264 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 violences which from time to time invade the 
 [loem, it remains true that the complete work 
 atfects the reader most powerfully with that 
 wide unity of impression which it is the highest 
 aim of dramatic art, and perhaps of all art, to 
 produce. After we have listened to all the 
 whimsical dogmatising about beauty, to all the 
 odious cant about morbid anatomy, to all the 
 well-deserved reproach for unpardonable per- 
 versities of phrase and outrages on rhythm, there 
 is left to us the consciousness that a striking 
 human transaction has been seized by a vigorous 
 and profound imagination, that its many diverse 
 threads have been wrought into a single, rich, 
 and many-coloured web of art, in which we may 
 see traced for us the labyrinths of passion and 
 inditference, stupidity and craft, prejudice and 
 chance, along which truth and justice have to 
 find a devious and doubtful way. The transac- 
 tion itself, lurid and fuliginous, is secondary to the 
 manner of its handling and presentment. We do 
 not derive our sense of unity from the singleness 
 and completeness of the horrid tragedy, so much 
 as from the power with which its own circum- 
 stances as they happened, the rumours which
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 265 
 
 clustered about it from the minds of men with- 
 out, the many moods, fancies, dispositions, which 
 it for the moment brought out into light, playing 
 round the fact, the half-sportive flights with 
 which lawyers, judges, quidnuncs of the street, 
 darted at conviction and snatched hap-hazard at 
 truth, are all wrought together into one self- 
 sufl&cient and compacted shape. 
 
 But this shape is not beautiful, and the end of 
 art is beauty ? Verbal fanaticism is always per- 
 plexing, and, rubbing my eyes, I ask whether 
 that beauty means anything more than such an 
 arrangement and disposition of the parts of the 
 work as, first kindling a great variety of dispersed 
 emotions and thoughts in the mind of the spec- 
 tator, finally concentrates them in a single mood 
 of joyous, sad, meditative, or interested delight. 
 The sculptor, the painter, and the musician, have 
 each their special means of producing this final 
 and superlative impression ; each is bound by the 
 strictly limited capability in one direction and 
 another of the medium in which he works. In 
 poetry it is because they do not perceive how 
 much more manifold and varied are the means of 
 reaching the end than in the other expressions of
 
 266 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 art, that people insist each upon some jmrticular 
 quiddity which, entering into composition, alone 
 constitutes it genuinely poetic, beautiful, or 
 artistic. Pressing for definition, you never get 
 much further than that each given quiddity 
 means a certain Whatness. This is why poetical 
 criticism is usually so little catholic. A man 
 remembers that a poem in one style has filled 
 him with consciousness of beauty and delight. 
 Why conclude that this style constitutes the one 
 access to the same impression 1 Why not rather 
 perceive that, to take contemporaries, the beauty 
 of Thyrsis is mainly produced by a fine suffusion 
 of delicately-toned emotion ; that of Atalanta by 
 splendid and barely rivalled music of verse ; of 
 In Memoriam by its ordered and harmonious pre- 
 sentation of a sacred mood ; of the Spanish Gypsy, 
 in the parts where it reaches beauty, by a sublime 
 ethical passion ; of the Earthly Paradise, by sweet 
 and simple reproduction of the spirit of the 
 younger-hearted times'? There are poems by 
 Mr. Browning in which it is difficult, or, let us 
 frankly say, impossible, for most of us at all 
 events and as yet, to discover the beauty or the 
 shape. But if beauty may not be denied to a
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 267 
 
 work which, abounding in many -coloured scenes 
 and diverse characters, in vivid image and por- 
 traiture, wide reflection and multiform emotion, 
 does further, by a broad thread of thought run- 
 ning under all, bind these impressions into one 
 supreme and elevated conviction, then assuredly, 
 whatever we may think of this passage or that, 
 that episode or the other, the first volume or the 
 third, we cannot deny that The Ring and the Book, 
 in its perfection and integrity, fully satisfies the 
 conditions of artistic triumph. Are we to ignore 
 the grandeur of a colossal statue, and the nobility 
 of the human conceptions which it embodies, 
 because here and there we notice a flaw in the 
 marble, a blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of 
 the chisel 1 " It is not force of intellect," as 
 George Eliot has said, " which causes ready re- 
 pulsion from the aberration and eccentricities of 
 greatness, any more than it is force of vision that 
 causes the eye to explore the warts in a face 
 bright with human expression ; it is simply the 
 negation of high sensibilities," 
 
 Then, it is asked by persons of another and 
 still more rigorous temper, whether, as the world 
 goes, the subject, or its treatment either, justifies
 
 2G8 ON " THE RINU AND THE BOOK," 
 
 US in reading some twenty-one thousand and 
 seventy-five lines, which do not seem to have any 
 direct tendency to make us better or to improve 
 mankind. This objection is an old enemy with 
 a new face, and need not detain us, though per- 
 haps the crude and incessant application of a 
 narrow moral standard, thoroughly misunder- 
 stood, is one of the intellectual dangers of our 
 time. You may now and again hear a man 
 of really masculine character confess that though 
 he loves Shakespeare and takes habitual delight 
 in his works, he cannot see that he was a par- 
 ticularly moral writer. That is to say, Shake- 
 speare is never directly didactic ; you can no more 
 get a system of morals out of his writings than 
 you can get such a system out of the writings of 
 the ever-searching Plato. But, if we must be 
 quantitative, one great creative poet probably 
 exerts a nobler, deeper, more permanent ethical 
 influence than a dozen generations of professed 
 moral teachers. It is a commonplace to the wise, 
 and an everlasting puzzle to the foolish, that 
 direct inculcation of morals should invariably 
 prove so powerless an instrument, so futile a 
 method. The truth is that nothing can be more
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 269 
 
 powerfully efficacious from the moral point of 
 view than the exercise of an exalted creative art, 
 stirring within the intelligence of the spectator 
 active thought and curiosity about many types of 
 character and many changeful issues of conduct 
 and fortune, at once enlarging and elevating the 
 range of his reflections on mankind, ever kindling 
 his sympathies into the warm and continuous 
 glow which purifies and strengthens nature, and 
 fills men with that love of humanity which is the 
 best inspirer of virtue. Is not this why music, 
 too, is to be counted supreme among moral agents, 
 soothing disorderly passion by diving down into 
 the hidden deeps of character where there is no 
 disorder, and touching the diviner mind 1 Given 
 a certain rectitude as well as vigour of intelli- 
 gence, then whatever stimulates the fancy, ex- 
 pands the imagination, enlivens meditation upon 
 the great human drama, is essentially moral. 
 Shakespeare does all this, as if sent Iris-like from 
 the immortal gods, and The Ring and the Book has 
 a measure of the same incomparable quality. 
 
 A profound and moving irony subsists in the 
 very structure of the poem. Any other human 
 transaction that ever was, tragic or comic or
 
 270 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 plain prosaic, may be looked at in a like spirit. 
 As the world's talk bubbled around the dumb 
 anguish of Pompilia, or the cruelty and hate of 
 Guido, so it does around the hourly tragedies of 
 all times and places, 
 
 " The instinctive theorizing whence a fact 
 Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look." — 
 
 " Vibrations in the general mind 
 At depth of deed already out of reach." — 
 " Live fact deadened down, 
 Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away :" — 
 
 if we reflect that these are the conditions which 
 have marked the formation of all the judgments 
 that we hold by, and which are vivid in opera- 
 tion and efiFect at this hour, the deep irony and 
 the impressive meaning of the poem are both 
 obvious : — 
 
 " So learn one lesson hence 
 Of many which whatever lives should teach, 
 This lesson that our human speech is naught, 
 Our human testimony false, our fame 
 And human estimation words and wind" (iv. 234). 
 
 It is characteristic of Mr. Browning that he 
 thus casts the moral of his piece in an essentially 
 intellectual rather than an emotional form, ap- 
 pealing to hard judgment rather than to imagina-
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 271 
 
 tive sensibility. Another living poet of original 
 genius, of whom we have much right to complain 
 that he gives us so little, ends a poem in two or 
 three lines which are worth quoting here for the 
 illustration they afford of what has just been said 
 about Mr. Browning : — 
 
 " Ah, what dusty answer gets the soul, 
 When hot for certainties in this our life ! — 
 In tragic hints here see what evermore 
 Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force, 
 Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, 
 To throw thiit faint thin line upon the shore 1"^ 
 
 This is imaginative and sympathetic in thought 
 as well as expression, and the truth and the 
 image enter the writer's mind together, the one 
 by the other. The lines convey poetic sentiment 
 rather than reasoned truth ; while Mr. Browning's 
 close would be no unfit epilogue to a scientific 
 essay on history, or a treatise on the errors of 
 the human understanding and the inaccuracy of 
 human opinion and judgment. This is the 
 common note of his highest work ; hard thought 
 and reason illustrating themselves in dramatic 
 circumstance, and the thought and reason are 
 ' Mr. George Meredith's Modern Love.
 
 272 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 not wholly fused, they exist apart and irradiate 
 with far-shooting beams the moral confusion of 
 the tragedy. This is, at any rate, emphatically 
 true of The Ring and the Booh. The fulness and 
 variety of creation, the amplitude of the play and 
 shifting of characters and motive and mood, are 
 absolutely unforced, absolutely uninterfered with 
 by the artificial exigencies of ethical or philoso- 
 phic purpose. There is the purpose, full-grown, 
 clear in outline, unmistakeable in significance. 
 But the just proprieties of place and season are 
 rigorously observed, because Mr. Browning, like 
 every other poet of his quality, has exuberant 
 and adequate delight in mere creation, simple 
 presentment, and returns to bethink him of the 
 meaning of it all only by-and-by. The pictures 
 of Guido, of Pompilia, of Caponsacchi, of Do- 
 minus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, of Pope 
 Innocent, are each of them full and adequate, as 
 conceptions of character in active manifestation 
 apart from the truth which the whole composi- 
 tion is meant to illustrate, and which clothes 
 itself in this most excellent drama. 
 
 The scientific attitude of the intelligence is 
 almost as markedly visible in Mr, Browning as
 
 ON "THE RING AND THE BOOK." 273 
 
 the strength of his creative power. The lessuii 
 of The Ring and the Book is perhaps as nearly 
 positive as anything poetic can be. It is true 
 that ultimately the drama ends in a vindication 
 of what are called the ways of God to man, if 
 indeed people are willing to put themselves off 
 with a form of omnipotent justice which is simply 
 a partial retribution inflicted on the monster, 
 while torture and butchery fall upon victims 
 more or less absolutely blameless. As if the fact 
 of punishment at length overtaking the guilty 
 Franceschini were any vindication of the justice 
 of that assumed Providence, which had for so 
 long a time awarded punishment far more harsh 
 to the innocent Pompilia. So far as you can be 
 content with the vindication of a justice of this 
 less than equivocal quality, the sight of the 
 monster brought to the 
 
 « Close fetid cell, 
 Where the hot vapour of an agony. 
 Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down 
 Horrible worms made out of sweat and tears," — 
 
 may in a sense prove satisfactory enough. But 
 a man must be very dull who in reading the 
 poem does not perceive that the very spirit, 
 s
 
 274 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 of it points to the thousand hazards which even 
 this fragment of justice had to run in saving it- 
 self, and bringing about such partially righteous 
 consummation as destiny permits. True opinion 
 fares yet more perilously. Half-Rome, the Other 
 Half -Rome, the Tertium Quid,wfh\ch is perhaps most 
 masterly and finished of the three, show us how 
 ill truth sifts itself, to how many it never comes 
 at all, how blurred, confused, next door to false, 
 it is figured even to those who seize it by the 
 hem of the garment. We may, perhaps, yawn 
 over the intermingled Latin and law of Arcangeli, 
 in spite of the humour of parts of it, as well as 
 over the vapid floweriness of his rival ; but for 
 all that, we are touched keenly by the irony of 
 the methods by which the two professional truth- 
 sifters darken counsel with words, and make skil- 
 ful sport of life and fact. The whole poem is a 
 parable of the feeble and half-hopeless struggle 
 which truth has to make against the ways of the 
 world. That in this particular case truth and 
 justice did win some pale sort of victory does 
 not weaken the force of the lesson. The victory 
 was such and so won as to stir in us awful 
 thoughts of fatal risks and certain defeats, of
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 275 
 
 falsehood a thousand times clasped for truth, of 
 fact a thousand times banished for fancy : — 
 
 "Because Pompilia's purity prevails, 
 Conclurie you, all truth triumphs in the end ? 
 So might those old inhabitants of the ark, 
 Witnessing haply their dove's safe return, 
 Pronounce there was no danger all the while 
 0' the deluge, to the creature's counterparts, 
 Aught that beat wing i' the world, was white or soft, 
 And that the lark, the thrush, the culver too, 
 Might equally have traversed air, found earth, 
 And brought back olive-branch in unharmed bill. 
 Methinks I hear the Patriarch's warning voice — 
 ' Though this one breast, by miracle, return, 
 No wave rolls by, in all the waste, but bears 
 Within it some dead dove-like thing as dear, 
 Beauty made blank and harmlessness destroyed ! ' " 
 
 (iv. 218). 
 
 Or, to take another simile from the same 
 magnificent passage, in which the fine dignity 
 of the verse fitly matches the deep truth of the 
 preacher's monitions : — 
 
 " Romans ! An elder race possessed your land 
 Long ago, and a false faith lingered still, 
 As shades do, though the morning-star be out. 
 Doubtless, some pagan of the twilight day 
 Has often pointed to a cavern-mouth. 
 Obnoxious to beholders, hard by Rome, 
 And said, — nor he a bad man, no, nor fool, —
 
 276 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 Only a man, so, blind like all his mates, — 
 
 ' Here skulk in safety, lurk, defying law, 
 
 The devotees to execrable creed, 
 
 Adoring — with what culture . . Jove, avert 
 
 Thy vengeance from us worshippers of thee ! . . 
 
 "What rites obscene — their idol-god, an Ass ! ' 
 
 So went the word forth, so acceptance found, 
 
 So century re-echoed century. 
 
 Cursed the accursed,— and so, from sire to son, 
 
 You Romans cried, ' The oflFscourings of our race 
 
 Corrupt within the depths there : fitly, fiends 
 
 Perform a temple-service o'er the dead : 
 
 Child, gather garment round thee, pass nor pry ! ' 
 
 So groaned your generations : till the time 
 
 Grew ripe, and lightning hath revealed, belike, — 
 
 Thro' crevice peeped into by curious fear, — 
 
 Some object even fear could recognise 
 
 I' the place of spectres ; on the illumined wall, 
 
 To-wit, some nook, tradition talks about, 
 
 Narrow and short, a corpse's length, no more : 
 
 And by it, in the due receptacle, 
 
 The little rude brown lamp of earthenware. 
 
 The cruse, was meant for flowers, but held the blood, 
 
 The rough-scratched palm-branch, and the legend left 
 
 Pro Ghrisfn. Then the mystery lay clear : 
 
 The abhorred one was a martyr all the time, 
 
 A saint whereof earth was not worthy. What ? 
 
 Do you continue in the old belief ? 
 
 Where blackness bides unbroke, must devils be 1 
 
 Is it so certain, not another cell 
 
 0' the myriad that make up the catacomb. 
 
 Contains some saint a second flash would show ?
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 277 
 
 Will you ascend into the light of day 
 
 And, having recognised a martyr's shrine, 
 
 Go join the votaries that gape around 
 
 Each vulgar god that awes the market-place ? " 
 
 (iv. 219). 
 
 With less impetuosity and a more weightily 
 reasoned argument the Pope confronts the long 
 perplexity and entanglement of circumstances 
 with the fatuous optimism which insists that 
 somehow justice and virtue do rule in the world. 
 Consider all the doings at Arezzo, before and 
 after the consummation of the tragedy. What of 
 the Aretine archbishop, to whom Pompilia cried 
 " Protect me from the fiend ! " — 
 
 " No, for thy Guido is one heady, strong, 
 Dangerous to disquiet : let him bide ! 
 He needs some bone to mumble, help amuse 
 The darkness of his den with : so, the fawn 
 Which limps up bleeding to my foot and lies, 
 — Come to me, daughter, — thus I throw him back ! " 
 
 Then the monk to whom she went, imploring 
 him to write to Rome : — 
 
 He meets the first cold sprinkle of the world 
 And shudders to the marrow, ' Save this child ? 
 Oh, my superiors, oh, the Archbishop here ! 
 Who was it dared lay hand upon the ark 
 His betters saw fall nor put finger forth?'"
 
 278 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 Worst of all, the Convent of the Convertites, 
 women to whom she was consigned for help, 
 
 " They do help ; they are prompt to testify 
 To her pure life and saintly dying days. 
 She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich ! 
 What does the body that lives through helpfulness 
 To women for Christ's sake 1 The kiss turns bite, 
 The dove's note changes to the crow's cry : judge ! 
 
 ' Seeing that this our Convent claims of right 
 What goods belong to those we succour, be 
 The same proved women of dishonest life, — 
 And seeing that this Trial made appear ^ 
 Pompilia was in such predicament, — 
 The Convent hereupon pretends to said 
 Succession of Pompilia, issues writ, 
 And takes possession by the Fisc's advice.' 
 Such is their attestation to the cause 
 Of Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped : 
 But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpse 
 To slander, and an infant-heir to cheat ? 
 Christ must give up his gains then ! They unsay 
 All the fine speeches, — who was saint is whore." 
 
 It is not wonderful if his review of all the 
 mean and dolorous circumstance of this cycle of 
 wrong brings the Pope face to face with the uncon- 
 querable problem for the Christian believer, the 
 keystone of the grim arch of religious doubt and 
 despair, through which the courageous soul must 
 needs pass to creeds of reason and life. Where is
 
 ON "THE RING AND THE BOOK." 279 
 
 " the gloriously decisive change, the immeasurable 
 metamorphosis " in human worth that should in 
 some sort justify the consummate price that had 
 been paid for man tliese seventeen hundred years 
 before ] 
 
 " Had a mere adept of the Kosy Cross 
 Spent his life to consummate the Great Work, 
 Would not we start to see the stuflf it touched 
 Yield not a grain more than the vulgar got 
 By the old smelting-process years ago ? 
 If this were sad to see in just the sage 
 Who should profess so much, perform no more, 
 What is it when suspected in that Power 
 Who undertook to make and made the world, 
 Devised and did effect man, body and soul, 
 Ordained salvation for them both, and yet . . . 
 Well, is the thing we see, salvation ? " 
 
 It is certain that by whatever other deficien- 
 cies it may be marked The Ring and the Book is 
 blameless for the most characteristic of all the 
 shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous 
 sterility of thought. And why ? Because steril- 
 ity of thought is the blight struck into the minds 
 of men by timorous and halt-footed scepti- 
 cism, by a half-hearted dread of what chill thing 
 the truth might prove itself, by unmanly reluc- 
 tance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty
 
 280 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 of poetic vision over the whole field ; and because 
 Mr. Browning's intelligence, on the other hand, 
 is masculine and courageous, moving cheerfully 
 on the solid earth of an articulate and defined 
 conviction, and careful not to omit realities from 
 the conception of the great drama, merely for 
 being unsightly to the too fastidious eye, or 
 jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to 
 faith or understanding. It is this resolute feel- 
 ing after and grip of fact which is at the root of 
 his distinguishing fruitfulness of thought, and it 
 is exuberance of thought, spontaneous, well- 
 marked, and sapid, that keeps him out of poetical 
 preaching, on the one hand, and mere making of 
 music, on the other. Regret as we may the 
 fantastic rudeness and unscrupulous barbarisms 
 into which Mr. Browning's art too often falls, and 
 find what fault we may with his method, let us 
 ever remember how much he has to say, and how 
 effectively he communicates the shock of new 
 thought which was first imparted to him by the 
 vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. 
 The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be 
 measured by poetic tests ; but still the thought 
 has poetic value, too, for it is this which has
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 281 
 
 stirred in the writer that keen yet impersonal 
 interest in the actors of his story and in its 
 situations which is one of the most certain notes 
 of true dramatic feeling, and which therefore 
 gives the most unfailing stimulus to the interest 
 of the appreciative reader. 
 
 At first sight The Ring and the Booh appears to 
 be absolutely wanting in that grandeur which, in 
 a composition of such enormous length, criticism 
 must pronounce to be a fundamental and indis- 
 pensable element. In an ordinary way this 
 effect of grandeur is produced either by some 
 heroic action surrounded by circumstances of 
 worthy stateliness, as in the finest of the Greek 
 plays ; or as in Paradise Lost by the presence of 
 personages of majestic sublimity of bearing and 
 association; or as in Faust or Hamlet by the 
 stupendous moral abysses which the poet dis- 
 closes fitfully on this side and that. None of 
 these things are to be found in The Pang aiwt the 
 Book. The action of Caponsacchi, though noble 
 and disinterested, is hardly heroic in the highest 
 dramatic sense, for it is not much more than the 
 lofty defiance of a conventionality, the contem- 
 plated penalty being only small ; not, for example.
 
 282 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 as if life or ascertained happiness had been the 
 fixed or even probable price of his magnanimous 
 enterprise. There was no marching to the stake, 
 no deliberate encountering of the mightier risks, 
 no voluntary submission to a lifelong endurance. 
 True, this came in the end, but it was an end 
 unforeseen, and one, therefore, not to be associated 
 with the first conception of the original act. 
 Besides, Guido is so saturated with hateful and 
 ignoble motive as to fill the surrounding air with 
 influences that preclude heroic association. It 
 has been said of the great men to whom the 
 Byzantine Empire once or twice gave birth, that 
 even their fame has a curiously tarnished air, as 
 if that too had been touched by the evil breath 
 of the times. And in like manner we may say 
 of Guido Franceschini that even to have touched 
 him in the way of resistance detracts from pure 
 heroism. Perhaps the same consideration ex- 
 plains the comparative disappointment which 
 most people seem to have felt with Pompilia in 
 the third volume. Again, there is nothing which 
 can be rightly called majesty of character visible 
 in one personage or another. There is high 
 devotion in Caponsacchi, a large-minded and
 
 ON "the ring and the book." 283 
 
 free sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around 
 Pompilia the tragic pathos of an incurable woe, 
 which by its intensity might raise her to grand- 
 eur if it sprang from some more solemn source 
 than the mere malignity and baseness of an 
 unworthy oppressor. Lastly, there is nothing in 
 The Ring and the Book of that " certain incom- 
 mensurableness " which Goethe found in his own ' 
 Faust. The poem is kept closely concrete and 
 strictly commensurable by the very framework of 
 
 its story : — 
 
 " pure crude fact, 
 Secreted from man's life when hearts beat bard, 
 And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since." 
 
 It moves from none of the supernatural agencies 
 which give the impulse to our interest in Faust, 
 nor from the sublimer passions and yearning 
 after things unspeakable alike in Faust and in 
 Hamlet. 
 
 Yet, notwithstanding its lack of the accus- 
 tomed elements of grandeur, there is a profound 
 impressiveness about The Ring and the Book which 
 must arise from the presence of some other fine 
 compensating or equivalent quality. Perhaps 
 one may say that this equivalent for grandeur is
 
 284 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 
 
 a certain simple touching of our sense of human 
 kinship, of the large identity of the conditions of 
 the human lot, of the piteous fatalities which 
 bring the lives of the great multitude of men to 
 he little more than " grains of sand to be blown 
 by the wind." This old woe, the poet says, now 
 in the fulness of the days again lives, 
 
 ^^ If precious he the sovl of man to man." 
 
 This is the deeply implanted sentiment to which 
 his poem makes successful appeal. Nor is it 
 mocked by mere outpouring of scorn on the blind 
 and fortuitous groping of men and societies of 
 men after truth and justice and traces of the 
 watchfulness of "the unlidded eye of God." 
 Rather it is this inability to see beyond the facts 
 of our condition to some diviner, ever-present 
 law, which helps to knit us to our kind, our 
 brethren " whom we have seen." 
 
 " Clouds obscure — 
 But for which obscuration aU were bright ? 
 Too hastily concluded ! Sun-suffused, 
 A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze, — 
 Better the very clarity of heaven : 
 The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear. 
 What but the weakness in a faith supplies 
 The incentive to humanity, no strength
 
 ON " THE RING AND THE BOOK." 285 
 
 Absolute, irresistible, comports ? 
 
 How can man love but what he yearns to help 
 
 And that which men think weakness within strength 
 
 But angels know for strength and stronger get — 
 
 What were it else but the first things made new, 
 
 But repetition of the miracle. 
 
 The divine instance of self-sacrifice 
 
 That never ends and aye begins for man ? "
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN 
 OF LETTERS. 
 
 \Yhat are the qualities of a good contributor 1 
 What makes a good Review] Is the best litera- 
 ture produced by the writer who does nothing 
 else but write, or by the man who tempers 
 literature by affairs? What are the different 
 recommendations of the rival systems of anony- 
 mity and signature? What kind of change, if 
 any, has i)assed over periodical literature since 
 those two great periodicals, the Edinburgh and 
 the Quarterly, held sway? These and a number 
 of other questions in the same matter — some of 
 them obviously not to be opened with propriety 
 in these pages — must naturally be often present 
 to the mind of any onn who is concerned in the 
 control of a Review, and a volume has just been 
 printed which sets such musings once more astir. 
 
 Mr. Macvey Napier was the editor of the 
 28e
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 287 
 
 Edinburgh Beview from 1829 — when Jeffrey, after 
 a reign of seven-and-twenty years, resigned it 
 into his hands — until his death in 1847. A 
 portion of the correspondence addressed to Mr. 
 Napier during this period is full of personal in- 
 terest both to the man of letters and to that 
 more singular being, the Editor, the impresario 
 of men of letters, the entrepreneur of the spiritual 
 power. 
 
 To manage an opera-house is usually supposed 
 to tax human powers more urgently than any 
 position save that of a general in the very heat 
 and stress of battle. The orchestra, the chorus, 
 the subscribers, the first tenor, a pair of rival 
 prima donnas, the newspapers, the box-agents 
 in Bond Street, the army of hangers-on in the 
 flies — all combine to demand such gifts of tact, 
 resolution, patience, foresight, tenacity, flexibility, 
 as are only expected from the great ruler or the 
 great soldier. The editor of a periodical of 
 public consideration — and the Edinburgh Review 
 in the hands of Mr. Napier was the avowed 
 organ of the ruling Whig powers — is sorely 
 tested in the same way. The rival house may 
 bribe his stars. His popular epigrammatist is
 
 288 MEMORIALS OF A MAiN OF LETTERS. 
 
 sometimes as full of humours as a spoiled soprano. 
 The favourite pyrotechnist is systematically late 
 and procrastinatory, or is piqued because his 
 punctuation or his paragraphs have been meddled 
 with. The contributor whose article would be 
 in excellent time if it did not appear before the 
 close of the century, or never appeared at all, 
 pesters you with warnings that a month's delay 
 is a deadly blow to progress, and stays the great 
 procession of the ages. The contributor who 
 could profitably fill a sheet, insists on sending a 
 treatise. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who had 
 charge of the Edinburgh for a short space, truly 
 described prolixity as the bete noire of an editor. 
 *' Every contributor," he said, " has some special 
 reason for wishing to write at length on his own 
 subject." 
 
 Ah, que de choses dans un menuet! cried Marcel, 
 the great dancing-master, and ah, what things in 
 the type and tSea of an article, cries an editor 
 with the enthusiasm of his calling; such pro- 
 portion, measure, comprehension, variety of 
 topics, pithiness of treatment, all within a space 
 appointed with Procrustean rigour. This is 
 what the soul of the volunteer contributor is
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 289 
 
 dull to. Of the minor vexations who can tell ? 
 There is one single tribulation dire enough to 
 poison life — even if there were no other — and 
 this is disorderly manuscript. Empson, Mr. 
 Napier's well-known contributor, was one of the 
 worst offenders ; he would never even take the 
 trouble to mark his paragraphs. It is my mis- 
 fortune to have a manuscript before me at this 
 moment that would fill thirty of these pages, and 
 yet from beginning to end there is no indication 
 that it is not to be read at a single breath. The 
 paragraph ought to be, and in all good writers it 
 is, as real and as sensible a division as the 
 sentence. It is an organic member in prose 
 composition, with a beginning, a middle, and an 
 end, just as a stanza is an organic and definite 
 member in the composition of an ode, " I fear 
 my manuscript is rather disorderly," says another, 
 " but I will correct carefully in print." Just so. 
 Because he is too heedless to do his work in a 
 workmanlike way, he first inflicts fatigue and 
 vexation on the editor whom he expects to read 
 his paper; second, he inflicts considerable and 
 quite needless expense on the publisher; and 
 thirdly, he inflicts a great deal of tedious and 
 T
 
 290 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 thankless labour on the printers, who are for 
 the most part far more meritorious persons than 
 fifth-rate authors. It is true that Burke returned 
 such disordered proofs that the printer usually 
 found it least troublesome to set the whole afresh, 
 and Miss Martineau tells a story of a Scotch 
 compositor who fled from Edinburgh to avoid 
 Carlyle's manuscript, and to his horror was 
 presently confronted with a piece of the too 
 familiar copy which made him cry, "Lord, have 
 mercy ! Have you got that man to print for ! " 
 But most editors will cheerfully forgive such 
 transgressions to all contributors who will 
 guarantee that they write as well as Burke or 
 Carlyle. Alas ! it is usually the case that those 
 who have least excuse are the worst ofienders. 
 The slovenliest manuscripts come from persons 
 to whom the difference between an hour and a 
 minute is of the very smallest importance. This, 
 however, is a digression, only to be excused 
 partly by the natural desire to say a word against 
 one's persecutors, and partly by a hope that some 
 persons of sensitive conscience may be led to 
 ponder whether there may not be after all some 
 moral obligations even towards editors and 
 printers. i
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 291 
 
 Mr. Napier had one famou.s contributor, who 
 stands out alone in the history of editors. Lord 
 Brougham's traditional connection with the 
 Review, — he had begun to write either in its 
 first or third number, and had written in it ever 
 since — his encyclopaedic ignorance, his power, his 
 great fame in the country, and the prestige 
 which his connection reflected on the Review, 
 all made him a personage with whom it would 
 have been most imprudent to quarrel. Yet the 
 position in which Mr. Napier was placed after 
 Brougham's breach with the Whigs, was one of 
 the most difficult in which the conductor of a 
 great organ could possibly be placed. The Review 
 was tlie representative, the champion, and the 
 mouthpiece of the Whig party, and of the Whigs 
 who were in office. Before William iv. dis- 
 missed the Whigs in 1834 as arbitrarily as his 
 father had dismissed the Whigs in 1784, 
 Brougham had covered himself with disrepute 
 among his party by a thousand pranks, and after 
 the dismissal he disgusted them by asking the 
 new Chancellor to make him Chief Baron of the 
 Exchequer. When Lord Melbourne returned to 
 power in the following year, this and other
 
 29 2 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 escapades were remembered against him. " If 
 left out," said Lord Melbourne, " he would indeed 
 be dangerous ; but if taken in, he would simply 
 be destructive." So Brougham was left out, 
 Pepys was made Chancellor, and the Premier 
 compared himself to a man who has broken with 
 a termagant mistress and married the best of 
 cooks. Mr. Napier was not so happy. The 
 termagant was left on his hands. He had to 
 keep terms with a contributor who hated with 
 deadly hatred the very government that the 
 Review existed to support. No editor ever had 
 such a contributor as Brougham in the long 
 history of editorial torment since the world 
 began. He scolds, he storms, he hectors, he 
 lectures ; he is for ever threatening desertion 
 and prophesying ruin ; he exhausts the vocabu- 
 lary of opprobrium against his correspondent's 
 best friends ; they are silly slaves, base traitors, 
 a vile clique " whose treatment of me has been 
 the very ne plus ultra of ingratitude, baseness, 
 and treachery." He got the Review and its 
 editor into a scrape which shook the world at 
 the time (1834), by betraying Cabinet secrets to 
 spite Lord Durliam. His cries against his ad-
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 293 
 
 versaries are as violent as the threats of Ajax 
 in his tent, and as loud as the bellowings of 
 Philoctetes at the mouth of his cave. Here is 
 one instance out of a hundred : — 
 
 " That is a trifle, and I only mention it to beg of you 
 to pluck up a little courage, and not be alarmed every 
 time any of the little knot of threateners annoy you. 
 They want to break off all kind of connection between me 
 and the Edinburgh Review. I have long seen it. 
 Their fury against the article in the last number 
 knows no bounds, and they will never cease till they 
 worry you out of your connection with me, and get the 
 whole control of the Review into their own hands, by 
 forcing you to resign it yourself. A party and a 
 personal engine is all they want to make it. What 
 possible right can any of these silly slaves have to 
 object to my opinion being — what it truly is — against 
 the Holland House theory of Lord Chatham's madness 1 
 I know that Lord Grenville treated it with contempt. 
 I know others now living who did so too, and I know 
 that so stout a Whig as Sir P. Francis was clearly of 
 that opinion, and he knew Lord Chatham personally. 
 I had every ground to believe that Horace Walpole, a 
 vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch, though a very 
 clever writer of Letters, was nine-tenths of the Holland 
 House authority for the tale. I knew that a baser man 
 in character, or a meaner in capacity than the first 
 Lord Holland existed not, even in those days of job 
 and mediocrity. Why, then, was I bound to take a 
 false view because Lord Holland's family have inherited 
 his hatred of a great rival ? "
 
 294 MEMORULS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 Another instance is as follows : — 
 
 " I solicit your best attention to the fate which seems 
 hastening upon the Edinburgh Review. The having 
 always been free from the least control of booksellers is 
 one of its principal distinctions, and long was peculiarly 
 so — perhaps it still has it nearly to itself. But if it 
 shall become a Treasury journal, I hardly see any great 
 advantage in one kind of independence without the 
 rest. Nay, I doubt if its literary freedom, any more 
 than its political, will long survive. Books will be 
 treated according as the Treasury, or their under- 
 strappers, regard the authors But, is it 
 
 after all possible that the Review should be suffered to 
 sink into such a state of subserviency that it dares not 
 insert any discussion upon a general question of politics 
 because it might give umbrage to the Government of 
 the day? I pass over the undeniable fact that it is 
 underlings only whom you are scared by, and that the 
 Ministers themselves have no such inordinate preten- 
 sion as to dream of interfering. I say nothing of those 
 underlings generally, except this, that I well know the 
 race, and a more despicable, above all, in point of 
 judgment, exists not. Never mind their threats, they 
 can do no harm. Even if any of them are contributors, 
 be assured they never will withdraw because you choose 
 to keep your course free and independent." 
 
 Mr. Napier, who seems to have been one of 
 the most considerate and high-minded of men, 
 was moved to energetic remonstrance on this 
 occasion. Lord Brougham explained his strong
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 295 
 
 language away, but he was incapable of really 
 controlling himself, and the strain was never 
 lessened until 1843, when the correspondence 
 ceases, and we learn that there had been a 
 quarrel between him and his too long-suffering 
 correspondent. Yet John Allen, — that able 
 scholar and conspicuous figure in the annals of 
 Holland House — wrote of Brougham to Mr. 
 Napier : — " He is not a malignant or bad-hearted 
 man, but he is an unscrupulous one, and where 
 his passions are concerned or his vanity irritated, 
 there is no excess of which he is not capable." 
 Of Brougham's strong and manly sense, when 
 passion or vanity did not cloud it, and even of 
 a sort of careful justice, these letters give more 
 than one instance. The Quarterly Review, for 
 instance, had an article on Eomilly's Memoirs, 
 which to Eomilly's friends seemed to do him less 
 than justice. Brougham took a more sensible 
 view. 
 
 " Surely we had no right whatever to expect that 
 they whom Romilly had all his life so stoutly opposed, 
 and who were treated by him with great harshness, 
 should treat him as his friends would do, and at the 
 very moment when a most injudicious act of his family 
 was bringing out all his secret thoughts against them.
 
 296 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 Only place yourself in the same position, and suppose 
 that Canning's private journals had been published, — 
 the journals he may have kept while the bitterest 
 enemy of the Whigs, and in every page of which there 
 must have been some passage offensive to the feelings 
 of the living and of the friends of the dead. Would 
 any mercy have been shown to Canning's character 
 and memory by any of the Whig party, either in so- 
 ciety or in Reviews ? Would the line have been drawn 
 of only attacking Canning's executors, who published 
 the papers, and leaving Canning himself untouched ? 
 Clearly and certainly not, and yet I am putting a 
 very much weaker case, for we had joined Canning, 
 and all political enmity was at an end : whereas the 
 Tories and Eomilly never had for an hour laid aside 
 their mutual hostility." 
 
 And if he was capable of equity, Brougham 
 was also capable of hearty admiration, even of 
 an old friend who had on later occasions gone 
 into a line which he intensely disliked. It is a 
 relief in the pages of blusterous anger and raging 
 censure to come upon what he says of Jeffrey. 
 
 "I can truly say that there never in all my life 
 crossed my mind one single unkind feeling respecting 
 him, or indeed any feeling but that of the warmest 
 affection and the most unmingled admiration of his 
 character, believing and knowing him to be as excellent 
 and amiable as he is great in the ordinary, and, as I 
 think, the far less important sense of the word."
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 297 
 
 Of the value of Brougham's contributions we 
 cannot now judge. They will not, in spite of 
 their energy and force, bear re-reading to-day, and 
 perhaps the same may be said of three-fourths 
 of Jeffrey's once famous essays. Brougham's 
 self-confidence is heroic. He believed that he 
 could make a speech for Bolingbroke, but by- 
 and-by he had sense enough to see that, in 
 order to attempt this, he ought to read Boling- 
 broke for a year, and then practise for another 
 year. In 1838 he thought nothing of under- 
 taking, amid all the demands of active life, such 
 a bagatelle as a History of the French Revolution. 
 " I have some little knack of narrative," he says, 
 " the most difficult by far of all styles, and never 
 yet attained in perfection but by Hume and Livy; 
 and I bring as much oratory and science to the 
 task as most of my predecessors." But what 
 sort of science? And what has oratory to do 
 with it? And how could he deceive himself 
 into thinking that he could retire to write a 
 history] Nobody that ever lived would have 
 more speedily found out the truth of Voltaire's 
 saying, " Le repos est une bonne chose, mais Vennui 
 est son frhre." The truth is that one learns,
 
 298 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LKTTERS. 
 
 after a certain observation of the world, to divide 
 one's amazement pretty equally between the 
 literary voluptuary or over-fastidious collegian, 
 on the one hand, who is so impressed by the size 
 of his subject that he never does more than 
 collect material and make notes, and the pre- 
 sumptuous politician, on the other hand, who 
 thinks that he can write a history or settle the 
 issues of philosophy and theology in odd half- 
 hours. The one is so enfeebled in will and 
 literary energy after his viginti annorvm lucubra- 
 tiones ; the other is so accustomed to be content 
 with the hurry, the unfinishedness, the rough- 
 and-ready methods of practical affairs, and they 
 both in different ways measure the worth and 
 seriousness of literature so wrongly in relation to 
 the rest of human interests. 
 
 The relations between Lord Brougham and 
 Mr. Napier naturally suggest a good many reflec- 
 tions on the vexed question of the comparative 
 advantages of the old and the new theory of 
 a periodical. The new theory is that a periodical 
 should not be an organ but an open pulpit, 
 and that each writer should sign his name. 
 Without disrespect to ably conducted and eminent
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 299 
 
 contemporaries of long standing, it may be said 
 that the tide of opinion and favour is setting 
 in this direction. Yet, on the whole, experience 
 perhaps leads to a doubt whether the gains of 
 the system of signature are so very considerable 
 as some of us once expected. An editor on the 
 new system is no doubt relieved of a certain 
 measure of responsibility. Lord Cockburn's 
 panegyric on the first great editor may show 
 what was expected from a man in such a position 
 as Jeffrey's. " He had to discover, and to train, 
 authors; to discern what truth and the public 
 mind required; to suggest subjects; to reject, 
 and, more offensive still, to improve, contribu- 
 tions ; to keep down absurdities ; to infuse spirit ; 
 to excite the timid; to repress violence; to 
 soothe jealousies; to quell mutinies; to watch 
 times ; and all this in the morning of the review- 
 ing day, before experience had taught editors 
 conciliatory firmness, and contributors reason- 
 able submission. He directed and controlled 
 the elements he presided over with a master's 
 judgment. There was not one of his associates 
 who could have even held these elements together 
 for a single year Inferior to these excel-
 
 300 MEMORIAI.S OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 lences, but still important, was his dexterity in 
 revising the writings of others. Without altering 
 the general tone or character of the composition, 
 he had great skill in leaving out defective ideas or 
 words, and in so aiding the original by lively 
 or graceful touches, that reasonable authors were 
 surprised and charmed on seeing how much better 
 they looked than they thought they would " 
 (Cockburn's Life of Jeffrey, i. 301). 
 
 From such toils and dangers as these the 
 editor of a Review with signed articles is in the 
 main happily free. He has usually suggestions 
 to make, for his experience has probably given 
 him points of view as to the effectiveness of this 
 or that feature of an article for its own purpose, 
 which would not occur to a writer. The writer is 
 absorbed in his subject, and has been less accus- 
 tomed to think of the public. But this exercise 
 of a claim to a general acquiescence in the 
 judgment and experience of a man who has the 
 best reasons for trying to judge rightly, is a very 
 different thing from the duty of drilling con- 
 tributors and dressing contributions as they were 
 dressed and drilled by Jeffrey. As Southey said, 
 when groaning under the mutilations inflicted
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 301 
 
 by GifForcl on his contributions to the Quarterly, 
 " there must be a power expurgatory in the hands 
 of the editor ; and the misfortune is that 
 editors frequently think it incumbent on them to 
 use that power merely because they have it " 
 (South ey's Life, iv. 18). This is probably true 
 on the anonymous system, where the editor is 
 answerable for every word, and for the literary 
 form no less than for the substantial soundness 
 or interest of an article. In a man of weakish 
 literary vanity — Jeffrey was evidently full of 
 it — there may well be a constant itch to set his 
 betters right in trifles, as Gifford thought that he 
 could mend Southey's adjectives. To a vain 
 editor, or a too masterful editor, the temptation 
 under the anonymous system is no doubt strong. 
 M. Buloz, it is true, the renowned conductor of 
 the Eevite des deux Mondes, is said to have insisted 
 on, and to have freely practised, the fullest 
 editorial prerogative over articles that were openly 
 signed by the most eminent names in France. 
 But M. Buloz had no competitor, and those who 
 did not choose to submit to his Sultanic despotism 
 were shut out from the only pulpit whence they 
 were sure of addressing the congregation that
 
 302 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 they wanted. In England contributors are better 
 off: and no editor of a signed periodical would 
 feel either bound or permitted to take such trouble 
 about mere wording of sentences as GifFord and 
 Jeffrey were in the habit of taking. 
 
 There is, however, another side to this, from an 
 editor's point of view. With responsibility — not 
 merely for commas and niceties and literary 
 kickshaws, but in its old sense — disappears also a 
 portion of the interest of editorial labour. One 
 would suppose it must be more interesting to 
 command a mau-of-war than a trading vessel ; it 
 would be more interesting to lead a regiment 
 than to keep a tilting-yard. But the times are 
 not ripe for such enterprises. Of literary ability 
 of a good and serviceable kind there is a hundred 
 or five hundred times more in the country than 
 there was when Jeffrey, Smith, Brougham, and 
 Horner devised their Eeview in a ninth storey 
 in Edinburgh seventy-six years ago. It is the 
 cohesion of a political creed that is gone, and the 
 strtuigth and fervour of a political school. The 
 principles that inspired that group of strong men 
 have been worked out. After their reforms had 
 been achieved, the next great school was economic,
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 303 
 
 and though it produced one fine orator, its work 
 was at no time literary. The Manchester school 
 with all their shortcomings had at least the signal 
 distinction of attaching their views on special 
 political questions to a general and presiding con- 
 ception of the modern phase of civilisation, as 
 industrial and pacific. The next party of advance, 
 when it is formed, will certainly borrow from 
 Cobden and Bright their hatred of war and their 
 hatred of imperialism. After the sagacity and 
 enlightenment of this school came the school of 
 persiflage. A knot of vigorous and brilliant men 
 towards 1856 rallied round the late editor of 
 the Saturday Review, — and a strange chief he was 
 for such a group, — but their flag was that of the 
 Red Rover. They gave Philistinism many a 
 shrewd blow, but perhaps at the same time 
 helped to some degree — with other far deeper and 
 stronger forces — to produce that sceptical and 
 centrifugal state of mind, which now tends to 
 nullify organised liberalism and paralyse the spirit 
 of improvement. The Benthamites, led first by 
 James Mill, and afterwards in a secondary degree 
 by John Mill, had pushed a number of political 
 improvements in the radical and democratic
 
 304 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 direction during the time when the Edinburgh so 
 powerfully represented more orthodox liberalism. 
 They were the last important group of men who 
 started together from a set of common principles, 
 accepted a common programme of practical ap- 
 plications, and set to work in earnest and with 
 due order and distribution of parts to advocate 
 the common cause. 
 
 At present [1878] there is no similar agreement 
 either among the younger men in parliament, or 
 among a sufficiently numerous group of writers 
 outside of parliament. The Edinburgh Reviewers 
 were most of them students of the university of 
 that city. The Westminster Reviewers had all 
 sat at the feet of Bentham. Each group had thus 
 a common doctrine and a positive doctrine. In 
 practical politics it does not much matter by what 
 different roads men have travelled to a given 
 position. But in an organ intended to lead public 
 opinion towards certain changes, or to hold it 
 steadfast against wayward gusts of passion, its 
 strength would be increased a hundredfold if all 
 the writers in it were inspired by that thorough 
 unity of conviction which comes from sincerely 
 accepting a common set of principles to start
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 305 
 
 from, and reaching practical conclusions by the 
 same route. We are probably not very far from a 
 time when such a group might form itself, and its 
 work would for some years lie in the formation of 
 a general body of opinion, rather than in practical 
 realisation of this or that measure. The success 
 of the French Republic, the peaceful order of the 
 United States, perhaps some trouble within our 
 own borders, will lead men with open minds 
 to such a conception of a high and stable type of 
 national life as will unite a sufficient number 
 of them in a common project for pressing with 
 systematic iteration for a complete set of organic 
 changes. A country with such a land-system, 
 such an electoral system, such a monarchy, as ours, 
 has a trying time before it. Those will be doing 
 good service who shall unite to prepare opinion 
 for the inevitable changes. At the present 
 moment the only motto that can be inscribed on 
 the flag of a liberal Review is the general device 
 of Progress, each writer interpreting it in his own 
 sense, and within such limits as he may set foi 
 himself. For such a state of things signature is 
 the natural condition, and an editor, even of a 
 signed Review, would hardly decline to accept
 
 306 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 the accouut of his function which we find 
 Jeffrey giving to Mr. Napier : — " There are three 
 legitimate considerations by which you should be 
 guided in your conduct as editor generally, and 
 particularly as to the admission or rejection of 
 important articles of a political sort. 1. The 
 effect of your decision on the other contributors 
 upon whom you mainly rely ; 2. its effect on the 
 sale and circulation, and on the just authority of 
 the work with the great body of its readers 3 
 and, 3. your own deliberate opinion as to the 
 safety or danger of the doctrines maintained in 
 the article under consideration, and its tendency 
 either to promote or retard the practical adoption 
 of those liberal principles to which, and their 
 practical advancement, you must always consider 
 the journal as devoted." 
 
 As for discovering and training authors, the 
 editor under the new system has inducements 
 that lie entirely the other way ; namely, to find 
 as many authors as possible whom the public has 
 already discovered and accepted for itself. Young 
 unknown writers certainly have not gained 
 anything by the new system. Neither perhaps 
 can they be said to have lost, for though of
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 307 
 
 two articles of equal merit an editor would 
 naturally choose the one which should carry the 
 additional recommendation of a name of recog- 
 nised authority, yet any marked superiority in 
 literary brilliance or eflfective argument or origin- 
 ality of view would be only too eagerly welcomed 
 in any Eeview in England. So much public 
 interest is now taken in periodical literature, and 
 the honourable competition in securing variety, 
 weight, and attractiveness is so active, that there 
 is no risk of a literary candle remaining long 
 under a bushel. Miss Martineau says : — " I have 
 always been anxious to extend to young or 
 struggling authors the sort of aid which would 
 have been so precious to me in that winter of 
 1829-30, and I know that, in above twenty years, 
 I have never succeeded but once." One of the 
 most distinguished editors in London, who had 
 charge of a periodical for many years, told the 
 present writer what comes to the same thing, 
 namely, that in no single case during all these 
 years did a volunteer contributor of real quality, 
 or with any promise of eminence, present himself 
 or herself. So many hundreds think themselves 
 called, so few are chosen. It used to be argued
 
 308 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 that the writer under the anonymous system was 
 hidden behind a screen and robbed of his well- 
 earned distinction. In truth, however, it is im- 
 possible for a writer of real distinction to remain 
 anonymous. If a writer in a periodical interests 
 the public, they are sure to find out who he is. 
 
 Again, there is folly unfathomable in a periodi- 
 cal affecting an eternal consistency, and giving 
 itself the airs of continuous individuality, and 
 being careful not to talk sense on a given ques- 
 tion to-day because its founders talked nonsense 
 upon it fifty years ago. This is quite true. 
 There is a monstrous charlatanry about the 
 old editorial We, but perhaps there are some 
 tolerably obvious openings for charlatanry of 
 a different kind under our own system. The 
 man who writes in his own name may some- 
 times be tempted to say what he knows he is 
 expected from his position or character to say, 
 rather than what he would have said if his per- 
 sonality were not concerned. As far as honesty 
 goes, signature perhaps offers as many induce- 
 ments to one kind of insincerity, as anonymity 
 offers to another kind. And on the public it 
 might perhaps be contended that there is an
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 309 
 
 effect of a rather similar sort. They are in 
 some cases tempted away from serious discus- 
 sion of the matter, into frivolous curiosity and 
 gossip about the man. All this criticism of 
 the principle of which the Fortnightly Review 
 was the earliest English adherent, will not be 
 taken as the result in the present writer of 
 Chamfort's maladie des d6sahis4s ; that would be 
 both extremely ungrateful and without excuse 
 or reason. It is merely a fragment of disin- 
 terested contribution to the study of a remark- 
 able change that is passing dVer a not unim- 
 portant department of literature. One gain 
 alone counterbalances all the drawbacks, and 
 that is a gain that could hardly have been 
 foreseen or expected; I mean the freedom with 
 which the great controversies of religion and 
 theology have been discussed in the new Re- 
 views. The removal of the mask has led to 
 an outburst of plain speaking on these subjects, 
 which to Mr. Napier's generation would have 
 seemed simply incredible. The frank avowal 
 of unpopular beliefs or non-beliefs has raised 
 the whole level of the discussion, and perhaps 
 has been even more advantageous to the ortho
 
 310 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 dox in teaching them more humility, than to 
 the heterodox in teaching them more courage 
 and honesty. 
 
 Let us return to Mr. Napier's volume. We 
 have said that it is impossible for a great writer 
 to be anonymous. No reader will need to be 
 told who among Mr. Napier's correspondents is 
 the writer of the following : — 
 
 " I have been thinking sometimes, likewise, of a paper 
 on Napoleon, a man whom, though bandied to the ex- 
 treme of triteness, it will be long years before we under- 
 stand. Hitherto in the English tongue, there is next to 
 nothing that betokens insight into him, or even sincere 
 belief of such, on the part of the writer. I should like 
 to study the man with what heartiness I could, and 
 form to myself some intelligible picture of him, both 
 as a biographical and as a historical figure, in both of 
 which senses he is our chief contemporary wonder, and 
 in some sort the epitome of his age. This, however, 
 were a task of far more difficulty than Byron, and per- 
 haps not so promising at present." 
 
 And if there is any difficulty in recognising 
 the same hand in the next proposal, it arises 
 only from the circumstance that it is this writer 
 above all others who has made Benthamism a 
 term of reproach on the lips of men less wise 
 than himself: —
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 311 
 
 "A far finer essay were a faithful, loving, and yet 
 critical, and in part condemnatory, delineation of Jeremy 
 Bentham, and his place and working in this section of 
 the world's history. Bentham will not be put down by 
 logic, and should not be put down, for we need him 
 greatly as a backwoodsman : neither can reconciliation 
 be eflfected till the one party understands and is just to 
 the other. Bentham is a denyer ; he denies with a loud 
 and universally convincing voice ; his fault is that he 
 can affirm nothing, except that money is pleasant in the 
 purse, and food in the stomach, and that by this simplest 
 of all beliefs he can reorganise society. He can shatter 
 it in pieces — no thanks to him, for its old fastenings are 
 quite rotten — but he cannot reorganise it ; this is work 
 for quite others than he. Such an essay on Bentham, 
 however, were a great task for any one ; for me a very 
 great one, and perhaps rather out of my road." 
 
 Perhaps Carlyle would have agreed that Mr. 
 Mill's famous pair of essays on Bentham and 
 Coleridge have served the purpose which he had 
 in his mind, though we may well regret the 
 loss of such a picture of Bentham's philosophic 
 personality as he would surely have given us. 
 It is touching to think of him whom we all 
 know as the most honoured name among living 
 veterans of letters,^ passing through the vexed 
 ordeal of the young recruit, and battling for 
 
 ^ Carlyle died on February 5, 1881.
 
 312 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 his own against the waywardness of critics and 
 the blindness of publishers. In 1831 he writes 
 to Mr. Napier : " All manner of perplexities 
 have occurred in the publishing of my poor 
 book, wliich perplexities I could only cut asunder, 
 not unloose ; so the MS. like an unhappy ghost 
 still lingers on the wrong side of Styx ; the 
 
 Charon of Street durst not risk it in his 
 
 sutilis cyniba, so it leaped ashore again." And 
 three months later : " I have given up the 
 notion of hawking my little Manuscript Book 
 about any further; for a long time it has lain 
 quiet in its drawer, waiting for a better day." 
 And yet this little book was nothing less than 
 the History of the French Revolution. 
 
 It might be a lesson to small men to see 
 the reasonableness, sense, and patience of these 
 greater men, Macaulay's letters show him to 
 have been a pattern of good sense and consider- 
 ateness. Mr. Carlyle seems indeed to have found 
 JeflFrey's editorial vigour more than could be 
 endured 
 
 "My respected friend your predecessor had some 
 difficulty with me in adjusting the respective preroga- 
 tives of Author and Editor, for though not, as I hope.
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 313 
 
 insensible to fair reason, I used sometimes to rebel 
 against what I reckoned mere authority, and this partly 
 perhaps as a matter of literary conscience ; being -wont 
 to write nothing without studying it if possible to the 
 bottom, and writing always with an almost painful feel- 
 ing of scrupulosity, that light editorial hacking and 
 hewing to right and left was in general nowise to my 
 mind." 
 
 But we feel that the fault must have lain with 
 Jeffrey ; the qualifications that Lord Cockburn 
 admired so much were not likely to be to the 
 taste of a man of Mr. Carlyle's grit. That 
 did not prevent the most original of Mr. Napier's 
 contributors from being one of the most just and 
 reasonable. 
 
 " I have, barely within my time, finished that paper 
 [' Characteristics '], to which you are now heartily wel- 
 come, if you have room for it. The doctrines here set 
 forth have mostly long been familiar convictions with 
 me ; yet it is perhaps only within the last twelvemonth 
 that the public utterance of some of them could have 
 seemed a duty. I have striven to express myself with 
 what giiardedness was possible ; and, as there will now 
 be no time for correcting proofs, I must leave it whoUy 
 in your editorial hands. Nay, should it on due con- 
 sideration appear to you in your place (for I see that 
 matter dimly, and nothing is clear but my own mind 
 and the general condition of the world), unadvisable to 
 print the paper at all, then pray understand, my dear
 
 314 RIEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 Sir, now and always, that I am no unreasonable man ; 
 but if dogmatic enough (as JeflPrey used to call it) in my 
 own beliefs, also truly desirous to be just towards those 
 of others. I shall, in all sincerity, beg of you to do, 
 without fear of oflFence (for in no point of view will 
 there be any), what you yourself see good. A mighty 
 work lies before the writers of this time." 
 
 It is always interesting, to the man of letters 
 at any rate if not to his neighbours, to find what 
 was first thought by men of admitted competence 
 of the beginnings of writers who are now seen to 
 have made a mark on the world. " When the 
 reputation of authors is made," said Sainte-Beuve, 
 " it is easy to speak of them convenablement : we 
 have only to guide ourselves by the common 
 opinion. But at the start, at the moment when 
 they are trying their first flight and are in part 
 ignorant of themselves, then to judge them with 
 tact, with precision, not to exaggerate their scope, 
 to predict their flight, or divine their limits, to 
 put the reasonable objections in the midst of all 
 due respect — this is the quality of the critic who 
 is born to be a critic." We have been speaking 
 of Mr. Carlyle. This is what Jeffrey thought of 
 him in 1832: — 
 
 "I fear Carlyle will not do, that is, if you do not
 
 IVIEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 315 
 
 take the liberties and the pains with him that I did, by 
 striking out freely, and writing in occasionally. The 
 misfortune is, that he is very obstinate, and unluckily 
 in a place like this, he finds people enough to abet and 
 applaud him, to intercept the operation of the otherwise 
 infallible remedy of general avoidance and neglect. It 
 is a great pity, for he is a man of genius and industry, 
 and with the capacity of being an elegant and impressive 
 writer " 
 
 The notion of Jeffrey occasionally writing 
 elegantly and impressively into Carlyle's proof- 
 sheets is rather striking. Some of Jeffrey's 
 other criticisms sound very curiously in our ear 
 in these days. It is startling to find Mill's Logic 
 described (1843) as a "great unreadable book, 
 and its elaborate demonstration of axioms and 
 truisms." A couple of years later Jeffrey admits, 
 in speaking of Mr. Mill's paper on Guizot — 
 " Though I have long thought very highly 
 of his powers as a reasoner, I scarcely gave 
 him credit for such large and sound views of 
 realities and practical results as are displayed 
 in this article." Sir James Stephen — the dis- 
 tinguished sire of two distinguished contributors, 
 who may remind more than one editor of our 
 generation of the Horatian saying, that
 
 316 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 " Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis, 
 . . neque iinbellem feroces 
 
 Progenerant aquilse columbam " 
 
 — this excellent writer took a more just measure 
 of the book which Jeffrey thought unreadable. 
 
 " My more immediate object in writing is to remind 
 you of John Mill's book [System of Logic], of which I 
 have lately been reading a considerable part, and I have 
 done so with the conviction that it is one of the most 
 remarkable productions of this nineteenth century. 
 Exceedingly debatable indeed, but most worthy of 
 debate, are many of his favourite tenets, especially 
 those of the last two or three chapters. No man is fit 
 to encounter him who is not thoroughly conversant with 
 the moral sciences which he handles ; and remembering 
 what you told me of your own studies under Dugald 
 Stewart, I cannot but recommend the affair to your 
 own personal attention. You will find very few men 
 fit to be trusted with it. You ought to be aware that, 
 although with great circumspection, not to say timidity, 
 Mill is an opponent of Religion in the abstract, not of 
 any particular form of it. That is, he evidently main- 
 tains that superhuman influences on the mind of man 
 are but a dream, whence the inevitable conclusion that 
 all acts of devotion and prayer are but a superstition. 
 That such is his real meaning, however darkly conveyed, 
 is indisputable. You are weU aware that it is in direct 
 conflict with my own deepest and most cherished con- 
 victions. Yet to condemn him for holding, and for 
 calmly publishing such views, is but to add to the
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 317 
 
 difficulties of fair and full discussion, and to render 
 truth (or supposed truth), less certain and valuable 
 than if it had invited, and encountered, and triumphed 
 over every assault of every honest antagonist. I, there- 
 fore, wish Mill to be treated respectfully and hand- 
 somely." 
 
 Few of Mr. Napier's correspondents seem to 
 have been more considerate. At one period 
 (1844) a long time had passed without any 
 contribution from Sir James Stephen's pen 
 appearing in the Review. Mr. Senior wrote a 
 hint on the subject to the editor, and Napier 
 seems to have communicated with Sir James 
 Stephen, who replied in a model strain. 
 
 " Have you any offer of a paper or papers from my 
 friend John Austin 1 If you have, and if you are not 
 aware what manner of man he is, it may not be amiss 
 that you should be apprised that in these parts he 
 enjoys, and deservedly, a very high and yet a peculiar 
 reputation. I have a great attachment to him. He is, 
 in the best sense of the word, a philosopher, an earnest 
 and humble lover of wisdom. I know not anywhere a 
 larger minded man, and yet, eloquent as he is in speech, 
 there is, in his written style, an involution and a lack 
 of vivacity which renders his writings a sealed book to 
 almost every one. Whether he wLU be able to assume 
 an easier and a lighter manner, I do not know. If not, 
 I rather fear for him when he stands at your bar. All
 
 318 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 I ask is, that you would convey your judgment in 
 measured and fas far as you can honestly) in courteous 
 terms ; for he is, for so considerable a man, strangely 
 sensitive. You must have an odd story to tell of your 
 intercourse with the knights of the Order of the Quill." 
 
 And the letter closed with what an editor values 
 more even than decently Christian treatment, 
 namely the suggestion of a fine subject. This 
 became the admirable essay on the Clapham 
 Sect. 
 
 The author of one of the two or three 
 most delightful biographies in ail literature has 
 published the letter to Mr. Napier in which 
 Macaulay speaks pretty plainly what he thought 
 about Brougham and the extent of his services 
 to the Review. Brougham in turn hated 
 Macaulay, whom he calls the third or greatest 
 bore in society that he has ever known. He 
 is furious — and here Brougham was certainly 
 not wrong — over the " most profligate political 
 morality " of Macaulay's essay on Clive. 
 
 " In my eyes, his defence of Clive, and the audacious 
 ground of it, merit execration. It is a most serious, 
 and, to me. a painful subject. No — no — all the sen- 
 tences a man can turn, even if he made them in pure 
 taste, and not in Tom's snip-snap taste of the lower
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 319 
 
 empire, — all won't avail against a rotten morality. 
 The first and most sacred duty of a public man, and. 
 above all, an author, is to keep by honest and true 
 doctrine — never to relax — never to countenance vice — 
 ever to hold fast by virtue. What ? Are we gravely 
 to be told, at this time of day, that a set-off may be 
 allowed for public, and, therefore, atrocious crimes, 
 though he admits that a common felon pleads it in vain ? 
 Gracious God, where is this to end ! What horrors wUl 
 it not excuse ! Tiberius's great capacity, his first-rate 
 wit, that which made him the charm of society, will next, 
 I suppose, be set up to give a splendour to the inhabit- 
 ants of Capreas. Why, Olive's address, and his skill, 
 and Ms courage are not at all more certain, nor are they 
 qualities of a different cast. Every great ruffian, who 
 has filled the world with blood and tears, will be sure 
 of an acquittal, because of his talents and his success. 
 After I had, and chiefly in the Edinburgh Review, been 
 trying to restore a better, a purer, a higher standard of 
 morals, and to wean men from the sUly love of military 
 glory, for which they are the first to pay, I find the 
 Edinburgh Review preaching, not merely the old and 
 common heresies, but ten thousand times worse, adopt- 
 ing a vile principle never yet avowed in terms, though 
 too often and too much taken for a guide, unknown to 
 those who followed it, in forming their judgments of 
 great and successful criminals." 
 
 Of the essay on Warren Hastings he thought 
 better, "bating some vulgarity and Macaulay's 
 usual want of all power of reasoning." Lord
 
 320 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 
 
 Cockburn wrote to Mr. Napier (1844) a word or 
 two on Macaulay. " Delighting as I do," says 
 Lord Cockburn, " in his thoughts, views, and 
 knowledge, I feel too often compelled to curse 
 and roar at his words and the structure of his 
 composition. As a corrupter of style, lie is more 
 dangerous to the young than Gibbon. His se- 
 ductive powers greater, his defects worse." All 
 good critics now accept this as true. Jeffrey, by 
 the way, speaking of the same essay, thinks that 
 Macaulay rates Chatham too high. " I have 
 always had an impression," he says, " (though 
 perhaps an ignorant and unjust one), that there 
 was more good luck than wisdom in his foreign 
 policy, and very little to admire (except his 
 personal purity) in any part of his domestic 
 administration." 
 
 It is interesting to find a record, in the ener- 
 getic speech of contemporary hatred, of the way 
 in which orthodox science regarded a once 
 famous book of heterodox philosophy. Here is 
 Professor Sedgwick on the Vestiges of Crea- 
 tion : — 
 
 " I now know the Vestiges well, and I detest the 
 book for its shallowness, for the intense vulgarity of
 
 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS. 321 
 
 its philosophy, for its gross, unblushing materialism, 
 for its silly credulity in catering out of every fool's dish, 
 for its utter ignorance of what is meant by induction, 
 for its gross (and I dare to say, filthy) views of physi- 
 ology, — most ignorant and most false, — and for its 
 shameful shuflBing of the facts of geology so as to 
 make them play a rogue's game. I believe some 
 woman is the author ; partly from the fair dress and 
 agreeable exterior of the Vestiges : and partly from the 
 utter ignorance the book displays of all sound physical 
 logic. A man who knew so much of the surface of Physics 
 must, at least on some one point or other, have taken a 
 deeper plunge ; but all parts of the book are shallow. 
 .... From the bottom of my soul, I loathe and detest 
 the Vestiges. 'Tis a rank pill of asafcetida and arsenic, 
 covered with gold leaf. I do, therefore, trust that your 
 contributor has stamped with an iron heel upon the 
 head of the filthy abortion, and put an end to its crawl- 
 ings. There is not one subject the author handles 
 bearing on life, of which he does not take a degrading 
 view." 
 
 Mr. Napier seems to have asked him to write on 
 the book, and Sedgwick's article, the first he 
 ever wrote for a review, eventually appeared 
 (1845), — without, it is to be hoped, too much of 
 the raging contempt of the above and other 
 letters. "I do feel contempt, and, I hope, I 
 shall express it. Rats hatched by the incuba- 
 tions of a gnose — dogs playing dominos — 
 X
 
 322 MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS, 
 
 monkeys breeding men and women — all distinc- 
 tions between natural and moral done away — 
 the Bible proved all a lie, and mental philosophy 
 one mass of folly, all of it to be pounded down, 
 and done over again in the cooking vessels of 
 Gall and Spurzheim ! " This was the beginning 
 of a long campaign, which is just now drawing 
 near its close. Let us at least be glad that 
 orthodoxy, whether scientific or religious, has 
 mended his temper. One among other causes of 
 the improvement, as we have already said, is 
 probably to be found in the greater self-restraint 
 which comes from the fact of the writer appear- 
 ing in his own proper person.
 
 VALEDICTORY.^ 
 
 The present number of the Review marks the 
 close of a task which was confided to me no less 
 than fifteen years ago — grande mmialis cevi spa- 
 tium, a long span of one's mortal days. Fifteen 
 years are enough to bring a man from youth to 
 middle age, to test the working value of convic- 
 tions, to measure the advance of principles and 
 beliefs, and, alas ! to cut off many early associates 
 and to extinguish many lights. It is hardly 
 possible that a Review should have been con- 
 ducted for so considerable a time without the 
 commission of some mistakes ; articles admitted 
 Avhich might as well have been left out, opinions 
 expressed which have a crudish look in the 
 mellow light of yearg, phrases dropped in the 
 heat or hurry of the moment which one would 
 fain obliterate. Many a regret must rise in men's 
 
 1 On the writer's retirement from the editorship of the 
 
 Fortnightly Review, in 1882. 
 
 328
 
 324 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 minds on any occasion that compels them to look 
 back over a long reach of years. The disparity 
 between aim and performance, the unfulfilled 
 promise, the wrong turnings taken at critical 
 points — as an accident of the hour draws us to 
 take stock of a complete period of our lives, all 
 these things rise up in private and internal judg- 
 ment against anybody who is not either too 
 stupid or too fatuously complacent to recognise 
 facts when he sees them. But the mood passes. 
 Time, happily, is mei"ciful, and men's memories 
 are benignly short. 
 
 More painful is the recollection of those earlier 
 contributors of ours who have vanished from the 
 world. Periodical literature is like the manna 
 in the wilderness ; it quickly loses its freshness, 
 and to turn over thirty volumes of old Reviews 
 can hardly be exhilarating at the best : least of 
 all so, when it recalls friends and coadjutors who 
 can give their help no more. George Henry 
 Lewes, the founder of the* Review, and always 
 cordially interested in its fortunes, has not sur- 
 vived to see the end of the reign of his successor. 
 His vivacious intelligence had probably done as 
 much as he was competent to do for his genera-
 
 VALEDICTORY. 325 
 
 tion. but there were other important contributors, 
 now gone, of whom this could not be said. In 
 the region of political theory, the loss of J. E. 
 Cairnes was truly lamentable and untimely. He 
 had, as Mill said of him, " that rare qualification 
 among writers on political and social subjects — a 
 genuine scientific intellect." Not a month passes 
 in which one does not feel hoAv great an advan- 
 tage it would have been to be able to go down 
 to Blackheath, and discuss the perplexities of the 
 time in that genial and manly companionship, 
 where facts were weighed with so much care, 
 where conclusions were measured with such 
 breadth and comprehension, and where even the 
 great stolid idols of the Cave and the Market 
 Place were never too rudely buffeted. Of a very 
 diff"erent order of mind from Cairnes, but not less 
 to be permanently regretted by all of us who 
 knew him, was Mr. Bagehot, whose books on the 
 English Constitution, on Physics and Politics, 
 and the fragment on the Postulates of Political 
 Economy, were all published in these pages. He 
 wrote, in fact, the first article in the first number. 
 Though himself extremely cool and sceptical 
 about political improvement of every sort, he
 
 326 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 took abundant interest in more ardent friends. 
 Perhaps it was that they amused him ; in return 
 his good-natured ironies put them wholesomely 
 on their mettle. As has been well said of him, 
 he had a unique power of animation without 
 combat ; it was all stimulus and yet no contest ; 
 his talk was full of youth, yet had all the 
 wisdom of mature judgment {R. H. Hutton). 
 Those who were least willing to assent to 
 Bagehot's practical maxims in judging current 
 affairs, yet were well aware how much they pro- 
 fited by his Socratic objections, and knew, too, 
 what real acquaintance with men and business, 
 what honest sympathy and friendliness, and what 
 serious judgment and interest all lay under his 
 playful and racy humour. 
 
 More untimely, in one sense, than any other 
 was the death of Professor Clifford, whose articles 
 in this Eeview attracted so much attention, and 
 I fear that I may add, gave for a season so much 
 offence six or seven years ago. Cairnes was 
 scarcely fifty when he died, and Bagehot was 
 fifty-one, but Clifford was only four-and- thirty. 
 Yet in this brief space he had not merely won a 
 reputation as a mathematician of the first order,
 
 VALEDICTORY, 327 
 
 but had made a real mark on his time, both by 
 the substance of his speculations in science, 
 religion, and ethics, and by the curious audacity 
 with which he proclaimed at the pitch of his 
 voice on the housetops religious opinions that had 
 hitherto been kept among the family secrets of 
 the domus Socratica. It is melancholy to think 
 that exciting work, done under pressure of time 
 of his own imposing, should have been the chief 
 cause of his premature decline. How intense 
 that pressure was the reader may measure by the 
 fact that a paper of his on The Unseen Universe, 
 which filled eighteen pages of the Review, was 
 composed at a single sitting that lasted from a 
 quarter to ten in the evening till nine o'clock the 
 following morning. As one revolves these and 
 other names of eminent men who actively helped 
 to make the Review what it has been, it would 
 be impossible to omit the most eminent of them 
 all. Time has done something to impair the 
 philosophical reputation and the political cele- 
 brity of J. S. Mill; but it cannot alter the 
 affectionate memory in which some of us must 
 always hold his ^visdom and goodness, his rare 
 union of moral ardour with a calm and settled
 
 328 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 mind. He took the warmest interest in this 
 Review from the moment when I took it up, 
 partly from the friendship with which he 
 honoured me, but much more because he wished 
 to encourage what was then— though it is now 
 happily no longer — the only attempt to conduct 
 a periodical on the principles of free discussion 
 and personal responsibility. While recalling 
 these and others who are no more, it was 
 naturally impossible for me to forget the con- 
 stant and valuable help that has been so freely 
 given to me, often at much sacrijfice of their own 
 convenience, by those friends and contributors 
 who are still with us. No conductor ever laid 
 down his hAton with a more cordial and sincere 
 sense of gratitude to those who took their several 
 parts in his performance. 
 
 One chief experiment which the Review was 
 established to try was that of signed articles. 
 When Mr. Lewes Avrote his Farewell Causerie, as 
 I am doing now, he said : " That we have been 
 enabled to bring together men so various in 
 opinion and so distinguished in power has been 
 mainly owing to the principle adopted of allow- 
 ing each writer perfect freedom ; which could
 
 VALEDICTORY. 329 
 
 only have been allowed under the condition of 
 personal responsibility. The question of signing 
 articles had long been debated ; it has now been 
 tested. The arguments ijp favour of it were 
 mainly of a moral order ; the arguments against 
 it, while admitting the morality, mainly asserted 
 its inexpediency. The question of expediency 
 has, I venture to say, been materially enlightened 
 by the success of the Eeview." The success of 
 other periodicals, conducted still more rigorously 
 on the principle that every article ought to bear 
 its writer's signature, leaves no further doubt on 
 the subject ; so that it is now almost impossible 
 to realise that only fifteen or sixteen years ago 
 scarcely anybody of the class called practical 
 could believe that the sacred principle of the 
 Anonymous was doomed. One of the shrewdest 
 publishers in Edinburgh, and also himself the 
 editor of a famous magazine, once said to me 
 while Mr. Lewes was still editor of tliis Review, 
 that he had always thought highly of our friend's 
 judgment " until he had taken up the senseless 
 notion of a magazine with signed articles and 
 open to both sides of every question." Nobody 
 will call the notion senseless any longer. The
 
 330 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 question is rather how long the exclusively 
 anonymous periodicals will resist the innovation. 
 
 Personally I havjp attached less stern import- 
 ance to signature as an unvarying rule than did 
 my predecessor ; though even he was compelled 
 by obvious considerations of convenience to make 
 his chronique of current affairs anonymous. Our 
 practice has been signature as the standing rule, 
 occasionally suspended in favour of anonymity 
 when there seemed to be sufficient reason. On 
 the whole it may be said that the change from 
 anonymous to signed articles has followed the 
 course of most changes. It has not led to one- 
 half either of the evils or of the advantages that 
 its advocates and its opponents foretold. That 
 it has produced some charlatanry, can hardly be 
 denied. Eeaders are tempted to postpone serious 
 and persistent interest in subjects, to a semi- 
 personal curiosity about the casual and uncon- 
 nected deliverances of the literary or social star 
 of the hour. That this conception has been 
 worked out with signal ability in more cases than 
 one; that it has made periodical literature full 
 of actuality ; that it has tickled and delighted
 
 VALEDICTORY. 331 
 
 the palate — is all most true. The obvious danger 
 is lest we should be tempted to think more of 
 the man who speaks than of the precise value of 
 what he says. 
 
 One indirect eflfect that is not unworthy of 
 notice in the new system is its tendency to narrow 
 the openings for the writer by profession. If 
 an article is to be signed, the editor will naturally 
 seek the name of an expert of special weight and 
 competence on the matter in hand. A reviewer 
 on the staff of a famous journal once received for 
 his week's task, General Hamley on the Art of War, 
 a three-volume novel, a work on dainty dishes, 
 and a translation of Pindar. This was perhaps 
 taxing versatility and omniscience over-much, 
 and it may be taken for granted that the writer 
 made no serious contribution to tactics, cookery, 
 or scholarship. But being a man of a certain 
 intelligence, passably honest, and reasonably 
 painstaking, probably he produced reviews 
 sufficiently useful and just to answer their pur- 
 pose. On the new system we should have an 
 article on General Hamley's work by Sir Garnet 
 Wolseley, and one on the cookery-book from M. 
 Trompette. It is not certain that this is all pure
 
 332 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 gain. There is a something to be said for the 
 writer by profession, who, without being an 
 expert, will take trouble to work up his subject, 
 to learn what is said and thought about it, to 
 penetrate to the real points, to get the same 
 mastery over it as an advocate or a judge does 
 over a patent case or a suit about rubrics and 
 vestments. He is at least as likely as the expert 
 to tell the reader all that he wants to know, and 
 at least as likely to be free from bias and in- 
 jurious prepossession. 
 
 Nor does experience, so far as it has yet gone, 
 quite bear out Mr. Lewes's train of argument 
 that the " first condition of all writing is 
 sincerity, and that one means of securing 
 sincerity is to insist on personal responsibility," 
 and that this personal responsibility can only 
 be secured by signing articles. The old talk of 
 " literary bravoes," " men in masks," " anony- 
 mous assassins," and so forth, is out of date. 
 Longer experience has only confirmed the pre- 
 sent writer's opinion, expressed here from the 
 very beginning : " Everybody who knows the 
 composition of any respectable journal in London 
 knows very well that the articles which those
 
 VALEDICTORY. 333 
 
 of our own way of thinking dislike most in- 
 tensely are written by men whom to call 
 bravoes in any sense whatever would be simply 
 monstrous. Let us say, as loudly as we choose, 
 if we see good reason, that they are half 
 informed about some of the things which they 
 so authoritatively discuss ; that they are under 
 strong class feeling ; that they have not mastered 
 the doctrines which they are opposing ; that 
 they have not sufficiently meditated their sub- 
 ject ; that they have not given themselves time 
 to do justice even to their scanty knowledge. 
 Journalists are open to charges of this kind ; 
 but to think of them as a shameless body, 
 thirsting for the blood of better men than 
 themselves, or ready to act as an editor's 
 instrument for money, involves a thoroughly 
 unjust misconception." 
 
 As to the comparative effects of the two 
 systems on literary quality, no prudent observer 
 with adequate experience will lay down an 
 unalterable rule. Habit no doubt counts for 
 a great deal, but apart from habit there are 
 difierences of temperament and peculiar sensi- 
 bilities. Some men write best when they sign
 
 334 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 what they write ; they find impersonality a 
 mystification and an incumbrance ; anonymity 
 makes them stiff, pompous, and over-magisterial. 
 With others, however, the effect is just the 
 reverse. If they sign, they become self-con- 
 scious, stilted, and even pretentious ; it is only 
 when they are anonymous that they recover 
 simplicity and ease. It is as if an actor who 
 is the soul of what is natural under the dis- 
 guises of his part, should become extremely 
 artificial if he were compelled to come upon 
 the stage in his own proper clothes and speak- 
 ing only in his ordinary voice. 
 
 The newspaper press has not yet followed 
 the example of the new Eeviews, but we are 
 probably not far from the time when here, 
 too, the practice of signature will make its 
 way. There was a silly cry at one time for 
 making the disuse of anonymity compulsory 
 by law. But we shall no more see this than 
 we shall see legal penalties imposed for pub- 
 lishing a book without an index, though that 
 also has been suggested. The same end will 
 be reached by other ways. Within the last
 
 VALEDICTORY. 335 
 
 few years a truly surprising shock has been 
 given to the idea of a newspaper, " as a sort 
 of impersonal thing, coming from nobody knows 
 where, the readers never thinking of the writer, 
 nor caring whether he thinks what he writes, 
 so long as they think what he writes." Of 
 course it is still true, and will most likely 
 always remain true, that, like the Athenian 
 Sophist, great newspapers will teach the con- 
 ventional prejudices of those who pay for it. 
 A writer will long be able to say that, like 
 the Sophist, the newspaper reflects the morality, 
 the intelligence, the tone of sentiment, of its 
 public, and if the latter is vicious, so is the 
 former. But there is infinitely less of this 
 than there used to be. The press is more and 
 more taking the tone of a man speaking to a 
 man. The childish imposture of the editorial 
 We is already thoroughly exploded. The names 
 of all important journalists are now coming to 
 be as publicly known as the names of impor- 
 tant members of parliament. There is even 
 something over and above this. More than 
 one editor has boldly aspired to create and 
 educate a public of his own, and he has sue-
 
 336 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 ceeded. The press is growing to be much more 
 personal, in the sense that its most important 
 directors are taking to themselves the right of 
 pursuing an individual line of their own, with 
 tar less respect than of old to the supposed 
 exigencies of party or the communiques of 
 political leaders. The editor of a Review of 
 great eminence said to the present writer (who, 
 for his own part, took a slightly more modest 
 view) that he regarded himself as equal in im- 
 portance to seventy -five Members of Parliament. 
 It is not altogether easy to weigh and measure 
 with this degree of precision. But what is 
 certain is that there are journalists on both 
 sides in politics to whom the public looks for 
 original suggestion, and from Avhom leading 
 politicians seek not merely such mechanical 
 support as they expect from their adherents 
 in the House of Commons, nor merely the uses 
 of the vane to show which way the wind 
 blows, but ideas, guidance, and counsel, as from 
 persons of co-equal authority with themselves. 
 England is still a long way from the point at 
 which French journalism has arrived in this 
 matter. We cannot count an effective host of
 
 VALEDICTORY. 337 
 
 Girardins, Lemoinnes, Abouts, or even Cas- 
 sagnacs and Eocheforts, each recognised as the 
 exponent of his own opinions, and each read 
 because the opinions written are known to be 
 his own. But there is a distinctly nearer 
 approach to this as the general state of 
 English journalism than there was twenty 
 years ago. 
 
 Of course nobody of sense supposes that any 
 journalist, however independent and however 
 possessed by the spirit of his personal respon- 
 sibility, tries to form his opinions out of his 
 own head, without reference to the view of the 
 men practically engaged in public affairs, the 
 temper of Parliament and the feeling of con- 
 stituencies, and so forth. All these are part 
 of the elements that go to the formation of 
 his own judgment, and he will certainly not 
 neglect to find out as much about them as he 
 possibly can. Nor, again, does the increase of 
 the personal sentiment about our public prints 
 lessen the general working fidelity of their 
 conductors to a party. It is their duty, no 
 doubt, to discuss the merits of measures as 
 
 Y
 
 338 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 they arise. In this respect any one can see 
 how radically they differ from the Member of 
 Parliament, Avhose business is not only to discuss 
 but to act. The Member of Parliament must 
 look at the effect of his vote in more lights 
 than one. Besides the merits of the given 
 measure, it is his duty to think of the wishes 
 of those who chose him to represent them ; 
 and if, moreover, the effect of voting against a 
 measure of which he disapproves would be to 
 overthrow a whole Ministry of which he strongly 
 approves, then, unless some very vital principle 
 indeed were involved, to give such a vote would 
 be to prefer a small object to a great one, and 
 would indicate a very queasy monkish sort of 
 conscience. The journalist is not in the same 
 position. He is an observer and a critic, and 
 can afford, and is bound, to speak the truth. 
 But even in his case, the disagreement, as Burke 
 said, " will be only enough to indulge freedom, 
 without violating concord or disturbing arrange- 
 ment." There is a certain " partiality which 
 becomes a well-chosen friendship." " Men think- 
 ing freely will, in particular instances, think 
 differently. But still as the greater part of
 
 VALEDICTORY. 339 
 
 the measures which arise in the course of public 
 business are related to, or dependent on, some 
 great leading general principles in government, 
 a man must be peculiarly unfortunate in 
 the choice of his political company if he doe? 
 not agree with them at least nine times in 
 ten." The doctrine that was good enough for 
 Burke in this matter may be counted good 
 enough for most of us. Some of the current 
 talk about political independence is mere hypo- 
 crisy ; some of it is mere vanity. For the new 
 priest of Literature is quite as liable to the 
 defects of spiritual pride and ambition as the 
 old priest of the Church, and it is quite as well 
 for him that he should be on his guard against 
 these scarlet and high-crested sins. 
 
 The success of Reviews, of which our own was 
 the first English type, marks a very considerable 
 revolution in the intellectual habits of the time. 
 They have brought abstract discussion from the 
 library down to the parlour, and from the serious 
 student down to the first man in the street. 
 We have passed through a perfect cyclone of 
 religious polemics. The popularity of such 
 Reviews means that really large audiences, le
 
 .540 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 fjros public, are eagerly interested in the radical 
 discussion of propositions which twenty years 
 ago were only publicly maintained, and then 
 in their crudest, least true, and most repulsive 
 form, in obscure debating societies and little 
 secularist clubs. Everybody, male or female, 
 who reads anything serious at all, now reads a 
 dozen essays a year to show, with infinite varieties 
 of approach and of demonstration, that we can 
 never know whether there be a Supreme Being 
 or not, whether the soul survives the body, or 
 whether mind is more and other than a mere 
 function of matter. No article that has appeared 
 in any periodical for a generation back excited 
 so profound a sensation as Mr. Huxley's memor- 
 able paper On the Physical Basis of Life, 
 published in this Review in February 1869. It 
 created just the same kind of stir that, in a 
 political epoch, was made by such a pamphlet as 
 the Conduct of the Allies or the Be/lections on 
 the French Revolution. This excitement was a 
 sign that controversies which had hitherto been 
 confined to books and treatises were now to be 
 admitted to popular periodicals, and that the 
 common man of the world would now listen
 
 VALEDICTORY. 341 
 
 and have an opinion of liis own on the bases 
 
 of belief, just as he listens and judges in politics, 
 
 or art, or letters. The clergy no longer have the 
 
 pulpit to themselves, for the new Reviews became 
 
 more powerful pulpits, in which heretics were 
 
 at least as welcome as orthodox. Speculation 
 
 has become entirely democratised. This is a 
 
 tremendous change to have come about in little 
 
 more than a dozen years. How far it goes, let 
 
 us not be too sure. It is no new discovery that 
 
 what looks like complete tolerance may be in 
 
 reality only complete indifference. Intellectual 
 
 fairness is often only another name for indolence 
 
 and inconclusiveness of mind, just as love of 
 
 truth is sometimes a fine phrase for temper. To 
 
 be piquant counts for much, and the interest 
 
 of seeing on the drawing-room tables of devout 
 
 Catholics and high-flying Anglicans article after 
 
 article, sending divinities, creeds, and Churches 
 
 all headlong into limbo, was indeed piquant. 
 
 Much of all this elegant dabbling in infidelity has 
 
 been a caprice of fashion. The Agnostic has 
 
 had his day with the fine ladies, like the black 
 
 footboy of other times, or the spirit-rapper and 
 
 table-turner of our own. What we have been 
 Y 2
 
 .142 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 watching, after all, was perhaps a tournament, 
 not a battle. 
 
 It would not be very easy for us now, and 
 perhaps it would not be particularly becoming at 
 any time, to analyse the position that has 
 been assigned to this Review in common esteem. 
 Those who have watched it from without can 
 judge better than those who have worked within. 
 Though it has been open, so far as editorial good- 
 will was concerned, to opinions from many sides, 
 the Review has unquestionably gathered round it 
 some of the associations of sect. What that sect 
 is, people have found it difficult to describe with 
 anything like precision. For a long time it was 
 the fashion to label the Review as Comtist, and it 
 would be singularly ungrateful to deny that it 
 has had no more effective contributors than some 
 of the best-known disciples of Comte. By-and-by 
 it was felt that this was too narrow. It was 
 nearer the truth to call it the organ of Positivists 
 in the wider sense of that designation. But even 
 this would not cover many directly political 
 articles that have appeared in our pages, and 
 made a mark in their time. The memorable
 
 VALEDICTORY. 343 
 
 programme of Free Labour, Free Land, Free 
 Schools, Free Church had notliing at all Positivist 
 about it. Nor could that programme and 
 many besides from the same pen and others 
 be compressed under the nickname of Academic 
 Liberalism. There was too strong a flavour of 
 action for the academic and the philosophic. 
 This passion for a label, after all, is au infirmity. 
 Yet people justly perceived that there seemed 
 to be a certain undefinable concurrence among 
 writers coming from different schools and handling 
 very different subjects. Perhaps the instinct was 
 right which fancied that it discerned some 
 common drift, a certain pervading atmosphere, 
 and scented a subtle connection between specula- 
 tions on the Physical Basis of Life and the Unseen 
 Universe, and articles on Trades Unions and 
 National Education. 
 
 So far as the Review has been more specially 
 identified with one set of opinions than another, 
 it has been due to the fact that a certain dissent 
 from received theologies has been found in com- 
 pany with new ideas of social and political reform. 
 This suspicious combination at one time aroused 
 considerable anger. The notion of anything like
 
 344 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 an intervention of the literary and scientific class 
 in political affairs touched a certain jealousy 
 which is always to be looked for in the positive 
 and practical man. They think as Napoleon 
 thought of men of letters and savans : — " Ce 
 sont des coquettes avec lesquelles il faut entretenir 
 un commerce de galanterie, et dont il ne faut 
 jamais songer a faire ni sa femme ni son ministre." 
 Men will listen to your views about the Unknow- 
 able with a composure that instantly disappears if 
 your argument comes too near to the Kates and 
 Taxes. It is amusing, as we read the newspapers 
 to-day, to think that Mr. Harrison's powerful 
 defence of Trades Unions fifteen years ago caused 
 the Review to be regarded as an incendiary 
 publication. Some papers that appeared here on 
 National Education were thought to indicate a 
 deliberate plot for suppressing the Holy Scriptures 
 in the land. Extravagant misjudgment of this 
 kind has passed away. But it was far from being 
 a mistake to suppose that the line taken here by 
 many writers did mean that there was a new 
 Kadicalism in the air, which went a good deal 
 deeper than fidgeting about an estimate or the 
 amount of the Queen's contribution to her own
 
 VALEDICTORY. 345 
 
 taxes. Time has verified what was serious in 
 those early apprehensions. Principles and aims 
 are coming into prominence in the social activity 
 of to-day which would hardly have found a 
 hearing twenty years ago, and it would he suffi- 
 cient justification for the past of our Review 
 if some writers in it have been instrumental in the 
 process of showing how such principles and aims 
 meet the requirements of the new time. Re- 
 formers must always be open to the taunt that 
 they find nothing in the world good enough 
 for them. " You write," said a popular novelist 
 to one of this unthanked tribe, " as if you believed 
 that everything is bad." " Nay," said the other, 
 "but I do believe that everything might be 
 better." Such a belief naturally breeds a spirit 
 which the easy-goers of the world resent as a 
 spirit of ceaseless complaint and scolding. Hence 
 our Liberalism here has often been taxed with 
 being ungenial, discontented, and even querulous. 
 But such Liberals will wrap themselves in their 
 own virtue, remembering the cheering apo- 
 phthegm that "those who are dissatisfied are the 
 sole benefactors of the world."
 
 346 VALEDICTORY. 
 
 This will not be found, I think, too lofty, 
 or too thrasonical an estimate of what has been 
 attempted. A certain number of people have 
 been persuaded to share opinions that fifteen 
 years ago were more unpopular than they are now. 
 A certain resistance has been offered to the 
 stubborn influence of prejudice and use and wont. 
 The original scheme of the Review, even if there 
 had been no other obstacle, prevented it from 
 being the organ of a systematic and constructive 
 policy. There is not, in fact, a body of systematic 
 political thought at work in our own day. The 
 Liberals of the Benthamite school surveyed society 
 and institutions as a whole ; they connected their 
 advocacy of political and legal changes with care- 
 fully formed theories of human nature ; they con- 
 sidered the great art of Government in connection 
 with the character of man, his proper education, 
 his potential capacities. Yet, as we then said, it 
 cannot be pretended that we are less in need of 
 systematic politics than our fathers were sixty 
 years since, or that general principles are now 
 more generally settled even among members of 
 the same party than they were then. The per- 
 plexities of to-day are as embarrassing as any in
 
 VALEDICTORY. 347 
 
 our history, and they may prove even more 
 dangerous. The renovation of Parliamentary 
 government; the transformation of the conditions 
 of the ownership and occupation of land ; the 
 relations between the Government at home and 
 our adventurers abroad in contact with inferior 
 races; the limitations on free contract and the 
 rights of majorities to restrict the private acts 
 of minorities ; these are only some of the questions 
 that time and circumstances are pressing upon us. 
 These are in the political and legislative sphere 
 alone. In Education, in Economics, the problems 
 are as many. Yet ideas are hardly ripe for 
 realisation. We shall need to see great schools 
 before we can make sure of powerful parties. 
 Meanwhile, whatever gives freedom and variety to 
 thought, and earnestness to men's interest in the 
 world, must contribute to a good end. 
 
 "Hnted by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty, 
 at the Edinlnrgh University Press.
 
 
 
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